Yes, that must be it. Thanks for playing. https://twitter.com/littmath/status/1279700988660768768

One thing that is totally bewildering right now is the number of people who accept these two premises:

1) Social justice is very important.
2) Some of the scholarship into it is crazy & unethical.

Also believe:
3) Criticising the crazy & unethical scholarship is bad.

I try to assume everyone is sincere & well-intentioned, but if you are instinctively defending Critical Social Justice scholarship & activism while having a limited understanding of it & refusing to look at any evidence of the problem, do you actually care about social justice?

You might do! I understand that no-one has the time or inclination to get into the details of everything. Sometimes we just need to support something that we know is important but don't fully understand. eg, I support Cancer Research w/out reading any of the research.

But if someone came to me and said "There's a real problem with the research and it's hurting the very people it's supposed to be helping" my instinct would not be to say "But cancer is bad & curing cancer is good so you must just hate people with cancer."

I would want to know if what they said was true. I probably wouldn't drop everything and learn to understand cancer research and read a tonne of it but if I cared about cancer sufferers & wanted to continue to contribute to helping them survive, I would pay attention.

I would want to see qualified medical researchers addressing the alleged problem & breaking the arguments down for the layperson so that they could be better informed about what they are supporting financially & ethically.

Cancer research is important so getting it right matters. Social justice is also important. Here I am a qualified person saying there is a problem that actually harms the cause of social justice & the people it is intended to help. I am not evil or an opponent of social justice.

There are people I respect who disagree with me. They either think that CSJ approaches have more worth than I think or that they don't but are also not doing any real harm. They recognise that I know what I am talking about & am critiquing it accurately & with good motivations.

I think they are wrong on both counts but these positions are honest & something I can work with. But then there are people who just assume that I am:
1) Ignorant.
2) Bigoted.
3) Opportunistic & financially motivated.

I can't work with this. I know none of them are true.

This is a knee-jerk response that signals a tribal position in favour of social justice and against opponents of social justice. When it comes from people who are actually knowledgeable in the theory, we get that cult mentality that is almost impossible to dislodge.

More often, however, it comes from people who are not knowledgeable in the theory but have a vague sense of it as something much more friendly &liberal than it actually is who are then motivated to defend it & attack its opponents to lazily signal their support for social justice

These people are absolutely infuriating because they are usually leftist academics with a strong social conscience working in some other field, often a STEM one, who mostly want to be supportive of their colleagues over in gender studies or race studies w/out having to read them

I don't blame them for not wanting to read CSJ papers, but then they really need not to defend it against its critics. It doesn't work like science where someone who is not a scientist can be supportive of science as a good thing with methods that work.

I cannot take part in any disagreement between scientists on the efficacy of certain methods so I won't defend any. I will leave them to work that out while recognising that scientific methods of knowledge production are generally much more reliable than non-scientific ones.

However, over in the realm of social justice issues, these disagreements are not allowed & Critical Social Justice scholarship defines itself as the only game in town and claims that anybody who disagrees with it is actually an opponent of genuine social justice.

CSJ is not, however, the only method for working on social justice issues. It's not even the only method on the left. Materialist (economic & empirical) & liberal frameworks also exist. Then we have libertarians & conservatives on the right who also have ethical frameworks.

Academics in STEM fields who kneejerk defend CSJ ideas often do so in a spirit of collegiality. They see themselves as indicating the same kind of respect & deference to expertise that they appreciate receiving from others to their own disciplines.

But CSJ doesn't work this way. It is not a respecter of categories, disciplines, methods and expertise. It is too rooted in postmodern theory to be that. It considers its own remit to be absolutely everything that exists in society & only its own methods to be legitimate.

Because academics in STEM so seldom have a strong understanding of CSJ scholarship, they don't realise this. They imagine they're supporting something benign, rigorous & ethical. Our project of paper publishing was primarily aimed at people making this mistake.

Last year we attended a science conference in Germany & it was my job to explain the 'methods' of Critical Social Justice to a roomful of scientists. This did not work very well.

After the conference the organiser told me he'd have preferred me to have spent less time on theory & more on methods. It was very difficult to get him to understand that the theory IS the methods.
1) Learn theory.
2) Read everything through it.
3) Write that down.
4) Publish it.

This is how we were able to write papers in two weeks. He kept saying 'Yes, but those are their beliefs. What are their *methods?* In the end, I sent him some key papers which showed their methods were to state those beliefs repeatedly in varied contexts & he got it.

Also, when I speak to pro-CSJ scientists, it immediately becomes clear that they do not realise how problematic their own assumptions about truth & knowledge would be considered by the theorists. They're supporting something that wants to destroy their disciplines.

And this isn't nutpicking. There is rigorous and science-respecting scholarship that goes on in various kinds of cultural & identity studies and we are not criticising that. We want more of that. It's very explicitly the epistemological & moral relativism that concerns us.

A family member of mine gave up on cultural anthropology because she was expected to contribute to a discussion on why pregnant women in South Asia agree to ultrasound scans when medical technology is clearly an oppressive, masculinist, imperialist, white thing.

The answer she found was that the women wanted to know how their babies were doing & science provided a way to find out, but this wasn't acceptable. The only acceptable answers were "the imposition of western patriarchy & imperialism."

This is what we're dealing with & what we're criticising. Meanwhile biological medical anthropologists are largely conducting empirical studies that actually benefit people by discovering what improves mother & baby survival rates. This is not what we're criticising.

So, if you are a liberal academic working in a field other than cultural or identity studies & you feel inclined to defend Critical Social Justice scholarship against people like us, I beg you to do one of two things.

1) Read a significant amount of it. Then read critiques of it by materialist & liberal scholars like Meera Nanda, Vivek Chibber, Martha Nussbaum, Linda Gordon. Then defend what you find defensible & help us push back at the illiberal, irrational & anti-scientific stuff.

2) Don't read any of that but also stop defending it. Be aware that the addressing of social justice does not belong to Critical Social Justice scholars even if they named themselves for it. People who criticise CSJ are probably not opponents of genuine social justice.

BTW, I think we would all do well to regard with suspicion any movement or method that names itself something you'd have to be a terrible person to disagree with. The chances of it having a totalitarian ethos is very high.

This applies to "Social Justice" and "Black Lives Matter" obviously, but also to the slogan "It's OK to be White."

I get that the last two are intended to convey a belief that society does not seem to know this, but passive aggression is not a good foundation for protesting.