“The better angel is a man right fair…”

-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 144 (1599)

 

“So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed”.

-Charles Dickens in Barnaby Rudge, 1841

Imagining life before the Hydra: The Nole¹ Exercise

A time before the Hydra?
In a previous blog post [chapter] I sketch out a history of the eight privileging forces represented by the heads of the Hydra. Based on anthropological and archeological evidence, I argue that if one goes back in human history far

enough, back to pre-agricultural times, the Hydra is non existent and social life is largely characterized by a marked lack of socially structured inequalities. All the privileging forces are muted by an egalitarian ethos necessary for the survival of the group. Hunting and gathering life is not perfect, but all evidence indicates that beyond age and gender differentiation, members of the group were treated as individuals, not as socially constructed categories. That social injustices exist in all globalized cultures is a sad fact of modernity, not basic human nature.

Human nature has changed little over these short millennia, but what has changed is the ability of modern culture’s shared norms and values to tamp down the ‘darker angels’ of our nature. In small hunting and gathering bands (typically numbering in the very low hundreds) group cooperation was essential for survival, and norms encouraging selfless group-centered behavior served to bring out the ‘better angels of our nature.’²

If it were possible to reboot humanity, could the small population of humans making up this new start engineer social life so as to permanently keep toxic othering from happening and the Hydra at bay, remaining in it’s embryonic form? That is question to be pondered in “The Nole Exercise.”

---

NOLE
A gedanken experiment about starting [humanity] over

Scenario
You are a team of sociologists asked to consult on an urgent “Relocation Plan”. It has been determined that our planet will be destroyed in about 6 months by a giant meteor. That’s the bad news. The good news is that international scientists have refined space travel technology to the point that we will be able to transport 100 humans to a newly discovered planet dubbed “Nole” which is uncannily similar to earth in terms of its plant and animal life but totally uninhabited by any humanoid ‘intelligent’ species.

Your task is to decide which 100 people should be the colonizers of the Nole world, what limited material items you will add to the cargo hold. Most importantly you are to help engineer, guide, and ultimately predict the development of the culture that will be created by the colonizers.

There are many critical decisions that will have to be made, many of which are technical and have to do with food production, housing, medical care, and so on. Since you are the sociologist on the team, you can leave those decisions to other experts. Your job is to consider what will happen socially and culturally to the 100 people who will colonize ‘Nole.’  Some initial questions to considering include

• What guiding principles should you use to make all decisions?
• Who will you bring and what personal or group material items will you prioritize as the sociologist?
• What types of people will be most appropriate? What will the 100 colonizers look like demographically?
• What social/psychological factors should you consider?

Some questions you might need to address about the Nole culture include

• How will they govern themselves?  How will group decisions be made?
• How will Nole residents deal with procreation, family life, and/or kin relations?
• Will religion be part of their new culture?
• How will disputes be handled?
• What kind of social control mechanisms will be put in place? What norms will emerge?
• What will gender, ethnicity, race and class issues look like or will they exist at all?
• Will there be ownership of property?
• Will there be a currency?
• What, if any, holidays will be celebrated?
• Will music, art, or sport play any role?
• What language(s) will be spoken?
• Is there (or can there) be a limit on total population size for Nole?
• What will be the guiding principles of this new start for humanity (their ‘ten commandments’, as it were)?
• Perhaps most importantly, how will toxic othering of any kind be tamped down? How will the Hydra be kept at bay?

Included in your consultation report must be a prediction of how the colonizers will function socially (1) initially, (2) 100 years out, (3) 500 years out, and (4) 1000 years out. Begin with the assumption that the population will likely grow due to access ample resources allowing for a high birth rate and low death rate. (Perhaps, do the math and make some predictions here.)

Discussion
You are to consider the fundamental components of human cultures (cultural universals?) and more specifically examine the basic functions of any (1) kinship structure, (2) governing system, and (3) the system of ‘faith’ or guiding philosophy practiced by humans. Using the ‘Nole’ scenario above as your premise, describe what you think will be the kinds of social structures that will emerge among this transplanted culture, especially related to politics and religion. As a functionalist you are aware that ‘everything is connected to everything else’, so discussing other institutions will be helpful or even essential.

What have you learned from sociology so far that informs the input you made as part of the team of sociologists working on this project? [E.g., consider having an emphasis on Freud and the thesis of his book Civilization and Its Discontents.] Go chapter by chapter and give one or two insights from each which to illustrate your understanding of some of their theories and concepts and how these helped you to more deeply understand the sociological nuances of this experiment.

How will this new Nole culture avoid compromising yet another planet by their anthropocentrism? The ‘mentality of exploitation’ is comprised of a series of subtle messages whispered to us by what Daniel Quinn calls “Mother Culture.” Taking these many messages in mind, how will the residents of Nole avoid having the same kinds of messages being created in this new culture? For your answer review your understanding of the ‘mentality of exploitation” and Mother Culture and, as the resident sociologist, describe how these messages should and can be prevented from taking root in Nole’s new culture.

Critical Hydra Theory and the origin of the eight privileging forces
Critical Hydra Theory (CHT) tells us that there are at least eight major privileging forces, driven by toxic othering and exacerbated by late stage capitalism, which dominate all world cultures. We teeter on the brink of climate disaster and clearly have major social justice issues increasingly impacting a majority of the lives on our planet. As the sociological team, how can you act to help the colonizers avoid making the same mistakes which have led humanity to our present state? What new and/or altered norms can be encouraged so as to create a just new world with dignity for all? How can the more destructive aspects of human nature be curbed by this new culture on Nole?

Done thoughtfully, this exercise is intended generate robust discussion by having students explore the essential elements of culture and, more importantly, have them reflect on basic human nature and the classic sociological theme of the tension between ‘self and society’. By applying CHT students will be forced to interrogate the origin of the many privileging forces and attempt to find ways to avoid having the Nole culture repeat these ‘mistakes.’

Can a culture be engineered such that toxic othering does not exist and “the shadows of our own desires” which “stand between us and our better angels” are kept in check by positive social institutions and an ethos of egalitarianism? A question for the ages, that.

---

¹I teach at Elon University. Nole is Elon spelled backwards.

²Though Abraham Lincoln first used the complete phrase ‘the better angels of our nature’, the core sentiment flows from Shakespeare though Dickens to Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seaward who suggested the phrase for Lincoln’s speech. This trope was more recently popularize by public intellectual Steven Pinker in his book by that title.

 

DRAFT

An overview of colonialism/paternalism

A synergy of privileging forces
The essay below will discuss the colonialism/paternalism head of the Hydra and argue how classism and racism are linked to colonialism/paternalism. Entire books have been written about the legacies of colonialism, so what appears below is only a primer. This essay (chapter) extends and reinforces the previous post (chapter) “Beginning a genealogy of privileging forces: racism, classism, and colonialism/paternalism”.

Virtually every global social problem is tied at least indirectly to the many legacies of colonialism. We do not live in a postcolonial era (in the same way that the post-racial era is a myth). Until all formerly colonized peoples are free of the effects of colonialism, we still live in the colonial era despite the practice itself not occurring anymore, at least in its most overt forms.

Can there be a reversal of the negative impacts of colonialism? That remains to be seen.

The language of colonialism
Important to point out is that this is being written in English, the language of colonization. At the height of its influence, the British empire was so large that it was said that “the sun never sets on the British empire“. In the early 1900’s the British empire had establishments in Africa, Asia, Europe, America, and numerous islands, across the globe with nearly one fourth of the total human population under its dominion.

That English is spoken in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Kenya, Jordan, and all the other locations where refugees are being contained is no accident. It is a perfect example of the extended and pervasive legacy of colonization. One way to think about this is that we all live in a world that was created by dead people. That is to say, the world we live in now characterized by various stages of post colonialism was created literally hundreds of years ago, and we continue to live with the impacts of decisions made by rulers that no longer exist. That said, there is still a considerable number of people on the planet that consider King Charles III of England their ultimate ruler.

Language is not neutral. We know from the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (also know as linguistic relativity theory) that human thought is shaped by the language one uses. Reading, writing, and thinking in English invades the mental space of those who’s native language is Arabic, Swahili, or Bengali. How would discourse about colonialism be different were it to be conducted in a non-colonizer language? Perhaps we will never know the answer to this question, but it is worth noting that linguistic privilege is a sub-set under the colonialism/paternalism head of the Hydra.

The Age of Discovery and the ‘doctrine of discovery’ = overt ethnocentrism and racism
Capitalism is an inherently expansionistic economic system which demands ever increasing access to raw materials (e.g., rubber, cotton, and spices) and cheap labor. The rise of a more advanced capitalism in Europe coupled with an unchecked power structure of monarchs and other elites lead inevitably to the so called “Age of Discovery’ which began in the 1400’s. These efforts to explore, conquer, and exploit -and, yes, colonize- the entire ‘uncivilized’ globe were given theological and legal support by the most important European religious leaders of this time. The ‘doctrine of discovery” is based on public decrees make by Catholic Popes Nicholas V and Alexander VI in the late 1400’s. Using these decrees, European leaders and monarchs justified international (read: Western European) laws granting ownership rights to lands ‘discovered’ and occupied during the ‘age of discovery’. Colonization was the divine right of first, all Catholic nations (e.g., Spain and Portugal) and then by international agreement the right of all other Western nations, including eventually the then new United States of America. The indigenous peoples who happened to be living in these newly ‘discovered’ lands were seen as souls to be saved. In the United States, the term Manifest Destiny must be seen as an extension to the doctrine of discovery. It was used to explain that white settlers had a divine right and even responsibility to expand westward, spreading white supremacy, capitalism, and Christianity while ignoring the rights of the indigenous peoples.

In a recent [March 2023] press release the Catholic Church addressed the error in the ‘doctrine of discovery’ noting that,

“It is in this context of listening to indigenous peoples that the Church has heard the importance of addressing the concept referred to as the ‘doctrine of discovery.’ The legal concept of ‘discovery’ was debated by colonial powers from the sixteenth century onward and found particular expression in the nineteenth century jurisprudence of courts in several countries, according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples.”

Explaining further that,

“...their [the colonized indigenous people’s across the globe] sufferings constitute a powerful summons to abandon the colonizing mentality and to walk with them side by side, in mutual respect and dialogue, recognizing the rights and cultural values of all individuals and peoples.”

In 1537 Pope Paul III essentially reversed the decrees made by Popes Nicholas V and Alexander VI and upheld the rights of indigenous peoples reversing the overtly ethnocentric and racist decrees previously published. But a door once opened, especially one with riches on the other side, is hard to close. Once begun and justified, the Age of Discovery and ‘Manifest Destiny’ moved forward with rapacious speed and energy and have left behind numerous negative legacies. Here is how the US based Upstander Project summarizes the impact of the Doctrine of Discovery,

“This ideology supported the dehumanization of those living on the land and their dispossession, murder, and forced assimilation. The Doctrine fueled white supremacy insofar as white European settlers claimed they were instruments of divine design and possessed cultural superiority.”  

The Age of Discovery and the ‘doctrine of discovery’ embodied and enacted overt ethnocentrism and racism all over the colonized world and these impacts continue to be felt now by literally billions of humans across the globe. Though the phrase ‘white-savior industrial complex’ did not come into popular usage until the 21st century, the elites in Europe and the United States fully embodied this racist mentality during the ‘age of discovery.’ George Orwell’s book 1984 describes how those in power use sanitizing words to disguise acts of oppression. Though he was referring to a future world of totalitarianism, his words describe with precision the logic behind using the phrase ‘the age of discovery’. Were this epoch to be described by those being colonized they would perhaps it would be more accurately called ‘the age of rape, racism, and avarice.’

Africa divided
Western European nations literally divided up most of the continent in the late 1800s scramble for extracting wealth from the continent. In 1884, European leaders met for many weeks at the now infamous West African Conference of Berlin with the purpose of dividing Africa. These leaders discussed and negotiated the rules for the conquest of Africa, legitimating the denial of any indigenous agency or question of sovereignty. In the months and years afterwards, just as in the Middle East, national lines were drawn without respect to cultural, tribal, or linguistic population centers.

There is no doubt these actions were overtly racist. In the words of French diplomat Jules Ferry in a speech before the Chamber of Deputies, March 28, 1884,

“Gentlemen, we must speak more loudly and more honestly! We must say openly that indeed the higher races have a right over the lower races . . . .

I repeat, that the superior races have a right because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races . . . . In the history of earlier centuries these duties, gentlemen, have often been misunderstood; and certainly when the Spanish soldiers and explorers introduced slavery into Central America, they did not fulfill their duty as men of a higher race.”

The rhetoric used to justify this carving up of a continent included three promises. First, all slave trade was to be ended, secondly, the peoples of Africa would be taught the love of Christ, and finally they would be civilized, freed from their primitive ways of life. These three promises perfectly exemplify toxic othering. This rhetoric of benevolence, as we know now, was just a thin veneer over the real motivation, more money and power for the elites. One irony of history is that the anti-slave movements in the UK and the USA during the mid-1800’s provided some of the very language that was used in Berlin and by King Leopold to provide public cover for their nefarious actions.

I find the use of the concept of ‘civilization’ here to be particularly perverse and ethnocentric to the core. Prior to European contact, the peoples of Africa though certainly less technologically advanced were extraordinarily civilized, their cultures advanced in art, diplomacy, philosophy, and all other markers of civilization. The colonizing powers normalized the notion that all non-Western nations were ‘primitive’ and hence inferior, particularly the cultures found in sub-Saharan Africa. This served to embed the concept of races -and hence racism- into the colonizers mindset, a legacy still dominating the globe manifesting itself as ‘white supremacy.’ This all in the name of creating more wealth for Western elites like King Leopold in Belgium.

By the end of the 1800’s 90% of the land mass of the second largest continent on the planet had been effectively raped, robbed, and dominated by the colonizing nations, their machine guns ruling the day.

Some of the nations in sub-Saharan Africa emerged from colonization resilient and ready to face a next chapter. Ghana and Zambia might be two examples of this. Other African nations were left with chronic problems, plagued by having narcissistic and kleptomaniacal leaders who had only their own best interest in mind, the history of Zimbabwe under the leadership of Robert Mugabe is perhaps a good example of this.

No human is less human than other humans
Getting rid of all legacies of colonialism may not be possible. What is possible, though, is that we become more deeply aware of how these legacies play into the continued marginalization of so many peoples around the planet.
A critical first observation when beginning a discussion about colonization is that, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948, all humans are equal, and all humans deserve to live lives of dignity, ensured of having the basics of food, education, and security.

Granting that premise, the history of colonization is most assuredly a history of one group acting on the belief they were superior to another group. Though at the beginning of colonization the concept of race was not being explicitly used, this particular form of malignant ethnocentrism was the norm for colonizing nations. Colonization is in all cases, exploitation and oppression of the culture being colonized. The colonizer may use all kinds of rhetoric, including religious dogma to justify what they are doing, but in all cases, colonization is exploitation, the extraction of natural resources and/or human resources for the profit of those in the colonizing nation. Colonization never has a net positive impact on those colonized, just the opposite, colonization always means marginalization and oppression.

It is both deeply ironic and instructive that rulers like King Leopold of Belgium and all of the white elites that attended the West African Conference of Berlin in 1884-85 used the justification they were fighting the slave trade and ‘bringing civilization’ to explain their racist behaviors. Though the North won the Civil War in the United States and thus underlined the fact that slavery was wrong, in 1883 it was an American President Chester A. Arthur who agreed to support Leopold’s Free Congo State and urged other European leaders to do the same. The US Civil War addressed the issue of slavery but ignored the global rise of racism.

Civilization ≠ technological mastery
Colonization is made possible by the technological superiority of one culture over another. One point to make clear is that technological superiority, as in the case of weapons or forms of transportation, or other technologies, does not equate to a more advanced civilization. I think this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings that allowed for colonization. The assumption was that civilization and technological advancement were a couple together. A culture without advanced technology appeared more ‘primitive’ through the warped ethnocentric lens of the colonizer.

In 1935 Margret Mead published her seminal work Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies . This book is noteworthy for many reasons, but I will call attention to the use of the word ‘primitive’ in the title. The accepted antonym to this word at that time in history (and even now?) is the word ‘civilized.’ Mead’s book title choice illustrates that the embedded ethnocentrism and racism in Western culture runs deep.

Overt colonization has ceased, but the long-lasting consequences of colonization continue to infect all parts of the global south. One key aspect of colonization is that the colonizer takes over the political in the economic system of the colonized country, and modifies those systems, to maximize the efficiency of the value extraction from the colony. The indigenous system of politics, and the (typically subsistence) economy of the colonized nation is changed in such a way as to make the colonized population more dependent upon the colonized power. When the colonizer chooses to leave, or as in many cases, is forced to leave by political action among the colonized people, what is left behind is typically a dysfunctional economy and a poorly functioning political system. In many cases, this political system is dominated by the military, as in the case of Myanmar (formally Burma) that was colonized by the British people.

Many people (including me) use the language of ‘Global South’ and ‘Global North’ to talk about the world today. Whenever you hear these terms, it is accurate to label those from the ‘Global North’, as being historically the colonizers, and those from the Global South as the colonized. In earlier times these were referred to as Third World nations, a sanitized and overtly ethnocentric way of referring to those nations who were recovering from the cancer of colonization. In a similar vein, the use of the phrase ‘New World’ is overtly Western-centric. Ample evidence indicates there were were humans living in what is now North and South America as long as 20,000 years ago, long before agriculture gave rise to state societies anywhere on our Earth.

Colonization and capitalism
Colonization can be seen as a as an extension of capitalism. Colonizers wanted to maximize their power and wealth, and to do so they needed to colonize everywhere they could around the planet. But it was not the typical citizen of say Portugal or Great Britain who wanted this expansion and this domination. It was the leaders of these colonizing nations who were intoxicated by power and wealth seeking to sate what appears to be unquenchable search for ever more power. The riches that were stolen from the colonized peoples were never distributed evenly among the people of the colonizing nation but rather went into the pockets of the rich and powerful ultra-bourgeoisie, the classism head of the Hydra justifying and insuring this inequality.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this is King Leopold in Belgium, who from 1885-1908 literally had personal ownership of the Congo Free State, and is arguably responsible for the largest genocide in human history, the killing more than 10,000,000 Congolese over his time in control of this part of Africa. Leopold was there and imposed his power only to increase his own wealth. Leopold used the rhetoric of “spreading Christianity“ as a way of justifying what he was doing. This is a perfect example of how religion was used to justify colonization.

The Portuguese and the Spanish were very adept at using this kind of proselytizing in the New World in spreading Catholicism, the typical citizens who were hearing about these overseas adventures were fed stories of how primitive, uncivilized savages were being turned in to “saved souls’: greed rebranded into benevolence using ethnocentric assumptions. Key to keep reminding ourselves is that colonization is inferred and extreme ethnocentrism, and thus dehumanization of the other, that is, pushing the assumption that everybody that was being colonized was inherently inferior to -that is less than human- compared to the colonizer. Colonization gives rise to the acceptance of racism and racist actions including the use of slavery at a level never before seen in world history.

Paternalism and Western Asia
The head of the Hydra that we are talking to right now is ‘colonization/paternalism.’ Paternalism is when one nation or a group of nations decides the fate of large swaths of the globe. This is the case of the Middle East, where western Europeans from the UK, France, Italy, and the United States, decided the fate of the peoples in the Middle East after both World Wars, I and II. There are no Middle Eastern (aka Western Asia) scholars who can ignore the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1918 Sykes-Picot Agreement, documents drawn up by the colonial powers in what Russian leader Vladimir Lenin perhaps accurately called “the agreement of the colonial thieves”. Lines were drawn and new nations were created by colonial powers. Many have argued, I think, convincingly, that these lines were drawn in such a way as to maximize internal discord, mixing religious, ethnic, and linguistic groups so as to make national harmony both before and after decolonization a very difficult goal to achieve. Unstable nations are easier to control.

Perhaps one of the most egregious paternalistic acts was the creation of Israel without a specific plan for the Palestinian peoples. In 1948 this new nation was created in the wake of World War II, while at the same time ignoring and hence marginalizing the existence of the Palestinian people. This lack of a Palestinian state, or at least, an assurance that Palestinians would have equal and full citizenship in the new state of Israel is a constant cause of conflict, as much now in 2023 as it had been since 1948. I find it troubling that though the Balfour Declaration does speak of a “national home for the Jewish people” it also specifies that “…it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…”

A similar conflict was created when the Kurdish people were spread among four different newly created nations, a recipe for chronic conflict. Though a Kurdistan was at one point proposed, it never came to be. As we can see, the paternalistic actions of the western European and United States leaders have led to chronic issues in the Middle East. Just as in the case of the ‘African scramble’ described above, small groups of elite white males made decisions both for and about countless peoples over whom they felt superior. Toxic othering at its worst.

Three heads linked together
The Hydra heads of colonialism and classism must be linked together with racism. Added as fuel to this mix, capitalism is an inherently expansionistic economic system, and is also a good vehicle for enhancing the power of most privileging forces. As we know from world history, about 5000 years ago after the rise of agriculturally focused state societies most cultures had a small elite at the top, kings, queens, monarchs, and holy rulers of all sorts. These people used their power to convince those under them that their expansionistic actions were in everyone’s benefit and were, not only the divine right of those doing the colonizing, but a responsibility of those doing the colonizing. Civilizing and saving savages was what colonization was all about and the concept of race was popularized to help justify this global expansion of oppression. Capitalism led to colonialism and colonialism exasperated and enhanced the assumptions of ethnocentrism and racism.

Critical Hydra Theory done properly must look long into the past. The general -and distressing pattern- is that once an inequality of power is established, those in power work toward justifying and normalizing these asymmetries, ossifying the social structures, enabling and ensuring toxic othering to become a ‘normal’ part of life.

The process of confronting toxic othering is slow and difficult, but it must be the task of everyone interested in creating a more just world for all.

Elon University students consider Critical Hydra Theory (CHT)

Introducing CHT in a 100 minute class
Recently I presented the concept of Critical Hydra Theory to 4 classes of Elon University students. Included were three sections of our first year seminar The Global Experience taught by my colleague Dr. Karen Wirth and the fourth my Introduction to Sociology class. The vast majority of these students are first year’s and none had heard of CHT before this class. Dr. Wirth and I had our students write an essay about what they took away from the session. Below are the five best submissions. Each of these exceptional students will have a modest donation made on their behalf to a humanitarian cause of their choosing.

 

 

Critical Hydra Theory

By Emma Hash

On a globe scale, true equality is not something that we have obtained since the beginning of agriculture. Once
there was an opportunity for a surplus mankind seized the gap and skewed the playing field. In the early Holocene days, superiority was judged on a material scale: who had the most food and weapons? Now as evolution goes, we have changed drastically and decidedly judge others based on numerous factors, those of which we call privileging forces. These forces are represented by eight hydra heads on the Hydra Theory Model (Arcaro) , and they specifically define factors in which inequality seep out of; patriarchy, race/ethnicity, colonialism/ paternalism, classism, ableism, ageism, and anthropocentrism. Which ever side one falls on in each of the eight categories will then impact their life-chances; these are described as, “chances in life for people of the same privileges that of you” (Arcaro 21 February). Essentially, this boils down to the idea that one’s privileging forces will impact, or determine, their life chances, also known as opportunities. In this post, I will dive into both the personal and societal implications of the Hydra Theory Model, intersectionality within the model, and the deeply rooted issue of religion in terms of privileging forces and how it has effected our societies today.

After careful evaluation of both the binary and non-binary models and utilizing positionality, “…the social and political context that creates our identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status…expand it to include our entire status array including both ascribed and achieved statuses” (Arcaro), I have concluded that I am a very privileged individual. This privilege stands on both a national and international stage; it is a simple fact from observation. Despite being a female of color, in the grand scheme of privileging forces, I am well-off to achieving success in life. My status, which is described as, “….obtained without effort or action on the part of the individual” (Basirico et al., 5:130) is not incredibly hindering to my life-chances. I am in the middle class, the global north, able-bodied, a young adult, and a homo sapien sapien. Others may have similar results, but more often than not they will not be as fortunate as me. The differences do not have to be dramatic in order for them to be less privileged. For example, take another woman and give her the same results as me, except change her race from Asian to Native American. She is now at a lower point of privilege, solely because of her race and ethnicity. This example highlights the delicacy of privileges, and how easily inequality has slipped itself into our societies. There is still always the possibility that we could both obtain the same achieved statuses, “Statuses that result from the efforts or actions of the individual” (Basirico et al., 5:130). However, the Native American woman would have to work much harder, as I have more life-chances than her solely because of my race. This example of changing just one ascribed status could be altered in a myriad number of ways, which would then in turn produce a myriad number of differences in life-chances.

The delicacy of life-chances can be related back to intersectionality. Without explicitly stating it earlier, I was playing with the function of intersectionality, which, “…postulates that these systems of oppression are mutually constituted and work together to produce inequality” (Viruell-Fuentes et al.,  2100). Earlier, I was using examples of changing the position of simply one hydra head, and then briefly examining its effects. This is slightly impractical, because more often than not, changing one position will cause the others to fluctuate. The domino like effect can be defined as intersectionality, the inter-relations of statuses. To better explain this, let us go back to the Native American woman. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely her only differing ascribed status would be race. Since she is of a less privileged race, then her class would have a high probability of also being less privileged. Both of these combined creates an even bigger gap in life-chances between the two of us, which in turn creates another big gap in achieved statuses. This is intersectionality at work. All the privileging forces are connected and interact with one another, as well as impact one’s future.

Taking a quick glance at the Hydra Model, I noticed the lack of head for religion. Undeniably, not all religions are equally respected. This impacts relationships between people, and consequently position in society “…indispensable requirements of society frequently emerged from an entirely undifferentiated form in which moral, religious, and juridical sanctions were still indiscriminately mingled…” (Simmel 362). The intermingling of religion and politics/ justice creates vast opportunities for inequality. Take our own American society: built off of a Christian belief system. Even today we still have not quite been able to separate church and state; this is problematic because it is evident we view Christianity as a superior religion. We have created norms against other religions, such as calling followers of Islam terrorists. Essentially, what I am trying to get at is the idea that privilege in this country is somewhat rooted in religion. Heteronormativity, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and anthropocentrism in this country can all be drawn back to religion, specifically Christianity. The Christian God deems homosexuality a sin, man as the leaders, etc. This in all is just a personal theory of mine; however, I believe the effects of religion are undeniable in terms of what are deemed privileging forces.

To bring everything back together, life-chances are relatively predetermined by privileging forces, which are depicted as hydra heads. The connections between the two can be looked at under an intersectionality lens. They have a relationship together and in solitude with themselves. I added in religion and pondered the roots privilege has in it. Once again, I do not have a question to leave us with, but rather a simple contemplation: if we want to keep moving towards equity and equality, perhaps we must detach our government and social structures from religion.

 

Works Cited

Arcaro 21 February 2023

Arcaro, Tom. “Basic Tenets of Critical Hydra Theory.” Aid Worker Voices, 23 Feb. 2023, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2091.

Arcaro, Tom. “Beginning a Genealogy of Privileging Forces: Racism, Classism, and Colonialism/Paternalism.” Aid Worker Voices, 3 June 2022, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=1956.

Arcaro, Tom. “Critical Hydra Theory.” Aid Worker Voices, 17 July 2021, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=1848.

Arcaro, Tom. “Examining and Expanding on the Concept of ‘Privilege’ through the Lens of the Hydra Model.” Aid Worker Voices, 16 Feb. 2023, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2085.

Arcaro, Tom. “Positionality and the Hydra.” Aid Worker Voices, 18 Sept. 2022, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2013.

Gjelten, Tom. “In Religious Freedom Debate, 2 American Values Clash.” NPR, NPR, 28 Feb. 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/02/28/517092031/in-religious-freedom-debate-2-american-values-clash.

Halsey, A.H. “Sociology and the Equality Debate.” Oxford Review of Education, vol. 1, no. 1, 1975, pp. 9–23., https://doi.org/10.1080/0305498750010103.

Simmel, Georg. “A Contribution to the Sociology of Religion.” American Journal of Sociology , 1 Nov. 1905. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2762794?refreqid=search-gateway. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.

Viruell-Fuentes, Edna A., et al. “More than Culture: Structural Racism, Intersectionality Theory, and Immigrant Health.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 75, no. 12, Dec. 2012, pp. 2099–2106., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.12.037.

Here is an NPR story relevant to my post.

---

Critical Hydra Theory

By Autumn Irby

Introduction
Critical Hydra Theory is a concept where open-minded individuals can look further into the forces that control the world and analyze how they affect humanity. The eight hydra heads that symbolize privileging forces in the CHT are patriarchy, race/ethnicity, colonialism/paternalism, hetero/cisnormativity, classism, ableism, ageism, and anthropocentrism. CHT looks at the genealogy of each hydra head to analyze the origin and development of these privileged forces, specifically how they transition from recognizing differences to discriminating differences. Privileging forces control society and determine who is at the highest level in society. For example a, “male, white, from the ‘Global north’, a cis heterosexual, upper class, fully able, neither very young nor old and a human ” (Arcaro). With the CHT, an open-minded individual can look further into the forces that control the world and analyze how they affect humanity. To apply the CHT, looking at the world from an open-minded perspective is necessary.

Examples of Privileging Forces
To further understand privileging forces, examples like classism are necessary. In North Carolina, 9.4% of people are below the poverty line in Cabarrus County. “Our state has one of the highest rates of poverty in the country and last year (the most recent figures available) over 1.4 million North Carolinians were under the incredibly low threshold the Federal Government defines as the poverty line (less than $26,000 for a family of four).” (McHugh). The wealth gap between the rich and impoverished is astronomical not just in North Carolina, but in the United States as a whole. Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates, further the wealth gap and create imbalances in the economy.

Globally, the world suffers from anthropocentrism as humans destroy the only home they have. The abiotic and biotic factors of the world suffer under humanity’s hands, creating an imbalance in the world. These do not cover even 1% of the world’s issues, but it signifies how privileging forces plague society. However, the hydra heads do not go unnoticed. The Black Lives Matter movement gains awareness every day, fighting for equality in America, and the world. The World Wildlife Foundation’s mission saves endangered species and spends its resources to protect the environment. Many organizations fight hard to establish diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the world, but increased global involvement is necessary to change the world.

Impact on Human Lives
The hydra heads affect each person in the world, determining their ascribed status and altering their life chances. Ascribed status determines a person’s status, but is involuntary, such as race, sex, sexuality, and ableness (Basicirio). A person’s status alters their “life chances”, prohibiting them from moving forward due to the probabilistic factors that hold them back (Arcaro).  Being a man in this world signifies privilege since women are statistically not paid equally and their rights, particularly to reproductive care, are often fought about in government. Being a person of color in the United States results in a target on their back as they face discrimination and microaggressions.

I am a young white woman, middle class, from the “Global North” and am human. Among my ascribed statuses are my sex, race, and social class. I have the privilege of being white but am limited by my status of being a woman. Reflecting on my position, I understand that I have advantages over people as well as disadvantages over others. An example of my privilege is I have never had to worry about not having a house, food, or necessities that those who live under the poverty line don’t have access to. I’ve also never had to be wary about discrimination due to my skin color, especially during job interviews or being pulled over by cops. My future roles are determined to allow me to flow through life easier than those that don’t have the same opportunities as me. To fully comprehend the CHT, it’s necessary to recognize your privilege and the factors that still hold you back (Arcaro).

Intersectionality and the CHT
“Race and racism are always concepts in formation. Our notion of race and our experience with racism do not represent fixed, static phenomena. Racism is more than the intentional behavior of the occasional bad actor. Racism mutates and multiplies, creating a range of racisms. We must be able to bring up issues of race and racism without the terms always leading to fear, alienation, and off-point debate.” (Calamore). The ascribed status of race determines a person’s way through life and is one of the main causes of conflicts globally. It’s usually what people see when they first meet one another. However, Kimberlé Crenshaw considered the interaction between race and gender, leading her to coin a new term, intersectionality. As a black woman, she deals with discrimination against both her race and gender. She created this term to include ascribed social statuses such as class (Arcaro). She recognized the ascribed status of being both black and female to explain that they’re not distinct forces, they are woven together. Crenshaw’s idea is what we students use to analyze the Critical Hydra Theory and realize that the privileging forces should all be considered as interactive with each other rather than separate forces.

The Critical Hydra Theory
The privileged forces all have similar definitions. For example, “Racism is the ideology of domination based on the assumption of the inert biological and cultural inferiority of a group based on how another group treats them.” The beginning of the definition can be replaced with all the other privileging forces, as the second part involving the “inert inferiority” can be applied to all. The CHT also proposes the difference between differentiation (othering) which leads to stratification (toxic othering). Toxic othering oppresses certain groups leading from inequality to “superiority” thinking. Racism is deeply woven into the United States since the government system is corrupted based on the premise of white superiority and the suffocation of POC. Racism is present in every country, along with colorism, the discrimination against those with darker skin. It’s even present within racial groups, causing those with darker skin further societal illness as their race and color are discriminated against. These toxic otherings subject people to violence and create strife in society that’s difficult to repair.

Conclusion
Privileging forces are constant in human lives and affect each person individually, however, it’s important to understand these concepts since it might expand people’s understanding of how these forces affect different groups. Recognizing privilege and limitation factors will strengthen perspectives individually and globally. Critical Hydra Theory forces people to look at the history and genealogy of each head, analyzing the way it affects the ascribed status of people. Comprehension of this theory is necessary to understand the way society works and how to better the world.

Works Cited

Arcaro, 23 February 2023

Arcaro, Tom. “Aid Worker Voices / Examining and expanding on the concept of ‘privilege’ through the lens of the Hydra model.” Elon University Blogs, 16 February 2023, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2085. Accessed 25 February 2023.

Arcaro, Tom. “Aid Worker Voices / Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness and critical Hydra theory.” Elon University Blogs, 23 July 2022, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=1993. Accessed 25 February 2023.

Arcaro, Tom. “Aid Worker Voices / Positionality and the Hydra.” Elon University Blogs, 18 September 2022, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2013. Accessed 25 February 2023.

Arcaro, Tom. “Aid Worker Voices / Status array exercise using the Hydra model.” Elon University Blogs, 1 October 2022, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2033. Accessed 25 February 2023.

Basiciro, 5: 130

Calmore, J. O. (1999). A call to context: The professional challenges of cause lawyering at the intersection of race, space, and poverty. Fordham Law Review, 67, 1927-1957.

McHugh, Patrick, et al. “The other side of NC’s tax-cut tale.” The News & Observer, 2 December 2019, https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/article237886109.html. Accessed 1 March 2023.

The power of privilege: Tiffany Jana at TEDxRVAWomen

---

Exploring the Hydra Model

By Maeve Durkin

The Hydra Model is something that I had never heard of before our class discussion on Thursday. This tool is one that puts my life into more of a perspective and displays the certain privileges that I may or may not have been born into. Exploring my own status array was something that I felt kept me accountable for noting what I can work on as a person in our society who has a certain level of privilege. “The term ‘status array’ can be used to describe any one person, combining all their ascribed and achieved statuses. One’s status array is the major factor establishing one’s positionality” (Arcaro 2022). I have always wondered about positionality and how this can alter depending on one’s social class or achieved status.

Another topic that we discussed that also caught my attention was a person’s master status. A master status is the first thing that people see about you, in my opinion, it’s the first thing that people choose to judge you about. The example we talked about in the lecture involved an African American female getting off the plane in Wajir, Kenya, and the salient point that the refugees would notice would be that she is American. This is something that could shift the way people would think about the individual, and although this is the first thing that is noticed, it would not be the last. As we can all guess, it would soon move on to the woman’s gender and race.

Lastly, life chances are something that was also talked about and how this can affect our status set. For some of us this can be positive and for others, this can be negative. “Our secondary group interactions typically begin with being seen in terms of our master status and then more so by our entire status set, both ascribed and achieved.” (Arcaro 2022). Status is something that we can make for ourselves, but also can be paved for us already depending on where we come from. An example that comes to my mind is the topic of first-generation college students. College isn’t something that can be in the cards for everyone, depending on where you come from, the level of financial stability there is, and how many opportunities you have been given in your life, these are all factors that could weigh heavily on what your future looks like.

Privilege in the Lens of the Hydra Model
To talk more specifically on privilege, looking into this through the lens of the hydra is also something we discussed in class on Thursday. When reading the example that Dr. Arcaro gave in his article, there were so many factors that can play into privilege that I, in all honesty, had never thought about before. I typically only think of privilege when race and gender are in question, however the story about Dr. Arcaro being pulled over brought me to realize many other things about privilege.

Not having to worry about being pulled over by a cop to begin with is something that I think many white people take for granted or don’t even think about. Next, not having to worry about being harassed or taken advantage of because a person doesn’t identify or present themselves as being female is something that I also don’t think crosses people’s minds often because you don’t really understand the feeling until you’ve been there. Finally, receiving some sort of fine or ticket is another aspect of privilege because if you are financially in a position where that isn’t something that strikes you with anxiety or worry, you have a leg up in society. “Simply put, social forces, especially privileged forces, impact one’s life chances, in many cases dramatically so” (Arcaro 2023).

Everyone walks a different path in life, sometimes it may not appear to be fair, and usually that means it isn’t. There are many outside forces that affect our everyday lives, depending on the cards you were given at birth, it all varies person to person.

 

Arcaro, Tom. “Aid Workers Voices.” / Examining and Expanding on the Concept of  ‘Privilege’ through the Lens of the Hydra Model, 16 Feb. 2023, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2085. Accessed 26 Feb 2023

Arcaro, Tom. “Aid Workers Voices.” / Status Array Exercise Using the Hydra Model, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2033. Accessed 26 Feb 2023

---

My Takeaways From our Discussion on Critical Hydra Theory

By Amy Lottes

Critical Hydra Theory is “[an expansion on positionality] to include our entire status array including both ascribed and achieved statuses” (Arcaro). In other words, Critical Hydra Theory is similar to the concept of intersectionality, exploring the idea that privilege and oppression are based on many factors that make up one’s identity rather than just one or two. The ‘heads’ of the hydra consist of patriarchy, race/ ethnicity, colonialism/ paternalism, hetero/ cisnormativity, classism/ class privilege, ableism, ageism, and anthropocentrism. I believe that Critical Hydra Theory is accurate to what causes a person to be privileged or oppressed, and I would like to add another head onto the Hydra that hasn’t been mentioned yet.

While the current Critical Hydra Theory already addresses the intersectionality of each identity that a person has, I found that during our discussion in class one element was left out; body privilege. Body privilege is a concept that explores how certain people have advantages in society due to their physical appearance. According to Arcaro, “We are a social species, largely defined by the cultural milieus in which we developed our sense of self and in which we currently work and live” (Arcaro). Humans require connection and the approval of others in order to thrive in society, thus demonstrating that discrimination based on physical appearance is detrimental to some. The negative opinions of others is the least concerning though, as there are many systemic issues that come with being perceived as unattractive. For example, “employers viewing photographs of potential employees were inclined to increase salaries by nearly 10.5% to attractive people” (Simon). In addition to potentially making less than they ‘attractive’ coworkers, those who are perceived as unattractive have a higher chance to receiving inadequate healthcare due to perceptions on weight. According to Boston Medical, weight related biases “[contribute] to individuals not receiving adequate healthcare for a number of reasons, 1) the assumption is if someone is overweight they cannot be healthy, 2) clinical care teams typically lack experience in treating diverse body sizes, 3) weight related structural barriers, e.g., size of exam tables, gowns, blood pressure cuffs, and scale limits” (Medical). Almost every overweight person, including myself, has been asked by a doctor if they’re trying to lose weight even if they are at the doctor for an ear infection. So, what does this have to do with Critical Hydra Theory? During our discussion in class (and one I had with Professor Arcaro during the break) I was trying to figure out if body privilege could fall under any one of the existing heads. I don’t believe it could though, as somebody could be privileged in every other way yet still experience disadvantages solely due to being perceived as unattractive or overweight.

Critical Hydra Theory is a great tool to help explain the concept of intersectionality, as people can be privileged in one way yet oppressed in another. During the discussion we had in class with Professor Arcaro I realized that another head should be added to the Hydra; Body Privilege. Being perceived as attractive in modern society has many benefits such as a higher salary and better medical care. Conversely, those perceived as unattractive are more likely to experience bias within the medical field and in many other ways in society. It is important to recognize the existence of body privilege in order to evolve away from it.

Works Cited

Arcaro, Tom. “Home.” Positionality and the Hydra, 18 Sept. 2022, https://blogs.elon.edu/aidworkervoices/?p=2013.

 

Medical, Boston. “Fatphobia.” Boston Medical Center, https://www.bmc.org/glossary-culture-transformation/fatphobia.

 

Simon, Olivia. “Pretty Privilege: Why Bias Is Real and What We Can Do about It.” RSS, LIFE Intelligence, 7 Apr. 2021, https://www.lifeintelligence.io/blog/pretty-privilege-bias-what-we-can-do.

---

Critical Hydra Theory

By Danielle Rudd

Critical Hydra Theory is a mechanism for understanding how the structures within our society
perpetuate discrimination towards certain groups and privilege towards others. This theory
suggests that there are privileging forces within society: The patriarchy, race/ethnicity,
colonialism, heteronormativity/cisnormativity, classism/class privilege, ableism, ageism, and
anthropocentrism. While I do agree that this is an effective method of conceptualizing the forces
that cause privilege and discrimination within society, I would make several changes to the
categories. First, I would divide heteronormativity and cisnormativity into two separate groups as
there is an important difference between your sexuality and whether or not you identify with the
gender that you were assigned at birth. Furthermore, and more importantly, I think that in order
to truly convey all of the privileging forces in society, it is crucial that religion is included. All of
the heads on of the hydra are individual identities that make us who we are. They are also the
identities that make us more susceptible to privilege and discrimination. Since religion is such a
large cause of discrimination across the world, I think that it is essential to consider and discuss it
as part of the Critical Hydra Theory.

Furthermore, some of the other takeaways from our discussion of Critical Hydra Theory include
my understanding of racism and anthropocentrism. Dr. Arcaro defined racism as an ideology of
domination based on an assumption of the inert biological inferiority of a group and the use of
that assumption to legitimize the unfair treatment of that group. This definition is very interesting
to me and I feel that it very effectively encapsulates how the institution of racism serves as a
privileging force. Similarly, he defined anthropocentrism as an ideology of domination and
subordination based on the assumption that humans are the apex species on Earth and the use of
this assumption to legitimize or rationalize the human centered domination and exploitation of
all life, both plant and animal. The idea of anthropocentrism is a very interesting concept to me. I
had never considered the fact that we as humans are the privileged beings when compared to all
other living things on Earth. I think that the addition of this concept to the Critical Hydra Theory
was a very productive choice.

Moreover, I also found the conversation of privileged status very intriguing. The differentiation
between achieved status and ascribed status reminds me of the nature v nurture debate.
Specifically, it questions which of our privileges are ascribed (natural, innate) and which are
achieved (learned, taught, nurture). Furthermore, the subjectivity of the master status is also a
fascinating concept to me. Master status is the status that people see in you, the most salient
thing about you – not necessarily what you choose, but how people automatically perceive you.
Context and situation is critical to how people perceive your master status. Overall, I think that
the Critical Hydra Theory is a very unique and effective method of broadening our worldview.

---

Thank you
I want to thank Dr. Wirth for allowing me to visit her classes and thank her students for patiently listening to -and talking with!- a strange face with a new idea to consider. I also want to thank all of the students who participated by writing essays and to all those who helped select the top responses to the prompt. May we all work together to confront toxic othering, denormalizing the marginalization caused by each head of the Hydra.

[Updated 8-4-23]

‘…the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…’

-from the first sentence of the Preamble to the 1948  Universal Declaration of Human Rights

 

Critical Hydra Theory
‘Critical Hydra Theory’ (CHT) is similar to but broadly expands on ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT). It is more comprehensive, interrogating not just race and ethnicity but all of the privileging forces which have historically served to marginalize the majority of humans, both past and present. Perhaps the biggest difference is that CHT includes anthropocentrism, an ‘othering’ of non-human life on our Earth. CHT has a demonstratively global perspective and seeks to provide a framework of analysis interrogating all social forces which have contributed to systemic marginalization of non-privileged status groups throughout history.

Like Critical Race Theory, this new perspective has a heavy emphasis on history, the phenomena of intersectionality, and how each of the privileging forces are structured into cultural systems.

Hydra
Hydra: a many-headed serpent or monster in Greek mythology that was slain by Hercules and each head of which when cut off was replaced by two others
 
(hydra) not capitalized : a multifarious evil not to be overcome by a single effort

The Hydra is a mythical beast with many heads, each potentially lethal, all harmful. Critical Hydra Theory is a powerful metaphor for engaging critically with intersectionality and reflexively with privilege; is a novel packaging of an old idea, namely that in many cases -perhaps most- those in power will seek to normalize and justify the marginalization of the ‘other’. These processes of normalization and justification serve to weave marginalization into the very fabric of each culture leading to various levels of ‘false consciousness.’

Both those being marginalized and those doing the marginalization may come to believe the falsehood that, for example, women are inferior to men or that ‘white’ people are superior to non-white people. More generally stated, this ‘false consciousness’ breeds an atmosphere where the acceptance of social inequalities and systemic marginalization of those not privileged is just ‘how things are’, to be accepted as normal. Our cultures teach us to never question the social construction of race, gender, class, sexuality, ‘normal’ ability, and also to accept the assumption that humans have dominion over all other life forms.

Critical Hydra Theory demands taking a very controversial stance, questioning how power has been misused in the formation of nearly all cultural institutions, but especially those of family, religion, politics, law, education, and the media. CHT is unequivocally against all forms of marginalization (e.g., racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, colonialism, hetero and cis normativity, and anthropocentrism). Embracing CHT means interrogating all cultural assumptions, norms, policies, laws, and structures which support toxic othering in any form. It is a radical theory both literally and figuratively. CRT examines and interrogates the root structures of cultures, thus questioning the very foundations of power and privilege.

An essential premise of critical Hydra theory (CHT) is intersectionality. This concept was presented to us by the founder of critical race theory (CRT) Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw. She says,

“Intersectionality is just a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood within conventional ways of thinking about anti-racism or feminism or whatever social justice advocacy structures we have. Intersectionality is not so much of a grand theory it’s a prism for understanding certain kinds of problems.”

In listing and discussing the historical trajectory all the privileging forces it is essential to keep in mind that
“…multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves”. For example, in a previous post I describe how racism, classism, and paternalism/colonialism are inextricably connected in their development and cannot be examined separately.

I am reminded -and cautioned by -the passage from Hermann Hesse’s book Siddhartha, “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” Acting on lessons learned from CHT means being sober to the fact that cultures are integrated and complex fabrics, and that pulling on one string may unravel essential parts of the whole. Worlds can be changed without wholesale destruction, indeed most social change is slow and organic. The fact remains, though, hard questions must be asked regarding all forms of culturally entrenched marginalization, and this means questioning basic assumptions about each major social institution and, yes, including religion and politics. The emphasis should not be on ‘destroying a world’ but rather a systematic, measured, but at the same time radical -meaning at the root- cultural transformation. Not defeating or killing the Hydra but rather taming the beast.

Basic tenets of Critical Hydra Theory
Embracing CHT means understanding it’s basic tenets including (but not limited to) the following:

• CHT builds on and is inspired by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and as such it demands that an aggressive, unwavering, deep, and thorough interrogation of all marginalizing social structures is necessary.
• Privileging statuses are socially created and as such can be socially deconstructed.
• Listening to the voices of and taking the lead from those who are marginalized, and especially those who are marginalized by multiple privileging forces, is a primary tool for those using both CRT and CHT. This means taking to heart the aphorism, “Until the lion learns to speak, tales of hunting will always favor the hunter” and actively listening to the ‘lion.’
• All humans see and interact with each other in terms of our various -mostly ascribed- statuses, at least in the initial stages of interaction.
• ‘Normal othering’ will tend to degenerate into ‘toxic othering’ whenever there is an asymmetry of power between one status group and another.
• ‘Toxic othering’ leads to the normalization of marginalization, entrenching itself deeply into cultural norms, rules, policies, laws, and religious and political dogma.
• The normalization of marginalization may take years, decades, or even centuries and at times can be slowed or even reversed temporarily in some cases. That said, the long term trajectory tends toward more entrenched toxic othering.
• Reversing toxic othering or ‘bending the moral arc toward justice’ can be done but is fundamentally a long term and multi-pronged effort.
• All privileging forces are driven by ‘toxic othering’ and throughout history these forces have impacted the life chances of those marginalized across the globe.
• The intersectionality inherent between all of the privileging forces must be recognized and addressed. Each privileging force can be seen separately, of course, but probing into how each force reinforces and amplifies the others is essential.
• CHT recognizes that the Hydra may present itself very differently across time and cultural context from . The heads may change in salience and even take on different forms in different settings. The Hydra is not a static model but rather it is dynamically morphing, taking on different forms as power and privilege are wielded in ever more adaptive ways, always insuring the perpetuation of toxic othering and marginalization.
• Critical to CHT is understanding that ‘false consciousness’ exists and that there can be a cultural blindness as to the existence of various privileging forces afflicting both the group in power and those being marginalized.
• Central to CHT is the understanding that the economic force of capitalism and the political ideology of neoliberalism have both served to fuel the body of the Hydra and hence each head.
• The desired end goal is for ‘toxic othering’ to be replaced by ‘normal othering’ where differences are recognized, honored, and respected by all. Restated, the goal is the denormalization of social marginalization. This social justice goal can be reached by addressing abuses of power and finding ways to emphasize the importance of using the positive forces of non-violence, love, and compassion to affect structural change.

The dangers of fighting for social justice
As a ‘boomer’ I feel there is a song lyric that merits mentioning.

“Find the cost of freedom buried in the ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down.”

Stephen Stills wrote these lyrics in reference to the killings at Kent State and Jackson State University in May of 1970, both involving students protesting the neo-colonial war in Viet Nam and domestic racial injustice, respectively. Those seeking justice have forever been caught in the literal crosshairs of those holding power, the harsh truth being that this seems unlikely to end any time soon. Recent events in Iran, China, and Myanmar provide stark examples.

Knowledge is power, and it is power that is needed in order to make change happen. In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh the Rohingya social justice advocate Mohibullah was murdered by those threatened by his words and actions. By advocating that readers -especially those who are multiply marginalized- embrace and adopt CHT am I helping them to paint a target on their backs?

Fighting the process of oppression in all forms
In the words of American author Ijeoma Oluo,

“The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself.”

Using the tool of critical Hydra theory (CHT), it may be useful to expand Oluo’s statement to include all of the toxic othering ‘isms’ including (but not limited to) sexism, colorism, homo/transphobia, classism, ageism, ableism, paternalism, colonialism, and so on. Consider replacing the word ‘anti-racism’ in Oluo’s statement with, for example, sexism or classism. Indeed, replace ‘anti-racism’ with any of the privileging forces represented by the heads of the Hydra.

The reality is that frequently we are both the oppressed and the oppressor, even in the same social situation. It is key to remember that we must fight oppression and marginalization as social forces and avoid focusing all our energies demonizing a specific ‘other’ who may be perpetuating a specific type of oppression. Our efforts should always be focused on addressing any false consciousness we may have (in other writing I refer to this as ‘baked in’ biases) and working to be anti-racist and ‘anti’ all of the other ‘isms’ mentioned above. One’s positionality fully considered always means understanding and addressing relevant forces of oppression at play in each social interaction, especially when asymmetries of power are a major factor.

Stated differently, using critical Hydra theory demands that we interrogate our past learning which has taught us how to be oppressed and also to oppress others. This is not an easy step, but it is one which might be facilitated by reading the words of Paulo Freire in his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In summarizing perhaps the main point of Freire’s cannonical book, researcher and activist Anton Treuer says,

“Essentially what Freire has to say is that all forms of oppression have a pedagogy, a way by which we are all instructed and enculturated to accept and participate in dealing out the oppression and then receiving it, and often both. And he says because there’s actually a pedagogy for oppression there needs to be a pedagogy for the oppressed, a way to bring us into liberation.”

He goes on to add,

“So here are a couple of the really important things that I learned from Paulo Freire’s work. One is that oppression in all of its forms is complex and insidious and all of us– no matter how advantaged or disadvantaged we think we are– we all participate in the oppression.” (emphasis added)

Listen to Friere himself,

“Although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressor and those whom they oppress, it it the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle.” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 47)

That one can be both oppressed and an oppressor makes having self-awareness of one’s status array and positionality all the more critical. We must tap into the parts of us which have been or are oppressed¹ when we are fighting oppression. The complicated and sometime treacherous journey toward social justice begins with greater self-awareness and has the ultimate goal of humanity’s liberation from all forms of oppression.

A point of departure, not as an ossified given
The image of the Hydra is flat, two dimensional, and static but in reality, using critical hydra theory is it just the opposite: multi layered, multi dimension, and absolutely dynamic. The size of the heads in any social context will change and morph as some become more relevant in one context, and less relevant in another. In the lived reality of BIPOC in the US, for example, the head of racism is much more impactful than perhaps and colonialism/paternalism, and this privileging force impacting more the peoples in sub-Saharan Africa. In a refugee camp, the largest head of the hydra would be a privileging force not clearly seen on this model. The ascribed status ‘refugee’ is the product of a type of racism (i.e., deep ethnic and religious bigotry) that has caused them to be put into a refugee camp as in the case of the Rohingya now exiled to Bangladesh. The Rohingya had the status of refugee thrust upon them because of the overt racism of the Burmese military and the Burmese ruling people.

The Hydra model with each head being equal is best seen as a starting point for discussion and analysis, challenging the user to reimagine how the various privileging forces vary in salience from context to context, culture to culture, and from one historical period to the next. As with the refugee example, the heads of the Hydra may take on different names and forms, new heads emerging and old one’s taking on new forms. Key to employing CHT, the Hydra model must be seen a flexible tool, a point of departure, not as an ossified given.

An unclear future
As humanity goes deeper into the 21st-century, the idea of most people having virtual identities and hence virtual status arrays has become a reality. We face a very uncertain future in terms of how the coming ‘metaverse’ will impact all of us regarding the various privileging forces and the process of toxic othering. One’s online presence is clearly a sophisticated product of impression management where an individual highlights typically or situationally positive aspects and dimensions of their status set and downplays others. This is an attempt to get a favorable relative positionality in whatever virtual social setting in which this person’s particular avatar exists. Of important note, and certainly relevant to my field of sociology, is that people can and do fabricate identities that may be quite unlike their real face to face identities they present in the ‘real’ world of social interaction.

In any case, my hope for the future is that technology and specifically online personalities and identities can serve as a force to mitigate toxic othering and not to enhance it. Only those with an accurate crystal ball can know for sure what the future holds in terms of how technology may impact social interaction and hence the forces which perpetuate oppression and marginalization. Being aware of one’s status array and how privileging forces are everywhere and impacting every human is difficult but important work. It is the work of those fighting for social justice and this work will become even harder in the future.

My journey in using critical Hydra theory (CHT) and understanding toxic othering began with the observation that no human is inherently better than any other human. Working for a more just world where we all contribute to social conditions which preserve “…the inherent dignity … [and]  the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family…” is my goal and I hope that it is yours as well.

---

¹Elsewhere I detail my status array in a positionality statement. I lived in abject poverty all during my formative years and felt constant marginalization from peers, teachers, and society in general. It is from these memories comes the genesis of my quest for social justice, a relief from toxic othering.

Sociology, critical Hydra theory, and social justice: online teaching with Azizul Hoque

Leading an online class for refugees
I talk several times per week with my Bangladeshi colleague Azizul Hoque, an education specialist with the BRAC University Centre for Peace and Justice (CPJ) based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We have been working together since the spring of 2021 when we began working on an online sociology and social justice course which combined Bangladeshi learners and Rohingya refugees. Our ten week course was a success and culminated in a virtual ceremony attended by all the learners and with a special guest appearance from (CPJ Executive Director Manzoor Hasan. I wrote a good deal about this experience on this blog. See here, here, and here for just a few examples.

Azizul and I have worked together on the curricula for an online course he is currently leading that has learners from both Kenya and Bangladesh, refugees all. This course is part of the Refugee Higher Education Access Program (RhEAP), a joint initiative by Bard College, the University of Arizona, Princeton Global History Lab, and the Open Society University (OSUN).

Azizul and I talk several times each week and I have been asked to contribute some videos as part of his class. The learners have watched these videos (and others I have done for the previous courses Azizul and I have co-taught). The most recent videos and the script for each appear below.

 

No human is more human than any other human
At the very beginning of the course I was asked to frame out the basic premise of the course. I fixed my response to the the words that appear in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights so aptly summarized by Maya Angelou who said, “No human being can be more human than another human being.” With this fundamental truth asserted, addressing privileging forces than marginalize so many becomes imperative.

[Here is the video version.]

The most fundamental assumption guiding any examination of humanity is that no human is more human than any other human. That is to say, though there will be cultural differences across the globe we are all one human family. Although there is a tendency to look down on those that are different from you -in sociology we call that ethnocentrism- a true social scientist remembers that human diversity is just people in different parts of the world trying to make a life for themselves.

In sociology, we talk about the idea of a functional alternative. For example, English is one language that we can speak in, but if we are all speaking, for example, Arabic, we could all still communicate: one language is the functional alternative of the other. Neither language is right or wrong, it just serves the function of allowing humans to communicate with each other.

Just as it is with language, the same is true for many other cultural practices. Though ways of living may be different in various parts of the world, these differences are only on the surface; these norms and practices are all serving common human needs. Another example is clothing. Although some people around the world wear very different clothing, these garments serve the same function, they protect people from the elements, and also project certain cultural aesthetic values.

So let me repeat, the basic assumption that we always must remember is that no human is better than any other human, and that when we treat others poorly, marginalize them, or discriminate against them, we are engaging in the practice of what I call ‘toxic othering.’

One useful way to explain this is to quote the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who when talking with some local Javanese, asked them about why the Javanese in the adjacent valley did things differently than them, and the locals said, simply ‘other fields other grasshoppers.’ This is a perfect statement of what we call cultural relativity, that is when one culture is different from another culture, but it is seen as just that, different but not better, eliminating any justification or motivation for ‘toxic othering’ which underlies all ethnocentrism.

 

The gap between the real and the ideal
In response to the “No human is more human than any other human” video one of the learners asked, “Why are human needs to unequally met around the world?”  I used this question to address the chronic issue of the gap between the aspirational documents -like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights- and the life that is experienced by so many around the world, especially in the majority world (aka the ‘Global South’).

[Here is the video link.]

One learner asked, “Why are human needs so unequally met around the world?”
 
What you are questioning is the gap between what you read in the Declaration of Human Rights and what you are experiencing as an individual. You are making a very important and every critical point about the nature of our social world, namely that there are vast inequalities in how people experience life. Though we are all human, some humans live far more privileged lives than others. Understanding why this is true takes us into the heart of sociology and social justice studies.
 
Let me offer some analytical tools as well as some questions of my own.
 
In sociology, we use the terms, ideal culture and real culture. Real culture is how things are and ideal culture is how we want things to be. Unfortunately, there is always a gap between the ‘is’ in the ‘ought’, between how things are, and how things should be.
 
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a very aspirational document, describing how the world should be, filled with dignity. The hope was that these humanitarian principles would be adopted and embraced by nations around the world. The fact that they were not fully adopted in far too many places in the world is an absolute -and sad- social fact.
 
The living conditions for people in refugee camps, for example, in terms of basic human rights like the provision of education, healthcare, proper food and shelter, and so on is very far from where it should be. The gap between the real culture and ideal culture is vast.
 
As sociologists we have many questions about this unjust reality. Here are just a few:
·      Who does this gap benefit?
·      Who is most impacted by this gap?
·      What social forces created this gap?

 
What we know is that all through history there are many privileging forces that impact peoples lives. Among these are racism, classism, sexism, colonialism, and more. These forces creating privilege for a few and oppression for most have driven the gap between the ideal culture what is stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the real culture what is actually happening all over the world, especially in certain areas of sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and even within my own country, the United States. Our quest must be to understand the nature of this gap and how to confront this gap in the most productive way possible. We must examine the source of these privileging forces and the toxic othering they encourage. The first step is doing what you have done, namely asking questions, and, ultimately demanding answers. 

The normalization of marginalization
I was both touched and challenged by a question from a learner in Kenya. She asks why some people treat others poorly. My first response was to send in the chat a quotation that has resonated with me over the years. Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said long ago that,

“(T)he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years…. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” 

There is truth in his statement, and so the question becomes ‘how do social conditions sometimes engender hatred, how does treating people poorly become tolerated behavior?’ My response to the learner dovetails with my thoughts on how toxic othering in its many Hydra-headed forms has become woven so deeply into all modern human cultures.

 

[Here is the video version.]

A female refugee learner in Kenya asked “What can be the reasons that make some people treat others poorly?  What can we benefit from treating others poorly?”
 
This is a profound -and profoundly important- question.
 
This question is also at the heart of critical Hydra theory. Another way of phrasing what the learner is asking is ‘why does marginalization exist’? Why do people do things which diminish, tear down, or control others?
 
Marginalization happens when some people in a culture have privileged statuses that allow and even encourage them to treat those with lower, unprivileged statuses poorly.
 
The question of how social norms, policies, and even laws allowing marginalization have been normalized into the behaviors and customs of a culture is central to understanding critical Hydra theory. The learner’s question can now be rephrased, “How is it that treating others poorly becomes accepted by a community?”
 
Normalization happens over a long period of time, and I have been calling it the normalization of marginalization. Normalizing means that behavior is just accepted. One example is the unequal and -many would argue- unjust treatment of girls and women all over the modern world. Thousands of years ago, long before modern society, this kind of mistreatment of females was not normal. In ancient societies before we had agriculture it was not common or accepted for one gender to dominate the other. Over time during the transition to modern society there was a slow normalization of the marginalization of women. Slowly treating females as less than males became “just how things are“.  
 
Other kinds of behaviors, based on privileged statuses, also became normalized. The normalization of the marginalization of the poor, for example, didn’t happen of all at once, but rather over a long period of time, until now, when we see some people living outrageously privileged lives this is ‘just the way things are’, or normal.  
 
Why do some people treat others poorly and what do they get out of it?
 
They get a twisted sense of superiority based on toxic and incorrect assumptions about the differences between one group and another, denying the basic fact that no human is more human than other humans. The normalization of marginalization is at the root of all toxic othering and thus all social injustices around the world.

Azizul had the learners watch my video but in our WhatsApp chat he offered some very insightful thoughts.

“My understanding of the question is very close to your thoughts. You have explained how socially dominant groups/oppressors normalize the marginalization of people from different ethnic or religious communities. Based on their narrow perspective of underprivileged people, these social elites create structural barriers. They formulate laws to secure their own interest and justify their misdeeds through that ethnocentric mindset. The maltreatment of the poor has been a legacy of the social elite generation after generation.

People who feel insecure or threatened by others may treat them poorly as a way to assert dominance or control over them. Due to a lack of empathy, some people may have difficulty understanding or caring about the feelings of others, which can lead to insensitive or hurtful behaviour.

As for the question of what someone can benefit from treating others poorly, it’s important to note that there is no real long-term benefit to such behaviour. While someone might feel temporarily powerful or in control, mistreating others ultimately damages relationships and can lead to a negative reputation. Treating others with kindness and respect, on the other hand, can foster positive relationships, build trust, and lead to better outcomes in both personal and professional settings.

[Those with] power or privilege seek to maintain their dominance over others. This can lead to the exclusion or marginalization of those who are seen as less powerful or influential.

Overall, the root causes of marginalization and belittlement are complex and multifaceted. Addressing these issues requires a willingness to understand and address the underlying attitudes and beliefs that contribute to harmful behavior, as well as a commitment to promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity.”

More to come
This online course supported by the RhEAP initiative moves forward, and I expect that Azizul and I will continue our collaboration. Providing learner-based tertiary education to refugees is a small step forward in reaching the UNHCR Education 2030: A Strategy for Refugee Education goal of “Raising the level of refugee participation in higher education from 3% to 15% over the next ten years… .” This goal is accomplished one class at a time, using the lessons learned through each class to find ways to overcome the many challenges faced by both the refugees and the organizations like CPJ and OSUN to make this learning happen. May we all continue to support each other toward this goal.

I will likely write another post in the coming weeks describing our experiences completing this course. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments please email me at arcaro@elon.edu.

 

 

 

 

Status array exercise using the Hydra model

[Trigger warning: Inherent in the nature of the material covered in this post are topics and exercises which may be triggering.]

[Updated 3-6-24]

Introduction
As with all of the exercises designed to explore critical Hydra theory (CHT) there needs to be a skilled facilitator to guide participants through each step, clarify definitions and usages of words, and insure all aspects of each step are explored thoroughly.

Exploring and understanding your status set though the lens of the Hydra model starts with a quick and simple status count and, using some basic tools from sociology, ends up by discussing the concept of master status. The exercise below will be helpful in understanding the concept of positionality discussed here.

This exercise must be seen as the beginning of many discussions about power, privilege, and status arrays and as part of a larger and even more robust discussion using the basic tenets of critical Hydra theory. This exercise is raises a very relevant and timely question, namely how does understanding one’s status array contribute to a greater understanding of the need for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) initiatives within your school or workplace and in your culture generally?

Before beginning this exercise it is important to note the distinction between primary and secondary groups. Primary groups are characterized by an emotional intimacy, and the most obvious example is the family. Secondary groups are more affectively distanced and are instrumentally based, such as in a committee meeting. This exercise is geared toward only secondary group membership.

Step One 1: A Binary look
Look at the heads of the Hydra. Each represents a significant privileging force driven by the process of toxic othering, creating and maintaining the marginalization of those who are the victims of othering. Moving from left to right give yourself a 1 or 0 based on how you believe you are viewed by others. The top score you can get is an eight. Here’s how it would look: by being male, white, from the ‘Global north’, a cis heterosexual, upper class, fully able, neither very young nor old, and a human you have all ‘1’s’; these statuses are given higher status not just in the US but globally. The lowest score possible is a 1, and would be, for example, a female, BIPOC, from the ‘Global south’, trans/queer, poor, not able in some or many ways, and very young or old. Anyone doing this exercise is human and thus scores a ‘1’ on the anthropocentrism head.

After determining your score, think about those around you or that you encounter during the day. What would their scores be in relation to yours? At this point we need to distinguish between one’s lived status array and their apparent status array. Many heads on the Hydra can be hidden, for example sexuality or disability. One’s apparent score may differ by as many as several points from their lived array. For example, one many present as a able bodied, heterosexual/cis person (that is their apparent status), getting 1’s on those two heads of the Hydra, when in reality they may be severely emotionally compromised and also be non-hetreorsexual/trans person), giving them 0’s on those heads,  that is their lived status array may be lower.

Step Two: Beyond the binary
Virtually anyone asked to do the first step of this status set exercise will reject immediately the assumption that most (or all) of these heads of the Hydra is best seen as binary.

In this step you are to explore each privileging force and describe how the ‘1 or 0′ scoring can be replaced by a much more nuanced discussion of each privileging force. For example, beginning with the first head “Patriarchy’ which infers a gender binary. This dated understanding of gender is now largely viewed as being overly simplistic and inaccurate. Considering at all of the heads of the Hydra, instead of a binary we must now see a range or a continuum. All the other heads can be similarly critiqued in short order except perhaps the last one, Anthropocentrism, since we are all human and enjoy the privileges brought on by our systemic ‘othering’ of non-human life forms.

As part of your discussion exposing the overly simplistic binary, consider these questions:

• • What are the ends of each continuum and what are the intermediate statuses?
  • What historical forces have helped define and shape each continuum?
  • How have these continua changed over time?

    

  • How do these continua vary cross-culturally?
  • In what other ways can we critique seeing any of these privileging forces as a binary?

The example of Race in America displayed to the right is a good example of what can to done with all of the heads. See here for how my past students responded to this challenge.

For those wanting to maintain the theme of giving a number to each head, each can now become a number 1-10, with the top total number being an 80. In the race example ‘Asians’ might be a ‘5’ instead of a 1 or a zero. Taking this step will facilitate arriving at a total score for each individual. Of course, discussions around these number assignments can lead to robust discussions about how and why each was assigned this new fraction.

Step Three: Exploring one’s ‘status array’
When talking about statuses sociologists typically separate them into two buckets. Those which are projected upon us by the society in which we are born and live are called ascribed. The ones which we earn or otherwise acquire over time are called achieved. Just a few examples of achieved status include educational degrees, elected leadership positions, jobs and job promotions, getting married, or testing positive for Covid-19. The term ‘status array’ can be used to describe any one person, combining all their ascribed and achieved statuses. One’s status array is the major factor establishing one’s positionality. One key factor is that the importance of each head of the Hydra varies from context to context. Understanding the nature of this variability both in terms of oneself and in terms of status groups is key to effectively using CHT.

Just as we critiqued the binary implied in Step One of this exercise, we must also question the ‘ascribed/achieved’ binary. For example, social class begins as an ascribed status but as one reaches adulthood it becomes at least in part an achieved status. A second very important example is religion. Is religion ascribed or achieved? The answer to that questions is clearly culturally bound, and the answer may be quite different in the US as compared to, for example, Bangladesh.

As part of your discussion on ascribed and achieved statuses consider these questions:

• The eight heads of the Hydra represent different major ascribed statues, but are there other ascribed statuses that hold a similar level of importance? That is, should there be other heads on the Hydra model in order to make it more inclusive?
• Should the Hydra model be culturally specific or can these privileging forces be seen as universal across all contemporary cultures?
• Examples of other ascribed statues include being an atheist, our culturally defined degree of physical attractiveness, and our skin tone. What other ascribed statues could we include?
• To what extent can achieved statuses (such as education) override the salience of one’s array of ascribed statuses?
• Under what circumstances and in what situations do one’s achieved statuses become more important than ascribed statuses?
• As one goes through different stages of life, how does their status array vary?
• How does awareness of one’s status array deepen an understanding of one’s positionality?

Each of the questions above merits an extended, deep, and competently facilitated discussion. There are no ‘right’ answers; the goal is to apply critical Hydra theory (CHT) and interrogate the nature of all privileging forces, the intersectionality between these forces, and how they impact our lives both individually and as interacting forces.

Step four: Master status
A person’s master status is what people first see about you when entering a new social setting. What people see when they see us is for the most part out of our control. We all engage in impression management, but some of our ascribed statuses stand out nonetheless. Understanding master status means recognizing that situationally one component of our status set may rise above both the other ascribed statuses and even our ascribed statuses. Here are some examples.

• When a Boston born American African-American female humanitarian worker with World Vision gets off the plane in Wajir, Kenya to do work in the Dadaab Refugee Complex, her initial master status, i.e., the one most salient to the refugees looking at her as she deplanes, is that she is from the Global north, an American.
• When a male walks unannounced into a women’s athletic locker room his master status is his apparent gender identity, not his age, race, class, or other ascribed status.
• When a 7 foot person walks into a room her/his physical stature is initially the most salient feature noticed by those present.

Here are some questions concerning master status:

• Statuses can have varying levels of salience depending upon the social setting. In socially homogeneous settings where one’s status set is similar to all others present, how can more nuanced differences become important?
• In a secondary group situation where people are relative strangers to each other how long does master status stay relevant? At what point do people begin seeing a more multi dimensional picture of identities, i.e., see beyond surface appearances?
• In any new social setting what are some ways and/or various achieved statuses can override any ascribed status set?
• Give a personal example where you were aware that you were being interacted with based on your master status. How did this situation make you feel?
• To what extent do you sense either micro aggressions or micro affirmations based on your master status? See here for a detailed (and personal) exploration of examining the concepts of both privilege and marginalization.

Step five: Life chances and your status set
Our ascribed statuses, as represented by our position vis-a-vis each head of the Hydra, have a massive effect on our lives. Our ‘life chances‘, a term coined by German sociologist Max Weber, are the many probabilistic factors impacting our lifelong journey as a social being. Our life chances are heavily influenced -some would say determined- by our status set. Our secondary group interactions typically begin with being seen in terms of our master status and then more so by our entire status set, both ascribed and achieved. Accurately assessing one’s status set helps provide the insight for understanding the status set of others with whom you interact, especially in secondary groups. Otherwise stated, sensitivity of the nuances of one’s own status set promotes a deeper empathy when interacting with others.

So, key questions for discussion would include:

• To what extent have your life chances been impacted by your status array? Which ascribed status seems most important in determining your life thus far? Which ascribed status seems least important in determining your life thus far?
• How you you image your future life chances will be influenced by your status array? Which ascribed status do you predict will be most important in determining your future life chances? Which ascribed status do you predict will be least important in determining your future life chances?
• Looking beyond your own status array and now out at those around you, what questions can you begin to raise about the life chances of those with marginalized master statuses and/or overall marginalized status sets?

Final questions
This post began with a trigger warning, and for good reason. Done in a mixed setting, this exercise shines a spotlight on status differences, especially in Step one where individuals in a group might share their scores. Here are some relevant questions:

• How does it feel to be a ‘4’ or ‘5’ in a roomful of ‘7’s’ and ‘8’s’?
• How does it feel to be a ‘7’ or ‘8’ in a roomful of ‘4’s and ‘5’s?
• In a discussion setting does this exercise make it likely that a person may feel a need to ‘out’ themself in some way in order to explain their status score?
• How can a skilled facilitator navigate this question in a way that raises more awareness than bad feelings?
• Should this exercise be done only in homogeneous groups (all ‘4’s’ or ‘5’s’ or all ‘7’s’ and ‘8’s’)?

Throughout all steps of the exercise there are ample times when potentially sensitive or triggering issues are discussed, and the danger exists that comments and questions of a triggering nature are raised organically.

Understanding one’s status array is not easy or painless for some. Talking about one’s status set inn a mixed setting can be awkward and even traumatizing. Exploring the questions above may provide some direction moving forward with this and other Hydra-related exercises.

 

 

 

[Updated 8-7-23]

Confronting toxic othering exercise

‘…the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…     

-from the first sentence of the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

 

[Note: This exercise is an example of how to employ critical Hydra theory (CHT). For additional context the reader is invited to explore various other posts on this blog.]

Overview
This exercise builds on the insights and methodologies of Critical Race Theory (CRT). The purpose of this exercise is to generate examples of how toxic othering has been confronted at all levels, local, national, and global. One of the most important wisdom‘s from CRT is that we must interrogate the history of racism and how racist ideologies have been entrenched into laws, policies, norms, and general expectations of behavior. In CRT there is a specific emphasis on examining systemic and legally buttressed racism, partly represented by what sociologists have long called ‘institutional racism.’

CHT looks at all ways in which the normalization of marginalization has infected cultural systems. The ‘normalization of marginalization’ is synonymous with the process of toxic othering. This exercise is intended to raise awareness as to how this normalization has taken place and to celebrate the process of calling out and denormalizing marginalization.

In the application of critical Hydra theory (CHT) we use exactly the same logic paying attention to all the other privileging forces; all heads of the Hydra are the products of toxic othering where those in power have normalized and in many instances formalized the marginalization of those groups being othered. This exercise employs the methodologies and insights of critical race theory to apply to all of the remaining privileging forces.

One intended outcome of this exercise is that those participating will be energized discovering and detailing progress made. One critical question is whether the gains represented by new or changed laws and policies made relative to one privileging force be used to explore similar changes relative to other privileging forces. In any case, a deep awareness of how these forces have been woven into the fabric of the culture is very important.

Step one: Examples of confronting toxic othering
The social injustices created by all of the privileging forces rarely just appear ‘out of thin air’; they are typically the product of many incremental actions ranging from simple micro aggressions to sweeping policies and laws. The fight against manifestations of toxic othering is similarly incremental and is often represented by small victories.

With the goal of being as thorough as possible, research how each privileging force has been confronted both recently and in the past at all three levels, namely local, national, and global. Populate the table below (or a table of your own construction) with examples, giving as many as you can find. Make sure to include both major, headline making changes and those which may seem more modest. Find examples of changes in norms, policies, or laws which have helped ‘confront toxic othering’ in each of the privileging forces. This exercise has several goals including

• to provide the student/learner with an opportunity to hone their research skills;
• to raise the awareness of there many positive actions that are taking place;
• to create a database of examples which may inspire others to act.

Pedagogical note: This exercise works well breaking the class down into teams assigned to just one of the privileging forces.

Privileging forces	Recent-local	Past-local	Recent-national	Past-national	Recent-global	Past-global
Patriarchy
Race/Ethnicity
Colonialism/paternalism
Hetero/cisnormativity
Classism
Ableism
Ageism
Anthropocentrism

Below is an example using patriarchy. See here for more examples from my students.

Patriarchy

Local recent: Gov. Cooper Executive Order 93 attacking gender wage gap (2019)

Local past: Isabella Cannon became first female mayor of a major NC city (Raleigh) in 1977

National recent: 2017 Women’s March in Wasington, DC broke record for largest one-day protest for women’s rights in US history

National past: First women’s rights convention- Seneca Falls, NY, 1848

Global recent: Women were granted the right to drive a vehicle in Saudi Arabia in July 2018

Global past: Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women held in 1979

This exercise clearly demands a good deal of time and seems ready-made for group work. The overall idea would need to be discussed and clarified and teams formed to tackle, for example, one privileging force.

An alternate approach
Another approach to organizing the grid, for example in the case of humanitarian workers, an alternate grid could include personal, organization, and sector wide actions and changes made both past and presernt.

Privileging forces	Personal, past and present	Organizationally, past and present	Sector-wide, past and present
Patriarchy
Race/ethnicity
Colonialism/paternalism
Hetero/cisnormativity
Classism
Ableism
Ageism
Anthropocentrism

Step two: More questions
Below is a suggestive list of questions to explore after a good number of examples have been generated. Each of these questions can easily turn into a long discussion; that indeed is the intent. Focusing on one head of the Hydra at a time may seem limiting but it may be more useful to go one by one before making attempts at outlining the many connections between these privileging forces.

• What person, group, or organization was behind the efforts making possible the examples you researched? What forms of social action were employed?
• What push back was there from those in power against the various examples? What form did this push back come in and was violence ever used as a weapon?
• Were there ‘champions’ or leaders that emerged during the struggle to implement the change? If so, how did they lead and motivate others?
• What trends or patterns can you see that explains the success of these changes?
• What was the time frame in which these changes happened and what factors most impacted the rate of progress?
• For which privileging force was it most difficult to generate examples? Why do you think this is so?
• For which privileging force was it easiest to generate examples? Why do you think this is so?
• To what extent did you find that some examples bridged more than one privileging force? Give examples of these instances.
• To what extent did you find that the policy or law change addressing one privileging force led to interest in pushing for change against another privileging force?
• How can we better understand intersectional connections through a deep analysis of confronting toxic othering efforts overall?

Step three: Set backs
Every move forward is typically mirrored by a move backward; social change is rarely linear and without repeated and frustrating setbacks. As a follow up exercise, populate the same table with various changes in law, policy, and norms that have set back progress toward confronting toxic othering relative to each privileging force. Using the same list of questions found in Step two, take a deep dive into these examples of ‘supporting toxic othering’ and attempt to identify patterns.

One obvious and important pattern is that the local, national, and global social forces which appear to support toxic othering are inherently politically driven. Becoming more extreme and politicized over the last decade, the US provides ample examples where changes that confront toxic othering are labeled as ‘liberal’ and those that maintain or further support the status quo seen as ‘conservative.’ One dramatic example is the controversy regarding US Supreme Court decisions which have undercut Roe v Wade, largely applauded by the far right. So, after examining ‘set backs’ more questions arise.

• • Is social change which confronts toxic othering always a matter of politics?
  • Is the politicization of social change which confronts toxic othering more true now than it was in the past?
  • In the United States to what extent does the rise of Christian nationalism exasperate the politicization of social change which confronts toxic othering?

Step four: Bringing it all together
The steps above force us to directly address questions about social change. Talking about privilege, privileging forces, and how these forces of systemic marginalization are woven into various social, political, and legal structures can be inherently frustrating due to all of the factors which must be considered. Indeed, much has been written about how to address each of the privileging forces represented by the heads of the Hydra, and any work that students/learners do individually or as part of a group must be seen as only a beginning to more extensive discussions.

This ‘confronting toxic othering’ exercise is intended for students/learners most, presumably, in secondary or tertiary  educational institutions and will be useful in deepening the understanding of various Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. As a final question for this exercise explore how your school, university, for workplace has responded to the DEI mandate.

Confronting toxic othering has been the task of all those who believe in “…the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family…” and the fight for inclusive social justice and a world free from all avatars of oppression. By doing this exercise you have joined others in this noble quest.

 

 

 

‘…the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…     

-from the first sentence of the Preamble to the 1948  Universal Declaration of Human Rights

[Updated 3-16-23]

[Trigger warning: Inherent in the nature of the material covered in this post are topics and exercises which may be triggering.]

Positionality and the Hydra
In my continuing journey to expand on what I have been calling ‘critical Hydra theory’ and to better understand privileging forces I have been thinking a good deal about positionality. Dimensions of our identity influence how we both see and are seen by others. This exercise is a companion to and should be done after exploring one’s status array.

Positionality can be defined as

“… the social and political context that creates our identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status. Positionality also describes how your identity influences, and potentially biases, your understanding of and outlook on the world. Positionality asks people to understand and describe how gender and other identity markers [your status array] inform how we see the world around us.”

Though I agree completely with the wording in the above definition, I would expand it to include our entire status array including both ascribed and achieved statuses. I would also include understanding positionality is an absolutely essential step for effectively understanding and using critical Hydra theory on a personal level.

Here is my personal positionality statement which I have begun putting on all my course syllabi.

Personal positionality statement
I am a cisgendered, heterosexual, middle class, able (well, mostly), older white male, from and living in the global north (aka ‘too pale, too stale, too male’). But I am also a lifelong credentialed sociologist and student of power and how socially created, defined, and maintained power differences help create and sustain privileging social forces. I am still learning and growing, always striving to use my sociological perspective to increase both my self-awareness and my grasp of how privileging forces both historically and currently serve to marginalize those who are victims of toxic othering. Standing with Paulo Friere, my efforts are to understand oppression in its many forms, especially within my own behavior. My ongoing quest is to recognize, address, and confront how my (mostly privileged) ascribed statuses have impacted my life, perspectives, and interactions with others. Seeking to more fully understand my positionality, I make myself a student of thinkers and activists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, John Lewis, Cornel West, and Angela Davis. I embrace this never-ending journey and know that I am not now -nor ever will be- completely free of all biases. As I move forward, feedback from you, my students, is critically important. I will accept this feedback with grace and my hope is this is the spirit in which it will be given. My we be a positive part of each other’s growth.

All humans have socially constructed status arrays that are comprised of both ascribed (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender, age) and achieved statuses (e.g., education, marital status) which change over time and from context to context. According to the Hydra model, our most salient ascribed statuses include gender/gender identity, race/ethnicity, colonial status, sexuality, social class, ability (including physical, mental, and cognitive), age, and our status as humans.

We are a social species, largely defined by the cultural milieus in which we developed our sense of self and in which we currently work and live. Social status is just that, a status defined by our society; self and society are two heads of the same coin.

In my classical theory class each fall I spend some time on G.H. Mead’s ‘Mind, Self, and Society‘, the  canonical work in the study of the interaction between self and society. In this work Mead talks about ‘taking the role of the other’, putting oneself in the position of the other and hence reflecting some degree of empathy. Awareness of one’s positionality, I believe, is an exercise in reflecting on our personal understanding of how we are socially created and sustained beings. This self awareness comes though constantly ‘taking the role of the other’. Importantly, this process of empathy also allows us to sense the positionality of those with whom we are interacting. That empathy is part of human nature perhaps explains the existence of a ‘Golden Rule’ ethos in virtually all world religions and thought systems.

Extending the concept of ‘taking the role of the other’, one of Mead’s colleagues, George H. Cooley, coined the phrase ‘looking-glass self’. He argues that at least in part one’s self identity comes from:

(1) imagining what others see when they see you,
(2) imagining how they evaluate or judge what they see when they see you, and
(3) incorporating these observations into one’s sense of self.

This ‘looking glass’ process supports the argument that self and society (those around us) are experientially connected. One hurdle is fully understanding this idea is that we tend to think of our self identity as more or less fixed and totally under our control. It is not. The sociologist Erving Goffman put it this way, “This special kind of institutional arrangement does not so much support the self as constitute it.” Though he was referring specifically to self identity within total institutions, his fundamental premise rings true.

Empathy is not unique to humans. We know from both human and non-human behavioral studies the level of empathetic capacity displayed by one individual can vary a good deal from others. Like many inherited traits (think height or intelligence), research evidence indicates that the capacity for empathy varies along a bell curve with most people within one standard deviation from the norm but with some two or more standard deviations from this norm; some people have an innately higher capacity for empathy, some, just the opposite, have a lower capacity for empathy. The cultures in which our minds develop do impact our behavior in terms of empathy, and tend to positively reinforce displays of empathy, though this is highly variable from one culture to the next. Indeed, human behavior can best be understood by looking at the complex interplay between our biology (‘human nature’) and cultural learning (‘nurture’).

A brother of my own blood
Late in the summer of 2022 I attended my Covid-delayed 50th (+2) high school reunion. Of the items on display at our dinner event were copies of ‘Potpourri‘, our high school’s yearly literary magazine. In the edition published during my sophomore year, 1968, I found a short writing of mine I had long forgotten. I discovered what amounts to a ‘positionality’ statement from over five decades ago. As a 15 year old raised in northeastern Ohio in the 1960’s, here were my thoughts:

Sadly, the pace of social change is at times glacial, and minus the dated language, what I wrote in 1968 reflects almost exactly my thoughts now in 2023. The county where I live in North Carolina still has a Confederate monument on the courthouse square.

I include this personal example to illustrate the point I made above, namely that we all ‘take the role of the other’ in most social encounters and are aware, at least at a subconscious level, of our positionality almost constantly. What I assumed in that moment was that what the other person (the “Negro”) saw was a white person and had every reason to believe that this white person was racist and hence felt superior, tending to marginalize him with any manner of subtle or not-so-subtle verbal or non-verbal communication. As it was in 1968 it still is now in 2023. Truly sad.

More notes on positionality
The Hydra model can be a useful tool when attempting to think and act more mindfully in a world characterized by the systemic marginalization of so many populations in every corner of the globe. Peace building and working for social justice go hand in hand.

Those who are aware of their own positionality and the privileging forces at play in their daily lives will be better equipped to integrate positive humanitarian and humanistic principles into their own lives. More deeply reflective and self aware individuals will thus be directly addressing and even confronting the many forms of toxic othering which fuel privileging forces and permeate virtually every social encounter.

An exercise
Here is an exercise intended to introduce the concept of positionality.

Describe your position within your family. How many siblings? What are their ages and genders? How many generations are in the household? You have a unique position within your family and it influences how you act and how others in your family interact with you. Most people would not speak in the same way to a parent as they would to a younger sibling of the opposite gender, for example. Though they may not think about it consciously, everyone is keenly aware of their positionality within their family and act accordingly.

Just as you are aware of your positionality within the context of your family, we all need to be aware of our positionality vis-a-vis co-workers, for example, and in all our social encounters. As discussed above, all humans have the capacity for empathy and just other capacities this varies within any human population; some people are more empathetic than others. Empathy leads to an awareness of one’s positionality in the work setting, and, just as in the family, this happens naturally, but typically not explicitly or even consciously.

A general principle of positionality awareness is that those who are in the status inferior (i.e., marginalized) positions tend to be more aware of their positionality than those in status superior positions. For example, in many workplace settings females tend to be very aware of misogynic or sexist behaviors while at the same time most males will be oblivious.

Awareness of one’s positionality allows for a greater awareness about how we may be engaging in behavior which marginalizes others and/or how our own behavior may have the impact of marginalizing others. Microaggressions are for the most part subtle but can have a huge impact on those being marginalized. An effective advocate for social justice is one who is sensitive to microaggressions and/or other acts of marginalization both as the victim and the perpetrator.

Critically important to understand is that in mixed social settings it is very likely that an individual can be both an oppressor and a victim of oppression. For example, a BIPOC male can be committing microaggressions toward females in the room when simultaneously having microaggressions being directed at him by non-BIPOC persons present. Being a good ally means constant vigilance regarding one’s status array and positionality and acting in a proactive manner to address all instances where marginalizing behavior is exhibited, both by oneself and others present.

Here are some questions to discuss:

• How does your positionality change from setting to setting during a typical day? For example, how does your status array compare with others in your work/school environment? On public transportation and other settings where you are anonymous? At home or in your neighborhood?
• What kinds of settings make you more aware of your positionality and status array? How does this awareness impact (if at all) your behavior?
• To what extent do you find yourself making an effort to be aware of other’s positionality and status arrays? What changes in behavior do you make (if any) as your awareness of your relative positionaliity increases?
• To what extent do the power and privilege ascribed to some statuses play a role in how you interact with others?
• Perhaps more relevant to school or work settings, to what to what extent does physical appearance or ‘pretty privilege’ play a role in social interaction?

As a final phase of this exercise, and after having done the status array exercise, each individual can be asked to write their own positionality statement.

Additional thoughts about positionality and social justice
Intersectionality, a term coined by and popularized by American legal scholar Kimberlé Crewshaw, must also be considered when raising one’s awareness of their status array and positionality. Crenshaw first used the term to describe the interaction between race and gender, but in her more recent writings she has stressed that all of our ascribed social statuses intersect as well (e.g., race and class, class and gender, etc.). The voices of those who are multiply marginalized are the best source for understanding this multi-layered intersectionality.

In the words of American author Ijeoma Oluo,

“The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself.”

Using the tool of critical Hydra theory (CHT), it may be useful to expand Oluo’s statement to include all of the toxic othering ‘isms’ including (but not limited to) sexism, colorism, homo/transphobia, classism, ageism, ableism, paternalism, colonialism, and so on. Consider replacing the word ‘anti-racism’ in Oluo’s statement with, for example, sexism or classism. Indeed, replace ‘anti-racism’ with any of the privileging forces represented by the heads of the Hydra.

The reality is that frequently we are both the oppressed and the oppressor, even in the same social situation. It is key to remember that we must fight oppression and marginalization as social forces and avoid focusing all our energies demonizing a specific ‘other’ who may be perpetuating a specific type of oppression. Our efforts should always be focused on addressing any false consciousness we may have (in other writing I refer to this as ‘baked in’ biases) and working to be anti-racist and ‘anti’ all of the other ‘isms’ mentioned above. One’s positionality fully considered always means understanding and addressing relevant forces of oppression at play in each social interaction, especially when asymmetries of power are a major factor.

Stated differently, using critical Hydra theory demands that we interrogate our past learning which has taught us how to be oppressed and also to oppress others. This is not an easy step, but it is one which might be facilitated by reading the words of Paulo Freire in his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In summarizing perhaps the main point of Friere’s cannonical book, researcher Anton Treuer says,

“Essentially what Freire has to say is that all forms of oppression have a pedagogy, a way by which we are all instructed and enculturated to accept and participate in dealing out the oppression and then receiving it, and often both.  And he says because there’s actually a pedagogy for oppression there needs to be a pedagogy for the oppressed, a way to bring us into liberation.”

He goes on to add,

“So here are a couple of the really important things that I learned from Paulo Freire’s work. One is that oppression in all of its forms is complex and insidious and all of us– no matter how advantaged or disadvantaged we think we are– we all participate in the oppression.”

Listen to Friere himself,

‘Although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressor and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle.” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 47) 

The complicated and sometime treacherous journey toward social justice begins with greater self-awareness and has the ultimate goal of humanity’s liberation from all forms of oppression.

As humanity goes deeper into the 21st-century, the idea of most people having virtual identities and hence virtual status arrays has become a reality. We face a very uncertain future in terms of how the coming ‘metaverse’ will impact all of us regarding the various privileging forces and the process of toxic othering. One’s online presence is clearly a sophisticated product of impression management where an individual highlights typically or situationally positive aspects and dimensions of their social status and downplays others. This is an attempt to get a favorable relative positionality in whatever virtual social setting in which this person’s particular avatar exists. Of important note, and certainly relevant to my field of sociology, is that people can and do fabricate identities that may be quite unlike their real face to face identities they present in the ‘real’ world of social interaction.

In any case, my hope for the future is that technology and specifically online personalities and identities can serve as a force to mitigate toxic othering and not to enhance it. Only those with an accurate crystal ball can know for sure what the future holds in terms of how technology may impact social interaction and hence the forces which perpetuate oppression and marginalization. Being aware of one’s status array and how privileging forces are everywhere and impacting every human is difficult but important work. It is the work of those fighting for social justice.

My journey in using critical Hydra theory (CHT) and understanding toxic othering began with the observation that no human is inherently better than any other human. Working for a more just world where we all contribute to social conditions which preserve “…the inherent dignity … [and]  the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family…” is my goal and I hope that it is yours as well.

 

“The problem of the poor is not the problem, the problem is the rich.”

-Miles Richardson

 

[Note: This and other posts will become part of a revised edition of Confronting Toxic Othering]

Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness and critical Hydra theory

More on critical Hydra theory
My quest to more fully understand the genealogy of privileging forces continues, and below I present my less-than-optimistic view on why confronting toxic othering and systemic marginalization is perhaps a Sisyphean task. In brief, an ethos of privilege -based on gender, class, race, religion, i.e, that some people are inherently superior to others- permeates all cultures at such a deep level that world-wide change may be impossible.

Common Reading
Not unlike many other educational institutions, every year my university assigns a common reading intended for all incoming students. The expectation is that ideas presented in this book will be talked about in a wide array of classes. Faculty are provided copies of the reading well in advance, and so I received -and have now read- this year’s reading. Factfullness by TED star Hans Rosling is not a hard read, though I found his repetitive style mildly annoying.

Reviews of this book tend to be positive, even from the development wonks at  OXFAM. However, none of the reviews I have been able to read address his core assumption, namely that we are ‘wired’ to think the way we do. We are  often wrong about world facts, Rosling argues, because our views are based on ‘instincts’, for example The Generalization Instinct and The Urgency Instinct.

Wired in preferences
Our preference for sweet, salty, and fat foods evolved within our species over scores of millennia and served us well in our struggle for survival in a pre-modern world. We now have to work at curbing these urges to avoid the health risks that come with modern life and affluence such as diabetes and heart disease. In exactly the same way, the ten psychological instincts outlined by Rosing need to be tempered and controlled by cultural norms. We tend to have critical and fundamental misperceptions of the world because we have not fully addressed due to these ‘instincts’.

Without explicitly saying so, Rosling is using a mainstream evolutionary psychology approach, and then presents an antidote to our ‘hard wired’ psychological mistakes, namely be more ‘factful’, hence the title of the book. Just like we need to control our tendency to eat too much sugar and fat we need also to be more self-aware of our tendencies to commit errors in how we view the world.

Here is how Rosling explains it:

“Our cravings for sugar and fat make obesity one of the largest health problems in the world today. We have to teach our children, and ourselves, to stay away from sweets and chips. In the same way, our quick thinking brains and cravings for drama -our dramatic instincts- are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview.”

The core assumption of evolutionary psychology is that human brains are the product of evolution. Numerous ‘modules’ (e.g., sweet and salty taste good!) emerged in the human brain which served our species well. These modules developed in what evolutionary psychologists call our ‘EEA’ or environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. EEA is “…the ancestral environment to which a species is adapted. It is the set of selection pressures that shaped an adaptation.”

This approach takes a strong nature and nurture approach, rejecting the more typical and extreme standard social science model (SSSM) which argues that all human behavior is solely a product of culture, or ‘nurture’.

I agree with Rosling’s evolutionary psychology premise and reject extreme SSSM. Can we extend his thinking into other realms? And what does this have to do with critical Hydra theory and a genealogy of privileging forces?

The Seven Deadly Sins
We don’t need to reference Freud to make the obvious point that sexual desire is a powerful and pervasive human characteristic. That said, all cultures have developed normative systems restricting sexual expression; in no known human culture are sexual desires totally unregulated, with both proscriptive and prescriptive norms restricting sexual behavior vigorously enforced.

Driven by a strong libidinal instinct our human brain wants sex, but our cultural norms temper our desires. To be clear, this is the same explanatory theme based in evolutionary psychology stressed by Rosling repeatedly in Factfulness.

Lust is one of the seven ‘deadly sins‘, the others are pride, greed, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. The origin of this list of sins lies deep in the Western cannon, dating back to pre-Christian Greek and Roman writings.

Through the lens of critical Hydra theory, perhaps the two most important sins are gluttony and greed. I have long argued that unchecked capitalism and neoliberalism tend to glorify and normalize these two sins.

As with all of the dead sins, Western religions have a great deal to say about gluttony and greed as sins, and many have dogma which encourages sharing, not hoarding, wealth. In Christianity there is reference to ‘tithing’ (giving one tenth of your wealth to the church so they may help the poor) and in Islam the giving of zakat is a form of worship that means giving to the mosque all wealth above what is needed for basic family living. Both the Qur’an and the Bible are fairly clear about the moral error of accumulating vast wealth and the goodness to distributing money beyond basic needs as charity to those less fortunate; both religious traditions condemn greed and gluttony. The founding intent of these religious traditions has been hijacked by the lust for power. For centuries the rich and powerful have hidden behind religion to maintain and increase their wealth. In the United States the far right and Republican Party in the US have elevated this practice to a high art.

Restated, using the evolutionary psychology perspective employed by Rosling I argue both gluttony and greed were ‘hard wired’ into human minds during our EEA. Cultures, through their religions or other moral teaching attempt to temper these tendencies, and we see evidence of this in the Western cannon and specifically in Western religions.

A less-than-optimistic conjecture
All of the heads of the Hydra (patriarchy, race/ethnicity, colonialism/paternalism, classism, hetero/cis normativity, ableism, ageism, and anthropocentrism) have long histories, but my conjecture is that patriarchy and classism are the most important in terms of understanding the intersectional connections that exist between all the privileging forces.  In a previous post I put is this way,

I suggest beginning with a broad theoretical approach, looking at cultural evolution and examining how capitalism drove the fundamental restructuring of social life. This restructuring can be seen in the emergence of state societies which, through the actions and example of those in power, legitimized the rise of stratified societies characterized by structured social inequality, beginning the long process of normalizing and then glorifying gluttony and greed. Like the proverbial frog put into a pot of cold water and slowly raising the temperature to boiling and killing the frog, human cultures have accepted the core myth embedded in classism -some ‘deserve’ great power. The slow rate of sociocultural change allowed for this assumption to be slowly perpetuated by those in power, ‘baked into’ norms, policies, laws, and traditions. I don’t think this transition was the result of any one group of leaders but rather an organic process that happened as those in power created and sustained the illusion of superiority. Humans invented social stratification -structured social inequality based on power and wealth- and classism just as much later they invented race and ‘whiteness.’

In general, gender differentiation did not degenerate into gender stratification, at least in highly toxic form, until relatively recently in human history, during the rise of agriculturally based state society 5,000-8,000 years ago. Perhaps simultaneously, sexism and proto-classism began to permeate human cultures, slowly being normalized, as stated above, in norms, policies, laws, etc., that is, woven into the fabric of world cultures. Gluttony and greed, though recognized as ‘sins’, slowly but inexorably became normalized in a world where the idea that some people legitimately deserve more power than others overcame any contrary moral teaching of Western or other religions.

We are hard wired to be gluttonous and greedy and we now have few norms and fewer laws tempering these tendencies. Though many may have other views, those who make the laws and dominate power structures see the accumulation of wealth as a right and as an admirable goal. As the Duchess of Windsor Wallis Simpson once said, “You can never be too rich or too thin”. Instead of curbing and tempering these anti-egalitarian instincts we have normalized these socially dysfunctional tendencies. The history of the last few centuries, and certainly of the last few decades, tells us that avarice has now become a virtue. Most will defend the right to accumulate wealth -and hence power- orders of magnitude beyond what is needed, therefore further ossifying various justifications for inequality and systemic marginalization of the ‘other’.

An implicit assumption of those who defend multi-millionaires and billionaires is that everyone has a right to acquire as much wealth as they are able, thus buying into an ‘infinite pie’ model of wealth. Economies expand and thus the wealth pie is not technically finite, but the opposite assumption of an infinite pie -where potentially everyone can be outrageously rich- is just not true. Wealth is limited, and the avarice of the upper 1% does impact the income and livelihoods of others.

Rosling’s core premise is right. Humans are driven by basic instincts and our cultures must recognize and address the dysfunctional consequences of these instincts, creating cultural mechanisms to curb and control them.  The instincts toward gluttony and greed  are powerful and we may have lost our ability to moderate them. This less-than-optimistic conjecture laments that effectively confronting toxic othering (‘bending the moral arc toward justice’) would mean, essentially, unwinding the past 5000 years of human history and finding a way for humans to recognize and confront these two deadly sins much more effectively. I’m not holding my breath.

More to come
In a next post I will discuss the trajectory of all eight privileging forces. In the meantime if you have any thoughts, feedback or suggestions you can reach me at arcaro@elon.edu.