Saturday, February 16, 2019

Social-Justice-as-Religion: Predictions

Over the last month I've been keeping track of falsifiable predictions with respect to religious sect evolution. The goal is to see to what extent the premise that Social Justice is a religion can be falsified or verified.

But for this post, I'm just going to concentrate on the major thesis of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God". His major point is that successful religions are able to re-interpret counter-factual events (things that clearly disprove religious (meta-) narrative validity) to produce a memetically optimal slightly-counter-intuitive position by extending their deity's power.

This often happens by extending the time frame over which actions happen. For instance, that battle your god was supposed to have helped you win was lost because you didn't make the right offerings for it. Thus god's teaching you a lesson via a longer term strategy.

Another way defeat is rationalized is by taking a clear counter-factual event, say the death of a saviour figure, and re-interpreting older clues to produce a plausible "always there" doctrinal change. Wright cites Jesus' resurrection and sacrificial narrative as an example of this cultural evolutionary tendency.



TESTING COUNTER-FACTUAL RE-INTERPRETATIONS
If Wright's general process is correct, then we should be able to look at counter-factual events within the modern radical Social Justice movement and see these two solutions at play. My reading of Wright suggests two major cultural-evolutionary paths:

  1. Major defeats are used to highlight a narrative's long term meta-value and its supra-ordinacy.
  2. Counter-factual events are re-intrepreted, post-facto, to highlight slightly different doctrinal threads. This is often evidenced by complaints like, "no, that's never what we actually believed, here's how you should have interpreted those statements..."
The first deals mainly with meta-narratives lessons and their culture/group/state validations. The second deals mainly with logical rationalizations which prove an ideology's anti-fragility.

Here's a brief summary of my analysis of major social justice counter-factual events. They're explained in detail below.







Major Social Justice Counter-Factuals

California's 2008 Prop 8 Loss
I think the Prop 8 battle came before social justice as a religion really took off.  Its narrow win margin certainly isn't a clear cut loss. Because of this I don't think this event is a good test case. While loss did serve as a rallying point for progressivists, victory was possible, and in fact the vote was closer than many people expected. The tide of bigotry was retreating. A new humanistic narrative was winning. Because prop 8 wasn't an unexpected defeat, I don't think it can be used to test Wright's thesis.




Trump's Election - Progressivism Defeat
This is by far the clearest test case for Wright's counter-factual re-interpretation theory. Right now it looks like both the doctrinal re-interpration and the meta-narrative time frame may be at work. But, I'm not sure how distinguishable things may actually be.

Many people portray Trump's election as a huge blimp in the system. The "correct" progressive arrow should be restored soon.  As of yet, there still isn't an overly clear sense that his election is viewed in terms of a societal castigation for people's secular sins (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.). While I strongly suspect radical Social Justice has a de facto moral agent, I don't think that agent has yet evolved much of a punisher role. Perhaps it never will. This challenges meta-narrative supra-ordinancies.

There is, however, a sense that countries like Hungary, Poland and others are likely to get their just-desserts for their choice of intolerance. But I don't think American progressivism yet sees itself as defeated. Thus, we really can't distinguish if Trump is a blimp in the inevitable progressive trajectory, or if the defeat was large enough to force the creation of a new-time framed supra-narrative. I think there is evidence for both.

Similarly the counter-factual interpretation of this event is a bit chaotic. For example, there is the growing narrative that this and other progressive presidential losses are due to the electoral system. But, there is no clear sense that any progressive doctrines have changed as a result of Trump. The main thing to have gone is the left's commitment to free speech. Is there a re-interpretation of hate-speech as an "always there" leftist doctrine? No yet. But, that idea is nascent and ready for growth.

There's also a bit of a sense that the enablement of governance by executive order is wrong. While most radical progressives thought Obama's application of it was a good thing. It seems like that stance has conveniently been forgotten and there are wisps of a "no, we never believed that" stance poised to deploy.

In conclusion, it seems Trump's election simply forced a few doctrinal re-interpretations; But even these are stalled pending the outcome of the next round or two of elections. The main thing Trump's win did in terms of progressive doctrines was to highlight the depth, breadth, and severity of society's "racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, etc." sins, and the time it may take society to get over them.





Hillary's Loss - sexism
While Trump's win and Hillary's loss are two sides of the same coin, I think the meta-narrative re-analysis on gender is tight enough for a good analysis.  There's no doubt that rejection of the "most qualified candidate ever" threw equity warriors for a loop. How could such a womanizing creep beat out a woman? How could white women not vote for her?

This did not induce any doctrinal changes. The uncoordinated radical progressive move did not shift what it thought about gender equity. It did not develop any unexpected rationalizing work-arounds.  It did however re-analyze how long it might take for women to earn parity in the workplace and in politics.

Thus, I think (though I'm not certain) that you saw a rise in the belief in how entrenched patriarchy is.  A number of thinkers now even view it as in-escapable.  For instance, it is not uncommon to find gender study scholars postulating that even a female dominated company will still be subject to the pervasive pernicious effects of patriarchy within their own sphere of action. It isn't just something external that is happening to them. Women unwittingly recreate the inescapable patriarchy!

What can change this "original sin"? Who knows. Can generations of female dominance offset patriarchy's corrupting structural influence? I sense that Hillary's loss has facilitated a narrative change toward feminist supra-ordinancy. Feminism can win, but only if it is universally hegemonic, and even then, only if it is universally hegemonic for a LONG period of time.

This is a weird, but interesting version of supremacy. The default isn't the Judeo-Christian version where Yahweh always wins (except when his chosen people pick infidelity). The default is Equity always loses (even when we try really really hard). Interesting.

As I've mentioned before, the chances of a saviour narrative developing (in order to escape from this universal original sin) are, in my mind, pretty good.



Jordan Peterson
I don't think it's wise to underestimate the counter-factual role Jordan Peterson has played in popular media circles. He came across as a loony evangelical blow-hard, but proved a ferociously tough opponent, even for gotcha-minded journalists (Cathy Newman, Wendy Mesley, Helen Lewis, etc.), and their editing subterfuges.

On the doctrinal level, I think the pay gap narrative has changed as a result of Peterson caused rhetorical losses. While this isn't strictly due to Peterson, his public evisceration of Cathy Newman on a hitherto unwinable point showed that a re-calibration of some progressive talking points was in order.  There's now a bit of a "we didn't ever mean simplistic wage averages" excuse going around.

I think you also see a bit of a doctrinal shift in terms of compelled speech legislation as well.

The hate-speech doctrines are still being fought over. I don't think anyone quite knows where that will wind up. Right now people are still clinging onto the meme that speech = violence at a real individualistic level rather than at a theoretical population level. We'll have to see where that goes.





Hate Hoaxes
Hate hoaxes (and there have been a lot of them - especially amongst high profile hate crimes on Colleges) haven't changed any specific doctrines. Rather, they seem to be rationalized as proof about the severity of the marginalization that inspired them. In effect, they are a scream in the dark that reflects a reality that otherwise is hard to adequately capture.  In this sense, they mostly meet Wright's definition of a re-tooled meta-narrative.





















CONCLUSION
The analysis doesn't provide any overly-reliable patterns. Loss severity doesn't seem correlated with meta-narrative time re-framing. I had anticipated that it would. That could, of course, change if Trump becomes something other than a bump in the road. Right now I think people are still a bit deluded in this regard. Hence part of the reason for so much Trump derangement syndrome, even among otherwise rational people. If he wins in 2020, that might change.



Defeat severity does seem somewhat correlated with post-factor doctrinal rationalizations. But it is really hard to tease out whether that is really happening in a post-facto way as Wright says happens with Judeo-Christianity, or if it simply acts as a selecting force between a wide range of doctrinal options.

One possible connection this chart brings out is that repeated losses, like women presidential candidates and hate hoaxes, do seem to affect meta-narrative time frame changes. Losing a battle may make you shift the details of your moralized story. Losing a war makes you re-frame your plot, and in extreme situations, even your themes.  Right now progressivism is still viewed as inevitable writing-on-the-wall.

Progressivism has suffered no real existential losses in the West's modern era. Trump and the rise of right wing populism has changed the rate of pace people expect progressivism to happen over. But, it has caused few major meta-narrative shifts. Perhaps it has brought out a a more fatalistic view of the structural embededness of the "patriarchy".  But there hasn't been any solid movements to a new level of supra-ordinance. There are certainly fringe populations ready to sell supra-ordinate narratives here. Some radicals truly believe it will take decades or centuries of feminist dominance to undo patriarchal effects, but these are fairly fringe players.

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