From The New Criterion:
Many have called social justice a new world religion. The enforcement of so-called justice over and against precedent and reason, almost exclusively a “rubbing out” of nuance rather than a “filling in,” certainly conveys a religious zeal. The negative dialectics of this form of justice cannot be overstated. For all the talk of “expanding the narrative,” the results always seem to be an editing down of the complexities of the human condition to the same short story of oppression. In the interest of “safety,” this fetish for sanitation, this program of social justice, grants the opposite of just access. Instead it places limits on the art we can see, books we can read, ideas we can think, words we can say, votes we can cast, food we can eat, energy we can use, and people we can befriend.
A term such as “ ‘diversity’—a slogan that looks attractive on the face of it,” Lasch observed, “turns out to legitimize a new dogmatism, in which rival minorities take shelter behind a set of beliefs impervious to rational discussion.” Taking advantage of America’s unparalleled empathy for racial redress, this strategy of divide and conquer is nothing new. Swaths of humanity are balkanized into ever smaller splinter groups of identity factions. They are destabilized through chaotic impositions on whatever remains of faith and family. And they then have no choice but to turn to their elites to keep the peace. In this scenario the overclass is both fire marshal and chief arsonist, lighting the flames and ringing the bells.
There are plenty of true believers in this progressive faith, especially along the American coasts and in urban centers. Their politics gives meaning to their successes and justifies the failures of others. At times in America such dogmas seem to have activated a sleeper cell of Mainline Protestants—from what we might have assumed was their eternal slumber. Those held by these believers to be latter-day martyrs would have died in vain if the deaths had not resulted in conflagration. Whether the subsequent promotion of looting and “defunding” has done more than anything else to endanger the lives of poor Americans is beside the point. Elites have acquiesced to a chaos and violence that disproportionately affects the underclass—precisely the people they say they want to help. For such believers, violent purification is a justification and an end in itself. A race war, or an environmental disaster, or some other end-of-times revelation would give meaning to their dying religionism.
Few outside of elite circles, of course, hope for any of this; we would be rid of these turbulent priests and other outspoken enablers were it not for their supporters in global foundations, media, entertainment, tech, government, and finance. For them the reality is often transactional: our overclass has sold out to the highest bidder and papered it over with a diversity initiative. For the elite order, the system works. Having churned up the waters, they skim over the waves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in American education. The more uniform the school, the more it will assure you of its commitment to diversity. The more exclusive its admissions, the more we are told of its inclusivity. The more it hoards its endowment funds, the more it appeals to equity and justice. To be sure, we might still find vestiges of the “old elite” legacy clinging to these institutions. The residue of great books, great educators, and great ideas is hard to completely scrub away. Some teachers inherently reject the censorious mandates of Critical Race Theory and the imposition of administrators in the classroom. Yet the artificial scarcity, the goosing of admission yields, the identity dogma, and the false appeals to “merit” all serve to mask the true aims of institutions that exist primarily to preserve elite privileges.
Any non-elite entrants, hand-selected by these insiders, are there to play a part in the equitable fantasy through a role not of their choosing. They are paraded in front of the banquet and are shown eating at the table. They just must obey all the directions of this legitimacy pageant until they exit stage left. For the “holiday dinner” at Yale University, for example, the freshmen are invited to a feast “decorated with holiday lights, ice sculptures, and gingerbread houses,” according to the school’s admissions page. “Now add eggnog, hot apple cider, prime rib, sole, roasted turkey and ham, golden potatoes, sushi, shrimp (in the shape of a Y), lobster, cupcakes, apple pie, cheesecake, fruit, chocolate covered strawberries, and a twelve-foot challah.”
In December 2021, despite its own self-imposed lockdown, the school went ahead with a two-night revel. Unmasked students crowded around to record the decadence on their smart phones as, in stark contrast, a line of masked dining-hall workers could be seen pushing this “Parade of Comestibles” heaped with lobsters, lamb chops, and an ice-sculpture sleigh piled with shrimp. “The food had to go somewhere,” noted Caleb Dunson, a black undergraduate and opinion columnist for the Yale Daily News, in a piece called “Abolish Yale,”“so people started taking it by the pound. Students lined up near the meal station back of Commons, waiting to grab entire crabs and lobsters to take home with them. They grabbed turkey legs the size of my forearm and munched away at them too. We all feasted like royalty. Just two blocks away, on the city’s Green, homeless people froze and starved in the bitter New Haven night.”(Read more.)Share
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