By David French
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
I grew up in rural Kentucky, where the process of
becoming a man meant gaining toughness, shedding weakness, and learning how to
take care of yourself and others. This was simply understood, not just by
fathers and sons but also by mothers and teachers. In one grade-school incident,
I got into a playground fight with another boy and knocked him to the ground.
As the teacher rushed up to separate us, she demanded to know what happened.
“He said I hit like a girl,” I told her. “Is this true?” She asked my friend.
Rubbing his face, he nodded. “Well then, you deserved it,” she said. And that
was that.
I thought of that minor playground scrap — and many
others like it — when reading through Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s
brilliant new paper, “Microaggression and Moral Culture.” (The full article
costs $30.00, but Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent summary on his
website). Campbell and Manning contend that we’re in the midst of a key
cultural change. Prior to the 18th and 19th centuries, we lived in an “honor
culture,” “where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on
their own.” And while the honor culture tended to be somewhat violent — dueling
is a classic response to an aggrieved sense of honor — it also carried with it
an inherent limitation: Because personal insults required a personal response,
people were more likely to count the cost of confrontation.
As western civilization built an elaborate rule of law,
“dignity culture” replaced honor culture. In a dignity culture, in Haidt’s
words, people “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.” The southern culture
of my childhood was a hybrid, where honor was earned. Violence was certainly
possible in this culture, but all parties would appeal to authority when life
or limb hung in the balance. The bottom line was that you either ignored minor
transgressions or you learned to step up, personally, to deal with offense.
The honor and dignity cultures, however, face new
competition from an insidious development: victim culture. In victim culture,
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 the culture of the
micro-aggression, where people literally seek out opportunities to be offended.
Once “victimized,” a person gains power — but not through any personal risk.
Indeed, it is the victim’s hypersensitivity and fragility that makes them
politically and socially strong.
Not only is this mindset destabilizing — there is high
incentive for conflict, with little to no personal risk to balance the desire
for vengeance — it’s unmanly. In victim culture, a person cultivates their
sense of weakness and fragility, actively retarding the process of growing up.
There is zero incentive to mature, because maturity can actually decrease your power and influence.
While I don’t mean to say that women haven’t
traditionally gone through the process of becoming tougher — of building
thicker skins and handling conflicts directly — developing toughness used to be
a defining male characteristic. We were to put aside the childish weakness and
vulnerability of our early years and work out our conflicts man-to-man, the
better to deploy them judiciously since we knew their price. The concept of
appealing for help because one’s “feelings were hurt” was frankly bizarre.
Raising boys to be whiny victims isn’t exactly new. When
I first moved to the Northeast in the mid-1990s I noticed that many of the boys
raised by the liberal elite weren’t “men” in any sense I could recognize. They
were whiny, petulant, hypersensitive, and incapable of either physical
self-defense or even the most rudimentary tasks of manual labor. I thought they
were so self-evidently off-putting that their cultural influence would be
limited. I was wrong.
I’d underestimated the allure of victim status — the ease
with which one can achieve power and sympathy all at once. Victim status is so
desirable that it’s constantly faked and exaggerated, and claims that one is
not a victim are met with indignation. It’s almost amusing, for example, to see
wealthy kids at America’s most elite colleges — among the most privileged
children in world history — compete to claim the most horrifying story of upset
and oppression.
At the time, my schoolyard tussle wasn’t that significant
— just another day in the life of a boy growing up in the South. My response to
my friend wasn’t right, but it wasn’t a big deal, and no one treated it as
such. Today, it would change my life in all the wrong ways. At most present-day
American schools, both of us would be punished for violating zero-tolerance
policies on violence, and the reference to “hitting like a girl” would cause an
uproar over gender discrimination, mandatory counseling, and possible
expulsion.
The only proper response to this sorry state of affairs
is to confront the crybabies until they man up or shut up. No more yielding to
the utter nonsense of social media shame campaigns, hand-wringing deans of
students, or idiotic, politically correct corporate press releases. There are
real victims out there, and real victims need actual men to stand in their
defense.
