Playing Word Games With the Woke

Why Critical Social Justice creates confusion in debates about social and political issues.

An astounding number of our current political issues revolve around the use of language. We might actually be having about as many discussions about word choice as about policy thanks to Critical Social Justice theory, which you probably know as wokeness. CSJ is a recent theory that incorporates postmodernism, critical studies, identity politics, and social justice advocacy into a largely incoherent mess.

It’s hard to understand social justice conversations for several reasons. First, CSJ theorists have relativistic attitudes toward rationality, truth, and ethics. For example, they believe that there are “different ways of knowing,” meaning that “marginalized” methods such as emotional reasoning and traditional story-telling are on par with the scientific method. And they often use relativistic arguments to dissuade people from casting judgment on marginalized people’s cultural practices. Such foundational disagreements about truth lead to people talking past each other.

A second problem with understanding Critical Social Justice theory is that they use unfamiliar words and familiar words in unusual ways. This use of language filters from the theorists to the advocates and into the wider culture. Terms such as gender queer, cis, birthing person, and emotional labor confuse people that are unattuned to this particular discourse. In addition to difficult-to-understand language, they often have highly idiosyncratic definitions or interpretations for words already in common usage. Consider the example of the slogan “silence is violence.” Whatever violence means in this context, it’s not what people typically think of violence as.

Relating concepts to language isn’t easy; philosophers have struggled for millennia. The injection of Critical Social Justice theory into politics makes it especially difficult to have a coherent conversation. People already seem to regularly think about ethical issues in terms of linguistic associations rather than considering the underlying ideas which are the heart of the problem, but CSJ advocates do this frequently.

To illustrate this sort of semantic ethical reasoning, imagine an ethical vegan who refuses to buy her child a stuffed animal. She argues that: a stuffed animal is an animal; it is wrong to purchase animals; therefore, it is wrong to buy a stuffed animal. If you think in words, then it makes sense. But if you start thinking about reality, you’ll notice an issue. Ethical vegans are usually vegan because they don’t want to cause animal suffering, and a stuffed animal—if you wish to call it an animal or not—does not experience suffering. Whether a stuffed animal is an animal is tangential to the ethicality of purchasing it.

Consider a more realistic example; selecting embryos for health is often called eugenics. Proponents of this practice sometimes retort with the reductio ad absurdum that choosing an attractive mate is also eugenics since attractiveness indicates favorable genes. What if the opponent concedes that it’s also eugenics and therefore immoral? That’s thinking in words again. Selecting an attractive spouse is clearly okay, and coercive eugenic practices like ethnic cleansing are clearly wrong. Both of these facts are true regardless of how a particular word is defined in English. The tendency would be to want to insist that selecting an attractive mate isn’t eugenics, but that’s tangential to the question of its ethicality.

The general form of the argument is: [Category] is wrong; [action] is a member of [category]; therefore, [action] is wrong. But the reason that the category is wrong is something that the action lacks, and deciding to include action in the category calls into question the premise that the category is wrong. To resolve this, you can try to have a debate about whether stuffed animals are really animals, or you can disregard the semantic debate and try to get to the heart of the issue. I think trying to reason with categories results in fuzzy thinking ethically. It is easy to find exceptions to general laws of morality.

Psychiatrist and rationalist blogger Scott Alexander describes a very similar fallacy he calls the non-central fallacy: “X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member.” Much of our present discourse is due to people using imprecise or misleading language to elicit emotional reactions or categorize behavior as unethical. Strong emotional and ethical connotations incentive stretching terms to their absolute limit; the currently fashionable words include groomer, gaslight, violence, and white supremacy.

One of the most fitting examples of thinking in words is any discussions involving the term racist. What does it mean to be a racist? The concept encompasses ethnocentrism, irrational hatred of other races, forming stereotypes, contributing to systemic inequality, believing some cultures are better than others, discriminating based on race, and a host of other practices and beliefs. Conservatives will accuse affirmative action programs of racism against whites because they think of racism as discrimination based on race. The Critical Social Justice response is often that racism requires power and privilege, meaning whites cannot experience racism.

For some, this feels like a game of cat-and-mouse. We used to have a more broadly agreed-upon idea of what it meant to be racist. Now, the definition has been changed or evolved to preserve the ethical and emotional connotation while not applying to discrimination against whites. A fundamental unseen assumption is that being unethical is baked into the concept of racist actions, and being false is baked into the idea of racist beliefs. If CSJ advocates conceded that affirmative action was racist against whites, they would have to concede that it’s wrong or that it’s okay to be racist sometimes.

The mother of all language games is “what is a woman?” This issue is mainly about something more profound than a semantic disagreement. There are many spaces that are segregated based on sex; we have women’s sports, shelters, prisons, parking places, gyms, sorority houses, colleges, clubs, changing rooms, bathrooms, awards, organizations, events, hygiene products, etc. People often argue that if transwomen are women, then women’s stuff is their stuff too. I doubt either party would be happy with a change in the language without a behavior change. If trans activists conceded that transwomen aren’t women, but women’s sports should now be transwomen and women’s sports, conservatives would not be satisfied. Likewise, trans activists wouldn’t be satisfied if conservatives conceded that transwomen were women but were a particular type of woman that shouldn’t do sports. They also wouldn’t be happy if conservatives started advocating for having “ciswomen’s sports.”

Conservatives saw supreme court candidate Ketanji Brown Jackson’s inability to answer “what is a woman?” as a win. On the other side, sometimes, the pro-trans side will feel they’ve garnered a victory when a conservative says that a woman is someone who can have children; “aha! some women are infertile.” The conservative can respond that they mean women with uteruses, but some ciswomen don’t have uteruses either. It’s all a bit tedious. The pro-trans side and anti-trans side will have conceived of a much better boilerplate response soon. There will be well-constructed but different definitions of what a woman is through enough iterations of the debate. One definition will include gamete production, and one will include identification with culturally typical behaviors. And yet, we won’t be further along on questions like how it is best to deal with inevitable tensions that arise when incorporating transwomen into what was previously exclusively ciswomen’s spaces.

Semantic debates can be interesting. But we ought to be careful to make sure we’re thinking about the relevant ethical or policy issues, rather than just something about the English language. Facts about the English language don’t tell us facts about the world or what’s ethical. It’s too easy to get hung up on this sort of discourse because many discussions about social justice revolve around categorizing certain beliefs and practices as racist, sexist, or transphobic. It would be much better if we abandoned these discussions and focused on the essential questions: is it true and is it ethical?

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