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Passion guided by reason's avatar

You're right on (again), Steve.

I want to note that a large portion of the prescriptions of neo-progressivism would quickly become chaotic if applied reciprocally. They are not advocated as universal or reciprocal, butas unilateral. If a non-trans person told a trans person to stay in their own lane, that would be considered an outrage, but a trans person should praised for telling a non-trans person to stay in their own lane. (Likewise for lived experience trumping evidence, 'impact trumps intention', cultural appropriation, and stereotyping among many others)

I see two roots to this asymmetry. One is a genuine concern about minority voices having traditionally been under-represented (note 1), but overshoots to giving a minority voice control of the conversation. The other is a type of compensatory privilege - in compensation for past and ongoing inequities in one realm, marginalized folks are supposed to have unequal and superior benefits in a different realm. Like "people in some population group have less household wealth on average than another group, so we will give them the high moral ground in any argument they make and suppress differing views". That doesn't fix the original issue, but it makes the balance of advantages between groups vary depending on the context.

There are big problems with this latter in particular. Instead of one group feeling put upon, it causes many folks on both sides to feel mistreated. People mostly ignore the context where they may have an advantage, and focus on the context where they feel mistreated, so both sides are resentful. All the while - the original inequality is not being fixed by this. We've just added a new problem, not reducing the original problem.

In fact, one could be suspicious that that is sometimes the point - a liberal white professional woman attends a DiAngelo training and goes into full self-abasement mode thereafter, always deferring to people of color intellectually and putting her own critical thinking in suspension - but conveniently gives up zero of her economic advantages. She may profess that she didn't earn her job but received it as unearned privilege of whiteness - but she doesn't quit to allow a marginalized person to fill it instead, or donate all the equity in her house to Black people.

Since this doesn't really move the needle on improving the original complaint, frustration grows and the only tool they have is to double down on the original strategy - apply more guilt and resentment, increase the compensatory privilege, punish anybody not buying into the strategy more severely.

Meanwhile, some people on the other side are also becoming resentful - eg: being told that an analysis which they spent a long time synthesizing from many sources is totally worthless compared to the subjective lived experience of somebody else. We can never count on a seamless guilt trip to over-ride all people's awareness of this asymmetry or their critical thinking - there will be many who do not buy in. This does not win support for strategies which might actually have some positive impact on the original issue.

Balancing unfairness in one domain by creating countervaling unfairness in another domain, just creates escalating polarization, not solutions.

I have mixed thoughts in positive discrimination in employment (in the US this is usually referred to as 'affirmative action'). There can be positives, but there are also negatives to consider. But at least it's a countervailing discrimination which is closer to the same domain as the original perceived unfairness. If it was successful, it could mitigate the original issue which stimulated it.

In the case of something like trans rights, the "balance" is often something like:

- I am discriminated against by some employers

- If I I call some viewpoint or person "transphobic", no non-trans person is allowed to disagree

I hope it's obvious that this compensatory unfairness in different domains is a dysfunctional strategy, when seen clearly. But a person who might have supported protection from employment discrimination may instead become more oppositional to that if they encounter the latter experience and build resentment against trans activist applying that technique to rhetorically "win" all arguments about sports and spas.

As Steve notes, it's actually worse than that. If a trans person has not even read what JK Rowling has written in full context, but they express an opinion that Rowling is a raging transphobe - that ungrounded personal opinion is supposed to trump any reasoning or evidence presented by a non-trans person. That is, non-oppressed people are supposed to defer to the moral superiority of a member of a marginalized group, EVEN WHEN the latter can be shown to be objectively ill informed and basing their opinion on a false narrative. This dynamic not only sows polarization, it fosters counter-productive strategies which proceed only because no reasoned pushback is allowed, even from those who might support the goals if not the strategies.

(Note 1: there is a whole 'nother issue regarding whether opinions should be represented proportionally or equally)

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Steve QJ's avatar

"I want to note that a large portion of the prescriptions of neo-progressivism would quickly become chaotic if applied reciprocally. They are not advocated as universal or reciprocal, but as unilateral."

Absolutely. As T. Blood points out above, this would very quickly fall apart of other groups tried to use the same trick.

As you say, minority groups *do* need a degree of special attention because their problems, by definition, are not seen or widely understood by the majority. But there's a difference between listening carefully to somebody else's experience and accepting what they say uncritically because they happen to be a member of a particular group. The former is vital to productive discourse, the latter is fatal.

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Lightwing's avatar

Exactly.

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