Every Revolution is a Religion, Eventually

More and more often, I see liberals grappling publicly with the way Social Justice and related movements (e.g., feminism) have become aggressive and puritanical. Movements demanding equality have been hijacked by a mob mentality. What started out as people confronting negative social norms has devolved into a perpetual moral panic reminiscent of Christian histrionics in the mid-twentieth century and before. It is encouraging to see this kind of engagement. However, the emerging similarities between the Social Justice movement and fundamentalist religion are not quite as unexpected or confusing as they may seem. Like Social Justice, religions are ideologies, and ideologies are tools for controlling human behavior and establishing power.
In her new book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, Laura Kipnis levels a scathing indictment of Title-IX abuses on campus and the brand of feminism that has brought them about. Kipnis describes how, rather than empowering women, narratives of sexual assault on campus, reproduce antiquated notions of female fragility and passivity. Sex becomes something done to women in those narratives. She further compares Title-IX complaint investigations to the Salem witch trials. This may seem predictable, but the analogy is as apt as an analogy can be. Title-IX complainants’ stories are accepted uncritically, while “respondents” (the defendants) are often prevented from mounting any kind of defense, including the introduction of exculpatory evidence. In detailing her own experience as a Title-IX respondent accused of “retaliation” for writing an article about bureaucratic overreach in an investigation at her school, Kipnis paints a picture of ideological fundamentalism in action.
Last week, Frances Lee published an essay entitled Excommunicate Me From the Church of Social Justice, that makes an unfavorable comparison between fundamentalist religion and the social justice movement. “Scrolling through my news feed sometimes feels like sliding into a pew to be blasted by a fragmented, frenzied sermon,” Lee says. And the sermons are just the beginning. There are “[p]unishments for saying/doing/believing the wrong thing include shaming, scolding, calling out, isolating, or eviscerating someone’s social standing.” Lee isn’t alone in these concerns; they are shared by other activists and liberally-minded folks the author knows.
Both Kipnis and Lee’s critiques are coming from within feminism and the broader Social Justice movement. Kipnis points out that she is a feminist, albeit of the old(er)-school variety, and Lee is a queer, trans person of color who studies queer theory and “decolonial design.” These aren’t outsiders — Republicans and alt-righties — making these accusations of pseudo-religious extremism*. How is it that the adherents of social justice have become so much like the fundamentalists they purportedly oppose that folks with these credentials are calling for a collective pumping of the brakes?
The problem actually isn’t that the ideology behind social justice has become like a religion. The problem is that religions are ideologies, just like Social Justice, and the behavior of one ideology and its adherents is indistinguishable that of any other.
Are the people who lead these campaigns of intimidation driven by earnest passion for doing what’s right, or by something more sinister?
In a 2016 study, Tamás Dávid-Barrett and James Carney created a computer-generated “societies” with ancestor-gods and a “priest-class” that had a kind of kinship with those ancestors. Individual members of those societies were more efficient at coordinating their behavior than members of societies that lacked those characteristics. Of course, these are computer-generated “agents,” and their behavior was modeled as simple state-changes. Yet these results show that the characteristics of religions or proto-religions — deified ancestors and the priests who speak for them — are a way of coordinating human behavior.
Using “gods” and “priests” implies religion, but any ideology could be easily substituted. For Social Justice, the gods are oppressed ancestors; specifically, those oppressed by European colonialism and/or Christianity. The priest classes are the descendants of those oppressed people and their allies. There is a great deal of power to be had through pseudo-kinship with deified ancestors. Pseudo-kinship is the basis of belonging to the group, and those who are “closest” to the ancestors, who embody the principles of their ideology get to coordinate the behavior of the rest of their group. They have the power to say who is included and excluded.
That kind of power is maintained by demanding ideological purity, and by wielding beliefs like a weapon. Recall Lee’s description of how those who believe or even say the wrong thing are treated. Are the people who lead these campaigns of intimidation really driven by an earnest passion for doing what’s right, or by something more sinister, like a hunger for power? Kipnis explains that many of the questionable Title-IX complaints she saw against faculty and graduate students were, in fact, encouraged and even propelled by faculty members in the same department. Not every accusation of gender-based discrimination or inappropriate sexual conduct is a secret power play, of course, but a moral panic like the one emerging on college campuses nationwide provides a convenient means of damaging and even derailing a rival’s career.
Not everyone wants to be a priest, and not all members of the priest-class are power-hungry bullies. Most of the SJWs (for lack of a better term) that I know are good people, just like most of the Christians, Muslims, etc. that I know. How does the congregation stop the tyranny of the abusive members of the priest-class? Take away the source of their power: the ideology. You don’t need an ideology to tell you how to behave, and you damn-sure don’t need other people to tell you how dead people would want you to behave. Reject all ideologies. Nihilism is the only true revolution.
* Ann Coulter actually made a similar (but shittier) argument ten-ish years ago in Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Of course, I didn’t read the book. If I want to feel like I’m being lectured by a sullen teenager in the thrall of a political stance they think is new, I’ll just wait for my son to reach junior high (no offense to my son, I’m sure he will be much more enjoyable to engage with than some deeply-unhappy gargoyle spouting wise-cracks that didn’t make the cut for 2 Broke Girls).
