Social Justice Discourse Fallacies

Way back in ’03, Michael Suileabhain-Wilson came out with some excellent advice on social relations within nerdery circles that remains as valuable and useful today as it was then. These observations were couched in terms of failure modes that he’d seen infect and destroy friendship circles over and over again–the Geek Social Fallacies. If you haven’t read them, I strongly recommend you go check them out.

With those in mind, I’d like to submit my own take on a similar array of fallacies that have wormed their way into online activist spaces, and many of the loose circles that are associated with them. For ease of reference, you could count them as SJDF1-6.

SJDF1 “Tone Arguments Are Bullshit, Therefore I Can Treat You Like Something I Found In A Sewer.”

There is a long history of people in power using civility as a weapon to silence dissent from the status quo. How else can you describe parents who subject their children to conversion therapy but as cruel, abusive, perhaps even murderous? How can you describe a governor who would force a woman to endure having an object inserted into her vagina against her will–which meets the definition of rape, by the way–as a precondition to undergoing a perfectly legal medical procedure, except to say that he’d rather see women get raped than be able to control their own bodies?

These are uncivil things to say. They are condemnations in the harshest terms I can muster. But they are also fair assessments of the behaviors of some respected members of American society. (If you’re not American, you can probably think of things in your own country that fit this description.)

People who are happy with the status quo invoke incivility and bad manners as a way to stifle dissent. If you cannot describe the crime, then you cannot fully describe the scope of the injustice. As long as false civility and pleasant discourse is valued over human dignity, injustice remains intractable.

This is doubly troubling because the people who suffer under systemic injustice often have years, decades even, of anger about the treatment they’ve been subjected to. Their dignity has been sabotaged again and again. They may have suffered materially, getting locked in a cycle of poverty or subjected to physical violence. These things create anger, and that anger is wholly justified. The mantra of civility is used to put a lid on that anger, to again help deny the scope of the injustice and the urgency of reform. Anger can be a powerful tool, a motivator not quite like any other, and stripping people of that tool through the use of social convention can only perpetuate further injustice.

All of the above being true, you probably shouldn’t call someone a shitlord.

There is a reason that Tumblr (and more recently, Twitter) has gained a reputation for being full of shrill misanthropes who cut anyone and everyone to rhetorical shreds at the earliest opportunity. It’s the same reason so many people get frustrated with trying to follow the newest, most boutique anti-oppressive vocabulary. It’s because a lot of people hold onto this idea that just because anger can be righteous, that it must necessarily always be so. Somehow the well-founded observation that an obsession with civility is often a defensive strategy of the over-caste has mutated into a cancerous notion that the deliberate lack of civility, of manners, of basic respect and courtesy, must therefore be somehow more honest, more genuine, more radical, and more conducive to progress. And it’s not just the perceived members of the privileged elite who are subjected to this treatment–most social justice flame wars that I’ve witnessed were civil wars. The eagerness with which some toxic communities gather to pillory the poor newbie or outsider who wandered onto the battlefield can be understood to be a sort of collective sigh of relief that, oh good, finally here’s someone we can all stomp on together, as a community.

It is this attitude more than any other, I think, that has caused the very term “social justice” to become loaded with poisonous connotations. Allowing deliberate rhetorical cruelty to stand in for honesty and intellectual rigor is perhaps the greatest own-goal that social progressives have made in generations. Being inappropriately polite might put you in the wrong, but being rude does not make you right. For some reason, this simple distinction has been lost. And so, again and again, we witness people come to the understanding that injustice exists, seek out an education on what they can do to come to grips with and combat the problem, and then flee in horror just a few years later, burnt out, emotionally scarred, and having accomplished little if anything of value.

SJDF2 “Intent Isn’t Magic, Therefore It Is Irrelevant.”

Along with the corrosive use of civility as a weapon to stifle dissent, there is a long tradition of acting as if inadvertently harming someone means that the harm was not done, or that it didn’t matter, or that no effort was required to rectify the offense. If a bunch of white people make a black person feel uncomfortable without realizing it, the logic goes, then it’s the black person’s responsibility to not make a scene because it’s not like they intended any harm.

Clearly, this is bullshit.

So people who criticize the way the social status quo harms and marginalizes anyone who doesn’t fit the straight-white-guy mold have developed a phrase to counter this line of argument: “Intent isn’t magic.” That is, your good intent does not undo the harm you inflict unintentionally. You still must take responsibility for the negative consequences of your actions, even if they were made with the best of intentions. And this is a really good notion and one that is important to keep in mind when you are surprised to learn that someone is upset with you over something you thought was innocent. If your intentions truly are that pure, you will want to know when you’re hurting people so that you can stop doing that.

But don’t go too far the other direction, as so many Twitter commandos do, and completely discount the importance of intent entirely. There is even an implication in some circles that pointing out that you didn’t intend to hurt someone’s feelings is inherently a disingenuous defense. And so the difference between an accident or ignorance and specific, intentional malice gets erased. There are no more accidents, only attacks.

When combined with SJDF1 the results can be explosive, and for the person who stepped on the landmine, bewildering. Nobody comes away from one of these incidents a better person, aware of their shortcomings but committed to change. They come away from it with the idea that people who use the word “privilege” are dangerous drama bombs who must be avoided.

SJDF3 “Offending My Deeply Held Convictions Is Indistinguishable From Material Harm.”

This is the same attitude that leads people to think that it is reasonable to make broad, sweeping judgements about the moral content of someone’s character based on a few tweets that might have gone out while they were upset or drunk or whatever. This attitude is similar to SJDF2, in that it attempts to erase the distinction between differing levels of offense. Suddenly, being called a dirty word is the same as being punched in the mouth, is the same as being evicted unjustly, is the same as being murdered. The Internet has a way of erasing fine distinctions, of making all statements equally urgent, and a way of bringing stimuli that we may not want directly into what we perceive as our territory, our emotional turf. And that can hurt, but does it actually harm you to see someone say or do something you find abhorrent? Does it take food from your mouth or put you on the street? Did that off-color joke doxx you or send slanderous emails to your boss? Gamergate made it impossible to deny that things people say and do on the Internet can be genuinely harmful, even evil, that’s absolutely true, but not everything that pisses you off is on the same scale as Gamergate.

In a broader sense, there’s going to be things that happen on TV or in movies or in comic books that you don’t like. There will always be skuzzy corners of the Internet where you don’t want to go. That’s inevitable. Some of it will offend you on moral grounds. You might have very strong arguments for why people shouldn’t like that stuff. You may be bummed that people are buying, consuming, and spreading around media that contains messages or subtext that you find disagreeable, or even destructive. That’s the price of living in a free society.

This doesn’t mean accept the status quo and never work for change, far from it, not at all. Speaking for myself, I wanted to see more female characters at the center of their own stories, so I started writing deliberately feminist fiction. But the best I can hope to do is provide an alternative. (As an aside, I’ve come to the conclusion that working for a positive change is almost always the more productive option, because it is only with positive momentum that you will pull people along in your wake.) There will always be people who disagree with me, who value different things than I do, and as long as that’s true, there will be folks catering to different tastes–and even differing moral systems–than mine. At some point, we all have to choose if we want to accept that price, or if we want to forever be carrying around a sense of aggrievement that somewhere, somebody is doing something we wish they wouldn’t.

Think really hard about if you want to be the same kind of person who wishes the only thing allowed on TV was Wholesome Christian Programming that didn’t offend their values.

SJDF4 “It Is Always Appropriate, And Indeed Necessary, For Me To Publicly Call You Out.”

There is an appropriate time, place, and manner for anything. As a community, we can no longer discount the power of an outrage storm sparked by some well meaning tweets. Again and again, people who made innocent (or maybe not so innocent) mistakes have been subjected to a kind of public scouring that was all out of proportion to their initial offense. Combined with the the way the prior two fallacies tend to erase any distinguishing scale or quality between showing a little embarrassing ignorance and screaming in a bullhorn that Hitler did nothing wrong, it is far, far too easy for drama to spiral out of control and destroy entire communities.

If you feel a need to speak up, by all means do so, but remember that ten thousand people probably share your opinion as well, and what seems like a thirty second investment to you–make a tweet and close the tab–might be part of an hours long ordeal for the person you’re calling out. Is what they did really worth having ten thousand strangers show up on their virtual doorstep with picket signs and bullhorns? (Hint: it almost certainly is not.)

Worse, any community that allows this ethos to take hold is basically inviting trolls into their midst. Trolls love destroying people for no good reason, and an ethos that says we must all keep our little red books close at hand and be ready to denounce the counterrevolutionaries at any opportunity is like a luxury resort to the Internet’s shit-stirring contingent.

Sometimes it is better to let a few mistakes slide or have a quiet word in private than to blow up the whole conversation. Sometimes this isn’t possible or it’s possible but inappropriate, so we have to be willing to have these conversations in public, absolutely. If that’s your only realistic option for redressing injustice, then maybe that’s what you’ve got to do. But we must strive to exercise good judgement and compassion (for all involved parties–compassion does not mean giving a free pass, nor does it mean sacrificing your own dignity) when we decide how we’re going to have these discussions. Remember the amplifying effect of social media, and how conversations can be stripped of context, sensationalized, and spun into something very different than what you intended. If you need to have a difficult conversation in public, go for it. But superficial point-scoring or public pillorying should not be our default mode of conflict resolution.

SJDF5 “Privilege Is A Linear Scale, And Those At The Bottom Are Always Right.”

Nope. Nuh-uh. I’m a trans woman, which places me in one of the most stigmatized and at-risk demographics in the world. But I’m also a college educated white chick with a steady job. A straight, cisgender man who happens to be black has a lot more to worry about in regards to discrimination than I do–at the very least, I can attempt to pass as cis, but he cannot change the color of his skin. I can also speak to police officers without being overly concerned that I’m in imminent peril of being shot. Privilege isn’t a quantifiable resource, that some have and others are denied, that can be measured and ranked on a simple scale. It’s not like you come out of the closet then deduct 10 points from Gryffindor. It’s complicated, and contextual, and murky as hell.

Conversely, those who do have high levels of privilege, who come close to that archetypal boogieman of the clueless straight white dude, are not responsible for all of society’s ills on a moment to moment individual basis. If I get into an argument with a cis man, I can’t hold him–as an individual–to account for the fact that I have to live in a cis-centric society that rigidly polices my gender and appearance. The challenges and discrimination I face (and yes, I’ve been discriminated against, at times to my great detriment) are not tokens to be cashed in for moral authority during an argument. Conversely, the mere holding of social privilege (privilege that by its nature is unasked for) isn’t sufficient grounds to discount what someone says.

But too often, that’s exactly how concepts of privilege and discrimination are invoked, and it can feel like a Kobayashi Maru to be on the wrong side of this kind of a dynamic. That doesn’t lead to progress or education or even just the ability to maintain a livable environment where people are not walking on eggshells all the time. And if you think this dynamic can’t be turned against you, that you’re so far down on the ladder that this kind of logic can only help you, then not only are you belittling the struggle, you’re setting yourself up to find out just how wrong you are in the most painful way possible.

SJDF6 “My Safety Is Your Responsibility.”

No it isn’t. Your safety is your own responsibility. Sure, everyone should do their best not to harm others, but eventually you must take responsibility for your own experience of the world. If you don’t, someone else will make those decisions for you, and they won’t be made with your best interests at heart.

Does taking responsibility mean that nothing bad will ever happen to you? No, obviously not. Nor does it mean that bad things that happen to people are somehow inherently their fault. What I’m talking about here is the attitude that other people should take responsibility for you–but that you shouldn’t have to.

Twitter is, by default, a public forum. So is Facebook. So are most blogs and most of Tumblr. These places are not your safe space. (I don’t really think safe spaces exist, though that’s a debate for another day; what is clear to me is that considered spaces are the best anyone can hope for outside of their skull.) Anyone who logs in signs an implicit social contract, and part of that is to handle your own shit. Too often I have seen people try to outsource their emotional management onto others, using (and abusing) the language of harm as a justification for not taking responsibility for themselves.

This can go as far as conflating safety with comfort, and in conjunction with some of the other faulty assumptions described here, can lead to incredibly unhealthy drama. In the bizzaro world of a social justice discourse gone toxic, it can seem as if when someone does something–like use a common word in a certain way–that makes someone else uncomfortable, suddenly they’re an abuser. (This goes hand in hand with SJDF2, and the presumption that all harm must have been intentional, or may as well have been.) This is nuts, but I’m really not exaggerating how this dynamic can play out.

And of course it goes without saying that when two people operating on these rules of engagement meet, fireworks of the energetically unpleasant sort are not far behind.

If you want to be a good citizen of the Internet, get your skin as thick as you can manage it. Be as generous and forgiving a spirit as you can manage. And when things are too much and your armor is wearing thin, tap out. It’s okay. Self care is always an acceptable option. Just as your safety is your responsibility, you don’t owe anyone shit when it comes to looking after yourself. This isn’t meant to cut anyone down–it’s meant to be empowering. Everyone has the tools to look after themselves, at least in a basic way (obviously sustained harassment and doxx campaigns are a whole different kettle of fish) and everyone should feel empowered to use those tools for their own benefit.

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So there you have it, the main social justice discourse fallacies that I see kneecapping progressives online again and again. I firmly believe that we are in the midst of a wonderful transition to a fairer and more just society. It’s wonderful that previously disenfranchised groups are finding venues online to make themselves heard. But I also believe that we are in great danger of a major backlash if we do not address the root causes of this pernicious problem we face, this tendency for the language and ethos we use to advance the cause of justice to instead make us all feel unsafe.

Because you’ve felt it to, haven’t you? That lurking dread that someday, you’ll put a toe out of line, that something you did and always thought was harmless will be ruled problematic, and then there’s blood in the water and no help in sight.

It doesn’t have to be that way.