Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
Historically, censorship has not worked out well for atheists, or for religious, racial, or sexual minorities—and there’s no reason to believe that Theory contains a magic ingredient that might make censorship work differently.
While no one should be made to feel ashamed of their sexuality, race, religion, gender, or ability status, many disabled people probably disagree with the view that having a disability should be celebrated—and this is unlikely to help them find an effective treatment or remedy, if that’s what they want. And, despite what disability studies claims,
... See moreOthers might say that progress is a myth because Nazism, the Holocaust, and genocidal communism all occurred less than a century ago—and after the Enlightenment. This would be reasonable if the argument were that everything that came after the Enlightenment was liberal. In fact, these phenomena show what happens when totalitarianism is allowed to d
... See morePrincipled 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
... See moreWhat it means to decolonize a thing that is not literally colonized varies considerably. It can refer simply to including scholars of all nationalities and races: this is the primary focus of the United Kingdom’s National Union of Students (NUS) campaigns, “Why is My Curriculum White?” (2015) and #LiberateMyDegree (2016).23 Such campaigns focus on
... See moreis therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarrat
... See moreWalter Truett Anderson, writing in 1996, describes the four pillars of postmodernism: 1.The social construction of the concept of the self: Identity is constructed by many cultural forces and is not given to a person by tradition; 2.Relativism of moral and ethical discourse: Morality is not found but made. That is, morality is not based on cultural
... See moreBecause they focused on self-perpetuating systems of power, few of the original postmodern Theorists advocated any specific political actions, preferring instead to engage in playful disruption or nihilistic despair. Indeed, meaningful change was largely regarded as impossible under the original postmodernism, due to the inherent meaninglessness of
... See moreThe postmodern political principle: A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.