In reading Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, they make the following statements regarding postmodern understandings of the human person:
“Consequently, to postmodern Theorists, the notion of the autonomous individual is largely a myth. The individual, like everything else, is a product of powerful discourses and culturally constructed knowledge. Equally, the concept of the universal—whether a biological universal about human nature; or an ethical universal, such as equal rights, freedoms, and opportunities for all individuals regardless of class, race, gender, or sexuality—is, at best, naïve. At worst, it is merely another exercise in power-knowledge, an attempt to enforce dominant discourses on everybody. The postmodern view largely rejects both the smallest unit of society—the individual—and the largest—humanity—and instead focuses on small, local groups as the producers of knowledge, values, and discourses. Therefore, postmodernism focuses on sets of people who are understood to be positioned in the same way—by race, sex, or class, for example—and have the same experiences and perceptions due to this positioning.”[1]
“The intense focus on identity categories and identity politics means that the individual and the universal are largely devalued. While mainstream liberalism focuses on achieving universal human rights and access to opportunities, to allow each individual to fulfill her potential, applied postmodern scholarship and activism is deeply skeptical of these values and even openly hostile to them. Applied postmodern Theory tends to regard mainstream liberalism as complacent, naïve, or indifferent about the deeply ingrained prejudices, assumptions, and biases that limit and constrain people with marginalized identities. The ‘individual’ in applied postmodernism is something like the sum total of the identity groups to which the person in question simultaneously belongs.”[2]
The specification of three aspects—the universal, the individual, and the group—reminded me of John Frame’s
Universal (Humanity)
Class/group Individual
These three perspectives correlate with Frame’s categories:
Normative: Universal humanity
Situational: Class/group
Existential: Individual
Within a biblical
Under the sovereignty of God, every individual is created in the image of God (universal) and is situated in a number of particular overlapping groups. Postmodern views, as noted by Pluckrose and Lindsay, are thus reductionist choosing to privilege the group to the exclusion of other perspectives.
[1]Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody(Durham, North Carolina: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020), 42—bold-face added.
