Wednesday, April 23, 2025

The Catholic Tradition Podcast: 94 – Understanding Postmodern “Social Justice”


Dec 22, 2020

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3Czyd0XSEso

The alarmists had been proper: concepts that had been only some years in the past
complacently dismissed because the perennial agitation of some campus
loonies are actually pervasive within the company world, mass media and
popular culture.

Important race principle, transgender ideology, the obsessive search
for oppressive energy relations in each side of life and each
function of language, the demand for all to be activists, shutting
down of dissenting speech as violence: frequent sense or the reward of
a strong Catholic formation will suffice for many who reject these
ideologies.

However some will need a extra rigorous critique or a deeper
understanding of the philosophical roots of radical leftist
activism. To that finish, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have
written Cynical Theories, a really useful primer on the
growth of recent activism from Sixties postmodernist
philosophy.

On this episode, Thomas and political thinker Darel Paul
talk about the e book, which tracks how postcolonial principle, queer
principle, girls’s/gender research, crucial race principle, and different
activist fields have instantiated or tailored the next central
rules and themes of postmodernism:

Postmodern rules:

  1. Radical skepticism concerning the capacity to know something, cultural
    constructivism
  2. Society is fashioned of techniques of energy and hierarchies which
    determine what and the way issues could be identified

Postmodern themes: The blurring of boundaries, the ability of
language, cultural relativism, lack of the person and the
common

The episode concludes with a critique of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s
prescription of a return to Enlightenment liberalism as a
corrective to postmodernism.

Contents

[1:41] Causes for discussing Cynical Theories

[4:36] Proof of postmodernist activist actions reaching the
mainstream

[10:58] What the e book contributes to the discourse on woke
ideology

[15:00] Similarities and variations between postmodernism and
Marxism

[26:25] The core postmodern rules and themes

[38:53] Policing speech as a device of energy reasonably than a
rational technique of speaking reality

[47:58] The proliferation of postmodern rules right into a quantity
of activist fields

[49:47] Defining one’s identification by way of struggling and
oppression

[55:07] Stress between postmodern rejection of classes and
the necessity to have classes to critique energy relations; the
emergence of queer principle; deliberate incoherence as liberation

[1:01:06] Conundrum for LGBTQ activists: achieve “regular” standing or
destroy concept of normality?

[1:06:40] Gender principle vs. crucial race principle on
classes

[1:18:50] Postmodernism as a category ideology?

[1:24:17] The postcolonial critique of science; epistemic
relativism

[1:27:30] Critique of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s advocacy of a
return to Enlightenment liberalism

[1:32:51] Liberalism as an inherently damaging and
deconstructive philosophy

[1:40:04] Postmodernism as an extension and/or consequence of
liberalism

[2:04:33] Find out how to talk reality to somebody who believes
language is merely energy?

 Hyperlinks

Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories
https://www.amazon.com/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Every part-Identity_and/dp/1634312023

Darel Paul, “Towards Racialism” https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/against-racialism

Darel Paul, “Listening on the Nice Awokening”
https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/17/listening-at-the-great-awokening/

Darel Paul, “The World Group Is a Fantasy”
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-global-community-is-a-fantasy/

Darel Paul, From Tolerance to Equality
https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481306959/from-tolerance-to-equality/

Ep. 61 on liberalism as an anti-culture with James Matthew
Wilson
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/ep-61-liberal-anti-culture-vs-western-vision-soul-pt-i-james-matthew-wilson/

Ep. 18 on the vice of acedia manifested in our refusal to just accept
our given nature
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-18-acedia-forgotten-capital-sin-rj-snell/

Christmas episodes:

It’s a Great Life (1946) movie dialogue w/ Patrick
Coffin
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/its-wonderful-life-1946-w-patrick-coffin/

CCP 59 – The Wonderful English Carol
https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-59-glorious-english-carol/

This podcast is a manufacturing of CatholicCulture.org. In the event you like
the present, please think about supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio



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