In the America of 2019, “social justice” is everywhere, strangling the imaginations of an entire generation like some many tentacled, rainbow-colored Kraken. The left loves and demands it, the right decries and fears it. The right’s primary objection to its increasingly bizarre dicates, however, is a peculiar one.
The usual charge leveled against social justice from the right generally begins with the observation that it is inherently theological, nay theocratic, in nature, making metaphysical claims which are then imposed on “unbelievers” by coercion. As Tucker Carlson memorably described it “Modern liberalism is a religious movement... a faith without God.” Undeniably true as Carlson’s observation is, the next link in the chain of the right’s usual criticism tends to veer off into stranger territory. This usually consists of lectures on the benefits of liberal neutrality, the desirability and necessity of absolute free speech, along with the occasional bromide on the dangers of postmodern “cultural Marxism.” The vast majority of these criticisms almost always turn into implicit or explicit endorsement of a robust secularism. A rather odd development for a political faction that barely over a decade ago was regularly suspected of attempting to impose a Bush family-led theocracy and whose voting base is the most religious in the country. So much for the “theocratic” right then.
Still, the question remains: what can we make of this seemingly backward state of affairs?
Scott Alexander, the author of the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex, recently published an insightful and important post entitled “Gay Rites Are Civil Rites.” The gist of the article was the juxaposition between the Fourth of July parades of Alexander’s childhood and contemporary Gay Pride festivities. Alexander’s thesis, in a nutshell, is that the religion of Social Justice, embodied most transparently in the modern LGBT movement, seems to be well on its way to supplanting both Christianity and the historic American civil religion of patriotic “Americanism:”
Last week I watched the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade...I don’t know when I realized it was a sublimated Fourth of July Parade. But once I figured it out, it wasn’t subtle – and not just because it was being held the weekend before July 4th. The police cars with red-white-and-blue stripes had been replaced by police cars with rainbow stripes. The civic dignitaries waving American flags had been replaced by civic dignitaries waving gay flags. Even the Boy Scouts were still there, in the same place as always.
Alexander, after making a compelling case that Social Justice does indeed have all the hallmarks of a genuinely religious movement, also goes on to convincingly dispatch a few of the more pedestrian arguments put forward by social conservatives who refuse to believe that such a development is tenable. He aims, correctly, at the utilitarian arguments favored by the “new natural law theorists” like the Heritage Foundation’s Ryan T. Anderson: those who tend to focus on the assumed inherent “natural” limits of the human person and society. In response to such objections, Alexander simply observes the obvious:
The world’s changed too much. Even if every religion converges on the same set of socially useful values, the socially useful values change. We don’t need to push chastity if we have good STD treatment and contraception; we don’t need to push martial valor if all our wars are fought by drones.
Again, one is struck immediately by the oddness of the fact that neutral and wonky sounding appeals to social utility or new, self consciously secular, versions of natural law have become the preferred weapons of cultural warfare for social conservatives (the vast bulk of whom are Christians of one kind or another). After all Christianity is historically premised, not on some abstract Stoic philosophy of nature, but on divine revelation, and a radical one at that. Not only was the Mosaic law literally received by Moses from God himself, but the very incarnation of Christ — perhaps the most bizarre and extreme of all the claims of divine revelation ever made by any of the world’s religions — remains the foundation of the Faith.
Historic roles seem to have reversed themselves. It is now the “liberal” Social Justice warriors who, consciously or not, have set about attempting to create and impose, if not quite a new religion, than at least a new conception of the sacred (The Gospel of Intersectionality), along with its natural corollary: the conception of blasphemy (racism, homophobia, transphobia and the like).
Conservatives meanwhile have sought to fight this new menace, almost exclusively, by appealing to classical liberal bromides concerning free speech, individualism, and the necessity of a secular public square that is agnostic about ultimate metaphysical goods. Claire Lehmann’s Quillette and the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” are naturally the examples par excellence here. And with this new, reversed Conservative/Progressive political paradigm shaping up as it has, it’s surely no wonder why their ranks have swelled with figures, like Sam Harris, who only a decade ago were outspoken members of the militant “new atheist” movement.
This dialectic is (much like the new atheist one which foreshadowed it), of course, completely pointless, as both sides inevitably end up talking past each other. They remain forever stuck on opposite ends of Hume’s Guillotine, with acolytes of the Intellectual Dark Web who “own the libs” with “facts and logic” (what “is”) battling Progressives seeking racial, sexual, and economic “justice” (what “ought to be”) by any means necessary.
Though this dialectic is pointless, however, that doesn’t mean that it won’t have an ultimate victor. Whatever the results of the impending presidential election of 2020, without a major change in the right’s rhetorical and philosophical fundamentals, the question of a complete victory by the army of Social Justice’s rainbow coalition remains one of “when” and not “if.”
This victory won’t simply be due to “brute facts” like better political organization and elite support either (these being merely the icing on the Progressive victory cake, and not the cake itself). Rather it will be the result of a superior narrative: sexual “justice” and equality as signifiers and harbingers of a new sacred order and eschatological victory, easily outperforming an outmoded one: the reductionist, materialist, and secular values of the so-called “Enlightenment.” After all, as Victor Hugo said, “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come,” and whether or not Intersectional Social Justice is indeed the religion of the future, it seems likely that the classical liberal values so many American conservatives have chosen to try to defend to the last man can only ever be relics of the past.
Naturally, there are a plethora of economic, social, and geopolitical reasons why this is likely the case, but the truly critical one is simply that American liberalism has utterly failed to address the basic human need for the sacred. The sacred not only must be immune to the dead mechanical artifices and arbitrarily restrictive epistemologies of Enlightenment “reason”; it is also something which can only be fully experienced communally. Both of these attributes are near impossibilities under a rigorously liberal system where communal understandings of ultimate metaphysical goods are banished, by design, to the purely individual sphere in the name of personal conscience.
Max Weber famously observed that the modern Western world had begun to become “disenchanted” as the cult of “reason,” science, and technology had banished religious “superstition” and its associated rituals from the contemporary imagination. Mircea Eliade likewise observed in The Sacred And The Profane that
The abyss that divides the two modalities of experience—sacred and profane—will be apparent when we come to...the consecration of human life itself, the sacrality with which man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so on) can be charged...For modern consciousness, a physiological act—eating, sex, and so on—is in sum only an organic phenomenon... But for the primitive, such an act is never simply physiological; it is... a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred.
This desacralization was, of course, a feature and not a bug for the architects of the postwar liberal order in the West. Though Francis Fukyama, due to his landmark bestseller, is the best known exponent of the “end of history,” his analysis, no doubt due to his Straussian training, always lacked full honesty: cloaked, as it was, in cautious but consistently optimistic predictions for mankind’s future after History’s End. His teacher, the infamous Alexander Kojeve, however, was significantly, and terrifyingly, more lucid in his assessment of mankind’s probable future in Fukuyama’s consumer’s paradise, in one of the more lurid footnotes from his Introduction To The Reading Of Hegel:
If Man becomes an animal again, his arts, his loves, and his play must also become purely “natural” again. Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals, and would indulge in love like adult beasts. But one cannot then say that all this “makes Man happy.” One would have to say that post-historical animals of the species Homo sapiens...will be content…”The definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called” also means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos)...What would disappear, then, is not only Philosophy or the search for discursive Wisdom, but also that Wisdom itself.
Melodramatic as Kojeve’s perverse hope for post-historical humanity may seem, his acknowledgement that the destruction of the “sacred” would inevitably result in humanity reverting back to a banal, animalistic existence seems to have largely proven to be correct, with all but the most insufferable, voxsplaining neoliberals disagreeing.
Eliade repeatedly uses the term “Hierophany” to describe the process of sacralization, in which an otherwise ordinary object becomes transfigured into a new, sacred reality. The Eucharist is, of course, the reality, goal and prototype of this process. Such an experience for the vast majority of people in the modern West is (the mystical orbs of Marianne Williams aside) almost completely alien, however, eviscerated as it has been by the combined forces of reductionistic scientism and the disenchantment of liberal political philosophy. The latter, with its single-minded obsession with reducing religion to a strictly private phenomenon, plays an underrated role in the de-sacralization of contemporary society, as hierophanies simply can not exist outside the context of communal ritual.
What is remarkable about our present Social Justice mania is precisely its predilection for creating new hierophanies, even if its practitioners do not consciously understand them as such. In the communal imaginarium of Social Justice, oppressed groups have themselves become receptacles of sacred energies. This can manifest itself as veneration for group identities in the abstract (LGBT, African American, etc) as well as particular incarnations which manifest themselves in physical space.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, arguably the most fascinating and complex figure currently writing within this nascent religious tradition, dedicated significant space in his own best-selling book Between The World And Me to the sacralization of what he compellingly termed “Black bodies,” the historical violation and exploitation of which by White American society, in his reading, creating a radical sanctifying quality which carries on through time.
Likewise, Transgenderism is perhaps the most crystalline example of this kind of “transmutation” of a profane subject into a sacred one. As the act of transitioning itself reminds one of nothing if not the peculiar sacrament practiced by the Medieval Cathars of “Consolamentum,” in which a participant would undergo a radical purification from the inherently sinful confines of a material world that was ruled over by a malevolent deity, with biological sex simply now serving as a stand-in for the corrupt and unjust limitations of the material world and the systemic oppression of a heteronormative Patriarchy becoming a new Demiurge to be rebelled against.
Point and scoff at these seemingly bizarre beliefs that now manifest as Hierophanies, as right-Liberals and their fellow travelers might. The fact remains that these ideas have become increasingly compelling to a critical mass of individuals living in the developed Western world. For it is the very aspects which strike right-Liberals as bizarre that make them appealing to leftists, and, frankly, to normal humans: in particular, the refusal to keep apparent manifestations of the sacred in the box of individual religious experience, and to then proceed to impose their revelatory truth claims onto what, in the right-Liberal mind, should be neutral public spaces free of any authoritative metaphysical claims.
Thus, while the Social Justice warrior fights to win, the conservative fights not to lose. The conclusion of this particular contest can only ever be a foregone one. For repressing the sacred is like repressing sex, an essential part of human nature that will inevitably reappear, frequently in monstrous and bizarre forms.
The deeper truth behind the rise of social justice ideology, and the strange re-enchantment of the world which has followed in its wake, is that it is an attempt to satisfy the inherent human desire for sacred revelations which serve to frame human society. This is a reality which is, by its very nature, incompatible with the sterile tenets of the classical liberalism to which conservatives have so eagerly wedded themselves. And until conservatives choose to finally abandon this liberalism and have the moral courage to offer forward their own authoritative accounts of the sacred, not only will they continue to lose, they will deserve to.