TRIGGERnometry - Helen Pluckrose on Grievance Studies & Postmodernism

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is the

00:00:13.000 show for you if you're bored of watching people argue on the internet about subjects they know

00:00:18.600 nothing about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our fantastic

00:00:25.520 expert guest this week is the editor-in-chief of Aero magazine, Helen Pluckrose. Welcome

00:00:30.480 to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me.

00:00:39.020 It's great that you're here. Thank you so much for coming. And listen, before we get

00:00:42.100 into the interview itself, tell our viewers and our listeners a little bit about who you

00:00:45.200 are, how are you, where you are. Well, I'm here from here in East London, and my background

00:00:52.160 is in English literature and early modern studies but I came into the kind the culture was kind of

00:01:00.680 via the new atheist movement I've always been very concerned about epistemology how we know what is

00:01:07.920 true and about liberal ethics so I was very critical of religion making unfounded truth

00:01:16.260 claims and having all kinds of

00:01:18.220 illiberal ideas about women and

00:01:20.320 LGBT

00:01:21.140 and that was the same

00:01:24.140 for Peter and James

00:01:26.280 who did their recent

00:01:28.140 project with us. We'll get onto

00:01:30.140 that. We'll get right

00:01:32.220 into that. So from that

00:01:33.980 when I was studying

00:01:35.720 English literature and trying to look at women's

00:01:38.080 history then the whole problem

00:01:40.000 of post-modernism and theory

00:01:42.180 that's derived from post-modernism

00:01:44.340 just kept coming up

00:01:45.960 and getting in the way of looking at anything rigorously and ethically.

00:01:51.220 So gradually my attention has turned from religious truth claims

00:01:56.600 and human rights issues to ones rooted in theory and in activism

00:02:02.740 that's sort of currently most known as the social justice approach.

00:02:08.180 Well, we'll get into all of that and the postmodernism and all of that in a second,

00:02:11.880 but tell us a little bit about Aria, the magazine, first of all,

00:02:14.640 for anyone who's not familiar with it.

00:02:15.960 Yeah, ERIO was set up by Malhar Mali to try and cut through the partisan divides,

00:02:23.300 to try and be open to a great range of ideas which were based on evidence and reason

00:02:30.000 and try and get all the different conversations out there and get people together.

00:02:36.200 He moved on in June and I have taken it over.

00:02:40.480 and I'm staying true to his aim

00:02:43.640 and I'm trying to get it a bit more well known in the UK

00:02:47.560 at the moment, half of our readers are in the US

00:02:49.980 so yeah, trying to broaden our horizons here a bit as well

00:02:54.900 And what does it mean to be a Liberal?

00:02:57.220 Because I hear this word bandied about a lot

00:02:59.600 people talk about being a Liberal

00:03:00.960 a lot of the time, sometimes people who say they're Liberal

00:03:03.480 I hear them speak, I go, well that doesn't sound very Liberal to me

00:03:06.680 So what does it mean to you to be a Liberal?

00:03:08.680 Well, I think that what you just said there sort of covers it.

00:03:12.560 That doesn't seem very liberal.

00:03:13.860 If something is illiberal, we recognise it much more easily.

00:03:17.280 It's something which isn't fair, which isn't free.

00:03:21.800 So to be illiberal is to try to shut down certain freedoms.

00:03:27.220 It's to be unbalanced and unjust, really.

00:03:33.600 So when we are saying liberal in this broadest sense,

00:03:35.900 What we are looking at is people who are concerned with freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of choice generally,

00:03:44.320 and people who are interested in a fair society and giving everybody the same opportunities to achieve everything.

00:03:53.860 It's a focus on individuality and shared humanity.

00:03:58.440 So every individual gets to access everything our shared society offers.

00:04:04.440 but I've so going back to my facebook echo chamber I'm in comedy a frighteningly hard left

00:04:12.840 industry and a lot of people tell me that freedom of speech is a right-wing issue and therefore

00:04:19.640 nothing to do with liberalism do you agree no I mean that that's what the the problem that we're

00:04:25.160 seeing at the moment the the liberals went when that the word liberal first came about it was

00:04:30.340 about freedom from the state in Italy and France and it still, I say it still does, it still should

00:04:39.180 be about this overarching freedom but what we've seen happen is the political scene has kind of

00:04:49.220 shifted so that now we have this hard left coming up and it comes from somewhere completely

00:04:56.560 different to the whole liberal aim it comes from the the radical side of what uh was once the the

00:05:05.020 marxist side but it's a rejection of marxism but it keeps this kind of idea of that it's really

00:05:12.740 quite sort of um authoritarian idea of language creating reality so we have to be very careful

00:05:22.520 with language we have to monitor and regulate what people can say and what they can't say because

00:05:28.020 that constructs our social reality which is in stark contrast to the traditionally liberal idea

00:05:33.020 of the marketplace of ideas where we believe that we can beat bad ideas with better ones and that is

00:05:39.160 in fact what we have done with increasing rapidity throughout sort of the last century so yeah the

00:05:46.640 freedom of speech

00:05:48.960 is not always

00:05:51.720 now associated with the liberals

00:05:53.560 if we're associating liberals with the

00:05:55.700 left, but

00:05:56.380 the hard left is illiberal, so

00:05:59.140 it is, we can get

00:06:01.680 lost in the words there, because of course in

00:06:03.500 America, liberal is

00:06:05.620 understood often to be synonymous with the

00:06:07.600 left, and in Australia it's understood to be

00:06:09.460 synonymous with the right, so

00:06:10.740 I think we just have to be saying, we're talking

00:06:13.580 about the opposite of illiberal.

00:06:14.660 it must be quite complicated for someone like you as well because when we were talking about

00:06:19.240 you coming onto the show you mentioned that you're someone who comes from the left right yeah so it

00:06:24.340 must be quite weird to see that part of of the political spectrum be kind of cannibalized by

00:06:30.000 this hard element increasingly and to the point where as you say we don't longer know what a you

00:06:36.700 know what's a left liberal you know it's become very complicated hasn't it yes what what i'm very

00:06:42.100 pleased to see is that a lot of the

00:06:43.900 identitarians

00:06:46.200 the social

00:06:48.160 justice identity politics left

00:06:49.820 are increasingly rejecting

00:06:51.520 the label of liberal

00:06:53.140 and they are associating it with

00:06:56.100 the right things. As they're

00:06:58.200 rejecting it, they're associating it

00:07:00.160 with a focus

00:07:02.160 on freedom of speech and a focus on

00:07:03.940 a level playing field

00:07:05.840 and not noticing

00:07:07.200 race, not finding it

00:07:09.960 significant, race, gender, sexuality

00:07:12.080 and they see that as a problem as trying to maintain a status quo which is unjust so there

00:07:18.480 will be a lot of criticism from them of liberals which actually helps our cause quite a lot for

00:07:23.980 those on the right who are inclined to sort of conflate the left liberals with the left

00:07:28.280 identitarians so long may they continue doing that so they're kind of pushing out almost the

00:07:35.100 people who are liberal as you say yeah and it's interesting because look we're equally critical

00:07:40.740 and the show of people on the far right as the far left,

00:07:43.900 I think they're both very, very dangerous.

00:07:46.220 And that's why we have to counter them, as you say, with better ideas, right?

00:07:50.820 Yeah, and I'm far more worried about the far right and the populist right.

00:07:56.660 But I think that is why it's so important to address the problems on the left.

00:08:02.620 Because when we're in a situation where people who are not firmly committed to left or right

00:08:08.960 but are somewhere in the middle trying to see who is making more sense

00:08:11.780 there's a real problem if the left isn't making sense

00:08:15.620 if the right is seeming more reasonable

00:08:18.500 more coherent than the left

00:08:20.720 then that's something that we leftists need to address

00:08:24.080 we can't just say well everybody who's gone right

00:08:26.780 has suddenly become racist, sexist, homophobic

00:08:29.560 and not caring about poor people

00:08:31.500 something has happened to undermine confidence in the left

00:08:35.440 and we need to address that as much as we need to criticise the right

00:08:38.160 And why are you worried about right-wing populism and the rise of right-wing populism?

00:08:43.860 Because it's anti-expertise, it's anti-knowledge,

00:08:47.340 it's producing quite a lot of the same problems that post-modernism is,

00:08:53.000 where we have alternative ways of knowing they have alternative facts.

00:08:57.580 We have post-modernism, they have post-truth.

00:09:00.540 So we're seeing a lot of the same sort of very, very fluffy thinking,

00:09:04.880 but then you get on top of that a real sort of problem with expertise generally and with with

00:09:11.820 knowledge so a lot of reactions to some of our work from people on the sort of populist right

00:09:17.420 is yeah experts know nothing universities are teaching nothing we just need to sort of go with

00:09:23.960 common sense and local knowledge and tradition and and yeah no we don't need to do that we you

00:09:28.280 know need to carry on sort of curing diseases and developing technology and being a modern

00:09:33.260 secular liberal democracy.

00:09:35.920 And why do you think that's happened?

00:09:37.180 Because if you think, you know, we are the most advanced we've ever been,

00:09:40.360 technology is the most advanced it's ever been,

00:09:42.740 yet you get these people now who sort of reject all that.

00:09:46.060 Why do you think that is?

00:09:47.400 Do you think it's down to the fact that they feel betrayed?

00:09:50.680 I think there's come about a certain complacency

00:09:54.360 and I think that what has happened is that society, culturally,

00:09:59.220 has been a liberal left for so long.

00:10:02.100 the the the sort of really liberal ideas and the the sort of left sort of economic social ideas

00:10:07.980 have really been dominant as uh what is good that people have forgotten how to actually defend them

00:10:14.980 and argue for them it just seems like this is how it should be so when one side becomes too

00:10:22.140 culturally powerful it can kind of turn in on itself start nasal gazing and and really get

00:10:30.640 quite mad so what we've seen with the cultural dominance and with the rise of the post-modern

00:10:38.460 ideas which came in at the the end of the um the civil rights movements all that all that good

00:10:43.900 stuff with um you know equal pay for women and equal rights for people of all races and

00:10:48.800 decriminalizing homosexuality and yet this has come in on the end of that and it's it's a

00:10:54.300 completely different and mad way of looking at it so now we've got that happening on the left and

00:11:00.960 on the right we've got a kind of reactionary pushback where there's a kind of pre-modern

00:11:07.280 nostalgia for a time that that never was but you know when there was just traditional marriage and

00:11:14.920 traditional gender roles and so we've got that narrative kind of coming in from there there's a

00:11:21.960 deep suspicion which is not unjustified of the idea of liberal elites in universities talking

00:11:27.920 incomprehensibly about pronouns and things so there's there's that but there's the too much of

00:11:34.160 a reaction to that you know there's a lot of wanting to throw babies out with bathwater and

00:11:39.420 i think if we did lose our our centers of knowledge production people would suddenly

00:11:46.000 appreciate them within a few years or within a few days possibly and they're very very important

00:11:51.100 of course but as you said there is there is a lot of people i think there are a lot of people who

00:11:55.660 feel like as you say universities and the media and politics has been dominated by a certain way

00:12:03.140 of thinking for so long yeah the the pushback now is almost a necessary correction to some extent

00:12:09.120 but as you say the you can't throw away the baby with the bathwater so how do we move forward from

00:12:14.500 how do we create which is what we're trying to do on the show is create that same center within

00:12:20.040 in which people from the left, people from the kind of non-far right

00:12:23.700 can come together and go, actually, we're all sane people,

00:12:26.000 we're all trying to move to the same place.

00:12:27.500 I know the answer to this. It's a good Facebook update.

00:12:30.380 That's what solves everything.

00:12:31.980 You say something like, racism's bad, up there, boom, nailed it.

00:12:36.620 Well, other than Francis' complicated and articulate solution,

00:12:40.080 how do you move forward from here?

00:12:41.940 Well, now I know how to fix it.

00:12:43.640 I think, James, Lindsay and I, we wrote a manifesto against the enemies of modernity,

00:12:50.440 a very deliberately provocative title,

00:12:53.020 and what we pointed out, which is similar to what you've just said,

00:12:56.540 is that the lunatics are the fringes, they are the extremes,

00:13:01.920 but what we are doing too much when we lean one way or the other

00:13:06.960 is looking at the extremes on the other side, reacting against that,

00:13:11.440 condoning or minimising the problems on our own side

00:13:14.280 and getting sort of further and further polarised.

00:13:17.620 We think that we need to re-conceptualise this

00:13:21.600 and look at how many of us actually value the fruits of modernity.

00:13:26.380 We value science, we value reason-based philosophy,

00:13:30.740 strong institutions, the liberal sense of freedom and of equal opportunity.

00:13:36.680 We are the majority.

00:13:37.720 and if we are pushing back at the far right or the far left

00:13:42.240 rather than at people who counter these values

00:13:46.940 which are very central to the development of Western civilisation

00:13:52.720 then we're aiming at the wrong things

00:13:56.740 we're going to be fighting with people that we don't really need to be fighting with

00:14:00.160 and we're not going to be addressing the problems that we should be addressing

00:14:05.360 And I think it's particularly important to address the ones that are on your own side, because if I know that I share very similar aims to the social justice left, I'm particularly concerned about social equality.

00:14:21.540 I'm interested in culture and in groups within culture and whether they are all having equal access to everything.

00:14:30.960 so we have the same aims but we have very different approaches so what we need to do

00:14:35.920 on that is talk about our approaches there's a certain resistance to talking or being allowed

00:14:40.580 to say anything from that group so that makes it hard but we need to we need to address it

00:14:46.140 and I think people on the right as well need to be looking at their extremes because there's a

00:14:52.300 tendency there to say yes look we have a few neo-nazi marches to which like 12 people turn up

00:14:57.580 and everybody else knows that they're bad people.

00:15:01.060 That's not how it defines us.

00:15:03.280 Meanwhile, you've got all these institutions

00:15:04.880 which are really quite sort of controlled by this narrative,

00:15:09.540 which makes no sense.

00:15:10.660 So we're not worried about our looms.

00:15:13.220 Well, you should be,

00:15:14.220 because we are seeing something of a resurgence of racism,

00:15:18.820 of sexism, of homophobia,

00:15:20.480 because we're seeing a bit of a pushback to traditional rules.

00:15:23.580 there's an idea that there's a threat

00:15:29.400 because, and I don't want to say that the left began this

00:15:33.260 it's been going back and forth for a long time

00:15:35.340 in America, James Lindsay will often argue

00:15:39.900 that the extremes of the right produced the left

00:15:43.080 I tend to think here that the extremes of the left

00:15:46.400 have produced the pushback from the right

00:15:49.040 but let's not get into who started it

00:15:50.880 where was i but yeah i i think if we've got this this sort of um coming up when we've got this

00:16:00.760 reaction now where we have um you know the way it becomes socially acceptable for women

00:16:06.820 to make very negative generalizations about men for um ethnic and racial minorities to

00:16:14.560 talk of whiteness

00:16:16.700 and being white in a disparaging

00:16:18.600 way. Toxic whiteness

00:16:20.200 toxic masculinity

00:16:21.620 white fragility and all this kind of stuff

00:16:24.180 what we're seeing from that

00:16:26.780 is a

00:16:28.460 kind of pushback reaction

00:16:30.540 because even if we

00:16:32.620 accept that systems of power

00:16:34.320 exist in which some groups

00:16:36.700 have been disadvantaged and may now be angry

00:16:38.540 and may want to say things

00:16:40.860 that we should understand

00:16:42.480 even if we accept that

00:16:44.480 we've got this kind of hardwired sense of fairness and reciprocity in us so if there is this seeming

00:16:52.680 imbalance where it's okay to be racist and sexist sometimes that does tend to produce a corresponding

00:16:59.160 racism and sexism back and so I think that goes a long way to explain why we are now hearing more

00:17:07.000 openly sexist or racist

00:17:09.360 comments

00:17:11.500 which are kind of

00:17:13.080 reactive

00:17:13.780 I think we need

00:17:17.480 to all take stock of this and try

00:17:19.500 to really focus on

00:17:21.580 a consistency

00:17:23.080 Are you saying that demonising

00:17:25.540 white men isn't a good thing?

00:17:26.800 I am saying that

00:17:27.700 What a racist thing to say

00:17:30.520 I will stick

00:17:32.980 my neck out and say that

00:17:34.120 I'm going to put that up on my Facebook feed

00:17:36.940 and watch it all melt down uh well you talk about the need for conversations on your own side and

00:17:43.980 as you say you're coming from the left uh one of the things that you've been involved with you

00:17:48.280 mentioned earlier with peter and james recently uh is precisely an effort to do that yeah which

00:17:53.600 is uh you why don't you tell everybody who a lot of people who are watching the show will know

00:17:58.000 exactly what we're talking about but for anyone who doesn't know about this whole

00:18:01.240 for fake papers and the grievance studies thing tell us a little bit about what happened what did

00:18:06.200 you do why did you do it and what was the result yeah we spent a year we intended to spend up to

00:18:12.260 two years but we got caught and yeah we wanted to write some papers that you may know james and

00:18:20.400 peter wrote a paper before in which they claimed that um uh penises were best understood as concepts

00:18:27.240 of toxic masculinity and they were causing global warming

00:18:30.180 it was very very funny but um they submitted it to a journal um which was quite low ranked and

00:18:40.060 there was some debate over whether it was predatory and whether it actually had actually

00:18:43.940 shown that um these ideas were acceptable or that journals will publish anything if there's a

00:18:50.660 there's a sort of profit for them so they decided to take a lot of the good criticisms from

00:18:56.580 the last thing and spend a year or two writing much sort of

00:19:04.060 papers which looked at what we are all worried about, looked at a denial of objective

00:19:11.460 knowledge, this sort of whole idea that culture is a, that everything is culturally constructed

00:19:18.400 and this inconsistent sort of liberalism where we're viewing everything in terms of systems

00:19:25.700 of power and certain groups who are always marginalised, certain ones who are always

00:19:29.620 privileged, what can and can't be said. All of those big sort of things that we're seeing

00:19:34.220 in action in social justice movements and which are coming from papers in feminist and

00:19:41.440 critical race, epistemology, philosophy and those sort of fields. So we decided, and they

00:19:48.880 brought me in on this to write as many papers as we could and get them into the top journals in

00:19:57.040 those sub-disciplines. So we've got one in feminist geography. Now that's not the highest

00:20:02.740 in geography but it's the top in feminist geography. When we're researching these ideas

00:20:07.700 we're finding that a lot of them that have great sort of cultural power like white fragility,

00:20:14.880 like toxic masculinity are coming from a collection of the few of the same journals so we started

00:20:21.360 targeting them with ideas which just should have been very clearly um nonsense not unevidenced

00:20:29.000 and also unethical so yeah we claim that by examining the genitals of a thousand dogs in an

00:20:35.200 Oregon dog park we could see evidence of human rape culture and get some tips on how to train

00:20:41.500 men like dogs that that really shouldn't have been acceptable and yeah but we've um we did get

00:20:49.680 yeah a section of Mein Kampf um which was rewritten as intersectional feminism and it's important not

00:20:56.680 to uh dwell too much on that we're not that it's not sections talking about genocide or

00:21:01.660 anything but it's um that very sort of totalitarian grievance uh sense the us and them and the

00:21:08.460 needing for everybody to sort of, yeah, become one solid group against the enemy.

00:21:13.000 So we, yeah, we managed to get that through.

00:21:15.680 And we claimed that morbid obesity is not admired in the same way

00:21:23.760 that muscular bodies are because of prejudice

00:21:27.080 and that there should be, bodybuilding competitions

00:21:32.660 should include bodies that are built with fat as well as with muscle.

00:21:38.460 That's quite a good premise for a joke.

00:21:40.200 Yeah, it is a very good premise.

00:21:41.560 I actually know one comedian who tweets about that all the time.

00:21:46.380 I mean, it is silly enough, but that's actually quite a serious problem.

00:21:50.940 We have seen campaigns to prevent the cancer research from saying that obesity is a problem.

00:22:01.520 Doctors talking about it, as a medical issue, are accused of fat shaming.

00:22:08.460 And, you know, I, as someone who doesn't exactly have thin privilege,

00:22:12.160 I still kind of see that this is a problem.

00:22:15.940 We can't, this is a big sort of health problem.

00:22:19.300 This is an epidemic and we need to actually address it as a health condition.

00:22:23.040 So I'm quite concerned about fat activists getting a lot of power.

00:22:28.940 How much do you think, and maybe this is me and my brutally uneducated mind,

00:22:34.420 when I see these people talking about fat activism and all the rest of it,

00:22:37.620 How much of it is just victim culture and just unwillingness to accept responsibility?

00:22:43.620 I think that's being, I mean, there is this thing where it's good to take on a victim identity now.

00:22:51.680 So if you can claim to have a marginalised identity, then you have a certain status within these communities.

00:23:00.340 So there certainly is that, but there are helpful ways and unhelpful ways to look at things like obesity and mental illness.

00:23:11.540 And the unhelpful thing to do is to take it on as an identity and not allow it to be seen as a problem because that would be prejudiced.

00:23:19.360 So I worry particularly about that. I think that those kind of problems need to be recognised as a health condition, which people should not be bullied, certainly people with mental illness.

00:23:34.600 But the idea should still always be to get better, to fix the problem or improve the problem.

00:23:41.220 So I am worried that this is tying into the whole sort of marginalised identity thing.

00:23:49.160 And I think as well that we're seeing that in the realms of trans activism.

00:23:54.700 Because trans people exist.

00:23:56.360 there is a growing amount of science which shows us why some people feel that they are the opposite

00:24:02.800 sex to what their genitals tell them they are and yet we are seeing particularly among teenagers

00:24:08.840 a growing tendency to identify as non-binary or demi something which seems to have an element of

00:24:21.060 a cultural ideological factor as well which then makes it quite difficult to identify who is trans

00:24:30.800 and who isn't and that will get me in a lot of trouble for saying that because nobody else should

00:24:34.920 judge who is trans and who isn't this is what people know themselves but um yeah we we are

00:24:40.660 seeing an increasing um ideological basis for uh complicating gender identity in addition to

00:24:50.300 what is is real which is the existence of trans people so that is likely to damage the trans

00:24:56.940 cause considerably because in 10 or 20 years the statistics which now show that people who

00:25:04.060 identify as trans after puberty normally do so for the rest of their lives and then looking at

00:25:10.400 their brains I think there's a big study done in post-mortens yeah evidence for why they did that

00:25:17.600 is found but what we're likely to find now is a load of people in their their teams identifying

00:25:24.620 as trans and then stopping desisting and this is going to undermine the um the the cause of people

00:25:32.780 who are trans who want to transition i mean it's a great point you make about young people because

00:25:38.720 famously you know being a teenager is a time of exploration you don't know really who you are

00:25:43.440 you don't know what your sexuality is a lot of the time

00:25:46.760 it's a time of exploration

00:25:48.020 you try things out, you find out who you are

00:25:50.240 you find out where your boundaries are

00:25:52.160 and if you're going to say that somebody is trans

00:25:54.940 at such an early age

00:25:56.420 it's a recipe for disaster

00:26:00.620 It is if it takes on ideological components

00:26:05.280 otherwise people are unsure of what their gender identity is

00:26:11.020 or they're very sure that it's not the same as their genitals,

00:26:13.760 then there are sensible and rational ways to go about supporting them,

00:26:18.940 working out what's happening and what they want to do about it.

00:26:22.580 But, yeah, when we have, I'm afraid it's pretentious ideologues

00:26:27.300 sort of coming in and talking nonsense about gender for political reasons,

00:26:33.640 that's really not doing anybody any good.

00:26:36.800 And that's what your papers that you wrote with the two guys,

00:26:40.600 that's what you were trying to show is that some of these academic subjects which inform our

00:26:45.840 discourse to a very significant extent I would argue they are purely ideological and there is

00:26:51.420 no pursuit of truth or fact in that subject so you publish these papers you try and get them

00:26:56.820 through the academic journals you're successful with some of them yeah we at the time we had to

00:27:03.000 stop we had seven in uh there were three more we were very confident we're going in people

00:27:10.500 reviews had said this isn't quite ready yet get it back soon you know so this section of my camp

00:27:16.140 is not quite feminist enough yeah so yeah we were confident of getting 10 we're there were another

00:27:22.400 two that we thought we'd probably get in but yes at the end when we had to call it a day uh there

00:27:28.460 were seven seven in so yeah and they did I mean particularly the ones that looked at

00:27:35.040 feminist epistemology which is something I'm particularly interested in that argues very

00:27:42.240 explicitly that we shouldn't have to go with evidence or reason that this is a western

00:27:47.520 philosophical tradition which goes along with slavery and imperialism and that this one

00:27:54.840 construction of knowledge needs to be given a back seat to let all these other knowledges

00:28:00.300 come in and have their say and this is obviously based very much on the idea that that knowledge is

00:28:06.180 is constructed and it's constructed by your position in society so there will be a black

00:28:11.040 knowledge and a women's knowledge and a trans knowledge and these will be different to straight

00:28:17.580 white men's knowledge which unfortunately is is being associated with science and reason and i

00:28:23.460 I think we can see how racist and sexist it is

00:28:28.600 to associate science and reason with straight white men.

00:28:32.600 Is that not, like, the most sexist argument you could possibly make,

00:28:35.840 is that straight white men are the ones who do science, logic and reason?

00:28:40.720 Yes.

00:28:41.580 My girlfriend's doing a doctorate at the moment in psychology.

00:28:46.460 I want to point that out to her and see how far that gets.

00:28:50.100 Yeah, I look forward to your search for your girlfriend.

00:28:53.460 here we're having a stem crisis we are reliant on attracting scientists doctors and engineers

00:29:01.720 from india pakistan nigeria you wonder what they think if they arrive to be told that they that

00:29:08.480 this is a a white masculinist imperialist type of knowledge and they they should really be uh

00:29:14.780 using traditional um uh healing practices in one sense it must have been quite exciting you know

00:29:21.840 You were sort of exposing the flaws in the system.

00:29:24.700 In another sense, wasn't it actually quite dispiriting and depressing?

00:29:29.600 There was a sort of heavy mixture of that, yeah,

00:29:32.640 because we knew what we were going to find.

00:29:36.500 We were fairly sure that we were going to come across this...

00:29:43.500 We were going to be encouraged to be less than rigorous.

00:29:48.060 There was going to be ideological pressure,

00:29:50.360 but when in theory we had to do a lot of research people sometimes they're claiming that we just

00:29:57.800 make put a lot of jargon in things no we didn't we read the papers we understand the theory we

00:30:03.940 we get the concepts and we developed them in horrible ways so that does kind of take a toll

00:30:10.120 on you as well i personally i had a big burst of reading uh critical race epistemology and

00:30:18.900 And Jose Medina and Barbara Applebaum, in particular,

00:30:22.560 being white, being good, white complicity.

00:30:25.360 And I sort of read both of those books in the same day.

00:30:29.580 And then in the evening, I was just watching a TV show

00:30:34.160 in which a mixed-race student was graduating,

00:30:37.180 and she hugged her white mother.

00:30:39.520 And I went, she loves her mother even though she's white.

00:30:42.820 And I thought, what?

00:30:44.220 Slap myself.

00:30:45.040 But this has gone into my head.

00:30:46.640 From having read this, I'm looking at this.

00:30:48.460 I'm seeing relationships in terms of balances of power.

00:30:54.080 And, yes, it started me thinking, well, how is it when there are young people in universities

00:31:00.660 and perhaps they are of mixed race, whatever,

00:31:03.560 are they having to sort of evaluate their family structures in terms of oppressors and the oppressed?

00:31:12.220 And after that, there was some big notice.

00:31:16.580 I can't remember where it was.

00:31:17.600 I think it was at a university, which asked students of colour

00:31:21.900 not to bring their white relatives to things

00:31:24.860 because it was threatening to other people.

00:31:28.040 And just the divisions here, it's just not a way.

00:31:34.460 I mean, even with America, which has this very recent,

00:31:37.900 very awful racial divide and oppressive system,

00:31:44.360 is this the way to heal it? I don't think it is.

00:31:47.600 We were talking beforehand about ridiculous examples

00:31:53.580 of these kind of trends of thought or schools of thought.

00:31:58.220 There was one about glaciers that you mentioned in the feminist geography.

00:32:02.200 I mean, I'm not the brightest bloke in the world.

00:32:03.920 How can geography be feminist?

00:32:06.740 The feminist glaciology paper was very well known.

00:32:11.340 That was because it was just so ridiculous.

00:32:13.520 you have to look at ice through a feminist lens

00:32:18.600 and there was some part of it in which there was a phone being attached to glaciers

00:32:23.200 so there was some kind of communication going on

00:32:25.420 and it was crazy and James read that one thoroughly

00:32:29.880 and he based his feminist astronomy paper on that

00:32:33.860 and that argued that astronomy needs to take in astrology

00:32:38.360 and not only astrology but feminist and queer astrology.

00:32:42.940 Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

00:32:44.480 And so this is the only way to study the stars.

00:32:47.560 All the best planets have male names, right?

00:32:49.700 Yeah.

00:32:50.580 Who wants to go to Venus?

00:32:52.040 Yeah.

00:32:52.700 It's all about Jupiter, Mars, you know.

00:32:54.980 Yeah, all the best planets that go, come on.

00:32:56.820 Right, let's just stop being prejudiced.

00:32:59.040 But that one hadn't got in by the time we had to stop,

00:33:04.120 but it was one of the ones we were confident about,

00:33:05.940 and they actually don't seem to have noticed what's happened

00:33:08.360 because they're still writing to us,

00:33:10.480 asking us to hurry up and revise it.

00:33:12.420 and get it back to them because in that one the comments that that we got were that this is very

00:33:18.020 exciting that um these sort of ideas have have made some impact in psychology and biology but

00:33:24.320 they've not gone into um the really hard sciences yet and it would be wonderful to see feminist

00:33:29.720 approaches in physics classes and things oh god yeah that that one really did affect james quite

00:33:36.960 badly he's we call him the supercomputer because he's got this incredibly sort of logical mind

00:33:44.360 so he read the feminist glaciology paper through carefully and then he just sort of didn't speak

00:33:51.800 for three days because he was just so traumatized by the way humans are thinking they're just

00:33:56.740 complete irrationalism and when you attach the phone to the glacier did it talk back

00:34:01.220 I can't even remember what the plan of that was,

00:34:05.300 but I'm just, oh, we're talking about this is feminist,

00:34:09.000 apparently, thinking of all the years

00:34:11.420 in which we've tried to overcome this idea

00:34:13.520 that women are too silly and frivolous to do science

00:34:16.940 and now you're, let's put a telephone in a glacier

00:34:19.660 so we can talk to it.

00:34:21.180 No.

00:34:22.180 Jesus.

00:34:23.420 Well, you know, the reason it may not have spoken back to you

00:34:25.800 is because it might have been on EU.

00:34:27.700 Because I never get any signals, so that might have been it.

00:34:30.080 But did you get a lot of a backlash that, you know, people came out and going, look, what you're doing, you are, you know, you are part of the oppression and you are part of, you know, the white hierarchy looking to oppress us and all the rest of it?

00:34:44.560 Yes, there's been a lot of that. This has been mainly from the extreme activists type.

00:34:51.380 And then things have happened following and we've been linked into them.

00:34:56.300 Only yesterday I was told it was assumed that I was celebrating the murder of 12 Jews because I'm quite clearly a fascist.

00:35:06.940 So, yeah, and the changes from the Trump administration is planning for that would just sort of pretend trans people didn't exist.

00:35:19.180 I apparently am responsible for that, I was told.

00:35:23.340 So there has been a lot of that.

00:35:25.280 It has been you are just trying to perpetuate your privilege.

00:35:30.860 And this is what our paper, When the Joke's on You, was about.

00:35:35.840 We anticipated this response and we wrote a paper going deep into feminist epistemology and stacking up a load of things to argue that there just isn't any way at all, not even in-depth academic hoaxes, we said, which was a bit of a risk, that would show that people had engaged well enough with the ideas to criticise and disagree with them.

00:35:58.860 And that is what we've found. It's this idea of privilege preserving epistemic pushback.

00:36:07.200 And what that means is that any criticism of social justice approaches is just an attempt to preserve privilege.

00:36:16.320 It shouldn't be engaged with as an argument. It just takes away from the important issues.

00:36:22.540 it needs to be shut down and that particularly horrified me and so that that was why we went

00:36:29.180 into that paper to try and work out where this argument is coming from and that one was um they

00:36:35.320 got the yes we want it within eight days which is very very fast and um yeah a revision and it was

00:36:42.520 in it was the fastest one and they called it an excellent contribution to feminist philosophy

00:36:48.500 Well, this tactic that you talk about, it is incredibly effective,

00:36:51.940 which I suspect why the social justice people use it,

00:36:55.820 which is to, they've come up with a way of not having to engage with people's ideas

00:37:00.100 because, frankly, a lot of their ideas don't stand up to actual logic

00:37:03.720 and all the other white male, you know, oppressive behavior,

00:37:07.660 like analyzing what they're saying.

00:37:09.640 When you look at it, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

00:37:12.880 So they've come up with a great, fantastically effective way

00:37:16.280 of countering that problem which is you go well you're white therefore you don't know what you're

00:37:20.740 talking about or you're this you don't know what you're talking or you're a man therefore you can't

00:37:24.520 talk about this because you can't know you can't have that women's knowing i need to stretch my

00:37:30.620 neck out sorry you're welcome to stretch out as much as you can in this in this cramped and tiny

00:37:36.040 feel free to so so what i'm what i'm saying is they've come up with a very effective way of

00:37:41.880 countering logic and reason and research and argument and is that not why they keep coming

00:37:47.600 back what this is because it's really effective there's a chicken and egg thing going on i mean

00:37:52.460 what's the way that you've just said it sounds quite quite cynical we want to get our views

00:37:57.480 across therefore we're going to reject evidence and reason but in fact the rejection of evidence

00:38:03.420 some reason came first. And the whole system is sort of built on that. With the sort of

00:38:11.140 start of postmodernism, the idea was that knowledge is not to be found, it is to be

00:38:17.140 made. And so everything is a construct through the categories that we have produced. So this

00:38:23.620 idea that how we see knowledge now is a construct of an imperialist patriarchal age is truly

00:38:33.060 believed so people like Alison Wolfe for example in her paper which we drew on a lot and tell me

00:38:40.080 how that makes you feel will argue specifically that this reason emotion divide is not a proper

00:38:47.640 philosophical context you cannot say in a philosophy class you haven't given any evidence

00:38:52.280 and reason for that so I'm not going to believe you because that is to perpetuate a western

00:38:58.040 the philosophical tradition and we need to give emotional and experiential knowledge the same

00:39:05.940 amount of credit so that that's very very central to feminist and critical race epistemology and

00:39:13.980 yes it does also have the effect of very simply shutting down any objection because it is unless

00:39:21.700 you agree with me then you're just not able to see things from my perspective because your

00:39:28.320 privilege is blinding you there's there's nothing that can be done with that so that was really why

00:39:33.820 we wanted to write that particular essay and go really into that to say yes we do understand it

00:39:39.260 we do know how it works we've engaged with social justice concepts of knowledge we still disagree

00:39:45.760 but yeah the responses we've got to that is um yeah this is just because you're you're white

00:39:51.700 and the other two are male and do you think there is some truth to this argument this is something

00:39:56.180 i've been thinking about in order to try and understand where these people might be coming

00:39:59.600 from is do you think there is some truth to the idea that over a period of time we focused a

00:40:04.800 little bit too much on facts and logic and we have ignored people's what they call lived experiences

00:40:11.140 that do inform us like you know if i was to tell you like i'm from russia right if we were talking

00:40:16.640 about russia if i was to say well when i was growing up in russia blah blah blah happened

00:40:20.200 that would have some value to an analysis of what's happening in russia wouldn't it

00:40:24.640 and do you think that the reason that this has happened is that maybe we've been ignoring that

00:40:28.500 a little bit i'm not sure i'm not sure that we ever have there has always been um there's

00:40:36.020 certainly been an emphasis on um on science and reason and there have been certain sceptic

00:40:42.100 organisations which have been very scathing of that um personal anecdotes or experiences are

00:40:48.380 ever relevant and that that can certainly um sort of shut down a conversation because as humans

00:40:54.700 um we do have experiences and often somebody's experience is more important to what we're

00:41:02.160 talking about the the example of this that i give is is if a mother has lost her child

00:41:06.780 there are facts about how this child has died perhaps the medical community are interested

00:41:11.720 in these facts what is of interest to the people who love the family and around that are how this

00:41:18.820 is affecting her how she feels so we as humans are often much more focused on um how everybody

00:41:27.140 is feeling and experiencing things than we are and what is true and that is why we tend to do

00:41:31.480 so badly on examining what is true and finding out what is true and tending to trust our own

00:41:37.120 feelings and biases to a huge extent. So I certainly don't think that there is any problem

00:41:44.580 with scholarship which is looking at experiences with social justice movements which care about

00:41:51.780 how things make people feel. I myself studied the Christian narrative in late medieval times

00:41:58.600 and how this was used.

00:42:00.640 This is of importance to humans,

00:42:03.420 but what we need not to do

00:42:05.380 is claim that personal experience

00:42:08.240 is the same thing as knowledge or objective truth.

00:42:12.120 We have to keep knowledge and truth

00:42:14.800 separate from perspective and experience,

00:42:17.560 but we can value both.

00:42:19.120 The reason I bring this up, sorry, Francis,

00:42:20.660 I just want to finish this point,

00:42:22.140 is if we were sitting, not in 2018,

00:42:24.800 but in, say, 1930s Germany

00:42:26.680 or before that in America

00:42:28.000 during the time where people scientifically believed that black people are inferior, right?

00:42:34.720 It could be reasonably argued that there have been periods in time

00:42:39.200 where power determined what truth is, including scientific truth, right?

00:42:45.900 So, and that is an argument that social justice people make,

00:42:51.160 which is that who has power in society determines what the science tells us to some extent, right?

00:42:56.040 Do you buy into that argument at all?

00:42:58.680 I certainly accept that there have been times when science has supported racist and sexist ideas.

00:43:07.680 But what we have to look at is that systems of power have always supported racist, anti-religious, sort of tribal loyalties and the ideas of rigid gender roles.

00:43:23.800 This has been fairly constant.

00:43:25.680 It is significant that it was in the age of science and reason and evidence that we overcame that because you can't do science for very long and not fix a whole load of bad assumptions that you have about race and gender.

00:43:43.580 the evidence is there that men and women have equal intelligence there's greater variability

00:43:50.260 in male but they're of equal intelligence that we have equal ability to perform all types of tasks

00:43:57.720 although women are likely to have slightly different interests to men so whereas before

00:44:03.640 when we have say the christian narrative that i looked at where men are guided by sapientia the

00:44:10.220 mind and women's skientia the body the senses where then we're um yeah that you can't really

00:44:19.100 argue with that because god said it if the hypothesis that uh men are naturally more

00:44:24.580 intelligent than women and we need to be ruled by women is made in a scientific context science is

00:44:29.700 going to show that not to be true and that is what we have seen happen so when people are saying i

00:44:35.840 I'm a supporter of science.

00:44:37.140 They're not saying I support anything that science once agreed with.

00:44:42.920 We're talking about supporting a system, a self-correcting system,

00:44:46.280 which has been more effective at weeding out human biases than any other.

00:44:53.200 And watching the left slowly descend into insanity,

00:44:58.760 and especially what you're talking about.

00:45:00.620 Well, it's almost beyond parody now.

00:45:02.220 You can't really parody it because it's where it is.

00:45:04.940 well they parried

00:45:06.300 that's what you guys did right

00:45:08.020 that's how it worked

00:45:09.240 yeah but in a way

00:45:10.680 you sort of

00:45:11.120 you didn't parry it

00:45:11.980 in a way

00:45:12.920 you just

00:45:13.580 gave them what they wanted

00:45:15.640 in a sense

00:45:16.440 but

00:45:16.700 seeing what's happened

00:45:18.720 to the left

00:45:19.260 do you think that just gives

00:45:20.580 greater strength

00:45:21.640 to the right

00:45:22.760 and you know

00:45:23.940 the alt-right

00:45:24.720 when they go

00:45:25.720 when people

00:45:26.560 you know

00:45:27.040 have put up

00:45:28.060 legitimate criticisms

00:45:29.140 of the alt-right

00:45:29.820 and go

00:45:30.160 you know

00:45:30.660 whatever it may be

00:45:31.580 and all they have to do

00:45:32.760 is go

00:45:33.120 well look at the left

00:45:34.140 Yeah. I mean, that is what my primary concern is, because I'm unapologetic about wanting to get the left parties in.

00:45:46.300 I want the left to be electable again.

00:45:48.880 And I do think, and we have argued over and over again, that much of the surge to the right is a reaction to the behaviour on the left.

00:45:58.400 If we're looking at people who voted Obama last time and then went to Trump, these are two very, very different men.

00:46:04.300 Do we think that the voters once held Obama views and now hold Trumpist views?

00:46:08.880 That is not very likely.

00:46:10.580 Something has drawn them to the right and pushed them from the left.

00:46:13.840 As much as we're looking at what has drawn them to the right, and a lot of...

00:46:18.400 I keep going back to America because this is where I've focused a lot recently.

00:46:22.680 A lot of this was fear of immigration. Trump's most popular policy still remains the Muslim ban, whether or not we think that's the correct term for it, which is very worrying.

00:46:34.740 But then the second motivation that is often cited is the fear of identity politics and wanting to punish liberals for this sort of highly politicised identity thing, for not prioritising the working class, which was essentially seen as their job.

00:46:57.120 So I think that we're seeing, yes, we're seeing a mixture of things,

00:47:00.760 but it's been so close on things like Trump and on Brexit

00:47:06.180 that we really need, there's not huge amounts of improvement

00:47:11.740 that need to be made to kind of shift the tide back

00:47:16.220 and to have sort of against the populism.

00:47:19.340 Because when I see the left talking about all these things,

00:47:22.600 I'm like, why aren't you talking about the fact

00:47:24.960 that wages haven't risen in however long?

00:47:28.520 Why are we not talking about the fact

00:47:30.100 that the gaps between rich and poor are getting ever wider?

00:47:33.460 Why are we not talking about the fact

00:47:35.620 that their health service doesn't seem to be functioning properly?

00:47:39.180 All these really important issues,

00:47:41.000 which the left should be dealing with,

00:47:42.880 which, as a person on the left, I'm passionate about,

00:47:45.480 instead we're talking about icebergs,

00:47:47.040 whether they have a fucking vagina or not.

00:47:48.540 Excuse my language.

00:47:52.040 What's going on?

00:47:52.840 Helen didn't expect you to say that.

00:47:54.500 I can deal with the saying of a vagina.

00:47:56.660 Yeah, this is the criticism made by the old left, the socialist left.

00:48:04.640 We've had a lot of support from the socialists

00:48:07.940 because they argue that the whole sort of postmodern identitarian movement

00:48:14.400 has just taken the left away from the working class

00:48:17.860 and moved it into the universities and rendered it incomprehensible.

00:48:21.400 and they say with which they're probably right that a lot of the reason that the class issues

00:48:28.900 aren't being targeted now is because it's these ideas are coming from people who are really in

00:48:35.920 the top wage bracket we're looking at um professors and um and academics you know they're not hugely

00:48:43.920 hugely paid but they are well paid so there is a less of a concern on working class issues and

00:48:50.300 on class issues unless it is blended with some other kind of identity so having to admit that

00:48:57.240 working class white men face any disadvantages in society really screws up the rest of the

00:49:05.020 narrative so that's that's really sort of downplayed and this is why I get quite frustrated

00:49:10.380 with people who try to confuse post-modernism with Marxism and with what we're seeing at the

00:49:19.940 moment is an evolution of post-modern ideas into identity studies. In the late 80s, early 90s,

00:49:27.240 a number of theorists like Kimberley Crenshaw and Judith Butler and post-colonials, they took

00:49:34.520 these ideas and they said, right, we need to keep the whole cultural constructivist bit,

00:49:39.520 but we can't just dismantle everything because we need to look at society. So what we're going

00:49:45.400 to say is that there are certain groups in certain places experiencing certain disadvantages

00:49:49.740 which the original post-modernist ideas did not allow for and so Crenshaw particularly the founder

00:49:57.040 of intersectionality and sort of influential in critical race theory describes intersectionality

00:50:02.180 as contemporary politics applied to post-modern theory so we're looking very much at this kind

00:50:08.180 of system so if it gets conflated with Marxism which is what post-modernism was very critical of

00:50:16.100 and reacted against, because for Marxists, there's an objective truth, there's an overarching

00:50:20.020 structure, then we're not going to be addressing the problem in the right way. We're going

00:50:26.240 to be confusing class analysis, which just almost is not present at all, with an identitarian

00:50:35.800 focus on constructive knowledge. And it makes it much harder to deal with. And I think what's

00:50:41.500 happening with this conflation is sometimes it's a cynical thing it allows right-wingers to link

00:50:48.980 their two enemies the economic left and the identitarian left and just dismiss them while

00:50:54.680 pointing at communist regimes and gulags so that's very easy and neat but also the post-modern ideas

00:51:01.880 and the critical theory that's developed from it is just so difficult to understand unless you're

00:51:06.680 willing to dedicate months of reading to it you're not going to get your your head around even the

00:51:12.800 basics of it so people are sort of latching on this idea that what we're seeing now is cultural

00:51:19.980 marxism in that oppressed and oppressor groups have now got more different identity titles now

00:51:25.920 we can understand it no you really need to get your head around the the denial of objective

00:51:31.700 knowledge the the cultural constructs the systems of power that's the key piece of it isn't it yeah

00:51:36.660 It's the denial of the fact that there is a truth and the invention of this idea that you have your truth and I have my truth and Francis has his truth.

00:51:44.200 Which is the objective truth.

00:51:45.260 Yeah.

00:51:46.980 But I was going to ask you, do you think there might be a simple explanation of why, as Francis says, we're having these irrelevant conversations in this country?

00:51:53.300 And that's because we're importing this conversation wholesale from America.

00:51:56.640 I do tend to think that we're doing that, yeah, because we're seeing some very strange race analysis which really reflects American race relations and not ours.

00:52:10.360 I heard sort of a second-hand conversation with a Black Lives Matter activist here who is talking about how much more races and black Brits suffer than Asian, South Asian Brits.

00:52:25.100 and this is because of this long legacy which includes the slavery and okay this this works

00:52:30.980 in america because america has had this long standing um superior whites inferior blacks

00:52:37.920 which hasn't been resolved successfully satisfactorily now but they're much more

00:52:43.940 positive about immigrants who have come from asia and um for them so so there is that balance here

00:52:51.820 We have a different, I think, where we had an influx of African and Jamaican immigrants earlier.

00:53:00.640 And then we had South Asian immigrants coming.

00:53:04.480 And there seems to be more hostility towards immigrants who could be Muslim than there are to Africans who are often Christian.

00:53:14.800 And I just don't think this analysis works.

00:53:17.640 I wouldn't feel entirely confident to say I think there's more prejudice against brown people than black people here,

00:53:22.500 but it's certainly not the same analysis as in America.

00:53:26.380 So this is a direct import, and we are seeing a lot of that.

00:53:31.160 I disagreed with a professor on Twitter who insists that England, the UK, is actually madder than America.

00:53:39.460 It isn't a lot of the scholarship. Unfortunately, the fat activism, the sort of the most influential fat activist scholars are here.

00:53:49.900 But otherwise, they're almost all in the in the US and they're sort of being shadowed here.

00:53:56.380 And how much do you blame on social media? Because it just seems to me that social media exacerbates the whole problem and what it does.

00:54:03.400 And especially the internet, whereas before you had these couple of whack jobs who thought whatever, you know, these ridiculous theories and they'd be on their own.

00:54:11.680 But on the internet, you can find about a thousand whack jobs, you know, and then all of a sudden you've got a community, whether they be, you know, fat activists, incels or whatever else, you know.

00:54:22.600 And do you think social media has exacerbated it?

00:54:27.380 I think exacerbate is the word. Some people have said it's produced it, and I don't think it's done that, but it's made us more able to access all of the madness and to react to it.

00:54:39.440 And because we are such reactive creatures at the moment, if we are seeing the insanist examples of the left who wouldn't have got on the news or written newspaper articles, then we're having a reaction from the reasonable right.

00:54:54.060 And if we see the most insane on the right, there's a reaction from the reasonable left.

00:54:58.160 And so I don't think it's a coincidence that the polarisation of parties,

00:55:03.800 which is particularly notable in America,

00:55:06.040 how willing people are to talk and be friends with people from the other side,

00:55:12.300 has just really sort of increased over about the same period that social media has taken off.

00:55:18.500 Perfect. Well, listen, our time's almost up.

00:55:20.640 two questions we'll go to our final questions in the final question in a second but

00:55:25.240 we've had quite a pessimistic and negative conversation here that's why i've enjoyed it

00:55:30.740 yeah just it goes along with your depressive personality yeah mate but is there a way that

00:55:36.660 we can find for what we've been talking about throughout which is the reasonable people on

00:55:41.860 both sides to come together and actually start to produce more harmony as opposed to more discord

00:55:47.200 I certainly hope so

00:55:49.440 I am a little bit optimistic already

00:55:52.360 I do think that we are seeing a pushback now

00:55:56.080 and from reasonable people

00:55:58.100 over the last few weeks I've seen a lot of leftist academics

00:56:02.680 distance themselves from the grievance studies approach

00:56:06.140 and we're seeing more willingness to regard it as ridiculous

00:56:11.960 and we're seeing obviously there's also the problems on the far right

00:56:18.460 and we're addressing those I think quite well.

00:56:22.180 So I am optimistic that people are going to get sick of extreme irrational views

00:56:30.540 and they're just going to say enough

00:56:33.680 but I think it's going to probably get a bit worse before it gets better

00:56:38.240 And we can hopefully, yeah, sort of speed up this process by trying to talk across the divides ourselves and by looking, talking in terms of being reasonable, of being evidenced, of being consistent, the ethical, rather than in terms of those lefties and those righties.

00:56:59.020 Well, that's what we try and do on the show.

00:57:00.760 Other than the consistently ethical, we struggle with that.

00:57:03.340 but listen the question we always like to ask at the end is what is the one thing that you think

00:57:08.120 we're not talking about that we absolutely should be talking about i don't think we're

00:57:12.780 talking about how we know things are true and i don't think we're doing that enough very few people

00:57:19.580 consider their epistemology now they're just there's a kind of acceptance of what is in the

00:57:27.500 air so we really need to start thinking again about how do I know this is true what is the process

00:57:35.260 there and we need to be consistently ethical we need to focus on the individual and our shared

00:57:42.700 humanity identity categories matter certainly that is an aspect of people but we cannot lose

00:57:48.720 individuality or common humanity for that perfect well thank you thank you very much for coming on

00:57:55.260 the show, Helen. If people want to follow

00:57:57.260 you, you're on Twitter at...

00:57:58.840 At HPluckRose. And very, very active

00:58:01.100 there. Oh, yes.

00:58:02.940 Very active, and I always follow

00:58:04.680 with interest what you get involved

00:58:07.240 in. Even last night, I think, before

00:58:09.100 you were coming here, you were involved in this massive

00:58:11.040 argument, and eventually went, okay, I've got

00:58:13.100 to go and speak to trigonometry tomorrow, so I'm going to bed.

00:58:15.360 Yes. So follow Helen

00:58:17.100 at HPluckRose, and

00:58:19.160 Aeromagazine is at...

00:58:21.100 Yeah, aeromagazine.com

00:58:24.280 Perfect.

00:58:24.700 Well, check that out, guys.

00:58:27.040 Do you want to do the rest of it?

00:58:28.040 Yeah, we'll wrap up.

00:58:29.680 Just to say, thank you very much for watching the episode.

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TRIGGERnometry - November 12, 2018

Helen Pluckrose on Grievance Studies & Postmodernism

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