this is thinking in public a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them i'm albert mohler your host and president of the southern baptist theological seminary in louisville kentucky dr james lindsey is a public intellectual a notable author on a range of subjects he holds a doctorate in mathematics in the university of tennessee at knoxville but his academic and intellectual output expand well beyond the fields of physics and math his six books span a variety of fields from philosophy and science to religion and contemporary thought he's also the co-founder of new discourses his most recent book cynical theories how activist scholarship made everything about race gender and identity and why this harms everybody he co-wrote with helen pluckrose it's an important critique of critical theory and contemporary culture it's a tour de force looking at the intellectual landscape that we confront today i'm looking forward to this conversation with james lindsey dr james lindsay welcome to thinking in public yeah thanks for having me i'm excited to be here yeah the title of your new book is uh cynical theories with the word critical crossed out the subtitle how activist scholarship made everything about race gender and identity and uh why this harms everybody you wrote the book with helen pluck rose and uh it's making quite a splash uh not only perhaps in uh academic circles uh but also in um a larger reach and and my guess is that was a part of the intention behind your writing of the book yeah the goal of of writing the book was actually to try to get these ideas outside of the academy it's nice if we can get the academy to reckon with the argument that we've made but it's more important from our perspective for average people to understand this very academic language and to understand where these ideas have come from yeah because as we'll get to in in your argument the problem is that what happens on the campus doesn't stay on the campus and that's something we're witnessing right now uh in many ways on the streets of america that's right that's right um it's it it's a lot of people believe that the university is just this removed place where kind of peculiar professors go and they teach their ideas their theories and and then you know young people go and they have their college experience whatever that all entails uh some of which is academic and a lot of which is probably growing up uh for the first time away from home and that it doesn't really matter much what happens in the university but this is not true um ideas have consequences and ideas are uh concentrated and they're they're explored and they're developed and then they're taught within the context of the university and they're taught to people who will go on to be our professionals to talk to people going to be our teachers and so on so ideas do definitely do not stay in the university now i want to come back to that a bit later because i want to uh to engage you in an argument about why uh certain ideas follow certain trajectories from the campus uh into a popular culture but but holding that back for a moment we've got our own meta-narrative to deal with here uh your your book is not only uh a book about uh ideas and analysis it's uh it's also uh i think kind of cleverly constructed around a narrative there's a timeline to this as well and you have to kind of work through the book to get that timeline but uh that timeline has a great deal to do with uh with my life uh i'm age 60 and so i i arrived at to the university campus just about the time a lot of this hit uh on the shores of the united states and i was in a particular place where i got it kind of full bore uh in the uh when i was 17 18 19 years old trying to figure some of these things out and uh you know the the language came uh about post-modernism and uh and and that was really interesting to me because uh as a teenager trying to deal with intellectual ideas and uh very interested in philosophy and theology apologetics just trying to figure this out it was clear that modernity was uh was not what the uh the founders of the of the modern age had intended and that was the the end of uh kind of like francis fukuyama the the end of history in their own sense they thought they had arrived at this uh this kind of permanent moment uh in the aftermath of the enlightenment uh clearly by the 1960s things were unraveling that that was not it and they'd unravel more quickly probably due to the the crucible of war for one thing uh in europe but europe had landed in the united states in a big way uh but uh to make the meta-narrative kind of come a little bit further uh by the time i was doing graduate work uh the entire academy uh was uh was was in a postmodern moment not every academic but the academic mood but then came the declaration about 19 oh i don't know 99 2005. post-modernism is over but i think one of the best arguments you make in your book is that post-modernism it's not over it was never over that's right in fact i think we we where we had the postmodern philosophers uh particularly uh john francois leotard saying that we live in the post-modern condition uh and he wrote that in 1979 i think we now actually live in the post-modern condition and i think the internet has a lot to do with that um the internet is sort of post-modernity's playground if you will and so the yeah the argument or the arc of the book is not is to actually disabuse academics of the belief that post-modernism died and convinced them that what happened is that it mutated or it changed it became something different and that you know we kind of earmarked the three-year span between 1989 and 1991 for when that transformation really took place yeah you know uh it just looking at this in the timeline uh the problem with post-modernism all along was asking what comes after post-modernism but in every one of these big intellectual movements there's been no retreat to a status quo ante so in other words post-modernism didn't mean that modernism ended it it was uh i think habermas and others speaking of a hyper modernity so this is this this is of course habermas didn't like it in a lot of ways but it was it was an unfolding of uh of the next stage it wasn't it was no retreat to a pre-modern condition that was unthinkable in the academy and uh and and then with post-modernism even when it was declared to be over it was kind of over because it won uh a lot of the discourse a lot of the a lot of the uh the intellectual environment of the american academy it didn't return to you know enlightenment rationality it uh it dived deeper into politics i mean that's that's generally a trajectory that's right um you you mentioned habermas you could bring up uh zigman bauman and his liquid modernity is the next evolution and he kind of makes the argument that uh the the rationalist project slowly dissolved all of the foundations of society into everything that had solidity became liquid and that what people call post-modernism is kind of an extreme variation on that and he rejects the idea of post-modernism and says that this is just very late stage modernism um my argument would be kind of to answer much of what you just said that the people and maybe even the people who are the architects of uh liberalism in the first place which is the is the philosophical foundation that gave rise to modernity maybe didn't understand exactly what they were creating and i don't think most people who who support uh the free and advanced societies that we live in now fully understand that liberalism was always meant to be whether the architects of it meant that or not it functions so functionally it's always been a means of resolving conflicts between people who disagree in the political realm we solve those with democracy in the the um economic realm we solve those with the market and with knowledge we resolve those with rational discussion rational debate the ability to try to get away from our biases to minimize their influence to check one idea against another so you and i may disagree on many things and i'm sure we do we can do so in certain ways that are pro-social and productive or we could do so in ways that are less good anti-social or destructive and as a means of conflict resolution liberalism allows you to forward your idea meet afford my idea you check my ideas i check yours and ideally we would be carving away wheat from chaff by that process and so my my thinking at this point is that the post-modernist in particular but also the critical theorists who were working alongside them in in some respects historically speaking not directly misunderstood liberalism and now that we find ourselves in a very post-modern condition most people seem to misunderstand what liberalism is and again just to be very clear because we're americans we don't mean democrats or anything like that we mean the philosophical underpinnings of the declaration of independence classical liberalism even the magna carta yeah thomas paine all of these yeah john locke and so on even the reformation as a matter of fact yeah lots to talk about here but as we're thinking about post-modernism and having this conversation we need to define the terms uh just in general terms a rejection of the meta-narrative you mentioned leotard uh and that's the idea there's no all-encompassing narrative to which all human beings are ultimately accountable uh and uh it gives the world meaning um and so that would mean in one sense the eclipse of marxism and christianity uh the the the metanarratives uh of of the west in particular uh but but that gets me to another point that uh i've uh i kind of intuited as a teenager trying to leave this and it's it's been demonstrated again and again to me as i look at history of thought in the west um after the enlightenment people put these in the enlightenment itself they put these extraordinary hopes for human liberation in some new way of thinking but that liberation never comes and so one of the things you know it you look at derek bell and and so he's extremely critical of the civil rights movement because it didn't bring about the liberation that uh that he thought would come the uh the philosophers of the enlightenment well their grandchildren thought the enlightenment didn't deliver and so you know post-modernism said uh you know all the men and narratives of the modern age didn't deliver and now you've got the what you call reified post-modernism in which case you've got the grandchildren of the post-modernist saying post-modernism didn't deliver there's a lot of frustration here that's right and that's in fact why we called the book cynical theories our understanding of what you've just described is that the theorists who especially the postmodernists who were very uh frustrated to characterize the postmodernist very briefly as a set of people who were working in a particular time and place they were marxists who saw marxism failing so they couldn't believe in liberalism they couldn't believe in christianity they couldn't believe in capitalism and now the thing they did believe in had also failed them so they were very very pessimistic but what we constantly see with this rejection of metanarratives and and so on is this this this tendency to look at these ideals like they're going to like like there's a faith that they are supposed to deliver right everything perfectly and it's very easy to become cynical when reality slaps you upside the head and says things aren't that simple um my co-author helen is very uh eloquent at saying that the postmodernist would have had a more reasonable case if it were true that the moment liberalism arrived on the scene then everything was supposed to be liberal but that's of course that's absurd and there's a very strong feeling that that's almost how they think about the world oh so now you know we have the civil rights act so racism is supposed to just go away that's not realistic uh the the question and the reason and we saw this particularly in foucault's genealogies but you can you can see it in the 1619 project today you can see it in essentially any of the analysis that we talk about there's this assumption also i should bring up the idea of positivism with science that there's this belief that science is very scientistic era in the 1940s and 50s you know you can even think of those um television and radio programs where they have that voice you know the 1950s voice i even say that you know what i'm talking about we have science and we're going to go to the moon you know it's got this very self-certain thing and if if we had the expectation that that that now meant that all the problems were going to be solved and maybe the the tones of voice and the attitudes of the the spokespeople gave that impression then there would be something more reasonable in post-modernism but this is mostly a cynical read of one step from another you can take say uh michelle foucault's history of sexuality and he says oh christianity got it wrong then we moved into sexology and that got it wrong and then we moved into this kind of criminal thinking about it and that got it wrong and so we're always going to have it wrong but at no point you ever see this this well you know we're still not perfect but we got it better you never have that kind of an ambition um which i think is is core to the liberal project which is why i mean they they always say that it's it's supposed to be radicals or whatever revolutionaries up against the status quo but in liberalism if you understand what it does there is no status quo there's always a perpetual state of learning and using that learning to reflect on society and hopefully do better by it yeah the uh the post-modernists and and here i'm talking about the the ones who were self-consciously uh a part of post-modernism especially in the 70s and 80s uh they they were filled with enormous frustration and i think a part of that is because you know you had the failure of marxism as a communist revolution on the part of the proletariat over economic issues it didn't happen in western europe but you know i was just reading the other day rosa luxembourg and reminding myself that that uh that frustration came really early you know it's so early that lenin had to deal with it why was there no revolution in the most industrialized city uh you know on on the planet which was london at the time and and in particular why was there no marxist revolution in germany uh because it it it would have made philosophical sense that it would have happened there and so you have this enormous frustration with communism not working and then i want to fast forward just for for the sake of clarity and time here i arrived on a college campus in 1977 and uh it was a secular university i spent a year as a faculty scholar at a university in florida and florida was doing a pretty clever thing back then they thought uh you still had mandatory retirement uh for uh academics uh in in 1977 and so the state of florida basically sent teams up to places like harvard yale uh brown and went to professors about age 65 and said hey won't you come work in florida you know join this new university faculty and uh you know you can basically end up retiring in florida we'll pay the bills and so i i got all these professors from the ivy league in particular and other places who ended up in this university and uh and it was the first time i heard this james they were saying look uh here's the deal it is clear that the consumer suburban uh society of the rationalized west is never going to allow for or facilitate the rising up of the proletariat in a marxist revolution as in classical marxism but that's okay uh because there's another way for this to happen it won't be from the bottom up like the proletariats can be from the top down through the institutions and and so i i'd not heard the name of uh of gramski at that point but uh it was basically you know rudy deutschke and and uh the long march through the institutions and so they they were saying look what we're going to do is take marxist analysis and and run it through all the disciplines in the academy and then and then through all the institutions uh but i think they thought that that was going to bring you know an immediate revolution in society i i think if if if my professors 1977 saw america in 2020 they'd be very frustrated uh you know isn't there just that kind of frustration that every generation thinks they're going to deliver on this i think that's probably right i mean the ever since especially the failures in the 1920s and 30s that you were speaking of there's been kind of a repeating cycle where various academics who to put it flatly are very bourgeois uh class of people have decided that they're going to figure out the right way they kind of appoint themselves like philosopher kings and they're going to figure out the white right way to teach everybody to think they're going to give them a critical consciousness and that will change everything and so there's these kind of cycles of very bourgeois theories that that don't really connect to reality because even with marx which was you know not well maybe you could say it's bourgeois or not there's still the there's this this is analysis which points at some truths and some in some things that are incorrect and then there's this kind of like gray area where nobody knows how it works and then all of a sudden we have the the communist utopia and nobody's ever solved for the how it works part meanwhile of course academics on that are opposed to this have figured out why there will be no making it work so it is a self-frustrating philosophy and they because it again the cynicism because it then focuses on its own failures and blames the system for those failures uh it can't say it's our own shortcomings that prevent us from getting to where we want to go it has to be the the nefarious powers it has to be the false consciousness it has to be the the ruling classes it has to be these people installing ideology instilling ideologies in all of us they are unable to understand that the source of their own frustration is themselves and then they're able to project that outward and so the frustration mounts and it kind of goes in these cycles where then eventually it bursts out onto the scene as we're seeing in 2020 as we saw in 1968. um i think that this is a a pretty cogent analysis of the the genus of the problem as opposed to just the species that we're dealing with at present but one one might argue in retrospect that the most surprising aspect of all of this is that uh critical theory itself would uh would it would emerge as a conversation uh rather necessary conversation in in the united states uh and necessitate your book because uh critical theory as it began it we'll talk about the frankfurt school and and and all those figures it it it didn't get so far politically even in germany for instance uh but but now all of a sudden it's been revivified and and and now it shows up as uh this explosive uh intellectual solvent uh go working its way through the academy how did that happen so the thing is that critical theory started off i would even argue i don't agree with it but it started off responsibly you had horkheimer laying out this concept that traditional theories meaning rationality philosophy empiricism science are not necessarily sufficient to deal with the moral implications of ideas that come out uh of of that line of inquiry and so you need this second dimension to analysis this critical theory and in particular we want to be as charitable and generous to their their case as possible they literally were staring at fascism and saying something is causing fascism something is causing genocides uh it mass scale the holocaust and so on and it is the rejection of any sense of morality uh the the understanding that with with science and technology maybe we can do this so the question of should is utterly removed and this leads to to true horrors but their original formulation and and you can even find herbert marcusa in the 1970s complaining about this on in a very famous interview he did on television they believe that it should be done in a very intellectual way the critical theory and traditional theory should be combined now i don't want to rescue critical theory or even any of these particular critical theorists from from the consequences of their ideas but the truth is that they at least tried to be more responsible with it now i mentioned herbert marcus and herbert marcusa is kind of a transformational figure in the united states becomes a transformational context why didn't it take off in germany well i can't say for sure but i can guess it why it was successful taking off in the united states there was a very um virulent strain of leftist activism that arose around the civil rights movement and uh if you read one-dimensional man herbert mercury is very clear that racial minorities are a an avenue to tap for this conflict theory based oppressor versus oppressed resentment to try to wake up and achieve liberation so now you have this move from let's look at the the production of culture mass culture elite culture high culture middle culture stealing away the the revolutionary will um popular culture was very adorno at that point saying things like that and now it's shifted to let's get the others let's gather the others let's gather in particular the racial minorities and let's combine them this is explicitly a you know quote from one-dimensional man let's let's combine them with the the radical intelligentsia in the university and so now you have this very willful move to make it about identity politics which obviously in the 1960s were extremely relevant in the united states but they've never lost their relevance then what happened was that they started to become less and less important as the echoes of the civil rights era and civil rights legislation came down through history so that by the 1980s and going into the 1990s they were seriously having diminishing returns so that's where you start to have the analyses of derek bell critical race theorist uh number one uh along with kimberly crenshaw critical race there's number two i mean literally they're named as the two founders mentor and mentee at harvard law laying out this new vision that clearly somehow the oppressor press dynamic has never been resolved that this this wasn't uh a success it didn't bring total racial reconciliation or total uh racial equality so something is missing and they they devised critical race theory for example and the the race issue is extremely touchy one but we could of course talk about the way that the feminists used it for that issue we could talk about the way that the lgbt i think it was just the uh gay lesbian alliance at the time used it um in terms of the gate what became the gay pride movement and so you can start looking at all the different identity factors we could even get into the aspects of the social model of disability eventually fat activism arose out of fat feminism and you get all of the various um pieces of the puzzle kind of coming to four where it became about identity politics and i think the vector there was that herbert mercur intentionally made it about identity politics and then he trained a generation of radicals including most most obviously and openly angela davis the black feminist who then went to palestine and further radicalized herself and then came back with this whole new way of thinking this sort of founded the black feminism movement in that liberationist paradigm and so that really set the stage for how critical theory retained its relevance and so helen and i have a discussion that we've decided doesn't matter at that crucial point in the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s was it that post-modernism mutated into a critical theory that uses post-modern tools or was it the critical theory picked up post-modern weapons uh which one is the the main object and what we finally decided over months and months and months and months of discussion about this back and forth she said is post-modernism picking up critical theory assets critical theory that has learned to be post-modern um we decided they fused they just fused they cherry-picked these activists in the 90s cherry-picked from both traditions uh very anti-intellectually but it's very easy to do justify that and here we are yeah it's very easy to do because they're amazingly parallel uh in their hopes and aspirations and and they're amazingly similar in the fact that everything has to fit into a oppression oppressor uh uh kind of uh matrix and by the way you know marcusa comes to the united states he arguably had his greatest influence in the united states and uh so you know the the hotbed of a lot of this shifted from frankfurt to uh berkeley you know and and right here in the united states americans largely unaware of all of this um you point to the trajectory of so let's assume these these uh these movements have fused uh but now it's being driven through every single discipline so uh and and in chapter by chapter i you really very hopefully lay out uh you know the and i think again it's a it's it's it's somewhat sequential with post-colonial theory and then queer theory and critical race theory intersectionality feminism and gender theory and then disability and fat studies and and like a lot of americans will be shocked by that last part because as you say it's actually more all coron uh at the current uh moment in uh in england uh in britain but uh but nonetheless this is uh this is the world we live in now and and what is shocking to me as a theologian and cultural analyst is that uh that this is showing up explicitly now that that's what's different all these ideas were behind what was coming out of hollywood where marcus by the way had enormous influence um it you know it was always a subtext it was only in the background but now now it's being foregrounded in in ways that i i think are actually shocking so walk us through the chapters okay yeah so the the book is organized to explain what post-modernism is to derive its core principles and themes so it's identifiable uh so that we can track it through history and then it moves into describing what we call applied post-modernism uh which is where the critical theory infused itself into post-modernism or vice versa and it became packaged up for activists and the way that that happened was that they chose for for various reasons that i think i described well enough already to use identity and systemic oppression based on identity as a as an objective really real thing that is obviously only subjectively experienced and only can be communicated in terms of subjective terms so that applied post modernism continues those themes and those uh those various uh principles of post-modernism but now has them in a very activist oriented way where it's no longer the goal to deconstruct everything because it's believed that you can't deconstruct a system of oppression without having i'm sorry you can ex you can't deconstruct the lived reality of systemic oppression without having the privilege of being outside of it so this was the observation that changed the course uh it came from the black feminists in particular uh and then it goes into these various theories so post-colonial theory you know fell mostly from edward saeed who combined franz fannin the very very radical um i guess psychoanalysts who analyze the post-colonial context the wretched of the earth black skins white masks uh you could even say that antifa is the combination of herbert marcus and franz fondan's philosophy and you can get that by reading their books where they cite them all the time and say that that's the case so post-colonial theory wanted to explore this this oppressor oppressed dynamic in terms of the east versus the west or the west as setting up its own goodness and power over eastern cultures as being barbaric and backwards and superstitious whereas the west is enlightened and rational and scientific and and civilized and it used a very uh both foucaultian and deridian analysis to try to flip that around edward said's book was called orientalism and he said that this construction is orientalism which is a very rhetorically and politically savvy move because the people who studied uh outside of the western context called themselves orientalists in a very neutral way before that so he therefore rendered all of his critics the united states state department had an entire department basically known as the orientalists i mean yeah exactly so he very savvy move and then the the goal there then is to deconstruct the colonial mindset and then once you start to say that things like uh using the most modern aspect of this that thought knowledge systems language those are actually products of the western culture and science is is usually one of them that's named as a product of the western culture that anybody who takes those things up has now been colonized by the west and so they have to be decolonized so you're allowed to now use postcolonial theory to take apart literally anything right that that resembles uh rational or scientific thought with queer theory the the object this is mostly going to be judith butler we could name other characters as well of course but the the object became to take apart stable categories of sex gender and sexuality in order to liberate people from the violence of categorization as it's called that they happen to be who they are and uh that that that's an intolerable and tolerable thing and so queer theory was born out of a desire to examine the ideas of normal and abnormal and to remove or even reverse the ideas of whether normal and abnormal or are good or not critical race theory came out of critical legal studies we we mentioned that a moment ago with derek bell and kimberly crenshaw took on post-modern tools and it took on a very explicitly identity first approach uh kimberly crenshaw very famously mapping the margins this is her 1991 paper where she says that intersection out she she doesn't introduce intersectionality here but she defines it the most clearly um she laid it out a few years earlier in another paper but in this paper she says that intersectionality is a provisional concept that's used to link contemporary politics to post-modern theory and what she means by contemporary politics she says the beginning of the paper is the liberationist radical uh in other words neo-marxist uh critical theory paradigm and she says that we're now going to recognize that a statement i am black is more important and more valuable than a statement like i am a person who happens to be black because the second of these forwards universal humanity first and as you talked about with the um pessimism here the liberalism had failed that approach had failed colorblindness had failed so now we have to focus on race all the time in everything in order to try to remove the the stain of racism if you will so it's like this they have this idea like the the fabric of society itself in every dimension is stained with with racism and the only way this is an indelible stain you read derek belly says it has a permanence to it you read any of the core critical race theory texts and they start off by saying that the racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society you read robin d'angelo's distillation of this from 2013 and she says the question is no longer did racism take place but how did racism manifest in the situation for it's to be assumed that it's in every situation and the analysis is to find it which is again a very cynical way to read human interactions phenomena or organizations and so this is a very um kind of cynical way to approach the idea of race but it's also a very divisive way that forwards the ideas that um race has to be made relevant more relevant and more relevant and more relevant in order to overcome the the problem of racism which they see as kind of a permanent stain on the fabric of society and they see no way to remove this stain so this the fabric itself has to be unmade and remade in a critical fashion in order not to have it so this is a a pretty nasty way to approach this um gender theory came a lot out of kind of feminism going into women's studies it's kind of a very complicated history uh lots of branches of feminism turns out none of them get along uh we started out the chapter by chronicling something poor helen had chronicled something like 25 different branches of feminism and i said helen we can't do 25 we have to like three and this is way too many we have to group them up somehow nobody's going to pay attention to this um but yeah gender gender studies came out of women's studies by trying to say that the object of relevance is seeing gender as being socially constructed and to advance that idea as far as humanly possible of course queer theory spun out of this this idea so those are related but the idea went so far as even within queer theories to say that sex is also socially constructed everything's socially constructed and so the idea is to interrogate the social construction of gender and thus try to render it deconstructed and less meaningful fat and disability studies uh apply the same line of thinking especially the identity first thinking we see in critical race theory got adopted into the these uh many of the methods of queer theory got adopted they see you know being disabled as abnormal being fat as abnormal as society views things and therefore we have to do the normal abnormal queer analysis they're kind of these late comers to the party very um hodgepodge sticking together of ideas that the other theories had already developed um the one that people will find most alarming of course is i i've run into this it surprises me i've lost touch a little bit people say fat studies what's that is that like studying you know obesity and it's known as the systematic rejection of the idea of obesity as a oppressive discourse generated by medicine to control fat people uh it's a very conspiracy theory and that's a real argument you know i came across this uh when i was uh in in london just uh just before covet 19. and uh on university campuses uh that that's a much more vibrant i'll say that discussion uh there where the norms of medicine are are now being rejected as being a part of a capitalist consumerist uh conspiracy right yeah um the that they go so far as to even say that if we were to come up with say that we the pharmaceutical companies finally had their i think found their their if you will holy grail pardon the the metaphor but if they found that their pill that cures uh being overweight that brings people to their to their ideal weight uh that would actually be a fat genocide they they perceive it that way and and that same argument is is being on this side of the atlantic used increasingly uh and i i confronted it pastorally uh uh in the last year by people who say if deafness could be cured or blindness could be cured right that would be the genocide of deaf people and and blind people right which is alarming but i'll give you an even more alarming one imagine that same pill i just mentioned with regard to fat actually existed and it were to bring people to their ideal weight there are actually communities called pro-ana which refers to pro-anorexia that see anorexia nervosa itself a severe eating disorder that's extraordinarily dangerous and unhealthy especially to young girls as an identity as an identity to be leaned into as an identity to embrace so if a pill were to be invented that brought people to their ideal weight which is a healthy weight which is not an anorexic weight you would then have that being a genocide of the anorexic identity but that gets me to a huge question that uh you don't you don't resolve really in your book but but uh it's in the background to everything and and that is that uh if you take the western conception of humanity and i'm going to say a biblical conception of humanity there are three different contexts it starts with every single human being made in the image of god and uh and situated within a particular context of family and and then you do have on the other side uh you might say the the largest category is humanity as uh what we share in common every single one of us made in god's image regardless of race creed ethnicity uh historical placement et cetera and and in between our is social man or social humanity uh the uh the critical theorists and especially by the time you get to to identity politics everything's the group the individual largely disappears and uh and and western liberalism and by that we mean the western experiment and ordered liberty is in the declaration of independence is built upon um an understanding of the the importance of the individual and the concern the individual is going to be crushed by the society but now the individual disappears into these group identities that's right yeah what the fourth of the the four themes that we outline in in cynical theories of post-modernism is the denial of the universal of humanity the denial of the individual and favor of group identity uh in in this school of thought they call it positionality it's the individuals to be understood in terms of their almost like an ambassador for their group identities which are to be understood intersectionally and so all of your relevant group identities which mix and match are relevant and you have to recognize as an ambassador of those groups that you're not an individual but rather you're a spokesperson so you would have to say things like say you were a black man you would have to come out and say well as a uh as a man i have to kind of be i have to have to remain silent and listen to my my female com compatriots and as a black person i can say that this has been my lived experience of oppression this gives me unique insight which is the intersectional derivation of what the feminists earlier had come up with called standpoint epistemology or standpoint theory um so you have this this issue now where you always have to speak as an identity and it's because the notion that it came from i think i think it originated in feminism personal is political uh has gone the slogans step further where the is is now kind of both directions personal the person is their politics so this is why for example you see someone like uh kanye west put on uh make america great again hat and the next thing you know you have tana hissy coats coming out and saying he's not really black um right so he's disqualified himself and this of course was explained more explicitly later by our friend the new york times nicole hannah jones who did the 1619 project and she said well there's a difference between being racially black and being politically black which if you want to play the you want to play it clearly what this tells you is that the ideology thinks only in terms of people that it agrees with and that's the only people that speak for it doesn't speak for say black people or gay people or women it speaks for socially constructed groups and those people who speak authentically to the way the theory conceives of those are the ones who are the authentic representatives and that's what intersectionality demands of people most readers realize that every time you read a book you're effectively having a conversation with the author or authors that's particularly true in a book like this and now i have the opportunity for a conversation with one of the authors and that's an incredible privilege but reading's a privilege just the the opportunity to pick up a book and engage with another's mind that's a rare privilege and to take ideas seriously and uh charitably but always critically in the best sense reading a book reading a newspaper article or anything consuming any artifact of of our consumer culture it requires us to think carefully about what we're doing while we're reading and to think about thinking as we're thinking and that's the fun of it so intellectually uh critical theory something like an acid and it reminds me of uh a parable that daniel dennett at tufts university has has used and that's the parable of the universal acid it's uh he talked about being a teenager and uh imagining an acid that would dissolve everything including the container that held it and including the you know the the table in which it's that until eventually the entire cosmos is destroyed by this universal asset and uh i think that parable plays out here because we see it in real time i mean the headlines this week are about ellen degeneres on the wrong side of history you know because this is exactly can't stay on the left yeah go ahead no i'm sorry i didn't even hear the last part because yeah i mean you you can't you you can't stay on the left so betty for dan the prophetess of of second wave feminism you know by 1977 she's threatened with being kicked out of the movement because she's anti-lesbian you know and sees it as the lavender menace you know and and and uh you know martina navratilova is uh is now on the wrong side of history uh because she believes that uh women biological women ought to compete in women's sports uh at the highest level you can't stay all courant on the left for long that's right yeah this is this is not an ideology that can be compromised with a lot of people want to try to introduce you know a soft version of it or whatever they think oh well we can bring it in a little bit we can use the use it analytically but the center piece of the ideology is complicity with systems of oppression that is the object at the very center so started off earlier saying ideas have consequences that idea has a consequence is that if anything that is complicit with systemic oppression is bad it's only a matter of time until they figure out a way that you are also systemic uh complicit with synthetic oppression so you can't you can't compromise with this ideology you can't bring a little bit of it in because um if they compromise with you if you try to have a compromise with them and it's very important that somebody asked me on twitter just a little while ago what what treaty what truce what what compromise could we make to just get this to stop which is the fear because people will want the the mayhem to stop and the answer is there's not one because if they if they said okay here's if you sat down with one of them for example and one of these very radical activists maybe angela davis i don't know we'll just pick a name and you said this is this is as far as i'm willing to go but i'm willing to bend on x y and z but i'm not willing to bend on on r s and q uh that and she signed to that that would mean that she's being complicit in the oppressions of rs and q which is exactly the opposite of what is possible within their ideology so the only way that they can compromise the only way that they can have anything short of of total acceptance of their critical view liberation from oppression being the key and only moral value is by uh by having all of the power having all the say anything else betrays their ideology anything else portrays their their one core value um it would be like turning your back on god right which as a christian you'll understand is not something that is is something you can be compromising about so there's no room for for a compromised partial position i mean i you know you will i think know about the fake papers we wrote a couple of years ago the fake academic papers and one of them oh yeah was a translation of a chapter of of hitler's men conf and the phrase from that that really stuck out to me was there will be no half measures and that's how this works there are no half measures meanwhile because it's it can find oppression in anything remember it's not the question is not did racism take place but how did racism manifest in this situation because it can read into it any any way that it wants and it's anti-intellectual and it's now postmodern and that it can can it's all about subjective truth and not objective reality it can attach to anything it can attach to christian faith it can attach education it can attach to national governments it can attach to our nuclear labs apparently um it can attach literally to anything and make a critical theory of anything even math i mean there's been a summer-long argument that i think i started about two plus two and whether or not it equals four or five um it can attach to anything yeah when i uh when i teach philosophy and worldview i i use the two plus two plus four and you're a mathematician your your graduate work is is in math and uh i think what uh what you uh define as uh uh abstract math uh at that level enumerative combinatorics more specifically if you want to play dorky times well i really appreciate you saying that but i must admit uh i'm i'm not able to engage that particular uh branch of mathematics we'll sit down and i'll show you the basics sometime it'll be fun you'll appreciate all right and we don't have to go very far i would appreciate that but when you say two plus two equals four um the uh the fact is that there are people who on the one hand will say two plus two equals four is is obvious and uh for instance when they point to their contract uh they wanna make clear that two plus two equals four but they wanna argue that the entire project of western civilization is based upon an oppressive limitation of knowledge to the privileged uh who exercise their privilege by applying two plus two equals four in such a way that it uh it represses people and groups in particular right but uh but you you point to something and i i just want to get to this you know there can be no resolution or um in other words the revolution has to continue always there can be no resolution that this is where it differs from classical marxism at least march had an eschatology uh there is there is no end game have you read your uh paolo ferrari the brazilian educator and his remark on uh pedagogy of the oppressed yeah that for a revolution to be authentic it must be perpetual for the second it stops being revolutionary it is the status quo so yeah perpetual revolution uh two big questions i i want to address to you uh one of them is and and i would i would have been glad to have had the time to walk through every one of these chapters because i actually think you trace you trace the genealogy uh there's foucault uh of uh of all of these ideas it's extremely well you lay them out very well but uh but where is this headed so uh there's a sense in which uh i think the american people and i'll say american christians for example who uh who are are deeply aware of the reality of injustice and uh and very concerned about the humanity of every single human being and know they're supposed to be uh they understand that things need to be fixed and and i'll call that reform there's a reform impulse but uh but what most of them don't understand is that what's going on and especially i want to say the people on the streets but the people who are driving uh that dynamic um they're not looking for reformation they're looking for top to bottom revolution and as we said just in in continuing so what i see and i appreciate your title cynical theories i go back to frustration heartbreak and frustration you know what i see right now happening in the headlines is is an enormous amount of heartbreak and frustration the people you know the revolution isn't delivering so where do you see this going i don't think that the ideology itself is stable and i don't think that it is popular when people see what it is so i event i think it will eventually fall you have to be always wary when you see something like this arising that it will gain enough institutional power to do some real damage before it collapses even the the marxist experiments collapsed but they did some serious damage along the way china not withstanding we'll see what happens uh north korea i suppose also but i think where this is going is that it we're in a moment actually of moral panic uh we do have and of course i share these um profound concerns about the humanity of every individual every person regardless of race sex gender sexual identity as judith butler phrase it that exasperated et cetera with all the different categories of people who've had it harder than others historically in in some ways even today but we are concerned about drawing that line between reform and revolution we we're very concerned about applying rigorous methodologies to find out what the genuine problems are the depth of the problems that causes the problems likely solutions to the problems whereas on the other side it's a it's a very toddler-like mentality that there's a bad thing get it off of me so not everything with the police as roses abolish the police that's that's the mentality the thing that's not working for me get rid of it completely uh which is a completely different mindset um so where i see this going is using this moral panic using the narratives that are being spun we can look at the black lives matter situation and of course this the three-letter or three-word uh slogan not the movement itself is is a truism this is something that virtually everybody we can't get everybody but virtually everybody agrees with in the world today um however if you look at the the movement and you look at the the claims that they're making about police violence they just don't hold up to evidence if you look at the specific cases that they're holding up as martyrs they they fall they're very flimsy these are not exactly the martyrs that a movement would want on its side the stories just don't stack up so what's happening is that a narrative has run away there's narrative privilege with with this because of the moral panic so we have institutions taking this stuff on very quickly i'm hearing more and more from people that it's backfiring where they've taken it on and now they want to find their way out it's like well you buddy you made a deal with the devil he's going to collect and that's the end of this is that it will infiltrate as many institutions as it can which may go as high as our federal government it's not impossible it could happen here as they say and every institution that it infects will lose all credibility and collapse within some amount of time that i don't think is terribly long yeah it can't work i mean you see uh american corporations trying to incorp no pun intended incorporate this and uh it and it it doesn't work uh so for instance there was a new york times uh article the other day about inclusivity officers and they're ten years incredibly short at all these fortune 500 corporations because they can't deliver uh you know what's expected uh they they can't bring about a revolution uh as as basically their job description and uh and it doesn't work uh i have a conversation with books all the time i've i've got a fountain pen in my hand and a red marker at hand and uh so when i read your book you had one point at the at in your conclusion where you said you know we have to avoid this being institutionalized and i just wrote a giant how in the margins well we were a little more optimistic when we wrote that chapter you know before this riot stuff started um and the answer what we've seen successfully is is consistently being able to stand up and say uh to stand for for for universal principles and individual principles uh whether if it's in say an institutional setting and somebody says well this institution is racist the what has worked and it does not work easily i don't want to give people this oh it's just a magic wand and it works but it's to demand evidence you say the institution's racist bring the evidence and we'll evaluate it and let's see the totality of the evidence let's let's weigh it out and let's have you know whether it's a conference or whatever we have to have to hear the voices and we do say in the last chapter that we need to humbler liberalism we need to listen more uh we liberal liberals throughout history have i think that the the big takeaway from this whole movement is when you see this frustration and this anger there's a legitimate side to it as well which is people don't feel like they're being heard so we can all learn to listen better we can all learn to bring people to the table and listen more but then it has to come down to objective standards whereas the evidence we have to have evidence if we're going to change the organization around your claim of racism we have to have evidence that the majority of us can agree that a reasonable person if we use the the term from law reasonable personal standard would agree that this constitutes a problem and then let's figure out why that happened how it happens and what we can do that might actually work to deliver the the answer when it's in any kind of an individual context it's a little bit different where you're not you don't want to necessarily demand evidence but let's say that uh you know somebody comes to you with this the principle ultimately is secularism which protects faith from state encroachment and protects the individual from the encroachment of faith and that they don't necessarily believe so if a muslim imam comes to you and they start preaching at you you can say listen brother i respect your right to believe that and i'm glad that that's working for you and i have a different set of commitments that i'm going to uphold so in this case somebody could come and say well what you just did don't you think that's a little bit racist and it's the reply is well i have a different conception of racism and i feel like uh i have every right to have a different conception of racism just like you have the right to have your conception of racism and we start thinking in terms of this uh very it's technically secularism it's it's the right in a sense the beating heart of liberalism is that each person's matters of private conscience get to be their matters of private conscience if they want to form a community around it that's a matter of willful inclusion if you want to form a church please do go practice your faith within you know limits of the law of course let's not have sacrifices or whatever else obviously um but you get to practice your faith as you will right and so this scene as a faith just conceptually not necessarily illegally immediately starts telling you what to do how do we keep it from institutionalizing see it as a faith legally then all of a sudden the entire apparatus of the first amendment and all of the law around that could start to de-institutionalize it or just watch some start collapsing you know you get a couple of big corpse collapse say disney takes a lot of this on say they lose you know a couple billion dollars you're immediately going to have a bunch of other corporations firing their diversity officers or uh or at least cosmetically uh making they may leave them in place but they'll change they'll change the way they do business yes yeah uh then now uh you use the word this is a this is a footnote but it gets me to the last big question when i ask you uh i think you misused the term secularism because you're using it i i see the french use of of the word there in the united states it generally at least in my circles uh means a more overt hostility uh to religious faith and uh i don't think you mean that i don't know i'm in the book the broader principle of protecting faith from the state and protecting the individuals from the encroachment of faith that don't match their their the contents of their private conscience which i think everybody agrees with and well that's part of the american charter yes yeah that that's part of the american charter i mean uh so everyone meaning everyone outside the united states that clearly is not the fact that as you would well know right in much of the world and i definitely don't mean by secular anti-religion i definitely don't mean that yep all right so then uh the the final question i want to ask you and i assess in all honesty because i agree with so much of your book in fact all the all the the major points of analysis but you're right from a different from a different world view than than my own i'm a uh an evangelical christian uh and you write as uh as an atheist uh in in and you've written two books uh on that so one of the things i appreciate most about this book is uh is your affirmation of truth uh as a category and uh your uh diagnosis of the problem of defining everything is uh socially constructed uh and theorizing everything and problematizing everything um so so and i i mean this with all sincerity where where do you ground truth and and by this i understand two plus two equals four but in a lot of our disputes right now are moral where would you point to uh the the true epistemic uh authority for for morality and adjudicating that in a society right yeah morality is a much a very complicated question it is it is very difficult so the the broad answer to your question of course of where do i how do i ground truth if we want to put it in more familiar terms i might say spinoza's god but in general it is the correspondence theory of truth that if we go out you and i we have very different worldviews we have very different understandings of things but if we perform the experiment then you know a simple experiment or a complicated experiment we're going to get roughly the same result and if that's happening then we can provisionally use that as a truth when it comes to morality we are now in a very complicated very complicated uh sphere human beings psychologically human beings sociologically are very very complicated systems i believe the science is sociology psychology and so on that study these things are in their infancy they're almost if we look historically you know sciences like geology you know they were arguing like literally with cancer culture they're arguing over whether the seafloor basalt rock was a product of volcanism or whether it's a product of something precipitating out of the ocean it was the volcanists versus the neptunians which sounds almost like a cartoon now um but there's this is a very violent conflict between academics before geology became an actual science and then lyell very famously said look we're just going to go look at the rocks and they spent 20 years they formed a conference that we're going to set aside their biases and they're going to do the best that they can they're going to look at the rocks and see what the rocks tell them and then a more mature science of geology was born and has matured ever since well psychology and and sociology are extraordinarily immature sciences still we barely barely understand what's going on and we're still caught up in ideas like is the point of learning about the world to understand it or to change it uh to echo marx and without having a very robust science of psychology and sociology we do have to do a lot of approximating and that's part of why i think that the principle that we just discussed of secularism is so important is that you are perfectly entitled to your beliefs that morality comes from that say the bible for example i think is the right answer for you uh or your relationship even with with christ as you understand him through the bible and through through other theological writings and i can say that i derive it from my experience with other human beings and what leads to positive outcomes and what leads to negative outcomes and i admit that's in a very blurry way and that we can sit down and communication with one another because we believe that there is something that is moral we believe that there are generally right answers to moral questions and your views can inform mine and my views can inform yours maybe it helps you deepen your understanding of theology to talk about you know something from neuroscience and maybe it helps me deepen my understanding of humanity by listening to a theologian uh and to to even read the gospel for example and so i think that this is the dividing line right the on the one side of this we have this attitude where we can uh say that we do believe that there are there are answers to these questions we believe that there may be easier or harder to to get to or there are different ways to get to them and we can use them to mutually inform one another versus everything is almost relative which is what we see with this critical social justice ideology uh within post-modernism of course it was more or less that everything is relative and then as it took on the critical theory the liberationist paradigm came into play where that which upholds oppression is immoral and that which facilitates liberation which basically means marxism is uh moral and that's of course one moral view and if people want to believe it a matter of private conscience good for you let's have a conversation maybe you're going to point to things that i'm not seeing and we can we can round out a better understanding of human interaction and human flourishing but i mean that's a very broad answer to the question i don't have something to just say you know well god is the objective standard and i can point to that but i'm also definitely not a subjectivist spinoza's god is pointing to the world to try to understand it the best we can fascinating discussion i would look forward to having uh further discussions with you as uh as that becomes possible but you're an intellectually honest man and i think you've made an incredible uh case uh in this new book you've written with helen pluckrow's cynical theories so uh james lindsey thank you for joining me today for thinking in public yeah thank you so much it's a great conversation how i appreciate it as i said to james lindsay i am uh shocked frankly at this point in my life that uh the incursions of critical theory and the uh the reified form of postmodernism and by now you know what we're talking about there that these have made such headway in american culture not just in the academy where quite honestly uh these forms of thought have basically been dominant for the better part of the last several decades uh but uh but also in popular culture and in the headlines coming from what's happening on the streets of america this is a very interesting development it reminds us of the fact that ideas do have consequences uh a title famously uh made by conservative writer richard weaver and james lindsay affirmed that very statement today ideas have consequences they always do but ideas also have a history and and ideas have future consequences that it's our responsibility to try to trace out and uh another thing about ideas is that they are themselves uh always developing now that that's always true you know you have one book on one idea the next thing you know they're they're 10 books and then it's 150 books but the conversation changes with every one of those books in some way or another and as as time goes forward it's uh very interesting that just talking about traditional western liberalism james made the very good point that uh it's it's not one thing in the sense that it's continuing to develop as a way of adjudicating conflict and and dealing with ideas as christians we look at this with a particular concern because it's not only about understanding the consequences of ideas and the intellectual context of our day it's uh it's understanding how we see all of these things as measured against the totality of a christian worldview you know one of the things that comes up to me again and again in this book is the fact that there's the frustration of the eschatology that never comes but if you are operating from a secular worldview that eschatology is going to have to come now or you're never going to see it but of course the true communist man true communism never emerged uh utopia never comes and that's where christians have a very different worldview a very different timeline we are looking forward uh to the kingdom of christ and its fullness but that also means that we don't expect all issues to be adjudicated and every eye to be dry and every tear to be wiped away until then we do believe we're here to do good and to glorify god and to make a difference and to engage our culture in such a way but we have to engage our culture with truth and that gets back to the last part of the conversation with james our understanding of truth is not just based on the correspondence theory of truth that's the first test of truth by the way for christians but it's that when we talk about morality and when we talk about issues of our ultimate theological concern uh we actually believe that they correspond to objective reality the objective reality the self-existent god and uh yes this takes us down to the authority of scripture so christians are going to read this book and should read very sympathetically and very appreciatively as an incredible indictment of what's happening in intellectual culture on both sides of the atlantic and it needs to inform how we think how we observe it needs to inform our church life it needs to inform our our engagement with the political and moral and cultural issues of the day it needs to inform how we think about the academy and sending our kids to college it needs to alert us to uh how we talk and how we hear other people talk uh but we will also realize that uh that this particular book is written from a defender of uh not only western liberalism in the in the more historic sense but also of uh of issues that uh are uh more contemporary than anything the the founders of uh of historic modern uh classical liberalism would have imagined uh lgbtq issues you know for example and so christians are going to have a very interesting conversation with this book but it's really important i i meant what i said i think it's the the best analysis of the contemporary intellectual scene written by someone who or by two authors in this case who really do understand what critical theory is they understand what uh what it means that post-modernism never went away and is continuing what it means that this is translated into the most not only seemingly unbelievable but dangerous forms of thought and why it matters because we care because of love of god and love of neighbor we care about what thought systems are shaping the thoughts and minds of our neighbors and what thoughts are establishing the society that we share with our neighbors we understand all of this matters and again i'm very thankful for this conversation with james lindsey hope for more conversations in the future if you enjoyed this conversation you'll find more than 100 of these programs at albertmore.com under the tab thinking in public i want to thank you today for joining me for thinking in public and until next time keep thinking [Music] you