The Social Justice Litmus Test

 

The BLM protest last Sunday in Wellington had a highly intelligent and formidable speaker.   She laid into the system and the structures of power.  When you hear those words one knows that the dead hand of a wearisome ideology of critical theory, neo-Marxism is present.  The dialectical theory of Hegel, and the unfortunate inheritance from Plato, lives on in the simplistic mechanical calculus which reduces life to the trite oppressor/oppressed paradigm which concludes with its predicted premise.

Social Justice Warriors might be better advised to dump the tower of Babel and look at the matter with an authentic voice.   I recall once seeing Dun Mihaka betrayed by stumbling over Marx’s dialectical materialism theory when it would have been better to hear what he had to say and propose from lived and factual experience.

It is a tower of babel because anyone who has read postmodernist texts and neo-Marxist theory knows that first, it is a jumble of jargon, hence the duping of periodicals with bogus articles and secondly the writing is endlessly loaded with citations of names: Marcuse, Horkheimer, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Laclau and Foucault.  The names and theory, rather than empirical data,  are used as authorities and the more names the more the authority.    

Laclau and Mouffe were clear that  modification was required to “the notion of class struggle, to be able to deal with the new political subjects – women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements etc – of a clearly anti-capitalist character, but whose identity is not constructed around specific ‘class interests’”…” Political struggle in this era must involve other groups.”  ( D Murray The Madness of Crowds 2018, p 58-59).  The mental dysphoria in Babel is increased and compounded by the drones of intersectionality.

The death blow to this philosophy has been effected by Stephen Hicks and especially by the feminist writer, the erudite  Camille Paglia,  in her article ‘Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf’, in  Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1991),  pp. 139-212.  As Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies,  had labelled Hegel an intellectual charlatan, Paglia does the same for Foucault.

To sidestep the heavy intellectual lifting and labour a litmus test on social Justice warriors is proposed.   This weeds out the power-hungry and the narcissistic from those who seek human decency and dignity and kosmopolitiea.   Seeking justice which is about means is a bona fide pursuit and a social good, and not an exclusive secular-religious mission to one iconographic issue. 

One serious area of discrimination and bigotry where people are grossly disempowered, 'othered' and where discrimination affects every aspect of life: family, housing,  employment (career terminal, particularly if one is a lawyer or other professional), access to medical treatment to legal services and credibility is mental health discrimination.  Occupational/workplace bullying and harassment, and even bereavement grief leading to depression, is captured- if ‘male pale and stale’ (capturing a rights trifecta)  it is even worse.    The litmus paper is applied: The response is a very uncomfortable silence. 

Whither then social justice?    The neo-Marxist view can be turned on its objectives.  If the power structure is overthrown who fills the power vacuum;  if a discipline is decolonised, who and what re colonises it; if the Idealist (in the Platonic sense) chimaera construct patriarchy is disestablished is it replaced by a matriarchy?  One oppressor is changed for another it is not?

The fact of the matter is that reductionist philosophies descending into ever-decreasing circles, and slipping from reality and common sense,  do not grasp the nuances and complexities of human life.  Last week a National  Review article stated: Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. . . . And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”  Solzhenitsyn’s message, [is] that there is virtue in the worst of us and vice in the best, is a reminder that people are morally complex.  So, too, is history."   An aspect of the 18thC needs to be let go and that is Rousseau.  Justice is a problem of us: the system comprises humans.

Having lived in a small “heartland” town one sees clearly- and experiences- the raft of hates, jealousies and resentments at those who are different.  The drive to conformity of opinion, conduct and taste; the petty “village vexations” as Burke called them can have real social and economic consequences.  Ostracism: Being asked to leave town or driven out of town in the light of being different is a local ‘cancel culture’ at work.

This is human beings and human nature  at work.   Recourse to  the “systemic” and “structures” is not needed.  Instead of social justice ‘warriordom’,  tolerance and acceptance of our neighbours is a better starting point.

 

Graham Hill
Nelson,  19 June 2020

Another Book to Read for these Present Times

In addition to George Orwell's 1984 one could add to the culture war's reading list the following book by Bernard Bailyn The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchison  Allen Lane,  1975.

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchison is about  Thomas  Hutchison,  a native-born American who became Chief Justice and then later the last  Governor of pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts.   He ended up in exile in England never to return to his homeland.

Bailyn wrote it after the student riots at Berkeley in the late 1960s, which has informed its content.  My dissertation supervisor at Canterbury, Dr D C Harlan, painted a picture of Bailyn huddled down in his office at Berkeley as the student mobs wandered outside and wondering how he had become the "enemy."

The chapter on 'Law and order and its break down' (think Seattle) and the one titled the Furies are salutary reading. 

It captures everything you need to know for the present madness: lies/spin, fake news; twisting of words, false narratives,  the demise of law and order,  mobs attacking public figures, people afraid to speak out; shaming and attacking people who had a different opinion from the mob; Justices of eh peace afraid to act, and if the authorities took action they were blamed for being oppressive and if they did not take action they were blamed.  The latter is not unlike the MSM Trump scenario.

There is even iconoclasm. Hutchison had to acquiesce in the removal of portraits of   Charles II and James II from the City Hall.

The mob wanted to bring down the existing "structure" and looked for crises to exploit. Additionally, there was the admixture of the mob (who Hutchison said were mostly misinformed and deceived) and its radicals plus business interests. (The US stock market during  the BLM protests has had a series of upward spikes as corporations virtual signal).

Hutchison was a prolific writer on law and politics and much of it unpublished in his lifetime and he sought to obtain a resolution.  Hutchison expresses a  parallel thought to that of  David Hume  (in the latter's History of England on the Puritan revolution of 1642 to 1645)  on passionately held moral opinion, that once held and galvanised by the mob, the state is weakened, law and order is compromised (Czarist Russia was relatively indulgent to its anarchist and revolutionaries)  and the state falls.

Bailyn specifically chose the losing side in the American Revolution to write about.  History is first written by the winners then it is by those who see ‘Whig progress’ and ultimately, history,  Bailyn theorised,  is tragedy.

Hutchison’s experiences of the political crises of 1763 to 1770 are a good comparator to current events in the USA and elsewhere in addition to the 17thC Puritan Revolution in Britain and the exempla exemplorum, the  French Revolution.

Graham Hill
Nelson
22 June 2020.