{"id":67451,"date":"2015-07-22T09:39:01","date_gmt":"2015-07-22T14:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=67451"},"modified":"2015-07-19T23:03:15","modified_gmt":"2015-07-20T04:03:15","slug":"trigger-warnings-the-big-picture-changing-our-culture-of-social-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/07\/22\/trigger-warnings-the-big-picture-changing-our-culture-of-social-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Trigger Warnings, the Big Picture: Changing Our Culture of Social Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently there’s been heightened attention to calling out microaggressions and giving\u00a0trigger warnings.\u00a0I recently speculated<\/a> that the loudest voices making these demands come from\u00a0people in categories that have gained in power but are still not dominant, notably women at elite universities.\u00a0 What they\u2019re saying in part is, \u201cWe don\u2019t have to take this shit anymore.\u201d Or as Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning put it in a recently in The Chronicle<\/a>:<\/i><\/p>\n

…offenses against historically disadvantaged social groups have become more taboo precisely because different groups are now more equal than in the past.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s nice to have one\u2019s hunches seconded by scholars who have given the issue much more thought.<\/p>\n

Campbell and Manning make the context even broader. The new \u201cplague of hypersensitivity\u201d (as sociologist Todd Gitlin called it<\/a>) isn’t just about a shift in power, but\u00a0a wider cultural transformation from a \u201cculture of dignity\u201d to a \u201cculture of victimhood.\u201d More specifically, the aspect of culture they are talking about is social control. How do you get other people to stop doing things you don\u2019t want them to do \u2013 or not do them in the first place?<\/p>\n

In a \u201cculture of honor,\u201d you take direct action against the offender.\u00a0 Where you stand in society \u2013 the rights and privileges that others accord you \u2013 is all about personal reputation (at least for men). \u201cOne must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or lose honor.\u201d The culture of honor arises where the state is weak or is concerned with justice only for some (the elite). So the person whose reputation and honor are at stake must rely on his own devices (devices like duelling pistols).\u00a0 Or in his pursuit of personal justice, he may enlist the aid of kin or a personalized state-substitute like Don Corleone.<\/p>\n

In more evolved societies with a more extensive state, honor gives way to \u201cdignity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. 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 \u201cthick skin\u201d that allows one to shrug off slights and even serious insults, and in a dignity-based society parents might teach children some version of \u201csticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me\u201d \u2013 an idea that would be alien in a culture of honor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The new \u201cculture of victimhood\u201d has a different goal \u2013 cultural change. Culture is, after all, a set of ideas that is shared, usually so widely shared as to be taken for granted. The microaggression debate is about insult, and one of the crucial cultural ideas at stake is how the insulted person should react. In the culture of honor, he must seek personal retribution. In doing so, of course, he is admitting that the insult did in fact sting. The culture of dignity also focuses on the character of offended people, but here they must pretend that the insult had no personal impact. They must maintain a Jackie-Robinson-like stoicism even in the face of gross insults and hope that others will rise to their defense. For smaller insults, say Campbell and Manning, the dignity culture \u201cwould likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue,\u201d which still keeps things at a personal level, \u201cor better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the culture of victimhood, the victim\u2019s goal is to make the personal political.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s not just about me…\u201d\u00a0 Victims and their supporters are moral entrepreneurs. They want to change the norms so that insults and injustices once deemed minor are now seen as deviant. They want to define deviance up. \u00a0That, for example, is the primary point of efforts like the Microaggressions Project<\/a>, which describes\u00a0microaggressions in exactly these terms, saying that microaggression “reminds us of the ways in which we and people like us<\/em> continue to be excluded and oppressed” (my emphasis).<\/p>\n

\"5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So, what we are seeing may be\u00a0a conflict between two cultures of social control: dignity and victimhood. It\u2019s not clear how it\u00a0will develop. I would expect that those who enjoy the benefits of the status quo and none of its drawbacks will be most likely to resist the change demanded by a culture of victimhood.\u00a0It may depend on whether shifts in the distribution of social power continue to give previously more marginalized groups a louder and louder voice.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently there’s been heightened attention to calling out microaggressions and giving\u00a0trigger warnings.\u00a0I recently speculated that the loudest voices making these demands come from\u00a0people in categories that have gained in power but are still not dominant, notably women at elite universities.\u00a0 What they\u2019re saying in part is, \u201cWe don\u2019t have to take this shit anymore.\u201d Or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":67452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12508,349,15,345,23384,329,55,2095,2102,253,868,283,285,23665,54],"class_list":["post-67451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-activismsocial-movements","tag-ageaging","tag-culture","tag-disability","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-emotion","tag-gender","tag-gender-feminismactivism","tag-gender-history","tag-history","tag-power","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-history","tag-sexual-orientation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/07\/53.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67451"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67455,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67451\/revisions\/67455"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}