SOCIAL JUSTICE EVOLUTION

This ten-part essay is one of the best online resources for understanding the Social Justice Ideology (SJI) and its increasing radicalization of people towards the Manichean (us-against-them) mindset. In Chapter 9, the writer defines “regressive” in the following way:

EXCERPT: “[Regression happens] when a member of any other closed social system or maybe even an extremist believer in political ideology, seeks to regress to a child-like state wherein an omnipotent parental figure is in complete control. Maintenance of this illusion requires epistemic closure: insulation of the belief system and its adherents from external influences that threaten to undermine it. Thus, outsiders and dissidents are demonized and ideological conformity and groupthink are made paramount.”

This essay and the Alternative Left website are highly recommended for people who wish to pursue knowledge about the theoretical underpinnings and overall goals of the SJI movement and to acquire the necessary tools for “the revival of the democratic humanist tradition”. Another essay that echoes the insights of this piece is called “With Allies Like These: Reflections on Privilege Reductionism”.

The Regressive Left Essays from Alternative Left

This piece explores the life of a social justice activist and how she was drawn into the extremely bleak world of punishment, hostility, paranoia, and political cultism. Over time, she allowed herself to see what was really going on and found her way out and back to a more sane relationship with reality. In some ways, this piece was a kind of watershed piece written at the beginning of the explosion of Social Justice Ideology (SJI). For a more recent piece written along the same lines and from a similar perspective, please read “Sad Radicals”, which came out in December of 2018. For an in-depth study of the labyrinthine doctrines and intentionally subversive practices of radical “woke” ideology, we highly recommend “#AltWoke Manifesto”.

This essay from Quillette describes the formal and ritualized way in which social justice as an ideology has become institutionalized in the media, educational institutions, and even corporations that have embraced a highly codified orthodoxy that threatens conformity through mechanisms of shame, public call-outs, and humiliation, enforced thought-conformity, and widespread censorship.

This Areo Magazine essay by James Lindsay provides the perfect companion piece to many other essays showcased on this site. In it, he explores the almost-religious nature of the institutionalized movement of Social Justice Ideology (SJI), along with its rituals for salvation (soteriology), epistemic claims about all of social reality, and its pursuit of institutional power. Although an increasing number of writers and thinkers have begun to grapple with the real-world impact of postmodernist philosophy and with the postmodernist foundations of SJI, few have tackled the issues involved in “applied postmodernism” in the way that Lindsay has. Of all the pieces included in this collection of proposed canonical works, this one builds the strongest case for a Social Justice Evolution.

As this particular essay attempts to analyze SJI comprehensively, the following seven articles – also from Areo Magazine – can serve as extensions and further elaboration on several of the themes touched on in James Lindsay’s piece.

Teaching to Transgress: Rage and Entitlement at Evergreen College

This essay offers a breakdown description of the specific beliefs and practices that led to the racially charged implosion of Evergreen State College in the Spring of 2017. It was written as an entry point to the disturbing and documentary series on these events by Mike Nayna.

My Apostasy from the Church of Critical Theory

This essay provides insight into the main ideological assumptions about human beings and all of reality that are taught in today’s higher ed institutions. In a highly dogmatic way, the author explains critical theory, critical race theory (a branch of it) and other deconstructionist theories that are inculcated into students as the only way to analyze the world and its systems.

What Thomas Sowell Taught Me About Being a Dissident Feminist

This essay explores the ways in which the more dogmatic variety of social justice activism punishes and demonizes those whose ideas and discoveries do not conform to the ideologically pure version of SJI.

The Progressive Case Against White Privilege

This essay begins with the following statements: “The arguments against the existence of white privilege are stereotypically represented as originating primarily from right-wingers and grounded in conservative notions about American meritocracy. But there is a stronger argument against the concept, which comes from the very philosophical tradition that its supporters claim as their intellectual heritage… White privilege is a flawed paradigm, which ascribes racism to a process which does not contain it. But, more importantly, it’s an ultimately self-defeating notion, which negates some of the most fundamental principles of equality and human rights.” This opening statement echoes the insights discovered in a recent study published in Greater Good Magazine, which found that whites who have embraced the concept of white privilege developed a marked drop in empathy for poor Whites while experiencing no change in how they felt towards the plight of People of Color.

The Epistemological Problem of White Fragility Theory

This essay along with a follow-up Areo essay on the proselytization aspect of White Fragility Theory in practice examines the dogmatic assumptions behind “fragility theory” and how it distorts conversations about bigotry and undermines relationships between demographic groups. A major insight is that this theory pre-supposes the secret inner thoughts and feelings of individuals who belong to out-of-favor groups, which sets up a dynamic in which those who belong to “marginalized” groups can claim moral superiority based on the presuppositions.

Racism Does Not Equal Prejudice Plus Power

This essay describes the history of this designed equation, which was originally set up in the 1970’s as a political tactic to reverse perceived power differentials between different demographic groups (originally the white population). The idea was that by making bigoted “isms” only possible for people who are said to be in power, those who are perceived to be out of power are then free to be as hostile and power-seeking as they wanted, as long as they are “punching up” against “the oppressor”. For an academic-style video treatment of this argument, click here.

The Evolution of Black Heterodox Thought

This essay by Samuel Kronen was written about the changing conversation in the Black community. In it, he explores the emerging influence of several Black intellectuals and moral philosophers, including Glenn Loury, Professor of the social sciences and economics at Brown University and host of The Glenn Show @ bloggingheads.tv., John McWhorter, linguistics professor at Columbia University, Coleman Hughes, author at Quillette Magazine, Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of “Losing My Cool”, and others.

This piece teaches us how this movement has grown from being centered on women’s rights to championing the rights of all marginalized groups in a world that is seen as a vast network of interlocking systems of oppression. It is a great primer for people who both support these movements and question some of their more problematic aspects.

This essay from a journal on religion and public life describes how the belief system called “intersectionality” forms the basis of an almost church-like doctrine and how the intersectionalist worldview divides the world into enemy camps.

EXCERPT: “In demonizing non-radical political views, white men, and tradition in general, intersectionality ­theorists make precisely the same mistake they so vehemently abhor: They classify people in terms of names and characteristics that they often have not chosen, and then write them off as enemies. The intersectional project of oppositional, activist scholarship demands it, for nothing brings people together like a common enemy. When that enemy must be eradicated in a quasi-­religious movement of destruction, we are in for a long and bitter fight.”

We’ve chosen to highlight this piece because of the religiosity and totalist mindset of the Intersectionality framework, but we also want to recognize the contribution of another essay published in Quillette, which presents a concise and meticulous rebuttal to the intellectual and moral claims of Intersectionality Theory.

This piece, also from Areo Magazine, was written by Helen Pluckrose (the current editor) and James Lindsay. While both Pluckrose and Lindsay gained wider recognition for a 2018 experiment in which they collaborated with and philosopher Peter Boghossian to expose the theoretical over-reach and support for abusive practices in postmodernist/social justice academic journals, they have been laying the groundwork for understanding Social Justice Ideology (SJI) for several years. For a more in-depth examination of the intellectual tradition and impact of applied post-modernism on Western culture, click here.

This is a PDF of Angela Nagle’s recent book “Kill All Normies”, which covers the differences between the punitive and puritanical aspects of modern social justice ideology and the reactionary “culture of transgression” that has given rise to the hyper-polarization of the Trump era. This book has its critics, but it is an informative resource for those who want a brief and reliable introduction to the culture wars.

This essay by Diane Musho Hamilton is best summed up with the final words of the essay itself. In an age of condemnation, the redemptive qualities of healthy, open exchange can show us the way in, out, and forward. Hamilton has developed models for what she calls “Inclusion 2.0” in response to the increasingly abusive atmosphere of communities that have embraced SJI.

EXCERPT: “When there is the freedom to truly exchange perspectives when we can practice listening better and hearing more, and when we can risk with each other, offering up new, sometimes dicey points of view, there is potent potential for learning and for compassion. We become capable of navigating through these perspectives in a way that honors the truth in each of them, but still creates a hierarchy of perspectives that offers the best and the highest for everyone. That’s not an easy thing to do. But it is far more interesting, informative, and helpful than insisting there is only one way to see things, and therefore, only one way to act.”

This essay by Diane Musho Hamilton is best summed up with the final words of the essay itself. In an age of condemnation, the redemptive qualities of healthy, open exchange can show us the way in, out, and forward. Hamilton has developed models for what she calls “Inclusion 2.0” in response to the increasingly abusive atmosphere of communities that have embraced SJI.

EXCERPT: “When there is the freedom to truly exchange perspectives when we can practice listening better and hearing more, and when we can risk with each other, offering up new, sometimes dicey points of view, there is potent potential for learning and for compassion. We become capable of navigating through these perspectives in a way that honors the truth in each of them, but still creates a hierarchy of perspectives that offers the best and the highest for everyone. That’s not an easy thing to do. But it is far more interesting, informative, and helpful than insisting there is only one way to see things, and therefore, only one way to act.”

This piece examines how academic theories and clever language are used as weapons by bad actors who seek to destroy and punish rather than heal and transform. The New York Times published a similar piece called “The Industrial Revolution of Shame” which focuses on the public’s online participation in heresy-hunting and reputation destruction. For a clinical perspective of online mobbing and blacklisting, we also recommend “The Apocalyptic Culture of Cancel Culture”, published in Psychology Today.

This piece examines how academic theories and clever language are used as weapons by bad actors who seek to destroy and punish rather than heal and transform. The New York Times published a similar piece called “The Industrial Revolution of Shame” which focuses on the public’s online participation in heresy-hunting and reputation destruction. For a clinical perspective of online mobbing and blacklisting, we also recommend “The Apocalyptic Culture of Cancel Culture”, published in Psychology Today.

In this essay, Coleman Hughes, a young black philosopher, argues for a more holistic approach to diagnosing the causes of disparities in outcomes between different racial groups. Hughes is currently studying philosophy at Columbia University, and he has been developing a framework for understanding and reconciling the competing visions of anti-racism versus humanism. Some of Coleman’s critique of Ta Nahesi Coates and Critical Race Theory are reminiscent of the views of Dr. Cornel West of Harvard University.

EXCERPT: “I submit that the Racism Treadmill, and the dogmas that motivate it, account for much of the progressophobia of the activist Left on the topic of race. The Treadmill shows itself in the way progressives appropriate the tragedies of history in order to summon rhetorical gravitas in the present. Carceral policy is not just bad, it’s the “New Jim Crow”; posting reaction GIFs on social media that portray black people is “digital blackface”; and, even though three separate analyses [article 1] [article 2] [article 3] have found no racial bias in police shootings, such shootings are said to be “reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching,” as a United Nations report put it. It seems as if every reduction in racist behavior is met with a commensurate expansion in our definition of the concept. Thus, racism has become a conserved quantity akin to mass or energy: transformable but irreducible.”

In this article, the anonymous writer speaks about how his life was destroyed after fellow activists went after him due to a single instance of offensive remarks. Unfortunately, some targets of online campaigns haven’t had the ability to remain anonymous, including journalist Jonathan Kaiman who became radioactive and isolated after an accusation. For advice about how to deal with the individual SJI adherents who use dogmatic language and bullying tactics, click on this essay by John Faithful Hamer, “How To Deal With a Progressive Bully”. Hamer also reflects on how abuse and mobbing by SJI adherents alienates supporters from otherwise good causes in a piece called “I’m Nobody’s Ally”.

This thoughtful essay was written by a moderate conservative writer who recounts her experiences and insights around public shame and humiliation and what it’s like to have your name and negative statements about you permanently accessible on the internet.

Towards the end of this piece, Helen Andrew offers sound moral advice to media editors and social media users:

EXCERPT: “The solution, then, is not to try to make shame storms well targeted, but to make it so they happen as infrequently as possible. Editors should refuse to run stories that have no value except humiliation, and readers should refuse to click on them. It is, after all, the moral equivalent of contributing your rock to a public stoning. We should all develop a robust sense of what is and is not any of our business. Shame can be useful—and even necessary—but it is toxic unless a relationship exists between two people first. A Twitter mob is no more a basis for salutary shaming than an actual mob is for reasoned discussion. That would be true even if the shaming’s relics were not preserved forever by Google, making any kind of rehabilitation impossible”.

As two the prominent SJI frameworks of Intersectionality Theory and Critical Race Theory have become increasingly influential in Western religions, including their formal adoption by the American Southern Baptist Convention and by various schools of Buddhism in the West, this essay offers additional insights that can balance perspectives and practices related to group identity, oppression narratives, personal responsibility, and open inquiry.

The essay also explores the theme of what the ancients called “idiot compassion”, which wisdom traditions have rejected as sentimental and lacking in insight into the unadorned and sometimes harsh realities of life and human nature. Victimhood culture, the demand for purity and perfect “goodness” from ourselves and others, and the constant striving to impose control on society to eradicate the inevitable pain, discomfort, suffering, loss, and ambiguities of living are increasingly valued by the Social Justice Ideology (SJI) that has been embraced by the modern left.

The writer of this essay explores why the Buddha and the ancient teachers from other non-dual wisdom traditions - would have questioned this.

This essay explores the current atmosphere in which people from disfavored identity groups can have their personal reputations, livelihoods, and future prospects destroyed, not only for making mistakes but simply for being misperceived or intentionally characterized as having engaged in wrong doing. Another related piece can be found in this Atlantic Magazine article, in which the journalist publicly apologizes for getting the Covington Catholic MAGA hat incident wrong and encouraging public humiliation and personal destruction of these high school kids. Click here for the full video of the incident released by the attorneys representing these students in their lawsuit against the Washington Post. Another video which goes into more detail about how the media and activists distorted the truth of this event can be found here. And, to get a sense of the personality of to Nick Sandmann, the 16-year old boy at the center of the controversy, we recommend this interview from the TODAY SHOW.

EXCERPT: Weaving comprehensive narratives about society from isolated cases (even cases in which the facts militate against those narratives) and engaging in moral preening targeted at entire identity groups is always dangerous. But in our current climate, it is deemed acceptable even so, so long as the objects of hatred hail from disfavored backgrounds… The unfortunate fate that the boys encountered and the Orwellian dishonesty and public Two Minutes Hate that followed hew to a broader and increasingly familiar trend of exacting revenge on historically privileged groups for the secularized original sin imputed to their unalterable characteristics, without regard for truth, consequences, or even simple human decency.

This infamous essay from the Washington Post was written by Suzanna Walters, the Gender Studies Department Chair at Northeastern University. Rather than including the original accompanying photo of an infamous man accused of being a serial perpetrator, we’ve chosen this photo from an essay on misandry by Dissent Mama, which explores in simple terms the bigotry and ideologically-driven stereotypes and rhetoric that modern social justice theories use to dehumanize and disempower people from the out-of-favor demographic groups these theories deem worthy of punishment. Cultural critic Jonathan Pageau explores a related theme in this YouTube video, where we can see the intentional reversal of perceived power hierarchies in contemporary films that portray males as weak, as incompetent buffoons, or as subjects bending the knee to female warrior and heroes.

Podcaster, writer and cultural critic Keri Smith has written this essay about the the cult-like beliefs and practices of contemporary social justice activism. The essay is written in the language and style of today’s youth culture and as a former insider of what she alternately calls “the Alt-Left” and “SJW”-ism, Smith is able to translate the dark side of this culture in a way that is accessible to all. The term “SJW” is an abbreviation of the term “Social Justice Warrior”, which was coined in the early 2000’s and popularized in a 2014 book called “How to Make a Social Justice Warrior” by science fiction writer, and self-described Marxist and universalist, William Shetterly. To learn more about Smith’s experiences inside the world of social justice activism, read her well-known breakout essay, “On Leaving the SJW Cult and Finding Myself”.

EXCERPT: “I am of the opinion that a lot of well-meaning people have become converts to the Alt-Left ideology without even realizing it. Like the parable of the slow boiling frog, if you had told me at the beginning that one day I’d be expected to perform mental gymnastics in order to defend censorship and violence in response to speech, I would have leapt from the pot. Instead, I was conditioned to accept as gospel each new tenet of SJWism over a period of twenty years. I believed in the essential goodness of the ideology, and in my own essential goodness in preaching it. When facts about the direction it was taking me made themselves known to me, I rejected them because they did not fit the frame. As the ideology became more noticeably toxic, hypocritical, and authoritarian, so too did the tactics of the true believers. Whether in academia, in the media, at Google, or online — the message is clear: dare to step out of line or express an independent thought, and a mob of zealous SJW zombies will come for you. The fear of losing one’s job, status, friends or personal safety is a strong motivator in forcing reasonable people to remain silent.”

This essay by dissenting academic Camile Paglia would seem to be a response to the above misandrist opinion column by Suzanne Walters, but it was written, most presciently, several years before. Mark J. Perry has written another short and interesting essay that compares these two strikingly different visions for the way we need to consider and treat men and boys. For a more in-depth look at the particular burdens placed on men, here is a talk given by Karen Straughan at the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE).

This essay by dissenting academic Camile Paglia would seem to be a response to the above misandrist opinion column by Suzanne Walters, but it was written, most presciently, several years before. Mark J. Perry has written another short and interesting essay that compares these two strikingly different visions for the way we need to consider and treat men and boys. For a more in-depth look at the particular burdens placed on men, here is a talk given by Karen Straughan at the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE).

This short piece reflects on the viral fallout of a Washington Post article in which the author reflects on her belief that her teenage sons - like almost all men - will never come to accept the non-redemptive reality of being a male in what she views as a rape culture. What’s most notable about this piece is the ease with which the writer is willing to reveal her lack of faith in the goodness of her sons and her lack of appreciation of how it might feel for her sons to have identities publicly known. A related article was published in the UK Telegraph in 2015 and places the shame of being suspected of being potential perpetrators at the center of the educational lives of boys and young men.

In contrast to the above article, Jordan Hall’s Situational Assessment series offers a multi-perspectival, sober, disciplined and hopeful assessment of the critical juncture that Western Civilization finds itself in. Over a series of essays, Hall discusses what his colleague Jeffrey Quackenbush has called the crisis in sense-making and the emergence of decentralized, collective intelligence as the way forward through the “new culture war”, the Trump Insurgency, and the rise of alternative media. The Assessment series also challenges individuals to participate consciously in the process of change that is occurring from the perspective of liminality rather than ideology.

EXCERPT: “From my perspective, then, the resolution of Culture War 2.0, and the broader War for Collective Intelligence, settles into a simple choice. We either endeavor to make sense and choices on the basis of our existing cultural toolkit and, ultimately, battle into self-extinguishing chaos as lived reality accelerates beyond the bounds of those tools. Or we listen to our deepest humanness and allow ourselves to become sensitive to creative liminality. From here (and, I propose, only from here) we are capable of a coherent collective intelligence that is fully adequate to the novelty and magnitude of our present reality… We already have what we need. We only need to step away from that which doesn’t serve the future and re-member that which does.”

This article explores the details of gas lighting behaviors and warns the reader not to overuse the term to describe behaviors that are not in fact gas lighting.

Victims of genuinely sociopathic behaviors and relentless bullying campaigns often develop hypervigilance later in life where they see bullying, gaslighting, abuse and evil everywhere. This hypervigilant style also occurs in those whose ideology trains them to seek out heresy and wrongness everywhere.

It’s a tricky thing. We don’t want to be caught off guard by those who are truly sociopathy and wish to play with us for personal pleasure. Yet, we also want to make sure we’re not throwing around words like “bullying”, “gaslighting”, “hate”, and “abuse” when we are having disagreements with people. These words not only cast unfair aspersions upon innocent people, they also lose their value when we do this because people begin to roll their eyes when the real thing finally comes along.

This piece demonstrates how ideologically-based hatreds and stereotyping against “those people” from out-of-favor demographic groups has led to the widespread belief and practice of refusing to engage with them. This has often resulted in severely distorted perceptions, rigid thinking, and the further dehumanization of perceived enemies. For an example of the insightfulness of both women and men when invited to respond to ideas, this is a collection of responses to a New York Times opinion piece about “raising boys not to be misogynists”.

This long-form essay gets to the heart of the matter in its respectful, sharp, and incisive critique of the symbolic paranoia and hatred that has begun to surface in modern iterations of Social Justice Ideology (SJI).

EXCERPT: The psychological tendency which unifies all these equity stances within the modern left is symbolic paranoia.

Symbolic paranoia is when you cease to see the reality of an empirical situation because you’ve projected a symbolic narrative onto it. The symbolic narrative makes you want to fight against a grave injustice, which now suddenly seems both pervasive, and something the rest of society displays a callous indifference towards. But this appearance of injustice is actually an illusion, an illusion borne out of an inability to perceive the features of reality that clash with the symbolic narrative.

When one acts on behalf of a symbolic narrative, the clash with reality makes the act counter-productive and destructive. In the name of helping the powerless and the vulnerable, one winds up hurting everyone, because ‘help’ is impossible outside the constraints of reality. What’s particularly fascinating about symbolic paranoia is it’s almost always coupled with hypocrisy. The person trying to enact justice on behalf of a symbolic narrative is normally doing a greater injustice than the purported injustice he or she is trying to fight. This is partly because when one is in the grip of symbolic paranoia, one confuses solving problems with prohibiting symbols one associates with the problems one would like to solve. When one is in the grip of symbolic paranoia, one typically tries to solve problem X, primarily by prohibiting symbols associated with X…

Symbolic narratives are, in effect, ways of explaining the world that block out empirical (and indeed, psychological) information. They block out the very information relevant to how one should explain the world, if one is to react to the moral demands of the world, rather than simply make childish demands upon our world. When we are mature adults, the way we see the world is fluid, capable of constantly shifting and adjusting, as new and incoming information pours in.

In contrast to this, the 21st century left has rigidly confined itself to a symbolic narrative that explains (and decides) all social conflict and change, prior to having investigated the particulars of situations. This prejudgement of situations and people is hence, why the modern mainstream left is awash in so much bigotry and authoritarianism. Judging people based on assumptions that cannot be altered with new information is the genesis of bigotry. And when one experiences discomfort because of incoming information one would rather block out, the more comforting solution is to ban its expression…

To fix it, we need a more thorough appreciation of our liberal democratic tradition, a tradition that allows most of us a level of freedom, prosperity, lawfulness, and health that would be unthinkable for most humans that have ever lived on planet earth. Without any gratitude, our tradition will atrophy and wither away, because of activists who are less like Martin Luther King than Veruca Salt.

THE END

In a world of increasingly hostile and cruel activism, this essay by a seasoned advocate is a precious pearl. Starhawk has been an activist and a feminist since the 1960’s and has organized protests, social action, and liberation movements for many years. While this piece of writing may occasionally turn to the rhetoric of the oppressors versus the oppressed, Starhawk’s insightful message contains ten workable strategies for building a welcoming movement. Below is the tenth strategy:

EXCERPT:

10. Be kind.

Not necessarily to the oppressors, but at least to your own supporters, friends, co-conspirators and allies. That doesn’t mean to stifle constructive critique, but don’t turn organizing into an episode of Mean Girls. Support people when they are down. Share burdens. Be there for your comrades in jail, in illness or disease or injury or other troubles.

Understand that kindness, compassion and caring are the cornerstones of the world we want to create, and they take practice. So begin with one another.

This is a terrifying and challenging time, but it is also a great time of opportunity. If we commit ourselves to valuing the inherent worth in every human being, to using inclusive language and to educating everyone, we can build a broad-based, welcoming movement that will be an enormous force for positive change.