"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"

PhilGoetz

The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:

3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism

The scenario is always the same: I say we should abolish prisons, police, and the American settler state— someone tells me I’m irrational. I say we need decolonization of the land — someone tells me I’m not being realistic.... When those who are the loudest, the most disruptive — the ones who want to destroy America and all of the oppression it has brought into the world — are being silenced even by others in social justice groups, that is unacceptable.

(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)

I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man. This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman. The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally. Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.

This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website. I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.

But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.

The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".

In fact, by American standards, my very existence is irrational. For many, I simply do not exist as a queer, Vietnamese femme who is neither a man or a woman. Living in my body, wading through my truths, is not a rational act. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Based on my experiences as a marginalized person, being rational just means going easy on my oppressors.

The narrow bit of room that rationalism gave me wasn’t enough for me to envision new possibilities for my gender, to escape the confines of impending manhood. It wasn’t enough for me to understand my personhood as infinitely more complicated than the models of personhood fed to me by white cis people.

S/he didn't realize that white cis people don't use rationality either to understand their gender and social role. These are cultural values that parents deliberately program in before a child can become rational and come up with their own version.

Making my own inferences, I'd guess that

1. The author has had many unpleasant social experiences because of zis refusal to adopt a gender, and

2. The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often makes bad arguments, and gets told ze is irrational, and

3. The author is unable to distinguish discomfort with zis gender non-choice, from resistance to zis bad ideas, as having separate causes.

The 3 reasons are:

1. Being Rational Has No Inherent Value

2. Rationalism Is a Tool Made to Hurt Us

3. We Are Enough Without Rationalism

Also see the same site's recent article "4 Reasons Demanding ‘Objectivity’ in Social Justice Debates Can Be Oppressive".

ADDED, since I'm 50 karma in the hole anyway:

Ironically, today's "social justice" program demands a radical rationalism.

Social justice used to be a rationalist program on its surface, pointing out the irrationality of prejudice and the illogic in narratives used to justify oppression. But as society adjusted its pre-judgements closer to targets that were rational but still unequal, e.g., from "Women can't do engineering" to "Most women don't want to do engineering", the emphasis switched from being rational about our beliefs to irrationally assuming equality of everyone and everything, not just as a default starting point, but as a mandated endpoint. (Historically, this was tied to an influx of reality-denying continental philosophy into social activism in the 1960s.)

De-emphasizing rationality on its surface requires a more radical rationalism for its practical implementation. Changing social conventions has a cost. When we extend social justice beyond respect for difference that people have no choice over, such as race or sex, to roles that they choose, such as religion or gender, the justification for allowing everyone to defy any particular social convention must be a rational cost-benefit assessment. Many people enjoy the ritual interactions specified by social roles; they are part of their identities and one of their terminal values. A demand to give up these values must fall back onto consequentialist arguments.

(Is constant social pressure on the person doing the defying more important than thousands of irritations to the people who don't know how to deal with zim, and who feel their own identities inhibited in zis presence? I don't know. It's torture vs. dust specks.)

The new social justice program is ultimately to strip from human consciousness all shortcuts, biases, prejudices, pre-computations, and priors. This requires making each individual a rational consequentialist capable of reasoning zer way from every situation to a rational behavior. To know how to use social roles, people require either social heuristics (which will inevitably oppress somebody), or radical ends-based rationality. This is particularly true when people are allowed to unilaterally opt in or out of social roles, so that every situation has a mix of people demanding to be treated differently.

(It isn't clear whether priors are permissible in this rationality.)

Even the oppressed classes must be ideal rationalists (Homo economicus). If women are still allowed to prefer not to be computer programmers, or men are allowed to prefer not to raise children, a free market will make mandated equality cause, rather than alleviate, injustice.

Alternately, we could possibly say that social justice doesn't require radical rationality, provided that we allow no social roles (a commitment to radical individuality). This also imposes a cost in so far as social roles serve to increase social utility.

The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:

3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism

The scenario is always the same: I say we should abolish prisons, police, and the American settler state— someone tells me I’m irrational. I say we need decolonization of the land — someone tells me I’m not being realistic.... When those who are the loudest, the most disruptive — the ones who want to destroy America and all of the oppression it has brought into the world — are being silenced even by others in social justice groups, that is unacceptable.

(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)

This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website. I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.

But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.

The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".

In fact, by American standards, my very existence is irrational. For many, I simply do not exist as a queer, Vietnamese femme who is neither a man or a woman. Living in my body, wading through my truths, is not a rational act. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Based on my experiences as a marginalized person, being rational just means going easy on my oppressors.

The narrow bit of room that rationalism gave me wasn’t enough for me to envision new possibilities for my gender, to escape the confines of impending manhood. It wasn’t enough for me to understand my personhood as infinitely more complicated than the models of personhood fed to me by white cis people.

Making my own inferences, I'd guess that

1. The author has had many unpleasant social experiences because of zis refusal to adopt a gender, and

2. The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often makes bad arguments, and gets told ze is irrational, and

3. The author is unable to distinguish discomfort with zis gender non-choice, from resistance to zis bad ideas, as having separate causes.

The 3 reasons are:

1. Being Rational Has No Inherent Value

2. Rationalism Is a Tool Made to Hurt Us

3. We Are Enough Without Rationalism

Also see the same site's recent article "4 Reasons Demanding ‘Objectivity’ in Social Justice Debates Can Be Oppressive".

ADDED, since I'm 50 karma in the hole anyway:

Ironically, today's "social justice" program demands a radical rationalism.

(It isn't clear whether priors are permissible in this rationality.)

Really? Why [...]

I'm not sure I understand your question. Taking it bit by bit:

"i.e., that most Marxist-Leninists at the time did not think that the working-class base as it existed then was important"
- You introduce this with "i.e.", but it doesn't seem to me like it means the same thing as the author means by "the lack of an industrial base for the majority of Marxist Leninists". I think his claim isn't that they didn't think the working-class base was important, but that although they proclaimed its importance they were out of touch with actual working-class people and didn't have a good model of their real needs and wants.
"and then go on to talk about students and the Little Red Book"
- He doesn't. This section is not about students, and I see no reason to think the people he's talking about waving the Little Red Book were students.
That's hardly what the article would say if its only point was, uh, "some student protesters were Maoists"
- I am not claiming that the only point of this document is "some student protesters were Maoists". In particular, most of the document is not about student protesters, and the bit you're quoting from is not about student protesters and tells us nothing about how many student protesters were Maoists or how heartfelt their Maoism was.
"the authors care about Maoism precisely because it was popular and indeed influential"
- The author cares about Maoism because he was a leading Maoist during the period the article describes.
"the United Kingdom section of Wikipedia's article on student activism"
- ... doesn't in fact say anything about Maoism being important. It says that from the 1930s on lots of socialist societies (of all kinds) were formed at universities. It names two particular groups formed in 1966, neither of which appears to have been Maoist. And it talks about some particular protests (e.g., the tearing down of the LSE gates, about which our document says "the Left was not actually strong enough to shape events"; and the Grosvenor Square protest, which our document indicates (1) was a minority breakaway group from the larger but less dramatic protest and (2) "went into decline in 1969", again not suggesting a lot of long-term influence).

But aside from all this point-by-point quibbling, I'm not seeing how any of this bears on the question of (1+2) versus (3) being meant when our author says there were a lot of Maoists among late-1960s student activists. The picture he paints of leftist student activism seems to me more or less what you'd expect: a mixture of genuine ideologues of various kinds (by no means all Maoist), more moderate people making common cause with the extremists, and people for whom the far-left politics was more attire than actual belief ("some comrades were preoccupied in trying to solve their 'sexual problems' instead of making revolution").

And, yet again, everything you say remains far removed from the present-day social justice movement you were originally making claims about. It's as if I said, I dunno, that modern physics is lightly disguised Christianity, and when challenged kept pointing out that Newton was very religious. (Not quite so extreme; the gap is 40 years rather than 400. But the same logical problem.)

I've answered these concerns in a previous comment.

Which I answered at the time.

You say they both want a "great cultural revolution" -- but the cultural changes they want are completely different, and only one of the groups actually uses the term "great cultural revolution" that you put in quotation marks. You say they both make a big deal of ideologically-driven self-criticism -- but this is actually a very common idea, which you can find in notably Maoist movements like Methodism, rationalism, and Scientology. You say they both aim to address "perceived vacuousness, oppression and degradation" -- but so far as I can tell (a) sociopolitical movements always get some of their power from participants' hope that they will bring meaning into their lives, so this doesn't distinguish Maoism and SJ from evangelical Christianity or neoreaction or transcendental meditation or anything else; (b) the alleged oppressions with which Maoism and SJ are concerned are extremely different and in fact barely overlap; (c) if by "degradation" you actually mean anything different from vacuousness + oppression, you'll need to explain what.

And you appeal to "actual historical heritage" but again this is very indirect: left-wing student activism was strongly influenced by Maoism for a few years in the late 1960s; subsequent left-wing students were influenced by the aftermath of that activism; those students grew up into left-wing academics; left-wing academics are responsible for much theorizing about "social justice". If that makes present-day "social justice" an incarnation of Maoism, then it seems to me almost anything can be an "incarnation" of almost anything. (The radical leftist students of the late 1960s were by no means all Maoists; being influenced by something is not the same as subscribing to it wholeheartedly; people's opinions and attitudes change, often dramatically, over time; present-day "social justice" is broader than academic theorizing about it.)

And: you say the SJ movement developed from leftist student radicalism starting in the 1960s, but the term has been around with a meaning not entirely unlike its present one since the 1840s and (I repeat) the distinctive concerns of present-day SJ that aren't shared with the 1840s advocates of "social justice" tend to be ones also not shared with Maoism.

a mixture of genuine ideologues of various kinds ... more moderate people making common cause with the extremists, and people for whom the far-left politics was more attire than actual belief ("some comrades were preoccupied in trying to solve their 'sexual problems' instead of making revolution").

This is a good description of any social movement. As the newest blogpost from SSC rightly states, 'The Ideology Is Not The Movement', and most movements are largely "about" socialization and tribal attitudes as opposed to their ideological... (read more)