Here we are in 2020 trying to decide whether to tear down statues of dead white men and whether people should be prosecuted for setting fire to local businesses.  How did we get here, anyway?  I believe that where we are has less to do with COVID or Black Lives Matter than the news media imagines.  People of my age, if paying attention, have seen a long, steady increase in media approval of mob activity since 1968, when students began to occupy and destroy buildings, eventually burning down the Bank of America in Isla Vista, California in 1970.  At that time, burning down one building was shocking. A lot has happened in between, but if you draw a line between these events, it will pass through a host of similar events of the past 50 years.

An important question about these events would be: “Why didn’t law enforcement stop it?” The answer, as you know, is that police were disarmed, because university leaders then, and civic leaders now, sanctioned these actions.  Local authorities discounted clear crimes in their belief that perpetrators, though misguided, were pursuing “social justice”.

If you imagined yourself as an attorney representing the arson victims, you would doubtless ask: “Where was the ‘justice’ in these episodes of social justice?”  Go further and imagine yourself as the attorney for the dead white guys represented in the statues.  As their names are dragged through the mud by a modern mob, where is their opportunity to face their accusers and be judged by their peers?  Who, now alive, could even be considered their peers, and, therefore, qualified to judge them?  Maybe they committed some acts we don’t like now, but, golly, what if, at that time, they thought they were pursuing “social justice”?

If you went to school back in the day, you learned that justice in the classical world was personified by Themis a Greek goddess.  In the more modern statues of the goddess scattered all over the western world, she is blindfolded, holds a sword in one hand, and a set of balance scales in the other.  Clearly, these objects are meant to symbolize impartiality, retribution, and objectivity, respectively.

The immediate point is that so-called social justice warriors have got the retribution part of justice right, while entirely missing the impartiality and objectivity embodied in the classical definition of “justice”.  The larger point is that calling them “social justice warriors” destroys the original meaning of justice.

As late as 1965, I believe that police in most cities would have immediately apprehended and jailed anyone trying to burn a building or tear down city statues regardless of their motive.  Until the concept of justice began to be “redefined” by post-modern Marxists, violent, destructive mob acts of retribution were considered heinous, regardless of the perpetrators’ backstory.  Mob rule has now moved uptown.

The concept of justice taught in colleges and universities since the Enlightenment, and tracing back to ancient Greece, was different from what is now presented by social justice warriors and the popular media. Not only justice, but other concepts, rules, and beliefs that are crucial infrastructure in maintaining an advanced civilization have been tarnished, diminished, reduced, and sometimes obliterated by a postmodern, Marxist revolution that began swallowing colleges and universities in 1965, and has now swallowed the media.

For 50 years, industrialists like myself have noticed that university graduates entering our workplaces required ever-increasing remedial work to adjust to what, we like to call “the real world”. Now, unless measures are taken, we might have to adjust to their world, the world envisaged by post-modern, Marxist academics, a chaotic power struggle of classes, races, and genders with no rules.  Having now observed that the media is now under the control of people who do not comprehend the original meaning of justice, we must now fight to defeat post-modern, Marxist, nihilist ideas in educational institutions or learn to live under them.

Categories: Commentary, Culture, Politics