One Possible Reason Why the Populists are Angry

Kate Manne, from her
Twitter Feed

I recently listened to a fascinating podcast interview between Ezra Klein and the philosopher Kate Manne titled This Conversation Will Change How You Understand Misogyny. I can't say that it actually changed the way I look at the current populist backlash that we are facing in politics, but it did reinforce something that I've been thinking about for years and it also helped me better articulate those ideas to the point where I think I can now share them with the people who follow my blog.

The two key points that underlie Manne's analysis is to accept two starting points. First, you have to get rid of the idea that human beings are discrete, atomic entities who freely choose everything that they do. The idea is that modern research has clearly shown

Ezra Klein, c/o Wiki Commons

that in a wide variety of different ways everyone is a product of their childhood, culture, biology, etc. All of these things have a profound effect on how we understand the world and act. This isn't to say that none of us have what we call "free will"---according to Manne---just that the exercise of that freedom has to take into account the subtle ways in which these various factors colour the way we see things. For Manne, the only "freedom" that we really have includes how we try to understand, compensate for, and, overcome these elements that have created who we are.

This is an important issue with a lot of different social issues because it reframes them from being directed onto the individual and instead talks about the society they inhabit. In the specific case that she was talking about with Klein, for example, seeing the world this way changes the conversation from being "do I hate women?" to "is what I'm doing right now something that doesn't help women become equal members of society?" The same thing could be said about other "identity politics" issues. The emphasis changes from "am I a racist?" to "does the immigration policy I support discriminate against non-whites?" It also has impact on the environment: "am I a climate change denier?" to "does this policy I'm supporting make the future sustainable?" Once we assume that people are to a very large part formed by the culture they live in, then if we want to make the world a better place, we need to change the culture instead of blame the individual.

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This leads to the second point that Manne identifies, namely that one of the key ways that culture controls human behaviour is through shaming. Gender is obviously rigidly controlled in our culture through shaming---"man-up", "don't be a sissy", "real men don't eat quiche", "that's so gay", "that haircut is so butch!", "that skirt makes you look like a slut!", etc, etc. It might be harder to recognize this in other aspects of culture, but once you understand what to look for, it becomes easier to see.

Shaming is a complex behaviour in that it involves pointing out that someone is expected to live up to a specific norm---and that they are failing to do so. As such, it is inherently hierarchical because it always involves someone taking on the role of being a judge who can decide who is or is not living up to their understanding of acceptable behaviour. It isn't just a case of someone being told that they don't "make the grade", though, it is also a case of someone internalizing this code to the point where the comment from the "outsider" has a deep emotional "sting". 

Let me illustrate this point with an example from my own life.

I have worked as a porter in an academic Library for over 30 years. Sometimes it's slow in the building and there is nothing to do except the odd walk-through and wait for someone to call on the radio or telephone for help. One night I happened to be suffering from a truly hideous migraine headache and was sitting behind a cup of tea trying to keep my eyeballs from falling out of my head. My supervisor showed-up to pick up something from his office. The next day he called me into his office and told me he was very upset about me being where I was the night before and called me "lazy" because I wasn't actively doing something. (I asked him what exactly I was supposed to be doing and he had no answer---he was actually an incompetent boob who didn't really understand my job.) This event put me into a tremendous depression that went on for weeks, led to some serious weight loss (my significant other called me "the incredible shrinking man"), and, only ended after I went to a professional for some therapy.

The point was that I had never been accused of being "lazy" in my entire life and my self-image was tied directly to being a "hard worker". When my boss called me "lazy", he totally shattered this belief about myself and deeply shamed me. It was only after the therapist pointed out that many workplaces are deeply hypocritical about how much people actually do, that many bosses have absolutely zero understanding about who does what, and, that in most cases our interactions at work are exercises in "gamesmanship" and "deception" that I realized that it was ridiculous for me to care what my incompetent boss thought of me. It also helped me immensely to hear this from a professional---who was actually provided by my workplace---which helped get out from under the deep shame that I'd felt because of this whole incident. 

I will admit that my example might seem a bit extreme, but not when you consider that a lot of working-class people have built their entire definition of self-worth on the concept of being "hard workers". I had this reinforced the other night with a cab driver. I mentioned something about having grown up on a farm and she started going on about how "farm people are all WORKERS". You could tell that in her universe this is obviously the most positive thing anyone can say about someone else. And this makes sense. When you have very little value placed on your being by society-at-large, one of the very few ways you can feel good about yourself is to at least think that you are doing the best you can with the very limited opportunities available.

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Another thing about working class culture is that it teaches people to be ashamed about asking for support. I have to admit that it's taken a bit out of me every time I switch to the blue font and start asking for people to support this blog in order to break the "habit" of assuming that all news on the Internet should be "free". Well, here's "the ask". If you like this blog enough to read it, you should consider supporting it. I don't want money from poor people, but if you aren't, perhaps you could kick something in both to "pay your way" and also to pay for the folks who can't afford to support it. It's easy---you can subscribe using Patreon, or toss something in the Tip Jar. If you don't want to do that, send me a cheque by mail:  124-A Surrey Street East Guelph, N1H 3P9  (made out to Bill Hulet.) (Thanks to Evelyn for being so awesome!) 

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Right now we are going through a period of rapid social change. When I was young there were schools and jobs that just refused to admit women. It was against the law to be gay and police raided their bars. Discrimination was casual and accepted just about everywhere. That's all gone. Just to give you an idea of how much things have changed, a co-worker mentioned to me the other day that it had been years and years since he'd heard a joke that made fun of an ethnic group. I had to admit that I could say the same thing---and that amazed me. They used to a common part of social discourse.

How did this change happen? I'd suggest that it simply became no longer acceptable for people to make "Newfie", or "Polack", or whatever type of dumb jokes anymore. People were shamed into no longer repeating them. I can certainly still remember the first time I was shamed by someone because I repeated a dumb anti-gay joke. It stung, and at first I had a hard time understanding what the problem was, but after some other similar incidents, some reflection, and, time, I simply "moved on" and this sort of thing ceased to be part of my casual conversation.

Unfortunately, some people don't see this sort of negative feedback as being an opportunity to rethink what they believe in. Instead, they get very upset and see the other people's attempt to modify their behaviour through shaming as being an assault on their sense of worth---just like when my boss called me "lazy".

The cartoon show South Park devoted an episode titled Smug Alert! to this issue. It involved the citizens of South Park all buying hybrid cars and becoming so self-righteous that they develop a deep cloud of "smug" over the city that threatened to destroy everything. Just to give you a sense of what the show is like, among other things, people owning hybrids were shown being so in love with themselves that they love the smell of their own farts. (I thought about putting a link to the entire show in the post, but there was so much casual homophobia in the episode---people routinely say something is "gay" because is it "fake", "silly", or, just plain bad---that I gagged on including it.)

Another example from popular literature comes from Barbara Kingsolver's  novel Flight Behaviour. In that book monarch butterflies stop over-wintering in Mexico and instead settle on a wooded valley in Appalachia that is going to be clear cut so a poor land owner can pay off some of his bills. Kingsolver specifically said in an interview that she wrote the book so readers could understand the sort of rural society that breeds climate change denial. In what I suspect she felt was a truly "telling" vignette, an outsider tells a poverty-stricken rural dweller that he should buy a hybrid car in order to "save the planet". I've been involved in the environmental movement for a very long time and I have yet to see this sort of stupid insensitivity to poverty by anyone. I mention this point specifically not because I think that this is an accurate portrayal of how environmentalists act, but because I think it is "spot on" about how some folks think environmentalists act. (I couldn't quite figure out what Kingsolver actually thinks about this, but I suspected that she believes the lie about the environmental movement.)

Barbara Kingsolver,
Photo by Annie Griffiths

I think that both South Park and Kingsolver are serving a useful purpose in articulating exactly what it is that populists are really angry about. A lot of people have lived their lives by defining themselves against a set of very clear notions. But along comes the rapid change of society and all of a sudden hard work isn't as important as having good "people skills". You think that being "gay" is a ridiculous perversion---and yet we have a Premier who is an "out" lesbian. You lost your good-paying job in the oil patch that proved that you were both a "WORKER" and a "good provider" and those damned environmentalists and First Nations types are refusing to let companies build a pipeline.  And the government keeps letting in more and more of those funny brown-skinned folks to compete with your jobs. And on top of all of this, whenever you complain smart-ass people with an education try to shame you into shutting up by saying that you are a ignorant boob who needs "sensitivity training". In fact, if you are too vocal about what you actually feel, you can end up losing your job. What ever happened to free speech?

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I've understood the importance of shaming for social control since well before I heard the conversation between Klein and Manne. I mentioned this to a friend once and suggested that environmentalists need to develop methods of shaming people in order to stop them from doing environmentally damaging things like driving big cars and flying all over the planet on their vacations. Her response was totally unexpected. She totally lost it and said that "shame" is a totally horrible thing to inflict on anyone. I was surprised by the depth of emotion behind her response. In retrospect, I think I now understand what was going on. This friend thinks Brexit is a good idea and believed that Donald Trump would do some good in the USA. She is also someone with a very strong work ethic (she's a "WORKER") who has had to suffer from a great deal of profound indignity in her life. I think that she has developed a very sensitive "antenna" to any attempt to put pressure on people to "get with the program". In other words---she's allergic to "smug". For someone like her, I'm not sure that trying to use informal social pressure is going to do anything except create anger and resentment.

Having said that, I'm not sure what else people can do about "die harders" who keep manifesting behaviour that hurts other or damages the planet. Would it be better to make everything illegal and put them in jail? Should we just try to convince them to change through gentle persuasion and tell the people that they hurt "well, we tried"? I don't really know how else we can get people to stop doing bad things than to let them know that we simply do not approve. It really is the case---as in my example of the racist and sexist jokes---that if enough folks tell you that something is in bad taste many folks will eventually stop doing it.

But in the interim there are going to be a few people that are really, really angry about being told that they need to "pull up their socks" and "get with the program". I suspect that all the people of good will can do is be patient and reflect on the idea that this backlash is only a temporary thing. Most young folks have no problem with this new world. It's just some of the older citizenry who hang tenaciously to the old ways of being. And to paraphrase Max Planck "Civilization progresses one funeral at a time".   

The Village Funeral, by Frank Holl,
Public Domain image c/o Wiki Commons