Category: Justice

Jordan Peterson’s analysis of Political Correctness

Peterson’s Straw Man diagnosis of campus social justice activists is concisely put here:

 

 

Peterson attributes a fairly sophisticated, if utterly wrong headed, theoretical framework to so called SJWs. He sees Political Correctness as based on an impure amalgam of Marxism and Postmodernism. I too think that Marxism and Postmodernism are terrible things and not just for the reasons Peterson articulates so well. But I think he is mistaken in his blanket attribution of Marxism and Postmodernism to social justice activists. I think Peterson hasn’t done enough field work to give an accurate diagnosis of the psychology and motivation of the average social justice promoting member of the campus community. For there just aren’t that many social justice activists that are this theoretically committed. However, social justice activists do tend to be pretty evidence based in ways Peterson’s analysis completely ignores.

What is most present to mind among, say Black Lives Matter activists is the historical legacy and ongoing perpetuation of a clearly unjust and often brutal practices. The specific injustices complained of would be clear injustices on any number of theoretical approaches, but perhaps not clearly so unjust on a marriage of Postmodernism and Marxism. In any case, theoretical commitments aren’t what really matters to the social justice crowd, at least not on my campus.

Trans people not getting murdered matters. Black people not getting harassed by the police matters. Women not getting sexually harassed in the workplace matters. You certainly don’t need to think that the interests of groups supersedes that of individuals to make sense out of this. The more noxious forms of Identity Politics occasionally make brief appearances in the form of uncritically invoking some hackneyed relativistic cliches, but we’d just be mistaken to attribute sophisticated if incoherent and self-defeating theoretical perspectives to folks on this thin basis.

Of course we do talk about groups in diagnosing systemic injustices, especially those groupings that have have served as the bases of historically well documented injustices. But this doesn’t demand that we take groups to matter more than individuals. We can quite coherently contend, as most people ordinarily do, that groups are mere abstractions, having no real existence apart from the members that make them up, and still be on the look out for unfair disadvantages that people face because they are black, or trans, or women. Even the current slogans avoid the mistake of reifying groups. Its, “Black lives matter” not “Blackness matters” and its “me too”, not “please also consider the collective identity of women.”

 

The Emotional Roots of Prejudice and Bigotry

At the social level, bigotry and prejudice are tools of oppression where in groups dominate and exploit out groups. But analysis at this sociological level leaves important questions unanswered about why people are are so prone to in group – out group thinking in the first place. Note that the most stridently prejudiced are often not those who benefit significantly from exploitative power dynamics between groups. Prejudice, bigotry and discrimination have deeper emotional roots in individual psychology than sociological analysis can fully illuminate.

We are familiar with fear mongering in racist demagoguery and fear often does play a central role in othering The Other. We see this in the long history of racial prejudice against African Americans and more recently against Muslims. This fear is irrational given that the perceived threat is largely based on fantasy stereotypes. But fear does little to explain misogyny or other cases of discrimination like anti-semitism in Nazi Germany or the caste system in India.

Disgust, according to Martha Nussbaum, does shed broader light on the psychology of prejudice. But what exactly is disgust? And how does it lead to prejudice, discrimination and oppression? These are the questions I will briefly explore in this essay. But first, I want to mention that the occasion for this reflection was a wonderful event at Seattle Town Hall the other night where Martha Nussbaum spoke about her new book, Aging Thoughtfully, co-authored with Saul Levmore. The full event is online here. While the main focus of the evening was ageism, her discussion also explored disgust and its role in prejudice and discrimination more generally.

We should also note that Nussbaum is a cognitivist about the emotions. That is, she thinks that emotions aren’t just feelings, but that emotions have at their core a cognitive element of judgment or belief. At the core of fear, for instance, is the judgment that something or someone presents some kind of danger. Similarly it would not make sense to understand a person as experiencing grief unless that person believes they have lost something or someone dear to them. Having this cognitive component means that emotions can be well grounded or irrational. A person’s fear, for instance, is rational to just the degree that the perceived threat is real. A fear based on distorted or fantastic belief is not rational. So, given this theoretical context, exploring the emotional roots of prejudice in no way excuses prejudice and discrimination as somehow beyond the scope rational critique. To the contrary, exploring the emotional roots of prejudice will be an attempt to get at what is going wrong in the mind of the bigot or the misogynist. The goal here is to illuminate the irrationality of prejudice.

So back to disgust. Nussbaum takes disgust to be aversion to contamination. In particular, disgust is repulsion against things we associate with decay, disease and death. What Nussbaum calls primary disgust probably has a biological basis. It’s easy to see how evolution would favor a strongly felt repulsion from things like rotting flesh or signs of communicable disease. Disgust in these cases is rational, just like our fear of tigers. Of course even here we often find overriding reasons for caring for the sick or facing down our fear of the tiger.

But then, people also suffer what Nussbaum calls “projective disgust.” As she puts it, “people seek to create a buffer zone between themselves and their own animality by identifying a group (usually a powerless minority) who can be targeted as the quasi-animals and projecting onto that group various animal characteristics, which they have to no greater degree than the ones doing the projecting: bad smell, animal sexuality and so on.”

Projective disgust is neither rational nor obviously adaptive from an evolutionary standpoint. So how do so many people across so many cultures become saddled with this irrational, socially problematic emotional attitude? Well, as slightly rational, self-aware beings, we must somehow cope with the foreknowledge of our own eventual decline, decay and demise. Gifted self-deceivers that we are, a widespread strategy for dealing with this long run crisis and the anxiety it can provoke is to deny and distance ourselves from our own animality and mortality. Indeed most of our major religious traditions seem to be overly concerned with assimilating us more closely to God or gods and thereby distancing us from our essential nature as mortal, disease prone, biological organisms.

Projective disgust is a dishonest mode of dividing the person against its self, cleaving our elevated, rational, self-aware minds from our ultimately decaying flesh. Descartes had it hard wired into the nature of reality. But the comfort of this dualism comes at a steep price. In elevating ourselves as something more than animal and mortal, we extend this elevation only to those we can readily identify with. Others can be literally left to rot. And so we other The Other. There are no doubt assorted other ways in which we other The Other, but failing to come to terms with our own humanity, and our own animality and mortality in particular, is surely among the deepest and most universal. Prejudice and bigotry is, in varying degrees, grounded in self-deception aimed at evading self-loathing. But if we can muster the courage to see ourselves with clear eyes, susceptible to all manner of corruption and decay, ultimately destined to demise, we might also hope to get over our disgust and find ourselves, along with all our fellow vulnerable, decaying, mortal organisms, as lovable all the same.

James Baldwin invokes this wisdom in connection with racism in America when he writes,

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never – the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

 

Critical Thinking Note 19: What’s going on with Black Lives/All Lives*

 

So here’s a now familiar exchange:

  • B: Black Lives matter!
  • W: All lives matter!
  • B: Black lives matter!
  • W: All lives matter!

We pay close attention to logic in philosophy and from a logical point of view this is a sort of non-debate. That’s because “All lives matter” logically entails that “Black lives matter.” If all lives matter, then black lives matter. This is a truth of logic. B and W aren’t disagreeing with each other. So what is going on?

W might say something like this:

W: When you say, “Black lives matter” it sounds to me like you are saying that black lives matter more or that only black lives matter.

But that’s just not what “Black lives matter” says. To say that black lives matter more or that only black lives matter is to make a different claim altogether. In fact in clear headed moments, almost everyone, regardless of color, will say that it’s true that black lives matter and that it is false that only black lives matter or that they matter more. Our language is not such a hopeless mess that a simple clear obviously true sentence also says something false. The words “only” and “more” make a real difference in meaning and if this is W’s complaint, then she is reading something into the sentence “Black lives matter” that just isn’t there.

The sentence “Black lives matter” is beautifully simple and specific. It just says that black lives matter and we’ve already established that B and W recognize the clear and straightforward truth of this simple and specific sentence. So again, what’s going on?

“Black lives matter” says that black lives matter, not something more or something less. But even once we grant this, we might still see a difference in emphasis in the claims made by B and W. As the rallying cry for a movement, “Black lives matter” emphasizes that black lives matter. Emphasis doesn’t entail mattering more. Emphasis here simply draws attention to the fact that black lives matter.

W might feel that she is taking the moral high ground in emphasizing that all lives matter. All lives, after all, is the broadest, most inclusive class of lives. Why not give voice to this? Its truth seems just as compelling and worthy and maybe more so because it is more inclusive than the claim that black lives matter. So, W even has an argument for emphasizing that all lives matter.

All other things being equal, W’s argument for emphasizing that all lives matter would appear to be pretty compelling. But all other things are not equal and that is exactly why B finds it appropriate to emphasize that black lives matter.

When we look just at the content of the “Black Lives/All Lives” exchange, what linguist’s call the semantics and the rest of us might call the linguistic meaning of the claims, it’s hard to see just what’s going on. Yet it is clear that there is a problem. The emotional clash is obviously real. The problem lays in the rhetorical roles the slogans play and particularly how the “All Lives Matter” slogan serves to obscure the very real reasons for emphasizing that black lives matter.

This central question that W needs to consider is why people think it appropriate to emphasize that black lives matter. The rhetorical role of merely insisting that all lives matter is to provide a way of avoiding this question. That is, the rhetorical role of the “All lives matter” slogan is to turn a non-disagreement into an interminable pseudo-debate that leads to emotional conflict based on talking past each other without listening. While we’d all grant the obvious truth of the claim that all lives matter, the role of that claim in this context is to divide people against each other.

Could W reasonably claim that the same is true of “Black lives matter”? Could she claim that it is also divisive? Clearly many white people feel that the “Black lives matter” slogan is devise. But it’s not so clear that this feeling is reasonable. To get some handle on whether it is, we need to consider why people would emphasize that black lives matter. Given a good reason, we can’t dismiss “Black lives Matter” as mere divisive rhetoric.

So why would people feel the need to emphasize that black lives matter? The answer here is that our social practices, the way we roll, sometimes at an individual level but always at a systemic level, treats black people as if they don’t matter or matter a good deal less. Emphasizing that black lives matter is a response to the standing situation, not just an arbitrary shout-out for black people.

The movement and slogan emerged as a response to a pattern of unarmed black men being shot or killed by police officers who were then never held accountable. There is ample evidence for this in the cases of Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and the list goes on. But this is just one of the more dramatic ways among the great many ways, some large and some small, that our society is hard on black people. Here’s a short list of some of the further ways:

  • The racially targeted way in which the war on drugs has been prosecuted.
  • Racial disparities in administration of the death penalty.
  • Disparities that fall along racial lines in school funding at the K – 12 level.
  • Racial disparities in pay and household wealth.
  • Racial disparities in employment.
  • Racial disparities in access to health care and life expectancy.

There is lots of basic unfairness here and it is systemic. This short list addresses injustices that are well documented with easily accessible data and evidence. A richer understanding of how our society stacks things against people of color really requires that you listen to some of those people. As a white guy, my usefulness is pretty limited when it comes to describing the black experience in America. But telling other people’s story isn’t required for making sense out of what’s going on, what’s going wrong, in America generally, and in the “All lives matter” backlash specifically.

It seems to me that there is exactly one good reason for emphasizing race, skin color, in public discourse and that is in response to the history and ongoing legacy of racial injustice our society suffers from. This one good reason is exactly what the “Black lives matter” movement is about.

Russ Payne

January 11, 2017

* I miss Marvin Gaye. This song, What’s Going On, was among the first hits I can remember hearing on the radio as a child. Now it brings tears to my eyes. It’s not as if the early 70s was an idyllic time of racial harmony. But people like Marvin Gaye infused that time with a sense of hope and joy. What he says remains worth emphasizing, “We got to find a way to bring some loving here today.”