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Given that there is a marked disparity between what most people understand by ‘social justice’ and what activists and academics mean when they use the term, we would do well to adopt Pluckrose’s distinction of ‘Critical Social Justice’ and ‘Liberal Social Justice’. The latter is the belief that inequalities and injustices in society are best addressed through civil discourse, the free exchange of views, and evidence-based analysis. The former is the belief that society is irredeemably unequal and unjust, that these structures are maintained by oppressive groups wielding power over the
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Rather than confront bad ideas through discussion, debate, ridicule and protest, the culture warriors of the 2010s preferred to intimidate their detractors into silence through what became known as ‘cancel culture’, a method of public humiliation and harassment which could often lead to the target losing his or her means of income. Often the response was massively disproportionate, and people found themselves shamed and denounced for simply expressing an opinion that did not align with the popular view. For these activists, the very notion of debate was anathema, because even to hear the
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The religion of Critical Social Justice, in other words, is a hydra with many heads. When one encounters someone who speaks in the familiar slogans of intersectionality, one can almost always predict their opinions on a whole range of other subjects. This is why the shorthand of ‘woke’ has become so useful to encapsulate a range of interconnected identity-obsessed movements. It is also why, as we shall see, its proponents have expended so much energy into delegitimising the term.
This is because the various branches of Critical Social Justice activism, from the extreme elements of the transgender movement to Black Lives Matter, are all underpinned by a form of identitarianism siphoned from the same source. In these circles, there is no distinction between the racist, the sexist, the homophobe, the transphobe; each designation implies the other. One may as well use the term ‘sinner’ and leave it there.
As John Stuart Mill wrote, without the mental exercise of defending one’s point of view, one is left holding ‘a dead dogma, not a living truth’. Little wonder, then, that Mustafa dismissed Mill’s seminal work, On Liberty, as ‘just shit’, which is precisely the kind of critique one has come to expect from activists of an identitarian disposition.
In effect we are dealing with the old ‘motte and bailey’ tactic. This relates to the medieval castle structure comprising a fortress on a raised mound (the motte) surrounded by a walled courtyard (the bailey). Given its location and fortifications, the motte is relatively easy to protect, as opposed to the bailey which is vulnerable to attack. As an informal fallacy in argumentation, the metaphor works as follows. Someone advances a tendentious viewpoint which we refer to as the ‘bailey’ because it is so difficult to defend. When challenged, our disputant retreats to the ‘motte’, which
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The new puritans have eschewed the traditional socialist goals of redressing economic inequality and redistributing wealth and replaced them with an obsessive focus on race, gender and sexuality. These are deemed to be the source of all disparities in power, in spite of the obvious truth that privilege is most commonly determined by money, class, heredity and nepotism.
With its emphasis on group identity, present-day intersectionality is rooted in a collectivist worldview. An article in the Huffington Post by Lyz Lenz entitled ‘Women Are Evil’ exemplifies this approach, assuming that white women are inherently privileged and a ‘menace’ that has ‘yet to be reckoned with’. Likewise, the author and diversity consultant Robin DiAngelo insists that treating people equally irrespective of the colour of their skin is ‘dangerous’, because it fails to account for oppressive power structures which are embedded in society. So we are in the bizarre situation where a
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Let us consider how class has a direct impact on one’s opportunities in life. A 2019 report by the Social Mobility Commission confirmed that although only 7 per cent of the population are educated in private schools, they are overwhelmingly dominant in politics, business, and the creative industries. When it comes to the media, those who are privately educated represent 43 per cent of the most influential news editors and broadcasters and 44 per cent of all newspaper columnists. Yet when it comes to the implementation of diversity quotas, class is rarely considered. If we must have quotas –
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The rise of the new puritans, and the success of their culture war, has effectively sabotaged the class struggle of the traditional left. Identity politics is not progressive; it is a bourgeois fig leaf that often conceals the realities of economic inequality. As editor of spiked magazine Tom Slater has observed, it is much cheaper for corporations to hire diversity experts ‘to lecture staff about their alleged racism than it is to offer them better pay and working conditions’. The ideology of Critical Social Justice has never caught on in poorer communities, because those who are facing
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Intersectional activists who claim to be the heirs to the legacy of Martin Luther King are both self-aggrandising and misguided. Their hostility to free speech situates them unambiguously in opposing camps to the great civil rights luminaries. Their infatuation with group identity is incompatible with King’s famous dream of a future in which people ‘will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. This is because the religion of Critical Social Justice is fundamentally identitarian in nature and sees people less for their individual qualities and more for
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One of the more curious aspects of the religion of Critical Social Justice is the way in which it encourages its followers to deny the progress that our commitment to liberal values has achieved. That racism still exists is taken as evidence of the failure of the liberal project, but of course nobody has made the case that it has been eradicated. If a disease is cured but a few symptoms linger, one does not claim that the treatment was ineffective. Social liberalism is an ongoing process because it recognises the imperfectability of human nature.
The mark of a healthy liberal democracy is that it is able to reach a consensus regarding civility without having recourse to criminalisation or mob pressure to enforce such terms. The belief of the apparatchiks of Critical Social Justice – that all our problems will magically disappear once we outlaw certain points of view or words that cause ‘harm’ – is a utopian delusion.
You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out – to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations! That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! If many such outcries had been heard all over the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens perhaps have begun to bristle? And would arrests perhaps no longer have been so easy? The road to tyranny, then, is circuitous and often navigated at a glacial pace. We might today sanction the occasional act of
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The greatest trick of authoritarians is to convince their subjects to rejoice in their own subjugation. The rise of the new puritanism has meant that it is not uncommon to see self-proclaimed ‘leftists’ cheering on multi-billion-dollar corporations as they ratchet up their policies on censorship and their determination to control the parameters of acceptable thought and speech. The strength of feeling against Donald Trump has meant that his permanent ban from all major social media platforms was treated as a victory for progressive values. The instinctive sense of satisfaction that comes from
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A lot of normies don’t understand. Most of the people who are involved in our culture are the sort who weren’t very popular at school, who were bullied, who felt rejected by society. They had this magical place to fall back on called the internet, where it didn’t matter who they were or what they looked like. Now there are people coming in and seeking to control that. They didn’t want us in mainstream society in the first place, and now they’re trying to kick us out of the world we created for ourselves.
It should surprise nobody that controversial figures have an interest in defending freedom of speech given that uncontroversial speech is never under threat. The principle cannot be said to be invalidated simply because those we dislike endorse it. In surrendering our ideals out of fear of guilt by association, we subordinate our own moral agency to those we fundamentally oppose. A former friend of mine once told me that defending Meechan’s right to free speech was out of the question because Tommy Robinson got there first. I asked him why, if he so despised Robinson, would he grant him the
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It is a truism that people are often educated out of extreme religious beliefs. With good education comes the ability to think critically, which is the death knell for ideologies that are built on tenuous foundations. The religion of Critical Social Justice has spread at an unprecedented rate, partly because it makes claims to authority in the kind of impenetrable language that discourages the sort of criticism and scrutiny that would see it collapse upon itself. Some would argue that this is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church resisted translating the Bible into the vernacular for so
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It is inevitable that the principle of freedom of speech should become a casualty when powerful people are obsessed with language and its capacity to shape the world. Revolutionaries of the postmodernist mindset would have us believe that societal change can be actuated through modifications to the language that describes it, which is why Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School maintained that it was not possible to conceive of the liberated world in the language of the existing world. As for the new puritans, they have embraced the belief that language is either a tool of oppression or a means
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I am aware of how ludicrous the concept of ‘woke librarians’ might sound, but the evidence is compelling. Even the British Library has a ‘Decolonising Working Group’, which has successfully persuaded its management to review its collections, ‘powerfully reinterpret’ statues of its founders, and put more than three hundred authors on a watchlist if they have even the flimsiest of connections to the slave trade. One of the group’s more risible findings is that the library’s main building is a monument to imperialism because it resembles a battleship.
The application of ‘trigger warnings’ has been common practice in universities since at least 2013. These can range from literary works on English Literature courses to the study of rape cases in law schools. One professor at Harvard University writes how a colleague was ‘asked by a student not to use the word “violate” in class – as in “Does this conduct violate the law?” – because the word was triggering’. It is hardly crass to point out that if undergraduates cannot bear to hear about unpleasant crimes, they should avoid the study of law. It would be like someone who cannot stand the sight
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A further aspect of the faculty’s ‘action plan’ was to add signs to the display of plaster casts of Roman and Greek sculptures explaining that their ‘whiteness’ was not to be taken as a sign that the ancient world lacked diversity. Of course, this sort of performative handwringing is hardly necessary. The whiteness of the plaster casts can be readily accounted for by the fact that plaster is white.
Such needless and patronising explanations are entirely in keeping with the trigger warning mentality, which perceives adults as being locked in a permanent state of infancy. In the summer of 2021, Brandeis University in Massachusetts published an ‘oppressive language list’ of phrases best avoided by students and staff. Examples included ‘female-bodied’, ‘lame’ and ‘spirit animal’. The phrase ‘person experiencing housing insecurity’ was recommended as an inoffensive alternative to ‘homeless person’. A category headed ‘violent language’ featured phrases such as ‘rule of thumb’ and ‘you’re
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In White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018), Robin DiAngelo rejects as ‘simplistic’ the notion that racism is best understood as ‘intentional acts of racial discrimination committed by immoral individuals’. Rather, racism is ‘a system’ or ‘a structure, not an event’. Furthermore, the ‘prejudice plus power’ formulation explains why the new puritans believe that only white people can be racist. So when two Indian teenagers were arrested at a football game in New Jersey having verbally abused and urinated on a group of black schoolgirls, the New York Times
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As with so many debates in the culture wars, the issue of pronouns has been misrepresented as a simple question of whether one is on the right or wrong side of history. Activists insist that it is just a way to be inclusive and polite, and in many instances that is clearly the intention. Yet the case against these measures is essentially liberal, and is worth outlining in full, given that most of us, at some point in the near future, will be faced with the choice between explaining our reasons for refusing, or capitulating in order to avoid conflict. When you ask someone to declare pronouns
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Announcing one’s pronouns has no practical purpose in most scenarios, given that we do not refer to individuals by their pronouns unless we are talking about them, rather than to them. In other words, there appears to be little utility in announcing pronouns other than to endorse the notion of gender identity. But this is a specifically ideological stance, one that people should not be pressurised into making against their will. Moreover, even raising the question can be offensive. Feminist campaigner Julie Bindel has pointed out that women who reject traditional notions of femininity are
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It is often forgotten that many transgender people are opposed to pronoun declaration for a number of reasons. It draws needless attention to them when they just want to get on with their lives. It can have the effect of ‘outing’ people against their will, particularly if they are in the early stages of their transition. It creates a false impression that gender identity ideology is the norm, even though it is a belief system shared by relatively few. Most importantly – to return to my key point – compelled speech is a fundamentally illiberal prospect, one that should always be resisted.
In the case of the Critical Social Justice ideology, the mendacity of the equation isn’t even what matters. As James Lindsay puts it, the real question is ‘whose specific identity group interests are served by accepting that two plus two equals four?’ According to this view, ‘if saying two plus two equals four predominately serves white, Western male interests, that statement itself is political and politically problematic and should therefore be treated with suspicion, maybe dismantled, decolonized, or banned’. Reality is not, and has never been, the point.
Like all religions, Critical Social Justice requires that the faithful adopt a specific perspective. We are not dealing with two competing narratives of the same reality, but a whole other kind of reality which is supernatural at heart. The map of the Critical Social Justice world is not composed of the coordinate systems of latitude and longitude, but the invisible power structures derived from a Foucauldian understanding of human relations. Inconvenient truths are to be erased from this new globe. Behavioural trends that emerge due to biological sex differences, for instance, are simply to
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The outright denial of what we can plainly see has become so common that we barely notice it. Consider a recent argument between broadcasters Piers Morgan and Alex Beresford on the current affairs television show Good Morning Britain, in which the latter took issue with the former’s scepticism over the truth of some of the claims made by Meghan Markle in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Midway through the discussion, Morgan pointed out that one of Markle’s most incendiary claims – that her son Archie had been denied the title of ‘Prince’ because he is mixed race – was demonstrably false. ‘Do
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Nor is ‘lived experience’ politically neutral. The intention is to validate personal perspective, but only if it corresponds with the expectations of the new puritans. For instance, Markle’s ‘lived experience’ apparently confirms that the royal family is inherently racist, but Prince William’s ‘lived experience’ that his family is ‘very much not’ racist can be readily dismissed. As usual for the practitioners of Critical Social Justice, propositions are framed as conclusions and all evidence to the contrary is ignored or denied. ‘Lived experience’, in other words, only carries weight if it is
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One would have thought that disciplines related to science, medicine or engineering might be ringfenced from the pernicious influence of positionality, but even these are now seen as constructions of an oppressive white, male and heteronormative culture. This is to engage in a soft form of racism, because the history of scientific discovery is by no means the singular domain of white people. With the origins of science in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the development of mathematics and physics in medieval Islam, claims that such areas of study are inherently ‘Eurocentric’ are untenable.
It seems counter-intuitive, but positionality is now a dominant framework in higher education. This is why the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington DC, recently included ‘objectivity’ on a short list of ‘harmful research practices’. Objectivity, it is claimed, is based on ‘the belief that neutrality on a subject is the best way to determine its facts’, allowing researchers ‘to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience’. Even ‘rigor’ is considered harmful because it involves ‘following an established research protocol meticulously instead of ensuring
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As the regalia and lexicon of the LGBTQIA+ movement grows ever more farcical, one cannot escape the feeling that many of its proponents are nostalgic for the oppression of the past. As we have seen, identity politics as practised by the new puritans is rooted in narratives of victimhood. This makes sense in countries where being gay is illegal or even punishable by death, but no sense at all in a country like the United Kingdom where equal rights have been long established. This is not to suggest that homophobia has ceased to exist, or that we shouldn’t be vigorously opposing it wherever it
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The struggle for gay rights was about equal treatment before the law, and making visible those whose persecution by the state had driven them into the shadows of society. Now that equality has been achieved, Pride has descended into a corporate orgy of identitarianism. The rainbow flag and all its tawdry spin-offs are a marker of virtue for companies that wish to sell products to the gullible and declare their commitment to ‘diversity and inclusion’. As psychiatrist Norman Doidge observes, ‘Telling people you’re virtuous isn’t a virtue, it’s self-promotion’.