What Ashlee is Reading

 "Critical Race Theory holds that race is a social construct that was created to maintain white privilege and white supremacy. This idea originated long before postmodernism with W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that the idea of race was being used to assert biological explanations of differences that are social and cultural, in order to perpetuate the unjust treatment of racial minorities, especially African Americans."  Of course, the reality is that this is only partially true. Some physical differences- hair texture, eye shape, skin color, relative susceptibility to certain diseases- are clearly based in DNA reality, not social constructs. The *importance* we put on those differences to divide into classes is not reality based, nor is it reality based that those differences sometimes overcome our shared humanity, the fact that we have so much more in common than we have differences. Some interesting historical examples are given of times when these differences were not signif

I interrupt my regularly scheduled programming to bring this report on my reading of The Coddling of the American Mind.  I'm still reading Cynical Theories. I swear. Or at least that is what I tell myself. It's rough. It's heavy. It's hard. I still think it's important but boy howdy is reading that book a lot of work.  I didn't read TCOTAM, I listened to the audiobook. As such, I didn't take notes, except mentally. But I thought it was such a fantastic book that it warranted a blog post, even though it will be less extensive without the notes and without being able to easily leaf back through a chapter. As a reminder, these blog posts are mostly for me, an exercise in processing and remembering the things I read. And listen to, I guess.  The authors of The Coddling of the American Mind assert that three great untruths have become widely accepted and even promoted, albeit unintentionally. These untruths teach thinking patterns that harm mental health, relatio

 "Queer theory presumes that oppression follows from categorization, which arises every time language constructs a sense of what is "normal" by producing and maintaining rigid categories of sex (male and female), gender (masculine and feminine), and sexuality (straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and so on) and "scripting" people into them."  Queer theory relies heavily on the postmodern knowledge principle, that objective knowledge is impossible to acquire. You can't say what is a woman and what isn't a woman, you can't possibly know that. It is an "unmodified manifestation" of the postmodern themes of the power of language: when we create labels to categorize people we are using power to control them and how they are viewed and expected to act. The blurring of boundaries, another post modern theme, hardly needs mentioning with regards to queer theory. In short, queer theory is thoroughly and unabashedly postmodern.  Obviously, many thi

 Although today most people would agree that colonialism was bad, it dominated global politics for five centuries, from about the fifteenth until the middle of the twentieth. At the time there were undoubtedly some enlightened people who frowned upon it, but it was largely accepted. The French used the phrase, 'la mission civilisatrice' (the civilizing mission) and in North America they used the phrase, 'manifest destiny'. Following WWII especially, these ideologies quickly lost favor and decolonization proceeded quickly, so that by the early 1960s, academia and the general public agreed on the immorality of colonialism. This also happens to be the time that postmodernism was coming into vouge, so postcolonialism is best seen as a narrowing of the focus of postmodernism to deal specifically with the problems of colonialism. For postcolonialism, it is not enough that we simply all agree that colonialism was bad, nor is it enough to try to address the political and econom

One of postmodernism's defining characteristics is deconstruction - dismantling everything. This was eventually a self-destructive tendency and it burned itself out around the 1980s. However, several offshoots of postmodernism took the principles and ideas of postmodernism and gave them  a practical aim, a goal, made them actionable. This enabled the Theory of postmodernism to live on, and also enabled it to break out of the bounds of academia and into the real world and the culture war we experience today.  Several varieties of Theory became prevalent, and they will each receive their own focal chapter: postcolonialism, black feminism, intersectional feminism, critical race Theory, and queer Theory. These various branches took the principles and themes of postmodernism that were discussed in the previous chapter to varying degrees, so they won't all look the same, have the same goals, or be applied in the same way, but they will all exhibit characteristics of postmodernism. Th

 I recently started to listen a Joe Rogan podcast here and there, for reasons that are probably obvious. One of the episodes I listened to was with James Lindsay. I thought some of his ideas and arguments were really interesting and I wanted to learn more about them, so I looked up this book of his, coauthored with Helen Pluckrose.  The intro acknowl edges that the culture war is divisive, pushing the left further left and the right further right. This book, while no excusing any of the craziness on the right, will focus on the craziness of the left. The reason given is that the left used to be associated, rightly, with the word 'liberal', " open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded. synonym: broad-minded." With cancel culture and the vitriol for anyone who questions any part of the latest gender ideology, it's not hard to see how they have forgotten their roots. The authors' argument