This article is written from a top-down perspective, as if morality is about how some higher power should allocate benefits and burdens:
> These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups.
A more useful understanding of morality is that it’s a framework for cultivating individually and socially desirable behavior. If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions.
From that perspective, it’s better for a member of a socially disadvantaged group to discount luck altogether-act is if nothing is holding them back—whether it’s true or not. I probably wouldn’t be here in America if my dad had sat around dwelling on the happenstance of his having been born in a third world village, or thinking about the unearned privileges reaped by British colonization of his homeland.
> If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions.
This is not true. You can organize others in your group, in other disadvantaged groups, and even allies in the socially dominant groups and try to change society to be more just. Atomization and learned helplessness are tools of these unfairly-advantaged groups. Believing this is doing their work for them.
This doesn't mean you have to be Rosa Luxembourg, but know that keeping your nose down is not the only option. There are others.
> You can organize others in your group, in other disadvantaged groups, and even allies in the socially dominant groups and try to change society to be more just.
If you look at the disadvantaged subgroups in American society that ultimately overcame those disadvantages (Jews, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mormons, etc.) they did't achieve that through organizing and solidarity and social change. They assumed that nobody was going to help them and acted accordingly.
> Atomization and learned helplessness are tools of these unfairly-advantaged groups.
A moral framework that emphasizes the role of personal actions in outcomes is a survival strategy. It's not a creation of "unfairly-advantaged groups." It's something you see over and over in societies confronted with harsh realities, from pioneers to Puritans to third-world villagers. Hoping that "allies in the socially dominant groups" are going to come to your rescue one day--instead of using your support to advance their own interests--is what's "learned helplessness."
We're in agreement. Work hard, advance your interests, and take the big wigs down a peg when you're good and strong. All the groups you mention (in a US context) did this and it worked out both for them and for everyone else (except the slaveholding planter/Yankee trader classes who used to run the country, and are now basically extinct -- though not completely so).
None of those groups achieved their upward mobility by “organizing” to “make society more just,” as you stated. They didn’t socialize their kids to focus on their own luck or lack thereof and turn to advantaged groups for help, as the Vox article advocates. Indeed, Cubans and Vietnamese stood with the advantaged groups as staunch allies against communism. Chinese and other Asians have historically been apolitical—much to the frustration of social justice organizers.
Jewish people have long allied themselves with social justice politics, as have affluent, educated Asians since 2000, but mainly social justice for other people. They act in the model of the “allies in the advantaged groups,” not in the model of disadvantaged groups organizing to pursue their own interests. But when it comes to socializing their own kids, however, it’s typically bootstraps and personal responsibility.
Again, I think we're in agreement. Chinese-Americans built themselves from being one step above chattel slaves to some of the wealthiest and most influential people in society. Penniless Jews from the shtetls of Europe have done the same. Ditto for Mormons, who were actively hunted by the U.S. Government. All of these groups "organized" by creating independent networks of power and influence. This is what organizing is. We might associate the word with things like ACORN or unionization drives, but those movements are essentially trying to do the same thing that these groups have done.
If there is some nuance of difference between our views, I don't have the energy or interest to find out what it is. Have a good day.
This is such a weird argument, given the history of the previous century was largely defined by two huge decades-long organizing efforts. It makes sense if your definition of success is, exclusively, "proportional representation among CEOs and K&E partners". But if your definition includes "not having children work 7 day weeks" and "outlawing de jure segregation", not so much.
We're exposed to a lot more small-bore organizing today, largely because of the media environment, probably also a fair bit because we've shifted virtually every adult in the country onto a college track. There's lots of ineffective organizing to dunk on. But talking down the entire concept of organizing? That seems wildly false.
My definition of success is group identity become decoupled from economic deprivation. Vietnamese went from being one of the poorest groups in the country in the 1980 census to having median incomes comparable to whites.
Obviously I'm not denying that political participation never works. But Obamacare or child labor laws are society-wide improvements. I'm talking specifically about disadvantaged groups organizing as a way out of their disadvantaged predicament. On that front, organizing has had limited success. For example, you mention eliminating de jure segregation, which was obviously great. But black-white income gaps are pretty much the same today as in 1965.
This argument only makes sense if you ignore the status quo ante of the civil rights movement, or of the labor movement. Which is the one sentence response I should have written originally.
The civil rights movement was obviously important for black Americans. But it also arose from, and in response to, economic and historical circumstances specific to them. De jure segregation didn’t arise out of ordinary racism or xenophobia. It arose out of an effort to resist the integration of a formerly enslaved minority. It has only incidental relevance to minorities of immigrant origin. Countries like Canada that never had slavery or segregation or an organized civil rights movement ended up in the same place as america with respect to Chinese or Vietnamese immigrants.
Sure, but that's not the argument you made. If all you're arguing is that some organizing efforts are more important than others, that's a banal truism.
> A more useful understanding of morality is that it’s a framework for cultivating individually and socially desirable behavior.
This reminds me of Edward Slingerland's definition of Virtue from "Trying Not To Try": Stable dispositions to perform socially desirable actions in manner that is sincerely motivated by shared values.
> These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups.
A more useful understanding of morality is that it’s a framework for cultivating individually and socially desirable behavior. If you’re a member of one of those “socially disadvantaged groups” you can’t do anything about the unearned advantages held by other people. All you can do is control your own actions.
From that perspective, it’s better for a member of a socially disadvantaged group to discount luck altogether-act is if nothing is holding them back—whether it’s true or not. I probably wouldn’t be here in America if my dad had sat around dwelling on the happenstance of his having been born in a third world village, or thinking about the unearned privileges reaped by British colonization of his homeland.