Speakers analyze changing cultures and a rise of “social tyranny”
On Tuesday, Azusa Pacific’s Honors College hosted a lecture entitled “The Freedom of Dignity and the Tyranny of Victimhood.” The lecture featured guest speakers Jason Manning, Ph.D, and Bradley Campbell, Ph.D, and is the second installment of the Koch Lecture Series.
Manning and Campbell are both associate professors of sociology at West Virginia University. Campbell is also an associate professor at California State University Los Angeles. Together, they wrote a book entitled “The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars,” which was published last year.
The lecture was attended by Koch Fellowship members, including Jorge Gonzalez, a senior political science major. Gonzalez said this lecture was timely given the current political climate.
“I think we are in a current political state where it’s very divided — there’s no common ground,” Gonzalez said. “In our past, we could have two people from different sides of the aisle and at least have some common ground … I think now we’re just attacking for the sake of attacking.”
Campbell presented first and spoke on moral conflicts, hate crime hoaxes, trigger warnings and microaggressions. He went on to cover what he and Manning called “victimhood culture.”
According to Campbell and Manning, victimhood culture describes the social circumstances the world is currently in. This is where people use microaggressions and safe spaces as an excuse not to engage in public debate.
Campbell claimed this culture of victimizing oneself leads to a tyrannical rule where people try to censor each other by referring to third parties, such as administrative staff on college campuses, whenever they face microaggressions.
Campbell also introduced a new way of viewing historical cultures. According to him, historical cultures can be put into one of three categories: honor culture, dignity culture and victimhood culture.
Honor culture, he said, is similar to the early patriotic days of America where men would duel each other over slights against their honor without discussing the matter in much detail.
Dignity culture was presented as the ideal of the three. According to Campbell and Manning, dignity culture didn’t take into account slights or insults, but held its citizens to a higher moral standard.
“The debates over these things we’re talking about — people being driven from campus, surrounded and cursed over disagreements, demands for safe spaces, all these things — … [are] a clash between the newer culture of victimhood and the older culture of dignity,” Campbell said. “It’s a clash over moral cultures.”
Manning spoke next about historical ideas of tyranny and victimhood culture. He pointed to examples of fascist rule, where citizens often unjustly report their neighbors due to “simple slights” on their character. Manning added these slights are even seen today, claiming that oftentimes people today report each other on social media or on college campuses for no reason other than being offended.
“Even in the most tyrannical dictatorships, tyranny is not entirely something that is top-down,” Manning said. “It’s that the rank and file citizens — the ordinary common people — [that] are active in policing each other.”
The event ended with a question and answer session from audience members. Questions primarily focused on details about research and clarification on certain points of the discussion.
Campbell suggested people who are offended by microaggressions and who require safe spaces to thrive should get out of their comfort zones to have conversations with others.
Brandon Primm, social science graduate, shared his thoughts on the lecture.
“It’s a good thing to hear perspectives from academic minds about what victimhood is and what it means for society,” Primm said. “It’s so prevalent in society today.”