Following on from yesterday's post, this is what I actually intended to get on to.
As long as we, as individuals or societies, see some people or groups as irredeemable, we have a long, long way to go.
I mentioned in passing yesterday that I thought some people might back away from all connections because they fear others, fear being hurt, disrespected, injured, mistreated. Well, after I finished writing I saw this article written by Scott Barry Kaufman (whom I do not expect to reply to my email: the man is busy and I wrote a damn essay). And it added another dimension to all this stuff that's bubbling around in my mind.
In fact, it made me realise that I can hardly stand on a moral high-ground here. I might be, instead, in something of a dip.
So, to start with, please read the article as otherwise I have to do a great deal of typing.
Read it? No, not skimmed it: read it properly? Go on, go back. It's here.
OK? Right.
But just in case you've been naughty, this paragraph offers the headline:
Based on clinical observations and research, the researchers found that the tendency for interpersonal victimhood consists of four main dimensions: (a) constantly seeking recognition for one’s victimhood, (b) moral elitism, (c) lack of empathy for the pain and suffering of others, and (d) frequently ruminating about past victimization.
I'll start with something that does please me. The research seems to confirm what I was saying in my post Scarcity - that when people are concerned with their own victim-status, they are unable to empathise with others. In the article, Kaufman suggests that the victimhood mentality can be caused by doubts over an individual or a group's social value. And this is exactly what we see happening in society's where inequality is prevalent and indeed where there has been severe past injustice aligned with present conditions of even low-level prejudice.
There's some support for the concept of forgiveness, which I am inclined to feel is very important. But it also aligns with Martha Nussbaum's view that forgiveness can be not an act of, for what of a better word, general love, but a manipulative transactional moral claim (in that the perpetrator is expected to grovel for it).
In addition, there is, although it's not stated in normative terms, an awareness of the way in which blaming and shaming can be utilised as weapons. This is something I was very agitated about in the early days of this blog.
Finally, the article stresses the ways in which memories can reinforce a victim - or hero - status. This reminded me of my recent post on looking at the past. It can be as hard to be objective about the past of our group or nation as it is to be objective about our own flaws and failings. This point was reinforced as I listened to an Audible podcast series called Hijacked Histories presented by the historian Dominic Sandbrook. One of the episodes was about the 'Blitz Spirit' in wartime Britain and the way in which that period was myth-made, for good reason, to encourage the populace in troubled times. Yet it was not as we tend to think it was. We weren't 'standing alone', we weren't the biggest losers in civilian terms, there was looting and stealing and crime and so on. These days we like the story because it makes us feel Great when we're really very little.
Where I am forced into greater humility is in recognising that I have something of a sense of moral... well, not perfection, but 'greater clarity' and rectitude. Yes, elitism. This can, and indeed does, make me less tolerant of others and can make me easily offended. Clearly my clarity is rather blurred by the relentless greed of my fattened ego.
That said, Iris Murdoch warns against focusing internally on the war between one's good and bad selves. She says that this can lead to a pleasurable sado-masochism in which the subject is fascinated by the machinations of her own psyche and believes that through this self-focus she can purify her soul. She can't (as I have previously argued) - she has to attend outwards and learn to see others with greater loving attention, greater truth. So I'll not brood on it. Just try to open my eyes and my heart.
The other area where I feel that I can incline to this victimhood state is in my desire for the acceptance and appreciation of others. This is why, I think, I found life much easier in lockdown than I have on my return to work. Already I have experienced the sense that I am not being appreciated enough, that I am being edged out, that I need people to feel sorry for me and so on and so forth.
However, what struck me especially in looking at the article the first time was the danger of casting one group as heroes or victims and the other as devils. I think that my father, though I have accused him of being an apologist for a kind of complacency and denial about on-going racism, is trying to suggest that the toppling of statues in this country, for example, is an extreme response by pointing out other threads in British history aside from involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonialisation. I think he and I try to approach nuance from different corners and although we are both attempting to see matters not, to put it bluntly, in a black and white way, even the starting points for our search for complexity set us against each other. That in itself is a worrying recognition.
If the search for a collaborative middle ground breaks down just because it begins from different, and not by any means at all extreme, perspectives, is so challenging then how can we ever hope to come to terms?
Part of the problem is that all our concepts in these big issues are so heavily cognitively laden that pretty much every claim has a dissertation's worth of reading, evidence and research let alone assumption, bias and preference behind it that we have to keep going back and back to trace each source and before you know it, you're at hunter-gatherers, the genesis of the first living organism, the big-bloody-bang. And that's just me talking to my dad.
It's rather as I said in a whimsical post about the problems of communicating. But communicating is all we have, on a group and societal level, as well as individually. Insights and glimpses help, but we still have to talk. Coercion and brain-washing aren't really the thing.
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