Summarizing a paper by two sociologists, he writes,
The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters “moral dependence” and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.
The paper is by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning.
To me, this just sounds like what I call the oppressor-oppressed axis in the three-axes model.* With college campuses dominated by progressives, you would expect them to see things in terms of oppressors and oppressed. But I am not sure that the rest of American culture is going to go this way.
*Well, I’ll be darned. They cite The Three Languages of Politics. They say, though, that non-progressives are starting to use oppressor-oppressed terminology. That may be true (as when one complains that academic life is prejudiced against conservatives), but ultimately I think you have to stick to a different axis to remain a conservative or libertarian.
The authors claim that what preceded our current culture was a culture of individual dignity. Haidt quotes the authors,
Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.
Ron Bailey offers a succinct description of the earlier transition from an honor culture to a dignity culture.
In honor cultures, people (men) maintained their honor by responding to insults, slights, violations of rights by self-help violence. Generally honor cultures exist where the rule of law is weak. In honor cultures, people protected themselves, their families, and property through having a reputation for swift violence. During the 19th century, most Western societies began the moral transition toward dignity cultures in which all citizens were legally endowed with equal rights. In such societies, persons, property, and rights are defended by recourse to third parties, usually courts, police, and so forth, that, if necessary, wield violence on their behalf. Dignity cultures practice tolerance and are much more peaceful than honor cultures.
The “honor culture” reminds me a bit of The Rule of the Clan and Mark Weiner’s view that it is the alternative to a strong state.
I would give the paper the Cowenian caveat: “speculative”
But schools never see themselves as fostering bullying, fomites that cause the vaccine conflicts, benefitting from party and hookup culture (and from the legal issues?), mill village economics, contributing (if not being THE major contributor) to inequality, etc.. do they? Getting to control the narrative is also important.
Btw, with regards to “Generally honor cultures exist where the rule of law is weak,” go look up some of the “hood” pranking videos on youtube. I was just recently marveling (and indeed admiring to some extent) how quickly the people being pranked ratchet up to the edge of violence (and beyond). It is possible that these places are both under and over-policed at at the same time. Incidentally, this is the same for middle and high schools (and elementary schools on certain spectrums) and this is also where this behavior is first encountered and learned.
That’s a good point about weak rule of law, honor culture, and our bad neighborhoods.
It is something so obvious and yet people suspend their disbelief. Strong “government” may have nothing at all to do with strong rule 8f law.
“But why emphasize one’s victimization? Certainly the distinction between offender and victim always has moral significance, lowering the offender’s moral status. In the settings such as those that generate microaggression catalogs, though, where offenders are oppressors and victims are the oppressed, it also raises the moral status of the victims. This only increases the incentive to publicize grievances, and it means aggrieved parties are especially likely to highlight their identity as victims, emphasizing their own suffering and innocence. Their adversaries are privileged and blameworthy, but they themselves are pitiable and blameless.”
Sharp observations. At the risk of coming off as completely sexist, I would posit that the phenomena they’re describing–gossiping, passive-aggressive, back-stabbing, shaming, and appeals to 3rd parties (hey-la, hey-la, my boyfriend’s back)–represents the worst kind of feminine social striving. If an honor culture full of duels, blood-feuds, and vendettas is the ugly, barbarous version of male social interactions, this ‘cry victim and try to sick a mob on my social rivals,’ ala the UVA rape hoax, is the female equivalent. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the increasing sex ratios on college campuses, but it’d be nice if level-headed adults would recognize this behavior for what it is and avoid indulging it rather than actively egging it on, as many campus administrators seem to do.
Most of the intellectual progress in human history took place in a handful of times and places that also emphasized sports as serious but not as serious as war. Males can be acculturated to treat debate as a form of sports with rules about not taking it too personally. Females … the jury is still out.
I like the story of the culture being a function of the strength of the state, and there being perhaps a kind of sweet-spot optimum in between extremes.
Weak State -> Honor Culture of self-help and clannish violence in response to insults to rights and dignity or violations of turf. If it’s more violent, it is because the strength of individuals and clans is both limited and uncertain, creating game-theory-styles incentives for a lot of probing and jockeying of relative strength to establish a new position, with a lot of those gambles turning out to be bad bets and leading to serious injury, just like in the animal world.
Moderately Strong State -> Dignity culture of appeal to the jurisdiction’s magistrate and institutions which have and insist upon a near-monopoly on legal application of coercive force. The state is not quite willing and/or strong enough to push everybody around to micro-manage every conceivably and trivial dispute and conflict, but it’s strength is so great and certain that practically no one things to challenge it physically, or that they can get away with violating the rights of their compatriots, and so violence is significantly reduced.
Extremely Strong State -> Victimhood culture where people psychologically place themselves in the position of helpless children unable to settle their own affairs and in relation to the unchallengeable authoritative father-figure of the state (or other state-like authoritative institution) – “I’m gonna tell Dad!” – and blow every situation of interpersonal friction out of proportion into hysterical melodrama and bring every petty complaint, grievance, slight, and offense to the state for adjudication, which is now in a kind of nanny-tyrannical position of setting extremely fine-grained rules and micromanaging all human intercourse.
“bring every petty complaint, grievance, slight, and offense to the state for adjudication, which is now in a kind of nanny-tyrannical position of setting extremely fine-grained rules and micromanaging all human intercourse.”
The beauty of this for those who profit marginally on these micro-aggressions and remediation transactions and the terror for the rest of us actually trying to get things done is that there is no limit to the minutiae. And they don’t even have to get it right because they can profit on the crime, the remedy, and the never-ending appeals if they do it right.
“They say, though, that non-progressives are starting to use oppressor-oppressed terminology. ”
Use of the terminology doesn’t imply acceptance of the viewpoint. It is a way to force the progressives to live up to their rhetoric. By presenting, say Whites or males, as the oppressed in some context, the non-progressives force the progressives to reflexively accept the logical identifiers or more often deny that the “out” group can be a victim, thus revealing their prejudice. It, also, forces strange newspeak, such as the claim minorities cannot be racist.
Universities could quickly find themselves overrun with a grey goo of micro aggression arbitration, and every instance a potential legal liability. I’m not sure whoever is steering this ship has really thought this through.
Paraphrasing Dr Brown, “where we’re going , we don’t need steering wheels”
Not a university, but a sign of things to come. The use of an old Civil Rights to enforce civil rights for all, not just the former groups.
http://popehat.com/2015/09/09/omg-broad-flexible-plaintiff-friendly-law-used-in-unanticipated-manner/
I wonder if the progressive axis is really a third axis. As I have thought about it, over time, it has started to seem to me that the oppressor-oppressed paradigm is really just a subset of the civilization-barbarism paradigm. That is, it is a form of sectarianism. Out of power, this can look as if it is a paradigm governed by egalitarianism, but in power, where the designation of oppressed and oppressor becomes muddled, or can be controlled by the progressive faction, it is left with just a confusing pre-meditated list of “us” groups vs. “them” groups. What distinction is there between progressivism in power and sectarianism?
Politics is about asking and answering the fundamental question of rival coalitions, “Whose side are you on?”
The languages of politics are ways to ideologically frame, rank, and cast moral judgments on social conditions that use ones commitment to a particular value system as a proxy for loyalty to a particular coalition.
For progressives the metric of judgment is oppression, and the answer to “Whose side are you on?” is always, “With the oppressed, against the oppressors,” (i.e. with us, the good guys, and against them, the bad guys) and of course ‘we’ are always the good guys, so can’t be oppressors by definition.
Their preferred forms of government differ, aristocracy, democracy, plutocracy.
By intervention into natural property rights you think it is democracy when you are causing plutocracy.
Visit any editorial or blog post on white privilege and you’ll see white people posting in the comments about how hard *they’ve* had it.
There’s no shame in having a mother who was at least 20 when you were born or a dad who you actually know.
Maybe giving my children a father is depleting the supply for others.
This is one of the better satirical sites that pokes fun at people who live on the oppressor/oppressed axis: http://everythingsaproblem.tumblr.com Pithy and to the point.