A gangland culture of honor may motivate a lot of violence, but an elite culture of victimhood rationalizes the violence, excuses the violence, and enables the violence.
So it might appear that progressive effort allows themselves to feel OK but forces others to become victims. Schools should have high, not low, expectations for students with extra help for those that struggle. Allowing any misbehavior gets more of it. Sadly many kids just seem to have given up, just getting by because nobody thinks they are worthwhile. Lectures on how bad off they are has no positives.
One thing I got out of taking time to assemble this essay is an idea that is so simple and obvious--but simple and obvious (to me) only after I wrote it. We hear a lot now about elites getting absorbed in a culture of victimhood. That idea is used to rationalize this more ambitious idea of well-off people ostentatiously competing with each other for victim status.
I admit that that last idea still strikes me as, like I said,... ambitious. Surely it is a more prominent phenomenon than it had been, but do most folks at the universities or living off of Lexington Avenue really appeal to it? I would be nice to have some hard data on that kind of thing.
Easier to accept is that elite opinion has been governed for a long time--decades--by this idea that whole communities of other people are victims. Forty years ago, these same people might have said of certain lawless communities, "They're the product of their environments." These days we just appeal to "systemic racism." But, it all amounts to the same thing: projecting victimization on everyone else, which in turn enables an appeal to remedies to that same victimization, notwithstanding the fact that it is all nonsense.
So it might appear that progressive effort allows themselves to feel OK but forces others to become victims. Schools should have high, not low, expectations for students with extra help for those that struggle. Allowing any misbehavior gets more of it. Sadly many kids just seem to have given up, just getting by because nobody thinks they are worthwhile. Lectures on how bad off they are has no positives.
Change "school" to society and see where we are.
One thing I got out of taking time to assemble this essay is an idea that is so simple and obvious--but simple and obvious (to me) only after I wrote it. We hear a lot now about elites getting absorbed in a culture of victimhood. That idea is used to rationalize this more ambitious idea of well-off people ostentatiously competing with each other for victim status.
I admit that that last idea still strikes me as, like I said,... ambitious. Surely it is a more prominent phenomenon than it had been, but do most folks at the universities or living off of Lexington Avenue really appeal to it? I would be nice to have some hard data on that kind of thing.
Easier to accept is that elite opinion has been governed for a long time--decades--by this idea that whole communities of other people are victims. Forty years ago, these same people might have said of certain lawless communities, "They're the product of their environments." These days we just appeal to "systemic racism." But, it all amounts to the same thing: projecting victimization on everyone else, which in turn enables an appeal to remedies to that same victimization, notwithstanding the fact that it is all nonsense.