I began writing this about a year ago and later abandoned it due to my inability (still present) to find a satisfying conclusion. However, given the rapid shifts in American ideology which began in the educated and upper classes and are now penetrating all of society, I decided to return to it, polish it, and post it. All of which to say, this is not a response to any recent development, but about an ideology that has been in development for at least a decade.
I’m not sure if any concept has swept the educated and upper classes with so much rapidity as that of “privilege” over the past decade. This concept remodeled these classes’ ideas about society, interpersonal relationships, and justice in ways that I believe are profoundly damaging. I will attempt to show why and how privilege theory is a step backwards in social thinking from older concepts of justice.
What is meant by ‘privilege’
First, I will attempt to define the concept of privilege, or at least what I mean when I refer to it. Like many pop political concepts it can be a bit slippery, but minimally I think it requires the following beliefs:
- Privilege is an abstract property which represents in some way how “easy” life is.
- Society grants privilege to some groups and withholds it from others. What those groups are may vary by the person’s analysis, but let’s just call them privilege groups. Each privilege group can be thought of as representing some dimension of privilege.
- People have privilege based on the number and types of privilege groups to which they belong.
- The relative justice or injustice of a society is determined by the degree to which privilege is assigned by privilege group.
Typically, privilege groups are defined based on things like race, gender, and sexuality (and some will try to extend the concept to economic status). But the type and validity of particular privilege groups is irrelevant to my argument here, so while I will make reference to popular analyses (racial privilege, gender privilege, etc), my objection is not based on which privilege groups a person recognizes. My critiques of the concept of privilege come from three sources: (i) simple group privilege ranking does not actually account for the relative quality or ease of a person’s life; (ii) if one were to try to amend the problems that make privilege a bad metric, the privilege calculations would become so complex as to be useless; (iii) even if the problems with calculating privilege could be overcome, knowing privilege differences cannot tell you how to create a better society.
I. Privilege cannot measure the quality of a person’s life
An important part of privilege theory is that it operates first on groups, and then individual privilege is derived from the properties of groups to which that individual belongs. (This holds whether the function is additive, multiplicative, or more complex still.) The act or concept of calculating privilege according to an individual’s privilege group memberships is typically called “intersectionality.”
This theory cannot accomplish what it sets out to do. Let us say we have carefully accounted for a person’s individual qualities. Let us say a person is trans, identifies as female, and is also attracted to women. This person must, by virtue of her membership in lower privilege groups, have a quite difficult life. Society treats her harshly. Now I move from the privilege groups to a specific individual who belongs to them and say this person’s name is Caitlyn Jenner. This changes the evaluation of this person’s life experience, as the properties of fame, extreme wealth, and high society connections counteract the alleged low level of privilege.
The problem tills the other way as well. Let’s say someone comes from various privilege groups that are considered privileged: white, male, American, heterosexual, two parents, graduated from college with few or no loans, able-bodied, and so on. It is not difficult to find a case where someone meeting any of these or other criteria actually has a quite difficult life. Perhaps he has a job which is not suited for him, and it saps him every day so that he is less able to give his wife and children the attention they deserve. Perhaps he has no job at all, or is always on the precipice of losing it. He may be alienated from his parents, or his in-laws, and have developed an unhealthy obsession with that loss. He has had a crisis of religious faith at the same time his children’s college investments took a turn for the worse, and suspects (but cannot prove) that his wife is cheating on him. Life has lost its color, he feels he has failed as a father, and so on. Now we may claim that these worries are not as bad as other privilege groups’ concerns, and this may even be true but it is very hard to prove. Suffering is really only knowable from the inside. So long as we are trying to tally suffering, we must admit this problem.
Now the typical rejoinder to this is that, Well it is still generally true that trans women have a rougher life and straight white men have an easier one. Caitlyn Jenner is an outlier, and so on. This may be true. But if we encounter cases where we have to with some frequency throw out the theory and say “It does not apply here” then that means the theory is not truly foundational – it is a simplification, a back-of-the-napkin sketch of some more accurate understanding. It would be incredibly foolish to ignore this arrow pointing us to a more general theory of social justice.
II. To address the objections in (I), privilege theory becomes too complex
Various schemes have been introduced to try and rescue privilege theory from the problem of the “outliers” above. They all come down, more or less, to introducing more privilege groups, more dimensions of privilege, in order to with ever greater precision locate individuals in the universe of privilege.
One attempt to account for these is to introduce what is essentially class into the dimensionality of privilege. A significant problem with this introduction is that it risks reducing the whole exercise back to Marxism. With sufficient class privilege the other dimensions of privilege melt away. What level of ownership over production and material wealth is necessary to counterbalance the negative of belonging to the privilege groups of trans and woman? Caitlyn Jenner has a net worth of $100 million—is this enough? What level of class exploitation is sufficient to wipe out the advantages of the privilege groups heterosexual and man? There is a number, of course, and whatever that number is it is one which describes the lives of many millions of straight white men. The theory of privilege, once class is introduced, risks becoming a very thin patina over what is otherwise a very basic marxist analysis, the exact analysis privilege attempt to convolute and replace. In my experience, adherents of privilege theory tend to downplay the class dimension, even if they formally admit it into their theory. This is because if class and material position are taken too seriously, it becomes a dimension of suffering that overwhelms the others. This would be the death of the theory, so while it can be acknowledged it can’t really be adopted.
The other problem, that of subjective suffering, elicits more interesting solutions from privilege theory. Perhaps the most creative is “spoon theory.” This is not a theory so much as a metaphor. Near as I can tell, it goes like this: People who have an invisible disability, like an anxiety or struggle getting through the day, wake up with a certain number of spoons. Every action costs some number of spoons and so, by the end of the day, they may be out of spoons for basic human tasks. I don’t know why the metaphorical item here is spoons. So when we calculate someone’s privilege score we have to take into account whether they are a spoonie and, if so, what their number of spoons is.
Rather less creative approaches are to simply add to privilege dimensionality: The status of one’s parents’ education level, the quality of their marriage, one’s number of friends, the percentage of time one feels anxiety, number of books read in childhood—the list is literally infinite. Both the creative spoonie account and the less creative infinite varieties of privilege account run into the same problem: The theory becomes too complex. It is now no longer really a theory of groups of people experiencing degrees of oppression, it is a laundry list of an entire human life. There is not really a natural group of people “my parents had a nice marriage” and another group “social anxiety havers.”
III. Even if perfectly implemented, privilege cannot tell you how to create a better society
An even more fatal flaw with the concept of privilege is that it flattens too many experiences into the same bucket labeled “privilege.” To take only two examples: It is a privilege for an upper class white man to mouth off to police without getting shot; it is also a privilege for an upper class white man to sexually harass his coworkers or subordinates without facing consequences. To label both of these as a “privilege” is to dangerously conflate two quite different social structures.
If we step outside of privilege theory for a moment, it would seem to most people (I sincerely hope) that the just way to structure society is one in which being mouthy to a police officer does not result in anyone being shot. It would also seem to most people that a just society is one in which no one can sexually harass anyone else. Note that these are two radically different kinds of responses: In the one case, the “privilege” is something we wish to extend to everyone (I shall call this a positive privilege); in the other case, the “privilege” is something we want to remove from society (I shall call this a negative privilege). But privilege theory as privilege theory cannot distinguish between positive and negative privileges: There are simply and straightforwardly some things allotted in greater proportion to one group and in lesser proportion to another. Even if we accurately describe social groups this way, this theory can tell us nothing about what to do as a result. Do we remove the privilege from the one group that has it, or should we extend it from the group that has it to the other? It will depend on what it is, and here privilege theory falls silent, because it is only capable of talking in terms of difference and cannot prescribe what to do once a difference is discovered.
This may seem like a small point—after all, must one theory do everything? we can simply apply different reasoning once privilege theory has discovered privileges—but this problem is actually central to privilege theory as a whole. The only form of injustice it is capable of articulating is social difference among defined population groups. If the social differences in question are equalized, privilege theory by its very construction cannot detect an injustice. Police violence is frequently mentioned in the context of modern social justice movements, and not without reason. If we could implement a range of policies and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that police kill civilians at racially equivalent rates of 1 person per 100 civilian-police interactions (regardless of gender, orientation, and any other privilege group you could imagine), then privilege theory would be unable to explain why this would be unjust. This is not entirely a theoretical proposal: I have actually seen, some years back, an educated professional suggest that perhaps we would be better off if the police were more violent toward whites. The injustice, that is, is in the disparity, not in the injustice. This is not incidental to privilege, this is in the foundation of the whole enterprise. It could look at a dystopia and declare it just, so long as it was evenly distributed according to population groups.
IV. Everything the concept of privilege tries to do, justice does better
If privilege theory has such severe shortcomings, why has it become so popular, and what is the alternative?
As for its popularity, I suspect the shortcomings are a benefit and not a detriment. It elevates certain elements of group membership in a way that confuses and occluded actual access to material resources—and for this reason is useful to those who have such access but wish (for whatever other social reasons) to inhabit the social role of a victim. It is incapable of directly offering a solution to social injustices, so that many suggestions (some of which may not address the actual suffering, or may even increase it) are compatible with its theory of a good society. This makes it malleable for a wide variety of political projects.
As for an alternative, there is already an older, if more complicated, concept on offer: justice. There is quite a large literature on the topic, and it is embedded into all of our religions. It is not without its own problems: what exactly is the just thing in some context is highly disputed. It took a disturbingly long time to work out that justice demanded the end of slavery (and this argument has occurred more than once in human history, which did not begin with the founding of America). However, we have also inherited the moral debates and arguments of previous generations, and the concept has been refined, added to, and expanded greatly over millennia. We have here a tradition and foundation, and from many different societies, from which we can begin to look at it. “Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you” is one of these maxims we have inherited. Another is, “Give to each what is due to him,” with then a greater and lesser understanding of moral debts. This tradition, in great part because of its time and depth, gives us a richer resource than the novel concept of privilege.
Anything privilege fails to give us, justice can provide. In some case where one segment of society has something and another lacks—say, one has access to clean tap water provided by government services and the other’s water has poisoned by cost-cutting measures imposed by that same government; or one people were promised healthcare, education, opportunity and respect, but these promises were abandoned and their children were kidnapped—we do not need to ask in what way to level the privilege difference. The simplest application of the golden rule will get us there.
In fact, privilege theorists opportunistically smuggle in justice to patch the holes in their theory. We can bypass the middleman, and go straight to justice. To speak in the language of privilege and not in the language of justice is at best an unnecessary complication, and too often at its worst hides from us what actions would true justice would require.