I can pinpoint the day that I started worrying about the rise of authoritarian populist movements in Canada. It was September 1, 2021, when members of these movements blocked roads and sidewalks in front of hospitals across the country in a coordinated act of disobedience. I remember the disbelief I felt watching the news as protestors clogged the streets in front of Vancouver General Hospital, waving signs that demanded freedom from government tyranny, a stop to segregation, and an end to forced medical experiments.  As a patient that travels to VGH for tests and treatment, I was horrified at what I saw. Despite the language of human rights that gives the protest the appearance of a civil rights movement, they absolutely do not qualify as one. The anti-lockdown protests that oppose mask wearing, vaccination, and public health orders are fundamentally about individual wants rather than the collective needs of a group. People being asked to provide proof of vaccination before dining in a restaurant (while you can still get take-out) is far from the medical experimentation cited in the Nuremberg Code that the protestors were evoking.

Among the protest signs was evidence of far-right ideologies and conspiracy theories representing everything from QAnon to imagined medical experimentation and communist government control. The anti-lockdown protests were co-opted by other populist groups set on publicly voicing their grievances. While not all protestors were far-right ideologues, they did all march together and disrupt access to hospitals across the country to publicly air their grievances. These strategic political alliances become important when looking at the rise of populist politics at a federal level. The People’s Party of Canada campaigned on an anti-Indigenous, anti-immigration, anti-lockdown, and pro-gun platform in the last election more than doubling their votes from 300,000 in 2019 to 800,000 just two years later (Palmater 2021). Through co-opting the language of human rights and strategic political alliances, authoritarian populist movements are able to grow in popularity and become more politically competitive. The political goals of populist groups like the PPC seek to repeal multicultural laws, restrict immigration, and force integrationist policies on Indigenous peoples. The purpose of this article will be to define multiculturalism and authoritarian populism; look at other ways that co-optation of human rights language is used by authoritarian populist movements; observe how authoritarian populist groups pose a threat to multicultural democracies; and argue why we should engage with the concerns of these populist movements rather than ignore them.

As a Canadian, the concept of multiculturalism appears to be a distinguishing characteristic of our national identity. Without a clear understanding of the varied meaning of culture, it is difficult to grasp the politics of culture and multiculturalism. To establish the importance of diversity and national identity, it is worth exploring the theoretical understandings of culture and multiculturalism that promote recognition of gender, ethnicity, and religious identity. Through looking at the works of two cultural theorists, Terry Eagleton and Will Kymlicka, we will find a definition of multiculturalism that can be applied to our understanding of authoritarian populist movements and the threat these groups pose.

Scholars like Eagleton try to find a definition for culture and multiculturalism that encapsulates all the varied meanings of the complicated word. Eagleton, the author of Culture, wrote that four main definitions of the word stand out. In his words, culture can mean: “(1) a body of artistic and intellectual work; (2) a process of spiritual and intellectual development; (3) the values, customs, beliefs and symbolic practices by which men and women live; or (4) a whole way of life” (2016, 1). However, when looking at culture so broadly, it becomes difficult to narrow down the important aspects of multiculturalism within the human rights movement which confuses the issues of authoritarian populist movements and the threat they pose to multicultural democracies.

Other scholars like Will Kymlicka use a narrower understanding of multiculturalism that see these policies as the product of the growing human rights revolution within liberal democracies that started after the atrocities of the Holocaust after WWII. In the Canadian context, Kymlicka’s version of multiculturalism “typically refers to the right of immigrants to express their ethnic identity without fear of prejudice or discrimination” (1996, 198). According to Kymlicka, to support the plurality of cultures within our liberal society, some accommodations should be made to protect the rights and freedoms of minority cultures. However, this definition of multiculturalism is not perfect either as it assumes that culture is well-bounded and integrated within cultural communities. Scholars like Sarah Song see cultures more as frameworks of meaning that are continuously reshaped by the dialogue between members of the cultural communities (Song 2005, 474). Therefore, Kymlicka’s definition of liberal multiculturalism emerging from the human rights movement, allowing for cultural accommodations between the minority and majority cultures works so long as it is understood that cultural groups are not bound to tradition but instead recreate themselves through social interactions. This idea of cultural change occurring naturally within these groups becomes important later when talking about authoritarian populist groups and their use of human rights language to declare the need to preserve “western culture” from disappearing.

When examining the rise of authoritarian populist movements, it is important to separate the movements themselves from other groups that associate with populist movements because of their shared political goals. For example, white supremacists, alt-right influencers, social conservatives, and anti-lockdown groups may all have individuals who support the PPC party, but that does not make these groups identical in their belief structures or political goals. However, there is a lot of ‘connective tissue’ between white supremacists, alt-right groups, social conservatives and authoritarian populists so further radicalization and recruitment into these groups does occur during these political alliances (HoSang and Lowndes 2019, 123). According to Norris and Inglehart who wrote Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism, authoritarian values prioritize three core concepts: security, conformity, and obedience (2019, 7).

Authoritarian values become especially dangerous when combined with populist rhetoric that channels grievances upwards towards elites and downwards towards scapegoat groups. Perceived threats to security may include the threat of terrorists or foreigners buying homes and stealing jobs from “real” Canadian citizens. The desire for conformity may manifest as a form of hyper nationalism or the need to preserve “western culture” from outside influence. Lastly, the need for loyalty and obedience may manifest as unquestioning support for a “strong man” leader figure or an us versus them perception of political opponents (Norris and Inglehart 2019). Populist use of human rights language and strategic recruitment of people of colour can insulate authoritarian groups allowing them plausible deniability towards criticisms of racism, exclusionary practices, and the undermining democratic institutions (HoSang and Lowndes 2019, 104). To better understand how authoritarian populist movements appropriate multiculturalism to strengthen their political movements while recruiting and radicalizing those with shared political goals, it is worth looking at some examples.

According to Kymlicka, the twentieth century is can be described as “the age of migration” because of the large amount of immigration seen around the world has transformed nearly every country into a polyethnic society (1996, 193). Multiculturalism is not just prescriptive policies and an extension of the human rights revolution, it could be understood in a descriptive sense to represent the diversity of human experiences within continents, countries, and cities. However, the language of human rights can be used to undermine the recognition of pluralism within our communities, and it is worth looking at three different examples of how this occurs: through advocating for cultural preservation of ‘western culture’, strategically recruiting ethnic minorities that reinforce racial hierarchies, and undermining legitimate human rights movements through counter protests.

At times, alt-right political influencers and authoritarian populist movements have advocated for the protection of “western culture” as if the majority culture faced erasure and censorship. The problem with advocating to preserve western culture is that it conflates cultural change with cultural loss which are much different in practice. In Canada, Indigenous Peoples’ children were taken from their home, given Christian names, and punished for speaking their language. For over one hundred years churches and the government forcibly removed children from their families to reeducate them as Canadian citizens. By contrast, those most vocal about preserving western culture voice concerns about changing demographics. As Alan Patten states, “The mere fact that a society is becoming more racially or ethnically diverse does not, on this view, imply cultural loss, though it may mean cultural change” (2020, 543). Generally speaking, even oppressed groups do not oppose cultural change which is the voluntary and natural process of any society. The claim that western culture must be preserved assumes that there is an actual threat comparable in practice or scope to what happened to Indigenous children which is not the same as voluntary immigration and participation in different religious and cultural practices.

Secondly, it is worth considering how the strategic incorporation of non-white members into far-right movements makes the efforts to undermine pluralism and multiculturalism more durable. Often when people think of white supremacy it is equated with the atrocities of WWII and the Nazi pursuit of racial purity. However, white supremacy in North America may not be about purity but instead could be understood instead as a way of preserving racial hierarchies or promoting cultural superiority through populist rhetoric (HoSang and Lowndes 2019, 104). This selective incorporation of non-white members and the disavowal of open white supremacy allows for ambiguity and deniability of a movement’s opposition to multiculturalism. Therefore, people of colour may be recruited into these authoritarian movements but at the exclusion of Muslims, BLM activists, and undocumented immigrants.

Thirdly, far-right authoritarian movements may try to mirror the language of human rights in an effort to oppose legitimate rights movements. For example, many people in the U.S. and Canada have organized to raise awareness for police brutality against non-white citizens. Supporters of Black Lives Matter oppose the contradictory ways that the policing can be used to oppress visible minorities. The slogan “Black Lives Matter” has become a rallying cry for people to be more attentive to issues of police violence while calling for systemic reforms. The counter protest “All Lives Matter” has emerged as a counter protest that denies racially motivated violence and reject the goal of political reforms (Capatides 2020). Instead, it frames BLM as an attack on white culture that seeks to prioritize black citizenship at the expense of other groups. Similarly, the seemingly benign “It’s Okay to Be White” slogan, which was developed by actual neo-Nazis, was used by authoritarian populist groups and alt-right influencers to undermine the efforts of legitimate civil rights activism across the continent (HoSang and Lowndes 2019, 121).

With these three examples of how populist authoritarian groups and far-right individuals may co-opt human rights language for their own purposes, the rise in popularity of these groups may be an indication that these tactics are working. As scholars HoSang and Lowndes suggest, the subversion of multiculturalism through the use of human rights language by the far-right “will likely increase in the future, and grow in their sophistication and effectiveness” (2019, 128).

When confronted with authoritarian populist movements, some might find it tempting to ignore them or dismiss them as political aberrations that give voice to dangerous and exclusionary activities. What is more concerning than the authoritarian movements themselves, is that they may align themselves with social conservatives, anti-lockdown groups, and white supremacists in their pursuit of political power. Authoritarian and populist support can be translated into votes as noted in Canada’s 2021 federal election that saw the PPC party more than double their votes. The popularization of these authoritarian tactics undermines people’s faith in democracy and polarizes politics dividing society rather than becoming more inclusive. However, as Norris and Inglehart caution us, the real danger arises when authoritarian populist values become embedded in executive powers and then “institutionalized through constitutional changes, then authoritarianism becomes the only game in town” (2019, 453). After recognizing the threat that authoritarian populism presents to multicultural democracies, it seems unwise to ignore the rhetorical techniques that are used by far-right individuals and movements.

The problem of authoritarian populist movements is that they seek to exclude groups that already coexist within multicultural democracies. Populists claim to speak for the “real people” that conform to their ideas of nationalism and cultural values. It is noteworthy that these complaints come from individuals within multicultural democracies so to exclude them is to become antipluralist and populist ourselves. So long as multicultural democracies are committed to accepting pluralism, there is a responsibility to engage with citizens with authoritarian or populist values so long as they stay within the law and do not incite violence. As Jan-Werner Müller states, “Talking with populists is not the same as talking like populists. One can take the problems they raise seriously without accepting the ways in which they frame these problems” (2016, 103). Alan Patten echoed this sentiment in his discussion of cultural preservation and majority rights (2020, 551). While the concept of majority rights might seem absurd to some, Patten believes that everyone has a right to be treated fairly which means not excluding populists from discussions of rights-based claims.

In conclusion, the co-optation of human rights language by authoritarian populist movements is well documented. Examples of this can be found in groups that use cultural preservation, strategic membership of non-white individuals, and counter movements to exclude people within society undermining the values of a multicultural democratic state. I started researching populist authoritarian groups when anti-lockdown protestors blocked access to hospitals across Canada and there is evidence that these protests contain more than people voicing their grievances about the pandemic and public health orders. There is evidence that these anti-lockdown protests are laden with hate propaganda that may further radicalize individuals into white supremacist and other far-right organizations (Taylor 2021). Even if people do not become radicalized into these movements, they may offer convenient political alliances that translate into votes as seen in the 2021 Canadian federal election. To protect the multicultural democracies that protect diverse citizenry, we must recognize the concerns of authoritarian populist members rather than ignore them. By identifying the rhetorical techniques used, such as incorporating multiculturalism and human rights language, it becomes easier to identify and address the concerns that these movements represent. To ignore populist authoritarian movements is to exclude a part of the countries population which is in itself antipluralist. Therefore, to avoid the same pitfalls that undermine multicultural democracies it is better to identify the rhetorical techniques used and counter them. Otherwise, by excluding parts of the democratic state as less legitimate we risk promoting populist and authoritarian values ourselves.

Works Cited

Capatides, Christina. 2020. “Why Saying ‘All Lives Matter’ Communicates to Black People That Their Lives Don’t.” CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/all-lives-matter-black-lives-matter/ (December 16, 2021).

CTVNewsVancouver.ca, Staff. 2021. “Thousands Crowd Vancouver Hospital for Rally against ‘tyranny’ of Vaccine Mandates.” British Columbia. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/thousands-crowd-vancouver-hospital-for-rally-against-tyranny-of-vaccine-mandates-1.5570252 (December 17, 2021).

Eagleton, Terry. 2016. Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1-191

HoSang, Daniel Martinez, and Joseph E. Lowndes. 2019. “‘A BROWN BROTHER FOR DONALD TRUMP’:” In Producers, Parasites, Patriots, Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, University of Minnesota Press, 103–28. http://www.jstor.org.proxy.ufv.ca:2048/stable/10.5749/j.ctvdjrrcq.7 (October 22, 2021).

Kymlicka, W. and Oxford University Press. 1996. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Great Britain: Clarendon Press.

Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 75-103.

Palmater, Pam. 2021. “The PPC Got More than 800,000 Votes, and That Should Worry All of Us.” Macleans.ca. https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-ppc-got-more-than-800000-votes-and-that-should-worry-all-of-us/ (December 16, 2021).

Patten, Alan. 2020. “Populist Multiculturalism: Are There Majority Cultural Rights?” Philosophy and Social Criticism 46(5): 539–552.

Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2019. Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Song, Sarah. 2005. “Majority Norms, Multiculturalism, and Gender Equality.” American Political Science Review 99(4): 473-489.

“The Co-Opting of Human Rights Language – Police Accountability Project.” https://www.policeaccountability.org.au/human-rights/the-co-opting-of-human-rights-language/ (December 2, 2021).

We struggle to understand instances of evil in our society so much that our media is consumed with it. Television and film continue to reproduce narratives of violence and murder to drive the plot forward. We see the characters as either heroes or monsters as they play their assigned roles. We want to understand evil; it scares us and thrills us. Still, it is often confined to describe uniquely broken individuals as in the film Joker where the villain is a social pariah, brain-damaged and ignored until one day he snaps. In some ways, this portrayal of evil is a comfort as the monster is a monster, which somehow makes the evil-doer less human. We need not fear that the monster could be lurking inside any one of us because these examples are unique and striking, not everyday and banal.

Nevertheless, evil is not confined to great terror commit by a small number of individuals. The Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and East Timor are all examples of intentional acts of murder and harm done on a massive scale. As acts of genocide involve a significant amount of social coordination to be effective, it would be hard to explain away every person involved in these examples of genocide as a uniquely broken person in the midst of a mental breakdown.

Hannah Arendt was a political thinker struggling to reconcile with the imaginings of a monster and the reality of Adolf Eichmann, a bureaucratic middleman responsible for organizing the transportation and execution of Jewish people, all from the safety of his desk job. Eichmann did not seem particularly unique or even spiteful of the Jews. During his trial, he often relied on clichés to explain his actions. According to Eichmann, he was just ‘doing his job’ or ‘following orders’ and not personally responsible for the horror he participated in. In Arendt’s attempt to reconcile the differences between the monstrous and the mediocre, she coined the term “the banality of evil” to describe how normal individuals’ thoughtlessness could lead to catastrophic consequences.

Elizabeth Minnich, a former student of Arendt’s, took her teacher’s lessons to heart and tried to further develop the theory by separating the systemic evil of genocides from individuals’ monstrous acts.  Individual acts of evil were ‘intensive evils’ defined as great harms done by one or more people. Intensive evils would seem to encapsulate that idea of the monstrous and would include mass shootings, mothers who murder their children or husbands who murder their wives. In contrast, evils that require mass coordination to implement, such as genocides, could be described as ‘extensive evils.’ They involved an incredible amount of cooperation and coordination in implementing these extensive acts of evil and are not strikingly unique in that many are involved in facilitating these evils.

Extensive evils are crimes of thoughtlessness where morality and critical thinking are outsourced to another group or institution. As the problem is thoughtlessness, the solution is simply the reverse. Minnich suggests that we teach thoughtfulness and mindfulness skills to combat the banality that allows extensive evils to occur.

When we look at how evil is reflected in our media, how shows like Hunters or movies like Inglorious Basterds portray Nazis, it is difficult to reconcile these two forms of evil. In the film Hannah Arendt, her character laments that evil cannot be both banal and radical at the same time. It might be that we prefer to see our Nazis as unique and striking rather than banal and mediocre to separate ourselves from the evil that we see in the world. However, perhaps situations of extensive evil can create more opportunities for intensive evil to occur. In this view, the material conditions of systemic injustice also create unique opportunities for intensive acts themselves.

If extensive evil has a synergetic relationship to intensive evil, we should consider both when confronting instances of evil in the world. In this sense, we need to be Janus-faced, looking at both the individual examples and the systemic ones. This is especially relevant today as people look at individual acts of police brutality and the systemic lack of accountability that allows them to happen. Suppose we are to take Minnich’s prescriptive advice and find an overlap of thoughtfulness and mindfulness to combat the evils in the world. In that case, it needs to have individual applications and systemic ones if we hope for it to work.

I must admit, of all the dystopian scenarios that play out in television and film, zombies are my favourite imagined threat. They are monstrously indiscriminate in their consumption of the living, whether young, old, male or female; zombies don’t care about your gender, identity or political affiliation. To parody Madonna’s tone-deaf response to the coronavirus outbreak, zombies are ‘the great equalizer.’ As most of us can agree that we like our brains where they are, fighting zombies and rebuilding humanity would seem like a common goal that we could all get behind despite our differences. Even with the ease in which we would identify zombies as our enemy, in zombie movies, society always seems to collapse within the first 15 minutes, and a dystopian pessimistic future ensues. Political scholar Daniel Drezner would have us ask, is there anything wrong with the underlying assumption that society would collapse? After all, questioning the consequences of fear and cynicism in our media could influence people’s responses to government and institutions when faced with future unknowns.

In movies like Dawn of the Dead (1978), government and media are woefully unprepared for the spread of zombies. In the film, radio broadcasts tell people that they cannot stay in their own homes. We see misinformation spreads as the television station broadcasts outdated information about rescue stations while ever hungry to maintain their ratings. The main characters of the movie are those that question their loyalty to the old social order. They abandon the hope of overcoming the zombie menace and steal the television station’s helicopter to escape the escalating disaster surrounding them. The survivors are drawn to the mall as it is stocked with all the comforts they might desire. In this post-apocalyptic future, the survivors are driven as much by their consumption as the zombies themselves. The living and dead are drawn to the mall as an important place, and they both use violent means, whether it be shooting or biting, as a way of satiating their appetites.

The problem with the overall cynical perspectives in these disaster scenarios is that they exclude better-coordinated responses to a disaster that would mitigate the damage to government and institutions. Would governments and media be this unprepared for a novel threat like the zombies? Drezner is not so sure about that, although he does not dismiss it as a possibility altogether. Suppose we see ourselves as just one disaster away from social and political collapse. In that case, it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy where our lack of faith in these institutions creates them to dissolve, especially if those in authority abandon their post.

Drezner uses a quote by Rebecca Solnit that states, “in the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbours as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human beings in times of disaster has little truth to it.” (p. 57) Perhaps this is true, but it seems to be only a generalization on how people tend to respond and does not capture the whole range of reactions to disaster scenarios. Some people would have good responses to stress and disaster, while others would have bad reactions and revel in the chaos that this scenario allows. One of my favourite aspects of zombie fiction is that it illustrates the varied responses to disaster through the survivor’s different temperaments and survival strategies.

As far as government and institutions adapting to unanticipated disasters, Drezner states that while “bureaucracies will inevitably make initial missteps, it would be foolhardy to predict persistent mistakes in the wake of negative feedback.” (p. 89) In other words, when presented with a novel threat, governments and institutions may make mistakes, or they may need time to assess and respond to an unforeseen threat. Still, we need not abandon those institutions altogether. Keeping a week or two worth of bottled water, canned food, flashlights, and batteries may be worthwhile if facing a novel threat, whether it is a natural disaster or a pandemic. Keeping a year’s worth of food, guns and ammo because you predict the collapse of government and political disorder may not only be excessive, it could also be overly pessimistic, and that can have consequences of its own.

Drezner’s concern about cynicism recreating the disasters of our fiction seems even more relevant today as people again start to panic buying toilet paper in parts of the country that have put in new health restrictions. It reminds me of the film Tomorrowland where humanity gets its best and brightest and tries to find solutions to all of humanity’s problems. In this pursuit, they build a machine that predicts a future of war, famine, drought and extinction. This “time machine” tries to prevent that future by sending subconscious warnings to the past about this potential future to avoid it, which manifests in the form of video games, movies and books that present a bleak future. The machine does nothing to prevent the predicted future; instead, these pessimistic warnings create a cynicism feedback loop that assures humanity’s destruction.

The plot twist in the film is that what saves humanity is the younger generation’s willingness to try and fix the future. The idealism of someone from the younger generation changes the probability of extinction from 100 percent certainty to 99 percent certainty. Interestingly, it is the optimism, not science or a proposed solution, that disrupts the calculation of humanity’s inevitable doom. In the end, destroying the time machine that creates the feedback loop is the only possible way to escape a future of certain destruction.

In conclusion, Drezner does make a good point about the influence of our media on our culture. Movies are an incredibly cynical form of media because they tend to present the most dramatic version of events. Whether it is a zombie apocalypse, natural disasters, or viral pandemics we like to watch the worst-case scenarios of these events play out for our entertainment. There is a whole genre of horror movies and zombies because we like to be afraid, but that fear does not have to result in cynicism. It is not often that you hear stories about people doing the work to prevent the apocalypse and all celebrating how they fixed things. However, Drezner would suggest that we look to movies like World War Z and Contagion that show government and institutions’ strength and resilience to weather through disasters rather than emulating the survivors in Dawn of the Dead.

As the pandemic continues to escalate in our country, spreading exponentially like a zombie apocalypse, we might be tempted to turn to media and let the potential disaster scenarios play out through our imagination. It is easy to say don’t panic or be afraid, but the truth that the zombie genre shows us is that we like a little bit of fear, but we do not need to succumb to it. Fear can be a motivating force as well as a demotivating one. So, I give you all permission to panic a little, especially if it results in emergency preparedness, like stocking up on a few weeks of food and adjusting your social behaviour to stem the spread of the virus. However, giving up on institutions and moving into your emergency bunker with a year’s worth of food is probably not a good response to fear. Instead, it might contribute to a feedback loop of cynicism that causes people to abandon their post or faith in institutions and government like the people in Tomorrowland. Perhaps our fear of climate change or pandemics can head off any potential disaster scenarios in the future. However, it would just prove environmental critics and anti-maskers right who have said all along that these dangers have been overstated.

“We didn’t do any learning, mom. We just played today.” This was what my daughter told me last week after I repeatedly questioned her about the first day of the Outdoor Experience Program at Langley Forest School. Playing sounds good to me, but I still wanted the details. Fortunately, Carol sent out an email highlighting some of their adventure in the forest, and a week later I had an opportunity to join the class as a parent volunteer. So, this letter is for other parents that want the details of what not learning, just playing looks like at Langley Forest School. 

From what I gathered from Carol’s email, last week the kids were encouraged to look for bugs around the park and the creek. In theme with the week before, this Friday class started with a lesson about arachnids. First, the kids were asked what spiders use their webs for, and what does a spider’s web feel like? All the kids seemed to know that the webs were for catching their food and that webs feel very sticky. But the next question was a good one. Carol asked, “Why don’t spiders stick to their own web?” I have to admit, even I didn’t know the answer to that one, but instead of just giving us the answer, we had an experiment to do!  

I peeled the backs off pieces of tape and passed the tape around to each of the kids. They were told that the tape was sticky like a web. Next, Carol had the kids dip their finger in some oil and touch their oily finger to their piece of tape. To the kids’ delight their oily finger did not stick to the tape. After our experiment it was explained that spiders produce their own oil so that they may walk on their web without sticking to it. This exercise really impressed me, because the best part about forest school is that the kids are learning stuff all the time, but they think that they are just playing. 

After our time in the picnic shelter the kids put on their backpacks and carried their secondary gear to a tree near the Yurt and off we went for our next part of the adventure, checking out the bat house. Carol allowed the kids to wonder out loud what the house on a big tall pole might be. I love this style of learning where you ask “I wonder” questions and allow a pause to pique the kids’ curiosity before providing any information. Going into my second year as a parent of children at forest school, I find myself trying to frame more questions with “I wonder” to give my kids a chance to cultivate their curiosity and imagination.  

Next, we climbed up a hill and the kids got to vote on whether they should stop for a snack or keep exploring. The kids voted to snack, and we had a lovely little picnic listening to the wind rustling the leaves and branches of the forest as rain sprinkled sparsely through the canopy of trees. After our break, we packed up to leave and made an amazing discovery on the path, a tangerine coloured slug! The kids were excited, and we made sure not to trample him as we made our way down to the meadow. 

The meadow was all about playing with ropes, tree climbing and mud puddles. “Incoming!” is what the kids yelled as they got a running start before leaping with both feet into a great big mud puddle. It started out with just a couple of the children but soon the laughter was infectious, and all the kids had to try jumping in the puddle themselves. My only regret during my day volunteering was that I abstained from jumping in the puddle. It looked really fun, and I should have taken a clue from the kids. Some kids spent so much time in the puddle that they needed to get changed into their secondary gear. At this time, it was nearly lunch so after the kids got cleaned up it was time for free play at basecamp. 

The kids loved the opportunity to use the basecamp that is usually reserved for the preschoolers, Friday was gradual entry so the little ones had gone home early, and the OED class were rolling stumps, making teeter totters and obstacle courses with the materials they found around the area. My favourite part was seeing the kids pair off with different children in their exploration, making new friendships than the ones we had seen blossom at the beginning of the day. After washing our hands with soap and water, everyone took a break for lunch and Carol pulled out some books about insects and read them to the class.  

We were nearing the end of the day, and I don’t know how the time went by so fast. The kids could choose their activities for the end of class. Some of the kids took sticks and twine and crafted their own spider webs, others made a bug house and collected beetles and sow bugs to put inside, a few kids pulled out their notebooks and practiced their spelling, and there was more tree climbing. Before the class was let out, Carol read the class another bug book and I have highlighted a few of the facts from the book. 

• Ants are like superheroes; their strength can be compared to a 3-year-old lifting a cow. 
• There are a lot of variety of bugs, including over 12 000 types of ants and 350 000 types of beetles. 
• Ladybugs are a beetle that lives in our area and their main food is aphids. 
• Where can bugs be found in the forest? Everywhere! 

In summary, the experience volunteering in the forest was such a pleasure, I felt as if I was not working, I was just playing along with the kids. It was just like how my daughter felt when she told me that she did not learning anything last week, all she did was play. For children, play is a portal to learning and cultivating a love of nature. As parents, volunteering for OED may seem like work with all of us having busy schedules, but I enjoyed my time so much it hardly felt like work at all. If you are lucky like me, you might accidentally learn something with the kids through play. And to all of you that can volunteer for a day, I hope you have as much fun as I did. 

Much Respect,

Stephany Garber Black

Published in the Cloverdale Reporter on July 2, 2020

I disagree with Jock Finlayson’s conclusions that when it comes to increasing the minimum wage, the timing couldn’t be worse.

The timing couldn’t be better. I say this because raising the minimum wage will protect human life and reduce poverty.

(Finlayson’s piece “Minister should look at financial carnage amid min. wage increase” ran in the June 4 issue of the Cloverdale Reporter.)

The minimum wage increased 75 cents to $14.60 per hour on June 1, an extra $6 for eight hours of work. These minimum wage employees are often working in restaurants and customer service where their interactions with the public make them more vulnerable to being exposed to COVID-19 than those in different industries. We need to trust these people to stay home when they feel ill to protect the rest of us.

Fighting poverty is part of protecting us collectively because minimum wage workers should not be forced to choose between working sick or being able to pay rent and eat. The increased minimum wage will help those workers protect themselves and others in the coming months.

The minimum wage historically has always been about protecting the vulnerable. According to our federal labour standards, the government has put minimum wage in place to protect non-unionized workers, reduce the number of low-paying jobs, alleviate poverty, create incentives to work and address inequality.

It is apparent the business community has organized and has advocates like Finlayson to protect their interests. Still, labour is discouraged from organizing to defend their wages because businesses can take away those coveted jobs.

Instead of mentioning that the minimum wage is in place to protect the vulnerable and reduce poverty, we have Finlayson reducing labour to a business expense. Talking about labour as a cost of production is problematic, because if working people are reduced to a business expense, what is a human life worth? I would argue that human life is precious and can’t just be looked at only in economic terms. This principle that human life is more than just a production expense is why we have a minimum wage in the first place.

Raising the minimum wage is not as bad as Finlayson makes it seem. Studies have shown that while raising the minimum wage may slightly increase unemployment; it also increases job stability. That means that it may be harder to find a job at first, but it is more likely to be a job you keep after you do. It also has a ripple effect of increasing other people’s wages, especially those close to minimum wage. If there is a time when we should protect the poorest and create more stable jobs, shouldn’t it be during a global health crisis?

Finlayson makes mention of the “calamity” and “carnage” the COVID-19 crisis has caused businesses. Perhaps we should remind ourselves why businesses closed in the first place—to protect human lives while we prepared and restructured our society during the pandemic. We chose to put the collective good before our individual needs as we listened to experts, voluntarily closed businesses, stayed home, and practiced social distancing.

As we look at the struggles of businesses, we must not forget the minimum wage workers and the working poor. The poor and the vulnerable need our help during a global pandemic when unemployment rates are rising and they have an increased chance of exposure to COVID-19.

Therefore, in the fight to protect human lives and decrease poverty, I politely disagree with Finlayson by saying that increasing the minimum wage could not have come at a better time.

The Isolation Journals – April 25, 2020

By Stephany Garber Black

 

When we moved to our home in Cloverdale on December 1, 2019, one of the first things I told people was how close we were to our daughter’s new school. I loved the idea of walking the kids to school every day. I imagined myself walking hand in hand with the kids, looking at cherry blossom trees and saying hello to our neighbours. As is so happens, walking to school was better in theory than in practice. Before this, we lived on a 30-acre farm, and we knew almost all our neighbours on a first-name basis. In a more residential area like Cloverdale, you see people much more often. Consequently, people aren’t as enthusiastic about making small talk.

 

I took it personally when some of my neighbours wouldn’t say hello back. It seemed weird that we all walked our kids to school down the same street but never introduced ourselves to each other. In a way, I felt isolated even before the isolation. To make matters worse, my 3-year-old son was—how shall I put this nicely—less than enthusiastic about walking his sister to school and picking her up every day. He would lay on the sidewalk, refusing to walk, telling me he was tired, or begrudgingly walk while he cried, taking twice the time to get home. I spent more time worrying about what people thought of me as a mom than time spent enjoying the landscape. And the cherry blossoms—well, they didn’t bloom in January when our walks to school started; instead, the trees had bare branches or muted leaves. All the same, we persisted on our walks through the snow or rain, walking the same path back and forth in the morning and the afternoon. I couldn’t tell you why at the time, but the walks became important to me even when they were miserable. In reflection, the walks were not about exercise, fresh air or any of the things I told myself they were about. The walks were about making a familiar path down an unfamiliar road and confronting the scary and new. The walks became about making a home after losing my old one.

 

At the end of March, I started to make that same walk to my daughter’s school as a way of escaping from my self-imposed isolation. Since the pandemic hit our community, going outside now is scary and weird. People turn their faces away from you when you say hello or cross the street when they see you coming to maintain social distancing. I’m not complaining, I don’t want to get sick either. Even I have stopped saying hello, opting to wave to my neighbours instead. The streets are quiet, with most people’s cars still parked in the driveway. The sign in front of the elementary school even says back to school March 30, although the school had informed us weeks ago that they would be closed until further notice. On top of the sign, spray-painted in yellow is the word “Corona.” Beyond the fences and grass field is the school’s playground wrapped up in caution tape with the words “Danger” and “Do not enter” silhouetted against the red plastic. It seems that our fight against this virus is fought on all fronts—hospitals, grocery stores, and playgrounds are dangerous in ways we never imagined before.

Walking to my daughter’s school is my new isolation ritual. I walk down our street past the trees and houses that border the sidewalk. After I reach the school, I walk around the field, circling the taped-off playground and walk by the outside door to kindergarten in a big loop. Around the neighbourhood, I finally see the cherry blossoms that I had imagined in my romantic visions of the walk months earlier. It seems like every other house has a garden full of tulips or hanging baskets with a rainbow of flowers in front of their door. I see the contrast between the graffiti and caution tape and the cherry blossoms and carefully cultivated gardens. It is not all bad; as unsightly as the caution tape is, it is there to protect our community. The terrible and the beautiful were always a part of our life; although, the virus has a way of sharpening these contrasts.

 

In some ways, the walk to my daughter’s school is like my journey through the pandemic. It is not always about the romantic notions I wanted it to be. I have yet to write a memoir, learn French or come up with an ambitious exercise routine. Whether it is because of bad news or bad weather, some days might be miserable, but I persevere through them to make sense of it later. I think my passage through the pandemic will not always be an isolated walk down an unfamiliar road. Eventually, the landscape becomes as familiar as the walk from school to home. If you look past the graffiti, caution tape and anxious neighbours, you might notice the cherry blossoms are blooming again or the tulips coming up in your neighbour’s garden. Even in times of terrible consequence, beauty can be found as we travel through familiar and unfamiliar landscapes.

The Isolation Journals – April 24, 2020

By Stephany Garber Black

Today started like most days in isolation. I woke up and reached for my phone to check the news from under the blankets of my bed. I am not a morning person, but having kids has deprived me of my late starts. These days, I still linger under the covers until I have no choice but to get up and face the day. Every night I check the news before bed and again in the morning when I wake up. It’s good to give yourself breaks throughout the day. Last night when I checked the headlines, the US President had said something about injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus and using UV lights and sunlight as treatments. Just when I thought I could not be surprised anymore. I hope that nobody took such terrible advice and died during the time I was sleeping. According to the morning headlines, Lysol and bleach are issuing warnings not to inject or drink disinfectant. Although it’s true, if you inject or drink disinfectant, it won’t be the coronavirus that kills you; the disinfectant will do the job first. It’s like saying the cure for the coronavirus is Hemlock.

Apparently, this is what “new normal” looks like. The next article I read is about a video posted by a doctor in Colorado whose 4-year-old son was struggling to breathe in the hospital while sick with Covid-19. It was terrifying. I had tears in my eyes thinking about my two young children, my 3-year-old son and my 5-year-old daughter. How would I feel if they were fighting to breathe? Early in the outbreak, experts said that the young and the healthy had mild to no symptoms. Every day that passes offers a new example of how we can never be sure that we are safe. The coronavirus can be lurking on any surface, threatening to take our breath away, which is why I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the importance of the breath.

It is easy to take our breath for granted, it is a function of our autonomic nervous system, and we barely need to think about it. After all, we breathe in our sleep. As nations struggle to manufacture masks and ventilators, the virus makes visible what was true all along. Protecting our breath can be life and death. When breathing ends, so does life.

Rising, falling, rising, falling. It is what I say in my mind in moments beyond words. Birth, life and death all connected by the breath.  During the worst moments of my life—seeing my daughter wheeled away from me to have surgery at one day old, sitting beside my mom’s bed after one of her painful cancer surgeries, or holding her hand as she died—I counted the rising and falling of my breath as despair resonated through me like a chord on the violin. In moments of discord, it is the breath that brings me back to the present. The past and future can threaten to overwhelm you like a tidal wave of grief and turmoil. In those turbulent waters, the breath is like a life raft that carries us safely to the other shore. The single-pointed focus on the breath reminds me that no matter how bad things are, at least I am still breathing, and that is something. It is at least better than the alternative.

You need only look to Buddhism to see that the breath is not just a part of life; it is a spiritual act. Breathing can be therapy in the face of calamity. We do it in meditation, in moments of peace and moments of turmoil, our breath is always with us. Sometimes the traumas of the past can be muted by the breath. Sitting with my mom at her doctors’ appointments, I would breathe through the bad news to keep the quiver from my voice and the tears from my eyes. Rising, falling became my silent mantra as I wrote the words the doctor spoke that would otherwise be lost in the waves of despair. My breath was a lifeboat that I clung to in those turbulent waters.

At other times the breath amplified emotions as they reverberated through my being, allowing these crucial moments to penetrate the soul. When my mom was really sick, it was all she could do to take care of herself. I had to hold it together in a time when everything was falling apart. I would imagine myself rising out of my own body, tethered but disconnected at the same time. I was the observer, separating thinking from feeling. It seemed like a good strategy until it stopped working. After my mom died, I felt despair like I’d never known. I would think, who would ever love me like my mother? Or, what terrible fate will I face one day? My meditations resonated with the sadness I had bottled up. Breathing became a way of grieving and releasing the pressure. It felt good the way that listening to a sad song feels good. The vocal notes we sing that stir our hearts are the sounds between each breath. The breath is with us through love and grief, and peace and calamity. We don’t need to remember to breathe, but it is helpful when we do. The breath is a bridge through time from one moment to the next.

Last week, New York doctor Colleen Farrell played Amazing Grace on the violin to memorialize a nurse, Ernesto DeLeon, who died of Covid-19. The song was sad and beautiful all at once. Colleen’s tribute was a lovely way to use the breath to memorialize someone through creating music. It reminded me of how on Remembrance Day, the anniversary of my mom’s death, we would stand for the ceremony in the cemetery and sing along with Amazing Grace in the crisp November air.

As this virus leaves people breathless, it gives me pause to be grateful for my health and my family’s health in the present. We are all home and healthy right now. In times like these it is important to breathe into these moments of peace and enjoy them while they last. As anyone who has encountered cancer or illness themselves will know, the future was never certain anyways. But if I could say anything with certainty, it would be this—injecting or drinking disinfectant is a terrible idea, so keep calm and continue breathing. Don’t worry; it’s easy. You can do it in your sleep.

 

We often think of journalism as a necessary function of our society, the Fourth Estate, or our political watchdogs, but it is not always seen from such an optimistic perspective. Pessimists might say that journalism, technology, and ideology have become braided together to serve the great Moloch of capitalist society; a culture where information is a commodity, citizens become consumers and news can be distorted through ideologies of the ‘left’ and the ‘right.’ To these critics, telling the truth instead can become selling the truth or in some cases, just selling the audience. Although I share some concerns about journalism and its entanglement with technology and ideology, I hope that journalists will serve their citizens rather than the devouring god of the Jewish Old Testament, a good metaphor for a society built upon consumption and profits for sure. Call me an optimist, but I see journalism as essential to our democracy; however, I am concerned that journalism is shaped by the technology that is used to create and distribute the news.

 

Journalism was a craft born out of technology; it depended upon the advent of the press to produce the printed word and reach its first mass audiences. As technology has progressed, news producers have been forced to adapt their craft to the new media. With radio and television broadcast, journalists were able to engage in new forms of storytelling and reach a wider audience. The spread of information to citizens allows them to form a public opinion on social, political, and economic issues. This sense of community, the spread of information, and forming of public opinion are essential to our ability to self-government. So, in this sense, journalism, democracy, and technology are interdependent on each other to provide our way of life.

 

If I am to believe that journalism and democracy rise and fall together, the loss of jobs for newsroom employees that work at newspapers, radio, television as well as digital-native media is a concerning trend. The Pew Research Center compared the number of American newsroom employees from 2008 to 2017 and found that newsroom employment was down a significant 23%, the loss of approximately 27,000 jobs. As most of these jobs lost are from the newspaper industry, it becomes apparent that the technology of this media plays a role in its decline. Despite the creation of some new jobs at digital-native media companies, the internet did not provide enough job opportunities to offset the jobs that were lost, but this was not the only hurdle that the field of journalism must face.

 

Journalism now faces new challenges with accusations of fake news, partisan reporting and a devastating loss of ad revenues compromising the amount and quality of investigative reporting done in newsrooms, causing some to suggest that journalism is dying a slow death. If it is the death of journalism, should we lament for what is lost? I have considered this, and although journalism is in decline, it is not dead yet, so I suggest we look at some of the strengths and shortcomings of the practice to contemplate how journalism may improve going forward. In our meditations on journalism, we must also understand how ideology and technology are all interdependent parts of news creation. Canadian political philosopher George Grant expressed a similar sentiment in his writing, believing that it is not enough to leave technology and ideology unexamined as they actively shape our lives.

 

You don’t have to look hard to find Grant’s criticisms of journalism. In the very first paragraph of Chapter 1 in his book Lament for a Nation Grant characterizes journalists as serving the interests of the liberal political elite to guarantee their pay. He considers journalists along with academics, politicians and business owners all contributing to the 1963 defeat of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and the Progressive Conservative government. The critical way that journalists represented Diefenbaker in the media showed that they lacked the moral character to stand up to the threat of nuclear warfare and the threat to nationalism.

 

Grant might be right in criticizing the journalists of his time. In accepting the principle that the journalist’s first obligation is to the truth, then telling the truth is always an act of moral character as it requires the journalist to suppress their own self-interest to serve a greater good than their own, the good of the public. To understand the theme that journalism is an act of character, I will look at three criticisms made by Grant about journalism. These three critiques by Grant address the problem of news creation as a capitalist pursuit, some journalists overemphasis of people’s intentions rather than decisions, and how journalists may obscure issues through ideological opposition to ‘conservatism’ or ‘liberalism’ in the way that they deliver the news.

 

In Grant’s first criticism, he recognizes how journalism should be separated from the profit-seeking motivations of news companies to ensure that we preserve Canadian news institutions rather than importing American media for cheap. He writes, “The encouragement of private broadcasting must be anti-nationalist: the purpose of private broadcast is to make money, and the easiest way to do this is to import canned American programs appealing to the lowest common denominator of the audience” (Grant, 1965, p. 20). Grant also reminds us that it was a conservative government that established Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, to prevent the public airwaves from being used simply to satisfy the interests of media ownership in making profits over the public interest of informing citizens so that they have the tools to participate in the democratic system.

 

Authors and media scholars Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel express similar concerns about media companies and the capitalist ideology of maximizing profits. Journalists may face a conflict of interest in serving both the interests of the public and the interests of their employer. They summarize this sentiment in the following passage from their book The Elements of Journalism:

People who produce journalism have different loyalties from employees engaged in other types of work. They have a social obligation that at times overrides employers’ or financial sponsors’ immediate interests, and yet this obligation is the source of their employers’ financial success. (2014, p. 73)

At times the journalists must separate themselves from the profit motives of the company they work for to accurately tell a story and protect citizens interests especially in an age when media ownership is concentrated, and these conflicts of interest are more likely to occur.

 

The second criticism by Grant is that to understand public events, it is crucial that journalists can differentiate between the ‘decision’ and ‘intention’ of public figures as intentions can be challenging to determine. He writes:

The “personalized” political journalism, associated on this continent with Time and exemplified in Canada by Maclean’s, has done much to obscure this fundamental distinction…The consequences of decisions can be understood historically for what they are, whereas the motives of the decision-makers are mainly of biographical—and perhaps eternal—significance. (1965, pp. 42-43)

In other words, understanding the intentions of public figures can be challenging in that we cannot see their thoughts, so instead, we can only speculate about what their motivations might be. However, the consequences of a public figure’s decisions can be more readily seen for what they are—results of action being innately more measurable than motivation, and arguably, more relevant. After all, the road to Hell has long been paved with good intentions.

 

Kovach and Rosenstiel described the emphasis on motives instead of actions as a form of journalistic cynicism that obscured the public from understanding the real impact of the decisions being made. They describe this as follows, “By shifting from the ‘what’ of public life to the ‘why,’ they argued, journalists’ interiorized’ public life, making it about the psyche and self of politicians and also making it less about the outcomes of public policy that actually affected citizens” (2014, p. 79). As concentrating on a public figure’s motives or intentions does not inform the public in a meaningful way, journalists should only pursue this so far as it helps them understand the results of the actions or decisions that are made which are of more importance to the public.

 

The third criticism that Grant makes is that journalists can obscure public issues by reducing them to ideological positions of either ‘liberalism’ or ‘conservatism.’

Influenced by Time magazine, politics is served up as gossip, and the more titillating the better…The “news” now functions to legitimize power, not to convey information. The politics of personalities helps the legitimizers to divert attention from issues that might upset the status quo. (1965, p. 8)

Grant saw that some journalists present events through this ideological lens with individuals chosen to represent the liberal or conservative position. Framing the news as an argument between two opposing political ideologies may be entertaining, but it is not informative as it does not allow for the nuance needed in many political discussions.

 

Kovach and Rosenstiel saw this partisan presentation of the news also reflected in major news organizations like Fox News and MSNBC as political affiliation became part of a company’s brand and therefore tied to its financial success. They describe political commentators such as Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity as practicing this journalism of affirmation:

Their currency is emotional mobilization more than ideas. Much of their conversation focuses on the wrongness of the other side, or the anticipation that there lies trouble ahead for the obviously misguided opponent.  (2014, p. 155)

Instead of taking the watchdog role, journalists reinforce the public’s preconceived notions about politics by dividing along ideological lines of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ However, this journalism of affirmation is to be distinguished from the journalism of opinion that tries to make sense of the news rather than just report it in a partisan manner. Opinion journalism is clearly labelled as opinion in an effort to be transparent about perceived bias rather than hiding behind the banner of ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ while distorting the news through partisan reporting so that in practice they are neither.

 

By considering Grant’s criticisms of journalism we see the problem of news creation being tied to profits, journalists’ overemphasis on intentions rather than decisions, and how the press can obscure issues by reducing them to ideologies of ‘conservatism’ or ‘liberalism.’ In acknowledging these problems some might think that I am already lamenting for what is lost, but even if the decline in journalism can be interpreted as a death knell, it would be hasty of me to declare it as already dead. Some good can come out of criticisms as it presents us with the opportunity to learn and gain wisdom as both citizens and journalists. Poor examples can show us what not to do while good examples can show us an ideal—how journalism can be an act of character. But even in addressing these criticisms of journalism, it is difficult to discuss without acknowledging the interdependence of journalism, ideology, and technology.

 

Ideology can obscure the issues as journalists, and their commentators align themselves with political faction while still purporting to be ‘fair’ and ‘balanced.’ Fairness can be much more subjective than truthfulness because as a journalist, you might not be able to be fair to someone in a matter of public interest when telling the truth. Trying to be balanced in news coverage can also be problematic. In deciding to be fair to both sides and provide a balance of these two perspectives, a journalist might not consider that both sides may not have equal weight. For this reason, I find these two principles better manifestations of journalistic ethics: A journalist’s obligation is to the truth, and a journalist’s loyalty is to their citizens.

 

Technology birthed journalism with the advent of the printing press, radio, and television. Now that the internet has emerged as a new media to broadcast through, we see that journalism and technology may not be mutually sustaining. In considering these changing institutions of news media, I am reminded of something Grant wrote: “When men are committed to technology, they are also committed to continual change in institutions and customs. Freedom must be the first political principle—the freedom to change any order that stands in the way of technological advance” (1965, p. 71). In other words, technological progress is seen as a pursuit of freedom but not a moral pursuit. Journalism, on the other hand, can be a moral pursuit. It is an act of character as journalists must rely upon their character to distinguish their loyalty to their citizens from their loyalty to their employer in order to tell the truth.

 

Some might think that objectivity is the height of journalistic virtue, but I would argue otherwise. Through looking at journalism, we can see that ideology is embedded in the meaning, making it challenging to isolate ideology, let alone remove it. Ideology and bias are not always harmful, as it can also provide us with a lens to understand political, social, and cultural issues. Journalists may not be able to remove their bias from their reporting, but that is okay if their work reflects strong moral character. In this sense, a journalist’s ability to exercise conscience is more important than their personal political beliefs as it is credibility more than objectivity that is important to the industry.

 

As a Christian and a political philosopher Grant recognized the importance of character, morality, and wisdom as the path to a virtuous life. His criticisms of journalism illuminate some of the problems that the journalist’s face while his personal ideals of virtue and morality show us a contrast to the bleak pursuit of the ideology of freedom and technological progress. Journalists and media scholars Kovach and Rosenstiel saw the criticisms of journalism as an opportunity to consider what journalism is for. In this respect, we may contemplate both the problems journalists face and the purpose of the craft going forward. If we believe that journalism is essential to participating in a democracy, perhaps we should consider how its death would impact our lives. After all, if journalism and democracy die together, what else might we be lamenting when journalism is gone?

 

References

Dart, R. S. (2008). Geroge Grant: Spiders & Bees. Abbotsford: Fresh Wind Press.

Grant, G. (1965). Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Grant, G. (1974). English-Speaking Justice. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2014). The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Three Rivers Press.

 

An analysis of the term Social Justice Warriors through the lenses of Jonathan Swift and George Grant.

I had not thought about social justice warriors much except in the sense that I didn’t want to be one. After all, you don’t need to have a solid definition of SJWs to know the term is steeped in controversy. Through my avoidance of social media, I manage to circumvent participation in the mudslinging that occurs on the comment feeds and public forums of the internet. But I am not one to shy away from a controversial topic, and so I must ask myself what did it mean to be a social justice warrior in the past and what does it mean now? Until recently, I’m not sure if I ever asked myself why some see social justice warriors as such a blight on society. To understand the term better, let’s deconstruct it and see what comes to mind.

 

When I think of justice, the image that contemplation evokes is a giant statue of Lady Justice carved out of stone, wearing her flowing robes and blindfold while holding up a scale in one hand and a sword in the other. However, to think of social justice does not recall the towering image of a goddess but instead suggests someone of a more human stature such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who championed causes like civil rights, race relations, labor relations, and public education. But what comes to mind when we think of social justice warriors? It has become such a pejorative term that it becomes a caricature of the social justice cause. We might imagine people dwarfed over their keyboards as the thought police of YouTube or social media, quick to correct any perceived slight against any marginalized group. With such a rift between social justice and its warriors, it is difficult to find a foothold while standing on the shifting sands of meaning.

 

I’ve become inspired after reading the political philosophy of George Grant, who had similar concerns as mine about ideology growing entangled with meaning. Instead of looking at social justice warriors Grant looked at the word justice itself and compared the modern version of justice inspired by liberal thinkers like Hobbes and Locke to the ancient justice inspired by Plato and Aristotle. Grant wanted to transcend ideology to see justice for what it really was—flaws and strengths alike.

 

At times Grant borrows from literature in his writings using myths and metaphors to help illustrate his point. Allan Bloom, a philosophic thinker like Grant, titled his book Giants and Dwarfs as a nod to Jonathan Swift. He wrote that books like Swift’s were “borrowed ladders” to new standpoints in which we can view ourselves. Let me then borrow from the writings of Swift with his metaphors of giants and dwarfs, spiders and bees and battling books to understand the term social justice warrior better. Through looking at the definitions of social justice warrior, the philosophy of Grant, and the literature of Swift, we will try to untangle ideology from meaning to understand the term social justice warrior from these different perspectives.

 

Social justice warriors have permeated our culture through meme production and YouTube compilations, but it was not always as widely used as it is today. Not only was the term used much less, but it also had different meanings. In the past, the term social justice warrior was seen to have a descriptive or even positive connotation. Social justice warriors were people who championed their social cause to bring about social change. A couple decades ago it would have been hard to find an example of a social justice warrior used in a pejorative way. So, what happened to the phrase to change its meaning so drastically? I can’t claim to understand all the intricacies involved in these shifting meanings, but if there was one event that brought the word to the forefront of our culture wars, it was #Gamergate. To get a sense of how this word has changed, I will look at three different connotative meanings—descriptive, negative, and derogatory—as well as the event called #Gamergate that popularized its use.

 

Descriptive and Positive Meanings of Social Justice Warrior

 

If we look at earlier uses of the term social justice warrior, we see it used much differently than it is today. The Washington Post found several examples of social justice warrior used descriptively and positively in its earliest manifestations. The first example is from the article on the jazz festival in the Montreal Gazette in 1991:

[Quebec guitarist Rene] Lussier will present the world premiere of his ambitious Quebecois mood piece Le Tresor de la Langue, which juxtaposes the spoken word — including sound bites from Charles de Gaulle and Quebec nationalist and social-justice warrior Michel Chartrand — with new-music noodlings.

There is no indication that the phrase social justice warrior is used as anything other than in a descriptive or positive connotation in the above example. Another example from that time frame was from the Houston Chronicle in 1992 with the obituary of Rev. James Obey Sr. that was titled, “Social Justice warrior dies.” Similarly, it would be unlikely that anyone would think a social justice warrior would have a negative meaning in a person’s obituary.

 

Several more examples of social justice warrior are found being used in its descriptive context including the more recent case from 2009 when filmmaker Ana Kokkinos told a journalist what had inspired her to become a lawyer, “What attracted me to law at that age was the idea of being a social justice warrior.” The Washington Post article did find an example of its negative use in an editorial piece in the Baltimore Sun in 2007 where the author suggested that some of the multiculturalism workshops were where “presenters instruct teachers to go back to their schools and become social justice warriors.” The editorial was anti-multiculturalism, and so in this context, the social justice warrior was used in a negative sense, but for the most part, the meaning was descriptive or positive. Looking at the pejorative use of the term social justice warrior today, we can see that meaning has changed drastically in only a decade.

 

To give this descriptive and positive meaning of a social justice warrior perspective, let us consider the works of George Grant, who thought about social justice through the lens of his philosophy and theology. In what way would Grant see the term social justice warrior used positively and descriptively? Grant often compared two versions of justice throughout his work: the modern liberal contractarian pursuit of justice celebrated by thinkers like John Rawls, and the ancient classical pursuit of justice as reflecting wisdom is more than knowing what it is to be free but also what it means to be good. In his book English-Speaking Justice, he writes:

In the western tradition, it was believed that the acting out of justice in human relationships was the essential way in which human beings are opened to eternity. Inward and outward justice were considered to be mutually interdependent. (p. 85)

Grant was an Anglican Christian inspired by Plato; he saw God as the unmoving image of eternity, so for him opening oneself to eternity in the pursuit of social justice was opening oneself up to God. If the social justice warrior’s pursuits of good were both inward and outward, we can imagine they could be seen in this descriptive and positive light by Grant. According to Grant, the difference between this ancient inspired vision of social justice and a contractual and liberal form of social justice was in stature the difference between giants and dwarfs.

 

Gamergate and the shifting meaning of Social Justice Warrior

 

Second, we look at the negative meaning of a social justice warrior and the event that gave that meaning depth, #Gamergate. In looking at #Gamergate, perhaps social justice warriors can offer a window into the war of ideologies fought on the political and social landscape of the English-speaking world. Google trends data shows searches for “social justice warrior” and “SJW” peaked in August 2014, right around the time of #Gamergate. To give context to the change in meaning, I will try to summarize the event as best as I can.

 

#Gamergate started as a conversation about “ethics in journalism” as people accused a female game developer of having sexual relations with a journalist to get a better game review. Criticism centered around the female game developer and not the male journalist causing a lot of talk on Twitter about sexism and the need for feminist perspectives within the culture of gaming and as this sentiment spread through social media so did the backlash against it.

 

After the events of #Gamergate is when the meaning of the social justice warrior had noticeably changed. All those that opposed or critiqued gaming based on feminism or identity politics were labeled an SJW and dismissed as an ideological opponent. A campaign of harassment was coordinated and implemented through websites like 4chan, Reddit and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter against the ‘opponents’ of gaming culture and more evidence of conflicts of interest within the industry provided fuel to the fires feeding the culture wars.

 

At its best moments, the event inspired people to question how gaming culture should change to represent the growing proportion of female gamers better as well as bringing attention to some concerning conflicts of interest within the gaming industry.  And at its worst, it devolved into a campaign of harassment against those designated as “SJWs.” Adrienne L. Massanari and Shira Chess describe it as follows: “the #Gamergate movement became a convenient way for a loose coalition of frustrated geeks, misogynists, alt-righters, and trolls to coalesce around a common idea—that popular culture was “overly concerned” with a particular kind of identity politics—even if their tactics and actual motivations were varied” (2018, p. 527). To sum up the sentiment, SJWs were too concerned with identity politics and were ruining people’s fun.

 

At times the conversation about #Gamergate became one about freedom of speech and freedom of expression in gaming. Those that critiqued games were trying to censor the gaming community and in doing so, launched an attack on free speech and an attack on gamers having fun. On Reddit and especially 4chan, there is an orientation towards radical understandings of freedom of speech where words are seen to have no consequence, and all is fair in the pursuit of “lulz,” an online term understood as a mean-spirited pursuit of fun. In that sense, the search for “lulz” became outright harassment escalating tensions between gamers and their critics.

 

It is challenging to understand #Gamergate without taking a close look at all the different participants and factions, so consider this an oversimplification. The purpose of this oversimplification is not to say that #Gamergate was the cause of the change of meaning, but to suggest that it contributed to it.

 

I tried to look at this through a philosophical lens and imagine what George Grant would think of #Gamergate, and two different quotes come to mind. The first quote relates to the very ideological nature of #Gamergate, where people segregate themselves into their tribes—the gamers and their critics. Grant writes, “One swallow does not make a summer; one academic book does not make an autumn of our justice. However, theories are at work in the decisions of the world, and we had better understand them” (English-Speaking Justice, 1984, p. 47). In the quote, Grant was referring to John Rawls’ book Theory of Justice, but it resonates with #Gamergate too. One cultural event, like #Gamergate, does not change the meaning of a term, but as Grant points out, there are theories at work influencing the meaning, so we best try and understand them.

 

The second quote is from Technology and Empire, in which Grant explains that through seeing where there is need or deprival, we may discover new ways to bring about good. “Any intimations of authentic deprival are precious because they are the ways through which intimations of good, unthinkable in the public terms, may yet appear to us” (Grant, 1969, p. 127). #Gamergate popularized the use of SJW and brought to our attention complaints that there are conflicts of interest within the business of making games as well as problems with how women are represented in the games they make. Inspired by Grant, we might think that by bringing our attention to these conflicts, #Gamergate could allow us a window into the political upheaval and culture wars of our times allowing us to identify these “intimations of deprival” so that we might do some good.

 

Social justice warriors might also offer us a window into our culture wars if we can make sense of the meanings. We see social justice as a positive pursuit in its early applications, but with technology and the internet, the negative representations of social justice began to emerge more frequently, creating a new context of understanding the term.

 

Negative meanings of Social Justice Warrior – Definitions, Abbreviation and Political Implications

 

A new definition of social justice warrior started to emerge as people outside of the #Gamergate conflict came to be associated with the term. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionary added social justice warriors to its definition, describing it as an informal and derogatory term for “a person who expresses or promotes socially progressive views.” In this definition, we start to see the negative connotation formally acknowledged. The Urban Dictionary had a more specific meaning of social justice warriors:

A person who uses the fight for civil rights as an excuse to be rude, condescending, and sometimes violent for the purpose of relieving their frustrations or validating their sense of unwarranted moral superiority. The behaviors of social justice warriors usually have a negative impact on the civil rights movement, turning away potential allies and fueling the resurgence of bigoted groups that scoop up people who have been burned or turned off by social justice warriors.

Here is where we see the meaning of the word has changed significantly. A social justice warrior is more than a person promoting progressive views; it is a person inauthentically pursuing these causes of social justice to gain “moral superiority” or as I have heard it called “virtue-signalling.” It is significant to note the perceived authenticity determines the difference between positive pursuits and harmful pursuits of social justice. In other words, social justice needs to be about more than an act of self-interest where a person establishes themselves as moral and good for the sake of appearances. This apprehension about justice being more than a self-interest calculation echoes of Grant’s concerns with Rawls as well.

 

Another factor to consider in the changing meaning of social justice warrior is that it had become abbreviated to “SJW” and was used more often in its short form (Massanari & Chess, 2018, p. 528). Although we could explain this with practical reasons—SJW is quicker to type—it also serves a subversive function in changing the meaning. A social justice warrior might still conjure an image of an Amazonian champion to those unfamiliar with the current internet usage, but “SJW” takes the warrior out of social justice warrior creating “a bastardized and disempowered stepchild of the original term” (2018, p. 526). In this sense, social justice warriors can be both empowering and disempowering depending on when it is used, the context it is used in and whether we are using its abbreviated form.

 

It is also interesting to note that an “SJW” is almost always associated with ideologies of the left and not the right. Here is an example from Professor Jason M. Morgan from Reitaku University in Japan:

If you are not way out front of the left-galloping vanguard of the “herd of independent minds,” then you are dead meat, prey for social justice warrior wolves who prowl the quad in search of unwoke nonconformists to destroy.” (The Great Awokening: The Puritan Roots of the Social Justice Warrior, 2019, p. 40)

The negative definition of the term from the Urban Dictionary does not indicate any political affiliation, but examples of the implicit political meaning of SJWs found in several of the SJW fail compilation videos. The video creators claim that right-leaning commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Judge Jeanine from Fox News ‘destroy’ their political opponents in argumentative segments of their show. Which leads me to ask, are there social justice pursuits associated with ideologies of the right that fit the negative definition of social justice warriors?

 

While warriors of the left might take up causes like feminism and multiculturalism to signify their superior morality or membership in the tribe, warriors of the right are more likely to take up causes like security and conflicts of racial and religious origins to signal their virtue and belonging in theirs. I am sure I could find an example of a social justice cause with these themes and argue that it is an ideological or inauthentic pursuit, but these examples are irrelevant because SJW isn’t commonly used to describe ideologies of the right negatively. Although, I did find a definition on Urban Dictionary of a Conservative SJW:

A Conservative SJW is a conservative version of an SJW, a social justice warrior. Rather than fighting for ideologies related to LGBT rights, women’s rights, minorities, etc., the Conservative SJW will fight for a white, Christian, male’s rights, and fight against other people on internet forums about how white Christian males are being oppressed by society.

I consider this definition evidence that I am not the only one who thought about the implicit political meaning of SJW. Because there is a need to distinguish between an SJW and a Conservative SJW, we may believe that the definition of SJW has also changed to carry political implications as an insult to someone associated with the political left.

 

In establishing a political dimension to SJW, usage of the term can divide people into factions such as left and right, liberal and conservative, democrat and republican, or us and them. Opponents see the social justice cause as political, ideological, and a shallow endeavor. And activism becomes its own kind of currency.  This brings to mind something that Grant wrote in his book, Time as History, “Only the greatest thinkers transcend scholarship without preaching easy acceptance of shallow activism” (1988, p. 32). The negative definition of SJW was about inauthentic pursuits of justice for reasons like moral superiority—could that not also be described as shallow activism? It would seem the solution to this shallow activism would be to transcend it by separating ourselves from inauthentic pursuits of justice; however, this becomes difficult as the meaning of SJW can change when used in the derogatory context and ignore the connection to shallow activism altogether.

 

Derogatory Meanings of Social Justice Warrior – “Snowflakes,” Irrational and Diseased

 

Along with the implicit political meaning of social justice warrior, came examples of it used in a broader sense transforming the implication from the realm of ideology to the personal. Its usage, then, is meant to imply that a person is rude, violent, and condescending with their pursuit of social justice, while previously highlighted as inauthentic, is now treated as an afterthought tacked onto the detestable ‘it’ in order to easily locate the mental trash bin within which the dehumanized SJW should be disposed. Often the perceived accusations of rudeness and violence don’t exist, and the authenticity of the person’s motivations are not questioned at all. In this sense, SJW has a more derogatory meaning of ‘otherness,’ and the use of it in the negative context becomes the codified language for us vs. them.

 

The concern in identifying your opponent as derogatory and as an ‘other’ is that it would create what Martin Buber would describe as I/it relationships where one group of people treats the other as less than human—as someone to be ‘destroyed’ or as someone to be harassment as an object of their amusement.  To understand how the meaning of SJW has changed into a derogatory meaning, I will look at three examples of how the derogatory use is meant to denigrate SJWs. The first is the use of “snowflakes” to attack expressions of uniqueness, the second example is the assumption that SJWs are irrational and incapable of civil discourse, and the third is the use of meme culture to suggest that SJWs are a disease or cancer.

 

 

In the first example of the derogatory context, SJWs are called “snowflakes” such as in this quote from an article by Professor Jason M. Morgan, “Convinced of their moral superiority, SJW snowflakes are also convinced of their uniqueness. They are one-of-a-kind, perfect, like snowflakes falling from the heights of wokeness to cover the unwoke world foul as Luther’s heap of dung” (The Great Awokening: The Puritan Roots of the Social Justice Warrior, 2019, p. 40). I think it is safe to assume that when Morgan talks about SJW snowflakes covering the world in dung, we are talking about them in the derogatory sense. Using the term pejoratively, Morgan equates a person expressing uniqueness with someone showing moral superiority.

 

We can also find this resentment towards expressions of uniqueness in several memes that represent the SJWs as people with coloured hair, tattoos, or piercings. It would not be a stretch to say that features like tattoos and dyed hair are seen as unattractive by the meme creators. By establishing these expressions of uniqueness as unattractive, an SJW’s appearance alone can have an implicit derogatory meaning.

 

The second derogatory meaning is that SJWs are irrational and incapable of civil discourse.  They either lack the intelligence, are overly emotional or have a mental illness that prevents them from engaging in rational conversation. The problem that may arise with thinking of SJWs like this is that if we believe a person is incapable of rational discussion, then it makes it pointless to engage them at all. Or worse, we decide to talk to them but only for the ‘lulz’ such as through online harassment or taking amusement from ‘destroying’ them in conversation.

 

 

The third example is when the meaning of SJWs is removed from any context, and the SJW is denounced as diseased, cancerous, or a virus. We have seen how SJW can be used as an insult in the derogatory sense when it is used to indicate that someone is irrational, unattractive, or just an ‘other;’ however, this does not have the same implications as calling them a disease or cancer. We may ignore people that we don’t like and can’t talk to, but usually, we do not ignore cancer – it must be removed or exterminated before it can spread and infect our healthy tissue. Most people are unlikely to realize these thoughts into actions, but the sentiment is clear the SJWs are reproachable.

 

 

It can be tricky trying to understand the multiple meanings of social justice warrior as the change has not been linear. The term can have a descriptive definition, a negative one, or a derogatory meaning depending on when and where it was used. This shifting meaning makes it difficult to understand what version of SJW we are referring to when we try and discuss it.

 

But it’s important to talk about social justice warriors because of the questions that come with the interpretation of these new definitions and meanings. We might ask ourselves—what social justice pursuits are worthwhile and authentic, and which ones are ideological and unskillful? Most of us have had an interest in some social cause, whether it is improving children’s hospitals, rebuilding communities devastated by wildfires or merely donating money to the food bank while you’re purchasing your groceries. If we consider social justice warriors to be a negative or derogatory word, what does that mean about individual opportunities for social justice, should we abandon all causes as shallow pursuits?

 

In thinking of social justice causes as shallow pursuits, reminds me of something I read in the afterword of Lament for a Nation written by Shiela Grant. She directs us to a statement that Grant had repeated throughout his life, that “it always matters what each of us does.” She explains that it matters because we are all free to take good action, to open ourselves to spiritual life despite what difficulties we face, and to bring some good into the world.

 

As I am not a pessimist, I must believe that despite the challenges I may confront with the changing meaning of social justice warrior, some pursuits of social justice must be worthwhile. Which leads me to ask, how are we to distinguish the worthwhile pursuits of social justice from those that are not? To try and answer that question, I will look at Grant’s concerns about the changing meaning of the word justice and the implications of interpreting justice as a self-interest calculation.

 

George Grant, Social Justice Warriors, and Self-Interest

 

Technology has popularized the term social justice warrior as evident by its usage on social media, the creation of SJW memes and SJW YouTube compilation videos. In this sense, technology has contributed to the multiple meanings of social justice warrior, which can cause an erosion of meaning as no one is sure which interpretation of the term we are to use. It may be of concern to think how a definition that was descriptive and positive can also be derogatory and divisive, although those two sentiments seem to be in opposition to each other.

 

Grant showed a similar concern about the erosion of meaning of the word justice through our modern ideology. For Grant, the ancient and ideal version of justice was informed by virtue, love, and an understanding of the nature of things through which difficult truths could be realized. In contrast, the modern philosophy of justice, or modern liberal justice, was seen as a contractual form of justice agreed upon to protect the freedom, self-interest, and convenience of those that were governed by it. To Grant, this modern liberal understanding of justice lacked virtue, love, or the uncovering of difficult truths which subtracted from the meaning of the word.

 

It is not that he didn’t see any good in our modern liberal society, in Technology & Justice he acknowledges that the union of contractarianism and technology has improved living conditions and brought us many comforts. According to Grant, this version of justice may work for some, but it is incomplete as it fails to address the excessive freedoms that come with the liberal ideology that can be used to pursue imperialistic ventures overseas or worse—our potential catastrophic end caused by nuclear weaponry. For Grant, justice needed to be more than the freedom to pursue our self-interest; justice must also be enfolded by love, virtue, and wisdom.

 

Taking some inspiration from Grant, I ask myself what if the justice social justice warriors seek was a self-interest calculation, what implications could that have? For example, consider the negative definition of SJW used to describe someone engaging in social justice to demonstrate a superior morality, activism becomes capital to be gained. Which leads me to ask, why would it be in our self-interest to gain this social capital through demonstrating a moral superiority?

 

Capital is only worth acquiring if some have more and some have less than others; otherwise, we would already have all the capital we need, and that would make it a futile endeavor. But if there is a disparity in social capital, then that inequity manifests as a form of hierarchy where some are worth more than others. The problem with this is that since freedom and hierarchies are different pursuits, they might at times be at odds with one another.

 

Freedom to pursue self-interest becomes the freedom to pursue moral hierarchies, although this pursuit is not exclusive to SJWs alone. Some people may seek social capital through the derogatory use of SJW. Used in this context, the opponent establishes the SJW as ‘other,’ and in doing so signifies their moral superiority. These critics of SJWs may consider themselves champions of freedom, especially freedom of speech and expression, but the derogatory use of SJW to prove a person’s moral superiority signifies one person is above the other forming not freedom but another kind of hierarchy. Again, the pursuit of hierarchies could be at odds with the version of justice as freedom.

 

Some hierarchies may be necessary for our ways of life, such as those established in government, businesses, and schools. Hierarchies exist in many of the institutions of our society, and they can’t all be bad, right? The problem is that moral hierarchies are not recognized in any official sense and therefore, can be challenging to address. If this is a false pursuit of justice because it is not informed by wisdom or love, then perhaps the hierarchies themselves are false and unjust. What if in trying to be morally superior we just come across as condescending and rude? In that example, our hierarchies are not a real construct at all and exist only in our imaginations.

 

To use the metaphor of the spider and the bee—these hierarchies are like the fabrications of the web of the spider, constructed of little substance and therefore extremely vulnerable to any who would poke holes in its design. To be like the bee, we must free ourselves from the webs of hierarchy and instead be judged by what we produce, whether that be cobwebs or honey.

 

The Spiders and Bees of Social Justice

 

The metaphor of spiders and bees or dwarfs and giants can be used to describe the tensions between two approaches to philosophy, that of moderns and that of the ancients or the vita activa and the vita contemplativa of human life. Many great thinkers have considered these themes, including Swift, Bloom, and Grant. Instead of using the metaphor of giants and dwarfs to talk about social justice, let’s instead consider Swift’s Battle of the Books and the argument between the spider and the bee.

 

In Swift’s story, a wandering bee encounters a spider’s web in the corner of the library and finds it surrounded by the corpses of the dead and devoured. The bee escapes this fate but in doing so damages the spider’s fortress of cobwebs, infuriating the spider. He is not content to just let the bee leave and curses the bee for not giving him his due respect. The spider begins the argument intending to be angry and vulgar, with a predetermined outcome in his mind and no desire to listening to his opponent for nothing can be said to change his convictions. It seems apparent that this is not a skillful way to approach any of our arguments. In my experience, deciding we know the outcome of a conversation before it happens excludes the possibility of finding a new understanding, especially if our demeanor is angry or rude. In the case of the spider, we don’t need to see the bodies of the devoured to know that this philosophy of life is flawed.

 

Unlike the spider who stays in his fortifications, the bee’s flight takes him from flower to blossom where he takes their pollen and then enriches it to make honey all without harming plant or tree. After listening to the spider, the bee counters with an argument of his own—let them be judged by what they produce, whether it be venom and excrement or honey and wax. We might consider the flowers in this metaphor as sources of knowledge and wisdom that we must search for like the bee. Enriched by these sources of wisdom, our conversations could go different then that of the spider if our words produce honey rather than venom. If we are to believe the bee, then we must be judged by what we produce. Most would agree that the philosophy of the bee seems sweeter than the venom of the spider.

 

So, how are social justice warriors like bees, and how are they like spiders? To answer this, we need to look at specific examples, and then to use the philosophy of the bee, judge them by what they have produced to see if it resembles honey or venom. Notably, not all criticisms are venom. Some criticisms of social justice warriors are both constructive and valid. Like the bee disentangling himself from the cobwebs, we must also separate ourselves from the rude and vulgar pursuits of social justice warriors. In this context, it may seem like the SJWs are the spiders, but that is not always the case. For example, when a person is using the term SJW in a derogatory sense, they are more likely to produce venom than honey. In this sense, social justice warriors can be like spiders or bees, and so can their opponents.

 

Social Justice Warriors – The Contradictory Meanings and Future Usage

 

If we look at all the meanings of social justice warriors, we see that some ideas are at odds with one another. Social justice warrior can be both a compliment or an insult depending on the context. People see them as warriors, but they are also seen as weaklings dwarfed over their keyboards. They are portrayed as overemphasizing their uniqueness but also as the NPCs of computer games, lacking any originality other than what they are programmed to say. SJWs are seen as irrational and incompetent but are also seen as dangerous and diseased.

 

 

Of all these contradictions, it is most difficult for me to reconcile the early uses of the term with the rhetoric of extermination that comes with the diseased and derogatory use. In its best manifestations, SJW seems to be lionizing the person, and in its most derogatory use, it seems to be crossing over into hate speech. I do not agree with the derogatory use of the term social justice warrior, and I think that Grant would agree that we need justice to be informed by love and not hate.

 

So, what do these contradictions mean for the term social justice warrior going forward? In my opinion, because the term does not have a fixed meaning, I think that this means the definition of the term could still change. Does that mean it will change to a positive meaning or a negative meaning? When I think of my initial reaction to thinking of social justice warriors, all I knew was that I didn’t want to be one, if I were to consider that sentiment I think I see the term moving in a negative direction. There are still contemporary examples of the term being used in a positive way, such as in a short YouTube film about social justice warriors, so perhaps it is too early to guess.

 

Academics like Adrienne L. Massanari and Shira Chess suggest that reclaiming the moniker SJW may be a form of resistance against its most derogatory uses. They write that “Laughter and playfulness are what allows the othered body to regain agency” (2018, p. 539). That sounds great, but how do you introduce laughter and playfulness into hate speech?

 

I am sure that there are multiple ways that laughter and play can be used to diffuse the derogatory uses of SJW, but one example of reclaiming the term can be found following #Gamergate in October of 2014. A woman named Sarah Nixon created buttons that could be pinned on clothing and accessories with words like “Social Justice Wizard,” and “Social Justice Ranger” as well as “Social Justice Warrior,” borrowing the names from online gaming character classes. She sold the buttons for $2, and all the proceeds went to Planned Parenthood. If we consider that the derogatory uses of SJW may be used as a way of trolling people who may have authentic causes of social justice, the creation of these buttons is an example of how people can troll back and have a laugh without furthering the spread of hate speech. As the pins were in limited supply, I suggest that people interested in reclaiming the word consider similar and creative ways to have a laugh with the term social justice warrior.

 

 

Conclusions

 

When I first started researching social justice warriors, I had no idea what I would find. I was not aware that the term had so many interpretations. To be transparent about my biases, I expected to find confirmation that being a social justice warrior was a negative pursuit. Instead, I found multiple instances of social justice warrior used in a descriptive and positive sense. I also found examples of SJW used in the derogatory sense to discount people based on their political affiliation, similar to how the term “fake news” can be used pejoratively. I decided on the themes of descriptive, negative and derogatory to organize the many different memes I curated from the internet, but in reflecting on the diversity of meaning in the way social justice warrior has been used, I think that other themes could be explored as well.

 

Some of my SJW research sources led me to Google Trends data showing that searches for “social justice warrior” and “SJW” peaked in August 2014 right around the time of #Gamergate. The conflict between gamers and their critics was tricky to decipher because both sides could be reactionary and ideological in their pursuits of justice. However, it seems that both sides brought up legitimate criticisms whether they were regarding the growing population of female gamers who wanted to see themselves better represented in games, or the management of game developing companies and the conflicts of interest that exist with the various institutions that support them.

 

I took inspiration from the philosophic thinker George Grant who had similar concerns to mine about ideology and meaning. Where I took an interest in social justice warriors, Grant was interested in the meaning of justice within the tensions of ancient and modern philosophy. He was concerned with the implications of justice being nothing more than a self-interest calculation. This led me to think about the consequences of social justice warriors acting out of self-interest and the effects this might have. If social justice is pursued for inauthentic reasons like demonstrating moral superiority over another, activism becomes a kind of social capital. It became apparent to me that although SJW is almost always used to criticize ideologies of the left, the people using SJW in a derogatory sense might also be trying to signal a moral superiority. The inequity of this social capital must exist; otherwise, people would have no need to pursue it. The pursuit of moral capital and inequity inevitably leads to the creation of hierarchies, whether they be real or imagined.

 

To understand the similarities between SJWs and their critics, I used the metaphors of Jonathan Swift—giants and dwarfs as well as spiders and bees. The full name of the story the spider and bee metaphor is borrowed from is, “A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday Between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library” in which the books themselves represent the clash of ideologies. To distinguish the spiders and bees from SJWs and their critics, I suggest we look at specific examples and see what they have produced, whether it be venom or honey.

 

The contradictory meanings of the social justice warrior show us that the meaning is still shifting and changing to suit the needs of those that use it. Although I am concerned that this may lead to an erosion of meaning as people are confused about the term when it is separated from the details and the context, I recognize that there is potential for the term to be reclaimed by people that see justice as more than a self-interest calculation. Several examples, such as the wearable buttons and YouTube shorts, show us that some people are trying to take the term back. I understand the sentiment; the social justice warrior does not have to have a negative meaning if people are interested in reclaiming it. However, as I have never identified with the term social justice warrior and have never been accused of being one, I see no need to reclaim the term for myself. I am interested to see how it will be used going forward.

 

If I were to give one recommendation on its usage, it would be to understand the positive and the negative meanings of the term but to avoid the derogatory usage. In its extreme manifestations, the derogatory use can describe SJWs as diseased or cancer. This can degenerate into elimination rhetoric where the SJW is seen as impossible to ignore and therefore must be ‘destroyed‘ through arguments and meme production. Most of the SJW memes I saw could be considered mean-spirited or negative, leading me to believe that if we were to judge the memes themselves, we would see that they resemble venom more than honey.

 

Let me sum up what I’ve learned from Grant in context to social justice warriors. He saw that some word meanings can become enfolded in ideology, and that might be problematic if those meanings and ideology are not apparent to us. In exploring these themes and trying to gain perspective and wisdom, we might see the ideology for what it is strengths and weaknesses alike. Despite whatever cultural or political influences an event or a person may have on a word or a term, we do not have to accept ideology and meaning passively. If we chose, we could also influence meaning through questioning the use of terms or through our own creative applications of words like social justice warrior.

 

To journey “Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem,” (or out of shadows and phantasms into the truth) we must try and separate ourselves from the ideological tribes that we might have become aligned with to view the world from new standpoints. As Bloom wrote, books can be our borrowed ladders to new perspectives in which to see ourselves. To this effect, I recommend the works of Jonathan Swift, George Grant, and Allan Bloom.

 

References

Bloom, A. (1990). Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Grant, G. (1969). Technology and Empire. Toronto: House Anansi Press Inc.

Grant, G. (1984). English-Speaking Justice. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc.

Grant, G. (1986). Technology & Justice. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

Grant, G. (1988). Time as History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Massanari, A. L., & Chess, S. (2018). Attack of the 50-foot social justice warrior: the discursive construction of SJW memes as the monstrous feminine. Feminist Media Studies, 525-542.

Morgan, J. M. (2019). The Great Awokening: The Puritan Roots of the Social Justice Warrior. New Oxford Review, 39-43.

Swift, J. (2010). The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

 

 

On April 19, 2019, prominent Canadian psychologist and self-help author Jordan Peterson and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek met to debate Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism at Toronto’s Sony Centre. Fans of both Žižek and Peterson eagerly awaited this match between intellectual titans, each side hoping to see its contender deliver the intellectual blow that would knock the other’s ideas out of the realm of influence. A friend had mentioned the debate to me, so I found myself tuning in for the match with everyone else when it came up as a recommendation on YouTube.

 

Many of those who were separated along these ideological lines found themselves disappointed when neither opponent delivered that blow and the event became more of a discussion than a debate. Even so, don’t be fooled by some people’s disappointment, the agreeable nature of the debate is exactly the reason you should watch it for yourself. In a context when ideology can be weaponized against us—when we are either “bigots” or “social justice warriors”—should we not try to transcend the tribalism of our time to achieve a civil discourse? To better understand this in the context of the debate, let us look into the intellectual opponents, the drama that has enfolded them and a few highlights of the debate itself.

 

In the interest of being transparent about my biases, I have some concerns about Jordan Peterson and his personal politics, but now that I’ve disclosed them, let me put these concerns aside. I do not want to inoculate you against Peterson or de-platform him to silence his ideas. He rose to fame through his objections to Bill C-16, which proposed adding trans people and trans expressions to the listed prohibited grounds for discrimination. Peterson claimed that passing this bill would lead to a form of compelled speech, as it would force people to use trans people’s preferred pronouns even if average people objected to doing so on the basis of their personal beliefs. Peterson’s vocal concern echoed by some of his supporters prompted René J. Basque, president of the Canadian Bar Association, to write:

This is a misunderstanding of human rights and hate crime legislation… Nothing in the section compels the use or avoidance of particular words in public as long as they are not used in their most “extreme manifestations” with the intention of promoting the “level of abhorrence, delegitimization and rejection” that produces feelings of hatred against identifiable groups.

 

Although some may critique Peterson, there are many who love him, showering praise upon his bestselling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This self-help book offers common sense wisdom like Rule 6, “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world,” Rule 9, “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t,” and my favourite, Rule 12, “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.” Putting his personal politics aside, I find it hard to disagree with advice like that. However, I encourage everyone to engage with Peterson for themselves before making up their minds to take his advice and pet a cat.

 

Žižek has courted his own share of controversy as a prominent critic of identity politics and political correctness. For instance, he has discussed the controversy surrounding the desegregation of bathrooms to accommodate the rights of people within the LGBTQ community. He claims that, in the interest of being politically correct, people “have become out of touch with the worries and anxieties of so-called ordinary people.” His stance has garnered him his own share of criticism from fellow academics as well as the trans community.

 

Žižek is a prolific writer, authoring many articles and books in several languages. It is difficult to summarize Žižek’s ideas, as he often has a roundabout way of speaking, but if I were to give you the gist of it, he sees identity politics as inherently ideological and therefore a distorted view of society and a shallow moral pursuit. He suggests that we try to transcend our ideology to prevent it from altering our perceptions of the world so that we can see things as they actually are and seek more authentic moral pursuits instead. There is so much more to be said about Žižek as well as Peterson, but I am only trying to pique your interest enough that you will look into them for yourself.

 

Although it would take too long to summarize the entire debate, I will offer some of my personal highlights. The topic was “capitalism vs. Marxism in the context of happiness” and Peterson started it out with a ten-point assault on The Communist Manifesto. In my opinion, Peterson’s introduction was somewhat weak, in that it revealed flaws in his interpretation of Marx, such as when he said, “You don’t rise to a position of authority that is reliable in a human society primarily by exploiting other people.” This does not seem to acknowledge that in Marxist theory the extraction of profit from workers by owners is always an act of exploitation. As Peterson is also known for being a vocal critic of the “postmodern neo-Marxist” agenda being pushed by everyone from university professors to everyday people who identify as feminists, I imagine that some audience members must have expected him to demonstrate a better understanding of Marx.

 

At this point Žižek had the opportunity to deliver the assault that people had been waiting for—but he didn’t. Instead, Žižek pointed out how absurd it was to describe the event as the debate of the century, with himself as the defender of the left and Peterson the defender of the right. Žižek stated that the academic community had marginalized both of them for their lack of political correctness. He claimed that if people asked the academic left if he should stand in their name, “They would turn in their graves even if they are still alive.” His response was actually very amicable, as he discussed topics in his typical roundabout manner, describing the need for free education and healthcare as well as issues of climate change and “white liberal multiculturalism.” Žižek even made a joke about Peterson’s Rule 6, asking “What good would it do people in North Korea to set their house in perfect order?” He didn’t disagree with Peterson, instead suggesting that maybe we should do more than just set our house in order: we should also consider how we have constructed the house.

 

And Žižek did ask Peterson the question all his critics were waiting to hear answered. He wanted to know about Peterson’s term “postmodern neo-Marxism,” asking “Where is the Marxism in it?” and “Can you name me one neo-Marxist?” The term itself has been criticized as a contradiction, as postmodern theory is known to be skeptical of grand narratives like Marxism. I won’t tell you how Peterson responded. To find the answer to those questions, you’ll have to watch the debate for yourself.

 

I found the debate very charming, with Žižek and Peterson mostly agreeing with each other. It made me think, what if rather than trying to destroy our opponents we tried to charm them with our ideas and told a couple of jokes instead? It is difficult to be open to ideas if we are always on the defensive or if we are forced to conform to the ideology that we have become aligned with. Ideology informs and divides us along the lines of left and right, conservative and liberal, or religious and secular. As an alternative to attacking our opponents in argument—or worse, trying to de-platform them to prevent their dangerous ideas from spreading—more of us should take a lesson from the Peterson and Žižek debate and try to find some common ground instead. I thought the debate was brilliant, but don’t take my word for it, I encourage you to watch it and decide for yourself.