Not entirely, because I'm speaking very broadly. You could probably name one of orthodoxies as the one colloquially known as social justice. It's the worldview that has gained significant traction over the course of the last five years.
The other one is harder to define because it's essentially not the social justice worldview.
In America, you tend to find the social justice worldview in urban and coastal areas, and you tend to find the latter in rural, interior locations.
Obviously this generalization breaks down in many ways, so [insert all the caveats].
My main beef with this is that even the philosophical father of social justice, John Rawls, would not recognize the means by which this movement is trying to achieve its ends as any form of justice and in any way aligned with his original position and veil of ignorance thought experiment.
The movement as currently practiced is one grand perversion with all the hallmarks of other populist illiberal (but believe they are liberal) movements that resulted in indisputable injustice.
Yep, definitely. It's why it's colloquial. In my view, the usage of that term today carries the same descriptive weight as terms like "free market". It's more evocative than literal.
I think the cultural shorthand for the -ists in question at the moment is “anti-PC” opposed with “woke” (in the non-pejorative sense; predictably enough it has also become a slur when used by those who oppose it).
These roughly align with a lot of other social dichotomies (e.g. they map approximately to right/left, respectively) in the US, although not quite coterminously. There’s a lot of fuzzy leakage around the edges on a lot of issues that primarily map directly to this split.
People want a political home. In countries without any type of per-capita representative voting system (where parties are split amount % of opinions like in MMP), they feel like they need to vote 'tactically.'
At least in America, at one time people could say, "I don't believe in everything x wants, but I do agree with core policies a, b and c and so I'm voting for them." Today we are much more polarized and people desperate for a political home may start internalizing and adopting policies they may not totally agree with just so they don't feel left out in the middle.
Cancel culture makes harder, if not impossible, to be in the middle. Are you against racism, but not for the specific BLM organization? You're opinion is not acceptable to the Democratic/politic-left. Is that a hill you're going to die on? If not, you move on and ignore it.
This gets into some pretty dangerous territory because now you cannot say certain beliefs publicly without fear of ostracization from your political home. You may be able to keep that belief secret, or you may just start to believe the opposite. Viewpoints within each false-dichotomy lose their diversity, and both sides could bend, consciously and subconsciously, to a narrow, homogeneous world view.
the mapped ideologies are dynamic (leaky), but the historically enduring dichotomy is simply power and its disciples vs. the disenfranchised.
"anti-PC" is power retaliating against change, and "woke" is the disenfranchised calling for change. conservative and progressive also map to this same dichotomy.
The conflict between "anti-PC" and "woke" in its entirety is in service of power. A perpetual screaming match between poor and middle-class people, about topics that have little to no bearing on profits, is ideal for corporate elites.
What do you mean? "Woke" is all about people with privilege trying to shield that privilege behind their correctthink as they attempt to disenfranchise the lower classes of their political rivals. "Woke" people do to Arkansas rednecks the same thing they accuse their opponents of doing to inner-city minorities.
"woke" people are more diverse than you claim, and certainly less privileged on average. perhaps the "privileged woke" people you speak about over-exert their privilege, but that's a conquence of privilege, not wokeness.
Wokeness and its methods are by their nature an amazing social shield and sword, so they attract the sort of people who want to cloak themselves in righteousness and tear into others.
possibly, but then, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance. i can't say how many such folks there might be, but in any case, it's more likely that they're pursuing their aims of fairness/justice badly, not maliciously.
Scott Alexander describes this view as "blue tribe" and "red tribe" where blue has a subgroup "grey" that broadly follows blue but disagrees with a good portion of blue's more extreme actions.
There's also a "grey" subgroup in the red tribe. For instance, a lot of Trump supporters will privately admit that he's a bad guy and an ineffective leader, but preferable to a liberal president.
The problem is that the more extreme factions in both tribes wield the power and tend to punish what they see as heresy within their own camps before going after the other tribe. Most groups treat apostates worse than those who never believed in the first place.
My point was not to draw a moral equivalence between two tribes, but rather point out that neither is a monolith, and both are currently controlled by their more extreme elements.
The Democratic party is being driven by those on the left flank of the party. Yes, the moderates are nominally in charge, but only so long as they drive the agenda of their more extreme members. It's similar to how John Boehner was an arguably more moderate Republican, nominally in charge of house. However, he got led around by the nose by the more extreme Freedom caucus who didn't have a lot of official control, but wielded a tremendous amount of soft power.
Right now, sure. But the political machinery is never in bed with the more radical people. Things are extreme now because it’s being driven that way by various parties.
As that calms down, compromises will be made and order will return. Recovery from economic catastrophe will be the priority.
'The right' holds this temporary power. But the arc of the last half-century remains unchanged: the platform of the democrats today will be the platform of GOP in 50 years. The right lost the universities and the culture long ago.
Not OP, but I will point out one example that should not be too controversial: "Science!".
Note that label of science has been as politicized ( to the detriment of all of us ) as pretty much everything else. If you dare to question "Science!", you are, by default, backwood white trash racist or something along those lines, which happens to ignore that science encourages healthy debate and constantly questions underlying assumptions. This is literally how we get progress.
Now, there is an argument to be made that words of a PhD carry more weight than FB educated person, but I think everyone here met a person with no formal education, who was still sharper than most people in the room ( and vice versa, an educated person arguing that black is white and getting himself killed crossing the next pedestrian crossing ).
If the COVID crisis has highlighted anything, it's that science literacy in the US is so bad that nobody really debates issues of science, they grab the label and bludgeon people with it.
What I find really distasteful is when people start with an argument like yours, then use it to argue their pet issue. eg to rail against the central dogma of genetics, the impossibility of evolution, or complain about "reproducibility/observability" and try to tear down whole areas of scientific research.
In the orthodoxy discussed in the article, people are taking it for granted that their beliefs are true and working diligently to ridicule those who don't agree.
In science, people hold many beliefs that have already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and are working diligently to prove others.
This might be true for things like the conventional laws of physics. But there are many things scientists do not agree or argue over. Quantum physics and string theory are two examples. The 1994 book The Bell Curve is another example from social sciences.
And today, we have grave reproducibility crises in science. We have people trying to apply rules about the psychological and metaphysical worlds into the doctrine of hard science. In the current crisis, we have conflicting papers published almost every week, and there is a deep political climate that cannot be denied behind much of the current research.
Even for thing that we can agree on work under experiment, like a certain class of drug, we can't explain WHY it works. We can say drug x will stop a heart attack 99% of the time and is generally considered safe in 99% of human beings, but often we're guess at the very specific interactions, based on what we see in labs, because we have no real introspection into all the complex things happening at the micro-level within the incredible complex cell systems inside of us.
Maybe one day we'll be able to see what happens at that microlevel in human bodies, and that could lead us to discover the drug isn't working at all the way we thought it was.
_The Bell Curve_ is not an academic treatise, and was near-universally derided. If anything, it itself was an anti-orthodox work trying to restore the basis of ethnicity as an explainer for many different phenomenon.
Maybe I'm confused. Are you using _The Bell Curve_ as an example of pseudo-scientific pop publication gone wrong, or as a worthy scientific viewpoint which is worthy of debate and was unfairly crucified in academia?
James Corbett did some great videos years ago on the weaponization of science. It is very true. Science should be debate and argument and reproducibility problems, working back and fourth until we get the methodology right and every student can follow the instructions and get the same results.
Today, science has certainly become a new belief system over certain publications and ideas over others. In the US, there is no constitution protection for "science," only for religion. Many of the things currently placed under the umbrella of science are really religious beliefs (you could even argue to some extent that all scientific beliefs are religious; even if some things, like the laws of physics, can be proven to be absolutely true 100% of the time) and should be looked at under the lens of the 1st amendment, when they're clearly not.
