OK, so we need a thread on the difference between liberal approaches to motivation vs impact, individual agency to accept & reject ideas and the human tendency to bias & prejudice vs the Critical Social Justice one.

So, it is a reality that humans suffer from motivated reasoning & biases that they may not be aware of. This is why individual reasoning is unreliable. Here is the transcript of a talk I gave about that drawing on cognitive psychology & neuroscience. https://areomagazine.com/2017/12/08/the-problem-with-truth-and-reason-in-a-post-truth-society/

When it comes to establishing what is factually true & what is morally right, the tendency to go with our intuitions & then use reason to rationalise that is beyond doubt. Haidt described it as humans having not an inner scientist but an inner lawyer.

The question is not whether humans have this tendency to believe what we want to believe whether or not it is true, whether or not it is morally good, but what we should do to mitigate it.

Historically, what we, as a species have done, is mandate one set of truth claims and moral framework & then enforce them, setting up harsh penalties for going against them. The words 'heresy," 'blasphemy' and 'treason' have been used to describe challenging the orthodoxy.

Within these frameworks, people were arranged in certain hierarchies, expected to keep within their place & perform their roles and affirm certain beliefs in the form of oaths of allegiance and religious creeds and confession.

The rise of secularism & liberalism slowly eroded this & dismantled the systems of feudalism, theocracy, patriarchy, slavery, colonialism, compulsory heterosexuality & monogamous marriage. This happened in stages but with increasing rapidity.

Spurred by the Renaissance & the Reformation, the idea of the individual with their own mind and their own right to decide the contents of it alongside the rights of all people to equal dignity & worth was sparked & gathered steam.

Postmodernists who are, by definition, skeptical & critical of these developments of modernity, usually point out now that slavery, genocide, colonialism and more were still front and centre in this alleged liberal age of moral progress. They are right but miss the point.

The point being that they were present in every other place & age too, but secular, liberal democracy was the one in which they were realised to be wrong. Realising this relied on a commitment to the value of the individual & the equal worth of all humans.

However, liberalism is not a state of being but a state of progress. It is the aim to make society liberal. That is, to recognise the autonomy & agency of the individual & to apply rights, freedoms & opportunities universally. It involves dismantling anything that prevents that.

Key to this liberal development was the concept of the Marketplace of Ideas. Again this works on an understanding that the individual can make & evaluate arguments & that when enough individuals are convinced by one, the knowledge & values of society change accordingly.

This is still not perfect because humans are not perfect & large numbers of us can be convinced by bad ideas for a long time & this results in those ideas having dominance in society & hurting people.

This leads revolutionaries & reactionaries to be critical of liberal individualism & universalism and wish to impose a moral framework on all of society for its own good.

The liberal response to this is to prevent revolutionary & reactionary forces from seizing power to impose their own moral framework & conception of society onto it while defending the right of those ideas to be presented in the marketplace so any good in them can be accepted.

Adam Gopnik on liberals:

So, how does all this rather simplistic & idealistic pontificating relate to the point of this thread which is this: https://twitter.com/HPluckrose/status/1280430474482106368

It comes down to liberal individualism & universalism against revolutionary thought control. The former is the necessary ethos to bring about moral progress & the latter is another manifestation of the human impulse to impose ideological conformity for the greater good.

Both the liberal marketplace of ideas and the CSJ belief in dominant discourses accept the importance of culture & ways of talking about things to how humans in any society think and how the society consequently evolves.

The liberal impulse wants to bring about positive change by treating individuals as though they have the ability to evaluate a number of different ideas present in any free society & choose those which are evidenced & ethical. Because they do have that ability.

The CSJ impulse is much more cynical. It believes that humans generally lack autonomy & agency to critically evaluate ideas like racism despite the ample evidence that racism has gone from being normal & morally acceptable to one of the very worst things a person can be.

CSJ believes that individual humans do not have the ability to reject racist narratives & that this can only be achieved by full acceptance of its own ideological understanding of racism as a system that pervades everything & makes everybody racist by default.

CSJ believes that racism can only be defeated by white people uncritically accepting that they are inherently racist & working constantly to uncover & make visible their own racism & that of other people. To become 'woke' to racist discourses permeating everything.

Liberals do not believe this. They believe that racism can be defeated by individuals evaluating & rejecting racist ideas on the grounds that they are stupid & immoral. This does not require all individuals to accept this, but for a strong consensus to form that this is the case.

When a strong consensus forms that a set of ideas is stupid & morally wrong, people who hold that set of ideas internally are less likely to express them externally & therefore spread those ideas & consequently those ideas die.

Believers of Critical Social Justice think this is hopelessly naive & simply results in white people covering up their racism better but continuing to perpetrate it to the detriment of racial minorities in less visible ways.

As usual, there is some truth in this. A person who holds racist ideas but knows they will be badly received in society is likely to keep quiet about them while continuing to act in racist ways but denying that they are racist when challenged about this.

A person who knows they are racist but denies it to others & acts in racist ways is indistinguishable from a person who is racist but does not admit it even to themselves & acts in racist ways. They both present the same problem to ending racism coz you can't get at their racism.

The CSJ solution to this is to make racism the default position & insist that all white people are racist & the correct interpretation of any of their actions is racism. From DiAngelo et al:

Liberals disagree with this because of their belief that individuals can reject racist ideas & should be expected to do so by a strong moral consensus. History shows that many harmful prejudices have died this way rather than authoritarian mindreading & thought-control.

For liberals, the only way racism can genuinely die is for individuals to be accepted as having the ability to reject racist ideas. This doesn't mean assuming that everyone who says they have done so is not lying to others or even to themselves. It does mean not assuming they are

In order to defeat racism, we must continue to understand accusations of racism to be very serious & if shown to be warranted, discrediting of an individual's moral standing. Racism cannot become a default position that doesn't make a person bad.

Yes, this can absolutely lead to people who are racist denying that they are racist & adherents of CSJ would argue that this clearly makes it impossible for them to address their racism. This is just bad psychology. Particularly for those who believe in socialisation.

While it would be ideal for any individual who holds racist ideas to be honest with themselves about them & address them quite possibly with the assistance of social scientists & psychologists with (legitimate & rigorously obtained) expertise in how racism works...

...this cannot be mandated. We cannot control how people think & we certainly cannot claim to know how they think according to a certain ideology whether that is forced catechism & confession of a religious variety or forced adherence to concepts of whiteness as systemic racism.

We can set up strong but achievable & charitable expectations of how people should behave while believing they are the authority on their own minds and also have the right to privacy of their own minds. This is not only more ethical but works better psychologically.

Humans are social mammals whose reputation & social standing are vitally important to them. They are much more likely to reject racist ideas if they know that holding them will diminish their moral standing in the eyes of other humans.

We really do all virtue signal because we want to feel like good people & to be recognised as such by others. Consequently making the rejection of racism virtuous is a very good way to get people to do that both outwardly & inwardly.

CSJ, by seeking to divorce racism from immorality & making a failure to admit one's racism the indication of immorality is likely to derail the significant progress society has made towards recognising racism as a bad thing we should expect people not to do. From our book: