Helen Pluckrose - Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know Whats Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

Pitchstone Publishing

Durham, North Carolina

www.pitchstonebooks.com

Copyright 2022 by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

This book is based on Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identityand Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, first published by Pitchstone Publishing in 2020, and was adapted by Rebecca Christiansen.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Christiansen, Rebecca, author. | Pluckrose, Helen, author. | Lindsay, James, author. | Pluckrose, Helen. Cynical theories.

Title: Social (in)justice : why many popular answers to important questions of race, gender, and identity are wrong-and how to know whats right : a reader-friendly remix of Cynical theories / Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay ; adapted by Rebecca Christiansen.

Description: Durham, North Carolina : Pitchstone Publishing, [2021] | This book is based on Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identityand Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, first published by Pitchstone Publishing in 2020Verso. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: Argues that many popular approaches to questions of social justice are illiberal and offers an alternative vision for social justice based on liberal principles, adapted from the Wall Street Journal bestseller Cynical Theories Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021028174 (print) | LCCN 2021028175 (ebook) | ISBN 9781634312233 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781634312240 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Social justicePhilosophy. | Postmodernism. | Philosophy, Modern20th century.

Classification: LCC HM671 .C487 2021 (print) | LCC HM671 (ebook) | DDC 303.3/7201dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028174

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021028175

For Generation Z who is our best hope.

Depending on your age and education, youve likely never come across a book quite like this before. At first glance, the subject may seem a bit unusual and unfamiliar, but our approach is really not that much different from other books you may have read in school or for pleasure. In many ways this book is like an introductory book on, say, world history, but rather than focusing on key people, events, innovations, and dates, and how they all acted together to affect and define the course of history, were focusing on the evolution of a particular set of ideas, and how these ideas are affecting and defining the history were living through today. As you will learn, how and whether these new ideas will define our future is largely up to the principles and positions we take now. The proliferation of this particular set of ideas presents a challenge toand often directly conflicts withanother set of extremely important ideas collectively referred to as liberalism. You may be surprised to learn that this word means something a little different than the way we usually hear it used in political discussions today. Indeed, liberalism is the bedrock on which modern societies in the West have been built and that continues to allow for so much human progress.

The exact story of how and why liberalism came to beat out many other ideas to become the foundational political philosophy in the West is beyond the scope of this book, but in the simplest terms, over the past two hundred years or so, most Western countries gradually came to realize that liberalism is the best political philosophy on which to build a modern civilization. There are many different political systems in Western countries, from the republics of the United States and France to the constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom and Canada, but theyre all underpinned by the same liberal values.

Some of those liberal values are:

Democracy

Limited government

Separation of church and state

Universal human rights

Equality for women, racial minorities, and LGBT people

Freedom of expression

Respect for the value of differing opinions and honest debate

Today, these values might seem like basic common sense. But they should not be seen as a given, or be taken for granted. They didnt begin to take hold until the 1700s, during the period known as the Enlightenment, and its taken centuries of struggle against superstition, theocracy, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, and fascism to realize them to the extent we have. This extent is considerable but not perfect. The aim for a golden age of science, reason, and individual rights based on beliefs in a shared objective reality and shared universal humanity is the ongoing project of the Enlightenment and liberalism.

In the 1960s, a new idea emerged in academia that would question everything, including the very basis of liberal societies. This idea is known as postmodernism, a philosophical, artistic, and literary movement that is extremely skepticalso skeptical that it doesnt believe in objective truth or knowledge. Sounds crazy, but its true. Postmodernism believes everything is corrupted by politics and political power, even knowledge itself.

Postmodern ideas have formed a broad literature of its own called Theorythink of Theory like postmodernisms body of religious texts. Since the 1960s, Theory has spread through governments, corporations, and primary, secondary, and postsecondary education. In more recent years, Theory has spawned a movement of activists who weaponize post-modernism in pursuit of social justice. In fact, you have almost certainly encountered a lot of Theory over the past few years, even if it wasnt ever directly presented as such.

The term social justice has had a lot of different meanings. In 1971, the liberal progressive philosopher John Rawls developed a philosophical theory on how a socially just society might be organized. He thought a socially just society would be one where anyone would be equally happy to be born into any social milieu or identity group, whether at the top or bottom of the society, because even those at the bottom would be thriving and injustices like discrimination would be exceptionally rare or entirely absent.

The most visible and popular movement taking up the charge of social justice today uses postmodern Theory to pursue social justice. It calls its ideologya system of opinions and beliefs that aim both to explain and change societySocial Justice, the Social Justice Movement, or, sometimes more specifically, Critical Social Justice. Many people, including its critics, call it being Woke (due to its belief that it is awake to systemic injustice). This is the Theory you are no doubt regularly encounteringat school, at work, online, or simply out and about with friendsand you may even be a bit baffled by it all. For the sake of clarityand because it also derives from another twentieth-century tradition called Critical Theorywell refer to this particular Theory-based movement as Critical Social Justice, and well refer to the broader and more general idea that everyone deserves equal rights and opportunities as social justice.