Safetyism
In 2015, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote an (influential and controversial) essay for The Atlantic entitled, “The Coddling of the American Mind” (later expanded into a 2018 book). The basic idea of the essay is that the generation of college students in the 2010s had been so protected from any possibility of (physical or emotional) harm that they had been psychologically harmed in the process.
“In a variety of ways, children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well” which led to “Students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them. The question is whether some of those changes might be doing more harm than good.”
The essay and book are much more detailed than this short summary, but the essence of their point is, “What are we doing to our students if we encourage them to develop extra-thin skin in the years just before they leave the cocoon of adult protection and enter the workforce? Would they not be better prepared to flourish if we taught them to question their own emotional reactions, and to give people the benefit of the doubt?”
In the intervening years, it appears to me that this trend has, if anything, accelerated. In particular, “safetyism” (coined in the Atlantic essay, referring to an obsession with eliminating all threats, both real and imagined, at any cost) returns 33,000 results in a current Google search. What I want to focus on here, though, is not so much safetyism itself (although USA version 2 will need to avoid this – to assist in this, recall Sowell’s dictum that “there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs”), but rather a slightly different problem that is likely a consequence of safetyism: victimhood culture.
Moral culture – honor, dignity, victimhood
Consider this portion of the first quote above: “…adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm…” While children can reasonably hope that adults will act in their interest, it is also important that children learn to deal with conflict on their own, in the process of becoming adults themselves. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, in an earlier paper (“Microaggression and moral cultures.” Comparative sociology, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 692-726) had classified societies (continuing still earlier work of Donald Black in The Social Structure of Right and Wrong and Peter Berger in “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor” [behind paywall] in European Journal of Sociology, vol. 11, pp. 339-347) based on their “moral culture,” most notably the dominant response to a nonviolent conflict (such as an insult).*
Ancient cultures were typically what is called “honor cultures” in which an insult or challenge called for retaliatory physical violence – one’s honor (status based on public opinion) demanded it. Subsequently, especially as law enforcement became more available for egregious, violent conflicts (and commerce among people more widespread), “dignity cultures” arose in which overlooking an insult or challenge is deemed more praiseworthy (dignity is an inherent status not dependent on public opinion) – “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” and thus (as one example) the demise of dueling. Apart from isolated pockets of “honor culture” like street gangs, almost all of the West was “dignity culture” as recently as, say, the 1990s.
Since then, though, a new moral culture has arisen in the West and is rapidly becoming dominant in certain areas (notably college campuses): the “victimhood culture.” In this culture, insults are dealt with not with duels or dignified silence but by finding some powerful third party to retaliate for even slight offenses (note the rise in concern about microaggressions). Victimhood gives rise to status.
A wide variety of “third parties” are available for this purpose, including university administration, police, and, most famously, “Twitter mobs” (or thoroughly-weaponized gossip). Much of this is linked with the notion of “Victimhood as Virtue” (as described by Campbell and Manning) and also the postmodern/Marxist reliance on Erlebnis rather than data and analysis (leading to, for example, susceptibility to hate-crime hoaxes). I will also mention the 2021 psych paper of Ok, Qian, Strejcek and Aquino (abstract here) that found a correlation between virtuous victimhood assertion and the Dark Triad traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy). Just one paper, but an additional caution about Victimhood as Virtue.**
The problem described here is fundamentally cultural, not structural, and so the only prescription I can give for USA version 2 is vigilance. As with postmodernism, since we seem to be lost in the weeds of victimhood culture at the moment, I have no concrete advice for USA version 2 as to how to get out, only a cautionary tale that it should be avoided.
It should also be pointed out that I am NOT saying that people DON’T suffer from insults, slights, etc. On the contrary, human suffering is ubiquitous – the question is what to do about it. I claim that retaliation (of either the direct “honor culture” flavor or the indirect “victimhood culture” flavor) is NOT the best approach, but rather (as mentioned here) with personal courage and effort, reduce the suffering of others in your personal orbit, and overlook slights and insults to you.
Postscript: on a lighter (but similar) note, the inimitable Frank J. Fleming, when he was writing for the Babylon Bee, produced this. Enjoy!
* All this is discussed very thoroughly by Haidt in 2015 here. See other good discussions here (Ronald Bailey), here (Ron Clutz), here (Campbell himself), and Campbell and Manning’s follow-up book. I will mention in passing that the Sam Abrams episode described in Campbell’s Quillette piece, may not be exactly as advertised – as I understand things, the first portion (student response) was just as bad as described, but the second portion (administrative response) may have been misunderstood by Abrams (and, sadly, I can’t document this without breaking anonymity). If so, though, this might be a rare (and unintentional) example of victimhood culture on the Right.
** I also ran across this paper referencing Virtuous Victimhood and found their narratives fascinating. Their examples of the political consequences of self-identified “victims” were: the disaffected lower class in Weimar Germany, pre-Civil War southerners, and Trump supporters. Um, anyone spot a pattern here? Their data might actually be accurate (Trump voters feel more victimized by “personally deserving more than they get” as opposed to Biden voters feeling victimized by “the system is against me”) but it’s tough to argue that the researchers are scientifically dispassionate when they’re inside a bubble that thick!