Moral Cultures

A couple years back, a paper made the rounds through the daily “science” “journalism” blogs. It discussed three types of moral cultures that exist: honor cultures, dignity cultures, and victimhood cultures. In the context of the US, the country started as an honor culture, evolved into a dignity culture in the early 19th century, and is in the process of evolving into a victimhood culture now.

As a background, honor culture is a type of culture where small slights are amplified into grievous insults, and are addressed with direct retribution. For example, a cad insinuates that your wife is his paramour and you slap him across the face with your glove to challenge him to a duel. A dignity culture is a type of culture where small slights are ignored and larger conflicts are elevated to a paternalistic overseer like a court or an administrator. For example, your neighbor builds a fence on your side of the property line, and you take them to court to resolve the issue. Finally, a victimhood culture is a natural outgrowth of the other two. Victimhood culture amplifies small slights into grievous insults (microaggressions) and elevates these small slights to their overseers, usually campus kangaroo courts, social media censors, or advertisers.

Victimhood as Social Currency

Campbell and Manning, in the linked paper, discuss the virtuosity of claiming victimhood status in a victimhood culture:

When the victims publicize microaggressions they call attention to what they see as the deviant behavior of the offenders. In doing so they also call attention to their own  victimization. Indeed, many ways of attracting the attention and sympathy of third parties emphasize or exacerbate the low status of the aggrieved. People portray themselves as oppressed by the powerful – as damaged, disadvantaged, and needy. This is especially evident with various forms of self-harm, such as protest suicides and hunger strikes. Other such gestures include the ancient Roman practice of “squalor,” where the aggrieved party would let his hair grow out, wear shabby clothes, and follow his adversary through the streets, and the Indian practice of “sitting dharna,” where he would sit at his adversary’s door. 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. To the extent that others take their side, they accept this characterization of the conflict, but their adversaries and their partisans might portray the conflict in the opposite terms. This can give rise to what is called “competitive  victimhood,” with both sides arguing that it is they and not their adversaries who have suffered the most and are most deserving of help or most justified in retribution.

. . .

Appeals that emphasize the victimhood status of the aggrieved appear to arise in situations where people rely on authorities to handle their conflicts. Even relatively wealthy or powerful litigants might approach the court by presenting themselves as victims in need of assistance against a bullying adversary (see, e.g., Bryen 2013: Chapter 4). Most state propaganda, on the other hand, is not aimed at superiors or equals, but at subordinates. It seeks to inspire not sympathy, but loyalty, fear, and respect. This is also largely true of the communications between states, particularly those of similar size and military power. Warring states have no central authority to which they might appeal to handle their conflict or deter violence, and so they handle their conflicts directly through aggression and negotiation. In this respect states resemble individuals living in settings where legal authority is weak or absent.

In essence, victims try to amplify the harm done to them, usually in an oppressor-oppressed context, to elicit pity from the authority, which they see as a parental figure. Usually, this results in an escalating comparison of grievances between opposing parties. Sound familiar? It should to all of you parents out there, especially parents of small children. Victimhood culture is the triumph of the tattle tale. One of the big themes of a victimhood culture is “actively retarding the process of growing up.”

Victimhood Culture and Statism

If you read the above excerpt carefully, you’ll notice something predictable, but rather telling. “Appeals that emphasize the victimhood status of the aggrieved appear to arise in situations where people rely on authorities to handle their conflicts.” Victimhood culture is a characteristically authoritarian culture. Campbell and Manning explain:

In sum, microaggression catalogs are a form of social control in which the aggrieved collect and publicize accounts of intercollective offenses, making the case that relatively minor slights are part of a larger pattern of injustice and that those who suffer them are socially marginalized and deserving of sympathy. The phenomenon is sociologically similar to other forms of social control that involve airing grievances to authority figures or the public as a whole, that actively manage social information in a campaign to convince others to intervene, and that emphasize the dominance of the adversary and the victimization of the aggrieved. Insofar as these forms are sociologically similar, they should tend to arise in under similar social conditions. These conditions include a social setting with cultural diversity and relatively high levels of equality, though with the presence of strongly superior third parties such as legal officials and organizational administrators. Furthermore, both social superiors and other third parties are in social locations – such as being distant from both disputants – that facilitate only latent or slow partisanship. Under these conditions, individuals are likely to express grievances about oppression, and aggrieved individuals are likely to depend on the aid of third parties, to cast a wide net in their attempt to find supporters, and to campaign for support by emphasizing their own need against a bullying adversary.

With the growth of authoritarian control factors in our society, whether through government, increasingly invasive social media, pussyfooting corporations, or university echo chambers, the flitting peacock dance of the victim isn’t truly focused on the so called offender, but is primarily signaling their virtue to the relevant authority. The demented offspring of the helicopter parent generation have choppered their way back home to roost. When somebody hurts your fee-fees, you tell your parental figure, and they will tell that nasty bully/teacher/coach/professor/employer/bigot/random internet person/wrongthinker what’s what and buy you an ice cream cone on the way home.

 

Watching It All Play Out In Real Life: #NeverAgain

As we deal with the political fallout of yet another school shooting, we can see exactly how this victimhood culture operates on a very public scale. In this case, the issue wasn’t a microaggression, but a legitimate tragedy. Of course, the backdrop of this entire charade is the fact that an activist authoritarian movement is working with a complicit media and a well-established community organizing infrastructure to ban guns.