Queeneta, would you like to start us off by telling us about
the war for social justice? Who are these warriors and what is their goal?
QUEENETA: Thank you, Mr. Whitey Moderator, for your biased
introduction. Progressives don’t call themselves SJWs. That’s a pejorative
label applied by the hillbillies and troglodytes who oppose progressive views, including
feminism, multiculturalism, and civil rights for minorities. Our enemies mean
to use that label ironically, to contrast leftists with the fascist superheroes
who figure so prominently in the comic books that constitute the sole reading
materials for these basement-dwelling right-wingers. So we feminists, for
example, are supposed to be “warriors” fighting for “justice,” even though we
don’t wear capes or leap tall buildings. Instead, we’re just ordinary people
who welcome what the modern world has to teach us. We don’t retreat from the lessons
of science and rationality or accept traditional rationalizations of oppression
and social inequality, including the white supremacist myths you find in the
reactionary alt right. But we do have the courage to stand up publicly to
oppressors instead of tolerating their bigotry.
FRED: The moderator’s white, so he must be oppressing you,
right Queeneta? Watch out or he’ll blow away this little snowflake just by
breathing heavy! Oh no, I just committed the felony of a microaggression
against her by saying a few unkind words! Call the police, someone! I just
verbally harassed Little Miss Snowflake. Heaven forbid this Millennial child
should feel the least bit uncomfortable anytime during her whole life. After
all, she’s entitled to everything she could ever want because her African
ancestors were conquered and enslaved by Europeans a few centuries ago. And
somehow Reason is supposed to license her slave morality? I don’t think so.
ADAM: Actually, I think Fred was just alluding to
Nietzsche.
FRED: But look at that: she betrays the weakness of her
gender too, by revealing her hysteria. She boasts about progress from science
and rationality, but she can’t keep her emotions in check. You push a button or
two and out flows the chaotic fervor that should have been harnessed by a
strong male presence. Of course, she lacks that because she’s a lesbian
feminazi. What a shame.
MODERATOR: Uh, I fear we’ve let the quality of the discussion
slide a little into undignified personal attacks. I’d like to get us back on
track. Fred, would you care to tell us what you meant by “slave morality”?
FRED: Adam was right, of course. It means so-called
progress is all about the weak and the oppressed channeling their resentments
and obtaining power in an underhanded fashion. Women and inheritors of inferior
cultures who are minorities in America can’t take power openly, because they’re
not strong or clever or ambitious enough, so they try to guilt-trip white men
into sharing the power that built modern America in the first
place.
HEATHER: The North American continent was inhabited before
it was colonized by Europeans. The Spanish committed genocide against the
natives, and the early modern Americans then built the United States on the
backs of an African slave population.
FRED: Irrelevant! The United States is culturally superior
to the indigenous blood cults that existed here before the Europeans conquered
this land—in the name of progress, I might add. And Africans couldn’t have
built anything as great as the United States by themselves. They had to be led
by some of the greatest minds to emerge from the European Enlightenment. Native
Americans and Africans were inferior not because of any genetic difference, but
because the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were unique events that
happen not to have occurred outside of Europe.
ADAM: We’re not here to talk about American history. But a
lot of hostility was apparent in that heated exchange between Fred and
Queeneta we just witnessed, and I think I can explain why this issue is so
controversial. It goes back to a dispute between feminists about so-called
intersectionality and the oversimplification of how oppression occurs even in a
democracy. By fighting for women’s civil rights, early feminists ignored how
personal identity is formed at the intersection of certain traits. Thus, black
women are different from white women, and lesbians are different from
heterosexual women. Moreover, lesbian black women are different from
heterosexual black women, and so on. Narrower personal identities are formed
within the social subclasses that are often ignored by the wider public, which
allows those subclasses to be oppressed with impunity. Thus, many progressives
came to believe it’s incumbent on everyone to assert the uniqueness of their
identity, to avoid being left out of the Overton Window, that is, of the limit
of what the public deems to be acceptable discourse. Is that about right,
Queeneta?
QUEENETA: Yes, we need to fight for our share of the pie
instead of being brushed aside or demonized. You can see how multiculturalism
fits with intersectionality. Within a culture, there are many subgroups and
each has equal validity because everyone’s personal identity is formed in the
same ways. It’s not as if Caucasians descend straight from Heaven or anything
like that. Similarly, each entire culture is equally valid and shouldn’t be
forgotten in the global discourse.
One problem, then, is that the more we search for uniqueness
in political categories, the less meaningful becomes any judgment of their
so-called equality. Equality requires similarity or sameness of properties. The
finer our distinctions between sub-groups and between sub-sub-groups, to let
every conceivable personal distinction count as politically relevant, to
prevent any basis for oppression, the fewer means we have of comparing
individuals. For example, first there were gay rights, and then eventually
there were rights for lesbians and then for bisexuals and transsexuals. Then
LGBT became LGBTQ, adding so-called queers to the aggrieved parties, and now
intersexuals have been added so the label is LGBTQI. There’s also talk of
adding asexuals, polyamorous/polygamous, and kink to the list, making the label
LGBTQIAPK. These different groups naturally thought the pioneering label “gay
community” overlooked important differences between the other sexual minorities,
so each subgroup wanted to be recognized. But the more we divide, the less
grasp we have on what we’re talking about, because we deprive ourselves of the
generalizations needed for thinking. The result isn’t social justice so much as
confusion. The alternative of picking a label that covers all of these
minorities, such as “deviants,” obviously runs the risk of being pejorative.
QUEENETA: There’s no confusion. The oppressed are simply
rejecting the biased labels that have been used to keep the minorities down.
We’re taking the power back by taking charge of the discourse. It turns out
that being able to name something does give you power over it.
ADAM: But there’s a slippery slope here. Why not just speak neutrally
of “minority sexualities” instead of obsessing over the need to give everyone
their separate positive recognition? Conservatives say that pedophiles and
zoophiles (those who practice bestiality) will eventually be added to the list
of those who likewise demand their sexual rights, following from the extension
of liberties to gays, lesbians, and the rest. Of course, progressives say the
line is drawn at the point of consent. Animals and children don’t consent to
the sexual activity, so those sexual practices shouldn’t be recognized as being
based on sexual orientations. But the appeal to consent is really an appeal to
autonomy and personhood. Animals and children aren’t full-fledged people. Once
you have the concept of a person, though, all the talk of intersectionality and
sub-identities seems superfluous. Transsexuals, queers, and so on are all
people, so they should have full rights to do whatever they want as long as
they don’t deprive other people of their similar rights. How, then, is
progressivism any different from libertarianism or classic liberalism? There
must be something else going on with identity politics.
FRED: Yeah, virtue signaling. It’s all about getting your
fifteen minutes of fame in the celebrity-obsessed consumer culture. Those
shouting for the rights they deserve for their special qualities, like the
little snowflakes they are, are just clamoring for attention. “Look at me,”
they say, “I’m not like you. I’m proud of what I am and you’ve got to tolerate
me because I’m not going to hide anymore; I’m going to get right in your face.”
The cry for limelight in the culture of spectacle signals that the precious
minority is heeding the call for almighty political correctness. To overlook
someone’s uniqueness is now supposed to be oppressive. But Adam is right:
surface features are irrelevant to personhood. The reason for equal rights
would be that the members of all these subgroups are roughly equal in their
mental powers. That’s why they have human rights. All the other privileges
they’re fighting for—special access to washrooms, forcing everyone else to call
them by their preferred labels, punishment for “hate crimes”—is itself
oppressive. Public space should be neutral, not slanted in favour of the groups
who whine the most.
HEATHER: I suspect there’s a generational factor too. It
looks like Millennials have been spoiled by their parents and so they feel
entitled to a life without hardships. When they were kids at summer camp, there
were no winners and losers since everyone got a trophy just for participating.
When they grow up, they still crave special recognition just for being
themselves, even if their deeds aren’t extraordinary. The internet and
communications technologies also contribute to this celebrity culture, since
anyone with a smartphone, Twitter or Facebook can broadcast every thought that
pops into their head as well as what they look like or what they’re eating on a
moment-by-moment basis. All of that provides the illusion that they’re special,
that they matter, and perhaps even that they deserve to be famous.
By contrast, Generation X, for example, is more concerned
with humility and honour. With power comes responsibility, so if we can create our
webpage and tell the world what we think about everything under the sun, we
should first ensure that we’ve worked on making ourselves worthy of those
privileges instead of complaining that we’re not respected just for the minimal
accomplishment of being ourselves. Respect should be earned by what we do, not extorted
as recognition of what we are, especially since we’re not responsible for our genetic
components. You’re inclined to be a lesbian? Congratulations, but why should I
care? As a lesbian you’re going to feel sexually attracted to women, just as natural
selection is going to compel the majority to prioritize the act of sexual
reproduction and thus heterosexuality. True, heterosexuality has been glorified
by religious myths for thousands of years, but a nobler attitude would be to
take values out of what happens in any case by natural necessity or
probability. Right and wrong have to do with what we choose, not with what we
are.
FRED: I’ve already pointed out that early-modern white
European males have triumphed on the world stage. Granted, they weren’t saints.
Millions of others suffered or were killed in the pursuit of modern progress.
Science and technology empowered modern Europeans, and power threatens to
corrupt the user. But instead of wallowing in autocracy, as happens in Africa,
South America, and the Middle East, some of those “terrible” white males set up
a progressive society in the New World, reining in themselves with the American
Constitution. There’s a real question, then, whether rampant egalitarianism
will prevent the sort of personal greatness we may need to solve our complex,
global problems. As we learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, when
everyone’s treated equally, there’s no incentive to excel.
In any case, let’s shift to some concrete examples of how
so-called fairness and equality play out. Recently, the feminist agenda
penetrated the gaming and comic book industries, and feminists faced a backlash
from male enthusiasts who objected to the overt politicization of games and
comics. Game programmers and mainstream comic books creators are overwhelmingly
male, so the contents of those products reflected male interests. Women’s
interests in those markets have grown, but women have difficulty convincing
anyone they can be genuine nerds. They’re not diehard, obsessive fans the way
men are; they don’t dedicate their life to these forms of entertainment. For
decades, men created these industries, but now women want to piggyback on that
labour and twist games and comics to suit their cringe-worthy notion of fairness,
thusly depriving nerdy male fans of their refuges, their fortresses of solitude.
The worst of this happened in Marvel Comics, which awkwardly wrote some male
heroes out of the narratives, abruptly changing Iron Man to an African-American
teenage girl, Captain America and Spiderman to African-Americans, Thor to a
woman, and Hulk to an Asian. Sales of these comics plunged or at least there
was no surge in sales as might have been expected; that is, there was no influx
of female or minority buyers of Marvel comics who had previously been put off
by the books that catered only to white males. In any case, many longtime male
readers stopped buying these comics, not because they’re racist or sexist, but presumably
because those nakedly political stories are off-putting. And then there was
James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired for writing that women aren’t
as cut out as men to be computer programmers.
MODERATOR: Lots to chew on there. I suppose the question is
whether greater diversity of outcomes is always fair. If women play computer
games and read comics, they shouldn’t have to be subjected to so many depictions
of scantily-clad female characters, and maybe they’d prefer for these outlets
of geek culture to be more uplifting and less focused on violence. If men
dominate the industries, they’d have to adjust their products for purely
business reasons, to sell more products. But if the products don’t sell, either
women aren’t so deeply into this culture as might have been thought or else
artists should focus on aesthetic standards rather than leapfrogging them in
the pursuit of improving their bottom line. Are women biologically different
from men in relevant ways? These are quite the conundrums! I don’t envy you four
for having to try to sort this all out for us.
HEATHER: Well, I don’t back down from a challenge. But I
think we should stipulate that political correctness is an obstacle to
philosophy. I understand that subgroups might want to fight for their fair
representation, but we’re here to have a meta-discussion to find out what’s
true in the first place. The fact is the truth may be politically unpopular.
Whether a subversive truth should then be broadcast to the public is a
separate, political question.
For me, the issue with so-called nerds or geeks is that
they’re what ethologists might call omegas, meaning that they’re losers, at
least in certain respects. I know that nerds, meaning those who excel in math
and science and who used to prefer obscure subcultures to mass-marketed
entertainments are now paradoxically thought of as cool, but this is the
problem. Take the TV comedy, The Big Bang Theory. Despite its tremendous
popularity, it’s commonplace to hear that real nerds don’t watch that show, because
it prettifies nerd culture for popular consumption. The four main nerdy male
characters who used to be sexually awkward now all have wives or girlfriends,
which means they’re on their way to beta status, to fitting into society in
conventional terms and thus to losing their nerdy bona fides. The upshot is that
a counterculture or an underclass can’t become normalized without losing its
integrity and perhaps the very qualities that make it a worthy corrective to
the flaws of pop culture. All the recent great movements in Western music, from
jazz to punk to industrial to grunge began as undercurrents, some of whose enthusiasts
sold out and thereby virtually killed the movements precisely by dragging them
into the spotlight. In the same way, the funniest stand-up comedians typically
have to languish in obscurity before they can use that suffering to temper
their perspective and fuel the bitterness that gives them their comedic edge. They need a chip on their
shoulder, since no one thinks the prom queen, for example, can afford to skewer
the social system in which she excels. This is again why men have dominated
comedy, because, on average, women can’t afford to sacrifice years of their
life for their art.
So when genuine nerds complain that feminists are ruining
computer games or comics, and these nerds are low in the social hierarchy and
thus are likely male, they may be protecting the primary reason for them to go
on living. They have no real women in their life, so they need the sexy pop
cultural substitutes. Of course, their chance of attracting a mate decreases
the more they dedicate themselves to such soft core porn, but perhaps that ship
has sailed for them and they’ve made their choice. In that case, feminist
intrusions into these subcultures become obnoxious, because the feminists are
punching down. Sure, the nerds lash out, as in Gamergate when hackers doxxed
the feminist journalists for their political reviews of computer games. But
maybe we should pity these trolls and leave them to their obsessions, because
if they become monsters, it’s their lack of a worthwhile life that’s made them
such.
Ironically, then, the ruthless pursuit of
social justice in the sense of balance or fairness may prevent the rise of triumphant giants, whom we might call
alphas or Ubermenschen; moreover, forcing everyone to be recognized might undermine art by emptying the underground
incubators. Maybe we should let some minorities stew in obscurity, since
suffering is the mother of art.
FRED: There may be something to that, but I’d just ask the
simpler question whether it’s in the interest of justice for depictions of sexy
women to be removed from pop culture or for more feminist characters to be
included. There’s art and then there’s commerce. Computer games and comic books
are big businesses, now that comics are tied to the movie industry, although
computer games dwarf Hollywood. Anyway, we need to ask merely who forms the
market for these products, and what those consumers want to see. Comic creators
have typically targeted teenage boys, exploiting their raging hormones, so of
course the female superheroes are sexy. The male superheroes are also bursting
with muscles, and in both cases this is also for the practical reason that
skintight costumes are easier to draw. Violence sells in comic books and in games
because, again, young males make up the bulk of the audience and they prefer
action, say, to romance. Social justice doesn’t really enter into it; if the
market changes, so will the products.
QUEENETA: You’re missing the deeper problem. Consumers don’t
occupy some neutral standpoint so they can freely decide what they want,
without being influenced by their environment. If all the women around them on
billboards, TV, movies, and computer games are airbrushed, with plastic boobs,
pouting lips, and empty heads, young impressionable males are being trained to
accept that as their ideal, and that affects how they treat real women outside
their fantasies created by the entertainment industries. The prevalence of
violence in computer games trains American boys to cheer the military in its
jingoistic escapades, and the very idea of a superhero carries the subtext that
mighty individuals, such as you might find in the richest one percent of
Americans, are above the law. This is why there’s been a surge of
nonsuperheroic stories in the alternative or indie graphic novels and comic
book presses, because female readers are more interested in sophisticated
dramas and ideas. In any case, progressives want to humanize our environment to
stop our minds from being polluted by toxic hegemonic signals.
ADAM: I can appreciate what you’re saying, Queeneta, but
radicalism is illiberal. For the most part, artists and businesspeople should
be left alone to decide how to express themselves or what to attempt to sell. The
market logic of supply and demand does mostly dictate the results, and that’s
for the best since the government hasn’t any crystal ball in these matters.
QUEENETA: So you’re the sort of liberal, Adam, who stood
with Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders—am I right? How did that
gutlessness and trust in the technocrats work out for you? You and the other
centrists have gifted us all with Mister Apocalypse, President Donald Trump.
Who’s trusting in the American government? Not I! It’s up to
NGOs to take over when the government has been overrun by plutocrats and
neoliberal technocrats who seek to preserve not just social systems that entail
vast inequalities in the future, but the particular ongoing distribution of
power that’s already eliminated the conditions for a stable middle class like
the one created by the New Deal. You trust in capitalism even as it trashes the
planet and thrives on our vices, like greed and gullibility. Have you so little
spirituality that you could be swayed by the economic myth of the invisible
hand? It’s all about managing the status quo for you, isn’t it? If Heather’s
trying to speak for the nerds or “losers,” and neofascist Freddie is hot for
macho leaders, you represent the followers, the betas in Heather’s ethological terminology.
Above all, you don’t want to rock the boat, because you’re a professional who
depends on the systems that are already in place. That means you’re not a
progressive. The call for social progress makes sense only when there’s much
that needs fixing; otherwise, no one could be expected to take a chance on
tinkering with a system that works well on the whole. Progress requires radicalism.
HEATHER: I don’t know which American values you’re talking
about, Fred. Our country prizes capitalism and debased Christianity most of
all. Globalization is a racket that protects the interests of big business
against those of the little guy. How is that un-American? Again, American
wealth was produced initially by an enslaved workforce, and today millions of
wage slaves have to work multiple jobs in the gig economy or the service
sector, in the likes of Walmart or Amazon. The growth of our middle class in
the last century was an exception that proved the rule. And Republican policies
enforce only those same self-serving biases of the richest one percent—who are
now transnational. But that’s your
political party. So what are you complaining about?
Oh, and in the 1930s and ’40s, the alt right would have been
right there beside the isolationists, Allen Dulles, and Rockefeller who either
resisted the effort to join the war against the fascists or who actively supported
the Nazi military-industrial complex. You talk about the need for strongman
leaders, but look what happened the last time they lost control of their
testosterone and rampaged across the planet. They had to be defeated by the
Allies. How can you sit there with a straight face, wrap yourself in the
American flag, and cover your face with apple pie while also spouting
neofascist principles? Do you not understand that late-modern America defined
itself by opposing fascism?
FRED: Only on the surface, in conventional history books’
propaganda did America stand against fascism. Sure, we opposed the Axis powers,
but as you implied, Rockefeller and the Fed were transnational, as is all
global big business. The double-dealing American robber barons and bankers were
puppet masters, pitting nations against each other and profiting from the
bloodshed. Animal populations are always divided between the weak and the
strong. The difference is just that big bankers can afford to exercise their
wealth without honour. These bankers are largely the treacherous Jews you hear
about from white supremacists. Like the American feminists and minorities, Jews
are bound by slave morality. Their ancestors were antisocial and beaten down by
the rest of the world for thousands of years, so now powerful Jews have no
culture left to prop up their self-esteem. Thus, they’re superficially
sophisticated while secretly plotting to avenge their tribe by buying up the
world and renting it out to the rest of us. The plutocrats today may be
outwardly mighty, but they have no spiritual depth, so they’re forced to rule
from the shadows since no one would be inspired to follow such conniving aristocrats
were they to reveal their intentions for world domination.
QUEENETA: Spare us your odious conspiracy theories, Fred!
You say progressives prevent men from being masculine, so I take it you’d
defend that Google programmer who said women make for inferior scientists and
engineers.
Picking up on Heather’s account of geeks and losers, I’d add
that male and female losers have different outlets for their survival. Socially
awkward and isolated boys at the bottom of the pecking order escape to fantasy
worlds, like comic books, science fiction, and Dungeons and Dragons, which lead
naturally to the study of science and math. The spare time in which they’re not
partying with their clique they use to learn programming languages, to design
games and apps to amuse themselves. By contrast, outcast girls often find
themselves preyed upon by popular or dangerous boys who get them pregnant and
hooked on drugs, so the girls drop out of school and turn to stripping,
prostitution, or sales (if they’re luckier). In short, omega males fall back on
their brains and become nerds, while outcast girls exploit their bodies to get
by.
You might think this dissimilarity is entirely cultural, but
that would be shortsighted. The omega males are typically shy, cerebral, and
unattractive, so girls aren’t socially interested in them. The market for male
strippers is miniscule compared to the one that showcases women’s bodies, and
that difference is informed by biology: male brains are geared to thinking
visually and spatially, females’ to thinking intuitively and socially; men are
interested largely in the look of things, and women care more about
relationships. This is because men instinctively needed to pick up on physical
clues of women’s health and fertility, whereas women are genetically driven to
divine the long-term potential of a relationship, based on emotional
connections and mental compatibility. Women can’t relate well to socially-awkward
men, and since women don’t care much about how men look, these male outcasts
are forced to pursue brainy activities to salvage their dignity. Instead, women
are liable to fall for the cockiness of sociopathic men who only pretend to
want a longer-term relationship—which the woman instinctively wants, to support
her during her nine months of vulnerability carrying the child in her womb.
Once she becomes an outcast, the market dictates her best career path, but only
because of the biological reality that men are easier to please than are women:
she need work only on her body to get by, whereas he must develop his intellect
to overpower nature through science and technology. Only when nerdy men’s minds
have thusly dominated nature may they indirectly attract the sort of women who
spurned them growing up, since by that point the nerds will have enriched themselves
to some degree and have built a formidable nest. Again, these are commonsense
biological realities which underpin what that Google martyr wrote. But go ahead
and castigate the messenger; reality will still bring your “progress” to ruins.
QUEENETA: You admit that women have the mental capacity to
excel in science or engineering, and also that we can conquer natural forces
with technology. So remind me again what stands in the way of perfecting our
instincts and even our genes, to eliminate sociopathy, for example, or to
develop men’s latent femininity.
HEATHER: But to what end, Queeneta? Isn’t there some wisdom
in the dictum that opposites attract? Would you want to live in a world in
which everyone thinks and acts in the same ways, in which there’s no
masculinity or femininity?
FRED: Sure she would, because she’s a lesbian, so she
happens to be attracted to people with her body type. She’s a double threat,
since the self-directedness of her sexual orientation exacerbates her
Millennialist habit of acting like a selfish child.
ADAM: Well, science does supply us with objective knowledge,
and philosophers just extend that knowledge by analyzing potential answers to
the most general questions that arise from scientific theories. You seem to
want to drag everyone into politics so you can dismiss their beliefs by
associating them with some unpleasant political machinations. But that would
likely be fallacious. This is the great error of so-called postmodern thought, which
is that a belief reduces to its psychological, social or historical origin. If
you can’t abstract from that background to consider what use you can make of a
thought, by reflecting on its semantic and more immediate content, you’re disabling
your mind. Granted, objectivity isn’t easy and we do need to overcome our
tendency to submit to our more self-interested thought-patterns, but the
success of science proves that objectivity is possible.
QUEENETA: So what unpopular truth are we supposed to have
learned here? That progress is counterproductive and progressives are childish
Millennials? Who cares about such academic pronouncements? The fact is that if
a teenaged girl commits suicide because she's been body-shamed on the internet, you’ll likely
conclude after consulting your intuitions, that this rise of trolling as a
side-effect of internet anonymity is regressive. If you’re not locked up in some
ivory tower, you should get up off the couch and help improve conditions on the
ground by solving the troll problem, for example.
HEATHER: Not so fast, Queeneta! Of course, no one would
argue against the platitude that we should all try to make the world a better
place. But we’re talking here specifically about progress in the form of
equality or “social justice.” One question we’ve been raising is whether some
upbringings are better than others. Perhaps progressivism is a form of naivety
to which Millennials especially are prone.
So take your example of cyber bullying. I wouldn’t want to
associate with someone who bullies a girl on the internet. But isn’t there
something to be said for toughening up these teens, so they don’t falter and
turn to suicide at the first sign of negative feedback? Contrary to what Fred said, the overarching danger may be that technology is weakening us, making us
less self-reliant, because obviously we depend more and more on machines for
our survival and our pleasure. What’s infantilizing us isn’t feminism so much
as our luxury of being able to outsource the many jobs we used to have to
perform ourselves. If you firmly say “No” to a child, chances are she’ll cry
and think her world is ending. But a bullied teenager needn’t act like a child
who hasn’t yet formed any inner basis for her self-worth. She should be able to
ignore or to shake off the trolls. Oddly, our reliance on technology is
supposed to be progressive, and yet it dehumanizes us. What good is social
equality if it means we all become equally childlike and thus vulnerable to
being wiped out or replaced by machines?
MODERATOR: I’m afraid we’re close to the end of our scheduled
time this evening, but I wonder if you could each summarize your take on
so-called social justice.
HEATHER: Well, we need to reflect on what we mean
by “progress.” It’s a tautology to declare merely that we should try to improve
the world and that improvement counts as progress. The question is about the
kind of world we really want to live in. We might presume technology is good
for us, but it may have these deleterious side-effects, one of which is that
techno-progress may be distorting our ideas about social progress, because our
overreliance on machines may be making us naïve and fragile, so we come to
oversimplify these philosophical issues as though we were children. Instead of
persuading conservatives with logic, progressives shout them down in the name
of political correctness. And while I may agree with progressives on certain
social issues, such as equal pay for equal work, I don’t see the wisdom of
striving for social equality in all respects, to the point of eliminating
gender or class altogether.
ADAM: As a liberal, I too will likely agree with Queeneta on
many social issues, but I suspect our reasons for holding those views may
differ. I also take solace in reason and the Enlightenment, but I have less
confidence that radical feminists were on the same page as those early modern
thinkers. Of course feminists will criticize philosophers like Locke, Mill, and
Kant for being privileged white males, so early modern philosophy doesn’t make
for such a sturdy foundation for radical “postmodern” thought. We need to
grapple with the extent to which capitalism conflicts with the interest in social
justice, because capitalism creates inequalities and we know that communism
doesn’t work as an alternative economic system. Communism would have been the
rational ideal, but we’re stuck with capitalism, with a way of doing business
that hones our selfish impulses. The result of competition is the gap between
rich and poor, and while it may logically seem fair to correct the outcomes for
equality, there’s no way to do so without violating the principles of
capitalism. This is the sticking point for neoliberals who regard progressives
as unrealistic.
MODERATOR: You’ve all left us with much to ponder, I’m sure.
Thank you all for being here, and stay tuned for sexist beer commercials and
the depressing daily news.
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