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I like the term “Social Justice Fundamentalism”. I’m a fan of social Justice. I’m also a fan of feminism and liberalism. But some of what we are seeing today i

I like the term “Social Justice Fundamentalism”. I’m a fan of social Justice. I’m also a fan of feminism and liberalism. But some of what we are seeing today isn’t that, and I think using the term fundamentalism to describe it, which, I suspect deliberately, draws a parallel between the efforts to force everyone to adopt these moral views with the attempts by religious fundamentalists to force everyone to adopt their views, makes a lot of sense.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
If you mean fundamentalism in the strict sense of rigid adherence to a core principle, religious fundamentalists act as they do because the core they follow, scripture, has claims over all aspects of personal and private life and makes assurances about the absolute correctness and necessity of its followers bringing everyone under its mantle. I don't see that "social justice fundamentalists" would have any such requirement imposed by their core principle. I'm pretty sure their core principle would be one of or some set of the things we already acknowledge, that we claim our society values: equality, personal freedom absent harm to others, justice yes. The difference isn't what they believe or even maybe how strongly. It's that they're calling our bluff on what we believe. These things are more social norms than moral necessities: you don't need to believe everyone is equal but you need to act as if you do. A liberal would say the right way to fight bigotry is to convert the bigots, a social justice-oriented leftist would say it's to limit the impact of their bigotry. I think history is in their favor too. If we had waited until every racist was on board before ending segregation we'd still have segregation.
- skissane 4y ago
  > If you mean fundamentalism in the strict sense of rigid adherence to a core principle, religious fundamentalists act as they do because the core they follow, scripture I don't like the way many people use the term "fundamentalism". It started out to describe an early 20th century movement in American Protestantism. And indeed, they were all about following scripture–or at least what they claimed it was saying, since other Christians have always disagreed with their interpretations of it. And I don't have a problem with calling them "Fundamentalists", since that is their own term they chose to describe themselves. Nor do I have a problem using the term to describe (ultra-)conservative Protestants who consciously continue the same approach today, and look back on the early 20th century Fundamentalists in admiration. The problem is when the term "fundamentalism" gets extended to (ultra-)conservative factions within other religions such as Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, etc. None of those belief systems shares the Protestant belief in "Scripture Alone" (sola scriptura). All three believe in the binding nature of extra-scriptural/post-scriptural traditions. So while "the core they follow, scripture" is an accurate description of the basis of the original Protestant fundamentalism, it ends up misrepresenting "fundamentalism" in other religions, and distorting them through a Protestant-coloured lens. Which is why a lot of scholars of religion object to using the term "fundamentalist", and instead advocate using customised terminology for each religious tradition. Hence people speak of "Islamism" or "jihadist Salafism" or "Khomeinism" rather than "Islamic fundamentalism", for example. Instead of "Catholic fundamentalism", people speak of "Feeneyism" or "radical traditionalism" or "integralism" or so on. Instead of "Jewish fundamentalism", we have terms like "Kahanism". Instead of "Hindu fundamentalism", "Hindutva". And I know by trying to talk about a "core principle", maybe you are acknowledging that for "non-Protestant fundamentalism", the core might not be "scripture". But, just because Protestant Fundamentalists might be said to have a single core principle, doesn't mean every other religion does. Sometimes there is no single core principle, just an assortment of views. People use "fundamentalism" to describe religious views which have a rather hostile attitude towards what we might call "modern scientific liberalism", and whether you have a single core principle or an amorphous blur of many principles is irrelevant to whether you have such a hostile attitude or not
green_man_lives 4y ago
Preface: I say this as a leftist who believes in reparations and cooperative ownership of capital. When I hear fundamentalism I think less about the proseltyzing aspect and more about the divergence from the core ideology. Fundamentalist is probably a misnomer, maybe "radical" or "sectarian". For example, someone sufficiently "woke" would understand that the slave and sharecropping economy of the rural south impacted the majority of whites negatively and that racism was a tool used to prevent them from developing class consciousness. With this knowledge, any discussion about anti-racism w/ respect to the US south needs to also be explicitly anti-capitalist to help the "poor white trash" understand that their economic anxiety is being redirected unproductively. These people do benefit from white privilege in some ways, but solidarity should be the primary message here as there is a spectrum of victimization going on. A concrete example of how you could respond to someone saying "immigrants are taking our jobs" is to reframe it (correctly) that US immigration laws are being taken advantage of by employers. The immigrants and workers have no leverage in the system and the decision-makers are the capital owners. It is not productive to call this person a bigot and leave it at that (even if it is true). People who want to fit into the cultural zeitgeist but without the fundamental understanding of the system they criticize will just use these people as a punching bag, which doesn't help anyone. These types of people are easily co-opted into positions of power that don't fundamentally challenge the system. The head of a DEI initiative at a college does not challenge the existence of legacy admissions or donations from war profiteers and oil companies. They are smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds them. There's also a purity aspect to it. When there's no solid basis for the ideology you can just start measuring people against their purity level. "No true scotsman" and all that.
- zenapollo 4y ago
  Would it fair to say that racism has really largely been about classism? I’ve always thought that if capitalists wanted to make a campaign that would misdirect people’s sense of injustice, that blm and subsequent woke ideology would make the perfect foil.
  - green_man_lives 4y ago
    > Would it fair to say that racism has really largely been about classism? Please do some reading on the subject. Cursory reading on the history of labor unions, immigration in America, or literally any book on the US south that isn't Lost Cause mythology will tell you resoundingly yes. I am not even talking about Marxist authors or Howard Zinn. You can easily find primary sources, the people who historically weaponized racism, telling you exactly how and to what end they are weaponizing their racism. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa... Secondly, capitalism is great at co-opting all sorts of messaging. Since you are on HN I assume you are familiar with the concept of a Paperclip Maximizer. The "machine" in this sense does not love you or hate you. You are a customer and they will adopt the aesthetics of your ideology to sell to you, inherent contradictions be damned. Every oil company that spent the last 50 years denying climate change now pours their money into showcasing their green energy products. Companies who benefit from convict labor of African Americans adopt BLM banners on their websites. Companies who donate to the political campaigns of every republican in both houses of legislature change their logos to pride flags in June. I dont want to assume but your phrasing makes me think (unless I am misreading it) that you think blm and "wokeness" are elite belief systems manufactured by "the machine", and that more reactionary "working class" ideology (a la Tucker Carlson) is grassroots. I really implore you to consider the Paperclip Maximizer idea and realize that the ideologies you are presented with on TV and print are the ones that have been passed through a corporate filter and sanitized to pose no threat to the machine. What you are seeing is a facsimile of what was once probably a more nuanced belief system. When was the last time you heard Georgism or Anarcho-syndicalism or de-growth discussed by any talking heads? The answer is never because these concepts are inherently antithetical to capitalism and cannot be co-opted.
zenapollo 4y ago
I agree that fundamentalism is good descriptor of the problem. A lot of comments replies arguing about the meaning of the word. To me fundamentalism means this. Where you fall on a certain issue defines a set of values. Fundamentalists are those believe that their one issue and the subsequent value structures are THE fundamental issue and value structure that individuals should be judged (morally and otherwise) as well as how we should see the world and organize society - above all other issues and value sets. With that definition one of the things you see a lot in American culture aside from Christian fundamentalism is capitalist fundamentalism - that free markets divine what and who is right. Social Justice fundamentalists do just that - dismiss or trample over other world views and values systems, in the name of equality.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

If you mean fundamentalism in the strict sense of rigid adherence to a core principle, religious fundamentalists act as they do because the core they follow, scripture, has claims over all aspects of personal and private life and makes assurances about the absolute correctness and necessity of its followers bringing everyone under its mantle. I don't see that "social justice fundamentalists" would have any such requirement imposed by their core principle. I'm pretty sure their core principle would be one of or some set of the things we already acknowledge, that we claim our society values: equality, personal freedom absent harm to others, justice yes. The difference isn't what they believe or even maybe how strongly. It's that they're calling our bluff on what we believe. These things are more social norms than moral necessities: you don't need to believe everyone is equal but you need to act as if you do. A liberal would say the right way to fight bigotry is to convert the bigots, a social justice-oriented leftist would say it's to limit the impact of their bigotry. I think history is in their favor too. If we had waited until every racist was on board before ending segregation we'd still have segregation.

skissane 4y ago
> If you mean fundamentalism in the strict sense of rigid adherence to a core principle, religious fundamentalists act as they do because the core they follow, scripture I don't like the way many people use the term "fundamentalism". It started out to describe an early 20th century movement in American Protestantism. And indeed, they were all about following scripture–or at least what they claimed it was saying, since other Christians have always disagreed with their interpretations of it. And I don't have a problem with calling them "Fundamentalists", since that is their own term they chose to describe themselves. Nor do I have a problem using the term to describe (ultra-)conservative Protestants who consciously continue the same approach today, and look back on the early 20th century Fundamentalists in admiration. The problem is when the term "fundamentalism" gets extended to (ultra-)conservative factions within other religions such as Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, etc. None of those belief systems shares the Protestant belief in "Scripture Alone" (sola scriptura). All three believe in the binding nature of extra-scriptural/post-scriptural traditions. So while "the core they follow, scripture" is an accurate description of the basis of the original Protestant fundamentalism, it ends up misrepresenting "fundamentalism" in other religions, and distorting them through a Protestant-coloured lens. Which is why a lot of scholars of religion object to using the term "fundamentalist", and instead advocate using customised terminology for each religious tradition. Hence people speak of "Islamism" or "jihadist Salafism" or "Khomeinism" rather than "Islamic fundamentalism", for example. Instead of "Catholic fundamentalism", people speak of "Feeneyism" or "radical traditionalism" or "integralism" or so on. Instead of "Jewish fundamentalism", we have terms like "Kahanism". Instead of "Hindu fundamentalism", "Hindutva". And I know by trying to talk about a "core principle", maybe you are acknowledging that for "non-Protestant fundamentalism", the core might not be "scripture". But, just because Protestant Fundamentalists might be said to have a single core principle, doesn't mean every other religion does. Sometimes there is no single core principle, just an assortment of views. People use "fundamentalism" to describe religious views which have a rather hostile attitude towards what we might call "modern scientific liberalism", and whether you have a single core principle or an amorphous blur of many principles is irrelevant to whether you have such a hostile attitude or not

green_man_lives 4y ago

Preface: I say this as a leftist who believes in reparations and cooperative ownership of capital. When I hear fundamentalism I think less about the proseltyzing aspect and more about the divergence from the core ideology. Fundamentalist is probably a misnomer, maybe "radical" or "sectarian". For example, someone sufficiently "woke" would understand that the slave and sharecropping economy of the rural south impacted the majority of whites negatively and that racism was a tool used to prevent them from developing class consciousness. With this knowledge, any discussion about anti-racism w/ respect to the US south needs to also be explicitly anti-capitalist to help the "poor white trash" understand that their economic anxiety is being redirected unproductively. These people do benefit from white privilege in some ways, but solidarity should be the primary message here as there is a spectrum of victimization going on. A concrete example of how you could respond to someone saying "immigrants are taking our jobs" is to reframe it (correctly) that US immigration laws are being taken advantage of by employers. The immigrants and workers have no leverage in the system and the decision-makers are the capital owners. It is not productive to call this person a bigot and leave it at that (even if it is true). People who want to fit into the cultural zeitgeist but without the fundamental understanding of the system they criticize will just use these people as a punching bag, which doesn't help anyone. These types of people are easily co-opted into positions of power that don't fundamentally challenge the system. The head of a DEI initiative at a college does not challenge the existence of legacy admissions or donations from war profiteers and oil companies. They are smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds them. There's also a purity aspect to it. When there's no solid basis for the ideology you can just start measuring people against their purity level. "No true scotsman" and all that.

zenapollo 4y ago
Would it fair to say that racism has really largely been about classism? I’ve always thought that if capitalists wanted to make a campaign that would misdirect people’s sense of injustice, that blm and subsequent woke ideology would make the perfect foil.
- green_man_lives 4y ago
  > Would it fair to say that racism has really largely been about classism? Please do some reading on the subject. Cursory reading on the history of labor unions, immigration in America, or literally any book on the US south that isn't Lost Cause mythology will tell you resoundingly yes. I am not even talking about Marxist authors or Howard Zinn. You can easily find primary sources, the people who historically weaponized racism, telling you exactly how and to what end they are weaponizing their racism. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa... Secondly, capitalism is great at co-opting all sorts of messaging. Since you are on HN I assume you are familiar with the concept of a Paperclip Maximizer. The "machine" in this sense does not love you or hate you. You are a customer and they will adopt the aesthetics of your ideology to sell to you, inherent contradictions be damned. Every oil company that spent the last 50 years denying climate change now pours their money into showcasing their green energy products. Companies who benefit from convict labor of African Americans adopt BLM banners on their websites. Companies who donate to the political campaigns of every republican in both houses of legislature change their logos to pride flags in June. I dont want to assume but your phrasing makes me think (unless I am misreading it) that you think blm and "wokeness" are elite belief systems manufactured by "the machine", and that more reactionary "working class" ideology (a la Tucker Carlson) is grassroots. I really implore you to consider the Paperclip Maximizer idea and realize that the ideologies you are presented with on TV and print are the ones that have been passed through a corporate filter and sanitized to pose no threat to the machine. What you are seeing is a facsimile of what was once probably a more nuanced belief system. When was the last time you heard Georgism or Anarcho-syndicalism or de-growth discussed by any talking heads? The answer is never because these concepts are inherently antithetical to capitalism and cannot be co-opted.

zenapollo 4y ago

I agree that fundamentalism is good descriptor of the problem. A lot of comments replies arguing about the meaning of the word. To me fundamentalism means this. Where you fall on a certain issue defines a set of values. Fundamentalists are those believe that their one issue and the subsequent value structures are THE fundamental issue and value structure that individuals should be judged (morally and otherwise) as well as how we should see the world and organize society - above all other issues and value sets. With that definition one of the things you see a lot in American culture aside from Christian fundamentalism is capitalist fundamentalism - that free markets divine what and who is right. Social Justice fundamentalists do just that - dismiss or trample over other world views and values systems, in the name of equality.