SJW Series (1 of 3): How Does a Social Justice Warrior Explain a Thunderstorm?
Why does the sky turn black and start bellowing with loud noises, torrential rain, and streaks of light?
Thunderstorms are terrifying even in the context of modern civilization, but they must have been especially terrifying to our ancestors living in the wilderness.
Explaining the power of the sky and why it acted in certain ways was something every pre-modern society had to do, and they all did so by referencing sky gods.
To give a few examples of what these narratives looked like –
In Kenya, thunder came from Mburu traveling on a huge bull and throwing spears at his enemies.
In Norway, it was Thor expressing his anger.
In Mongolia, it was Tengri punishing the wicked.
While today we regard these stories as easily dismissible folklore, this is not how the pre-modern peoples viewed them – they believed these narratives quite literally.
It was said that the only thing that could stop Genghis Kahn’s warriors was a thunderstorm. When one encroached, the Mongolian horsemen would cower and hide, fearing the judgement of Tengri more than any opposing army.
Now the modern world is very different from this pre-modern world. Our understanding of reality has been revolutionized by science and when we come across something like a thunderstorm, we don’t cower in fear or make up stories about sky gods, we apply the scientific method, which goes something like this –
You observe
You pose a question
You create hypothesis
You test the hypothesis with an experiment
Then you confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis based on the experiments’ results
What underlines all of this is the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth and we mortals can discover it.
Reasoning/empirical data might seem like an obvious way to approach the world but for the vast expanse of human history, we didn’t take this route – we largely took the Mburu/Thor/Tengri route. It wasn’t until the 17th century that Sir Francis Bacon codified the scientific method. From there sprang the Enlightenment and the Modern World.
Now, let’s for a second imagine taking a Norwegian, a Kenyan and a Mongol from the pre-modern past and having them sit by a camp fire and the asking them to explain thunderstorms.
They would all have strong conviction in their belief –
The Pre-modern Norwegian: “Thunderstorms happen because Thor is pissed”
The Pre-modern Mongolian: “No, it is because Tengri is pissed”
The Pre-modern Kenyan: “No it’s Mburu who is riding a bull and is also pissed.”
Imagine you stop this bickering and interject -
Modern You: “Actually, a thunderstorm occurs when warm moist meets cold air and the rubbing of the water vapor in the warm air against the frozen droplets creates electric charges, which then have to find an opposite charge on the ground, releasing a loud noise in the process, which is delayed because light travels faster than the speed of sound.“
All three of the pre-moderns would turn to you and laugh.
Modern you is right, but you actually can’t win the argument because you are arguing against a religious/cultural belief.
What turns these pre-moderns into moderns is agreeing to a data-based framework for arbitration.
It is this very ability to test things and have objective scientific truths that are divorced from emotionally held beliefs or religious practices that has created the modern world and all the progress known to date from cell phones to Bed Bath and Beyond.
So if that is modernism in a nutshell – then what is this thing called postmodernism?
The easiest way to explain it is to go back to the thunderstorm analogy.
Remember –
Pre-Modern: Crazy god explanation for why thunderstorms occur.
Modern: Detached, detailed technical answer derived from empirical data uncovered through the scientific method.
So how does the post-modernist explain it?
The post-modernist will tell you something strange. He will tell you that science is constantly changing and that while there might be an objective reality, there is no way of knowing it. Instead we have various groups of people defined by their identities (gender, orientation, race, religion) who create their own forms of reality and ways of legitimating knowledge. Your explanation derived from Western science is just one of those ways that is subject to its various contextual biases.
In other words, the post-modernist believes that it is impossible to define what is true and false and each social group has the right to believe whatever truth works for them.
So turning back to the thunderstorm question, they would look at the pre-modern Mongolians and Kenyans and Norwegians and say:
If you interjected to continue your attack on these other culture’s beliefs, the post-modernist would get angry and tell you to “stop trying to impose your views on these other people.”
In the post-modern world, it is not the principles of science or modernism that matter but rather something else – something called identity.
“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.” - Cobb (Dicaprio) in Inception
Post-modernism might seem like an abstract ivory tower thought exercise but it is not. It forms the intellectual backbone of the various social justice movements that have arisen today – what we call “wokeness.”
The new woke religion is totalitarian and like other totalitarian religions it is demanding wholesale changes to the way we speak and act and who we venerate. The fervor of someone tearing down a statue of Churchill or cancelling a celebrity for using the incorrect pronoun is no different than the religious fervor that motivated Muhammad’s followers or the Spanish conquistadors.
But the question is where did all of it come from?
We know the origin of Islam and Christianity. But where did this new thought virus / religious movement come from?
As John Maynard Keynes once said that “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and then they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.”
Keynes is right and to understand what is happening today you have to go back several decades to these now dead political philosophers. Postmodernism and its applied form in Social Justice didn’t arise out of nowhere but developed and mutated in the ivory tower before it launched its assault on the world…