Do the rich dominate our society?
In one sense, they obviously do. Rich people run most of the business world, own most of the wealth, and are vastly more likely to be powerful politicians.
In another sense, however, the rich aren’t dominant at all. If you get in public and loudly say, “Rich people are great. We owe them everything. They deserve every penny they’ve got – and more. People who criticize the rich are just jealous failures,” almost everyone will recoil in horror.
Do males dominate our society?
In one sense, they obviously do. Males run most of the business world, hold most of the top political offices, hold a supermajority of the most prestigious jobs, and make a lot more money on average.
In another sense, however, males aren’t dominant at all. If you get in public and loudly say, “Males are the superior sex. We owe them everything. We need to protect males from women’s emotional abuse and financial exploitation, and show them the great deference they deserve,” almost everyone will recoil in horror.
Do whites dominate our society?
In one sense, they obviously do. Whites run most of the business world, hold most of the top political offices, hold a clear majority of the most prestigious jobs, and earn above-average incomes.
In another sense, however, whites aren’t dominant at all. If you get in public and loudly say, “Whites have built Western civilization, the glory of the modern world. Almost everything good in the modern world builds on white Europeans’ efforts. The people of the world need to acknowledge how much they owe to the white race, and apologize for their many insults fueled by their own sense of inferiority,” almost everyone will recoil in horror.
My point: There are two very distinct kinds of dominance.* There is material dominance – control of economic wealth and political power. And there is rhetorical dominance – control of words and ideas. Intuitively, you would expect the two to correlate highly. At least in the modern world, however, they don’t. Indeed, the correlation is plausibly negative: The groups with high material dominance now tend to have low rhetorical dominance.
Isn’t material dominance clearly more enviable than mere rhetorical dominance? On balance, I suspect so. Still, many people who could have won material dominance invest their lives in acquiring rhetorical dominance instead: intellectuals, activists, and religious leaders are all prime examples. Why do they bother? Because man does not live by bread alone. Material dominance gives you luxuries, but rhetorical dominance makes you feel like you’re on top of the world: “I can loudly praise what I like and blame what I dislike – and expect the people who demur to meekly keep their objections to themselves. Or even feign agreement!”
Conflation of material and rhetorical dominance helps explain why liberals and conservatives so often talk past each other. Liberals feel like conservatives dominate the world, because conservatives run the government half the time, and conservative-leaning groups – the rich, males, whites – have disproportionate influence over the economy. Conservatives feel like liberals dominate the world, because liberals run the media, schools, and human resources departments. In a sense, both groups are right. Conservatives have the lion’s share of material dominance; liberals have more than the lion’s share of rhetorical dominance. In another sense, though, both groups are wrong. In the contest for overall dominance, both groups are roughly tied. Both groups feel like underdogs because both yearn for the kind of dominance they lack.
Due to the endowment effect, moreover, both sides get angry when the other intrudes on “their” territory. Thus, even though leftists have a near-stranglehold over research universities, the rare academic center that promotes free markets or social conservatism blinds them with rage. 99% rhetorical dominance? We’re supposed to have 100% rhetorical dominance! Conservatives have a similar, though less hyperbolic, reaction when business adopts liberal causes. “Sensitivity training?! Give me a break.”
The dream of both movements, naturally, is to hold all the dominances. The conservative dream is a world where they consolidate their lead in the world of business and take over the whole culture. The liberal dream is a world where they purge the last vestiges of conservative culture and bring business and the rich to their knees. (The latter rarely means outright expropriation; I think even America’s far left would be satisfied if they could sharply increase regulation and taxation – and hear business and the rich repeatedly shout, “Thank you, may I have another?”)
When you put it this way, of course, both dreams sound like nightmares. Neither liberals nor conservatives even dimly internalize Spiderman’s principle that “With great power comes great responsibility.” Both are epistemically vicious to the core, so habitually drunk with emotion they don’t even know what sober rationality looks like. Frankly, I’d like to see both of these secular religions fade away like Norse mythology. Since that’s unlikely to happen, however, I’m grateful to live in a world with an uneasy balance of power. Or to be more precise, an uneasy balance of dominance.
* I suspect Robin Hanson will say that I’m conflating dominance and prestige. Maybe a little, but when I picture “rhetorical dominance,” I’m picturing words and ideas that intimidate more than they inspire. General point: You can have material prestige and rhetorical prestige as well as material dominance and rhetorical dominance.
READER COMMENTS
James Minor
Aug 19 2019 at 10:46am
“General point: You can have material prestige and rhetorical prestige as well as material dominance and rhetorical dominance.”
This seems much weaker than the rest of the (quite strong) post. Can you state an example of material prestige without material dominance? In a modern economy where nearly every material possession can be converted to cash over long enough timeframes, it strikes me as nearly impossible to have material prestige without material dominance, except perhaps for legal edge cases like churches in the center of cities which are barred from selling their property (which is very rare…in most cases a property tax-exempt church in the center of a city still has material dominance because it has the option of selling its property for an, ahem, ungodly sum of money).
Similarly, I don’t think the split between rhetorical prestige and rhetorical dominance is as clean as you would like. A high-prestige individual leveraging their prestige to attack someone still derives their power from prestige, not dominance, even though in the moment of the attack they are exercising their prestige in a dominating way. The key difference is that a dominant individual can, by their own actions or by the actions of people they directly control, damage a person’s life and livelihood. Whereas a prestigious individual must arrange their attack in a way that the voluntary followers they have collected through their high prestige voluntarily carry out the attack.
Liberal institutions derive their power from prestige, nearly always. The reason why conservatives covet the cultural high ground (Hollywood, universities, etc) is that people (ESPECIALLY young people) are willing and uncoercedly gravitating towards said high ground.
To summarize: material-assets are nearly always dominance-related (implicitly or explicitly), and rhetorical-assets are nearly always prestige-related (implicitly or explicitly).
Mark
Aug 19 2019 at 11:42am
Arguably, the rich do have rhetorical dominance—lots more people brag about being rich than being poor, for example. You could make a good case that whites are rhetorically dominant too—whites are far more represented in media portrayals, for example.
In determining what groups are dominant, I would ask which group people would prefer to be in, ceteris paribus. My guess is that virtually everyone would prefer to be rich rather than poor, and an overwhelming majority would prefer to be white rather than a minority though there might be some people going the other way on that.
I suspect the gender question would be more mixed. Most parents in the US who choose their baby’s sex prefer girls. If you assume parents are generally acting in their children’s interests, that does suggest that a lot of people would prefer to be female, so the case for male dominance is weaker compared to the case for dominance by whites, which is itself weaker compared to the case for dominance by the wealthy.
nobody.really
Aug 19 2019 at 2:19pm
Clearly around the world, plenty of places have exercised selective abortions to ensure that they have male offspring, leading in many places to a dearth of females and the very predictable problems that ensue.
The fact that we don’t observe this dynamic in the US suggests that the US has been relatively successful in promoting the welfare of women. That said….
I would not entirely embrace the idea that parents are solely concerned with their kid’s welfare. I suspect parents are self-interested. In many contexts, self-interest drives them to favor sons who will carry on the family name and bring in the harvest. But in the US, daughters famously bear a disproportionate share of the burden of caring for parents. Thus, US parents may be just as self-interested as others–but in the US, that self-interest leads to a different preference.
Mark Z
Aug 19 2019 at 6:23pm
This argument cuts both ways. In other countries, people are also not necessarily merely thinking of the welfare of their children. E.g., it may be less acceptable for male children to be financially dependent on parents into adulthood; or more importantly, historically speaking (and present day norms surely have a great deal of residual historical influence in them), males were more physically useful to a community in defending it from threats. Or, in the US, as most places, a female child is more likely to survive to adulthood and beyond, and not end up incarcerated or homeless, in which case this discrimination may indeed correspond then with ‘female privilege’ (operating from the assumption that these disparities are in fact attributable to ‘privilege’, which I question in any case).
Joseph K
Aug 19 2019 at 12:36pm
If you think about the dominance of males over females, you can think of it in two ways: (1) how dominant is the average male or (2) what is the sex of the people who are most dominant. You (and most people) look at in terms of (2) – most of the most powerful, wealthiest, and most celebrated people are male. But if you look at it in terms of (1), you have to bear in mind that prison inmates and homeless people are overwhelmingly male. In terms of Mark’s point about whether you’re better off being male or female, it is worth remember that the average male lives a shorter life, is more likely to suffer from genetic diseases, is more likely to die violently, is more likely to be convicted of a crime, and is more like to live in extreme poverty. These seem to me to balance out the advantages of being a male.
So, again, when you say, “Are males dominant?” you should be clear on whether you’re asking (1) is the average male more dominant than the average female (probably not) or (2) are dominant people more often male than female (yes).
nobody.really
Aug 19 2019 at 2:00pm
This isn’t exactly on point, but kinda. C.S. Lewis argued for candid classism–a kind of meritocracy that recognizes that there are various kinds of merit, and that the world would work better if we could acknowledge that other have merits that we lack.
C.S. Lewis, published in the English literary magazine Time and Tide, vol. XXIV (September 4, 1943) at 717, “Notes on the Way,”—or perhaps as “Democratic Education” in 1944—and republished as “Democratic Education” in Present Concerns (1986) at 32-36. This appears to have been a precursor to his “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” (1959), which also addresses the themes of democratic equality among people with unequal talents and training.
In short, I understand Lewis to argue for meritocracy subordinated to democratic control. There is something profoundly healthy about members of subordinated groups publicly chiding their superiors. Arguably this tradition goes back to the Stoics and their exhortation for all men to remember, even in their triumphs, that they are but mortals. Or to the tradition of harvest festivals wherein servants, granted a time of rest, would dress as their masters to mock them. Or to the tradition of court jesters publicly mocking the king. A society is less brittle when everyone knows that the dominant class can laugh at himself.
[ comment edited with permission of the commenter.—Econlib Ed.]
John Alcorn
Aug 20 2019 at 11:34am
Re:
What mechanisms produce a balance of power between material dominance and rhetorical dominance? Or is the balance of power merely fortuitous?
Thomas Sewell
Aug 22 2019 at 2:45am
I think there’s even more to fear from the rhetorical dominance than implied, because it is tied to physical and economic dominance as most acquiesce to it and behave accordingly.
Which groups, if you publicly insult them, will get you fired, even if you’re a billionaire owner of your own sports franchise, or if you donate to the “wrong” cause and you’re the CEO of a non-profit. Sure, some places are more sensitive to that than others, but even if you theoretically completely control your own fate by owning your own company 100% and not having any employees, you can still be seriously hurt by saying the “wrong” things publicly and losing your customers, but only about certain rhetorically privileged groups/topics.
You’ll notice even Caplan wouldn’t dare to publicly make really negative statements about certain groups, even as just an example in this article, because going anywhere near there, even a true-believer just quoting someone else using a negative word in a legitimate academic environment can get you investigated and put through the wringer.
You’ve seen the field days they’ve had with Hanson for just doing a marginally non-PC twitter poll, right?
There’s an old thought experiment about Israel. Is the United States protecting Israel from it’s neighbors? That’s the conventional wisdom, but not so fast…
Imagine that tomorrow, the United States completely left Israel alone, broke diplomatic ties, etc…
Would Israel be crushed by it’s neighbors, or would Israel defeat them instead?
It’s pretty clear Israel would win, and quickly, if it actually wanted to, if the U.S. stopped encouraging it to refrain and left it alone, instead. So who is the United States actually protecting with it’s involvement in Israel?
In the same way, who aren’t you allowed to criticize in the U.S.? Who can you make fun of in TV commercials, or in speeches in Congress, and who can’t you? It’s clear there is more than just rhetorical power, there, because it’s enforced by real-life consequences, not just people “recoiling in horror” and then going on their way.
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