I offer a speculative answer.
a rapid influx of women and minorities, starting in the late 1960s, left women and minorities wondering whether they fit in. This motivated people on campus to focus on issues of race and gender. Attitudes have been in flux ever since. At the moment, they seem far from the equilibrium that I would hope to see reached.
I hope that any reactions to this essay are based on reading it carefully.
Thomas Sowell emphasized the role of Affirmative Action in campus unrest. Not only were minority students placed in a new and alien environment, many were placed in schools for which they were academically unprepared. Students who were in the top ten percent of students nationwide, were in the bottom ten percent at Yale and Harvard.
Dear Prof. Arnold,
I read it and even printed it out to peruse at my leisure and chew over. My first impression is that it’s not enough–you have certainly identified one of the generating factors, but the phenomenon of “causal density” is a real one, if I’m using that phrase correctly.
Not only causal density, but “interaction effects” in a multivariate model.
My guess is that the phenomenon of the Social Justice Warrior reaches its full bloom because of interaction effects. At the very least I will assert that it helps to have (1) “visible demographic variability” plus (2) “individual self doubt by women and visible minorities” plus (3) “isolation of campus from the rest of adult society” plus (4) “diversity professionals” in the university administration plus (5) what we might call “Relative Deprivation”–the gap between expected and observed progress. Especially when you add in social media and the need of legacy media to find a new business model, you have an environment in which the “interaction effects” are very important.
There are other factors I’m not certain how to articulate–let’s just call one of them (6) “lack of clear norms for acceptable behavior.” You could even throw in (7) Martin Gurri’s observation about the lack of gatekeepers in the news.
The Rise to Prominence of the Social Justice Warrior has been encouraged by all these things.
= – = – = – =
Richard Fulmer’s point above is a an important one. It’s my guess that a lot of enthusiasts for Social Justice are unaware that his statement can be empirically validated. It’s treated a little bit like a “hate fact”–a finding that replicates but isn’t stated in polite company to the extent that some people aren’t even aware of it, and it is slippery because it’s an observation about statistical variation among groups and doesn’t clearly map to any individual.
A useful discussion of Richard Fulmer’s point appears in this post by Jonathan Haidt at Heterodox Academy, here. Please note it’s just one factor–one of 7 factors as I’ve enumerated them above.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-amazing-1969-prophecy/
Did these changes happen on campuses, or were they the result of major shifts in parent/child relations and rearing that began with the Boomers and continued going forward? I think its the latter.
I think it has more to do with what Eric Weinstein called The Great Oppression Shortage. Institutional barriers to advancement have been removed, and yet achievement levels and outcomes still remain unequal. This has led to a combination of status anxiety, resentment, and paranoid conspiracy mongering about privilege and institutional racism on the part of (some) women and minority groups who continue to lag behind.
The social justice movement came out of the social gospel movement of the early 20th century, which started with German theologians in the early 19th century. Germany gave up on Christianity early in the 19th century and “theologians” created a Christianity without Christ. They denied the deity of Jesus and all of the miracles in the Bible, but continued to call themselves Christians. Traditional Christians called the unbelievers liberal or modernists. But without a Jesus who is also God, the liberal churches no longer had a mission or vision until socialism gave them one. Those “Christians” married atheistic socialism because they were nothing more than sentimental atheists anyway. They made implementing socialism the goal of their Christianity and called socialism the “social gospel.” Realizing that class conflict didn’t sell to Americans, they came up with other groups that capitalism was oppressing – minorities and women. The social gospel crowd led the women’s suffrage movement which morphed into women’s lib. But the progressives and social gospel crowd invented eugenics and wanted to suppress minorities. Only after the atrocities of Germany in WWII against the Jews made eugenics unpopular did the movement realize that capitalism had “oppressed” the minorities that they had wanted to euthanize.
A fear of evolution.
Medium.com now banned where I work. #Sad.
What is “social justice”?
Can you give it a definition? Can you measure it? When do you know if you’ve achieved your “social justice” goal? Is there ever an end state that can be identified and reached, and then remain the status quo?
Once upon a time, “social justice” meant, among other things [I think], integration in education. But more recently I’ve read that, in higher ed for example, some minorities feel more comfortable in segregated dorms and events. If that’s the expressed preference of a minority, then is that their form of “social justice,” and we can all just go home & not be concerned about it anymore?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/american-colleges-segregated-housing-graduation-ceremonies/
If you cannot define your goal, or if the “goal posts” keep moving, then how do you know whether you are moving toward or away from “social justice,” whether your preferred [government coercive] programs are cost v benefit useful, or whether it’s all just a massive fraud on the public, the taxpayers, and the minorities themselves by these self-envisioned, self-appointed “social justice warriors”?
Excellent interview with Erik Torenberg. Highly recommended.
“My basic claim is that a rapid influx of women and minorities, starting in the late 1960s, left women and minorities wondering whether they fit in. This motivated people on campus to focus on issues of race and gender.”
Definitely an interesting explanation for what plowed the fields in the US on college campuses and even the white-collar world making them ready for various ideological seeds that have flourished since. And we see this story addressed in shows like All In the Familiy, The Facts of Life, Welcome Back Kotter, and Cooley High, in which a the equilibrium you describe was fictitiously portrayed and more recently in shows like Mad Men, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Most Beautiful Thing in which the oppressed are given more heroic roles. Looking at the phenomenon from this perspective is also a welcome relief from the attribution of everything and anything to hunter-gatherer tribalism.
However, institutional demographic influxes in the USA don’t explain the global phenomenon of the ascension of social justice ideology.
Student movements in Brazil for example date back to the 30’s and were active in building a Brazilian national identity. Despite being smothered by the dictatorship in the early 60’s through the mid 80’s, feminism emerged every bit as strong as in the US although the development of campus racial identitarianism was hobbled somewhat by a largely mestizo population and the absence of the “one-drop” rule that governs US culture. Their official census categories are mostly based upon skin color (preto, pardo, amarelo, branco, indigena) rather than racial identify group, but nevertheless have been rejected by a substantial portion of the population that prefers to identify as moreno. Recent efforts to foment large scale race hate have been stymied by a long history of widespread and persistent intermarriage between groups as well as the fact that the sort of grievance studies scholarship going on today in the US was already old hat having been thoroughly explored in Gilberto Freyre’s 1933 book Casa-Grande e Senzala and also by the fact that Brazil had a great national anti-slavery poet in the form of Castro Alves “The Poet of the Slaves” immortalized globally in Pablo Neruda’s great poem “Castro Alves From Brazil.”
Elsewhere, we can look to the May 1968 student demonstrations at the University of Paris at Nanterre that first exploded into a nationwide event with widespread protests over working conditions and the education system policy, which threatened to bring down the government. And then was followed by education policy related major demonstrations around the world in places as diverse as Pakistan, Mexico, Spain, Japan, and Germany. There were of course plenty of other 1968 protests that shed plenty of other variant seeds of social-justice related dissent but many of the seeds of alternate strains, such as anti-authoritarianism, found the USA a rocky place where they could find no purchase. Echoes of these events, however, are still felt today and are actively modeled by US students in their antics today.
In the US, another chain of events unfolded in the Roman Catholic universities with the gradual evolution of Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical letter Rerum Novarum into liberation theology which was paralleled by large scale exclusion of conservative thinkers from Catholic university faculties. The encyclical wove economic distributism into Catholic theology along with the Marxist/corporatist vocabulary of worker classes and labor unions.
First implemented as a philosophy of governance in the 1920’s Estado Novo in Portugal through the writings of António de Oliveira Salazar whom one might be excused for suspecting that several of the Democrat 2020 candidates are plagiarizing, the Rerum Novarum philosophy ultimately resulted in huge spending on public education and public universities being opened in the 1960s.
But more generally there seems to be a strong human tendency to embrace corporatist tendencies globally whether in the form of castes, kinship groups, guilds, labor unions, Marxist social theory, or identitarian politics. And this tendency flows from wells in human development more recent and different in kind than hunter-gatherer tribalism, perhaps from the more recent evolutionary influence of specialization and trade.
Unfortunately the idea of people being treated as individuals seems like whistling past the graveyard. Trying to think of how we get from here to there, I can’t shake the image of Albrecht Durer’s engraving “Not Preparing for Death” from my mind, at least in the USA. Perhaps if we are lucky people in the US will survive a reign like the Estado Novo and emerge with a Carnation Revolution of our own but I am not planning on sticking around to find out, the post-Trump USA is far more likely to resemble post-Lusaka Accord Mozambique.
Or maybe it emerged from a US culture in the 1950s:
1) Local Theocracy in which the community had a stronger mix of church, business, and local government working closer together for society. A lot of this started breaking apart in the 1960s and collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s. As good as this society was the union manufacturing economy was the basis of holding this reality together and when the union manufacturing collapsed in the 1980s, so did the local church and government. (This is the center of Buchanan paloconservative goals in which Trump ran on. And honestly I don’t see how their goals will be achieved.)
2) Matt Yglesias point – 1960 economic-political system set a white male Protestant Christian at the head of the table and other groups had to fit their positions. (Segregation was not just Jim Crow laws but California had a lot of understanding of where minority population lived and worked.) Women could work but a lower defined wages and career opportunities while the optimal well family wives did a lot community service at the church. So there is a lot of reasonable complaints about SJW, but there is a degree of past Christian citizens that don’t like the equal situation.
I suggest you take a look at A.A. Jack’s “The Privileged Poor.” There was a very good summary posted last month at Commentary https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/dds-and-pps/
From that review:
Jack argues that lower-income students, like “students of color,” in elite American universities are often analyzed as though they were a unitary, cohesive block—but that doing so ignores high levels of diversity within these groups. Specifically, Jack contends that poor students in top colleges fall into two distinct groups. There are the Doubly Disadvantaged (DD), who attended struggling high schools in their disadvantaged big-city neighborhoods or rural towns before matriculating to Harvard or Michigan. And there are the Privileged Poor (PP), who received “upward mobility” scholarships to select boarding or day schools prior to college.
In the 60s, there was obvious social injustice to blacks and women due to discrimination. Avg. economic results of group members was lower than avg results for whites and men. This justified the Civil Rights movements to end discrimination, including MLK’s great criterion of ending racism:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
That dream has been mostly realized But But But … economic results for avg Blacks still are far below that for Whites, or Asians.
Magic thinking demands equal avg economic results from different tribal groupings, and if the results are not equal, the SJ Despots claim it is because of social injustice, not because of “the content of their character.”
Yes Arnold, you are so correct. Like MLK. The only livable (stable) equilibrium is to judge people as individuals. But the SJ Despots want power, and their SJ “Warrior” pretensions are, have been, and will be, useful for them to get more power.
Finally, there is the rejection of a (God given???) reality that is “unfair”. It’s obvious that people are both different, and that it is unfair that they are different, and thus unfair that these differences result in different, unequal, results.
But unfair is NOT unjust. When there was unjust discrimination, the injustice can be stopped. When there is unfair distribution of intelligence, or good parents, or beauty, these individual benefits can NOT be “shared fairly”. Unlike good nutrition or clean water, which can be.
The confusion between unfair, which cannot be corrected in a free society, and unjust, which can be changed, is part linguistic but mostly that of socialist magic thinking.
Recently, the privileges of being “White” and “male” have become targets of faux-injustice, because they are unfair. I would argue that being “American” is a bigger privilege, and also one that can more easily be changed — those who feel guilty over privilege can leave America. Many Trump-haters threatened/ promised to do that if Trump won — but they lied.
SJW Despots are full of liars, willing to lie to win, because they want power. Their successful ability in colleges to discriminate against hiring pro-life folk, and to a lesser extent against hiring pro-capitalism folk have increased their ignorant polarization.
I think you’ve identified one of the major ingredients. I think one of the others was a Marxist critique of imperialism that became fixated on the oppression of Third World people (of color) by Americans (at the time, nearly always white men), and that kept that fixation even after the Marxist precursor had failed.
SJWs do because they can. People want things. They do what they can to get them. If you wake up one day and find that calling someone else a bigot without any shame is a good way to get yourself a cushy sinecure and some personal power, why wouldn’t you do it? Especially if it was your best play available.
The question isn’t why didn’t women, minorities, and opportunists of all genders and races jump on an opportunity to advance their interests. That’s the default. The question is “Why did we let them?” If someone is obviously acting in bad faith, why let them get away with it?
Today it may seem like an inevitability. People toe the line because they credibly believe that to not do so will see them crushed. But how did we get here? It’s not like these people had this kind of power a few decades ago.
One thing I know is that showing weakness or vulnerability NEVER works with these people. They see an olive branch as nothing more than an opportunity to exploit. I think we’ve taken empathy as far as we can take with SJWs, we are clearly at the point where these things have a negative rather than positive impact.
Seems to me more of a natural extension and gradual progression of race and sex-related anti-discrimination movements and initiatives going back long before the late 60’s and early 70’s. Also, it seems to me that the federal and some state and local governments were noticeably ahead of many campuses on these matters in the 50’s and early 60’s.
When one is trying to accomplish the impossible, there’s just no end to possible new interventions and doubling down on old ones. If each failure is taken as evidence of evil, then the tension, frustration, and animus never diminish. And if purposefully agitating and aggravating that tension and animus provide a road to financial, political, and personal status gain, then you are going to be in a situation of continuous escalation and rapid hopping from one barely-tolerable radical proposal to another.
Once the expression of the idea that any group statistical differences might have innocent origins and not derive from irrational bigotry become a firing offense (see, e.g., James Damore), then the flood gates were opened as there was no way to push back against any complaints or proposals no matter how petty or ludicrous or harmful.
When I was 9-10 years old, in 1950-51, I used to tour the River Plate in a paddle steamer named JUSTICIA SOCIAL. The extraordinary story of this steamer can be read in
http://www.paddlesteamers.info/Argentina%20Historical.htm (under PARIS, its original name)
https://www.lacapitalmdp.com/contenidos/fotosfamilia/fotos/8483
In a few words, when Perón nationalized the Dodero company, the federal government took control of the steamer PARIS but it was sold to the government of Buenos Aires Province whose governor, Domingo Mercante, launched several programs under the heading Justicia Social. One program provided free tours to labor unions’ members on Saturdays in the River Plate. One of my uncles was the steamer’s captain and since his son and I were close friends we could join the tours whenever we wanted.
After October 1945, Justicia Social was the battle cry of several factions under the Partido Justicialista o Peronista’s umbrella. Why? Because the mass displacement of Argentinians from the rest of the country to the Great Buenos Aires Area changed its population drastically. Although the limits of the city had been well known for decades, after 1930 the Area expanded due to the severe effects of the Great Depression and WWII (for these effects, just read “Cambalache”, a tango in which a well-known, middle-class poet complained about the elite’s behavior — see in Spanish and English https://letrasdetango.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/cambalache/).
The displaced mass was much poorer than the large middle-class population of Buenos Aires city. In that context, social justice was the new mass’s battle cry to enjoy the living standards of the city’s middle-class (including recreational tours).