Humans are susceptible to trends. Even the fiercest individualist doesn’t form her desires and personal goals in a social vacuum. This extends to moral attitudes too. Skirt lengths go up and down with the times, both literally and metaphorically. The proneness of personal morals to social influence has long encouraged missionary-types to think they should cross the globe to save people’s souls. These days, though, the missionary in your life is as likely to be a manager in your workplace as a Mormon doing speculative house-calls - and certainly, the manager is harder to get rid of. In the last decade in the UK, there’s been an escalation in attempts, both by corporations and public organisations, to alter workers’ moral attitudes. To those who endorse the attitudes in question, the attempts may seem harmless - indeed, they may be practically invisible. But even if you think a given moral agenda is self-evidently correct, I think you should recognise that there are significant problems with your boss trying to push it on you.
Mar 7, 2022·edited Mar 9, 2022Liked by Kathleen Stock
Superb analysis! Thank you. I'm currently working on a piece with a similar theme, specifically focusing on HR Departments' encouragement of the practice of declaring one's "preferred pronouns" (PPs) in one's email signature. This is clearly part of the broader EDI program and exemplifies the problem that you describe so succinctly:
"Properly operationalising “kindness” institutionally, for instance, would require a sophisticated grasp of complication: Kindness to whom? In what way, exactly? At what cost to others? Do we sometimes have to be cruel to be kind? Should we be kind to those who are unkind? and so on. As I have written elsewhere, kindness is a value which, when adopted at institutional level usually degenerates into bland superficiality and counterproductive sentimentality, and can easily be hijacked for personal gain or to shut others up."
The ostensive motivation for encouraging the use of PPs is "kindness." The problem is that the effects of this kindness include persuading people that sex is less important than gender identity. This is a pernicious, albeit socially condoned, lie. Among other ill effects, it teaches people to disregard their own knowledge and instincts, with regard to the obvious sex of people with whom they interact. The many evils of gender ideology don't require elaboration here, obviously, but the important point is that this is a *counterfeit* of kindness. It purports to be morally good, while, in actuality, it actively promotes a serious harm with many morally objectionable features.
This insertion of a counterfeit version of morality undermines the social fabric of trust in shared values. In my forthcoming article, I liken this fabric to the general economy, with moral tokens as a metaphor for capital. When counterfeit currency circulates, the trust in the official currency becomes diluted.
Another related feature of abuse of the general economy is repurposing the profits of illegal activities, aka money laundering. A slight extension of this metaphor leads me to the conclusion that the entire EDI edifice, and PPs in particular are its moral equivalent.
I think we'd be safe to recognize that HR departments that encourage using PPs, along with their institutionalized propagation of EDI in general, is actually *lie laundering*.
Thank you for this substack and your most recent book. I lead a small local in a teacher union here in Canada and I'm grateful for the clarity your writing and thinking has leant to performative morality and gender self id, issues I encounter daily. I want to engage in discourse with others in my union but fear the human rights tribunal that might follow. There are increasing calls to eject teachers from the profession who don't conform. I even heard a young teacher label academic or teacher autonomy as white supremacist. So, I think it important your work gets as wide an audience as possible. Best regards.
“Send them on a training course”, I’ve noticed, has become a more and more common demand from undergraduates, also. This stuff is not just coming top-down from university management. Students have learnt it before they’ve even arrived at university. It’s as stupid from them as it is from management (for the reasons you say: morality doesn’t work like that) but what that signals is that this has permeated far and wide in society more generally.
I think it has something to do with a normalisation of bureaucratic/managerialist mindsets more generally: the technocratic vision by wish if you send people for “training” they will pop out on the other side as de-fragged and re-coded automatons now behaving nicely rather than naughtily. The fact that this way of looking at the world seems to be both desirable and to make intuitive sense to so many people is both important data about the wider social world as well as evidence that we’re pretty far up shit creek on this one
A few months ago I participated in a virtual training for art education. There were several dozen of us in the class. The first 45 minutes, out of a total of two hours, were spent going over people's pronouns and discussing one member's anxiety about getting other people's pronouns wrong. Of course, by the time the lengthy round robin ended, and despite my good will, I forgot everyone's pronouns - the only thing that remained etched in my memory was that others, who likely also forgot them, would now be terrified to address their fellow attendees.
I contacted the instructor afterwards and asked: What is the purpose of this exercise? If the purpose is to respectfully refer to people in the way they prefer, it can be much more easily and straightforwardly accomplished by having whoever wants this specify their pronouns on their zoom name (in a real room it could be a name tag) than by going through this forgettable performance. Other folks may want to specify other things, like a phonetic pronunciation of an unusual name, a nickname, etc. If the purpose of the exercise, however, is to waste time so that we can all bask in what good people we are, then mission accomplished.
We could, of course, go through the mediocre community theater of pretending that, in the few decades that we've lived on the planet, the cognitive shortcuts (biases, heuristics, etc.) for assuming the correct pronouns of another human being based on their presentation/appearance have completely eluded us, but why do it? If anyone has needs in this department that do not comport with how they appear, they can quietly state them to the instructor or in writing, without contorting everyone else into pretending that we don't know how to talk to other people anymore. If the point is to seek and obtain everyone's attention, however, that's a different matter.
I also refuse to engage with this pointless exercise in my classroom, partly because I find that it draws attention, in an insulting way, to folks who do have an unusual gender presentation and would rather not focus the entire classroom on them and their identity grapplings. Instead, I hand out index cards and tell people that, if there is something about them that I should know, they should write it down. If anyone specifies a unique name, nickname, or pronoun, I quietly refer to them, the first time it comes up in class, in the way that they requested, and that's that. Classroom time is too valuable to make it into earnest group therapy.
Superb analysis! Thank you. I'm currently working on a piece with a similar theme, specifically focusing on HR Departments' encouragement of the practice of declaring one's "preferred pronouns" (PPs) in one's email signature. This is clearly part of the broader EDI program and exemplifies the problem that you describe so succinctly:
"Properly operationalising “kindness” institutionally, for instance, would require a sophisticated grasp of complication: Kindness to whom? In what way, exactly? At what cost to others? Do we sometimes have to be cruel to be kind? Should we be kind to those who are unkind? and so on. As I have written elsewhere, kindness is a value which, when adopted at institutional level usually degenerates into bland superficiality and counterproductive sentimentality, and can easily be hijacked for personal gain or to shut others up."
The ostensive motivation for encouraging the use of PPs is "kindness." The problem is that the effects of this kindness include persuading people that sex is less important than gender identity. This is a pernicious, albeit socially condoned, lie. Among other ill effects, it teaches people to disregard their own knowledge and instincts, with regard to the obvious sex of people with whom they interact. The many evils of gender ideology don't require elaboration here, obviously, but the important point is that this is a *counterfeit* of kindness. It purports to be morally good, while, in actuality, it actively promotes a serious harm with many morally objectionable features.
This insertion of a counterfeit version of morality undermines the social fabric of trust in shared values. In my forthcoming article, I liken this fabric to the general economy, with moral tokens as a metaphor for capital. When counterfeit currency circulates, the trust in the official currency becomes diluted.
Another related feature of abuse of the general economy is repurposing the profits of illegal activities, aka money laundering. A slight extension of this metaphor leads me to the conclusion that the entire EDI edifice, and PPs in particular are its moral equivalent.
I think we'd be safe to recognize that HR departments that encourage using PPs, along with their institutionalized propagation of EDI in general, is actually *lie laundering*.
This is fascinating and compelling. I recognise the power-grasping missionary all too well... Also, I have to say, Sussex's loss is our gain.
Also repays a squizz in this area: The Equal Opportunities Revolution https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/191092492X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apan_glt_i_7KSTVRZDEJWHWVJ5R6JH
Thank you for this substack and your most recent book. I lead a small local in a teacher union here in Canada and I'm grateful for the clarity your writing and thinking has leant to performative morality and gender self id, issues I encounter daily. I want to engage in discourse with others in my union but fear the human rights tribunal that might follow. There are increasing calls to eject teachers from the profession who don't conform. I even heard a young teacher label academic or teacher autonomy as white supremacist. So, I think it important your work gets as wide an audience as possible. Best regards.
“Send them on a training course”, I’ve noticed, has become a more and more common demand from undergraduates, also. This stuff is not just coming top-down from university management. Students have learnt it before they’ve even arrived at university. It’s as stupid from them as it is from management (for the reasons you say: morality doesn’t work like that) but what that signals is that this has permeated far and wide in society more generally.
I think it has something to do with a normalisation of bureaucratic/managerialist mindsets more generally: the technocratic vision by wish if you send people for “training” they will pop out on the other side as de-fragged and re-coded automatons now behaving nicely rather than naughtily. The fact that this way of looking at the world seems to be both desirable and to make intuitive sense to so many people is both important data about the wider social world as well as evidence that we’re pretty far up shit creek on this one
A few months ago I participated in a virtual training for art education. There were several dozen of us in the class. The first 45 minutes, out of a total of two hours, were spent going over people's pronouns and discussing one member's anxiety about getting other people's pronouns wrong. Of course, by the time the lengthy round robin ended, and despite my good will, I forgot everyone's pronouns - the only thing that remained etched in my memory was that others, who likely also forgot them, would now be terrified to address their fellow attendees.
I contacted the instructor afterwards and asked: What is the purpose of this exercise? If the purpose is to respectfully refer to people in the way they prefer, it can be much more easily and straightforwardly accomplished by having whoever wants this specify their pronouns on their zoom name (in a real room it could be a name tag) than by going through this forgettable performance. Other folks may want to specify other things, like a phonetic pronunciation of an unusual name, a nickname, etc. If the purpose of the exercise, however, is to waste time so that we can all bask in what good people we are, then mission accomplished.
We could, of course, go through the mediocre community theater of pretending that, in the few decades that we've lived on the planet, the cognitive shortcuts (biases, heuristics, etc.) for assuming the correct pronouns of another human being based on their presentation/appearance have completely eluded us, but why do it? If anyone has needs in this department that do not comport with how they appear, they can quietly state them to the instructor or in writing, without contorting everyone else into pretending that we don't know how to talk to other people anymore. If the point is to seek and obtain everyone's attention, however, that's a different matter.
I also refuse to engage with this pointless exercise in my classroom, partly because I find that it draws attention, in an insulting way, to folks who do have an unusual gender presentation and would rather not focus the entire classroom on them and their identity grapplings. Instead, I hand out index cards and tell people that, if there is something about them that I should know, they should write it down. If anyone specifies a unique name, nickname, or pronoun, I quietly refer to them, the first time it comes up in class, in the way that they requested, and that's that. Classroom time is too valuable to make it into earnest group therapy.