This is long, and I don’t usually watch long videos. Nor have I completely finished watching this one – not yet. But I’ve watched (or listened to; you can do the latter while doing some other task that doesn’t require full attention) much of it and I’m highly impressed. “Wokal Distance” manages to sum up the philosophical underpinnings of what’s going on today in a manner that’s fluent, clear, and understandable.
At around minute 42:30, he talks about methods of fighting it. But the whole thing is worth listening to:
And this is interesting as well [emphasis mine]:
Once reified, postmodern abstractions about the world are treated as though they are real things, and accorded the status of empirical truth. Contemporary social justice activism thus sees theory as reality, as though it were gravity or cell division or the atomic structure of uranium.
The correspondence theory of truth holds that objective truth exists and we can learn something about it through evidence and reason. That is, things are knowable and we gain reliable information about them when our beliefs align with reality. It’s termed “the correspondence theory of truth” because a statement is considered true when it corresponds with reality and false when it doesn’t. Reality, of course, is the thing that does not change regardless of what you believe.
While advanced civilisations going back to classical antiquity employed this reasoning in selected areas (Ancient Rome to civil engineering and law, for example, or Medieval China to public administration), it’s only since the Enlightenment that it’s been applied consistently to nearly everything, at least in developed countries. It forms the foundation of modern scientific and administrative progress and accounts in large part for the safety and material comfort we now enjoy.
Reified “Theory” is no more and no less than a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth. There are no universal truths and no objective reality, only narratives expressed in discourses and language that reflect one group’s power over another. Science has no claim on objectivity, because science itself is a cultural construct, created out of power differentials, and ordered by straight white males. There are no arguments, merely identity showdowns; the most oppressed always wins.
And, because language makes the world, attempts by scholars in other disciplines and from across the political spectrum to do what I did and falsify Theory’s empirical claims are met not with reasoned debate but an accusation that those individuals are harming the oppressed or silencing the marginalised, because all someone higher up the hierarchical food chain is supposed to do when confronted by someone lower down is listen. That’s the point of telling people to “check their privilege” before they open their mouths.
Pluckrose and Lindsay make a compelling argument that this is a religion, and not in the glib, observational sense that its adherents are taking knees, engaging in call-and-response, or washing each other’s feet. Rather, contemporary social justice asks us to believe things that aren’t proven in the same way that “Muhammad ascended to heaven from the battlements of Jerusalem on a winged horse” or “Christ rose from the dead on the third day” aren’t proven.
We live in two competing worlds. We’re not just watching two different movies (a phrase you often hear). We actually disagree about what “watching” and “two” and “different” and “movies” are.
Another way to look at it is that it’s a war between content and process. The post-modernists are about process, with content being whatever they say it is. And the process has to do with power as they see and define it, who has it and who doesn’t, and who ought to have it. They think they should have it, and then they will determine the content, which does not exist as an independent truth.
[ADDENDUM: A relevant announcement by Trump.]