This week, Professor Gad Saad explained to Breitbart News why it can be so difficult to intellectually engage social justice warriors — progressive politics has become their religion.
As a part of an exclusive and wide-ranging conversation with Breitbart News, Professor Gad Saad of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, explained why social justice politics is designed to invite a religious-like adherence.
“…It is a form of quasi-religious belief. The commonality between social justice quasi-religion and actual religion is that they both start off with revealed truths,” Saad began. “And these revealed truths are the starting points of their belief system. And those beliefs cannot be attacked or questioned. That’s why they are in the realm of faith and not evidence.”
Saad explained that a strict adherent to social justice politics will not be swayed by even the strongest of arguments. Why? Because social justice warriors refuse to allow intellectual criticism of their “revealed truths.”
“Even scientific truths are ‘provisional.’ They are currently correct but tomorrow they might be superseded,” Saad said. “When it comes to social justice, it doesn’t operate that way. That’s why I call them all part of this cancerous, virus of the human mind; postmodernism, radical feminism, identity politics, cultural and moral relativism. They are revealed truths. You start off with a premise and there is no amount of evidence that I can offer you that can alter your thinking. That’s why, in that sense, they are quasi-religious.”
Heterodox Academy founder Jonathan Haidt uses the term “ring of sacredness” to refer to a group or person’s set of ideas that they won’t allow to be challenged.
It’s just a fact that as humans, we are really good at making something sacred. Maybe it’s a rock, tree … book, a person…We make something sacred, we worship it, circle around it, often literally circling. … When you do that, you bind yourself together, you trust each other, you have a shared sacred object and you go forth into battle…
Haidt explained the “ring of sacredness” in the context of social justice politics.
There is no nuance, you cannot trade off any other goods with it. So if you organize around fighting racism, fighting homophobia, fighting sexism, again all good things, but when they become sacred, when they become essentially objects of worship, fundamentalist religion, then when someone comes to class, someone comes to your campus, and they say the rape culture is exaggerated, they have committed blasphemy.
So how does Professor Saad avoided developing his own “ring of sacredness?”
“Even the most incontrovertible evidence that I could give you, like what I just described [regarding men’s evolved preference for the hourglass figure in women], if new data were to come up — that made me question my evidence — then if I’m an honest scientist, I have to go back to the drawing board,” Saad argued.
On Wednesday, Breitbart News published Professor Saad’s advice for parents that are considering to send their children to progressive colleges and universities.