The Issue Is Never the Issue, the Issue Is Always the Revolution

Woke activists aren't being hypocrites, they're using the only principle they have

I am sometimes surprised at the amount of time people spend trying to show that Critical Social Justice/Woke activists are engaged in hypocrisy. The goal of these efforts seems to be to show that the woke worldview and political ideology is nothing but a set of convenient excuses used to grab power, and people seem to think that this contention can be evidenced by showing that woke activists break their own rules whenever it is expedient for them to do so. As much as I want to agree with all of that, I have to dig my heels in here and say that if you really understand the underlying worldview and ideology of Critical Social Justice, many of the things that look like complete hypocrisy are actually perfectly coherent expressions of Critical Social Justice ideology.

I think the mistake is made because people tend to think in liberal terms, where the goal is that certain principles are adopted because they are thought to be morally or epistemically correct, and then those principle are applied in an even handed and fair way. This can always go wrong (people make mistakes) but that goal is in fact the ideal. The reason for this is that liberalism recognizes that principles are necessary in order to create a functioning society. If there are no principles to contrain the actions of people, all that happens is that everyone pursues their own self-interest without any respect for the rights of other people, and so a set of strong principles is needed in order for society to functions. Liberals recognize this, and as such they adopt a set of broad principles which allow people to pursue whatever conception of the good they see fit, while still protecting the rights of individuals and ensuring that the rules are fair. (Of Course, this has to occur within certain constraints, we do not let murderers pursue their desire to murder on the grounds that it is just another conception of the good.)

Now, Because Liberals accept that different people will have different values and different culture and pursue different ends, the liberal is also therefore comfortable with the idea of different outcomes. As such, if the application of liberal principles results in an inequality this is not taken to mean that the principles do not apply, or that the principles must be flawed in some way. In other words, the liberal conception of justice recognizes that if you allow people the freedom to make different choices based on different values, you need to tolerate the existence of different outcomes. What matters (to the liberal) is that the rules were applied in a fair manner, and that all people involved had a fair and reasonable opportunity to pursue their conception of the good. What is guaranteed in liberalism is a fair shake, not equal outcomes.

In a system of thought such as this, the violation of principles is taken to be a great injustice not matter what reason for violating the principles is given. For example, if the government decides to search your home without a warrant, the fact that they are trying to solve a crime does not diminish the fact that searching my home without a warrant is a violation of my rights, and the desired outcome (arresting criminals) does not serve as a justification for abolishing rights. Even in cases of emergency, there are rules regarding rights and one is not allowed to declare a state of emergency purely because one wants to roll back some rights that prevent the achievement of some desired outcome or other. I realize in practice this is not always what happens and that the way in which we balance rights is always contentious, but the basic premise still stands: principles matter and one cannot dispose of them in the service of achieving certain preferred outcomes.

The point here is not just about rights per se, the point about rights is just an example about the importance of principles generally. Namely, that peoples actions and goals ought to be selected on the basis of robust and objective political, moral, and ethical principles, the principles ought not to be selected based upon just whatever outcomes one seeks to achieve. In other words, principles are taken to be prior to and greater than whatever outcomes one wishes to achieve, and for this reason the justness of an outcomes is always dependent on whether or not the outcome was achieved according to fair and just principles. There are different versions of this (some argue in favor of something like “natural law,” others take a Rawlsian position and try to ground their principles in something like reason or rationality) but in the West most people take principles to be grounded in something objective, and therefore give them priority over individual or group interests.

This line of thinking about principles does not apply in the world of Critical Social Justice activism, and in order to understand why we need to understand how the woke worldview functions.