Grief, Status, and Modernity
One of the most peculiar things about the modern world is how we jockey for status by making competing claims to grief and victimization. Many advocacy groups in Washington devote as much energy and ink to advertising Really Mean things their opponents have said about them as they do to substantive arguments for the policies they support.
The Council on American Islamic Relations energetically highlights and sometimes exaggerates claims of victimization in the United States, perhaps more energetically than it actually contributes to decisions about future policy directions. And the reflex obviously transcends political boundaries. Sarah Palin’s very successful political brand is largely based around her (not entirely untrue) claims that she is misunderstood and hated by prejudiced and powerful people in the media, academe, and big cities -- and her popularity largely comes from people who identify with her because of that persecution. (Remember the “I’m anti-anti-Palin” meme.) As a journalist at a conservative outlet, I always know that the pieces I am assigned about conservatives who have been wronged will always get hundreds of “likes,” get tweeted and re-tweeted, while a more difficult piece I am assigned that might produce a useful policy recommendation might get ignored. (One obvious difference between liberals and conservatives is that whereas conservatives incorporate aggrieved sentiments into their internal rhetoric and politics they don’t make it into the basis for policy as much as liberals do.) This is, moreover, not a strictly political phenomenon. Ask any college admissions officer -- high-schoolers have learned from our culture that the way to make themselves worthy is to advertise the persecutions to which they been subject. (None of this is to deny that there are real griefs all around, or to suggest a lack of sympathy for those who really do experience them.)
Our political rhetoric is occupied by ad hominem of a very weird sort. The old ad hominem distracted from the argument itself by redirecting attention to the man (the other dialectician) and his allegedly poor character; today we distract from the argument itself and bring it back again to a man (ourselves) and our ill repute (the bad things that have been said of us).
It was not, I think, always this way. In ancient literature, receiving an insult is a source of shame, even if the affront was undeserved. The insulted would have tried to stop the spread of word of it, while perhaps settling the slight privately. Now when we are insulted, we talk about it to everyone but the insulter.
Friedrich Nietzsche would attribute our valorization of victimhood as a source of status to Christianity, but this is not likely totally correct -- surely we were once both more Christian and less aggrieved?
Are there any superior intellectual or cultural historians (maybe even social psychologists) who can explain this for me?
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Nov '10
Re: Grief, Status, and Modernity
Isn't it a natural consequence of statism?
We have been institutionally trained to appeal to a higher earthly power, the government, to settle all our scores for us- and not merely when we are victims of human injustice (criminal exploitation), but also when we are victims of cosmic injustice (bad luck).
So we all eagerly seek the government's solicitude. Yet we always do so in zero-sum game with other supplicants. How then do we compete successfully? Simple: by whinging loudest.
For its part, the government then seeks re-election by pandering to such whinging. Hence, a positive feedback loop develops becoming culturally prevalent. This is an essentially maternal psychodynamic writ large--and one not inappropriate between children and parents. It character in adults, however, is to elevate sentiment over reason, and indulgence over fortitude.
I would suggest, nonetheless, a qualification: whereas Liberals mostly whinge, Conservatives mostly sulk.
May '10
Re: Grief, Status, and Modernity
Well if everyone likes Sarah because she's hacked on then the world must love Hitler.
CAIR has indeed foolishly (or perhaps, thankfully) adapted victimology as a method to blame everyone else to achieve a political goal. The racial pimp crowd has been doing so quite successfully for years now, yet those of us who know better call them "whiners". This goes for high school students, too. We don't call Sarah a whiner because she does not ask for redress, only speaking up in defense.
We talk to everyone but the insulter because we've become non-confrontational. Your ancient literature probably mentions a few incidents of knives to the back, foils to the belly, or more recently a pistol ball — ask Hamilton.
The element I believe you have overlooked in your analysis is defense of honor.
Jul '10
Re: Grief, Status, and Modernity
Aodhan & Cal made good points.
I'd add that at least some of it is probably due to the relative ease of our existence. When the basics come easily, I'd guess that lots of folks look for reasons to claim a hardscrabble life. So it often becomes: those weasels are out to hose me. Add in the American love of the underdog and virtue via being targeted makes some sense.
Nov '10
Re: Grief, Status, and Modernity
Human being's sense of honor (sensitivity to being insulted) is something that is ineliminable--much as modern natural science and psychology have no use for "honor" and try to eliminate it.
With our culture steeped in a sort of scientism--i.e., few people today actually believe in souls; "consciousness" and "self" replace "soul"--what fills the void of meaning but things like multicultural education and "self-esteem"? Self-esteem doesn't have to be earned. Ergo, virtually no one today--except mainly conservatives (e.g., Paul Rahe's pithy/wise recent comment)--speaks of character anymore.
Ultimately the issue you're addressing has to do with the growth of identity* politics and authenticity.
As Harvey Mansfield puts it:
"In our age of self-expression, the worst accusation you can face is being unfaithful to yourself [i.e., to be inauthentic]. That is why personal attack, always a danger in a democracy, so often today replaces serious argument about principle."
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* Everyone is wrapped up in their "identity." The word is not as in logic (i..e, one's name; one's dog-tags, etc.) but rather is coterminous with history and projection of will.
Edited on Jun 1, 2011 at 7:01pmNov '10
Re: Grief, Status, and Modernity
To amplify on what I said re identity as coterminous with history and projection of will, consider Mansfield's formulation in his brilliant essay "Self-Interest Rightly Understood" (and perhaps Mansfield is one of the intellectuals you might consult to answer the very interesting questions you raise):
"There is a marked contrast between self-interest and 'identity' spoken of today. Identity must be sought; one must 'find oneself.' Identity is not given by nature but is partly created, partly fated. [I.e., creation and fate are both phenomena of historical will. Mansfield's linking this phenomena with identity is something I take him to be getting from Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche]. But the notion of identity gives rise to a new, expanded, and corrupted understanding of interest shown in the way we say of many diverse things that they are 'interesting.' 'Interesting people' in this sense are precisely lacking in a focus on self-interest. We praise them because they are not always busy or confined to business. Today, as a long-term consequence of Rousseau's critique and its truth, the bourgeois virtues surrounding self-interest carry with them their own antibourgeois critique. Now, isn't that interesting?"
Nov '10
Re: Grief, Status, and Modernity
And as a further gloss on the foregoing excerpt, I should point out that if nature is a term of distinction--if nature provides an objective standard to guide the will; if human purposes can be discerned from nature--then all this talk today of "identity" is utterly meaningless . . . which in fact it is.