SJW Series (2 of 3):How the SJW Thought Virus Took Over the World
To re-recap – humanity lived more or less in a superstitious, religious darkness for its entire history until, some Europeans starting in the 16th century, began systematically practicing a thing called the scientific method and then using that thing, they created other things like The Enlightenment, which in turn brought about still other things like Modernism and the Modern World – which gave us long lives, cars and text messaging.
All of these things, turned the Europeans into super empowered space aliens relative to the rest of humanity and the Europeans did what space aliens typically do – they conquered planet earth, peopling three continents (North and South America and Oceania) and subjugating, the other two, Africa and Asia. And thus it was for a few hundred years, their hegemony over the world continued unabated.
But then a strange thing happened in the mid 20th century, they decided to make two successive suicide attempts, World War I and World War II.
The brutal suffering brought about by these self-inflected wounds, confused everyone, most of all themselves. How could the modernism that had led to such dazzling advances in living standards and science and power also lead to industrial scale suffering never before fathomed?
Now, while this was happening, a different thought virus – Marxism – had successfully spread itself first in university and then in its applied form Communism among various national governments by the mid 20th century.
Before continuing, let me explain that a thought virus can be either descriptive or prescriptive –
- Marxism is descriptive – this is the way the world is (material wealth is unequally spread because of capitalism and that inequality will in the end create the conditions for a revolution).
- Communism is prescriptive – this is the way the world ought to be (we should radically distribute wealth and force co-operative ownership).
The typical evolution is that a thought virus starts out descriptive as Marxism did – it was a fun idea toyed around with in academic circles and stayed that way for decades – before it eventually catches the minds of more politically minded thinkers who make it proscriptive – turning it into the Leninist/Communist ideologies that were imposed on Russia during the aftermath of World War I.
Now many in the academic and journalist world cheered on that turn from descriptive to prescriptive – believing that it would cure the world of the injustices of capitalism. But over time, those folks found themselves disenchanted with the outcome of that change. Instead of seeing a communal paradise, they got Soviet gulags and cheerless Mao suits and total poverty for everyone. By the 1960s Marxism had fallen out of fashion, the left needed a new theory to expound.
The 1960s Sorbonne was fertile ground for such a new theory, which was born with emergence of a few key French Social Theorists – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
(Remember that quote by Keynes about how we are all zombies spewing forth thought viruses created by long dead philosophers and economists – well these three guys are the scientists who helped create the virus that infected everyone else yet it is unlikely that you or the social justice warriors out there cancelling comedians have any idea who these three men are.)
Initially like Marxism before it – these men came up with descriptive theories.
What troubled these men was how modernism and the certainty of science had created obscenities like the trenches of World War I or the gas chambers of World War II. They developed a cynical view of the whole arc of Western history and about the various hierarchies and forms of power that existed within it.
They came to disavow the key modernist principle which is that there is an objective universal that although subjectively experienced by an individual exists outside of that individual and is accessible to that individual through science. They replaced that principle with the idea that there were multiple equally valid truths constructed by people with differing identities and positions in society.
From there, they derived four key principles which to this day still underline post-modern thought and the social justice activism that it has in turn birthed.
There is no objective truth or categories.
Language controls society through hierarchical discourses.
No one set of cultural norms is better than any other and it is impossible to critique another culture since it presupposes that one’s own viewpoints and perspective is superior.
There is no such thing as an autonomous individual nor is there such thing as humanity – instead there are simply smaller local groups who produce their own knowledge and discourses e.g. classes, races, sexes etc.
Now the ideas of post-modernism were debated and expounded upon for years in academia in relative obscurity but these French theorists and their descendants were basically decadent Ivory tower inhabitants who were fine just bemoaning the state of the world and didn’t seek on any level to change it.
But that changed. The virus did eventually make the jump from the Ivory tower species to the rest of humanity and it happened as a result of a new prescriptive form of the theory – which we call “Social Justice Theory.”
The new thinkers did not just want to play with ideas, they wanted to re-order society. If “social injustice” occurred because certain discourses and narratives were reigning supreme, then “social justice” could occur when those discourses were delegitimized and replaced with better ones. This turned postmodernism from an academic pursuit to a moral, crusading one.
Leading the charge from theory to practice were not white males but rather black females specifically Kim Crenshaw and Gloria Watkins who used the tools of post-modernism to try to address what they viewed to be the various injustices derived from identity.
They viewed post-modernism as somewhat limiting in that it did not make special considerations for various identity matrixes, particularly those belonging to marginalized groups. They furthered this concept called intersectionality, which basically looked at the different overlapping layers of victimization across categories – you’re not just black but also female and lesbian etc.
These burgeoning social justice causes centered on marginalized identities weaponized the four principles of post-modernism.
Since objective truth didn’t exist, they would elevate lived experiences or perspectives as being higher and more evidentiary than empirical analysis and the scientific method.
For example, when confronted with data that conflicts with a belief or view, their response is not to argue back with data an enlightenment thinker would but to resort to an experiential narrative discussion. You might have x, y, z logic and data but my anecdotal experience as a member of this group trumpets all that.
If all knowledge is simply just a construct of power then knowledge can be changed and power structures can be changed by how we talk about things. This meant controlling discourses and how language was used.
We see this on how the norms on what is considered okay or not okay to say has dramatically changed and the rise of call out culture, which is meant to call out offensive language through public shaming. Language is controlled and re-ordered.
If no set of cultural norms is higher – then the West could be understood as an oppressive power structure and the tools of it such as science can be made cultural artifacts.
You can disavow any science or objectivity that clashes with Social Justice Theory by claiming that it is inherently biased. For instance, if you show differences between men and women in spatial reasoning scores and offer that as evidence for why there are more male Google programmers versus females that is nothing more than an example of biased patriarchal thinking resulting from your Western cultural bias.
If you deny the idea of the autonomy of the individual – then you are just the sum of your identity groups.
We see this in how certain individuals are unable to escape whatever their group identity is and make larger commentaries outside of their group. As a white cisgendered male, you can not comment on members outside of your group as your identity inherently limits you.
As you can see, this applied post-modernism enveloped not just racial identity politics, but identities centered on sex, sexual orientation, gender and even body types. It allowed for new ways of viewing reality.
Certain things that we believe to be objectively true – like being obese is unhealthy and bad – could now be radically reframed. Being obese was not bad, it was people who because of their cultural biases thought obesity was bad who had created a social construct around obesity being bad that were the problem and it was their attitude that needed to be changed and made more inclusive and accommodating. Obese people didn’t need to lose weight – non-obese people needed sensitivity training.
From the outset though many of the ideas espoused by these burgeoning theorists, were somewhat contradictory.
The key contradiction was the idea that all identities were social conventions (e.g. entirely made up by society) and yet at the same time these identities were by far the most important thing and explained everything about reality, overriding concepts like individuality and humanity itself.
For instance, social justice theory would say that race has no basis in biology and any attempts to show that race has any biological construct as far as different racial groups having different allele clusters is racist and a product of your cultural biases.
But the theorist would then go on to say that this made up construct is the single most important and determining fact about a person and overrides all other individual aspects of self or considerations – you are not a person who happens to be of African descent but you are a black person and that is the totality of who you are.
This distinction represents a departure from how race was discussed in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. This movement (that gave us much of the racial progress we see today) came out of African-American churches in the South and was centered on Christian and Enlightenment principles of all men being created equal and deserving of the same consideration. To define someone first by their race (as segregation did), was to take away from that principle.
While some civil rights activists might carry on those universalist elements, much of what informs the current thinking of Black Lives Matters is derived from post-modernist ideas of intersectionality and Critical Race Theory, which developed alongside it.
Critical Race Theory essentially states that racism is so engrained in our cultural fabric that it informs everything – as Robin D’Angelo asks in her book White Fragility – it is not so much was racism present but how was it present.
Using the principles of postmodernism, Critical Race Theory allows for everything to be reinterpreted as reflective of White Supremacy. Even attempts to get rid of racism, are re-interpreted as evidence of racism with the critical race theorists going so far as to call the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as evidence of White Supremacy and racism.
(CRT’s founder Derrick Bell argues that anti-discrimination laws like Brown v. Board were not examples of American’s making advances in their treatment of race but rather a cynical attempt by a white elite to appear more equitable in order to advance America’s public image in the newly liberated countries of the global South. In other words, MLK was just a puppet for white racists.)
The problem with these theories of systemic racism and White Supremacy and all Social Justice theories about reality is that because they are grounded in post-modernist frameworks – they are unfalsifiable.
You cannot disprove racism or white supremacy with empirical arguments as lived experiences and feelings are considered more evidentiary under the new rules.
(You can not even attempt to disprove these theories if you are a white Western male because your very status as such puts you outside the box of being able to offer opinion given you are inherently biased as a result of your identity again according to these new rules.)
The core belief of something like Critical Race Theory is that the conspiracy of white supremacy is so completely all-encompassing that any attempts to deny its existence are reflective of white supremacy itself.
Now no one wants to be called a white supremacist – so what do you do?
You’ve got to go out and find white supremacy to show you are not a white supremacist.
Apparently, it is easy to find. White supremacy is now celebrating fourth of July (Kaepernick tweeted that it was a white supremacist holiday) or using the SATs as a factor in admissions (here we see the editor of Teachers College Press claiming that it has its origins in eugenics) or even showing up on time - see here – or the idea that “mankind is one human family”- see here.
White supremacy can even be found within black culture. In his book How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi claims that Bill Cosby manifests white supremacist thinking when he criticizes young Black males for abandoning their children.
In Stalinist Russia, you got better treatment if you admitted to bourgeois tendencies before someone else accused you of such. Institutions today from newspapers to universities are preemptively announcing to the world that they are irrevocably grounded in white supremacy as a means of pro-actively fighting it. We see this from newspapers like the NYTimes to companies like JPMorgan.
The danger here going forward is that this lurking totalitarian ideology is not content with the status quo and will seek whole sale changes in how people think and act. We already see this in suggestions from the leading light of the movement like Kendi advocating for transitional justice and truth commissions that “rehabilitate people” – see here.
But to really appreciate the dangers of all of this – we have to turn to the last time a totalitarian ideology took over a country in its entirety and kept sway for a period of time. Now we could look at Nazi Germany but that only lasted for a few devastating years. The more informative example is really Russia in the 20th century.