A Quick Romp Through Academic Philosophy

How did we ever end up here?

Welcome to my thoughts.

If you don’t believe that biological sex is on a spectrum or can be chosen at will, then you have come to the right place. If you do believe that feelings are more important than actual bodies and facts then please don’t bother to call me nasty names or attempt to bully me into submission. Not everyone believes in magical thinking. Yes, your feelings and beliefs are important, but I don’t share them and you are not more important just because you shout louder. Nothing I say here will literally kill anyone and I don’t want anyone to no longer exist.

This blog was created as a repository of my thinking and as a way to blow off the frustrations of living in an applied postmodernist world; where facts and established science are treated as something to be denied and overlooked in favour of whatever beliefs are chosen on the basis of subjective feelings that can be ever changing.

If I’ve lost you already, let me start (sort of) at the beginning. It is hard to comprehend how some of our societal changes have come about until you understand the origins of the thinking behind them. What follows is a brief history behind the foundational thoughts that underpin the Brave New World we are expected to embrace. A world where male rapists can declare they are women and be housed in women’s prisons (where they go on to impregnate female inmates), a world where men can cheat their way to victory in sports categories that were created to give women a fair chance of winning and a world where men can expose their male genitalia to women and girls in changing rooms and if the women complain, they will be the ones to be barred from using the facilities.

A “CliffsNotes” guide to Western philosophy

“Philosophy, (from Greek, by way of Latin, philosophia, “love of wisdom”) the rational, abstract, and methodical consideration of reality as a whole or of fundamental dimensions of human existence and experience” philosophy | Definition, Systems, Fields, Schools, & Biographies | Britannica

This is a fancy way of saying that philosophy is a way to think about things. Everyone has a personal philosophy about how they live their lives, even if they don’t realise this. From an academic standpoint, there are recognised schools of thought and study that change over time and in response to cultural changes.

So that this doesn’t evolve into an ancient history lesson, I’ll start after the European Medieval period to try and explain how we got where we are today.

The Enlightenment: 18th century (usually referred to as the “Modern” period). In general terms, the Enlightenment was an intellectual movement, developed mainly in France, Britain and Germany, which advocated freedom, democracy and reason as the primary values of society. It started from the standpoint that men's minds should be freed from ignorance, from superstition and from the arbitrary powers of the State, in order to allow mankind to achieve progress and perfection. The period was marked by a decline in the influence of the church, governmental consolidation and greater rights for the common people. Politically, it was a time of revolutions and turmoil and of the overturning of established traditions.

It was centered around the idea that reason is the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and it advocated such ideals as liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state. However, historians of race, gender, and class note that Enlightenment ideals were not originally envisioned as universal in today’s sense of the word.

Modern Philosophy - 19th and 20th Century: Modern philosophy is philosophy developed in what is referred to as the modern era. Along with significant scientific and political revolutions, the Modern period exploded in a flurry of new philosophical movements.

The key hallmarks of Modern philosophy are: focus on issues of knowledge, skepticism, justification. rationalism and reliance on science (instead of religion); individualism as opposed to a community focus came to the fore. The typical view focuses on the shift from epistemology to metaphysics. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, while metaphysics is the study of reality. Epistemology looks at how we know what the truth is and whether there are limits to this knowledge, while metaphysics seeks to understand the nature of reality and existence.

Postmodernism - after WWII: Postmodernism is a broad movement in late 20th Century philosophy and the arts, marked in general terms by an openness to meaning and authority from unexpected places, and a willingness to borrow unashamedly from previous movements or traditions.

Postmodernism is "post" because it is denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody - a characteristic of the so-called "modern" mind.

In a nutshell, postmodern theory seeks to detach human nature from biology.

Applied postmodernism - 2000 to the present: applied postmodernism’s two principles are:

- the belief that objective knowledge or truth is not possible; no facts exist

- that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how things can be known; truth is what anyone says it is

The consequences of this are profound as they move principles off the page and into the lives and behaviour of people. Over the last few decades, this has been taken to a new level, referred to as applied postmodern scholarship. Applied postmodernism is a system that takes ideas and turns them into actions. And this is where we are now.

Applied postmodernism has four key themes:

1)  The blurring of boundaries (messily mixing the experiential with the evidenced in a way that elevates one’s interpretation of lived experience to the status of evidence). An example of blurring of boundaries would be if you take your own birth and breastfeeding experience and turn this into a universal (confusing anecdote with data). Another example of boundary blurring is the ongoing debate about “what is a woman?”. That modern politicians refuse to answer or make up excuses for not answering is also blurring formerly very clear boundaries.

2) The power of language (the idea that words are powerful and dangerous and must be scrutinised according to theoretical frameworks). This is where queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, gender studies, disability and fat studies, trans rights and environmentalism are weaponised as either woke or not. NB you know all those Women’s Studies departments that used to be in universities around the world? Well they are gone - converted to gender studies instead. If you can’t talk about women and their sexed bodies, they disappear.

3) Cultural relativism (Western thoughts and ideals are the pinnacle of an oppressive power structure).  Cultural relativism posits that anything that comes from the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) countries is automatically faulty and oppressive.

4)  The loss of the individual and the universal (the intense focus on identity categories and politics means that both the individual and the universal are largely devalued). People are not as important as ideas and identities. This leads to a loss of safeguarding for women and children because there are no ways to separate (predatory) men from invading women’s private spaces.

No, there wasn’t much about birth or breastfeeding here. But in my experience, understanding the foundational concepts underpinning the overall structure is vital to explaining the ‘interesting bits’ that follow.

Next up: Queer Theory and Transactivism: Supporting the Erasure of Women