Member-only story
The Problem With “Privilege” Talk
Banging on about people’s “privilege” is logically suspect and pragmatically dense
In Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left, I tried to make the case that left-wing activists should spend time learning how to break down the logical structure of arguments and steer clear of logical fallacies. Part of my case involved selling them on the importance of being able to debunk right-wing arguments. Another part of it, though, was about how an indifference to logical precision has contributed to the pathologies of the contemporary left.
Here’s the way I put it:
A left that only knows how to shame, call out, privilege-check, and diagnose the allegedly unsavory motivations of people who disagree with us will lose a lot of persuadable people whose material interests should put them on our side. What’s more, left-wing people who really do share all the same long-term goals often find themselves disagreeing about strategy and tactics. Should we advocate a Universal Jobs Guarantee (UJG) or Universal Basic Income (UBI)? Or are all demands for radical reforms within the current system counterproductive distractions from the fight against capitalism itself? Should social democrats and socialists try to form a labor party? Can we take over the Democratic Party? Should we just focus on non-electoral activism? These are complicated questions. If we’re out of practice using the kind of reasoning skills enhanced and sharpened by the study of logic, if we find that we’re just better at privilege-checking and snark and diagnosing people’s motivations than we are at making compelling arguments for our positions, the inevitable consequence is that when we argue with each other about these points of intra-left disagreement, all of those weapons are turned inward. That kind of thing makes the left about as appealing to potential converts as an endless Twitter war about race science with toxic right-wing logicbros. We can do better.
But aside from how it turns people away, is there anything substantively off with the practice of privilege-checking? Though I didn’t address this head-on the book, I want to bring up a fallacy I included in an appendix, which can form the beginning of a fuller answer to this question.
