163. Helen Pluckrose — Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2021

⏱️ 132 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

In this wide-ranging conversation Helen Pluckrose recounts the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.

Transcript

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1:35.9	guest today is Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and
1:41.0	speaker. She is the editor of R. E.O magazine and the author of many
1:45.2	popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and
1:50.3	feminism. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair Probe, which highlighted problems in social justice
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