Rise of Victimhood Culture

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* Book: The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars. By Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

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"explaining the nation’s shift from a culture of honor, to a culture of dignity, to one of victimhood"

Description

1. From the publisher:

"The Rise of Victimhood Culture offers a framework for understanding recent moral conflicts at U.S. universities, which have bled into society at large. These are not the familiar clashes between liberals and conservatives or the religious and the secular: instead, they are clashes between a new moral culture―victimhood culture―and a more traditional culture of dignity. Even as students increasingly demand trigger warnings and “safe spaces,” many young people are quick to police the words and deeds of others, who in turn claim that political correctness has run amok. Interestingly, members of both camps often consider themselves victims of the other. In tracking the rise of victimhood culture, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning help to decode an often dizzying cultural milieu, from campus riots over conservative speakers and debates around free speech to the election of Donald Trump."


2. From the Wikipedia:

"Campbell and Manning argue that accusations of microaggression focus on unintentional slights, unlike the Civil rights movement, which focused on concrete injustices. They argue that the purpose of calling attention to microaggressions is to elevate the status of offended victim. "When the victims publicize microaggressions,” wrote Campbell and Manning “they call attention to what they see as the deviant behavior of the offenders. In doing so,” they “also call attention to their own victimization.” They do this because it lowers “the offender’s moral status” and “raises the moral status of the victims.”

In both the paper and the book, Manning and Campbell draw on the work of sociologist Donald Black on conflict and on cross-cultural studies of conflict and morality to argue that the contemporary culture wars resemble tactics described by scholars in which an aggrieved party or group seeks the support of third parties. They argue that grievance-based conflicts have led to large-scale moral change in which an emergent victimhood culture is clashing with and replacing older honor and dignity cultures.

Honour cultures, often called honour-shame cultures are cultures like that of the American West or Europe in the era when dueling was common.[4] In such cultures, honour is paramount and when it is infringed upon the offended party retaliates directly. Dispute mechanisms include blood feuds. In honor cultures, victims have a low moral status.

Manning and Campbell describe honour-shame culture as having been replaced in the modern Western societies in the 19th and 20th century by a dignity culture where “insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery.” Instead, “When intolerable conflicts do arise, dignity cultures prescribe direct but non-violent actions.”[1][4] In such a culture, instead of challenging the offender to a duel, an aggrieved party might “exercise covert avoidance, quietly cutting off relations with the offender without any confrontation” or “conceptualize the problem as a disruption to their relationship and seek only to restore harmony without passing judgment.” Legal action was taken, “For offenses like theft, assault, or breach of contract, people in a dignity culture will use law without shame,... “But in keeping with their ethic of restraint and toleration, it is not necessarily their first resort, and they might condemn many uses of the authorities as frivolous. People might even be expected to tolerate serious but accidental personal injuries.”

A dignity culture, according to Campbell and Manning, has moral values and behavioral norms that promote the value of every human life, encouraging achievement in its children while teaching that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."[5]

Because victimhood culture is now claimed to confer the highest moral status on victims, Campbell and Manning argue that it “increases the incentive to publicize grievances.” Injured and offended parties who might once have thrown a punch or filed a lawsuit now appeal for support on social media.

According to Campbell and Manning, victimhood culture engenders “competitive victimhood,” incentivizing even privileged people to claim that they are victims of, for example reverse discrimination.[3] According to Claire Lehmann, Manning and Campbell's culture of victimhood sees moral worth as largely defined by skin color and membership in a fixed identity group, such as LGBTIQ, Muslims, or indigenous peoples."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Victimhood_Culture?)


Discussion

Victimhood Culture and Identity Journalism

Matthew Goodwin:

"By earning their stripes in the most prestigious universities, many journalists have also been swimming in the sea of what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning call the new ‘victimhood culture’.

Unlike moral cultures in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, which stressed things such as dignity and honour (“sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”), our new victimhood culture —which is especially strong in the elite institutions— instead incentivizes people to define themselves first and foremost as members of a victimised group, to derive their sense of social esteem, social status, and recognition from this status, and to punish, aggressively, perceived oppressors.

This is quickly dividing the country and the national debate between those who are considered victims and those who are considered oppressors, perhaps changing the guiding logic for media along the way. Moral status and worth is now given to people on the basis of their racial, sexual, or gender identities, and whether or not they happen to belong to one of these fixed identity groups. Having taken these ideas from the Ivory Towers into Fleet Street, this too may be playing a contributory role.

The rise to dominance of a far more elite media class has also been encouraged by the parallel collapse of local and regional media, which once upon a time provided people from outside the elite with a springboard to joining national media. This helped to inject ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ views into the debate, as did the fact that many journalists had either not gone to university or had other experiences in life. Today, even those who are held up as evidence of ‘diversity’ in media —such as women or people from minority ethnic backgrounds— have often gone to the same schools and the same universities and so, in terms of their views, are really not that diverse at all.

The increasingly liberal composition of British newsrooms may therefore be shaping what journalists and their editors choose to cover, since people who openly identify on the left are more concerned with prejudice and social justice. In turn, right-leaning media then respond to this by seeking to channel public outrage against the latest Wokery or allegation that person x or institution y is racist. And so the cycle escalates."

(https://mattgoodwin.substack.com/p/the-great-awokening-of-british-media?)