you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

[Freddie deBoer] Some Principles & Observations About Social Justice Politics

  1. Social justice politics, like most political schools, is right about some things and wrong about others. The problem is that social justice politics also militate against criticizing people who express them thanks to ideas like standpoint theory; embedded in this school of politics is the notion that no one outside the movement (and few people inside) have standing to say that the movement is unhealthy. In a very basic sense this means that social justice politics lack the typical correction systems of other ideologies. When criticism becomes forbidden it is impossible to recognize and address serious internal problems. This meta-problem permeates everything that follows.
  2. This prohibition against criticism is enforced with the same instrument that the members of this community use to enforce everything: absolute social destruction. There is no probation in the eyes of the social justice world. The only penalty is the death penalty, the attempt to commit permanent character assassination. I suppose that some will call this claim inflammatory, but it seems to me to be far easier to find examples of people being forever shunned in the social justice world than to find examples of people who were gently educated and allowed to perform penance. This brutality is self-replicating: the executioners know that they could become the condemned with the slightest slipup. The most reliable way to prevent that is to be the most aggressive prosecutor you can. So the cycle actively rewards a never-ending escalation of vindictive punishment. This makes the social justice world, it’s fair to say, a somewhat unpleasant space.
  3. The desire to find fault in everyone and everything damages your basic perception of the world and make it harder to express your moral purpose. There are times when people are targeted for social exclusion because of perceived violation of social justice norms where many people react not with objection but with confusion; the alleged violation is premised on academic theories so complex and inscrutable that it’s hard for ordinary people to sort them out. And it leaves practitioners of these politics often expending time and energy making critiques that simply aren’t a reflection of what they’re critiquing. I wrote a post recently that argues that historical evidence shows that censorship efforts can’t stop right-wing extremism. This was very, very explicitly an argument that those efforts don’t work, not that they are wrong on principle, which is a different conversation. At the beginning of the piece I said that liberals seem incapable of understanding the is-ought distinction, that there is a difference between saying “this is good” and “this is true.” The reaction to the post was mostly positive, but there were plenty of critics who… seemed incapable of understanding the is-ought distinction, summarizing it as “deBoer says it’s bad to censor Nazis.” But I had very directly and unambiguously not said that. I have to imagine these educated adults are capable of better reading than that. The problem is that their incentive within the social justice world is to condemn in the harshest and most simplistic way possible. So “censorship cannot prevent right-wing extremism” becomes “deBoer loves Nazis.” Eventually this kind of thing undermines your credibility in the broader public, but then again see the next item.
  4. Social justice politics has an inside-outside problem. When you refer to “Black bodies” to describe Black people, and wield that phrase as though it has talismanic power, it becomes a kind of insider jargon that is confusing to those outside of your discourse space, and this confusion is not incidental but by design. The advantage of insiderism is that human beings have an inherent desire to be insiders and the appeal of becoming one can attract converts. The disadvantage is that for insider status to mean anything the outsiders must vastly outnumber the insiders, which provides direct incentives to limit the numbers within your movement, an existential contradiction with the basic project of any politics.
  5. An obvious conclusion one must draw from social justice politics is that most people are inherently bigoted, perhaps irredeemably so. It’s hard to see how someone could not derive that from the basic ideology. It is now perfectly common for people within that world to say that all white people are racist, in the interpersonal sense - that is, that all white people harbor animus and fear towards people of color. And those who do not go that far still see all white people as parts of a structurally racist system which they personally benefit from and uphold via their passive behavior at the very least. Similarly all cisgender people are assumed to perpetuate transphobia, again at least through participation in normal transphobic society and usually through active prejudice, patriarchy conditions the thoughts and behavior of all men and many unenlightened women, etc. Simply taking the basic texts and values of this tradition at face value leads you inevitably to the conclusion that almost everyone you encounter in contemporary society is a bad person.

(Observations 6-10 follow)