The way I see it you could find yourself in either one of these two categories:
- You think all the criticism of social justice warriors is valid and people just need to learn to contend with ideas they don't like
- You don't think the criticism of social justice warriors is valid but you have neither the time nor patience to analyze the work of popular critics like Jordan Peterson or Steven Pinker and adequately refute their arguments
I've been in both these categories. There was a time I gave in to popular sentiment and assumed leftists, especially college leftists, were being too sensitive. I thought things like safe spaces, microaggressions, and trigger warnings were taking the idea of egalitarianism to hypersensitive levels and made it too easy to parody. I was even one of those insufferable free speech purists who felt that credible arguments exist on all sides of a given argument and, if we could only hear them all out, the most rational outcome would prevail (which isn't necessarily wrong, I just failed to grasp that the arguments presented to us in mainstream discourse were just two sides of the same coin).
As I began moving further to the left after college (this is what working in a cubicle 40 hours a week will do to you) I could start to see major power imbalances being challenged by the same leftists I criticized. And they weren't just challenging them with trigger warnings or microaggressions (though they were certainly present) but rather with visions of a just and more fair outcome for all. These were the people being referred to as SJWs or Social Justice Warriors and written off as "snowflakes".
A lot of people in my life still subscribe to the theory that social justice is a concept gone too far and they're still heavily influenced by the harshest critics. Joe Rogan hosts the most popular podcast in the world and he uses it to platform many like-minded critics of the left. People like Sam Harris, David Brooks, and Steven Pinker are seen as rational classical liberals and attract justice-minded people with a perceived evenhandedness. Pseudo-academics like Jordan Peterson and Charles Murray will use the real language of science or statistics to legitimize ideas with no real scientific or statistical backing. And of course, there are those on the right like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Milo Yiannopoulos who reasoned people will often say they disagree with while simultaneously insisting on the existence of good faith in their arguments.
Rather than take on these people and critiques on our own I think it is time to elevate those voices who can best critically defend social justice. I would like to nominate Nathan Robinson, who edits the magazine Current Affairs and whose collection of essays The Current Affairs Rule for Life offers key insights into the real arguments behind both social justice and its critics.
If I were describing a Ben Shapiro YouTube video I would describe Part One of the books as "Nathan Robinson Eats Anti-SJW With The Teeth of Logic and Shits Th-". You get it. Each essay tracks a popular social justice critic, fairly defines their major beef with the movements and ideation of the left, and then either provides a lawyerly, well-evidenced counterpoint or exposes them as only speciously engaging with leftist arguments at all. The gang is all here; Peterson, Harris, Carlson, Brooks and more. The level of engagement is useful in its substance as well as its timeliness.
Part Two goes on to defend the idea of social justice as a whole. Rather than describe each argument in detail, here is a taste of the central theme from the essay In Defense of Social Justice:
"Why is the left-wing political agenda so hopelessly muddled and varied? Redistributing wealth, eliminating gender roles, protecting the environment, stopping the war, prosecuting Wall Street, opening the borders, saving the Louisiana pancake batfish—why do we just throw all of this different stuff together into the political equivalent of a KFC Famous Bowl® and call it social justice? What is this, other than a series of different ways to signal one’s virtue? But the premise of the question is wrong, because it looks only at the goals that follow from a certain set of basic values and misses the values themselves. It’s understandable that people get confused, because on the left we end up spending far more time talking about what we want than the reasons we want it. It’s still true, however, that there is a coherent (and to me, compelling) philosophy underlying “left-wing social justice politics.” It starts from a belief that other people matter, that we should empathize with the rest of humanity and care about what happens to them as much as we care about what happens to ourselves. It also holds a vision of the good life, a life where people have freedom and equality. But it realizes that those need to be more than empty feel-good words: Freedom means the actual capacity to do things, not the mere absence of physical restraint"
All of the essays are available online, but I highly suggest subscribing to Current Affairs or at least purchasing the book. This is part of that "elevating voices" thing I was talking about. Whether you're sending these essays to people or just reading them to equip yourself with better arguments, I can't stress how important projects like Current Affairs are (Robinson makes a lot of references to other writers I'll be reading too). With the growing popularity of the anti-left, the left needs better messaging and better arguments, which will require complex engagement with the anti-left talking points.
Robinson's trick to this engagement is giving serious consideration to what your target is saying, really knowing/being able to speak to the values backing them up, as well as...just reading them. During the Kavanaugh hearings, I kept his essay on the Supreme Court nominee's testimony permanently up on my phone. What made it such a useful piece? Well, Robinson actually read the testimony and painstakingly combed for inconsistencies in it. Every day, ordinary social justice critics in our lives have professional critics on the center-left and right popularizing and normalizing their ideas. Let's make people like Nathan Robinson ours, let's let him read their screeds for us so we can develop our own way of combating those advocating brutal individualism. He's like that nerd in high school that will do your homework for you except this time you don't even need to threaten him with a wedgie, you just need to subscribe to his magazine.
