'Social Justice" As Religion

B.J. Campbell has an interesting, if incomplete, essay at Medium about the ways in which "social justice" resembles religion. Summarizing a YouTube talk by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsey, and others, he writes:

Defining religion is tough, because there’s no explicit quality that defines them, but they share a broad range of features which bind them conceptually. They are meaning making structures, which help us make sense of things we find chaotic or don’t understand. Religious communities are organized around adoption and promulgation of certain moral principles. They have scripture, which conveys doctrines and ideology. They focus on moral purity, they focus on the in-group, they demonize the out-group, and they demonize and excommunicate blasphemers. They impart a sense of control, if not actual control, over uncontrollable circumstances.

Social Justice has all this stuff.

There are many important additional parallels. Religions have a tendency to identify everything good with God, so when a religious person hears an atheist say they don’t believe in God, the religious person has a tendency to hear that to mean they don’t believe in Good. Social Justice followers react the same way. When someone questions their equity driven approach to “equality,” that’s “hate speech.”

Religious thinkers invent their own epistemologies, in such a manner that their religious teachings become unfalsifiable. The Social Justice approach to this is called “standpoint epistemology,” and finds its roots in cultural postmodernism. If you and I disagree, then that’s because we come from different standpoints, therefore you cannot falsify my claim because you lack my standpoint. This is the Social Justice adaptation of “God put the dinosaur bones there.”

I would argue that a better way to express this is, religious teachings explain the natural world with unfalsifiable first principles, which is what distinguishes them from empiricism. This, in fact, forms the primary reason "social justice", as currently understood, is a kind of religion. If you claim that patriarchy is a myth, that "male privilege" is easily disproved by looking at males in shabby conditions, you directly attack a first principle, and thus have exposed yourself a heretic, as James Damore. Scott Aaronson saw through this some long while back with his brilliant dismissal of "patriarchy".

More, to excuse themselves of acts they accuse others of, social justice advocates play dictionary games. Racism, as Campbell elsewhere writes, redefines the word to exclude academics engaging racist arguments — such as "white privilege". The problem this seeks to elide is that of preferring lazy generalization to taking into consideration specific circumstances, i.e. of having to actually think.

But back to religion, Campbell starts to wrap up:

We could easily take this realization that Social Justice is a religion and use it to bludgeon and troll its proponents, who generally proport themselves be anti-religion, but in my opinion that would be sloppy and unconstructive and generally not very nice.

Given its proponents repeatedly "bludgeon and troll" everyone outside academia, expecting them to kowtow to their benighted mob, "generally not very nice" describes the social justice pitchfork wielders. Theirs is an expansionist, totalitarian ideology, hostile to science. Grievance studies programs therefore rightly need to be chased out of public universities, on the same grounds that we do not have seminaries at Iowa State. If people wish to pursue women's studies, they may do so alongside the Yalies getting divinity degrees.

Raising The Curtain On Peggy McIntosh

I have mentioned elsewhere Peggy McIntosh's seminal rant-disguised-as-an-academic-exercise, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible KnapsackPeggy McIntosh" (PDF). It has received an unusual number of citations (3,895 by Google Scholar's count), i.e. more than one, and with good reason: it is foundational to the enterprise of intersectional politics, i.e. the scaffolding supporting the entire parasitic operation. Yet not enough attention has been paid to the woman herself, an oversight happily rectified today by William Ray at Quillette. McIntosh, it turns out, benefited mightily from wealthy parents and deep, aristocratic connections:

So central has this doctrine [of intersectionalism] become to progressive politics, pedagogy, and activism, that to even question its validity is to invite the inquisitorial wrath of ‘social justice’ radicals. But it is for this very reason that it is important to subject McIntosh’s ideas to scrutiny.

Peggy McIntosh was born Elisabeth Vance Means in 1934. She grew up in Summit, New Jersey where the median income is quadruple the American national average—that is to say that half the incomes there are more than four times the national average, some of them substantially so. McIntosh’s father was Winthrop J. Means, the head of Bell Laboratories electronic switching department during the late 1950s. ...

Elizabeth Vance Means then attended Radcliffe, a renowned finishing school for the daughters of America’s patrician elites, and continued her private education at the University of London (ranked in the top 50 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings), before completing her English Doctorate at Harvard. Her engagement to Dr. Kenneth McIntosh was announced in the New York Times‘s social register on the same page as the wedding of Chicago’s Mayor Daley. McIntosh’s father, Dr. Rustin McIntosh, was Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at Columbia University. His mother was President Emeritus of Barnard College, an institution in the opulent Morningside Heights district of Manhattan, famous since 1889 for providing the daughters of the wealthiest Americans with liberal arts degrees. This was once the stomping ground of American cultural luminaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cecil B. DeMille, and several Supreme Court Justices. Kenneth McIntosh was himself a graduate of the Phillips Exeter Academy, which boasted alumni including Daniel Webster, the sons of Presidents Lincoln and Grant, and a number of Rockefeller scions. He later completed his elite education at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School. By the time of his marriage to Elizabeth, Kenneth McIntosh was a senior resident at the prestigious Brigham Hospital in Boston, founded by millionaire Peter Bent.

In other words, Peggy McIntosh was born into the very cream of America’s aristocratic elite, and has remained ensconced there ever since. Her ‘experiential’ list enumerating the ways in which she benefits from being born with white skin simply confuses racial privilege with the financial advantages she has always been fortunate enough to enjoy.

"One is left to wonder why," Ray continues, "given her stated conviction that she has unfairly benefited from her skin color, there seems to be no record of her involvement in any charity or civil rights work." If you are your movement's Moses, your reputation is already secure.

On Privilege

Because it keeps coming up, and I have wanted to write a brief something on this topic, a meditation on the concept of "privilege". As commonly used in feminist and racial contexts, e.g. Peggy McIntosh's tiresome "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" or John Scalzi's dumb, tendentious, and insulting essay, "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is", "privilege" is an unearned benefit derived from birth status, e.g. the condition of being male, or white. In my experience, "privilege" is really two things, one trivially (in the sense of inarguably) true, and the other demonstrably false:

1. That certain people have it easier in the world than others as a consequence of birth.
2. That all subsequent success such people have are in fact directly derived from those advantages.

 I came across a clickbait-headlined cartoon recently that promised to "forever change the way you look at privilege", but in fact was a pretty standard review of how "privilege" is alleged to work. A couple remarks before diving in:

 

Does there exist, anywhere in this nation, a school district that confesses they are anything but terribly underfunded? I have yet to hear of it. And yet. Pushing on:

Here we go: item 2, FTW! All success can be ascribed to birth status, in some large measure. Q.E.D.

Except where that's wrong. Ultimately, privilege is a motte-and-bailey tactic as described by Nicholas Shackel in his paper, "The Vacuity Of Postmodernist Methodology" (PDF). A motte-and-bailey is a kind of bait-and-switch: the first part is easily defensible (birth can confer unearned advantages), but the second, radical part (all success thereafter is also due to unearned advantages) is not. By shifting definitions, and refusing to look at failures as well as success, we see that "privilege", animated by jealousy, is a toy philosophical theory that has almost no explanatory power.

I encountered (what might well be) a good example of this latter at Medium a number of weeks back in Umar Haque's essay, "The Asshole Factory". The only thing of importance for my purposes here is the first two sentences:

My good friend Mara has not one but two graduate degrees. From fine, storied universities. Surprise, surprise: the only “job” she was able to find was at a retail store.

Let that sink in for a bit: this person has two graduate degrees, and is obliged to work retail? It's entirely reasonable to infer a couple things here:

1. Her parents have considerable money to put her through multiple postgraduate programs.
2. She has never previously had to give much thought to how she was going to make a living.

Yet, despite these advantages, she's ... working retail for a crummy employer who spies on her every second of her work day, comparing her performance against her daily sales quota in real time, etc. In privilege theory, none of this should have happened, and she should have ridden off into the sunset with a big bag of money. Or something. Now, I'll grant you I don't know if Mara is white, or even real, but that story is one that's getting repeated time and again because of the painfully false belief that college is necessary for everyone. Being white doesn't get you out of college debt. "Privilege" doesn't address failure and hardship; as a theory for how society works, it deserves only ridicule.

Update: Just came across David Greenberg's "What In The World Is 'Privilege'?" at The College Conservative, which addresses the matter from its Marxist origins.