"How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Haslam argues that concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”...
concept creep” exacerbates failures to communicate.
When a concept is stretched to include “milder, subtler, or less extreme phenomena than those to which they referred at an earlier time,” any earlier judgment or consensus about how best to respond to that concept no longer applies."
Caveat: This article uses the phrase "the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed". Evidently this is both an agenda and a bad thing.
Again, my issues with the Atlantic - somehow this magazine often ends up being a pseudo-intellectual parenting magazine that freaks us all out about a problem using a bunch of over-intense rhetoric, fails to really dig in and analyze how the proposed problem is working (instead presenting a series of examples that the author experience as worrying), and ends the article by just sort of repeating the thesis. The audience is left with a new anxiety, one that *happens* to feed into a trend that the magazine covers a lot (in this case, the way that being over-sensitive is ruining everything, and especially The Children).
But. I find concept creep to be helpful as a starting point for explaining some of what is happening in American society. So I appreciate the article for bringing the phenomenon to my attention in this context, and for the illustrations it provides. I just wish it had talked more about the way it seems to be acting on definitions of "breaking news" and global/existential threats like terrorism and epidemics and how that has fed into stuff like the terrible stigma for American Ebola patients. 9/11 is touched on at the end, but legalized torture is treated like less of a harm than someone who was called a bully when they were probably not a bully.
I find that the with most useful point is the one around language (that we need more language if we are, say, broadening what is considered to be 'trauma'). But I am having a negative reaction to the way that the author pings on things like sexual harassment as a trauma, or new diagnoses for mild bipolar disorder, as though these are "new" and indulgent problems. That feels very old-fashioned and unadjusted to me, that feels like the people who object to the personal pronoun 'they' because "back in my day, sure there were closeted gay people, everyone had a gender!'.
I think that we are lucky to live in an era where people have the freedom and knowledge to identify issues in their lives, to explore negative reactions they are having to their environments even though those reactions aren't life threatening and even though those reactions violate long-held norms and social assumptions. It's amazing to be able to say "I have the potential to be living better than this, to have better mental and physical health, to have better relationships, to have a job or pursued-goal that gives me life". It's exhausting and terrifying and raises a lot more possibilities for failure, but it is the power of the time that we live in.
<flip with above> I don't know, maybe we are stuck in the existing language of problems and harms and maybe we do need to start using new rhetoric with more positives, identifying as people with greater potentials than what we are currently living instead of using labels that have "under" and "dis" and "ill" in them.
(___)
I also want to touch on something else the author used as an example, summarized in this quote:
"Like most people I know, there is no group for whom I feel more aversion than racists and few political causes that I feel as strongly about as opposing prejudice...
I’m grateful for the scholars who are studying implicit bias, too.
But it seems like there ought to be clearly distinguishable words and concepts for klansmen and demagogues who deliberately stoke racial anxieties, on the one hand, and college students who take a test that suggests that they have mild, negative associations about a racial group, without harboring any animosity toward people in that group, acting badly toward any members of that group, or advocating for anything but full equality on the other. Those college students may be labeled “prejudiced” or “racist,” but few people will be inclined to exclude them from their homes or their workplaces."
Ack there are so many misunderstanding here. First of all, let's imagine a world where we don't hold animosity towards individual "racists" - we, in fact, don't regard animosity as productive (though we recognize it as a natural emotional response, just not a strategic one). We then have the room to recognize that we can all be racist and that it isn't then very helpful to use it as a noun for a person, unless we have some very clear point at which that quality would take over someone's identity.
Notably, prejudice can exist within members of a group /for their own group/, which is referred to as internalized prejudice, and which most members of an oppressed people /will have/ in some way. Incorporating this phenomenon should make it even more clear why the author's proposed language structures are *unhelpful/incomplete*?
Secondly, implicit bias /absolutely/ derives from harbored animosities and leads to people acting poorly towards members of the racial group. These animosities are sometimes subconscious, but often conscious and just not labeled as racist - they might be understood as reasonable conclusions from observations made in the world (for example, assuming that black people are good dancers because all the black people you see on television can dance). And these assumptions lead to a lot of subtle, even unintentional, harmful behaviors - like making snap assumptions about someone's interests instead of getting to know them and then scoping your interactions to just those topics, or never considering members of a certain race to be possible romantic interests, or always asking members of that groups to explain issues that are in the news and convince you of arguments being made by related activist groups.
This is exhausting, and in a perfect world I would exclude these people from my homes and workplaces. But I can't, because this is everyone, and it's also me, so I can't even live in a cave to escape it.
Racism operates at a level higher than any of us as individuals, and we have to recognize it /honestly/ in ourselves in order to figure out where it is coming from and silence that social influence.
Related: Empowerment for sale <-- an example of concept creep that I read right before I read this, possibly informing my expectations for what The Atlantic would be writing about
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