In this podcast, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay discuss their 2017 essay "A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity". This lengthy essay investigates what the authors perceive as a two pronged-attack on modernity, which they define as Enlightenment morality and science, from the adherents of both postmodernism and pre-modernism.
Pluckrose and Lindsay identify the postmodernists and the pre-modernists as the extreme fringes of the left and right respectively and not post and pre-modernists in general. Whilst at the opposite end of the "identitarian horseshoe" they identify both sides as being similar in their extreme authoritarianism. Both sides have ventured to such extremes they believe their opponents as existential threats to humanity. This extreme and "existential polarization" has the consequence that people who are in fact centrists are caught in the middle and viewed as being far-left or far-right by the extremist, often simultaneously. This polarization has become so deep that the authors believe that modernity is at significant risk and that both opposing sides seem intent on its destruction. Pluckrose and Lindsay also believe that this polarized partisanship results in people thinking along ideological lines and without reason, a phenomenon often referred to as "groupthink".