Wastrels and Popinjays

“How did we get here?” is a question most of you have probably asked yourself over the last few years in one form or another.

I see example after example of ‘woke’ buffoonery, probably numbering in the thousands by now, and try to piece together how we got to the point where, for example, people can complain about the difficulties of getting a non-binary haircut, or believe that one’s skin colour confers ownership of a particular hairstyle, or bemoan the difficulty of getting an appropriate shampoo for your hair.

This last example comes from a few years back when I was making a serious effort to understand white privilege. I was looking to be convinced that this was a legitimate and meaningful concept, but the supportive articles I was reading, more often than not, cited the difficulty of getting ‘ethnically appropriate’ hair products as their first example of where white privilege has an impact.

Clearly, there is no such thing as equity when it comes to hair.

Hair equity would mean that everyone comes out of the hairdressers with the same haircut.

The buffoonery has a long history. One of the ‘classic’ papers in the whole field of what has been termed ‘grievance studies’ is now 35 years old. It’s Peggy McIntosh’s opinion piece White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. But you can clearly see from that paper that she had already been working on ‘unpacking’ something called male privilege.

This is one of the now more antiquated meanings of the word privilege, but it was also very commonly used to denote class privilege. Someone who was said to be privileged could be assumed to have been born into a wealthy family who moved within the upper echelons of society.

Privilege, as it used to be applied to class, was the steak of unfairness served up with the peppercorn sauce of envy.

They had a point. By an accident of birth, by being born into the ‘right’ family, one could benefit from a wholly unearned privilege.

By Peggy McIntosh’s time it was beginning to be applied to all sorts of different situations where an ‘unearned’ advantage was perceived.

And, to be fair, we were just starting to change from a more (but not wholly) patriarchal system back in 1980 when McIntosh was writing and there were definitely things regarding the ‘system-generated’ unfair advantage of being male that needed to change.

The problem is that you now have the round hole of privilege being applied to too many square pegs, and the ‘solutions’ tend to be of the form to mutilate the square pegs, rather than finding a more appropriate hole.

The solutions today are akin to the following. Some people are blessed with more intelligence than others. It’s just a fact of life. They have an ‘unearned’ advantage, or privilege, over others because of it. The typical ‘solution’ to that today wouldn’t be to encourage the lesser gifted, to help them work harder and more effectively, to put more resources into bringing them up to reach their full potential, but to give the smart guys a lobotomy.

An old example from nearly a decade ago has been doing the rounds again

This article from 2015 discussing the work of the philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse can be viewed here. What I want to draw your attention to is a direct quote from Swift from that article

What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children

What we wanted to allow parents to do for their children?

Like reading them a bedtime story?

Whilst they dress everything up in a seemingly quasi-reasonable way, you can see here the underlying way they’re thinking about this from the language that is used.

Whilst it’s (obviously) more complex and nuanced than this, the basic thesis is along the lines of : children of good parents get an advantage that children of bad parents don’t. That’s unfair for the kids of bad parents, and so we must limit the ability of good parents to be good parents in order to reduce this unfairness.

Stop being so good at your job - you’re making the rest of us look bad.

Notice how being loving parents, trying to do the best for your kids, is framed as giving them an unfair advantage in life.

You’re not being a good parent, you’re disadvantaging other kids.

This, then, is a prime example of how the ‘wokerati’ think. Unfairness (which is a good thing to try to address) arises from external factors, things that other people do, and we need to tackle these things in order to make things more fair.

That’s obviously true to some extent; many unfairnesses do arise from factors beyond our control. But look at the piece that’s missing here, and the effect it has had.

Once you become convinced you are a victim of a myriad of unfairnesses, of all these unearned privileges to which you do not have access, you stop focusing on improving yourself and look to blame everything that’s wrong in your life on others.

You become a wastrel and a popinjay entirely, and narcissistically, focused on yourself as the victim, the central character in a boring melodrama that only yourself derives any pleasure from.

You may actually be a victim of bad luck and bad circumstances - that’s regrettable - but sitting around raving about how the world has done you wrong is going to get you precisely nowhere.

The answer to parental ‘unfairness’ isn’t to prevent good parents from being good parents, but to help ‘bad’ parents do a better job.

The other effect this focus on others does is to create a sense of entitlement. Why can’t I have what they have? Here’s where the unearned bit comes back to bite them on the ass. Most people who do well for themselves, even if they’ve had a bit of a head start, do well because they have earned it.

Take someone like Feynman, an extraordinarily gifted individual. Yes, he was blessed, by genetics or whatever, with a very significant head start, but he still had to work very hard to unlock the ‘privileges’ this gave him.

Even those gifted with the potential to become extraordinary athletes have to work like crazy to realize that potential.

Just because you have been given a head start does not mean you are going to be able to maintain it. You have to put in some effort to make it work for you.

The Equity Cultists seem to want a world in which nobody is given an ‘unearned’ head start. This is impossible to achieve. Even with a brutal communist style approach, like that of Mao, one cannot achieve it.

There are too many axes of ‘privilege’.

To take the example of reading a bedtime story as being a way to create ‘privileged’ kids to a gruesome level let’s consider the ‘unfair’ advantage you give to your kids by not abusing them. That sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? But does anyone (in their right mind) think that the ‘solution’ here is to ensure that every kid is abused in order to eliminate this advantage?

Another example is often seen when you have a large person, and I’ve only seen videos of larger ladies making this complaint (I don’t know why), who will produce some video ranting about how ‘unfair’ it is that airplane seats are not wide enough. The ‘answer’ for these people isn’t to accept that maybe they need to do some (literal) work, but to ask everyone else to do the work for them, to adapt society to accommodate them.

I’ve been like a yo-yo most of my life, oscillating between being blobby and trim. I am a victim - but only of my own idiocy.

This is what the various victim narratives have done - to put people firmly in the centre of some dramatic fight for ‘justice’ centred around themselves, and to garner sympathy through misplaced ‘compassion’ from other people who have good hearts. These good-hearted people don’t want others to suffer and so they, mistakenly, think they see an ‘injustice’, a privilege, that must be challenged.

Privileges, of all sorts of kinds, are always going to exist. We’re biological creatures and the struggle for our place on a hierarchy is built right in at a very deep biological level. This is the message Jordan Peterson was trying to get across with his much-derided (and much misunderstood) comments about lobsters.

Notice that many of the things that critics of ‘whiteness’ attack, things like self-reliance, hard work, family, a rugged independence, are all the kinds of things that can lead to a genuine sense of self-respect. This is distinct from a sense of self love, which is primarily where the ‘woke’ focus is.

Other than a necessary basic level of respect, more akin to civility, respect of others is something that, traditionally, one had to earn. It’s not something that can be, or should be, demanded. Even when I was way more religious than I am now, I never understood why a religion was something that deserved some automatic respect. Why should I ‘respect’ a religion? Why should I ‘respect’ someone’s pronouns?

There are a million reasons why one might respect someone more than the basic level of respect we should afford everyone. They might be damn good at their job. They may be a very generous and kind person always trying to do good. They may help out their communities by visiting the sick, or helping the homeless.

And we can respect some aspects of a person but not others. I even respect Ibram X. Kendi for writing a book whilst not respecting his ideas or the underlying ugliness of them.

One of the big shifts we’ve seen, I maintain, is this focus on the self and one’s perceived victimhood. It has crippled us. It has turned many people into helpless wastrels and popinjays focused entirely on their own perceived ‘suffering’. I wonder if, deep-down at some almost sub-conscious level, many of these folks have a kind of self-despite and, rather than face up to the reality, seek to deflect the blame onto others?

The issue, as it seems so often to be with a lot of ‘woke’ stuff, is that there are, sometimes, some genuine grievances. For example, a hundred years ago it could be very difficult for a woman to gain an academic position. Not impossible, but one had to have an extraordinary talent not, generally, required of the menfolk. The same situation existed if you were black.

If anything it’s the other way round now, and has been for quite a number of years, and yet we still see people bitterly complain about how ‘unjust’ the whole system is and that it’s stacked against them along those now largely historical lines.

The legitimate sense of historical injustice has morphed into an eternal battle against the ‘system’ where any slight, no matter how small or insignificant, is seen as a major obstacle and further ‘evidence’ of the vast invisible mechanisms of Oppression™ that are said to operate.

And so we have people claiming ‘trauma’ for what are trivialities. We have people who have been trained throughout their lives to look for instances of ‘injustice’ and to blow this up out of all proportion into some epic battle against evil.

This is what the continual focus on victimhood has done to us. It has washed away any sense of genuine self-respect and pride in our own earned achievements. It has built whole generations of fragile and over-sensitive wastrels and popinjays who can only flail about in anger and blame their own inadequacies on others.

Injustices exist. They are always going to exist. Privilege, of some kind or another, is always going to exist. This is the nature of being human and living in a society of humans.

And, as Jordan Peterson is so often fond of saying, “what are you going to do about that?”

Are you going to be like Aesop’s fox and try to convince other foxes they don’t need their tails, or are you going to make the best of what you still have?