Social Justice Movement and Its Postmodern Parentage
* Book: Springtime for Snowflakes: "Social Justice" and Its Postmodern Parentage. By Michael Rectenwald.,New English Review Press, 2018
URL = https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/
"a daring and candid memoir. NYU Professor Michael Rectenwald – the notorious @AntiPCNYUProf – illuminates the obscurity of postmodern theory to track down the ideas and beliefs that spawned the contemporary “social justice” creed and movement."
Excerpt
"Criticism of political correctness was supposed to be the exclusive province of the rightwing. For most observers, it was almost inconceivable that an anti-P.C. critic could come from another political quarter. Unsurprisingly, then, the majority of people who discovered my case, including some reporters, simply assumed that I was a conservative. As one Twitter troll put it: “You’re anti-P.C.? You must be a rightwing nut-job.” But as I explained in numerous interviews and essays, I was not a Trump supporter; I was never a right-winger, or an alt-right-winger; I was never a conservative of any variety. Hell, I wasn’t even a classical John Stuart Mill liberal.
In fact, for several years, I had identified as a left communist. My politics were to the left (and considerably critical of the authoritarianism) of Bolshevism! " (https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/essays)
Social Justice Ideology Does Not Foster Egalitarianism
Michael Rectenwald:
"Social justice ideology does not foster egalitarianism. Rank is maintained, only the bottom becomes the top when the totem pole of identity is inevitably flipped upside-down and stood on its head. Is it any wonder then that social justice warriors compete valiantly for the status of “most subordinated” in the games derogatorily referred to as “the Oppression Olympics?” The race to the bottom is really a race to the top—although the race runs downhill.
Both its epistemology and ontology—its assumptions about how one acquires knowledge, who can know, and the nature of the objects of knowledge—are enforced with authoritarianism.
Claims made on behalf of correct beliefs, correct wording, and proper naming—that is, language itself—trump empirical evidence and nullify scientific findings and methods in advance. Thus, social justice represents an entirely new understanding, quite distinct from previous versions. It also involves entirely different practices and methods for implementing it. The social and linguistic constructivist claims of social justice ideologues amount to a form of philosophical and social idealism that is enforced with a moral absolutism. Once beliefs are unconstrained by the object world and people can believe anything they like with impunity, the possibility for assuming a pretense of infallibility becomes almost irresistible, especially when the requisite power is available to support such a pretense. In fact, given its willy-nilly determination of truth and reality on the basis of beliefs alone, philosophical and social idealism necessarily becomes dogmatic, authoritarian, anti-rational, and effectively religious. Since it sanctions no push-back from the object world and regards it with indifference or disdain, it necessarily encounters push-back from the object world and must double-down. Because it usually contains so much nonsense, the social and philosophical idealism of the social justice creed must be established by force, or the threat of force." (https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/essays/2019/4/10/libertarianisms-versus-postmodernism-and-social-justice-ideology)