Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

The main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of r

Postmodernism is difficult to define, perhaps by design. It represents a set of ideas and modes of thought that came together in response to specific historical conditions, including the cultural impact of the World Wars and how these ended, widespread disillusionment with Marxism, the waning credibility of religious worldviews in post-industrial s

Principled Opposition: Example 2 We affirm that sexism remains a problem in society and needs to be addressed. We deny that Theoretical approaches to gender issues, including queer Theory and intersectional feminism, which work on blank slatist theories of sex and gender, are useful to address it as we believe it is necessary to acknowledge biologi

The better methods—reason and evidence—are cultural artifacts too, but they are undeniably effective at winnowing out statements that accurately describe and predict what is occurring out there, both physically and socially. We need to reject the postmodern knowledge principle by seeing it for what it is—a language game—and reinstate the general un

In liberal societies, we already have the answer to the problem of how to deal with reified philosophical systems that threaten to impose themselves on society: this answer is called secularism. Secularism is best known as a legal principle: the “separation of church and state.” But this principle is based on a more profound philosophical idea—that

Liberalism is perhaps best understood as a desire to gradually make society fairer, freer, and less cruel, one practical goal after another. This is because liberalism is a system of conflict resolution, not a solution to human conflicts. In being a system that works through the inputs of its participants, it offers up no one in particular in whom

The only salvageable kernel of cultural relativism is something nobody denies: some cultures do some things differently and, in many cases, the differences don’t matter much and are interesting to learn about and share.

Principled Opposition: Example 1 We affirm that racism remains a problem in society and needs to be addressed. We deny that critical race Theory and intersectionality provide the most useful tools to do so, since we believe that racial issues are best solved through the most rigorous analyses possible. We contend that racism is defined as prejudice

the willingness of liberal systems to accept self-criticism is, in fact, the feature of liberalism that critical methods like postmodern Theory exploit to undermine it. When done cynically, as with Theory, it can destroy people’s trust in the liberal system and obscure from them that it is this system that has made modernity possible.