#antiliberalism

By: Allan Stratton

Published: Jul 23, 2023

Toronto is one of the most tolerant, multicultural cities in the world. And yet, according to many of its progressive journalists, academics, and politicians, it’s actually a den of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Unless you’re a straight white man, daily life is supposedly an exhausting and dangerous struggle. If you live in the United States, the UK, Australia, or elsewhere in Canada, I’m guessing you’ve been told similar things about your own society.

I’m a gay man for whom these reports bear no relationship to the real world. Certainly, hate-crime statistics show a sharp increase in physical and verbal abuse against specific demographics, including my own. And there are even rare incidents of murder and arson. But to suggest that minorities live under constant threat from a bigoted majority is apocalyptic nonsense. This is especially true of Canada, an especially open, diverse, and welcoming country. Western nations, more generally, are incontrovertibly the most tolerant on the planet.

My heretical view (among fellow progressives, at least) may be due to my “positionality” (this being a faddishly woke jargon term that most English speakers would call “perspective”). The Holocaust and the internment of Japanese North Americans ended a mere six years before I was born. The pass system that turned Canadian Indigenous reservations into open-air prison camps was still in force. The United States was segregated by Jim Crow and redlining. Cross burnings and lynchings went unpunished. Marital rape was legal. Spousal abuse and unequal pay were commonplace. Gay sex and cross-dressing were criminalized, with outed individuals losing their jobs and children. “Fag bashing” was treated as public entertainment.

In the relatively few decades since, western governments have implemented universal civil and human rights protections for racial and sexual minorities. The speed and depth of this transformation has been so remarkable that it seems inconceivable that we ever lived as we once did. Has any other culture critiqued its failings and set about reforming itself so quickly?

This is not to suggest that everything is sunshine and lollipops. Human nature has not been repealed. Police departments without effective civilian oversight, for instance, continue to invite corruption and abuse. Nonetheless, we now have the tools to press for accountability, such as human rights tribunals and whistleblower protections.

It’s also important to acknowledge that while the relative increase in reported hate crimes may seem shocking, that rise is based on a remarkably low baseline. For instance, 2021 saw a 65 per cent increase in incidents (over 50 per cent of these comprising verbal slurs) targeting Canada’s LGB and T communities. But that still represents just 423 cases in a country of 40-million people. That’s hardly a “tsunami of hate.” The number is infinitesimal compared to the 114,132 domestic assaults and 34,242 sexual assaults recorded against women.

One often hears that a reversion to the backward ways of the past is just around the corner. And it is true that abortion rights now hang in the balance in many conservative U.S. states. But the idea that any Western country (especially Canada) is on the cusp of a wholesale rejection of liberal principles is absurd. Women will never again need their husband’s signature to open a bank account. Racial segregation is unthinkable (except, ironically, in certain progressive institutions). Marriage equality for same-sex couples is constitutionally protected in North America, and enjoys a historic 70 per cent level of support in the United States.

So, unlike those on the left who came of age in the 90s and the decades that followed, I don’t see an intolerant society destroying civil rights and minority safety. Rather, what I am now witnessing is a period of progressive overreach, led by ideologues with no (apparent) historical memory or understanding of how our liberal social contract evolved. They have turned language inside out so as to render words such as “woman,” “safety,” and “genocide” essentially meaningless; pursued policies that lock one-time progressive allies in a zero-sum culture-war conflict; recast free speech as hate speech; confused wishes (and, in some cases, fantasies) with rights; and punished dissenters from their Borg-think with social exclusion, “re-education,” and firing.

This radical attempt to unilaterally impose a new social order based on race and gender essentialism has ignited a widespread public backlash, which has been weaponized by the far right, destroyed public goodwill, and done more damage to the progressive cause than anything its reactionary enemies have done in recent years.

-

The civil-rights movements of the last century won victories by liberal means based on liberal values. This included an insistence on free speech and civil liberties; and an appeal to the universal values of dignity and equality, which in turn underpin the case for protecting individual human rights and freedoms.

In part, this was because we liberals understood math. We needed white, straight, male legislators to support our causes, a project that could only be engaged through free and open debate. Empathy-based co-operation enabled us to create bridges among our diverse groups: The Gay Liberation Front raised money for the Black Panthers. In turn, its leader, Huey Newton, supported the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements. Meanwhile, Jewish groups applied their historical understanding of discrimination to help lead the fights for women’s rights (Betty Friedan), gay rights (Larry Kramer), and black voting rights, with some even giving their lives as Freedom Riders

By contrast, today’s illiberal left explicitly rejects the principles of free speech and universality. It ignores the lessons of past civil-rights successes, often denying that such successes even took place. After all, how can one insist on the dismantling (or “decolonization”) of a system that has shown itself capable of self-correction and continuous improvement? The only framework that validates the progressive narrative of ongoing oppression and white supremacy is one that ahistorically presents mainstream liberal values as a failure.

The switch in social-justice circles from liberal to authoritarian ends and means has at least three major causes. The first is structural: As (originally) liberal rights groups such as the ACLU achieved their objectives, they were required to rewrite their mission statements and pretend away their past successes — this being the only way to justify their ongoing existence.

Far from seeking to “burn it all down,” most of us within the original LGB and T movements simply wanted equality within existing social structures. We used liberal “respectability politics” to make our case, and (for the most part) folded our tents when we achieved our goal. The unwitting effect of this was to leave our old organizations to the radicals, who had long condemned us as sellouts to the patriarchy. Their goal is nothing less than the remaking — or “queering” — of society, a vaguely defined project infused with a deep suspicion of, or even hostility to, capitalism and the nuclear family. The liberal LGB and T wish to live and let live is now the authoritarian “live as we live.”

The second factor is generational change. Just as children separate from their parents in their passage to adulthood, so does each generation define itself in contradistinction to its immediate predecessor. Without personal memory of past struggles, present conditions are taken for granted. And so the battle against current injustices (real or otherwise) is seen as humanity’s defining and timeless struggle.

My generation mocked our parents’ conformity and stoic, suck-it-up ethos, forgetting that these traits had been necessary social adaptations during the Great Depression and World War II. Similarly, activists of this generation attack our commitment to free speech and integration within society, forgetting that these strategies were necessary for us to be heard during the Cold War, when outsiders were suspected as potential fifth columnists.

But perhaps the most significant factor has been the academic trend toward postmodernism, which instructs adherents that neither objective reality nor human nature exist in any certain, provable way. Reason, logic, and objective facts are rejected — or at least put in scare quotes — as are appeals to history and science. These are all held to be mere artifacts of language, which is itself presented as a reflection of existing power structures. And since these structures are presumed to systematically oppress the powerless, they must be deconstructed, dismantled, and decolonized, root and branch.

This kind of thinking isn’t just claptrap that flies in the face of day-to-day human experience. It also encourages a kind of intellectual nihilism that precludes amelioration of the injustices and power imbalances that supposedly concern many postmodern thinkers: After all, what could possibly replace our current power-based intellectual constructs except new power-based intellectual constructs?

Nonetheless, postmodern habits of mind (often flying under the banner of “critical” studies of one kind or another) have infected academic humanities and social science departments all over the west, much like the fungal parasite on The Last of Us. Its professorial hosts now work to dismantle their own institutions, attacking the “colonial” concepts of science and empiricism in favour of undefined and unfalsifiable “ways of knowing.” Meanwhile, their students have incubated its spores and spread them into the wider society, including corporate human-rights offices.

Progressives (rightly) have denounced Donald Trump and his supporters for their paranoid belief that the 2020 U.S. election was “stolen.” But these right-wing conspiracy theorists are not so different from campus leftists when it comes to their à la carte approach to accepting or rejecting reality according to passing ideological convenience

In particular, the idea that pronouns serve as magic spells that can turn a man into a (literal) women is no less ridiculous than anything Trump has ever said. The same goes for the mantra that while girls who cut themselves need therapy, girls seeking a double mastectomy require “affirmation.” Likewise: Racial segregation is a bigoted practice … except when it represents the very acme of progressive enlightenment. “Defund the police” doesn’t mean abolish the police, except when it means exactly that.

And then there’s Schrödinger’s Antifa, which presents these street thugs either as a very real force that rose up as a morally laudable reaction to fascism … or as something that exists only in Tucker Carlson’s fever dreams, depending on context.

But postmodernism and critical theory have done more than just damage our societies’ intellectual cohesion. Their denial of universal human nature eliminates empathy as a tool to bridge differences among groups, which are instead presented as warring sects prosecuting unbridgeable race (or gender) feuds. Since power is presented as the singular currency of the realm, the ability to shut the other side up is valued more than the ability to persuade it.

Gay men such as Andrew Sullivan and Andrew Doyle have been among the most prominent dissenters against wokeism — in part because we instinctively recognize the destructive nature of this power-fixated mindset. Our experience suggests that empathy and reason are far more important than threats and cultural power plays.

Dave Chappelle has said that the LGBT movement won public support more quickly than its black counterpart because of racism. But I believe the truth is different: Unlike racial and ethnic minorities, we exist in every demographic, every family, every ethnic category. When we gay men came out en masse during the 1980s AIDS pandemic, all communities realized that we were among its children, parents, and siblings. People have a harder time discriminating against their own than against outsiders.

Traditionally, the left has appealed to a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose. The resulting project of alliance-building has entailed negotiation among different groups, all of which may have different priorities and perspectives. But that alliance-building project becomes impossible when one sect or another demands that disagreement be treated as a form of thoughtcrime. Deplatforming doesn’t just hurt the target; it also hurts the movement, since the summary excommunication of dissidents means that adherents never need to acknowledge or address counterarguments, internal logical inconsistencies, or the off-putting nature of their message.

Indeed, ideologues such as Nikole Hannah-Jones claim that politics has a colour: Blacks who aren’t “politically black” are traitors who collaborate with “whiteness.” As seen through this lens, Asian-Americans who fight anti-Asian discrimination in the context of affirmative action are supposedly puppets of white supremacists, and the LGB Alliance, by standing up for same-sex attraction, is smeared as a transphobic hate group. (For asserting that biology is real, Stonewall UK even tried to destroy the career of one of the LGB Alliance’s founders, Allison Bailey, a lifelong social justice advocate who happens to be a black, working-class lesbian, and the child of immigrant parents. Thankfully, Stonewall did not prevail.)

Opponents of cancel culture often focus on its negative effects on conservatives. But it’s often woke organizations that end up imploding under its strains, typically due to internal battles over victimhood status and linguistic control. In recent years, many of these groups have been driven off the rails by single-issue gender activists who are willing to support misogyny and homophobia in the name of trans rights; or BLM activists willing to permit racism directed at “model minorities.” Even antisemites have been allowed to infiltrate left-wing political parties, the arts establishment, and anti-racist education initiatives. No wonder everyone involved with this movement is always complaining about how emotionally “exhausted” they are: They’re surrounded by toxic fellow travellers who gaslight them as right-stooges if they dare raise a complaint.

Another notable feature of militant social-justice movements is the sheer joylessness of their leaders and supporters, a condition that often seems to blur into a collectively embraced state of clinical depression and paranoia. This posture flows from their presupposition that they suffer endlessly due to the malignant primordial character of “whiteness” and heteronormativity (or, yet worse, cisheteronormativity). The language of individual agency and hope, which animates liberalism, is replaced with a soul-dead idiom by which the activist presents as a self-pitying victim of oppression, constantly at risk of suicidal ideation, erasure, and genocide.

Even privileged “allies” are encouraged to dwell on their whiteness, straightness, cisness, “settler” status, and other marks of intersectional Cain. By erasing the possibility of redemption, the movement alienates liberal allies who are seeking to build bridges with others en route to living successful and fulfilling lives in a way that escapes the politics of identity. The social-justice puritan, being primarily concerned with advancing his status within a cultish inward-seeking subculture that’s constantly inventing new grievances, on the other hand, finds such a goal unthinkable.

The use of words such as “harm” and “violence” to describe the microaggressions known to the rest of us as “daily life” is a particularly unattractive feature of social-justice culture. In the 1980s, gays and lesbians responded to daily discrimination with the chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” Today, the children and grandchildren of that generation, now enjoying full civil rights and perches within elites sectors of government, culture, and high society, instead tell us, “We’re here, we’re queer, and … we’re terrified to step outside.” As a gay man, it’s humiliating to hear this kind of maudlin rhetoric uttered in my name.

The broad public, long sympathetic and accommodating, has had it. People have no time for hysterical activists who whine, bully, and hector them about things they didn’t do and over which they have no control. This is particularly true when those same activists demand the elimination of women’s sex-based rights, the medical sterilization of children and teens, and the explicit exclusion of job applicants by race. The more that ordinary men and women came to learn about gay marriage, the more they accepted it. By contrast, the more that ordinary men and women come to learn about trans-activist demands and critical race theory, the more they’ve become repulsed.

Support for Black Lives Matter collapsed when the woke trivialized the arson and looting that accompanied the George Floyd protests. The public was completely onside with the left’s demand for police reform, but horrified by the extremist push to dismantle public security, and enraged that the left justified breaking pandemic restrictions for protests while insisting that grieving families be kept from their dying relatives in hospitals.

Likewise, Lia Thomas tanked support on gender radicalism. The public had long welcomed trans civil rights, sympathized with those suffering dysphoria, and accepted that even non-dysphoric trans-identified individuals should be able to live and present as they wished. But the sight of a strapping, butch male taking women’s prizes and opportunities was a breaststroke too far.

Facing resistance, the woke doubled down, insisting on automatic gender affirmation for everyone, including rapists and children. The result gifted social conservatives an issue of concern to majorities across the political spectrum. Now, progressives in the U.S. face a raft of bills that, among other things, resurrect false charges of Alphabet paedophilia. No wonder LGB groups are jettisoning the T: In the space of just a few years, trans activists have undone the good work that gay activists did over multiple generations.

The progressive movement must stand up to its extremists. We must restore the liberal social compact that won our civil and human rights. That means we should root our claims in areas of common ground, demanding fair treatment, but not the right to dictate what others think.

The most intense theatres of culture-war combat involve the education of children, an area in which liberal attitudes must be allowed to hold sway. Popular free speech principles should be applied to school libraries and curricula — which means opposing campaigns to root out books demonized by both the left and the right alike. In classrooms, an open exploration of history can provide a context for kids to discuss how injustices were overcome in the past and how they might be handled in the present. Students can be taught to brainstorm how to use their advantages to help the less fortunate, and how others in their situation have dealt with adversity. But they should never be taught that personal relationships and moral hierarchies are determined by the colour of one’s skin.

Likewise, boys and girls should be allowed to play and dress free of gender stereotypes, with a no-bullying policy strictly enforced. They should learn who they are by themselves, and be taught that they are more than the sum of their parts. They should not be labelled by ideological adults consumed by a mania for gender theory. In school, I skipped with the girls, had a lisp, and liked to play with china elves. That didn’t make me a girl, just as dressing butch and dreading the effects of a puberty doesn’t turn a lesbian into a boy. (I shudder to think what might have happened were I a child today.)

We should also return to the left’s traditional focus on class. Diversty, equity, and inclusion initiatives enrich the small group of well-educated profiteers who proselytize the DEI faith, but they’re actually worse than useless when it comes to workplaces, exacerbating intolerance among the hapless workers forced to submit to tedious seminars and questionnaires. Resources from the DEI industry’s rapidly metastasizing bureaucracies should be redirected to programs that materially help the poor: Unlike affirmative action programs, investments in deprived neighbourhoods disproportionately assist minorities without the creation of double-standards and racial left-behinds that serve to energize white nationalists. They also support social mobility and economic inclusion.

“I just want to say—you know—can we, can we all get along?” is how Rodney King put it in 1991. While many of us might read the underlying sentiment as self-evident, the militant social-justice left now treats it as a forbidden lie, since the entire movement is based on the conceit that peaceful and harmonious coexistence is impossible within a pluralistic liberal society that doesn’t forcibly “queer” itself, endlessly hector citizens about their bigotry, and segregate workers and students by skin colour.

I believe we can all get along. As a progressive, a gay man, a Canadian, and a liberal, I want no part of any movement — whatever it calls itself — that insists we can’t.

[ Mirror: https://archive.is/es3Q4 ]

==

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jul 26, 2023

As our culture war rumbles on, there are hordes of denialists at hand to reassure us that it either “doesn’t exist”, or that it is a mere “distraction”. Labour MP Ben Bradshaw warns us that we need “to resist the Tory culture war”, as though it had been concocted by the very party that has presided over its worst excesses. Writing in The Scotsman, Joyce McMillian claims that the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill is “being used as a culture-war distraction”. Times columnist Matthew Parris insists that the “Why-Oh-Why War with Woke” is “not a real culture war”, and if we “stop thinking about it, stop talking about it, it will finally go away”.

Wishful thinking only explains so much. A cynic might take the view that all this talk of “distraction” is a way to minimise the significance of the culture war, a tactic likely to appeal to those who support the creeping authoritarianism of our times. But perhaps the better explanation is that culture warriors have been so successful in misleading the public when it comes to their methods and objectives. The claim that the culture war is a “distraction” is, in other words, a distraction.

This is not to deny that some tabloid “woke-gone-mad” stories are frivolous. It is, of course, eminently sensible to shrug off bitter screeds about vegan sausage rolls or reports of young people tweeting about how old sitcoms are “problematic”. All conceivable opinions are available on social media if one searches long enough. Just as the devil can cite scripture for his purpose, so too a lazy tabloid columnist can quote “the Twitterati” to confect some juicy clickbait.

That said, these kinds of trivialities are often symptomatic of a much deeper cultural malaise. We may laugh at the university that appended a trigger warning to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, informing students that it contains scenes of “graphic fishing”, but the proliferation of such measures is an authentic concern. It points to an increasingly infantilising tendency in higher education, one that accepts the dubious premise that words can be a form of violence and that adults require protection from ugly ideas. Worse still, it is related to growing demands that certain forms of speech must be curtailed by the state. Only this month, a poll by Newsweek found that 44% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 believe that “misgendering” should result in criminal prosecution.

Such developments are anything but a distraction. What has become known colloquially as the “woke” movement is rooted in the postmodernist belief that our understanding of reality is entirely constructed through language, and therefore censorship by the state, big tech or mob pressure is fully justified. In addition, this group maintains that society operates according to invisible power structures that perpetuate inequality, and that these can only be redressed through an obsessive focus on group identity and the implementation of present discrimination to resolve past discrimination. This is why the most accurate synonym for woke is “anti-liberal”.

When James Davison Hunter popularised the term “culture war” in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, he was describing tensions between religious and secular trends as well as alternative visions of the role of the family in society. He was using the term in its established sense, where any given “culture war” has clearly defined and oppositional goals (such as the Kulturkampf of the late-19th century, which saw the Catholic Church resisting the secular reforms of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck). Hunter’s application of the term mapped neatly onto accepted distinctions of Right versus Left in American politics, which is perhaps why the notion of a “culture war” is still so often interpreted through this lens.

But our present culture war is not so simple. The goals are certainly oppositional, but the terms are vaguely defined and often muddied further through obfuscation. Rather than a reflection of antipathies between Right and Left, today’s culture war is a continuation of the age-old conflict between liberty and authoritarianism. John Stuart Mill opened On Liberty (1859) with an account of the “struggle between Liberty and Authority”; the only difference today is that the authoritarian impulse has been repackaged as “progressive”. This would help explain why a YouGov poll last week found that 24% of Labour voters believe that banks ought to be allowed to remove customers for their political views.

The idea that defending liberal principles is a kind of “distraction” amounts to an elaborate form of whataboutism. Contemporary critics of Mill might well have argued that in writing On Liberty, he was allowing himself to be distracted from more pressing causes. Why wasn’t he writing about social reform, for instance, or the Franco-Austrian war? Similarly, while some commentators ask why we are discussing climate change during a cost-of-living crisis, an environmentalist might well ask why we are discussing the cost-of-living crisis in the midst of climate change. The extent to which we are being “distracted” is very much dependent on our individual priorities.

That is not to suggest that there are not important issues that are being neglected. Matthew Syed has observed the curious lack of interest in the possibility that we are facing self-annihilation due to our rapidly advancing technology. As he points out, in an age when the full sequence of the Spanish flu can be uploaded online and reconstructed in a laboratory, “how long before it is possible for a solitary fanatic to design and release a pathogen capable of killing millions, perhaps billions?” And why, Syed asks, aren’t world leaders devoting time and money to confront these existential threats?

Syed writes persuasively, and I certainly share his concerns. But I part company when it comes to his diagnosis of our culture war as “a form of Freudian displacement”, that “the woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in their piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront”. Syed is right that there are some who specialise in the trivial, but there are many more who are undertaking in earnest the crucial task of halting the ongoing erosion of our freedoms.

The liberal approach to redressing injustices, one now routinely dismissed as “anti-woke”, has a long and illustrious history. We might look to Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and many others who understood that freedom of speech and individual liberties were fundamental to human progress. Identity politics in its current form is directly opposed to the ideals of these great civil rights luminaries. While many of today’s culture warriors promote polarising narratives of distinct and incompatible group identities, the proponents of universal liberalism — as embodied in the movements for black emancipation, second-wave feminism and gay rights — have always advanced individual rights in the context of our shared humanity.

“Many of these [Critical Theory-based] movements initially advocated for a type of liberal humanism (individualism, freedom, and peace) but quickly turned to a rejection of liberal humanism.

The logic of individual autonomy that underlies liberal humanism (the idea that people are free to make independent rational decisions that determine their own fate) was viewed as a mechanism for keeping the marginalized in their place by obscuring larger structural systems of inequality.

In other words, it fooled people into believing that they had more freedom and choice than societal structures actually allow.”

-- Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, “Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education"

“The closest synonym to the word ‘woke’ is ‘antiliberal’.”

-- Andrew Doyle

--

“Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

“As mentioned earlier, critical race scholars are discontented with liberalism as a framework for addressing America’s racial problems. Many liberals believe in color blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law. They believe in equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations.”

By: Jonathan Kay

Published: Sep 27, 2022

The term “woke” was originally popularized by progressive activists who saw themselves as having (metaphorically) awakened to bold new insights about the racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia that supposedly contaminate every corner of western societies. In recent years, however, “woke” has been more commonly used as a pejorative term to describe extremists who extrapolate these well-intentioned principles in a radically ill-advised manner. In many cases, this includes performative gestures—on social media or otherwise—that are clearly intended to burnish the ideological bona fides of woke individuals and groups, as opposed to providing real assistance to the allegedly oppressed masses whose well-being ostensibly lies at the core of the woke mission.

Some woke ideological positions are so extreme that they directly contradict core tenets of liberalism, including free speech and due process. At its outer edges, moreover, wokeism closely tracks policy prescriptions associated with reactionary 20th-century social conservatives. In schools, government agencies, and woke corporations, it has become increasingly common to celebrate racial segregation as a means to create “affinity groups.” Some woke ideologues and diversity consultants also claim that qualities associated with professional life, such as punctuality, attention to detail, and a commitment to merit, betray the influence of a nefarious force called “whiteness”—thereby channeling the racist idea that non-white individuals cannot meet baseline standards of intellect and behavior.

Woke manifestos and policy documents typically embed slogans that cast entire swathes of the western world as “oppressive” (or even intrinsically genocidal), and which call upon followers to engage in gestures of righteous “anti-capitalist” rebellion. Canada, in particular, is routinely denounced as a “white supremacist” state whose very existence must be “disrupted.”

Unlike traditional forms of leftish thought, which have been aimed in large part at assisting working-class individuals, wokeism exhibits an unconcealed hostility toward underprivileged members of society who have not internalized faddish ideas about race and gender. Woke ideas are communicated using academic jargon densely cluttered with newly conceived acronyms such as 2SLGBTQQIA+, AMAB, and BIPOC. As with many cultish movements, the unintelligible nature of this idiom is treated as a feature not a bug, since mastery of such terms permits an acolyte to signal his or her elect status within a woke organization or clique.

In other words, wokeism not only consists of a set of anti-liberal ideological concepts masquerading as progressivism, but also as a status-seeking strategy within upper-middle-class white-collar social and professional subcultures.

Many highly woke proponents plainly imagine themselves as secular priests, communicating revealed truths to their (more ignorant) workplace or classroom parishioners. While their language often is full of nominally self-incriminating flourishes about “whiteness,” “internalized white supremacy,” and their status as “settlers living on unceded land,” such admissions are actually intended as badges of enlightenment—much as a religious fundamentalist might demonstrate his or her devotion by pontificating about the shameful depths of his or her original sin.

Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright says sex IS NOT a spectrum | Free Speech Nation: The Podcast

Andrew: I've never had an evolutionary biologist on the show before. So you'll be in a position to be able to tell me, is sex a spectrum?

Colin: So it is not a spectrum. There tends to be a lot of ways people try to argue that it is, but it's really confused about what sex actually is, which is how your reproductive anatomy is organized around or the type of gamete it's organized around to produce. So people will use things like the existence of intersex people - so people who have ambiguous genitalia - as this way to suggest that males and females are just these arbitrary social constructs.

Or they'll confuse the secondary sex characteristics, like you know, facial hair and the upper body strength that men get or breast development, as evidence that sex is a spectrum, because these individual traits might differ and overlap between males and females. But this is just fundamentally misunderstands what it means for someone to be a male or female. So sex isn't a spectrum any more than flipping a coin could potentially land on its edge one out of every 6000 flips doesn't mean that heads and tails don't exist. So that's that's sort of my take on that.

Andrew: So, you would be able to find women that are a lot stronger than me, that are a lot more traditionally masculine than me, but that doesn't mean that there's a third sex.

Colin: No not at all. There would have to be another type of reproductive anatomy that is evolved, that someone can exhibit that's organized around to produce a third type of gamete, something between sperm or ova.

So a lot of people think when I say that there's two sexes, that I mean that every single individual in the entire planet can be categorically defined as either male or female. Now I kind of leave it open. Someone might have a developmental condition that makes them truly sexually ambiguous in certain ways. But they wouldn't be a third sex in the same way that male and female are individual sexes.

Andrew: So why do I hear all the time intersex people being used as examples of a third sex, much to the annoyance of a lot of intersex people, i notice.

Colin: Yeah it's part of a larger move to try to blur the lines between male and female, and to assert that male and female, these are these social constructs which is then being used by trans activists to suggest that people who are unambiguously male or female should therefore be able to identify as the opposite sex, and that no one can tell them that they're wrong. So in a way these intersex individuals are just being used by activists to further their own agenda

Because even if sex were a spectrum, this still doesn't indicate that you can choose where along that spectrum you reside. So their arguments just sort of don't hold up no matter even if you grant them what they would like you to grant.

Andrew: So perhaps you could talk us through then this differentiation between sex and gender, because I think that's at the heart of so much of the confusion around this debate.

Colin: Yeah it's what kind of got me into this whole debate too. Because you probably are aware that maybe in the 2010s, this is when I first started hearing about people talking about these differences between sex and gender. They were saying that sex is you know, your biology, it's reproductive anatomy. But gender is how you identify and that was something I was willing to go along with, a lot of other people were. As a biologist, I just wanted to make sure there was this sharp line between biology and psychology to some degree.

But then that line has been more and more blurred. So I know what biological sex is, which refers to your reproductive anatomy, your primary reproductive anatomy. But gender can mean all sorts of things, and I think it's a major point of confusion in this entire cultural discussion about it.

Because some people view gender as the equivalent of sex, they don't distinguish the two. Some think gender is just the evolved natural differences between males and females, some include the social aspects that maybe we've become socialized into into behaving certain ways. Some people view gender as the societal norms and expectations that are placed on individuals because of the sex they're perceived to be. And then some people just think that gender is just something you can completely identify with, it's like this internal sense of being male or female.

So if we're going to have a debate on these, it needs to be clear about what we're talking about. I don't really have a personal definition of what gender is, I just sort of ask people what they mean and then see whether or not that conflicts with my understanding of biology, to make sure they're not trying to blur some boundaries and use sophistry to confuse people or push their agenda.

Andrew: But it is very confusing. I mean I often hear people talking about how we have an innate gender which is fixed, that we can't change, that should should supersede our biological anatomy. And at the same time I'm told that gender is really fluid and it can continually be in flux. And then I see people, for instance, there was a BBC program where where a woman was telling children as young as five there are over a hundred different genders, and she seems so certain about this. But no one's really certain are they?

Colin: No, I'm not even sure what they mean by gender in these situations, I mean, it sometimes appears that they're just referring to the recognition that people have about where they reside on the spectrum of masculinity or femininity. Like they've come to realize if you're a girl, that maybe you're more masculine and you have more in common with boys in terms of your likes and dislikes and personality and and temperament.

But then there's this whole ideological overlay on everything, this almost like an immaterial soul, the way they talk about gender identity. We all have one, this is this deep-seated thing and we know from a very young age even though it can change from moment to moment, and then we should use this as the basis for springing forth and doing things like surgeries and blocking puberty because kids know who they are is what they say. It's one thing to say that kids are aware of their sex and are aware of where they reside in terms of masculinity and femininity compared to their their peers. It's one other thing to say that we have this internal sense of knowing if you're a boy or a girl.

Like, this is kind of a religious framework that they're dealing with. It exits the realm of science and it's really entering pseudoscience, mysticism type of thing in my view.

Andrew: And given that these definitions of this innate sexed soul being either male or female, invariably draw us back to quite conservative ideas of what it means to be male and female. They tend to rely on sex stereotypes. If we're teaching children this, is that not quite a regressive step?

Colin: Yeah and this is the angle I try to convince people of the harms of gender ideology, you know. The feminist movement is in large part defined by trying to defy gender norms, saying that just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I can't be masculine, I can't be an engineer or a scientist, I can't be risk-taking, I can't be aggressive, all these things that they were trying to shake off.

And what gender ideology has really done, it sort of embraced those ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman in a very essentialist sense, and it asserts that if you're behaving feminine and you're a boy, then maybe you're actually a girl trapped in a boy's body.

There was a really good summation of this. It started off saying sexism was that women should do the dishes, and then it was equality both men and women should do the dishes, and then gender ideology really says that whoever's doing the dishes is a woman. Like that's sort of how they're framing things now based on identifying with these roles.

Andrew: So then that leads us into this realm of of non-binary and I keep seeing this phrase online, "non-binary lives are valid." But as far as I can see, someone who identifies as non-binary is just someone who doesn't see themselves as fitting into traditional roles of male or female, and therefore by identifying as non-binary, they are in a sense reinforcing those roles.

Colin: Exactly. The non-binary phenomenon I think really shows what's behind the mask of a lot of the gender ideology stuff. Because they're not claiming that they're intersex. It's not like they're claiming to be somewhere in between male and female, although some will say, use male and female as identities.

But what they're really saying is the so-called gender binary that a non-binary person is objecting to, isn't the biological categories of male and female, it's like the social roles and expectations that are associated with being male and female. So these types of roles about masculinity and femininity and what those roles mean for society. So they're basically just saying that they don't agree, they don't identify with these maximally masculine roles or these maximally feminine roles, they're somewhere in between.

I attended a gender webinar recently, that I sort of infiltrated, and under this, they had this big umbrella that was like non-binary and underneath it - and keep in mind, non-binary is considered a subset of transgenderism - but under the non-binary umbrella was literally just gender non-conformity. So gender non-conforming kids, adults they're now considered transgender according to this new ideology.

Andrew: But they're absolutely not. I mean, I was a gender non-conforming child. I didn't play football, I didn't I preferred hanging out with girls than boys. It's absolutely not the case that that makes you trans.

Colin: This has been a really big definitional shift that I think a lot of people have not really caught up to. I mean, I'm the same way. I'm straight man, but I'm certainly not like a Randy "Macho Man" Savage type of masculine character. I think a day spent bottle feeding kittens sounds like a nice day for me.

So by their definitions, I would be considered non-binary or gender fluid or something like that. And this is something we need to really push back on. It's one thing to just re-imagine what it means to be trans in these cases, you know, what's the harm of kids just identifying this way. Well, there is a whole medical apparatus that is set up around people who are identifying as trans and what it means to be gender dysphoric. And so if we're letting gender non-conforming kids be trans, if we're defining them as as being trans, literally this opens the door to medicalization, it medicalizes gender non-conformity, and the medical institutions really need to catch up to this change in definition. Because it's, I believe, it's causing a lot of harm, and it's contributing to this insane medical scandal that's going on right now.

==

https://www.hrc.org/resources/glossary-of-terms

Transgender | An umbrella term for people whose gender identity and/or expression is different from cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, private property and a market economy.

--

“Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” [..] “As mentioned earlier, critical race scholars are discontented with liberalism as a framework for addressing America’s racial problems. Many liberals believe in color blindness and neutral principles of constitutional law. They believe in equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations.”

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Feb 17, 2021

What Do we Mean by “Critical Social Justice”?

Counterweight, while being consistently opposed to all authoritarian attempts to curtail freedom of belief and expression and/or enforce adherence to any ideology or belief system, is specifically geared towards helping people who are having Critical Social Justice (CSJ) beliefs forced upon them. This is because we operate primarily in the Western world where these ideas are a dominant discourse, a discourse which carries much prestige and power. They are thus difficult to resist by the general population without incurring material or social penalties. Material penalties include disciplinary action in employment while social penalties accrue from being misunderstood to oppose genuine social justice in the form of racial, sexual and LGBT equality. Both of these potential risks deter people from criticising the ideas because they simply cannot afford to lose their job and/or because they abhor bigotries like racism, so being believed to support them is psychologically unendurable.

But what do we mean precisely by “Critical Social Justice?” And is it really a clear and useful term? Some people have criticised our use of it. This can be because they support or are sympathetic to the ideas underlying CSJ and think that to use the term as a kind of shorthand for a variety of theories and activisms acting in the alleged interests of a variety of marginalised groups is overly dismissive of a vast body of thought that merits more careful consideration. For other people, the problem is that while they share our concerns about this scholarship, activism or worldview, they believe the term “Critical Social Justice” to be too unwieldy and potentially daunting to those without an academic background in the theories. They suggest that other terms for the same phenomenon like “Wokeism” are more graspable and immediately recognisable to the average person. In short, our usage of the term “Critical Social Justice” is criticised both for being too simplistic and for being too complicated by differently motivated critics! This essay explains and defends our use of the term.

To those who say we are reducing a vast range of scholarship to a simplistic term in order to dismiss it, we would argue that we are not. We are not criticising all or even most of the scholarship that focuses on issues of social justice. Some of it is very good. Nor are we criticising everything that has been called “critical theory” in the intellectual history of the last century. We are criticising a very specific, current approach to issues of social justice that are referred to as “critical” approaches by people who are using them and defining them in simplistic terms right now. This will be demonstrated below.

To those who say we are using unnecessarily academic language that will alienate non-academics or that simply lacks the needed “punch” to inspire people to oppose it, we would argue that there is value in specificity. The word “woke” is both useful and valid since it originated with activists themselves who use the African-American Vernacular English word to describe being able to see systems of oppression that are invisible to most people but particularly to the privileged. However, it is also ambiguous and applied far too broadly by some of the “anti-Woke.” Despite having criticised these ideas for many years and written a book about it, I myself am frequently accused of being “woke” for doing things like voting Labour, not being a fan of Trump, thinking racism still exists and is still bad and for believing that we can care about protecting women’s spaces and sports and about the social acceptance of trans people at the same time.

Allow me, then, to explain what we mean by “Critical Social Justice” and how this differs from liberal approaches to issues of social justice and why we advocate for the latter. Those of you who only want a brief overview can just read the first part while those who are interested in the more specific usages of terms like “critical”, “Critical Social Justice”, etc. by the scholars who work with them and my discussion of the problems I see with them can read the second part too.

What is Critical Social Justice and How Does it Differ from Liberalism?

Critical Social Justice (CSJ) is a specific theoretical approach to addressing issues of prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of characteristics like race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, dis/ability and body size. It has some of its intellectual ancestry in Marxist thought and the concept of “critical consciousness” (that is, becoming aware of oppressive power systems – note the similarity with “woke”) but more from postmodern concepts of knowledge, power and discourses. CSJ holds that knowledge is not objective but is culturally constructed to maintain oppressive power systems. This is believed to be achieved primarily by certain kinds of knowledge being legitimised by powerful forces in society, then being accepted by everyone and perpetuated by ways of talking about things – discourses.

These oppressive power systems believed to exist and permeate everything are called things like white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity (assuming that most people are heterosexual), cisnormativity (assuming that people are men or women depending on their reproductive systems), ableism and fatphobia. However, it is believed, most of us cannot see these oppressive discourses and systems because they are just the water we swim in. The marginalised have a greater ability to see them and so have a greater competence to define them and point them out. Knowledge is thus tied to identity and one’s perceived position in society in relation to power – often referred to as “positionality.”

The 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. They believe that in this way society can be revolutionised and social justice achieved provided the rest of us accept our moral imperative to pay attention to and accept their interpretations. This is often referred to as “doing the work” or simply “educating yourself.” Any scepticism of these interpretations is assumed to be an attempt to preserve one’s own privilege if one is of a group perceived to be privileged or, if one is not a member of a privileged group, it is seen as evidence of one having internalised the oppressive power system.

Liberalism is the approach to achieving social justice that preceded the CSJ approach and is still the one most commonly held by the general public. (Please note that the “liberalism” described here is meant in the philosophical sense and not in the political sense often used in the United States as interchangeable with “leftism.”) Philosophical liberals are focused on freedom, individuality and equality of opportunity. They primarily want every individual to be able to pursue their own goals and fulfilment provided this does not infringe on anybody else’s pursuit of the same. Liberals do not usually deny the existence of dominant cultural narratives although they might disagree about what they are with CSJ adherents. For example, CSJ adherents believe society to still be dominated by white supremacist and patriarchal discourses and themselves to be a radical movement pushing back against such systems of oppression. Liberals are more likely to think that while bigoted attitudes certainly still exist and some normative assumptions also exist that need addressing, racism and sexism are widely regarded negatively by society. They may even think that CSJ itself is a dominant narrative with prejudiced assumptions that has significant social influence and needs pushing back.

Liberals usually accept that many different ways of talking about things (discourses) exist in society and believe that individuals have the agency and free will to evaluate and reject or accept these ideas. This is often referred to as the ‘marketplace of ideas’ model and credited for the cultural changes that have occurred over the last 70 years or so in which cultural attitudes towards race, homosexuality and gender roles have become much more liberal. Liberals tend to think less in terms of revolution and more in terms of reform. For example, they are likely to believe that secular, liberal democracies are generally good frameworks but that they have failed to extend all their benefits to all people equally and these barriers must be removed. Enabling women and racial minorities to access all professions and be paid equally and enabling same-sex couples to marry are liberal reformist approaches.

Therefore, while the CSJ approach advocates for identity politics, liberals advocate for removing social significance from identity – that is, eradicating the idea that one’s race, sex or sexuality tells us anything about anybody’s abilities, morals or roles in society. While the CSJ approach argues that knowledge is relative, positional and tied to identity, liberals argue that knowledge is objective (at least in principle although we should never be too sure of having obtained it) and individuals of any identity may access it, although experiences and perceptions may vary. Where the CSJ approach insists we are all socialised into the acceptance of certain discourses and therefore language must be closely scrutinised and policed to dismantle oppressive power systems, liberals believe that culture has influence but that individuals have agency and can use language to argue for and against ideas and that bad ideas (including bigoted ones) are best overcome by better ideas.

Ultimately, then, Critical Social Justice and liberal social justice are opposed in many ways in their approach but ultimately seek the same outcome – a just society in which nobody is discriminated against due to their race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, religious or cultural background, physical ability or weight.

What does the Critical Social Justice Scholarship say?

Many people associate the word “critical” with critical thinking which is generally understood to mean the examination of an argument or claim in the light of reason and evidence rather than accepting it uncritically. This is not what is meant in terms of Critical Social Justice. In her 2017 paper ‘Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes’, Alison Bailey, a professor of philosophy, explains the difference between critical thinking and critical pedagogy (a teaching method). First, she shows us the ways in which these things are similar, though:

Philosophers of education have long made the distinction between critical thinking and critical pedagogy. Both literatures appeal to the value of being “critical” in the sense that instructors should cultivate in students a more cautious approach to accepting common beliefs at face value. Both traditions share the concern that learners generally lack the ability to spot inaccurate, misleading, incomplete, or blatantly false claims. They also share a sense that learning a particular set of critical skills has a corrective, humanizing, and liberatory effect.

So far, so good. But then Bailey starts to show us the differences:

The traditions, however, part ways over their definition of “critical.” Nicholas C. Burbules and Rupert Berk’s comparison of the traditions provides a useful background for my discussion in the next section. The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy.

The term “epistemic” refers to the ways in which we decide what counts as true knowledge, as Bailey goes on to explain:

To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life… the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living” (Burbules and Berk 1999, 46). In this tradition sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly.

Yes, this is what is generally understood by critical thinking. When someone tries to employ critical thinking, they are essentially looking for flaws of reasoning or unevidenced claims or unwarranted assumptions being made due to an ideologically biased interpretation of a situation. The value of critical thinking is understood to be that it helps us to discover what is true or what is morally right. Critical thinking is central to the liberal conception of the marketplace of ideas in which people evaluate certain ideas before ‘buying’ into any of them. While every individual will have their own biases that limit their ability to impartially examine ideas for their merits, the expectation is that they should try to do so and to make reasoned and evidenced arguments for their own position. Meanwhile, people with an opposing view will do the same for their position and this back and forth will lead to some ideas winning out over others in public consensus. Critical pedagogy, Bailey explains, is something quite different:

Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions rooted in the neo-Marxian literature on critical theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Here, the critical learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities [emphasis mine].

So, “Critical” in this neo-Marxist sense is not about discovering what is true but about uncovering power dynamics. As explained above, ‘truth’ is considered to be a social construct created in the service of power. Therefore, critical pedagogy is looking for the oppressive power dynamics that are assumed to underlie all claims of truth in order to dismantle them. This is a political endeavour aimed at empowering this neo-Marxist concept of social justice and challenging critical thinking. Bailey is explicit about this purpose of critical pedagogy:

Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world. This is the first step toward resisting and transforming social injustices. By interrogating the politics of knowledge-production, this tradition also calls into question the uses of the accepted critical-thinking toolkit to determine epistemic adequacy.

Kiaras Gharabaghi and Ben Anderson-Nathe argue similarly for a political understanding of “critical” in their 2017 paper ‘The need for critical scholarship’, saying:

Critical scholarship is less an approach and more an invitation; it is a way of thinking about research as a form of resistance. While resistance is usually associated with the politics of the day, with tangible forms of oppression or with nuanced forms of manipulation, we believe that we must balance the production of the orthodoxy with resistance to system-preserving truths.

We see here the belief that oppressive systems of power are what are accepted as truth and thus that this requires resistance by default. Gharabaghi and Anderson-Nathe argue not for the critical thinking that evaluates arguments on their merits in order to reach conclusions but to begin with the assumption that power imbalances underlie the whole process of thinking and that to think this way is to be “critical”:

And so we invite you to submit your scholarship that is critical not in its conclusions but in its starting points: Is attachment really the framework in which we must see the entire life form of youth? Is trauma a universal concept? Does resilience explain something in particular or is it a way of identifying the economic, social, and cultural processes that re-produce a colonial, white, heterosexist, ableist social order? How do binary constructs of ways of being and of living impact on the full diversity of humanity? Are we either male or female? Are we racialized or white? Are we religious or atheist? Are we rich or poor? Are we perpetrator or victim?

Like Bailey, Gharabaghi and Anderson-Nathe reject the idea of objective knowledge or objective truth but regard knowledge as a social construct which is tied to a person’s identity and their position in society:

Critical scholarship can perhaps be characterized in another way. It is a way of approaching knowledge that is inherently not certain, always fluid, rooted in the lived experiences of people with multiplicity of life-contexts and informed by dialogue, relationship, and connection with those who have a stake in the knowledge being generated. Critical research is not out to create truth; it aims to consider the moment and looks forward to a way of seeing that moment in ways we could not have imagined. Finally, it invites into the research process an active identification of and engagement with power, with the social systems and structures, ideologies and paradigms that uphold the status quo.

The “critical” idea, then, has its roots in Marxism. Marx himself advocated the “ruthless criticism of all that exists.” However, Marx and traditional Marxists believed and continue to believe in objective truth and in science as the best method for obtaining knowledge. However, the neo-Marxists or post-Marxists and then the postmodernists who turned their attention to culture and the relation between power, knowledge and language became radically sceptical of the ability to obtain objective knowledge. They also moved increasingly from critiques of economics and class to those of identity – race, gender, sexuality etc. This move occurred in academia. An excellent source for following this development is The Critical Turn in Education: From Marxist Critique to Poststructuralist Feminism to Critical Theories of Race (2016) by Isaac Gottesman, in which he says:

After the fall of the New Left arose a new left, an Academic Left. For many of these young scholars, Marxist thought, and particularly what some refer to as Western Marxism or neo-Marxism, and what I will refer to as the critical Marxist tradition, was an intellectual anchor. As participants in the radical politics of the sixties entered graduate school and moved into faculty positions and started publishing, the critical turn began to change scholarship throughout the humanities and social sciences. The field of education was no exception.

The turn to critical Marxist thought is a defining moment in the past 40 years of educational scholarship, especially for educational scholars who identify as part of the political left. It introduced the ideas and vocabulary that continue to frame most conversations in the field about social justice, such as hegemony, ideology, consciousness, praxis, and most importantly, the word ‘critical’ itself, which has become ubiquitous as a descriptor for left educational scholarship.

“Hegemony” refers to the dominance believed to be held by powerful groups or sets of ideas over all others while “ideology” refers to those ideas and is usually used negatively. “Consciousness” refers to one’s understanding of one’s position in the world as part of a social class and in Marxist thought it can be true or false depending on whether it tallies with Marxist ideas of class consciousness or not. The working class were held to have a false consciousness if they did not recognise their own exploitation. Within cultural and identity studies and related activism, the idea of a false consciousness remains but it is more often applied to the privileged. They are believed to be unable to see their privileged positions unless they develop critical consciousness or, more colloquially, become “woke.” “Praxis” refers to putting these theories into practice. Says Gottesman:

Initially sequestered in curriculum studies and sociology of education, today critical scholarship is frequently published in the journals of some of the field’s most historically conservative areas, such as educational administration and science education. The critical turn radicalized the field.

Indeed. One could even quite reasonably argue that this ideology has become “hegemonic”. The problem of left-wing bias in the academy has been pointed out repeatedly as a problem for knowledge production even by those of us who are left-wing ourselves. A marketplace of ideas cannot work to advance knowledge and make moral progress if all its wares are rooted in the same ideas. Gottesman acknowledges the “critical Marxist tradition” to have more recently become mixed with other identity-based theories:

Since its beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s, critical educational scholarship has also pushed far beyond the Marxist tradition and its focus on political economy and social class. Although the critical Marxist tradition remains a foundation for much of the work that followed, critical educational scholars now engage a range of intellectual and political traditions that help us better understand culture and identity, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, constructions of ability, ecological crisis, and their myriad intersections.

These theories have much more to do with postmodern concepts of knowledge, power and language to the extent that James Lindsay and I have referred to them as “applied postmodernism.” But do these newer intellectual and political traditions really help us better understand culture and identity or is there still value in exploring them via a diverse range of viewpoints? Liberals would certainly argue that there is and always will be value in political and intellectual diversity and in living within a pluralistic liberal culture that positively encourages the free exchange of ideas and maintains an expectation that they will be presented with reasoned argument and evidence. Unfortunately, the most recent incarnation of this critical tradition is not open to dialectic or the marketplace of ideas. Nor does it have much confidence in individuals’ ability to evaluate and reject or accept ideas. It has rapidly become a dogma with clearly spelt out tenets.

The best example of this is to be found in the section of Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo’s Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (2017). I think a look at the section entitled “What Is Critical Social Justice?” should be enough to convince critics that it is not we who are being reductionist about what it is and how it works but the purveyors of it. Sensoy and DiAngelo also make it very clear that Critical Social Justice is something very different from what most people understand as social justice, which remains mostly liberal. It is particularly important for liberals to understand this distinction. Sensoy and DiAngelo write:

While some scholars and activists prefer to use the term social justice in order to reclaim its true commitments, in this book we prefer the term critical social justice. We do so in order to distinguish our standpoint on social justice from mainstream standpoints.

They define the mainstream standpoint on social justice in this way:

Most people have a working definition of social justice; it is commonly understood as the principles of “fairness” and “equality” for all people and respect for their basic human rights. Most people would say that they value these principles.

Indeed, they would. This is liberal humanism. However, Critical Social Justice is not about fairness and equality for all people but a very specific political theory. Sensoy and DiAngelo write:

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

That is, Critical Social Justice is not just an acceptance that bigoted attitudes and inequalities continue to exist, and that society still has work to do to overcome that, but a firm belief that systems of oppressive power are deeply embedded in the very fabric of society in ways that can only be revealed by “critical” and not liberal approaches to social justice.

As discussed above, liberal opposition to Critical Social Justice ought not to be equated with the wholesale rejection of social justice scholarship. Much of this scholarship includes sound empirical sociological research and consistently liberal ethics. Instead, it is the particular “critical” approach that is antithetical to liberalism. Sensoy and DiAngelo state this “critical” approach explicitly and then detail its principles:

The definition we apply is rooted in a critical theoretical approach. While this approach refers to a broad range of fields, there are some important shared principles:

• All people are individuals, but they are also members of social groups. • These social groups are valued unequally in society. • Social groups that are valued more highly have greater access to the resources of a society. • Social injustice is real, exists today, and results in unequal access to resources between groups of people. • Those who claim to be for social justice must be engaged in self-reflection about their own socialization into these groups (their “positionality”) and must strategically act from that awareness in ways that challenge social injustice.

From this, we see that Sensoy and DiAngelo are referring to identity groups when they speak of “social groups.” They posit a simplistic model of society in which people are divided by their race, sex, class, sexuality and ability and then ranked and allocated certain resources depending on their identity. This goes against empirical evidence which paints a much more complex picture of society than a straightforward white supremacist, patriarchal, homophobic, ableist system in which people can plot their “positionality” by their identity and expect consistent results from it. We know, for example, that the most successful demographics in society are not white but that this does not mean racism has disappeared and never impacts people’s life outcomes. Believing that such a simple framework can be used to understand society and to further social justice is unlikely to be successful. Further, by assuming that all people are socialised into certain beliefs due to their identity they end up placing more social significance on immutable characteristics rather than less. Thus, Critical Theory contributes to the creation of the very social structures it claims to seek to challenge, inadvertently disempowering the people it seeks to empower. Liberals generally reject this reductionist worldview and seek to overcome racism, sexism and homophobia by consistently objecting to anybody’s worth being evaluated by their race, sex or sexuality and seeking empirical evidence of discrimination and effective ways to overcome it.

The authors go on to say that, based on these principles, a person engaged in critical social justice practice must be able to:

“Recognize that relations of unequal social power are constantly being enacted at both the micro (individual) and macro (structural) levels.”

Are they, though? Is there reason to believe that identity-based power dynamics are constantly in play in consistent ways in every interaction and every system in society? Isn’t reality a bit more complicated than this? Is it possible that many if not most people actually go about their lives seeing others as individuals rather than as identity-based pawns positioned on a power grid? Sensoy and DiAngelo also state that we must:

“Understand our own positions within these relations of unequal power.”

There is an unwarranted certainty in the claim that there are identity-based relations of unequal power that needs to be “understood” – that is, accepted to be true. Must I “understand” that every time I interact with a man, he has more power than me and is exercising it against me and that every time I interact with a non-white person, I have more power than them and am exercising it against them? Is it that most people fail to “understand” this or is it that most humans who regularly interact with a variety of other humans don’t find it to be true? Another of their suggestions:

“Think critically about knowledge; what we know and how we know it.”

Yes, absolutely. This includes thinking critically about the knowledge the critical theorists claim to have and how they claim to know it and being able to disagree with it. Unfortunately, according to DiAngelo, disagreeing with this conception of the world (as well as staying quiet or going away) cannot be a legitimate alternative viewpoint about how society works but a symptom of “white fragility”. White fragility occurs whenever white people disagree with and object to the claim that they are inherently racist. Sensoy and DiAngelo conclude that we should:

“Act on all of the above in service of a more socially just society.”

Unfortunately, I think acting on all of the above in the service of a more socially just society requires acting against Critical Social Justice and in the service of liberal social justice. It is only within a liberal framework that multiple viewpoints on social justice can exist and be argued for. It is only within the liberal marketplace of ideas that people’s arguments can be separated from their identities, allowing anybody to subscribe to any viewpoint and challenge any viewpoint and not be confined to the one presumptuously deemed to be appropriate for their race, sex or sexuality. It was liberalism that convinced society that women and racial and sexual minorities were individuals with their own minds and voices and in possession of exactly the same moral right to access everything society had to offer (including the full range of ideas). It is this liberal concept of social justice, with its extraordinary record of achievement, that we must defend and further.

Helen Pluckrose is the Founder of Counterweight, Editor of Areo and co-author of Cynical Theories. She is a liberal humanist.

==