I made the mistake of taking a fresh look at Arts and Letters Daily today after several years away. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how the site pioneered a clickbaiting strategy: Dennis Dutton, its founding editor, mixed articles of genuine interest with “hate reads” that would guarantee audience engagement at an affective and not just an intellectual level. Dutton (not that bright a bulb himself) practiced an editorial “neutrality” that put tedious ideologues like Roger Scruton on the same level as serious thinkers and talented writers. Notably, Christopher Hitchens loomed as large on the site after his neocon conversion as before. I think I used to respect this, but now I can’t see it as anything different than what facebook does.
All that is by way of apology for my taking the bait. Matthew Crawford, the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft (and somehow, on that basis, a fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Study, but more on that tomorrow or the next day), published an essay on “Privilege” which aldaily, with its infallible nose for outrageous bullshit, picked up. There’s enough wrong with the essay to fill three posts, to which I’ll be adding a fourth with a theory as to why it managed to find a place in a “major” publication.
Crawford’s argument is essentially that the use of the term “privilege” in phrases like “white privilege” is historically illegitimate, motivated by resentment, and functional more as a way of assuaging bourgeois guilt than as a real political critique. I’m going to address each of these points in turn, starting with the first.
When he treats modern use of the word “privilege” as a katachresis, I take Crawford to be making a point about etymology. As a classicist, this is a subject in which I have some expertise. Knowing Greek, Latin and a little Indo-European linguistics is enough to make English transparent: you know where all the words come from.
The pedagogical temptation, if you have this knowledge and happen to be standing in front of a class that neither has it nor aspires to it, is to trot it out at every point and make your class about words rather than whatever you advertised yourself as teaching. You might, for instance, point out that the word “advertise” comes originally from Latin “[animum] advertere,” “to notice or attend to.” You might then say either that this is a “true” etyomology because of the attention-seeking character of modern advertising, or that American-style descriptive/aspirational advertising is “illegitimate” because it goes beyond advertising’s etymological function as that which merely draws our attention to the products of commerce. Both claims would probably be convincing for a classroom of undergraduates, but they’re equally shoddy: the causal arguments involved in each (“because,” “since”) can’t possibly be justified with reference to etymology. They’re synchronic evaluations grounded in diachronic evidence. These two types of explanation don’t mix: it’s as if you’re telling me my steak counts as a vegetable because it used to be grass.
Crawford’s discussion of the history of the word “privilege” is only slightly more nuanced than this. He begins by giving a straightforward explanation of the term’s Latin/French etymology as “private law,” then outlines the role such privileges played in the noble exceptionalism of the ancien regime. That exceptionalism was bad, Crawford says, because parasitical (another bad argument, but for different reasons; 18th century economists saw things this way, but both the noblemen themselves and that considerable group of revolutionaries motivated by their reading of Rousseau articulated the problem in terms of justice.) Modern talk about “X privilege,” however, means something completely different:
Obviously, the whole system of privilege was parasitical. It was also quite different from what we mean today when we speak of privilege. According to current usage, it means something like good fortune. In a polemical discussion of education, for example, it will be said that a child who grows up with two parents is “privileged,” from which we are meant to infer that there is something illegitimate about the source of his relative calm and competence.
Leaving aside Crawford’s straw-man example (the notion of two-parent privilege is preposterous, to be sure, but I also suspect Crawford invented it himself), the argument appears complete. People used to use the word in a serious sense to justify or attack “real” injustices, ones enshrined in law; now people use it to attack anyone who’s been lucky. The new usage is “illegitimate” from the perspective of etymology.
The trick with an argument like Crawford’s is that, if you devote yourself to contradicting one of its assumptions, you appear to grant a number of others that are equally weak. In passing, then, I need to raise the following questions: what does Crawford think noble birth was, if not “something like good fortune?” Is Crawford unaware that the “relative calm and confidence” of his American students, whether they come from two-parent households or not, is grounded in a tremendous resource parasitism vis-a-vis the rest of the world? To say nothing of the parasitism of capital on labor, which, in a reference to communism as a passing illusion that obscures a real petitio principii, Crawford disregards with a wave of the hand.
Leaving those questions behind, I’m going to pose a hypothetical one that exposes the basic hollowness of Crawford’s argument from etymology and others like it: what would have to be true in the present day for people to go on using “privilege” in a historically legitimate sense? The answer to that can only be that we’d have to live in something like ancien regime France. The US constitution effectively bans privileges, so that would have to be modified or repealed; then, somehow, a situation would have to arrive in which the very rich so openly controlled our government that they were able to pass laws explicitly exempting themselves, as individuals, from civic obligations that the rest of us had to undertake (leaving aside the question of whether this is how things are already, de facto; in a democracy, you at least need to put on a show of equality before the law.)
By Crawford’s standards, then, not only do college students use the word “privilege” incorrectly; there’s no way for anyone now living to use it in the right way, except with historical referent. That’s the actual conclusion of Crawford’s argument. Etymology grounds a prescriptivist claim that effectively annihilates a word from the English language.
Where did Crawford go wrong here? I’m sure he knows, but I’ll say it anyway: he ignored the basic Nietzschean point that origin is neither definition nor explanation. Knowing the etymological root of a word tells us nothing, either positive or negative, about its usage in the present day. The only question of interest, the real genealogical question, is how we got from there to here.
The rest of Crawford’s essay seems to want to answer this question, but, since it assumes the illegitimacy of the modern usage and since it operates at a time-depth (from one to two decades) equivalent to synchronicity, it’s not an answer of the right sort. The right sort of answer would be the sort that Raymond Williams gives in Keywords, his commentary on the OED: a lexicographically careful history of usage from the 18th century to the present. That kind of answer helps you understand not just that the meaning of the word has changed – a trivial observation – but how and why.
What would such a genealogy of privilege look like? I don’t have Williams’ patience or talent, but I do have online access to the OED, and that’s enough at least to draw a sketch. When I look at the entry there, the first thing that stands out to me is that the use of privilege to mean “something like good fortune” (s.v., 3b) actually predates the 18th century. If we’re looking for something new in the way the word’s now used, we should be looking under definition 6:
As a mass noun: the fact or state of being privileged. In later use also: the existence of economic and social privileges associated with rank or status; the fact of there being such privileges within a society.
The quotations suggest that what the OED means by “later use” here, especially when it comes to “the fact of there being such privileges in society,” is “late 20th century and onward.” Since this is also the sense of the noun as it appears in phrases like “white privilege,” then this, and not a superficial detail like Crawford’s “good fortune” or “parasitism,” is what a historian ought to be investigating.
How did “privilege,” once exclusively the property of an individual or corporate institution, develop into an abstract noun? The turn, it would appear, begins at some point in the 18th century, and almost immediately privilege appears as something to be attacked. The target these early users have in mind, though, is not those legal privileges of which Crawford makes so much. Instead, they’re attacking the social echoes of those legal privileges. Take for instance Samuel Richardson’s 1753 description of “A..man, who wants to assume airs of privilege, and thinks he has a right to be impertinent.” The characterization is evidently invidious, not because its target actually possesses legal privileges but because he acts as though he did.
The line of connection between Crawford’s legal privilege and the “airs of privilege” sniffed at by Richardson is easy to draw. Special status at law means you have less need to be careful of offending or injuring others, whom you can also count upon to render you certain legally-mandated services and obeisance. To take advantage of those privileges means acting differently than you would have acted without them: privilege produces a habitus, and the habitus can persist without legal support.
Richardson and his contemporaries already knew what modern research has confirmed, that behaviors have historically been more important than laws in the production of social inequality. Suppose you create a society ideologically committed to social equality: then you’ve set the stage for the next step in the semantic evolution of privilege, from the habitus of an individual to the very existence of such a habitus in society.
That kind of privilege is the one that the best part of the enlightenment project has been dedicated to stamping out. When activists anywhere talk about white privilege, then, it would also only be charitable to read them in this way: as attacking a habitus that has the pernicious tendency to produce and reproduce social inequality. Crawford’s sloppy etymology, however makes him (allows him to?) miss the point.
Instead, Crawford identifies the discourse of “x privilege” with resentment. His argument for that identification is plausible and in some cases correct, but that’s not why it appeals to him or his readers. More on this tomorrow.