A status-and-social-leverage strategy is a form of collective narcissism; a means to redistribute status

What a pleasure to come across a thoughtful piece which gives you new ways of framing something, advances ideas with which you can sympathetically agree but also advances arguments with which you might disagree. 

A piece which forces serious engagement and that engagement returns advantages.

Such is A better future versus the transformative future by Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby.  The subheading is Degrading the bargaining politics of human flourishing: I. 

The core idea with which I am intrigued is woven across their essay and therefore hard to extract from their larger argument.  

I will attempt to do so in their own words below.  In my own reformulation, I would put forward the following argument in my words but with some of their concepts.  

The Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment (CLAE) yielded an ever-expanding Emancipation Sequence.  At the heart of the Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment radical experiment is a belief in a knowable world (scientific method) made up of individual people all of whom have equal inalienable natural rights which include property, speech, assembly, religion, etc..  The core experiment was (and is) the effort to birth a new world through consent of the governed in which all these precepts were realized for everyone to the fullest degree possible.  

The challenge facing Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment thinkers was how to transition from a past world dominated by myth, superstition, violent domination, forcible governance by the few of the many into the realized Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment model of free individuals exercising their natural rights for their own benefit via the marketplaces of ideas, property, risk, capital, etc.  

A central success of that transition has been the Emancipation Sequence.  From Dale and Warby:

The Emancipation Sequence

The politics of the transformative future are profoundly different from standard attempts to do better.

In many ways, Western societies have been doing better for centuries. We can identify an Emancipation Sequence marching through Western (especially Anglo) history: abolition of the slave trade, then of slavery; Catholic emancipation in the Anglican United Kingdom; Jewish emancipation; adult male suffrage; women’s suffrage; equal opportunities for women; civil rights in the US, and finally gay and lesbian equality.

The common element in these widenings of legal equality and political participation is that each step in the sequence was not about social transformation. It was about being included, about a place at the table. The basic claim was “we want to have the legal and social standing to participate in society that you have”.

This claim did not depend on some elevated valorisation of the to-be-included group, merely an appeal to a common humanity. Indeed, both Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi regularly criticised failings among those on whose behalf they spoke.

Again and again, this appeal to a common humanity was powerful and persuasive. Every single advance in the Emancipation Sequence came from successfully convincing folk who were not from the group seeking inclusion. Most obviously, every single women’s movement advance came about by persuading men.

A persistent feature of human societies has been presumptive sex roles. It has always included cultural endorsement and management of the presumptive sex roles within each society or collection of societies. The speed of the success within Western societies in achieving legal equality—and the acceptance of women’s participation in all walks of life—is, in historical terms, astonishing.

In the case of the UK, the process started with the Married Women’s Property Act (1882). Most women were granted the right to vote at the same time as all adult men were, in 1918. By 2015, a survey in the UK found that 84 per cent of men and 81 per cent of women endorsed equal opportunity for women. The concept of presumptive sex roles had become attenuated to the point of near complete disappearance.

To acknowledge the Emancipation Sequence and its successful inclusions is to undermine any division between the moral wonder of the imagined future and the moral perdition of the past or present. This is why those who promote the politics of the transformative future ignore or disparage that history and those successes.

The central argument is indisputably true.  Across the West, and certainly the Anglophone West, we have a 250 years expansion of rights and privileges from some protected core to virtually the entirety of society.  It has been empirically and morally an enormous victory.  Yes, it occurred in fits and starts, never smoothly, and with occasional backsliding here and there.  But the success of this entirely new way of viewing the world (CLAE) has been astonishing in its breadth and effectiveness.  And astonishing in terms of the consequent progress in terms of knowledge and prosperity.  They all go together, forming a Goldilocks ecology of prosperity.  

Failures are primarily in those areas of the world where the precepts of CLAE are not accepted in whole or in part.  Places where recidivism to authoritarianism and totalitarian control remain a reality.  

The Emancipation Sequence in the context of, and via the nature of Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment ideas has been an astonishing success.  And it has always been predicated on the idea that all individuals have equal rights which are protected through the rule of law and the equality of all before the law.  

What is strange in the past thirty or so years has been the emergence of victim movements which do not wish to avail themselves of the benefits of CLAE but which wish to achieve privileged moral or material positions within a fundamentally transformed social structure.  

I am inclined to interpret these victim movements via the Gramscian lens of totalitarian offspring of always persistent Marxist ideologies.  Certainly, most of the individuals involved in these victim movements speak some Marxist patois with more or less explicit ideological descent from the Original Gangster Marx.  

Dale and Warby are offering an alternative way to view the emergence of Victim Movements.  I do not dismiss it.  It warrants consideration but there is much to consider.

The two primary victim groups so far have been racial victim groups (via Critical Race Theory) and gender victim groups (via Feminist Theory).  They have recently been joined by the probably passing transgender victim group.

I look at each of these as mere manifestations of remnant Marxism in its various guises. 

Dale and Warby note:

Those who endorse the politics of the transformative future seek to claim the Emancipation Sequence’s moral lustre, particularly that of the civil rights movement, while rejecting its underlying principles and devaluing its achievements. It also regularly eschews the politics of open political bargaining—which, after all, might not go the way you want—for the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

[snip]

This politics of institutional capture intimidates, seeking to destroy careers while censoring dissent. Dissent from the moral project is taken to be either malfeasance or the tacit endorsement or facilitation of evil. This view of dissent rejects the bargaining politics that is inherent to democratic process and parliamentary politics.

The politics of the transformative future is not about doing better within society as it is. It is about transcending that society and its heritage. It creates such a conceptual and moral gap between what is, what has been, and what ought to be, that the transformational future become endless fodder for status-and-social-leverage strategies. The problem with having practical aims—such as legal equality—is that such aims come with end-points.

I am good with those arguments and observations.

Dale and Warby in this essay are mostly focused on explicating their argument via the gender victim movement, i.e. recent versions of feminism.

Feminism is where the politics of inclusion—of the Emancipation Sequence—came to be distorted and derailed. It’s where the sequence went past “we want what you have too, because we are human” to systematic self-valorisation based on drawing a moral distinction between groups (specifically, between men and women).

We are now seeing explicit rejection of equal opportunity.

Feminism’s fundamental problem is one of differentiation. If there is no profound moral distinction to be made between men and women, what is the point of feminism? Liberal feminism just becomes liberalism, socialist feminism just becomes socialism, and so on.

Feminism has thus openly valorised its own group. This is not a feature of previous inclusion movements. Feminism spoke as though, somehow, patriarchal constraints throughout history had turned women into a finer form of Homo sapien. This valorisation entailed denigration of men and masculinity.

This combination of denigration and valorisation is antipathetic to the politics of bargaining of electoral politics but well-suited to the politics of institutional capture through piety display*, intimidation and censorship. So, the more feminism comes to lean on moral distinction—and the less it becomes about practical politics—the more it shifts to the politics of institutional capture.

This is where they begin to address something which is notable and yet seemingly under-discussed.  I suspect that in the West, especially the Anglophone West, there remains an enormous commitment to the equal rights agenda of CLAE.  Yet in these heartlands of CLAE, we see these victimhood movements reverting to the old arguments of privilege - we deserve a superior position because of . . . (race, class, gender, language, religion, gender, etc.)  

Why?  Dale Warby have an answer.

The more genuinely gender-egalitarian society becomes, the fewer legal or other barriers there are to women, the more feminism has to lean on making moral distinctions between men and women. It’s no longer about getting rid of various barriers, about the practical politics of inclusion as per the Emancipation Sequence, about investing in parliamentary politics and open persuasion. Instead, it becomes a status-and-social-leverage strategy.

The tendency to self-valorise women at times becomes a form of collective narcissism (“believe all women”, which permits conviction by accusation). Feminism has come to lean heavily on an updated version of the Victorian era cult of womanhood: that men are the brutes women have to civilise.

I am somewhat . . . dubious? But I don't disagree with what they are saying.  Hence the need to mull.  I agree and yet hesitate over the position.

Dale and Warby head off into different territory for a while before coming back to:

As part of group self-valorisation, feminism became the first movement in the Emancipation Sequence not to seek to generalise dignity, but to redistribute it so women have more than men. Seeking an unequal redistribution of dignity—of presumptive social standing—is now standard across social justice progressivism.

Indeed - that has been what has been so striking in the post 1970s Emancipation Sequence.  The emergence of some groups who seek not to increase everyone's access to equal rights and protections of the law but instead to create newly privileged groups.  

Then they head off into some biological woods for a while.  I don't inherently disagree with the arguments they are making but they make me somewhat nervous.

But enough said about that.  An excellent essay in making a provocative argument with a fresh framing.  

I really like the Emancipation Sequence, because it conforms so well with the substance of CLAE and because it so clearly maps to the actual sequence of historical events over the past 250 years.

Hopefully, we can move past this period of authoritarian revanchism characterized by the victimhood movements who seek to privilege themselves at the expense of everyone else, and which are in direct opposition to the CLAE agenda.  Whether they are simply revitalized Marxists or merely self-seeking provocateurs, this essay provides me more reason to have an atavistic aversion to those seeking to fundamentally transform culture/society/institutions etc.  They are mere authoritarian chancers seeking the hot opportunity for self-advantage.