Mar
21
The Truth According to Social Justice
Here is another fascinating citation from Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (see last week’s post). The symptoms and situations will sound familiar, and the authors provide helpful explanations of the SJ reasoning behind it all. (I hesitate to use the term “reasoning”, because part of the problem is the postmodernist skepticism about facts and logic, preferring to glean knowledge from feelings and “lived experience” instead.)
“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. The blurring of boundaries and cultural relativism typical of the applied postmodernist Theories are developed further, in an attempt to erase the boundary between rigorously produced knowledge and lived experience (of oppression). Group identity is treated as so integral to the functioning of society that those invested in Social Justice have elevated divisive group-identity politics to a fever pitch. Belief in the overwhelming power of language, which must be scrutinized and cleansed, is simply taken for granted.
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. Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility) calls anything except deferential agreement ‘white fragility’; Alison Bailey (“Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes”) characterizes disagreement as ‘willful ignorance’ and a power play to preserve one’s privilege; Kristie Dotson (“Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression”) characterizes dissent as ‘pernicious’; Barbara Applebaum (Being White, Being Good) dismisses any criticism of Social Justice Theoretical methods as ‘color-talk’ and ‘white ignore-ance’.
Social Justice scholarship represents the third phase in the evolution of postmodernism. In this new incarnation, postmodernism is no longer characterized by radical skepticism, epistemic despair, nihilism, and a playful, though pessimistic, tendency to pick apart and deconstruct everything we think we know. It 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 feeling, intuition, and subjective experience: what should we do when people’s subjective experiences conflict? The overarching liberal principle of conflict resolution — to put forth one’s best arguments and hash the issue out, deferring to the best available evidence whenever possible — is completely eliminated by this approach. Indeed, it’s billed as a conspiracy used to keep marginalized people down. If different members of the same marginalized group — or members of different marginalized groups — give incompatible interpretations of their ‘lived experience,’ how can this contradiction be reconciled? The common-sense answer — that different people have different experiences and different interpretations, and that there is no logical contradiction in that — cannot suffice here, because Social Justice epistemology under the reification of postmodernism claims that these ‘lived experiences’ reveal objective truths about society, not merely some people’s beliefs about their experiences.
The radically relativist answer — that two or more contradictory statements can be simultaneously true — is sometimes attempted, but it does not, after all, make much sense. Instead, what 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. In this way the logical contradiction between radical relativism and dogmatic absolutism is resolved, but at the price of rendering the Social Justice Theory completely unfalsifiable and indefeasible: no matter what evidence about reality (physical, biological, and social) or philosophical argument may be presented, Theory always can and always does explain it away. In this sense, we are not so far, in fact, from the apocalyptic cults who predicted that the world would end on a specific day, but reaffirmed their beliefs with added fervor when that day passed uneventfully. (The spaceship coming to destroy the earth really did come, but the extraterrestrials changed their minds when they saw the cult members’ devotion.)
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.”
It is astonishing the “logical” gymnastics these people go to — indeed, they must — to maintain their incoherent dogma as the “True” metanarrative. This junk has flowed out of Leftist academia and is becoming increasingly mainstream. Truly a scary thing, and we cannot assume it will just go away on its own.
