Michael Shermer w/ Helen Pluckrose-from Skeptic
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. Shermer and Pluckrose discuss:
- liberalism vs. illiberalism,
- Enlightenment/Scientific humanism vs. theism/authoritarianism/anti-humanism,
- modernism/modernity vs. postmodernism,
- social justice/wokeism vs. social justice,
- critical theory: revealing hidden biases & assumptions, inequalities,
- political correctness,
- cancel culture,
- identity politics,
- postmodernism,
- postcolonial theory,
- queer theory,
- critical race theory and intersectionality,
- feminisms and gender studies,
- disability and fat studies,
- social justice in action, and
- an alternative to the ideology of social justice.
Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and speaker. She is the editor of Areo Magazine and the author of many popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and feminism. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe, which highlighted problems in social justice scholarship, she is today an exile from the humanities, where she researched late medieval and early modern religious writing by and for women. She lives in England
