Psychologizing SJT's
An Annoying Habit
Earlier (https://fakenous.net/?p=1354), I hypothesized that a good part of what motivates Social Justice Warriors (SJW's) is the desire to preserve the particular social group they belong to, and to acquire status within that group.
This is a very annoying and divisive kind of claim to advance, because it does not actually engage with the SJWs' theories as theories. It ignores the question of the truth of those theories and ignores the reasons that SJW's themselves would offer for their ideas. It might also be taken as a personal attack. (Not necessarily, though; it's not necessarily bad to try to preserve one's group or increase one's status.)
In this post, I won't correct these problems; I'm just going to make things worse. I'm not going to argue the case for or against the 'Social Justice' ideology. I'm not doing that because I have so little buy-in to that worldview on its face that it just isn't interesting to me to talk about. (It's like why I would not partake of a debate about whether the Earth is flat. It isn't a live issue to me, and I wouldn't expect to learn anything from thinking about it.)
So if you want to know whether the Social Justice ideology is true, don't read this. Also, if you are an SJW, you probably won't get anything out of this.
But the psychological/sociological analysis of the movement is of some interest to me. So, I'm going to try to explain why I think that SJW's are doing the things I say they're doing. This won't convince any SJW's, but it might be interesting to others.
SJT's
Background: SJW's can be divided into two categories (with possible overlap, obviously): Social Justice Activists (SJA's), and Social Justice Theorists (SJT's). The former are political activists. The latter are people who devote a lot of time, often a whole career, to theorizing about "social justice" from a particular ideological perspective, one focused on race, sex, and other 'identity' categories, 'systems of oppression', &c.
This post is particularly about SJT's. I think SJT's are largely engaged in
(i) working to preserve a social group (the 'social justice subculture', if you will), and
(ii) promoting their own social status within that group.
Those aren't the only things they are doing, but I think those things are a large part of what they are doing. (So, for example, they are not merely trying to understand reality or to improve the larger society.)
Evidence
1. General implausibility
Of course, a significant part of why I think SJT's are doing these things is that I just find their ideology extremely implausible in various ways. (But if you don't agree with this, there is no quick way that I could expect to convince you.) Some of the things they find oppressive or offensive I find it very hard to see as creating a major problem for someone who wasn't looking to feel oppressed or offended. So, that naturally makes me want to look for other things they are doing, besides trying to describe reality.
2. Preaching to the choir
If you look at SJT writings (which I've looked at some of), you'll notice that they tend to presuppose a far-left, identity-politics ideology. They almost never give arguments that could be expected to appeal to a conservative, a libertarian, a moderate, a reasonable undecided person, or even a leftist of a different variety.
(It's not impossible to defend a point of your ideology in a way that could appeal to reasonable people who don't initially share that ideology. See, e.g., my arguments on gun control, immigration, and drug prohibition.)
This could be explained by the hypothesis that their intended audience is other committed SJT's (surely that is their actual audience), not people with different views. This, in turn, could be explained if they are doing the things I say (preserving the social group and gaining status within it) -- then it makes perfect sense that they would mainly be talking to their own group. It is much harder to understand if they are trying to improve the larger society.
3. Linguistic style
A second feature of SJT writings that will probably jump out at you immediately (if you're not an SJT) is how hard they are to understand. They are often filled with undefined, specialized jargon, vague abstractions, and otherwise confusing sentences.
From Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet: "An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet — the relations of the known and unknown, the explicit and the unexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition — have the potential for being peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts more generally. It has felt throughout this work as though the density of their social meaning lends any speech act concerning these issues — and the outlines of that ‘concern’ it turns out are broad indeed — the exaggerated propulsiveness of wearing flippers in a swimming pool: the force of various rhetorical effects has seemed uniquely difficult to calibrate."
One hypothesis is that the linguistic style is intentionally exclusionary: they are specifically trying to keep outsiders from hearing or adding to their conversation. I know it works on me: if I'm looking for a non-libertarian article to read and possibly respond to, I'm not going to pick one that I have to spend five hours just trying to understand. And so the insiders are able to maintain an insular conversation with each other.
But, whether or not SJT's are actively trying to discourage readers, they certainly are not trying to encourage outsiders to engage with them. Again, this makes sense if their purposes are as I suggest.
4. Rejecting objectivity
There's a pretty good overlap between far-left theorists (including SJT's) and people who criticize ideals of objectivity and rationality.
I think rationality and objectivity are necessary if one wants to benefit society. However, they are not needed -- indeed, they are a hindrance -- if one's aim is to preserve one's preferred ideology regardless of the truth, or to signal one's loyalty to a social group. I also think these facts are readily available to almost any smart, reflective person. So, if a person is trying to undermine objectivity and rationality, that's evidence that their goals are more along the lines of ideology-defense and affiliation-signaling than benefitting society.
5. Inconsistent pattern of concern
Some of the pattern of concern of SJT's is hard to reconcile with their stated values. For instance, ending patriarchy and oppression of women is a key SJT value. But then one would think that the treatment of women in the Islamic world would be a central focus of their concern, much more so than the (vastly better) treatment of women in the West.
Another key SJT value is diversity, especially in education. It is said that we need affirmative action in the academy so that students can be exposed to the different perspectives of people who are very different from the students. But then one would think that SJT's would especially favor affirmative action for people with a variety of different ideologies.
One would also think they would especially favor affirmative action for immigrants. E.g., black people from Africa would be more favored than American blacks, and much more than middle class American blacks.
One would also think SJT's would favor affirmative action for Asians, at least in those areas where Asians are underrepresented, such as philosophy.
None of these things is the case. I think this sort of thing calls into question whether their main goal is really to promote the values that they profess.
6. Assumptions about SJW status hierarchy
I'm assuming here that there is a social status hierarchy in the woke culture, that people who identify with that culture want higher status, and that status is tied to claimed oppression and claimed concern about others' oppression. Is there independent evidence of these assumptions?
There have been some interesting cases of people making false claims of SJ-related oppression (being oppressed because of one's identity group). For instance, the Jussie Smollett case, or the Rolling Stone rape case. So it's clearly not just right-wing ideologues who think SJW's have a status hierarchy tied to oppression; actual SJW's (or aspiring SJW's) perceive that hierarchy and try to gain position in it.
There are also cases of people publicly expressing outrage with dubious sincerity. For instance, in the Rebecca Tuvel case, some people signed the petition, then later, after it appeared that the profession was not getting behind it, wanted their names removed from it. In some cases, we see people expressing outrage about a book, article, or speaker, without having read the allegedly outrage-inspiring texts. I would cite Charles Murray and Noah Carl here.
Granted, people vary a lot in their emotional reactions, so there may be many people who feel genuine outrage at things that do not bother me. But I just find it hard to credit outrage at an article one has not read, or outrage that evaporates when one learns that other people are not getting on the bandwagon.
All of this makes sense, however, if people are trying to gain status in an ideologically-defined subculture. Now, most of these are not SJ theorists per se. But it is relevant to note that there is this kind of status hierarchy that people are trying to climb.
By the way, I found some of the discourse in the Democratic Primary Debates striking. Candidates tried to score points by pointing to their being female or of a minority race. Some tried to discredit others by pointing to the others' wealth. Quite odd, on its face. But they were trying to get status with the SJW base. (This is compatible with their really thinking that white men are bad and wealthy people are bad.)
7. Psychological mechanisms
The basic psychological mechanisms I'm appealing to are ones that I think we have independent knowledge of. We already know about Groupthink, which happens when a group is too ideologically uniform. There is then a tendency for group members to publicly take increasingly extreme and unreasonable positions. Explanation: they are trying to outdo each other in manifestations of loyalty to the group's ideology.
I think we also already know, in general, that human social groups, especially ones that provide a sense of meaning and purpose (like religions, cultures, and ideologies) don't like to disband.
We know that a person's ideology (including religions and political ideologies) can be very emotionally important to a person, and leaving it can be extremely hard. I have not experienced this, but I have been told this by people who have. The famous right-wing ideologue, David Horowitz, was once a communist. He describes how it was extremely emotionally difficult to leave that ideology, which he had to do after he learned about the Soviet atrocities. Luckily for him, he found another ideology to fervently devote himself to.
So, if you have an ideologically defined social group, it makes sense that there would be people concerned about protecting the ideology. And I don't just mean rationally defending it from fallacious objections because you are concerned about the truth. I mean there would be a motivation to defend it from any criticism, to insulate it from falsification.
How SJT's Will Respond
As I say, I don't think many SJT's will find the above convincing. Maybe they'll flat-out deny the factual claims ("No, we don't have any status hierarchy. I don't know why you would think that." "No, there's nothing obscure about our writing; I have no idea what you're talking about.") Anyway, I'm sure they'll say they aren't trying to climb a status hierarchy or defend the ideology from being tested by evidence.
But their saying that won't be significant evidence that I'm wrong, because that's what we would expect them to say if they are in fact doing those things. Of course if you're trying to climb the hierarchy and protect the ideology, then you'd want to insist that the ideology is just true and that you're only motivated by social justice.
And by the way, no, this doesn't mean that I'm insulating my own view from falsification (cuz I know some people are about to say that). I'm not saying nothing would be evidence against my claims. I'm saying specifically that the disagreement of SJT's won't be strong evidence against my claims.