I’m angry and frustrated. I feel like the social justice left was sold to me as the be all end all of ethics and behavior to me and I’m realizing that after years of believing that the whole philosophy has done nothing to solve my own problems, nothing to even give me a vocabulary to describe my problems, and nothing to even help me find sympathetic listeners.
I do have a robust vocabulary for why I don’t actually have any problems, though.
Particularly, I have a lot of trouble with my day to day actions. What does it look like, day to day, to behave in a moral way? How do you embody your morality and make your life better through concrete actions you can take day to day?
And the people I know all take a “Well, that’s that, and this is this” attitude towards politics.
I’ve talked about this with gender stuff a lot, “Yeah, you reblog those articles about how the worst thing about men is unwarranted confidence, but obviously confidence is sexy and people expect men to be assertive, so you don’t actually, like, add a lot of hedges to your speech in real life. Isn’t that obvious? How did you not realize that?”
Now that I’m looking for it I notice that people, men and women, seem to react better when I’m not afraid to take up space, or when I fake confidence.
And the more left-wing the people I talk to are, the more they go, “Well, duh? Why would you ever think differently? Just because I keep talking about how those things are horrible and we need to completely remake gender relations? How did you not get I wasn’t talking about you when I said that?”
People who are less ensconced in that culture often go, “Oh, yeah, I also had to learn that myself, it was hard.”
And then there’s the people who go, “Oh, well, that’s not my experience at all! Left-wingers are actually really good at answering these kinds of questions, you just aren’t asking the right people the right questions.”
And then when I go, “Okay, who are the right people? What questions should I be asking?”
They just offer a confused shrug and go, “Have you tried going to therapy more often?”
Day to day, how do I put together a life that is fulfilling and leaves the world better off? I feel like I’m surrounded by people who just go,
“That’s got nothing to do with politics, people just, like, know how to do that. It’s not something you talk about or ask for help with, you just shut up and do it because we all know how, and I don’t know why you’re so crabby.”
Maybe other people have other strategies, but speaking only for myself…
…I don’t know how it’s possible to live in the world without accepting it as truth that moral discourse in the public sphere is a battlefield. People have widely differing visions of the good – sometimes that’s literally what’s going on, sometimes it’s a euphemism for “people have divergent social interests that they’re trying to advance under the cover of moral rhetoric” – and they will try to badger and bully and guilt you into doing what they want, and this has very little to do with any notion of goodness to which you might reasonably aspire. As has already been pointed out, this is what you get from all sides, or at least from all sides that are large and strong enough to act with confidence. SJ folks do it, trad folk do it, “normal commonsense regular people in favor of decency” do it, and you will go mad if you don’t internalize the belief that they can all go to hell.
If you actually want help and guidance from others…well, the best you can do is probably to look for people who are willing to talk about morality abstractly rather than concretely. Someone who will listen to you say “this is what I value in the world,” and who will talk to you about how to achieve/realize that value or how to refine it in the face of worldly contradictions, is probably on your side in some meaningful sense. Anyone who says “no, fuck that, you have to work towards achieving these values” is a soldier in an enemy army.