Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage

Australian psychologist Mark Halloran, Ph.D., has published a remarkable collection of essays about the current culture war. The essays, found in Iconoclast: Ideas That Shaped the Culture, were penned by a range of formidable public intellectuals like Heather Heying, Gad Saad, Nicholas Christakis, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Eric Topol, and others. Each chapter is unique and explains emergent themes and underlying issues affecting our modern predicament.

Dr. Halloran has graciously allowed me to publish my chapter, Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage, on my Substack. If you enjoy this chapter, please consider purchasing the book and supporting Dr. Halloran’s work on explaining the phenomena underlying the culture war.

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Postmodernism and the Failure of Moral Triage

Based on an interview with Peter Boghossian

Mark Halloran: I wanted to start off with the Grievance Studies Affair and discuss some of the criticisms. And I think that in discussing the criticisms, I feel like we can talk about some of the ideas that don’t really get explored. And I’d be interested to see what you think the heart of the problem is.

Peter Boghossian: This is the way I think about it: The Grievance Studies Affair exposed the problem, and Cynical Theories explains the problem. So, it was point to the problem, corrupt scholarship, explain the problem, and now each of us are doing something different. Helen is engaging with people who have been damaged by woke ideology. James Lindsay is more on the front lines, fighting – and he has a nonprofit, New Discourses. I’m fully immersed in the culture war in an attempt to change the moral mind.

I wanted to talk about the criticisms. The first one: journals with higher impact factors were more likely to reject the papers, and secondly the chances were better if the manuscripts were allegedly based on empirical data. They’re two of the most significant ones. The idea, I think, is that there is an issue with peer review across academia. So, there’s a replication crisis in psychology and a similar crisis also occurs within biological sciences. So, I wonder how you respond to that?

I think Helen Pluckrose said it best, if you have rats in your house, and you’re saying, ‘I have a problem, there’s rats in my house,’ and someone else comes along and says, ‘Well, wait a second, the neighbor’s house has cockroaches,’ that’s totally irrelevant to the fact that you have rats in your house. So, there is a problem in these disciplines. People have known that there’s been a problem in these disciplines for a long time. And to make the criticism that ‘Well, all disciplines have problems so why should we attempt to either intrude upon the academic freedom or do anything about our problem when other people have problems as well?’ Okay, other people have problems, fine. There’s a replication crisis in psychology. Perhaps how you deal with that problem tells you more about whether or not the discipline is based in reality or not, and whether there are actual corrective mechanisms for it.

I think there’s a deeper problem in relation to this. Because there’s often the quotation that comes up: ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.’

That’s from Audry Lorde’s 1984 piece. I think that’s the best way to explain the problem to people.

So, if you reject the ideas of science, and you say that these ideas are simply the ideas of white males and therefore they’re problematic, then you have to reject all the ideas that come from that. You have to reject falsification and you have to reject the idea of avoiding tautologies. How do you conduct research?

One of the things that folks want to do, it’s called Research Justice, is to forward certain citations. So, Research Justice involves the forwarding of the citations of non-white men. Black trans females, for example, would be forwarded, whereas white male citations would not. And the problem with that? Or do I actually have to explain that that’s the most insane, fucking deranged idea? But among the problems with that, are that you cut off knowledge and you cut off avenues of potential research; medical research, telecommunications, transportation, etc. It’s one of the most dangerous and pernicious ideas we have now: that your immutable characteristics limit or enable you to have access to the truth. And that idea is a social, cognitive and epistemological toxin. Because once you say that, then all of society almost necessarily collapses - you have no common bond. It’s like when folks resort to their lived experience. This has a long pedigree in the literature, but it’s come up now quite a bit. I can’t speak for Australia, but in the US, you hear so many college students say ‘In my lived experience...’ Well, who gives a fuck about your lived experience? I want to know what the data is. What’s the evidence? If there’s a conflict between one’s lived experience and the data, you have to defer to the data.

I’d read about postmodernism and social constructionism back in my undergraduate degree, and so I started to read Foucault and I found one place where we really agreed, which is where he says that the methods of the natural sciences such as physics, biology, and chemistry, translate imperfectly to disciplines like the humanities, sociology, and psychology. And so, what has happened with these academic disciplines is they’ve hothouse themselves, they’ve argued amongst themselves with these ideas, in a little bit like what happened to Freudian psychoanalysis. What they were talking about mostly was literature and philosophical ideas that had some truth. But it wasn’t science. Once you uncouple yourself from empiricism, you can start to wander off in multiple directions. So, you can do Gender Studies and call it literature or some type of ethics or philosophy. But I don’t think you can call it research.

They call it action research, which is a fancy way of saying that this doesn’t universalize; it’s not generalizable, it’s hyper-localized. But I think that the key in understanding these disciplines is that they promote moral ideas, and that it’s what Sokal calls fashionable nonsense. They are morally fashionable ideas. And if you want to publish a paper in a journal that goes against the zeitgeist, it’s almost impossible. And so, what we have is, and this is funny that this is actually a postmodern notion in and of itself, like a reality tunnel; we have a funneling of domains of thought that are untethered to reality. They’re kind of floating out there, but they’re extremely well-layered upon themselves. When I was in the New Atheist movement, I read texts by N.T. Wright. It’s an astonishing exegesis of the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus. But it’s all built upon other people who have these experiences, and it’s layers of self-reinforcing madness. It’s just like an architectonic structure of mass delusion.

So, what we have in these fields is morally fashionable nonsense. It’s idea laundering. And they’re not only informing public policies. When you look at society and the madness we see now, it’s because entire generations of people; probably a full generation and a half, depending on how you want to parse it, have been taught by ideologues. They’ve been taught that certain moral impulses these ideologues have are true. They’re tested on articles and journal materials, and then they get out of college and I think Jordan Peterson has said, five to seven years later, then not only do they go in the workplace, but they ascend in managerial capacity and administrative duty. And the consequence of that is they then institutionalize what they’ve been taught in schools because they think it’s true, but it’s not true. It’s completely untethered to reality.

When you’ve talked about this, you’ve talked about it developing from critical theory and postmodernism. The thing that stood out for me from a philosophical perspective was that postmodernism embeds its causal reality within language and culture.

That’s one of the reasons why you see—primarily on the left—the idea that if you change the institutions you can change the outcomes. It’s very structuralist, you see that in Saussure. It’s complicated, because there are many variables that go into play. But one of those is with this new phenomenon now. And you mentioned that in the Grievance Studies content, you see a kind of biological denialism. Eric Weinstein posed a fantastic question: ‘When there’s a conflict between gender studies and biology on which side do you err?’ So that’s really a litmus test for this whole thing. When you have a kind of biological denialism, what you have to have instead is a manufactured importance of language, and the institutions that govern the structure of society. For example, it’s the opposite of Tim Urban’s idea of an Idea Lab; there’s a concerted effort to control speech. And the idea is that if you can control speech, then you can help control outcomes. This is a sophisticated but hollow notion.

If you can’t root something in biology, or you can’t root it in theology, then what are you rooting it in? Well, you can’t root it in anything because that’s postmodernism, right? It’s an incredulity toward meta-narratives. It’s a skepticism of a God’s eye view. So, what are you rooting it in? Well, you’re rooting it in power-knowledge, as Foucault calls it, and you’re rooting it in the language people use. And they’ve been incredibly successful with the terms they’ve used: diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism. These words simply don’t mean what people think they mean. They’ve been changed to manufacture different outcomes.

When I first encountered the idea, it took me a lot of thinking to get out of the solipsism of language. That the only reason that you refer to an object as the thing that it is, is because that’s what your culture and your language has taught you. But of course, if you moved across time into a different episteme or different zeitgeist, it would be completely unfettered, and so that it’s all utterly relative.

That’s interesting because when I read Feyerabend Farewell to Reason...it’s a play on words: ‘Farewell, fare well to reason.’ French postmodernists tell me these ideas translate better in the French, I don’t read French so I’ll take their word for it. But there is unquestionably some truth in the consequences of having captured the meanings of words. I’m very interested in the practical aspect of how we solve this problem. That’s one of the things that FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) is doing. It’s headed by Bion Bartning, and I’m a founder and currently on the board of advisors. Bion is trying to reclaim certain terms. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I’m incredibly sympathetic to that project. He wants to reclaim anti-racism, which is currently a ubiquitous term, but I will say that there was a lot of truth to the idea that if you can control—this is kind of Orwellian in a sense—if you can control the language, you can control people’s cognitions. And if you can control certain words which have a positive valence and people want to be associated with those words for a whole host of reasons but personal entity is chief among them, you can control outcomes. 

I had a friend who is a teacher at a very expensive private school tell me that a student said to him that genitalia is a social construct. And I think it is a social construct - in the same way that cyclones are.

Right. And that’s one of the reasons that we did The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct. If you think in terms of everything being a social construct, then where does that leave you? Well, that leads to the position of the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire who stated that the purpose of education is to develop a critical consciousness, or conscientização, and to eliminate oppression. And when you think in those terms, and there’s no grounding again, there’s no grand explanatory mechanism like science or Christianity, then it becomes easy to understand why using words and defining words in certain ways is essential to navigating social power hierarchies.

Foucault has been acknowledged as having really taken the philosophical idea of power, and extending it: to the institutional, political, personal, diffuse, structured, non-structured. It’s everywhere, it’s in the criminal justice system - it’s in every personal interaction.

He’s saying that power differential; it’s not that there is no objective truth, which is a common mistake, it’s just that it’s all mediated, and you can’t really get there to external reality because you use language. And then you’re dealing in a kind of anti-Socratic idea. When you wed your personal identity, particularly in terms of identity politics, to your ability to access the truth, not only is that limiting, but it makes any kind of liberation, particularly social liberation, impossible. I would argue that they’ve got it dead wrong. I don’t believe this should be the purpose of education. I think the purpose of education should be orientated toward the truth. Jonathan Haidt talks about the telos of the educational institution. And briefly, institutions have changed their mission from truth-seeking enterprises because of applied postmodernism and postmodernism, to instruments of social change in that they basically teach people how to recognise these individual power structures and power differentials and then disrupt them.

Henry Giroux writes about that again, building off the work of Paulo Freire. These are notions now that you see institutionalised. Not only institutionalised, actually, I’m going to go beyond that. You see them as the North Star of almost every college and university in United States right now. This is within a very short period of time—we’re talking literally five years. The president of Portland State just sent out an email saying, and he said it twice: ‘Racial justice is his highest priority.’ Let’s linger on that for a second. His highest priority. Not teaching excellence, not financial solvency. The university has gone bankrupt. They’re talking about laying people off. And he’s still sending emails and making pronouncements about racial justice being the highest priority. It’s astonishing.

That’s the power of language, though, isn’t it? This is the problem I think you face, is that racial justice sounds like a good thing?

Well, it is a good thing. Racial justice. It’s that you’d have to modify the word justice with anything, right? Why would you have to modify it with anything?

You mean there is just justice? Well, there are different elements of justice. I would say that there’s the lowercase social justice, there’s natural justice…

That’s a more philosophical conversation. Broadly, Socrates would say that justice is anything that participates in the good. I love The Republic, it is one of my favorite, if not my favorite book of all time, but that topic, which Dan Dennett calls the topic of abiding significance is really wrestling with what justice means. And it’s an anathema to even think in those terms, to talk about the immutable trait someone has and say; ‘Well, you’re a man, you can’t have access to that.’ What are you talking about?

I feel like often the simple kind of narrative that comes up about this, is that all of the ideas of science, and even philosophical ideas like individualism and universality, come from the Enlightenment. And then when this is critiqued by postmodernists, or Marxist feminists, they say, ‘It’s white male ideas.’ However, all of those values can be found in Islamic culture during the Arabic transmission, it can be found in African philosophy etc.

Well, of course, it’s even more of a problem; it’s a derangement syndrome. Let’s say that we’re not going to put a ridiculous restriction on this conversation, and then someone says something ridiculous, and we want to engage it, to borrow a phrase from Christians ‘in good faith.’ Okay, what’s the problem with that? It all came from white guys. So what? No, I mean, I actually am asking a sincere question. So why is that a problem?

I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem. But if you allow that to be problematized in terms of the history and the history is wrong ...

First of all, that’s the whole idea; it is to problematize everything and find grievances in everything. But that assumes that their identity was responsible for falsification, as opposed to falsification being a fundamental guiding principle of scientific inquiry. So, one would have to make an argument why that would be the case, and there’s nothing you could do, because there’s no reasonable argument that you could make. You’re not talking about the culture or the philosophy they develop. You’re talking about inventing and discovering things. It’s not about belonging to a period like the Enlightenment - it doesn’t belong to white guys. I did an event with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, at Portland State University titled ‘Are Western Values Worth Defending?’. And it’s an incredibly important concept. And if you watch that video, it’s crystal clear that everybody has access to Enlightenment values and the tools and the fruits of the scientific method.

I thought that where we would have disagreement is in relation to the idea that gets spoken about a lot now, which is speech is violence. You have said, ‘Well, speech is violence is a category error.’ And I’m not sure I think that’s true. I think speech can be violent.

I think I said it’s a category mistake, that’s a term that comes from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. It confuses categories, like three is not in the tactile field. So, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote a wonderful piece in The Atlantic about it, and they actually perfectly captured my views. Why do you think speech is violence?

If I make a threat to kill, and the other person believed it, and I never acted upon that, that’s not to say the other person wasn’t traumatized by that threat. So, I think the problem is what people would call concept creep, or what I would call extrapolation.

So microaggressions, the claim could be, are a kind of speech violence. So it goes: ‘I’m going to punch you in the face you four-eyed bastard’ to ‘I hate you,’ to ‘We should be colorblind.’ The threshold for violence is continuously lowered. But in every case, the answer is always more resilience. I guess in the highest case, the answer is a gun and Brazilian jujitsu! But barring that, the answer is always ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ I just read a tweet from Paul Graham about that the other day, and it would seem to me that it’s inevitable if there’s a homeostasis, if there’s a balance, and you take care of the big things, and you always have to be offended, or outraged at something, then the threshold is continually lowered and so you’re always outraged about smaller and smaller things; the minutiae of life. I think that could very well be a universal human constant.

So, resilience has to be a value. Again, back to ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ Think about this: when you say ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones,’ you’re saying that physical violence can get me for sure. You can smash my head with a rock, but names will never hurt me. So, it’s a value you’re taking upon yourself, as opposed to ‘I’m offended’ when you want someone else to stop. You are ceding power to everybody around you with that switch from the old mantra that we grew up with, sticks and stones, to the new, ‘I’m offended, that’s a microaggression.’ You’re actually making yourself more brittle and more fragile. As my friend Douglas Murray says: ‘Part of the problem is that there are not enough Nazis, so we have to invent them.’ Everybody’s a Nazi if they say something I don’t like. How many Nazis do you think are actually running around? I mean, actual Nazis? I don’t think there are any left.    

My mentor was interred at Buchenwald, and he died at 98 years old about five years ago. World War II ended in 1945. I think they use Nazi to mean very bad person, but how many actual skinheads and neo-Nazis do we have running around? So, we need to invent more Nazis. And then the most Orwellian thing of all, is when you profess to be an anti-fascist, and you act exactly like a fascist. 

This is sort of a personal question, but you live in Portland. And it seems as though this is the epicenter for woke ideology. What’s happened in Portland that this has really taken hold? And what are your experiences? Because you’ve obviously decided to come out against this, because you’ve recognized that it’s stifling.

It’s totally worse than stifling. So why Portland? That’s a very complicated question. I think it has to do with intellectual homogeneity. It’s really a political monoculture here. It has to do with the university continuously cranking out utter madness and stamping it with an academic imprimatur. And they have been for years and all of the University of Oregon system as well, it’s beholden to some pretty vicious ideologies. It was a fertile ground for breeding bad ideas. And when you cull intellectual diversity out of the mix, the problem becomes more extreme, because the more deranged your ideas, the more normative they become. Many if not most faculty at Portland State do not inform students of the other side of an argument, because it’s racist, or homophobic, or however they’ve construed it. As just one example, take Martha Nussbaum’s criticism of Judith Butler. If something goes against the narrative, it’s not taught, even if the counterview is espoused by a woman and one of the world’s leading philosophers, like Nussbaum.

Again, along with the theme of this conversation, one becomes more brittle and more fragile, instead of developing the cognitive and emotional capacity to deal with arguments they don’t like and the intellectual capacity to argue against those ideas. And there are some monstrously bad ideas floating around. And the most important thing is that we have to retain our ability to call them out. And once we lose that, we’ve lost everything.

There’s the kernel of truth inside each idea that you’ve talked about. For instance, if you take an idea, like victim blaming, this has come from a time when women could be blamed for their own sexual assault.

Still today, if you look at India, Pakistan, South Africa…

And the same thing can be said with cultural appropriation, you can simply see that as cultural theft. So, I’m taking indigenous art from indigenous people and not paying them and not recognizing them for it.

That’s not what people mean when they use the term cultural appropriation.

No, but that is probably where it started and if the idea isn’t clear then it creeps.

Or people just problematize things and their taught to find grievances in everything. There’s a place here in Portland where white business owners had a taco stand, and then some people went crazy, because the owners culturally appropriated Mexican food. That’s a derangement.

How would you have fusion in culture?

How do you have anything? You literally couldn’t exist! You couldn’t speak English, because that’s an appropriation, you couldn’t wear clothes, because you’ve appropriated that from another time. You couldn’t cut your hair, you couldn’t fill your cavities; there’s literally nothing you could do. You couldn’t even be in a mud hut, because mud huts are appropriated! So, there’s literally nothing you could do, you would be dead, the whole society would be extinguished.

If you took Foucault and the idea of power and a cultural narrative, for instance British colonial ideas around the criminalization of homosexuality. So, if he says, ‘Well, you’ve got to really be a little bit suspicious about a culture that criminalizes homosexuality and what’s considered a cultural norm.’

So, even that is, to borrow a turn of phrase, ‘problematic.’ I was just reading about the laws against homosexuality, I don’t know if you want to call it the Palestinian territories, Gaza maybe is the most neutral, and these laws are draconian. And when was the last time you heard any of the wokester’s criticize that? Just a few years ago, and we know this, not only was this not a secret, people were screaming out about it from the rooftops. And we have unequivocal testimony of Yazidi women who had been sold by Islamic State; literal, actual physical slaves - actual sexual slaves. We know that - that’s a fact. Did you see a single protest on a college campus about the female sexual slavery of the Yazidis? No, not one. Zero. Did you even hear of one person carrying a sign: ‘Free the Yazidis’? No. So the question is, why?

Isn’t the narrative of postcolonial studies basically: ‘If ISIS or Taliban soldiers are enslaving women, that’s only because the West created it?’

It’s just intellectually exhausting to me to try to make a better argument for the unhinged ideas of people who are uneducated and uninformed. I would circumvent all of that and say it’s a grotesque failure to morally triage. What would be the gold standards of bad? The gold standard of bad would have to be genocide. One right down from that, but not very far down, would be institutionalized slavery. And so, you can formulate a kind of a hierarchy: not paying your parking ticket is low down, stepping on an ant that runs across your floor, maybe that’s not even an issue? Maybe if you’re a Jain it is. And so, if you have a hierarchy, the failure to criticize the institutionalized slavery of Yazidi women while at the same time screaming at the top of your lungs about gender disparities in conferences is a failure to morally triage. It’s also a failure to be honest about the nature of the problem.

The problem here is that some of the ideas have infiltrated from people like the Foucault, Gayle Reubin or Judith Butler. I don’t really know how many gay, bisexual or trans people would actually know where these ideas come from?

It’s not like with queer theory, that there’s a small group of activists, and then they talk among themselves. It’s that there’s been a cultural shift. And these ideas which weren’t heard of are normative now. And the Overton window has shifted. So, the whole idea about how we think about these things has changed, and many of those ways are very, very good. But some are certainly not good.

Homosexuality was first decriminalized in the United States in the 1960s. However, up until 2003, there were still some American states, Texas was one, where homosexuality was still criminalized. And so, you can see that these ideologies might be driven by anger about real injustice.

The idea is, of course, there have been injustices historically, and some of those injustices persist. And those injustices have to be dealt with, and they have to be dealt with honestly. If you believe that moral values are rationally drivable, then certain things follow from that; certain pedagogical methods, certain dialectical methods ... You want conversation, you want debate, you want to talk - let the best ideas win, sunlight is the best disinfectant, etc. But if you don’t believe that, you believe that these ideas are artifacts of culture, or you believe that they are historical accidents, and then certain methods also follow on from that as well. And those tend to be more totalitarian, more speech restrictive, etc. I think that’s one of the things you see happening now is that you see a denigration of and a turning away from reason. So certain things follow from that with necessity. And that gets back to the idea that speech is violence. If you say ‘You feel unsafe,’ someone said something, and then everybody then has to shut up. Another word for that is an inclusive space - you’ve created an inclusive space. And the reason that the space was inclusive is because an inclusive space is a welcoming space. And the only way you can create a welcoming space is when people don’t feel offended. And the only way you can make sure that people aren’t offended is if you restrict speech. So, an inclusive space restricts speech.

I wanted to talk about where the ideas go wrong. For instance, Foucault’s idea around questioning the criminalization of homosexuality. Good idea. But then if you extrapolate that and you say: ‘If a society is oppressive, and they’ve criminalized homosexuality, they’ve also criminalized pedophilia. So is pedophilia just another oppressed identity?’

That gets back to the rationally derived value again, and so there are rules you can use to rationally ascertain that pedophilia is bad - you can rationally derive that. There are metrics that you can operationalize in psychology, for example. But even beyond that, I think that there’s another key thing that may be worth exploring, which is whether or not a lot of this ideology and the manifestations of the ideology come because people do not at their core believe in the emancipatory power of human reason. The Enlightenment values; live by our own lights, human flourishing, the idea that through reason and science we can figure things out, we don’t need God figures, we can construct systems outside of ourselves that bring about our flourishing. Many of the postmodernists would call that a narrative. It’s not a narrative. It’s not merely a story we tell ourselves. There’s something liberating and powerful about human reason; it is unprecedented in its ability to improve our lives in demonstrably meaningful ways.

I suppose that there are norms that are developed that are good norms, because you can tell from consequences.

That’s called instrumental rationality, when you use rationality as an instrument to achieve some end. And I don’t think anybody is at the point of denying consequences. I think that what they think is that they weigh the consequences of different actions and different institutions differently - different structural advantages is a term you’ll hear frequently.

If you go back to postmodernism, and the idea that things are embedded in language. So, I can create two narratives which are: I step off the Empire State Building, and I’ll plummet to my death, or I’ll step off the Empire State Building and I’ll fly. So, they’re both narratives developed through language, but they have very different consequences.

In that case, that’s such an extreme example. People who make those arguments wouldn’t make that claim because one narrative is demonstrably false. And the idea behind this project is that there’s a kind of egalitarianism of narratives. Foucault talks about power-knowledge, and that’s why in Fat Studies for example, they don’t like the word obesity as they think it’s a medical narrative. They prefer the word fat. So, there are these competing narratives, but they would never use a narrative like that, in which to borrow a turn of phrase from the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, every individual rational agent would not agree that the idea behind the narratives are all equally true.

Often narratives are more complex, but they still lead to different consequences. Example: Lysenko’s genetics, which ends up killing millions of people because it’s based on Stalinist ideology.  They crushed Mendelian genetics, which is the true narrative. So, you can develop truth and objective reality through speech, which undermines the whole project.

Yes. In those cases, the question is again: how are you making the judgment that one of those is true? How you adjudicating that? And you need some ultimate arbiter adjudicating - in that case it would be science. Which is again, a grand narrative, which is a contradiction, which is what Habermas’s critique of Derrida and Foucault was; it’s a performative contradiction. It just doesn’t hold up. I said to one of my best friends, Matt Thornton, ‘You know this is just really sophisticated nonsense.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s not. There’s nothing sophisticated about it.’ And the more I thought about that, the more profound that was to me. There’s just nothing sophisticated about this. It’s not even sophistry. It’s just silly.

I wonder whether identity politics, tribalism, is sort of the norm that people can revert back to easily? Like it’s evolutionary.

You are not the first person who has said that - that idea has been floating around for a while. It has a long pedigree. Before it was easy to determine who was part of your tribe because you could see people on the basis of some characteristic like skin color. My mentor grew up in Nazi Germany, he was interred at Buchenwald, and he had black curly hair, and he would straighten it. This was during Kristallnacht. But the idea is, before, in tribalism, you could see differences with people. But now it’s more in terms of people’s ideological beliefs. In fact, I’m working with two guys right now, two people in Portland, black Jews, and I would say we’re in identical moral tribes. We have identical causes, and yet I’m not black, and I’m not Jewish. Those traditional markers in this age are no longer there.

There’s a quote by Crenshaw that for African Americans, other people of color, gays, lesbians… Identity politics has been a source of strength, community and intellectual development. You’d probably disagree with that?

I don’t disagree with that. I’m sure that that’s true. There’s a lot of community support, particularly if one is marginalized, and getting together with other people who are marginalized, and if nothing else, commiserating about what bastards your oppressors are. There’s a lot of truth to that. That doesn’t mean it should be an ought, right? We need to create conditions so that people don’t have to do that.

Does social justice activism just mean missionary now? 

I don’t know. I think there is a kind of a zealous, somewhat of a proselytizing nature in activism. That’s what makes it activism. And I also think that there’s a certainty embedded in the whole concept of activism. The question is: is this certainty warranted by the evidence? Epistemology must come before anything else. And that should always be one’s first priority. And if we can figure out that then we can figure out if one’s activism is justified.

I’ve read that the only two disciplines that took up postmodernism and social constructionism in the early 80s, were education and social psychology. It was the only places it took root in the university. 

One of the reasons we’re in this catastrophe right now is because of colleges of education, and to have this conversation without mentioning colleges of education, you’re doing your readers a disservice. Because the primary way that this propagates is through college of education. Let’s talk about that very briefly. To get a teaching certificate, I can’t just walk into a classroom - even with all my teaching experience and publications - I can’t just walk in and teach. You need to have a teaching certificate. Colleges of education and the standard pedagogical models are woke. It’s like a woke indoctrination factory. They’re minting teachers and giving them their imprimatur and then sending them out to K through 12 to teach. The problem is replicating itself. Dr. Robert Asher has some fantastic material on this that I’d highly recommend.

I think political correctness in the 90s was kind of like SARS-CoV-1. It seems like it’s really strong, but not very virulent. And then you move on to about 2015. And you’ve got a complex series of things that go on with the uptake of social media and so woke is SARS-CoV-2 - it’s highly infectious.

It’s hard to say because it was creeping and then there was an explosion. It’s also hard to say because I’m in the belly of the beast at Portland State. I saw the transformation around 2015. I saw it at the same time in the skeptic and atheist movement, which were canaries in the coal mine with Social Justice. I was just at a conference in Bozeman, Montana, and Wilford Reilly who I find to be an utterly fascinating, fearless thinker, and he said, ‘Woke is a mind virus of the lower upper class.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s exactly right.’ I think your analogue works well. Part of it is - and I think one thing that’s very helpful to think about in relation to this - is to break it down into discrete ways of thinking about the university and the educational system. Because you’re right, it didn’t just happen overnight. And then all of a sudden, the censoriousness and illiberalism; the not teaching and not exposing people to different ideas, the hyper-rigid orthodoxy surrounding certain positions about race, sexual orientation and gender. Positions which have literally no evidence behind them. Not only do they have no evidence behind then, there’s actually evidence against them. When you really start to think about that - that’s the next level of systemic derangement.

And I think concurrent with that, there were changes in the culture, and there was the weaponization of certain offices of diversity, equity and inclusion, that made sure people stayed in line. There’s no due process there. The university system has, again as Jonathan Haidt says, abandoned its telos of truth and turned into an instrument of social change.

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