TRIGGERnometry - Helen Pluckrose on Grievance Studies & Postmodernism

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Areo magazine editor Helen Pluckrose (@HPluckrose) discusses grievance studies, hoax papers, social justice, feminism, the patriarchy, post modernism, fat activism, the regressive left, liberalism, illiberal progressives, the far right and a lot more with the guys at TRIGGERnometry. Find us on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissing. And this is the show for you if you're bored of watching people argue on the internet about subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our fantastic expert guest this week is the editor-in-chief of Aero Magazine. Helen Pluckrose, welcome to Triginometry. Thank you for having me. It's great that you're here. Thank you so much for coming. And listen, before we get into the internet, Tell our views and I listen to a little bit about who you are, how are you where you are? Well, I'm from here in East London and my background is in English literature and early modern

studies, but I came into the culture was kind of via the new atheist movement. I've always been very concerned about epistemology, how we know what is true and about liberal ethics. So I was very critical of religion making unfounded truth claims and having all kinds of illiberal ideas about women and LGBT. So that was the same for Peter and James, who did their recent project with us. I'll get onto that, but we'll get right into that. So from that, when I was studying English literature

and trying to look at women's history, then the whole problem of, of people, postmodernism and theory that's derived from postmodernism just kept coming up and getting in the way of looking at anything rigorously and ethically. So I, gradually, my attention has turned from religious truth claims and human rights issues to ones rooted in theory and in activism that's sort of currently the most known as the social justice approach. Well, we'll get into all of that and the postmodernism and all that in the second. But tell us a little about Aero, the magazine, first of all,

for anyone who's not familiar with it. Yeah, Aereo was set up by Malhar Mali to try and cut through the partisan divides to try and be open to a great range of ideas which were based on evidence and reason and try and get all the different conversations out there and get people together. He moved on in June,

and I have taken. taking it over. And I'm staying true to his aim and I'm trying to get it a bit more well-known in the UK at the moment. Half of our readers are in the US. So, yeah, trying to broaden our horizons here a bit as well. And what does it mean to be a liberal? Because I hear this word bandied about a lot. People talk about being a liberal. A lot of the time, sometimes people who say they're liberal, I hear them speaking. I go, well, that doesn't sound very liberal to me. So what does it mean to you to be a liberal? Well, I think that what you just said there, it sort of covers it, that doesn't seem very liberal. If something is illiberal, we recognise it much more easily.

It's something which isn't fair, which isn't free. So to be illiberal is to try to shut down certain freedoms, it's to be unbalanced and unjust, really. So when we are saying liberal in this broadest sense, what we are looking at is people who are concerned with freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of choice generally, and people who are interested in a fair society and giving everybody the same opportunities to achieve everything. It's a focus on individuality and shared humanity. So every individual gets to access everything our shared society offers. But I've, so, going back to my Facebook, Echo Chamber, I'm in comedy, a frighteningly hard left industry,

and a lot of people tell me that freedom of speech is a right-wing issue and therefore nothing to do with liberalism. Do you agree? No, I mean, that's what the problem that we're seeing at the moment. The liberals, when the word liberal first came about, it was about freedom from the state in Italy and France. and it still I say it still does

it still should be about about this overarching freedom but what we've seen happen is the political scene has kind of shifted so that now we have this hard left coming up and it comes from somewhere completely different to the whole liberal aim

it comes from the radical side of what was once the Marxist side, but it's a rejection of Marxism. But it keeps this kind of idea of this really quite sort of authoritarian idea of language creating reality. So we have to be very careful with language. We have to monitor and regulate what people can say and what they can't say because that constructs our social reality, which is in stark contrast to the traditionally liberal idea of the market.

marketplace of ideas where we believe that we can beat bad ideas with better ones and that is in fact what we have done with increasing rapidity throughout the last century so yeah the um the freedom of speech is not always now associated with the liberals if we're associating liberals with the left but the hard left is illiberal so we can get lost in the words there because of course it is In America, liberal is understood often to be synonymous with the left. In Australia, it's understood to be synonymous with the right. So I think we just have to be saying, we're talking about the opposite of illiberal. It must be quite complicated for someone like you as well,

because when we were talking about you coming onto the show, you mentioned that you are someone who comes from the left, right? Yeah. So it must be quite weird to see that part of the political spectrum be kind of cannibalized by this hard element increasingly. and to the point where, as you say, we don't longer know what's a left liberal, you know, it's become very complicated, hasn't it? Yes.

What I'm very pleased to see is that a lot of the identitarians, the social justice identity politics left, are increasingly rejecting the label of liberal, and they are associating it with the right things. As they're rejecting it, they're associating it with a freedom of focus on freedom. freedom of speech and a focus on a level playing field and not noticing race, not finding it significant race, gender, sexuality. And they see that as a problem as trying to maintain a status quo, which is unjust. So there will be a lot of criticism from them of liberals, which actually helps our cause quite a lot for those on the right who are inclined to sort of complaint the left liberals with the left identitarians. So long may they continue doing that.

So they're kind of pushing out almost the people who are liberal, as you say. Yeah. And it's interesting because, look, we're equally critical on the show of people on the far right and as the far left. I think they're both very, very dangerous. And that's why we have to counter them, as you say, with better ideas, right? Yeah, and I'm far more worried about the far right and the populist right. But I think that is why it's so important to address the problems on the left.

because when we're in a situation where people who are not, you know, firmly committed to left or right, but are somewhere in the middle trying to see who is making more sense, there's a real problem if the left isn't making sense. If the right is seeming more reasonable, more coherent than the left, then that's something that we leftists need to address. We can't just say, well, everybody who's gone right has suddenly become racist, sexist, homophobic, and, you know, not caring about poor people. something has happened to undermine confidence in the left,

and we need to address that as much as we need to criticise the right. And why are you worried about right-wing populism and the rise of right-wing populism? Because it's anti-experty, it's anti-knowledge, it's producing quite a lot of the same problems that post-modernism is, where we have alternative ways of knowing they have alternative facts. In that we have post-modernism, they have post-truth. So we're seeing a lot of the same sort of very, very fluffy thinking,

but then you get, on top of that, a real sort of problem with expertise generally and with knowledge. So another reaction to some of our work from people on the sort of populist right is, yeah, experts know nothing, universities teaching, nothing, we just need to sort of go with common sense and local knowledge and tradition. And, yeah, no, we don't need to do that. we need to carry on sort of curing diseases and developing technology and being a modern secular democracy. And why do you think that's happened? Because if you think, you know,

we are the most advanced we've ever been, technology is the most advanced it's ever been, yet you get these people now who'd sort of reject all that. Why do you think that is? Do you think it's down to the fact that they feel betrayed? I think there's come about a certain complacency And I think that what has happened is that society culturally has been a liberal left for so long. The sort of really liberal ideas and the left sort of economic social ideas have really been dominant as what is good. That people have forgotten how to actually defend them and argue for them. It just seems like this is how it should be. So when one side becomes too culturally powerful, it can kind of turn in on itself, start nasal gazing and really get quite mad.

So what we've seen with the cultural dominance and with the rise of the postmodern ideas, which came in at the end of the civil rights movements, all that good stuff with equal pay for women and equal rights for people of all races and decriminalising homosexuality. Yeah, this has come in on the end of that and it's a completely different and mad way of looking at it. So now we've got that happening on the left and on the right, got a kind of reactionary pushback where there's a kind of pre-modern nostalgia for a time that never was, but, you know, when there was just traditional marriage and traditional gender roles.

And so we've got that narrative kind of coming in from there. There's a deep suspicion, which is not unjustified of the idea of liberal elites in universities talking incomprehensibly about pronouns and things. So there's a deep suspicion, which is not unjustified of the idea of liberal elites in universities, in universities, So there's that, but there's too much of a reaction to that. You know, there's a lot of wanting to throw babies out with Barthorch, and I think if we did lose our centres of knowledge production, people would suddenly appreciate them within a few years. Oh, within a few days, possibly.

They're very, very important, of course. But as you said, there is a lot of people, I think there are a lot of people who feel like, as you say, universities and the media and politics has been dominated by a certain way of thinking for so long the pushback now is almost a necessary correction to some extent but as you say you can't throw away the baby with the bathwater so how do we move forward

from here how do we create which is what we're trying to do on the show is create that same center within which people from the left people from the kind of non-far right can come together and go actually we're all saying people we're all trying to move to the same place I know the answer to this. It's a good Facebook update. That's what solves everything. You say something like racism's bad. Up there. Boom. Nailed it.

Well, other than Francis, it's complicated and an articulate solution. How do you move forward from here? Well, like that. Now I know how to feel. I think, James Lindsay and I, we wrote a manifesto against the enemies of modernity of a deliberately provocative title. And what we appointed out, which is similar to what you've just said, is that the lunatics are the fringes. They are the extremes.

But what we are doing too much when we lean one way or the other is looking at the extremes on the other side, reacting against that, condoning or minimizing the problems on our own side, and getting further and further polarised. We think that we need to re-conceptualise this and look at how many of us actually value the fruits of modernity.

We value science, we value reason-based philosophy, strong institutions, the liberal sense of freedom and of equal opportunity. We are the majority, and if we are pushing back at the far right or the far left, rather than at people who counter these values, which are very central to the development of Western civilization, then we're aiming at the world. things. We're going to be fighting with people that we don't really need to be fighting with, and we're not going to be addressing the problems that we should be addressing. And I think it's particularly important to address the ones that are on your own side, because if I know that I share very similar aims to the social justice left, I'm particularly concerned about social equality. I'm interested in culture and in groups within culture

and whether they are all having equal access to everything. So we have the same aims, but we have very different approaches. So what we need to do on the left is talk about our approaches. There's a certain resistance to talking or being allowed to say anything from that group, so that makes it hard. But we need to address it. And I think people on the right as well need to be. be looking at their extremes because there's a tendency there to say, yes, look, we have a few

neo-Nazi marches to which 12 people turn up and everybody else knows that they're bad people. That's not how it defines us. Meanwhile, you've got all these institutions which are really quite sort of controlled by this narrative, which makes no sense. So we're not worried about our looms. Well, you should be because we are seeing something of a resurgence of racism, of sexism, of homophobia, because we're seeing a bit of a pushback to traditional rules. There's an idea that there's a threat because, and I'm not, don't want to say that the left began this, it's been going back and forth for a long time. In America, James Lindsay will often argue that the extremes of the right produce the left. I tend to think here that the

extremes of the left have produced the pushback from the right, but let's not get into who started it. Well, I was that, but yeah, I think if we've got this sort of coming up, when we've got this reaction now, where we have, you know, where it becomes socially acceptable for women to make negative generalisations about men for ethnic and racial minorities to, to, to, you know, talk of whiteness and being whiteness in a disparaging way. Toxic whiteness or toxic masculinity or whatever. White fragility and all this kind of stuff. What we're seeing from that is a kind of pushback reaction

because even if we accept that systems of power exist in which some groups have been disadvantaged and may now be angry and may want to say things that we should understand, even if we accept that, we've got this kind of. of hardwired sense of fairness and reciprocity in us. So if there is this seeming imbalance where it's okay to be racist and sexist sometimes, that does tend to produce a corresponding racism and sexism back. And so I think that goes a long way to explain why we are now hearing more sort of openly sexist or racist comments which are kind of reactive. So

Yeah, I think we need to all sort of take stock of this and try to really sort of focus on a consistency. Are you saying that demonising white men isn't a good thing? I'm saying that. What a racist thing to say. I will stick my neck out and say that. I'm going to put that up on my Facebook feet and watch it all melt down. Well, you talk about the need for conversations on your own side,

and as you say, you're coming from the left. One of the things that you've been involved with, you mentioned earlier with Peter and James recently, is precisely an effort to do that, which is you, why don't you tell everybody who, a lot of people who are watching the show will know exactly what we're talking about. But for anyone who doesn't know about this whole,

for fake papers and the grievance studies thing, tell us a little bit about what happened, what did you do, why did you do it, and what was the result? Yeah, we spent a year, we intended to spend up to two years, but we got caught. Yeah, we wanted to write some papers. You may know, James and Peter wrote a paper before in which they claimed that penises were best understood

as concepts of toxic masculinity, and they were causing global warming. It was very, very funny, but they submitted it to a journal which was quite low-ranked, and there was some debate over whether it was predatory, and whether it had actually shown that these ideas were acceptable or that journals will publish anything if there's a sort of profit for them. So they decided to take a lot of the good criticisms from the last thing

and spend a year or two writing much sort of papers which looked at what we are all worried about, looked at a denial of objective knowledge, this sort of whole idea that that everything is culturally constructed and this inconsistent sort of a liberalism where we're viewing everything in terms of systems of power and certain groups who are always marginalised,

certain ones who are always privileged, what can and can't be said, all of those big sort of things that we're seeing in action in social justice movements and which are coming from papers in feminist critical race epistemology philosophy and those sort of fields so we decided and they brought me in on this to write

as many papers as we could and get them into the top journals in those sub-disciplines so we we've got one in feminist geography now that's not the highest in geography but it's the top in feminist geography when we're researching these ideas we're finding that a lot of them that have great sort of cultural power like white fragility, like toxic masculinity, are coming from a collection of the few of the same journals. So we started targeting them with ideas which just should have been very clearly nonsense, not un-evidenced and also unethical. So yeah, we claim that by examining the genitals of a thousand dogs in an Oregon dog park, we could see evidence of human rape culture and get some tips on how to train men like dogs.

That really shouldn't have been acceptable. And yeah, but we did get, yeah, a section of Minkf, which was rewritten as intersectional feminism. And it's important not to dwell too much on that way. It's not sections talking about genocide or anything, but it's that very sort of totalitarian in grievance sense the us and them and the needing to, for everybody to sort of, yeah, become one solid group against the enemy. So we, yeah, we managed to get that through. And we've claimed that morbid obesity is not admired in the same way that muscular bodies are because of prejudice and that there should be, there should be, but bodybuilding competition

should include bodies that are built with fat as well as with muscle. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing,

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That's quite a good premise for a joke. Yeah, it is a very good premise. I actually know one comedian who tweets about that all the time. I mean, it is silly and enough bit, but that's actually quite a serious problem. We have seen campaigns to prevent the cancer research from saying that obesity is a problem. Doctors talking about it, it's a medical issue.

are accused of fat shaming. And I, as someone who doesn't exactly have thin privilege, I still kind of see that this is a problem. This is a big sort of health problem. This is an epidemic, and we need to actually address it as a health condition. So I'm quite concerned about fat activists getting a lot of power. How much do you think, and maybe this is me and my brutally uneducated mind, And when I see these people talking about fat activism, all the rest of it,

how much of it is just victim culture and just unwillingness to accept responsibility? I think that's being, I mean, there is this thing where it's good to take on a victim identity. Yeah. So if you can claim to have a marginalised identity, then you have a certain status within these communities. So there certainly is that, but there are helpful. ways and unhelpful ways to look at things like obesity and mental illness. And the unhelpful thing to do is to take it on as an identity and not allow it to be seen as a problem because that would be prejudiced. So that, I worry particularly about that. I think that those kind of

problems need to be recognised as a health condition, which people don't, shouldn't not be bullied, certainly, you know, people with mental illness. But the idea is, should still always be to get better to fix the problem or improve the problem. So I am worried that this is, is tying into the whole sort of marginalised identity thing. And I think as well that we're seeing that in the realms of trans activism. Because trans people exist. There is a growing amount of science, which shows us why some people feel that they are the opposite sex to what their genitals tell them they are. And yet we are seeing, particularly among teenagers,

a growing tendency to identify as non-binary or demi, something which seems to have an element of a cultural ideological factor as well, which then makes it quite difficult to identify, who is trans and who isn't, and that will get me in a lot of trouble for saying that, because nobody else should judge who is trans and who isn't. This is what people know themselves. But, yeah, we are seeing an increasing ideological basis for complicating gender identity in addition to what is real, which is the existence of trans people.

So that is likely to damage the trans cause considerably. because in 10 or 20 years, the statistics which now show that people who identify as trans after puberty and normally do so for the rest of their lives. And then looking at the brains, I think it was a big study done in post-mortens. Yeah, evidence for why they did that is found. But what we're likely to find now is a load of people in their teens identifying as trans and then stopping, desisting. and this is going to undermine the cause of people who are trans, who want to transition. I mean, it's a great point you make about young people, because famously, you know, being a teenager is a time of exploration.

You don't know really who you are. You don't know what your sexuality is a lot of the time. It's a time of exploration. You try things out. You find out who you are. You find out where your boundaries are. And if you're going to, you know, say that somebody is trans at such an early age, I mean, it's a recipe for disaster.

It is if it takes on an ideological component. I mean, otherwise, people are sort of unsure of what their gender identity is or they're very sure that it's not the same as their genitals, then they are sensible and rational ways to go about supporting them, working out what's happening and what they want to do about it. But, yeah, when we have, I'm afraid it's pretentious, ideologues sort of coming in and talking nonsense about gender for political reasons. That's

really not doing anybody in good. And that's what your papers that you wrote with the two guys, that's what you were trying to show is that some of these academic subjects, which inform our discourse to a very significant extent, I would argue, they are purely ideological and there is no pursuit of truth or fact in that subject. So you publish these papers, you try to and get them through the academic journals. You're successful with some of them? Yeah, at the time we had to stop, we had seven in. There were three more.

We were very confident we're going in. People that reviews had said, this isn't quite ready yet, getting back soon, you know. This section of mine camp is not quite feminist enough. So, yeah, we were confident of getting 10. There were another two that we thought we'd probably get in. But yes, at the end, when we had to call it a day

there were seven seven in so yeah and they did and particularly the ones that looked at feminist epistemology which was something I'm particularly interested in that argues very explicitly that we

shouldn't have to go with evidence or reason that this is a Western philosophical tradition which goes along with slavery and imperialism and that this one construction of knowledge needs to be given a back seat to let all these other knowages come in and have their say. And this is obviously based very much on the idea that knowledge is constructed,

and it's constructed by your position in society. So there will be a black knowledge and a women's knowledge and a trans knowledge, and these will be different to straight white men's knowledge, which unfortunately is being associated with science and reason. and I think you can see how racist and sexist it is to associate science and reason with straight white. Is that not like the most sexist argument you could possibly make? Yes. Straight white men are the ones who do science, logic and reason.

Yes. My girlfriend's doing a, she's doing a doctorate at the moment in psychology. I want to point that out to her and see how far that gets. Yeah, I look forward to your search for your girlfriend. Well, here we're having a STEM crisis. We are reliant on attracting scientists, doctors and engineers from India, Pakistan, Nigeria. You wonder what they think if they arrive to be told that this is a white masculinist, imperialist type of knowledge, and they should really be using traditional healing practices.

In one sense, it must have been quite exciting. you're sort of exposing the flaws in the system. And in the other sense, wasn't it actually quite dispiriting and depressing? There was a sort of heavy mixture of that, yeah, because we knew what we were going to find. We were fairly sure that we were going to come across this... We were going to be encouraged to be less than rigorous. There was going to be ideological pressure. but when in theory, we had to do a lot of research.

People sometimes are claiming that we just may put a lot of jargon in things. No, we didn't. We read the papers, we understand the theory, we get the concepts, and we developed them in horrible ways. So that does kind of take a toll on you as well. I personally had a big burst of reading critical race epistemology. and Jose Medina and Barbara Applebaum in particular, being white, being good, white complicity.

And I sort of read both of those books in the same day, and then in the evening I was just watching a TV show in which a mixed-race student was graduating, and she hugged her white mother. She loves her mother even though she's white. And I've thought, what? Slap myself, but this has gone into my head. from having read this, I'm looking at this, I'm seeing relationships in terms of balances of power.

And it's, yes, it started to me thinking, well, how is it when there are young people in universities and perhaps they are a mixed race, whatever, are they having to sort of evaluate their family structures in terms of oppressors and the oppressed? And recently, after that, there was some big notice. I can't remember where it was, I think it was at a university, which asked students of colour not to bring their white relatives to things because it was threatening to other people. And the divisions here, it's just not a way.

I mean, even with America, which has this very recent, very awful racial divide and an oppressive system, is this the way to heal it? I don't think it is. We were talking beforehand about ridiculous examples of these kind of, you know, these kind of trends of thought or schools of thought. There was one about glaciers that you mentioned in the feminist geography. I mean, I'm not the brightest bloke in the world. How can geography be feminist?

Yeah, the feminist glaciology paper was, yeah, very well known that. That was because it was just so ridiculous. you have to look at ice through a feminist lens, and there was some part of it in which there was a phone being attached to glaciers, so there was some kind of communication going on, and it was crazy. And James read that one thoroughly, and he based his feminist astronomy paper on that, and that argued that astronomy needs to take in astrology, and not only astrology, but feminist and queer astrology.

Absolutely. could agree more. And so this is the only way to study the stars. And all the best planets have male names, right? Who wants to go to Venus? Yeah. It's all about Jupiter, Mars, you know. All the best planets are going, come on. Right, stop being prejudiced. But that one hadn't got in by the time we had to stop, but it was one of the ones we were confident about and they actually don't seem to have noticed what's happened because they're still writing to us, asking us to hurry up and revise it and get it back to the

them because in that one the comments that that we got were that this is very exciting that these sort of ideas have made some impact in psychology and biology but they've not gone into the really hard sciences yet and it would be wonderful to see feminist approaches in physics classes and things. Oh God. Yeah that that one really did affect James quite badly. He's, we call him the supercomputer because he's got this incredibly sort of logical mind. So he read the feminist glaciology paper through carefully and then he just sort of

didn't speak for three days. He was just so traumatised by the way humans are thinking, just complete irrationalism. And when you attach the phone to the glacier, did it talk back? I don't even remember what the plan of that was but I'm just, oh, we're talking about this is feminist, apparently

thinking of all the years in which we've tried to overcome this idea that women are too silly and frivolous to do science and now you're let's put a telephone in a glacier so we can talk to it no well you know the reason it may not have spoken back to is because it might have been on ee because i never get any signals that might have been it but um did you get a lot of a backlash that you know people came out and going look what you're doing you are you are you are part of the oppression and you were part of you know the the white hierarchy looking to oppress us and all the rest of it? Yes. There's been a lot of that. This has been mainly from

the extreme activists type. And then things have happened following and we've been linked into them. Only yesterday I was told it was assumed that I was celebrating the murder of 12 Jews because I'm quite clearly a fascist. So yeah. And the changes from the Trump administration is planning for, that would just sort of pretend trans people didn't exist. I apparently am responsible for that, I was told. So there has been a lot of that. It has been you are just trying to perpetuate your privilege. And this is what our paper, when the Jokes on You, was about. We anticipated this response and we wrote a paper going deep into feminist epistemoste-moly. and stacking up a load of things to argue that there just isn't any way at all,

not even in-depth academic hoaxies, we said, which was a bit of a risk, that would show that people had engaged well enough with the ideas to criticise and disagree with them. And that is what we've found. It's this idea of privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. And what that means is that any criticism of social justice approaches, is just an attempt to preserve privilege. It shouldn't be engaged with as an argument. It just takes away from the important issues.

It needs to be shut down. And that particularly horrified me. And so that was why we went into that paper to try and work out where this argument is coming from. And that one was, it got the yes, we want it within eight days, which is very, very fast. And, yeah, a revision. And it was in.

it was the fastest one and they called it an excellent contribution to feminist philosophy. Well, this tactic that you talk about it is incredibly effective, which I suspect why the social justice people use it, which is to, they've come up with a way of not having to engage with people's ideas because, frankly, a lot of their ideas don't stand up to actual logic and all the white male, you know, oppressive behavior like analyzing what they're saying. When you look at it, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. So they've come up with a great, a fantastically effective way of countering that problem, which is you go, well, you're white, therefore you don't know what you're talking about.

Or you're this, you don't know what you're talking about. Or you're a man. Therefore, you can't talk about this because you can't know, you can't have that women's knowing. I need to stretch my legs out. Sorry, you're welcome to. Stretch out as much as you can in this cramped and tiny scene. Feel free to. So what I'm saying is they've come up with a very effective way of countering

logic and reason and research and argument. And is that not why they keep coming back for this? Because it's really effective. There's a chicken and egg thing going on. I mean, the way that you've just said it sounds quite cynical, we want to get our views across, therefore we're going to reject evidence and reason. But in fact, the rejection of evidence and reason came first,

and the whole system is sort of built on that. with the sort of start of postmodernism, the idea was that knowledge is not to be found, it is to be made. And so everything is a construct through the categories that we have produced. So this idea that how we see knowledge now is a construct of an imperialist patriarchal age is truly believed. So people like Alison Wolfe, for example, in her paper, which we drew on a lot, tell me how that makes you feel. We'll argue specifically that this reason, emotion divide, is not a proper philosophical context. You cannot say in a philosophy class,

you haven't given any evidence and reason for that, so I'm not going to believe you, because that is to perpetuate a Western philosophical tradition, and we need to give emotional and experiential knowledge the same amount of credit. So that's very, very central to feminist and critical race epistemology. And yes, it does also have the effect of very simply shutting down any objection because it is unless you agree with me, then you're just not able to see things from my perspective because your privilege is blinding you.

There's nothing that can be done with that. So that was really why we wanted to write that particular essay and go really into that to say, yes, we do understand it. We do know how it works. We've engaged with social justice concepts of knowledge. We still disagree. But, yeah, the responses we've got to that is, yeah, this is just because you're white and the other two are male.

Do you think there is some truth to this argument? This is something I've been thinking about in order to try and understand where these people might be coming from is, do you think there is some truth to the idea that over a period of time we've focused a little bit too much. on facts and logic and we have ignored people's what they call lived experiences that do inform us. Like, you know, if I was to tell you, like I'm from Russia, right? If we were talking about Russia, if I was to say, well, when I was growing up on Russia, blah, blah, blah happened, that would have some value to an analysis of what's happening in Russia,

wouldn't it? And do you think that the reason that this has happened is that maybe we've been ignoring that a little bit? I'm not sure that we ever have. there has always been, there's certainly been an emphasis on science and reason, and there have been certain sceptic organisations which have been very scathing that personal anecdotes or experiences are ever relevant. And that can certainly sort of shut down a conversation because as humans, we do have experiences and often somebody's experience is more important to what we're talking about.

example of this that I give is if a mother has lost her child, there are facts about how this child has died. Perhaps the medical community are interested in these facts. What is of interest to the people who love the family and around that are how this is affecting her, how she feels? So we as humans are often much more focused on how everybody is feeling and experiencing things than we are and what is true and that is why we tend to do so badly on examining what is true and finding out what is true and tending to trust our own feelings and biases to a huge extent so I certainly don't think that there is any problem with scholarship which is looking at experiences with social justice movements which which care about how things make people feel I myself studied the Christian

narrative in late sort of medieval times and how this was used, that this is of importance to humans, but what we need not to do is claim that personal experience is the same thing as knowledge or objective truth. We have to keep knowledge and truth separate from perspective and experience, but we can value both. But the reason I bring this up, sorry, Francis, just want to finish this point, is if we were sitting not in 2018, but in, say, 1930s, Germany or before that in America during the time where people scientifically believed that black people are inferior, right? It could be reasonably argued that there has been periods in time where power determined

what truth is, including scientific truth, right? So, and that is an argument that social justice people make, which is that who has power in society determines what the science tells us to some extent, right? Do you buy into that argument at all? I certainly accept that there have been times when science has supported racist and sexist ideas. But what we have to look at is that systems of power have always supported racist, anti-religious, sort of tribal loyalties and the ideas of rigid gender roles. This has been fairly constant. It is significant that it was in the age where of science and reason and evidence that we overcame that.

Because you can't do science for very long and not fix a whole load of bad assumptions that you have about race and gender. The evidence is there that men and women have equal intelligence. There's greater variability in male, but there are equal intelligence that we have equal ability to, perform all types of tasks, although women are likely to have slightly different interests to men. So whereas before when we have, say, the Christian narrative that I looked at, where men are guided by sapientia, the mind, and women skientia, sorry, the body, the senses, then we're, yeah, that you can't really argue with that because God said it. If the hypothesis that men are naturally more intelligent than women and need to be ruled by women is made in a scientific context,

science is going to show that not to be true. And that is what we have seen happen. So when people are saying, I am a supporter of science, they're not saying I support anything that science once agreed with. We're talking about supporting a system, a self-correcting system, which has been more effective at weeding out human bias. than any other. And having, watching the left slowly descend into insanity

and especially what you're talking about. Well, it's almost beyond parody now. You can't really parody it because it's where it is. Well, they parodied it. That's what you guys did, right? That's how it worked. Yeah, but in a way,

you sort of, you didn't parody it in a way. You just gave them what they wanted in a sense. But seeing what's happened to the left, do you think that just gives, greater strength to the right and, you know, the alt-right, when they go, when people, you know, have put up legitimate criticisms of the right and go, you know, whatever it may be. And all they have to do is go, well, look at the left. Yeah. I mean, that is, that is what my primary concern is, because I'm unapologetic about wanting to get the left parties in. I want the left to be

electable again. And I do think, and we have argued over and over again, that much of the surge of the right to the right is a reaction to the behaviour on the left. If we're looking at people who voted Obama last time and then went to Trump, these are two very, very different men. Do we think that the voters once held Obama views and now hold Trumpist views? That is not very likely. Something has drawn them to the right and pushed them from the left, as much as we're looking at what has drawn them to the right. And I keep going back to America, because this is where I've focused a lot recently.

A lot of this was the fear of immigration, to minister, that Trump's most popular policy still remains the Muslim ban, whether or not we think that's the correct term for it, which is very worrying. But then the second motivation that is often cited is the fear of identity politics are wanting to punish liberals for this sort of highly politicised identity thing,

for not prioritising the working class, which was essentially seen as their job. So I think that we're seeing, yes, we're seeing a mixture of things, but it's been so close on things like Trump and on Brexit, that we really need, there's not huge amounts of improvement that need to be made to kind of shift the tide back and to have sort of against the populism. Because when I see the left talking about all these things, I'm like, why aren't you talking about the fact

that wages haven't risen in however long? Why are we not talking about the fact that the gaps between rich and poor are getting ever wider? Why are we not talking about the fact that their health service doesn't seem to be functioning properly? All these really important issues, which the left should be dealing with,

which as a person on the left I'm passionate about, instead we're talking about icebox, whether they have a fucking vagina or not. Excuse my language. Yeah. What's going on? Helen didn't expect you to say it. I can deal with the saying of vagina.

Yeah, this is the criticism made by the old left, the socialist left. We've had a lot of support from the socialist because they argue that it, that the whole sort of, of postmodern identityarian movement has just taken the left away from the working class and moved it into the universities and rendered it incomprehensible. And they say with, which they're probably right, that a lot of the reason that class issues aren't being targeted

now is because it's these ideas are coming from people who are really in the top wage bracket. We're looking at professors and academics, you know, they're not hugely, hugely paid, but they are well paid. So there is less of a concern on working class issues and on class issues unless it is blended with some other kind of identity. So having to admit that working class white men face any disadvantages in society really screws up the rest of the narrative. So that's really sort of downplayed.

And this is why I get quite frustrated with people who try, to confuse postmodernism with Marxism and what we're seeing at the moment is an evolution of postmodern ideas into identity studies in the late 80s, early 90s

a number of theorists like Kimberly Crenshaw and Judith Butler and post-colonials they took these ideas and they said, right, we need to keep the whole cultural constructivist bit but we can't just dismantle everything because we need

to look at society. So what we're going to say is that there are certain groups in certain places experiencing certain disadvantages, which the original postmodernist ideas did not allow for. And so Crenshaw, particularly the founder of intersectionality and sort of influential and critical race theory describes intersectionality as contemporary politics applied to postmodern theory. So we're looking very much at this kind of system. So if it gets conflated with Marxism, which is what postmodernism was very critical of and reacted against because for Marxists there's an objective truth, there's an overarching structure, then we're not going to be addressing the problem in the right way.

We're going to be confusing class analysis, which just almost is not present at all, with an identitarian focus on constructive knowledge, and it makes it much harder to deal with. And I think what's happening with this conflation is sometimes it's a cynical thing. It allows right-wingers to link their two enemies, the economic left and the identitarian left, and just dismiss them while pointing at communist regimes and gulags. So that's very easy and neat.

But also the post-modern ideas and the critical theory that's developed from it is just so difficult to understand. Unless you're willing to dedicate months of reading to it, it, you're not going to get your head around even the basics of it. So people are sort of latching on this idea that what we're seeing now is cultural Marxism in that oppressed and oppressor groups have now got more different identity titles. Now we can understand it. No, you really need to get your head around the denial of objective knowledge, the cultural constructs, the systems of power.

That's the key piece of it, isn't it? Yeah. It's the denial of the fact that there is a truth and the invention of the sense. idea that you have your truth and I have my truth and Francis has his truth. Which is the objective truth. But I was going to ask you, do you think there might be a simple explanation of why, as Francis says, we're having these irrelevant conversations in this country? And that's because we're importing this conversation wholesale from America.

I do tend to think that we're doing that, yeah, because we're seeing some very strange race analysis, which really reflects American race relations and not ours. I heard sort of a second-hand conversation with a Black Lives Matter activist here who is talking about how much more racism black Brits suffer than Asian, South Asian Brits. And this is because of this long legacy which includes slavery. And, okay, this works in America because America has had this long-standing, superior, whites, inferior blacks, which hasn't been resolved. successfully satisfactorily now, but they're much more positive about immigrants who have come from

Asia and for them. So there is that balance here. We have a different, I think, where we had an influx of African and Jamaican immigrants earlier. And then we had South Asian immigrants coming. And there was, there seems to be more hostility towards immigrants who could be Muslim. than there are to Africans who are often Christian. And I just don't think this analysis works. I wouldn't feel entirely confident to say, I think there's more prejudice against brown people than black people here, but it's certainly not the same analysis as in America.

So this is a direct import. And we are seeing a lot of that. I disagreed with a professor on Twitter who insists that England is the UK is actually madder than America. It isn't a lot of the scholarship. Unfortunately, the fat activism, the most influential fat activist scholars are here, but otherwise they're almost all in the US

and they're sort of being shadowed here. When you fly with Hawaiian Airlines, it's hard to tell where your flight ends and family vacation begins. From the moment you board, feel the Aloha spirit. Hear the sounds of fun. Hawaii and relax with local entertainment at your seat. Let us welcome your family to our island home. Hawaii starts here. And how much do you blame on social media? Because it just seems to me that

social media exacerbates a whole problem and what it does, and especially the internet, whereas before you had these couple of whack jobs who thought whatever, you know, these ridiculous theories, and they'd be on their own. But on the internet, you can find about a thousand whack jobs, you know, all of a sudden you've got a community, whether they be, you know, fat activists, in cells, or whatever else, you know. And do you think social media's exacerbated it? I think exacerbate is the word.

Some people have said it's produced it, and I don't think it's done that, but it has, it's made us more able to access all of the madness and to react to it, because we are such reactive creatures at the moment, if we are seeing the insaneist examples of the left who wouldn't have got on the news or written newspaper articles, then we're having a reaction from the reasonable right.

And if we see the most insane on the right, there's a reaction from the reasonable left. And so I don't think it's a coincidence that the polarisation of parties, which is particularly notable in America, how willing people are to talk and be friends with people from the other side, has just really sort of increased over about the same period that social media has taken off.

Perfect. Well, listen, our time is almost up. Two questions. We'll go to our final questions in the final question in the second, but we've had quite a pessimistic and negative conversation here. That's what I've enjoyed it. Yeah. It goes along with your depressive personality. Yeah, mate. But is there a way that we can find for what we've been talking about throughout, which is the reasonable people on both sides to come together and actually start to produce more harmony as opposed to more discord? I certainly hope so.

I am a little bit optimistic already. I do think that we are seeing a pushback now and from reasonable people. Over the last few weeks, I've seen a lot of leftist academics distance themselves from the grievance studies approach. And we're seeing more willingness to regard it as ridiculous.

And we're seeing, obviously, there's also the problems on the far right, and we're addressing those, I think, quite well. So I am optimistic that people are going to get sick of extreme irrational views, and they're just going to say enough. But I think it's going to probably get a bit worse before it gets better. and we can hopefully, yeah, sort of speed up this process by trying to talk across the divides ourselves and by looking, talking in terms of being reasonable, of being evidenced of being consistently ethical, rather than in terms of those lefties and those righties.

Well, that's what we try and do on the show, other than the consistently ethical. We struggle with that. But listen, the question we always like to ask at the end is what is the one thing that you think we're not talking about that we absolutely should be talking about? I don't think we're talking about how we know things are true. And I don't think we're doing that enough. Very few people consider their epistemology now. They're just a kind of acceptance of what is in the air.

So we really need to start thinking again about how do I know this is true? What is the process there? And we need to be consistently ethical. We need to focus on the individual and our shared humanity. Identity categories matter, certainly. That is an aspect of people. But we cannot lose individuality or common humanity for that. Perfect.

Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Helen. If people want to follow you here on Twitter at H. Pluck Rose. And very, very active there. Oh, yes. And very active, and I was following with interest what you get involved in. Even last night, I think before you were coming here, you were involved in this massive argument and eventually went, okay, I've got to go and speak to the trigonometry tomorrow, so I'm going there.

So follow Helen, follow Helen H. Pluckrose. And Aeromagin is at? Yeah, at aereomagizon.com. Perfect. Well, check that out, guys. Do you want to do the rest of it? Yeah, we'll wrap up. Just to say, thank you very much for watching.

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