Where Social Justice fails as a religion, is in its efficacy. Every religion that’s survived the historical gauntlet of religious Darwinism has done so by promulgating key features which make a society stable. This stability usually includes an order or hierarchy, but not always, as in the case of Buddhism or Wicca. The Golden Rule is a must have, for the in-group. It’s not necessary for the out-group (Burn the Heretic! Kill the Mutant! Purge the Unclean!) but Golden Rule principles within the in-group are not negotiable if a religion is to survive. Golden Rule indoctrination guides people towards good behavior among their peers without the need for a burdensome behavior enforcement apparatus. Social Justice fails on this, because of what we might call the Totem Pole of Oppression.
What he goes on to suggest is that regardless of whether or not you believe in the Social Justice religion, you can be labeled as belonging to the oppressor class. Thus, the religion will alienate some of its believers, and that is not stable.
I don’t find that prediction compelling. Plenty of straight white males want to be perceived as Social Justice adherents, and they can do so.
Elsewhere, Uri Harris writes that there are reasonable adherents of Social Justice
who wouldn’t dream of demanding that Jordan Peterson’s books be banned or of declaring math a social construct. However, they devote a lot of their attention to pointing out racial or gender disparities, arguing that social norms confer privileges on white people, or suggesting that giving a platform to speakers lends credibility to their views in the eyes of impressionable viewers. One can agree or disagree with any of these views, but there’s nothing necessarily authoritarian, bigoted, or anti-intellectual about them. They’re factual claims, even if they are sometimes presented in emotionally or morally charged language.
His claim is that Social Justice is not inherently authoritarian.
Suppose one makes a factual claim that disparities in race and gender outcomes are mostly due to differences in the distribution of abilities and preferences. The authoritarian will treat such a claim as blasphemy. The reasonable person will respond with empirical counter-claims. If Social Justice were predominantly reasonable, then the IDW would not exist.
Here’s a challenge.
Please reconcile these views with the endless stream of posts about political bias and tribalism. How can you argue that a social justice perspective is predominantly unreasonable, while simultaneously building a detailed theory of political behavior that argues we are all driven by affiliation bias instead?
Calculate the cost of tribal bias then tax us for being stupid.
Good point. Robin Hanson has run into a problem too along these lines, trying to reconcile his “hidden selfish motivation” argument with the “just asking questions” vibe he promotes simultaneously.
Golden Rule indoctrination guides people towards good behavior among their peers without the need for a burdensome behavior enforcement apparatus.
I wouldn’t say this. Catholicism and Islam are pretty harsh internally. Protestants spin off new churches in response to chaffing under internal rules.
It’s not just the Golden Rule.
Off the top of my head, the Abrahamic religions all promote written laws and rules that are known by all.
If a society is going to have rules and laws, they should be written down for people to be able to look at them and say “Oh, that’s what the rulebook says.”
A bug (or feature) of the Social Justice movement is that norms and codes are unwritten, fluid, and ever changing. People seem to get status for identifying new violations that weren’t bad to do a few years earlier, and for demonizing violators of the newest rule.
As Pinker said, “Man is a sanctimonious animal.”
One might link this to Twitter, to recency bias, to moving the Overton Window farther to the left.
It may also be the case that we have too many educated intellectuals with “verbal virtuosity,” and Twitter. As more people went to college not enough of them studied things like nursing, engineering, accounting, etc. And the humanities now introduces students to the study of grievance, rather than belles lettres (sp?).
This is a very post-Reformation, “sola scriptura” view of things, but has little to do with the qualities of stable religious civilizations going back before then for thousands of years when “the written law” was practically inaccessible for most people, who instead has to defer to the authority of a special, small, and exclusive group of clerics, judges, and/or other ‘legal’ professionals.
In particular, letting everybody just read “the law” for themselves, without a system of authority perceived as legitimate and with the practical power to impose one particular teaching and view, makes the unavoidable problem of interpretation worse, not better, which inevitably feeds into the very mechanisms that lead to runaway radicalism, fission, friction, and inter-sectarian conflict. In other words, this point of view leads directly to the undermining of mechanims that keep certain Social Failure Modes like a virtue-signalling rat race under control. It’s like removing the control rods that moderate the fission rate in a nuclear reactor and prevent meltdown.
I don’t think BJ Campbell really grasps what social attributes and institutional designs and structures are the genuine factors that lead to ideological social stability (hint, they are not classically liberal, and so hard for liberals to embrace or even think about as being socially beneficial or even indispensible), and how their gradual decay in our history had led to the current moment of ideological singulariy and cultural nervous breakdown.
Probably the worst thing in the world for people who love the Enlightenment is “The Inquisition” (especially the Spanish one).
When studying history though, one learns that the inquisitors were actually brought in to keep things under control. The locals were in a frenzy wanting to accuse and burn everyone, and the trained sober inquisitors sent from Rome were basically there to try and calm things down and bring some order to the chaos (which would have gone on whether they were there or not).
That’s one reason why the actual numbers on things like the inquisition aren’t that eye popping compared to what I thought they would have been growing up.
It’s also the case that most egregious examples in the inquisition were opposed by the papacy, and that in many ways the worst excesses came from ambitious rising monarchs that wanted to expropriate the power and wealth of Jews/Conversos for their own selfish aims, not because of some religious zealotry by the Catholic Church.
This was often the case with violent anti-semitism too. In the Middle Ages, prelates would often offer save haven to Jews in their countries
because they wanted to cultivate their domestic financial markets, and often (though usually rather feebly) tried to quell popular antisemitic unrest. Of course, narratives about malicious institutions corrupting an innocent public are naturally more popular among the public than narratives about a malicious public.
I agree. This is a problem.
The things is that libertarians are generally against having strictly codified (as in governmental) rules, as this prevents evolution. In an anarchistic system the rules can evolve as society changes. Write them down and you end up with regulations that prevent people from doing things differently or better. So there appears to be a fundamental conflict in libertarian philosophy between the preference for private informal rule-making and uniformity/fairness of enforcement.
I belong to a Catholic group and its easily the nicest people I’ve met in my entire life.
Well, given that “social justice” is part grift, part rent seeking ploy, part political project, etc., it should shock anybody that it doesn’t function well as a religion. It’s got irons in a lot of fires.
However, they devote a lot of their attention to pointing out racial or gender disparities, arguing that social norms confer privileges on white people, or suggesting that giving a platform to speakers lends credibility to their views in the eyes of impressionable viewers. One can agree or disagree with any of these views, but there’s nothing necessarily authoritarian, bigoted, or anti-intellectual about them.
Right, it’s the remedies that are authoritarian.
I am fond of Kevin Williamson’s hypothesis that some Social Justice tactics are used to dislodge middle-aged workers in order to create space so that the younger generation can move up into those positions. The validity of this claim is an empirical question.
He calls it “scalp-hunting,” mentions the tactic of *takfiri*, and draws a comparison to social life at Versailles.
The essay is all-over-the-place, but worth reading.
https://www.weeklystandard.com/kevin-d-williamson/harvey-weinstein-roman-polanski-and-iggy-pop-how-the-social-justice-mob-decides-who-gets-ruined-and-who-doesnt
Once you accept that disparities can’t be genetics, then they are caused by insufficient Wokeness. Wokeness solutions are authoritarian because we’ve already tried all of the voluntary methods for ending these disparities and they failed, so obviously we need to try authoritarian ones to solve “the problem.”
There just isn’t a way to give into the claim of factual equality and not end up with authoritarianism to make this “fact” reality.
Even the assumption of non-genetic etiology is obviously insufficient though. If people of one group have on average significantly more children per household than another (excluding households with 0 children) then that alone will lead to significantly lower IQ on average. I don’t think it’s lnown whether it’s biological or psychological, but the more older siblings you have, the lower your IQ tends to be.
Even if one assumed genetics were a non-factor, only a rigidly and precisely managed (very totalitarian) society would yield equal outcomes between groups from opposite sides of the world. The assumption that equality of outcome alone can result from a just society is staggeringly nonsensical.
No one expects the Social Justice Movement.
“Every religion that’s survived the historical gauntlet of religious Darwinism has done so by promulgating key features which make a society stable. ”
What if it’s not stable? Communism was a failed religion of sorts. It had a 70 year run before collapse.
The West built up incredible societal capital over the last few centuries. There is a ton that can get run down before collapse. What bandit wouldn’t be enticed by that.
“I don’t find that prediction compelling. Plenty of straight white males want to be perceived as Social Justice adherents, and they can do so.”
I concur.
The 2020 Census will be a wonder to behold. I would not be surprised to see the number of people identifying as white in the US plummeting significantly as individuals who identified previously as white take on new identities.
And I would not blame them.
The far left extremists who dominate every institution in US society today are a scary bunch. One wonders if we can put genocide out of the question. Of course it will be dressed up in more favorable terms, something like a new national health care system devoting medical resources to higher social values and steering older whites from access to medicine.
Personally, I plan to join the rush as well. Some amateur geneology has turned up the fact that about 20 generations back I have Spanish ancestors. So obviously the safe thing to do now is to start identifying as Hispanic. And for a bonus, since I can also trace back to Portuguese ancestors, I can claim structural oppression as the system denies me the right to identify as Lusitanian which is not even recognized. As a Portuguese speaker and Brazilophile, I would much prefer the opportunity to claim Lusitanian identity and see no reason Lusitanians should take a back seat to Hispanics in the grievance olympics and affirmative action derby.
Social Justice Now For Lusitanians!!!!
I’m not white, I’m a Bavarian-American!
In all seriousness, if I insist that I’m not white and refuse to identify as such, this puts the social justice adherent in an awkward situation. Does he insist that I’m white and impose the identity on me regardless of my protestations? How does he reconcile that with his insistence that race is a social construct and identity, not an intrinsic characteristic? Or if he says: “society regards you as white, so you’re white, and you can’t opt out of that,” then he is being part of the problem by reinforcing the very racial categorization he finds so spurious and pernicious.
That “trans-black” woman got hell. Like Native American tribal gibs, a whole system will develop to determine whose entitled to the gibs, and then police it to make sure it doesn’t get expanded and thus dilute gibs to people determining whose in.
Sorta like how the white Iowa farmers are gettin the gibs today?
Yes.
Where Social Justice fails as a religion, is in its efficacy.
IDK….The treatment of this SJW realities sounds a lot the Claremont whining about Multiculturalism. It treats that 2% of SJW reflects the realities of all Left Democrats who live a variety of different lives. And to show how impactful they are: Biden is leading Democrats in the Primary with 35% with 22 or so candidates. (The least of the SJWs of any of the 22.)
1) The worst assumption of the Democratic Primary is African-American would vote for an African-American candidate. Biden leads the most with Southern African-Americans, who also happen to be the most Christian church goers of the Democratic Party. (I believe he is leading Catholic heavy Hispanic-Americans but is harder tell. And minority voters carried HRC in D Primary 2016.)
2) Suppose one makes a factual claim that disparities in race and gender outcomes are mostly due to differences in the distribution of abilities and preferences.
The most interesting reality today is the group IMO the group with the least economic opportunities are going to be WWC in in WV. So a lot this is very conflicting narratives.
3) Again, if you live in California, the reality is many best corporate positions are taken by Asian-Americans so is some of the whining about multiculturalism/SJW sounds like white populations are seeing less opportunity. (My kids with equal grades as 1980s HS and higher SAT will not be accepted at the University of California schools like I did back in the day.)
1) African Americans are heavily influenced by name recognition, electability, and likelihood to pass along gibs to African Americans. Basically, low information voters with a kind of informal predilection for spoils system politics. Since electing someone with the same skin color often checks off those boxes they often gravitate in that direction, but not always. Biden seems like someone that delivers on those metrics.
2) Cost of living adjusted wages are about $20 in Los Angelos, CA and $20 in Morgantown, WV. Given that the whites in Morgantown probably are slightly above average compared to per capita and Hispanics in LA are probably below the LA average, perhaps this isn’t even a true statement.
https://www.governing.com/gov-data/metro-area-wages-cost-of-living-adjusted-2014-data.html
3) Asians are suing Harvard over affirmative action. If repealed, the white population would stay about the same while Hispanics and Blacks would loss slots in order to increase Asians.
1) Most voters are lower information voters and should we make the claims WWC for Trump as African-Americans? (And Biden does relatively well with WWC Democrats.) Sure there could be name recognition and spoils of his political past, but the main preference of Democratic voters for 2020 is Electability and Biden seems to fit this bill. (And his campaign is building on it.)
2) There is difference of life style and long term economic opportunities. I really could be wrong on long term WV populations but there are significant issues here as the opoids is the first drug epidemic to hit white citizens harder than minorities in decades.
3) Hey I am with Asian-Americans and they have been going after Californian Affirmative Action colleges for decades. (Admissions for California colleges must be absurd pretzel logic.) I do wonder how the anti-multiculturalist is not just Hispanic-Americans are lowering native wages but also concerned that Asian-Americans are doing extremely well. And this is somewhat the concern of Tech companies not representing ‘True America’. I could be wrong but Bannon and few others has made obvious statement against Tech leadership
Just listening to the latest Uncommon Knowledge with Thomas Sowell. I’ve found his observations on social justice to be illuminating:
“Social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital”
https://youtu.be/LdHEbOAQFmY?list=PLq8BgDugd2oyqmYx6RdVlJfQeAdhJkhc3&t=2064
If you listen to his description, I think you’ll find the outcomes similar to this from Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ (ch 3):
“This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent.
“A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress ‘educated’ people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their ‘education’ is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and everywhere. ”
The goal of social justice is to instill a sense of futility in those they wish to “help” (dependency). That “they” are keeping you down and you, yourself, are helpless without the power of the social justice warrior.
The Econtalk ‘Mauricio Miller on Poverty, Social Work, and the Alternative’ describes Miller’s successful experiment of stopping his (social justice warrior) staff from “helping” and empowering his clients to develop human capital.
Thank you for posting a link to the latest interview of Thomas Sowell’s at Uncommon Knowledge!
“The Golden Rule is a must have, for the in-group.”
Long ago when I read Houston Smith’s ‘The World’s Religions’ I came to see that a fundamental element of all the religions he surveyed was some form of the Golden Rule. Smith doesn’t point this out overtly, but one can’t help but see the commonality.
Religion may be useful as a way of thinking of the social justice movement, but so too maybe be “fundamentalism.”
Wikipedia tells us “Fundamentalism usually has a religious connotation that indicates unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs. However, fundamentalism has come to be applied to a tendency among certain groups–mainly, although not exclusively, in religion–that is characterized by a markedly strict literalism as it is applied to certain specific scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, and a strong sense of the importance of maintaining ingroup and outgroup distinctions, leading to an emphasis on purity and the desire to return to a previous ideal from which advocates believe members have strayed. Rejection of diversity of opinion as applied to these established “fundamentals” and their accepted interpretation within the group often results from this tendency.”
The dogmas of fundamentalist social justice include a farrago of notions: catastrophic anthropomorphic global warming is ruining a world whose ideal average temperature is that of the Little Ace Age; an oppressive white male patriarchy appropriate the achievements of oppressed peoples as their own; the existance of an ideal pre-industrial environmental state; nationalism is bad; Islam is good and other religions not so much; sex is a social construct; capitalism is bad; Europrean colonialism ruined idyllic societies in the colonized areas of the world; attempts or even thinking that accepting large numbers of indigent immigrants might not be a net benefit to an existing community are wholly evil; and that the manipulable masses must be educated and nudged into proper thinking.
Just as with the religious zealot, to the fundamentalist, any attempt at nuance in any of these discussions is blasphemy and penalties such losing a job or deplatforming is entirely appropriate.
It might be hairsplitting, but getting away from the notion of religion in which the notion of a god or no-god is paramount, to just fundamentalism in which the god question is irrelevant, might make for a clearer comparison.
If Social Justice were predominantly reasonable, then the IDW would not exist.
I disagree. A lot of the IDW seems to be people who are not actually persecuted but enjoy portraying themselves as persecuted outsiders anyway. It sells books.
I read the Uri Harris piece and I think it is generally right. A lot of what social justice people talk about regarding identity, privilege and structural oppression isn’t baseless, and it deserves a better response than simply getting offended at the idea that white people might have certain social advantages or accusations that anyone who thinks so is an anti-white bigot.
Of his list of what counts as the “upgrade” I agree with #2, and #4, disagree with #1, and partially agree with #3. #4 should be obvious – of course all literature is written from the perspective of the author and thus is not identity-neutral. #2 takes a little bit more nuanced understanding of human relations, but yes, there are all sorts of subtle ways that people race, class, gender (identity), influences their chances of success. Just being an “outsider” obviously means that you have fewer of those informal social connections that contribute to success, aside from other issues like class mannerism and gender norms.
I really disagree with the deplatforming thing, and in general the idea that allowing speakers to have a platform gives them credibility. That said, there are still a few people I wouldn’t give a platform to (like a holocaust denier).
#3 depends on what your understanding of “math is a social construct” means. Obviously, the base 10 numeral system is a social construct. So are the symbols we use for the language of math. For instance, in a base 2 system 1+1 = 10. Or in a system where + actually means multiply, then 2 + 3 = 6. If that’s all they mean that shouldn’t even be controversial. If what they are saying is “there’s no underlying logic to the structure of reality” , then that sounds insane. But is that what they are saying?
It’s hard to get to the bottom of these things, because there’s so much reliance on internal tribal mythology about the evils that the other side is supposedly up to. How much of what you think you know about the “Social Justice” movement is informed by the writing of leading social justice intellectuals, and how much is informed by isolated scare-quotes that are circulated in right-leaning circles?