Critical Social Justice

Contextual Quote

A life of fear:

"Critical Social Justice (CSJ) worldviews tie all disparities, misunderstandings, and opportunity gaps between groups labeled as oppressors and the oppressed to a single variable, disregarding factors like economics, geography, personality types, and individual skills. Aligning with the most basic tenet of CSJ theory, every word, deed, and behavior is linked to a single underlying foundation that must be named and opposed at all times. Viewing these frameworks as highlighting the escalation from minor slights to serious crimes up to and including violence, rape, and even genocide can be helpful. But viewing all of human reality as structured by White Supremacy, rape culture, and hatred of gay and trans people and other groups, can lead to collective paranoia. Such a perspective about reality can lead to an environment where people are on constant alert, ever-ready to make accusations and to search for and root out all beliefs, words, and behaviors considered to be supportive of or as actively representing the pervasive malevolent force. It is a life of fear."

- Steven Lawrence [1]

Description

Steven J. Lawrence:

"In the fall of 2020, Helen Pluckrose and Dr. James A. Lindsay released a book that addresses the underlying ideas that are fueling the current social and political climate. The book is aptly titled Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. It explores the world view and theoretical foundations of a very specific ideological framework called Critical Social Justice (CSJ). In their book, Pluckrose and Lindsay refer to Critical Social Justice as simply “Social Justice” (note the capitalization) to distinguish CSJ from the general aims of what some call social justice and others call civil rights—movements dedicated to human rights, fairness and a just society in which all people have the potential to thrive free from bigotry, oppression, tyranny and unfair treatment.

In 1848, the term social justice was coined by Sicilian Jesuit scholar Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, who was greatly influenced by the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. Over the years the originally Catholic term was adopted by various secular movements related to human rights, climate change, anti-war efforts, racial and gender equality and economic justice. Since, the middle of the 20th century, and especially during the first decades of the 21st century, the term social justice has come to be defined by the specific set of doctrines of Critical Social Justice (CSJ), which has specific ideas about the world, the nature of humanity, and even the nature of knowledge itself (the study of which is sometimes referred to as epistemology).

At the core of the CSJ ideology is an approach to analyzing and responding to reality that is called “Critical Theory”, which has been broken down into several sub-theories or “studies” such as queer theory, fat studies, critical race theory, intersectionality, and other critical theories. The authors of Cynical Theories group these theories/studies together throughout the book and apply to them the simple label of “Theory”." (https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/one-we-are-part-i)

Discussion

Social Justice vs. Critical Social Justice: An Important Distinction

Steven J. Lawrence:

“There is something wrong about contemporary social justice. And that is the thrust of Cynical Theories and one of the overarching themes of the three-part series of essays I am calling One We Are. It’s important to make useful distinctions and to be clear about what we mean when we use the phrase “social justice”. In philosophy and law, this is the practice of defining our terms, so I will do so now.

A variety of phrases and labels are used to describe the framework and practices analyzed in Cynical Theories. For the purposes of this essay and in alignment with the language used in the book, I will use the term “Critical Social Justice” (CSJ) that has been used by many of CSJ’s own adherents. Sometimes, I may also use the term “Theory” as the authors do, which is shorthand for Critical Theory, the underlying ideology that informs the practices of CSJ.

It will help to briefly mention alternative phrases and labels to help orient the reader.

When describing what we are calling Critical Social Justice, journalist Wesley Yang uses the term Successor Ideology. Yang and others consider this ideology to be the successor to—though not a child of—the civil rights era liberalism that enjoyed wide appeal in the United States and western Europe for the past sixty years.

When journalist Matt Taibbi refers to The New Puritanism, he is naming the same ideology, which he has described as having the same flavor of aggressive purity politics and punishment orientation as the religious Right.

Ayishat Akanbi calls it “”wokeness”.

Andrew Sullivan has referred to it as both “wokeness” and as “The New Orthodoxy”.

Jesse Singal has named it “Left Identitarianism”.

Other names are out there, too, such as neo-Marxist Postmodernism, Political Correctness, and Cultural Marxism, which is a term favored more by conservatives than people of other political persuasions.

And, there is the term, identity politics, which needs a moment of thoughtful attention. I want to note here something positive that I learned about the original meaning of the term identity politics from Dr. Erec Smith, a professor of rhetoric and composition at York College and a scholar of political ideology. In his book, A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment, Smith speaks about the originally positive and empowering term identity politics that was coined by Black Feminists in the “1977 Combahee River Collective Statement”.

In the same way that Dr. Erec Smith has chosen to do in this book and in his general advocacy work, I am choosing not to use the term “identity politics” in a negative sense because I support its original meaning—the necessity and the right for people to organize and to engage in collective advocacy for their demographic group, especially if that group has experienced oppression in its history or continues to experience oppression in the present by unjust systems and policies.

So, I won’t be using the term “identity politics”. When I want to speak critically of the extreme preoccupation with our socio-cultural identities and the emerging culture of closing our hearts and minds to people from “outside” groups based on our extreme identification with that identity (e.g. race, gender identity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc.), I will use other terms.

It’s never been more important to draw clear boundaries and to make clear and unambiguous distinctions when we are discussing human rights and social justice ideas that people have embraced in their efforts to create a just and benevolent world. And, in the current era in which inaccurate and stigmatizing labels can cause economic and reputational ruin; clarity of purpose, meaning, and belief is absolutely essential.”

(https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/one-we-are-part-i)

The Hypothesis of the Permanent Pervasive Presence of a Malevolent Force

The Basic Outlook of Critical Social Justice

Steven Lawrence:

"For those who see the world in this way, the practices of separating, categorizing, stereotyping, labeling, and hyperbolizing towards the building of what they conceive to be a better world makes perfect sense.

The chief reason why these ideas and practices make perfect sense and why it feels perfectly right and natural to split society apart in service of this specific vision of social justice is the belief that there is a pervasive malevolent force that controls all of social reality17. And when a single force of malevolence is presumed to be the underlying causal agent in all scenarios, then it becomes easier to justify any and all behaviors—whether physically or socially violent—towards any individual or group that is perceived to be a part of the malevolent force or as benefitting from the malevolent force.

And as we have seen, the belief in a permanently present force of malevolence is foundational to Critical Social Justice.

Fear of an all powerful enemy is not unique to CSJ theories. Many of the most rigid frameworks or ideologies, both secular and religious, revolve around the presence of an all powerful enemy. For Christians, it is the Devil, and especially during the earlier centuries, heretics. For Muslims who hold to the faith in a doctrinaire way, it is the “infidel”, the non-Muslim who is not a believer in the teachings of Islam. For some who have ultra-nationalist leanings and who hold the belief that mass immigration is the intentional design of a cabal of power-brokers behind the scenes, the enemy is the Jewish population. For various communist movements, the enemy has traditionally been the bourgeoisie, the upper middle class and upper class parasites who have propped up and benefitted from capitalist systems throughout the world, and in some communist movements, the enemy is a country, especially the United States.

Theory-crafting is not unique to the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movement and academia. Q-anon is just one example of theorizing from right part of the political spectrum. This theory, like some of the more extreme aspects of CSJ, further adds fuel not only to the culture wars but to the feelings of fear, suspicion and enemy-ship that seems to be spreading in online environments. For adherents of Critical Social Justice ideology (CSJ), the enemy is an all-pervasive invisible force that controls the way people see the world, the way they speak about things, and what they accept as true about reality. According to CSJ theories, this reality is accepted through a kind of collective conditioning that nobody can see without the expert guidance of the almost priest-like CSJ theory-scholar. It is a reality with power-seeking as its foundation, a reality that has been set up to oppress the marginalized for the benefit of those in power.

Depending on which sector of society is being analyzed by the CSJ adherent (which is called “structural analysis”), this all-pervasive force could be the patriarchy, an almost metaphysical, all-powerful invisible force that reinforces male domination. It could be cisheteronormativity, an all-powerful invisible force that reinforces the traditional gender and sexual norms of heterosexual males and females. And it could even be fatphobia, the belief that the powers that be are intentionally propping up “thin privilege” as a beauty standard to create divisions between people of different body types, thus conquering the population in the service of protecting the power and privilege of the cisheteronormative white male patriarchy.

In the excerpt below from the book, The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice Ideology - at Work, in Schools and Beyond, Helen Pluckrose describes the way Critical Social Justice ideology analyzes reality:

- “The core tenets of Critical Social Justice are easily recognisable and distinguishable from other ethical frameworks. They rest on a belief in largely invisible systems of identity-based power into which everybody has been socialised. This simplistic belief rejects both the complexity of social reality and the individual’s agency to accept or reject bigoted ideas. This makes it different from most other ethical frameworks that oppose prejudice and discrimination. Critical Social Justice theorists and activists apply their ‘critical’ methods to analyse systems, language and interactions in society to ‘uncover’ these power systems and make them visible to the rest of us. In their framework, these identity-based power systems include ‘Whiteness’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘colonialism’, ‘heteronormativity’ and ‘transphobia’. They are believed to infect all aspects of society and even the most benign everyday interactions. The belief that people are unable to avoid being racist, sexist, or transphobic because they have absorbed bigoted discourses from wider society is a tenet of faith that originated in postmodern thought, particularly that of Michel Foucault. Following on from its focus on invisible systems of oppressive power and how language often serves those systems, Critical Social Justice demands enforcement of the right ways of thinking and punishment of the wrong ways of thinking.”

The term Critical Social Justice comes from the combination of the phrase social justice and the word critical as it was used by an umbrella school of thought called Critical Theory. This term was justified by education professors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo in their book “Is Everyone Really Equal?”, and they explain in the book that their use of this term was intentional as a way to separate their approach to social justice from the mainstream view of social justice that most people have.

In their words:

- ‘A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognise that society is stratified (ie, divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social-group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality and ability. Critical Social Justice recognises inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (ie, as structural), and actively seeks to change this.’

As I laid out in a 2021 post called “What’s Missing in the Pop CRT Debate”, I myself am partly influenced by critical theories, and specifically by Critical Pedagogy, which is the education “branch” of Critical Race Theory. One way I am influenced by critical theories is the selection for my reading and writing courses of reading and viewing materials that reflect my students’ overall demographic makeup and lived experiences as well as the demographic makeup of people from other groups. I am also influenced by the idea that there are differences of advantage between groups that we should take into consideration when crafting policies, creating curriculum, and running institutions."

(https://groundexperience.substack.com/p/the-wages-of-disembodied-theory-part)