The Dangers of Social Justice Collectivism
A blog post by the academic team of Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay from May 2016 drew a compelling comparison between the Christian notion of original sin and the social justice concept of “privilege.”
Here’s how they lay it out:
The concepts of Original Sin and privilege are identical except that they operate in different moral universes. In familiar religions, Original Sin is something you’re born with. It’s something you can’t escape. It’s something you can’t really do anything about — except be ashamed. It’s something you should confess and try to cleanse yourself of. It’s something that requires forgiveness, atonement, penitence, and work. It’s something, if you take it to heart, for which you will browbeat others.
This one-dimensional concept of privilege has quietly snuck into American political discourse without notice or resistance. In discussions over societal injustice, the right of reparation for an individual who has been transgressed is directly proportional to the assumed privileges, or lack thereof, of the demographic groups to which said person belongs. This collectivist method of thinking should feel foreign to those who have maintained the individualist outlook on American society. Consider a Black American, son or daughter of a wealthy executive, being given preference at elite universities over a poor white American male. Such a situation hardly feels like “social justice.”
The comparison between original sin and privilege isn’t perfect. Consider an important distinction that Boghossian and Lindsay point out:
While we can love the sinner but hate the sin, we seem poorly equipped to love the privileged, unless merely as mascots and objects of envy. Sinners have been born into a struggle against a fatal flaw; the privileged are just born flawed — unwholesomely lucky and blithely ungrateful. The sinner is born flawed and thus writes his own undoing. The sinner, then, in being unable to help it, is a wretch, and behind all contempt for him there is pity. Not so with the privileged. The very word privileged almost makes you find its target contemptible. The privileged don’t hinder themselves; they hinder you. A sinner can be redeemed; the privileged must be taken down a notch.
This distinction proves crucial. While Christians opt to love the sinner, adherents to social justice dogma, according to Harvard professor Steven Pinker, believe that the social power of majority groups must be dismantled. This, in effect, means that struggles faced exclusively by members of groups considered to be “privileged” will intentionally go ignored.
If taken to its logical conclusion, then this collectivist attitude would permit a Black American female with a degree from a good university to ask a white male leukemia patient to “check his privilege.” Is this really the direction America is headed?
Consider struggles faced particularly by American men. According to research published in The Huffington Post, “men receive sentences that are 63 percent higher, on average, than their female counterparts” when committing the same crime. Men are significantly more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Men comprise over 90 percent of workplace fatalities. They are the majority of the homeless, and the majority of suicide victims. As a result of their biological makeup, men make up over 95 percent of all combat deaths. An audience of the popular CBS daytime show, The Talk, made humor of the case of a California man who had his penis cut off by his deranged wife after he filed for divorce. Many men took issue with the program’s handling of the matter not because they opposed making light of the absurdity of the case, but because of the obvious double standard that the situation presented.
To those church members that may stumble upon this column, I feel that I must clarify that my bringing attention to these issues faced by American men in no way serves to diminish those issues faced by exclusively American women. Rather, I hope these issues serve to place an inkling of doubt in their minds. Perhaps the structure of American society isn’t the one-dimensional hierarchy of privilege that was laid out for them by their college instructors. For if America truly is an oppressive patriarchy, why does it often fail men so miserably?
Academics, women, and progressives within the Church of Social Justice are able to ignore such issues because prevailing wisdom tells that injustices against men are inconsequential. After all, aren’t men the majority of corporate executives, politicians, and heads of household? Aren’t they the perpetrators of most violent, sexual, and white-collar crimes?
But what if we flipped the script? What if we ignored issues of sexual violence because women are now make up the majority of American college students? Or because they seemingly receive institutional advantages in family court? Such arguments would rightly be considered absurd.
One might think that we could agree, as a society, that a poor white American male who grew up with abusive parents has a lesser net privilege (the total sum of an individual’s advantages and disadvantages) than the daughter of a wealthy Black American executive, but that isn’t the case. Those within the Church of Social Justice often maintain that because the poor white male benefits from the advantages of membership in social majority groups, he must repent for these sins by foregoing the institutional advantages afforded to even the most privileged black and female Americans, such as affirmative action into university or STEM-industry jobs.
Can we not consider a vision of justice for American society that takes into consideration the unique situation of the individual? Some Black Americans have genuinely been held back by discrimination. Others have not. Some White Americans lead comfortable lives of relative privilege. Others lead lives ravaged by personal hardship. Some women are held back by gender stereotypes and sexual violence. Others aren’t. Some men lead comfortable lives. Others face a myriad of socially and biologically-cultivated injustices, such as discrimination in family court, the incentives for lower-class males to enlist in the military, or earlier death via suicide, combat, or homicide.
Postmodernists and social justice warriors will view my call for a more nuanced, individualistic approach to rectifying social injustices as the ramblings of a privileged white male who is blinded by the benefits afforded to him by the systems of oppression within American society. But it is their twisted view of justice that threatens the freedoms of all Americans. To make someone complicit in an oppression based upon the color of their skin or the shape of their genitals is a greater form of discrimination than they understand. And if we recall some of the issues faced by men mentioned earlier, we realize that there are ongoing real-world consequences to such attitudes. Why seek justice for a sinner whose mere existence is a transgression against the truly marginalized?
The San Francisco Post is an open platform for writers of all ideological persuasions to share their original opinion-based writing.
Please email write@sanfranpost.com to pitch content.
