Moral Cultures 2: Victimhood
Time to confess your privilege
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This is Part 2 in a series. In case you missed it, here’s Part 1: Honor and Dignity.
In the last installment, we covered the differences between two moral cultures: dignity culture and honor culture. Each differs in the virtues and vices it emphasizes, in the sorts of justice it prescribes, and in the types of conflict behavior it tends to generate. In short, dignity cultures promote restraint and tolerance for minor slights, and settlement by third party for major ones. Honor cultures promote high sensitivity to slight — such that even minor and accidental slights demand serious response — and unilateral aggression — such that offended people eschew settlement in favor of violence.
New Behaviors
Bradley Campbell and I were familiar with the distinction between honor and dignity culture from our work on conflict and violence. Beginning around 2014, we took interest in a few patterns of conflict that did not seem to neatly fit into either culture. These patterns seemed to us to be on the rise. They included:
Microaggression complaints. Microaggressions are said to be small, fleeting, often unintentional slights that contribute to the oppression of minority groups. For example, a document used by the University of California says that asking an Asian- or Latino-American where they are from would be a microaggression, since it implies they are not true Americans, as would the statement that “America is a melting pot,” since it implies that minorities should assimilate. We found it significant that even “micro” offenses merited public awareness and calls for action, and that they were now labeled with the term “aggression,” which connotes intentional hostility and is generally associated with more severe offenses.
While the concept itself had been around for decades, it has rapidly gained currency in recent years. After initially gaining attention on blogs and websites it has become common in academia and the corporate world, where employees and students might be made to attend workshops educating them on microaggressions and how to avoid them. We have also seen the popularization of new terms (“cultural appropriation,” “mansplaining,” “heteronormativity”) to refer to particular kinds of minor offense. Indeed, it seems like new categories of misconduct are created every year, and university administrations are increasingly involved in policing them.
Hate crime hoaxes. False accusations are a recurring aspect of conflict, and in the modern world people sometimes falsely claim to have been victimized by strangers because of their race, religion, or sexuality. Sometimes this is an attempt to call attention to a problem, aiming to mobilize action against it. For example, an Asian-American Oberlin College student who wrote “Death to Chinks” and other anti-Asian slurs on a campus monument “announced she had written the graffiti to make manifest the racism she thought was inherent to the monument.” Likewise, when two black students at Duke University admitted they had hung a black baby doll from a tree, they said they had done it to “move the masses.”
In other cases, where the hate crime hoaxers present themselves as the victim of the crime, they may also be trying to gain individual attention and sympathy. For example, Empire actor Jussie Smollett, recently convicted of staging an apparent racist and homophobic attack against himself, has been accused of orchestrating the hoax to attract “publicity and a career boost.” The Smollett hoax illustrates something else we found interesting about many of these cases. It seemed implausible from the beginning that two white Trump supporters wearing “Make America Great Again Hats” just happened upon Smollett late at night in Chicago, in below-freezing weather, that they recognized him, and that they also happened to have bleach with them to pour on him and a noose to tie around his neck. Yet many observers were strangely credulous, or at least hesitant to question a story that seemed plainly fishy.
What was interesting was that so many people would wish to portray themselves as victims of oppression, even to the point of inventing episodes whole cloth, and that others would be so ready to take their side without question.
Calls for trigger warnings. “Trigger warnings” were based on the idea that words or images can trigger symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. By 2014 students and administrators on college campuses were calling for such warnings regarding course content. While such warnings were often requested for material that graphically depicted severe violence, some claim mere discussion of violence, or of any other sort of unpleasant thing, should count.
At Oberlin College, for example, suggested guidelines for faculty stated that trigger warnings should extend to any material involving “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.” And faculty at the University of Edinburgh, the London School of Economics, and elsewhere provide warnings for subjects such as “Christianity, popular culture, history, forensic science, photography, politics and law.” It seemed there was no limit to the sort of things that might cause serious harm. Have people always been in such need of protection?
Demands for censorship. Some move beyond asking for warnings for triggering content and seek to banish it entirely. In recent years conservative speakers and others who criticize the left — Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Alice Dreger, and others — have been targeted by campus activists who demand – sometimes successfully – that they be disinvited or banned from speaking. As with the calls for trigger warnings, activists say that the speakers and their ideas would cause trauma or threaten safety. The campus must be a safe space free of such things. Similar language and logic is used to demand the removal of old statues, or even rocks, the renaming of old buildings, and to object to various other words and images.
Censorship isn’t new, of course, but it seemed strange that college students, once fabled for flaunting taboos and challenging restrictions, were so active in demanding authority do more to regulate speech. Even more interesting that many recent demands to forbid unwanted speech are couched in language of harm. Notably, words and sights of various kinds were being reclassified as violent oppression, a literal threat to safety. It was the job of the university administration to keep the beleaguered and traumatized students safe from such violence.
The Common Thread
We see all these things as being part of a larger pattern. Consider the similarities. Most involve a relatively high sensitivity to slight, such that even unintentional verbal slights are a matter for public complaint, collective protest, and official sanctions. There is also a tendency to advertise victimization by cataloguing complaints in public forums, to emphasize or exaggerate victimization by rebranding awkwardness as aggression or words as violence, and – in the case of hate crime hoaxes – a tendency to fabricate victimization whole cloth.
If this be a pattern, it is one that differs from dignity culture. Scholars often contrast dignity culture’s emphasis on tolerance and restraint with honor culture’s high sensitivity to slight. Scholars will point to the saying, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” as a moral instruction that is distinctive of dignity culture. It shows a clear demarcation between physical or material damage and mere words, and espouses the ideal of not letting insults and slights get under one’s skin. It is an ideal that would be alien to an honor culture, where careless words demand a forceful response. In this way the complaints about microaggressions, and the rebranding of words and images traumatic or violent, seemed more similar to honor culture than to dignity culture.
On the other hand, honor culture revolves around violent retaliation and projecting an image of toughness. While the honorable might be quick to take offense, they tend not to handle offenses through public complaint, or by appealing to authorities to censor or punish those they dislike. They tend to respond by unilateral aggression. In their tendency to rely on authorities or public opinion at large, those posting lists of microaggressions, calling for censorship, or staging hoaxes were different from the honorable.
These behaviors also differed from expressions of honor in that they emphasized the victimization, neediness, and fragility of the complainant. Hate crime hoaxes went so far as to manufacture victimization, their perpetrators claiming to be the target of aggression that they did not respond to in kind — something that would be shameful rather than sympathetic in an honor culture.
In short, we thought the behaviors listed above formed a coherent pattern, and one that differed enough from honor and dignity cultures that it deserved to be classed on its own. But what to call it?
Choosing a Label
Aye, there’s the rub. People treat words and labels as if they were a form of magic. And maybe sometimes they are, as the average person seems to have a though process that is mostly a process of moral association.
But I digress. In many ways this new culture seemed to opposite of honor culture, where victimization was a shameful thing to be hidden and people boasted of their strength and prowess. What we see in the examples listed above are behaviors that advertise, emphasize, exaggerate, or fabricate victimization. In this new moral culture, victimhood, weakness, fragility – these were things to be proclaimed. The term victimhood culture immediately suggested itself.
We had some internal debate over the label — it sounded conservative, which is about the worst thing one can possibly be in the field of sociology, where the Marxist wing long ago succeeded in tarring Kennedy-voting, Civil Rights supporting Talcott Parsons as some sort of arch-reactionary.
But the term just worked too well in helping draw comparisons with honor and dignity cultures. Both of those were named for a kind of moral status or worth; one rooted in public reputation for toughness, the other said to be universal and inalienable. And did it not seem that victimhood was a kind of moral worth in this culture?
The examples we considered certainly seemed to display a culture in which the distinction between the marginalized and the privileged, the oppressed and the oppressor, had an exaggerated importance. And the victimized or marginalized were certainly viewed as deserving more concern and consideration than those with power and privilege. Indeed, we saw people being asked to confess their “privilege” as if it were a great vice, much like how cowardice was the chief vice in honor culture.
If victimhood were not a virtue, why would people condemn its opposite? And why would people be so quick to emphasize their own oppression, let alone fabricate it with hoaxes?
We stuck with the term. No doubt it has been the source of much attention to our work, whether positive or negative. Both fans and critics often take it as a pejorative, though — whatever our opinions on the behaviors we describe — we did not intend it as such.
But here again: Names have magic for people. Perhaps for this reason so many people have suggested their own for whatever moral and cultural shift we’ve experienced in the past decade. Other popular terms include “cancel culture,” “safety culture,” “successor ideology,” and the “Great Awokening” or “wokeness.” Of these, wokeness appears to be the most common these days. Even I now default to using it in everyday conversation, rather than the term I helped coin.
For analytical purposes, though, I still believe victimhood culture is more useful, partly because it is rooted in the broader concept of moral culture, and so recognizes the moral nature of the phenomena we describe. We are talking here about virtue and vice, complaint and condemnation, calls for justice and punishment.. And because we developed the concept in comparison to honor and dignity cultures, it facilitates our understanding and explaining differences. If you’re going to characterize what a cultural moment is, you ought to also be able to say what it is not, and how these other things differ. What does something look like if it’s not a cancel culture or a safety culture? How do we get from one kind of culture to another?
Thus for the remainder of this series I’ll persist in talking about victimhood culture. To keep things clear, here’s a formal definition: Victimhood culture is one characterized by 1) high sensitivity to slight, 2) a strong moral concern with oppression as deviance, and 3) a tendency to handle grievances by appeal to third parties, leading to 4) a tendency to cultivate an image of being a victim in need of help.
As with anything else in the study of humanity, we have here an ideal type, something that exists as a matter of degree. What Campbell and I argued is that in various parts of the modern West, the degree of these things has increased drastically. This is the reason so many are scrambling to coin new terms to characterize contemporary culture, and why so many others are angered by them. In a period of rapid moral change people seek some way of making sense of it all. But when the changes involved heightened levels of moral sensitivity and public complaint, few words and ideas are safe.
For more on moral cultures, see the other entries in this series. Beyond these first two posts it doesn’t matter what order you read them in.
The Morality of Star Trek TNG (Paid subscribers only)
Who Counts as a Victim? (Paid subscribers only)
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