Jonathan Haidt On Microaggressions

Interesting summary by Haidt of a paper on microaggression complaints here.

I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized.

This is simply describing the transition from a K-selected culture to a more r-selected one. In K-selection, everything must be earned to survive. Demonstrating honor demonstrates fitness at this required skill, and thus is a signal to other mates of your fitness.

When resources are in such a glut that everyone can easily graze sufficiently to survive easily competition is no longer necessary, and indeed, direct competition becomes a disadvantage. In the initial stages of such an environment, notice that avoidance of competition becomes a shield, conferring greater fitness than is possessed by the competitive, who risk injury and death for no more than the uncompetitive enjoy.

Eventually, that shield of competition-avoidance is uniformly adopted and ceases to offer personal advantage. At that point, inflicting unnecessary competition on others becomes a sword by which individuals seek further advantage over peers (while still avoiding all competition themselves). The optimal strategy becomes one which eschews the risks and dangers of competition itself, while miring everyone around it in dangerous and risky conflict and competition, all to get them killed, damaged, and/or keep them otherwise occupied.

Inherent to the r-strategy is this desire to trigger fights and sow discontent. Where homogeneity prevents discontent it will introduce diversity. (Did you think those aggressive Muslim refugees in Europe were being welcomed for humanitarian reasons?) Where authority exists, it will seek any reason, no matter how “micro” or outlandish. to place others in conflict. Where conflict erupts, it will proclaim itself not involved, even as it fans the flames (Think of how Soros and the Communists fund #Blacklivesmatter protesters).

The pursuit of victim status is an natural outgrowth of this, because it is both the shield and the sword. It allows the victim to avoid the dangers of competition by pleading helplessness, even as the sword mires the “victimizer” in conflict with external forces themselves. That the victimizing behaviors cited today are so obviously silly and imagined as to trigger academic examination only shows the extent to which this behavioral drive operates among the r-selected. It must operate, even if environmental conditions are clearly, to any rational eye, against it. Imagine how it would operate in a less ordered, less civilized, more natural environment, that wasn’t such an epitome of egalitarianism as exists in modern academia.

The sad thing is the effect of such r-selection here. Where K-selection produces a noble tribe composed of greatness and in pursuit of common cause, r-selection first dilutes the greatness with uniform survival, and then poisons it with pointless internecine conflict. It is almost as if the r-strategist human rabbit’s entire purpose is to supplant the uniform loyalty, unity of purpose, and greatness of the K-selected tribe with the endless bickering of a neurotic mass of inferiors, each incapable of attaining greatness upon their own merits, desperate to destroy anyone who is capable, and crammed together into a giant morass of selfish, bickering, mental incompetency.

Again, without r/K certain parts elude full understanding:

But note that these campaigns for support do not necessarily emanate from the lowest reaches of society – that they are not primarily stocked or led by those who are completely lacking in property, respectability, education, or other forms of social status. Rather, such forms as microaggression complaints and protest demonstrations appear to flourish among the relatively educated and affluent populations of American colleges and universities. The socially down and out are so inferior to third parties that they are unlikely to campaign for their support, just as they are unlikely to receive it.

The idea of the paper is that microaggressions are a means of gaining complaint satisfaction that are inherent to the culture. Again, in not knowing r/K Haidt misses out on some key insights. The lower echelons do not eschew worrying about microaggressions because they have given up on attaining stature. They ignore microaggression complaints because they would feel such complaints are silly, and would be embarrassed to make them.

The lower echelons have a history of exposure to resource shortage, and thus exhibit a more K-selected psychology. Once you have a K-selected psychology you are innately programmed to be more self-reliant, more directly competitive, less likely to be subservient to external authority, less likely to expect others to be subservient to external authority, and more tolerant generally of minor inconveniences. This is the only psychology that will be functional if it is necessary to compete for a share of resources that are so limited that someone will end up going without.

I keep finding it so silly that people view everyone as identical, and try to ascribe logic to these behaviors.

Some other thoughts as I read Haidt’s summary:

Conduct is offensive because it perpetuates or increases the domination of some persons and groups by others.

This is a competitive strategy by which human r-selected rabbits are trying to advance their own relative positions over those of other dominants. Of course dominance would be targeted.

It is in egalitarian and diverse settings – such as at modern American universities – that equality and diversity are most valued, and it is in these settings that perceived offenses against these values are most deviant.

Again, these slights are perceived as more deviant because those egalitarian settings have the greatest degree of free resource availability, and thus exhibit the greatest r-selected psychology. Only the r-selected psychology operates this way. Notice that bimbos who exhibit this psychology are most likely prone to fall for game, have higher numbers of sexual partners, have shorter relationship durations, have abortions and use contraception to reduce rearing investments, and end up not marrying. That is not coincidence. They are human rabbits, and they hate human wolves.

[In other words: progress toward greater equality and inclusiveness, combined with the enormous growth of administrators and other “adults” on campus charged with adjudicating complaints about verbal behavior, plus social atomization, multiplied by the power of social media, explains why charges of “microaggression” have emerged so rapidly on some college campuses just in the last few years.]

No. Reduced conflict, less real fear, less stress, and the introduction of free resource availability has altered the brains of those whose ancestral lines, and themselves, have been exposed to it. The means are almost certainly a combination of genetic selection, epigenetic alteration of specific gene’s transcriptional rates, “pleasure” desensitization at the neurochemical level, and atrophy of stress-coping brain structures (the amygdala). This has triggered a shift in human reproductive strategy and mindset from one designed to survive shortage to one designed to exploit a resource glut, and it has produced a concomitant adoption of a more “r-selected” human psychology.

Then there is a summary of the transition from an entirely K-environment of competition and conflict, to a hybrid society where r’s act fairly to avoid seeing K’s resort to “self-help,” to an entirely r-environment where competition and conflict are personally avoided while others are mired in it purposefully. I’ll include the entire thing here:

A) A Culture of Honor

Honor is a kind of status attached to physical bravery and the unwillingness to be dominated by anyone. Honor in this sense is a status that depends on the evaluations of others, and members of honor societies are expected to display their bravery by engaging in violent retaliation against those who offend them (Cooney 1998:108–109; Leung and Cohen 2011). Accordingly, those who engage in such violence often say that the opinions of others left them no choice at all…. In honor cultures, it is one’s reputation that makes one honorable or not, and one must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or lose honor. Not to fight back is itself a kind of moral failing, such that “in honor cultures, people are shunned or criticized not for exacting vengeance but for failing to do so” (Cooney 1998:110). Honorable people must guard their reputations, so they are highly sensitive to insult, often responding aggressively to what might seem to outsiders as minor slights (Cohen et al. 1996; Cooney 1998:115–119; Leung and Cohen 2011)… Cultures of honor tend to arise in places where legal authority is weak or nonexistent and where a reputation for toughness is perhaps the only effective deterrent against predation or attack (Cooney 1998:122; Leung and Cohen 2011:510). Because of their belief in the value of personal bravery and capability, people socialized into a culture of honor will often shun reliance on law or any other authority even when it is available, refusing to lower their standing by depending on another to handle their affairs (Cooney 1998:122–129). But historically, as state authority has expanded and reliance on the law has increased, honor culture has given way to something else: a culture of dignity. [p. 712-713]

B) A Culture of Dignity

The prevailing culture in the modern West is one whose moral code is nearly the exact opposite of that of an honor culture. Rather than honor, a status based primarily on public opinion, people are said to have dignity, a kind of inherent worth that cannot be alienated by others (Berger 1970; see also Leung and Cohen 2011). Dignity exists independently of what others think, so a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery. It is even commendable to have “thick skin” that allows one to shrug off slights and even serious insults, and in a dignity-based society parents might teach children some version of “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” – an idea that would be alien in a culture of honor (Leung and Cohen 2011:509). People are to avoid insulting others, too, whether intentionally or not, and in general an ethic of self-restraint prevails.

When intolerable conflicts do arise, dignity cultures prescribe direct but non-violent actions, such as negotiated compromise geared toward solving the problem (Aslani et al. 2012). Failing this, or if the offense is sufficiently severe, people are to go to the police or appeal to the courts. Unlike the honorable, the dignified approve of appeals to third parties and condemn those who “take the law into their own hands.” 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…. The ideal in dignity cultures is thus to use the courts as quickly, quietly, and rarely as possible. The growth of law, order, and commerce in the modern world facilitated the rise of the culture of dignity, which largely supplanted the culture of honor among the middle and upper classes of the West…. But the rise of microaggression complaints suggests a new direction in the evolution of moral culture.

C) A Culture of Victimhood

Microaggression complaints have characteristics that put them at odds with both honor and dignity cultures. Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response. But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor – tantamount to showing that one had no honor at all. Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.[p.714-715]

A culture of victimhood is one characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization. … Under such conditions complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood because the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights.[p.715]

The culture of victimhood is currently most entrenched on college campuses, where microaggression complaints are most prevalent. Other ways of campaigning for support from third parties and emphasizing one’s own oppression – from protest demonstrations to the invented victimization of hate-crime hoaxes – are prevalent in this setting as well. That victimhood culture is so evident among campus activists might lead the reader to believe this is entirely a phenomenon of the political left, and indeed, the narrative of oppression and victimization is especially congenial to the leftist worldview (Haidt 2012:296; Kling 2013; Smith 2003:82). But insofar as they share a social environment, the same conditions that lead the aggrieved to use a tactic against their adversaries encourage their adversaries to use that tactic as well. For instance, hate crime hoaxes do not all come from the left. [gives examples] … Naturally, whenever victimhood (or honor, or anything else) confers status, all sorts of people will want to claim it. As clinical psychologist David J. Ley notes, the response of those labeled as oppressors is frequently to “assert that they are a victim as well.” Thus, “men criticized as sexist for challenging radical feminism defend themselves as victims of reverse sexism, [and] people criticized as being unsympathetic proclaim their own history of victimization.”[p.715] [In this way, victimhood culture causes a downward spiral of competitive victimhood. Young people on the left and the right get sucked into its vortex of grievance. We can expect political polarization to get steadily worse in the coming decades as this moral culture of victimhood spreads]

All of that assumes that the victim culture is as honest as the honor culture. In my view, the honor culture people would have tended toward honesty and principle, since when they leveled a complaint they were willing to die for it. Obviously today’s victim culture complainers make silly and ridiculous complaints willy-nilly, with no basis in reality. Given how the system rewards even the most specious of complaints, this inevitably will render a system which undoubtedly favors the cowardly liar, who uses complaints as a Machiavellian tool to advance their own interests.

I could go on, but the entire post is like that. If you wish to understand the effects of r/K, imagine that today there was only enough food to feed 15% of the population, and 85% of the population were going to starve to death in the next six months. Would the whiners who complain about microaggressions be the ones to survive, or would the 75 million gun owners in America be disproportionately represented among the survivors? Would the resulting culture contain complaints about “microaggressions?” Would it embrace out-group interests? Would Caitlyn Jenner be a big celebrity? Would marriage be more popular? Would welfare be more popular? Would we be debating whether or not to import tens of thousands of Muslims from the Middle East, when our own citizens can’t find work?

Know r/K Selection, and your entire perspective is changed, leaving the article as little more than really bright people astounded by insights that lead them only 1/10th of the way toward the total understanding that is provided by simply grasping r/K.

Know r/K, and you will know what follows when the Apocalypse cometh™.

Apocalypse cometh™