Essays

James E. Petts

Fundamentally, the whole Middle East conflict (and many similar conflicts past and present) is driven by sectarianism. Sectarianism is the most extreme possible form of human evil (as explained here).

Those who view the conflict as a conflict between Israelis in general and Palestinians in general (or, even worse, Muslims in general and Jews in general) are part of the problem. The real conflict is between rational people who treat other people as individuals and sectarian extremists who do not… 

Jennifer Friend, LCSW

As Critical Social Justice (CSJ) commonly known as “wokeness,” gains dominance in our institutions and culture, the practice of psychotherapy has likewise been transformed. Professional organizations in the mental health field, such as The American Psychological Association, have issued guidelines for practitioners that are clearly informed by a CSJ perspective…

James E. Petts

The term “liberalism” has been used to refer to many different and often incompatible political and ethical theories. This is not an attempt to document those different theories: anyone interested in the academic debates on the topic will find the entry on liberalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy worth reading. Rather, this is a short description of a particular conception of liberalism, universal liberalism, setting out what it is and why it matters…

Helen Pluckrose

Some people have questioned why I do not use the term “anti-white” to describe aspects of Critical Social Justice Theory and activism that explicitly generalise negatively about white people. Instead, when someone points out that a statement is racist about white people, rather than focusing on the fact that the denigrated group is white, I am likely to address it as a failure to consistently oppose racial essentialism and the evaluation of the worth of any individual by their race…

Laura Walker-Beaven

Academic freedom has faced numerous challenges over time. In the UK, a 1963 report on higher education regarded the greatest threat to academic freedom as being political influence. Recently, the debate surrounding academic freedom has been resurrected, as threats to freedom of speech appear to emerge from within academia itself…

Isobel Marston

To “sleep cosmologically against a rock”: the fractured—and great—mind of Fernando Pessoa birthed this phrase in his lonely and angst-ridden “factless” semi-autobiography The Book of Disquiet. Though one could argue—and quite convincingly at that—that Pessoa’s outlook on life closely resembles the criteria for clinical depression and he is thus only someone to be regarded as imitable if you dislike getting out of bed in the morning, I have always thought he captured a great truth about imagination, and therefore literature, in this phrase…

David Bernstein

I’ve heard from friends lately who say “yes this woke stuff can go too far, but it’s really not that dangerous. Give me a break, it’s no threat to liberalism! You should fight against something more important, like Republican efforts to undercut voting rights.”

While I agree that people should stand up for voting rights, I also strongly believe that the imposition of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) is, in fact, a real threat to liberalism...

Jason Littlefield

More than 300 years ago, humanity emerged from the feudal dark ages and entered the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in human history, logic, reason, and the concept of individual liberty entered the culture and became the standard orthodoxy of Western democratic society. In the early 21st-century, a new orthodoxy emerged that challenged the legitimacy of Western civilization. While the new orthodoxy has permeated Western culture and its institutions for generations, it came to prominence around 2010 through the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) cultural movement. In the past decade governmental institutions (including public education), corporations, and communities have adopted this new cultural standard: Orthodox Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ODEI). The dogmatic application of ODEI is often referred to as wokism or being woke…

W.F. Twyman, Jr.

On April 21, 2018, my black teenage daughter declared: “race is all about culture. Blackness is all about oppression. Nothing else matters.” She was fifteen years old. How could this young woman of great potential and promise believe nothing else matters but oppression? It would be one thing if she had grown up poor in a public housing project with no dad and a mom strung out on drugs and older brothers in prison. Maybe then her perception of the world could be understood. But oppression is far, far from the teenager’s reality…

Mike Young

This essay is the second instalment of my series on woke tactics. This series is dedicated to helping you understand the way that Critical Social Justice advocates try to win arguments so they can advance their cause socially, politically, and institutionally…

David Bernstein

Critical Social Justice (CSJ) operates to maintain a single explanation for disparity in outcomes and suchlike in our societies. It asserts that the only reason fit for public discussion – as to why some groups in society have more power, resources or education than other groups – is a rigged structure favoring certain groups and disfavoring others…

Helen Pluckrose

I am often asked if I know of any liberal diversity training programmes or whether I could develop one. I know of some excellent programmes to address diversity issues that are compatible with liberalism. See here, here and here, for example. But I don’t know of any specifically liberal diversity training programmes. And there’s a good reason for that.

Liberals don’t tend to train people in what they should think…

Mike Young

There is a type of cynicism that you cannot fight against, the sort of cynicism which makes engagement impossible. Let me give you an example by way of a hypothetical conversation: …

Mike Young

When I was a child, I used to like watching my mom bake cookies. One day as I was watching her bake, I asked if I could help. She said yes, and so I went about getting ingredients and mixing them as she instructed…

Laura Walker-Beaven

Free will scepticism is irrefutably in vogue in pop philosophy at the moment. Indeed, a 2015 study by Scientific American showed that 41% of their readership do not believe in free will. So what implications (if any) could this wave of free will scepticism have on our key liberal traditions and the ideas that underpin them?…

Jonathan Church

It might be said that a great deal of opposition to critical race theory (CRT), and the ongoing controversy over whether CRT is being taught in schools, is rooted in a perception that CRT is motivated by a racist belief that white people are bad people who refuse to take well- deserved responsibility for racial inequality…

James E. Petts

As discussed elsewhere, ethical deceit is a common method used to manipulate people into harming themselves to advance the interests of the promoters of the deceitful ideas. One technique of ethical deceit is to claim, falsely, that an idea, concept or principle entails or consists of some other, undesirable, idea, concept or principle, in order to attempt to manipulate people into rejecting the former even though in truth there is no reason to do so…

Isobel Marston

The question of whether or not there are biologically based psychological and cognitive differences between the sexes is a touchy subject in much feminist literature and increasingly—as these ideas have by now far outgrown the confines of academia—society at large. Judith Butler has gone so far as to say that sex itself is a social construct that has “no ontological status” beyond our social realities; that is, the significance of sex is socially constructed in the way we classify it…

James E. Petts

If (and insofar as) ethics is not based entirely on reason, there is no general^[1] reason to be ethical. So much is a truism. The reason not to kill somebody out of anger has nothing to do with the fact that people have devised a concept of ethics and decided that killing somebody out of anger should be categorised as unethical according to that concept: it is that a world in which people are free to kill people out of anger is a much worse and more dangerous world than one in which such conduct is not practised and is prohibited…

Helen Pluckrose

What Critical Race Theory (or CRT) is and isn’t, who understands it and who doesn’t, and what people’s motivations are for defending or criticising it seem to be the issues dominating the culture wars right now. It is a good thing that we’re talking about contemporary critical theories of race…

Mike Young

I think the only universally shared memory we have is the elementary school fire drill. We all remember the principal over the intercom, the loud buzzing of the alarm, and the teacher announcing that we are to put down everything, get in line, and walk single file toward the exit…

Andrew Sansone

Whether you’re scrolling through Twitter, listening to your favourite podcast, or sitting on Zoom for a university class, discussions surrounding race can be found everywhere. Oftentimes these are important conversations to have. Racism, although not nearly as prevalent as it once was, still remains an ugly blemish on Western civilization, a blemish most are interested in erasing for good. So, as an open-minded, sympathetic person, you believe that discussing the issues around racial discrimination is an honourable endeavour in which we should all participate…

Isobel Marston

On what do we disagree?

This is a question which admits many answers. We might offer the safety of vaccines, the cause of COVID-19 or the best way to achieve social justice, to name but a few points of contention in 2021. In fact, entertain pretty much any belief that you hold to be true and—no matter how much you think the evidence points to the unquestionable veracity of your belief—somebody will disagree…