Activist Scholarship Quotes

“Foucault adopted the position that there are no fundamental principles by which to discover truth and that all knowledge is "local" to the knower - ideas which form the basis of the postmodern knowledge principle. Foucault didn't deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“The "individual" in applied postmodernism is something like the sum total of the identity groups to which the person in question simultaneously belongs.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“While scholars can, of course, be activists and activists can be scholars, combining these two roles is liable to create problems and, when a political stance is taught at university, it is apt to become an orthodoxy, which cannot be questioned.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted. The perception of society as formed of individuals interacting with universal reality in unique ways - which underlies the liberal principles of individual freedom, shared humanity, and equal opportunities - was replaced by multiple allegedly equally valid knowledges and truths, constructed by groups of people with shared markers of identity related to their positions in society.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“The postmodern approach to knowledge denies that objective truth or knowledge is that which corresponds with reality as determined by evidence - regardless of the time or culture in question and regardless of whether that culture believes that evidence is the best way to determine truth or knowledge. Instead, the postmodern approach might acknowledge that objective reality exists, but it focuses on the barriers to knowing that reality by explaining cultural biases and assumptions and theorizing about how they work.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“The Postmodern Political Principle: A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Because of their focus on power dynamics, these thinkers argued that the powerful have, both intentionally and inadvertently, organized society to benefit them and perpetuate their power. They have done so by legitimating certain ways of talking about things as true, which then spread throughout society, creating societal rules that are viewed as common sense and perpetuated on all levels.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Throughout postmodern Theory runs the overtly left-wing idea that oppressive power structures constrain humanity and are to be deplored. This results in an ethical imperative to deconstruct, challenge, problematize (find and exaggerate the problems within), and resist all ways of thinking that support oppressive structures of power, the categories relevant to power structures, and the language that perpetuates them - thus embedded a value system into what might have been a moderately useful descriptive theory.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Because of its rejection of objective truth and reason, postmodernism refuses to substantiate itself and cannot, therefore, be argued with.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Almost every socially significant category has been intentionally complicated and problematized by postmodern Theorists in order to deny such categories any objective validity and disrupt the systems of power that might exist across them.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“[P]ostmodern Theory seeks not to be factually true but to be strategically useful: in order to bring about its own aims, morally virtuous and politically useful by its own definitions.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Those social sciences and humanities scholars who took Theoretical approaches began to form a left-wing moral community, rather than a purely academic one: an intellectual organ more interested in advocating a particular ought than attempting a detached assessment of is - an attitude we usually associate with churches, rather than universities.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“[Theoretical humanities], in turn, influence and often hold sway over the social sciences and professional programs like education, law, psychology, and social work, and have been carried by activists and media into the broader culture.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“After the applied postmodern turn, postmodernism was no longer a mode of describing society and undermining confidence in long-established models of reality: it now aspired to be a tool of Social Justice.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Thus, applied postmodernism focuses on controlling discourses, especially by problematizing language and imagery it deems Theoretically harmful. This means that it looks for then highlights ways in which the oppressive problems they assume exist in society manifest themselves, sometimes quite subtly, in order to "make oppression visible." The intense scrutiny of language and development of ever stricter rules for terminology pertaining to identity often known as political correctness came to a head in the 1990s and has again become pertinent since the mid-2010s.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“It used to be considered a failure of teaching or scholarship to work from a particular ideological standpoint. Academics were incentivized...by knowing that other scholars could - and would - point out evidence of bias or motivating reasoning and counter it with evidence and argument. Teachers could consider their attempts at objectivity successful if their students did not know what their political or ideological positions were.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“One does not merely challenge the dominant orthodoxy.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“It is hard to see how scientific theories that don't correspond with reality and consequently don't work can benefit marginalized people, or anyone.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“Queer Theory is dominated by the problematizing of discourse - how things are spoken about - the deconstruction of categories and a profound skepticism of science.”
― Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

“The main industry of queer Theorists is to intentionally conflate two meanings of "normative," and deliberately make strategic use of the moral understanding of the term to contrive problems with its descriptive meaning.”
― James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Papers that use queer Theory usually begin by examining an idea, problematizing it in queer (or "queering" or "genderfucking") ways, and eventually concluding that there can be no conclusions.”
― James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody