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However, in the frenzy of these legitimate lawsuits, grievances can escalate, resulting in a seizure that reaches the point of eliminating any voice that does not fully match what the street is asking for, thus striking the essence of the movement and the basis for its launching. The intellectual landscape is changing tremendously towards the restriction of freedom of expression and access to ideas, even if it is through archives, knowledge or study. Publishers are subject to dismissal when they publish controversial material, books are withdrawn if they are claimed to be inauthentic, journalists are prohibited from writing on certain topics, and university professors are subject to investigation if they cite literary works in their ranks. So the “culture of nullification” is the accurate description of what is happening in the political and social environments these days. The prevalence of the logic of “political correctness” constantly led to the imposition of a kind of obligatory harmony among thinkers, and many began to avoid thorny topics or freely express their ideas about them. However, keeping silent about raising a problem does not mean its solution, nor its extinction due to this silence.
In this tense atmosphere, James A. Lindsay and Helen Bluecross recently presented their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (Pitchstone Publications 2020) to explain half a century of intellectual history that it has reached its zenith in our age. Present. The book focuses on globalized values and the authors discuss: “How these values threatened freedom of expression, scientific debate and evaluation of the mind!”
The book begins by studying intellectual changes at the academic level as a result of trying to impose principles of social justice. The book does not pretend to criticize work for a more just society as a subject that is not worth studying or working on. Instead, the authors argue that there is a militarized campaign in the name of critical social justice that is often not about social justice at all, but rather about a set of illiberal theories that have their origin in the ideas of postmodern intellectuals. dating back to the late 1960s and have merged These ideas are found in a central thesis that assumes that truth, knowledge, and ethics are so wrapped up in discourses of power and privilege that they should be understood as social constructions rather than as fruits of actions and objective discussions. So when postmodernists speak, they present society as a cognitive and linguistic construct designed to preserve hegemony in power against the oppressed. They also raise the slogan “There is no objective and neutral truth.” The above two principles are presented simply as “the truth”, and no controversy surrounding them should be tolerated, and everyone should agree on these two principles or be excluded by accusations already made, the most famous of which are “white racism”, “male”, “fascist or Nazi” and “hostility”. Sublime »…
According to the authors of the book, postmodern thought transformed social justice into a religion or cult rather than a political movement. They consider that it has become a reformulated faith tradition directed against reason that allows the manipulation of ideas under the name of “relativism” and eliminates the difference by soft means such as social ostracism, distortion and rudeness invoking the arsenal of laws and material penalties for the state that attacks him at the same time. Now we are faced with a postmodern belief based on a dead deity, which believes in mysterious worldly powers that undermine power systems but sanctify the authority of the victim, it is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular new left.
The logic of “political correctness” imposed a kind of mandatory harmony among intellectuals.
If there were a motto for that stage in which we live now it would be “denying objective reality”, since the 1960s and up to the present day witnessed an influx of innumerable ideas from postmodern intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida in many directions, Postmodernism has gone from a state of radical nihilistic skepticism in the 1960s to a militarized ideological state, to a “renewed postmodernity.”
Postmodernism restored, on the foundations of the first postmodernism emanating from the post-WWII era. The most prominent of these foundations are the rejection of major narratives / ideologies, the radical skepticism that rejected Christianity, Marxism, science, reason, and the pillars of liberal democracy, and the blurring of conceptual boundaries such as those that they exist between health and disease or truth and belief. These fundamentals remained largely unchanged even with the development of postmodernism and its applications from its deconstructive beginnings, which was a miserable way of thinking in France before transforming into a general intellectual activity in the United States and acquiring a pattern of reverence. religious today. Within the American Academy, postmodernism developed from its “miserable deconstructive phase” in the 1960s to “applied postmodernism” in the 1980s. It continued to conquer the fields of human knowledge and practice until the mid-1960s. 2000, and it finally reached what Lindsay and Blucross called “renewed postmodernism” in the first decade of the 21st century, when scholars and activists combined the theories and studies found in a simple doctrinal methodology, known simply as “Social Justice.” This dogmatism refers to the idea that an abstraction can become something real. At this stage, the logic of theoretical social justice is interpreted as reality and, therefore, as the only way to see and interpret reality.
Postmodernism and its description led to dozens of theories, beginning with postcolonial theory, “Queer” theory, numerous versions of feminism, gender studies, disability and obesity studies, and critical race theory. Reconsidering these theories does not mean that they have no advantages and have made a difference. In our opinion many ideas. However, over time, these theories began to carry less burden on the individual than the obligations imposed and placed on society and the other. The idea that women’s lives should be raised on men’s backs, and black lives should be built by whites … seems to be a brilliant moral perspective, but in reality it lacks rational logic, it is dedicated to dependency and maintains inequality as a result of charging a class that is often not responsible for the fate of another category.
What the book expresses is not an immoral state of mind. It is a real concern about the threat that social justice activity, identity politics and the postmodern legacy pose to Enlightenment secularism and the belief that disagreement and debate are a means to the truth, not to sanctify the victims. At this point, you might ask: is it really that our thinking is besieged by postmodern professors and activists who are neither secular nor rebellious, and that deception and the culture of abolition have become their central function? Have you ever thought that social justice, once a desired dream, has been transformed by an alliance between the forces of civil society, the new left and globalized forces, in a perverse act that undermines freedoms and stifles the academic climate within universities, newspapers and political institutions?
The book warns us of the situation we have reached as a consequence of dealing with social justice after renewed postmodernity is a reality, and its themes, especially gender, race and language … have become fields that do not allow any opposition, and whoever deviates from the text in them must be eliminated. We should never be ashamed of the color of our skin if it is white, or our conservative ideas, or our classic values. We must realize that diversity, debate, difference, and opposition are essential characteristics of any healthy environment for life. Certainly any school of thought that takes abolition as a shield, be it feminism or ethnic or scientific schools is bankrupt on the intellectual path. Therefore, he is always protected by the moral condemnation of the individual who opposes him. Confrontation remains the best solution, especially if we are people or groups that have not committed, practiced or usurped the rights of others. Hence the intellectual asphyxia and psychological warfare waged by the new left to hide its intellectual bankruptcy and political failure.
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