Unjust, page 10
A 2015 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine revealed that integration into society by first-generation Mexican and Central American immigrants was hindered by the undocumented status of more than eleven million of them. Most of their children do not, however, have that impediment to overcome. “Immigrants are healthier than the native-born, have longer life expectancies, and have lower crime rates, the academics concluded,” read a Washington Times summary of the report. “And more than a quarter of immigrants have a college education, giving them a head start, and their children ‘do exceptionally well’ in integrating.”47
One reason that some of these trends might not be showing up in survey data is that more and more Hispanics identify as white. A 2014 study of the 2000 and 2010 census data revealed that approximately 2.5 million Hispanic-Americans who identified as “some other race” in 2000 checked off “white” in 2010. “The data provide new evidence consistent with the theory that Hispanics may assimilate as white Americans, like the Italians or Irish, who were not universally considered to be white,” observes the New York Times reporter Nate Cohn.48 Research has indicated that Hispanics who experience racial discrimination in their lives are less likely to identify as white than those who have not. This suggests that not only is assimilation proceeding apace but also that millions of Hispanic-Americans are facing less discrimination.
Lately, though, fears involving Hispanic integration, or the lack thereof, into the mainstream of the United States have taken a back seat to the concern that America is incubating homegrown terrorism in its unassimilated Muslim communities. These fears are not entirely irrational. The United States, Canada, and Europe have suffered deadly attacks by naturalized immigrants or Muslim residents who became radicalized. On the whole, however, the kind of alienation experienced by Muslim migrants in European ghettos is unknown in the United States. Indeed, Muslims are among the most well-integrated immigrant groups in America.
In quadrennial surveys of Muslim Americans taken since 2007, the Pew Research Center found that, while geographically varied and diverse, they remain a predominantly first-generation immigrant group. You might, therefore, think they’d experience the same troubles integrating into society that first-generation Hispanics encounter. Not quite.
A majority of Muslim Americans rate the communities in which they live “good” or “excellent” and describe themselves as middle-class. In 2007, seven out of ten Muslims believed in “the American dream,” which Pew defines as the conviction that “people who want to get ahead in the United States can make it if they are willing to work hard.”49 American Muslims were far more likely than their European counterparts to reject extremism and violence as a feature of Islam.
“U.S. Muslims are about as likely as other Americans to report household incomes of $100,000 or more (14 percent of Muslims, compared with 16 percent of all adults), and they express similar levels of satisfaction with their personal financial situation,” Pew reported four years later.50 Because they are on average a younger population, Muslim Americans are more likely to attend college than their native-born counterparts, and fewer than half of all respondents said “all” or “most” of their friends are also Muslim.
Pew’s 2011 study found that a plurality of American Muslims do not think their community’s leaders have done enough to “speak out against extremists.” By 2015, even amid the rise of ISIS and a resurgence of radical Islamic terrorism abroad, Pew’s data had not reflected any substantial shift in opinion among Muslim-American respondents.51 Pew found that just one-quarter of American Muslims—quite unlike Muslim communities in Europe—were native born (meaning third-generation immigrants or older), but that the vast majority of Muslims living in America—82 percent—are American citizens. Sixty-nine percent of all foreign-born Muslims elect to go through the naturalization process.52
For every Nidal Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist who murdered thirteen of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, there are nearly six thousand active-duty Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces (as of 2015). Anwar al-Awlaki, a propagandist for al-Qaeda who was killed in Yemen in 2011, was born in America, but a majority of American Muslims, Pew found, believe that their faith is open to multiple interpretations. Those who persist in believing that there is no distinction between American Muslims and European Muslims—both first-generation and native-born—are taking refuge in a category error. By alienating and stereotyping the American-Muslims who are intent on assimilation, they risk encouraging the development of dangerous and isolated communities.
Lies We Tell Ourselves
These are only a handful of the unquestioned myths that animate Identitarians and fill the sails of social justice activists. Anyone who honestly seeks a just society should be glad that they are only myths.
The reality is that race relations in America have improved, sex-specific life choices are often mistaken for sexism, and immigrants are integrating into American society at a pace consistent with their predecessors. That is obviously not to say that race relations in the United States are perfect or that women and minorities do not face discrimination. Similarly, the left’s antipathy toward the assimilation of immigrants into American culture is not a figment of conservative imaginations.
And yet, the idea that the United States is in the midst of a terrible societal regression is the height of sophistry. Identitarians are wallowing in a self-serving ideology that confirms unhealthy biases. That should be greeted as good news. But for an influential contingent of identity-obsessed activists, it is a threat to their very reason for being.
CHAPTER 4
Lifting the Veil
How did a set of principles ostensibly devoted to achieving a fair and just society bring about an acrimonious movement dedicated not to justice but to retribution? So far, we’ve examined the people and ideas that are typical of the social justice movement’s excesses. To understand its core beliefs, though, we need to explore social justice’s philosophical roots.
Modern social justice activism owes its origins to ageless philosophical speculation about the nature of justice itself. Some of history’s greatest thinkers devoted their lives to studying justice at a conceptual level. From Aristotle to David Hume, philosophers have tried to pin down mankind’s true nature to determine whether we are even capable of such high-mindedness.
While an embryonic conception of social justice had taken hold in the public imagination by the mid-nineteenth century, it was more or less indistinguishable from charity. In the mid-twentieth century, the idea of social justice as we understand it today became a defined line of philosophical thought, though it was subsequently abused and disfigured by the activists who adopted it as their lodestar.
Perhaps the best description of the Identitarian activist class’s ethos is a collective antipathy to fortune and the fortunate. Not a very lofty ethos, perhaps, but it is not without philosophical and ideological precedents. A variety of philosophers and theoreticians throughout history dedicated their careers to polishing envy and class-consciousness until they shine with a bogus academic luster.
Rewriting History
Sadly, many of today’s students of philosophy have little use for those who laid the foundations of their disciplines simply because of the philosophers’ demographic backgrounds.
In 2018, Arizona State University became the subject of an adversarial New York Times profile as a result of the school’s decision to establish a program for the study of “political economy and moral science.” Designed to focus on under-taught works like Adam Smith’s economic theories and the supremely valuable Federalist Papers—all eighty-five of them—the program came under fire because it was “too heavily focused on white male thinkers from the United States and Europe.”1
This kind of racial reductionism is common in academia. In 2017, for example, students at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, bent on “decolonizing” the syllabus and “address[ing] the structural and epistemological legacy of colonialism,” demanded that thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, and Kant give way, for the most part, to non-Western philosophers. If white European philosophers must be studied, let it be from “a critical standpoint.”2
At first glance, it is not unreasonable for students who want to immerse themselves in non-Western cultures to maximize every opportunity to do precisely that, even if it means relegating the giants of European philosophical thought to the footnotes. But that is not how philosophy works. Its thinkers are interdependent, each relating to the others. There is no comprehensive study of Kant without the study of his contemporary David Hume. Nor can Descartes be comprehended without understanding Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates.
The idea that Western and non-Western philosophy can be entirely compartmentalized is a product of ignorance. Some of the most influential works of medieval Islamic philosophy, for example, were composed in Spain—a nation that engaged in a fair bit of colonizing long after its Islamic influences had been integrated into Iberian society. Those Islamic philosophers, heavily influenced by their classical predecessors, in turn had a profound effect on the philosophical minds that came after them. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza set Europe on a course toward the Enlightenment, but he was also a dark-skinned Sephardic Jew from Portugal. Spinoza’s works are, however, unlikely to appear on the preferred reading list of London’s irate anticolonial student activists. Their objections are less a matter of geography or ethnicity than a self-referential preconception about what they believe ought to constitute white European thought.
Minna Salami is among many on the left who insist that a racially correct philosophy curriculum is long overdue. History’s female philosophers, she charges, were persecuted or killed, and the Aztec world was purged of its deep thinkers by murderous colonialists. African philosophy, like that of the seventeenth-century Ethiopian Zera Yacob, whose criticism of organized religion and deism long predates Nietzsche, is not found on many syllabi.3
These are valuable critiques of philosophy’s core curriculum, and Salami is arguing in favor of inclusivity in good faith. But she is not making the same argument as the students for whom she presumes to speak. Salami is not calling for intellectual partitioning in pursuit of historical justice, but her comrades in the grassroots most certainly are. Down that road lies illiteracy, not enlightenment.
For instance, an item posted on the website Accredited Times praising the anti-white philosophy campaign asserts that our own age, graced by the philosophy of the great hip-hop artists, is “far superior” to that of the ancient Greeks. “When modern geniuses like Kanye West and Dr. Dre are still very much alive,” writes a self-described “transpecies activist, new age spiritual guru, and chief diversity coordinator,” “it is nothing short of perverse that our youth are forced to study philosophy from over two thousand years ago.”4
These activists don’t know what they don’t know, but they also don’t seem to care that they don’t know it. They are not familiar with the Western philosophy they claim to resent. They don’t appear to know much about philosophy in general—neither the philosophy of others nor even their own. The pursuit of pure justice is rich with history. It’s a satisfying irony that since the philosophical minds who gave birth to the concept of social justice were, by and large, white males, they would be spurned by their disciples.
Justice in Antiquity
Aristotle was among the first Western philosophers to examine the nature of justice—who should enjoy its benefits and how inequality results in or exacerbates injustices. Aristotle believed in objectivity and absolutes, but for the Sophists who preceded him, morality was relative. That’s a pretty cynical way to go through life. A society operating on this principle would quickly descend into sloth, venality, and intemperance. Abandoning this self-obsession masquerading as high-mindedness was a great leap forward.
If justice is viewed as a commodity, Aristotle thought, it should be equitably distributed across a population. Because all commodities are finite, a happy medium lies somewhere between getting more than your fair share and not getting enough.
Aristotle saw justice in terms familiar to future generations of redistributionists, even Karl Marx himself. If a society is possessed of only a handful of unique musical instruments, for example, Aristotle thought that they should be distributed to those who can play them best, giving society the maximum benefit from their use.5 This might seem a reasonable judgment if you don’t consider some of the more intangible virtues we prize today, like dignity, property rights, and enfranchisement.
Aristotle endorsed equality, but not as we understand it today. He took for granted slavery and the inferiority of women. In fact, Aristotle saw the human condition as suited to social stratification. His concept of justice exemplifies a problem with which all of his successors would struggle. If justice is a virtue, it’s a strange one. It is not doled out by the charitable, and its recipients are not obliged to be grateful upon its delivery. If justice is giving each man his “due,” then those who are owed justice may seize it—by force, if necessary. But who determines what is “due” to someone? That’s a moving target.
Enlightened Justice
Fortunately, Aristotle’s descendants were not as comfortable as he was with a stratified society. Subsequent thinkers like Rousseau, Hegel, and eventually Marx all took a stab at understanding and addressing the causes of social inequality. Many philosophers of justice during this period focused on the establishment of just institutions. With the right social mechanisms, they reasoned, inequality will take care of itself.
Luigi Taparelli’s acolytes disagreed. “[L]et it be laid down in the first place that in civil society, the lowest cannot be made equal with the highest,” declared Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum.6 This is hardly a theory of retributive justice—indeed, in its contemporary political context, this encyclical “on the condition of the working classes” was distinctly anti-socialist. But it also advocated activist government and articulated a progressive view of how governments might mollify potential revolutionaries before they rose up to demand Marxist reforms.
“Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts,” Leo declared. “There are truly very great and very many natural differences among men. Neither the talents, nor the skill, nor the health, nor the capacities of all are the same, and unequal fortune follows of itself upon necessary inequality in respect to these endowments.” In other words, the virtue of an unequal society is that all can find fulfillment simply in the pursuit of their individual interests and abilities.
This is beginning to sound like a pretty conservative, even Lockean, articulation of the theories that resulted in free market economics as we understand it today. And, indeed, Rerum novarum reiterated that the ownership of property is a natural right. But it also contained the seeds of an idea that would blossom into the governing vision of today’s social democrats.
Leo warned that “riches do not bring freedom from sorrow.” Asserting that the Church’s mission is to bring “the rich and the working class together,” he railed against the exploitation of the working class and advocated, albeit in veiled terms, a regulated living wage. “[S]ince wage workers are numbered among the great mass of the needy,” he concluded, “the State must include them under its special care and foresight.” Rerum novarum is therefore considered one of the foundational philosophical arguments for the modern welfare state. Because Leo’s philosophy accepts inequality as the natural state of man, we might not recognize its connection to “social justice” in its present incarnation. The ideological scaffolding that would later be used to construct the modern definition of social justice was nevertheless evident in the encyclical.
Upon this foundation, Harvard’s John Rawls built a theory of social justice that animates its activists today, many of whom have probably never read a word he wrote.
The Contemptible Veil
Over the course of several decades, Rawls secured his status as the preeminent philosopher of social justice. More critically, he established a universal definition for the concept in practice that endures today.
A virtuous distribution of justice doesn’t mean perfect equality, Rawls postulates. Inequality among individuals isn’t inherently unjust as long as that inequality makes society, on balance, better off. “The basic structure is perfectly just when the prospects of the least fortunate are as great as they can be,” he wrote in 1969. And unequal outcomes are themselves just, but only as long as they are the result of decisions by just institutions.7 So how do you create a just institution? Rawls prescribes what he calls the “veil of ignorance,” according to which justice is “redistributed” by those who have no idea who the lucky and unlucky recipients will be. The veil ensures that the distributors of justice cannot know the class, abilities, tastes, physical characteristics, or morality of the people who will benefit from their actions. Justice (a Rawlsian definition of which has very little to do with courtroom proceedings) would therefore be dispensed without consideration for any of the individuals involved, so those doing the distributing are more likely to be fair about it.
As much as these distributors of justice might want to bestow advantages upon themselves or their particular tribe, they are blinded by the veil. Their adversaries might end up being the beneficiaries of their unfair distribution of social goods as much as their allies. Therefore, the operator behind the veil will choose the fairest distribution possible.
No one should enjoy an unearned advantage in a just society, Rawls theorizes, and the veil eliminates that temptation. Rawls contends that this is the place from which any just society must begin.
