Excellent analysis, and it fits right in with how anti-racists frame the narrative: you can't simply be not racist. You're either racist or actively anti racist. This is how they launder that absurd but strangely effective and dangerous notion: via language and emotional manipulation, as effective abusers do.
An example where the establishment (illegitimately) won an argument by changing the way they used words is in the medical definition of death. It was changed in 1968 from permanent cardiopulmonary collapse to whole brain death. They did this so that people with whole brain death could be declared dead and therefore pulled off life support (“organ support”) so that their organs could be donated.
Many bioethicists objected, including Peter Singer, because people in whole brain death still preserve a lot of biological function, including digesting food, being warm, having a pulse, even gestating a pregnancy. Yes, people in whole brain death have permanently lost all personality and psychological properties that make them a person, but that actually happens in way more cases than people are comfortable harvesting organs from, such as in higher brain death and even late dementia.
Singer’s point was that it’s fine to take these people off support for organs, but let’s be honest: doing so kills them. You can’t win an ethical debate (is it okay to take these people off support) by changing the way we use words (turns out they were already ‘dead’; how convenient). He blamed the conceptual confusion on the sanctity of life ethic--see his “Is the Sanctity of Life Ethic Terminally Ill?” Bioethics 1995.
Let’s take the existing word “privilege” out of it. Change it to some other word. Or even replace it with a variable.
Now, describe those situations where some people are able to live moment to moment without ever having to contemplate that variable, versus others who have that whatever-it-is omnipresent and an obstacle.
Do you deny the existence of those obstacles, or those situations?
Literally, you're right. You could re-label "privileges" as "blessings" and note that the idea of counting your blessings has been recommended by religious leaders and psychologists for millennia at least as a way to improve mood. It is also known that blessings-counting induces a higher level of generosity - which also tends to improve mood.
Still, from context we can readily tell that the meaning of "check your privilege" is NOT "let's review your blessings as a way to lift your mood and perhaps even as a tactic to get you to feel more generous." Rather, it is "shut up."
Yeah. While I fully agree that the woke’s use of “check your privilege” is really just wielding guilt as a weapon to shut down any dissent, that doesn’t discredit the entire concept of privilege altogether. Honestly, it’s pretty obvious that things like height and looks give people preferential treatment. That’s privilege, and that’s OK. There’s absolutely no reason to demonize the good looking or tall for it. I don’t think it’s productive to deny these things exist, nor is is productive to dwell on it if you don’t have them.
I would not deny the existence of obstacles because they are very real. And, in today's society, these obstacles exist in a variety of forms that affect a variety of people in ways that are not so clear cut. Being absent of difficult obstacles may be subjective.
Let's put reciprocity into this: is asking someone to check their privilege, transactional? I mean, to ask someone to suspend whatever-it-is, and that whatever-it-is carries benefit, then asking/demanding should require a quid pro quo; should it not? Assuming you're engaged in a discussion with a reasonable person - but a person that just happens to have some toxic priors that cause them to dispense gaslighting techniques - why would it not be okay to ask that this person check their baggage?
Good point, structurally. The issue is that we can't assert or grant the existence of a whatever-it-is force or constraint in the sense leftists (or anyone) mean without an explanation and an appropriate body of evidence. In this case, it's assumed that "privilege" is either decisive as a cause of outcomes, the total cause, the primary cause, the largest cause, or a big enough cause for all humans in the asserted demographics that they can't take credit or blame for life outcomes, or that they should feel somewhat guilty or resentful for privilege's role in said outcomes. Or something along those lines – a large problem is that leftists don't explain which it is, and I think the structure and properties of leftist abstractions like "privilege" make them untenable and we'll probably have to toss them aside within a few steps of reasoning or contemplation of how to test them against reality, evidence, etc.
There are some assumptions in your "do you deny the existence of these obstacles" question. Privilege is asserted as a universal force in the stipulated demographics, either positive or negative (by its absence and others having it), applying to all humans without any apparent qualification. Non-leftists would trivially deny its existence as universal, if it's supposed to be decisive or really chunky, for many reasons, and from many angles, observations, and frameworks. We'd probably also deny the ability to assume its presence in most people or a large minority, where you just know the leftist-stipulated demographics.
I think there's a big knowledge gap between privilege believers and all other humans. Some of that knowledge I'd count as practical wisdom, but a lot is just random knowledge of the world, memories, bits of data, the Success Sequence, the out of wedlock births data, the IQ data, crime rate differences, WWII, Hamlet, self-fulfilling prophecy, the recent study on the link between envy and leftist ideology, a million other things. I'd bet lots of money, maybe everything I had, on the claim that if people are well educated *before* you introduce them to leftist ideology, you get very little adoption/agreement. I'd probably be comfortable with 10% as the limit given certain details of this probably very difficult to run experiment (we can't do a Truman Show, but maybe just some kind of controlled homeschooling condition or an actual school if we could seal off exposure – overseas makes it easier). My prediction is stronger if we wait until age 25 to spring leftist ideology, and any other ideologies, on them.
By education, I mean rich engagement with history, philosophy, math, literature, science, the Greeks, lots of great stories, both literary and biographies, solid basic stats like linear correlation and probability. A milquetoast version would be whatever Americans got in 1920 or something, or something hilarious like only covering history up until 1850 or 1900, saying we'll fill you in when you're 25... at which point they'd read leftist ideology along with the history update.
My prediction is that leftist ideology only works on the young and uneducated. I don't think it's just being young, though there are substantive educational deficits in youth that are inherent, not subject to any formal education or curriculum. It's really about education, the knowledge and learning and reasoning skills that would be activated upon exposure to leftist assertions based on strange abstractions that no one has or uses outside of leftist ideology. The fact that leftist ideology is indoctrinated in kids is probably important too – it's presented as descriptively true, as reality, not as "these people contend that..." vs "these people disagree and contend that..." vs "this school has a different framework altogether". There we're running into the fact that leftist ideology is distinctively dogmatic, where I think it's inherently destined for indoctrination, cannot be formulated as a perspective in a constellation of perspectives. It's like they can't talk the way humans normally talk about normative philosophy or values, maybe don't even fit the classic framework there. They start with loaded, proprietary abstractions as reality, where we'd want to start at the beginning. The left is a cult right now, an actual cult like Scientology is a cult, but much worse. They weren't in 2010, definitely not in 1990. I think the abstractions are a big part of that story, and those abstractions are fairly new in the public left, the media, web, politicians. They're the abstractions of the academic left, and they somehow got out of their cage. I assume the reason is the web. It's not possible without the web. The dynamics of the pervasive web, maturing over the 2000s and since, with social media, mobile, etc. There's a lot to figure out there, a lot of hypotheses and mechanisms, but this madness couldn't happen without the web, and maybe mature, full saturation mass media, which becomes reciprocally more and more biased over time.
It might be useful to think about the origin of the word privilege, which is "private law". It's a special set of rules that applies only to certain individuals. Diluting that down to mean nothing but "advantage" is not productive - the word advantage is already there to use!
The supreme irony being that the people who use phrases like "check your privilege" are those who are working to entrench legal privilege based on race and sex. Their problem isn't privilege as such, but rather who has it.
I don't think that's right. If all the word privlege served to do was to convey the message that all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing then it wouldn't be particularly threatening.
I'm not a huge believer in feeling guilty but all the old starving children ads that implicitly tried to make one feel guilty for being well off Americans were at worst annoying not pernicious. The problem is that privlege is too often used to imply that, because you haven't experienced the issue yourself, you lack the epistemic or moral authority to dispute the views of those who have.
On its own the idea that one might have a moral responsibility as a result of being better off isn't really an issue. It's the coupling of the concept to the idea that those with privlege aren't allowed to have a legitimate view of their own on the matter. This allows the word privlege to be used to delegitimize even the views of people who have worked to solve problems for decades if they don't have the right views.
> Do woke activists really think they can guilt lots of normal people into joining their crusade? Probably not. They’re goal, rather, is to guilt lots of normal people into shutting up.
Maybe. But if so, I think it's not a conscious decision. Few people are consciously that cynical.
I expect it's some mix of Motivated Reasoning, as described in "The Elephant in the Brain", and/or a speech pattern that's evolved as a successful way to win debates.
Interesting that you thought of Elephant in the Brain, as I was thinking of something else Robin Hanson wrote, which is that people want be be socially dominant, but doing so overtly is frowned upon. So we have to disguise dominance moves as something else, e.g. paternalism, in which we try to get people to do what we want, while telling ourselves (and others) that we are actually just trying to help them.
Saying “check your privilege” also seems like a dominance move. It works because it accuses someone else of being in a dominant or oppressor role, which knocks them off guard and is difficult for most people to defend against.
I think that last one is it. Telling people to shut up via leaning on their guilt for not being some supposed victim class turns out to have worked well, so it is used.
Where does anything written imply that the author thinks this is his or anyone else's 'main problem' or that making this argument is his 'purpose'? And as per the authors argument, you are using the word privilege inappropriately, and what is there not to be fine with? Should straight white men feel bad all the time?
I agree that using 'check your privilege' to shut people up is bad, and while I've never actually seen it used that way off the internet, not denying it happens. When I see it used it's typically as a reminder: to remind someone that their opinion is likely coloured by their experiences in a way they don't realise.
***in what I have done and in what I have failed to do***,
(strike breast) through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault;
therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.
-------
*** Commenters Emphasis***
Christianity really doesn't have a concept of being "OK". While it expects people to not be perfect, it inspires perfection as the ultimate goal. There is both good and bad in this, as the wisest Christians have noticed in the past (worth noting that holy men are both the saints and villains of the New Testament, while the state literally washes its hands of the matter.)
Personally, I think in the utterly brutal reality that existed up until very recent times in the developed world, Christian mercy tended towards marginal improvement more often than not.
But in our soft times I think at least abstracted christianity is a failure mode, moreso then any point in the past. Mercy has something to add to interpersonal relationships, but systematized mercy has gone off the rails.
Well said! I’ve joked that if somebody told me to “check my privilege”, I would reply “It’s fine! Thanks for asking!”
Excellent analysis, and it fits right in with how anti-racists frame the narrative: you can't simply be not racist. You're either racist or actively anti racist. This is how they launder that absurd but strangely effective and dangerous notion: via language and emotional manipulation, as effective abusers do.
An example where the establishment (illegitimately) won an argument by changing the way they used words is in the medical definition of death. It was changed in 1968 from permanent cardiopulmonary collapse to whole brain death. They did this so that people with whole brain death could be declared dead and therefore pulled off life support (“organ support”) so that their organs could be donated.
Many bioethicists objected, including Peter Singer, because people in whole brain death still preserve a lot of biological function, including digesting food, being warm, having a pulse, even gestating a pregnancy. Yes, people in whole brain death have permanently lost all personality and psychological properties that make them a person, but that actually happens in way more cases than people are comfortable harvesting organs from, such as in higher brain death and even late dementia.
Singer’s point was that it’s fine to take these people off support for organs, but let’s be honest: doing so kills them. You can’t win an ethical debate (is it okay to take these people off support) by changing the way we use words (turns out they were already ‘dead’; how convenient). He blamed the conceptual confusion on the sanctity of life ethic--see his “Is the Sanctity of Life Ethic Terminally Ill?” Bioethics 1995.
Brian, I’m not sure I agree.
Let’s take the existing word “privilege” out of it. Change it to some other word. Or even replace it with a variable.
Now, describe those situations where some people are able to live moment to moment without ever having to contemplate that variable, versus others who have that whatever-it-is omnipresent and an obstacle.
Do you deny the existence of those obstacles, or those situations?
Literally, you're right. You could re-label "privileges" as "blessings" and note that the idea of counting your blessings has been recommended by religious leaders and psychologists for millennia at least as a way to improve mood. It is also known that blessings-counting induces a higher level of generosity - which also tends to improve mood.
Still, from context we can readily tell that the meaning of "check your privilege" is NOT "let's review your blessings as a way to lift your mood and perhaps even as a tactic to get you to feel more generous." Rather, it is "shut up."
Yeah. While I fully agree that the woke’s use of “check your privilege” is really just wielding guilt as a weapon to shut down any dissent, that doesn’t discredit the entire concept of privilege altogether. Honestly, it’s pretty obvious that things like height and looks give people preferential treatment. That’s privilege, and that’s OK. There’s absolutely no reason to demonize the good looking or tall for it. I don’t think it’s productive to deny these things exist, nor is is productive to dwell on it if you don’t have them.
I would not deny the existence of obstacles because they are very real. And, in today's society, these obstacles exist in a variety of forms that affect a variety of people in ways that are not so clear cut. Being absent of difficult obstacles may be subjective.
Let's put reciprocity into this: is asking someone to check their privilege, transactional? I mean, to ask someone to suspend whatever-it-is, and that whatever-it-is carries benefit, then asking/demanding should require a quid pro quo; should it not? Assuming you're engaged in a discussion with a reasonable person - but a person that just happens to have some toxic priors that cause them to dispense gaslighting techniques - why would it not be okay to ask that this person check their baggage?
Good point, structurally. The issue is that we can't assert or grant the existence of a whatever-it-is force or constraint in the sense leftists (or anyone) mean without an explanation and an appropriate body of evidence. In this case, it's assumed that "privilege" is either decisive as a cause of outcomes, the total cause, the primary cause, the largest cause, or a big enough cause for all humans in the asserted demographics that they can't take credit or blame for life outcomes, or that they should feel somewhat guilty or resentful for privilege's role in said outcomes. Or something along those lines – a large problem is that leftists don't explain which it is, and I think the structure and properties of leftist abstractions like "privilege" make them untenable and we'll probably have to toss them aside within a few steps of reasoning or contemplation of how to test them against reality, evidence, etc.
There are some assumptions in your "do you deny the existence of these obstacles" question. Privilege is asserted as a universal force in the stipulated demographics, either positive or negative (by its absence and others having it), applying to all humans without any apparent qualification. Non-leftists would trivially deny its existence as universal, if it's supposed to be decisive or really chunky, for many reasons, and from many angles, observations, and frameworks. We'd probably also deny the ability to assume its presence in most people or a large minority, where you just know the leftist-stipulated demographics.
I think there's a big knowledge gap between privilege believers and all other humans. Some of that knowledge I'd count as practical wisdom, but a lot is just random knowledge of the world, memories, bits of data, the Success Sequence, the out of wedlock births data, the IQ data, crime rate differences, WWII, Hamlet, self-fulfilling prophecy, the recent study on the link between envy and leftist ideology, a million other things. I'd bet lots of money, maybe everything I had, on the claim that if people are well educated *before* you introduce them to leftist ideology, you get very little adoption/agreement. I'd probably be comfortable with 10% as the limit given certain details of this probably very difficult to run experiment (we can't do a Truman Show, but maybe just some kind of controlled homeschooling condition or an actual school if we could seal off exposure – overseas makes it easier). My prediction is stronger if we wait until age 25 to spring leftist ideology, and any other ideologies, on them.
By education, I mean rich engagement with history, philosophy, math, literature, science, the Greeks, lots of great stories, both literary and biographies, solid basic stats like linear correlation and probability. A milquetoast version would be whatever Americans got in 1920 or something, or something hilarious like only covering history up until 1850 or 1900, saying we'll fill you in when you're 25... at which point they'd read leftist ideology along with the history update.
My prediction is that leftist ideology only works on the young and uneducated. I don't think it's just being young, though there are substantive educational deficits in youth that are inherent, not subject to any formal education or curriculum. It's really about education, the knowledge and learning and reasoning skills that would be activated upon exposure to leftist assertions based on strange abstractions that no one has or uses outside of leftist ideology. The fact that leftist ideology is indoctrinated in kids is probably important too – it's presented as descriptively true, as reality, not as "these people contend that..." vs "these people disagree and contend that..." vs "this school has a different framework altogether". There we're running into the fact that leftist ideology is distinctively dogmatic, where I think it's inherently destined for indoctrination, cannot be formulated as a perspective in a constellation of perspectives. It's like they can't talk the way humans normally talk about normative philosophy or values, maybe don't even fit the classic framework there. They start with loaded, proprietary abstractions as reality, where we'd want to start at the beginning. The left is a cult right now, an actual cult like Scientology is a cult, but much worse. They weren't in 2010, definitely not in 1990. I think the abstractions are a big part of that story, and those abstractions are fairly new in the public left, the media, web, politicians. They're the abstractions of the academic left, and they somehow got out of their cage. I assume the reason is the web. It's not possible without the web. The dynamics of the pervasive web, maturing over the 2000s and since, with social media, mobile, etc. There's a lot to figure out there, a lot of hypotheses and mechanisms, but this madness couldn't happen without the web, and maybe mature, full saturation mass media, which becomes reciprocally more and more biased over time.
Typo: *They’re* goal, rather...
It might be useful to think about the origin of the word privilege, which is "private law". It's a special set of rules that applies only to certain individuals. Diluting that down to mean nothing but "advantage" is not productive - the word advantage is already there to use!
The supreme irony being that the people who use phrases like "check your privilege" are those who are working to entrench legal privilege based on race and sex. Their problem isn't privilege as such, but rather who has it.
"words masquerading as arguments". That's a great description of the general MO of those bullying non-activists.
I don't think that's right. If all the word privlege served to do was to convey the message that all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing then it wouldn't be particularly threatening.
I'm not a huge believer in feeling guilty but all the old starving children ads that implicitly tried to make one feel guilty for being well off Americans were at worst annoying not pernicious. The problem is that privlege is too often used to imply that, because you haven't experienced the issue yourself, you lack the epistemic or moral authority to dispute the views of those who have.
On its own the idea that one might have a moral responsibility as a result of being better off isn't really an issue. It's the coupling of the concept to the idea that those with privlege aren't allowed to have a legitimate view of their own on the matter. This allows the word privlege to be used to delegitimize even the views of people who have worked to solve problems for decades if they don't have the right views.
Since when is merely keeping your own hands clean sufficient to lead a moral life?
> Do woke activists really think they can guilt lots of normal people into joining their crusade? Probably not. They’re goal, rather, is to guilt lots of normal people into shutting up.
Maybe. But if so, I think it's not a conscious decision. Few people are consciously that cynical.
I expect it's some mix of Motivated Reasoning, as described in "The Elephant in the Brain", and/or a speech pattern that's evolved as a successful way to win debates.
Interesting that you thought of Elephant in the Brain, as I was thinking of something else Robin Hanson wrote, which is that people want be be socially dominant, but doing so overtly is frowned upon. So we have to disguise dominance moves as something else, e.g. paternalism, in which we try to get people to do what we want, while telling ourselves (and others) that we are actually just trying to help them.
Saying “check your privilege” also seems like a dominance move. It works because it accuses someone else of being in a dominant or oppressor role, which knocks them off guard and is difficult for most people to defend against.
I think that last one is it. Telling people to shut up via leaning on their guilt for not being some supposed victim class turns out to have worked well, so it is used.
What a world you live in, Bryan, where the main problem is people making you feel guilty.
And your main purpose is to make straight white men feel fine about being privileged.
Yeesh.
Where does anything written imply that the author thinks this is his or anyone else's 'main problem' or that making this argument is his 'purpose'? And as per the authors argument, you are using the word privilege inappropriately, and what is there not to be fine with? Should straight white men feel bad all the time?
Great post.
Just one minor objection: You perhaps mildly accept the idea of wealth as privilege; I don't accept that idea.
I agree that using 'check your privilege' to shut people up is bad, and while I've never actually seen it used that way off the internet, not denying it happens. When I see it used it's typically as a reminder: to remind someone that their opinion is likely coloured by their experiences in a way they don't realise.
Well-said. The whole concept of "privilege" has truly jumped the shark many years ago, and has become a self-satire.
-------
I confess to almighty God
and to you, my brothers and sisters,
that I have greatly sinned,
in my thoughts and in my words,
***in what I have done and in what I have failed to do***,
(strike breast) through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault;
therefore I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints,
and you, my brothers and sisters,
to pray for me to the Lord our God.
-------
*** Commenters Emphasis***
Christianity really doesn't have a concept of being "OK". While it expects people to not be perfect, it inspires perfection as the ultimate goal. There is both good and bad in this, as the wisest Christians have noticed in the past (worth noting that holy men are both the saints and villains of the New Testament, while the state literally washes its hands of the matter.)
Personally, I think in the utterly brutal reality that existed up until very recent times in the developed world, Christian mercy tended towards marginal improvement more often than not.
But in our soft times I think at least abstracted christianity is a failure mode, moreso then any point in the past. Mercy has something to add to interpersonal relationships, but systematized mercy has gone off the rails.