Platos Symposium And The Oppression Of Sappho - something and
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Share Share This is a contribution to Symposium No. Liberalism is a much misunderstood word.
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However, liberalism is not a political position. Liberalism, therefore, can be at home on the left where it mixes with left-wing aims to distribute goods more evenly to enable everyone to reach their potential, or on the right where its concepts of freedom extend more into the realm of markets and overlap with libertarianism.
Liberals on the left and liberals on the right might therefore disagree with each other on economic issues. What they agree on however, are the centrality of the individual, the importance of freedom of belief and speech, the value of tolerating different ideas, and the need for a consistency of principles in which the same rules and freedoms apply to everyone. This is where those of us who are "liberals" in the widest sense of that word often find ourselves in opposition to the advocates of "Critical Social Justice. Critical Social Justice, however, is something very different from liberalism and, in fact, opposed to its understanding of social justice.
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It does not support the primacy of the individual but focuses instead on the group defined by identity. And Critical Social Justice is deeply skeptical of universalism, understanding the world instead as constructed of systems of power, privilege, and link that need to be readjusted by applying different rights and freedoms to different groups. Liberal concepts of social justice and critical concepts of social justice may well see themselves as seeking the same ends—a just see more in which everybody is able to access everything society has to offer, but we have very different ideas of how to get there and, indeed, very different ideas of society. To understand this, it is important to understand, in more depth, the difference between a liberal conception of social justice—a vision that is, in fact, widely supported today—and the very narrow and censorious approach of "Critical Social Justice," which is the vision at the root of today's Platos Symposium And The Oppression Of Sappho left.
What Is Critical Social Justice? It has some of its intellectual ancestry in Marxist thought and the concept of "critical consciousness," that is, becoming aware of oppressive power systems—hence the connection with the term " woke ," which uses the African-American Vernacular English word to describe being able to see systems of oppression that are invisible to most people.
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But Critical Social Justice derives more from postmodern concepts of knowledge, power, and discourses. CSJ holds that knowledge is not objective but is culturally constructed to maintain oppressive power systems.
This is believed to be achieved primarily by certain kinds of knowledge being legitimized by powerful forces in society, then being accepted by everyone and perpetuated by ways of talking about things—discourses. These oppressive power systems believed to exist and permeate everything are called things like white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity assuming that most people are heterosexualcisnormativity assuming that people are men or women depending on their reproductive systemsableism, and fatphobia. However, it is believed, most of us cannot see these oppressive discourses and systems because they are just the water we swim in.]
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