Sunday, October 13, 2024
In recent years, we have heard much about social justice and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Given the social importance of these topics, and the degree of conflict and controversy they continue to generate, it is important to situate this conversation in broader historical and conceptual contexts. In this essay I offer some frameworks for understanding how our conceptions of social justice and DEI are situated in broader and deeper stories of shared history, and point toward how our shared story can bring us together across a wide range of conceptual, cultural, and ideological perspectives.
To understand the complexities of our socio-cultural moment, it is helpful to trace its history. Our current cultural climate has evolved from previous epochs that scholars have referred to as modern and postmodern. There are many ways to understand the meaning of ‘modern.’ One simple and potentially insightful way to see modernity is as the cultural world in which the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity/solidarity became widespread, and understood as values that apply (in principle, though not yet in practice) to all people.
In the modern world, pre-modern practices like slavery were no longer justified. This inability to coherently justify slavery in the light of modern values ultimately led to profound changes in social behavior, norms, and laws. The abolition of slavery is rooted in the cultural inability to justify slavery in the context of modern values; the underlying contradictions between those values and practices such as slavery paved the way for cultural evolution and abolition—with women’s rights, universal suffrage, civil rights, and gay rights following along in the wake of the ongoing spread and establishment of these new ‘modern’ systems of justification.
In the past century, modern values have been widely questioned and contested. Postmodernity developed as a collective (and of course not fully conscious or intentional) response to aspects of the modern world. Postmodern critique questions the idea that there is only one path to knowledge and certainty. It is based on the idea that any attempt to know the world is always organized by already existing social and cultural beliefs. If this is so, then no observation or form of knowledge can be unbiased or objectively “true.” As a result, many pillars of the Enlightenment—such as individualism, reason, science, progress, and objectivity—have been called into question.
Fundamentally, postmodernism questions our capacity to justify our beliefs, values, and social practices. This raises a difficult problem: how can a culture justify shared norms and social behavior if it actively seeks to undermine the premises of justification itself? I suggest that the answer is: not very well.
One of the modern world’s central problems is that it (has thus far) failed to achieve its own aims. Modern societies remained rife with contradictions, hypocrisy, and heartbreaking inequalities and injustices. Every modern society that articulated and strived for some version of liberty, equality, and fraternity remained replete with blatant shortcomings, failures, and conflicts of both means and ends. Although modern conceptions ushered in the desire for justice and equality, those conceptions could not themselves justify the social oppression and inequality that they appeared to spawn.
However, instead of appreciating the scope of the challenges involved—as well as the limits of our capacity to obtain such ideals—postmodernism began to undermine the very ideals and principles toward which modern societies were striving. This movement slid into a critique of modern values themselves. It produced and reinforced forms of materialism, cynicism, and nihilism that obscure our capacity to align facts and norms. In so doing, it undermined our collective capacity to justify our beliefs, values, and practices.
Our critiques of modern values have left us with no meaningful, coherent, or consistent basis for any values. Our desire to affirm human equality while criticizing the shortcomings of modern values has left us sliding down the slippery slope of relativism and social constructionism. If we are all equal, then so are our views and values; it is all relative. And it is all relative because no worldview is really real—they are all merely social/cultural constructs. We are currently in the process of figuring out and coming to understand how and why these pseudo-philosophical platitudes are wrong and harmful, and how and why they lead almost inexorably toward the nihilism and cynicism that now threaten to undermine the evolution of culture and civilization[1].
Of course (obviously?), there is truth and reality to systemic racism and patriarchy (and many other easy-to-criticize things). Socially constructed ideologies and systems of laws and norms do in fact exert much influence on human life and the world as a whole. However, we must find a way to explain, understand, and justify any ideology, worldview, or system of behavior in light of some collective and public discernment of truth, beauty, and goodness. Our failure to do so risks viewing knowledge and norms as arbitrary artifacts of power and leads to the production of relativist, dystopian, polarized, dopamine-driven and attention-seeking conflict—which is precisely what we see unfolding on the world stage.
If we (mistakenly) think that all morals and values are social constructions with no objective merit, then we are fully justified in ignoring them altogether and striving to attain power over others—even while using the language of social justice and equity while we do so. Without a coherent and justifiable story of unity and shared value, there is no possibility of social harmony.
Fortunately, there are higher aims, and new stories of unity and value are possible. The contradictions and undesirable outcomes of postmodern critique are being increasingly acknowledged—precisely because of our ongoing search for adequate justifications for social justice. Our collective regression to immature forms of tribalism, othering, and aggression are being driven by factors that we can objectify, understand, and influence. In an effort to support this process, we can highlight three social influences that we must be awake to and leery of if we are to avoid the worst of postmodern identity politics and cultural fragmentation: mimetic pressure, the dualistic desire to be on the side of good against evil, and the toxic incentivization of our social media ecology.
Mimetic pressure refers to the widespread if not universal social influences of conformity and herd behavior. This includes the tensions and conflicts that arise from people wanting the same things, as well as our widespread tendency to find a scapegoat to blame for those problems. The quintessential theorist of this domain is Rene Girard, who outlines both the deep history and the psychology behind scapegoating and mimetic desire. We all have a drive to copy others and to avoid being a scapegoat of collective projections. Our search for social safety in tribalized social situations leads to and reinforces our search for safety in numbers in a landscape of shifting group alliances and identities.
We also all have a deep need and desire to be seen as good, and to be seen as being against evil. In the postmodern world, this deep need is expressed as the impulse to label some people as oppressors—the ultimate bad—which makes those who are oppressed inevitably members of team good. These divisions have been clearly marked by explicit and intensely reinforced associations: bad/evil = white, European, western, male, cis/hetero, patriarchal, etc. The good is that which is opposed to those bad things—and those who are, fundamentally and essentially, oppressed. With these associations in place, we have strong social incentives to identify as “oppressed” in whatever ways we can. Combined with the logic mimetic desire, this is not hard to see as it plays out all around us. The platform X is an ever-updated testament to these dynamics.
Third, we must contend with an incredibly anti-social social media infrastructure. The social and financial incentives of social media seek to capture as much human attention as possible. The aim of our media is not truth, open inquiry, learning, or social cohesion—but simply the capture of attention. This drive is inevitably and ineluctably antithetical to any other potentially positive and value-based aims or goals. As a result of this drive, we experience “algorithmic tunneling,” intensified polarization, and the formation and manipulation of human identity structures and patterns that are fundamentally maladaptive and less healthy than the ways in which human identity has been formed in any past epoch.
It will be quite a bit of work to find our way out of these dysfunctional and unfortunate patterns of media, relationship, identity formation, and social fragmentation. As noted above, one of the essential avenues of progress and potential escapes from this postmodern morass is the creation and adoption of new stories of unity and harmony. We need a new story, and we need it to be meaningful, coherent, and universal. We need a new story to incentivize and justify more pro-social behaviors; a story that invites us all to co-create a generative, creative, moral, and meaningful universe. We need a story that we can truly and wholeheartedly justify; a story that can justify and help us to explain to each other who we are, why we are here, and how we should live together and love each other.
Whether we know it or not, we are collectively searching for new justifications for global solidarity that are believable, defendable, robust, and widely shared. Many of us are waking up to this task, and are trying our best to serve the fullness and diversity of humanity by working out how to understand and explain these complex issues and topics. In one way or another we find ourselves asking the question: what comes after postmodernity? What is next? How do we harmonize and unify the diversity of all humanity? There are many possible answers, and many more will come in future years. One nascent approach—the metamodern—seeks to justify itself by integrating the partially true and historically logical/rational/necessary aspects of premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews that are still very much active and present today, while clarifying and seeking to heal and/or transcend the unhealthy, unhelpful, and unnecessary aspects of each historically emergent worldview.
Whatever we call it and however it takes shape to capture the imagination and collective identity of the emergent global tribe of humanity, the process of justification will continue as we strive for adequate and relevant stories, principles, and values that can be justified in light of the pressures, critiques, complexities, and crises of the 21st century. May we come to live and love our shared story of humanity on this precious earth, while we still can.
Recommended reading for seekers of a justified story of value:
A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology by Gregg Henriques
A Post-Truth World by Ken Wilber
Developmental Politics by Steve McIntosh
First Principles & First Values by David J. Temple
Identity by Francis Fukuyama
The Identity Trap by Yascha Mounk
The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht
The Myth of Left and Right by Hyram and Verlan Lewis
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard
Brad Kershner, Ph.D., is the Head of School at Kimberton Waldorf School and an independent scholar. He received his graduate education at The University of Chicago and Boston College, and he is a co-founder of The Reconstitution Project, a meta-political think tank (www.thereconstitution.com). His first book is Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership. You can follow his work on Substack (https://integratedemergence.substack.com).
[1] Another interesting thing to note in the current cultural milieu is the way in which our underlying desire and need for objective reality leads to the reification and reinforcement of ideas that are not nearly as substantial or empirically validated as we’d like to believe. This is what Helen Pluckrose refers to as “reified postmodernism”: the widespread attempt to justify and make real the abstract claims of postmodern social justice, which would be just as meaningless as anything else if they were just the relative social constructions of particular postmodern cultures. Therefore, we must proclaim: systemic racism is real! Patriarchy is real! Social constructions are real! It’s not funny, but neither is it serious; it is profoundly confused and confusing, as well as self-contradictory, self-refuting, and self-defeating. Alas, these things take time to sort out.
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