Social Matter

The latest thing the hipster Millennial commentariat wants you, their adoring public, to stop doing is “punching down.” They want you to know it ranks just below violating a safe space but above microaggressions on the graduated scale of Not OK. Totally problematic. And what exactly is “punching down”? Well, punching down is where a big guy picks on a little guy (or girl). It’s where someone from a position of power or privilege makes and argument or a statement or even a joke that comes at the expense of someone from a lower social stratum, where the well-situated mocks the marginalized.

I’ll admit that, as a card-carrying cisheteropatriarchal shitlord, that sort of prohibition appeals to my inborn sense of chivalry. I don’t know that I’ve read enough Nietzsche—or even could read enough Nietzsche—to cheer on the depredation of the weak by the strong. I think that those able to have an obligation to watch out for those vulnerable ones whom God has put providentially under their care. Men to women. Adults to children. The community to a member of it who has fallen on hard times. So the quibble here is not really with the “don’t bully your inferiors” formulation but rather with the bizarre calculus by which the various pundits and writers who market that line go about establishing the hierarchy. In other words, their idea of marginalized groups doesn’t exactly jibe with my idea of reality. Most of the time, in fact, they’re radically out of sync.

You see, according to our moral betters on sites like Gawker or Salon, I shouldn’t mock a guy like Michael Sam because he’s part of an oppressed group—two, in fact. He’s already double “stigmatized,” already a social pariah, eking out a marginal existence on the scraps that drop from the dinner table of polite society. And I suppose they might have a point. I mean consider his ordeal. Upon coming out of the closet, he was subjected to fawning op eds and adulation from Hollywood, media figures, and politicians. He had instant celebrity cruelly foisted upon him, interviews with nationally syndicated magazines and news shows. He got a shot at the NFL despite an underwhelming showing at the combine and a spot on Dancing with the Stars afterwards. He even got a congratulatory phone call from the President of the United States. Imagine if you will the fortitude it would take to endure such slings and arrows. Imagine the bravery required. Sam is obviously approaching the end of his rope. Some mean-spirited ridicule from an anonymous internet poster might be the last straw for a man so beset and hounded by the world.

Then compare Sam’s travails to the kid-glove treatment that a walking, talking concentration of privilege like Brendan Eich enjoyed even after it came out that he had donated money to a popular and successful campaign for a state constitutional amendment in California. All he got was an online lynch mob and a public smear campaign that involved even employees from his own company, that he co-founded and built from the ground up. All he got was fired and forcibly separated from his life’s work. So everyone should feel free to pile on him, since his obvious status as darling of American society insulates him from any negative outcomes.

Obviously the notion that a black homosexual is ipso facto socially inferior to a white male doesn’t match up with the cultural contours of contemporary America. Instead, it’s a function of the strange cosmology of the social justice Left. Theirs is a worldview where Hate and Bigotry are nigh omnipotent, charting the course of civilizations, driving generations of men and women to fundamentally misappraise their fellow human beings, fighting against the very arc of the moral universe and frustrating its bend towards justice. To them, as I’ve argued here and elsewhere, these concepts have a massive explanatory power, are the keys to understanding great swaths of human history. And so anyone who allies themselves with hatred or bigotry (or racism or homophobia or misogyny or whatever the flavor du jour is) is obviously in league with the powers and principalities that hold sway over our vale of tears. And anyone who belongs to one of the designated victim groups that these powers wage their eternal war against are just that: victims. They are the underdogs, despite the testimony of your senses. They are the bullied, damn your lying eyes. And thus they are sacrosanct under the no-punching-down commandment.

If you were so inclined, you could compile quite a list of these instances of bait-and-switch. Our recent history is rife with them. A lot of early anti-discrimination rhetoric, for instance, promised a fairer, more meritocratic States. And to many well-intentioned people this seemed perfectly in line with the ethos of our founding fathers, one where no one was disqualified from the pursuit of excellence by a so-called “accident of birth.” Let everyone pursue happiness to the best of his ability, uninterrupted by governmental interference! But nowadays we recognize meritocracy for the white supremacist construct that it is and instead engage in a top-down, totalitarian effort to pave the playing field and smooth every last point of “disparate impact” out of existence. We leverage the full strength of DC to make sure no actual meritocratic fair play takes place. The same could be said of the “question everything” rallying cry of the Left’s revolution in higher education. That appealed to many aspiring scholar’s sense of intellectual curiosity. But a little while later it became clear that certain dogma were quietly exempted from that directive. There are certain “truths” that you were not only discouraged from question but stood liable to lose your welcome on campus if you did so.

In a sense, then, this week’s ruminations are just an extension of last week’s. It’s important to realize that even when the enemy is speaking words that seem to resonate with you, he isn’t actually referencing ideas that will not, visions of a future that don’t. The signifier might be identical, but the things signified are not. Because the fundamental assumptions, the worldview of the Left creates contradictions where we see none and erase contradictions that we’re positive exist. We see a mostly unremarkable football player enjoying the favor of all the good and the great in contemporary American society, with the entire media-government complex in his corner. The Left sees an outcast bravely fighting against the implacable tides of bigotry. Well.

There’s really no use in trying to have a discussion where you find some common ground between these two poles. And it’s clinically insane to follow the other side’s prescription for having such a discussion “ethically.” There’s nothing doing there. Personally, I say find a better use of your time. Pick a worthy target. Punch away.