Modern Wisdom - #124 - James Lindsay - Social Justice Explained: The Foundations Of Wokeness

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

James Lindsay is an author & researcher. I've been exposed the words Social Justice Warrior, Wokeness and Post Modernism a lot over the last year, but I don't really have a strong grasp on their origins or where they came from. Thankfully James is the perfect man to explain them to us as he's spent much of his recent career diving head first into the academic literature which underpins these movements. Enjoy. #socialjusticewarrior #woke #postmodernism Extra Stuff: Follow James on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames Buy James' Book - https://amzn.to/2DKeiz5 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is James Lindsay. You might recognize him from Joe Rogan last year and the Grievance Studies Dog Park debacle, which he was one of the co-authors, along with Peter Boggossian and Helen Pluckrose. But today he's sitting down in his own and we're talking about the foundations of walkeness. I, as you will have

done as well, have been exposed to quite a lot of social justice warrior bashing over the last few years. I was kind of getting a bit bored of just seeing Sam Harris destroys social justice warrior on YouTube. I kind of actually wanted to understand where this movement comes from. I wanted to understand postmodernism and social justice and everything else to do with this particular subject area. I want to have a concrete foundational understanding of exactly what's going on. Because how can I have a view on it if I don't understand its origins. So fortunately it turns out that James is not only like patient zero for understanding this stuff but he's also writing a book on it which will be out next year. So it gonna go back to the next one.

I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one.

I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. I'm gonna go back to the next one. psychoanalyzing people you disagree with in paranoia. And it's all about systems of power and the way that those influence everything so that nothing can be authentic. And it's all kind of whining and complaining and very pessimistic, very cynical. It has that characteristic where you probably run into this where you know it's wrong

and it's not hard to see how it's wrong It's easy to see how it's persuasive though and it's gonna take you a lot of work to explain why it's wrong in a satisfactory way and It's really a negative place to be I don't think it's fun to do this at all are you the the sort of the guy that's had to walk over hot calls to try and retrieve something of value from the other side a little bit? It's you that's suffering this discomfort. That is a good way to put it, yeah, in a sense. I feel like that's kind of what I'm doing now is I really want to understand the mindset and understand it in a way that's faithful to what it actually

is that portrays it accurately, but also in a way that I can communicate that back to other people in plain language so that they can see it for what it is without having to go read tons of it. And it is like walking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth across the Coles, knowing every single time that it's going to be hard again. I get it. So, I mean, the listeners you will have joined us, there's usually an intro, but me and James had too much to talk about.

So, welcome back and joined by James Lindsay and we are talking about an awful lot of different interesting things today, principally, critical theory. That's principally what I've been thinking about. What is critical theory? I don't know what critical theory is. Critical theory is a way to view the world. The long and short of it is that it's a way to view the world that sees the world in terms of

then there are multiple critical theories. There are many critical theories. It is very bottom. It's a way to view the world where everything relevant in terms of at least of social relations has to do with power dynamics that are in society between some group with power and other groups who don't have as much power. And the object of critical theory is to say that the groups that have power carry certain assumptions and biases and the likes and they bake that into the systems that they create without realizing that they're doing it. So the critical theorist's job is to expose those biases and uncover those assumptions so that they can be critiqued and reexamined and usually discarded, dismantled, subverted or otherwise overthrown. So you would have this in the Marxist sense, the power group would

either be the capitalists or the bourgeoisie, which would be a property holding class. And they, you know, in a kind of a very direct sense, control the working class and kind of control how they're supposed to think and set the fashion and set the tone of what high society supposed to look like or how the businesses are supposed to be operated. And they exploit the working class, which would be the oppressed group. Critical theory grew out of that mindset in what the Institute for Social Research that was set up in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 20s that it's now called the Frankfurt School. And they actually following off of the Italian Communist Foss for Antonio Gramsci realized that Marx predicted there would be this revolution.

The proletariat would rise up and overthrow the capitalist and the bourgeoisie. And this didn't happen. And they wanted to know why. So Antonio Gramsci came up with this idea that's called cultural hegemony, and that's the idea that the powerful classes of society set the way that everybody's supposed to think and everybody else buys into that,

so they won't go against it. And then the Frankfurt School kind of ran with this idea and started saying that things like liberalism and Western civilization themselves bake in the assumptions of their creators and make it so that the people who have power, which would mostly be white, Western men who are straight and so on, have both explicitly and inadvertently cooked up systems of power so that they benefit themselves and exclude those that they don't want to take to have the power because the powers is zero-some object in this worldview. So critical theory is in that sense a way of looking at the world that sees the world that way

and that essentially tries to pick at whatever the system is so as to tear apart the hidden assumptions and biases that's the most charitable way to put it. That's what they say that they're doing is tearing apart the hidden assumptions and biases to make the system more fair or as they phrased it in the front for school to make it into an ideal democracy where nobody is actually, has their voice or their opportunity or whatever short-changed. So that's a very long definition. But it face value, that sounds critical theory sounds pretty good. It's definitely something that when used appropriately a critical method at least can be very very useful and in fact the enlightenment tradition which

has brought us you know pretty much all of modernity like the ability to Skype and have good microphones and things. The Enlightenment tradition could very easily be seen as an appropriate use of critical methods. It started to question the authority of, say, the church. And it started to say, let's defer to an external authority, essentially, the way nature works to answer our questions about the world. and let's try to appeal to reason and logic and evidence as much as we can in making our decisions.

And so it started to create this very different way to see the world that presented a very useful skepticism against the previous kind of mythological and a Piscopit type and monarchical type mindsets where you had these literally powerful individuals who then decided either the interpretation of scripture or the organization of society or whatever. And whatever their fancy was was how it went. The law was what the king said, the law was, or the scripture is the Pope, interprets it to say, and so on. So yes, the issue is that a critical theory,

so this philosopher, Max Horkheimer in the Frankfurt School laid out the difference between what's technically called a critical theory and what he called a traditional theory, both of which exist within a broader kind of critical thinking tradition that we would think of. And the point of a traditional theory is to understand a thing. It's just to understand it. The point of a critical theory is to understand how it goes wrong. And in particular, how it goes wrong according to some normative vision, which means a moral structure. And how to qualify as a critical theory, it must be explanatory about how it is particularly an unjust thing. So it's looking for injustices in the system

and nothing else. No attempt to understand how the thing works necessarily, or why those injustices happen to be what they are or something like this. And it must fit the vision of the social engineers who have decided what justice looks like when they look for these injustices, and it must be applicable by activists.

And so it is in a sense a way of putting the cart ahead of the horse, where our best knowledge should lead our decision making rather than what we want to be true leading our approach to figuring out knowledge. So yes, the best way that I can think of it is to actually, because I don't want to say that critical theory is useless because it's not. It's odd that it gets applied to so much given that it's mostly a literary thing, but I try to say that it's like a really strong industrial solvent. It has applications, it has uses, but man, you're not going to spread it everywhere. You're not going to give it the kids, you're not going to just,

you know, dump it on everything you see. It's one of those things that certainly has beneficial and appropriate uses. We should be looking for those biases and those unconsidered assumptions, but we should also do so responsibly, not with an effort only to pick at how something goes wrong. You must also understand why the system, your situation, is the way that it is. Yeah, I mean, that to me is one of the most enjoyable parts of life. For me, as someone who enjoys sense-making, you know, I do this podcast and I try and I try and uncover why things are the way they are. The tagline to Modern Wisdom is, understand yourself in the world around you.

Like, you know, I like doing it. It's cool. There's nothing, there's no better satisfaction for me than joining together two different points with something and you being like, fuck, that's why, that's why that's that thing. And that's inherently enjoyable. But yeah, when it's got this,

it's the same central core, but it's just facing in the complete different direction, and this direction, this direction is like you say, it's trying to work out who has the power, why is that the case? So how do we, because this is something that you are, I think, probably. Let me give you, let me give you an example real quick before we go into that. So it's really clear what the difference between a critical mindset and another, you know, I'm just even going to say normal mindset is, although that would be torn apart by critical theory. So imagine like, I just want to use an example of, say, like an airplane in the seats on an airplane. Everybody has a bad time with the seats on airplanes except very small women, I think.

So the seats on airplanes tend to be narrow, they tend to be smaller, your knees are getting banged up against the person in front of you, so on and so forth. Nobody's really happy about this. Now a traditional theory would try, you know, you have the people who designed the aircraft and they had to make decisions as to how they're going to arrange the seats. Obviously, they want to put as many seats in the plane as they can, given the size of the aircraft and its weight specifications and so on, because that optimizes for the number of people who can travel and the amount of money that they can make with the plane. So those considerations would

all fall under traditional theory. A critical theory would say, well, these seats are really uncomfortable. And so if we were to take a lens, for example, that looks from what's now called fat studies, it would say, and obviously, everybody knows that the issue of really overweight people on airplanes because the seats are what they are, and it makes the next person over uncomfortable and sometimes they need two seats and all the different things. And so the critical perspective there would say, well, the plane was designed by people who are generally thin or of average size not overweight. And so they have a blind spot to what it's like to

be an overweight person. And that is them exercising a power called thin normativity that sees thinness as normal and over-weightness as abnormal. And therefore, there is a power relation here between average size or thin people, and they are exerting it on the oppressed overweight people who are forced to be uncomfortable on aircraft because they, the people designing the airplane don't care that, ultimately, is what it is, that they don't care or they want fat people not to exist or they want fat people to lose weight or whatever happens to be. So that's the difference between the way a critical mindset, the critical mindset is

merely going to look at the size of the chairs and start complaining. The traditional mindset, or what the Horkheimer called a traditional theory, would say, why were the plain seats designed like this in the first place? And what were the reasons that went into that? Why was this considered to be the best possible decision over maybe a few iterations of, well, they used to be more narrow or they used to be wider and we figured out we could get more people? And there's the one that tries to understand why the seats are the way they are, and then there's the one that says, this sucks that I want to complain about it. So, they're informed or not, whether there's any attention given to

the real reasons that things are the way they are. So that's kind of the difference between a critical mindset versus a more comprehensive way to look at things. It's a solvent. It's a, it tears apart what's there without necessarily even knowing what it is. Yeah, I understand. So that's, that's actually, I wanted to ask the question, where did social justice come from and can you give us the academic underpinnings of it, which it sounds like you're really delving into. And I think as well for a lot of the listeners, I've had Douglas Murray on, Andrew Doyle's been on, Constantin

Kisens coming on soon and blah, blah, blah. So you got all of these people who are talking about the manifestations of that, but what we're talking about here and what's my particular selfish love of things, why is this the way it is? So I want to get into that. But what you've come across there to me, I think, is quite archetypal in terms of what appears to be happening overall with social justice at the moment. And this is that there is a normal distribution of something, anything, whether it be gender expression, whether it be performance, it's school based on race, or particular job choices based on in relation to gender or whatever it might be.

There is a particular normal distribution, and it seems to me that one of the hallmarks of social justice at the moment in its malignant form, because social justice in its purist form, I don't know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, before this term sort of began to get hijacked, is actually a really, really, really good thing. But, yeah, in its current form, it appears to be there are some people who have an extreme experience of the world. we need to accommodate them ahead of the bulk of people that fall within the normal distribution. Am I a million miles away there or is that what's happening a lot?

You're pretty close to the bullseye. There's a number of interesting things that can be said about that if you want, but you are very close to an accurate description of what's going on. One of the things that can be said about that is that what you are, so another kind of useful example here is what's known as the social model of disability. So within disability studies, which has also become one of these kind of social justice bastions to the dismay of lots of disabled people. We reach out to me all the time and say

it's wrecking their lives. There's this model that came about, I think, in the 80s, it may have been a little earlier, and it was okay at the beginning. Disability studies is a really an interesting case because it's one where it's really easy to see the point being made that's good and then how it falls off the rails. The social model of disability basically said, okay, so some people are disabled and it's

important not just to kind of say suck it up, buttercup and figure it out, but rather society should make reasonable accommodations for disabled people. So there should be, you know, the thing on the sidewalk, the sidewalk the ridge area for the blind people in traffic signals should make noise and should be outside of the ramps and elevators and things yes to agree that bathrooms and so on and so the social model disability is exactly what you're just saying there are these people who fall outside of the normal range of human experience. And there is some expectation that a society that's well-off enough is doing the right thing by making them have more accessibility to that society. So there's the so it shouldn't all be on the disabled person to deal with the world. If the society is, I mean, they usually don't say it so explicitly, but the reality is,

if the society is well off enough to be able to afford it, there is a reason to believe that we have a social obligation to make things more accessible. Yes, to pay for those ramps, to pay for the pay taxes, to pay for the thing on the sidewalk and at the light, the crossing light makes noises and things like that. So this seems perfectly reasonable because it is perfectly reasonable. And then when it starts becoming, as you were distinguishing between this, so that is social justice. That is making, in the liberal sense sense society more just for people on the outside into the spectrum at very some, but very little cost to people in the middle. But then where it starts to become the malignant form is when you start getting into ideas like, and these are

these are valid, these are things that are actually happening, that deafness, for example, is an identity. So you are a deaf person, not a person who happens to be deaf. And so when there's medical advances in, say, hearing aid technology that can give deaf people the ability to hear, that can be reinterpreted as a medicalization of deafness or a desire for deafness, not to exist, which then can be further interpreted into a will to genocide against deaf people. So the wish that no one would be deaf because being deaf is a disability is interpreted when you go too far down this rabbit hole as wishing there were no deaf people in the other meaning of the term as in like they were all their deafness

was all it's so hard to say but they literally equated to a genocide. Is this not the same, would this not be the same as when was the, when did the polio jab come out? Is about a hundred years ago, is that right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it would be the same as a hundred years ago, the polio jab being released and everyone's saying, right, so you're saying that all of these people that have got polio that are like walking around on crutch, you're saying you're saying that they shouldn't exist. You're like, well, I mean, by most people's measures of welfare,

they would be having a fuller human experience if they weren't like that. And given the choice between the two, the majority of people, if they were laid out in front of them would also choose sort of full normal human function. Where is the problem here? But as I say, it's an attack on the identity or at least that's what it's. So that's the thing. It becomes an attack on the identity, which then it gets further translated into an attack on the people who carry that identity. And you can start to see how this isn't really a good way to think about things. And then so people start to, we will get up to the listeners, we will go on to the academic underpinnings of social justice in a seconder promise. This is cool and interesting.

You can increasingly slice this, I am out on the fringes thing, right? Is that what's happening whereby people are making something which isn't perhaps that much of a disadvantage more of a exaggerating that? So, um, for instance, yeah, I think so. For instance, Douglas, I don't know whether you ever heard the interview that I did with him, but I asked him, what chapters would you have put in the book in the madness of crowds that you didn't? And he said that one of them was mental health, because he said that as far as he was concerned, there are real people who have real problems with mental health, but waving your hand in the air and saying, I have mental health problems, it's some sort of some calling card, some

marker of, of distinguishment or whatever it might be, some sort of sympathy card. And the other one was green. So those were the two, those were the two that he was, he was considering adding in. But yeah, I'm wondering how that, you have some people who have, who genuinely are out on that, the tail end of that distribution of normalness and who require social justice To allow them to be a part of society because we have to accommodate for them because that's the good thing to do within a good society But then there are people who want accommodations made for them because Why because they want some attention?

them because why, because they want some attention. It's really difficult to say why, but somehow along the way, this all became very identity focused. Like how an identity first mindset, in other words, it adopted identity politics. This maybe is attributable to the black feminists and that black feminism is a type of feminism. I'm not saying feminists who happen to be black. Yeah, it turns out black feminism is kind of grew out of like the combination

of the black power movement and feminist feminism, I think, and it has ethos at any rate. And so they very much so Kimberly Crunchyon Bell hooks in the 1980s to very famous names among people who are paying attention to any of this now. They both were very adamant that black identity should be first. It should be I am a black person or I am a black woman rather than I am a person who happens to be black. So in the Kimberly Crunchyre at least was explicit about it. The purpose is so we can do identity politics. What do you mean so a step away? So we can do so we can do identity politics. What's that mean? So the goal was to put identity first so that you can use that matter of identity as a lever to achieve political ends.

And it was explicitly written, and for example, Crenshaw's mapping the margins that identity politics was the goal. So there was this switch, sometime in the 80s and 90s, to the mainstream even academic thought, becoming very identity politics oriented. And so that started causing this identity centric kind of thinking

that you're kind of hinting at or asking about. One other thing to say about the normal distribution, by the way, it's worth mentioning, but we won't go down the rabbit hole, is that there's a trick being played here that everybody should be aware of, which is that the word normal means two things at once. There's normal in the sense of, you know, near the middle of the normal distribution, and then common every day, the regular, the expected thing, you know, typical. Yeah. And then there's, there's normal in the sense of normative, which means that it has some moral valence. It's the good thing.

And so what they're doing is they're mixing those two meanings at the same time. So they are actually waging a war against the normal because they feel like they're, when you expect, if lots of people are normal, and then you have some abnormal people, the belief is that there's an automatic, you can't have a neutral

understanding of normal and abnormal. There's always normal good abnormal bad. And so they're mixing the moral with the just descriptive understandings of those two terms and they play on that double meaning very intentionally and more or less constantly. So when you talk about the normal distribution laws, and then there's the people on the ends who would be abnormal, that's certainly what's going on. And if you want to know the, we can segue toward the academic roots there

by saying that that actually comes from the understanding of power, knowledge, and language that would have come from the French postmodernists, specifically Michelle Foucault and who was very concerned with the exclusion of the abnormal and the way that power does that. And then Jack Derrida, who was very concerned with how language, such as words in language appear in pairs that give hierarchical pairs, in fact, that give the words a meaning. Normal only means something because there's abnormal to compare it to.

And there it is. One of there it is hypotheses is that one of those words has a positive valence and one of those words has a negative valence. And then again, the confusion between descriptive and moral understanding of those. Is it a murky, murky, what is. Am I right in thinking that your actual, if you've got PhD in math, is that right? That is correct. PhD in mathematics, and you're now swimming in these waters.

Yeah, it's actually really interesting. Most of the people that I'm aware of that are being, other than Helen, who's Helen Pluckers, who's probably the most just stooped mind on all of this in terms of total like wide view and clarity. Most of the people working in this that are critical of it are coming out of things like mathematics and science. So that I've decided to start learning. I don't know. I think that, I mean, you see,

certainly mathematicians, well, maybe less mathematicians, but certainly scientists are, if they're not on board with it, are likely to be very prone to wanting to, I mean, it's very irritating to them to see these abuses of logic and empiricism and epistemology. I was going to say, is it partly because you guys are one of the bastions of true academia. There's, you know, a lot of the listens will be familiar with how many times someone

has said on this podcast, if the subject has the word science in it, it's not a true science. Or if it's got studies in it, it tends to not be a true science because nothing physics doesn't have the word science in it. Chemistry doesn't have the word. It's only a lot of slightly more serious topics and subject areas, which need to reaffirm their scientificness by putting signs in the title. And I wonder whether this is the old guard dusting off their sort of padded, elbow padded jackets and putting the chalkboards down to like come out and have a cracket sort of

protecting true academia. So yeah, I actually do think the more I think about it, the more I am convinced so that I may be am diluting myself or I'm getting more right, I don't know. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that most of what is happening regarding all this very academic side of the culture war the social justice and the scholarship and all of this postmodern stuff and all Ultimately comes down to a gigantic culture war between the sciences and the humanities. It's been raging since like the 30s I really don't know if that's what's going on It's quite so it's a tour for Yeah. So I think what happened was it became

undeniable that the sciences were getting much better answers about the world than as the harder the science has got, the more rigorous they got, the better the answers they were getting. Instead of this, you know, kind of armchair philosophy sort of thing, you used to be able to do and you were a natural philosopher and so on and so forth. You could just kind of like if you look at the advancement even in psychology from Freud which is all kind of unfalseifiable and he's just sitting back thinking about stuff and writing it down to what we expect now which is very deeply when it's done well, very deeply rigorous and experimental and experimental controls and statistics. And you can't just, you know, well, everybody wants to have sex with

their mother and then that results in, you know, you can't do that anymore. And so you've had this like hardening up. And so you had the side of scholarship that was more of the, well, I want to sit back and my armchair and talk about issues, we had the, well, let's go get our hands dirty with the data, the two sides of it. And the science just keeps stealing ground from the other ones. And I think they're bitter about it and they've been bitter about it for decades and want their ground back. You see it really strongly with analytic philosophers and moral philosophers, especially where they feel like science is

encroaching upon, you know, the highest end of philosophy and the science is encroaching on their turf and their very hostile about it and get really worked up. But the French postmodernist, for example, were extraordinarily fukou in particular, extraordinarily pessimistic about science. His whole stick was, you know, was a philosopher, I'm a historiographer, and I'm gonna tell you about the history of how science was wrong,

and science was wrong here, and then science thought it was better, and science was wrong again, and you know, it's just this whole kind of, well, science can't do anything right. And I actually think that's how Foucault took off is these literary theory departments that were trying to do a lot of social activism realized that Foucault gave them a tool to point out how science is more a longstanding string of failures, which gigantic moral consequences,

than it is a rigorous and legitimate method. So it gave people a way to criticize science without having to do science, allowing that turf war to just flare up at like the highest level. And so who's going to come out and defend it? Scientists. And that's what you saw in the 90s with what's called science wars now. You had like with what's called science wars now. You had like, gross and lev it and so cool, and I can't think of all the names up against these, mostly French postmodern philosophers, and just this really heated culture war

within the academy was raging between them, and I think ultimately this I inside one, the battle, but maybe lost the work as the theorists went underground and have now come back with a vengeance with seven seven arms and eight heads and the breathing fire and all this stuff. Somebody recently that I was talking to I can't think of it was so I apologize to whoever that was said It's like a hydra and I think that's a really good analogy you cut off ahead and it grows too more and

It seems to be a hydra that doesn't know it's a hydra which is is really a Fick you're just a fluffy bunny or something like that So we've got actually do have by the way a touch of how these ideas came to be what they are. You had these philosopher, well, I mean, the call of people like Foucault philosophers are really tough stretch of the word. He wasn't considered that by his contemporaries. His legacy in France isn't very good, same with Derrida, but you had these, ultimately, these people that were structuralists, and became very, you know, it's a very strange branch of philosophy, that then got tied in with German idealism, with what the Frankfurt School really was coming from, and then got really

pessimistic and cynical and just started doing their strange thing and it eventually caught on. So let's just as to why I get it. Let's take it from we've got about 20 minutes or so. James, can you try and take us through a journey? Let's imagine that we're at the Epcot at Disneyland or whatever it might be. I'm going to go on a little roller coaster. I'm going to sit in the roller coaster. And this is social justice from beginning until now.

And we're going to sit in there. So where are we going first? Where's the roller coaster take us first? Hell's Kitchen, New York City. Early 1900s or late 1800s with a guy named, early 1900s or late 1800s with a guy named, I mean, so the term I think originated in the 1820s or 40s, but I don't know exactly what it referred to. I haven't gone that far back. I'm not going to talk about Mark's, although Mark's is going to be very influential. I'm going to try to direct it to a number of streams, but the word social justice gained a lot of its relevance actually with Befts, Minister, and was named Walter Rauschenbush, who invented what was called the social gospel. And if you go back and read the social gospel, it looks a lot like the social justice of today. And we're going to leave that as a seed,

except that Rauschenbush ended up working with people on your side of the pond, he came over to London and got in cahoots with the Fabian Society early on, which is a far left organization, eventually spawned the London School of Economics, which is a socialist school of economics and so on, think tank now. And so he came back to Hell's Kitchen, he said, so social justice started to become a thing within a, within the Baptist religion of all things, which is very conservative now, which is kind of funny.

So, turns out Rastrambush was Richard Rorody, who's one of the American postmodern philosophers. Rastrambush was his grandfather. So, that's kind of like track number one. Then I wanna take you to Frankfurt and by Frankfurt, I actually mean Frankfurt kind of in mostly New York City because the Frankfurt School was mostly in New York City

because of the Nazis, so they had to leave Germany because that's when that was going on. It started in the late 20s, and so not very long later, most of them relocated to New York City. So you're talking about Max Horkheimer, the Adora Dorno, Herbert Marcusa, eventually a decade later, two decades later,

Yergen Habermas Walter Benjamin was early on, allegedly Adorno stole most of Benjamin's ideas. And so these guys, laid, as we talked at the beginning of the conversation, they laid the groundwork for this critical theory idea and they ended up especially coming off of Marcusa. The groundwork for what became known as a social movement, known as the new left.

And the new left is what was responsible for all of the, when you talk about the crazy politics of the 1960s and all of the riots, especially around 1968, the new left was really what was responsible for that. So these guys' vision for how society should be organized and ultimately viewed through critical theory in order to overthrow the hidden oppressions and injustices of liberalism and Western civilization became a huge political movement on the far left. It defined the radical left. So all your radical feminists, your black power movement, Malcolm X, etc.

All of that would have had in some sense either direct or indirect ties to the thinking of the new left. And so that kind of whole far left radical activist, Morasse, which was actually quite violent at the time in the 60s, that you got the May 1968, what was it in France and Paris? You got whatever happened in the US, some of the riots got pretty intense, Berkeley and so on and so That would be kind of like the second stop on our little roller coaster is that philosophy there So especially like I said Marcusa who is extremely influential with these These kids

I actually saw an interview with him from the 70s where he was a bit dismayed with how people were taking up his ideas and being Uncareful with them and running kind of roughshodden wild with them. I was going to say just so that we can kind of have a, I would you say, one of those dipsticks, like a PhD level dipstick of the intensity of how much this is becoming malignant, because you know, we hear these things. We've got Malcolm X. We've got, these are are just in most people's eyes, there's some extreme tactics that are being used, but they're just causes. There's a few people that would go back and see these and say, that shouldn't have happened. So where does this start to sort of lose its way as well?

So yeah, we'll get there. So I wanted to actually dip back to Paris for a minute, because around that same time, around the 60s and early 70s, is when you had the postmodernists really coming to bear. Now, the context in Europe more broadly, of course, also was the collapse of colonialism at this point. So, you had the postcolonial people

really starting to speak out about how bad empire was and the damage that that did. And it's kind of set. Now it became very actually central to European new left thinking. Whereas roughly the same time in the US, it started shifting toward anti-Vietnam war sentiment. And so they kind of had two different paths going on there.

So the postmodernists arose in the European context of being French and highly influenced by some of the German idealists, philosophers. And so they were at the Sarbonne at, I think, the University of Paris in Paris, anyway. And they all kind of worked together and studied together. And you have this kind of whole little group of, you know, Derrida Foucault, etc. They didn't always agree. Sometimes they didn't like each other. Sometimes they did. But there was this sort of occasionally Marxist, occasionally lendingist, occasionally Maoist, occasionally not that occasionally communist, occasionally anti-communist, but very far left.

There is no stable knowledge. We got to, because of the post-colonial context, we have to look at different cultures. There's no way to compare a culture. We've been doing that. That was unjust. We were saying Western cultures better. So they had to pull back from all of that kind of thing, very culturally relative. We can't really obtain objective truth. They had to pull back from all of that kind of thing very culturally relative.

We can't really obtain objective truth. We think that the West is so good, but it made World War II all this death and destruction. It came up with the Atlantic slave trade became an interesting topic. All of these horrors that came out of Western culture, so we can't keep saying it's so good. Postmodern theory was born. And so I think postmodern theory was actually not really, it was an offshoot of and not really in line with

the rest of what the so-called new left was doing. And then so where did it really start? There are already problems here, but where it really started to become the lignit was when those two things came back together. And that would have been in the mid in late 1980s. So through the 70s and 80s, for example, within feminism, you would overwhelmingly have had radical feminists and Marxist feminists, or they're called materialist feminists, being the ones doing the analysis. And they would say, oh, well, women were a commodity under patriarchy and patriarchy and capitalism or in cahoots. And so the patriarchy

or capitalist system is what needs to be overthrown. And so you can kind of see this is a very radical mindset. You had people like Andrea Dworkin and all of these characters, Catherine McKinnon, who are very against pornography as a form of exploitation of violence against women. A lot of this dipped in and out of the liberal feminist stuff, but the radicals were separate and more often separatist and intense in their approach. This, of course, is also, by the way, all along stimulating a backlash

from the conservatives who are afraid that this is the end of society and the making. So, you know, something boiling on the other side is a result of this, so that's kind of important. And eventually, in the making. So, you know, something boiling on the other side is a result of this. That's kind of important. Eventually in the late 1980s, you had a fusion of postmodern methods into this radical left thought. And that's where I think it really started to become a lignit. That's where, again, we talked about briefly before the introduction of the intention to do identity politics through postmodern methods was introduced. That's where postmodernism and liberalism

were simultaneously critiqued heavily by these theorists. But the conclusion was that postmodernism was just, the problems with postmodernism, postmodernism has as most the right ideas except that it was formulated by white Western well-off men who could afford to deconstruct everything. And so when you look at oppression,

you can't deconstruct that experience. You can't deconstruct that injustice hence the turn toward identity centrality. So you had that whole twist toward, let's do identity politics and let's do it with postmodern methods. If you really wanted to stick a date stamp on it, I would tell you, it was 1989 is when that happened, but really anywhere from 1984 up through 1994 is one that was developing and cooking and all of the biggest pieces and most of the groundwork was laid. And from there, it's just actually kind of concretized. Most of this happening in the United States now, once the postmodernism

was picked up by these American philosophers, so like Kimberly Crenshaw is a legal scholar Judith Butler as a, I guess a philosopher or something, but the queer theorist is the best way to describe her now. As it started getting picked up by all these Americans, it just took off. I'm not entirely sure why it took off. So heavily in the American Academy, whereas it was kind of Poup-Poup-Den-France, where it was originated, nobody in the continent or in England was particularly interested. And it just took off in the US. And then, of course, our academic exported it to yours, and especially to Australian ones, who were also very interested in these kinds of things. The first women's studies department actually wasn't Sydney in Australia, which that would have been more of the radical line.

So that's how it started to change and what it changed into by 2010, and anybody who's interested will be able to read this in great detail in the book I wrote with Helen, which is due out in May called cynical theories. By 2010 or so, it had become just the phrase that is probably best used as it's hard to say this and have it be understood. It's known knowns things that are known to be known things that people just therefore accept as being generally true. So all of the postmodern theorizing all of the attempts to reify certain points around identity that went into the identity politics turn in the late 80s and early 90s and then the developments that proceeded in the next decade or so, everybody just started taking those things

for granted. Well, that's true, everybody knows that. We have decades of theory saying that that's true. There's no reason to say no, that that can't be right. We have so much scholarship now all saying that that's true. There's no reason to say no, that that can't be right. We have so much scholarship now all saying that that's true. And so, in 2010, they just started kind of mixing everything together in this sort of super intersectional framework where solidarity and allyship became kind of core ideas that had to be paid full attention to all the time. And it started

coming out of the academies and into society. And when they speak about it now, it used to be this crazy high-falutin jargon that nobody understood, complicated sentences. Now it's quite clear, it's almost religious in its quality. If you could listen to, for example, Robin DeAngelo, who's a famous whiteness scholar, it sounds very much like a woman talking to children with her theory. It's comprehensible by a ten year old, very straightforward, very clear, very self-assured, absolutely confident in the underlying assumptions that these systems of power are the correct way to view the world and the identity is at the core of systems of power are the correct way to view the world and the identity is at the core of systems of power and knowledge and who can have what in society and do what in society.

So that's sort of like the broad tour of how this all has come down largely because it tends to eat itself also. It tends to concentrate and get more and more virulent. Anybody who kind of says, well, maybe it's a little bit not quite that extreme is that person's gonna get shut down big time. So this is this is really this a really interesting point that came up in my discussion with Douglas Murray and with other people as well, which is that in these discussions, as we increasingly sort of polarise the opinions about any topic, the room for nuance, and I suppose this loops to how to have impossible

conversations, which is your most recent book, the room for nuance and subtlety is largely missing, and the problem is that to your own side, if you're in this quite sort of militant discussion where you're supposed to be as aggressive or as convincing as possible, to your own side, New Onsen subtlety sounds like a lack of commitment to the cause, and to the other side, New Onsen subtlety sounds like a lack of conviction or a potential weak point in your argument. Do you think that's fair to say? Yeah, I think that's right. And there's been a little while ago, I was giving you the tour and I said, all along, each step along the way, the new left, the riots in 1968,

the turn toward identity politics, et cetera. And then more recently, all the things where it's become widely disseminated, I left out that this happened mostly in where it got the tightest hold as an education, or schools of education have basically been social justice oriented since the 1980s, which is becoming a problem. Critical pedagogy is what it's called

and it's been more or less the only approach, not even the dominant approach, the only approach to education. So if it's an education, I read that, for example, in colleges, I was like, oh, it's coming from the colleges. What I read was that the universities actually experienced it as a student-led change. Where did the students get it from their previous education, which was critically oriented

because our colleges of education have been doing critical pedagogy since the 80s. So all along though, I said that there is this right wing backlash brewing. Well, guess what? The far left side of this interprets the far right side of this as proof that their theories are correct, that society really is corrupt and society really is trying to protect its vested interests in the so-called status quo and the powerful people really are pushing back against them. And they of course course, are going to have irrational back clashes. Meanwhile, they double down because of the exact dynamic you just said, nuance can't be allowed because it looks like a lack of

commitment or betrayal. And from the other side, it looks like a weak point. And so both sides have actually pulled apart from one another, seeing the other as as I Helen and I wrote an article in 2017 that we titled this dynamic existential polarization where both sides now actually believes if the other side gets any power whatsoever it's an existential threat either to the planet or to our way of life or to our civil our civilizations or societies or something like this. And so that's absolutely non-negotiable nuance can't possibly exist in such a situation. Yeah, it's no longer a threat to just your side. It's a threat to everybody, even the people who aren't involved and who don't know it, and they're a threat to themselves as well.

Right, right. And so critical theory, of course, stems out of this idea that generally the unwashed masses don't know what's good for them. That was more less Antonio Gramsci's underlying idea. That was what you saw a lot of the motivation on the Frankfurt school was that if you leave the masses to choose things for themselves, they won't choose art and poetry. They'll choose football and beer and go into the strip club or whatever it happens to be. And so people tend not to choose what's best for themselves and they need some kind of philosopher king to be able to choose for them. The postmodernists in particular, Bojariard and Leotard were particularly concerned with this.

So, Bojariard especially was that people never pick art and poetry. They're always going to pick some low culture trash if you let them make their own choices. So they clearly don't know how to make good decisions and everything's artificial and everything's fake now. So, which is also, we can kind of see what that's like. That kind of like out gaming or that, increasing sort of caricaturism of what's going on.

You know, if you were to look at something 20 years ago and say, oh, you think that that's vacuous, like just just just wait until you see what happens when Instagram arrives, just wait until you see what happens when the Kardashians get on TV, like, you know, we are able to outdo ourselves even in how hollow we are, which is. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah. Well, the left sees the right well, I should say I guess that the the so the left that's all into this like kind of high-minded thing that doesn't trust the masses sees the right as choosing against their own interests. So the right as background, you know,

the right conservatives all back corporate interests and they, you know, big politics and a bunch of white men in a room and smoking jackets or whatever the hell the things are. Right, and so the average conservative is backing something that's against his own interests, and he just has to be informed and brought back around to the right side of thinking, and then he wouldn't choose conservatives anymore. Whereas the conservatives are like the liberals are trying to do some damn social engineering program, they call it the liberal agenda. And if we do that, society is going to collapse. And you can actually sit back for like two seconds and look at the dynamic and think, man, we're fucked.

How does that stop? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I, I, I, that's kind of I think what's going on. So cheers or something. You're not far wrong. Okay. So to finish up, James, put your money away your mouth is now. What does the next five to 10 years look like for this dynamic? That's so hard to answer because it depends on a lot of things. Um, I do think the next election in the US, a presidential election, uh, well, it's, you know, we do all over elections. Um, is going to be, uh, a big variable in how that goes. Mike, perception, so it'll take that off the table for the moment because it's a big wild card and nobody really knows what's gonna happen and everybody's kind of scared but nothing it doesn't look like anything good's coming.

Do you think that's going to be a keystone in terms of where we go moving forward? I think it's very likely that it will be, yeah. But I don't want to like also say this is the election of a lifetime because then that increases those stakes and makes everything worse. I think one of the only, or biggest lessons of Trump is that, because I think Trump's a disaster in general, but one of the biggest lessons you can pull out of his presidency is most stuff still works okay, even with that in the White House, so calm down about politics. Whoever's the president isn't nearly as important as we've been thinking for the last 20 or 30

years. But as far as social justice goes right now, the dynamic I just described, I have no idea. The social justice part of it, I feel like, is collapsing under its own weight, but it's at the same time rapidly institutionalizing. So I anticipate that a lot more organizations, companies, legal entities, whatever they happen to be are going to go woke as it were, and that wokeness is going to end up hamstringing them. And so we'll see a lot of important institutions and less important institutions that see a lot of damage as the thing starts to collapse under

its own weight, which is I think what's happening. So it's like it's weight. Is that just sort of the inherent ridiculousness and self-contradictoriness of the situation implode? Yes. inherent ridiculousness and self-contradictoriness of the situation imploded. Yes. Yes. For example, I saw the other day article that I read, this is maybe two weeks ago about the problem of settlers of color. And so what is a settler of color? This is a black person, say, in North America, who for whatever reason they ended up there, they stole indigenous land also.

So this is basically a turf war for victimhood status between black and indigenous as kind of the maximum racial victimhood status. And it's a clear bid that the indigenous are going to try to throw the black people under the bus by saying that they're settlers of color. So the infighting alone is going to really hobble what they're able to do. I also see that there is two, there are two things happening at once. One is good and one is bad in response to all this. A lot of people on both of those two things are waking up to what's going on. Social justice has shown its hand. A lot of people have become very interested in the problem

and are studying it like I have, like Helen has. And that's going to increase tremendously. And people are going to understand what it is. And when they understand what it is, they will do what they can to reject it. The bad side of that is going to be the backlash side, which is going to be a turn again toward making traditional gender roles cool,

maybe a turn toward racism. Certainly a lot less sensitivity than we actually should have toward issues of identity. Disability, also rejects like that. Sure. And there's these new movements, it's like, I guess there was like the Trump people, and now those people are all like cucks or something now like they're not hardcore enough like Trump in his family or sell out liberals or something now from the far far far far or extra all double all right or whatever they have a name.

Frogs or something. Grypers they call him. So it's like, is that what we're looking at over the next year? I doubt it. I don't think they're going to have a whole lot of steam behind them. They're a thing at the moment, but probably not much of one. But it's like the alt-right aspect is going to still continue to swell. You couldn't give them a better recruiting ground than having all this crazy stuff happening like with presidential nominees and things like that. On the other hand, there is also a, this is very good, an enormous growth in the interest in liberalism and the underpinnings of how liberal societies should work and why those principles should be in place and how to defend them.

A tremendous amount of interest. And I'm seeing that from people on the left, I'm seeing it from people who identify as centrist and people on the right. So, and those people will, despite retaining tremendous disagreements politically, will be able to rise up and say, you know what, a liberal on the right and a liberal on the left have more in common than these fools on the extreme.

And so they will, they will probably start to pick in elections less predictably and more well predictable toward whoever's being the most liberal. For example, you see this kind of broad coalition. I don't think it's going to work out, but broad coalition for candidates like Andrew Yang, who are being in the US right now, who are being very traditionally liberal, whether left or right doesn't actually matter. I think you would see a lot of conservative supporting him despite many of his policies are being open to his ideas, despite his policies. Whereas normally you would just be, you know, Democrat trying to get, you know, a position terrible. You're not seeing that. So you're starting to see this broader open-minded thing where people, and I think it would be reflected as well, if you had a very centrist Republican

who's trying to push back against whatever's going on right now with the far right politics, it's the populism that's dominating. I think you'd see a lot of left wing support coming out for central support coming out for that. So I see this huge rebirth, like almost a renaissance of liberalism. And that's the place that I'm trying to stick myself into is to encourage that, to expose the thing that we're looking at, social justice, malignant, social justice thing,

and try to resurrect, you know, proper liberal principles, including liberal social justice principles, like you said earlier, are actually really good and almost everybody short of a small fringe off on the right agree with them. One of the things I've thought of as you've got towards the end of this discussion, we've been talking about sort of this, it's analogized to a virus and we're talking about when did it become malignant and things like that. I've got it in my head thinking about how a vaccination works.

The vaccination gives you a very small dose of a potentially lethal virus. And then you realize your system realizes, shit, I'm pretty vulnerable to this. I need to do something. And I wonder how much this particular social justice movement is going to be a vaccination against something else which could have or may arise in the not too distant future for which we will need to be able to marshal an appropriate response.

And that this situation that we have encountered recently will have been a canary in the coal mine to go, oh, you didn't, you didn't know that this was a problem? Let me tell you, like this is, this is, this really is a problem and you, you got to be ready for it. But we didn't get the smooth-talking slick-dist, future dystopian overlord from like some James Bond film. We didn't get him. like some James Bond film, we didn't get him. We got like Native Americans versus like Black settler, like who's got them, who is the most underprivileged in this situation, like fat studies, that's who we got. Yeah.

We can get the owner of some huge billion dollar media conglomerate who's actually really, really nefarious with it. We got, like, people with blue head are unhappy that they didn't get enough hugs as a kid. I wonder whether or not that will actually end up being in the long term, whether that will end up serving as well because it'll prepare us for what's to come. It's possible. I think it's going to be really important that we understand I think that it's not centralized like the dangerous guy with the big money and all of that,

but critical theory is a real, it's again, like we talked about, it's like an industrial grade solvent. And so learning how to deal with that as a society is going to be really, really important. And so perhaps it's as you're suggesting best that it's in the hands of these self-defeating oddballs and grievance mongers, rather than, you know, the next Hitler who's going to come out and know how to wield those tools to much worse. And it's certainly a possibility. I do think, though, that understanding that the potential for critical theory, to be something that can literally dissolve a liberal or Western society,

or any society really, because you can latch on and change itself to fit anything, is of paramount importance right now. And so administering kind of like the critical theory jab and giving people that vaccine, I think is super important at the moment. Well, I'm excited. I'm looking forward to the book to come out with with Helen next year. Thank you so much for today, James. Why should the listeners head if they want to keep in touch? Do you find out more? I am probably pathologically active on Twitter.

So that's the best place to look for me and reach out to me. I'm at Conceptual James on Twitter. There should be some big things coming in the next few months, so if those pan out, people should be getting excited and check me out and see what's going on. So that's the place to look for now. I'm looking forward to it. James, thank you so much to the listeners at home.

You know what to do. If you've enjoyed this episode, go and follow James. Check out how to have impossible conversations and don't wait for his book with Helen, which we'll be coming out early next year. Like, share, subscribe, all that good stuff you know what to do. But for now, thank you James. Thank you.

Thank you. you