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Helen Pluckrose: From Social Justice to Social (In)Justice
78 Plays19 days ago
In this episode, Eric talks with writer and cultural commentator Helen Pluckrose about a pattern that shows up in universities, organizations, and public life: the slow shift from inquiry to certainty.
Helen’s work began with a simple concern about the health of academic debate. Over time, that concern widened into a broader question about how ideas spread, harden, and eventually become resistant to criticism. The challenge is rarely malicious intent. More often, it begins with a desire to improve the world, followed by a gradual loss of skepticism about one’s own assumptions.
The conversation explores how language shapes perception. Words that once described reality can quietly transform into moral signals. Concepts intended to promote fairness can become tools for shutting down disagreement. And when disagreement is framed as harm, institutions may begin protecting beliefs rather than testing them.
They also discuss the psychological comfort of belonging to a moral community. Shared values create cohesion, but they can also create blind spots. When identity becomes tied to ideology, questioning an idea can feel like betraying a group. That emotional pressure makes it harder to admit uncertainty, revise beliefs, or acknowledge tradeoffs.
At its core, this is a conversation about intellectual humility. About the discipline of staying curious even when an answer feels obvious. And about the responsibility to keep testing ideas, especially the ones we most want to be true.
Topics Covered
- How ideas shift from open inquiry to unquestioned belief
- The role of language in shaping perception and moral judgment
- Why good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes
- The difference between disagreement and harm
- How moral certainty can suppress curiosity
- The psychological comfort of belonging to a shared ideology
- Why institutions sometimes protect beliefs instead of testing them
- The tension between social justice goals and open debate
- How identity can become fused with ideology
- The importance of intellectual humility in public discourse
- Why skepticism is a form of care, not hostility
- The risk of treating complex problems as morally simple
- How to create cultures that encourage disagreement without hostility
Episode Links
- Read Helen’s writing on Substack: https://www.hpluckrose.com
- Explore Helen’s books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B08GSPKP4M?ccs_id=56f8b1a6-fbea-4049-9c00-adaca09c1cf3
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Helen, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? I'm in a little seaside fishing town in Suffolk, where it's all lovely and beautiful. The seagulls are extremely noisy and impolite, but I'm surrounded by and in a tiny little cottage and with doors. you You can tell which century it was built in by how tall the doors are.
00:00:29
Speaker
Helen, would you mind telling me a bit about yourself? Well, i'm i'm ah I'm now a writer, of of course. I'm man i'm ah a respectable, middle-aged, long-married lady with the two adult daughters. And I worked in in social care for 17 years, a very long time, and caring for people who had brain disease, brain injury or um neurological and disorders.
00:00:55
Speaker
And then i had a stroke, which put me out of of action. So I got my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. And since then, I have been writing and telling people why they are wrong about everything and and how to be less wrong.
00:01:10
Speaker
As far as I'm aware, as far as I recall, that writing is how I and plenty of people became aware of you. But having mentioned the stroke and then feel like tying it to your education, was there a motivation to go back to school or to pursue you know those degrees? Because were you less physically able to do the work you were doing before? Or how did one lead to another?
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I left school quite early. was very eager to get out into the world to be independent. So left school at 17 and I got a full-time job. I got my own place and then I worked for 17 years. And I really, always, started to wish that I had gone to university. My parents wanted me to.
00:02:07
Speaker
And started to to think i I would actually like to do that now. I'd built up an intellectual appetite again. So when I had the sort of neurological accident, stroke-like thing, and um my vision was impaired, my balance was impaired, I was having to spend a lot of time lying down, i i thought that this might be a good time to do that studying. I can still read. I can still think.
00:02:32
Speaker
And so I studied and English literature generally in undergraduates and I realized them by the end of that that I was particularly interested in late medieval, early modern women's religious writing and how they they used the Christian narrative to negotiate autonomy and authority for themselves. And I also really liked studying Latin and paleography. So that was what I i did in my in my master's.
00:02:59
Speaker
And after that, I found it was very difficult for me to address and women's experiences as I really wanted to because of the prevalence of postmodern theories. So in in my first year of of undergraduate, i was we had to do a a module on on postmodernism And um I had to, and an exam, the first question of and of an exam was explain why liberal humanism is wrong and these critical theories are better.
00:03:34
Speaker
That was post-colonial theory, queer theory. There wasn't the option to say actually I quite like liberal humanism. that That wasn't a way to to pass. And so I started studying the postmodern theories then, and the the original sort of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard. And then going more into the um the later the theories, the critical race theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and and being really quite annoyed by these. So by the time I got to my postgraduate studies, I was... um
00:04:08
Speaker
I was was really very strongly sort of epistemically and ethically opposed to the critical theory approach. And I thought that I had had some luck there because um one of the the lecturers said, oh we we don't we don't do all that. Postmodernism is is silly. we're not We're not doing that.
00:04:26
Speaker
and um So I asked him, can i then, in this case, look at um women's religious writing or women's writing generally through the lens of evolutionary psychology? I would really love to write an essay sort of showing how a lot of the writing that was happening in the early modern period and the way that it presents men and and women and psychological sex differences and usually through a ah religious lens, actually can be explained much better by evolutionary psychology and the um and theres sex differences on average. And he said, yes, yes, that sounds interesting.
00:05:01
Speaker
But once I'd done that, um it seemed I had said that ah men were particularly attracted to youth and beauty because it was a sign of fertility, while women were um typically attracted to status and um and resources because that was ah a sign of um of protection for themselves and their offspring. And I was accused of um of propagating a beauty myth that oppressed women.
00:05:29
Speaker
I had also said that um our brains are not built to be racist. There is no cognitive mechanism there. This is something that we have to learn by associating race with systems of allegiance and consequently overcoming racism.
00:05:45
Speaker
It is informed by this. And I was told inexplicably, that by saying racism wasn't inherent, I was being very offensive to black communities in America.
00:05:58
Speaker
ah So i I was going to do my PhD in medieval manuscripts. I was going to to try and produce ah an edition of 14th century texts that I believed to be ah by women, where couldn't always tell, um and and show how how they were using the the late sort of Catholicism um in order to to have an empowering role for women. And I just thought, I don't actually...
00:06:22
Speaker
want to be doing this. The reason that I'm saying I'm going to do this is because translation and transcription still has right and wrong answers. I can't actually argue for anything that I want to argue for because I won't be reading it through those lenses. So I'm just doing this to get a PhD and I don't want to.
00:06:42
Speaker
and And so i I took a year out and I started writing about culture and politics and then people seemed to like that. And so I never stopped. Did you have any experiences or something that you feel contributed to your initial, as I'm going to put it, dislike or lack of alignment with the postmodern theories and so on that you were initially encountering?
00:07:08
Speaker
I'd been giving a lot of thought too to, epistemology, to how we decide what is true. And the reason that I had been, been doing that was because in my, my childhood and my, my teens, I had, um, despite both of my parents being atheists, I had, um, taken on the Christian faith. I, I got myself baptized. I got myself confirmed.
00:07:33
Speaker
I became very, very zealously Christian. and At that point, that that wasn't a a healthy development for me. I but i was kind of looking for some kind of meaning, for for some kind of of structure. and i was I was diagnosed in the end with hyper-religiosity and religious OCD.
00:07:55
Speaker
because I had become um very, very anxious about so um about heaven, about hell. I was a very literal thinker. And I yeah um i got into this um this this kind of a framework and it really seriously damaged my my mental health. So coming away from that, I did a lot of reading of the um of the New Atheists, a lot of reading of neuroscience.
00:08:22
Speaker
And I stopped being able to believe when I was 16, but I retained my my fear that so that that so like there could be an afterlife, that people I love and that myself, but i could we could go to hell for not not being Christian.
00:08:37
Speaker
So as I was coming out of that, I did a lot of reading on on critical thinking, on um on evidence-based ah epistemology, on how we know things are that are true. I had a lot of arguments with them with religious believers. And so when i i i then I started writing as a critic of religion.
00:08:58
Speaker
I'd say that this is faith-based based epistemology is not a good one for deciding what is true. The liberal elements of um of conservative Christianity, at least with its attitude towards women and and gay people, is is not ethical.
00:09:14
Speaker
And so when postmodernism appeared, in my life anyway, and there was the the same um highly dubious narrative-based epistemology, this same narrative in liberal ethics which which did not allow the individual their own dignity, their own reason, their own their own personality, that their their own ability to to access things and address them and evaluate them.
00:09:40
Speaker
i um I saw the same kind of problem there. So I started criticizing postmodernism in the same way that I had criticized religion. Helen, do you think that it is fair to me to characterize some of this as you having experiences in several different paradigms or mental models or, you know, you could say if you had moved from one culture to another, that Because of those differing positions that you then, you know, I'm not trying to go with standpoint theory here for it just to be clear, but because you were able to experience life from some different perspectives,
00:10:25
Speaker
that that gave you a greater appreciation for or a greater ability to question what was just accepted as orthodoxy from people who maybe hadn't stepped outside of their existing mental models.
00:10:42
Speaker
Well, i I think that's always true to to a certain extent. When you come up against um against very different ideas, when you have to try and navigate your way through them, then that's that's always going to produce thinking and patterns of thinking. But I i think that that much more of um of what defines me and the the reasons that I have been addressing these things comes down to psychological traits.
00:11:09
Speaker
And i I think maybe some of those are learnt from my my family environment, but I think more of them are are innate. And this is my my father. um but Just to inform me that I am bolshie.
00:11:22
Speaker
I don't know if you have that word in in them America, but it it did means the a contrarian willing to argue with everything. And this this is actually very, very true. i at school, at home, i i have always liked to argue.
00:11:36
Speaker
And not not for the sake of it, but if if something comes up but that that i I think is wrong, it's very important to me that I address this. So I have kind of taken a um ah not remotely conflict averse.
00:11:52
Speaker
And I think if there had been somebody with a different kind of personality to me, and and and women in particular, often are more conflict averse than the men. i'm I'm atypical in that regard. I think somebody who'd had the same experiences as me but had had a a more um kind of accepting, agreeable personality would probably not have ended up basing a career on sort of arguing with authoritarian ideologies. This is is something that' um that is of particular interest, I think, to a personality type like me. I am a a very literal person.
00:12:29
Speaker
think I've realized that in in in recent years I tend to be analytical materialistic literal in my my thinking while a lot of of um of other people are are more ah happier to go with with narratives with with With sort of ah emotionally resonant ideas, with a general overview, i want to dig into everything and and make models of it and see how it all works.
00:12:57
Speaker
And I do think this is much more to do with with neurology and with psychological traits than with experiences. Ellen, I think that the way that you you know were first recognized sort of worldwide, at least a few if you look at Wikipedia or whatever else is through what I think Wikipedia calls the grievance studies affair.
00:13:25
Speaker
And so is that when it will will, one, I suppose, would you mind giving me a minute on what went on there. But then also, is that when things really started to take off or your writing and speaking?
00:13:39
Speaker
So the the Grievance Studies affair was a ah result of um James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and I just really feeling a need to show people the the problem with and with some of the scholarship within cultural and identity studies. So all of us had been writing straightforwardly and we all came from the New Atheist.
00:14:01
Speaker
and is that it true ah sort of arena. and And we were all concerned about this epistemology. We were all concerned about the the ethics of it. And when we were trying to explain straightforwardly to people that this and a lot of these theories that are divorced from reality, they they don't respect individuality. They're and grouping people um together ah as collectives and as and ascribing moral and values to ah to them and and they just don't think this is and this is ethical, it's not liberal, it's it's not evidence-based, it's not empirical. And when we were were trying to explain this to people straightforwardly in hundreds of essays between us, um people would always say, oh, you just don't understand the theories or they'd say, you're just not picking a few bad examples, they always exist. And so we thought, well, let's go into it, maybe. maybe um And we tried to do this with a very open mind.
00:14:59
Speaker
So we we said that we were going to, it it was more of a ah a kind of F, F, So reflexive ethnography was what we called it because we weren't quite sure what we were going to do at first. We were going to send things in. We wanted to see how we would be advised. We we had some hypotheses that we thought if if we put in um ah papers which have these conclusions, which use these methods, they'll be ah successful. But we wanted to see how we were were directed and how the the system worked and get an idea from the inside of it.
00:15:32
Speaker
So we we ultimately had seven papers published. and None of them are good in any way. that They're not based on on evidence. That that which which claims to have empirical research in it, it should have been clear that that research was either not possible or not plausible or that the conclusions we drew from it just weren't warranted. Most of them were straightforward theoretical papers and they they argued for...
00:16:01
Speaker
really deeply unethical things to see and men and women and black people and white people and trans people and gay people as these kind of categories of people who had certain beliefs and who all thought it in certain ways and and in really very often in very unethical ways And so we um but we had seven of those those accepted and seven more were progressing under revise and resubmit, which means they had a very good chance of being accepted with a few revisions. And the idea generally was that...
00:16:33
Speaker
we had We wanted to show people how this system worked. We wanted to understand it for ourselves. We only wanted to show people all of our citations are genuine. All of the arguments we made drew on theories and developments of theories that already existed. So we created a kind of and encyclopedia of terrible theories for people if you just go into our papers. And essentially well we wanted to be able to, well, I did, I won't speak for the other two, but my my main aim here was to be able to say, yes, I do understand the theories. Please see my paper in the leading feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia. And ah yes, this isn't just a few bad papers. Please see my hundreds of references. Please see what people had to do to be published and what would have presented us from being published.
00:17:20
Speaker
With some of the things that you were writing either before this or after this, are there problems in the world that some of these postmodern theories are genuinely, that are trying to they're trying to solve and those problems actually matter?
00:17:38
Speaker
They're just going about solving them or explaining them in perhaps the wrong way? ah Absolutely. There's ah one one piece that I've i've written and explicitly about this called What Social Justice Gets Right.
00:17:51
Speaker
But so to summarise that, I think we always have to accept that there is a kernel of truth. with all of with that with and with any of these these theories that that come up. And and within um within critical race theory, we can can say that without doubt that there has been a pattern of and exploitation and um and subjugation, of as we were writing in the American context, of of black Americans by by in favour of white i Americans, and that this has had an aftermath economically, geographically, um and in attitudes which continues to affect people to today. It's not... um
00:18:33
Speaker
ah sufficient to simply say, well, that was wrong and we mustn't do that anymore. We must treat people as equals. we there's all There's remaining and racist attitudes. And this is what these postmodern um theories attempt to get at. They want to get to the unconscious mind.
00:18:47
Speaker
They want to get at discourses that are perpetuating ideas about the inferiorities of black people, and they want to dismantle them. These are all very good aims. And the the same, of course, it is true with with sexuality. it It wasn't too long ago that homosexuality was illegal. It was regarded as a sin. Then it was regarded as a disorder. Now we have kind of reached a consensus of some people are gay, get over it, which is is excellent. But there are are still um attitudes out there which are...
00:19:17
Speaker
are blatantly homophobic. And and there are there are still sexist attitudes as well. I argue with people today and and quite often who who believe that that women just don't have the rational capabilities to take responsibilities like voting or having senior positions in institutions. and um And so these attitudes all do exist and we do need to get at them. Where the critical social justice approach goes so wrong, though, is that it tries to impose its own theoretical framework on top of of everybody.
00:19:50
Speaker
It has at its root, and this isn't the original ah postmodernists even. like well Let me take that back. So we if we have the original postmodern idea that knowledge and power are ah intertwined, there that we think of power knowledge as Foucault called it, So knowledge is always a construct of power and it is perpetuated in language. The people who are powerful, which is the straight, white, wealthy men, um decide what is true. They do so in their own interest and they take positions of power in institutions and culturally. And the way they talk about things becomes the way we all talk about things. And so in in order to get into that and dismantle it, we need to deconstruct.
00:20:33
Speaker
these um this This knowledge which has has come from from me from from powerful interests. And so then as as this has has developed within the specific identity theories, we've then got this um this same sort of thing that perpetuating. We we have that these arguments that there's a specific way that black people or people of color think. There's a specific female knowledge. There's a specific knowledge of of trans people.
00:21:01
Speaker
And where they this has gone so terribly wrong is that that isn't actually true. If you were to speak to any number of any significant number of black people and ask what their opinions on any issue was, you would find that some are conservative, some are libertarians, some are ran are progressive, some are Marxist. There's this whole whole range, but this these theories, they simplify and reduce politics knowledge down to their own perception of what the authentic voice of any group would be. and then they... um
00:21:38
Speaker
They they take yeah use these voices ah as authoritative while dismissing everybody else and of of that demographic as having internalised white supremacy or misogyny or transphobia and everybody else as um as being being blind, being ignorant, just having not woken up to these power structures. And this isn't something that that you can get at. It's a much more... religious style epistemology where if you know you've you've hardened your heart you just have to open your your mind to this your're re you're you're blinded blinded to the truth you need to see the light and that's just not something that we can work with
00:22:18
Speaker
You went on to write a couple of books. I believe that I have read all of them. So I i first read Cynical Theories.
00:22:29
Speaker
You wrote Counterweight Handbook. And then was there a variation of Counterweight Handbook? that Or was it Social Injustice? Yeah, so cynical theories was where we wanted to break down the the ideas because they are and complicated and they are counterintuitive and and and people kept and arguing with various points of them. So in cynical theories, we looked briefly in one chapter at at the core ideas of the postmodernists and then how they um evolved into the different so ah strands of critical theory of the the 90s and then how they solidified into what could just be called critical social justice or woke. I've really fought against woke, but I've lost. So it woke ah theories and and and just tried to to show people the the threads that that run through it and how it all works. And then some people found this too theoretically dense because it it was looking at a ah lot of the postmodern um ah scholars. it was It was bringing a lot of um of really quite deeply theoretical stuff into it. So even even though i I think most people have said that it is accessible to somebody with no background, but you they do have to read paragraphs more than once, it wasn't and terribly easy. So we got ah an excellent and young adult writer, Rebecca Christensen, to do a um ah revamped version. And she was aiming it at young adults. But we've learned since that so the majority of people who found it useful were adult adults.
00:24:04
Speaker
Am i recalling correctly that one of your books, at least you narrated the audio version? Yes, I narrated both are both of them. i you know, view your writing as, you know sitting at a very sort of foundational level of sort of opening my eyes, ah helping bringing a lot of insight to things that I did not have a depth of understanding. I'm sure you've encountered plenty of this and you kind of deal with it your writing that
00:24:37
Speaker
Many of us have heard of woke, but we don't really know what woke stands for. We just maybe have a feeling or we just go along to get along.
00:24:49
Speaker
And your writing has opened my eyes and helped me understand a number of of these things. And then I also sort of have your voice tied to the writing as well because of having listened to the audiobooks.
00:25:02
Speaker
yeah My favourite compliment is is when somebody tells me that I've helped them give verbal shape to something that they'd been been thinking about intuitively but hadn't quite managed to to get their heads entirely around. And I thought, yes, this is this is what i'm I'm trying to do, break things down, and put them in in models and and kind of show show how they work to make it easier to navigate them.
00:25:26
Speaker
I think that it was in counterweight handbook, but in one of your books, I believe I recall that you start to, you contend with the difference between liberal social justice and applied postmodernism.
00:25:46
Speaker
And I would love if you could remind me of the differences here and how you explain that. The difference to think about it is is set out by Kimberley Crenshaw in mapping the margins.
00:25:59
Speaker
And in that, and she really ah just just sets out beautifully where the whole sort of movement from the 90s went. So she takes issue with with two ways of um trying to to deal with and with racism, sexism, other things.
00:26:15
Speaker
The forms of of bigotry. And she says that that postmodernism, while it's very it's very useful for recognizing that things are socially constructed and deconstructing them, it doesn't give a way to act on it. and And in order to do any kind of activism, you need to be able to reconstruct.
00:26:32
Speaker
So she sees flaws in postmodernism. the other issue that the The other sort of philosophy that she sees flaws in is liberalism. And she criticizes liberalism very accurately in that she says that what liberalism does is tries to remove barriers.
00:26:48
Speaker
It tries to remove social significance from from things like race. so and and And she sees that as as not sufficient. and and this is this is how it how it does work at at the root. the The liberal, individual and universal approach, it it says that everybody deserves to have equal access to everything, equal rights, equal freedoms, equal opportunities. There are some people who have been denied this on and on the grounds of their race, their sex, their sexuality. This is not right. We must remove those barriers and enable each individual to reach their own potential, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc. That's the the core liberal element. But for Crenshaw and a lot of the identity politicians who were sort of rising at this time, this just wasn't enough. They they needed, they thought, to to to go into our identity politics, to speak for the interests of a group specifically, not in that universal sense, but and as having their own knowledge, their their own values, their own experiences, their own interests.
00:27:58
Speaker
And this, I think, was the absolutely fatal mistake because we are tribal territorial apes. When we had people like Martin Luther King...
00:28:08
Speaker
And he was appealing to America, generally saying, you know, i I have a dream that one day my little children will not be judged by the contents, by the color of their skin, but the contents of their character. He was speaking to a very common drive. of of concern for one's children, of um of the wish to succeed on one's own merits. This kind of universal approach that he took makes people think, yes, this isn't fair.
00:28:37
Speaker
I can empathize with you. I can see exactly why this is what you want. This is something I have. This isn't fair. I will help you. And this is where you you kind of then people see that they have common ground. They see that they have common humanity. When you take the identity politics approach, and i if I were to say to you, i I am a woman and I have all these experiences and knowledges that you can never possibly imagine.
00:29:00
Speaker
And as your status as a man, you will necessarily be thinking me, irrational and and ignorant and and silly and yourself to have to have superior knowledge and and you will want to to think in ways that keep me down.
00:29:13
Speaker
how sympathetic are you going to be to me? you're You're going to, with it this isn't this isn't how i feel, this isn't what i how i think. And you're going to see me as ah something other than you, not somebody with shared aims and interests, but something entirely different. And when you when you put this to species of tribal territorial apes, that this group of people are different, they have different interests, they're in competition for the same resources, nothing good is going to come of that.
00:29:46
Speaker
it feels like there's a no true Scotsman fallacy that is, is being played out. But then it you know, somebody that is, is, is applying these postmodern theories often, I feel like will say, well, you know,
00:30:07
Speaker
one of these people in one of these oppressed groups, if they were really, you know, gay or whatever it is, they wouldn't act like that. And then when you push on that, then there's a fallback to something else, which I was sort of alluded to, I believe, in some of the things that you said, Helen, which is, well, they wouldn't, maybe they are really part of that group.
00:30:32
Speaker
But they wouldn't think like that. They wouldn't disagree with our postmodern theory if not for the fact that they have been indoctrinated into the belief of the oppressive group and
00:30:49
Speaker
Do you encounter this, I suppose, is one question, or do you see it in a similar vein? And then if you do, how do you have constructive conversations with people who that can just constantly fall back to something that is is difficult to disprove?
00:31:05
Speaker
Well, I think the only thing you can do and when when this kind of argument comes up he is try to show the flaws in it. So I think Hannah Nicole Jones, yeah does the um ah she she set it out very, very clearly. She said that that some people could be racially black but not politically black.
00:31:27
Speaker
And what she she meant by that was that, yeah, okay, so this person is is is black by the color of of their skin, but they're not having the right ideas ah for to be a ah voice of color.
00:31:40
Speaker
And i think that if if you're going to start thinking like this, and i I think it's actually good to think like this because what she's doing at root is saying this individual with these ideas is right.
00:31:54
Speaker
So now take that that stance and say, why is this person right? Just make the argument. Because what people do when they with a standpoint epistemology and they start saying, well, listen listen to women, listen to women of colour, listen to trans women, is they always mean listen to the ones who agree with me. Now cut through that. Why ah do the ones who agree and who agree with you right? This is what we want. We want the argument. We want...
00:32:21
Speaker
You to make a case for this. and um and And that that is is what is not done. So if you, I think when somebody is making making this argument, then you just have say, well, if if you're going to argue that all of these people are right thinkers and everybody else is right,
00:32:37
Speaker
it has has been and indoctrinated into to sort of self-hating narratives by the socialization of the white supremacist, transphobic, patriarchal society, then you are ah are just making an assertion of your own own beliefs. we we We can all do that. I could say, and and a lot of people do, that you, by having these views, have been indoctrinated into the whole sort of woke mind virus by the um by the universities. and europe But we're not making arguments now, are we?
00:33:07
Speaker
What is the ultimate outcome, if I can put it that way, of the application of postmodern theory? Well, I mean, the the original hope postmodernists were were very despairing of there being any positive outcome. They felt that all we could do was keep dismantling and and deconstructing the the systems of power knowledge so that we were more aware of them. But then when that shift happened around 89, 90, where people started saying, well, no, we have to be able to reconstruct,
00:33:38
Speaker
then the the idea is, i think the the the best kind of steel man case for it is that it's a bit like being an alcoholic and you cannot hope to recover from that unless you admit that you have a problem.
00:33:52
Speaker
So the idea with the critical social justice activists where they have the unconscious bias training and and and all of these that sort of them and anti-racist training groups where they they ask people to say a affirm, that one statement that that people had to say when I was working with Counterweight was, all white people are racist and I am not the exception.
00:34:16
Speaker
That's a a statement very much like, I am so-and-so and I am an alcoholic. So once you've acknowledged that, then you are able to start dismantling your own thinking. And their idea is that if everybody just admits, recognizes, and and really sees these oppressive power systems and and accepts that they are within them,
00:34:37
Speaker
then we can actually have a chance of dismantling the sort of white supremacist and discourses that we're we're all um all all socialized into.
00:34:48
Speaker
That dismantling, does it lead or in one way or another, contribute to it some a breakdown of social cohesion?
00:35:00
Speaker
Does it lead to authoritarianism? Are there other things that you feel like if if we just continue to believe these things, we I'm speaking very broadly here, or we continue to allow them to be applied at the institutional or governmental level.
00:35:19
Speaker
Do you worry about things like that? Authoritarianism, social cohesion or something else? Well, yes, I think and and mean so social cohesion can have have so many different meanings. that As a liberal individualist, I don't think that everybody needs to have the same ideas. I want them to be able to to coexist.
00:35:38
Speaker
But yes, I mean, yeah chapter chapter three of of the the Counterweight Handbook, it it looks at the effects of a lot of this unconscious bias. um training and and how it has worked. And it's done pretty much what we thought it would. and Companies that have had this kind of training where they they have said, this is the experiences of of black people and and this is how all white people think and and this is what we have to do about it.
00:36:04
Speaker
It has either no improvement on racial relations or it has worsened them. And in one sort of five-year study by and Dobbin and Callow, very, very good rigorous researchers into this, they found that companies that had had five years of unconscious bias training then had 9% fewer black women in positions of of management than those which had not had it. Because the the result of of of this was that the um ah white white people who abhor racism...
00:36:39
Speaker
would then become very, very conscious of of race and they would so would want to affirm that that they themselves were racist because they're being told that this is how to how to address it, admit that you have a problem.
00:36:51
Speaker
first of all And then they would start thinking in racial terms. It was affecting their relationships with their their colleagues because there really isn't much difference between convincing yourself, because I have racist bias, I will think black people are less intelligent, and then actually thinking black people are less intelligent.
00:37:08
Speaker
So this caused them to actually become, to have more racist ideas. Meanwhile, the white people who were not ashamed of their racism and um when actually held those ideas were were comforted by being told what everybody does. It's normal.
00:37:25
Speaker
And so they then became more more protective of those ideas. Meanwhile, people of racial minority ah were reporting, suddenly realising that everybody was much more racist than they had possible than they had previously imagined due to these theories and them feeling...
00:37:40
Speaker
ah feeling very much sort of alienated from from the workforce. And that this is precisely what you would expect to happen. And there's a wonderful, um now Pamela is her first name. I've i've forgotten the name of the um of the author who who came in and she wrote some wonderful books on on then sort of updating unconscious bias training in a way to bring people together. But this is what various different studies have found now, that that if instead of saying you are this distinct group, you are that distinct group, you can't possibly understand each other, and this group is is trying to oppress you, and you are really going to be very disadvantaged with everything you try to do,
00:38:21
Speaker
you're going to It's going to cause a breakdown of um ah for everybody. But if you are doing more of an unconscious bias training in in which people are recognized as having shared goals, shared aims, being of mutual value, of belonging, and actually working together,
00:38:41
Speaker
but this is is when you're you're most likely to be able to overcome any any kinds of um of racial prejudice, of of sexism, of of homophobia that that is actually there. britain I mean, this is this is and is something i I go on about a lot because we really are tribal apes and we do have this sense of in-group and out-group. It's very, very difficult to get rid of that, but what we can do is so is is work is work with it to bring more people into the into the in-group, to see more people as sharing our goals and our aims.
00:39:18
Speaker
You said two things earlier that I wanted to ask you about. you I think it was in your graduate studies or sometime around then when you were you were saying that racism is not inherent.
00:39:35
Speaker
And then a few times you mentioned that we are tribal territorial apes. And those, i feel like they're not really in conflict.
00:39:47
Speaker
But when you first said racism is not inherent, one of the things that I thought about, and I'm I really would love your perspective, given your writing and your research, is that I thought that there is a part that is generally built into our you know very base psychology that we tend to feel more comfortable with people who sound like us, look like us, whatever else. And that's not, to some extent, you know, that's not wholly due to socialization.
00:40:26
Speaker
And so when you said tribal in particular, that again, they're not in conflict directly, but I started to be curious about your perspective on how much of maybe what some people would call racism or group affinity comes from that as an animal, we maybe feel safe around people that look like us, sound like us, whatever, versus that develops sometime later. And then maybe that contributes to you using the word tribal.
00:41:00
Speaker
I think those, those so ah i have written about this this recently, and I also have an ongoing piece called done Tribalism is Innate, Racism is Not, because that is the the distinctive difference here, is that we are hardwired to think tribally, to think groupishly. We are apes who have evolved by competing with other tribes and by cooperating with ourselves And so we do look for for differences. ah Very, very quickly, there are some wonderful and studies in in which um people have just been put in different t-shirts and and and set the the same goals. And and within 24 hours, they're attributing all kinds of horrible characteristics to the other group.
00:41:48
Speaker
And so that that is something that we have to understand that we do. Now, with race, and there's a very, very good um ah study on this, I'm going to pronounce his name wrongly, Pietruski. And they're putting people into groups and looking at at what kind of um what kind of categorizations people continue to make when they're engaged on a set on a shared project.
00:42:13
Speaker
And their hypothesis was that they would find that people always remembered the sex of the other members in the group and the age of the other members in the group because that is is something that is always significant for a sexually reproducing species, for a species who will need to know who can who can fight, who can run.
00:42:32
Speaker
We always remain aware of what sex and what age other people are. Race, we forget very, very quickly as soon as we are engaged in a in a shared goal because that has not been significant over evolutionary time.
00:42:48
Speaker
and And in order to make it significant, we have to build and ideologies or or narratives or reality around that um connecting a racial group to an alliance system.
00:43:04
Speaker
So we we could, but and before we can, that that tribal thing fires at all. And obviously, there sometimes that is connected. When we're looking at wide-scale immigration, for example, and we have, ah ah say, ah a group of very conservative Muslims, they're going to hold very different ideas. They're also going to be a different colour. There's going to be a potential there for a tribal in-group, out-group thing on both sides. But it's not actually to do with the race. It's to do with the the different ideas and and the sense of tribalism that has been produced. So when you first started saying, we are you know we we feel more comfortable with people who look like us, who sound like us, I was um was remembering a ah time and when I was in San Francisco and I was on my own. and i was a little bit anxious and there's um very sort of that book,
00:43:57
Speaker
San Franciscan and mentally ill people are very different to London mentally ill people. And Americans are quite different in their sort of social interaction anyway. they they look more they They make more eye contact. They're more likely to speak to strangers. And I i was wandering around this this um this city just not really knowing and if there somebody just came up and started talking to me enthusiastically. This isn't a thing that happens in London. And I'm thinking, are you, do do you want something for me? Are you just a nice, friendly American? Are you mentally ill? I couldn't really place what was happening. And as I was walking around, I heard ah the accent of London, of them of my own town behind me. And i i looked around and they were a group of Sikh lads. So they were were in Indian Brits.
00:44:46
Speaker
And I i went and and said hello to them. And they heard my accent. And they the the recognition for both of us, it was, ah, my people are here. Now, I love Americans. you're You're my second favorite country in the world.
00:44:59
Speaker
And, ah you know, we we have an an awful lot in common. But when I was in a strange place where I was just not quite picking up on the social cues at all, and then somebody else from my own town appears, I am going to automatically think, my people, even though they are a different race to me, they were a different generation to me, they were a different religion to me, they still kicked off those in-group signals because those are the ones that are most I think, significant, the culture, the language, the um all those little cues of familiarity. That is what we have evolved, I think, to pick up on to a much greater degree than you know the degree of of um of pigmentation and melotin melatonin.
00:45:46
Speaker
Melanin even. Get me chemicals right. That's really helpful. And I think relates to one thing that you have dealt with in your writing, but also in this conversation that is really important is, you know, the, ah cool what do we mean when we say this word or this phrase?
00:46:09
Speaker
And, you know, the thing that I was thinking when you said the, I think the way that you phrased it was racism is not inherent, was probably better characterized in my mind as, you know, color of someone's skin.
00:46:28
Speaker
But what I was applying it to, or the definition that I was putting on it was really, if we want to use the word prejudice, prejudice of numerous forms.
00:46:40
Speaker
And it becomes really helpful to get clear on what we're talking about. So I appreciate that the way that you helped me clarify some of that. I think um and we have used concepts of um of of race so so differently and you know got concepts of of group and of blood. I've recently been rereading and Agatha Christie, sort of write writing in the the nineteen forty s and 50s. And the way that she addresses this is um she she speaks of Americans as a race. Yeah.
00:47:15
Speaker
and And she says that this is a race ah of people, they're they're they're very friendly, they're they're very um outspoken, they're very sociable, and to you know like others of their race. And then she speaks of the race of Frenchmen and the race ah of Italians. And and this was was really you know less than 100 years ago, before we had um the people of different races, any significant number, in our country. This idea of of race as a sort of...
00:47:43
Speaker
as as a cultural social grouping, because we all we all know that and Americans have the same genetic ancestry as as um as a lot of us. So that this um this concept of of race and and how it has ah has developed and been ah been changed over the centuries is is really very, it it taps into that deeper thing. And that is what I would like people to separate from. is that that that hardwired element where we're going to see people as our in-group and we're going to be wary of anyone as in as our out-group and the idea that this is natural to do on any particular unchosen characteristic because it it isn't.
00:48:27
Speaker
And that's something then that we can can work on. If we wanted to reduce racism, then we could could work on not seeing and seeing race as significant. and and And people of other races can can also work work on on not making that significant, on on trying to come together on on our common experiences, what we have in common. And this is is what a lot of the research that has been looking into ah more successful ways to improve um workplace harmony and reduce reduced prejudice has been finding. this is this is how This is how we hack our ape brains.
00:49:07
Speaker
You've referenced some of your more recent writing. So I'm curious, what does your writing or research or other work look like more recently? And is it leading toward any new books or anything of that nature?
00:49:27
Speaker
ye i keep um i'm I'm consistently looking at ah how we can be liberal in any situation. And when i'm I'm speaking of being liberal, I am talking about that broader philosophical tradition. So i'm i'm there are liberals on the right, there are liberals on the left, all of us who value those fundamental philosophical principles that underlie liberal democracies, that that right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. And so I am always writing um about something to do with this. So I opposed the critical social justice movement as a liberal. I am a liberal on the left.
00:50:07
Speaker
And so I thought it was particularly important for me to address address that. And I've been looking as well. We've had a rise of um of ethno-nationalism in in the UK. And that's really very sort of ah strongly...
00:50:23
Speaker
illiberal attitude. So I've been appealing to cultural conservatives on the right who still hold those liberal um those liberal values to to address them. And the the sort of right-wing populists in in the US, s i'm I'm not a fan of your president, I'm afraid. And um and and And other parts of of Europe as well. So I've been focusing more recently on trying to appeal to to what I would call liberal conservatives. i I'm aware that to a lot of Americans this seems like an oxymoron. But what I mean by this is is people who have ah who are very patriotic, who are are very committed to their country, they they value family, community, personal responsibility, They want to conserve their their culture and their traditions, but among those things they want to conserve is that liberal philosophical tradition, that's um that thing that that made America the land of the free.
00:51:23
Speaker
And so these I think these traditional liberal conservatives are a lot of whom i'm I'm addressing at the moment because I think we really need them to develop a very strong voice and and and come to define the right much more than the...
00:51:40
Speaker
The post-truth populists or the yeah Christian nationalists or ethno-nationalists. So if I want to keep up with that writing or otherwise follow you, you know, in the sense of social media, subscriptions, connect with you or whatever else, yeah, where should I go to?
00:52:02
Speaker
The overflowing of a liberal brain and is is my sub-spec. Is there anything you would want me to be thinking about after today or any words of wisdom that you would leave me with?
00:52:15
Speaker
The thing that I would really like like people to to understand about what is going on at the moment, which I don't think is addressed ah very much, is that we're we're really facing an epistemic problem. It isn't just a matter of of political divides and polarisation.
00:52:33
Speaker
On all sides at the moment, we are seeing people... increasingly disregard what is true. and so we've We've had that the the postmodern left saying that that knowledge is a construct of of power and we can't trust these privileged people. and Then we're seeing the populist right saying that everything we think is true is made up by the elites and they're they're building conspiracy theories around this and we can't trust the experts anymore. and We're seeing more and more people lean into their own narratives and um and yeah and use inconsistent reasoning, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias without any kind of shame in order to to to promote their own narrative. And I i think rather, whereas...
00:53:19
Speaker
Ideally, and and and for the most part, there has always been some expectation that people will have some kind of ethical consistency, that they will care somewhat about about what is true. the There's always been spin in politics. There's there's always, um you know, it's kind of persuasive rhetoric and and talking around subjects. But what we're seeing at the moment, which really worries me,
00:53:44
Speaker
is that people can say things which are blatantly untrue, which can be demonstrated as untrue, and they don't feel any embarrassment or fear of this being found out because they know that they won't lose the support of their peers as long as they are supporting the right narrative.
00:54:01
Speaker
So we see that like in particularly clear examples of this, some kind of um of hor horrific incident will will happen and people will say, well, this is terrorism. And then immediately they'll say, well, this is immigrants or or this is the far right, this is Jews, this is this is Muslims. They'll immediately build their narrative. Now, we know within a few hours we're going to know who that was. But nobody is ashamed that um you know yeah afraid that it might turn out, well, you were wrong.
00:54:29
Speaker
Because their purpose was to say, I commit to this narrative, not what is true. That's a really interesting thought to leave on. And so, Helen, after all the time that we emailed and been in contact, I really appreciate you making the time today.
00:54:50
Speaker
i i don't even remember when it was. I'm sure I can find it on Goodreads when I first read Cynical Theories. But as I said, you...
00:55:01
Speaker
You did exactly what you know you you said makes you feel good, I think, about your work or your writing. You helped me understand a lot of things that I'd been hearing, but I didn't really have a definition for. I didn't have enough to grasp onto to understand whether I felt like I liked or disliked or aligned or did not align with something. And so I really have looked forward to talking to you and you've been on my list for a long time. So thank you for joining me today.
00:55:33
Speaker
Thank you for having me, Eric. It's been a really good conversation. Thank you.