Sometimes we see a social setting where a particular vice or virtue takes on exaggerated importance. This may have been the case with honesty in ancient Persia, where lying was reportedly a capital crime. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, writing of the Persian elite, “Their sons are carefully instructed from their fifth to their twentieth year, in three things alone—to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth.” Similarly, in what social scientists call honor cultures, the virtue of physical bravery and the vice of cowardice take center stage. Actions that to outsiders might seem senseless, reckless, or unproductive – such as fighting a fatal duel over a mere difference of opinion – occur because proving one’s courage overshadows other competing concerns.
In The Rise of Victimhood Culture, Bradley Campbell and I argued that across much of the modern world, oppression and privilege are increasingly the chief vices. Most innocent of these crimes are those who are disadvantaged or marginalized, so that having these characteristics, or, at least, being a good ally to those who do, is an increasingly prominent virtue.
Of particular salience in modern morality is any act that could further the disadvantage of minorities. Across much of modern America, Canada, and the UK, bigotry against minority groups is perhaps the greatest sin. Thus, for instance, when the owner of an American sports team’s mistress leaked a secretly recorded phone conversation to the public, the resulting scandal centered not around his infidelity, nor her breach of privacy, but on his expressing antipathy toward the black men she dated on the side. And that offense was severe enough to merit a lifetime ban and millions of dollars in fines from his professional sports organization. Though a history of prior offenses, including some more severe, surely contributed to this outcome, it is still significant that these statements were the hook on which he was finally hanged. Similarly, one might observe that derogatory terms for American blacks are now so taboo that even black employees might be forbidden from using them in their workplace when quoting another person saying them in an anecdote from their own lives.
The more a particular type of vice is magnified in a social setting, the more that the bar for being labelled guilty of this vice creeps ever lower. In an honor culture, for instance, letting even a small and probably inadvertent slight go unanswered might be perceived as meekness and cowardice, and so honorable people – from Greek shepherds to the plantation owners of the antebellum American South – are notoriously touchy.
In our early work on moral culture, Campbell and I examined this tendency by dissecting the newly popular concept of microaggression. This concept, arcane just a few years ago but now in widespread use, refers to minor slights that offend members of disadvantaged social groups. As the prefix “micro” implies, these offenses are what most of us would consider small matters – an insensitive question, an awkward comment, a mispronounced name, and the like. And many of these fleeting offenses are unintentional, perhaps even the result of unsuccessful attempts to be friendly and understanding. Yet they are described not just as a faux pas or misunderstanding or irritation, but as an act of aggression. And they are seen not as trivial, but as something that, through their collective and cumulative impact, are a major source of oppression. Complaints about microaggression well-illustrate the tendency for a moral culture supremely concerned with bigotry and oppression to ferret out ever smaller instances of it, constantly lowering the bar for what words and deeds might be labelled racism, sexism, homophobia, or some other form of collective victimization.
The concept of microaggression, and its rapid growth in popularity, thus made for a good example of the kind of moral trends we sought to examine. And what made the concept most fascinating to us – and to many of our readers – was that many of these supposedly aggressive offenses seemed neither aggressive nor offensive at all. To many outsiders, it is a mystery why mundane statements such as “I like your shoes” or “Where are you from?” were worth complaint, much less allegations of oppression.
Yet the moral changes we wrote about are not limited to people labelling things as microaggressions, nor are they limited to unintentional slights. After all, in a world where conflict happens constantly, there is no shortage of slights that are quite clearly intentional. Actual aggression occurs all the time, ranging from the verbal to the physical. For example, people engaged in conflict regularly insult their opponents in overtly hostile ways. Few observers would find it mysterious that people take offense to intentional insults. But the reaction to insults can still be a good site for observing how the prevailing morality shapes the way people understand and describe the things that offend them.
Consider two recent examples, neither particularly important
in itself, but both perhaps showing us something important about how people
these days handle conflict.
A few weeks ago a video surfaced on social media showing an altercation between CNN anchor Chris Cuomo – son of one New York governor and brother of another – and a man who harassed him while he was dining with his family in public. The man antagonized Cuomo by calling him “Fredo” – a reference to the book and film The Godfather, in which Fredo, the weak and incompetent second son of a mob boss, is passed over to inherit his father’s position in favor of first his older and then his younger brother. Cuomo responded to the verbal aggression in kind, swearing at the man and eventually threatening physical violence against him. But he also said something rather strange: While recognizing the reference to The Godfather and comparing it to calling his adversary a “punk bitch”, he also claimed that “Fredo” was not just a personal insult leveled at him, but an ethnic slur against all Italians: “Any of you Italian?,” he said, speaking perhaps to both his adversary and to the watching audience, “It’s a fucking insult to your people. It’s an insult to your fucking people. It’s like the N-word for us.” His employer CNN later endorsed this interpretation, stating that: “Chris Cuomo defended himself when he was verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur in an orchestrated setup. We completely support him.”
In doing this Cuomo and CNN transformed what might be an
offense against an individual – notably, a prominent member of the media – into
an offense against a cultural group. Likewise, they transformed an offense
against someone who in other contexts would be described as a member of the
majority – a white man – into an offense against a cultural minority – Italians.
Through this interpretation the offense is collectivized, and a personal insult
becomes an instance of oppressive bigotry. The interpretation might not have
been widely accepted (partly because Italian-Americans are rarely considered a disadvantaged
minority in the contemporary US), but that it occurred at all is noteworthy.
Another recent conflict to gain social media attention occurred when a college professor posted a snide remark on Twitter referring to New York Times columnist Brett Stephens as “bedbugs.” Though, like the insult against Cuomo, the statement was probably motivated by political differences, it appears to be a personal insult rather than a collective one. Yet Stephens reacted by publishing a column likening the insult to the Nazi dehumanization of Jews, associating it with racial slurs and an extreme instance of racial oppression.
Such reframing of grievances is not unique to contemporary settings. Whenever a society develops an intense focus on a particular set of moral or ideological concepts, all sorts of negative evaluations – whether moral or intellectual or aesthetic — tend to be interpreted in terms of the major moral concerns. For example, many physicists were initially appalled by the strange new concepts in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, but their condemnations varied: In Germany, where Communism and Judaism were increasingly seen as the twin evils of the world, Einstein’s work was called Communist and Jewish. In the Soviet Union critics gave it a label that was uniquely harsh in their own ideological realm: they called it bourgeois. Had the theory hit the scene in earlier times, a Persian astrologer might have called it dishonest, a Southern gentlemen might have called it cowardly, and a seventeenth-century Puritan might have called it ungodly. Were it new today, critics in academia and journalism might call it racist, colonialist, or misogynist.
As Campbell and I wrote in The Rise of Victimhood Culture, the tendency to frame conflicts in terms of the dominant morality – and to make them out to be more extreme than they are, such as being a collective matter rather than an individual one – is intensified by another recent moral trend: The increasing involvement of distant third parties – be they social media sympathizers, government officials, or university bureaucrats – in the handling of grievances. Cuomo did not seek third party attention but was likely aware that the encounter was being filmed and would be seen by the public, while CNN’s statement of support was directed specifically to that public after the video had gone viral. Brett Stephens did seek third party intervention: His letter of complaint to the professor who insulted him was also sent to the professor’s superiors in the university administration – those in a position to censure him if they found his conduct deviant – and of course his column likening the insult to the rhetoric of the Holocaust was aimed at the general public, airing his grievance to a sea of strangers.
Wherever distant third parties play a large role in conflict, there is a tendency for the aggrieved to frame their conflict in terms that maximize the sympathy and support they might receive. If the dominant morality is one in which bigotry by the privileged is the greatest evil, then all complaints – whatever their origin – tend to get framed as complaints about bigotry, and the aggrieved will try to associate themselves with the oppressed and their opponents with the oppressors.
