Infallibility and Violence

There's a video going around the internet that shows Jordan Hunt, a Toronto hairdresser and pro-choice activist kicking a woman in the face for espousing pro-life views.  During an annual peaceful pro-life demonstration in Toronto where many women were holding up signs expressing their views, one man came along and decided that—unlike the peaceful sign-holding pro-choice demonstrator already present—he was entitled and obligated to express his opinion more directly and silence the women protesters.  He started drawing on their signs, trying to deface and destroy the message they were conveying.  He started drawing and writing on their clothes with a permanent marker, trying to force them to carry around his words instead of their own.  When one of the protesters started filming this behavior and approached him, pointing out that what he was doing was destroying the property of these women, his response was as follows: he asked her for her opinion on a question where pro-life and pro-choice people have differing views—should a 16 year-old rape victim be allowed to have an abortion to recover from the trauma of her rape and not have to have her life further disrupted by it, or does the life of the unborn baby outweigh the horrid circumstances of her birth and the crimes of her rapist father?  When the woman voiced her opinion, which differed from Jordan's, he felt perfectly justified to resort to violence in order to silence her.

It is shocking to see someone allegedly standing up for women's rights so readily resort to using violence to suppress women who don't agree with him.  It is shocking, but sadly not uncommon to see those who ostensibly stand up for oppressed groups like blacks, immigrants, and women viciously lash out at members of these groups who dare voice their dissent.  Witness the racial slurs hurled at black people like Candice Owens or Kayne West by those who supposedly hate racism for these "race traitors" daring to have and give voice to a contrary political opinion.  Even silence is not enough to shield minorities from hate-filled epithets for stepping out of line.  Witness black police officers being treated with threats and hate for simply silently doing their jobs.  Even off the streets and in the supposedly civilized halls of academia it is the same.  Witness conservative women being branded with racial and sexual slurs and accused of internalized misogyny by mainstream media because they dared to vote for the wrong candidate in a free election.

The examples of this behavior could go on for days.  They are limitless, and according to the left only the most extreme examples might be unjustified.  After all, the social justice warriors on the left firmly believe that there's is the side of love and compassion.

And it is true that, from his perspective, it is more compassionate and loving to give a 16 year old rape victim the choice to have an abortion.  It is better to allow her that abortion to relieve her suffering than to spare the mere blob of cells in her uterus.  From his perspective to choice the opposite—to deny the girl the chance to relieve her suffering in favor of the "right to life" of a mere blob of tissue, a part of her body, is at best insane and at worst an act of active hatred and malice toward women.  The problem is that this isn't the only way to view the situation.  Others, like the woman in the video, have a different perspective.  From her perspective, a fetus isn't a mere blob of cells or a part of female anatomy: it is a human being, a baby girl.  From her perspective it is wrong to allow one human to end the life of another because her life or birth is inconvenient.  From her perspective it is madness at best or bloodthirstiness at worst to say that a rape victim should have the right to kill her unborn baby girl for the crime her father committed.

Similar differences exist between the social justice warriors of the left and conservatives on every other issue.  The left sees massive welfare programs as necessary to raise blacks out of poverty, and thus views any attempt to defund or dismantle them as hatred and oppression of blacks.  Conservatives see massive welfare programs as preventing blacks from becoming economically independent and trapping them in poverty, and views attempts to expand and reinforce them as oppression and hatred of blacks.  The left sees police violence against blacks as excessive and motivated by racial animus, and therefore views support of the police as hateful and threatening toward blacks.  Conservatives sees violent clashes between the police and black criminals as the inevitable result of high black crime rates—which primarily victimize law-abiding blacks, and views opposition to the police as encouraging the criminals victimizing law-abiding blacks and destroying black neighborhoods.  The list could go on and on.  On both sides each has a perspective which leads it to see the opposition as hateful and wrong.

But actual violence and hateful rhetoric is primarily the domain of the left, not the right.  The left has Anti-Fa, a large international coalition of activists dedicated to using riots, vandalism, slurs, and violence to silence political opponents (and frequently anyone else who stands in their way).  They're bad enough they've been labeled as a terrorist organization.  Before that they had BLM, which encouraged race riots and the beating of non-blacks, though ultimately denying responsibility for the kidnapping and torture of a white disabled student.  All the time on TV, in the newspapers, and from their pedestals in Hollywood the left has the mainstream media spewing invective (and occasionally threats) at anyone who dares take an opposing political stance.  While there are occasional acts of violence from conservatives (such as the murder of a counter protester by a member of the alt-right at Charlottesville) and small groups that spew violence or hate (such as Westboro Baptist Church), there are no large overarching groups dedicated to spreading violence and hate toward their political opposition.  Furthermore, you can approach a conservative friend on social media or Facebook with a dissenting opinion, and while they may argue with you and some may even insult your intelligence, they won't throw hateful slurs at you to silence you and sever your friendship without even giving you a chance to finish explaining your position.  A left leaning friend on social media, however, usually will.

When the disagreements are equal and proportional, why is the left so much more prone to react to disagreement with violence and hate than the right?  There are many possible answers.  One that many conservatives use among themselves is the idea that shouting names and hitting people is what children do when they've lost an argument.  According to this answer, the left's positions are indefensible, self-evidently untrue, and so when they face opposition their only recourse is to shout obscenities and use violence.  However, this ignores the fact that there is some internal logic to the social justice positions of the left.  However deeply (and reasonably) conservatives may disagree with the premise, it follows that if a fetus is not alive or human and the woman who carries it is, then it is better to kill the fetus than to make the woman suffer.  College university courses and professors offer abundant evidence that when the left wants to they can put together convincing arguments for their positions: else they would not be nearly so successful at converting university graduates into social justice activists.  Furthermore if they all believed, at heart, that they'd lost the argument, it's unlikely many of them would continue to cling to their political views.

Instead, I believe a more likely answer for Jordan Hunt's motive lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the tantrums of a child who knows they have lost: the hubris of a man who believes his position infallible.

Conservatives owe their tolerance for other viewpoints to a willingness to discuss, debate, and exchange ideas.  It is a willingess born of a desire to understand other view points, and the knowledge that ones own viewpoint may be incomplete and flawed without information or a perspective from the other side.  Conservatives are willing to admit they are wrong.  They believe in an objective truth which, while obtainable, takes effort to know and that no one can fully know without looking beyond their own limited perspective.  They are, on most things, willing to believe that their positions are fallible and may be incorrect.  This gives them the ability to listen to and engage with other viewpoints in a non-confrontational and non-violent way—though a few, of course choose not to do so.

On the other side, as a pundit once observed, "social justice warriors always double-down."  Rather than admitting they were mistaken in their claims or actions, they deflect, obfuscate, and try to push forward the same claims and actions once again, but harder.  This can be seen most recently in the left's dumbfounded reaction to the election of Donald Trump: where, as any moderately neutral observer could tell them, they made the triple mistakes of being caught in political corruption, running on a platform that was more identity politics than substance, and attacking whites and males on the basis of sex and race for opposing them politically.  Yet none of this occurred to the left which instead has spent the past two years chasing ghosts of Russian hacking and collusion (while forgetting that the alleged hacking was only important because it revealed the left's own corruption) only to come to the midterm elections and the Kavanaugh nomination and make exactly the same three mistakes again, but even more obviously and overtly: be caught (by doing it openly) corruptly using alleged sexual assault victims and fake gang rape charges in an effort to derail a nomination, push forward the charges and their entire political platform on a narrative of women's identity politics with no substance whatsoever, and then castigate whites and males for their race and gender when they don't fall into line.  Unsurprisingly, this appears to have cost the Democrats in the polls and made a close race out of what was otherwise to be a blue landslide.  Why does the left keep doing this to itself?  Because fundamentally, they cannot admit that their own perspective is fallible.

At bottom, this is because they don't view truth as an objective thing we are all searching for and that none of us can fully grasp without looking beyond our own perspectives: something which we may find contradicts our own perspectives.  Rather, the social justice left has a Post-Modernist view of truth as completely subjective.  To them truth is one's perspective, one's point of view, one's lived experiences.  There is no possibility in Post-Modernism, of finding a truth which contradicts or invalidates one's perspective or lived experiences.  Those experiences are truth!  And when one's perspective is truth, when there does not exist any objective truth out there that might run contrary to one's lived experiences, then one's opinions and positions become by definition infallible.

This idea of the infallibly true individual perspective was marketed by the professors and teachers of the left as something that would create a more tolerant and amicable society.  Demonstrably, it has done quite the opposite.  When a man's position is infallible, he need not listen to nor understand any opposing view point.  When his very life experience is the infallible truth, then any criticism of what he believes is akin to an attack on his person itself.  When every person's perspective is an infallible subjective truth, argument is violence and there is no point to argument except to dominate another person by a lesser act of violence.  Working from this perspective, the left sees every contrary opinion as a personal attack, a microaggression, a miniaturized act of violence in itself.  They have no need to tolerate it, because their position is infallibly true, and they can respond to it freely with hatred and violence the act of disagreement is in itself a violent provocation.  As the left is fond of saying, "words are violence" so it only makes sense that Jordan Hunt would respond to words with violence.  Whether the violence was directed towards a woman or not was irrelevant.  She violated his infallible truth, and in his view posed a threat to other women.  In that moment, that made it right for him to attack her in order to silence her

The left is not the first or only group to fall prey to violent partisanship based on their own belief in their inherent infallibility.  Some even within Christianity believe themselves to have grasped the absolute truth completely.  They believe that their perspective lines up entirely with the truth and is therefore infallible.  In my experience moderating a discussion forum for Christians, these were the most contentious people, who readily resorted to name-calling, personal attacks, and questioning of other members' eternal salvation over the slightest disagreement.  They believed their own position was infallible, so they had no need to hear out other perspectives, understand or even counter arguments from people with other opinions.  They already knew the infallible truth so they did not need to learn anything!  Further, since they believed they knew this truth from God, anyone who opposed them was engaged in hatred and rebellion against God and treating them with contempt and scorn was entirely justified.  Historically of course, there were other Christians.  The Bishops of Rome and Constantinople famously excommunicated each other because each believed himself and his positions infallible.  From there the branches of Christianity regularly split and diverged, many times violently, because each was convinced that theirs was the infallible truth and they need only punish those who criticized them as heretics.  While proclaiming love for God, they killed His children.  They forgot the humility so often extolled in the Bible, and forgot that even the Apostle Peter once needed to be reproved.

Today, in the face of rising secularism, many Christians are thankfully turning toward one another with humility again, though of course, not all choose to do so.  The left, meanwhile, holds ever closer to the belief in it's own birthright of infallible truth, and thus grows more and more hateful and violent toward outsiders, even those they proclaim they love and fight for.  They also become more and more riven with internal schisms and crusades against heresy that would not have been out of place in 15th Century Catholic Spain, were it not for the technology in use and the fact that the left (currently) lacks the political power to torture and execute those they despise as heretics.

But then of course, I am not a leftist or a social justice warrior.  I am a Christian and a conservative, and I don't believe my perspective is infallible truth.  I don't kick women for disagreeing with me or call people racial slurs for having a different opinion.  I listen, I reason, and I try to understand.  And if you think I'm wrong here, tell me why.  I am fallible, and I am willing to learn.

Traditional Justice vs Social Justice

General principles, such as "justice" or "equality," are often passionately invoked in the course of arguing about the issues of the day, but such terms usually go undefined or unexamined.  Often much more could be gained by scrutinizing what we ourselves mean by such notions than by trying to convince or overwhelm others.  If we understood what we were really saying, in many cases, we might not say it or, if we did, we might have a better chance to make ourselves understood by those who disagree with us.

—Thomas Sowell, "The Quest for Cosmic Justice"

It's not secret that championing for social justice is a huge part of our culture in America today.  It is also a hotly debated and deeply divisive issue.  On one side, you have those who see themselves as the champions of justice—social justice warriors, if you will—for the marginalized and oppressed groups of our country and the world at large, opposed to—as they see it—hateful bigots and promoters of injustice and inequality between groups.  But if you go to the other side, you'll find the opposition is also enamored with the idea of justice and equality for all people, talking about equal processes, egalitarianism, and the justice of meritocratic systems—all opposed, as they see it, to the gross injustices and inequalities of the bigoted social justice warriors themselves.  Both sides are concerned with equality, fairness, and justice, but both have different definitions of what justice is.  One group's views of justice are thoroughly modern and revolve around social causes, activism, progressivism, and righting the wrongs not only of society but of history and the cosmos itself.  The other group's views of justice are more traditional and revolve around individual liberties, rights, and merits, and about impartial systems modeled after the blindfolded goddess of justice from Greek mythology.  These concepts of justice are not merely opposite, but in many cases mutually exclusive, giving rise to plenty of conflict between these groups.

Individual vs Collective

While both traditional justice and social justice concern themselves with addressing the wrongs in the world, the type of wrongs and the object of justice differs.  For traditional justice the emphasis is on individual wrongs, crimes which can be assigned to individual culprits who can then be brought to justice.  Traditional justice looks at crimes like the embezzlement of funds by a banker, the rape of a woman, or the murder of a man, and it seeks to punish these crimes.

For social justice the emphasis is on social or cosmic wrongs for which no individual actor can be blamed.  It looks at wrongs like the greed and callousness of the wealthy toward the lower class, society's sexualization of women, the plight of those born with disabilities, and high arrest rates among racial minorities.  In addition, while traditional justice looks at individual victims and individual perpetrators, social justice looks at both victims and perpetrators as a group.  While individual examples of social justice wrongs are often widely publicized, the point with social justice warriors is never merely to punish an individual crime but rather to use that crime to raise awareness of the communal problem facing the whole group and to seek retribution from the group held responsible.  For example, while in traditional justice a male sexual predator found to have raped a young woman would be cause for punishment of that individual criminal and nothing more, in social justice the punishment of the individual rapist is almost immaterial: the real cause is using him as an example of how all men objectify all women and punishing men as a class for this wrong.  An example of this very thing can be seen in the #MeToo movement, where women are hailed as heroes for bringing forward their personal stories of abuse but withholding the identities of their abusers from the public and from authorities.  In traditional justice this would be a mockery of justice because it allows the individual perpetrator to escape and continue committing crimes, but in social justice it is a victory because it furthers the case for condemning all powerful men as sexual predators preying on all women.  As one social justice writer argues, "We Don’t Help Most Victims When #MeToo Becomes About Punishing Abusers...punishing individuals does not address the systemic forces that enable men to harass and assault people, mostly women, with impunity."  In much the same fashion false allegations of hate crimes and abuse (such as a black alumni activist and leader sending "white supremacist" death threats to her own school and fellow black students) are often justified and minimized by social justice advocates because even though the individual alleged crime is a fake (which is an affront to traditional justice), the larger social issue it was supposed to represent is real and gained attention from the hoax (which was all social justice advocates wanted).

The biggest problem with this idea of collective guilt is that it is really only humanly possible to determine guilt for anything on a case-by-case, individual-by-individual basis.  You cannot say for sure that every person even in a very small group like a family is guilty of a particular sin if you have not examined them each as individuals.  Since the groups social justice warriors seek to assign collective guilt to are generally vast demographics, they invariably wind up making sweeping accusations (as Marilyn French did when she said "all men are rapists"), only to have to back down from them when it's demonstrated that not all individuals in the group match the mold they've cast for them (with things like "not all men" disclaimers now commonly posted before social justice warrior's collective accusations of male guilt for their participation in a culture of patriarchal sin).  Social justice thus is inherently unjust in this respect because it assigns guilt to innocent individuals based solely on their group membership.  Likewise it assigns innocence or even victimhood to individuals who may have perpetrated crimes (such as female rapists and black racists) based solely on their membership in designated-victim demographic groups.

Actions vs Identity

As an extension of the above, traditional justice concerns itself with individual actions, whereas social justice concerns itself with group identities.  The distinction seems little more than a reiteration of the above emphasis on individual vs collective guilt, but the contrast is very stark when we compare the ideals of traditional justice to those of social justice.  The ideals of traditional justice are embodied by the blindfolded goddess Themis, with her scales in her hand.  Traditional justice weighs the actions of individuals to determine what their actions are and what reward or punishment they deserve.  Traditional justice is blind to the concerns of identity.  Ideally, rich and poor, young and old, men and women, black and white, are all one and the same before traditional justice, which cares only whether the actions of each of them as individuals are right or wrong and whether or not they've reaped the appropriate rewards or punishments for their deeds.

Social justice is just the opposite.  In social justice, guilt or victimhood is determined collectively and is based on group identity, most often broken down along broad demographic lines such as race, sexuality, gender, or gender identity.  Because this necessarily condemns innocent group members alongside guilty ones (and, by the same token, lumps guilty individuals into groups designated as "innocent" or "victims"), it is necessary for social justice warriors to, on some level, determine that individual actions are irrelevant.  Stories of individual crimes committed or suffered are still circulated, but only to serve as anecdotes to prove the reality that certain identities are always victims in need of protection and retribution and others always privileged perpetrators in need of punishment and repentance.  Disclaimers may acknowledge that "not all" members of this or that group have such experiences or are guilty of such wrongs, but these disclaimers are always followed by blanket accusations nonetheless, often including some point of argument that seeks to bring even the exceptions into the rule.  Thus in social justice the goddess discards her scales to remove her blindfold, because the only really relevant factor in social justice is identity, not actions.

The irony of this is that it tends to make social justice warriors, on some level, hypocrites to their own cause.  Ostensibly, they claim to oppose bigotry and prejudice of every kind.  They proclaim themselves the true opponents of racism and sexism, the true enemies of anyone or thing that judges others on their membership in demographic identities rather than by the actions that make them an individual human being.  And yet the ideology of social justice compels them to do the same, constantly judging everyone they come in contact with not on the basis of their actions as an individual human being but by their membership in a demographic group.  And since social justice encompasses and judges all group identities, social justice warriors often turn out to be, by their actions and words, more bigoted than the racists or sexists they oppose—as their opponents will often only hold prejudices and stereotypes about one group and may even discard those prejudices with group members they've come to know as individuals (that is, of course, assuming they ever held any prejudices at all), but social justice requires prejudice and stereotyping toward all groups, even one's own allies and friends.  And it requires it unceasingly: no amount of action can make social justice view a white straight woman as a black lesbian.  Even the most ardent champion of social justice remains tainted by their membership in a designated perpetrator group.

Opportunity vs Outcome

Another big focus with both traditional justice and social justice is the emphasis on fairness and equality.  But again, this is a place where differing ideas of what fairness and equality are lead to totally different philosophies.  In traditional justice, the emphasis is on equal opportunity and fair process.  This is embodied in the concept of a fair trial, where even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion the accused gets the same opportunity to defend him or herself by the same processes and rules as any other individual would have.  Equal process does not mean, however, equal chance of success.  A trial may still be just as fair if the evidence against the accused was slight and they were easily able to prove their innocence, or if it was overwhelming and their best efforts failed to plant any reasonable doubt of their guilt in the minds of the jury.  This is similar to the concept of fairness in sports, games, or war where to play or fight fair means to adhere to a common set of rules that applies to everyone, whatever the outcome may be.

With social justice the emphasis is not on the process, but on the outcome.  Fairness in this context is similar to how one might say a cripple racing an athlete is not a fair race unless the athlete is given some sort of handicap (that is, unless they race by a different set of rules).  In social justice equality means that the outcomes of wealth, success, happiness, safety, and other benefits of society are distributed equally across all demographic groups.  Whether or not the process of getting to that outcome is equal or fair for all people (or any people) is irrelevant in social justice.  In fact, many social justice warriors treat equal processes and equal opportunities with suspicion saying they are not really equal because the underlying advantages and disadvantages of the differing groups give some a better chance of achieving a desirable outcome through the same process than others.  They propose explicitly unequal systems in the form of numerous affirmative action programs in an effort to "level the playing field" and make up for the disadvantages of one demographic compared to another, which are always attributed to the past or present prejudice of social justice's opponents.  But there are numerous problems with this approach to equality, starting with whether or not it is really achievable.

Achievable vs Unobtainable

Where traditional justice demands equal opportunity, that result is generally easily achieved.  In some cases, achieving this is as simple as removing a checkbox from an application, and gender and race blind application processes have been used successfully many times.  In other cases, laws forbidding discrimination and requiring a low burden of proof for accusations of it have been extremely successful in convincing organizations that they must eschew even the appearance of discriminatory practices.  In other cases, simple economic competition has been able to overcome prejudice, as employers in Apartheid South Africa sometimes found it was cheaper to provide illegal equal opportunity employment to blacks than to maintain the mandated segregation between the races.   Equal opportunity can also be tested for by creating test cases such as fake resumes or actors of differing genders or races portraying the same actions and measuring the result.  By such means, we can determine that not only has the past 50 years of social activism been successful in achieving equal opportunity for women and minorities, but in many ways it has even overshot the mark, as women, for instance, perform better on applications where their sex is known than if it is unknown, and if male and female actors perform equally violent physical assaults on one another in public the reaction invariably and overwhelmingly favors the female (who is often aided and applauded by bystanders) over the male (who is almost instantly in danger of physical attack or arrest from passers by) even when the attacks the woman actor is portraying would be just as damaging if performed in earnest.  Whites and particularly Southeast Asians have also found that they have a more favorable acceptance rate in colleges if they self-identify as African-American than as their actual race.

But of course none of this achieves equality of outcome.  Thus while advocates of traditional justice warn that society has gone too far in overcorrecting past injustices, advocates of social justice maintain that it has not gone nearly far enough.  After all, women still take up fewer than 50% of the coveted management and STEM field jobs, and there are still more Asians in most universities than their are African-Americans.  These things are easily measurable, but they remain utterly unachievable—and they will continue to be!  Even in the absence of discrimination, the ideal of any occupation or powerful position being made up of exactly the same demographics in exactly the same proportions as the nation's population at large cannot be realized for two reasons.

The first reason is that such a distribution of outcomes arising on its own (without being artificially forced by quotas) is statistically impossible.  This can be easily demonstrated with a coin flip.  The coin has a 50% chance of landing on either side, heads or tails.  Neither side is any different in this respect, neither has any special advantage or disadvantage.  They are both perfectly equal in the process by which they arrive on top and in their ability to get there.  And yet this does not mean that flipping the coin twice will give you one heads and one tails, or that flipping it four times will give you two heads and two tails.  Just because the odds are equal and the sides are the same, nothing prevents the coin flip from producing heads four times in a row, and though hundreds or thousands of flips will approach a 50-50 distribution, they will never quite arrive.  So likewise even if there were no difference or discrimination between men and women in the workplace, we would never quite see an even 50-50 split between them in any given career.  We would get close with a large enough sample size, but the only way to truly get the outcomes to align with the odds based on demographics would be to force the result artificially.

The second reason equal outcomes cannot be realized, and the larger problem with the concept, is that it stands opposed to the very concept of diversity.  Social justice warriors are quick to point out that diversity is a wonderful thing, our strength, because it brings us all together in one whole, and we all bring something different to the table.  We all have different backgrounds, different experiences, different thoughts, feelings, cultures, attitudes, outlooks, wants, desires, plans, and approaches.  Social justice warriors constantly point this out, and even go so far as to say that the concerns of a minority demographic cannot be truly understood or appreciated by outsiders of the majority group, because our inherent diversity makes us so different.  But the moment it comes to considering equal outcomes in terms of who does what job, how much money is made, who holds the positions of power, and who buys what product, all that diversity is instantly forgotten: members of the various groups are treated as so many interchangeable parts with their only difference being which box they check on a demographic survey.  But if diversity is important, if we are really different, then what reason would we have to expect all our outcomes to be the same.  If we really are different, would we even want equal outcomes?  Nowhere is this question more apparent then when gender disparities are discussed.  Would women really want to make up 50% of sewage and sanitation workers, 50% of construction workers, and 50% of wartime and workplace fatalities and injuries in exchange for being limited to making up only 50% of teachers, nurses, and stay-at-home parents?  If we don't expect women to make up 50% of the fanbase for war movies and violent video games, why would we expect them to be just as interested in risky and potentially dangerous jobs as men?  If we think it's okay for women to make up more than 50% of the market for dramas and Harlequin romances, then why shouldn't we expect more of them to be interested in a good work-family balance (or being a stay-at-home spouse) than men are?  If we can admit that many women have different likes and dislikes than many men, then we must face the fact that creating equal outcomes in the workplace will mean forcing a lot of women into jobs and situations they'd rather not be in, for the sake of "equality."  If we try to deny that women are any different than men, then we undercut the entire narrative of diversity, to say nothing of contradicting the evidence.

While the difference between men and women is perhaps the best example of how diversity makes equal outcomes impossible, the same problem exists to a greater or lesser degree with every demographic social justice warriors champion.  We are constantly reminded by social justice advocates that these groups have different cultures, experiences, and perspectives—different enough that outsiders cannot truly understand them.  Should we expect such different subcultures to all have exactly the same values and thus all pursue exactly the same goals in life in exactly the same way with exactly the same skill and energy?  Should we expect that all differing perspectives will lead to the same approach to life and get exactly the same results?  If we really are different, if we truly are diverse, than we cannot expect that we'll all take advantage of the same opportunities with equal vigor and take the same approach to each and every challenge—and if we cannot expect every group to act the same, we cannot expect that they'll all have exactly the same results.  The only way to get equal outcomes for everyone would be to erase our diversity with enforced conformity.

But social justice proposes that at least the majority of the differences in outcomes are really the result of either present discrimination or groups being hampered by generations of past mistreatment.  Even if the processes and opportunities are equal, social justice warriors insist that the unequal results necessitate discrimination as the cause and that it must be countered by a the well-intentioned discrimination of affirmative action.  Even if we accepted the morality of righting one wrong by committing another, there's still a practical consideration that poses an enormous challenge to this approach.  Since discrimination is not the only possible reason why equal outcomes might not exist, how do we determine how much of the unequal outcome is down to discrimination rather than random chance and the different choices that diverse groups make?  Having determined that, how do we decide how much present discrimination is necessary to undo the effects of past discrimination?  It really isn't humanly possible to make this determination with any degree of accuracy—there are simply too many factors, especially when you consider that not all members of a group have faced the same amount of disadvantages or been equally hampered by them.  What ends up happening instead is that an arbitrary standard is set across the entire group, usually with the end goal of forcing exactly equal outcomes without any attempt to account for other possible causes of differing outcomes, like random chance and differing choices.  Because these necessary variables are not factored in the desired split is almost never achieved and the resulting system is really only equal in that it isn't really fair to anyone.

Incentivizing vs Disincentivizing

One major difference that arises between the results of these approaches to justice is how they incentivize or disincentivize human behavior.  In traditional justice, equal opportunity incentivizes doing one's best.  While a certain racial group arriving in a country may start off with a severe disadvantage, everyone in that group has the same opportunity for success or failure based on their personal actions as previous generations of immigrants.  While they may not at first be able to take advantage of the opportunities that lead to the top outcomes of wealth and status, they are no different in that than the groups that came before them.  With this promise of succeeding by the same opportunities as other groups, they have the motivation to pull themselves up to equal footing generation by generation.  This is the American success story that has been replayed by nearly every immigrant group to come to these shores in the past two hundred years.  The Irish, German, Italian, Eastern European, Jewish, and Asian immigrant groups all faced animosity and poverty on first arriving on America's shores, but each group was spurred on by the availability of success promised by equality of opportunity (even though for many it was—and in some cases, still is—limited by institutional racism) and incentivized to try hard and reap the rewards of their efforts.  Consequently, each of these groups has enjoyed great success in American society and some have even risen to the top in terms of wealth, education, and prosperity.  The reason is simple: telling someone that if they do well, they can succeed incentivizes them to try their best; it motivates them.

By contrast, the equality of outcome social justice promotes is a powerful demotivator.  The reason is equally simple: tell people that they will get the same result whether they do well or poorly, and they will not put in the effort to do anything but poorly.  Tell African-Americans that they don't need high SAT scores to get into college and they won't try to get them.  Tell them that the entire education system is a rigged game and they deserve to have life simply handed to them on account of past injustices, and it should come as no surprise that their performance in school tanks and they begin demanding the world on a gilded platter.  Even with the best of intentions, this effect applies, with welfare programs that give money to those who are unemployed and even more money to those who are single mothers invariably creating large populations of unemployed single mothers who are dependent on the checks.  The key is that whatever behavior a program or initiative most rewards is the behavior people will have an incentive to do.  Thus unemployment programs that give more income than entry-level jobs incentivize people to remain unemployed (or underemployed) rather than starting careers that could raise them out of poverty (because in the short term, they'd lose their government checks and their income would actually fall).  Affirmative action programs which reward being a victim of discrimination and member of a certain race incentivize strong racial identity (bordering on ethnocentrism), a constant sense of victimization and entitlement, and fake hate crimes when real ones cannot be readily found.  To see these incentives, however, is to acknowledge the importance of opportunity over outcome (since these incentives always operate at the level of determining which opportunities people pursue and how hard), and since social justice cannot do that, it remains clueless a to why so many of its programs intended to uplift minority groups (especially blacks, their favorite target to "help") wind up trapping them in a permanent underclass instead.

Liberal vs Authoritarian

Traditional justice and equality of opportunity do not require a great deal of authority to enforce. Even unsupervised children can agree among themselves to race each other by a common set of rules. No dominant authority is required to tell them to pick the same goal, route, starting point and time.  Likewise, no great amount of authority is required for traditional justice to be established.

On the contrary most great advances in traditional justice and equality of opportunity have often been the result of lack of authority.  The Magna Carta was signed not because a powerful king demanded it, but because his authority was too weak to prevent it. Voting rights expanded to all classes of men not by feat of aristocratic power, but because aristocratic power was too eroded to prevent it.  The American experiment of a kingless society founded on the ideals of equal opportunity and traditional justice for all arose as a result of democratic processes and a citizen's militia overcoming the authority of a monarchy across the sea.  Slavery and Jim Crow may have been abolished by acts of government authority, but these acts were made possible by the erosion of the authority of the white Southern elites over the centuries.  Northerner abolitionists had wanted to abolish slavery and establish equality from the very outset of America, but the economic stranglehold and resultant wealth and power of Southern plantation owners prevented them from doing so until the industrialization of the North and the decline of the economic power of cotton growing gave them enough power to challenge that authority, first in the Civil War, then again with the coup-de-grace of the Civil Rights Movement.  Even in our own time the view that heterosexual and homosexual unions should be equal under the law occurred largely because of the collapse of the political authority of the "Moral Majority" that was the Evangelical Christian Right.

But traditional justice and equality of opportunity don't just come into being because of liberal situations or policies.  They also promote liberal societies and hedge against the emergence of any kind of authoritarianism.  After all, while an authoritarian might easily use the equal opportunities of a liberal society to rise to power, he would be unable to abuse that power much, since traditional justice systems would give his opponents opportunities to thwart his power.  Nor would he be able to remain in power long, as the same opportunities he used to gain authority could be easily used by anyone else to replace him.  No authoritarian could remain in power long or exercise his power much in a traditionally just society of equal opportunities without first changing the society to move away from these ideals.

Social justice and especially equality of outcome on the other hand, as we have seen above, require authoritarianism to work.  Someone has to decide which groups are the designated victims and which are the designated perpetrators.  Just looking at society as a whole, it is hardly obvious which group is which.  Does the fact that the women on average are paid up to 22% less than men on average make women the victims, or does the fact that men suffer workplace fatalities at over 13 times the rate of women make men the victims?  Similarly, does the fact that blacks are killed in police-related shootings at a disproportionately high rate (25%, when they're only 13% of the population) make them the victims, or does the fact that blacks commit crimes at a hugely disproportionate rate (53% of all murderers, when they're only 13% of the population) make them the perpetrators?  In both situations both facts have the same root cause and can't really be addressed or understood in isolation.  In both, one statistic is far more out of balance and more alarming to a neutral observer than the other, and yet in each case the former statistic is all that's ever talked about because it reinforces the designated victim status of women and blacks, while the latter statistic is ignored or suppressed (talking about either will get you labeled a racist or sexist).  All of this takes an authoritarian attitude from academics, activists, and the media to choose the designated victim and present only those facts which support that view, while simultaneously repressing contrary information as hate speech.

Once groups have been broken down into a racial/sexual hierarchy of designated victims and designated perpetrators.  Authoritarianism is required to enforce arbitrary amounts of discrimination against demographics designated as privileged and in favor of groups designated as oppressed.  There is no real incentive to enact this kind of discrimination without a society of authoritarian social justice, since it's bad for business—driving away good applicants of the designated privileged class because they realize they won't get a fair chance and driving away good applicants of the designated oppressed class because they realize they'll only be valued for their demographic identity rather than their work, while simultaneously attracting bad applicants who couldn't otherwise get employment and will expect to be able to coast by on minimal effort and the trump card of their designated minority status.  But if the alternative to enacting discriminatory affirmative action policies is being ostracized and ruined by accusations of racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, businesses have little choice but to comply.

Beyond this discrimination, since unequal outcomes are often the result, as was discussed above, of different choices made by diverse groups, authoritarianism is required to enforce conformity between differing groups.  This can be seen at work in social justice today in many ways.  Most obviously it can be seen in Anita Sarkeesian's famous declaration that intersectional feminism (a branch of social justice) is rightly opposed to "choice feminism"—or the freedom of individual women to make their own choices about how to live their own lives—and more recently in the authoritarian feminist stripping of grid girls from their chosen profession, against the wishes of those women and the majority of the community in which they were a part.  It can also be seen in the black community in the tendency by social justice warrior blacks to denigrate any black who performs well in school and seeks to succeed in society on the basis of their own merit rather than through affirmative action and entitlement—or worse yet doesn't vote a straight Democratic ticket—as a "coon," "Uncle Tom", or an "oreo:" a traitor to their own race.  An ideology that depends on suppressing individual free will for the accomplishment of its end goals cannot be anything other than authoritarian.

But social justice not only is authoritarian in the present, it also has an authoritarian past.  Social justice traces its roots to Marxism, which first posited the basic ideas of social justice with the designated victim demographic of the working class and the designated perpetrator of the privileged bourgeoisie.  When first advanced by Karl Marx, this philosophy had little or no impact and gained very little following.  It wasn't until Marxism was taken up by Lenin that it really became a powerful force, and Lenin himself wasn't able to enforce any of the social justice ideals of Marxism until he forcibly dissolved the democracy of Russia in the Russian Civil War.  Lenin to Stalin, to Mao, to Pol Pot, to Castro, to Maduro, the history of the communist branch of social justice is a history of the bloodiest authoritarian regimes known to mankind, responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 million—far exceeding the death toll of the Holocaust.  The fact that many major social justice authority figures got their start as communists and that many social justice warriors espouse communism today and speak favorably of communist regimes illustrates that they too share the communist dream of an authoritarian utopia of forced equality of outcome (though as history as indicated time and time again, the real result of this will be a dystopia of enforced squalor, misery, and death for all).

Facts vs Feelings

Underlying all of this is a fundamental difference on what constitutes evidence.  In traditional justice, evidence is based on objective truths. Facts about which both sides can agree are used for the basis of arguments to persuade the other side to adopt one's point of view.  This results in traditional justice philosophies being highly grounded in reality, but simultaneously gives them the risk of appearing unsympathetic toward the feelings of others, since only facts are taken into account when making a decision, regardless of how well or poorly that decision may make others feel.

This emphasis on the importance of facts, objective truth, and scientific method over feelings, beliefs, and perceptions traces its roots back to the Enlightement, which heavily influenced and was heavily influenced by traditional justice.  During the Renaissance, Enlightenment thinkers sought to overthrow of old systems of thought steeped in ungrounded belief, religious mystery, and the desire not to offend against cherished individuals or ideals, and to replace them with a science, religion, and society built solidly on facts, reason, and evidence.

Social justice takes the opposite approach, as indeed it must.  As discussed above, social justice must ignore a great many facts when it comes to inditing whole demographics as guilty and privileged (or innocent and oppressed) when many of the individuals within them are not and when many facts paint a picture which contradicts the chosen demographic hierarchy.  Social justice must also ignore the facts about different demographics arriving at different outcomes because of random chance and different choices, and it must ignore the fact of its own discriminatory policies and their failure to bring about the desired equality of outcome.  It must also ignore the fact of its own authoritarian use of power (or even the fact that it has power) in favor of projecting authoritarianism and power on designated perpetrator demographics (even when those demographics demonstrably have no power—such as the Boers in South Africa).

But none of this really poses a challenge to social justice, because social justice has different philosophical roots than traditional justice.  Where traditional justice springs from the Enlightenment—a movement that elevated the importance of facts over all—social justice springs from Post-Modernism—a movement that declared facts do not exist.  In a nutshell, Post-Modernism proposes that there is no real objective truth, or that no real objective truth can be known: that all we can really know is our own perceptions of (or feelings about) truth.  At the same time, Post-Modernism does not reject perceptions as not-truth, but instead promotes them as replacements for truth.  A commonly used example is the story of the blind men who don't know what an elephant is feeling different parts of it and creating descriptions of the entire creature from their feeling of a single part: variously describing it as long like a snake, thin and flat like a leaf, or thick and round like a tree trunk.  The moral in Post-Modernism is that no perspective is really invalid, since parts of the elephant really are like that, but that everyone's perspective and feelings about truth are equally true and valuable while simultaneously having no basis in objective fact.  In fact, since objective truth cannot be known in Post-Modernism, feelings and perspectives effectively become far more important than rational analysis and evidence (since these seek to reveal an objective truth that Post-Modernism believes non-existent or unknowable, and thus irrelevant).  Another effect of this elevation of feelings and perspectives as equally valid (and more important) alternatives to objective truth, is that under-represented feelings and perspectives gain greater authority in Post-Modernism, and especially social justice.  After all, if all you have are the accounts of the blind men with which to imagine an elephant, and all of their perspectives are equally true and valid, then you must hear and give equal weight to all of them in order to truly understand the elephant yourself (or at least come as close to true understanding as Post-Modern theory allows, given that there is no truth, just subjective perceptions of it).  Thus feelings and perspectives which are said to be less prominently expressed or less common are heralded as gems containing insights overlooked by the predominant perspectives.  In fact, in intersectional feminism, oppressed groups and perspectives are held to contain not equal but greater wisdom and validity than those of the majority.

Social justice has embraced this philosophy wholesale as its foundation, and in social justice facts are irrelevant—what truly matters are the feelings and perspectives—the lived experiences—of those who are oppressed.  Of course, saying facts and evidence are irrelevant makes it impossible to prove who is oppressed and who isn't.  Fortunately, social justice has an authoritarian bent where designated victims will tell you that their demographics are the most oppressed and therefore have the best and most valid perspectives.  As proof of this (or of anything really) they will appeal not to any objectively verifiable facts, rather they present as proof their own subjective experiences and feelings of fear, outrage, and sadness—feelings meant to prove that they are oppressed, because to be oppressed is to be right.  In social justice, outrage trumps objective evidence.

Manufacturing Peace vs Manufacturing Hate

In traditional justice, the emphasis is on bringing different parties with different perspectives together to discuss and settle their grievances on the basis of their common ground and the unified nature we all share as human beings.  While it seeks to punish injustices and reward righteous acts, it also seeks to bring peace between individuals by resolving misunderstandings and clashing perspectives by arriving at conclusions based on a set of objective facts and evidence upon which both sides can agree.  It has countless times been successful in staying the hands of angry mobs by patiently explaining how the evidence—which the mob itself can see and verify as objectively true—points to the innocence of the accused.  Even in cases where it finds a perpetrator guilty, its measured handling of evidence, conviction, and punishment has in many cases meant that those once rightly spurned by society as awful criminals are welcomed peacefully back by their neighbors because "he served his time" and the matter has been objectively settled.  In some cases, it has even motivated reconciliation between the relatives of murder victims and repentant convicted killers.  Traditional justice does not merely punish wrongdoing, it promotes and creates peace, stability, and harmony between groups whose clashing feelings, perspectives, and lived experiences would otherwise motivate them to hatred and violence against each other.  In doing so it does not negate its own power and usefulness, but rather objectively proves it.

Social justice, while it promotes itself as the bringer of a utopian future, brings no such peace or unity.  In fact, because of the central importance of feelings of oppression in social justice and the irrelevance of objective truths, social justice actually promotes greater mutual hatred and division.  By denying the existence and relevance of objective truths that both sides can agree upon, social justice demolishes and denies the possibility of common ground.  Each side becomes locked in a struggle in which it is impossible to give quarter to the enemy without denying one's very self—invalidating not only one's own perspective, but since perspective is reality, denying their very existence—because there is no middle ground, no common humanity based on objectivity: just the tyrannical perspectives of Us vs Them.  This can be observed in society at large,  where the animosity between the sexes has become a palpable and (increasingly) political tension—more so than during the Suffrage Movement—, where racial tensions are higher now in many ways than they were during the Civil Rights Era, and where (tellingly) social justice advocates are openly calling for (and implementing wherever possible) a return to segregation and apartheid.  Far from bringing unity to diversity and thus making it a strength (which America's previous melting pot of traditional justice did silently for generations), social justice has in one generation weaponized diversity and used our differences in perspective, feelings, and life experiences to tear our common heritage, institutions, values, and reality apart into armed camps.

Internally, social justice groups are just as—if not more—divided, riven by constant rivalry and animosity between each of the component demographics.  Witness, for example, the fighting between and eventual conquest of the LGBT activist faction by the Black Lives Matter faction (as symbolized by the forced inclusion of black and brown stripes on top of and dominant over the LGBT rainbow flag).  Even within the LGBT movement itself there is infighting and resentment between homosexuals and bisexuals, and homosexuals are further polarized between the "more privileged" gay men and the "more oppressed" and therefore more important lesbians, who further break down between cis and transgendered women, and so on.  The in-fighting is infinite.  As feminist Christina Hoff Summers observed of a 1992 annual meeting of the social-justice-inspired Women's Studies Association:

"The participants were told to assemble in small groups based on their healing needs.  So there were groups for Asian women, African-American women, elderly women, Jewish women, disabled women, fat women...  None of these groups proved stable.  The fat group polarized into gay and straight factions.  Members of the black lesbian group could not get along, those who had white partners were called out for their privilege and had to form a separate group.  And new identities emerged!  A group of women with allergies formed a caucus and issued a set of demands...  It was a conference of scholars, but we didn't resolve our differences through rational discussion.  Instead intersectionality created new reasons for anger and devoured itself."

By focusing only on the differences of perspective and feelings which divide its adherents, social justice leaves no unifying factor even for its own movement other than the presence of a mutual enemy.  It is therefore imperative to the social justice movement that hatred and oppression from designated perpetrator groups (whites, males, heterosexuals, etc), continue indefinitely, or even increase to keep pace with the increasing internal tensions within their movement.  Should these groups fail to oblige (as an increasingly racially-diverse and color-blind majority frequently does), social justice advocates are forced to latch onto objectively inoffensive occurrences (like a child wearing a shirt that uses an affectionate comparison that's been in vogue for use on children of all races for decades, or two men who refused multiple times to leave a store being arrested for loitering, or a young thug being shot dead while charging at a police officer he'd previously assaulted) and distort them into evidence of racism and oppression, and sources of outrage.  Sometimes, when even that is not enough, some social justice warriors will create instances of bigotry and hate whole cloth, sending death threats to their own accounts, painting their own houses with swastikas, or leveling accusations of criminal assault or sexual violence that never really happened at unsuspecting innocents...and other social justice warriors will defend their actions, because their lies helped hold the movement together and keep it focused on an external enemy, lest it turn inward and tear itself apart completely.

More than that these instances of hatred and bigotry, whether real or manufactured, become a currency of power within the social justice movement.  After all, to be outraged it to be right, to be most oppressed is to have the most important voice.  No surprise then that the social justice communities that dominate the media and academia have devolved into a "race to the bottom" where new identities and oppressed demographics are invented daily for adherents to claim membership in and thus boost the validity and power of their own viewpoint.  Small wonder that the self-reported rates of mental illness and PTSD in these groups approach 100%—even though for most of these self-diagnosed their most traumatic memory is the announcement that their candidate lost a presidential election.  No wonder that reported hate crimes seem to be most common in cosmopolitan, multi-cultural cities dominated by left-leaning politicians and social-justice-obsessed universities, rather than in isolated and ethnically homogeneous rural poor farming towns.  All of these things not only give cohesion and legitimacy to the social justice movement as a whole, they also grant power, status, and relevance to the supposed targets of these alleged hate crimes.  Social justice is not only the cause of hatred and division, not only does it depend on continued animosity, it and its adherents thrive on it and have no incentive to stop or slow down.

On Sex and Gender

While many Christians may see the idea that there are only two genders as so obvious as to not even require explanation, our society no longer sees it that way.  There is an increasing movement in society today there is an increasing movement in our culture and nation today to push for the celebration of and catering toward transexuality, especially toward those who identify as "non-binary"—neither male nor female.  Not many months ago, The National Geographic devoted an entire issue to discussing how our understanding of gender had been "revolutionized" to see gender as a fluid spectrum running from male to female, where individuals could move from one to the other or drift along somewhere inbetween as they pleased.  Bill Nye of "Science Guy" fame endorsed similar views with a tonedeaf dance number.  More and more major media outlets have followed suit.  Legal changes are beginning as well, and not just making it possible to identify as a non-binary gender on legal documents.  In Canada, Bill C-16 is set to define the use of gender binary pronouns (such as him or her) as "harassment" punishable by a fine.  Many of those who support it on the far left consider the use of him or her to constitute "hate speech."  Saying that there are only two genders and two biological sexes isn't just old-fashioned, it's painted as false, offensive, bigoted, and—if some groups get their way—someday illegal.  If Christians are to engage with this rising movement in our culture and in the powerful halls of academia, media, and politics, they must be able to explain why they believe what they believe on sex and gender.

So here is my attempt.

First off, I want to respond to some of the arguments employed by the proponents of non-binary gender.  Many of these arguments are emotional, accusing anyone who doesn't subscribe to their beliefs about gender (or worse yet voices a contrary opinion) of bigotry, hate, phobia (transphobia, specifically), and trying to "deny the existence of trans people."  While these arguments are often made very passionately, they are at bottom misinformation, empty rhetoric, and emotional manipulation.  Arguing that someone is not who they claim to be is not in any way a denial of their existence, even if the claim one disagrees with is central to that person's view of themselves.  For example, it is not a denial of the existence of Mormons to argue that Mormonism is not a Christian denomination but a cult.  Mormonism is very central to the lives of millions of people who shape their every decision throughout their entire lives around it, and they hold it to be a true representation of faithful Christian doctrine and themselves to be true Christians.  Saying it isn't so doesn't mean you think these Mormons don't exist—it means you think these Mormons are mistaken about the Christian religion and their place within it.  So also, denying the claims that non-binary or trangender advocates or individuals make does not erase these people or invalidate them as people: it just states that you believe they are mistaken about some of the things they believe about the world and themselves.  Likewise, arguing against these beliefs is not a phobia.  A phobia is an extreme irrational fear or aversion to something.  I have mild arachnophobia: if a spider were to come anywhere near me, or touch me, I would instinctively jump and try to brush it off in a pulse-pounding panic.  When a non-binary trangender sits next to me at work, I don't recoil in instinctive dread: I make small talk and ask them about work because I am not in any honest sense of the word a transphobic.  Disagreeing with someone isn't a phobia.  It isn't bigotry either.  The KKK was and is bigoted toward blacks, believing them to be an inferior race.  They fought tooth and nail to avoid even having to share restaurant counters with them.  But disagreeing with someone doesn't entail bigotry.  Two may disagree and share a meal or a table (as I have with some non-binary trangender folk).  Thinking someone else is mistaken does not mean thinking someone else is inferior—especially not for a Christian.  For a Christian one of the first tenants is that we are all sinners and continue to be so despite our best efforts, never coming to a complete grasp of the whole truth or a perfect application of it.  In Christianity, we are all of us mistaken on something, and none of us have cause to feel superior for a disagreement (that would be called pride, the mistake of thinking you're better and more important than you actually are).  Disagreeing with someone, even on a core belief, is not disavowing their existence, a phobia, or bigotry. Claiming it is one of these things silences other opinions and stifles any hope of really understanding gender, whether you believe it is binary and static or non-binary and fluid.  You cannot evaluate or appreciate the validity of your own belief until you have seen it contrasted with other points of view—and you can't do that if you label everyone who disagrees with you a hater to silence them.  If you really feel you must silence everyone who disagrees with you in order to feel safe, then the only one with real problems with phobia or bigotry is you.

Second, gender and sex are two sides of the same coin, not two unrelated topics.  Gender is defined as the state of being male or female: sex or the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.  Sex is defined as either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs or structures (all definitions from Merriam-Webster, 2017).  While there is a trend to try to disassociate these terms and say gender is a social construction completely divorced from biological sex, such redifinition is misleading.  While there are aspects of gender which are socially constructed, such as gendered fashion (suits for men, dresses for women) and gender roles, there are other aspects of gender which seem to be founded in biology (like women tending to be more nurturing and men tending to be more aggressive).  Even the aspects of gender which are socially constructed are seldom arbitrary, and usually trace back to real differences between the sexes.  Take suits and dresses, for instance, in our own culture.  Suits are descended from military uniforms because militaries are overwhelmingly made up of men; dresses are descended from everyday tunics lengthened and modified to make them visibly impractical for work because most of the people sheltered from hard physical labor are women—and both differences come down to the general characteristics of the sexes, where men are generally stronger than women and therefore more fit for military service and better able to free up their female compatriots from manual labor.  Those who argue for gender as a fluid spectrum likewise prove that gender and sex are tightly interrelated as they fluidly move from discussion of gender roles to discussion of intersex conditions in their arguments and typically have the end goal of abolishing both gender and sex as categories entirely, making no real distinction.

Finally, I'd like to take a look at typical arguments for gender as a fluid spectrum and point out how backward their logic really is.  In nearly every argument made for this position, its proponent will begin by pointing out the fact that both gender roles and the clothing and hairstyles by which each gender is identified in day-to-day life vary from culture to culture and are socially constructed.  Having demonstrated this, they will use this point as a foundation for understanding every other difference between the sexes, rendering them mere social constructs by comparison.  Their first stop is typically to point out that the secondary sex characteristics which we normally use to determine the sex or gender of others can vary from person to person. Not all women are shorter than men or have visibly developed breasts. Not all men have deeper voices or facial hair.  The conclusion they draw from this is that male and female are arbitrary categories that we draw on the spectrum of true human sexual diversity. Similarly they point out that various intersex conditions can result in people having genitals, sexual organs, or genetic makeups that vary from the clear male-female norm.  They will call these conditions commonplace, normal, and healthy—and use them to sell the argument that the biological distinctions we draw in these areas are similarly arbitrary and artificial categories imposed upon a wonderful spectrum of human diversity.

But to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of and honest interest in these topics, such reasoning is entirely backward.  It's fairly ridiculous to draw conclusions about human genetics and biology from observations of human fashion.  The kind of clothes a person wears doesn't change their biology or genetic makeup, but rather is influenced by these deeper facets of who they are.

For a Christian there is another element to consider, the most important one of all, and that is God.  For an honest Christian, looking into the truth about gender and sex should start not with an examination of whether people wear pink or blue (the actual foundational starting point of one pseudo-scientific gender spectrum argument), but with the truths presented in the Word of God. To a Christian, God's perspective on things should never be an afterthought. So, what does the Bible say? The Bible says that in the beginning God created them "male and female." This is a distinction that the Bible carries all the way through with no mention of any spectrum of genders or allowance for people changing their own sex. According to the Bible there are only two genders—male and female—and they are not socially constructed, but created by God in the beginning and declared "very good."

Of course, we need not take the Bible's word for it. Science tells the same story. Any honest scientific discussion of sex or gender must begin not with who wears a skirt but with the discussion of biological sex itself. Biological sex is an aspect of sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction is one of the most prominent forms of reproduction in the natural world and is the form of reproduction employed by our own species. In sexual reproduction, genetic information from multiple individual donors is combined to create the genetic code of a new individual of the species. The number of genetic donors determines the number of sexes in that species. In humans as in most species the number of genetic donors, and the number of sexes, is two. These are called male and female and are distinguished not by their style of dress but by the way in which they donate genetic and cellular material to reproduction. Males donate genetic material only using sperm cells whose sole function is to deliver the genetic material to the egg and then be destroyed. Females donate both the genetic material and the egg cell that will become the cellular foundation of the new individual. In some species (especially plants), a single individual can fulfill both reproductive roles or maybe able to switch reproductive roles during their lifetime. But for humans and most other mammalian species these roles are distinct and do not change.  In fact in many species, including humans there is a physiological difference between the two sexes beyond simply having different reproductive organs, causing males and females to have different sizes, builds, or colorations (called secondary sex characteristics).  These differences are lumped under the umbrella of sexual dimorphism, and humans are a moderately sexually dimorphic species—meaning that in humans sexual dimorphism is more akin to a bell curve of general tendencies as opposed to a strongly sexually dimorphic species where the differences are more black and white (such as in peafowl or anglerfish).

Of course, an individual need not reproduce or even be capable of reproduction to be considered male or female. The reproductive role of an individual is designated by their genetic code even if that individual is themselves, for other reasons, unable to reproduce. In humans, these reproductive roles are designated by the sex chromosomes X and Y. A normal male has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome. A normal female has two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. The chromosomal makeup of an individual is determined at birth and remains constant throughout their lifetime.  It cannot be changed. This makeup, known as the individual's genotype, determines the physical expression of that gender in the individual, known as their phenotype. It is this immutable genotype that determines what an individual's genitals and reproductive organs will be and what secondary sex characteristics they will develop. These characteristics are genetically, not socially determined, as an everyday expression of the real biological divide between male and female that is expressed in our genes.

At this point, an advocate of the gender spectrum view might object that not everyone falls into these genetic norms, and may attempt to assert that the mere existence of intersex people completely invalidates the scientific understanding of sex and gender. But the existence of exceptions does not disprove the rule.  No matter how many intersex conditions exist humans still reproduce sexually with only two genetic donors. We remain a species with only two biological sexes. To understand what intersex conditions are we have to understand where they come from. These conditions more commonly known as Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD) in the scientific community are usually caused by rare genetic disorders which caused an individual's phenotypical sex to develop in an unusual way.  There is a very wide variety of DSDs, and all of them are very rare.  While gender spectrum advocates like to play these conditions off as commonplace things everyone has, the reality is that the largest possible estimate of the population affected by these disorders (after lumping together every single abnormality of sexual development known to medical science, including those that are practically undetectable) is 1.7%.  The prevalence of even the most common DSD is only 1 in a thousand—comparable to your odds of dying in a housefire or contracting HIV (both 1 in 1,000).  Most effect far fewer people, becoming about as commonplace as being struck lightning during one's lifetime (1 in 13,000).  They are far from ordinary, and they are by no means medically normal.

The exact cause and nature of these abnormalities varies from condition to condition. Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome for instance is caused by a rare genetic mutation that causes the developing fetus's body to be unable correctly process the hormones involved in sexual development. Other conditions (such as Klinefelter Syndrome) are caused by an individual receiving too many copies of a sex chromosome, which is called polyploidy and is a genetic error similar to what causes Down syndrome (which is caused by having three copies of chromosome 21). In other cases an individual may receive too few sex chromosomes (such as Turner Syndrome) which is known monosomy as similar to what causes Cri Du Chat Syndrome. In all cases, these are not new sexes or new genders: these are medical conditions. While some are relatively benign, others can have a severe impact on an individual's life and require lifelong medical treatment to manage. Nearly all render the individual completely unable to reproduce, dashing any hopes these people may have of ever having children of their own. These are disabilities and can have a huge negative impact on the lives of the individuals they effect. With this in mind, I cannot help but think of it as callous and heartless to use such people as political pawns in an argument for gender spectrum ideology by trying to take advantage of them and trying to convince others that these disabilities are new gender identities to be celebrated and reveled in rather than disabilities to be treated and hopefully someday cured.

Irregularities with genitals are often the phenotypic expression of genetic disorders of sexual development. Even when they are not these irregularities are medical conditions and may be considered disabilities, and it disturbs me to see those who call themselves transexual advocates callously use these disabilities in an effort to win arguments on the nature of gender. This advocate, for instance uses survivors of cancer who have had their testicles removed as an example of a possible new biological sex. Just because a man is a survivor of testicular cancer does not mean he is no longer a man or suddenly some third sex. This is mild however compared to the case of David Reimer (born Bruce Reimer) who suffered from a botched circumcision operation shortly after birth. Rather than treating Bruce with compassion for the injury and permanent amputation he had suffered, Doctor John Money (a prominent proponent of the idea that gender was merely a social construct) chose to use him as a poster child in his argument for gender. Little Bruce was subjected to further surgeries without his consent in an effort to reshape is genitals to resemble those of a female. Doctor Money then directed his family to raise him as a girl (Brenda) despite the fact that he consistently identified himself as male, which was his birth and genetic gender. This situation caused a great deal of distress and harm for him.  Bruce eventually took the name David in an effort to reclaim his true gender, and eventually committed suicide at the age of 38—a tragedy which could have been prevented if Doctor Money had been more keen on helping his patient than politicizing the maiming of an infant.

Disturbingly, this trend of using people's disabilities to win arguments for political ends continues even with individuals who is disability is not physical. Many who identify as transsexual, such as prominent YouTuber and activist Blair White, has been diagnosed with a mental condition known as gender dysphoria which causes their brain to physiologically process information in a way more similar to the function of the brain of a member of the opposite sex then a member of their own sex. As a consequence, such individuals often feel like strangers in their own bodies and frequently identify as members of the opposite sex. The exact cause of gender dysphoria is unknown, and there is currently no cure, but it is not a lifestyle choice or a sign that there is more than one gender. It is a mental condition, a disability, and it can have a severe effect on an individual's life. Even after transitioning to life as a member of the opposite sex and being surrounded by a society that supports them, people with gender dysphoria suffer from a high rate of depression and suicide. Dishearteningly the only response from the so-called transgender advocates is to use these people as poster children for their gender spectrum ideology and trying to blame their continued suffering on anyone who dares point out that they are suffering from a mental condition and deserve real help.

Of course not all of those who identify as transgender have gender dysphoria.  Some have other unrelated conditions which make them want to distance themselves from their own gender.  One worker in a clinic in Sydney reports, "Often, especially with females, there’s child abuse in their background, a lot of mental health issues and challenges."  There is a certain sad logic to this, that an abused child may believe that "if only I was a boy, I wouldn't be molested" or "if only I was a girl, I would be loved."  But as the clinic worker goes on to say, these issues are not addressed in our modern climate of gender-as-a-fluid-spectrum: "You’re not able to say this is a psychological issue. There’s this push to refer them out and get them processed to [send them to] Westmead children’s hospital and into that [sex change] process" (from this article). Gender spectrum advocates aren't interested in helping these people address the root causes of their pain, though, only with pushing them into various transgender identities in order to promote their own ideas about gender as a spectrum.  As bad as it is that these "enlightened advocates" are willfully ignoring the real psychological issues these individuals are facing, it's worse still that they are pushing them—as children—into sex change drugs and surgeries, which can be dangerous and leave a permanent mark on the child's body.

There are other reasons why one might identify as transgender, however, and these reasons apply more to those who identify as non-binary than anything else (most people with a DSD, gender dysphoria, or other psychological condition want nothing more than to be considered fully a member of one gender or the other).  This final reason is that the rise of gender spectrum ideology has made transgender identities socially appealing.  On one level, this can come from kids or teens struggling with confusing years of trying to fit in or going through puberty.  In an environment where gender is a fluid spectrum, transgender identities offer these people a quick easy solution to any confusion they may encounter.  Rather than having to parse out the fact that its okay for a boy to do ballet or a girl to like arm wrestling and convince their friends of this, they can simply identify themselves as one of a growing number of "new genders"...and if their friends reject them for it, well, they can brand them as transphobic!  Of course, the "quick and easy" solution doesn't really resolve the confusion in the long run, and may lead to social or medical choices with long-lasting consequences in the meantime, but gender spectrum advocates are happy to swell their ranks with these confused souls and—rather than helping them work through their issues—exacerbate them and isolate them from anyone who may be willing to help them understand what's really going on (especially their families, who are often devastated).

On another level, this can come as a sort of fashion statement or form of social climbing.  After all, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, transgenderism, and especially non-binary identities, are a rising trend.  With more and more celebrities and media outlets climbing on the gender-spectrum bandwagon, transexuality is—as one socially astute teen told her doctor—"the new black."  It's in fashion not only to proclaim that gender is a spectrum but also to demonstrate it by declaring yourself a non-binary transgender person.  This becomes especially pertinent when one considers the huge  reach and influence of intersectional feminism.  Intersectional feminism emerged in 1989 as a growing movement within feminism which taught that the different identities a person possessed (racial, sexual, and such) were all divided into differing levels of being privileged or oppressed by society at large, and all intersected to make an individual person either more or less oppressed.  Thus blacks were seen as oppressed, and women were seen as oppressed, but black women were seen as more oppressed than either group.  Intersectional feminism also states that the more oppressed a group is, the more insight its experiences give it into how the world works, and the more it should be listened to above any other groups.  This is why at many supposedly socially progressive events it's common to see speakers from majority groups (such as whites or men) silenced in favor of speakers from minority groups.  While a full critique of intersectionality is beyond my scope here, the effect of the ideology on society in feminist-dominated circles (which includes higher education, media, and much of politics) is pretty easy to anticipate.  If members of minority groups are accorded special privileges and higher social status in these circles in order to make up for supposed oppression in their past, then it's easy to see why it would suddenly become very advantageous and very appealing to label oneself as a member of a minority group.  In fact, the best way to socially advance in such a group would be to claim membership in as many minority groups as possible.  Of course the obvious problem is that most minority groups are ones that people are born into and not easy to claim without proof.  Transgender status is something that happens after birth, though, and when combined with a non-binary or gender-fluid status it allows the claimant to simply assert their membership in an ostensibly very oppressed group without ever actually having to do anything to prove they are transgender.  They can just say they are non-binary and dress and act in exactly the same way as before with the exception that now they get to bully others about not using the obscure set of made-up pronouns they found on the internet.  Combined with the current massive popularity of gender spectrum ideology, it's inevitable that some people would start claiming non-binary identities purely for the fashion and power of it—it's human nature to try fit in and seize easy routes to power.  People who were genuinely transgender before it became popular have a name for these new comers seeking to appropriate their title: they call them transtrenders.

And ultimately, that's what we're looking at in gender spectrum ideology: a trend.  There is no real intellectual or scientific underpinning to the movement.  The truest thing it says is that men and women do not always dress or act in ways that conform with their traditional gender roles, and that this is alright!  Then, of course, it fumbles by trying to label self-expression as a new biological sex, and for evidence morbidly glorifies disabilities while pretending they're normal and healthy.  That, to me, is the most disturbing thing about it, the thing that really betrays the fad's complete lack of empathy for real people with real problems.  Like all trends, it will eventually end and fade away, but while it's here, I think it's important we speak the truth in love, and demonstrate compassion for those whose suffering gender-spectrum ideology ignores or blames on others.

Now Maps are Racist

In our modern, enlightened, and tolerant society, it seems increasingly evident that in the eyes of some people whites can't do anything without revealing what awful racists they are.  Apparently the list of things that constitute white supremacist crimes against humanity now includes drawing world maps.

This came to my attention when I overheard someone claiming that America is bigger than Australia on world maps "because of ethnocentrism."  This prompted me to do some quick Google searches, which revealed that the claim was completely unfounded.  For one thing, most maps portray Australia and the lower 48 (or contiguous) states of America as being roughly the same size—because they are.  In fact, the contiguous United States is a little bit larger, coming in at 3,119,884 square miles to Australia's 2,969,907 square miles.  If one discounts the 160,820 square miles of massive lakes included in America's contiguous borders, the result is a much closer 2,959,064 square miles of land—very close to the Australian total (which does include some large lakes, like Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens of South Australia).  So it was clear that portraying the United States as a close match and slight superior of Australia in size is a move rooted in geographical fact rather than ethnocentrism.

But looking up this claim made me wonder if there really were people out there who saw maps as racially motivated.  That led me down the rabbit hole that ended at the obviously enlightened blog "stuff white people do" which included this article on how whites allegedly use world maps (specifically the popular Mercator Projection) to "imagine the world as literally eurocentric"[sic].  It was not the only one to do so.  One need only search for "Mercator Projection ethnocentric" and dozens of results pop up, most citing episode 16 of the second season of The West Wing as their inspiration, and many of them from ostensibly academic websites one would expect to know better.  So the resounding answer is yes: in our modern world real people, college educated people, actually think that maps are racist.

No matter where you look in these articles, all of the same complaints are listed, all focusing on the Mercator Projection.  The map is ethnocentric because it literally places Europe near the center of the map.  The center line, the prime meridian, even runs right through it!  The map is white supremacist because it puts the countries of the white-majority Northern Hemisphere on top.  And of course, the final and most oft stated proof that the Mercator Projection promotes racism is that it depicts white majority Europe and the United States as disproportionately enlarged—and even depicts that European isle of Greenland as bigger than the whole continent of Africa, when it's actually only 1/14th the size!  The solution most of these writers will offer is the same: get rid of that abhorrent ethnocentric Mercator Projection and bring in the socially-conscious and far superior Peters Projection.

The problem is that in writing these articles the authors all really just proved one thing: they know less about maps than you can learn from fifteen minutes on Wikipedia.

Let's start with the size issue.  In the Mercator Projection, white-majority Europe, the United States, and (especially) Greenland are all shown as bigger than black-majority Africa.  Bigger equals better and more important, therefore the map is a clear product of and promoter of racism, right?  Wrong.  If this were true, than the biggest thing on the map should be Germany or Belgium, since its creator (Geradus Mercator) was Flemish.  But instead the whole of Europe, most of North America, and even Australia are dwarfed by the colossus which is Greenland—a far northern island which in reality is much smaller than any of them.  Was Mercator a secret proponent of Greenlandic supremacy then?  Hardly.  In Mercator's day Greenland was an almost total unknown, with only one coastline being portrayed with any accuracy on his original 1569 map.  While in centuries past Greenland had been colonized by Europeans (or more specifically, Vikings), those colonies had failed, vanishing into historical oblivion to the point that some Europeans didn't even realize they'd existed and erroneously thought the frigid isle their ancestors had written off as a backwater a mere hundred years ago was actually some newly discovered land.  Greenland was still inhabited of course, by native Inuit peoples, who make up 88% of the population of Greenland to this day.  Worse still for this theory, however, is the enormous size of Antarctica, which appears to be large enough to comfortably swallow every other landmass on Earth (when it's really smaller than both Africa and Asia, being roughly the same size as South America).  So unless the Mercator Projection is secretly a propaganda tool of Inuit supremacists and ethnocentric penguins, I think we can write this explanation off!

Instead of racism, the real explanation for the size inaccuracies of the Mercator Projection lies in the mathematics of cartography itself.  The Earth is a sphere, but most maps are rectangles.  Projecting a spherical surface onto a flat one presents an enormous challenge, and it simply cannot be done without some inaccuracies.  Cartographers approaching the task of making a world map must choose which inaccuracies they're willing to tolerate and which they will not.  Will they preserve the relative shapes and sizes of the contents at the cost of introducing huge gashes and discontinuities that make the map all but unusable for navigation?  If they keep the map whole, will they distort the shapes of the landmasses by stretching or squashing them in order to preserve their relative size, or sacrifice their relative size for fidelity of shape?  These decisions really depend on the purpose of the map.  The purpose of Geradus Mercator's map was to create a world map which could be used for reliable navigation by early sailors (one so reliable that iterations of it continue to be used by mariners of all nationalities to this day).  For that purpose, it was imperative to avoid as many gashes and discontinuities as possible (sailing off the edge of the map would mean difficulty finding where your course picked up on the other side).  It was also necessary to preserve the shape of the coastlines, since these shapes would be used as points of reference for ocean-going navigation.  To that end, size had to be sacrificed, but distorted size could easily be fixed by adjusting the scale—distorted shape and discontinuities would be much harder for a sailor to adjust to on the fly.  That explains at least why the sizes of the various landmasses on the Mercator Projection are inaccurate, but why choose to enlarge the places he did?  It's not a racial prejudice in favor of penguins.  Rather, Mercator, like many 16th Century European cartographers, was motivated by geographical accuracy.  While we in the 21st Century have adapted to the idea that many lines on our maps are arbitrary, the cartographers of Mercator's day were not prepared to accept this.  Mercator needed a line of latitude to serve as the center-line for his map, the line off of which the rest of the map would scale up to preserve shape.  He picked what was, in his view, the center-line of the world: the equator.  The equator, of course, runs through Africa and South America, but not through Europe (so much for a Eurocentric worldview).  Because these continents were the closest to Mercator's center-line, he was able to portray them with the greatest fidelity of size while maintaining the all-important shape of their coastlines.  But as lands became further away from the equator, to the north or to the south, Mercator was forced to scale up their size in order to prevent their coastlines from becoming distorted and useless for navigation.  As the map moved further and further from the equator, the necessary size distortions became larger and larger, culminating in a massive Greenland (due to its extremely high northerly latitude) and a mindbogglingly huge Antarctica (due to it being at the extreme southern end of the globe).

So the size distortions of the Mercator Projection were clearly not motivated by racism or European ethnocentrism.  Some might argue that, even if these weren't the cartographer's motive they were certainly the effect his size distortions have had on the minds of young children, who see the larger size of northerly white-dominant nations compared to Africa and interpret the map as reinforcing white supremacist worldviews.  To those people I would ask this: how many of these young children grow up to be Inuit supremacists or believe that Antarctica is by far the best and most important place in the world?  If children can recognize that the hugely distorted size of Greenland and Antarctica doesn't make these lands and their inhabitants (or wildlife, in the case of Antarctica) inherently better than everyone else in the world (in their smaller-scaled lands), then surely they can recognize that the relatively small size difference between Europe, the United States, and Africa isn't an endorsement of white supremacy.

But what about that prime meridian, passing problematically right through Europe.  The prime meridian—the designated line 0 in the longitude system—is, as we know, basically arbitrary.  Surely Mercator's decision to place this arbitrary vertical center-line in Europe is a clear reflection of his ethnocentric worldview, right?  Wrong again.  Espousing this view reveals a fundamental ignorance of the history of cartography.  While we today realize that where the longitudinal system begins and ends is an arbitrary decision, cartographers of 16th Century Europe did not.  In fact, they expected that, just like the equator, the prime meridian would turn out to be a global line with a real geophysical significance.  The consensus was that this line was somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, just beyond the shores of Europe.  Christopher Columbus fueled this consensus when he reported that in the mid-Atlantic his compass had pointed to true north (with no deflection due to the north pole and geomagnetic north pole not lining up), but the idea of a prime meridian in that area predated him by over a thousand years.  In the year 150, the Greek mathematician, astronomer, and cartographer Ptolemy produced the Geographia, which became the foundation of all European map-making when it was reprinted by the Italians during the Renaissance.  In it, Ptolemy became the first person to use a near-European Atlantic prime meridian.  As a Greek living in lands far from this line, he wasn't motivated by racism but by practicality: lines of longitude counted west to east with the positional changes of the Moon by which they were mathematically determined, but the mathematics of Ptolemy's day lacked a system for negative numbers.  The zero of the prime meridian was a necessary stopping point for his map, so he pushed it out into the western ocean to the farthest isles he'd heard about.  Over a thousand years later, European cartographers continued to place the prime meridians of their maps in the same general area, revering Ptolemy's legacy and trusting that he'd been on to something after all by placing the 0 longitude line where he did.  Mercator, as hopeful as any of them, followed suit, placing the prime meridian in the same general area as Ptolemy's, running through the Canary Islands, off the coast of Europe and West Africa.  This happened to place both Europe and Africa fairly near to the center of the world, but the reasoning came down to history and the legacy of a Greek cartographer, rather than a Flemish man's ethnocentrism.

But today the prime meridian has shifted east.  It now runs through Greenwich, England.  Surely this is the result of racism?  Well, not really, just an artifact of further history.  You see, eventually, the European cartographers realized that the prime meridian didn't have a geophysical basis, and that Ptolemy's line and every other line before or since had been essentially arbitrary.  The question then became whose arbitrary line would become the most widely used and thus eventually be adopted as the official prime meridian of the world.  The answer was English astronomer Nevil Maskelyne.  The reason wasn't that Nevil was white, but because in the 1760's he published a series of astronomical tables painstakingly charting the position of the Moon for use in navigation—which allowed cartographers and navigators to plot lines of longitude more accurately than ever before.  He placed the prime meridian of his work through Greenwich, England, and due to the importance and influence of his work, it became the officially adopted prime meridian of the world.  His choice of location wasn't entirely arbitrary, though, nor was it motivated by ethnocentrism.  Rather, it was a pragmatic choice: Greenwich was the town where his observatory was located, and thus was the easiest place to start his intensive calculations.  Thus, Greenwich became the prime meridian in his work and, by extension, the prime meridian of the adjusted Mercator Projection maps that would come after him.  No racism was required.

But again, one might argue that even if the location of the prime meridian came about through developments of history and science rather than racial prejudice, it still communicates ethnocentrism to children today.  Again, I would have to ask such people if they think these children will grow up to believe in the inherent superiority of Africans.  The prime meridian passes through Greenwich, England and Europe, but it also passes through Accra, Ghana and Africa, and Africa is a lot closer to the intersection of the equator and the prime meridian—putting it dead center on most world maps.  If the arbitrarily central location of Europe communicates white superiority today, then surely the even more central location of Africa fosters ideas of black supremacy, right?  If we find the latter notion ridiculous, there's no reason we should hold the former in any seriousness either.

Only one complaint remains, the "ethnocentric" notion of putting white-dominant northern nations on top.  Surely this idea holds, as the decision of which direction to put "up" is purely arbitrary, right?  Well, again, history shows this to be false.  Again, the idea of north being "up" goes back to Ptolemy's Geographia.  No one's sure why Ptolemy put north at the top of his maps, but the best guess is that he knew less about sub-Saharan Africa (with which there was little trade, due to the desert's natural barrier) compared to Northern Europe.  There wasn't any good racially biased reason for him to arrange the map like this, since the blacks of central and southern Africa would have been as strange to him as the blond Germanic tribes moving in from the northern reaches of Europe.  He certainly would have had no reason to consider them his superiors.  Of course when the Renaissance came, Ptolemy's work became the cornerstone of cartography in Europe and his every decision was seen as endowed with wisdom on the inner workings of the world, even the ones that later turned out to be arbitrary or made merely for convenience.  Putting north at the top of his maps was one of these decisions, and the discovery of a geomagnetic north pole that attracted the needles of a compass seemed only to cement the brilliance of Ptolemy's map orientation in the minds of Europeans.  Naturally, then, when Mercator made his projection, he did what every other European before (and most of them since) has done and put north at the top of his map—a decision determined by history rather than racial prejudice.

Still people might argue that even if Mercator's intentions were innocent, placing north on the top of the map still communicates the idea of white superiority.  Again, I have to question how familiar these people really are with geography.  Even if north did automatically equate to superiority once it was put at the top of the globe, the real demographics of the world would preclude children coming to the conclusion that white people were the best people.  Rather, they'd decide that some white people (those in Canada, England, Scandinavia, and northern Russia) were pretty good, some were terrible reprobates (those in Australia), and scientists and explorers were sent to Antarctica because they were absolutely the worst people on Earth.  And, of course, they'd be staunch Inuit supremacists, since Inuits are the predominant demographic on the most extreme northern areas of the Mercator Projection (along with the indigenous peoples of extreme northern Siberia, who would also be seen as better than whites).  Since there is no movement among today's youth demonizing Australians and promoting Inuit ethnic superiority, we can safely conclude that children can tell the difference between using North-as-up as a convention and enforcing ethnocentrism.

The real question is, why can't academics tell the difference between conventions of cartography rooted in math and history and the propaganda tools of ethnocentrism?  There the answer may be too much of The West Wing and not enough of real history.  Take the proposed solution: the much-touted Peters Projection which is going to iron out all the "problematic" aspects of the Mercator Projection and become the map of a new, ethnically tolerant and enlightened world.  If the authors of these pieces knew a little more about history and cartography (again not in-depth knowledge, just a very basic overview from a quick fact-check), they'd quickly realize they were being taken for a ride.  The Peters Projection is more appropriately known as the Gall-Peters Projection.  It was first created in 1855 by James Gall, who presented it along with a couple other projections.  It joined the line of many similar equal-area projections which were interesting for their ability to preserve the relative size of the landmasses, but not particularly useful or influential because they introduced such distortions of shape that they were impractical for navigation.  In 1974, however, the map was resurrected by German film-maker and multi-cultural historian Arno Peters, who claimed to have invented it himself and touted it as the most accurate and all-around best map ever made.  Unsurprisingly, the cartographic community saw right through these claims, recognized the map as something they'd rejected as inaccurate and useless more than a hundred years ago, and blew him off.  Peters, however, would not be dissuaded.  He went after folks who were more socially inclined and less map-savvy and tried to win them over with arguments that his map was the best because it showed the continents in the correct relative size, trying to persuade them to buy and use his map instead of the more popular (and more accurate) Mercator Projection maps everyone was using.  And why would they do that?  Because, Peters argued, the Mercator Projection was racist!  That's right, the TV shows, social justice warriors, and academics are all quoting almost verbatim from the sales pitch of a plagiarizing cartographer desperate to get people to buy "his" map.  The worst part is that absolutely none of Peters' claims were true!  The Mercator Projection, as we've seen, isn't racist in the slightest.  The vaunted solution, the Peters Projection didn't really solve any of the Mercator's alleged problems.  Oh, sure, it resized the United States and Europe to be less offensively enlarged—by making them some of the only places in the world were the map was accurate (the map distorts the shapes of landmasses more and more the further they are away from the 45th parallel, which runs through North America and Europe).  It didn't do a thing about any of the other alleged offenses of the Mercator Projection though.  The prime meridian is still running through Greenwich, England, and is dead-center of the map.  North is still up.  If Mercator's map promoted racism, Peters' did nothing to fix it.  And of course, it wasn't even his map in the first place: it was Gall's, and it was just one of a dozen other equal-area map projections doing the exact same thing (and most of them doing it better)!

Why do so many academics, college students, educated social justice warriors, and other supposedly enlightened elites fall for this?  Why are they still falling for it (the latest article I found, in my very brief search, was from June, 2016)?  This is what worries and bothers me more than the pushing of a narrative that everything white people do is subtly racist (which is saying something, because that's a falsehood that bothers me a lot).  These people are supposed to be a part of the best, the brightest, and the most educated in our society.  The one most essential thing they should have picked up in their educational experience is the ability to apply critical thinking and sift through the glut of information at our fingertips today to sort fact from fiction.  If anyone should be expected to have that skill, it is them.  And yet in this area and others, I see such people falling victim to haphazardly constructed propaganda that anyone with access to Google can see through almost immediately.  Even without access to Google, they should have been able to see through this one.  Come on, seriously: this map is Eurocentric because it places Africa in almost the exact center, and white supremacist because it depicts every country with a white majority as being dwarfed by an island overwhelmingly populated by Inuits—how do you not see right through that?!  The only answer I can think of is because they just aren't trying.  Peters' propaganda tells them a story they want to hear, and they just don't critically think about it.  It tells them a story about how all the white people before and around them are and have been racists, but they can fix it and bring about racial harmony by making a series of profoundly easy and basically meaningless choices with no impact other than to declare them as well-intentioned and ill-informed—choices like trading one distorted world map on their wall for another.  Frankly, it's disappointing.