Intolerance in Social Justice Movements is Not Hypocritical
Say you love nature and animals, and that has led you to consider yourself a conservationist as well as an animal rights advocate. If you don’t personally hold those values, then try to consider the perspective of someone who does.
Now imagine you’re given a choice: whether to kill a hundred animals, or ten animals. Obviously you choose to only kill ten, if you must choose, since ten lives clearly can’t outweigh a hundred.
Now imagine that the hundred animals are chickens, the ten animals are the last ten of an endangered species of tropical bird, so that once they’re gone they’re completely extinct. Not as easy anymore, is it? And it’s not necessarily because you believe a chicken has less right to live than an endangered tropical bird. It’s because deleting one hundred chickens out of billions currently alive on earth will not significantly or irreversibly alter the biosphere. You can breed more chickens. Once a species is extinct, though, it’s probably impossible to bring them back. (There are exciting recent developments that have introduced the word “probably” to that sentence, but just like I think abortion is no substitute for good contraceptives, I think it’s overall preferable to prevent extinction rather than reverse it.)
So, in conservation, diversity is often favored over the well-being and even the lives of individual creatures under our stewardship. One of my first jobs was a seasonal position on the Invasive Plant Strike Team of a local park system. Invasive species are creatures brought into an environment, usually by humans, where they reproduce out of control and out-compete the native wildlife, usually because there are no natural predators to check their population growth. In order to protect the native ecosystem, our job was to find, track, and exterminate invasive plant species in our parks, so that the way would be clear for our native plants and animals to thrive.
In other words, we chose to destroy as many as we could of a certain more plentiful species just to protect a very small population of diverse others. And that is exactly what social justice movements are doing when they purge bigots and fascists and their sympathizers from their social groups and spaces: to protect a very small population of diverse others from being completely overwhelmed.
Intolerance in social justice movements is not hypocritical, because “tolerance” is not the ideal that they advocate. Diversity is.
And if that doesn’t make perfect sense to you, think of it in market terms. You take two chunks of metal to your local scrap yard. They weigh the same, but you’re offered two wildly different prices for them. Why? Well, obviously, it’s because one is a rarer metal than the other. That makes it more valuable. Supply is lower, so the price is higher. You should have learned that in your first week of freshman economics.
You say it makes you uncomfortable to think of human beings as commodities? Okay, fair enough, I can buy that. But then, there are plenty of things that aren’t commodities that we treat the same way. Special occasions, for instance: a birthday is great. But a hundredth birthday? Now that’s something to fly in from out of town for. Its rareness, and its improbability, are what make it special.
You see, sometimes we think treating everyone equally means treating them all the same. Equality as interchangeability. But we aren’t interchangeable unless you make us all the same. Treat us like chickens in a lot. Or as commodities whose value can be modeled as an interaction between supply and demand, without knowing anything about its essence. As a figure on a population graph, without a face or a story or a name.
I think the word “minority” is underrated. It’s treated like a bad thing — either a bad thing to be, or a bad thing to be labeled as. The way it’s used lately, it sounds like being weak, ineffectual, or just unlucky. But what it really means is rare. And the fact that the concept of minority even exists just proves that we all on some level know this: although we’re all unique, and all special, some of us are just less common than others. For better or worse.
And that’s why we have to purge bigots and fascists and their sympathizers from our social groups and spaces. In the end, if they are more attached to their politics than to the unique and irreplaceable human lives those politics threaten, then they have already forfeited their membership in society. If the lesser celandine were capable of living in peace with the other plants, then we wouldn’t have to spray poison over acres upon acres of it in hopes that there will be an acre less next season. We don’t hate the lesser celandine. We just love the trillium and the trout lily and the bluebells, and we want them to survive.
But what ever happened to tolerance, you ask?
Don’t you get it? It was never about tolerance. Tolerance is an ill-advised compromise we made back when it looked like “live and let live” was a possibility. Tolerance was never the goal. Have you ever just been tolerated? Do you know how demeaning and alienating it is to just be put up with, because outright antagonism isn’t worth the paperwork? Why would you ever want that from the community you call home? The only reason you’d ever come to want that is if the alternative turned out to be so, so much worse.
Moreover, we can’t afford to settle for mere tolerance. If we push for tolerance, then we’ll get tolerance by the majority and outright persecution by the stubborn few, and tolerance doesn’t motivate someone to defend others against persecution. Love does. I don’t fight for the people I’ve decided are getting a raw deal. I fight for the people I love. And I don’t hate the bigots and fascists and their sympathizers. I just love them a lot less than the people they’ve threatened to destroy.
Thank you for reading.
