(Updated 4/18)

The concept of microaggression continues its spread through the social system. Ironically, given that I recently blogged about the moral culture of the starship Enterprise, this latest example comes from NASA, the U.S. agency tasked with space exploration. Here employees were invited to an educational event that trained them to recognize microaggressions:

MODDI stands for Management Operations Directorate, Diversity and Inclusion. Apparently it is an arm of the space agency.

The flyer was sent with the comment that NASA now spends a lot of time and resources on such programs: “You would be shocked where they are devoting the energies . . . vary rarely is there any technical training.” But there is moral training.

Contemporary bureauacracies are highly involved in moralism, developing specialized appendages focused on moral instruction and on policing and punishing deviance. Both state agencies and private companies devote substantial resources to training their employees to avoid offensive speech or conduct, and also to handle complaints by employees against one another.

We would expect such heavy involvement of superiors in the moral life of their subordinates to generate both moral dependency and moral sensitivity. We might also expect the combination of sensitivity and dependency — the heart of what Bradley Campbell and I call victimhood culture — to be conducive to the creation of new departments, divisions, and agencies charged with preventing and policing verbal offenses. This is especially so where affluence (e.g., wealthy colleges), monopoly (e.g., Google), or taxpayer money (e.g., government agencies ) can free an organization from other constraints, including constraints that might be imposed by the organization’s stated mission (e.g., despite no longer being able to put people into space 46 years after the last moon landing, the space agency apparently has resources to spare on moral initiatives).

In the modern context, at least, bureaucratization and victimhood culture are mutually reinforcing.