Some more from “Cynical Theories” :

 - the moral imperative is to protect marginalised people from the non obvious forms of harm contained in attitudes and discourses (ie how we talk about things).....

- systemic bigotry is present in all institutions; it is always lurking beneath the surface in need of exposure...

- the ideas of SJW scholars and activists often look good on paper. On paper they seem to say good things ie: let’s get to the bottom of bigotry, oppression, marginalisation and injustice and heal the world!......but it isn’t going to work. SJW Theory cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative. Nevertheless, metanarratives can sound convincing and obtain sufficient support to significantly influence society and the way it thinks about knowledge, power and language. Why? Partly because we humans aren’t as smart as we think we are, partly because most of us are idealists on at least some level, partly because we tend to lie to ourselves when we want something to work. But the ideology of SJWs and Theory is a meta narrative and meta narratives are, in fact, unreliable.......The postmodernists were right that meta narratives are unreliable. What they got disastrously wrong is mistaking effective and adaptive SYSTEMS for meta narratives. Religions and many theoretical constructions are metanarratives but liberalism and science are NOT. Liberalism and science are systems - not just neat little theories - because they are SELF-SCEPTICAL rather than SELF-CERTAIN, by design. This is a seasoned - NOT a radical- skepticism. They put the EMPIRICAL first, rather than the THEORETICAL. They are self-correcting. Liberal systems like regulated capitalism, republican democracy and science resolve conflicts by subjecting human economies, societies, and knowledge production to evolutionary processes that - over time, and with persistence - produce reliable societies, governments and provisionally true statements about the world. The proof is that almost everything has changed over the last 500 years, especially in the West. As SJ Theory points out, that progress has at times been problematic, but it still has been PROGRESS. 

Things are much better than they were 500 years ago, for most people most of the time, and this is undeniable.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Postmodernism - a summary.

Some prayers: