Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts, heteronormative hegemony. Are my right-on credentials right on enough? Am I sufficiently penitent for being white, cis and male? Will I be cancelled or de-platformed by the Pronoun Police? What is my woke-quotient? At least as far as science is concerned, it’s a satisfactory zero. Science is not a patriarchal instrument of colonial oppression. Nor is it a social construct. It’s simply true. Or at least truth is real and science is the best way we have of finding it. ‘Alternative ways of knowing’ may be consoling, they may be sincere, they may be quaint, they may have a poetic or mythic beauty, but the one thing they are not is true. As well as being real, moreover, science has a crystalline, poetic beauty of its own.
I’ve just joined a new initiative set up to oppose postmodern metabaloney and bossy woke bullying. Look up ‘Counterweight’ + ‘Helen Pluckrose’, its founder. She’s also co-author of Cynical Theories, an excellent history and analysis of Francophoney postmodernism and the pernicious influence of ‘theory’, drivelling out of the universities into the culture at large. The book’s only fault is that, bending over backwards to be scrupulously fair to its subject matter — queer theory, social justice theory etc, chapter by thorough chapter — it can’t help inheriting some of the subject matter’s obscurantist style. The result is not as stupefyingly boring as the original. Nevertheless, busy readers might prefer to skip to the concluding pages of each chapter, where the pretentious original is decisively skewered.
Strangely, when I have expressed hostility to woke nonsense, a significant reaction from American readers has been: ‘Well, people like you brought it on yourselves.’ Mystified, I dug deeper. Apparently the permissible spectrum of opinion is so all-or-none, so left-or-right, so yes-or-no that you can’t oppose both Trump and the loony left simultaneously.
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