James Lindsay | Social Justice Explained: The Foundations Of Wokeness | Modern Wisdom Podcast 124

James Lindsay is an author & researcher. I've been exposed the words Social Justice Warrior, Wokeness and Post Modernism a lot over the last year, but I don't really have a strong grasp on their origins or where they came from. Thankfully James is the perfect man to explain them to us as he's spent much of his recent career diving head first into the academic literature which underpins these movements. Enjoy. #socialjusticewarrior #woke #postmodernism Extra Stuff: Follow James on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames Buy James' Book - https://amzn.to/2DKeiz5 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Somebody will get upset that I've said this, but truly, the whole thing is steeped in psychoanalyzing people you disagree with and paranoia. And it's all about systems of power and the way that those influence everything so that nothing can be authentic. And it's all kind of whining and complaining and very pessimistic, very cynical. It has that characteristic where you probably run into this, where you know it's wrong and it's not hard to see how it's wrong. It's easy to see how it's persuasive, though, and it's going to take you a lot of work to explain why it's wrong in a satisfactory way. And it's really a negative place to be.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  I don't think it's fun to do this at all.

• 0:52Chris Williamson?

  Are you the guy that's had to walk over hot coals to try and retrieve something of value from the other side a little bit? Sort of it's you that's suffering this discomfort?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  That is a good way to put it, yeah. In a sense, I feel like that's kind of what I'm doing now is I really want to understand the mindset and understand it in a way that's faithful to what it actually is, that portrays it accurately, but also in a way that I can communicate that back to other people in plain language so that they can see it for what it is without having to go read tons of it. And it is like walking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth across the coals, knowing every single time that it's gonna be hot again. It's terrible.

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  I get it. So, I mean, the listeners, you will have joined us. There's usually an intro, but me and James had too much to talk about. So, welcome back. I'm joined by James Lindsay and we are talking about an awful lot of different interesting things today, principally, critical theory?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  That's principally what I've been thinking about, yeah.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  What is, what is critical theory? I don't know what critical theory is.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Critical theory is a way to view the world. The long and short of it is that it's a way to view the world that sees the world in terms of so then there are multiple critical theories. There are many critical theories.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  At its very bottom, it's a way to view the world where everything relevant in terms of, at least of social relations has to do with power dynamics that are in society between some group with power and other groups who don't have as much power. And the object of critical theory is to say that the groups that have power carry certain assumptions and biases and the likes. And they bake that into the systems that they create without realizing that they're doing it. So the critical theorist's job is to expose those biases and uncover those assumptions so that they can be critiqued and reexamined and

• 3:05Speaker 00

  usually discarded, dismantled, subverted, or otherwise overthrown. So you would have this, in the Marxist sense, the power group would either be the capitalists or the bourgeoisie, which would be the property holding class. And they, you know, in a kind of a very direct sense, control the working class and kind of control how they're supposed to think and set the fashion and set the tone of what high society is supposed to look like or how the businesses are supposed to be operated. And they exploit the working class, which would be the oppressed group.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Critical theory grew out of that mindset in what the Institute for Social Research that was set up in Frankfurt, Germany in the twenties, that's now called the Frankfurt School. And they actually, following off of the Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, realized that Marx predicted there would be this revolution, the proletariat would rise up and overthrow the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, and this didn't happen, and they wanted to know why. So Antonio Gramsci came up with this idea that's called cultural hegemony, and that's the idea that the powerful classes of society set the way that everybody's supposed

• 4:24Speaker 00

  to think, and everybody else buys into that, so they won't go against it. And then the Frankfurt School kind of ran with this idea and started saying that things like liberalism and Western civilization themselves bake in the assumptions of their creators and make it so that the people who have power, which would mostly be white, Western men, who are straight and so on, have both explicitly and inadvertently cooked up systems of power so that they benefit themselves and exclude those that they don't want to have the power,

• 5:05Speaker 00

  because the power is a zero-sum object in this worldview. So, um, critical theory is, in that sense, a way of looking at the world that sees the world that way, and that essentially tries to pick at whatever the system is, so as to tear apart the hidden assumptions and biases. That's the most charitable way to put it. That's what they say that they're doing, is tearing apart the hidden assumptions and biases to make the system more fair, or as they phrased it in the Frankfurt School, to make it into an ideal democracy, where nobody is actually, uh, has their voice or their opportunity or whatever shortchanged. So, that's a very long definition.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  But at face value, that sounds, critical theory sounds pretty good. Uh, it, it's definitely something that, when used appropriately, a critical method at least, can be very, very useful. And in fact, um, the Enlightenment tradition, which has brought us, you know, pretty much all of modernity, like the ability to Skype and have good microphones and things, um, the Enlightenment tradition...

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Could very easily be seen as an appropriate use of critical methods. It started to question the authority of, say, the church. And it started to say, let's defer to an external authority. Essentially, the way nature works to answer our questions about the world. And let's try to appeal to reason and logic and evidence as much as we can in making our decisions. And so it started to create this very different way to see the world that presented a very useful skepticism against the previous kind of mythological and

• 6:54Speaker 00

  episcopit type and monarchical type mindsets where you had these literally powerful individuals who then decided, you know, either the interpretation of scripture or the organization of society or whatever, and whatever their fancy was, was how it went. You know, the law was what the king said the law was, or, you know, the scripture is that the pope interprets it to say, and so on. So, yes, the issue is that a critical theory, so this philosopher Max Horkheimer in the Frankfurt School laid out the difference between what's technically called a critical theory

• 7:34Speaker 00

  and what he called a traditional theory, both of which exist within a broader kind of critical thinking tradition that we would think of. And the point of a traditional theory is to understand a thing. It's just to understand it. The point of a critical theory is to understand how it goes wrong. And in particular, how it goes wrong according to some normative vision, which means a moral structure. And how, to qualify as a critical theory, it must be explanatory about how it is particularly an unjust

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Thing, so it's looking for injustices in the system and nothing else. No attempt to understand how the thing works necessarily. Or why those injustices happen to be what they are, or something like this. And it must fit the vision of the social engineers who are, have decided what justice looks like. When they look for these injustices. And it must be applicable by activists. And so it is, in a sense, a way of putting the cart ahead of the horse. Where, you know, our, our best knowledge should lead our decision making. Rather than what we want to be true, leading our approach to figuring out knowledge.

• 8:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  So, yes, the best way that I can think of it is to actually, because I don't want to say that critical theory is useless. Because it's not. Um, it's odd that it gets applied to so much, given that it's mostly a literary thing, but, um. I try to say that it's like a really strong industrial solvent. Um, it has applications, it has uses, but man, you're not going to spread it everywhere.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  You're not going to give it to kids. You're not going to just, you know, dump it on everything you see. Um, it's one of those things that certainly has beneficial and appropriate uses. Uh, we should be looking for those biases and those unconsidered assumptions. But we should also do so responsibly, not with an effort only to pick at how something goes wrong. You must also understand why the system, your situation is the way that it is.

• 9:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, that, that to me is one of the most enjoyable parts of life. For me, as someone who enjoys sense making, you know, I, I do this podcast and I try and, I try and uncover why things are the way they are. The, the tagline to modern wisdom is, uh, understand yourself and the world around you. Like, you know, I like doing it, it's cool. There's nothing, there's no better satisfaction for me than joining together two different points with something and you being like, fuck. That's why, that's why that's that thing. And that's inherently enjoyable, but yeah, when it's got this.

• 10:35Chris Williamson?

  It's the same central core, but it's just facing in the complete different direction. And this direction, this direction is, like you say, is trying to work out who has the power. Why, why is that the case? So how do we, because this is something that you are, I think probably-

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Let me give you, let me give you an example real quick before we go into that. So it's really clear what the difference between a critical mindset and another, you know, I'm just even going to say normal mindset is, although that would be torn apart by critical theory. So imagine, like, I just want to use an example of, say, like, an airplane, and the seats on an airplane, everybody has a bad time with the seats on airplanes, except for very small women, I think. So the seats on airplanes tend to be narrow, they tend to be small, your knees are getting banged up against the person in front of you, so on and so forth. Nobody's really happy about this. Now, a traditional theory would try, you know, you have the people who designed the aircraft, and they, they had to make decisions as to how they're going to arrange the seats. Obviously,

• 11:34Speaker 00

  they want to put as many seats in the plane as they can, given the size of the aircraft and its weight specifications and so on, because that optimizes for the number of people who can travel and the amount of money that they can make with the plane. So those considerations would all fall under traditional theory. Critical theory would say, well, these seats are really uncomfortable. And so if we were to take a lens, for example, that looks from what's now called FAT studies, it would say, and obviously, you know, everybody knows of the issue of really overweight people on airplanes, because the seats are what they are, and it makes the next person over uncomfortable, and sometimes they need two seats, and, you know, all the different things. And so the critical perspective there would say, well, the plane was designed by people

• 12:18Speaker 00

  who are generally thin or of average size, not overweight. And so they have a blind spot to what it's like to be an overweight person. And that is them exercising a power called thin normativity that sees thinness as normal and overweightness as abnormal. And therefore, there is a power relation here between average size or thin people- And they are exerting it on the oppressed overweight people who are forced to be uncomfortable on aircraft because they, the people designing the airplane don't care that, and ultimately

• 13:01Speaker 00

  that's what it is, that they don't care, or they want fat people not to exist, or they want fat people to lose weight, or whatever it happens to be. So that's the difference between the way a critical mindset, the critical mindset is merely going to look at the size of the chairs and start complaining. The traditional mindset, or what Horkheimer called a traditional theory, would say, why were the plane seats designed like this in the first place? And what were the reasons that went into that? Why was this considered to be the best possible decision over maybe a few iterations of, well, they used to be more narrow, or they used to be wider, and we figured out we could get more people? And there's the one that tries to understand why the seats are the way they are. And then there's the one that says, this sucks, and I want to complain about it. So

• 13:45Speaker 00

  they're informed or not, whether there's any attention given to the real reasons that things are the way they are. So that's kind of the difference between a critical mindset versus a more comprehensive way to look at things. It's a solvent. It tears apart what's there without necessarily even knowing what it is.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I understand. So that's, that's actually, I wanted to ask the question, where did social justice come from? And can you give us the academic underpinnings of it, which it sounds like you're really delving into? And I think as well, for a lot of the listeners, I've had Douglas Murray on, Andrew Doyle's been on, Konstantin Kissin's coming on soon, and blah, blah, blah.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  So you've got all of these people who are talking about the manifestations of that. But what are we talking about here? And what's my, my particular selfish love of things? Why is this the way it is? So I want to get into that. But the, what you've come across there to me, I think, is quite archetypal in terms of what appears to be happening overall with social justice at the moment. And this is that. There is a normal distribution of something, anything, whether it be gender expression, whether it be performance at school based on race, or particular job choices based on, in relation to gender, or whatever it might be. There is a particular normal distribution.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  And it seems to me that one of the hallmarks of social justice at the moment, in its malignant form, because, you know, social justice in its purest form, I don't know, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, before this term sort of began to get hijacked, is actually a really, a really, really good thing. But yeah, in its current form, it appears to be, there are some people who have an extreme experience of the world. We need to accommodate them ahead of the bulk of people that fall within the normal distribution. Am I, am I a million miles away there? Or is that, is that, is that what's happening a lot?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  You're pretty close to the bullseye. There's a number of interesting things that can be said about that if you want. But you are very close to the inaccurate, inaccurate description of what's going on. One of the things that can be said about that is that what you are, so another kind of useful example here is, is what's known as the social model of disability. So within disability studies, which has also become one of these kind of social justice bastions to the dismay of lots of disabled people who reach out to me all the time and say it's wrecking their lives. There's this model that came about, I think in the 80s, it may have been a little earlier, and it was okay at the beginning. Disability studies is really an interesting

• 16:28Speaker 00

  case, because it's one where it's really easy to see the point being made that's good, and then how it falls off the rails. The social model of disability basically said, okay, so some people are disabled, and it's important not just to kind of say suck it up buttercup and figure it out, but rather, society should make reasonable accommodations for disabled people. So there should be, you know, the, the thing on the sidewalk, the ridged area for the blind people, and the traffic signal should make noise, and

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  Ramps outside of doors.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Ramps and, and elevators and things, yes, to the degree that bathrooms, and so on. And so the social model of disability is exactly what you were just saying. There are these people who fall outside of the normal range of human experience.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  And there is some expectation that a society that's well off enough is doing the right thing by making them have more accessibility to that society. So there's the so it shouldn't all be on the disabled person to deal with the world. If the society is, I mean, they usually don't say it so explicitly, but the reality is if the society is well off enough to be able to afford it, there is a uh there is a reason to believe that we have a social obligation to uh make things more accessible. Yes, to pay for those ramps, to pay for that, to pay taxes, to pay for the thing on the sidewalk and at the light, uh the so that the the crossing light makes noises and things like that.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  So this seems perfectly reasonable because it is perfectly reasonable. And then when it starts becoming, as you were distinguishing between this, so that's that is social justice. That is making, in the liberal sense, society more just for people on the outside into the spectrum at very some, but very little cost to people in the middle. But then where it starts to become the malignant form is when you start getting into ideas like, and these are, these are valid, these are things that are actually happening, that deafness, for example, is an identity. So you are a deaf person, not a person who happens to be deaf. And so when there's medical advances in, say, hearing aid technology that can give deaf people the ability to hear, that can be reinterpreted as a uh medicalization of

• 18:42Speaker 00

  deafness or a desire for deafness not to exist, which then can be further interpreted into a will to genocide against deaf people. So the wish that that no one would be deaf because being deaf is a disability is interpreted, when you go too far down this rabbit hole, as wishing there were no deaf people in the other meaning of the term, as in like, they were all, their deafness was all, it's so hard to say, but they literally equate it to a genocide.

• 19:13Chris Williamson?

  But is this not the same, would this not be the same as, uh, when was the, when did the polio jab come out? It was about a hundred years ago, is that right?

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it would be the same as a hundred years ago, the polio jab being released. And everyone's saying, right, so you're saying that all of these people that have got polio that are like walking around on crutches, you're saying, you're saying that they shouldn't exist. And you're like, whoa, I mean, by most people's measures of welfare, they would be having a fuller human experience if they weren't like that.

• 19:44Chris Williamson?

  And given the choice between the two, the majority of people, if they were laid out in front of them, would also choose sort of full, normal, human function. Where is the problem here? But as you say, it's an attack on, it's an attack on the identity, or at least that's what it's.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  So that's the thing. It's, it becomes an attack on the identity, which then it gets further translated into an attack on the people who carry that identity. And you can start to see how this isn't really a good way to think about things.

• 20:17Chris Williamson?

  And then, so people start to, we will get up to the listeners, we will get on to the academic underpinnings of social justice in a second, I promise. This is cool and interesting. You can increasingly slice this, I am out on the fringes thing, right? Is that what's happening whereby people are making something which isn't perhaps that much of a disadvantage, more of a exaggerating that? So.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so.

• 20:49Chris Williamson?

  For instance, Douglas, I don't know whether you ever heard the interview that I did with him, but I asked him, what chapters would you have put in the book in The Madness of Crowds that you didn't? And he said that one of them was mental health, because he said that as far as he was concerned, there are real people who have real problems with mental health, but waving your hand in the air and saying, I have mental health problems, like it's some sort of, some calling card, some sort of marker of distinguishment, or whatever it might be, some sort of sympathy card. And the other one was green. So those were the two, those were the two that he was, he was considering adding in. But yeah, I'm wondering how that, you have some people who have, who genuinely are out on that, the

• 21:32Chris Williamson?

  tail ends of that distribution of normalness, and who require social justice to allow them to be a part of society, because we have to accommodate for them, because that's the good thing to do within a good society. But then there are people who want accommodations made for them, because, why? Because they want some attention?

• 21:55Speaker 00

  It's really difficult to say why, but somehow along the way, this all became very identity focused. They call it an identity first mindset. In other words, it adopted identity politics. This maybe is attributable to the black feminists and that black feminism is a type of feminism. I'm not saying feminists who happen to be black.

• 22:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  As it turns out, black feminism is kind of grew out of like the combination of the black power movement and feminism, I think. And it has that ethos at any rate. And so they very much so, Kimberle Crenshaw and Bell Hooks in the 1980s, two very famous names among people who are paying attention to any of this now. They both were very adamant that black identity should be first. It should be, I am a black person, or I am a black woman, rather than I am a person who happens to be black. So and Kimberle Crenshaw at least was explicit about it. The purpose is so we can do identity politics.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean, so we can do, so we can do identity politics? What's that mean?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  So the goal was to put identity first, so that you can use that matter of identity as a lever to achieve political ends. And it was explicitly written in, for example, Crenshaw's Mapping the Margins, that identity politics was the goal. So there was this switch sometime in the 80s and 90s to the mainstream even academic thought becoming very identity politics oriented. And so that started causing this identity centric kind of thinking that you're kind of hinting at or asking about. One other thing to say about the normal distribution, by the way, it's worth mentioning, but we won't go down the rabbit hole, is that

• 23:45Speaker 00

  There's a trick being played here that everybody should be aware of, which is that the word "normal" means two things at once. There's "normal" in the sense of, you know, near the middle of the normal distribution. And then, "common", "everyday", the regular, the expected thing, you know, typical, yeah. And then there's, there's "normal" in the sense of "normative", which means that it has some moral valence, it's the good thing. And so what they're doing is they're mixing those two meanings at the same time. So they are actually waging a war against the "normal", because they feel like they're, when you expect, if lots of people are in, are, are, are "normal", and then you have some abnormal people,

• 24:29Speaker 00

  the belief is that there's an automatic, you can't have a neutral understanding of "normal" and "abnormal", there's always "normal", "good", "abnormal", "bad". And so they're mixing the moral with the, just descriptive understandings of those two terms, and they play on that double meaning very intentionally, uh, and more or less constantly. So, um, when you talked about the normal distribution, and then there's the people on the ends who would be abnormal, um, that's certainly what's going on. And if you want to know the, we can segue toward the academic roots there by saying that that actually comes from, um, the understanding of, uh, power, knowledge, and language that would have come from the French postmodernists, specifically Michel Foucault,

• 25:13Speaker 00

  and, uh, who was very concerned with the exclusion of the abnormal, and the way that power does that. And then Jacques Derrida, who was very concerned with how language such as, words in language appear in pairs that give, give hierarchical pairs, in fact, that give the words a meaning. "Normal" only means something because there's abnormal to compare it to. And Derrida's, one of Derrida's hypotheses is that one of those words has a positive valence and one of those words has a negative valence. And then again, the confusion between descriptive and, uh, moral understanding of those terms.

• 25:49Chris Williamson?

  It is murky, murky waters. Am I right in thinking that your actual, you've, have you got PhD in maths? Is that right?

• 25:57Speaker 00

  That's right, that is correct.

• 25:59Chris Williamson?

  PhD in mathematics and you're now swimming in these waters.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's actually really interesting. Most of the people that I'm aware of that are being the other than Helen, who's Helen Pluckrose, who's probably the most astute mind on all of this is in terms of total like wide view and clarity. Most of the people working in this that are critical of it are coming out of things like mathematics and science. So that have decided to start learning. I don't know. I think that, I mean, you see certainly mathematicians, well, maybe less mathematicians, but certainly scientists

• 26:44Speaker 00

  are, if they're not on board with it, are likely to be very prone to wanting to, to, I mean, it's, it's very irritating to them to see these abuses of logic and empiricism and epistemology.

• 26:58Chris Williamson?

  I was going to say, yeah, is it, is it partly because you guys are one of the bastions of sort of true academia? There's, you know, a lot of the listeners will be familiar with how many times someone has said on this podcast, if the subject has the word science in it, it's not a true science, or if it's got studies in it, it tends to not be a true science because nothing, physics doesn't have the word science in it. Chemistry doesn't have the word, it's only a lot of slightly more spurious topics and subject areas which need to reaffirm their scientificness by putting science in the title. And I wonder whether

• 27:37Speaker 00

  That's probably right.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether this is the old guard dusting off their sort of padded, their elbow padded jackets and putting the chalkboards down to like come out and have a crack at sort of protecting true academia.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I actually do think, the more I think about it, the more I am convinced. So that I maybe I'm deluding myself or I'm getting more right, I don't know. But the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that most of what is happening regarding all this very academic side of the culture war, the social justice and the scholarship and all of this postmodern stuff and all ultimately comes down to a gigantic culture war between the sciences and the humanities. It's been raging since like the 30s.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  I really kind of think that's what's going on.

• 28:29Chris Williamson?

  It's quite territorial.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  It's a turf war, yeah. So I think what happened was it became undeniable that the sciences were getting much better answers about the world than, the harder the sciences got, the more rigorous they got, the better the answers they were getting. Instead of this, you know, kind of armchair philosophy sort of thing you used to be able to do and you were a natural philosopher and so on and so forth. You could just kind of, like, if you look at the advancement even in like psychology from Freud, which is all kind of unfalsifiable and he's just sitting back thinking about stuff and writing it down to, you know, what we expect now, which is very deeply, when it's done well, very deeply rigorous and experimental and experimental controls and statistics.

• 29:14Speaker 00

  And you can't just, you know, well, everybody wants to have sex with their mother and then that results in, you know, you can't do that anymore. And so you've had this like hardening up. And so you had the, the side of, of scholarship that was more of the, well, I want to sit back in my armchair and talk, talk about issues. You had the, well, let's go get our hands dirty with the data. The two sides of it. And they, science just keeps stealing ground from the other ones. And I think they're bitter about it and have been bitter about it for decades and want their ground back. You see it really strongly with analytic philosophers and moral philosophers especially, where they feel like science is encroaching upon, you know, they, they're like the highest

• 29:57Speaker 00

  end of philosophy and the science is encroaching on their turf. And they're very hostile about it and get really worked up. But the French postmodernists, for example, were extraordinarily, Foucault in particular is extraordinarily pessimistic about science. His whole shtick was, well, he, you know, it's like, well, I'm a philosopher, I'm a historiographer, and I'm going to tell you about the history of how science was, was wrong. And science was wrong here. And then science thought it was better and science was wrong again. And, you know, it's just this whole kind of, well, science can't do anything right. And I actually think that's how Foucault took off, is these literary theory departments that were trying to do a lot of social activism realized that Foucault gave them a tool to...

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Point out how science is more a longstanding string of failures with gigantic moral consequences than it is a rigorous and legitimate method. So it gave people a way to criticize science without having to do science, allowing that turf war to just flare up at like the highest level. And so who's going to come out and defend it? Scientists. And that's what you saw in the 90s with what's called the science wars now. You had like Gross and Levitt and Sokol and I can't think of all the names up against these mostly French postmodern philosophers and just this really heated culture war within the academy was

• 31:29Speaker 00

  raging between them and I think ultimately this science side won the battle, but maybe lost the war because the theorists went underground and have now come back with a vengeance.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  With seven arms and eight heads and the breathing fire and all this sort of stuff.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Somebody recently that I was talking to, I can't think of who it was, so I apologize to whoever that was, said it's like a hydra. And I think that's a really good analogy. You cut off a head and it grows two more. And it seems to be a hydra that doesn't know it's a hydra, which is really a peculiar.

• 32:04Chris Williamson?

  It's just a fluffy bunny or something like that. So we've

• 32:08Speaker 00

  But now you actually do have, by the way, a touch of how these ideas came to be what they are is you had these philosopher, well, I mean, to call people like Foucault philosophers are really tough stretch of the word. He wasn't considered that by his contemporaries. His legacy in France isn't very good. Same with Derrida. But you had these, ultimately, these people that were structuralists and became very, you know, it's a very strange branch of philosophy that then got tied in with German idealism, with what the Frankfurt School really was coming from, and then got really pessimistic and cynical and just started

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Doing their strange thing and it eventually caught on. I have guesses as to why, but.

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  I get it. Let's, let's take it from, we've got about 20 minutes or so. James, can you try and take us through a journey? Let's imagine that we're at, is it Epcot at Disneyland or whatever it might be? And we're going to go on a little roller coaster and we're going to sit in the roller coaster. And this is social justice from beginning until now. And we're going to sit in there. So where are we, where are we going first? Where's the roller coaster take us first?

• 33:24Speaker 00

  Hell's Kitchen, New York City.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Early 1900s or late 1800s with a guy named. I mean, so the term I think originated in the 1820s or 40s, but I don't know exactly what it referred to. I haven't gone that far back. I'm not going to talk about Marx, although Marx is going to be very influential. Um, I'm going to try to direct it to a number of streams, but the word social justice gained a lot of its relevance. Actually with Baptist minister in Hell's Kitchen named Walter Rauschenbusch, who invented what was called the social gospel. And if you go back and read the social gospel, it looks a lot like the social justice of today. And we're going to leave that as a seed, except that, uh, Rauschenbusch ended up working with people, um, in, on your side of the pond, uh, he came over to London and, uh,

• 34:13Speaker 00

  got in cahoots with the, um, Fabian Society early on, which is a far left organization. Uh, eventually spawned the London School of Economics, which is a socialist school of economics and so on. Uh, think tank now. And so he came back to Hell's Kitchen and he says, so social justice started to become a thing within a, within the Baptist, religion of all things, uh, which is very conservative now, which is kind of funny. So. Turns out Rasschenbusch was Richard Rorty, who's one of the American postmodern philosophers. Rasschenbusch was his grandfather. So that's kind of like track number one. Then I want to take you to Frankfurt.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  And by Frankfurt, I actually mean Frankfurt, kind of in mostly New York City, because the Frankfurt School was mostly in New York City because of the Nazis, so they had to leave Germany. Because that's when that was going on. It started in the late 20s, and so not very long later, most of them relocated to New York City. So you're talking about Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse. Eventually, a decade later, two decades later, Jürgen Habermas. Walter Benjamin was early on. Legitimately, Adorno stole most of Benjamin's ideas. And so these guys laid, as we talked at the beginning of the conversation, they laid the groundwork for this critical theory idea.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  And they ended up especially coming off of Marcuse. The groundwork for what became known as a social movement, known as the New Left. And the New Left is what was responsible for all of the, when you talk about the crazy politics of the 1960s and all of the riots, especially around 1968, the New Left was really what was responsible for that. So these guys' vision for how society should be organized and ultimately viewed through critical theory in order to overthrow the hidden oppressions and injustices of liberalism and Western civilization, became a huge, like, political movement on the far left. It defined the radical left.

• 36:24Speaker 00

  So all your radical feminists, your Black Power movement, you know, Malcolm X, et cetera, all of that would have had, in some sense, either direct or indirect ties to the thinking of the New Left. And so that kind of whole far-left radical activist morass, which was actually quite violent at the time in the 60s, that, you know, you got the May 1968, what was it, in France and Paris, you got whatever happened in the US, some of the riots got pretty intense, Berkeley and so on. And so...

• 36:55Speaker 00

  That would be kind of like the second stop on our little roller coaster is that philosophy there. So especially, like I said, Marcuse, who was extremely influential with these, these kids. I actually saw an interview with him from the 70s where he was a bit dismayed with how people were taking up his ideas and being uncareful with them and running kind of rough shot and wild with them.

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, just so that we can, we can kind of have a, um, how would you say, one of those dipsticks, like a PhD level dipstick of the intensity of how much this is becoming malignant. Cause you know, we hear these things. We've got Malcolm X, we've got, these are just, in most people's eyes, there's some extreme tactics that are being used, but they're just causes. There's few people that would look back and see these and say, that shouldn't have happened. So where does this start to, to sort of lose its way as well?

• 37:48Speaker 00

  So, um, yeah, we'll get there. So I want to actually dip back to Paris for, for a minute, because around that same time, around the 60s and early 70s is when you had the postmodernists really coming to bear. Now, the context in Europe more broadly, of course, also was the collapse of colonialism at this point. So you had the post-colonial people really starting to speak out about how bad empire was and, um, the damage that that did. And it's kind of set, now it became very actually central to, to European new left thinking. Um, whereas at roughly the same time in the US, it started shifting toward anti-Vietnam war sentiment. And so they kind of had two different paths going

• 38:31Speaker 00

  on there. So the postmodernists arose in the European context of being French and highly influenced by some of the German idealists, uh, philosophers. And so they, um, they were at the Sorbonne, at, I think the University of Paris, in Paris anyway, and they all kind of worked together and studied together. And you have this kind of whole little group of, you know, Derrida, Foucault, et cetera. They didn't always agree. Sometimes they didn't like each other. Sometimes they did. But there was this sort of, um, occasionally Marxist, occasionally Leninist, occasionally Maoist, occasionally not that, occasionally communist, occasionally anti-communist.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  But very far left, there is no stable knowledge. We got to, because of the post-colonial context, we have to look at different cultures. There's no way to compare a culture. We've been doing that. That was unjust. We were saying Western culture is better. So they had to cut back from, they pulled back from all of that kind of thing, very culturally relative. We can't really obtain objective truth. We think that the West is so good, but it made World War II. You know, all this death and destruction. It came up with the Atlantic slave trade, became an interesting topic. All of these horrors that came out of, out of Western culture, so we can't keep saying it's so good. And post-modern theory was born.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  And so I think post-modern theory was actually not really, it was, it was an offshoot of and not really in line with the rest of what the so-called new left was doing. And then, so where did it really start? There are already problems here, but where it really started to become malignant was when those two things came back together. And that would have been in the mid and late 1980s. So through the 70s and 80s, for example, within feminism, uh, you would overwhelmingly have had, um, radical feminists and Marxist feminists, or they're called materialist feminists, being the ones doing the analysis. And they would say, oh, well, women were a commodity under patriarchy and patriarchy and capitalism are in cahoots.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  And so the patriarchal capitalist system is what needs to be overthrown. And so you can kind of see, this is a very radical mindset. You had people like Andrea Dworkin and all of these characters, Catherine McKinnon, who were very against pornography as a form of exploitation and violence against women. A lot of this dipped in and out of the liberal feminist stuff, but the radicals were separate and more often separatist and, and intense in their, their, their approach. This, of course, is also, by the way, all along stimulating a backlash from the conservatives who are afraid that this is the end of society in the making. So, you know, something boiling on the other side as a result of this, that's kind of important. Eventually, in the late 1980s, you had a fusion of post-modern methods into this radical left thought.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  And that's where I think it really started to become malignant. That's where, again, we talked about briefly before, the introduction of the intention to do identity politics through postmodern methods was introduced. That's where postmodernism and liberalism were simultaneously critiqued heavily by these theorists. But the conclusion was that postmodernism was just... The problems with postmodernism, postmodernism has most of the right ideas, except that it was formulated by white, Western, well-off men who could afford to deconstruct everything. And so, when you look at oppression, you can't deconstruct that experience.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  You can't deconstruct that injustice. Hence, the turn toward identity centrality. So, you had that whole twist toward, "Let's do identity politics and let's do it with postmodern methods." If you really wanted to stick a date stamp on it, I would tell you it was 1989 is when that happened, but really, anywhere from 1984 up through 1994 is when that was developing and cooking, and all of the biggest pieces and most of the groundwork was laid. And from there, it's just actually kind of concretized. Most of this happening in the United States now. Once the postmodernism was picked up by these American philosophers, so like Kimberle

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Crenshaw is a legal scholar, Judith Butler is, I guess, a philosopher or something, but queer theorist is the best way to describe her now. As it started getting picked up by all these Americans, it just took off. I'm not entirely sure why it took off so heavily in the American academy, whereas it was kind of poo-pooed in France, where it was originated. Nobody in the continent or in England was particularly interested. And it just took off in the US. And then, of course, our academics exported it to yours, and especially to Australian ones who were also very interested in these kinds of things. The first women's studies department actually was in Sydney, in Australia, which, that would have been more of the radical line.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  So that's how it started to change and what it changed into by 2010. And anybody who's interested will be able to read this in great detail in the book I wrote with Helen, which is due out in May called Cynical Theories. By 2010 or so, it had become just, the phrase that is probably best used is, it's hard to say this and have it be understood, it's known knowns. Things that are known to be known, things that people just therefore accept as being generally true. So all of the postmodern theorizing, all of the, the attempts to reify certain points around identity that went into the identity politics turn in the late eighties and early nineties.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  And then the developments that proceeded in the next decade or so, everybody just started taking those things for granted. Well, that's true. Everybody knows that. We have decades of theory saying that that's true. There's no reason to, to say no, that, that can't be right. We have so much scholarship now all saying that that's true. And so by 2010, they just started kind of mixing everything together in, in this sort of super intersectional framework where solidarity and allyship became kind of core ideas that had to be paid full attention to all the time. And it started coming out of the academies and into society. Then when they speak about it now, it used to be this crazy highfalutin jargon that nobody

• 45:02Speaker 00

  understood, complicated sentences. Now it's quite clear, it's almost religious in its quality. It's, if you go listen to, for example, Robin DiAngelo, who's a famous whiteness scholar, it sounds very much like a, a woman talking to children with her theory. It's comprehensible by a 10-year-old. Very straightforward, very clear, very self-assured, absolutely confident in the underlying assumptions that these systems of power are the correct way to view the world and the identity is at the core of systems of power and knowledge and who can have what in society and do what in society. So that's sort of like the broad tour of how this all has come down.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Largely because it tends to eat itself. Also, it tends to concentrate, you know, and get more and more virulent. Anybody who kind of says, well, maybe it's a little bit not quite that extreme is that person's going to get shut down big time.

• 46:01Chris Williamson?

  So this is, this is a really, this is a really interesting point that came up in my discussion with Douglas Murray and with other people as well, which is that in these discussions, as we increasingly sort of polarize the opinions about any topic. The room for nuance, and I suppose this loops to how to have impossible conversations, which is, you almost read the book.

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  The room for nuance and subtlety is largely missing. And the problem is that to your own side, if you're in this quite sort of militant discussion where you're supposed to be as aggressive or as convincing as possible. To your own side, nuance and subtlety sounds like a lack of commitment to the cause. And to the other side, nuance and subtlety sounds like a lack of conviction or a potential weak point in your argument. Do you think that's fair to say?

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And there's been, so a little while ago, I was giving you the tour and I said, that all along, each step along the way, the new left, the riots in 1968, the turn toward identity politics, et cetera. And then more recently, all the things where it's become, you know, widely disseminated. I left out that this happened mostly in where it got the tightest hold was in education. Our schools of education have basically been social justice oriented since the 1980s, which is becoming a problem. Critical pedagogy is what it's called and it's been.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  More or less the only approach, not even the dominant approach, the only approach to education. So if it's in education, I read that, for example, in colleges, everyone's like, oh, this was coming from the colleges. What I read was that the universities actually experienced it as a student-led change. Where did the students get it? From their previous education, which was critically oriented, because our colleges of education have been doing critical pedagogy since the 80s. So, all along, though, I said that there was this right-wing backlash brewing. Well, guess what? The far-left side of this interprets the far-right side of this as proof that their theories are correct, that

• 48:23Speaker 00

  society really is corrupt, and society really is trying to protect its vested interests in the so-called status quo, and the powerful people really are pushing back against them, and they, of course, are going to have irrational backlashes. Meanwhile, they double down because of the exact dynamic you just said, nuance can't be allowed because it looks like a lack of commitment or betrayal, and from the other side, it looks like, you know, a weak point. And so, both sides have actually pulled apart from one another, seeing the other as Helen and I wrote an article in 2017 that we titled this dynamic "existential polarization," where both sides now actually believe if the other side gets any power whatsoever, it's an existential threat, either to the planet, or to our way of life, or

• 49:05Speaker 00

  to our civilizations or societies, or something like this. And so, that's absolutely non-negotiable. Nuance can't possibly exist in such a situation.

• 49:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's no longer a threat to just your side, it's a threat to everybody, even the people who aren't involved and who don't know it, and they're a threat to themselves as well.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Right, right. And so, critical theory, of course, stems out of this idea that generally the unwashed masses don't know what's good for them. That was more or less Antonio Gramsci's underlying idea, that was what you saw. A lot of the motivation on the Frankfurt School was that if you leave the masses to choose things for themselves, they won't choose art and poetry, they'll choose football and beer, and go into the strip club, or whatever it happens to be. And so, people tend not to choose what's best for themselves, and they need some kind of philosopher king to be able to choose for them. The postmodernists, in particular, Bojor Yard and Leotard, were particularly concerned with this. So...

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Booger art especially was that people never pick art and poetry. They're always going to pick some low culture trash. If you let them make their own choices, so they clearly don't know how to make good decisions and everything's artificial and everything's fake now. So, um.

• 50:20Chris Williamson?

  Which is also interesting, right? That kind of like outgaming or that um increasing sort of caricaturism of what's going on. You know, if you were to look at something 20 years ago and say, oh, you think that that's vacuous? Like, just, just, just wait until you see what happens when Instagram arrives. Just wait until you see what happens when the Kardashians get on TV. Like, you know, we are able to outdo ourselves even in um how hollow we are, which is almost impressive.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, the left sees the, the, the right, well, I should say, I guess, that the, the, so the left, that's all into this like kind of high minded thing that doesn't trust the masses sees the right as choosing against their own interests. So the right is back, you know, the right conservatives all back corporate interests and they, you know, big politics and a bunch of white men in a room and smoking jackets or whatever the hell the things are.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Right. And so the average conservative is backing something that's against his own interests and he just has to be informed and brought back around to the right side of thinking and then he wouldn't choose conservatives anymore. Whereas the conservatives are like the liberals are trying to do some damn social engineering program. They call it the liberal agenda. And if we do that, society's going to collapse and you can actually sit back for like two seconds and look at the dynamic and think, man, we're fucked.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  How does that stop?

• 51:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, I mean.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  I, I.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  But that's kind of, I think, what's going on. So cheers or something.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  You're not far wrong. Okay. So to finish up, James, put your money where your mouth is now. What does the next five to 10 years look like for this dynamic?

• 52:11Speaker 00

  That's so hard to answer because it depends on a lot of things. I do think the next election in the US, a presidential election, well, it's, you know, we do all over our elections is going to be a big variable in how that goes. My perception, so we'll take that off the table for the moment because it's a big wild card and nobody really knows what's going to happen and everybody's kind of scared, but nothing, it doesn't look like anything good's coming.

• 52:37Chris Williamson?

  Do you think, so just to

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Take that off of the table.

• 52:39Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that's going to be a keystone in terms of sort of where we go moving forward?

• 52:43Speaker 00

  I think it's very likely that it will be, yeah. But I don't want to like also say this is the election of a lifetime because then that increases those stakes and makes everything worse. I think one of the only or biggest lessons of Trump is that, because I think Trump's a disaster in general, but one of the biggest lessons you can pull out of his presidency is most stuff still works okay, even with that in the White House. So calm down about politics. Whoever's the president isn't nearly as important as we've been thinking for the last 20 or 30 years. But as far as social justice goes right now, the dynamic

• 53:23Speaker 00

  I just described, I have no idea. The social justice part of it, I feel like is collapsing under its own weight, but it's at the same time rapidly institutionalizing. So I anticipate that a lot more organizations, companies, legal entities, whatever they happen to be, are going to go woke, as it were, and that wokeness is going to end up hamstringing them. And so we'll see a lot of important institutions and less important institutions that see a lot of damage as the thing starts to collapse under its own weight, which is, I think, what's happening.

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  By collapse under its own weight, is that just sort of the inherent ridiculousness and self-contradictoriness of the situation imploded?

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Yes. Yes, and it's for example, I saw the other day, uh, article that I read, this is maybe two weeks ago about the problem of settlers of color. And so what is a settler of color? This is a black person, say in North America, who, um, for whatever reason, they ended up there, you know, they stole indigenous land also. So this is basically a turf war for victimhood status between black and indigenous as kind of the maximum racial, uh, victimhood status. And it's a clear bid that the indigenous are going to try to throw the black people under the bus by saying that they're settlers of color. So the infighting alone is going

• 54:52Speaker 00

  to really hobble what they're able to do. I also see that there is two, there are two things happening at once. One is good and one is bad. In response to all this, a lot of people on both of those two things are waking up to what's going on. Social justice has shown its hand. A lot of people have become very interested in the problem and are studying it like I have, like Helen has. And that's going to increase tremendously. Um, and people are going to understand what it is. And when they understand what it is, they will do what they can to reject it. The bad side of that is going to be the backlash side, which is going to be a turn again toward making traditional gender roles cool, maybe

• 55:35Speaker 00

  a turn toward racism. Uh, certainly a lot less sensitivity than we actually should have toward issues of identity. Disability. Wholesale rejection. Things like that. Sure. And there's these new movements. It's like, I guess there was like the Trump people and now those people are all like cucks or something now, like they're not hardcore enough, like Trump and his family are sellout liberals or something now from the far, far, far, or extra alt, double alt right, or whatever. They have a name. Frogs or something. Groypers, they call them. So it's like. Is that what we're looking out for over the next year? I doubt it. I don't think they're gonna have a whole lot of steam behind them. They're a thing at the moment, but probably not much of one.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  But it's like the alt-right aspect is going to still continue to swell. You couldn't give them a better recruiting ground than having all this crazy stuff happening like with presidential nominees and things like that. On the other hand, there is also a, this is very good, an enormous growth in the interest in liberalism and the underpinnings of how liberal societies should work and why those principles should be in place and how to defend them. Tremendous amount of interest and I'm seeing that from people on the left. I'm seeing it from people who identify as centrists and people on the right. So, and those people will, despite retaining tremendous disagreements politically,

• 56:58Speaker 00

  will be able to rise up and say, you know what, a liberal on the right and a liberal on the left have more in common than these fools on the extreme. And so they will, they will probably start to pick in elections, less predictably and more, well predictable toward whoever's being the most liberal. For example, you see this kind of broad coalition. I don't think it's gonna work out, but broad coalition for candidates like Andrew Yang, who are being in the US right now, who are being very traditionally liberal. Whether left or right doesn't actually matter. I think you would see, you see a lot of conservatives supporting him despite many of his policies are being open to his ideas despite his policies.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  Whereas normally you would just be, you know, Democrat trying to get, you know, a position terrible. You're not seeing that. So you're starting to see this broader, open-minded thing where people, and I think it would be reflected as well. If you had a very centrist Republican, who's trying to push back against whatever's going on right now with the far-right politics. It's the populism that's dominating. I think you'd see a lot of left-wing support coming out for, central, center-left support coming out for that. So I see this huge rebirth, like almost a renaissance of liberalism. And that's the place that I'm trying to stick myself into is to encourage that to expose the thing that we're looking at, the social justice malignant, social justice

• 58:27Speaker 00

  thing, and try to resurrect, you know, proper liberal principles, including liberal social justice principles, like you said earlier, are actually really good. And almost everybody short of a small fringe off on the right, agree with them.

• 58:40Chris Williamson?

  One of the things I've thought of as you've got towards the end of this discussion, we've been talking about sort of this, it's analogized to a virus, and we're talking about when did it become malignant and things like that. I've got it in my head, thinking about how a vaccination works. The vaccination gives you a very small dose of a potentially lethal virus. And then you realize, your system realizes, shit, I'm pretty vulnerable to this. I need to do something. And I wonder, I wonder how much this particular social justice movement is going to be a vaccination against something else which could have or may arise in the not too distant future, for which we will need to be able to marshal

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  an appropriate response. And that this situation that we have encountered recently will have been a canary in the coal mine to go, oh, you didn't, you didn't know that this was a problem? Let me tell you, like, this is, this is, this really is a problem. And you, you got to be ready for it. But we didn't get the smooth talking, slick, future dystopian overlord from like, some James Bond film. We didn't get him. We got like, Native Americans versus like, black settler, like, who's got them, who is the most underprivileged in this situation, like, fat studies. That's who we got.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Chris Williamson?

  We can get the owner of some huge billion dollar media conglomerate who's actually really, really nefarious with it. We got like, people with blue hair that are unhappy that they didn't get enough hugs as a kid.

• 1:00:19Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether or not that that will actually end up being in the long term, whether that will end up serving us well because it will prepare us for what's to come.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  It's possible. I think it's going to be really important that we understand. I think that it's not centralized like the like the dangerous guy with the big money and all of that. But critical theory is a real it's again, like we talked about, it's like it's like an industrial grade solvent. And so learning how to deal with that as a society is going to be really, really important. And so perhaps it's, as you're suggesting, best that it's in the hands of these self defeating

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  oddballs and grievance mongers, rather than, you know, the next Hitler, who's going to come out and know how to wield those tools to a much worse end.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  It's certainly a possibility. I do think, though, that understanding that the potential for critical theory to be something that can literally dissolve a liberal or Western society, or any society, really, because it can latch on and change itself to fit anything, is of paramount importance right now. And so administering kind of like the the critical theory jab and giving people that vaccine, I think is super important at the moment.

• 1:01:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm excited. I'm looking forward to the book to come out with with Helen next year. Thank you so much for today, James. Where should where should the listeners head if they want to keep in touch if you find out more?

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  I am probably pathologically active on Twitter, so that's the best place to look for me and reach out to me. I'm at conceptualjames on Twitter. There should be some big things coming in the next few months, so if those pan out, people should be getting excited and check me out and see what's going on. So that's the place to look for now.

• 1:02:22Chris Williamson?

  I'm looking forward to it, James. Thank you so much. To the listeners at home, you know what to do. If you've enjoyed this episode, go and follow James, check out How to Have Impossible Conversations, and don't wait for his book with Helen, which will be coming out early next year. Like, share, subscribe, all that good stuff. You know what to do. But for now, thank you, James.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Get away, get off this.