Campbell and Manning Respond to Readers’ Comments
[Below is a guest post from Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, in response to my previous blog post on their article]
Jonathan Haidt’s discussion on this blog of our article “Microaggression and Moral Cultures” led to a number of comments here and elsewhere. We are grateful for everyone’s insights and observations, and especially for those that have directed us to some very useful resources (commenter D.M. Ryan was especially helpful, as were the blog posts of Ronald Bailey and Alan Jacobs). Many of the commenters brought up important objections and questions that we’d like to address more thoroughly.
1) Is the culture changing? What’s your evidence?
Some have questioned whether the changes we discuss have actually occurred. These questions tend to deal with our conception of moral culture, our evidence, or both. Commenter Sarah, for example, asks about whether all three cultures we discuss are actually distinct moral cultures, and Steve Ruble wonders “what the objective evidence for an actual shift in the cultural moral code would look like.”
One thing to keep in mind is that our concept of moral culture is just shorthand for identifying clusters of traits that are more prevalent in one setting than another. The “moral cultures” we identify are in that sense both a simplification and a matter of degree. This is true of the honor and dignity cultures identified by previous scholars as well as the victimhood culture we view as divergent from each of these. When we talk about a new moral culture arising, we mean that a cluster of traits has become frequent and prominent enough that we think it ought to be distinguished from the others.
What we are interested in is what people have conflicts about and how they handle them. Certainly many of the things we identify as characteristic of victimhood culture can be seen in the past. Just about every society in history has had people complaining and appealing to third parties. For that matter, just about every society has had violent aggression, direct negotiation, tolerance, avoidance, and so forth. And one can still see honor conflicts and violent retribution in the contemporary United States. But we doubt college students today are as likely to worry about maintaining a reputation for toughness and pugnacity as young men in the antebellum South, and they’re certainly less likely to fight duels. Similarly, we think they are more likely than young people 50 or 60 years ago to complain to the public or to authorities about being hurt by offensive remarks.
These are empirical matters, and perhaps someone will find evidence to counter or to support our claims. In science, a single paper is rarely the last word on any subject, all the more so when the paper involves general theoretical ideas like the principles of conflict and social control employed in our paper.
But for now the evidence we do present – the microaggression complaints, the calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces – seems to us to illustrate well enough the emergence of a fairly distinct kind of moral thinking. Consider too that some very stark examples are too new even to have made it into our article, published just nine months ago. Since then university administrators have begun to heed the cries of the microaggression complainants. The University of California system, for instance, has issued a set of guidelines for faculty listing a number of statements that might be microaggressions, and its regents are now considering a policy guaranteeing the right of everyone in the university community to be free from “expressions of intolerance.” There seems to be a change in social control and moral life afoot.
2) Don’t people other than campus activists complain about microaggressions?
The term “microaggression” comes from the campus left, and it is there that we see victimhood culture at its peak. But we certainly see manifestations of it elsewhere, and many of our readers have, in person or online, pointed to various examples of conservatives, evangelical Christians, or others complaining about minor slights, portraying themselves as oppressed, or in some other way claiming victim status. This is something we point out in our article – that if victimhood confers status, then all sorts of people will want to claim it. But the extent of this is something worth investigating. As Conor Friedersdorf, writing in The Atlantic, asks, “To what extent are non-collegians engaged in policing microaggressions by another name? How are their actions the same as and distinct from Oberlin Microaggressions [a microaggression website he discusses] and its analogs at other campuses?”
One reason microaggression complaints illustrate so well the cultural change from a dignity- to a victimhood-based morality is the name itself. Microaggression complainants differ from others who complain about often unintentional slights or other verbal offenses in that they label these offenses as a kind of “aggression.” Someone asking you a normal question, perhaps inappropriate for the occasion, like “Where are you from?” is thus not friendly and well intentioned, or even awkward and ignorant, but an “aggressor” who has victimized you. It is this terminology, in part, that makes these kinds of complaints so appealing to the complainants and their supporters and at the same time so outrageous to others. What might otherwise be understood as the rudeness or cluelessness of individuals is now cast as a way in which dominant collectivities marginalize and oppress minority groups.
Still, as Alan Jacobs notes, “Friedersdorf’s post encourages us to consider whether these habits of mind are characteristic of society as a whole.” We think they are to some degree, and this is likely to increase. True, there may be a backlash. And yes, it’s always possible social conditions will change in ways that send the course of moral evolution down some other path. We cannot see the future in a crystal ball. But what we do see is that the conditions we claim give rise to a full blown victimhood culture among circles of campus activists are present to lesser degrees elsewhere and show few signs of abating. And it seems that victimhood begets victimhood, as those accused of oppression and privilege find it easiest to defend against such accusations by claiming victimhood themselves. For instance, someone taken to task for being blinded by privilege might be able to silence a critic by labeling his criticism an instance of mansplaining or some other microaggressive offense. And even those most opposed to the morality of victimhood might become similar to their opponents in the course of the conflict, as they increasingly focus on minor and verbal offenses. A complaint about a microaggression complaint is, like the microaggression complaint itself, a complaint about a matter most people would see as trivial.
Under the right social conditions, social behaviors reproduce themselves like a seed crystal dropped into solution. Introduce one violent gang into a lawless setting, and it won’t be long before other gangs form to defend or compete against it. Victimhood culture might self-replicate in similar ways, with the clash of victimhood and dignity giving way to clashes between competing victims.
3) Is the term “victimhood culture” appropriate?
The supporters of microaggression complaints, trigger warnings, and safe spaces commonly object to the term “victimhood culture.” As commenter Andrew puts it, “I don’t think anyone in this emerging set of norms, frameworks, and models for reactivity to speech would describe it as a culture of ‘victimhood.’” Is our use of the term therefore pejorative rather than descriptive? We think it is not, though the question is a fair one. Elsewhere we have noted our own moral preference for dignity culture and commitment to academic freedom, but we don’t find the moral assessment of moral cultures nearly as interesting as the descriptive sociology of moral cultures. As sociologists we are fascinated by alternative moralities such as those of honor and victimhood. Honor is interesting because it is such a peculiar type of status, one associated with a reputation for bravery. So is victimhood, which involves the conferral of a kind of moral status on those designated as victims of oppression. Since this is what best distinguishes this emerging morality from others, we see “victimhood culture” as the most appropriate name.
We do understand why some might see the term as pejorative, though. There is an asymmetry between this term and the terms honor and dignity: People in honor cultures openly refer to their honor and judge it a good thing, people in dignity cultures openly refer to their dignity and judge it a good thing, but people in victimhood cultures would not likewise openly refer to victimhood as a kind of status and judge it a good thing.
We believe this could not be any other way, as there is an inherent tension – a cultural contradiction if you will – in demonizing the privileged and valorizing the oppressed. Supporting one side in a conflict – judging it as virtuous and throwing your weight behind the cause – accords that side a kind of status. The contradiction is that support goes to those who lack privilege, but the ability to attract support is a kind of privilege. It is perhaps then quite difficult – a source of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance – to openly acknowledge this: that a reduction in oppression – however limited in context and extent – comes from being recognized as oppressed. If this is the case, it is not really the term “victimhood culture” that people are objecting to, but the very idea that victimization is increasingly valorized, or that anyone might find it attractive to gain recognition as a victim or member of a disadvantaged group.
It is likewise difficult to admit that privilege can ever be a liability. What Lukianoff and Haidt call “vindictive protectiveness” creates “a culture in which everyone must think twice before they speak up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.” But the advocates of this type of morality seldom acknowledge they are harming anyone at all. This is especially so since, while everyone can have dignity, not everyone can be a victim. As commenter Andrew puts it, the culture “seems to separate people into those-who-harm, those-who-are-harmed, and those-who-protect-from-harm.” And as Jake Was Here adds, in response to Andrew, “Those Who Harm can NEVER become Those Who Are Harmed, and Those Who Are Harmed can NEVER become Those Who Harmed.”
Designating one group as protected implicitly designates others as unprotected. While some advocates justify this inequality as serving the purpose of counterbalancing other systemic inequities, such as the continuing effects of historic oppression, it seems that others have difficulty recognizing that the distinction creates any inequality at all. For example, recall the policy the regents of the University of California are considering – to guarantee a right to be free from verbal expressions of intolerance. The policy also says that it “does not apply to the free exchange of ideas in keeping with the principles of academic freedom and free speech.” But obviously these two things cannot both be true. To say someone has a right to be free from some type of speech means someone else is prohibited from speaking. Which groups fall into which category is the only question. They do not answer that question explicitly, of course, since, as Megan McArdle points out, it’s “hard to establish a rule that only some groups are entitled to be free from offense.” The groups on the losing end “will not take this lying down.” They might even start complaining of their victimization and launching campaigns to sway authority figures and the public to their cause.
Owing to these contradictions, we believe, any accurate description of this moral milieu is bound to offend. As sociologists of morality, though, we must discuss these things as clearly as we can. Others can choose whatever terminology they like, so long as they too try to be clear and descriptively accurate as well. Again, our main purpose is neither to make ethical arguments nor to quibble over terminology. Our concern is with the grievances that people have, how those grievances are handled, and how these things vary across different social settings. It’s an endlessly fascinating topic, and we invite others to join us in exploring it.
I’ll quote a few sections from my post in response to the original paper that elaborates on question #2:
and
oops, the last two paragraphs there were not part of the original piece. They should be presented outside the blockquote, as follows:
“Victim ethics is a phenomena much bigger than university campuses. It is becoming the default mode of political expression in many parts of America far away from Ivory Towers.
P.S. I also point out that close similarity between Manning and Campbell’s explanation for the change and the predictions offered by de Tocqueville in Vol 2, Part IV, ch. 3 (p. 781-783 in the Bevan translation) of Democracy in America. I’m quite curious–the ideas are so similar. Did they influence your own theory?”
To answer your question, we weren’t influenced here by de Tocqueville, but thanks for referring me to it. This sentence from that chapter is especially perceptive: “When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye; whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity: the more complete is this uniformity, the more insupportable does the sight of such a difference become.” This can be seen not just in democracies but in the egalitarian societies of the distant past discussed in anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s book HIERARCHY IN THE FOREST. What we see is that where people are highly equal, they tend to go bananas over the slightest attempt of someone to rise above them. Sociologist Donald Black, in chapters 4 and 8 of his book MORAL TIME, discusses this kind of thing at a higher level of generality. What’s good about the de Tocqueville chapter is that it makes clear that this kind of concern for equality among one’s peers can also exist alongside and even give rise to the increasing power and centralization of government — something we see in the dignity and victimhood cultures.
Thanks also for linking to your post. I’ll read it carefully. I can see that there’s a great deal there that will be extremely helpful.
This diagnosis of a changing culture is correct but it does not explain why it has occurred. Network effects (efficient transport and communication) mean that collaboration is more important than ever. We are more equal today not because of any moral advance but because social distinctions are inconvenient given the technology we have available to us. Even if an individual achieves something for which he is greatly esteemed it is because he has a network of support behind him. ‘Genius’ is today a worthless moniker. Because collaboration is of greater importance and because society is more ‘diverse’, the ability to resolve conflict is increasingly outsourced to a third party (the state). This situation encourages victimhood and victim seeking. What we are witnessing with the microaggressions guff is nothing new, it is the politics of berry pickers.
You highlighted some important points in your response, and it’s good to see you take on the criticisms directly, but I think that you really only gave some of them cursory treatment.
For example::
Why do you single out the specific reputational concerns of toughness and pugnacity? Reputational concerns are hardwired into humans (see Kahan’s work on Identity Protective Cognition). Further, even if we grant those particular reputational concerns special focus (for the sake of argument) your work lacks scientific heft absent quantified, longitudinal data showing tends over time.
The issues that you are shining a light on are part of much larger dynamics related to cultural cognition, motivated reasoning, tribalism, and identity-protective and identity-defensive behaviors. But what empiricalmeasure do you lift these particular issues? from the larger context? My guess is that people have been identifying large-scale societal changes being created by “kids today” since the beginning of civilization – many of which are more a reflection of the biases of those identifying a pattern than the existence of any actual pattern. The control against such criticism lies in an empirical methodology.
As an example, this looks like selective culling of examples so as to reverse engineer in confirming a bias. True, your mention about duels (which seems to me a bit like unhelpful reductio ad absurdum) highlights an obvious change over time, but by the same token, were college students as likely 40 years ago as they are not to walk into a classroom and shoot fellow students and teachers because they feel they’ve been bullied? Again, I think that your definitions are imprecise, and as an academic statement, it’s important for you to define terms objectively.
Along similar lines, you acknowledge the existence of self-victimization in contexts other than college campuses, but I have to wonder (with my intrinsic biases) whether you’re selectively discounting those other examples as being emblematic of a larger phenomenon you’re describing:
For example, what about someone saying to someone else, “Happy Holidays?” Certainly, the self-victimization claimed from that entirely non-aggressive act is evident in our society on a scale that is orders of magnitude greater than complaints about microaggressions on college campuses.
There’s more, but I would be interested in seeing your responses so far.
Well, since it seems I’m not going to get a response, I’ll add a few more comments and move on.
I think of the recent development were Confederate flags were taken down from a Statehouse, in the context of the concept of microagressions. Some 30 years ago, it isn’t beyond reason to think that a strong majority of people flying Confederate flags would say that anyone objecting was just being overly sensitive, that there was on aggression involved, it is merely a wish to honor their tradition. Certainly, such a perspective held sway. But over time that shared perspective changed in balance, and more people came to recognize an aggressive posture in flying the Confederate flag – whether necessarily intended or not.
Is it a bad thing that sensibilities have changed? Is it bad that epithets for homosexuals are no longer generally considered acceptable in public discourse?
So in addition to questioning the assertion that there is some large-scale social evolution afoot (while perhaps there is a difference in amount, or in specifics, I don’t think that there’s a difference in kind in people seeking and leveraging group support for perceived aggressions), I also question what seems to be a facile determination that even if such an evolution were taking place, it is necessarily bad. If there is an increase, I question assumptions about direction of causality. Are people identifying more microagressions because there seems to me more equality, or is there more equality because more people are more sensitive to the impact of microaggressions? Or at least some bilateral causality? And I definitely question some notion that what is seen on campuses is somehow uniquely representative.
We are changing in our society in a variety of more external, and clearly identifiable ways – primarily I’m thinking of social media. If students on college campuses use social media as a communicative tool more so than other segments of society, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are using social media in a way that identifies them as being somehow unique. Maybe they’re just using a tool that’s available more than others. In that sense, it doesn’t mean that there’s some kind of social evolution taking place, just increased use of a tool, that in some 30 or 40 years hence we will see as not an evolution in kind, but an evolution in quality – as we might be inclined to see the development where 30 or 40 years ago it would have been inconceivable that public pressure would lower Confederate flags from statehouses. Perhaps it’s a bit premature to try to identify and describe some massive signal of social evolution?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0
I just heard about this on the radio. It’s an interest example to think of when I read these arguments that what’s taking place on college campuses is uniquely instructive:
In the original post on this blog dedicated to this paper, it is stated:
“Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor – tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all.”
There is actually an exception to this — cases where group honor is attacked. Such as when a gang or a family is insulted, then it is permitted to recruit support from your fellow pack members in order to organize a raid (drive by) on your enemies, to teach them a lesson.
As Pinker notes in his “The Blank Slate” book, cultures of honor were originally the product of tribal societies, where everyone you knew lived within walking distance, everyone would remember who insulted who, and retaliatory practices are a way of honest signaling of your seriousness in not accepting any slights.
Cultures of dignity were the product of their time, larger social units, such as big cities or the nation state, where most people you dealt with were anonymous, and so there would be little sense in taking on the cost of signaling your abilities to people you’d most likely never meet again.
The culture of victimhood is a variation on the culture of honor, made possible by the fact that the Internet has made the world a smaller place. The weak ties of social networks constitute the closest thing to a “pack”, and everything can get personal again. The twitter mob is the most obvious example of this.
As the original article mentioned, this is not the first time people have taken on the status of victims in order to advance their own interests. But this is the first time they have been taken so seriously as to promote policy. This could only be possible in closed ecosystems such as college campuses, where a sort of founder effect took place — a critical mass of people all promoting the same message until they strong-armed the faculty to submit.
I call it a “founder effect” because its tentacles have spread beyond the college campus. Popular progressive outlets on the Internet have taken the cry (such as Gawker, RawStory, BoingBoing, BoredPanda others) and are taking the message to an international scene.
Intel announced a “diversity” Initiative with Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency by pledging a sum of money equal to the GBP of a small nation. GitHub’s CEO removed a ‘Meritocracy’ rug from their offices because it was deemed offensive.
Even South Park touched upon the issue in their new series, starting with S19E01 where a new new principal (P.C. principal — white, college-aged, male), imposes a new draconic order on South Park, bringing it into the „21’st century”.
This is a common slogan on the radical left — that they represent progress and the future, while everyone else is stuck in the past but will inevitably join The Future. Daniel Dennett, in his “Intuition Pumps” book recalls how back in his youth they used to troll Marxists by asking them “if the revolution is inevitable, why are you making all these efforts to make it happen?”.
From the point of view of memes, the current wave of PC is a particularly successful meme that has recruited several human biases to its aid:
– Just-world bias (the belief in karmic justice, that there is something wrong with the world and it needs fixing).
– Partisanship thinking (groupthink) — our group is better than everyone else, our grievances are justified etc.
– Our desire to inflict punishment, as third parties, upon someone who we consider to be “in the wrong”.
– Online disinhibition effect, allowing the twitterati to mob upon their victims.
Victimization is not the end goal, but a means to an end, and the end is for one group to gain dominance over others. Back in the honor culture days, honor was the currency du jour. Nowadays it is feigning victim status.
It is especially troubling that this trend has taken over a part of the “skeptical community”, which was supposed to be all about science and awareness to biases. Well, this new culture claims it has the science all settled on it’s side, while everyone is biased, bigoted, stupid and anti-science, but it uses our entire arsenal of cognitive biases in order to go about its business.
Don’t know if you read these comments Jonathan but this is directly connected to everything else you’ve been talking about in the last few months:
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/647421818081517568
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/647410648079577090
Things have started to get rather scary. Please keep doing what you’re doing. I think a lot of people feel like this is building up to something bad.
Great article, great comments.
Two thoughts about which I would like to know what people think…
1. Could one put shame culture into the analysis. It is not a major part of our Western history, but is certainly a big thing elsewhere, and the frequent use of “shaming” to describe the victimhood process suggests there may be useful associations or linkages, there.
2. It strikes me that much of what happens when people group into a victim class and go after an enemy is from Saul Alinsky’s community organizing playbook, updated with social media… making it personal, using the opponent’s beliefs against him, and organizing not to win a point but to empower a group to crush its opposition and take over its space. Alinsky was a sociologist and viewed what he did as making sociology real, so I don’t think it a stretch to ask if there may be some useful associations, here.
I would be fascinated to know the authors’ interpretation of the complainants’ demands. Student groups are demanding more minority professors, additional funding for student groups, firing of campus police officers, etc. These remedies seem to have only the remotest connection with the alleged offenses in the first place, and probably none would have prevented the offenses. I’m curious as to the social logic behind the content of the protesters’ demands.