The author of this piece, Musa al-Gharbi is a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia University. Readers can connect to his social media and other work via his website.
From Heterodox Academy:
“The appeal to ‘social justice’ has by now become the most widely used and most effective argument in political discussion. Almost every claim for government action on behalf of particular groups is made in its name, and if it can be made to appear that a certain measure is demanded by ‘social justice,’ opposition to it will rapidly weaken…. It seems to be widely believed that ‘social justice’ is just a new moral value which we must add to those that were recognized in the past, and that it can be fitted within the existing framework of moral rules. What is not sufficiently recognized is that in order to give this phrase meaning a complete change of the whole character of the social order will have to be effected, and that some of the values which used to govern it will have to be sacrificed. It is such a transformation of society into one of a fundamentally different type which is currently occurring piecemeal and without awareness of the outcome to which it must lead.”
This selection may read like something written in the post-2014 milieu – perhaps published in an outlet like Quillette – perhaps referring to ‘SJW’ students run amok. In fact, the words are more than 40 years old, taken from Hayek’s 1976 The Mirage of Social Justice.
How about this:
“Leftists have helped to put together such academic disciplines as women’s history, black history, gay studies, Hispanic-American studies, and migrant studies. This has led [some] to remark that in the United States the term ‘cultural studies’ means ‘victim studies.’ [This] choice of phrase has been resented, but [it makes] a good point: namely, that such programs were created not out of the sort of curiosity about diverse forms of human life which gave rise to cultural anthropology, but rather, to do something for people who have been humiliated – to help victims of socially acceptable forms of sadism by making such sadism no longer acceptable… Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies or trailer-park studies because these people are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely economic selfishness…
To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world where citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce, in which ‘liberalism’ and ‘humanism’ are synonyms for naivete – for an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation.”
One would be forgiven for believing this was an essay riffing on the recent ‘Grievance Studies’ hoax. In fact, the term (victim studies), and the debate surrounding these lines of research, long predated Pluckrose, Boghossian and Lindsay’s stunt. This particular passage is from Richard Rorty’s 1998 classic Achieving Our Country (published roughly 20 years prior to the ‘Sokal Squared’ affair).
Similarly, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s 2014 paper “Microaggression and Moral Cultures” was met with great fanfare (and expanded into a book, The Rise of Victimhood Culture, in 2018) — in large part because it ostensibly explained the sudden surge of student protests in the months that preceded (and the years that followed) its publication, as well as the new language and strategies that seemed to define these demonstrations.
Yet well before these transformations in student protests, others had identified a change in both the valence and salience of victimhood in American culture more broadly. For instance, in 1992 conservative author Charles Skyes wrote an entire book lamenting how the United States was becoming, in his words, a “nation of victims.” In 2009, two sociologists (Fassin & Rechtman) chronicled the emergence of what Campbell & Manning would later describe as ‘victimhood culture’ in The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood.
Here is their story in a nutshell:
Although the notion of psychological trauma goes back to the late 19th century (particularly via the work of Charcot, Freud and Janet) – even as late as World War II, trauma was not taken too seriously. Many argued that appeals to trauma were merely a means for soldiers to excuse their weak constitutions (unlike the ‘real men’ who could hold themselves together in war). It was widely believed that soldiers were exaggerating their symptoms in order to return home from the field, or avoid returning thereto. This widespread dismissal spurred a decades-long campaign among practitioners treating those soldiers, and veterans advocacy groups, to privilege testimony and subjective experience – to not only take these seriously, but to place them, in some senses, above meaningful scrutiny or reproach.
Nonetheless, trauma was not widely embraced until the Vietnam War. Most intellectuals and academics were against the war. Psychologists and psychiatrists, many of whom had been formerly hesitant or skeptical of the trauma framework, increasingly sought to ground their opposition to Vietnam in their domain of expertise — by arguing that the conflict was traumatizing our nation’s young men en masse. The image of the psychologically damaged veteran became an important component of antiwar advocacy — and PTSD was formally added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) III, following shortly after the U.S. withdrawal from the theater....
....MUCH MORE
