Social Justice and Selective Attention

The demands of social justice tend toward the capricious. Like Fortuna or that stretch of the Atlantic around the Outer Banks or legendary tech dynamo Shanley Kane, she is a fickle mistress. The changefulness and the frequent mutual incompatibility of her demands are well documented by now. America ought to, for instance, treat violence against women as a singular and heinous evil. Social justice demands it. But social justice also demands that Americans put women toe-to-toe with our most savage enemies on the front lines of combat. Quite the quandary. So I suppose it’s no wonder that the most ardent devotees of social justice often adopt gradually jumpier and more harried attitudes as time goes on. They are themselves like battered women, committed heart and soul to an entity who might decide at any moment and for any arbitrary reason at all to punish them. Hell of a way to live.

Social justice progressivism is inconsistent even in its inconsistencies, however. Sometimes the demands are remarkably predictable. One such pattern of injunctions is that people, and the wrong sort of white people in particular, ought to repent in sackcloth and ashes for holding a whole raft of perfectly ordinary feelings and beliefs. Some of these perfectly ordinary feelings, in fact, transcend the category of “ordinary” entirely and enter into that of “human universal.” We’ll keep with the theme of what is and isn’t sexism here. When the enlightened feminist of today chastises you for wanting women to lean out of the workplace and lean into the work of nurturing the generations to come, that feminist is chastising you for believing in a system that has operated the world over, from deepest antiquity on down, from prehistory. Our instinctual gender roles. History’s perennial recurrence. Their sexism.

These arguments, arguments that opportunistically demonize historical norms, crop up all the time. A couple of them have reared their heads with especial sound and fury in recent years in America, on the national stage. In fact one of them is at the very heart of the “nation of immigrants” line that gets trotted out to excuse the ongoing inundation of the United States by the global South. The idea is that, since the landmass of America was inhabited by red Indians when the first colonists arrived, well obviously they still have some sort of eternal claim on it and all of the generations of Americans who from that time to ours dreamt up, built, and maintained a civilization on that landmass have less of a claim to either that land and those improvements both.

(Add to that exaggerated tales of infected blankets and ruthless double-crossings and genocide and you’ve got, from the progressive point of view, a knock-out punch. The founders of the United States of America and the posterity they founded it for have no more or less a right to these United States than anyone else the world over. Everyone except for those proud native tribes are sojourners here.)

The other argument doesn’t concern immigration but instead America’s “troubled racial legacy” or whatever MSNBC is calling it this evening. It is the idea that, since our country was “founded on” slavery, it will continue to be illegitimate until some sort of reparations (financial or otherwise) make our relationship with our black co-citizens “right” for the first time in history. (We have been slogging towards this Utopia since the 60s or thereabouts. Whether or not real progress has actually been made depends on the day, the mood of the speaker, and whether liberals are attempting to congratulate themselves or chastise their retrograde conservative cousins.) Such refrains are common in the latest round of race riots and the media buzz surrounding them.

In both instances, whatever we do now is morally suspect because of what our ancestors did back then. And it doesn’t matter at all that our ancestors only did what was common to man. It doesn’t matter that mass population movements, that conflict over territory, that wars between genetically and culturally distinct tribes, that subjugation of defeated people, that slavery have all been with humanity for as long as humanity has troubled the earth. It doesn’t matter that they are still with us today. It doesn’t matter that they will be with us until the Day of Judgment. We are supposed to take the times that we lived up to historical norms as special evidence of our unique historical culpability and our own unique moral illegitimacies.

Of course, perhaps all of this is giving these sorts of “arguments” too much credit in the first place. It runs the risk of treating them as logical propositions, which makes them more transparently absurd. If conquest or genocide categorically remove a people’s claim over their own homeland, let that tribe who has never won a war cast the first stone. (You will, of course, have to exhume them from their unmarked graves first.) If historical slavery categorically requires a present reparation, then, by all means, let the money start to flow. But to be fair and above-the-table with all of this we’re going to have to start the accounting entire millennia before the American South. And the various financial transfers between Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia are going to get a little complicated, to say the least.

So, yes, it’s probably best to recognize that these arguments are not arguments proper at all. They are simply particular outgrowths that fickle drive for “social justice,” which itself originated as a critique of the West. They treat the failures of the West as historically unique because that’s a convenient strategy for attacking the West. They ignore the sins of the rest of the world because that’s a convenient strategy for attacking the West. And once again we’re back at that one eerie consistency that persists throughout all the vicissitudes and permutations and transmogrifications of the social justice agenda, that it always comes back to finding the wrong sort of white person, shaking one’s finger at him or her, and shouting “Wrong! Bad! Evil!”

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