By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 06, 2019
Noah Rothman, a brilliant young writer and editor at Commentary magazine, has just published
his first book, and it’s about nonsense.
Let me be clear: The book isn’t nonsense. It’s crisp,
insightful, and passionate. The topic, captured in the title, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of
America, is nonsense because social justice is nonsense.
Now, when I say “nonsense,” I mean nonsensical, as in
lacking interior logic and definitional rigor. A few years ago, while working
on my book The Tyranny of Clichés, I
put on my prospector’s helmet and mined the literature for an agreed-upon
definition of social justice. What I found was one deposit after another of
fool’s gold. From labor unions to countless universities to gay-rights groups
to even the American Nazi party, everyone insisted they were champions of
social justice. The only disagreements hinged on who is most in need of this
precious resource.
Common to almost every definition of social justice is
some version of “economic justice,” which usually means what philosophers call
“distributive justice” — i.e., taking money from the haves and giving it to the
have-nots. But what it’s really about is power. Its advocates want the power to
do what they want, and if they say it’s for social justice, that’s supposed to
make it okay.
For instance, the Green party platform on social justice
is nearly 60 pages (and 17,000 words) long. Among its planks: stopping speech
that perpetuates “oppression and abuse,” reform of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, sovereignty for Hawaii, compensation for gays and lesbians who’ve
suffered from “injustice,” the encouragement of young people’s potential “to
the greatest extent possible,” and reinvestment of a “significant portion” of
military spending on “family support, living-wage job development and work
training programs.” Social justice isn’t a theory; it’s a wish list.
And here we get to the crux of the issue. Conservatives
who read the social-justice literature can be forgiven for thinking the term is
really just a Trojan horse for socialism, and in earlier eras it has been. But
while it’s true that many of today’s social-justice warriors advocate
socialism, the animating passion stems from identity politics.
To put it bluntly, historically oppressed or
disadvantaged groups want payback in the name of social justice. Rothman calls
this “retributive justice.” According to this view — which obviously has more
than a little truth to it — whites have historically enjoyed privileges that
non-whites did not, and therefore non-whites are owed something, and “white
privilege” must be overthrown. The argument follows the same form for males,
heterosexuals, etc.
Among the myriad problems with this worldview is that
individual circumstances are boiled away. The white descendant of a Northern
abolitionist is as “guilty” as any other beneficiary of white privilege. Vast
abstract categories of human beings are swept up into notions of collective
guilt — or victimhood.
This is partly why philosopher Friedrich Hayek loathed
the concept of social justice. He saw it as the very negation of plain old
justice. Traditionally, a person is only supposed to be responsible for the
wrongs he or she committed against a specific person. If Person A does
something terrible entirely unbeknownst to Person B, it is unjust to hold
Person B accountable solely because of the color of his skin. It’s even more
grotesque to hold Person B accountable for the things done by Person A if
Person A lived 300 years ago.
When Rothman appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss his book, the reaction from critics on the
set and in social media often boiled down to the claim that he can’t criticize
social justice because he doesn’t belong to a category of people in need of
social justice. A white guy’s arguments can be dismissed out of hand because of
the color of his skin.
And this gets to the heart of why social justice is
nonsense. Social justice is a kind of magical incantation that renders
inconvenient impediments to its champions’ agenda illegitimate. Free speech is
good unless it hurts certain groups. Property rights are fine except when
social justice dictates that someone else needs your stuff more. The right to
confront your accuser is negated by the need to “believe all women.”
Even facts are irrelevant in the face of social justice.
As the United Nations put it a decade ago: “Present-day believers in an
absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor
desirable companions for the defenders of social justice.”
In other words, if you believe that the rule of law and
simple truth should determine who’s right, you’re the enemy of social justice.
I, for one, find those terms acceptable.
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