Social (In)justice: Why Many Popular Answers to Important Questions of Race, Gender, and Identity Are Wrong--and How to Know What's Right: A Reader-Friendly Remix of Cynical Theories

INTRODUCTION

Depending on your age and education, you’ve likely never come across a book quite like this before. At first glance, the subject may seem a bit unusual and unfamiliar, but our approach is really not that much different from other books you may have read in school or for pleasure. In many ways this book is like an introductory book on, say, world history, but rather than focusing on key people, events, innovations, and dates, and how they all acted together to affect and define the course of history, we’re focusing on the evolution of a particular set of ideas, and how these ideas are affecting and defining the history we’re living through today. As you will learn, how and whether these new ideas will define our future is largely up to the principles and positions we take now. The proliferation of this particular set of ideas presents a challenge to—and often directly conflicts with—another set of extremely important ideas collectively referred to as liberalism. You may be surprised to learn that this word means something a little different than the way we usually hear it used in political discussions today. Indeed, liberalism is the bedrock on which modern societies in the West have been built and that continues to allow for so much human progress.

The exact story of how and why liberalism came to beat out many other ideas to become the foundational political philosophy in the West is beyond the scope of this book, but in the simplest terms, over the past two hundred years or so, most Western countries gradually came to realize that liberalism is the best political philosophy on which to build a modern civilization. There are many different political systems in Western countries, from the republics of the United States and France to the constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom and Canada, but they’re all underpinned by the same liberal values.

Some of those liberal values are:

•Democracy

•Limited government

•Separation of church and state

•Universal human rights

•Equality for women, racial minorities, and LGBT people

•Freedom of expression

•Respect for the value of differing opinions and honest debate

Today, these values might seem like basic common sense. But they should not be seen as a given, or be taken for granted. They didn’t begin to take hold until the 1700s, during the period known as the Enlightenment, and it’s taken centuries of struggle against superstition, theocracy, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, and fascism to realize them to the extent we have. This extent is considerable but not perfect. The aim for a golden age of science, reason, and individual rights based on beliefs in a shared objective reality and shared universal humanity is the ongoing project of the Enlightenment and liberalism.

In the 1960s, a new idea emerged in academia that would question everything, including the very basis of liberal societies. This idea is known as postmodernism, a philosophical, artistic, and literary movement that is extremely skeptical—so skeptical that it doesn’t believe in objective truth or knowledge. Sounds crazy, but it’s true. Postmodernism believes everything is corrupted by politics and political power, even knowledge itself.

Postmodern ideas have formed a broad literature of its own called Theory—think of Theory like postmodernism’s body of religious texts. Since the 1960s, Theory has spread through governments, corporations, and primary, secondary, and postsecondary education. In more recent years, Theory has spawned a movement of activists who weaponize post-modernism in pursuit of social justice. In fact, you have almost certainly encountered a lot of Theory over the past few years, even if it wasn’t ever directly presented as such.

The term social justice has had a lot of different meanings. In 1971, the liberal progressive philosopher John Rawls developed a philosophical theory on how a socially just society might be organized. He thought a socially just society would be one where anyone would be equally happy to be born into any social milieu or identity group, whether at the top or bottom of the society, because even those at the bottom would be thriving and injustices like discrimination would be exceptionally rare or entirely absent.

The most visible and popular movement taking up the charge of social justice today uses postmodern Theory to pursue social justice. It calls its ideology—a system of opinions and beliefs that aim both to explain and change society—Social Justice, the Social Justice Movement, or, sometimes more specifically, Critical Social Justice. Many people, including its critics, call it being Woke (due to its belief that it is awake to systemic injustice). This is the Theory you are no doubt regularly encountering—at school, at work, online, or simply out and about with friends—and you may even be a bit baffled by it all. For the sake of clarity—and because it also derives from another twentieth-century tradition called Critical Theory—we’ll refer to this particular Theory-based movement as Critical Social Justice, and we’ll refer to the broader and more general idea that everyone deserves equal rights and opportunities as social justice.

Here, it’s important to note that the modifier critical in Critical Social Justice has a specific academic meaning related to critique and thus does not imply objective analysis as in critical thinking. Instead, it refers to a specific and illiberal approach that does not believe in objectivity and loosely tries to explain how society fails to be perfect or even a utopia.

Many people have strong opinions about Wokeness, or Critical Social Justice, perhaps even you. Here’s our position, which will inform much of this book: we oppose Critical Social Justice because we believe in social justice. Put another way, we believe that Critical Social Justice offers the wrong answers to important questions about race, gender, and identity and that it does not offer a path to true social justice. Further, we believe that the Critical Social Justice approach runs counter to many of the core liberal values outlined above; that rights belong to individuals, not groups; and that ideals such as truth, objectivity, and merit should be central to securing those rights—and justice. That is, we advocate for a fairer society that minimizes the impacts of identity-based discrimination and prejudice, but we reject both the push for group-based rights and the methods by which the Critical Social Justice movement seeks to achieve them.

Almost every day, a story comes out about somebody who has been fired, cancelled, or subjected to a public shaming on social media for saying or doing something interpreted as sexist, racist, or homophobic. Sometimes the accusations are warranted, and we can comfort ourselves knowing that a bigot—someone, of course, totally unlike us—is receiving the punishment she deserves. But increasingly, it feels like anyone, even a firm believer in universal liberty and equality, could inadvertently say or do something the Critical Social Justice movement doesn’t like and face devastating consequences.

At best, this has a chilling effect on our culture of free expression, a core principle of liberalism that has produced much knowledge and moral progress over the last two centuries. At worst, it’s a malicious form of bullying, and when institutionalized, a kind of totalitarianism.

In any case, it’s not liberal; it’s illiberal.

These changes stem from a very peculiar view of the world—one that speaks its own language. When Critical Social Justice scholars and activists speak of racism, for example, they aren’t referring to prejudice on the grounds of race. They have their own definition, which can be summarized as: a racialized system that permeates all interactions in society yet is largely invisible except to those who experience it or who have been trained in the proper methods that allow them to see it.

This very specialized usage of the word inevitably confuses the average person. Many of us can sense that something has gone wrong, but it can be difficult to formulate a response, especially when objections are often misunderstood or misrepresented as opposition to genuine social justice.

Aside from their own language, these scholars and activists also seem to have their own culture. They’re obsessed with power, language, knowledge, and the relationships between them. They detect power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact. Their worldview makes everything into a political struggle revolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and many others.

As experienced travelers know, there’s more to communicating in a different culture than learning the language. You also have to learn the idioms, implications, cultural references, and etiquette. Often, we don’t just need a translator but an interpreter, someone who knows both sets of customs, to help us communicate effectively. That’s why we wrote this book. It will guide you through the language and culture of this world, which remains alien to many, chart a history of the evolution of these ideas, and propose a way for those who believe in liberal values to counter them.

Some Critical Social Justice advocates will insist that those with a liberal mind-set are just reactionary right-wingers who don’t believe in the injustice experienced by marginalized people. Others will reject the liberal, empirical (evidence-based), and rational stance on the issues as an outdated delusion that centers white, male, Western, and heterosexual (straight) constructions of knowledge and maintains an unjust status quo. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, they will tell us.

While that statement itself probably isn’t true, it does accurately represent our intentions. We don’t want to dismantle liberal societies and empirical and rational concepts of knowledge. We want to continue the amazing advances for social justice that they have brought. The master’s house is a good one—the problem has been limited access to it. Liberalism increases access to a solid structure that can shelter and empower everyone. Tearing the liberal house down might make equal access quicker and easier to achieve, but equal access to a pile of rubble isn’t a worthy goal.

Wherever you encounter Critical Social Justice ideas, whether in school, at work, at home, online, or among your friends, it’s important to keep an open mind and consider each idea on its own merits, just as we hope you’ll keep an open mind to the ideas we present in this book. Even if you find you strongly disagree with most Critical Social Justice ideas, as we ourselves do, remember that those who believe them aren’t enemies to be debated and defeated. They’re still your classmates, peers, co-workers, friends, and family members, or maybe even your teachers or bosses. You likely have a lot in common. Even so, you may at times feel alienated and misunderstood, but lashing out in anger or frustration is the wrong response. Approaching with understanding is the right response. This includes having a principled position of your own toward social justice on which to stand—ideally one based on traditional liberal values. Doing so can establish a path for having productive and ideologically diverse conversations about these important issues. We hope this book will provide you with some of the knowledge and tools needed for having such conversations—and even for figuring out your own principles and beliefs.

Those with a Critical Social Justice worldview and those with a liberal worldview often see the same problems. After all, Critical Social Justice activists want a fair world—the same thing we want. They just have ideas of how to get there that are different from our own and may not understand why we as liberals argue not only that their ideas won’t work but also that their ideas will ultimately do more harm than good.

If both sides listen to each other in good faith, however, we can find common ground. It’s not always easy, but keeping an open mind and engaging in open dialogue is always the correct path.

1 POSTMODERNISM

Questioning Knowledge and Power

In the 1960s, a radical new way to think about the world and our place in it was introduced in France. Leading figures behind this new way of thinking were Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others. Although most people in the English-speaking world probably haven’t heard of these French Theorists, the change they inspired—postmodernism—revolutionized social philosophy, the study of society and the institutions and human relationships that form it. Over the decades, postmodernism has not only dramatically altered what and how we think, but also how we think about thinking itself. It has led many people to question how we know what we believe we know and even if we can truly know anything at all.

Whoa.

So what is postmodernism, really? The online Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as

a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.

Postmodernism first appeared in the arts around 1940, but by the late 1960s, it was in the humanities and social sciences, including fields like psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, history, and sociology. The early thinkers in these fields drew from their precursors in surrealist art, revolutionary politics, and antirealist philosophy. (Antirealist philosophy says that while the real world might be out there, there’s no meaningful connection between it and our claims of knowledge about it—knowledge is just ideas expressed in words, not reality or even a truly meaningful description of reality.)

Since we’re focusing on the aspects of postmodern thought that have been applied to the real world and become socially and culturally powerful today, this chapter won’t be a complete summary of postmodernism. We’ll highlight some underlying themes of postmodernism that drive today’s Critical Social Justice activism, shape educational theory and practice, and dominate our current conversations about social justice.

The Roots, Principles, and Themes of Postmodernism

Like all intellectual movements, postmodernism emerged in a specific social and political context. To understand the modern context from which it emerged, however, we first need to understand a bit about the past. Among other things, we need to understand the role skepticism, or a questioning attitude, has played in shaping history since the 1500s, when Christianity splintered into different sects during the period known as the Reformation. These new groups all challenged both the old ways and each other. By the end of the sixteenth century, treatises against atheism also began to appear, which suggests that some people in that era had even stopped believing in God.

Up until this time, most scientific knowledge in the West had come from the ancient Greeks. But in the 1600s, medicine and anatomy underwent a revolution, and Europeans quickly learned a lot about the human body. Other revolutionary advances were made in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Collectively, these developments played a crucial role in the rise of Enlightenment thought, which broke away from the then-dominant religious narratives and spread throughout Europe in the 1700s. This Enlightenment thought included the liberal ideas and principles on which modern Western societies came to be based. These developments, in turn, led to the emergence of the scientific method in the 1800s, which was centered on skepticism, questioning conventional wisdom, and the need for increasingly rigorous testing and falsification—the process of attempting to prove things false.

A series of rapid developments in the early 1900s, including increasing political volatility and eventually war across Europe, contributed to changing ideas about class and gender and gave rise to a strain of thought and art that came to be known as modernism. Products of this philosophical, artistic, and cultural movement included a strange mixture of pessimistic skepticism about reality and progress and a focus on subjectivity, with an overly confident belief in the individual and universal truths and the potential of innovation.

By the middle of the twentieth century, a number of profound social and political changes had happened in a very short time. The First and Second World Wars shook Europe’s confidence in the notion of progress and made people wary of the power of technology, since it had been used to commit so many atrocities in the wars themselves, in Nazi Germany, and under Communism, the official state ideology of the Soviet Union based on the revolutionary socialist ideas of German philosopher Karl Marx. Left-wing intellectuals across Europe grew suspicious of liberalism and Western civilization, which had allowed the rise of fascism, a totalitarian and authoritarian ideology, in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. At the same time, the horrific effects of Communist ideology in the Soviet Union during that period could no longer be denied, even by those on the political and cultural left. The same could be said for colonialism, which was no longer seen as morally justifiable or defensible as European colonies, such as British and French colonies in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, successfully fought for and gained independence.

Meanwhile, technology and