The Oppression Two-Step: creating mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth
Systematic misuse of the concept of oppression disorders moral and analytical judgement.
I was reading a book, a good book, on the application of ordinary language philosophy to literary theory (yes, I am that nerdy) and I came across the following passage:
I have (of course) nothing against the fundamental project of intersectionality theory, which I’ll preliminarily define as the attempt to understand the experience of complex forms of oppression, the identities formed under such conditions, and the power structures than produce them. (P.91)
What follows is not a shot at the author, who is a wonderfully clear writer and comes across as a sensible and humane person. What cries out for critique is the normalising of what are, at bottom, ridiculous and inflated claims about contemporary Western societies.
Let us start with forms of oppression. It takes well-developed historical blindness, or historical ignorance, to characterise the ordinary experience of folk in contemporary developed (“Western”) societies as oppression.
What is imposed on a labour camp inmate, brought vividly to literary life in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, is oppression. Living in a Nazi death camp is oppression. A slave chained in the bowels of an Atlantic passage slave ship experienced oppression. A slave chained in a caravan marching across the Sahara experienced oppression. If that slave ended up in hot sand as the standard after-being-castrated procedure, his oppression had been intensified. They are all cases of oppression, of intense oppression, because they all entail the profound and systematic destruction of human well-being; usually to serve the well-being of others.
The issue of the treatment of female African-American workers legal academic Kimberle Crenshaw describes in her original essay that launched the academic career of intersectionality is a labour dispute. To call being underpaid, even systematically underpaid, oppression is to hugely cheapen the term. To call the experience of Western women in the 1950s, let alone the experience of contemporary Western women, oppression is to hugely cheapen the term. Constraint, even exploitation, is not oppression unless it destroys well-being (rather than insufficiently generating or unfairly distributing it). Unfairly distributing well-being is not, in itself, oppression.
Is there unfairness and inequities within Western societies. Yes. Are there pockets of oppression? Yes. Are they remotely characteristic of such societies? No.
There has been a systematic, wilful, creation of an intellectual edifice built on oppression, and related concepts, to generate a sense of moral urgency, moral catastrophe and moral self-importance about the least oppressive societies in human history. That in itself might merely be regrettable. What makes it far more than merely regrettable is that it is tied to, and helps create, an expanding intellectual structure built on a serious, systematic, blindness to genuine social achievement, to the profound and pervasive achievement that makes these societies the least oppressive in human history. A blindness that has become a required marker of moral and intellectual seriousness when in fact it is a marker of wilful self-deception and systematic mischaracterisation of social and historical realities. A blindness that can only be expected to leave social destruction in its wake.
If you define achievement and success as vice, and then act upon that characterisation, you will generate a great deal of failure. Even more deeply, the above mindset encourages a certain sort of destructive arrogance that thinks protections and freedoms that evolved for good reasons can be dispensed with by sufficiently moral people engaged in the sufficiently morally urgent task of opposing oppression.
The oppression two step — declare oppression, thereby also proclaiming look at me!, I am opposing oppression! — generates identity, purpose and status in one package. But it is, at bottom, built on distortions and self-deception, on creating mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth.
Critical theory
In 1922, a famous seminar was held in Germany that kicked off the Frankfurt School. The Great War had killed millions. Postwar revolutions had come and gone. The Bolsheviks had triumphed in Russia, but so had the Fascists in Italy and traditionalist authoritarians elsewhere. The question those at the seminar grappled with was; why was the working class not being revolutionary in the way Marx and Marxism postulated?
Critical theory, and the cultural turn in Marxism that the Frankfurt School embodied, was the result. For those with eyes to see, it was already obvious that the Bolshevik regime was murderous and tyrannical. (As Rosa Luxemburg had predicted it would be.) But what became the standard defence — Leninists were doing Marxism wrong — was already being mounted.
One can listen to any number of YouTube lectures and presentations, often information and intellectually serious ones, going through this history. A common refrain from those sympathetic to the Frankfurt School is to say something like “even though inequality was getting worse, the workers were not being revolutionary”.
There is a basic problem with this why not revolutionary? question. The stated or implied premise of increasing inequality is false. In all sorts of ways that matter, Western societies were becoming more equal, not less. Political power was becoming more evenly distributed, educational opportunities were becoming more evenly distributed, health was becoming more evenly distributed. There is absolutely nothing surprising in the lack of revolutionary fervour. You can only be surprised by that lack if you could not actually see the societies in front of you, the societies you were living in.
To take a single, powerful example; in 1875, members of the British elite had a life expectancy 17 years longer than that of the lower class. By the latter part of C20th it was maybe 2 years longer and by the end of the C20th, it was less than a year longer. An utterly unprecedented expansion in the life expectancy of lower class folk had occurred. And it had been managed without the tyranny and mass murder that lesser health advances in Leninist states came with.
There is also a very condescending tendency in the lines of thinking that presume that workers should be revolutionary. There is simply no example of societies where workers were better off than in the “capitalist” societies that workers were implicitly or explicitly derided for not wanting to overthrow. This condescending (or worse) tendency has turned up again when members of otherwise morally valorised groups fail to act as the relevant theory insists they ought.
Marxists have regularly preferred their theory to the actual working class. (No independent working class voice is ever permitted in Marxist regimes.) Streams of thought that have drawn upon Marxism have shown the same tendency. Across the history of socialism and social democracy, those who identified more with the actual working class perennially ended up abandoning Marxism. Conversely, those who stuck with their Marxism have often abandoned the working class in the search for new “revolutionary” groups that can sustain the sense of identity that Marxism (and derivatives thereof) provide for them.
If you believe the presumptive answer to the question of why the workers were not revolutionary in the societies that gave them more say, better health, and greater prosperity than any societies in human history, is that they should have been revolutionary, that says far more about you than it does about the working class. Marxism, and its derivatives, have turned out to be just another version of educated elites assigning to workers preset roles in self-serving morality plays.
A vast intellectual superstructure has been created that systematically characterise the least oppressive, most pervasively successful, societies in terms of oppression and structures of oppression.
It is a rhetorically very powerful intellectual superstructure, as any attempt to refer to the reality of this embodied social achievement, and the dramatic lack of oppression, gets instantly derided as showing monstrous moral insensitivity to, you guessed it, oppression. With minor transgressions in word use, or even pretty ordinary human unpleasantness, blown up into appalling sins. And all those who, to a greater or less extent, have their identity, their sense of purpose and their sense of status invested in look at me!, I am opposing oppression! nod along or join in.
The current focus on trans issues, which pertain to a tiny minority of people, manifest this search for validating oppression so as to be able do that oppression two-step. Anything short of complete, even instant, acceptance of the demand of the moment becomes an oppressive act, of complicity in oppression.
Concerning emancipation
Eurosphere societies — especially, but not only, Anglosphere societies — have already generated their own emancipation sequence. (The Eurosphere is all societies where folk of European descent became the dominant population: Europe. Siberia, the Americas, the Antipodes. The Anglosphere in this context is the British Isles, the US, Canada and the Antipodes.)
The emancipation sequence started in the late C18th with the campaign against the slave trade and slavery. In the Anglosphere, the emancipation sequence moved on to Catholic emancipation. Across Eurosphere societies, it moved on to Jewish emancipation, the campaigns for full male, and then female, suffrage. Then there came the civil rights campaign in the US, second-wave feminism and queer emancipation. A process that unfolded across centuries. An emancipation sequence that did not need anything remotely of the form of critical theory, or its derivatives, to happen. It just needed folk to articulate and mobilise humbug-piercing human decency in a world of expanding productive and communication possibilities. Something that was managed again and again.
One of the indicators of the success of the civil rights movement in the US is the substantial rise in the happiness of African-American men and women, a rise that has eliminated two-thirds of the happiness gap between Euro-Americans and African-Americans. Much of the remaining gap is explained by differences in education attainment and income, as happiness tends to increase with education and income.
The income gap between African-Americans and Euro-Americans has also narrowed significantly, with differences in educational attainment again accounting for much of the remaining gap. The income gap between men and women has narrowed as well, and is now almost entirely driven by differences in hours of work and career choices.
Identity politics has intensified as the income and happiness gaps between the most valorised identities and those designated-as-privileged groups have narrowed, with the remaining gaps mostly explained by factors that do not pertain to bigotry or prejudice. Perhaps not coincidentally, income inequality has increased substantially at the same time as identity politics has blossomed. Income inequality that has been significantly driven by increasing returns to education, which intensifies as one moves further up the education scale.
To put it another way, as the income advantages potentially available to the most avid adherents of identity politics have intensified, that same social group has more intensely pushed politics that (1) ignore or mischaracterise their generally expanding income advantages, (2) maximise contempt for those with less education and lower incomes and (3) encourage divisions between workers, residents and citizens, based on identity groups, that advantage those in elite networks.
In the US, critical social theory comes along at the tail end of the emancipation sequence and, as an exercise in self-importance, tries to pretend that it is fighting evils equivalent to those of Jim Crow and patriarchal exclusion. It does so by pretending the world is as if the successes of the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism had not happened. Adherents thereby trade away understanding of what did work in exchange for inflated senses of moral self-importance in service of ideas driven, not by genuine understanding of the world around us, but in the service of that sense of identity, purpose and status. Hence molehills of white nationalism are projected into mountains of white supremacy, with a startling number of hate-crime hoaxes as part of such inflated projection. Minor levels of actual racism are inflated into mountains of systemic racism that nicely deflect responsibility away from, well, people like them.
Instead of careful consideration of the rich, even noble, human experience that the emancipation sequence manifests, we get a series of self-serving caricatures of people and social dynamics. But very useful caricatures. In a world flooded with information, and especially for people whose cognitive status is tied up in being the people who understand, any mechanism or structure of thought that economises on information is going to be deeply appealing. Which, of course, a structure of designated what-the-good-people-believe opinions does very well. (What we can call prestige opinions.) You don’t have to know much about a subject, and certainly not its irritating complexities. You just have to know what opinions put you amongst the good people, the moral people, who understand.
This is a very poor strategy for genuine understanding. But then, that is not what is being selected for. Opinions are being selected for on the basis of their information-economising status value, not their accuracy. Hence, we end up with all sorts of cognitive misfirings. Such as characterising the least oppressive societies in human history, societies with a still-progressing pattern of becoming strikingly less oppressive over time, as structures of oppression.
The ongoing process of finding ever finer gradations of alleged bigotry, which is reaching truly Orwellian proportions, is simply necessary to maintain the mountains of bullshit, given the shrinking of the molehills of truth they are built upon. That people tend to engage in concept-creep, seeing more things as being of a particular phenomena as its prevalence reduces, provides a cognitive bias for the aforementioned mountains of bullshit to be sustained even as their supporting molehills of truth shrink. Bullshit in the technical sense of things said for their rhetorical and persuasive power, regardless of their truth.
Bullshit is generally constructed by the manipulation of salience. In this case, moral salience built on the inflation of the concept of oppression. What makes this approach to manipulating salience so effective, is such manipulation of moral salience is an excellent way for people to bullshit themselves. People trade away epistemic seriousness, trade away care for the complexities of social reality, in order to maximise their individual and collective sense of moral seriousness.
Race talk itself is much of the problem. First because race is, in terms of actual causal dynamics, a fiction: at best, it is a clumsy and distracting way to talk about ethnicity — the descendants of American slaves are an ethnic group, not a racial one. Second, in the US, the more one invests intellectually, culturally and politically in race talk, the more one is invested in African-Americans continuing to do disproportionately less well. If African-Americans start doing as well as Euro-Americans, that investment in race talk crumbles. For someone who has culturally, intellectually and political invested in race talk, there is absolutely no incentive to invest in understanding what actually works in improving the situation of African-Americans. On the contrary, there is every reason to invest in blocking any line of analysis or inquiry that undermines their investment in race talk.
On feminism
The oppression of women so often so lazily invoked fits right in. The social and legal exclusions second-wave feminism organised against were based on social norms and mores that had originally evolved in a situation where women did not unilaterally control their own fertility, except through restricting sexual activity. Hence the dominance of sexually restrictive norms, particularly enforced by women, and norms based on a strong sense of presumptive sex roles. As women acquired unilateral control over their own fertility, the norms that had evolved under the previous regime of constraints made increasingly less sense to people.
This was a major, even transformative, change. Due to pregnancy and breastfeeding, and the high rate of child mortality, across human societies, women have generally been tied to child-rearing. The classic reasons that activities became presumptively male have been physical risk (i.e. be not something to do with children in tow), variance of outcome (children have to be fed every day) and requiring rapt attention (not something that children are conducive to).
The expansion of low-physical risk, stable-income jobs, and of child-minding schooling, increased the range of female employment outside the home and the local neighbourhood. Unilateral female control of their fertility further enabled women (whether married or not) to invest in long-term formal training, opening up professional and other credentialed-skill jobs to women on an unprecedented scale.
Second-wave feminism was the overt exploration of what had become practicable, given the change in the underlying constraints. It was a search for a new set of norms that worked in the new social circumstances. This meant pushing against legal and social restrictions, and the legacy norms that underpinned them.
This was an interactive process — development of, and legalisation of, new contraceptive technology was not a passive thing that just happened. Nevertheless, without the key change of women having unilateral control of their own fertility, most of the successes of second-wave feminism would not have been possible. If a sufficient number of women (and men) had not wanted to go down that broad path, those successes would also not have been possible.
It is a considerable, though perhaps natural, error to conflate the role of activism with the shift in the deeper constraints and the social response to the same. No amount of activism could have worked without the change in the underlying possibilities. Indeed, there would not have been anywhere near the level of activism, nor would it have resonated in the way it did, without the change in the underlying possibilities.
Patriarchy represents particular patterns of social leverage. It is typically a way of making the underlying constraints that help generate the relevant pattern of social leverage work. Change the underlying social leverage and patriarchy can (and did) crumble remarkably quickly (in the Eurosphere). With a lot of men not only going along with, but actively accepting or supporting that crumbling.
To see how different underlying structures produce different outcomes, consider the rather different social dynamics within Islam in response to expanding education and employment opportunities for women. In Muslim societies and communities, the expanded opportunities saw the development of the new veiling movement, and its massive upsurge in public religious signalling by women. In societies where veiling was not legally imposed, and had been in retreat, women adopted Islamic headgear en masse to signal their conformity to protective norms as they ventured alone outside their local neighbourhoods.
Except in some limited aspects of property law, Islam has been a far more patriarchal religion than Christianity. The Christian Church sanctified monogamy and insisted on the primacy of mutual consent for marriage. Church marriage law plus manorialism broke up kin groups, so women’s fertility were no longer kin group assets. The Church insisted on the right of women to own and dispose of property. The Church insisted, through the concept of legitimacy, that it mattered who your mother was. All these things were positive for the status of women.
Christianity held, despite the existence of canon law, that law was human and could be changed by direct human action. This, along with the break up of kin groups (encouraging search for alternative mechanisms of social cooperation) meant that practices of social bargaining were far more extensively entrenched in Christendom than in Islam. (Or, indeed, in any other state civilisation apart from Japan: Shinto and Buddhism, like Christianity, but unlike Islam, Judaism or Brahminism, are not legislating, sacred-law religions.)
This entrenched, centuries-old, culture of social bargaining, and of such bargains being entrenched in law, within the Christian-heritage Eurosphere was successfully mobilised by suffragettes, feminists and all the various emancipation-sequence activists back to the campaigns against slavery.
Women within Islam have had far, far less to work with. Hence their response to increased education and work opportunities was to increase their religious signalling, not reduce it. A process that started among middle-class women leaving their neighbourhoods for education and work.
What also mattered to the success of Western feminism were the constraints that weren’t there and the opportunities that were.
The language of oppression may be good rhetoric, and particularly good rhetoric for an information-economising status strategy based on prestige opinions and social dominance through stigmatisation, but it actively gets in the way of understanding the transformation in the possibilities for women. Particularly as it blocks examining some of the costs of those transformations; costs for women, for girls, for boys, and for the operation of society.
No major social change is without costs, and if someone tries to imply that there are no costs, or that there is something wicked about noticing that there might be costs, they are selling you a bill of goods. But, of course, if you have bought into the status game, it may be a bill of goods you want to buy.
That female happiness appears to have declined, relative to men, across industrialised countries since the 1970s (with women’s happiness having declined absolutely in the US) certainly suggests that there are costs to discuss. The disappearance of presumptive sex roles, a dramatic novelty in human history, is not something that we have biologically evolved for, or have previous cultural experience of. That feminism has been dominated by highly educated women, and has had a very careerist focus, has functionally (but not intentionally) meant what were presumptively male roles have become roles that women are also supposed to aspire to. A point that has cultural implications whether or not women are in employment.
Conversely, whatever the complications of the dating environment and workplace etiquette, men have had the presumption of being the provider be much reduced while no-obligation sex has become much more socially acceptable. (Even if opportunities for such have been wildly unevenly distributed among men.)
On reflection, the shift to a happiness gap in favour of men is not so surprising. But it also makes nonsense of any presumptive notion of the oppression of women. Especially so, given that women previously reported higher rates of happiness than men and remain the longer-lived sex.
Intersectionality and other confusions
Within the critical theory-derived intellectual superstructure, any disproportionate constraint is likely to be cast as oppression. Pockets of oppressive behaviour are likely to be cast as structural. These are moves that inflate a sense of moral status at the cost of social understanding.
In Kimberle Crenshaw’s original intersectional essay, she used battered women in refuges to give her case extra moral and emotional weight. Typically, intimate partner violence (labelled domestic violence, a labelling that obscures away violence against children) gets portrayed as structural (typically as patriarchal). This is a characterisation that seriously mischaracterises the patterns and causes of intimate partner violence, and of violence against children. The mischaracterising notably avoids female violence, including female violence against children.
As a way of understanding either the world around us, this critical theory-derived intellectual superstructure is truly awful. Which means, of course, it is also potentially disastrous for effective social action. The more decent the society, the more one has to focus on the extraordinary to dance the oppression two-step, the more unreal one’s characterisation of the wider society, and the people in it, will become and the more likely social action is to misfire.
As the basis for identity, purpose and industrial-strength status strategies, however, it is brilliant. It generates entire sets of prestige opinions (shared opinions that proclaim the worthiness of the holder and whose contradiction proclaims the moral unworthiness of the dissenter) primed for social dominance strategies based on stigmatisation of dissenters for failing to sufficiently oppose, or being complicit in, of course, oppression. With associated social sanctions. The combinstion of prestige opinions and social dominance strategies is, of course, why the viewpoint is so successful.
The case of intersectionality, which takes a good point about the difficulties with social categories and turns it into an overblown edifice of nonsense, is the standard pattern for all the intellectual streams that critical theory has fed into. As is the case with so much of the constellation of ideas around what has become critical social theory, it takes a molehill of truth and inflates it into a mountain of bullshit.
A similar point applies to feminism as to race talk. If women stop being oppressed, there is little point to feminism. The entire architecture of establishment feminism requires women to be oppressed to justify its existence. Once substantial numbers of people have feminist as a central identity, the oppression of women becomes a required fact: not a conclusion but a required premise. Nowadays, people are not feminist because women are oppressed, women have to be oppressed because there are so many feminists.
The corollary of this can be seen in response to the question: what is to be done to satisfy contemporary feminists? Precious little that is practical, and still less that is beneficial. What is required is to agree that women are oppressed, so that the identities as feminists can be buttressed and resource flows to the advocacy networks justified. That half a century of feminist activism has resulted in men becoming generally happier that women is a richly and appropriately ironic comment on the problem with building an entire structure of activism and advocacy on turning shrinking molehills of truth into expanding mountains of bullshit.
The war against biology many feminists appear to wish to rage has at least the advantage of being an designated enemy that will never go away. (The echoes of Lysenkoism are a little more chilling.)
A key intellectual stream that, added to Frankfurt School critical theory, flows into contemporary American critical social theory is various adaptations from French theorists (Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, etc.). They were, in part, reacting to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in the context of the failure of political Marxism. For those for whom neither Kronstadt 1921 nor the Holodomor were sufficiently informative about the nature of political Marxism, Hungary 1956, the Great Leap Forward creating the worst famine in history, Czechoslovakia 1968, the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the Cambodian genocide, the Ethiopian terror-famine, and the obvious productive success of Western commerce, cumulatively made the point.
There remain those who run with the “but, but, Marxism was just done wrongly” line. This is, of course, self-deluding nonsense. If such true believers were part of a Marxist transformation of society, they would either repeat the pattern, as that is the power-logic of the system being implemented. Or they would be shot for getting in the way of the logic of the system being implemented. The deadly combination of a grand moral project of social transformation with belief in one’s own virtue and understanding to carry it out, naturally leads to contemptuous dismissal and sweeping away of the institutional constraints, processes and procedures painfully built up to protect freedoms and liberties. It thus naturally leads to murderous and tyrannical politics.
Rosa Luxemburg got the point a century ago, a point richly demonstrated by the history of political Marxism. It is a standing condemnation of so many that they still don’t.
Marxists can get very scornful of libertarians who defensively say of actual existing capitalism “but that is market economies being done wrong”. Yet Marxists are in the very same logical situation regarding political Marxism’s scores of tyrannies and millions of murders and starvations while being in a much worse moral position.
Emancipation delusions
It has become a deeply embedded pattern of thought to see modern Western societies as pervaded as structures of oppression. As a corollary of this, people are graded by what they say according to the alleged implications for said structures of oppression and power relations.
Critical theory, and the streams of thought which it feeds into, have been lauded as emancipatory thought. But that is precisely the source of such thought’s greatest weakness. It is precisely the intoxicating sense of being an agent of grand social transformation that drives the combination of self-deception, and mischaracterisation of social reality, that encourages contempt for the protective procedures, processes and institutions that create and maintain a free society. And, not coincidentally, contempt for millions of one’s fellow citizens. There is no greater source of self-deluding ego-inflation that to imagine that one is an instrument of profound social transformation to a future of unparalleled harmony and bliss. Assuming that the task is to get everyone to agree with oneself is an entirely consequent and natural arrogance, leading directly to regimes of censorship and repression of ideas and people.
There has been, and is, a great deal of self-deception involved in the appeal of critical theory and (especially) contemporary critical social theory and its associated constellation of ideas. None of this is to say that there are not profound issues generated by the human condition, or by the flood of evolutionary novelty we are living in — what folk call modernity or, if you prefer, postmodernity. But any analytical lens that so profoundly promotes systematic mischaracterising of the societies we live in, and attendant self-deception, as does critical theory, and the constellation of thought derived from it, is not at all a good basis from which to grapple with any issues that matter.
It is, however, a very effective basis to undermine and destroy basic freedoms in the service of a vision of social transformation and personal virtue based on building mountains of bullshit from molehills of truth and “lived experience” anecdotes. With critical theory providing the rejecting-through-mischaracterising of the societies around us that fuels a sense of identity and purpose, of moral fervour, based on a self-conception as having superior understanding and moral purpose. The sort of outlook that, held sufficiently intensely, leads down tyrannical and murderous paths.
