It is going to be interesting to see if the currently metastasizing DEI mania eventually collapses as its illiberal and destructive features become impossible to excuse or ignore. I assume it will eventually end up in history’s junk yard, and the sooner the better, but equally bad ideas have survived to cause decades of societal chaos.

The post about the diversity officer declaring “White people,” “Able-bodied people,” “Heterosexuals,” “Cisgender people,” “Males,” “Christians,” “Middle or owning class people,” “Middle-aged people,” and “English-speaking people” to be blights on efforts to build a just society (and then quickly disavowing her language as soon as she was called on it) provoked—is still provoking–many excellent comments, including the Comment of the Day by Extradimensional Cephalopod below. He (It? I don’t know EC’s preferred pronouns) shamed me by pointing out that the woke concept of “privilege” is a manifestation of the fundamental attribution error, which I haven’t discussed here for a long time. His Comment of the Day also provoked the Comment of the Day on a Comment Destined to Become a Comment of the Day by JutGory, who wrote,

Extradimensional Cephalopod: “(I keep unsuccessfully searching for a quote I remember where someone describes their “privilege” as a right that they want everyone to have, e.g. the right to have no reason to fear the police.)” Attribute it to me if you like; that is one of my critiques of the notion of privilege. In some instances, privilege is not part of an unearned advantage; it is part of an unwarranted disadvantage. I am not privileged by being treated the way everyone should be treated; someone else is “under-privileged” by not being treated the way one should be.

“Under-privileged”?

“Unprivileged”?

“Demoted”?

“Debased”?

We don’t really have a commensurate term to describe that.So, people use privilege to describe any advantage that one person may have over another. Actually, common with leftists, we talk about groups, not individuals, and then ascribe a quality of the group to the individual. This is kind of an example of the logical fallacy of division. But, the problem is that individuals have, as comments above have noted, many qualities, some of which are more advantageous or disadvantageous than others (almost as if individuals are somehow unique). It is because of this that they had to come up with notions of “intersectionality” because it turns out that “privilege” is a concept that is inadequate when it comes to describing the world. (But, hey, Ptolemy needed epicycles and the equant to make sense of the universe.)

“Privilege” does not exist. “Privilege” is an attempt to describe phenomena and create a generalization about it.

Here is EC’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Comment of the Day: “Oops! A Chief Diversity Officer Reveals The Real Biases Corrupting Her Field”:

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It sounds like Golden is talking about “privilege” as it relates to the cognitive bias known as the fundamental attribution error: the tendency for people to ascribe other people’s failures to their character, and their own failures to circumstance (and vice versa for successes).

To address the fact that the list of privileges ends up encompassing most of humanity: the word “intersectionality” is supposed to acknowledge the various privileges that people can have or lack. What I think most people (outside this blog) fail to realize is that privilege is context-dependent: a trait that is an advantage in one context can be a disadvantage in another context.

There’s something vital that we’re missing, though: what are we expected to do in response to recognizing privilege or lack thereof?

Treat people with more kindness and respect? That’s definitely good.

Try and remove obstacles so that people can contribute and be rewarded without unnecessary struggle? I’d support that. (I keep unsuccessfully searching for a quote I remember where someone describes their “privilege” as a right that they want everyone to have, e.g. the right to have no reason to fear the police.)

Give people positions of status and authority that would otherwise go to the more privileged? That might not be so good. If affirmative action means lowering non-arbitrary standards, it’s just a bad idea. However, if it means investing in the education and development of people who would otherwise be at a disadvantage for superficial reasons, so that they can rise to meet those standards, then I would support it.

Overhaul institutions that put people at a disadvantage for superficial reasons? That could be good.

Arrange for each cultural community to have skilled, responsible people in positions of influence (official or unofficial) so they can develop the autonomy of the community and those within it? That sounds good as well.

The main reason people suggest silly responses to the existence of privilege is that most humans don’t understand how skills like large-scale responsibility work. They don’t know the sorts of decisions that have to be made and the situations that shape those decisions. They think being an authority is just wearing the bling and telling people what to do, and therefore anyone can do it, and therefore why not them?

There’s no clear picture of what a good decision process looks like, only decisions that people like or don’t like, which get labeled “good/smart” or “evil/stupid”. That’s why humans have trouble holding authorities accountable, and that in turn is why they wind up with so many incompetent and corrupt authority figures.

That’s my plan involves helping people define skills and effective decision-making processes: so that we can define clear standards for competence and help people learn to meet them.