Pluckrose The Counterweight Handbook

Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice Ideology - at Work, in Schools and Beyond
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80075-109-5
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Diversity, equity and inclusion programmes have the admirable goal of creating a welcoming environment for everyone. Increasingly, however, people are realising that the way they are commonly practised isn't simply an extension of past civil rights movements. Instead, they're often intertwined with Critical Social Justice ideology, which imposes its principles and punishes any disagreement. Mild questions about Critical Social Justice claims - like all white people being racists or all minorities being oppressed, or sex differences having no biological basis - are met with curt commands by DEI trainers and HR officers: 'Educate yourself,' 'Do the work,' 'Listen and learn.' Advancements at work and school often depend on agreeing with these beliefs. Critical Social Justice ideology poses a real threat to rights and democracy, yet speaking out risks social backlash. When choosing between compliance and ethical opposition, what's the right path? Based on the author's years of experience studying, exposing and fighting Critical Social Justice ideology and advising people and organisations struggling with it, The Counterweight Handbook is designed to help people address Critical Social Justice problems in the most ethical and effective way possible.

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and speaker. She was editor of Areo Magazine and is the author of many popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and feminism. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe, which highlighted problems in social justice scholarship, she is today an exile from the humanities, where she researched late medieval and early modern religious writing by and for women. She is the co-author of Cynical Theories: How activist scholarship made everything about race, gender and identity - and why this harms everybody which was book of the year in the Times, Sunday Times and Financial Times. She lives in England and can be found on Twitter @HPluckrose.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pluckrose, Helen

Leseproben

1 Understanding the Theories behind Critical Social Justice: Key Tenets

If you are somebody who has decided to read this book, you will almost certainly already have some idea of the problem that is commonly referred to as “wokeism” or “cancel culture.” Because these terms are so slippery, it can be very hard to define them in a universally accepted way and thus to criticize them in a knowledgeable and principled way. This is made especially hard when advocates of the theories behind this particular form of activism insist that the word “woke” is a pejorative used by right-wing bigots to prevent people from talking about important issues of social justice or maintain that cancel culture is a myth created to shield those with privilege from accountability and to delegitimize the marginalized who call out bigotry.1 Nevertheless, “wokeism” refers to a real phenomenon with identifiable characteristics that is not simply about opposition to racism or other bigotries.2 After all, opposition to prejudice and discrimination is central to all ethical frameworks that seek a more just society where nobody is disadvantaged due to their immutable characteristics. Equally, cancel culture refers to a real phenomenon that operates much more broadly than by moralizing scorn aimed at celebrities and other high-profile people on social media for something they’ve said, done, or believe. It affects many more average people who have been bullied, pilloried, shamed, or fired simply for expressing an unpopular idea or for asking the wrong question,3 and we see manifestations of it daily that threaten fundamental rights and inhibit democratic processes.4 Rather than use these two separate but interrelated terms that are often inadequately defined and overly charged, however, I will refer to this overall phenomenon as “Critical Social Justice” to be precise in my meanings, definitions, and prescriptions.5

The core tenets of Critical Social Justice are easily recognizable and distinguishable from other ethical frameworks. Central to this is a belief in largely invisible systems of power that into which everybody has been socialized. This simplistic belief rejects both the complexity of social reality, which does not break down so neatly into identity-based power structures, and the individual’s agency to accept or reject bigoted ideas. This makes it different from most other ethical frameworks that oppose prejudice and discrimination. Critical Social Justice theorists and activists apply their “Critical” methods to analyze systems, language, and interactions in society to “uncover” these power systems and make them visible to the rest of us. In their framework, these systems include “whiteness,” “patriarchy,” “colonialism,” “heteronormativity,” “cisnormativity,” “transphobia,” “ableism,” “fatphobia,” etc., and are believed to infect all aspects of society and even the most benign everyday interactions. The belief that people are unable to avoid being racist, sexist, or transphobic because they have absorbed bigoted discourses from wider society is a tenet of faith that bears testament to its origins in postmodern thought, particularly that of Michel Foucault.6

Following on from its focus on invisible systems of oppressive power and how language often serves those systems, Critical Social Justice demands enforcement of the right ways of thinking and punishment of the wrong ways of thinking. When teachers are fired for including black intellectuals like Glenn Loury in Black History Month; when firefighters face disciplinary action for saying they do not care what race or gender identity an individual has when saving their lives; when African Muslim immigrants are barred access to jobs for saying they have experienced any racism or Islamophobia in their new country; and when graduate students are at risk of not being allowed to finish their PhDs for the crime of referring to people who give birth as “mothers,” we can safely say that we are living in a culture in which people are removed from earned positions for thinking the wrong way.7

Critical Social Justice is, at root, based on two core premises: (1) invisible power systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity permeate all of society, and (2) most people cannot see them because these systems just seem normal to us and, for the majority and the powerful, it is more convenient that we not see them.

Therefore, Critical Social Justice focuses primarily on oppressive attitudes, beliefs, biases, and narratives assumed to exist in society and be perpetuated primarily by the groups in society seen as dominant—the white, the male, the straight—but which can also be upheld by groups seen as marginalized. Just as dominant groups may knowingly uphold things like “white supremacy” to maintain their power or because they are ignorant or indifferent, marginalized groups may knowingly uphold “white supremacy” to curry favor with the dominant groups or because they have internalized the narratives underlying them. According to Critical Social Justice ideology, the way to dismantle these invisible power structures is to address the attitudes, beliefs, and biases people are assumed to have using specific “Critical” methods that center on scrutinizing and policing the use of language in society.

To be “woke,” as popularly understood, is to have become aware of these alleged invisible power systems and to want to act to dismantle them. This involves “awakening” others to the Critical Social Justice view of the world and getting them to take on the same assumptions and policing of themselves and others. The symbolism of being “woke” reflects the belief that a specific process is needed to arouse people from their stupor and get them into a state of awareness. This heightened awareness and intentional engagement can be understood as a variation on “critical consciousness” as developed by Paulo Freire writing in the neo-Marxist tradition.8

Of course, beliefs that one’s ideological group has developed a consciousness of oppressive power dynamics that broader society largely accepts uncritically is a trait of overly certain ideologues rather than of the left. We might think of the concept of being “red-pilled,” which references the film to describe having been suddenly awakened to a social reality that one had previously been asleep to, and which is associated mostly with the right-wing “anti-woke.”9 Humans are highly prone to believing that they have “seen the light” and have a responsibility to make others see it, too. Those on both left and right who favor the “marketplace of ideas” approach to evaluating ideas on their merits while mitigating one’s own bias as much as possible via evidence, reason, and viewpoint diversity generally reject any way of determining what is true that relies on believing one’s own ideological group to be awake and all others asleep.

Within Critical Social Justice, the word “consciousness” is used in the usual sense to indicate being awake and aware of a certain reality. However, within academic theory, the term “critical” holds a different meaning from its everyday usage. In common usage, to be critical can mean to think negatively of something, or it can be related to what we’d usually think of as “critical thinking,” where we attempt to step back from an issue and survey it as rationally and objectively as possible with the purpose of establishing whether it is true or ethically sound. Critical theorists, however, draw a sharp distinction between the everyday meaning of “critical” and their meaning of “critical.” Alison Bailey, a Critical Social Justice theorist in education, makes this distinction explicit. She begins by describing what is meant by “critical thinking”:

The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. . . . To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life . . . the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living.” . . . In this tradition sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly.10

Here, Bailey provides an accurate understanding of what is generally meant by critical thinking. Humans are not perfectly rational, objective, and logical beings; we get at truth best by evaluating arguments and truth claims on the grounds of the soundness of their reasoning and the strength of their evidence. To work properly and minimize confirmation bias (only looking at the evidence that confirms what one already believes) and motivated reasoning (using rationalizations for what one already believes), this evaluation needs to be done with other people with different views. Other people are likely to be equally biased but will be more likely than us to see the flaws in our arguments, point out the problems with our evidence, and offer counterarguments and disconfirming evidence for us to consider. If an expectation exists that viewpoint diversity, reason, evidence, and civil and honest debate govern these discussions, we are far more...