James Lindsay and Mike Nayna wrote,
to the degree that we can accept that Social Justice is a faith-based program based upon a kind of locally legitimized special revelation, we should feel serious concerns and discomfort about institutionalizing its beliefs in any space that isn’t wholly devoted to them. We should also be quick to be honest about which spaces are and which aren’t. Public institutions like public universities, being public, should be very hesitant to implement Social Justice initiatives. Private institutions, like corporations and private universities, can make their own choices on the matter and accept the benefits and consequences of openly aligning with a faith initiative as they come.
. . .Social Justice, because it is an (applied) postmodern mythological system upon which a moral tribe is built, is not technically a religion but is a kind of faith system. This raises serious questions about how we should deal with its attempts to institutionalize itself in various cultural enterprises—especially education—under the guise of being secular in the broad sense merely because it qualifies in the narrow sense. Most importantly, however, it provides all of us with explicit permission to treat its claims and advances in the same way we would any other faith—say, like Scientology—and to proceed accordingly without the guilt it attempts to foist upon us as a conversion mechanism.
I linked to the essay when it first appeared, but when I recently came across it again I felt it deserved another mention.
It’s so typical of atheists to label something they don’t like as a religion, but by the criteria supplied by the author, the theory of evolution is a religion. In fact, much of “science” is religious. Besides, I seriously doubt any social justice warrior will agree to any of the points the author raises.
I very much oppose the social justice movement. Like radical environmentalism, it’s just a clever way to sneak socialism into academia and make it respectable. But I think the best way to view social justice is as Helmut Schoeck did in “Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior.” Social justice, which is nothing but cover for socialism, is envy elevated to a virtue. Rawls’ definition of justice does the same thing.
Does a person who has been found guilty of stealing $300 stands a lower chance of incarceration in America today than someone found guilty of stealing $300 million?
Yes. People routinely get sizable prison sentences for things like insider trading that aren’t even steeling. Stealing $300 however is a misdemeanor. Almost no one would be incarcerated for petty theft. Maybe u I forget commit it over and over and over again they eventually would, but for a first time offender it would just about never happen. We don’t live in a Victor Hugo novel.
Sorry if I don’t find your answer very informative. I actually chose $300 because that is above the threshold for a felony in my state.
https://media2.mofo.com/documents/190118-insider-trading-2018.pdf
The most relevant quote from above is:
“If you are looking for an SEC insider trading trial in 2018, you will not find one—the SEC tried a grand total of zero insider trading cases in 2018. “
“but by the criteria supplied by the author, the theory of evolution is a religion. In fact, much of “science” is religious.”
No. Those are positive frameworks. The authors were careful to draw the line at moral community, at insisting upon certain normative assertions, and socially enforcing those claims via the Basic Social Rule, “reward cooperators; punish defectors.”
Now, there is such a thing as cliquish teams, soap-opera-like drama, and inappropriate resort to nasty social-enforcement mechanisms that emerge to promote purely positive claims, without normative or political implications, and behaving that way seems to be tragic human nature and happens a lot in academic pursuits. See, e.g., The Nastiest Feud In Science.
But, according to those authors, that’s not enough to be religion, or even religion-like.
Social Justice and environmentalism are religions in development. You just need to consider what is religion. I found the paper below very illuminating. These two “religions” fill the void left by the throwing off of the traditional beliefs. Are how the adherents try to align themselves with the sum that is greater than they.
“Whenever a man knows enough to distinguish the outside world from himself, and tries to act in accordance with this knowledge, he begins to be religious.
“The first element, therefore, in religion is the recognition of the existence of a power not ourselves pervading the universe. And another is the endeavor to put ourselves in harmonious relation with this power. Of course the feeling or affective element is presupposed as coming in between the other two. For without it the endeavor would lack a motive, and could therefore have no existence whatsoever. Every sane man believes, at least, that he is only a fraction of the sum-total of things. He also feels some dependence upon this sum-total, and he is obliged to put himself in some sort of accord with it. This is what [Edward] Caird has condensed into the statement, “A man’s religion is the expression of his ultimate attitude to the universe” (“Evolution of Religion,” Vol. I, p.30).”
What Is Religion?
Author(s): Frank Sargent Hoffman
Source: The North American Review, Vol. 187, No. 627 (Feb., 1908), pp. 231-239
It’s the functional equivalent of a religion, but then so are all conventional moral systems. Society is a cult, and socialization is brainwashing.
The religious impulse is real. it is hard wired. It’s not going away. We can repress any given manifestation, but then it will only express itself by some other channel. And we can do a lot worse than the Abrahamic religions. We may yet find out how much worse.
Buddhists I’ve known seem like pleasant enough people. Good at minding their own business. Sedate.
This is a very ancient philosophical problem and the conversation always ends up in the same place. Men need norms and morals to live together in pleasant, high-functioning civilization, they need to believe they are more than merely arbitrary and provisional choices, but without believing in the premise of divine revelation (or some equivalent metaphysical construct) and the legitimacy of magisterial interpretive authority, there is no way to objectively justify and thus stabilize any particular set of rules. Without something like that, all intellectual attempts at deriving a normative Ought from a positive Is fail, as Hume insisted, and as Arthur Leff famously explained in his “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law”, critiquing mostly Posner’s failed (because futile) attempt to hack away at the same Gordian knot.
Intellectually, the positive-foundations approach leads to Meta-Ethical Moral Nihilism, but this is not stable or compatible with human social psychology, and so some kind of framework of something religious-like in terms of consensual faith in metaphysical constructs, moral community, and social pressures to enforce norms will spontaneously re-emerge, with the vast majority of people not worrying about intellectual or logical issues such as coherence, evidence, completeness, consistency, or non-contradiction. (It turns out we can’t even guarantee those things in pure axiomatic mathematics past a certain point, and ethical claims are far, far away from that.)
So, in addition to not being an ITT-compatible statement of SJW values (i.e., the way they would unironically identify their beliefs and behaviors), this makes it impossible to compartmentalize, quarantine, or decontaminate anything “religion-like” from public life or intellectual pursuits, unless one insists upon an explicitly amoral, positive, and ethically agnostic approach to everything.
Which, in practice, one can’t do, because the oldest trick in the book is to try to sneak the normative in under the guise of it being the positive, and because without divine entities, people really think their moral systems are capital-T True, and won’t accept the characterization of those beliefs as a non-secular faith. To the extent it is socially undesirable and personally dangerous to argue the point, they will get their way, and the quarantine would fail.
So, I will once again bang my drum in favor of adversarial pedagogy, and making there is always someone there as representative of the rival coalition arguing the other side, and that nothing gets done without bi-coalition consensus.
Men need norms and morals to live together in pleasant, high-functioning civilization, they need to believe they are more than merely arbitrary and provisional choices
I am sure the first clause is true. I am not at all sure about the second. People don’t need to consciously “believe they [moral rules] are more than merely arbitrary and provisional choices”. They simply need to live in accordance with them. As you say, “the vast majority of people [are] not worrying about intellectual or logical issues such as coherence, evidence, completeness, consistency, or non-contradiction.”
The question isn’t whether people can develop and believe in a logically consistent system of morals “without believing in the premise of divine revelation (or some equivalent metaphysical construct) and the legitimacy of magisterial interpretive authority”. The question is whether they can act in obedience to a socially accepted system. In other words, the question isn’t logical; it is psychological/sociological.
Our evolutionary history of living in societies suggests that they can. Indeed, most can’t help but obey. That at least is a moral I take away from books like Joseph Heinrich’s The Secret of Our Success.
The Gordian knot can’t be cut logically. But for most people, that does not and will not matter.
While it can be true for law, in practice there is no such thing as a society in which everyone is functionally cynical and merely obedient about morality, and of course no one teaches their kids like that, and most people are unreflective but still true believers.
But the real trouble is maintaining stability and preventing moral and ideological runaway meltdowns, as happened in the French and Russian revolutions and many other instances in history.
Without a stabilizing institution, moral assertions are fashion, and not only can change just as quickly, but are driven to change by opportunities for status competition, and the fact of differential rates of adoption is a recipe for domestic conflict of the nature of a perpetual civil war of religion.
“functionally cynical” Like “objectively fascist”. In other words, I want you to have the bad emotion of the second word without the actuality of it. No, it’s not cynical. It’s simply the way people work. They don’t need a tight logical system of right and wrong. They just want to know what is. And they are predisposed to get that from the people around them who they respect. Like so many social things, much of right and wrong is just something they “pick up”.
Yes, those moral customs can change. Though rarely quickly and dramatically enough to be called a “meltdown”–and both the French and Russian Revolutions involved a great deal of extreme coercive government action to change customs. They were not ordinary social change.
Moreover, the existence of a “magisterial interpretive authority” does not solve the problem of providing people something stable that they can believe in. The Catholic Church of 2020 is very different from the Catholic Church of 1960. What Pius XII considered a “good Catholic” and what Francis thinks is a “good Catholic” are rather different. If I was feeling cute, I would call Francis “functionally a social justice warrior”.
People “on the spectrum” to Asperger’s find it hard to just “pick up” social expectations and values. Some become philosophers or economists or sociologists or theologians–or the consumers of those disciplines. They (and some others) do feel a need for a rigorous system, based on something solid.
But when it comes to “what is right and what is wrong?”, there is always an infinite regress problem. No matter how deep you go, you can always ask, “Why?” You base your moral system on divine command? Why? Well, because God made the universe that way. Why do you know that? I just do. Why do you “just do”? I have faith. Why do you have that faith? My church says so. Why do you believe your church? Eventually, there is always a passive acceptance or an active profession of faith.
We might want to distinguish between faith.1 which is a synonym for “assumptions” and faith.2 which is an assumption of the existence of “supernatural sapience”.
Social justice activists have a core set of assumptions. These assumptions are treated as truth and rarely, if ever, re-examined. This pattern is similar to religious faith. I don’t find the similarities useful in any context that comes to mind.