Social Justice Warriors’ War Against the Enlightenment
by Lorna Salzman (March 2016)
The Enlightenment of the 18th century, whose principles enabled the rise of secular democracy, egalitarianism and human rights, was made flesh in the French Revolution and inscribed in our Constitution as the foundation of our country’s statutes and political identity. It also made possible the scientific revolution that began in the previous century even as it provoked persecution of scientific free-thinkers by the Catholic church, whose doctrines and power structures were directly threatened.
Dissent and free inquiry were arguably the greatest gifts of the Enlightenment, and their absence today in the world of Islam has empowered Muslim theocracies based on irrationality and fanaticism as well as a resurgence of socially regressive “political” Hinduism in India, where the western legacy of evidence-based science and critical reason is being replaced by a Hinduism that claims to be the originator of modern physics and evolutionary biology and boasts of the power of “traditional” and alternative ways of seeing the world.
This intellectual and moral void has relegated these theocracy-infused societies to little more than Neanderthal status in science, philosophy and culture. Foreign texts, art, philosophy, and science are essentially banned in educational institutions while government and media conspire to prevent contamination by foreign influences. Some American liberals and most of the left still purvey theories about incipient “democratic” resistance starting with the Arab Spring, and with the rebellion against ISIS in the region, as signs of burgeoning democratic urges and now they and the liberal media promote the pretense that the influx of refugees from northern Africa and the middle east consists of persecuted innocent people fleeing tyrannical government repression.
This is of course the usual myth, echoing the leftist rant that indicts the Iraq war and the US for everything that is wrong in the world. But it is a myth without evidence, like all the others associated with religion, with no historic substantiation. Putting aside the centuries-long tribal, ethnic and religious conflicts, the simple fact is that overpopulation, religious doctrine and underdevelopment due to rejection of western secular values and science have led to a super-abundance of young, uneducated, unskilled and socially maladapted men who, seeing the flight of the truly persecuted Syrians, tagged on to their exodus to Western Europe….that same continent which their societies long regarded as morally and culturally degenerate but which now are imagined to be some kind of cornucopian refuge. Many refugees interviewed in recent weeks were stunned to discover that their expectation of a free house and job in the western welfare states was not being met. And many of the Iraqi refugees are now returning to their home country, having seen their hopes dashed.
Let us look at the new social resistance movements in the US, collectively called the Social Justice Warriors (SJW), exemplified by radical feminist attacks on white men and atheists, campus Identity Politics demanding “safe spaces,” rejection of textbooks written by white men (Ovid being a special target), demands for protection from what they interpret as racist speech, Political Correctness, inculcation of white university teachers with a better attitude and more awareness of “racism,” demands for “trigger warnings” of writings or speech that might make them uncomfortable, a reversion to the ugly notion of group as opposed to individual equality, calls for physical segregation (private rooms for meetings, separate dormitory facilities for blacks, etc.): these have become commonplace, in a situation where legitimate grievances are overwhelmed by absurdities like the renaming of schools, ad hominem attacks on peripheral individuals, and a laundry list of imaginary or fabricated grievances such as second-hand reports of hate speech or overheard conversations where the listener detects a whiff of racism and which is about as reliable as the party game of telephone, where the last listener announces what she heard and it is light-years away from the original message.
At its core, SJW, feminism and Identity Politics are all resistance movements against Enlightenment principles of reason, dissent, free thought and scientific inquiry. And no one articulates these values more credibly than Richard Dawkins….and his associate “New Atheists” such as Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer and Jerry Coyne. Worse, these white men are powerful advocates of evolution! This is that touchy subject inflicted on everyone in school, taught by professors in thrall to capitalism and corporate power, who do not sufficiently preach or abjectly accede to the goals of the SJW and the feminists, who do not preach cultural relativism, who do not indict our distant ancestors for today’s plague of sexism, who do not adequately incorporate the feminist/left’s own social justice principles into their daily lessons, and who do not play the game called “Phenotype Rules!” in which skin color or ethnicity displaces equal rights for individuals.
Like the old Stalin who spit in the face of science, persecuted the botanist Vavilov and discarded evolutionary biology in favor of political Lysenkoism (which squashed Russian science for decades), we are witnessing the dismissal not only of reason but of the notion of universal values and the replacement of the individual as the inheritor of rights with the concept of Group Rights. This is an old trick, and more than just diversionary. It is subversive of all the Enlightenment principles emboded in our Constitution and in our entire civil society. It is socially divisive, as we can see every day from the tussles on campuses and on the internet. And if Group Rights ever became the norm, then it’s a coin toss as to who decides which Group gets the rights and which ones don’t, or which group gets pilloried for its offenses.
In a word, the new social justice/feminism attack dogs are dancing to the same ideological tune as the Islamists and the fundamentalist Muslims. But instead of regarding women as the fount of everything repugnant, they are indicting white atheist men. Not the old boys’ club of the U.S Congress, not the male board rooms of corporations, not the pederast priest, not the unpunished rapists in the U.S. military, not the Wall St. financiers and brokers who created the expanding economic inequality that has thrown millions out of jobs, not the corporations who outsource or move their business abroad to avoid taxes and thus indirectly impoverish social, technological and infrastructure funding. To address these would be too much like work: intellectual work, physical work, time, money, organization. Far easier it is to limit yourself to what is nearby and easy to torment: the campus. And famous white men. It is far easier to curse atheists on twitter or the internet or confront an individual without worrying about evidence, without having to leave your computer and go out into the streets and do some actual political work. Far easier it is to insinuate and intimidate instead of debate. Far easier it is to manipulate, even create, stimulants of human guilt.
The SJW and feminists are, of course, not attacking religion or its many atrocities. To do so would be to align with Dawkins and the “new atheists”, all white men who are stand-ins for a white male-dominated society. Nor are they, it should be noted emphatically, even discussing atheism. Why? Because Identity Politics does not allow it. IP by definition is an elevation of personal beliefs and feelings above societal concerns. The Personal becomes the Political, in the most egregious and egotistical sense. A SFW will not allow herself or her grievances to be deflected by acknowledging the oppression of Muslim women. Instead, she will align with some “moderate” Muslim man against white and western society, thus sparing him the trouble of confronting the atrocities of his religion. Thus has almost the entire American left recused itself from the major human rights battles of our time, leaving the field wide open to the right. Europe is now finding this out to its sorrow.
Today, following hundreds of Islam-motivated crimes and acts of terrorism, many liberals and most leftists still refuse to acknowledge that this religion is the largest agent opposing human rights in the world today. One might expect the SJW to place the inequality and abuse of women as a major (if not THE major) human rights problem in the world. In fact it has no clue about the scary resemblance of their movement to religious fanaticism and its corresponding curbs on human rights. And when a small cartoon notes this resemblance publicly, their fury cannot be contained. It is almost as if the pope announced evidence proving there were no God.
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Politics as if Evolution Mattered,” which addresses the intersection of evolution with socio-political policy.
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