Super interesting. Quite a lot of this reminded me of Harari’s Homo Deus which makes the case that religion was supplanted by something that played essentially the same role — societal glue — namely humanism, the belief in progress, human rights etc.
There are many interesting things to say. But because time is somewhat short, let me just make some relatively scattered comments. What I’ll do is try to suggest how the friend of social justice would respond to your post (while I’m a friend of social justice, these don’t necessarily all reflect my views; I just think it’s a coherent enough response that’s out there to be made).
So, first, I think the friend of social justice might have some reticence about framing it as a crowdsourced religion. First, I wonder if ‘crowdsourced religion’ is the most apt term. What is it for a religion to be crowdsourced? One might think that it’s for its central tenets to be determined in roughly the same way that, say, wikipedia articles, or best answers on stack exchange, are. But are the central tenets of SJ (as I’ll henceforth abbreviate it) crowdsourced? It seems to me — as you yourself point out — that a lot of them come from various branches of what is called theory, critical race theory being one of them. That is, it seems that there are certain foundational texts or texts (Butler for social constructionism, e.g.) rather than it being the product of group deliberation. Of course, if anything this strengthens your position that it’s a religion, but it seems to me to weaken the crowdsourced bit. (A further point on that — arguably the social justice movement (indeed, even some reactions to it) antedates the internet. I’m not an expert, but I recall, for example, Naomi Klein in a chapter of No Logo (1999) argue that she became disillusioned with campus politics precisely because it was overly concerned with representation — such politics (again iirc), that placed lots of emphasis in people of colour, for example, being represented in the media overlooked more foundational class struggle issues that leftist people should be concerned with. Point is, 90s campus politics as least as presented by Klein seem to have some of features of the SJ movement, but can’t have been crowdsourced because it preceded the internet)
Second, and this might be directed more at PLB and others than you — let’s grant SJ is a religion. Is opposition to it also a religion? It would be the sort of negation of SJ — its heretical ideas would the SJ ideas, blasphemy would be speaking against science, and so on. If not, why not? Well, here’s an answer: the anti-PLB position is scientific, and by definition science is not religion. Maybe that answer is acceptable — but I’ll suggest that if you include linguistics, in particular semantics, the study of meaning, then it becomes less clear. But that leads to my third and perhaps most important point:
The relation between SJ and science. SJ of necessity is anti-scientific, you and others seem to say. You quote some people in support of this. Ok — some people might say that. But the strongest version of SJ should, I think, deny some of these anti-scientist claims. In particular, the strongest version, I think, should say the following:
A large part of SJ is concerned not with denying facts about science, but with instead emphasizing some facts about language that have been considerably studied by linguists and (analytic) philosophers. Here is how I think we should interpret a SJ utterance of ‘sex is a social construct’. It’s a recommendation of how we should use ‘sex’ going forward, and in particular it’s a suggestion that it will be politically and socially beneficial to use so use ‘sex’.
Now, it’s a matter of fact that we sometimes use what seem like straightforward utterances to in fact make points about how language should be used. There are many examples of this, but perhaps the clearest is what linguist Larry Horn called — as do many who follow him — ‘metalinguistic negation’. Here is an example:
(American) person 1: are there to-MAY-toes in this salad?
(British) person 2, cheekily: no, but there are to-MA-tos
What’s person 2 saying there? They’re not denying what person 1 is saying. Rather, this is what they’re saying ‘the sentence ‘there are to-MA-tos’ is how one should speak about Solanum lycopersicum, if one wants to obey the principles of pronunciation’ (more examples are here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/negation/#MetNeg).
That is to say, sometimes we use language not to state facts, but to state how language should be used for certain perhaps. Then the claim that ‘sex is a social construct’ be interpreted in that way.
Now, you can deny this — you can say either that’s a bad analysis of the case on its own merits, or that that’s not what SJ people mean (but I would note that some analytic philosophers would be sympathetic to something roughly like the spirit of my proposal, in particular Sally Haslanger). But the point is it’s an analysis grounded in the empirical study of language, and if one were to take that route, the idea that there must be a SJ/science dichotomy needn’t be held. More generally, this area is tough, and I think it’s important to think about what the strongest version of the SJ version should be. By contrast, I would say Singal as quoted concentrates on a weak version of the thesis.
One final point, because I have to stop writing shortly. The stuff about stability is interesting. Personally, the thing I deplore the most about leftist people is their tendency for infighting, and, actually, I think I might be tempted to agree with you that alliances among such people are going to be precarious things (one thing I’m curious about is — why all this infighting? I don’t think stratification-by-privilege can explain it all, because I don’t think it can explain people among the same stratum fighting, which, I can assure you, they do).
Nevertheless, I have a concern about the idea that a system which is built on stratifying people into different tiers is inherently unstable. Is not history replete with this? That people lived in subsistence or subsubsistence levels to finance pyramids seems ridiculous to us, now. In response you might say: well, they did so because they had religion to trick them. But if SJ is a religion, then surely the same thing could be said here — that stability will persist even in the face of stratification by virtue of the fact that SJ is a religion. I think there are other pro-stability responses one can make that don’t assume it’s a religion, but I will stop writing now.
