“Privilege” as cudgel in private conversation

[mahagonny]

There is little question but that, like it or not, anyone who has been retired on a comfy pension etc., esp  one able to be acquired in one's mid-50s, and then subsequently has been able to use the pandemic time to learn Spanish, has substantially more 'privilege' than someone who has had to spend the last six months working ringing a grocery store cash register, risking his life on a daily basis, for minimum wage.

No denying that, and I was alluding to something a bit like that in my post upthread, and  I also had the bad taste to use the occasion to insert a pet cause of of mine (while you didn't), the plight of majority faculty, which is certainly something to be categorically ignored, I expect, for many readers. But the strange thing here is that TH's friend is similarly privileged as herself so it would seem odd to throw it in someone's face they way they did, superciliously.

Yes, she is definitely more "woke" than I am & she knows it.

so yeah, she's thinking about politics and how she, being a liberal, is automatically more compassionate than you (we) are.

[financeguy]

I've looked at many behavioral finance issues and just as a quick summary:

-Financial stability is viewed in relative terms.
-One's immediate circle is a reference point, not others we "know" exist.
-You will not change this perception by pointing out its irrationality any more than your knowledge of the physical impossibility of the MC Escher drawing will cause you to see it the "right" way.

This explains why someone can enjoy and in fact admire rappers who literally throw stacks of money in the air in a video or otherwise brag about their wealth but at the same time be consumed with envy over the next door neighbor who has a slightly better car or the guy in the next cubicle when discovered his bonus was 5% of salary and yours only 3.

The privilege issue is a different matter entirely in that (like almost all terms used by the left to shake others down) they have no objective criteria other than the feelings of the person holding them. If privilege were defined as those with the top 20% of the worlds net worth,  those with greater than average incomes, those who have three meals a day or any other observable measurable standard, no one would use or be offended by the term. It only exists to verbally bully people into agreement. It's lack of objective verification means it can only be a personal judgement.

[polly_mer]

Finally, I am not sure what is the point of only having friends who are like you. I mean, I don't want to be friends with Klan members, or made men in the mafia, or whatever. But within a certain standard deviation, it is nice to have friends who are different than you. Otherwise, why would you have friends?

Where you set that standard deviation is the key to compatible worldviews.  Yes, my friends who are into watching all the experimental and non-mainstream films often share things I wouldn't have known existed. However, they wade through a lot of crap and my success rate by focusing on mainstream entertainment and curated other channels is much higher.

In contrast, I have zero friends who think every day that ends in a y needs to be celebrated by heavy drinking and therefore never have to ask how much drinking is worrying and would need intervention.

My friends who love to travel have great stories to tell.  At no point will I be taking any trips with them because I find travel for the sake of new experiences extremely unpleasant.  We established this situation early so there's never a need to write to the advice column on how to navigate the tradeoffs in shared travel frequency and activities that satisfy no one.

As an atheist, I have many friends who have solid ties to a faith community with regular participation in a specific congregation.  I have zero friends who insist that prayer is better than science, but many who believe that every little bit helps during times of uncertainty.

I have zero friends who live lives of scary drama involving drug/alcohol use, frequent bouts of unemployment, frequent bouts of physical violence, frequent bouts of arguing by shouting, frequent visits by child services, frequent negative interactions with the police, and similar indications of bad life choices.

I have friends and chosen family who value relationships, free time, small town life with a low cost of living and other aspects of daily life over maximizing monetary gain.  That mindset sometimes results in coming up a little short monetarily, but it's not huge drama that lasts years in entirely foreseeable ways.

None of my friends would privilege cudgel me, even though my household is the most monetarily privileged in the social group (my coworkers are a different story), but they might point out that proposed plans will not let individual X participate at this time, but tweak Y would.

[polly_mer]

I'm all in favor of a social class analysis. Isabel Wilkerson has a new book out, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which sets out the caste system in the US, and that idea seems right to me. There's remarkably little social mobility in the US. But exactly what we should do with the political concept of privilege is not easily answered. I don't think that liberal guilt or all those "privilege quizzes" have been useful. If we were going to make the US a society of equal opportunity, things would need to change radically. Right now, the main effect of raising consciousness about class privilege is to encourage a few liberals to give some money to charity.

Those of us who did move up significantly in social class (I personally went from bottom quintile  to top quintile) through sacrifice and hard work to leverage every opportunity are the least easily swayed by arguments that the situation is all a matter of the system keeping people down, especially when we know so many people who didn't even try when given similar opportunities.

Some communities are indeed unresourced and need more money in targeted ways to have reasonable opportunities for their members or need targeted ways to help 'everyone' move away and get a solid start in their new places.

It is simultaneously true that we could do more as a society to equalize opportunity and that many people are worse off than they have to be under the current system through their own repeated entirely foreseeable bad choices.

[mahagonny]

Being talented enough to complete is PhD is more than hard work and good choices. It is a gift the most don't have. If you don't believe in God, It's random luck. As well, many have similar talent but not a sustained condition of mental health which hinders them and leads to situations others will call 'bad choices.'
Carrying sheetrock at a construction site is hard work too, and done by someone who more likely did not spend his grade school years looking into the faces of pleased teachers who were enjoying the student who makes them look good.
As someone told Ben Franklin, add humility to your list of traits to cultivate.

[polly_mer]

Being talented enough to complete is PhD is more than hard work and good choices.

Not any more.  Finishing a graduate degree in the US is now more a matter of not having your life fall apart during the time you're in the program and that's been true for most of my lifetime.  It does not require being super brilliant, but it does require having been good at school for a long time and being able to then switch gears to deal well with ambiguity when no one knows.

People from my youth who have good lives now worked hard in various areas, that's true.  All of them are middle class, particularly those who went into the skilled trades or continued on the family farm.  Not everyone has to be good at school to succeed, but there are definitely good life choices that tend to work out and bad life choices that tend to sink even those who started in a solid position with many resources.

[mahagonny]

I'm all in favor of a social class analysis. Isabel Wilkerson has a new book out, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which sets out the caste system in the US, and that idea seems right to me. There's remarkably little social mobility in the US. But exactly what we should do with the political concept of privilege is not easily answered. I don't think that liberal guilt or all those "privilege quizzes" have been useful. If we were going to make the US a society of equal opportunity, things would need to change radically. Right now, the main effect of raising consciousness about class privilege is to encourage a few liberals to give some money to charity.

No way the country with the best health care in the world is going to make that same health care available to everyone.

[kaysixteen]

I suppose I could have ignored polly's latest attempt to demonstrate that she has an ego the size of Jupiter, believes, stunningly, that she is completely responsible for everything good in her life, AND those who have not succeeded to her level deserve their fate, etc., but, ah, well....

[aside]

Why are you friends with someone who doesn't share your values and world view?

So the world does not end in a white-hot blaze of hatred.

[Hegemony]

I think if the word "privilege" is replaced with "advantage," then the self-obvious truth of it becomes clear. Yes, white people have a racial advantage over black people, in our society. Yes, rich people have an advantage over poor people. Yes, people who don't need wheelchairs have an advantage over people who do need them. And unquestionably it's important to be aware of that. Nobody should behave as if privilege/advantage is a prize awarded for innate superiority. Nobody should behave as if the obstacles are identical for all of us.

However, in this case, the woman in question seems to have a practice of looking at how privilege/advantage works, so much so that it's carried over into ridiculous realms, such as self-righteously reminding others of their privilege when she benefits from almost exactly the same amount of privilege. I'd guess her subconscious motivation is "The person who first remarks on privilege is morally superior."  So, easy enough to develop a response.

Her, some sunny afternoon: My tomatoes have finally ripened!
You, with an attitude of mild and detached wisdom: Having a garden is certainly benefiting from privilege, isn't it?

Another day:

Her: Did you hear that sixteen refugees were imprisoned down in [foreign place]? Terrible.
[And is indeed terrible. But.]
You: Yes. And we must acknowledge our privileged position to be reading this in the news, safe in our houses as white people.
Her, needled that you have arrived at the position of acknowledging privilege first: Certainly. I am aware of my privilege every day.
You: That's as it should be. Of course even being aware of it is a privilege. We all know that.

This may have an extra advantage in that she will talk to you less.

[Wahoo Redux]

Personally, having seen this in my extended family (my immediate family is essentially rolling in middle-class privilege) and having seen this in several acquaintances across the years...

...people who've had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps often (not always, but often) are equipped with buttons that are very easy to push when advantage/privilege rears itself in one way or another.  When people feel that have succeeded because they have had to work harder than we privileged people the bootstrapper is often very resentful and feels the need to remind us non-bootstrappers that we had an easier time of it.  I've never understood that.  Rather than being intensely proud and self-confident, bootstrappers sometimes have an automatic defense mechanism that kicks in at the slightest hint of class/advantage/privilege.  SES can leave a deep wound.

Again, since we were not there, we really don't know what is driving TH's friend so bat-guano crazy.  In my life this has been a source of tension around family and, occasionally, friends who did not stay friends very long.

Does anybody remember a study of middle-class students who had low self-esteem because they felt they did not have to struggle as much as other people?  It was done some time ago.  We non-bootstrappers either tend to be very arrogant or feel embarrassed.  Certainly we don't celebrate the highly successful children of cardiologists and corporate attorneys in the same way that we celebrate the highly successful first-generation and low SES students, and maybe we shouldn't.

[kaysixteen]

Don't go overboard.  The 'successful' child of a cardiologist was born on third and thinks he hit a triple.   The successful child of working, let alone lower/ underclass welfare recipients who spent more money on marijuana than food is much much more worthy of society's kudos and and assorted accolades.

[mahagonny]

For a guy who wasn't born on third base, is famous, successful and economically comfortable there's the example of Thomas Sowell whose parents were already dead; he grew up in poor all black South Carolina, was raised by a great aunt and her daughters. Ran away from home because in his adolescent stage of rebellion became enemies with the great aunt. He certainly knows not every black person could do things like he has done, because we are all different, but believes they could be doing much more and better for themselves if white people on the left weren't drumming it into their heads that their lack of progress is the white man's fault and not something they can reverse through reasonably hard work, a sense of personal agency, a bit of common sense and avoiding toxic influences and culture (some of which white people glorify). He's very adamant in his views about where society has gone wrong, but where congratulating oneself for one's success in life his ego is closer to the size of Pluto. But ironically black people are not encouraged to celebrate his kind of success very much. Maybe that will change.

If Thomas Sowell is too unpopular to mention, substitute Morgan Freeman and you get approximately the same example. How many would stop enjoying his movies is they knew about his political views?

...people who've had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps often (not always, but often) are equipped with buttons that are very easy to push when advantage/privilege rears itself in one way or another.  When people feel that have succeeded because they have had to work harder than we privileged people the bootstrapper is often very resentful and feels the need to remind us non-bootstrappers that we had an easier time of it.  I've never understood that.  Rather than being intensely proud and self-confident, bootstrappers sometimes have an automatic defense mechanism that kicks in at the slightest hint of class/advantage/privilege.  SES can leave a deep wound.

[Hegemony]

Ah yes, black people just imagine that racism is operant in their lives, and their failure to make more progress is all because they're hoodwinked into thinking bigotry exists and affects them.

It's funny, I've just been working on 19th-century English food riots, and the same argument was used by the wealthier classes. The agricultural workers were literally starving, as every modern historian agrees. The enclosures that took away the common land that country folk had used to pasture their cow, the Corn Laws that kept the price of grain artificially inflated, the lack of work after the demobbed soldiers came flooding back from the Napoleonic Wars, the utterly inadequate poor relief, and numerous other factors meant that families were desperate. They could not even afford a diet of only bread; many were homeless; many starved. First they pleaded, then they protested, and then, in the face of the government's utter indifference to the reports the government themselves had commissioned, the peasants rioted. They damaged farm machinery. They set fires. They stole things from the wealthy, including a loaf of bread. They marched around at night.  They scared the affluent. They demanded relief. They demanded jobs well-paid enough to afford bread.

And what was the response of the authorities?  It had all been caused by bad influences, who had filled the gullible heads of the farmworkers with the notion that they were starving. The poor relief was especially to blame, because it encouraged the poor to think that the government might have resources to provide, and therefore made the peasants lazy. Their difficulties were all in their heads.

The authorities bore down on the protestors with troops and cannon. One protestor fled and was shot in the back and killed. No non-protestors were killed. Four protestors were sentenced to die and were executed. The spokesman for the government stood up and said that the protestors claimed they were hungry, but that was clearly untrue. What was the evidence that it was untrue? Well, he himself, a man who had strong opinions on the matter, said it was untrue. That was the evidence.

"But as distress did not incite them to riot, what was the cause, and who urged these persons on? Those cruel and malignant men, that are always representing the country as disgraced and ruined, who would make the people believe that their governors are all corrupt, and have an interest in oppressing them, that the country might be happier and freer but for the machinations of the high and the rich, that all reform is obstinately withheld. It is such language as this that inflames the passions, and operating upon minds incapable of detecting its falsehood, produces an impatience of controul, and a disposition to violate the public peace... Do not let them be told that they are suffering, without being told also that those sufferings will only be temporary, and have not been occasioned by their Government; that what they have already endured has been to preserve all that makes life and country dear and honourable; for their freedom and their independence, the homes of their families, the graves of their fathers, the altars of their God. All were in peril and all have been preserved: and the people of the British Empire may safely stand up and claim the praise and the post of being the freest, the happiest, and the greatest people upon earth."

A few concessions had been made — wages were increased a tad — but this was all reversed as soon as the rioters had been clapped into prison. They made the laws more draconian; they blamed the poor for their own disadvantages twice as vigorously.

To which I say, in the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay, "It's not one damn thing after another, it's the same damn thing over and over."

Apart from the minor point that some of the poor people starved, the main effect was that because nothings had changed, in about another fifteen years, riots broke out again — worse.

[Wahoo Redux]

Don't go overboard.  The 'successful' child of a cardiologist was born on third and thinks he hit a triple.   The successful child of working, let alone lower/ underclass welfare recipients who spent more money on marijuana than food is much much more worthy of society's kudos and and assorted accolades.

Yep.  That was pretty much exactly what I was thinking of. 

We are a paradoxical society in that we both pursue and resent wealth.   

I agree with you, Kay, but it is interesting that we feel we much assert this as much as we do.