Social Justice Warriors' War Against the Enlightenment. (2024)

The Enlightenment of the 18th century, whose principles enabled therise of secular democracy, egalitarianism and human rights, was madeflesh in the French Revolution and inscribed in our Constitution as thefoundation of our country's statutes and political identity. Italso made possible the scientific revolution that began in the previouscentury even as it provoked persecution of scientific free-thinkers bythe Catholic Church, whose doctrines and power structures were directlythreatened.

Dissent and free inquiry were arguably the greatest gifts of theEnlightenment and their absence today in the world of Islam hasempowered Muslim theocracies based on irrationality and fanaticism aswell as a resurgence of socially regressive "political"Hinduism in India, where the western legacy of evidence-based scienceand critical reason is being replaced by a Hinduism that claims to bethe originator of modern physics and evolutionary biology and boasts ofthe power of "traditional" and alternative ways of seeing theworld.

Meera Nanda recounts this in her important book Prophets

Looking Backwards, and those who read it will get clues to the newAmerican culture wars being led mainly by feminists; it is no accidentthat their wrath has descended on the leading proponent of reason andscience, evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins. Islam andHinduism and some strains of Buddhism embrace models of superstition andirrationality as a means of controlling the populace. In India, it is acynical ploy to gain the trust of the lower castes who often practicetheir own form of vigilantism by slandering and murdering innocentpeople accused of heretical acts. In the US, the Social Justice Warriorfeminists have their own vigilantism via Twitter and the internet,lynching nonconformist thinkers like Richard Dawkins. This intellectualand moral void has relegated these theocracy-infused societies to littlemore than Neanderthal status in science, philosophy and culture. Foreigntexts, art, philosophy, and science are essentially banned ineducational institutions, while government and media conspire to preventcontamination by foreign influences. Some American liberals and most ofthe

Left still purvey theories about incipient "democratic"resistance starting with the Arab Spring, and with the rebellion againstISIS in the region, as signs of burgeoning democratic urges, and nowthey and the liberal media promote the pretense that the influx ofrefugees from northern Africa and the Middle East consists of persecutedinnocent people fleeing tyrannical government repression.

This is of course the usual myth, echoing the leftist rant thatindicts the Iraq war and the US for everything that is wrong in theworld. But it is a myth without evidence, like all the others associatedwith religion, with no historic substantiation. Putting aside thecenturies-long tribal, ethnic and religious conflicts, the simple factis that overpopulation, religious doctrine and underdevelopment due torejection of Western secular values and science have led to asuper-abundance of young, uneducated, unskilled and socially maladaptedmen who, seeing the flight of the truly persecuted Syrians, tagged on totheir exodus to Western Europe - that same continent which theirsocieties long regarded as morally and culturally degenerate but whichnow is imagined to be some kind of cornucopian refuge. Many refugeesinterviewed during the influx were stunned to discover that theirexpectation of a free house and job in the Western welfare states wasnot being met. And many of the Iraqi refugees are now returning to theirhome country, having seen their hopes dashed.

Let us look at the new social resistance movements in the US,collectively called the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), exemplified byradical feminist attacks on white men and atheists, campus IdentityPolitics demanding "safe spaces," rejection of textbookswritten by white men (Ovid being a special target), demands forprotection from what they interpret as racist speech, PoliticalCorrectness, inculcation of white university teachers to develop abetter attitude and more awareness of "racism," demands for"trigger warnings" of writings or speech that might make themuncomfortable, are-version to the ugly notion of group as opposed toindividual equality, calls for physical segregation (private rooms formeetings, separate dormitory facilities for blacks, etc.). These havebecome commonplace, in a situation where legitimate grievances areoverwhelmed by absurdities like the renaming of schools, ad hominemattacks on peripheral individuals, and a laundry list of imaginary orfabricated grievances such as second-hand reports of hate speech oroverheard conversations where the listener detects a whiff of racism andwhich are about as reliable as the party game of telephone, where thelast listener announces what she heard and it is light-years away fromthe original message.

This is secular doctrinal coercion intended to remove "whiteprivilege" and replace it with "black privilege"... orwomen's privilege or gay privilege. To enhance this doctrine, thosefiling their complaints against an entire society are willing, eveneager, to revive the segregation of the early 20th century, to submitwhites to loyalty oaths, to coerce educational institutions intomarginalizing or abandoning the intellectual creations of Westerncivilization on the grounds that our ancestors owned slaves or held somerepugnant positions on race. Only the alleged offenders' being deaddeprives these critics of the ability to punish them personally;instead, all of American society must now pay penance by knuckling underto the new Stalinism.

But what does this have to do with Islamism?

And what does it have to do with the vicious attacks by feministson Richard Dawkins? Everything. Because Dawkins is talking about THEM:the feminists and the SJWs, who represent the secular version of radicalfundamentalist religion and in which their personal doctrinal dedicationprecludes dissent and dialogue, in the end discarding egalitarianism infavor of phenotypic preference, in a modern version of Social Darwinism.They recognize themselves as the subject of Dawkins' critiques,even when they are not named. And that's why they exploded at thefamous cartoon re-posted by Dawkins, with the Islamist and the feministcomparing their agendas: they are identical. Of all people today,Dawkins most effectively represents the opposite of irrational fanaticideology. Dawkins, a white Western man, an "elitist" withimpeccable intellectual credentials and status - with more mediaprominence than an Indian rapist, an Afghani husband married to anine-year-old girl, a polygamist Arab or a Minnesota Somali recruit toAl Shabab - is the enemy rather than patriarchal misogynist Islam. Andit is not accidental that this parallels the American Left's claimthat American "imperialism" is responsible for Islamistterrorism.

At its core, SJW dogma, feminism and Identity Politics are allresistance movements against Enlightenment principles of reason,dissent, free thought and scientific inquiry. And no one articulatesthese values more credibly than Richard Dawkins - and his associate"New Atheists" such as Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, MichaelShermer and Jerry Coyne. Worse, these white men are powerful advocatesof evolution! This is that touchy subject inflicted on everyone inschool, taught by professors in thrall to capitalism and corporatepower, who do not sufficiently preach or abjectly accede to the goals ofthe SJWs and the feminists, who do not preach cultural relativism, whodo not indict our distant ancestors for today's plague of sexism,who do not adequately incorporate the feminist/Left's own socialjustice principles into their daily lessons, and who do not play thegame called "Phenotype Rules!" in which skin color orethnicity displaces equal rights for individuals.

Evolution's enabler, natural selection, is condemned as theprogenitor of inequality and "genetic determinism." Behavioror practices with an evolutionary basis are scorned as repressive,replaced by the Marxist doctrine (now rampant among culturaldeterminists and post-modernists) that society alone is to blame forhuman misbehaviour-a modern version of Original Sin - and that thereforesociety must be engineered (by the Left of course) to attain a just andequitable society. Social justice and feminist warriors seem to havemissed the totalitarian implications of this doctrine, not to mentionthat others than themselves might end up doing the social engineering inthe name of a different doctrine.

Like the old Stalin who spit in the face of science, persecuted thebotanist Vavilov and discarded evolutionary biology in favor ofpolitical Lysenkoism (which squashed Russian science for decades), weare witnessing the dismissal not only of reason but of the notion ofuniversal values and the replacement of the individual as the inheritorof rights with the concept of Group Rights. This is an old trick, andmore than just diversionary. It is subversive of all the Enlightenmentprinciples embodied in our Constitution and in our entire civil society.It is socially divisive, as we can see every day from the tussles oncampuses and on the internet. And if Group Rights ever became the norm,then it's a coin toss as to who decides which Group gets the rightsand which ones don't, or which group gets pilloried for itsoffenses.

In a word, the new social justice/feminism attack dogs are dancingto the same ideological tune as the Islamists and the fundamentalistMuslims. But instead of regarding women as the fount of everythingrepugnant, they are indicting white atheist men. Not the old boys'club of the US Congress, not the male boardrooms of corporations, notthe pederast priest, not the unpunished rapists in the US military, notthe Wall Street financiers and brokers who created the expandingeconomic inequality that has thrown millions out of jobs, not thecorporations who outsource or move their business abroad to avoid taxesand thus indirectly impoverish social, technological and infrastructurefunding. To address these would be too much like work: intellectualwork, physical work, time, money, organization. Far easier it is tolimit yourself to what is nearby and easy to torment: the campus. Andfamous white men. It is far easier to curse atheists on Twitter or theinternet or confront an individual without worrying about evidence,without having to leave your computer and go out into the streets and dosome actual political work. Far easier it is to insinuate and intimidateinstead of debate. Far easier it is to manipulate, even create,stimulants of human guilt.

The SJWs and feminists are, of course, not attacking religion orits many atrocities. To do so would be to align with Dawkins and the"new atheists," all white men who are stand-ins for a whitemale-dominated society. Nor are they, it should be noted emphatically,even discussing atheism. Why? Because Identity Politics does not allowit. IP by definition is an elevation of personal beliefs and feelingsabove societal concerns. The Personal becomes the Political, in the mostegregious and egotistical sense. An SJW will not allow herself or hergrievances to be deflected by acknowledging the oppression of Muslimwomen. Instead, she will align with some "moderate" Muslim managainst white and Western society, thus sparing him the trouble ofconfronting the atrocities of his religion. Thus has almost the entireAmerican Left recused itself from the major human rights battles of ourtime, leaving the field wide open to the Right. Europe is now findingthis out to its sorrow.

The irony of all this, amid the spectacle of a degraded anddespised public space and discourse, is that today's overtlyatheist movement was stimulated by a profound concern over a growingglobal human rights crisis caused mostly by religion: the persecutionand murder of women, gays and apostates by a theocraticpseudo-nation-state calling itself Islam, a state founded on therejection of reason and the embrace of irrationality and doctrinalfanaticism. The SJW movement appropriated the lesson brilliantly andadapted it to the secular context, ending up precisely alongside thosesuch as climate change deniers, who promise to destroy every remnant ofthe Enlightenment. This is what is commonly known as giving aid andcomfort to the enemy but in this case the enemy is a friend.

Today, following hundreds of Islam-motivated crimes and acts ofterrorism, many liberals and most leftists still refuse to acknowledgethat this religion is the largest agent opposing human rights in theworld today. One might expect the SJWs to place the inequality and abuseof women as a major (if not THE major) human rights problem in theworld. In fact, they have no clue about the scary resemblance of theirmovement to religious fanaticism and its corresponding curbs on humanrights. And when a small cartoon notes this resemblance publicly, theirfury cannot be contained. It is almost as if the Pope had announcedevidence proving there was no God.

by Lorna Salzman

Lorna Salzman worked as regional representative of Friends of theEarth in the 1970s and 1980s. After her tenure at the NYC Dept. ofEnvironmental Protection as a natural resource specialist, sheco-founded the NY State Green Party and sought the US Green Partypresidential nomination in 2004. She is the author of Politics as ifEvolution Mattered, which addresses the intersection of evolutionarythought and human society, www.lornasalzman.com