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Just to lay my cards on the table: I'm registered as a member of the US Green Party and have been involved with various left wing activist movements since I was

Just to lay my cards on the table: I'm registered as a member of the US Green Party and have been involved with various left wing activist movements since I was fifteen. I've also been poor, living in a junkie hotel and doing day labor for cash. My most upvoted comment on hn (before I ragequit my previous account (for basically leftist grievances (!))) was one describing what that was like. Still, I find the intellectual attitude that you've described deeply unsettling. As you've sketched it, the "social justice narrative[0]" is unfalsifiable: what claims does your theory of politics actually make about the world if any given piece of it can be overturned without making a dent in the theory itself? A theory of social inequality can't be correct in general without being correct in particular cases. Refuting (not "deconstructing") a particular thesis is not "intellectual showboating", it's engaging in argument. What else is someone who sincerely disagrees with you supposed to do? I've seen this happen with depressing regularity: a self-styled social justice advocate will make a claim, and sometimes that claim will get demolished by an intelligent opponent. (Yes, this can happen, and it is a portent for the future of the left that most activists never learn to take a drubbing from a perceptive conservative.) Rather than taking stock at that point, the social justice advocate throws up a polysyllabic ink cloud ("institutional", "systemic" and "societal" seem to enjoy heavy rotation) and jets away. Whether it is true or not that nebulous social forces conspire to constrain outcomes for the poor in the way that the social justice advocate believes, I have no idea why such verbal behavior should be considered convincing. This is especially frustrating if you actually sincerely think that the left has good ideas about social policy that should be argued for in earnest and implemented. --- [0] The heavy rhetorical weight placed on the word "narrative" also gives me goosebumps. What happened to plain old arguments-- a set of propositions intended to establish (or at least raise the probability of) the truth of a conclusion? I would hate to think it's because "narratives", unlike arguments, are impossible to demonstrate or refute.

ahelwer 13y ago
The key word here is vacuum. It's pretty easy to come up with compelling arguments against individual examples of inequality, but these really only hold up on their own and yes, fall apart at the structural level. I agree retreating to argue on the structural level is rhetorically weak. That's all that can really be said against it, and it's unfortunate, because someone saying how really you are a member of the oppressed (as seen in white supremacist and MRA groups) is much more alluring than some intangible narrative about structural inequality. I say narrative because that's the form it has taken, and indeed had to take. Mary Wollstonecraft couldn't spend her time arguing point by point in a council chamber. She wrote books, compelling novels which had to fight viciously for every inch of ground on which they stood. You've seen how easily people convince themselves that gripes of oppression are baseless, today, 200 years after A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. We've had academics write and study and provide rhetorical tools for generations now, building a narrative, because that is what is needed. To truly argue against it, it must be met on that same narrative ground.

ahelwer 13y ago

The key word here is vacuum. It's pretty easy to come up with compelling arguments against individual examples of inequality, but these really only hold up on their own and yes, fall apart at the structural level. I agree retreating to argue on the structural level is rhetorically weak. That's all that can really be said against it, and it's unfortunate, because someone saying how really you are a member of the oppressed (as seen in white supremacist and MRA groups) is much more alluring than some intangible narrative about structural inequality. I say narrative because that's the form it has taken, and indeed had to take. Mary Wollstonecraft couldn't spend her time arguing point by point in a council chamber. She wrote books, compelling novels which had to fight viciously for every inch of ground on which they stood. You've seen how easily people convince themselves that gripes of oppression are baseless, today, 200 years after A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. We've had academics write and study and provide rhetorical tools for generations now, building a narrative, because that is what is needed. To truly argue against it, it must be met on that same narrative ground.