NOTE: Marxian doesn't mean Marxist. It is an academic term, and here it means something like pseudo-Marxist or Marxist-like. For my latest thoughts on why criticalism isn't Marxism, see this 2021 post.
Hi everyone, welcome again to the fifth season of the TaraElla Report, where we dive deeper to take a real look at the issues underlying the toxic political environment we have throughout the West right now. This show is brought to you by my new book, The Moral Libertarian Idea, which is all about reimagining a positive and pro-community, pro-humanity classical liberalism for the 21st century.
Today, I'm going to talk about cultural appropriation, and social justice more generally. Do you remember the outrage around so-called 'cultural appropriation'? I certainly do. And while that has died down for some time now, I see signs of a revival on the horizon. For example, the other day, I saw a video talking about whether singer Billie Eilish was guilty of 'cultural appropriation'. So it's unfortunately important to talk about that again. I also think this is a good time to reflect again on the state of the social justice discussion as a whole.
Social Justice Got Hijacked By Theoretical Concerns
Cultural appropriation is one of those topics most people don't think of as important at all, for a good reason: there is almost never any injustice to any individual from the act of 'cultural appropriation'. Now, I'm not talking about blackface, which is actually offensive, but is not really relevant to most discussion about 'cultural appropriation'. I'm talking about things like a white person wearing an Asian dress; or a non-black person doing rap music. According to most people's common sense, there's simply nothing wrong with that, and they would be correct. In fact, 'cultural appropriation' is what I call a 'theoretical injustice', that is, a form of injustice that only exists in academic theories, and has no real bad consequence in the real world. Most of these 'theoretical injustices' seem to arise from the application of a pseudo-Marxian worldview, as I will discuss later in this video.
Anyway, the point is, in the past few years, the discussion of theoretical injustices have made the whole social justice idea look stupid, to the point where many young people simply stay away from social justice nowadays. Back when the conversation was starting to get ridiculous, I warned people that this was what was going to happen next, but they didn't listen. Oh, well, the social justice thing is now dead in the water, as I told you so! Back in Season 1 of the TaraElla Report, and even earlier than that, I was arguing for pulling back from the excesses of the social justice movement, but all I got was nasty comments from the most extreme activists. They accused me of not supporting social justice; but in fact, I was trying to save it. In truth, I care deeply about social justice. I care that people aren't treated unfairly because of their race, or that they aren't fired because they are LGBT. But by 2017 or so, the social justice movement had lost sight of what's important. Besides, they started promoting things like the 'progressive stack', where straight white men got less of an opportunity to speak, which was clearly unjust to many individuals! Ideas like these make a mockery of what social justice should be about.
The Pseudo-Marxian 'Cultural appropriation'
'Cultural appropriation' is one of the best examples I can use to explain the nonsense that is the pseudo-Marxian version of social justice. Under cultural appropriation theory, ethnicities or cultures are seen as analogous to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, like everything in the pseudo-Marxian worldview. As usual, Western culture is seen as the oppressor and other cultures are seen as the oppressed. Therefore, a white person doing rap music would be seen as someone from the oppressor class taking something away from the oppressed class, like how capitalists bosses take what's produced by workers and sell it for a profit. That's what they mean by 'appropriation', it is literally used in a pseudo-Marxist sense. That's also why black people playing Baroque music doesn't count as 'cultural appropriation'. It's a 'logic' that only makes sense if you both understand and accept pseudo-Marxism in the first place, which most of us don't. Of course, the other problem is that, when you reduce everything to a pseudo-Marxian oppressor vs oppressed dynamic, there's really no room for freedom, creativity, individuality, or anything else. That's why most people can't accept this worldview.
As mentioned earlier, I think the reason why the social justice train got de-railed was that a pseudo-Marxian, worldview had taken hold in that movement, some time around the middle of the decade. Interestingly, it was also the reason the 1960s anti-war progressives got de-railed. In the most basic form, a pseudo-Marxian worldview is where people are seen as groups that are pitted against each other, oppressors vs the oppressed, plus the idea that we are all living in a structure that holds this oppression together, so traditions are bad and radical cultural change is needed. The problem with all this is that it doesn't afford any freedom or dignity to individuals. It's scary to see this kind of thinking getting mainstream in the West. That's why I welcomed the influence of Jordan Peterson back in 2017 or 18. I don't agree with everything he says, and I openly stated my disagreements with him, but I thought he could save social justice by removing the us-vs-them theories influence, and restoring the central role of individual dignity. I guess that didn't work.
What Needs To Happen From Now On
The experience of how social justice got de-railed in the 2010s has inspired the position I will take going forward: that I won't be ready, or interested, in another social justice movement, unless a framework that is rooted in individual dignity, like the Moral Libertarian principle of Equal and Maximum Moral Agency for every individual, is accepted a-priori. The fact is, there is no point to restart the social justice conversation, only to let the us-vs-them theories worldview hijack it again, to lead the movement to yet another trainwreck, which would probably discredit social justice for at least a generation. Given that I think there are still social injustices that need to be fixed, I really don't want that to happen. Therefore, from my point of view, it is better than the next social justice train only departs the station when there are enough safeguards to prevent it from de-railing again.
