The three pillars, it seems to me, of the Postmodernist Social Justice experiment have been Group Identity (prioritizing Groups over individuals and forcing allocation to Groups); Relativism (there is no objective reality, just opinions and social constructs); and Victimhood (seeking support from the state/others to circumvent law, custom and natural rights in order to enjoy benefits not extended to others.) All three pillars are anathema to the Classical Liberal worldview anchored on the individual, natural rights, freedom, consent of the governed, rule of law, etc.
The pursuit of postmodernist social justice via Group Identity, Relativism, and Victimhood has driven three dangerous trends. Centralization of power in order to rectify outcomes not achievable through free choice. Authoritarianism in order to force solutions not achievable owing to the withholding of consent by the governed. Totalitarianism (all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state) to drive out nonconformity which is a key attribute of free systems.
We are so accustomed to the postmodernist social justice assumptions that it is difficult to realize that at one time very recently they were not common. There were voices singing those social justice tunes when I was in university and grad school in the eighties but they were solo performances. At some point they became a choir. A centralized, authoritarian, totalitarian choir which we see with greatest clarity in university campuses these days.
When was the tipping point? I had assumed that it was sometime between 1985 and 1995.
Lending support for that is this prescient essay by academic, author, essayist, Joseph Epstein from 1989, The Joys of Victimhood.
I have long enjoyed Epstein's essays (in small doses) but had never come across this one before.
A shame there isn't a machine, the sociological equivalent of a seismograph, that registers fundamental shifts in social attitudes and concerns. In the absence of such a machine, we all have to operate with our own often rather primitive social radar, taking our signals where we find them. When one's dentist, for example, begins to say ''pasta'' instead of spaghetti or noodles, one knows that the interest in cookery has fully swept the middle classes. When one sees Mafia men jogging and worrying about their cholesterol, one knows that anxiety about health really is endemic. What began as a fad becomes a trend, which becomes a shift, which finally becomes a serious change in the way we live and think about ourselves.Epstein can sound like a recalcitrant conservative curmudgeon but he comes from a wonderful tradition of classical liberalism in an American intellectual history of libertarians and classical liberals who object to the centralization, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism of postmodern social justice, without losing their commitment to the wonderful vision of classical liberalism. Public intellectuals such as Allan Bloom, E.O. Wilson, Neil Postman, E.D. Hirsch, Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson, Camille Paglia, etc.
My own fairly low-voltage radar has been pinging away for some while on another such shift, and last summer, while I was watching the Democratic National Convention on television, it began to bleep furiously in my mind. The noise could no longer be avoided when, at the moment that Ann Richards, the Texas State Treasurer, completed her strong keynote speech, the commentator on the television network I was watching remarked (as near as I can recall), ''Ann Richards is a divorced mother of four who has undergone rehabilitation for an alcohol problem.'' Earlier in the campaign, Kitty Dukakis had announced that she had undergone treatment for an addiction she had to diet pills. During his speech at the convention, Jesse Jackson, in speaking of his own origins, declared that he was an illegitimate child, and then he wove a speech around the metaphor of the Democratic Party being a quilt both made by and supplying warmth to all those elements in American life - minority groups, homosexuals, American Indians (or Native Americans, as they're now known), welfare families, and many others - who, in Mr. Jackson's reading, were America's victims. Eight and even four years earlier, the Democratic Party had advertised itself as the party of concern. Last summer, though, the Democratic Party seemed to have cut out the middleman and gone from ''caring persons'' straight to victims. The logic of the convention seemed to call for Michael Dukakis, on the night of his nomination, to arrive in an iron lung and announce that he was a lesbian mother.
Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life.
[snip]
Yet it was the civil rights movement, by my reckoning, that changed the tenor, the quality, the very nature of victimhood in the United States. I happened to be living in the South in the early 1960's, working as a director of the antipoverty program in Little Rock, Ark., while the civil rights movement was under way in full earnest. What I saw was a number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws. One really had to have nailed shut the shutters to one's heart not to have been moved by the spectacle of men and women risking everything to gain only what in fairness was coming to them. It was immensely impressive, on every level. Why? Because the early civil rights movement's appeal was unmistakably not to the guilt but to the conscience of the nation.
An appeal to conscience is an appeal to one's ethical nature, to one's sense of fair play; it is fundamentally an appeal to act upon the best that is in one. An appeal to guilt is almost entirely negative; rather than awaken the best in one, it reminds one what a dog one is. Conscience seeks its outlet in action, or right conduct; guilt seeks assuagement, or to find a way to be let off the hook.
The civil rights movement, like a spiritual oil spill, left a vast residue of guilt in its wake.
[snip]
Sometimes it must be difficult for the spokesmen for victims to keep up the anger - Jesse Jackson in an expensive suit, Gloria Steinem at a socialite party at the New York Public Library - but, whether simulated or real, the note of outrage always seems to be there when they need it. A victim, especially a professional victim, must at all times be angry, suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout for that touch of racism, sexism, or homophobia that might show up in a stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. With victims everywhere, life becomes a minefield in a cow pasture - no matter where you step, you are in trouble.
As if all this isn't nervous-making enough, there has come into being a large number of people, many of them in universities, who, if not victims themselves, wish to speak for victims or rouse other people to a sense of their injury as victims. They are the intellectual equivalent of ambulance chasers.
Perhaps the best place to see the traffic of victims and ambulance chasers in full flow is in the contemporary university.
[snip]
People who count and call themselves victims never blame themselves for their condition. They therefore have to find enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: society is organized against them; history is not on their side; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down. Asked by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that are all-black - that is, violence by blacks against blacks - the novelist Toni Morrison replies, ''None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.''
For victimhood to be taken seriously, there has to be a core of substance to the victim's complaints.
[snip]
They also remind the rest of us that the most efficient way to become truly a victim is to think and act like a victim.
All our public intellectuals of the first order, are frequently charged as conservatives by postmodernists, and yet derive their values and worldview primarily from the Classical Liberal school of inquiry.
Epstein's essay centers the tipping point from classical liberalism to postmodernist social justice as perhaps closer to 1990.
The sooner we see the back of postmodernist social justice as a mainstay of public discourse, the better.
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