The Problem With 'Social Justice'
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Noah Rothman, a brilliant young writer and editor at Commentary Magazine, has just published his first book, and it's about nonsense.
Let me be clear: The book isn't nonsense. It's crisp, insightful and passionate. The topic, captured in the title, "Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America," is nonsense because social justice is nonsense.
Now, when I say "nonsense," I mean nonsensical, as in lacking interior logic and definitional rigor. A few years ago, while working on my book "The Tyranny of Cliches," I put on my prospector's helmet and mined the literature for an agreed-upon definition of social justice. What I found was one deposit after another of fool's gold. From labor unions to countless universities to gay rights groups to even the American Nazi Party, everyone insisted they were champions of social justice. The only disagreements hinged on who is most in need of this precious resource.
Common to almost every definition of social justice is some version of "economic justice," which usually means what philosophers call "distributive justice" -- i.e., taking money from the haves and giving it to the have-nots. But what it's really about is power. Its advocates want the power to do what they want, and if they say it's for social justice, that's supposed to make it OK.
Source:
Town Hall
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