Social Matter

One of the perennial weaknesses in leftist thought is its utopianism. Good old vanilla Marxism is the model here, especially considering how many contemporary ideas about social justice are intellectually derivative of it. The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles, you see. All the miseries, the frustrations, the wars, the peregrinations, the tragedies of this great ongoing pageant can be attributed to those struggles. Even its triumphs, too, are tainted by the fact that they were erected on the bent backs of the laboring classes. Injustices and exploitation all the way down. In the Marxist scheme, then, the way to remedy the sad state of human affairs is for workers of the world to unite, enact the Communist revolution, and win the class struggle once and for all. After that, we all know, the new age of peace and prosperity, of each according to his need, will be ushered in. Utopia.

As I said, modern offshoots of that thinking operate within the same utopian frame. Not only in the conviction that we’re on the cusp of a golden future but also in the sense of offering simplistic solutions for how to transition into it. Feminism chases after the phantom of “gender equality” and promises a tomorrow when just as many women will graduate with STEM degrees as men. Their solution? Well, pink legos for one, but more broadly the society-wide dismantling of harmful stereotypes about double-x chromosomes and the generalized affirmation that, yes, girls can too do math. Anti-racism, the LGBT agenda (which seems to be skewing heavily towards the T now that the L, G, and B have succeeded so roundly), multiculturalism—all of these preach that the kingdom of heaven on earth is nigh and that all we need is some tolerance and/or dialogue and/or dismantling of “privilege” to finish manifesting it.

The social affordances of backing such obviously limited solutions have been discussed at length in this here corner of the Right, under the label “signaling.” And the attractions of signaling are real. Yammering on about how you just know in your heart of hearts that a little more love and maybe the courage required for us to own up to our internalized racism is what’s really going to turn this ship around… that marks you as a good person to your peers and in the eyes of our social superiors nationwide. It proves your right-opinion bona fides. Some people like to take this signaling to the next level and are always looking for a way to insinuate that they are prepared to out-tolerate and out-accept even other bonafide progressives, so eager are they to graduate into nirvana. To see one such signaling arms race in action, peruse social justice Tumblr. To see a slightly more sophisticated version, visit an open forum at your nearest college campus.

Something that’s received perhaps less attention than the social affordances of the utopian frame, however, are the psychological affordances of it. The interior benefits, rather than the exterior ones. Take “transgenderism” for example. The whole thing’s a mess. The people who typically identify as transgenders (especially the one’s that truly believe they are in the wrong body) are mental and emotional wrecks. They’ve got neurosis upon neurosis, above and beyond “gender dysphoria.” And it could be for any number of reasons. Bad home life, past sexual abuse, chemical imbalances, whatever. These are miserable people with a blasted hellscape of an inner life, unable to produce a realistic self-appraisal, often fighting suicidal ideation. But what does the conceptual neatness of the official LGBT worldview offer them? It offers them a conceptually neat solution. “There’s nothing wrong with you. The real fault is with all those bigots out there who can’t accept you. If we promote trans-acceptance thoroughly enough, society will embrace you and you’ll finally be able to sleep peacefully at night.”

That’s a lie, of course. It misidentifies the origin of their woes, and it mis-prescribes the cure. But how tantalizing is that prescription? How much would someone in that situation crave such a simple Rx? Faced with the prospect of staring down your own psychological demons, with no clear plan of attack and no clue where to start, how wonderful would it be to have someone come along and say, “This right here is actually all you have to do to be well again”?

An individual facing the, pardon my French, clusterfuck of race relations in twenty-first century America is in those same shoes. An individual appraising the ruin that the last fifty years has wrought on women and their families is in those same shoes. These situations are complex, almost menacingly so. Boiling the solution down to “end racism” or “end misogyny,” though, makes them seem far more tractable. It provides a clear (if primrose) path forward. It allows us to retreat from the complexity of our straits and in part relieves the anxiety associated with them. So that’s one of the psychological appeals of the utopian frame that characterizes so much of leftist thought these days. You can rationalize away the need for wisdom, for prudence, for insight, for perspicacity. You divest yourself of the heavy burden of having to comprehend your labyrinthine predicament and make an informed response to it.

Let’s not pretend, however, that this is a mental temptation that only our esteemed colleagues on the Left fall into. There are plenty of right-wing critiques that broadcast on that same wavelength, at least insofar as they offer ersatz refuge from the complexity of the modern world, insofar as they offer simplistic but psychologically palatable answers. All we have to do is get back to the Constitution! All we have to do is vote Obummer and the Dumbocrats out of office or, ahem, restore monarchy to the West! All we have to do is disband the state and institute voluntaryism! Within even conservative churches and denominations a similar pattern generally obtains. We are instructed with due diligence how to go out into the midst of the world and be as harmless as doves. Because that is a soothing message. We are rarely exhorted with equal enthusiasm to obey the second portion of Christ’s commandment: be ye wise as serpents. Because, well, that’s frequently a much harder row to hoe. At least cognitively speaking.

The fact of the matter, though, is that life is complicated. And it doesn’t seem to be getting any less so. We Americans, for instance, are living in the twilight of a collapsing multiracial empire, supervised by a detached and neurotic elite, infested top to bottom with increasingly dysfunctional bureaucracies, dependent on the uninterrupted operation of a byzantine infrastructure and food supply chain, an empire that’s splitting along any number of fault lines. And it would be nice to survive the oncoming collapse (hard or soft) more or less intact. So there’s too much at stake to devolve into platitude thinking at this point, whether those platitudes be left or right, no matter how much solace they seem to offer. We rightly ridicule social justice warriors for their care bear dreams and magical thinking. Let’s make sure we’re not engaging in wishful-thinking escapism of our own.