1. Cognitive Discourse Analysis: An introduction - Thora Tenbrink
2. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender And Identity- And Why This Harms Everybody – Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
351 pp.
An interesting and thought-provoking read. I was very careful in choosing this book. It is not a jeremiad by some right-leaning bloviators discoursing on loony lefties and political correctness gone mad. Nor is it a Gish gallop through a cherry-picked assortment of social media posts, chat room diatribes and self-important ‘influencers’. Rather, the authors take a tour of the scholarship, the published writings of academics who have gone down the post-modernist path over the last 50 years and charted the gradual transformation from a rarified, ivory tower intellectual exercise to a reified ideology that holds itself in high esteem and admits of no debate over its central truths, while at the same time holding that there are no truths only ‘narratives’ of exploitation and victimhood. The authors support their writing with a very extensive section of notes and sources, as good scholarship should.
Of interest to the membership here is the postmodernist rejection of the scientific method as in any way reliable in making statements about the nature of reality.
Here is a quote from page 34.
“The main takeaway from this is that postmodern skepticism is not garden-variety skepticism, which might also be called “reasonable doubt.” The kind of skepticism employed in the sciences and other rigorous means of producing knowledge asks, “How can I be sure this proposition is true?” and will only tentatively accept as a provisional truth that which survives repeated attempts to disprove it. [ …] The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as “radical skepticism.” It says “All knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way.” […] The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn’t true. […] In postmodern thinking, that which is known is known only within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power.”
The authors detail how the socio-cultural theorizing of the postmodernists has leaked over into STEM, with, for example, the alarming quote from a Purdue University Press book on engineering which stated “getting beyond views of truth as objective and absolute is the most fundamental change we need to make in engineering education.” (p.219).
Remind me not to fly in a plane engineered by anyone holding this view.
Another theme that the authors examine is the surprising omission of economic class from the list of identities that constitute the disempowered and marginalized.
“The shift away from class and towards gender, identity, race and sexuality troubles traditional economic leftists, who fear that the left is being taken away from the working class and hijacked by the bourgeoisie within the academy. More worrying still, it could drive working class voters into the arms of the populist right. If the group it has traditionally supported – the working class- believe that the political left has abandoned them, the left may lose many of the voters it requires to attain political power.” (p.153)
Or as a friend expressed it- telling poor white people who lead difficult lives that they are lavishly enjoying unearned privilege is hardly a vote winning strategy.
An interesting book with a lot of thought-provoking ideas. The attachment of the authors to secular liberal humanism, rational skepticism and the scientific method is something I am in alignment with and this book helped me to clarify some of my thinking on these issues.
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