Do you think I should submit this essay somewhere?
The central concept of the sociologists is privilege. Privilege is like status, except that it is based on membership in a group rather than in characteristics of the individual. One’s privilege is based on his her membership in a economic class, race, religious group, or sexual category. Rich people enjoy a lot of privilege, while poor people are underprivileged. In America, whites are privileged, while African-Americans and Hispanics are not. Similarly, Christians are privileged, and Muslims are not. Male heterosexuals are privileged, and people with other sexual orientations are not.
It goes on to claim that this is how the Obama Administration views terrorism. I actually don’t think I’m being uncharitable. I think I could pass an ideological Turing test as a sociologist or as a member of the Administration.
But now you need to explain why the inhabitants of the faculty lounge don’t love America.
I’ll help: It’s actually not that they don’t love America. You think Robespierre didn’t love France, or Lenin didn’t love Russia? Of course not! But what they love is what they want to turn America into, not what America is, or has been.
Giuliani’s statements are perfectly comprehensible. Just imagine that love of what something is not yet, isn’t love of that thing.
Not sure about Robespierre, but I expect Lenin was more internationalist in outlook than the median Russian. Certainly he would have had an emotional attraction to the great socialist future of his country. But I somehow doubt he had the soppy nationalism of the common man.
Fair, but:
Lenin might have agitated for Revolution anywhere before the Germans shipped him off to Russia as an Agent Provocateur. But he didn’t, he chose to agitate for Revolution in Russia. Part of that may have been opportunism, but I think part of it was a certain sense of Nationalism. Even if he was more internationalist, it wouldn’t make him not love Russia, just have no unique love for Russia.
Status is granted, privilege is assumed.
My white privilege is what has me up at 3 am. I guess I’m lucky my parents privileged me with insomnia. This might be the first thing I agree with Obama on, except I’m reassured that he only dones this to troll the right and pander the left rather than believing or caring.
Where btw, is this anti-muslim bigotry that Obama thinks is problem #1? If he thinks it is here, it ain’t. Rednecks hating Muslims along with everyone else would be a problem, if it were a problem. Maybe the main problem is the marketing department for Islam who thinks beheadings make for good advertising.
This leads me to wonder if Muslims consider it a “sin” to kill the unconverted. Why or why not?
Obama could say basically the same thing except he could say it by tongue wagging the people who present a feature and benefits of Islam the murdering of innocents rather than being condescending to people half a world away. People who are understamdably confused by this marketing strategy. The same people he expects to be ready to ship out on his humanitarian war whims at the drop of a red line here or there.
But that wouldn’t troll the right.
I don’t know anything about sociology but it makes sense. And by providing an explanation for seemingly nonsensical comments you are indeed being charitable.
The interestring thing is that none of the things Obama says AK’s quotes are actually false or even particularly objectionable.
So I clicked through to see what’s actually quoted, and the first blockquote I found was the “bitter clingers” line. Um, wow. So that is neither “false [n]or even particularly objectionable”? Claiming Christianity — a religion 2,000 years old — is the result of rust belt economic decay? Claiming someone like myself — a programmer who makes $70k/year and hated the only time he ever worked in a factory, and who has demonstrated to his satisfaction that he can’t shoot — only thinks private gun ownership should be legal (and thinks you and Obama both favor gun confiscation as the ultimate form of “gun control”) because he’s bitter about rust belt economic decay? Those, claims? Really?
The condescension and arrogance betrayed by that quote is what is most troubling. That sense of superiority also isn’t likely to be helpful when dealing with Muslims- unless it is his plan to have extremists re-align squarely against progressivism.
“You cling to your ideas of Sharia law and such because you haven’t been properly educated by The West.” How is that going to work out?
To pass the ideological Turing test, you need to go farther. In any discussion of terrorism, it would be important not to single out the Islamists, but to also assert that the Christian right is as bad or worse, for example:
http://www.alternet.org/belief/despite-wingnut-freakout-obama-right-christian-violence-just-bad-muslim-violence
(Alternet may be to the left of most U.S. progressives, but it’s not to the left of sociology departments)
No, you should not submit this essay anywhere. It fails the ideological Turing Test and it fails it spectacularly.
I majored in Sociology at one of the top rated American Liberal Arts colleges. I am not proud of this fact and I am not here to defend Sociology. In my opinion, the field of Sociology has failed to fulfill its promise or even justify its own existence as a separate discipline.
The “central concept” of Sociology is that membership in groups is highly correlated with a wide variety of quite stable patterns that tend to predict individual behavior in ways both surprising and unsurprising. And that this can teach us something worth knowing about the causes of individual behavior. Sociologists do NOT believe that “every issue” boils down to privilege. Privilege is one characteristic among many that can affect behavior. This kind of disparaging talk of “every” issue and “the” central issue is not charitable or even accurate.
There are plenty of devastating criticisms that could be made of Sociology. You could start with the failure of the field to build a body of knowledge that has progressed in a meaningful way. You could point out how easy it is for people to hide out in Sociology departments without doing any meaningful work (although that’s not charitable either even though it’s true). You could point out how much easier it would be to pass an ideological Turing Test in a Sociology Department than in almost any other department. Which is why I expect you to do better than this. By the way, I am a big fan of your three axes analysis which really did show a very charitable insight into a wide variety of views.
“Privilege is one characteristic among many that can affect behavior. This kind of disparaging talk of “every” issue and “the” central issue is not charitable or even accurate. ”
Again, I don’t think Arnold is here to criticize sociology (and he said you wouldn’t think he is being charitable).
I suspect that privilege becomes the main issue to the extent that sociology is captured by left-wing politics whose primary concern is vote counts achieved by campaign promises, which always seem to revolve around money, and in the case of democrats always seem to involve ‘reparations.’
If a sociology department stops the analysis after determining a group is disadvantaged and assumes the solution is to redistribute advantage, then I assume that is what makes that department ‘mediocre.’ I suspect Arnold could add the alternative explanation for contrast of what would make the sociology department better and he might do likewise for the president.
You are harder on sociology than Arnold? I suspect Arnold thinks it is just another department responding to incentives. I am starting to think there should be two departments, applied/empirical math and applied statistics.
I am starting to think there should be two departments, applied/empirical math and applied statistics.
I like that idea.
Take the Turing test with it! For example, post it to DailyKOS under the guise of being a “student”, and ask if you have captured Obama’s view on privilege.
Careful associating it with your usual name. DK is prone to dismissing anything by a libertarian under the argument, “libertarian, hence wrong. Q.E.D.”.
Well, I don’t read the Daily KOS so I will have to defer to your greater familiarity with it in regard to what might or might not happen there Daublin.
Your comment does remind me though that, despite all his brilliant insight into the future of computing, Turing may have failed to anticipate Poe’s Law.
Good idea.
Actually, thinking this through some more, Obama is probably intentionally shilling to the concepts used by his audience.
His initial election was backed by the most extensive computer market-analysis system of any presidential candidate ever, along with a large staff to run and analyze the data it gathered. I have to imagine he kept that kind of stuff running and is constantly doing market tests on different kinds of things he is considering saying.
Is it true that most most terrorists are disadvantaged? I thought (maybe incorrectly) that terrorists were not poor members of society; that terrorism does not come from the desperately poor.
Also, the “give them jobs” spokesperson from the State Department is clearly foolish. But is she wrong about not being able to kill our way out of the ISIS problem? I actually agree with her on that. I don’t have a solution.
Obama explicitly makes this point in one of the excerpts Kling uses. As I think Kling recognizes, the issue isn’t economic well-being, but recognition. A relatively well-off and well-educated Palestinian is still going to obsess about the lack of recognition his people get. Obama specifically says this.
Do you disagree that privilege matters? It’s the only core dogma you identify from the field of sociology, and it seems, based on your framing of the essay, as though you disagree with the sociologists’ worldview. If you do not think that it matters and that it is an unhelpful way of viewing the world, why not? Do you think the economics field’s focus on incentives and the sociology field’s focus on privilege are different? Is it useful to separate incentives from privilege? Can you fully understand how people react to certain incentives without an understanding of how privilege matters?
I suggest you read Peggy McIntosh’s original essay on the subject if you wish to pass an ideological Turing test: https://www.isr.umich.edu/home/diversity/resources/white-privilege.pdf
You don’t seem to offer a working definition of the term your essay is about beyond being based on membership in a group and that it means “don’t get on your high horse.” It does not seem clear to me from this that your understanding of the issue is as robust as you’d like to think it is. The purpose of checking your privilege is to examine the ways in which patterns of assumptions and conditions of daily experience are embedded in certain groups of people through invisible systems of advantage and power.
Perhaps one of the big flaws of the economics field is its failure to seriously consider the importance of McIntosh’s concepts of unearned power conferred systematically and conferred dominance.
FWIW, Arnold is not really criticizing sociology, per se.
I also think his understanding of the privilege meme is more robust than I assume you assume.
The “don’t get on your high horse” is shorthand for, to use your terms, the special incentives you face under success may be a post hoc fallacy if assumed prescriptively. In other words, your doing well does not prove that other people without your privilege can or should do what you do to achieve similar success. Importantly, this seems to be the major emphasis to the point that it is constantly referred to in certain circles.
Arnold isn’t really criticizing this view although I suspect he would.
You may very well be right, but those are two points it would be helpful to clarify and expand on if he wants to submit this essay.
I’d say it needs some work. I think it’s a bit more complicated than the picture you paint. There is more than one bizarre feature of contemporary progressivism that is twisting the Administration’s thinking and pronouncements on the issue. Not an exhaustive list:
1. The universalist fallacy of thinking everyone ultimately shares the same goals and aspirations which just happen to be the same ones you have, namely peace and prosperity. They simply cannot put themselves in the shoes of theocrats and the kinds of extremists who think a religious war is an appealing idea. Thus, they suspect that these people are not and cannot actually be acting out of personal conviction, but must instead be acting out of some kind of deprivation or frustration.
2. Victim/oppression binary thinking. This is basically the same as your privilege discussion. Muslims have been victimized by colonialism and imperialism for many years, and then after that by secular dictatorships (and Jews, but let’s leave that one alone). The common Muslim, whether Arab, Persian, North/East African, whatever, was thus classified as an oppressed person or victim in the progressive mind, and thus their faults and failings tend to be dismissed and/or argued away due to the sympathy progressives have for the oppressed and the victimized, in general.
3. Reflexive anti-racism. Progressives are prone to denouncing anti-Muslim sentiments as racist, even though Islam is a religion, not a race and thus the charge is both inaccurate and idiotic. But progressives see themselves as waging a righteous struggle against judging people by whatever group they happen to belong to, whether it be a race, a religion, a class, a sexual orientation, whatever, so when they hear people express disdain for Islam, what they hear is disdain for adherents of Islam, and that’s no different from racism. Thus, we cannot label people who are both Muslims and terrorists as “Muslim terrorists” because that would invite denunciations of Islam for spawning said terrorists and thus we’re right back at racism, aka square one. The astute reader will note that progressives have no trouble at all lumping people into groups when they engage in the kind of thinking described in #2, but that’s the good kind of tribal thinking, not the bad kind.
You could add to this list, and you could probably make a case that 1 and 2 could be lumped together in some way or 2 and 3 or what have you, but anyway, that’s my take.