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Campbell and Manning hint at a more important factor when they highlight the growing power of university administration and the weakening of social ties among students. Here the college campus is a microcosm of social changes happening at every level of American society. Not every American must deal with an ever distant university administration, but all are further and further removed from the levers of power. This story is a well known one: over the last five decades American social capital has fallen apart. Americans are less likely to volunteer, participate in local political parties or caucuses, join civic, religious, or self improvement associations, attend church, have group hobbies, vote, read local newspapers, organize neighborhood gatherings, play cards, spend time on social visits, or have as many friends now as they did in 1960.
At the same time many organizations which once gave average men and women the chance to work together or serve in local leadership roles disappeared–or have been consolidated to heights far beyond the reach of the average citizen. There are fewer school boards and municipal governments now than there in the 1950s, despite the doubling of America’s population since then. National charities are more likely to ask their members for money than time; lobbying has replaced supporting local chapters as the main activity of most national activists. The federal government assumes powers traditionally reserved to local and state governments. Local businesses have been pushed out of existence by international conglomerates. [11] The businesses, associations, congregations, and clubs that once made up American society are gone. America has been atomized; her citizens live alone, connected but weakly one to another. Arrayed against each is a set of vast, impersonal bureaucracies that cannot be controlled, only appealed to.
A “Culture of Victimhood” is a perfectly natural response to this shift in the distribution of power. Remember that the central purpose of moral cultures is to help resolve or deter disputes. Dignity cultures provide a moral code to regulate disputes among equals from the same community. They also help individuals in a community–citizens–organize to protect their joint interests. 21st century America has lost this ability to organize and solve problems at the local level. The most effective way to resolve disputes is appeal to the powerful third parties: corporations, the federal government, or the great mass of people weakly connected by social media. The easiest way to earn the sympathy of these powers is to be the unambiguous victim in the dispute.
* In a world where anyone is to be destroyed for saying the mildest criticism of homos, this kind of PC craziness is to be expected.
We can’t even trust the media.
It took citizen journalists to take down the UVA rape hoax since the media establishment wouldn’t do it.
* Jonathan Haidt “Where microaggressions really come from: A sociological account”
… We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.
Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind.
… 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.”
* We are all caregivers to black society, 24/7. And our #1 obligation, in addition to paying the bills, is to protect their fragile psyches from outward manifestations of white contempt. This is why James Watson had to be exiled.
* On the other hand the ideological shift makes some sense, and goes like this:
a) Title IX (and similar) demands gender equality.
b) Gender equality cannot be achieved if women (call it, a class of humans) feel “threatened”, “oppressed” etc. by some other class(es) of humans.
c) So we get “safe spaces”, special departments, rape accusations believed at the drop of a hat, Star Chamber proceedings including expulsions for sexual assault accusations, suspension of ordinary rule of law for the sake of non-compliance with Title IX, etc. etc. etc.
d) What’s happening right now is that this entire conceptual universe has been coopted by Persons of Color.
Why I don’t think it will work:
1) The Title IX Mattress Girl types are after all the children of parents who are paying their tuition. I would bet that most of these POC students (who in all likelihood are a distinct minority) are on diversity scholarships of one kind or another. This doesn’t mean they aren’t bright, it means that they probably aren’t paying for their education.
2) Because 50% of the faculty, staff, and student body in any school will share the same gender, so accusations of non-representation will not fly when these concepts are applied to women. On the other hand, when used by POC, there is an automatic demand for reconstituting faculty, staff, student body, and curriculum on racial, ethnic, sexual performance lines.
3) I can imagine a lot of young co-eds going to a “take back the night” rally or going on a “slut walk”. It gives them a chance to dress up sexy for a political purpose, and maybe have a couple of beers with some hot looking guys. However, the majority of the people involved in these kinds of protests seem to be terminal lecturer types from Occupy Wall Street, not good looking, not sexy, and not fun. The Redditt clip of the young Asian lesbian who wants to have sex with women from different continents and by the way black people can be racist too is just about the most boring clip I have ever seen. How can anyone even attend such a rally?
I don’t really know how this will shake out but I expect the fever will subside before the Christmas holidays. It’s just amazingly stupid and I feel sorry for anyone who was too timid to leave academia and has to suck up to this sh*t on a daily basis.
* I’m sure all this publicity is just going to do wonders for Mizzou’s enrollment numbers next fall.
Seriously though, it’s time to cut off the public education system, from K-12 to college and beyond, from its sources of funding and legitimacy. Every parent should pull their children out of public education as soon as possible, and should not by any means pay them any money.
The culture also needs to get it out of its collective head that college is a sure path to success and prosperity. That hasn’t actually been true for several years now, especially since grade inflation and degree inflation have rendered college education basically worthless in many respects. A majority of college students today cannot really benefit from a higher education and have no business being there, gumming up the works for the top few percentage points of people who actually ought to be engineers, jurists, and professional scholars. Our society is facing a disjunctive decision here: Either a college degree has to mean something again (i.e., the possession of one has to guarantee that the bearer has met the highest standards of intellectual excellence) or it needs to stop being awarded, touted, and pursued.
The sub-prime bubble in housing blew up relatively quickly and took a good portion of the global economy with it, but the sub-prime bubble in education has been brewing for forty years, is many times bigger, and much more multifaceted. If the current generation of student protesters are successful in their demands for debt forgiveness or free education, not only will the financial system implode, but the whole transmission mechanism from childhood to productive adulthood (which is currently embodied, however dubiously, by multiple years of public “education”) will be irreparably broken. That would certainly be a good thing in the long run. I would love to see a return to apprenticeships, trade schools, guild systems, and board certifications for most professions currently requiring a degree, while colleges and universities can revert to their natural role as repositories of the highest intellectual traditions presided over by incurable dons, catering to the uniquely talented or the wealthy. However, the short-term pain will be immense.
Nevertheless, it’s all inevitable, and all deserved, so we might as well get on with it.
* Commenter Alec Leamas writes:
The working theory is that the students are of a generation raised by helicopter in a therapeutic culture – in shorthand, they lack the very basic coping skills that most everyone in generations previous developed as of course. Rather than “walking off” a skinned knee or saying “sticks and stones” in response to a bully’s insult, they’re acculturated to appeal to authority for attention, protection, and justice (revenge).
At the same time, overt racial and other discrimination and expressions thereof having receded, a need arose to find racial or sexist offense in innocuous statements and neutral acts for the Left to maintain fuel for its resentment politics – see, for example, the theories of “privilege” and “micro-agressions.” (Putting those words in quotes is likely an expression of my “privilege” while also serving as a “micro-agression.”)
Because they’ve been so acculturated to therapy and therapeutic talk, the political proselytizing by the Left works as a sort of reverse therapy by making them less psychologically stable. Psychological therapy is supposed to make one less sensitive to irrational fears and better able to process real traumas, but these young people have been made more sensitive to the vagaries of ordinary life and less able to process perceived traumas. They then appeal to authority to eliminate those things that they unreasonably perceive as threats.
The “safe space” gambit I have understood to be a legal gambit pioneered by the feminists. My understanding is that threats to student safety require a certain prescribed response under Title IX, and therefore casting disagreement and a desire to censor opinions and speakers they don’t like as “threats to safety” precipitate the prescribed responses (at least in an abundance of legal caution to avoid sanctions up to and including loss of Federal funding). So, in effect, the feminists figured out that they could use language about “safety” to hold the gun of Federal funding to the head of the University to extort from it administrative action and censoring that they would not be able to accomplish by honest means.
For example, the student chapter of the Traditional Nice Guys invites a speaker who believes that women who want to bear children should get married (to men!) before the age of 25 in order to assure that they’ll have relatively easy, safe pregnancies. The speaker cites medical literature about women’s years of peak fertility, economic studies about the stability of two parent families, longitudinal studies about the outcomes of children of intact families, and the rest – the sort of thing from which intellectuals and academics form arguments. The campus feminists obviously don’t want this sort of thing said in public – not because it’s untrue, but rather because their worldview has a particular weakness in dealing with matters which are true. So they get together and claim that the content of the speech makes them feel unsafe insofar as they’re women on campus and the obvious implication of the speaker’s comments is that they don’t belong on campus but rather at home and someone might hear the speaker and use violence to make them get married and pregnant and off campus.
To add some spice, the Lesbians interpret the exhortation to marry men as “othering” and “marginalization” which is a form of “erasure” of them and their experiences and a form of “verbal violence” every bit as real violence as a baseball bat to the skull while being called a dyke.
Of course this is total and complete nonsense, however because the complaint is about “safety” and “violence” rather than disagreement, the University has to do something. The easiest thing is to avoid the whole affair by rescinding the invitation to the speaker.
Second to that is to require the inviting student organization to provide from its funds the cost of additional security or to claim that anticipated protests will exceed the capacity of the venue, thereby leaving the event without the planned venue.
I think what we’re seeing are show trials of the reigning Trotskyites by emergent Stalinists. The Leftists in administration are being put on trial for not being pure enough, not being sufficiently enthusiastic in their Leftism, and not abridging the rights of the enemy with the requisite alacrity and prejudice. Once accused, denial is proof of guilt, and admission is also proof of guilt.
We’d like to think that the Left is somehow losing power in this transaction, when the ultimate outcome will be replacing the sort of comfortable hard Left academic ministerial types with more fervent activists and additional administrative commissars to oversee academic and campus affairs. The old guard was constrained – at least in a perfunctory way – with maintaining a facade of academic freedom, free inquiry, and conformity with laws and conventions guaranteeing free thought and expression. Their replacements will not be – their only allegiance is to the cause.
