welcome to this intelligence squared podcast with me helen joyce i'm delighted to introduce our guest today helen rose she's the editor of aero magazine and co-author with james lindsey of a new book cynical theories how activist scholarship made everything about race gender and identity and why this harms everybody it's out now thank you for inviting me oh it's very exciting to have you on i really enjoyed the book i actually uh bookmarked it as soon as i heard about it several months ago because i thought that's a book i need to read oh thank you and i'm never quite sure people always seem to have an opinion very far in one direction or the other well that's the world we live in and actually that's something we're probably going to talk about isn't it i wanted to start with that word cynical i have the book on my phone i don't have a print copy or i'd show our audience but you've got the word critical and you have the word cynical written over it so it's like critical theories but cynical theories instead cynical what cynical okay so when post-modern post-modernism arose it was defined as a skepticism towards meta narratives and what annoys us is that this particular approach this this critical approach considers itself to be the epitome of skepticism whereas in fact being skeptical of meta narratives has been something that have been happening throughout the modern period this is what the whole sort of scientific revolution was about how do i know this is true so we say that the the theories that came out of these postmodern ideas aren't skeptical because skeptical is doubtful and it's still in search of some kind of truth it's cynical because it begins with the assumption that everything is about power imbalances and people trying to protect their power and then it reads society through it so no idea about how people are working in you know it together or sometimes in opposition sometimes but towards some variety of truth or objectivity or understanding or any of those things yeah exactly i think um alan sockle and jean-brickman they they wrote wrote it very well they said there's a specific skepticism in which we say how do we know this is true and then we work out how to find out if it is true how to falsify it if it isn't true and this is interesting and productive if you've got the kind of radical skepticism of the postmodern approach you don't even look for truth you just start with this idea that we can't actually obtain truth and what's interesting is is what power dynamics are being are in play here so you've said the word power several times here and i do want to come back to that but i want to say just one more thing i'll get you to comment on one more thing before we do that so you said now twice i think meta narrative so they're skeptical about meta-narratives but it sounds like what you're saying is there is a meta-narrative they have their own yes this is um the third generation so in the sixties uh jean-francois layton he described post-modernism as a skepticism towards meta narratives and that's all those big overarching explanations for things so christianity obviously marxism um but science and progress as well so he was skeptical of that and so were all of the first post-modernists they really took things apart and they didn't really try to build anything but as these few core ideas about power knowledge and language have evolved over the last 50 years they have formed a meta-narrative of their own now so power knowledge and language and from reading your book power is what people have kind of innately because of their characteristics and language is what brings the whole thing together how we talk about it in our discourses and knowledge is what we're creating by discoursing if that's a verb is that about right yes so um it's uh michel foucault particularly who joined the words power and knowledge to make one power knowledge and this is what underlies everything so it isn't that um people are deliberately trying to exercise power over others necessarily it's that people are born into certain positions in society that gives them a certain relationship to power the powerful forces get to decide what is knowledge and what isn't and then this is legitimized and everybody speaks um through this these discourses of knowledge which are really discourses of power so they can be called things like white supremacy patriarchy cisnormativity heteronormativity and we're all upholding them all the time by assuming that um there is knowledge that is legitimate about these things so we've been quite abstract up to now we've talked about things like meta narratives and discourses and now you've started to hint at some rather specific versions of this in the book you give a chapter each to several of these cynical theories so you know critical race theory etc etc let's pick race since you mentioned uh you mentioned the white fragility or the white supremacy sort of idea that's very topical right now and we have books like um with people like robin d'angelo um talking about white fragility and so what's wrong with that i mean we do we do live in a world where um you know people have been horribly oppressed on the basis of race there is there is a hierarchy here so are they getting it completely wrong have they got some aspect of it right they're getting the approach wrong so if we're going to look at um racism there are a number of different ways to do this so the liberal approach to racism which was kind performed by martin luther king for example this aims to take significance out of identity categories so you know while being black or being a woman could be important to your sense of who you are it shouldn't tell society anything about your moral or social value or what role you should play in the world so this is what the liberal approach is when critical race theory arose it took aim at that um particularly it didn't agree with the liberal approach of trying to be colorblind it obviously it tends to interpret that as a willingness to be blind to racism which isn't at all the same thing if you think being colorblind is a is a is a positive thing that we should try we should aim for in a society it means you oppose people who are not being colorblind people who are being racist so when we look at racism we need the most rigorous scholarship that's out there and there are some very very rigorous uh scholars out there they um take a materialist empirical approach so you could look at the research into the criminal justice system by someone like michelle alexander for example and you will find her looking at systems at laws at numbers and she'll be analyzing this in a in a in a strong and steady way but if you go with somebody like robin d'angelo she is all about um theory her own interpretation of how what all white people must think how all black people must experience things she wants um people to admit uh all white people to admit that they have been socialized into believing that black people are inferior in various ways and then work to dismantle that even though that isn't actually ever possible so one of her and when she she wrote a number of tenets with a team and one of them was the question is not does race did racism occur but how did racism manifest in this situation so it's assumed to always be there it reminds me very much of the logic of the ducking stool you know you've got the you know if the witch thinks she wasn't a witch and if she floats well we'll burn her so there's just no way out there's nothing that you can do in this situation no exactly there's um d'angelo she gives us two choices you can either be racist and acknowledge it and work against it or you can be in be racist and in selfish denial of it so it's unfalsifiable and that's obvious that's a feature that's not a bug i guess because she doesn't want anybody denying it how can this actually have caught on when i thought we had you know i thought we had actually solidified the idea that what was the power of the modern world was that we had theories that we could test and we could falsify them and we could reject them if they weren't good enough and replace them by new ones how did that even catch on this is what has been being undermined this is the liberal approach and it's what jonathan roush calls liberal science that process where everybody can raise any idea they want anybody else can challenge that idea there's the belief that we can all get at ideas and examine them on their own merits and that the individual has agency to reject some ideas and uphold others so this to the post-modernist is very very naive it's either an extreme naivety and an inability to see the invisible powers power structures or it's a selfish attempt to protect one's own privilege so you see to some extent there is of course truth in this because if we look at how our understanding of homosexuality has changed for example dominant discourses for a long time said it was a heinous sin then it said it was a shameful disorder now the dominant discourse around homosexuality is some people are gay get over it so this has changed but whereas the liberals would say this has changed because we were able to look at it talk about it discuss it apply science to it and you know really sort of compare arguments for what homosexuality is does it have any moral valiance at all and that was how we overcame prejudice against homosexuality but the the the discourse theorists the the descendants of the post-modernist would say this is naive and what all that has happened is that um the ways of talking about things have changed we are still living in a very um heterocentrist and uh cis-centrist society and that those power structures are still there and they still need to be dismantled and they think that we're going to do that by changing the way that we talk about things yes precisely if language creates social reality changing language can create a better one and if you think that like if one thinks that uh we're in this sort of invisible web there's this power web and where all of us are positioned according to our characteristics uh we maybe even don't see these things until somebody has taught us the techniques of critical whatever theory and how can like it sounds like we're trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps if you believe that you can change the way that you talk and that would change reality like it is incredibly pessimistic and i don't know how they think if you think like that how they think that you can even change your language well some theorists have argued that that it's almost impossible christy dotson for example when she does her um conceptual conceptualizing epistemic oppression she says that third level that one where you have to try to to even speak in the language that you have trying to see that there is a problem when you only have the language the the epistemic resources that you have is almost impossible so there is a lot of um of pessimism there but there's also a certain simplicity to it and there's a certain appeal to it because people feel as though we're only at the beginning we can't they don't know not even that the most advanced theorists um in the world know or exactly how this power system works but what we're doing is we're picking at it we're digging at it we're trying to see it we're uncovering more bits of it because it's unfalsifiable somebody can identify racism within any interaction and as long as it's um according to the theory it will be deemed authoritative it will be correct so there's there's a lot of um a lot of room for people to play with these ideas for them to interpret things and and to them feel like you're really uncovering new ground and setting the the scene for improving things right so they feel like they're making progress because when there's no falsifiability everything is sort of progress every bit of thing that you say yeah i mean it's beginning to be able to see it that that's the thing the angelo often says we need to make it visible and then we can get at it i mean i think the second bit of that doesn't necessarily follow from the first but since i don't agree with the first either i think that's going to be relevant and i thought it was very interesting the way you talked i think it was it was um maybe in an article just very recently uh you said this thing about what cancel culture really is and there was a great explanation that the point of cancer culture is that if people are saying wrong things and those wrong things are creating wrongness then silence them is an extremely moral thing to do and silencing them by any means really and you don't have to debate them debating them will be bad have i got that about right yes exactly i think this makes intuitive sense to humans i mean this is why there have been such strong laws against heresy and blasphemy because the idea is you can corrupt society you can taint and damn others so you know when we had awful things like the inquisition this was a moral endeavor because the attempt was to stop this corruption from spreading and damning a lot of people to hell and so yes they wanted to put very very strong disincentives in place for people to question um the orthodoxy of religion now this is a different situation because we're in a different time but the same um the same sorry my husband has not got his keys can you let daddy in please shall i ask you a question again i think you were going pretty well so i don't want to maybe maybe not from the inquisition that was good so um yeah so we um yeah even with things like the inquisition which were with such a sort of terrorizing um thing there was a moral imperative uh underneath that the idea was that if people um speak heresy if they they challenge the um the orthodoxy that the truth of god this this can um this this will corrupt and um and taint the rest of society and cause and cause people to be damned to hell so there's this incentive to really make um to ensure that people are thinking and speaking in the right way for the good of everybody and that's what you get right now i mean the the strongest mantra i think that people are wanted are expected to repeat at the moment is trans women and women and so what no matter what you actually believe about trans identity i'm um fully in support of trans trans rights and like people identifying as they wish to with you know there's obviously conversations that need to be happen about spaces and sports but no matter what you think about this we it's difficult to notice that the emphasis is very much on language are you saying things which suggest that trans women aren't women the way to respond to that is not with an argument so we don't have people arguing back and forwards as much as we have them and throwing mantras at each other as if they're trying to um to out out speak each other on the level of these discourses if i say trans women or women often enough if enough people say it that will make the social reality be what is needed for the acceptance of trans people yeah it's interesting because i had i must say i had sort of thought that anyone who hung on to a mantra that much couldn't possibly really believe it you know that if you're if you feel secure in your own ideas i'd always thought but then this just shows that i'm from a previous generation i always thought if you were secure in your ideas you wouldn't mind debating them you'd feel confident that you could answer any criticism that people put forward but i think what you showed you know and you you gave me a different way to conceive of this was that the very saying of these things was a harm and i hadn't understood that before that you know i was creating an evil according to these people by saying things even possibly if i was saying them on my own in a room i'm not even meant to think them i'm not even meant to say them in my head i guess yeah i mean this is why we get the argument that um gender-critical feminists are involved in the murder of trans women even though you know trans women do seem to be particularly vulnerable to violence but this isn't um has never been by a gender critical feminist but there's this idea that they're speaking into a narrative that devalidates invalidates delegitimizes and trans people it creates a hostile environment and one in which it is acceptable for them to be abused by people who have completely different ideas and aren't feminists at all so it's um yeah it seems it seems quite remarkable i mean you know i mean i lived in brazil for several years and i mean that is one of the places where trans women are murdered i mean you know it's actually one of the hot spots of it in rio de janeiro because there's a lot of street workers there you know yeah they're not listening to what gender critical feminists are saying i mean these men it's nothing to do with it's nothing to do with that it's you know some mixture of violence homophobia to be honest self-hatred etc etc you know and just being violent is anyone really so convinced if they think it through or is the point that they're stopping themselves from thinking it through by saying the mantra like is it a thought-stopping cliche i think it's i have a tendency to think that it is actually quite normal quite intuitive to humans to think that our words have more power than they do i think um that the idea that if we can just get everybody saying the right thing everything will be okay it actually makes a lot of sense to us we're a storytelling species so i think what's more counterintuitive to us is the idea that there can be worth in getting people together who have two different uh views on a thing and getting them to argue their own side using evidence in a reasoned argument this this that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to a lot of the activists right now and it hasn't made a lot of sense historically i think people like um you and i and our our generation and people who have been involved in having these kind of conversations we can it seems that this is the obvious way you know we talk about things we we exchange ideas this is how we progress but it doesn't seem to be that intuitive to a lot of people yes maybe it was a brief period but it was a brief and very glorious period i think it's something we have to we have to hang on to it we have to cons constantly reinforce it otherwise it we are likely to lose it and it will be the most powerful narrative wins so what let's see and i want to ask you what you think this means for two particular large areas very important areas of society that i think are really under attack at the moment and one is academia and the other one is journalism so academia seems to have pretty much fallen to these ideas at least large chunks of it i i think it's certainly um very much overpowered by it of course you get um i i don't think the majority of academics hold these views and they're you don't find them in it in every field they're really sort of concentrated in a cluster in the humanities and also on campus culture but anybody who goes against them is likely to find themselves in trouble so this is what i was i found when i'm studying um late medieval women's religious writing now i can look i can do work that i can be proud of as long as i'm not looking at what and sex is what gender is how it works in any way that's going to go against the dominant narrative you know so somebody wanted to be a historian and they wanted to look at agriculture or something they could go through their whole lives without coming cropper with this but if you're a scientist and you want to look at say how sex differences exist between men and women then you're going to find yourself in trouble this is interesting isn't it because i think that's a bit of it that people don't see if they're outside what we might call a knowledge producing industry so i'll count journalism as that even even if it's not very fair but it's it's the it's the self-censorship it's before you even get to the area that's touchy so it's not it's not about the people who are sacked it's about the people who never said anything more than anything else yes i hear from a lot of academics i hear from a lot of people generally who write to me and say i you know i think i'm the only person in my organization who is concerned about this and then quite often now i happen to know that they're not and i can put them in touch with somebody else and i i think there's a lot more people who are um concerned about it or who at least don't agree with it i think with a lot of liberals on the left who still actually have those kind of beliefs that i'd like them to have about the value of different ideas and and the exchange of debates and consistent principles they tend to understand the social justice approach is a more friendly and liberal thing than it is and feel that they should be supportive of it and the scholars producing it because the problem on the right is um is a more severe one if you if you are a leftist yes we're going to worry about the rise of right-wing populists and they then get rather annoyed with people on the left who are saying yes but this is a problem that's on the left it is a problem we do need to address it and more than that they're connected aren't they uh yeah so you tell me about how you think they're connected then i i don't think i think there are two ways if you if you are a leftist and you want left-wing parties to win and be able to institute left-wing policies there are two things you have to do you have to show the problem with the party on the right and you have to make your own party a strong one and one that people can respect and i don't think that's happening on the left at the moment i think that there's this division between the identitarians the radicals and the liberals on the left and at the moment the identity politics left is the one that is most visible it's the one that corporations and politicians feel that they have to appease and i think it's driving people right now i can't know how many people went right because of this and so it's not very helpful to guess but i do think that if we could have a more consistently liberal left then we could see then we'd have been a better chance of getting people to vote left again so the profession that worries me most i have to say because it's the one i'm in is journalism and i think you see a lot of the same tendencies in particular the self-censorship not surprisingly i suppose i mean a lot of money has gone out of journalism a lot of people have gone out of journalism it's become a low paid um very temporary and casual sort of work that young people come into and they have no time no specialism no support from older journalists and of course they're all graduates now and most of them have come in from the sorts of courses where they learned this sort of stuff so i'm absolutely astounded at how fast this has happened the journalism has been hollowed out and i also see this as part of the political problem because ordinary people slowly get the sense that they're not actually reading what's going on they're reading a sort of a self-censored version of it in what are meant to be the papers of record so you have a you have your own magazine you edit a sort of a new magazine is this part of the motivation for you that you you see no other place to put the sorts of things that you want to say yeah and that was why area was um was created in the first place by malham mali he wanted something that wasn't um left-wing or right-wing or by but something that would have views from both sides but would argue them straightforwardly with um evidence and reason and so that that is what we try to do we have quite a lot of leftists who write for us but a few of them are the social justice leftists they tend to be socialists or social democrats and we have quite a lot of conservatives as well and and um and christians and they will write from from their belief systems and this i think works well we don't require people to be apolitical but we do require them to both state what their what political position they're coming from is and try to look charitably and concede as much as they can to the one they're criticizing yeah let's so okay i'm going to take a bit of a leap a sort of side step here and say um how fascinating i find it endlessly fascinating the way that uh race in one bucket and then we might say sex gender and sexuality in another bucket how incredibly differently theorized these two things are so race which actually is this fluid blurred sort of category uh you know i mean the race line was drawn differently in different countries at different times etc is regarded as the most rigid possible thing and sex gender sexuality when you know sex is incredibly rigid sexuality for feels for most people quite binary not everybody but most gender less so but i mean compared with race you know how did that happen how did we end up sort of almost the wrong way round there okay so i think that we've come from different um different places so queer theory which is where a lot of the sort of gender theory and trans activism comes from that's the most purely postmodern so it believes that there is a problem with having step with knowledge and that it's been constructed in the service of power so to get at that we have to look at the categories through which we think and to try to to blur those boundaries dismantle those categories and stop um putting people into them they believe that um if we get rid of all categories that aren't you know uh feminine women attracted to men or masculine man attracted to women then the world will become a more welcoming place to the people who don't um naturally fit into the pet degrees so we've got that whole um fluid thing going on there and in fact queer has become a a verb and to queer something is to blur the boundaries and to mix up the categories so that that's one particular theory and it relies quite a lot on dairy durham foucault so when we're going into critical race theory this comes from a different lineage that has quite a lot of um of input from the radical new left and then it has the post-modern influence um on top so kimberly crenshaw when she described intersectionality she described it as contemporary politics by which she meant the radical activism um linked to post-modern theory by which she meant the idea of everything being culturally constructed but she wanted um some acceptance of objective truth to be there she criticized the post-modernist saying that you know we can't just dismantle everything we have to accept some things are objectively true or we can't achieve anything so those systems of power and privilege had to be seen as true and i think because this comes from america and because there really has been that rigid line in america you know there has been that one drop rule where if you are black at all then you are black and so this the whole sort of um identity politics to push back at this has taken this as well as as a solid category they don't think that race is a biological category they do think it's a social construct but they think it's been constructed very simply into white supremacy and black subordination how can we get some of the things that are never talked about in this whole world view that are actually to do with power in particular money in class how can we get money in class back into this sort of discussion poverty i never hear it i never actually hear poverty or poor except when it's kind of tagged on to other things you know poor black women or you know i mean i mean this is why it's been the marxists who have been criticizing the post-modernist for longest and we still have the traditional marxists who are still saying you are dividing the working class this is now all about rich black and white people usually in universities we're not looking at economics or class at all now this is an entirely bourgeois enterprise and um you know they're criticizing it on these grounds and so they get quite annoyed when people then call what we're seeing now neo-marxism because yeah this is nothing to do with marx you can't blame him for this but i think that there are more connections with the whole sort of revolutionary idea but leaving class out is i i think one of the the the most serious drawbacks of the critical race approach because we we can look at race certainly and there are we don't always have to only look at class i think the marxists are a bit restricted if they only want to look at class in particular in a country in which race has been significant for so long but by only including class when somebody has another intersecting identity that is marginalized we're going to lose a lot of the um of the the sort of empirical analysis that we could have to actually make things better i mean a lot of the reason that um that black americans have such a lower lower outcomes in life generally is surely because they've only been allowed to try to rise out of the lowest positions for about two generations now we know that the best indicator of an individual's success is if their parents have been successful so it's not going to happen straight away and it's not going to happen unless we look at social and material factors as well as potential prejudice and it also seems something that is quite obviously going to create pushback because if you've got a i mean i think you mentioned this in the book you get a hypothetical example of you know a very poor white person like somebody with a really really hard life and if the only thing you have to say to that person is if you've been black it would have been even worse it's like come on you know and if the person saying it is is a university graduate of whatever race this is extremely painful it sounds like nothing nobody has anything to offer you and you may as well just go off to the right yes i i think this does make a lot of um of working-class people feel alienated we've seen the surge to the right from the working class both here in the uk although we can't sort of put too much emphasis on on that being anything to do with the social justice because there was the whole brexit thing going on as well but yeah the working class do seem to be going to the right they see trump as having their interests more in mind they see boris johnson as having their interests more in mind now this is this is a really strange development and i think critical social justice ideas have got to take some responsibility for that so something else that you talked about in the book that i thought was really also clarifying for me was that we have three levels of analysis we could say individual and group and universal and as a liberal the emphasis is really on individual and universal so we are human beings when that's what we share but also we're individuals so we have our own interests whereas all these sort of cynical theories that you talk about are really at that middle level group as maybe you could talk a little bit about that and whether you think uh liberals could maybe learn something from that or whether you think that particular slice a way of slicing things through should just be abandoned i i think it would be great if we didn't have to think in terms of group but as a tribal territorial species i think we always will have to so i think sometimes when the um the socialists and the social justice scholars have criticized liberalism for focusing too much on the individual having access to everything and our shared humanity and not enough on group they do make a point because it it's quite simplistic to think well we just want every individual to be able to do everything and not look at things that could be holding them back from that which could be their class could be their race could be their sex so we do need to have that kind of focus and i think the the liberal civil rights movements of the 60s and 70s liberal feminism gay pride the civil rights movements they were largely driven by this liberal universalist impulse they said we want to have the same rights as everybody else which is very different to the identity um politics approach which is we are this group with this source of power you are a different group and we are in conflict right so you're saying maybe the group is the way that uh uh and let's see an inequality lawyer or might look at this would be to say well you know this could be in direct discrimination there could be something here that it's a facially neutral policy as they say an american law meaning everybody has access but actually not really and that could be discrimination so you can kind of fit it into a liberal framework you don't have to go the whole way down to you know group thought as all i i think we need a liberal framework overall but one that takes input from um from class analysis and and from identity analysis because we that that is how humans work i i think the danger of focusing too much on groups is that that brings out the worst of human nature because we are tribal because it's so easy for us to think well of our own group demonize and out group and we become callously indifferent to people who aren't on our team that's something we need to always protect against and we need an element of liberal humanism to do that to be thinking of as many people as possible as coming within our fear of of concern so my fear with identity politics is that it will lead um and it is leading to to really harsh conflict and an inability to see each other as human beings or as individuals so the first time i heard of intersectionality i thought that's what it was trying to do that it was saying think about the way that this could be different for people who are different you know think are you actually thinking how this would look to a feminist who's black are you thinking about how this might feel to someone who's disabled and i really liked that idea but somehow that's not at all how the word has come to to mean no i mean it really could be valuable i think patricia hill collins who um sort of developed the concept of intersectionality along with um kimberly crenshaw she points out that in the us there are very very different stereotypes for black women than they were for black men or white women so a black woman could be discriminated against in an employment position because there's this stereotype that she would be aggressive sexually promiscuous all these other things which don't aren't um considered to be traits of white women so they're you know that that was a a valid point that you can't really say well this company employs white women so there's no sexism and it close back men so there's no racism if there is a prejudice specifically against black women so that needs to be in there but unfortunately right from the start um kimberly crenshaw was critical of liberalism she said it wasn't the way to go she said that taking social significance out of categories um sort of disempowers people we need to have a less universal group orientated approach and she wanted to go with post-modernism which is all about social constructs and that really kind of shot itself in the foot because now everything is interpretive everything is theoretical first and then trying to make things fit it and then you get um people in opposition and in conflict and in competition with each other until you you're ending up with this um really combative uh approach at looking at what could be a useful theory of understanding how different uh kinds of identity can can compound each other yeah and also you have to say then if you if you want to take this identity first approach you have to say that say a black woman who doesn't agree with you is somehow got a forced consciousness or she's wrong or she's theorized it wrong because you you know what the black woman or whatever the position actually is do you end up with somebody like robert you know robin deangelo telling people what they should think really yes this is um this is something i've been wanting to write about recently i've just started reading um a lot of black conservatives again in american context because i want to to see you know a range of how people are addressing racism and so i've been reading shelby steele and i think his attitude he really has got this kind of pull yourself up by the bootstraps attitude this really typically conservative personal responsibility thing and i'm looking at him and i'm thinking i think this for an individual is probably a really really good attitude but it's no good for a social policy you know you conservatism isn't a black conservatism is the same as other kinds of conservatism it focuses too much on the individual's power and not enough on social on the responsibility of society so i think we do need to keep pointing out to people who say well this is listen to black people listen to people of color that this is not a monolithic entity we have a number of black intellectuals and they are to be found all over the political spectrum what would really be helpful is if people try to look at the good and bad points of all of them and i think cornell west does this quite well i really liked um reading his race matters because he he's one of his sentences started my fellow christian and friend glenn lowry and then he went through about how he's completely wrong about everything and i thought yes this is what we need we need what kind of attitude do you think it's fair or unfair to say that post-modernism is a new religion is that an acc characterization well we we did a talk on that and we said no but it does i think fulfill the same social and psychological needs as religion i think for purposes of um the amount of power it can be allowed to have on over how other people think and speak it should be treated as equivalent to a religion in that it should be protected people can believe it they can say so they can live by it but they mustn't um impose it on other people right right i i find i must say i'm finding the whole thing extremely pessimistic because it's got a lot of things built into it that make it um very hard to course correct so for example this thing of double binds or this thing that um you know if you criticize that you're just proving that you're a very bad person so it seems to be something that's going to go and go and go and then crash and i find it hard to be optimistic you i think are a bit more optimistic than me or at least you were pretending to be in your last chapter you went through and you said what was worth keeping and what wasn't honestly are you optimistic i'm not as optimistic as i was a year ago when i finished writing that chapter before we saw all the um protests that we're seeing now i still don't think this can last um for long because it's it is too counterintuitive and it's really um sort of setting itself up against the majority which that's what worries me particularly i i think we could actually see a push back um on in the form of white identity politics and socially conservative ideas about sex and gender and that this could actually set us back considerably with the amount of progress that we've already made towards racial and gender equality but i'm i am optimistic because i this is a set of ideas that can survive for long term and the more extreme it gets i think the the more liberal lefties who aren't completely committed to social justice ideas are having to admit that there is a problem right and having to sort of distance themselves from it so i've seen the the rise of a group that is sort of between me and the social justice um people so they are now um criticizing me they're saying that i'm i'm too dismissive of um social justice but they're also picking up the problems in social justice so i don't think that um little tribe really existed even a couple of years ago so this is something in the leftist academic um sphere which is already starting to distance itself in a way that it hadn't before so yeah i i think it will happen i think it will gradually get marginalized unless there's you know something dramatic happens first and i'm afraid that in america we could even see something equivalent to a civil war at the moment i don't but it's it's escalating so fast it's really quite worrying okay i don't want to end on such a pessimistic note so i want to ask you if you could pick the things from these cynical theories because quite often you know you're very you're a very generous interlocutor you you often say you know i really like this idea or i get something from this or i think there was a really good insight here could you pick say three things that you think you know you learned and that you'd like to rescue from the conflagration if there is a conflagration um so i i think in queer theory um the pointing out that the way we see uh sexuality has changed so much in the last century and we shouldn't be too confident that we are now getting it right that is something i could certainly agree with um within critical race theory hmm that's a little bit more tricky because it's so um it's so dogmatic at the moment and it's gone down the path of robin d'angelo however i i think that we need to point out that there are still some very good um scholars looking at racial issues who are still accepted within that that sphere like i i particularly like as i said michelle alexander and she is still well regarded by the majority of critical race theory so i think there's space for some improvement there and then when we come to disability and fact studies there's there's some good work in there we're trying to sort of move the responsibility to be um you know with disabled people to be fully um active in society from the in disabled individual to society to to make society more accommodating of disabled people and um when it comes to obesity to to not consider people uh people's worth into in terms of their weight to such an extent that that actually is a stigma which isn't helpful so we can i think support those ideas unfortunately there's been a lot of nonsense about how you know being healthy is a social construct but there are good intentions in there and i think if you've got um shared goals but different methods that's that's something you can work with well that's a nice place to stop thank you so much helen that was a great discussion i really enjoyed