Sacrificial Politics is a system of roles bestowed upon people by those around them, and these roles carry rights, prerogatives, obligations, expectations, and social statuses. For example, with diversity talk we do not just recognize that some people are “different” in the desired way; we do not just include them; and we don’t treat everyone in the room equally. We confer a status on select people as “diverse” and as having the power to bestow “diversity” on the groups they join. Other people get the status of not “diverse.”
You might think of this system of social constructions as a game with four positions and rules for what each position is supposed to do. (i) The Sacred, who are members of an oppressed category, are supposed to represent their category by believing and advocating certain things. (ii) The Pious are the members of the privileged category (e.g., white, male, straight, or cis) who recognize, honor, protect, and avenge the Sacred. (iii) The Profane are the members of the privileged category who are not pious (“profane” just means “outside the temple”). (iv) The Blasphemers commit acts of desecration against the Sacred (sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose) and are marked henceforth as perpetrators of injustice.
It is a long essay on the theme of the religious character of the oppressor-oppressed axis.
Amy Wax follows up with another long essay on how this religion may undermine our legal tradition.
The cult of progressivism dictates that these groups, and any individuals within them, are always victimized by evil attitudes and actions — discrimination, bigotry, racism, sexism — on the part of members of favored groups (mainly white males), or to unfair and unjust societal structures. Regardless of facts, logic, or evidence, any disadvantage or detriments they suffer must be attributed to these causes. To the extent these conditions are legally actionable — and the job of progressivism is to ensure that they are — they must be rectified. Those are the central tenets of the legal department of the cult, which must be indulged without exception. Any aspect or result in the law that is inconsistent with these tenets is designated and banished as evil.
Understanding the dire effects of this brand of progressive wokeness rests on recognizing that the proper operation of our legal system depends on objective, impartial, and intelligible limits on the reach of our laws and the instruments of legal redress, and on respecting longstanding discursive, analytical, and adversarial methods for determining those limits.
To me, these read like very unflattering portrayals of the social justice movement. It is hard to believe that they would pass an ideological Turing test. Yet they strike me as valid.
Molly
Here is my claim: Sacrificial Politics operates psychologically through piety for those who have suffered oppression, an oppression taken to be identity-shaping, authority-bestowing, and sacred-making for members of oppressed categories.
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Front runner grabbing he cheap seats.
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“As a woman,” “As an African American,” or “As a gay person,”
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One of the variously colored genders.
Here at Redneck U we cornered off a section of campus for the religiously diversified, kind of keep them out of the way while meeting the diversity code.
Chris Caldwell’s book apparently argues that the 1964 civil rights act caused all of this. I disagree – I think that this godless sect of Puritanism was the cause of the civil rights act, and is the real enemy of classical liberals today.
Ironically, the real victims of this cult are not the designated oppressors so much as the designated oppressed. To the extent that they buy into their victimhood, they lose their agency. To believe that there is nothing you can do to improve your situation or that of your loved ones is to be profoundly crippled.
+1.
How did being a leftist benefactor of affirmative action cause Barack Obama to lose his agency? Seems to me it vastly increased his agency.
Conservatives would do well to understand that victimhood and affirmative action benefit blacks…that’s why they support it. Getting into a better school than they otherwise would, getting a better job than one otherwise would, winning a government contract one otherwise wouldn’t. These are good things, and clearly blacks want them and support this.
There is a conservative mythos that at some point they will have to “face a reality they are unprepared for”. Why? Can’t you just go from one affirmative action sinecure to another. Institutions are desperate to diversity at every single stage of life.
You might as well complain that being a mediocre noble in the Middle Ages limited ones agency because you weren’t as meritorious as your privileges would indicate…but I didn’t see a lot of nobles volunteering to be peasants.
Moreover, “victimhood” isn’t some state of mind that has to permeate all of ones thoughts and actions. A black person can simultaneously think that the system is rigged against them and they deserve special privilege to counteract that, and think they have agency and control over their lives.
At best you could claim that certain societal level equilibrium based on the current assumptions aren’t optimal for the underclass, many of whom are black, for Bell Curve reasons. But it’s not like individual blacks can much change that, and its not like there are great politically viable solutions for the underclass even without race as an issue.
And does anyone really care about the underclass? “Diversity” is mainly about the talented tenth blacks that can carry themselves at university and fill in diversity slots in the corporate world. It’s an unalloyed good for them, why would they question it.
These people are never going to “see the light” about how getting free power, status, and money is really a curse and not a blessing. And they shouldn’t because they aren’t suckers.
Following the religion metaphor, the successful Sacred are moved into the group of the Pious. Obama can’t claim victim hood precisely because he is so successful, but he does claim to honor and protect the Sacred group. In this context, the Sacred group largely is composed of those who are not successful and that lack of success can be attributed to some sort of oppression: e.g. poor innercity blacks and other minorities, but also every minority group that is not high status among the privileged majority such as transgender etc.
So the Sacred group is hurt to the extent that they accept the narrative of their victim hood. Their world seems antagonistic, unfair and ultimately beyond their control (see learned helplessness.)
Those who are by appearance similar to the Sacred group but actually are in the Pious group do benefit. Obama benefits a lot. Minorities that are capable of succeeding without help but are willing to mouth the pieties do better than they otherwise would. (On average I would guess.)
Now, those like Thomas Sowell, or Clarence Thomas, who seem like they should fit in the Sacred group but disagree with the proclamations of the pious are definitely harmed. They are the apostates, the worst kind of heretics
So the Sacred group believes it will be helped by the Pious, but probably are not, yet will still support it. The Pious definitely benefit, regardless of affiliation, and are probably the strongest supporters. The Blasphemers and apostates are also hurt.
Which is a long way of saying that actual benefits are not a requirement for supporting a religious/political faction. Simply being the Sacred is often enough; only the Pious tie benefits and support, and they don’t need to care much about the Sacred. The Pious merely can purport to speak for the good of the Sacred, and so long as the Sacred agree that without some random oppression they too would be like the Pious that look like them, the Sacred will play along.
E.g. consider Baltimore: Run by Democrats for decades, many of whom are black, with a terrible track record of the treatment of its black citizens. The citizens periodically are so upset about their treatment that they set the city on fire. Yet, they keep voting for the same people who promise heaven but reliably deliver hell. Those Sacred people are worse off, but the Pious have remarkable job security.
One can believe in their own agency and feel they are oppressed. Did not actual oppressed groups believe this? If you said to a Jew that couldn’t get into Harvard in 1920 that this oppressed him, he would believe it, but he wouldn’t stop hustling.
The Sacred in your scenario get something. They get Section 8. They get welfare. They get XYZ. If nothing else, they get RELATIVE STATUS.
If they didn’t get those things, its not like they would suddenly thrive. They are screwed by birth.
And besides, their discount rate on anything is HUGE. Maybe raising Baltimore property tax so high to get those things killed the golden goose, but that takes time. In the absolute short/medium term it did lead to higher revenues, and it did mean more of “dem programs”. Who knows that five years from now brings? Can a low IQ even imagine five years out? Especially when it’s something abstract like government policy.
It’s true that people in Baltimore schools would benefit from better discipline. But they don’t want it bad enough. The social status hit of admitting they need things like Singapore style corporal punishment to even begin to act half human is just too much. You could bring discipline to Baltimore schools in a month if you expelled the bottom 10% and canned anyone that misbehaved. Could the black community stomach that? I doubt it. They want social status more than they want discipline.
That’s what it means to be lumpenproletariats. Unless someone makes you human, you aren’t. Back when making them human meant cheap reliable factory workers, their betters in Baltimore bothered to do it, hard as it was, because there was something in it. There were methodist churches all around my neighborhood taking in the working class and churning out punch clockers. Now, there isn’t. So the only people who bother aren’t people that need them to show up for their shift sober, but people who need them to show at the polling booth drunk.
Dear asdf,
You make some interesting points. I don’t entirely agree with your analysis, but parts of it are persuasive.
I don’t think anyone is screwed from birth, and I’m guessing to some extent that’s just rhetoric on your part.
Immediately I thought of “The Curley Effect” which is also “The Coleman Young” Effect.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w8942
It’s hard to tell what the bottom limit is to decline. In Detroit after Coleman Young, after a while came Kwame Kilpatrick.
The exact reason that Boston (Curley) doesn’t look like Detroit (Coleman Young is an interesting question. It’s beyond the ambit of my impulsive morning commenting.
Dynamic effects and feedback loops matter a lot.
The “exit option” makes a difference, as does external resources.
My understanding is that municipal unions can do more to bankrupt a city than the feckless and violent lumpenproletariat.
It would be interesting to model things with
1. No exit option for the private middle class
2. No racial or ethnic politics
3. No external resources such as federal programs for HUD subsidized housing, Section 8, AFDC, Model Cities, etc.
4. Different ideologies, for example no “White Guilt” or no “Black Power” or no “Social Engineering” from the self-nominating technocratic experts.
What’s interesting is that Singapore has most of those, though perhaps not all and not totally.
P.S.:
It would be helpful if all politicians and managers were required to swear a public oath, “In my official capacity I personally, and my administration collectively, will refuse to subsidize behavior that we don’t like.”
It doesn’t matter whether the model used for a program that can pass a Turing test bears any resemblance to the self-conception of the people whose style of rhetoric it can convincingly mimic while producing accurate predictions of ideas and positions to express.
Indeed, one would expect an accurate underlying psychological model to deviate quite profoundly from the stories people tell each other as the “reasons” behind their beliefs and behaviors, because typically those stories are full of baloney and people constantly deceive each other and themselves about their genuine motives. Hanson’s Elephant in the Brian provides a good overview.
So, certainly this is not the way progressives understand or would describe themselves, however, if one uses it, it’s easy to sound indistinguishable from a Current Year Wokester. Not only that, but one can employ the general logic of the model to make accurate predictions about what comes next for PC, what positions progressives will openly embrace in the near future, even if they themselves don’t know it yet, or would even sincerely deny it. Insightful conservatives good at doing this have learned Poe’s Law the hard way and that they should not make jokes of the form “What’s next, X? Ha ha” where X is some idea which one thinks would be currently universally acknowledged as crazy, but which is in fact a perfectly logical extension of progressive principles.
I am happy to see, after more than a quarter century during which it should have been obvious, increasing numbers of mainstream conservatives abandon the old, erroneous “moral relativists!” model (which took false, rationalizing claims of the nature described above at face value) in favor of a religious model of a fully developed moral system backed by metaphysical constructs and bolstered by pressures of phenomenon of social psychology which characterize religious movements, both the carrots and sticks, for conversion via prestige and intimidation via domination, that is, ostracization and other types of intimidating decentralized enforcement.
Religion is any system that provides narrative structure to life; which would include meaning or purpose (or lack thereof), beginning/origins, parts or roles, and ends. In this sense, progressivism and identity politics must be religious. The question is one of comparative religion.
Molly McGrath writes:
This is getting silly. Software developers (devs) have a saying that “defining the problem is 80% of the solution”. Devs use issue databases where people report perceived problems and the devs responsible for fixing the problems beg for a clear definition and/or reproduction steps. At a certain point, a dev will say “AHA!!!, BUG!!!!” and mark the issue as a bug and this starts the chain of engineering assignments to finish the last 20% leg of the solution. When there is a lag between an issue being marked as BUG and the point it is marked as FIXED, people will report the same bug in the issue database and the frustrated devs will mark each of the issues as DUPLICATE and reference the one issue that represents the BUG (often with snarky remarks due to the uselessness of the duplicate report).
Molly McGrath’s piece is a DUPLICATE. It has zero new value. We have a clear problem definition.
BUG: social justice activists are violating the rights of others based on the false assumptions of Oppression (gender is a social construct, race is a social construct) and Exploitation (large economic profits are theft).
Get on with the FIX and stop creating and commenting on DUPLICATE bug reports.
The “fix” is easy to name but politically impossible to implement: Get government out of the wealth transfer business. Once there’s no longer a political advantage to being a “victim,” people will stop labeling themselves as such.
“The” fix might be a tad bit too focused on the language of the Bug Database analogy; the same sin McGrath makes. Small incremental steps that result in continuous improvement of the situation is realistic. I find it highly unlikely that the pathology that is social justice activism has reached an equilibrium that represents a permanent dystopia, though you might find a fellow traveler in Edgar below.
Rewording the BUG or lamenting that the BUG is unfixable is unproductive.
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer (1951). “Thus, religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics and rhetorical tools.” (quote from Wikipedia.com) There’s always “the devil” – an outsider that is the cause of the group’s problems.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
– T.S. Eliot
Homo sapiens may not exhibit identical physical behavioral sink tendencies as earths norvegicus, but we can infer a similar intellectual/psychological process related to our overcrowded social space. McGrath and Wax both appear to be rationalizing a maladaptive evolutionary predilection for conformity as an adaptation to unprecedented overcrowding, especially in urban areas where social justice morbidity is epidemic and most endemic. The rationalization masks the developing survival advantage of a modular colonial way of life. Welcome to our bryozoan future.
Come on, Edgar, veiled references to rats and colonies of undifferentiated invertebrates doesn’t mask your underlying pessimism about humanity. Thomas Malthus understood exponential growth but his pessimistic view of humanity prevented him from clearly seeing the potential of what eventually became Population Biology. The greatest irony of Malthus is that his famous paper was inked right at the moment that the Industrial Revolution bent the curve of history. In population biology terms, humans are K-Selectors, just like most large mammals, but our K value continues to increase in big jumps based on human innovation. I’m sure there was no shortage of doomsayers waxing eloquently about the unnatural density of London during the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak but this hard limit to K was quickly surpassed.
Humanity is no where near a magical upper limit on K. Assuming that social justice activism is the result of a social limit built into population density borders on numerology.
We can thus imagine a technologically highly advanced society, containing many sorts of complex structures, some of which are much smarter and more intricate than anything that exists today, in which there would nevertheless be a complete absence of any type of being whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. All the kinds of being that we care even remotely about would have vanished.
– Nick Bronstom in The Future of Human Evolution
I may be an idiot but there are plenty of smart people out there who would disagree with the proposition that we have experienced an end to human evolution. Traveling a lot to many different places, some with high density and others with less, it is interesting to try to observe which populations in which locales tend to select for different human characteristics. My thinking in this area took a jolt from reading chapter 4 “Understorey “ in Robert MacFarlane’s Underland, discussing the social life of trees through the “wood wide web.” Population pressures have interesting outcomes in other species and I don’t see how Homo sapiens is necessarily immune. As the earth grows ever more carpeted with solar tiles, it doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable to recognize a bryozoan, “moss animal “ potentiality.
How much evolution has occurred with the eusocial bees? Sometimes the levers change. One could argue that that the anthropecene ended the tyranny of trees. Or maybe the rise of the Antarctic Circumpolar Circulation broke up the terrestrial monopoly of flowering trees and plowed the way for the C4 grasses and sedges. After bipedal apes mastered these new C4 ecosystems they forced the trees to retreat even further. One thing is clear, humans are ecosystem builders/manipulators on par with trees and coral reefs and humanity’s evolutionary levers are closer to those of bees than those of Darwin’s Finches.
In fairness to Haidt, I believe he would say that Liberals were not sacralists; rather that that is a phenomenon of the non-Liberal Left, who are in effect religious fundamentalists.
No, that doesn’t sound like Haidt at all. Haidt has always used “non-liberal” to mean, “not on the left” or “not a progressive”. He uses the word sacred, consistently and constantly, to describe the left’s attitudes and behaviors regarding their absolutist anti-discriminatory ideas, which has been an accurate description for at least three generations.
What Haidt finds is only that liberals don’t perceive themselves in this way, rejecting the religious descriptions of their attitudes and behaviors. Where Haidt goes wrong is to take this self-reporting at face value when convenient to emphasize his pet theory of “instinctive moral impulse diversity”, but then contradicting that view in the next breath by saying they are the equal and opposite equivalents to highly religious groups, with the same basic portfolio and toolkit of values, on average. It could be a Straussian clue, or it could be intellectual malpractice; who can say?
Here’s a good and famous example: When he asked the big meeting at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology nine years ago how many were liberals, 80 percent of them raised their hands. The New York Times covered the story and quoted him as follows:
None of that sounds at all like he’s making any distinctions between different parts of the left, liberal or not-liberal, being sacralist or non-sacralist. If it was ever true, it hasn’t been for our entire adult lives.
On the other hand, the notion of religious sacrifices discussed in the McGrath and Wax seem particularly relevant to the current eco-millenniarian phenomenon. Particularly in Germany where it seems reinforced by deep seated guilt. Hundreds of billions are to be sacrificed there on the eco-alter for no reason, not even within the dogma of the eco-cult. https://m.focus.de/finanzen/boerse/klimaziele-erreichen-deutscher-oekonom-widerspricht-wirtschaftsforschern-kohleausstieg-bringt-nichts_id_11676560.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook-focus-online-finanzen&fbc=facebook-focus-online-finanzen&ts=202002181452&cid=18022020&fbclid=IwAR11riXmzeZZKt69eY_vvSdT6-yAH34FejErewHaurgPGRcm9HnrZyU0hT8
I think McGrath is getting a little confused with regards to Haidt’s system. Haidt’s term isn’t so much “sacred” as she describes, but sanctity vs degradation. McGrath seems to conflate the two, but Haidt uses them very differently. Right off the bat he identifies “sanctity” as being an evolved answer to the “omnivore problem” of what is ok to eat and what isn’t. Pork is not eaten not because pigs are sacred, but because pigs are “unclean” and if you eat pigs you will also become unclean, as evidenced by the fact that you will get sick. It has next to nothing to do with religion, other than they fact that religions tend to be what keeps those habits going these days, and sin is considered to make your soul unclean.
The secular example he gives is the example of the German guy who wanted to pay people to let him kill and eat them. A few people agreed, but most people found the idea horrific and gross. Why? Two consenting adults, who own their bodies, know what was going on etc. But eating people is gross, goes against sanctity, whether you are religious or not.
TL:DR Sanctity is related to sacredness, but it isn’t the same thing. McGrath is going after a straw man with regards to Haidt. A religion doesn’t need to worry about sanctity of any given thing, just as atheists might be pretty serious about sanctity.
Exactly, and many of our swear words involve bodily fluids, excrement, and mucus membranes (I’m not sure if this is from Pinker or Haidt). The piece felt like metaphor wordplay in the same way some people take Kling’s “barbarism” axis too literally and claim Progressives are also against barbarism.