SOCIAL JUSTICE IS A “VICIOUS ABSTRACTION”
Your assessment isn’t wrong, but I’d say it looks like apologetics for the status-quo. What I’m trying to do is advocate change at the most abstract level. To sort of ‘reset’ drug laws, for example, or other unjust laws. So I can completely agree with you that America has been great and that there has been a lot of progress for black people, BUT that is not our concern if we’re critiquing. The question is what are the gross injustices still existing despite the progress. Social justice isn’t a ‘vicious abstraction.’
This might be the core of our difference of opinion, because I think what passes for “social justice” in 2018 certainly is a vicious abstraction. The term “social justice” is a vaguely positive-sounding bromide ... as in, who wouldn’t be on board with social justice, right? Except that this conceals an ugly reality, which is that “social justice” is too often code for impulsive, angry, intolerant alt-left bigots shutting up, shouting down and shaming anyone who disagrees with their myopic and often empirically unsupported worldview.
Take #BlackLivesMatter. You say that “[t]he mistake is criticizing them without acknowledging that overall they are in the right.” But they’re not in the right. They’re very much in the wrong. The narrative of disproportionate police killings of blacks that #BlackLivesMatter was built on has been empirically discredited again and again. The best evidence is that there is absolutely no epidemic of cops disproportionately killing blacks. I discuss some of that evidence here:
If you want to really look at the numbers in a way that’s incredibly nuanced and detailed, I’d refer you to this wonderful, comprehensive analysis by David Shuey:
And yet, listening to the tenor of the conversation that goes on in the mainstream of our culture, you’d never know that the evidence isn’t on #BlackLivesMatters’ side. Cowed by political correctness and eager to make a quick buck off of sensationalized coverage of race issues, the media has irresponsibly pushed a narrative that fans the flames of racial acrimony and furthers racial divisions.
And speaking of racial divisions, I also disagree with this assessment of yours:
I’d say the majority of black culture is actually anti-racialized.. meaning, look at a random segment of black actors, or black athletes, or black journalists, or black lawyers or doctors or whatever. They have integrated and live their lives generally without recourse to black activism, at least publicly.
I have a very different impression, but in lieu of speculating, let’s bring some numbers into this:
Here are some facts, drawn from the Pew Survey I just linked to:
- “About eight-in-ten (81%) blacks say they feel at least somewhat connected to a broader black community in the U.S., including 36% who feel very connected. Blacks who feel a strong sense of connection to a broader black community are more likely than those who don’t to say that in the past 12 months they have made a financial contribution to, attended an event sponsored by, or volunteered their time to a group or organization working specifically to improve the lives of black Americans.”
- “An overwhelming majority of blacks (88%) say the country needs to continue making changes for blacks to have equal rights with whites.”
- “More broadly, blacks and whites offer different perspectives of the current state of race relations in the U.S. White Americans are evenly divided, with 46% saying race relations are generally good and 45% saying they are generally bad. In contrast, by a nearly two-to-one margin, blacks are more likely to say race relations are bad (61%) rather than good (34%). Blacks are also about twice as likely as whites to say too little attention is paid to race and racial issues in the U.S. these days (58% vs. 27%). About four-in-ten whites (41%) — compared with 22% of blacks — say there is too much focus on race and racial issues.”
- “When asked about their views of Black Lives Matter, the activist movement that first came to national prominence following the 2014 shooting death of an unarmed black 18-year-old by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, roughly two-thirds (65%) of blacks express support, including 41% who strongly support it.”
Also, keep in mind, these numbers are from mid-2016, and I’d guess the divisions are even more extreme now, with another year-and-a-half of all of us being exposed to a wildly racialized media stream.
In line with these numbers, my perception is that, far from being “anti-racialized,” most blacks (and many whites as well) have become hyper-racialized. This is happening in ways that are becoming invisible to us because we don’t even process them as odd. When, for example, a black author, filmmaker, musical artist or other creative black individual creates something that is focused on what we’d term “black” issues, race issues or some aspect of the black experience, we don’t even bat an eyelash. The racialization and de-universalization of aesthetics and cultural canons have become so prevalent that we have ceased to notice the extent to which art’s venerable virtue of universality has been undermined. We think blacks can only be inspired to become entrepreneurs or scientists, for instance, by seeing others like themselves who are entrepreneurs or scientists represented, and it never occurs to us anymore that “others like themselves” can mean humans, rather than humans who happen to look a certain way. Political attitudes have also become hyper-racialized, as the data I’ve quoted above and many other recent empirical findings have shown, and there has been extensive evidence suggesting that this polarization in racial attitudes is of recent vintage, a process that was brewing for awhile but that really started to heat up when the media began focusing obsessively on race after Ferguson.
My point is that the pursuit of what you call “social justice” is leading to an escalation in racial tensions (and now, with the #MeToo crusade, a worsening of gender relations as well), in a manner that is counterproductive and does not actually help most black people in America better themselves in any real way. So, on this issue and many others, I see no duty to pursue the current mirage of “social justice.” Rather, I see a duty to pursue the truth, wherever it may lead.
More broadly speaking, I think that what you might not be giving adequate consideration to is that in going about the task of “critiquing” in the name of “social justice,” as you put it, you (and many others who are far less reflective than you obviously are) may be doing harm to the fabric of this country, undermining morale and bringing out our worst, most primal, tribal instincts. For instance, I’ve argued here, citing underlying data, that our recent national crusade of “anti-racism” and our obsession with race issues are the direct causes of the current upsurge in white supremacy and the groundswell of support for white identity politics culminating in the election of Donald Trump (however one may feel about him). I also made a broader argument in a Times Higher Education piece a few months ago that the recent reformulation of admissions standards at elite universities to focus more on student community engagement, i.e., “social justice,” and less on academics was doing harm insofar as we already have too many students and others engaged in activism of one sort or another but not enough doing the hard work of thinking critically about whether or not the kind of activism they’re engaged with is a good idea in the first place.
Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, made the distinction between what he called “Hebraism” and “Hellenism.” Both of these forces aim ultimately at human perfection, but they go about that differently. Hebraism is focused on action, on the pursuit of morality and justice and things of that sort. Hellenism, by contrast, is focused on contemplation, on the deep thinking necessary to question and figure out what it is we should or shouldn’t be doing. For Arnold, these forces need to be in need to be in balance and work in harmony in a healthy society, but the society he saw in his day was one that had prevailed ever since the ascent of Christianity in the West, in which the force of Hebraism had far exceeded the countervailing force of Hellenism in our midst. There were too many people acting but not enough thinking. This is even more true today. I don’t think we need more frenzied idiots going around screaming and protesting and boycotting. We need more people reading and learning and thinking deeply.
Turning to the issue of drug laws, you write this:
There is this persistent fallacy, even among people against prohibition like yourself, that drugs are some dirty thing people just use to get high. You phrase your views on drug laws as your opinion, because maybe you don’t partake, but I say its fact. We agree on it, because its the right policy. This is the policy one comes to when they look at history and the big picture.
I think I should have the same religious right to peyote, because I exercise personal religion. These are cases where individuals and subcultures know FAR more about the safe use and therapeutic power of illicit drugs, from mushrooms to cocaine, than the state ever will. We need an open drug culture, with full education.. not like this case where the Supreme Court makes an exception for SOME natives, while not making an exception for black people using cannabis, and where you ask “where does it stop?” In a liberated drug culture, it would be demystified and people would always use responsibly.
You’re right that I personally don’t partake, but I don’t think drugs are “some dirty thing people just use to get high.” What I do think is that they’re generally a superficial short-cut people take to get to certain desirable feeling states. I don’t drink (alcohol), for instance, because I don’t feel any need to drink. I find so many aspects of life fascinating and enchanting and intoxicating that I don’t need a substance to achieve that for me. Culture, literature, philosophy and knowledge of all sorts are my drugs. But that’s just my personal view. Others, in my opinion, should be free to partake however they want, so long as they don’t hurt anyone else in the process. And there are certain drugs, like ayahuasca, where, as far as I understand, responsible use on even one occasion under traditional shamanic supervision can lead people to make life-changing self-discoveries. I’m all for people having the freedom to do that if they want. (To this extent, I completely agree with you that there are “cases where individuals and subcultures know FAR more about the safe use and therapeutic power of illicit drugs … than the state ever will.”)
Having said all that, the one point where I’d still disagree with you is when you say that “You phrase your views on drug laws as your opinion, because maybe you don’t partake, but I say it[’]s fact.” I’m not sure what you mean by “fact” here, but unless you’re privy to some notion of objectivity that I’m not familiar with, I don’t see how your view and my view (which are otherwise largely in accord on this issue) rise to the level of “facts.” As I argued in my last response to you, laws in a democracy are generally an expression of social consensus (assuming no corruption, corporate cronyism, etc., which, of course, is unfortunately not a safe assumption to make). You might “think [you] should have the same religious right to peyote, because [you] exercise personal religion,” but, as I said in that last article, someone else may think they should have the right to stone homosexuals because they (and the homosexual they want to stone) are part of a religion that says that’s what they have to do. The State has the right to say no in such situations. Or an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man might demand that he not be seated next to a woman on a plane because inadvertent contact between him and his a woman other than his wife violates his religion, but the airline (and State) has the right to say no, sorry, that’s not how we do things in America. Or you might live in a subculture or community in which men marry and have sexual relations with 14-year-old girls, but again, even if the 14-year-old-girl at issue is part of the same community and is perfectly fine with it all, the State has the right to say, sorry, no, you’ve violated our laws. There’s no right and wrong here. We can make arguments for or against specific laws and policies, but it ultimately still comes down to commonly accepted societal customs institutionalized in laws and practices.
But, zooming out from this issue, your approach implicates the very problem I’m pointing to. You seem so sure of yourself, so sure of what’s right and wrong, what’s true and what’s false, and so you’re far more committed to “social justice” than I am, whereas, though I’m not a conservative in most ways, I do see some virtue in the Burkean view that existing traditional practices and institutions have accumulated wisdom in them that we should respect, so that change should happen slowly and gradually to give ourselves time to reflect on the consequences of what it is we’re doing. To this extent, your contention that my view sounds like “apologetics for the status-quo” might be right. I don’t defend the status quo in all respects and think many, many things about our society need changing, but I also don’t use “status quo” as a term of opprobrium. The status quo might, after all, for all its flaws, be better than the status-we-don’t-yet-know.
