Book Review | Cynical Theories

CYNICAL THEORIES: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity  | Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, Pitchstone Publishing, 352p.

This is a must-read for those interested in one of the strongest, strangest, and batshit crazy currents driving elite culture: the so-called Critical Theories or "wokeness." It has many expressions but is essentially a revival of secular fundamentalism in a postmodern expression. It parades under Critical Theories in colonialism, feminism, queer, gender, sexuality, disability, and fat studies. This grouping of currents has a cult's characteristics: belief without evidence and rabid fanaticism.

The authors, Pluckrose and Lindsay, are painstakingly thorough - in an academic sense - in charting the rise and meaning of these currents of alleged "social justice." The authors, themselves liberals (small L), are horrified by the anti-science, anti-reason, racist, and discriminatory worldviews adopted by these trends. They warn these fads have escaped the campus and are rapidly occupying the mainstream. 

As they tour the landscape of Critical Theory harm, the most obvious is the physical damage done: disability and fat studies. These fields conclude that when parents use medicine to address a disability, they create violence or harm upon a child by normalizing "ableism." When a medical professional suggests that obesity is harmful to health, they are merely fatphobic. As with most cults, wokeness can harm and kill. 

These harms can be seen more broadly in Critical Race Theory, which has moved ironically into a racist cabal devoid of evidence, reason, and morality. Yet, its ascendency is near peak cultural acceptance and, with great irony, resulting in the decline of tolerance. The mere denial of objective reality threatens our physical safety. 

The book posits the whole cabal of “wokeness” is an existential threat to civilization. Yet the authors don't leave readers in despair, noting the need for more liberalism: dissent, debate, speech, pluralism, and freedom. A prescription upon which all reasoned people can - and should - agree.