Identities Part 4: Victimhood

Critical theory is a way of looking at humanity through power imbalances that may have harmed a person’s human flourishing as currently defined by economic and/or sexual expression.  Critical theory's Achilles heel is that it is unclear about the future institutions and values that the revolution is aiming towards.  Thus, there is a faith in revolution for revolution sake.

Power imbalances were initially defined as economic ones between bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Critical race theory built upon these economic disparities through racial lines.  Lastly, power was interpreted not only economically but in any power structure that constrained behavior.  With Freud, sexual expression was posited as fundamental to what it means to be human and thus sexual constraints and the power within them must be eliminated.

Now our humanity is increasingly seen through an economic and/or sexual expression lens.  However, increasing freedoms in these areas are not achieving happiness.  

Categorizing an entire group of people based upon race and/or sexual expression is a very blunt and increasingly ineffective way of approaching individuals.  This turns people into objects.  

This oppressor-victim dichotomy results in untruths about individuals and a great untruth of the good versus bad people.  This widens gaps and deepens divisions between people.  Fixing power imbalances by reversing power imbalances appears to be merely throwing kerosene on a raging fire.  

Victimhood identity minimizes personal agency or moral responsibility which leads to fatalism and a sense of lack of control.  Furthermore, it allows "victims" to do wrong with little resistance leading to injustice.  Victim class is increasingly not applicable for many individuals within these historic groups as economic progress and community approval continue to move many previously disenfranchised people forward thus becoming less grounded in the truth.  Critical theory minimizes the importance of truth while also harming the basic good of work by hiring people who are less than fully qualified while also changing the parameters of what good work is in various categories such as science or medicine. 

Intersectionality provides a pecking order or bragging rights for victim status which confers on these individuals even more power and even less moral responsibility.  Exerting power and lording it over others is now what the new power brokers do over everyone deemed inferior (prior oppressors). 

References:

To Change All Worlds by Carl Trueman 

The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences by Heather Mac Donald

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Transcript

Identities Part 4:  Victimhood

            It has been said that sex and power are the two fundamental forces that have driven humanity.  I think this claim helps to explain the phenomenon of critical theory.  What is critical theory?  The term along with the more specific term critical race theory is a controversial theory that people either are supportive or dismissive of.  Dr. Carl Trueman’s latest book To Change All Worlds helps us to understand what critical theory is and its contribution to our current culture.  Like many theories, it does not lend itself too easily to trite explanations, but I will attempt to summarize it as simply as possible without being too simple.

            Carl explains that the basis of critical theory is that it addresses the fundamental problem of unequal power in societies.  Although many people may focus on inequality through the criteria of money or income, money ends up at the end of the day being just a measure for the power a person has or does not have.  Certainly, the more money you have, then frequently the more power that you have for either good or ill.  Critical theory has its roots in economic inequality with the tension between the bourgeoisie or those that control the means of production and the proletariat or the workers.  Critical theory proposed that the institutional structures of the society along with those values had to be eliminated in order to bring about a fair and just society.  However, what the new institutional structures will be is left entirely unclear.  Carl states “But the main problem with critical theory, … , is its anthropology, its understanding of human nature.” “It also explains one of the great problems that critical theory exhibits: an inability to articulate a clear vision of what the future of human society should look like.” Carl sums up this problem later when he says “… that then prevents it from offering a cogent view of the future than anything more than hopeful pieties.”  So, Carl explains to us that critical theory wants to tear down the society to bring about a utopian future that is never clearly defined and thus ends up becoming more of a faith in revolution for revolution sake rather than a defined pathway for achieving a better future.  

            These two fundamental groups of people were also later termed the oppressors (the bourgeoisie or the privileged) and the oppressed or the workers).  Subsequently, the oppressed are also known as victims.  This understanding or theory of humanity spread out of Europe and into the world.  Outside of Europe, there was the additional power dynamic of race especially in America which had the legacy of slavery or in the old colonialism in many parts of the world.  Critical race theory was then born which used race as the dividing line for power between the oppressors (usually white males) and the oppressed (most non-white peoples).  

            Although there is certainly much truth to this narrative, it is far from the whole story which leads us to the problem of making a complex problem too simple.  Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their book The Coddling of the American Mind identify this overly simplistic mentality when they say “It's as though some of the students had their own mental prototype, a schema with two boxes to fill: victim and oppressor. Everyone is placed into one box or the other.”  Thus, we see that the end effect of critical theory is to bluntly put everyone in one of two categories.  Haidt and Lukianoff further explain the harmful effects of this crude categorization of humanity when they say “Since privilege is defined as the power to dominate and to cause oppression, these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. The sort of teaching seems likely to encode the untruth of us versus them directly into students' cognitive schemas: life is a battle between good people and evil people.”  I think this then makes many ask the question Who would want to be on the side of evil or who wouldn’t want to be on the side of good?  

            Unfortunately, this binary way of looking at people has many serious problems which we have alluded to in our previous episodes.  As we go back to the three fundamental questions of identity of who is my God, my neighbor or myself, this theory answers predominantly the question of who is my neighbor?  My neighbor is then whoever is labelled a victim and my enemies are all those labelled an oppressor.  Certainly, there is a lot of truth regarding supporting those who are unjustly victimized.  Every individual should be supported who has been a victim of injustice.  However, when we attempt to paint victimhood with too broad of a brush, it can result in many problems both for those classified as victims and those labelled oppressors.  

            From the victim perspective, it effaces or minimizes personal accountability or moral agency.  This can promote an element of fatalism where I cannot do anything of my own efforts to improve my condition which frequently ends up being measured mainly by economic success.  It is assumed that if I’m poor then I have no power, but many great movements were begun by people with very little economic power.  Think of Jesus, Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  True, those people might have been aided by financial resources but in some sense, it is likely because of the lack of these resources that they were able to bring about the transformation in their cultures that they did.  

            Another aspect of minimizing personal agency is seen in the notion of imposter syndrome.  Web MD website says this “Imposter syndrome is when you doubt your own skills and successes.  You feel you’re not as talented or worthy as others believe, and you’re scared that one day, people will realize that.”  I think this syndrome is magnified by critical theory and the subsequent attempts to promote diversity borne out by personal testimonies.  Now what we see are many hard working and bright people who have been dumped into the class of an oppressed victim who are now uncertain whether their abilities and talent got them that prestigious position or whether it was an unearned handout.  This robs many people of the assurance of their abilities and work subsequently harming their dignity. 

            Another aspect of the minimization of personal moral agency is seen in people turning a blind eye to wrong-doing that those in the victim class may commit.  The recent event of not condemning or even justifying the recent Hamas killing of Israeli women and children is a direct result of this binary and rigid thinking of good people against bad people.  In this thinking, good or oppressed victims people can never do anything wrong since it now becomes just for them to retaliate in nearly any form against the bad people or the oppressors.  At the same time, the bad people or the privileged class can almost never do anything right nor can they even defend themselves against any form of injury, harm, or injustice.  

Additionally, we must ask the question whether this victim status truly applies to the vast majority of a certain group of people.  As we get further away from colonial rule and the effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws, increasingly, some people within these groups have not experienced any significant oppression but on the other hand have many of the privileges that are commonly associated with the oppressor or privileged class.  Is it just to give additional privileges to those who already have them?  The necessity of treating people as individuals rather than a bland nondescript representative of some labelled group comes pressingly to the front.  

Carl Trueman sums up this problem of lumping everyone into a category when he says “And therein lies the problem.  As soon as we deploy general categories of discourse beyond that of the individual--whether it be the all embracing human being or something based upon the reification of some less universal category such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, sex, or gender--we run the risk of dissolving persons into things. And this is where the sterility of much that passes for critical theory comes into play.” “These new categories--rather like the old--allow people to be dismissed out of hand and treated as objects, not free subjects. If I look at somebody and see them as merely an instantiation of “whiteness,” I see them as a thing, not as a person.” I agree with Carl that each person is unique and should be valued more in their totality and not just a representation of some potentially minor aspect of their humanity.

            Now on to the oppressor side of things.  Broadly brushing every white person as a privileged oppressor is an affront to the truth that many white people are struggling and even impoverished.  Poor white people correctly assess their situation not one of privilege or being an oppressor, but merely that of being poor.  Again, the economic lens by which we view and judge people of any class or race can continue to feed a false narrative that poor people have no power in their lives and even that they are less valuable than those who are richer.  Additionally, they will have resentment when they see additional opportunities and benefits granted to others of better economic status merely because of their race or ethnicity, and not because of their need.  

For those in the oppressor class who are not poor, I think that this viewpoint is ultimately harmful from a psychologic and spiritual perspective.  Critical theory and the oppressor-victim dynamic stimulates a sense of guilt in those labelled oppressors.  This guilt or sense of sin or wrong doing must then be atoned for which has resulted in the strange phenomena of people apologizing for the sins of their ancestors to someone they don’t even know.  Now you might think this is at best a harmless or even nice gesture, but I think we all have guilt that we walk around with because of the times we have legitimately wronged people or withheld good from them.  Many of us have a nagging sense that we need to make restitution to those that we have wronged.  But rather than making the hard decisions, swallow our pride and apologize to those we have truly wronged which is usually family and friends, it’s much easier to apologize to a stranger I never wronged for a sin I never committed.  I think apologizing for sins I haven’t committed to people that I do not even know can assuage temporarily a sense of the nagging guilt that I carry, but in the end, it does not measurably improve my own character nor make strides to restore the real broken relationships in my life. 

            We have seen how the economic structure between the bourgeoisie and the workers when combined with the natural consequences of material poverty and the lack of resources or power to live a flourishing life led to critical theory and later critical race theory.  How then did sex, our other main driver of human behavior, get thrown into the mix?  Sigmund Freud’s claim that fundamentally we are sexual creatures gained real traction especially in the West in the 1960s.  This understanding of the human or our anthropology was truly revolutionary in history.  Carl, whose specialty is intellectual history, sums it up when he states “And, at root, what we witness in the sexual revolution is nothing less than a transformation of what it means to be human.” Hence, the sexual revolution’s premise was that people’s true humanity was being repressed unnecessarily by societal norms and customs that constrained their sexual activity.  If people are as Freud claimed fundamentally sexual creatures, then any expression of that sexuality must be good for the flourishing of that person.  This expression took on even more of a fundamental nature when it became closely tied to identity.  Carl states this about sexual identity “In a world where you are your sexual desires, then rules about how you can behave sexually are in reality rules less about behavior and more about whose society will allow you to be.”  Hence, we see the background behind the current centrality of sex and sexual expression for many people.  

Historically, the first domino to fall in this current series was the social more or taboo against sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman.  The free love free sex movement of the 1960s challenged and eventually defeated the old monogamous standard of sexual behavior.  Within a couple of decades after that, we then experienced the revolution of homosexual behavior.  The gay movement took the west by storm culminating in the 2015 Supreme Court decision mandating homosexual marriage in the United States with most other countries in the west going along as well.  Without well-defined limits of sex or sexual expression except for mutual consent, the transgender movement then sprung on to the scene.  With transgenderism, mutual consent for sexual expression is no longer needed, but merely the self and the psychologic dimension’s thoughts, emotions, and desires are all that is required.  

So, the twin ideas that economic prosperity and sexual expression are fundamental to our humanity, leads then to the elimination of any power structures, norms, or laws that constrain them.  The difficulty as we have seen and as Carl Trueman notes is that there is no end game or goal that this revolution in society is definitively striving for. The sexual revolution started as a monogamous sexual revolt leading to a heterosexual revolt and now has turned into a biologic sex revolt.  Where will this end?  Additionally, and more fundamentally, does this theory with its grounding in the economic and sexual aspect of our humanity actually lead to true human flourishing.  A brief survey of health in just about any dimension can only lead to a definitive “no” as the answer.  

            Now, let’s analyze critical theory with its emphasis on race and sexual expression through our five questions.  

            How much is it based on truth?  Like all theories that have some traction, there is undoubtedly some truth related to it.  A brief survey of the history of the world indicates that it is nothing but a long string of episodes of one group exerting power over another group.  The notion of power and the subsequent economic inequalities is a reality.  However, applying it to every member of that group becomes increasingly problematic especially as you get further and further away from the times of the height of oppression.  The plight of African Americans in the United States is a historical reality however great improvements have been made over the centuries.  Disadvantages still exist for many, but these disadvantages can no longer be said to be nearly as uniform as they may have been in the past.  In the slave South, virtually no African American was free to any substantial degree, and all were definitely impoverished.  The same cannot be said today where many are highly paid professionals respected in the community.  Painting the group with a broad brush was truthful and effective in the Jim Crow south, but much less so today, and thus a more complex and nuanced approach must be taken to avoid injustice and to help everyone in their journey for human flourishing.  

            How unifying is it?  Haidt and Lukianoff state that there are two broad perspectives of identity which they contrast as “Common humanity identity politics versus common enemy identity politics.” They go on further to say that “Identifying a common enemy is an effective way to enlarge and motivate your tribe.” “There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of the horrors of common enemy identity politics than Adolf Hitler's use of Jews to unify and expand his Third Reich.”  Haidt and Lukianoff cut to the core of this problem when they say, “the untruth of US versus them: life is a battle between good people and evil people.”  In essence, Haidt and Lukianoff observe that critical theory and its more specified version critical race theory prohibits any substantial progress to a common humanity identity.  This will lead to further division and a deepening of the many divisions that have been created. Critical theory attempts to solve the power imbalance problem with more but opposite power imbalances.  Dr. Trueman sums up this problem when he says, “But the second effect is this: that which replaces them creates its own hierarchies of power, its own ruling elites and its own marginalized and oppressed minorities.” “But less optimistic critical theorists--those whose understanding of the operations of power is detached from any aspirations to utopian politics--would surely concede that replacing one set of reified categories with another delivers no real and universal liberation.”  Thus, we see that critical theory does not result in a true just society, but merely fractures and antagonizes each group against one another even more.  This is what we see today with some white people now banding together claiming to be oppressed and using the same rhetoric and tactics of other groups.  

            Our next question is how competitive is it or how willing are we to intentional harm basic goods or virtues because of our identity?  When we prioritize anything else but excellence in our craft or work, then we downgrade the basic good of work and harm it.  Heather Mac Donald in her 2022 article entitled “How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences” outlined the degrading effects that this is having on the sciences.  She asserts “The science diversity charade wastes extraordinary amounts of time and money that could be going into basic research and its real-world application. If that were its only consequence, the cost would be high enough. But identity politics is now altering the standards for scientific competence and the way future scientists are trained.” Later in the article she relates this victim thinking problem at Google.  “In August 2017, Google fired computer engineer James Damore for questioning the premises of Google’s diversity training and policies. The discrimination lawsuit he subsequently filed against the Silicon Valley giant reveals a workplace culture infused with academic victimology.” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb in his humorously titled book Take Two Aspirins and Call Me by My Pronouns also details the harms to the excellence of the practice of medicine.  

In addition to harming the basic good of work, we spoke about harms to freedom of speech in part 2, that although not a basic good is an essential means to bringing about most of the basic goods especially through the basic good of knowledge.  When people are forbidden to speak out on topics just because of possible emotional harms to others, then we have sacrificed the basic good of knowledge for someone’s emotional comfort.  This coddling of the American mind is the title of Haidt and Lukianoff’s book where they prove this effect.  Heather Mac Donald further reinforces this when she says, “Facts are especially inappropriate ‘in the context of the threat’ faced by minorities and females at Google.” Additionally, from a more general or theoretical basis, truth is not an end but merely a tool for critical theorists.  Carl states “As a result, the normal criterion of truth--correspondence to reality--is irrelevant. The important thing is whether the idea destabilizes the status quo and tilts the world toward the realization of revolution.”

Finally, the virtue of justice is always in mind.  Lord Acton famously quipped in the 19th century “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and history is replete with power being used selfishly harming human flourishing.  By merely transferring power from one group to another group in no way guarantees that the new group in power will not misuse it for their own selfish ambition or pride.  This misuse of power is notable in today’s cancel culture.  Haidt and Lukianoff detail this when they say “the combination of common enemy identity politics and microaggression training creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a call out culture, in which students gain prestige for identifying small offenses committed by members of their community, and then publicly calling out the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy. Call out culture requires an easy way to reach an audience that can award status to people who shame or punish alleged offenders. Life in a call out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship.” We this power dynamic played out daily.  Carl Trueman sums this up when he says, “The cult of the microaggression has become the means for silencing those voices of which powerful progressive establishment disapproves.” I think without an underlying ethic of virtue and love, cancel culture will continue to harm the basic goods and degrade virtue.

Speaking of harms to virtue, pride is the antithesis of virtue and the chief of the seven deadly sins. Intersectionality now provides for a pecking order or bragging rights of who is to be esteemed the greatest victim. Intersectionality is when more than one group identity that a person may be associated with has been on the lower end of the power structure.  So, being both African-American and a woman would be an intersection of previously disenfranchised groups thus accentuating this person’s claim to victimhood.  This victim pecking order when combined with decreased moral responsibility can easily pander to an individual’s pride because of the power that they now have been given to say or do anything without any criticism, judgement or push back.  Along with great power goes great responsibility.  However, what we see is many people abusing this power since there is no notion of what that power should now be used for apart from exerting if over others.  

            How meaningful is it?  Is being a victim a meaningful identity?  From a victim’s perspective, I’m not sure it is in any substantial sense.  It becomes all about me and my plight.  It is a very inward turn to the psychologic.  However, most of meaning in life as Dr. Viktor Frankl notes is found outside ourselves.  Remember his words ““The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love –the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”  Meaning in life is commonly derived from hard work and diligence that can result in an improved situation or the realization of a goal.  However, victim identities rob people of their own moral agency and can perpetuate a cycle of feeling that they can do nothing to improve their lot in life and that they are dependent upon others for any progress.  Just think of your own life, things given to you are not usually as meaningful as things that you earned yourself.  

            How about meaning for those not in an oppressed group but for those who stylize themselves as helping the victims.  As we mentioned before, speaking out for the poor, the widows and the orphans has a long history and provides for substantial meaning through the efforts we exert on behalf of others to improve their situation and help them realize increased human flourishing.  However, this must be grounded in reality or truth as well.  How substantially have you helped a disadvantaged person?  Did you visit them when they were younger, mentor them through school and attend their graduation from college, or was it a social media hashtag or feel-good lip service?  Are we supporting the true victims while preserving our higher ideals, or are we robbing Peter to pay Paul?  

            Lastly, how permanent is it?  It’s interesting that throughout the whole history of man that critical theory has fixated on and selected out only economic, racial, or sexual aspects of our humanity to be counted worthy as victims.  Certainly, religion is another fundamental aspect of our humanity where people have been oppressed and killed over the years, but that does not reach the level of being a victim in our current victim hierarchy.  The obvious example is the Jews.  I am not sure how in one generation the victims of the Holocaust with 6 million people killed only for their ethnic religion identity became an oppressor group.  Christians are another group who were oppressed for the first 300 years after Christ, then became the dominant cultural force in the West and are commonly labelled as oppressors.  However, today, they are not in power in the East but rather are frequently the victims of violence.  Thus, being a victim is not entirely a permanent situation but is dependent upon both the individual’s situation and their culture.  Additionally, rapidly changing sexual expression dynamics may include more groups in the future thus showing a lack of permanence.  The next trend in sexual identity may be polygamous or polyamorous relationships.  If marriage is just the love between two people, then why limit love to just two people?  The bottom line is that you may be a victim today and an oppressor tomorrow because the lines are always shifting like lines drawn in the sand. 

      Thus, we see that critical theory is being used to attempt to address previous power imbalances that may have harmed a person’s human flourishing as defined by economic and/or sexual expression.  Economic opportunity is an important instrumental good in bringing about the basic goods while sexual expression is another instrument that may bring about or even harm the basic goods.  Additionally, painting an entire group of people based upon race and/or sexual expression is a very blunt and increasingly ineffective way of approaching individuals.  This oppressor-victim dichotomy results in untruths about individuals and a great untruth of the good versus bad people.  As Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn said “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

     Fixing power imbalances by reversing the power imbalances appears to be merely throwing kerosene on a raging fire.  Next episode we will look at the man and the movement he spawned of whom it was written “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.” This man responded to his oppression not with power but with love.