You know, for as much as I previously said I hate discussing this topic, I discuss it an awful lot. I kind of feel like I have to given the prominence of these politics on the left these days and how much of an existential threat to my values they are though. I guess the big thing that I kind of realized about them recently, which explains a lot about why I find them distasteful, is that they remind me of the culture warriors I grew up siding with as a conservative Christian.
My history as a conservative Christian and a left wing atheist
You see, when I was a teenager in the 2000s, there were the "culture wars". I was in with the religious right, and they basically wanted to impose their culture on everyone. They not only wanted freedom to worship their religion, they wanted to pressure society to worship it too. Their ideology was seen as superior to the common enlightenment era American ideology based on freedom and tolerance. They wanted to impose their ideas in schools. They wanted to make illegal behavior they didn't like. They wanted to terraform our culture to fit their standards. Even in public media, they wanted to censor stuff they didn't like, sometimes stuff as asinine as Harry Potter (witchcraft) and pokemon cards (evolution). They were religious zealots, and did not care that other people saw the world differently than them.
Thankfully, I grew out of that, and since then, the religious right has been on the decline politically. While still a potent force in American politics, the country is slowly secularizing and even those who are religious seem to be turning their backs on the religious right. While this coalition has reached its zenith in the 1980s and was relevant through the 2000s, in the 2010s it has suffered several blows, and with Trumpism on the rise, it seems like the republican party is shifting somewhat away from those politics.
The thing with me, though, is I left the religious right more formally in 2012, when I stopped identifying as a conservative and a christian at around the same time. The two went hand in hand and I had since grown into my form of left libertarianism, which I've seen as the antidote to the right, while also countering what I consider to be the problematic tendencies of the left.I mean, to be fair, I've been involved with culture wars all along, even after becoming an atheist, but I took a different approach to the issue. Being an atheist, I valued, and still value, freedom of thought. I think it's important for everyone in society to be able to express their opinions, and my big bone to pick with the religious right since leaving the right politically has been their willingness to impose their values on everyone else. They wanna restrict abortion? I wanna allow it. They wanna stop gay marriage? I wanna allow it. They wanna impose religion on people in schools? I wanna ensure separation of church and state. I have, at every step, tried to thwart the religious right from imposing their agenda on others, instead supporting freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of action.
But here's the thing. I like philosophical consistency, and as such, as part of my desire to support freedom of various things, I also made it a principle to never try to impose my ideology on others. Even if I have a strong dislike of a certain ideology or belief system. I knew what it was like to be a Christian, and I know Christians fear losing their dominance because they are afraid of being treated like they try to treat others. I'm going to be honest, I think christianity, particularly fundamentalist forms of it, are toxic in a lot of cases. I even lean toward teaching that stuff to children as potentially being a soft form of abuse for the mental harm it can cause developing minds. But what do I propose we do about it? Nothing. People have a right to teach their kids religion and I dont want to take that away. Same with hate speech. I have nothing for contempt for actual racists. But you know what? You have the freedom to say and believe horrid things if you want. It's part of my ideology. Because I found the religious right and its tactics and behavior so distasteful, I swore to never be like them myself. I seek a higher path, one that gives people the freedom to live as they want, even if they're wrong and I think their views are horrible.
Parallels to the social justice left
Enter the social justice left. These guys are essentially the left wing equivalent of the religious right. They seek to impose their morality on others too. Like Christians, they want to basically control media. One of their first high profile incidents in recent history is gamergate where they got in a bitter struggle against gamers and gamer culture, claiming it's sexist. I mean, to some extent it was, but then they started trying to impose their morality on those cultures and the like. We even see this in games. Games have since tried imposing themes of inclusivity, much to the chagrin of the gaming community. Sometimes this worked out well (overwatch), but other times it seemed cringey and out of place (don't you wanna play a female amputee sniper in battlefield 5?!). Then there's movies like the new ghostbusters, which had an all female cast in way to blatantly impose their cultural norms on others.
Now, to some extent, new media experimenting with this stuff isn't bad. I mean the new ghostbusters kind of sucked in my opinion, but I mean, there's nothing inherently wrong with raising the profiles of women, minorities in media, and it can even be a good thing. However, the SJWs take it a bit too far and are a bit too blatant at times.
Where I have problems is they often want to go in to established franchises and try to force them to conform to their standards. For example there was a debate on Idris Elba (black guy) playing James Bond. I mean...why? Bond is explicitly, canonically, a white guy. But these guys treat a black guy playing the secret agent as breaking some glass ceiling of some kind.
Or, there are the cases when old media comes under fire for not conforming to the times. I've seen SJWs criticize, for example, Dragonball for being sexist. I mean, to some extent it is, but so what? It was written in the 1980s-1990s, is one of the best Japanese series ever made, and Japan's culture isn't known for being progressive. But SJWs will criticize it. Then there's stuff like revising old works like say Gone with the Wind, or Looney Tunes to fit modern standards, removing past content because it might be racist. I mean, yeah, it was the 1930s. Things were different then. Not everything has to conform to modern standards.
The thing is, like or hate past works, they are what they are, and I hate censorship and revisionism to meet certain cultural norms. I support freedom.
Speaking of freedom, what happens when people go against these standards? Why, they're cancelled. The social justice approves of cancelling people who refuse to abide by their standards as a way to control people who don't conform. If you tweet something bad, or say something bad, and you're famous, you will have an angry mob of people trying to get you fired from your career. It's not uncommon for them to try to pressure companies to fire people for daring express their views.
Now, again, keep in mind my economics here. I believe economic coercion is still coercion, and these guys are trying to leverage employers into terminating jobs, thus threatening their access to money, aka, resources, in order to change their behavior. i'm sorry, but that's just wrong and shouldn't be a thing. While I cannot censor any leftist or SJW seeking to do this, I will deeply criticize this behavior and see it as unethical. People have a freedom to say crappy things, if they dont have that freedom, then they don't have freedom of speech, period.
The most ironic thing is that the left often defends this behavior...by pointing to right wing "cancel culture" and how the jingoists wanted to cancel Kapernick because he wanted to kneel to protest police violence and that offended people who worship a piece of cloth. Hey, guess what, I don't approve of cancelling him either. I hold the same standards. Just because the right engages in this crap behavior doesn't mean the left should too. We should be better than that.
Another area where these left wing culture warriors wage battles is the schools. The religious right has tried, and still tries, to get their agendas imposed in the schools. A huge reason they care so much about the supreme court is because they want to get rulings that will allow them to reinstitute bible study in schools, and prayer, and explicitly religious curriculums. Essentially, they wanna brainwash kids into this stuff in order to make their worldview dominant. I, personally, oppose that, and instead want to teach critical thinking. I believe we should teach people how to think (in terms of logic, rationality, etc.), not what to think (in terms of specific beliefs, let kids reach their own conclusions after giving them the tools to think critically and rationally). I would even go so far to say I do believe that critical theory should be taught in schools in some form, perhaps a high school level social studies class.
The social justice left though also wants to impose their views in schools. They want to replace the current white washed curriculum with an obvious white bias with a heavily racialized "1619 project" type curriculum. I'm going to be honest, the patriotic education Trump wanted and this 1619 crap are two sides to the same coin. Both want a heavily biased approach to learning that brainwashes the next generation and imposes a certain perspective on people. Again, education should be about giving people the tools to reach their own conclusions, and history should be taught more objectively. I agree we shouldnt be glorifying people like Christopher Columbus and the founding fathers, but at the same time I don't want them to come away thinking everything we do is bad and evil and blah blah blah. Why can't we just, you know, teach both sides, or some hybrid/in between approach that attempts to establish objectivity? Teach what we did, don't shy away from our crappy past, but don't impose an agenda too. The social justice left seems to wanna replace the right's hyper patriotic and religious agendas with their own, and that bothers me.
Conclusion
That said, I'm going to be honest, one of the things that bothers me most about the social justice movement is how authoritarian it is. It reminds me of the religious right. Both groups are a bunch of extremist zealots who want to impose their cultural ideology on the populace, and punish people who fall out of line. And both sides, are quite frankly, bad. While I believe the social justice left has a lot of academic value to offer people, such themes and ideas needs to be taught in a far more objective way, and peoples' freedom should be respected. But these guys just wanna shove their values down everyone's throats and punish anyone who disagrees with them. it's sickening. I dislike the auth left in this sense as much as I dislike the auth right. Everyone should have freedom, mainstream culture should reflect everyone, and schools should simply teach facts and critical thinking, not specific dogmas or ideologies.
No comments:
Post a Comment