Rise of Victimhood Culture

* 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

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."

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?)