In my previous post, I offered a correction to Matthew Crawford’s etymological method. Now, returning to the same article (“Privilege,” published in the Hedgehog Review), I’m going to discuss the second in Crawford’s docket of complaints against the widespread circulation of phrases like “white privilege” and “cis privilege.” Crawford sees these phrases not as apodictic but as expressive: “The term ‘privilege,'” he writes, “is used not to make a case but to convey a mood.” The mood in question, according to Crawford, is fundamentally one of resentment against those who succeed in the “winner-takes-all” competition of modern capitalism. That the most successful are also the most likely to express such resentment is a separate claim of Crawford’s, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.
The form of Crawford’s argument has its roots in Nietzsche, who was the first to articulate a theory of ressentiment that transformed it from a term of personal psychology into a world-historical force. Broadly speaking, Nietzsche characterized the history of Europe as following from a series of “slave revolt in morality” (Christianity in its various historical forms) that replaced the aristocratic ethic, a valuation of power, with a slave/peasant ethic that valued suffering and that bound the exercise of power together with guilt. Feelings of ressentiment on the part of the lower orders against their social superiors were the what drove this transformation. For Nietzsche, ressentiment meant a feeling of having been injured and a drive for revenge against those to whom, because of your own weakness, you could do nothing. Physically impotent, ressentiment seeks its satisfaction in the world of ideas; ressentiment takes advantage of every opportunity to force the powerful to see the exploitation by which they thrive as morally wrong.
Nietzsche intented ressentiment as a categorory of historical explanation. In that field, it functioned as part of Nietzsche’s more general attack on the notion of reason in history. Not only were the progressive accounts of whig historians (to say nothing of older providential narratives) wrong; the historical agents themselves, when they offered apodictic claims, could not be taken at their word. Those agents took their various argumentative positions not because logic compelled them to do so, but for other reasons having to do with partial or private interest. Ressentiment was one of those reasons. In history, Nietzsche thought, these were the only kind of reasons with any explanatory value.
Nevertheless, resentment rapidly came to play a role in arguments of an entirely different sort. Since its foundation, Western political philosophy has gyrated around the question of whether there’s one politics or many: do different social positions generate different but commensurate political orders, or is there one right order that transcends social positioning? On the side of multiplicity are e.g. Aristotle, Plato (not uncontroversially) and Machiavelli; on the side of singularity, we find Cicero, Hobbes and Spinoza (a rare and perhaps the only non-elitist to insist on the univocality of the political good). Anyone in that latter camp has to face the difficulty that, in fact, different people have advocated and put into practice many different solutions to the basic problems of politics. Tactically, the easiest way to surmount this difficulty has been to insist that all solutions except the right one have arisen from irrational motives, typically motives that satisfy the self-interest of a section or of individuals at the expense of the social whole.
Nietzschean resentment was readily deployed as one such motives by bourgeois thinkers who wanted to argue against calls for redistribution of the wealth amassed by industrial capitalists. You can see, though, how this shift of context is inappropriate: the defenders of profit transferred resentment from a historical field where logic had no purchase into a “scientific” field where it would always fight an asymmetrical battle against the superior logic of upper-class intellectuals.
Nietzsche would not have objected to this appropriation (for him, ideas are only tokens in a struggle between wills to power) but neither can we say that such use of the term belongs to a Nietzschean tradition. He would probably have commented, though, on the ironic transformation of what he had identified as a drive of the lower classes into a psychological defense mechanism of the aristocrats. In the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, “resentment” was a magic word that you could use to make the logic any argument for redistribution, no matter how sound, disappear. It now appeared as though the shoe was on the other foot: in the field of political theory, “resentment” was an irrational response on the part of the oppressor against the reason of the oppressed.
That’s how Crawford uses the word in his essay: “white privilege” is an inherently irrational attack on the successful. That this usage still makes sense is a measure of how successful the rhetorical class warfare of the capitalists was, at least in an Anglophone context. After a paragraph accounting for “X privilege” in terms of resentment, Crawford expects his readers to take him at his word when he claims that such language is purely expressive in character. Never mind that there are dozens of books, academic and popular alike, written from the left and the right, that spell out exactly what apodictic weight the charge of “X privilege” carries. The word “resentment” conjures away all that literature in advance.
Here, as usual, the theory of resentment is anti-intellectual: it saves us the trouble of puzzling out what arguments might be offered in support of the existence of something like “white privilege.” I suspect it also saved Matthew Crawford a lot of research, on which more in a couple of days. For now, and to give a sense of what Crawford’s trying to cover up, I’ll spell out one argument as to the existence and salience of “white privilege.”
Legal privilege is odious to American democracy, and per se illegal. However, the forms of action enabled by such privilege, as I argued yesterday, not only persist outside of legal justification but may, with time give rise to a legal justification. Minimally, such forms of action could be identified with the practical indifference of a group or individual to a law that everyone else has to follow. The fact that non-white people are far more likely to be stopped and, if stopped, ticketed for minor traffic violations, is sufficient evidence for the existence of this minimal white privilege. I’m white, and one of my brake lights has been out for a year. During that time, I haven’t bothered to replace it and I’ve never been pulled over. That’s an action consistent with privilege: I act as though the law doesn’t apply to me.
When people talk about white privilege, however, this isn’t always what they mean. They’re often talking about a certain kind of inequality of opportunity, in particular claim that white people don’t have to concern themselves with certain negative possibilities like deportation, chronic underemployment and housing precarity. Each of these particular instances calls for empirical demonstration, of course; one of the major weaknesses of “X privilege” language is that it doesn’t always pursue such demonstration and, when it does, fails to recognize that the privilege in question may result not just from whatever X is but from the cross-cutting of other categories like class, race, gender and geography.* In principle, however, such language has content and is not merely expressive.
Here is where Crawford’s charge of resentment appears to have some purchase. Why do we care if some people get ahead while others fail, so long as that’s not the result of a collective decision for which we’re responsible, i.e. a law? It’s just a result of market sorting – which process, Crawford seems to think, gets the right answer every time.
This appearance is a trick, not so much on Crawford’s part as of the system in which we live. Free-market ideology is one thing, free-market politics is another: something like an allergy on the part of the state for being blamed for any particular outcome. To avoid such blame, the sphere of the law contracts – except when it comes to regulations for public safety, of which the drug and traffic laws now so unevenly applied are a prime example. Then what happens? The laws of the state get replaced by the laws of economics, which are, preposterously, supposed to be “natural” laws. Nonetheless, by refusing to regulate the economy more aggressively, we chose them.
If economics now stands in for the law, as in many spheres it does, then the economy is a field in which we should look for patterns of action associated with privilege. When we find them, as we do – whites accepting as entitlements things like SAT prep classes and home loans for which Blacks and Hispanics have to fight – we should seek to eliminate them for the same reasons we seek to eliminate legal privileges, though perhaps by different means. Crawford, no idiot in economics, is disingenuous in ignoring these arguments. Resentment gives him conceptual cover for doing so.
* This weakness is tantamount to a general public unwillingness, grounded in a justified fear that doing so would amount to giving up on the American Dream, to identify any particular social formation as an “aristocracy.” A group so identified would be ripe for revolutionary overthrow, but most Americans would still rather join them than beat them. Apropos of that, a major reason for the failure of all slave revolts in antiquity is that their leaders didn’t want to overthrow slavery as such: they only wanted to become masters.