Reviewed by Nick Hetrick

Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay are nothing if not ambitious. In Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, they set out to offer nothing short of an intellectual history of postmodernism, an assessment of its contemporary form (which they call Social Justice Scholarship), and a remedy to what they view as its utter perils. Praised by the likes of Steven Pinker and Alan Sokal (of the eponymous hoax) and crammed with primary sources, Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book (starting with its title) sounds a very noisy alarm about the turn from the “high deconstruction” of early postmodernism to its current, “reified” form. Postmodernism in its present state, they claim, threatens not just intellectual rigor and progress but western civilization itself. In making these claims, Pluckrose and Lindsay join a growing chorus of voices concerned about a culture and intellectual climate overly skeptical of truth claims and unduly resistant to any brand of skepticism other than its own.

Given the heights Pluckrose and Lindsay hope to scale, readers of Cynical Theories must brace themselves for two challenges: first, getting their intellectual arms around the concepts Pluckrose and Lindsay take on; and second, assuming at the outset that there is only so much nuance possible in a book of this scale. Those who take these challenges to heart will be rewarded with a helpful genealogy of ideas and an appropriate caution against the most problematic elements of those ideas. Overall, Cynical Theories is an erudite treatment of identity studies in particular and, in general, of the everyday application of an activist worldview that has undeniably taken on a life of its own far beyond the walls of the academy. However, as I will discuss, the attempt to engage such a wide range of content areas leads Pluckrose and Lindsay to sacrifice precision for punch at some key moments—presumably in order to make their case for liberalism and against Social Justice Scholarship more compelling. 

Summary

The term “Cynical Theories” refers to a collection of content areas that Pluckrose and Lindsay broadly categorize as Social Justice Scholarship. These areas share both an intellectual heritage and an explicit commitment to applying what were previously the purely abstract (if consequential) tenets of postmodernism. The theories are “cynical” because they claim to discern invisible but real dynamics meant to preserve power for the powerful and deny it to the oppressed by constructing “truth” and knowledge through various types of discourse (political, legal, medical, etc.). They are Theory with a capital “T” because they share a set of unifying assumptions toward their areas of study—namely, the cynical approach just described. 

The book begins with a chapter on postmodernism’s origins and a chapter on its “applied turn.” These chapters are an achievement in their own right (in my view, the best chapters in the book). They situate postmodernism in a post-World-Wars moment of skepticism toward what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously called “metanarratives”—grand, unifying explanatory stories about why the world is the way it is. In the midst of such skepticism, postmodernism emerged as a movement characterized by “a profound cultural crisis of confidence and authenticity alongside a growing distrust of liberal social orders” (25). And whereas earlier skepticism about truth claims (for example, during the Enlightenment) were subject to scrutiny from, say, empirical science, postmodernism’s skepticism tended toward cynicism about the possibility of accessing any fundamental truths that might underwrite those grand explanations and stories. From the outset, then, postmodernism was committed to two principles, which Pluckrose and Lindsay call “the postmodern knowledge principle” and “the postmodern political principle.” They define the first as “radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism” and the second as “a belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how” (31 passim). 

The first postmodern thinkers were not explicitly interested in, let alone calling for, particular application of their ideas to cultural practices or institutions. Instead, they engaged in “deconstruction,” which is mostly an intellectual and linguistic endeavor meant “to render absurd our ways of understanding, approaching, and living in the world and its societies,” because the first step in questioning and resisting metanarratives is, naturally, to criticize and disrupt them (45). For example, French philosopher and foundational postmodern thinker Jacques Derrida argued—in keeping with the postmodern knowledge principle—that words do not, as we typically think, “refer straightforwardly to things in the real world.” Rather, “he insists that words refer only to other words and to the ways in which they differ from one another…For example, ‘man’ is defined in opposition to ‘woman.’” And in keeping with the postmodern political principle, man was “taken to be superior” to woman (40). Derrida was not evidently interested in any particular social change in response to his arguments (and perhaps this was an affordance of being a privileged, white European man). Like other early postmodernists, he was content to engage in a kind of destructive “play” that called knowledge, language, and explanations into question and destabilized previously taken-for-granted ways of understanding the world. This is characteristic of what Pluckrose and Lindsay call postmodernism’s “high deconstructive phase.” 

In the mid-1980s, however, a new generation of scholars and thinkers emerged who were deeply influenced by postmodernism but eager to apply its ideas rather than pursuing “[e]ndless dismantling and disrupting” that would eventually, inevitably, render itself useless (45). It was these scholars and their intellectual offspring who made postmodernism “more goal-oriented and actionable” (43). Pluckrose and Lindsay rightly point out, “It is these applied theories…not postmodernism itself, that have gone out into the world and manifested themselves in scholarship, activism, and our institutions” (66). This accurate distinction between abstract, “classical” postmodernism and its newer, applied form is both important and a sign of intellectual good faith from Pluckrose and Lindsay, who are careful to point out repeatedly that the early postmodernists raised necessary, important questions about meaning making, truth, knowledge, and power. 

As a result of this “applied turn” in postmodernism, “a vast body of work drawing on any (or all) identity-based fields has emerged since roughly 2010. It asserts the objective truth of socially constructed knowledge and power hierarchies with absolute certainty” (62). The ensuing five chapters of Cynical Theories take up a series of these fields, pointing out how the postmodern knowledge and political principles are at work in those fields. In each chapter Pluckrose and Lindsay furnish sample ideas and attempt to point out the practical value and importance of the given field’s ideas. Whether they give enough credence to any given field or idea is up for some debate. Having done this, they move to highlight both the intellectual and practical problems with one branch or another of what they call Social Justice Scholarship—their term for the sum total of these identity studies fields. As they put it later in the book, “Social justice scholarship has become a kind of Theory of Everything, a set of unquestionable Truths with a capital T, whose central tenets were taken from the original postmodernists and solidified within the derived Theories” (183). 

What, precisely, do Pluckrose and Lindsay think are the problems with Theory in its various manifestations? Primarily, they object to (1) its self-presentation as a novel and unique defender of human rights; (2) its functional denial of objective truth; and (3) its characteristic strategy of reducing everything to issues of power and oppression. 

Regarding Theory’s social justice predecessors, Pluckrose and Lindsay rightly point out, “Postmodernism did not invent ethical opposition to oppressive power systems and hierarchies – in fact, much of the most significant social progress occurred in preceding periods that it rejects and continues to be brought about by applying the methods of liberalism” (38). By the time postmodernism came into its own, the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism had done much of the work of pointing out and initiating material change on behalf of racial minorities and women. At this point, Pluckrose and Lindsay argue, the legal and structural barriers to women and minorities had been removed, so what is left to today’s postmodernism is little more than to locate invisible, unconscious, structural inequalities and imbalances that are mostly to be dealt with through its stock-in-trade: discourse and analysis. Pluckrose and Lindsay are highly skeptical of the value of such a project—a skepticism I will return to later. 

Regarding Theory’s denial of objective truth, Pluckose and Lindsay rightly point out a distinction between its existence and its accessibility. They write, “the postmodern approach might acknowledge that objective reality exists, but it focuses on the barriers to knowing that reality by examining cultural biases and assumptions and theorizing about how they work” (33). In other words, postmodernism (especially in its social activist phase) might affirm at the most abstract level that objective truth exists. However, its emphasis on its inaccessibility due to the constraints of language and of human subjectivity means that at the end of the day there is little if any hope of discovering it. Thus, postmodernism ultimately relinquishes any claim to discovering authentic knowledge—a fatal flaw, in Pluckrose and Lindsay’s estimation, and a critique I share.

The third problem with Theory is perhaps the most egregious, according to Pluckrose and Lindsay: its reductive, relentless framing of everything in terms of power and oppression. Discussions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, race, ability, and body type revolve entirely around questions of how oppressed people remain oppressed via the operation of the invisible, unconscious, and structural biases and discrimination I mentioned above. The reason this third problem is such a problem is that it forestalls discussion and debate on the grounds of empirical data and instead can only proceed via consideration of “lived experiences, emotions, and cultural traditions of minority groups” that must be considered forms of knowledge and then be “privilege[d]…over reason and evidence-based knowledge, which is unfairly dominant.” Evidence-based knowledge, Theory would say, is actually just one way of knowing. It should be put alongside but not elevated over other, historically minimized (or entirely ignored) modes of knowledge production (187).  

In their concluding chapter, Pluckrose and Lindsay advocate for their favored alternative to the Social Justice Scholarship that makes everything about power, oppression, and social construction—namely, classical liberalism. Why? Because liberalism stands on “firm tenets of individual liberty, equality of opportunity, free and open inquiry, free speech and debate, and humanism” (243). Liberalism offers pluralism without relativism, skepticism without cynicism, and the possibility of equality without an unthinking and unworkable demand for equity. They argue that liberalism and science have, by and large, been good for most people, most of the time—a conclusion that’s difficult to dispute.

Evaluation

As I mentioned earlier, Cynical Theories’s early chapters are its strongest. Anyone who has wondered what in the world postmodernism is, where in the world it came from, and why in the world it matters would do well to read Chapters 1 and 2. Pluckrose and Lindsay are obviously well-acquainted not just with the primary sources of early postmodernism, but also with the historical, cultural, and intellectual factors that gave rise to it. I think they are also right to point to a decidedly activist turn in postmodern scholarship in the 2010s and to the way formerly academic ideas have gone mainstream in western culture in the past decade or so. To be clear, postmodern ideas—skepticism about metanarratives, a commitment to relativism, etc.—were very much in the air prior to the 2010s, but postmodernism’s language and concepts were much more limited in their reach at that time than they are today. 

I mentioned above that one can only hope for so much nuance in a book attempting to cover so much ground. As a non-specialist in all but one of the fields they cover (disability studies), I couldn’t help wondering whether the selection of primary sources was appropriately representative of any given field, and whether perhaps Pluckrose and Lindsay were playing fast and loose with key ideas in service of their overarching purposes for the book. When I read the half-chapter on disability studies, my suspicions were confirmed. 

For example, Pluckrose and Lindsay mention in a single phrase that one of disability studies’ “most frequent postmodern themes” is (a) “a radical distrust of science” alongside (b) disparagement of “[t]he concept of the individual…due to the belief [in the field] that individualism enables a ‘neoliberal expectation’ to adapt to one’s disabilities and become a productive member of a capitalist society” (163). It is true that disability studies scholars (and scholar-activists) are (a) often distrustful of medical science and (b) critical of individualism. But Pluckrose and Lindsay do not address what might drive either. On (a), some hesitancy towards medicine is warranted given the history of forced sterilization, widespread institutionalization, and eugenics. On (b), many of us believe that there are pitfalls to the historically novel, radical individualism of modern society. Moreover even if (a) and (b) don’t follow from the relevant histories, a fairer assessment of disability studies would have addressed these understandable psychological obstacles. This suggests that Pluckrose and Lindsay have a very particular question through which they interpret disability studies: namely, how is it postmodern and why is that a problem? Never mind their careful attention to postmodernism’s intellectual history in the book’s opening chapters and the scant three sentences about the origin of disability studies in this half chapter. 

Pluckrose and Lindsay seem particularly scandalized by the idea that disabled people might want to place their disabilities at or near the center of their self-identification, let alone find some type of positive valence in their disabilities. They are aghast at the way “[t]his identity-obsessed approach pressures disabled people to identify with, celebrate, and politicize their disabilities,” saying that “[w]hile some disabled people may find comfort and empowerment in identity-first politicking, many won’t. Many disabled people wish they weren’t disabled…and seek ways to improve or mitigate their condition for themselves and others. This is their right. Accusations of ‘internalized ableism’ are presumptuous and insulting” (169-170). At one level, this is obviously true: if a person wants to seek amelioration for an impairment of one kind or another, that person should be able to do so without fear of reprisal from other disabled people (or from anyone, for that matter). At the same time, Pluckrose and Lindsay flippantly dismiss the impact of cultural attitudes toward disability, attitudes that are likely to obscure––if not obliterate––any positive valence on disability. This dismissal reveals a failure to understand disability history in particular, and the impact of culture on individual psychology in general. 

A similar type of incredulity reveals itself in the heavy use of modal verbs in the following paragraph:

[T]aking on a physical or mental disability as an identity…might…lead people to problematize or refuse technology…[F]ocusing on one’s identity as a disabled person can devalue other aspects of an individual, which could lead to greater fulfillment and quality of life…there may be an increased temptation to become more rather than less disabled and to focus overwhelmingly on one’s disability. This is particularly troubling if people can self-identify as disabled without a professional diagnosis or medical care.

Cynical theories, p. 170-1, emph added

In other words, a lot of things could go wrong, and people might miss out on things that would help them if they did those things instead of doing what they may do instead—namely, center disability as an important part of their identities. Again, there is wisdom in their caution. It should not be verboten to seek amelioration for an impairment, and receiving medical treatment or psychiatric help should not be viewed as an obvious sign of self-hatred or internalized ableism. Pluckrose and Lindsay are right to say that some disability studies scholars and activists seem to issue such prohibitions and hold such views. However, Pluckrose and Lindsay seem to be so busy worrying about what might happen if postmodernism runs amok that they seem literally unable to imagine the possibility that someone would experience pleasure or insight or some kind of benefit from an impairment if they were authorized—emotionally, culturally, spiritually—to do so. This last point regarding the benefit of impairment brings me to some final thoughts regarding a specifically Christian reading of Cynical Theories. 

Who Has Known the Mind of Christ?

Christians are rightly concerned about many aspects of reified postmodernism and Social Justice Scholarship. Many and more capable authors than me have taken up those concerns in other books and essays—and more to the point, this is a book review. But the vigor with which some Christians have embraced Cynical Theories deserves some pushback on both the theological and the pastoral levels. My concern is that some Christian readers may be quick to miss some of the book’s key points of departure from a biblical worldview in their fervor for taking a valid stand against some of postmodernism’s unbiblical assumption and conclusions.

For example, with respect to the half chapter on disability studies, Christians should pause over Pluckrose and Lindsay’s incredulity about the positive valences of disability. What will we do with passages about God using hardship to train his children (Heb. 12:7ff), his power being made perfect in weakness and actually producing strength (2 Cor. 12:9-10), or indeed the incarnation itself, in which Jesus took on what could reasonably be called a disability in a way that draws forth our trust and was motivated by his joy at being united with us (Heb. 12:2; cf. Eph. 1:18)? As I mentioned previously, Christians should not refuse all opportunities for medical care or accommodations. But Christians also should not be quick to dismiss the idea that disability is at least more complicated than a simple problem begging for a simple solution and eager to take any that comes along. Jesus did heal some people with disabilities, but he didn’t heal every disabled person he encountered. Presumably he still wanted those non-healed people to believe in and follow him, and those people would have had to incorporate their disabilities into their experience of following Jesus. A speculative case study comes from the recent dramatization of the life and ministry of Jesus and the Twelve, The Chosen. In The Chosen, Matthew is portrayed as (apparently) autistic. His lack of social graces and some of his unusual talents turn out to be some of his greatest strengths and the greatest help to Jesus. 

Throughout Cynical Theories Pluckrose and Lindsay are critical of what they call postmodernism’s “obsession with language,” saying that this “neurotic fixation” lies “at the heart of postmodern thinking and [is] key to its methods” (40). For example, in their critique of postcolonial theory, they point out that “repulsive” examples of colonialism would be “recogniz[able] as far-right extremism” if they were articulated the same way today that they were in the nineteenth century. “Neverthless,” Pluckrose and Lindsay say, “these attitudes are cited in postcolonial Theory as though their past existence produced an indelible imprint upon how people discuss and view issues today. Postcolonial theory establishes much of its claim to importance by assuming there must be permanent problems that have been handed down to us through language constructed centuries ago” (75). They go on to say that liberalism and science were responsible for progress in championing equality—and that’s true. But Christians ought to have a robust category for language, even “old” language, creating a lasting impact and having real power in the world. While we are not constrained by language, as some iterations of postmodernism contend, language undeniably does have enduring impacts.

First and foremost, when God speaks, his word carries power—in creation (Gen. 1), in the good news about Jesus (Rom. 1:16 passim), and in his revelation through his people and especially through scripture (e.g. Ps. 19). Human language also has great and lasting power on a biblical worldview. Examples are almost too numerous to know where to start: the power of the patriarchs’ blessings (whose impact rippled through Israel for generations and centuries and left a lasting sting in the life of, for example, Esau); the power of the tongue to give life or inflict death (Prov. 18:21); the power of God’s word to “demolish strongholds” that betray his truth (2 Cor. 10:3-5); and the astonishing difficulty of harnessing the power of the tongue (Jas. 3:1-12). Christians should be able to understand that language handed down through centuries could (if I may take a turn using the modal form) contribute to if not create built-in problems for minority populations. That would be especially likely if such language was the parlance of the day when important laws, economic policies, and other foundational institutional documents were established and solidified. For this reason, Christians should be at least willing to entertain the possibility that certain disadvantaging and problematic ideas could be “baked in” to nations and cultures. We can deny that language is a prison house while affirming that it does have real power. 

One clear historical example of seemingly innocent language perpetuating inequality is the American G.I. Bill. In principle, the bill was meant to provide for affordable housing (through mortgage loans) and education for veterans of the second World War. However, because of the relative autonomy of lenders and educational institutions, the fact that implementation of the bill fell to states rather than the federal government, and exclusionary policies at the state level regarding things like education and vocational training, over a million black veterans did not receive the types of benefits their white counterparts did. Did all mortgage lenders and admissions officers have demonstrably racist attitudes? Presumably not. Did the people who drafted and voted the bill into law know it would be applied this way? Inarguably so.

In the aftermath of the imbalanced opportunities the G.I. Bill provided, the disparity between black families and white families’ opportunities to build wealth and pursue diverse careers in future generations persisted. And while the United States offers much greater equality of opportunity now than it did seventy-five years ago, many families still live with real, present-day disadvantages as a result of the unequal application of the bill’s provisions decades ago. There is, of course, ample room for debate and disagreement about what if anything should be done about these types of problems. But it is impossible to deny that such problems exist and that they exist and that they are the result of discourse—namely, the bill and what its language and implementation made possible. To return to the broader point of which the G.I. Bill is an example: words have power, and even “old” words can have lasting and significant effects.

Pastorally, I think Christians miss an opportunity to connect with people who are “under the influence” of postmodernism if we lead with our opposition to postmodern ways of thinking rather than finding common ground where we can and expressing our concern responsibly. Having written that sentence, let me make two things very clear: First, that claim is not (indeed, could not be) a critique of Pluckrose and Lindsay. They make no claim to Christianity, let alone to writing a book about how to engage at all (let alone how to engage evangelistically) with non-Christians persuaded by postmodernism. Second, I share many of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s concerns about postmodernism and its trajectory in the last forty or so years. While I am critical of Pluckrose and Lindsay at times, I stand with them against postmodernism’s significant weaknesses and liabilities. Still, Christians should refrain from issuing (or retweeting) doomsday prophecies about the imminent demise of western civilization, which are unlikely (to put it mildly) to endear us to those we hope to reach with Christ’s love. Besides, to my untrained eye, “civilization” at this particular time is probably under greater and more realistic threat from the likes of Vladimir Putin than from Gayatri Spivak, gender politics, and the unapologetically obese. 

Nick Hetrick has a PhD in English from Ohio State and an MA in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.