Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay's Cynical Theories

The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, 2020:

"Postmodernism first burst onto the intellectual scene in the late 1960s and quickly became wildly fashionable among leftist and left-leaning academics. As the intellectual fad grew, its proselytes set to work, producing reams of radically skeptical Theory, in which existing knowledge and ways of obtaining knowledge understood as belonging to Western modernity were indiscriminately criticized and dismantled. The old religions—in the broadest sense of the word—had to be torn down. Thus, the ideas that we can come to know objective reality[,] and that what we call 'truth' in some way corresponds to it[,] were placed on the chopping block, together with the assumptions that modernity had been built upon. The postmodernists sought to render absurd our ways of understanding, approaching, and living in the world[,] and in societies. Despite proving simultaneously modish and influential, this approach had its limits. Endless dismantling and disruption—or, as they call it, deconstruction—is not only destined to consume itself; it is also fated to consume everything interesting and thus [to] render itself boring.

"That is, Theory couldn't content itself with nihilistic despair. It needed something to do, something actionable. Because of its own morally and politically charged core, it had to apply itself to the problem it saw at the core of society: unjust access to power. After its first big bang beginning in the late 1960s, the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism burnt itself out by the early 1980s. But postmodernism did not die. From the ashes arose a new set of Theorists whose mission was to make some core tenets of postmodernism applicable[,] and to reconstruct a better world.

"The common wisdom among academics is that, by the 1990s, postmodernism had died. But, in fact, it simply mutated from its earlier high deconstructive phase into a new form. A diverse set of highly politicized and actionable Theories developed out of postmodernism proper. We will call this more recent development applied postmodernism. This change occurred as a new wave of Theorists emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These new applied postmodernists also came from different fields, but, in many respects, their ideas were much more alike than those of their predecessors[,] and provided a more user-friendly approach. During this turn, Theory mutated into a handful of Theories—postcolonial, queer, and critical race—that were put to work in the world[,] to deconstruct social injustice.

"We therefore might think of postmodernism as a kind of fast-evolving virus. Its original and purest form was unsustainable: it tore its hosts apart and destroyed itself. It could not spread from the academy to the general population[,] because it was so difficult to grasp and so seemingly removed from social realities. In its evolved form, [however,] it spread, leaping the 'species' gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious. It mutated around a core of Theory[,] to form several new strains, which are far less playful and far more certain of their own (meta)narratives. These are centered on a practical aim that was absent before: to reconstruct society in the image of an ideology[,] which came to refer to itself as 'Social Justice.' " – pp. 45–6

"For postmodernists, Theory refers to a specific set of beliefs, which posit that the world[,] and our ability to gather knowledge about it[,] work in accordance with the postmodern knowledge and political principles. Theory assumes that objective reality cannot be known, [that] 'truth' is socially constructed[,] through language and 'language games[,]' and is local to a particular culture, and [that] knowledge functions to protect and [to] advance the interests of the privileged. Theory therefore explicitly aims to critically examine discourses. This means something specific. It means to examine them closely so as to expose and disrupt the political power dynamics it assumes are baked into them[,] so that people will be convinced to reject them and [to] initiate an ideological revolution.

"Theory, in this sense, has not gone away, but neither has it stayed the same. Between the late 1980s and roughly 2010, it developed the applicability of its underlying concepts[,] and came to form the basis of entirely new fields of scholarship, which have since become profoundly influential. These new disciplines, which have come to be known loosely as 'Social Justice scholarship,' co-opted the notion of social justice from the civil rights movements and other liberal and progressive theories. Not coincidentally, this all began in earnest just as legal equality had largely been achieved[,] and antiracist, feminist, and LGBT activism began to produce diminishing returns. Now[,] the main barriers to social equality in the West were lingering prejudices, embodied in attitudes, assumptions, expectations, and language. For those tackling these less tangible problems, Theory, with its focus on systems of power and privilege perpetuated through discourses, might have been an ideal tool—except that, as it was wholly deconstructive, indiscriminately radically skeptical, and unpalatably nihilistic, it was not really fit for any productive purpose.

"The new forms of Theory arose within postcolonialism, black feminism...intersectional feminism, critical race (legal) Theory, and queer Theory, all of which sought to describe the world critically in order to change it. Scholars in these fields increasingly argued that, while postmodernism could help reveal the socially constructed nature of knowledge and the associated 'problematics,' [their] activism was simply not compatible with fully radical skepticism. They needed to accept that certain groups of people faced disadvantages and injustices based on who they were, a concept that radically skeptical postmodern thinking readily deconstructed. Some of the new Theorists therefore criticized their predecessors for their privilege, which they claimed was demonstrated by their ability to deconstruct identity and identity-based oppression. Some accused their forebears of being white, male, wealthy, and Western enough to afford to be playful, ironic, and radically skeptical, because society was already set up for their benefit. As a result, while the new Theorists retained much Theory, they did not entirely dispense with stable identity and objective truth. Instead, they laid claim to a limited amount of both, arguing that some identities were privileged over others[,] and that this injustice was objectively true.

"While the original postmodern thinkers dismantled our understanding of knowledge, truth, and societal structures, the new Theorists reconstructed these from the ground up, in accordance with their own narratives[.] Thus, while the original (postmodern) Theorists were fairly aimless, using irony and playfulness to reverse hierarchies[,] and [to] disrupt what they saw as unjust power and knowledge (or power-knowledge) structures, the second wave of (applied) postmodernists focused on dismantling hierarchies[,] and making truth claims about power, language, and oppression. During its applied turn, Theory underwent a moral mutation: it adopted a number of beliefs about the rights and wrongs of power and privilege. The original Theorists were content to observe, bemoan, and play with such phenomena; the new ones wanted to reorder society. If social injustice is caused by legitimizing bad discourses, [then,] they reasoned, social justice can be achieved by delegitimizing them and replacing them with better ones. Those social sciences and humanities scholars who took Theoretical approaches began to form a left-wing moral community, rather than a purely academic one: an intellectual organ more interested in advocating a particular ought[,] than [in] attempting a detached assessment of is—an attitude we usually associate with churches, rather than universities." – pp. 46–8

"By losing the ironic playfulness and despair of meaning characteristic of high-deconstructive postmodernism[,] and by becoming goal-oriented, Theorists of the 1980s and 1990s made postmodernism applicable to institutions and politics. By recovering the idea of identity as something that—although culturally constructed—provided group knowledge and empowerment, they enabled more specific forms of activism-scholarship to develop. Theory therefore turned from being largely descriptive to highly prescriptive—a shift from is to ought. After the applied postmodern turn, postmodernism was no longer a mode of describing society and undermining confidence in long-established models of reality: it now aspired to be a tool of Social Justice. This ambition would come to fruition in the early 2010s, when a second significant evolutionary mutation in postmodernism occurred.

"The new Theories emerging from the applied postmodern turn made it possible for scholars and activists to do something with the postmodern conception of society. If knowledge is a construct of power, which functions through ways of talking about things, knowledge can be changed and power structures toppled by changing the way we talk about things. Thus, applied postmodernism focuses on controlling discourses, especially by problematizing language and imagery it deems Theoretically harmful....The intense scrutiny of language and development of ever stricter rules for terminology pertaining to identity often known as political correctness came to a head in the 1990s and has again become pertinent since the mid-2010s.

"This carries politically actionable conclusions. If what we accept as true is only accepted as such because the discourses of straight, white, wealthy, Western men have been privileged, applied Theory indicates this can be challenged by empowering marginalized identity groups[,] and insisting their voices take precedence. This belief increased the aggressiveness of identity politics to such an extent that it even led to concepts like 'research justice.' This alarming proposal demands that scholars preferentially cite women and minorities—and minimize citations of white Western men—because empirical research that values knowledge production rooted in evidence and reasoned argument is an unfairly privileged cultural construct of white Westerners. It is therefore, in this view, a moral obligation to share the prestige of rigorous research with 'other forms of research,' including superstition, spiritual beliefs, cultural traditions and beliefs, identity-based experiences, and emotional responses.

"As these methods can be applied to virtually anything, a vast body of work drawing on any (or all) identity-based fields has emerged since roughly 2010. It asserts the objective truth of socially constructed knowledge and power hierarchies with absolute certainty. This represents an evolution that began with the applied turn in postmodernism[,] as its new assumptions became known-knowns—that which people take for granted because it is known that they are 'known.'

"These changes have been steadily eroding the barrier between scholarship and activism. It used to be considered a failure of teaching or scholarship to work from a particular ideological standpoint. The teacher or scholar was expected to set aside her own biases and beliefs in order to approach her subject as objectively as possible. Academics were incentivized to do so by knowing that other scholars could—and would—point out evidence of bias or motivated reasoning and counter it with evidence and argument. Teachers could consider their attempts at objectivity successful if their students did not know what their political or ideological positions were.

"This is not how Social Justice scholarship works or is applied to education. Teaching is now supposed to be a political act, and only one type of politics is acceptable—identity politics, as defined by Social Justice and Theory. In subjects ranging from gender studies to English literature, it is now perfectly acceptable to state a theoretical or ideological position and then use that lens to examine the material, without making any attempt to falsify one's interpretation by including disconfirming evidence or alternative explanations. Now, scholars can openly declare themselves to be activists and teach activism in courses that require students to accept the ideological basis of Social Justice as true[,] and [to] produce work that supports it." – pp. 61–3

"While, initially, postcolonial Theory scholarship mostly took the form of literary criticism and the discursive analysis of writing about colonialism...the field gradually expanded and simplified. By the early 2000s, the concept of decolonizing everything had begun to dominate scholarship and activism, and new scholars were using and developing the concepts in different ways, with more actionable elements. They...extended the focus beyond ideas and speech about literal colonialism to perceived attitudes of superiority towards people of certain identity statuses. These included displaced indigenous groups and people from racial or ethnic minorities who could be considered in some way subaltern, diasporic, or hybrid, or whose non-Western beliefs, cultures, or customs had been devalued. The aims of postcolonial Theory also became more concrete: focusing less on disrupting discourses they saw as colonialist in the fairly pessimistic way typical of postmodernism[,] and more on taking active steps to decolonize these, using the militant Social Justice approach that has taken hold since 2010. This has mainly occurred via various decolonize movements, which can be taken as the product of more recent Theorists having reified the assumptions of postcolonial Theory and put them into action.

"What it means to decolonize a thing that is not literally colonized varies considerably. It can refer simply to including scholars of all nationalities and races[.] Such campaigns focus on reducing reliance on white scholars from former colonizing powers and replacing them with scholars of color from formerly colonized regions. However, we also see a drive for a diversity of 'knowledges' and epistemologies—ways of deciding what is true—under Theory[,] often described as '(other) ways of knowing.' This comes with a strong inclination to critique, problematize, and disparage knowledge understood as Western." – p. 77

"If we think of the first postmodernists of the late 1960s as a manifestation of radical skepticism and despair[,] and the second wave, from the late 1980s, as a recovery from hopelessness[,] and a drive to make [the] core ideas politically actionable, [then] this third wave, which became prominent between the late 2000s and the early 2010s, has fully recovered its certainty and activist zeal. The first postmodernists were reacting largely to the failure of Marxism, the longstanding analytical framework of the academic left, and suffering from major disillusionment. Because their theoretical framework of choice was falling apart, they adopted the cynical attitude that nothing could be relied upon anymore. The metanarratives they were skeptical of included Christianity, science, and the concept of progress, among others—but, with the loss of Marxism, came a loss of hope of restructuring society towards 'justice.' They therefore sought only to dismantle, deconstruct, and disrupt existing frameworks ironically, with a kind of joyless playfulness. This was the state of cultural thought in the 1970s.

"By the time this first wave of despairing skepticism—the high deconstructive phase of postmodernism—had worn itself out twenty years later, the academic left had somewhat recovered hope and was looking for more positive and applicable forms of Theory. It took postmodernism's two key principles and four themes, and tried to do something with them. Thus, postmodern Theory developed into the applied postmodern Theories, plural. [For instance,] postcolonial Theory...would, if it could, rescue the 'other' from the West, mostly by tearing the West down....Above all else, intersectional feminism sought empowerment through identity politics and collective action, which largely defines the current cultural mood....So, by the 1990s, the applied postmodern turn had arrived, [which] made postmodern Theory actionable, and focused on identity and identity politics.

"As these Theories developed through the late 1990s into the 2000s within various forms of identity studies...they increasingly combined their aims, to become steadily more intersectional. By the mid-2000s, if you studied one of the key topics—sex, gender identity, race, sexuality, immigration status, indigeneity, colonial status, disability, religion, and weight—you were expected to factor in all the others....This resulted in a form of general scholarship that looks at 'marginalized groups[,]' and multiple systems of power and privilege.

"As so many of these marginalized groups united[,] and the various streams of thought merged to create a single large pool of similar, competing issues, Social Justice scholars and activists also became much more confident in their underlying assumptions. As the 2010s began, the ambiguity and doubt that had characterized postmodernism up until then had almost entirely disappeared[.]" – pp. 184–6

"Social Justice scholarship does not just rely on the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes: it treats them and their underlying assumptions as morally righteous known-knowns—as The Truth According to Social Justice. It therefore constitutes a third distinct phase of postmodernism, one we have called reified postmodernism because it treats the abstractions at the heart of postmodernism as if they were real truths about society.

"To understand how the three phases of postmodernism have developed, imagine a tree with deep roots in radical leftist social theory. The first phase, or high deconstructive phase, from the 1960s to the 1980s (usually simply referred to as 'postmodernism'), gave us the tree trunk: Theory. The second phase, from the 1980s to the mid-2000s, which we call applied postmodernism, gave us the branches—the more applicable Theories and studies, including postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, gender studies, fat studies, disability studies, and many critical anything studies. In the current, third phase, which began in the mid-2000s, Theory has gone from being an assumption to being The Truth, a truth that is taken for granted. This has given us the leaves of the tree of Social Justice scholarship, which combines the previous approaches as needed. The constant in all three phases is Theory, which manifests in the two postmodern principles and four postmodern themes.

"Social Justice scholarship does not merely present the postmodern knowledge principle—that objective truth does not exist and [that] knowledge is socially constructed and a product of culture—and the postmodern political principle—society is constructed through knowledge by language and discourses, designed to keep the dominant in power over the oppressed. It treats them as The Truth, tolerates no dissent, and expects everyone to agree or be 'cancelled.' We see this in the obsessive focus on who can produce knowledge and how[,] and in the explicit desire to 'infect' as many other disciplines as possible with Social Justice methods. This is reflected in a clear wish to achieve epistemic and research 'justice[,]' by asserting that rigorous knowledge production is just a product of white, male, and Western culture[,] and thus no better than the Theoretically interpreted lived experiences of members of marginalized groups, which must be constantly elevated and foregrounded.

"The four postmodern themes are not generally treated by Critical Social Justice scholars as a reification of postmodernism. They are facets of The Truth According to Social Justice.

"This has had a number of consequences. Scholars and activists devote tremendous effort to searching for and inflating the smallest infractions—this being the 'critical' approach. They scrupulously examine people's current and past speech, particularly on social media, and punish purveyors of 'hateful' discourses. If the person involved is considered influential, the mob may even try to end her career altogether.

"Social Justice scholarship represents the third phase in the evolution of postmodernism. In this new incarnation, postmodernism...now seeks to apply deconstructive methods and postmodernist principles to the task of creating social change, which it pushes into everything. In the guise of Social Justice scholarship, postmodernism has become a grand, sweeping explanation for society—a metanarrative—of its own.

"So let's return to the contradiction at the heart of reified postmodernism: how can intelligent people profess both radical skepticism and radical relativism—the postmodern knowledge principle—and at the same time assert the Truth According to Social Justice (Theory) with absolute certainty?

"The answer seems to be that the skepticism and relativism of the postmodern knowledge principle are now interpreted in a more restrictive fashion: that it is impossible for humans to obtain reliable knowledge by employing evidence and reason, but, it is now claimed, reliable knowledge can be obtained by listening to the 'lived experience' of members of marginalized groups—or what is really more accurate, to marginalized people's interpretations of their own lived experience, after these have been properly colored by Theory.

"The difficulty with this sort of Social Justice 'way of knowing' is, however, the same as that with all gnostic 'epistemologies' that rely upon feelings, intuition, and subjective experience: what should we do when people's subjective experiences conflict?

"[W]hat Social Justice scholars seem in practice to do is to select certain favored interpretations of marginalized people's experience (those consistent with Theory) and anoint these as the 'authentic' ones; all others are explained away as an unfortunate internalization of dominant ideologies or cynical self-interest...at the price of rendering the Social Justice Theory completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible: [N]o matter what evidence about reality (physical, biological, and social)[,] or philosophical argument may be presented, Theory always can and always does explain it away.

"It is therefore no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theorists have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation, and disagreement of any kind. Indeed, the whole postmodernist project now seems, in retrospect, like an unwitting attempt to have deconstructed the old metanarratives of Western thought—science and reason along with religion and capitalist economic systems—to make room for a wholly new religion, a postmodern faith based on a dead God, which sees mysterious worldly forces in systems of power and privilege[,] and which sanctifies victimhood. This, increasingly, is the fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left." – pp. 207–11

"It is not a coincidence that the applied postmodern turn began in the late 1980s, just as the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism, and Gay Pride began to see diminishing returns after twenty years of remarkably rapid progress towards racial, gender, and LGBT equality on a legal and political level. With Jim Crow laws dismantled, Empire fallen, male homosexuality legalized, and discrimination on the grounds of race and sex criminalized, Western society was newly aware and ashamed of its long history of oppression of marginalized groups and wanted to continue righting those wrongs. Since the most significant legal battles had been won, all that remained to tackle were sexist, racist, and homophobic attitudes and discourses. Postmodernism, with its focus on discourses of power and socially constructed knowledge, was perfectly placed to address these." – pp. 230–1

"There is a significant danger in Social Justice imposing its social constructivist beliefs on the institutions of society. A good case study of this is provided by the events at Evergreen State College, which got overtaken by the ideas of critical race Theory generally[,] and of the Theorist and educator Robin DiAngelo specifically. [After a precipitating event,] a contingent of student-activists reacted angrily. The result was mayhem: student-activists began to protest and riot at events all over campus. Proceedings at the college were entirely disrupted[.] The problem escalated to the point where student-activists were barricading doors against the police, holding faculty members as de facto hostages, and, armed with baseball bats, stopping cars to search for [the target of the protest].

"The campus descended into mob madness, and Evergreen has not yet recovered from it.

"There is a one-word answer to how this could have happened: Theory. What happened at Evergreen is a demonstration at the microcosmic scale of what happens when Theory gets applied to an autonomous institution in a real-world setting. The Evergreen establishment set itself up for destruction by accepting enough of the 'antiracism' views of critical race educators like Robin DiAngelo—not least the idea of white fragility—to have lost its ability to mount a defense against the protestors. Indeed, when some students of color expressed support for [the target of the protest] and made similar statements to his, the mob shouted them down and dismissed their own lived experience, most probably because it didn't align with the 'authentic' experience detailed by Theory. Thus, once enough people, most notably the faculty member Naima Lowe, who taught media studies at Evergreen at the time of the meltdown, accused the college of being a racist institution overrun by white supremacy, the faculty and administrators, who had taken on 'antiracist' concepts from critical race Theory, had no recourse but to accept the accusation and start making the changes demanded.

"What else could they do? The Theory of 'white fragility,' among others, tied their hands such that to do anything else was, in the eyes of the prevailing Theory, to confirm their complicity in the very problem they had every reason to deny....Having accepted that 'the question isn't "did racism take place?" but rather "how did racism manifest in that situation?",' the only possible conclusion was that they were working for an intrinsically racist organization. Those were the charges. Having accepted the Social Justice idea that the only possible way not to be complicit in racism is to accept the charge and take on an endless amount of antiracism work, as dictated by Theory, they were powerless against an extremist minority of faculty and students, particularly once administrators like the new president George Bridges got on board. It is extremely unlikely that the majority of the students and faculty at Evergreen who were sympathetic to the concerns voiced by Social Justice knew that this was what they were signing up for.

"This dynamic is predictable once Theory is introduced into a closed system. The ideas begin to gain some currency with some of the population, who become sympathetic partisans and begin to take on the Theoretical worldview. In that state, they 'know' that systemic bigotry is present in all institutions, including their own, and that it lurks beneath the surface in need of exposure and problematization through the 'critical' methods. Eventually, a Theoretically relevant incident occurs or, as may have been the case at Evergreen, is manufactured, and the Theorists within that institution begin to focus intently on the revealed 'problematics' at the bottom of the problem. This will be interpreted systemically, and the community fragments as every discussion and argument turns into a series of accusations and close readings of every utterance made by anyone who isn't being sufficiently Theoretical. To do anything but acquiesce and take up the fight on behalf of Theory is taken to 'prove' one's complicity with the systemic problem at the institution's heart, and there is no recourse. If enough activists have adopted enough Theory in the institution by the time the incident occurs—and there will always be an incident eventually[,] as even a misunderstanding or faux pas will qualify—Theory will consume the institution. If it folds, it deserved it[,] because it was systemically bigoted in the first place. If it survives, even as a fragment of its former self, it will do so consistent with Theory or as a toxic battleground around Theory. This is not a bug of Theory; it's a feature. It is what the 'critical' method at its heart was intended to do from the beginning. Indeed, this dynamic has played out in diverse settings beyond Evergreen, including online forums dedicated to hobbies like knitting, the Atheism Movement of the early 2010s, and even conservative churches." – pp. 231–3

"The ideas of Social Justice scholarship often look good on paper. That's almost always the way with bad theories. Take communism, for example. Communism presents the idea that an advanced and technological society can organize itself around cooperation and shared resources and minimize human exploitation. The injustices that spring from disparities between capitalism's winners and losers can be eliminated. With sufficient information—information that proves incredibly hard to get without markets, as we now know—surely we can redistribute goods and services[,] in much fairer and more equitable ways, and surely the moral benefits are sufficient to inspire all good people to participate in such a system. We just have to get everyone on script. We just all have to cooperate. That's the theory. But, in practice, communism has generated some of the greatest atrocities of history and been responsible for the deaths of millions.

"Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of 'the greater good.' Postmodernism began as a rejection of communism, along with all other grand theories belonging to the modern period, the Enlightenment, and the premodern faiths that came before them. The cynical Theorists whom we now recognize as the original postmodernists laid the groundwork for a new Theoretical approach to human hubris. Rather than following in the footsteps of their predecessors, who attempted grand, sweeping explanations and visions of how the world could and should work, they wanted to tear it all apart, right down to the foundations. They weren't just skeptical of specific visions of human progress: they were radically skeptical of the possibility of progress at all. This cynicism was effective. In becoming politically actionable, this cynicism was specifically applied to remake society—not just to complain about it—and thus evolved into Theories we face today, particularly in Social Justice scholarship and activism. On paper, those Theories seem to say good things. Let's get to the bottom of bigotry, oppression, marginalization, and injustice, and heal the world. If we could all just care a little more, and care in the right way, we could make our way to the right side of history. We just have to get everyone on script. We just have to get everyone to cooperate. We just have to ignore any problems and swear solidarity to the cause.

"It isn't going to work. Social Justice is a nice-looking Theory that, once put into practice, will fail, and which could do tremendous damage in the process. Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative. Nevertheless, metanarratives can sound convincing and obtain sufficient support to significantly influence society and the way it thinks about knowledge, power and language. Why? Partly because we humans aren't as smart as we think we are, partly because most of us are idealists on at least some level, partly because we tend to lie to ourselves when we want something to work. But Theory is a metanarrative and metanarratives are, in fact, unreliable.

"The postmodernists got that right." – pp. 234–5

"The answer to these problems isn't new, though, and perhaps that's why it isn't immediately gratifying. The solution is liberalism, both political (universal liberalism is an antidote to the postmodern political principle) and in terms of knowledge production (Jonathan Rauch's 'liberal science' is the remedy for the postmodern knowledge principle). You don't need to become an expert[.] But you do need to have a little bit of courage to stand up to something with a lot of power. You need to recognize Theory when you see it, and side with the liberal responses to it—which might be no more complicated than saying, 'No, that's your ideological belief, and I don't have to go along with it.' " – pp. 265–6

Copyright (c) 2021 Mark D. Blackwell.