The Psychoanalytic Critique of Cynical Theories (Part Two)
One of the common criticisms of academic theory and Left-wing politics that you now hear is that these radicals see everything in terms of power. Thus, in their Cynical Theories, Pluckrose and Lindsay make the following claim: “They are obsessed with power, language, knowledge, and the relationships between them. They interpret the world through a lens that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact—even when they aren’t obvious or real” (15). Even though it is untrue that some of the postmodern theories they examine focus on power, it is important to ask why are these supposed liberal authors so interested in critiquing the critique of power relations? In other words, why do they want to downplay the real existence of power in society, and who are they trying to protect or promote?
On a very basic level, the desire to hide the true effects and causes of power in society stems from the conservative need to represent social structures as being either natural or divine. According to premodern ideology, if something in culture is natural or controlled by a higher power, there is no reason to question it or try to change it; anything that is natural is inevitable. Of course, one of the main ways that gender, racial, and class hierarchies are maintained is by seeing them as natural, and so the postmodern emphasis on how knowledge and culture are the products of social constructions represents a direct threat to conservative ideology. After all, what conservatives want to conserve is the social hierarchy, and this maintenance of an authoritarian order requires oppressed and exploited people to accept their social position as being the result of a natural order or the dictates of a higher power. Although it looks like it is the postmodern theorists who first exposed this false naturalization of the social, it should be clear that the modern liberal Enlightenment also realized that knowledge and truth are accessed by rejecting premodern faith, fate, and belief in favor of empirical testing. Thus, what many of the French postmodern thinkers focused on was something that was already implied by modern philosophers like Descartes and Kant: Humans develop social practices and institutions based on shared ideals, and while reality itself remains ultimately unknowable, we use scientific methods and concepts to approximate the real.
Instead of seeing how the modern Enlightenment is based on using methodical doubt to suspend prejudice and self-interest, Pluckrose and Lindsay attack the postmodernists for being cynical: “To an outsider, this culture feels as though it originated on another planet, whose inhabitants have no knowledge of sexually reproducing species, and who interpret all our human sociological interactions in the most cynical way possible” (16). Since the name of their book is Cynical Theories, it is vital to determine how they are using this notion of cynicism. In fact, I would argue that a key to understanding this book and contemporary politics in general is to distinguish cynicism from irony, skepticism, belief, and empathy.
Cynicism is a belief that there is no higher power or deeper meaning to the world: Someone who is a cynic is an opportunist who takes advantage of a system of which others believe. Thus, Trump is a cynic because he does not believe in anything except his own desire for more money, power, and recognition. This type of attitude shapes libertarian ideology and is determined by a borderline personality structure.
In contrast to the cynical Right, we find conservatives who really believe in a higher power or some other form of determinism. Through the process of idealization, one regresses to the state of being a helpless child in front of an all-powerful authority-figure. Thus. in this structure of the authoritarian personality, individuals suspend reality testing and moral judgment in order to submit to the will of the master. Thus, at the foundation of conservative ideology, one finds the psychological structure of a cult.
If we understand modern liberalism as the response to premodern conservative ideology, we see that at the essence of the Enlightenment, we find a radical skepticism of everything that cannot be proven or tested from a neutral perspective. As Descartes argues, the first step of the modern scientific method is to suspend all prejudice and self-interest, and much of his work is an effort to defend Galileo against his imprisonment by the church. While Descartes used doubt to seek the truth, his ultimate goal was certainty and the distinction between truth and fiction.
Many of the academic postmodernists discussed in Cynical Theories follow Descartes in employing doubt to discover the truth, but they also turn modern reason against modernity itself. By questioning the ability of language to discover the truth, they engage in an ironic discourse since they use language and reason to undermine language and reason. I would equate this type of ideology with the center-Left and a form obsessional narcissism since the strategy is to affirm two opposite things at the same time. On the most basic level, obsessional narcissists want to be recognized as being good and competent by conforming to social expectations, but they also want to be seen as exceptional individuals. As Lacan argues, they are an other for the Other, and yet they maintain a distance from their own double alienation. In terms of contemporary politics, virtue signaling is often used to show that one is a good person in order to repress feelings of guilt and shame.
In an ironic manner, many people on the center-Left often appropriate the ideas of the Left because they want to show off their moral virtue, but these centrists do not want to risk their careers or abilities to profit from an unequal society so they really do not want anything to change. In contrast, true Leftists really do want a radical transformation of society, and they feel a deep empathy for minoritized subjects. Although I believe that the Left plays a vital role in extending who is covered by universal human rights, the danger of this ideology is that it tends to take on the hysterical features of splitting, dramatization, and emotional manipulations through the display of real and imagined suffering.
While the center-Left takes on the moral values of the Left without engaging in radical social movements, the people inhabiting the center-Right tend to hide their investment in conservative and Right-wing ideology by claiming to be moderate liberals. Since they want to be seen as being rational and objective, they tend to rationalize the irrational ideas and beliefs coming from conservatives and libertarians. The center-Right, therefore, combines together cynicism and irony as they repress their own true beliefs in an effort to seem rational and objective: They are partisans who deny their own partisanship.
An example of the contradictory and hypocritical nature of the center-Right can be found in Pluckrose’s and Lindsay’s acknowledgement that the theorists they are targeting were actually anti-Marxists: “We begin in the late 1960s, when the group of theoretical concepts clustered around the nature of knowledge, power, and language that came to be known as postmodernism emerged from within several humanities disciplines at once. At its core, postmodernism rejected what it calls metanarratives—broad, cohesive explanations of the world and society. It rejected Christianity and Marxism. It also rejected science, reason, and the pillars of post-Enlightenment Western Democracy. Postmodern ideas have shaped what has since mostly been called Theory—the entity which is, in some sense, the protagonist of this book” (16). It should be clear here that these authors are blaming a secret Marxist revolution on theorists who were mostly anti-Marxists. They also do not understand how the center-Left academic appropriation of Marxism by capitalist careerists serves to contain and defang real political Left-wing movements.
Like so many people on the center-Right, Pluckrose and Lindsay want to argue that academic theorists are the ones responsible for the current lack of trust in science and democracy: “We can see its impact on the world in their attacks on science and reason. It is also evident in their assertions that society is simplistically divided into dominant and marginalized identities and underpinned by invisible systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia. We find ourselves faced with the continuing dismantlement of categories like knowledge and belief, reason and emotion, and men and women, and with increasing pressures to censor our language in accordance with The Truth According to Social Justice” (18). From this perspective, it is not the Republican party that has undermined modern science and democracy; rather, the blame is now placed on the people who are fighting against racism, sexism, and homophobia. In other words, the Left-wing reversal of conservative hierarchies is now being reversed from the perspective of the Right.
As a reactionary counter-revolution, Right-wing politics presents a reversal of a reversal, which returns us to conservative ideology, but now this investment in the social hierarchy is based on cynicism and not belief. Thus, the people on the Right do not promote a positive agenda since they represent a negation of a negation, yet this Hegelian structure does not result in a synthesis or a move to a higher plane. Still, one thing that Pluckrose and Lindsay do get correct is that some center-Left academic thinkers undermine reason and knowledge by trying to replace Left-wing activism with a mode of performative morality. I am therefore arguing that Pluckrose and Lindsay are cynics who are calling ironists cynical as they lump together the Left and the center-Left.
One of the things that the Right and the center-Right hate most about their perceived enemies is that they feel that they are hypocritical: “We see radical relativism in the form of double standards, such as assertions that only men can be sexist and only white people can be racist, and in the wholesale rejection of consistent principles of nondiscrimination” (18). This argument revolves around the notion that the victims of prejudice can also be prejudiced; however, we have to ask why is this type of relativism so bothersome for the Right? On the one hand, they do appear to affirm the modern notion of universal human rights and nondiscrimination, but these center-Right critics need to posit the absurd idea that since everyone can be prejudiced, no one is really prejudiced. Once again, the repressed driving force behind this rhetoric is the fifty-year Republican war against taxes and the welfare state. Since they believe that welfare only goes to people of color, they have to show how these minorities do not really need any help. According to this libertarian perspective, if we have moved beyond racism, then we can cut taxes and stop making people feel ashamed for their racist thoughts and words.
The irony of the authors’ cynicism comes out in the open when they claim that their constant criticisms of social justice warriors represents a defense of social justice: “Although many of us now recognize these problems and intuitively feel that such ideas are unreasonable and illiberal, it can be difficult to articulate responses to them, since objections to irrationalism and illiberalism are often misunderstood or misrepresented as opposition to genuine social justice—a legitimate philosophy that advocates a fairer society” (18). Here we find a common center-Right trope, which involves the claim that we need to still fight to make society fairer, but the people who are engaging in social movements are too extreme or too focused on prejudice and discrimination.
In many ways, the current rejection of identity politics, political correctness, postmodernism, and diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives represent a Right-wing counter-revolution fomented by cynics who want to increase their wealth power, and recognition coupled with the catering to the worst tendencies of religious conservatives and the resentful white working class. Psychoanalysis helps us to understand the underlying unconscious motivations fueling this political ideology.