From 2018:
Thinking Critically About Social Justice
"The U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released a memo written by an attorney, Jayme Sophir, which determined that Google did not violate United States federal law when it fired James Damore. Sophir reasoned that references to psychometric literature on sex differences in personality were “discriminatory and constitute sexual harassment,” and on these grounds, Damore’s firing was justified. Following the release of the NLRB memo, a number of scientists on Twitter expressed alarm at the justifications provided within the memo, which appeared to relegate the discussion of sex differences outside the realm of constitutionally protected speech...
Damore, together with another former Google engineer, filed a class action lawsuit against the company alleging an institutionalised culture of harassment towards people with conservative or libertarian political views. Their complaint is eye-opening. Damore and Gudeman lay out in detail the many ways in which this harassment occurs: a pervasive environment of disparaging jokes and demeaning language amongst colleagues; a climate of bullying, mocking, and personal attacks from superiors and others in power; an open endorsement by superiors of bullying (referred to internally as social pecking); an unwillingness by superiors and administrators to act upon threats of violence; the use of incentive programmes to promote and celebrate harassment; a set of training programmes that foment hostility through emotionalised and unnuanced company-endorsed lectures; and a number of other mechanisms that disincentivise or punish political expression, which in Damore and Gudeman’s case eventually led to their dismissals.
Google is far from the only Silicon Valley company where this occurs. A recent survey suggests the vast majority of conservative and libertarian employees at Silicon Valley companies are hesitant of being themselves at work, and that all but the very liberal feel less comfortable expressing their political views in the aftermath of Damore’s very public dismissal. Some of the responses were remarkable. One libertarian respondent claimed there’s a “concerted purge of conservative employees at Apple.” A conservative respondent experienced colleagues openly mocking conservatives and had to sit through “cruel mockery of my home state while others nodded and laughed along.” A Google employee claimed to have lost multiple talented colleagues who resigned rather than continue in “an increasingly extreme, narrow-minded, and regressive environment.”
Silicon Valley has historically had a reputation for being quite libertarian, but it appears to be becoming increasingly intolerant towards conservatives and even libertarians..
A similar trend seems to be taking place in other parts of society as well...
What has caused this rapid cultural shift? Haidt suggests it’s a combination of ideas that have been developing in left-leaning academic fields for a long time with recent societal shifts that have made these ideas more attractive or powerful to university students, including a more hands-on parenting style and the invention of social media. The ideas, as Haidt notes are: “organised around victims of oppression, it’s a vertical metaphor of privileged and oppressor people, and victims. This idea that everything is power.”
The methodology underpinning much of the social justice perspective is known as critical theory, which draws heavily on German philosopher Karl Marx’s notion of ideology...
Theory, they suggested, always serves the interests of certain people; traditional theory, because it is uncritical towards power, automatically serves the powerful, while critical theory, because it unmasks these interests, serves the powerless. All theory is political, they said, and by choosing critical theory over traditional theory one chooses to challenge the status quo, in accordance with Marx’s famous statement: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”Gradually, critical theorists broadened their attention to other forms of oppression—gender, race, and sexual orientation especially—but the methodology remained the same: to identify the hidden and complex ways in which power and oppression permeate society, and then dismantle them...
There’s something missing from the social justice narrative though, demonstrated by the situation in Silicon Valley and those other fields I mentioned: it doesn’t take into account the power and oppression it exerts itself...
Social justice advocates have created a portrayal of themselves as being outside the flow of power; everyone else is exerting power or being oppressed by it, while they are simply observing it, and any power they do exert is selfless and unoppressive...
Take for instance morality. Marx proposed that a society’s morality serves the interests of its ruling class, while purporting to be universal...
An analogous claim can be made of a social justice society, it seems to me. This is most obvious in parts of society where social justice ideology is strongest. In those parts of society, values like equality, liberation, and cosmopolitanism aren’t just treated as values—organisations of society that different people prefer to different degrees—they’re considered moral. Consequently, conflicting values are considered immoral: people who value a more competitive society, or a smaller government, or a stronger national identity, or a tougher culture, or more traditional family structures, or less immigration aren’t just regarded as having different values; they’re regarded as bad people.
This is especially clear in the context of immigration...
People in these areas are afraid to come home at night and are wondering how things could have changed so quickly, yet no one is allowed to talk about it. And when someone does say something, they are met with a wave of sophisticated terminology backed by academic credentials that they have no way of parsing. All they know is something is wrong, but they’re unable to parse the academic discourse, and so they’re effectively shut down. And as conservatives and libertarians become increasingly scarce in academia, academia becomes more and more a tool of power to oppress their values...
Including values in our power analysis makes it clear there can be no such thing as simply removing power, because it takes power to remove power. Consequently, power doesn’t disappear, it redirects...
This isn’t just theoretical speculation. Some of the most explicitly social justice-oriented societies ever to exist were the communist regimes of the 20th century, and they were characterised by tremendous oppression of their citizens. Why—when the explicit aim of these regimes was to liberate their citizens from oppression—did the opposite occur? The answer, surely, is that they made the same mistake contemporary social justice advocates make: not including themselves in the power analysis. (Which is especially questionable when you’re the dictator.)
This means they could send millions of political opponents and dissenters to prison camps, have a population living in terror of a secret police ready to pounce on any word deemed subversive, erect walls manned by armed guards to prevent people from leaving, yet consider themselves liberators for having reduced class differences...
The irony of doing a proper power analysis—not the selective power analysis of social justice ideology, but a complete one—is that you end up with something not that far from the Hobbesian view of human nature that formed the foundation of classical liberal thought, and which social justice advocates dislike...
A common theme is that they are critical, while other people accept things as they are. Some writers have even suggested that social justice advocates are the true inheritors of the Socratic approach to philosophy and/or of Enlightenment thinking.
This confuses two types of criticality. It’s certainly true that social justice advocates are highly critical, but this is not what distinguished the Socratic approach or Enlightenment thought from previous traditions. In fact, the most critical people are usually religious people, especially fundamentalist religious people. Why? Because they have an explicit norm, such as The Bible, to which they can compare everything and criticise whatever doesn’t match up. It’s not criticality that distinguishes Socratic and Enlightenment methodology from religious tradition, it’s meta-criticality: the process of continually digging up one’s assumptions and methods and questioning them, potentially indefinitely. In religion, especially fundamentalist religion, certain beliefs are beyond question; they are sacred and must if necessary be taken on faith. This is what Socratic and Enlightenment thought diverged from, regarding nothing as sacred and treating all beliefs and methods as provisional.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach, of course. Explicitly declaring one’s own beliefs provisional reduces the force of their criticism of society or other people’s beliefs, which is part of why religions can be so powerful; they offer certainty and their adherents can criticise everything around them with confidence. Social justice ideology is far more like this than like the Socratic or Enlightenment methodology. Its advocates are highly critical of society and other people’s beliefs, but they mostly reject meta-criticality, often going so far as to shut down anyone who criticises their beliefs...
As the failures of the many 20th century communist regimes
showed all too clearly, there are few things more dangerous than trying
to dismantle power structures while simultaneously having major gaps in
the framework through which power is identified. It’s a recipe for
disaster."
