Reality...What a Concept

Back in 2017, three academic folks believed that a lot of their peers were publishing nonsense under the guise of "critical theory" scholarship and they set about to prove it. They theorized that many disciplines, particularly within social sciences, were so committed to non-academic agendas centered on social change that their own skeptical threshold would be too low to catch fraudulent and even ridiculous ideas. As it happened, they were able to demonstrate that they were more right than wrong, getting an article about how modern urban dog parks expressed rape culture into a journal covering gender studies. Two of the trio, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, continued exploring the issue with the 2020 book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity -- and Why This Harms Everybody.

Pluckrose and Lindsay open by exploring the roots of postmodernism from writers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, as well as lesser-known thinkers in the field. But while current postmodern scholarship roots in what those thinkers brought to the table, it sets aside a large chunk of the conclusions they reached -- which can be summed up in the John Mellencamp album title Nothin' Matters and What if It Did? The original postmodernists believed that truth was constructed rather than discovered, so "meaning" was a concept without, well, meaning. But the current postmodernists are invested in deconstructing the received versions of "truth" in order to reconstruct them in order to reduce oppression of historically marginalized groups.

Cynical Theories outlines several modern fields and concepts built on this foundation and offers examples of how they have affected not just scholarship but university life. They also show how what is sometimes called "cancel culture" in public life grows from applying the idea of constructed rather than revealed or discovered truth to everyday interactions. One of the strengths of the book is that the authors, like their partner in the original project, are not a part of a perceived conservative backlash against "libral perfessors," being firmly leftist themselves. Their critique grows from what they see as uncritical acceptance of ideas and concepts that have as much basis in reality as religious faith (all three are also atheists) and therefore aren't any better as a basis for understanding the way the world works.

Although several fields -- such as racial studies, gender studies and so on -- are surveyed, the details tend to blend together since the different arcs parallel each other. Cynical Theories could benefit from losing one or two of its survey chapters. And when the surveys are finished, Pluckrose and Lindsay have a harder time laying out a coherent strategy for changing and repairing the situation. Part of that is organic -- they approach postmodern theory only partly as opponents and mostly as skeptics. Skepticism makes for an excellent interrogator but it's a lousy architect for figuring out what has to happen next.

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Each year the approach of Easter seems to bring a new find of scholarship that will "rock the church to its core" or otherwise call into question some of the foundational beliefs of Christianity. Those are often interpretations laid onto the discovery or announcement by media coverage, rather than by the academic person at the center of the story. But in 2012,  a papyrus fragment that implied Jesus was married was given the name "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife" not by reporters but by the professor announcing its discovery. It quickly became the center of a controversy, but not about the supposed theological hand grenade it tossed into Christian teaching.

Ariel Sabar, then a journalist working for the Smithsonian magazine, outlined how many questions historians, Coptic language experts, papyrologists and so forth had about the fragment and its "provenance," or history of its discovery and delivery to Dr. Karen King, the Harvard professor who announced it to the world. In 2016, Sabar's investigation into that provenance reavealed who the anonymous donor was in an article in The Atlantic. He expanded both articles, as well as described how he found out what he found out, in the 2020 book Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus' Wife.

Obviously a big chunk of Veritas comes from the earlier articles, but Sabar has tried to add enough new material to justify book publication. Much of the additional material is biographical detail on King and some of the other players in the matter. Sabar also speculates about King's motives for choosing the sensational name "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" for a piece of papyrus as big as a business card and for her subsequent semi-admission that it's probably not an authentic document from the early history of Christianity. King hangs back, Sabar suggests, because the idea of a married Jesus opens up a new history of the possible ways women participated in the early church until patriarchal forces took over.

Veritas never really overcomes the way that the bulk of its most crucial information has already been in print -- in some cases, twice -- from the same author. The exploration of the way that King's own postmodern ideas saw the papyrus' forged status as less important than its value in constructing new narratives about women and Christianity would probably be better as a part of a new article or book, and the biographical sections feel more like padding than essential information.