Abstract
Campbell and Manning examine how victimhood culture affects the discipline of sociology. The moral concerns of victimhood culture can lead to distortions of research and unscientific evaluations of theory. They discuss the potential of sociology as a science and potential tool for reform, and argue that the failure to distinguish between facts and values undermines this potential. Many sociologists neglect scientific goals and see sociology as synonymous with the pursuit of social justice. Campbell and Manning discuss the concept of social justice and its uses in moral decision-making. Like sociology, social justice has promise, but the moral climate of universities is such that social justice is synonymous with victimhood culture and any who dissent from this view are silenced. Conflating sociology with social justice, and social justice with victimhood culture, hampers our ability to seriously pursue social science and social reform.
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Such explanations also imply that the wealthy achieve their status, at least in part, from their values, beliefs, and habits. This is seen as giving them credit for their success, and as morally justifying inequality.
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Comte’s view of sociology is idiosyncratic, but it is not hard, even now, to find fairly grandiose claims about sociology’s potential in helping to bring about a better society. Earl Babbie, for example, says that because of potential problems such as nuclear war and overpopulation, “there is a more pressing need for sociological insights today than at any time in history” (1994:1).
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This is not simply hypothetical; support or opposition to the death penalty may have no connection to one’s view of its deterrent effect. Economist Naci Mohan, for example, is personally opposed to the death penalty, but he believes his own research shows that each execution saves five lives (Liptak 2007).
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Those that do define social justice (or purport to) just make things more confusing. The website for the University of Wyoming’s Social Justice Research Center has a 169 word paragraph under the heading “What is social justice,” but while this tells what social justice grew out of (“the history of the Civil Rights Movement”), what it draws on (“decades of work in Anti-Racist, Black and Ethnic Studies, and Women’s Studies”), what it utilizes (“a vocabulary and framework that considers the dominant or targeted social group identities of participants within an analysis of social hierarchies”), and so on, there is nothing about what it is (University of Wyoming 2017).
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The nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill had a similar conception of social justice as having to do with organizing society so that, to the extent possible, people are given their due. “If it is a duty,” he wrote, “to do to each according to his deserts, returning good for good, as well as repressing evil by evil, it necessarily follows that we should treat all equally well (when no higher duty forbids) who have deserved equally well of us, and that society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it… This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice, toward which all institutions and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost possible degree to converge” (Mill 1957:76).
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Conversely, even an unjust homicide—where the police have committed a crime—might be only an act of individual injustice, rather than social injustice, if organizing society so that such events never happened were either impossible or would produce outcomes that would be seen as a greater injustice.
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Campus activists and administrators seem uninterested in research showing that the assumptions of the microaggression program are baseless (Lilienfeld 2017), just as they seem uninterested in analyses of whether campus diversity programs achieve their stated goals (Haidt and Jussim 2016). They might even take offense at any empirical work that calls into question the activists’ claims.
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The ASA officers’ statement on the matter takes a different view. Given Collins’s involvement, we found this puzzling, even prior to Collins’s later remarks, since the statement seemed at odds with the theory presented in Collins’s (2008) book on violence. It seemed to endorse the very kind of view (that people are easily driven to violence by heated rhetoric and the like) that Collins opposes in the book. While the ASA statement does have some caveats (e.g., “It is true that death threats are generally only a form of extremist rhetoric”), the thrust of it is to blame Glenn Beck for the death threats and thus to blame him for putting Piven in danger. The ASA officers say that “an overheated emotional atmosphere” can lead “deranged individuals … to real violence against those targeted by demagoguery” (Collins et al. 2011). They even claim that the shooting of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords was an example of “how abundant, polarizing rhetoric by political leaders and commenters can spur mass murder” (Collins et al. 2011). In fact, though, Jared Loughner, who targeted Giffords as part of a mass shooting in which he killed six others, was angry with Giffords because she had failed several years earlier to adequately answer a question he put to her: “What is government if words have no meaning?” Loughner was mentally ill and believed the government was controlling grammar (Douthat 2017). He was not motivated by political rhetoric.
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Theory textbooks and courses might also count Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harriet Martineau, and various others among the classical theorists, but Durkheim, Weber, and Marx predominate as a kind of sociological “triumvirate” or “holy trinity” (Bratton et al. 2009:3).
- 11.
Key to such interpretations, too, is that the victims might not recognize their exploitation. Women or wage laborers might have a false consciousness, the idea goes, that might even lead them to believe they are benefiting from marriage or capitalist employment. One goal of activists, then, has been to raise the awareness or consciousness of some group of victims.
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One anonymous critic of our work (Friedersdorf 2015) says that what we call victimhood culture is really empathy culture, but as these statements indicate, a key feature of the new morality seems to be an extreme lack of empathy for those belonging to groups deemed privileged or oppressive.
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The natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering are not completely immune, however. Engineering professor Donna Riley, for example, has received awards for “her work on implementing and assessing critical and feminist pedagogies in engineering classrooms” and for “her work on combining social justice work and pedagogy” (Vivian 2013). And at the University of Saskatchewan the academic governing body recently “agreed that all of the 17 colleges and schools, from dentistry to engineering, should include indigenous knowledge.” One course developed in response is an “indigenous wellness” course for kinesiology students, which “includes sharing circles, oral storytelling and participation in ceremonies” (Porter 2017).
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And their recurring blunders do not seem to alter their thinking. In late December of 2014, for example, even after news reports had already debunked the Rolling Stone rape story (e.g., Shapiro 2014), the University of Virginia’s sociology department put out a statement, signed by most of the sociology faculty, that began, “We stand in solidarity with the survivors of sexual violence at the University of Virginia.” The statement almost seemed to imply that the authors still believed the basics of the story, as it acknowledged only that Rolling Stone had released a statement “questioning the details of its published story” and said that “it did not change the reality that UVA and other college campuses have a problem with sexual assault” (Blumberg et al. 2014). The statement expressed no concern about the falsely accused fraternity members or about the protests, threats, and property destruction that had followed the story’s publication. It provided references to articles and books about rape and about things like “hegemonic masculinity,” but to none dealing with false accusations or moral panics.
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Campbell, B., Manning, J. (2018). Sociology, Social Justice, and Victimhood. In: The Rise of Victimhood Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_6
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