People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments to pursue what they value in life, and they think of more ideas in the process. The idea of privilege is one way people talk about how differences in people’s abilities, environments, and ideas affect the outcomes of what they do in life. Recognizing that is a big part of understanding the diversity of humanity.
Within a high school you can meet diverse people who each have their own stories about how they’ve used their abilities and ideas in their environments to live their lives. In a college you can meet people who are even more diverse. By understanding the connection among abilities, environments, ideas, and what people value, you can talk about how your lives have been different and learn a lot from each other.
ACT I
Scene 1
[106 bpm]
If you’re in high school now, and you plan to go to college, you’re about to see one of the biggest tests of the Web of Human Behavior and the Empathy Formula ever.
People always use their abilities and ideas to make
[-2 bpm]
the best decisions
they can think of
in the environments
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
You probably have a pretty good idea of how the different groups of people in your high school do that, since you all live within a few miles of your school.
No matter how diverse your high school is, college is way more diverse, because it brings in people from all over the state, the country, or the world.
Scene 2
If you go to college and you believe in diversity, you’re going to hear a lot about privilege.
Now think about people always using their abilities and ideas to make
the best decisions
they can think of
in the environments
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
Where does privilege fit into that?
Scene 3
Let’s start with abilities.
Some individual people think of ideas no one else thinks of because they have high levels of abilities for thinking about those kinds of ideas. But that also depends on them having the environmental factors they need to support their ideas.
Henry Ford is famous for inventing the assembly line production of automobiles and founding Ford Motor Company. But what would he have done if he’d been born a century earlier, long before internal combustion engines were invented? He was good at inventing machines, so he’s sure to have invented something, but it wouldn’t have been anything that depended on internal combustion engines.
Scene 4
What about differences in ability that affect groups of people?
A relatively large group of individuals are deaf. That makes them a group of deaf people.
We each help to create the environments for the people who are affected by things we do. Most people can hear, so when we assume everyone can hear it works pretty well most of the time. But that creates an environment that’s unfavorable to deaf people.
At the same time, groups of people evolve ideas to adapt to their environments.
When a group of people can’t hear, they can all learn sign language. That helps them communicate with each other and anyone else who knows sign language.
ACT II
Scene 1
What about forms of privilege that don’t depend directly on abilities?
Most forms of discrimination are based on assumptions about people’s abilities. We’re still talking about environments, where we each help to create the environment for the people who are affected by our actions.
If you assume that one group of people is more capable of something than another, the easiest way for you to deal with that situation is to favor the most capable group. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are all ways that happens.
Racism is based on assumptions about people’s mental abilities to make good decisions. Sexism, homophobia, and transphobia all start with the recognition of some differences in abilities between one group of people and another. But then they generalize those assumptions way beyond their relevance to the situation.
We usually don’t talk about homosexuality as an ability. But homosexuality is a characteristic, and differences in our mental characteristics give us differences in our abilities.
It’s a fact that a gay man has the ability to be sexually aroused by other men, and much less of an ability than straight men to be sexually aroused by women. That lets gay men do certain things that straight men can’t do. It also stands in the way of them doing other things that straight men can do.
None of that affects a gay man’s ability to work at a job, make a steady income, or pay his rent on time. So if a gay man applies for a job or an apartment and you don’t want to give it to him because you feel there’s something not quite right with that guy, you’re right that he’s different from most men, but it’s not in a way that has any effect on the kind of relationship he’s trying to have with you.
Scene 2
Now what about privilege that comes mostly from people’s physical environment?
People who have economic privilege have access to a lot more money than other people. And access to a lot of other resources.
Ideas are adaptations to environments. So how do differences in environments like those affect the evolution of ideas?
On the simplest level, when you have resources, you can learn skills that depend on those resources.
If you grow up in an house with a back yard and a garage and a spare room, think of how much that helps you learn some things as part of your ordinary home life. If you have the space to store tools, or other kinds of equipment, and the space to use them for something, think of how many things you can do.
You can go out in your back yard and garden or play basketball or football or soccer with your friends. You can go out in your garage and fix cars or kitchen appliances, or build furniture or model airplanes or make sculptures or pottery. You can go in your spare room and rebuild computers or paint or play your piano or your guitar or your trumpet or your flute.
If you grew up in a small apartment, you could still do any of those things if you could find somewhere to do them, and some way to get hold of the tools and equipment you needed. But that takes more effort.
How would that make your life different? And how would that affect what you learn?
Scene 3
What would that do to your motivations to learn things? And your goals and priorities for learning things?
With every decision you make in life, you’re trying to improve you life.
If you go to college and learn how to do something that pays you a lot of money, you can improve your life very directly. You can buy an expensive house in an expensive neighborhood.
Expensive neighborhoods have low crime rates. Expensive houses are easy to live in, because you have a lot of space for the people who live there and their possessions, and all of your electricity and plumbing and everything else works the way it’s supposed to work.
Scene 4
When you buy a house like that, you can think about your life and how great your house and your neighborhood are, and how hard you had to work to get there. But if your children grow up there, what do they think about them?
You used your abilities to learn and to work hard, you learned ideas that helped you make money, and you greatly improved your environment. But your kids don’t see all of that. If you wait to have kids after you buy your big house, they don’t see any of it. If you buy your house when they’re 5 or 10 or 15, how much of the adult world stuff that you had to do to get it do they really understand?
Now your kids are growing up in the environment you paid for. You’re like a family of immigrants.
You can be smart and make sure you do everything you need to do to keep your house and your neighborhood. Meanwhile, your kids grow up learning your new way of life as their starting point in life. Your new house and neighborhood is their idea of normal.
Scene 5
What does that do to the evolution of their ideas? Whatever they learn it’s going to be whatever they believe they need to know to live in that environment.
If you just give them whatever they want now that you’re rich, they’ll get very good at asking you for stuff and expecting you to give it to them.
If you avoid that temptation and manage to teach them your values of hard work, they’ll probably learn to work hard to keep the environment they have.
Or learn to make even more money than you and move into an even more expensive house in an even more expensive neighborhood.
Or maybe they’ll have some exceptional abilities that make them think differently and their idea of working hard for a better life will lead them in some other direction.
The point is, when certain ideas work well for a lot of people in an environment, a lot of people use those ideas. Then the people evolve their ideas to become more adapted to living in that environment. But the more adapted people become to an environment, the more they depend on that environment.
ACT III
Scene 1
The idea of privilege is one step in a good direction, by starting a discussion of how people’s environments affect their lives.
But there’s more to it than that. What is this, some kind of privilege Marxism, where everyone is supposed to have the same amount of privilege? That leaves out the evolution of ideas as adaptations to our environments.
If you’re a straight White man, but you’re not rich, does that make you 3/4 of a straight, rich White man?
No. It makes you 100% of yourself.
Harriet Tubman didn’t become famous for not having male privilege, not having White privilege, not having economic privilege, not having freedom privilege, and whatever else you would add to a discussion about privilege during the slavery years. Harriet Tubman is famous because she adapted to her situation in ways no one expected.
This is not to say that we should force people into lifetimes of hardship just to make them evolve new ideas. This is to say that we do have different levels of hardship we adapt to, which means we’ve evolved different ideas for different situations.
Scene 2
If you go to college and you meet other people there who have been listening to this series, you could do an experiment together.
Take some pencils and paper, and sit around a table. Then start some sentences, and let everyone finish them.
“When I think of things going wrong where I live, the first things that come to mind are…”
People who write down things like getting shot by a deer hunter in my back yard, getting attacked by a bear, fishing boats sinking in storms with all hands aboard, and sliding into a snowbank off a country road after midnight and trying to stay warm enough to live though the night…
Or people who write down things like getting killed by the police, getting killed by gang violence, my siblings getting addicted to drugs, and my mom losing her job and losing our apartment…
Think very differently about life in some important ways than people who write down more abstract things like, getting in a car accident, getting cancer, and not getting into college.
“When I think of people who went to college, the first people I think of are…”
People who write down their parents, all the other adults in their families, and most of the adults in their neighborhoods think differently about going to college than people who write down their high school teachers, their doctor, and names of celebrities.
“When I think of people who have been seriously injured or killed in work accidents, the first people I think of are…”
Suddenly everything switches around. A lot of people who didn’t write down names of relatives and neighbors before do write down relatives and neighbors now, and a lot of people who did write down relatives and neighbors before write down general things now, like factory workers and migrant farm laborers.
Scene 3
Have you ever heard of a philosophy professor being killed in a work accident?
Philosophers devote their lives to thinking about ideas. But what does that mean when there’s a huge body of ideas that humans have thought about throughout the ages that philosophers have almost no first hand experience with?
Philosophy professors devote their lives to teaching future generations of leaders about thinking. But what does that mean when, again, there’s a huge body of important ideas they have almost no first hand experience with?
The people who work in the maintenance department and groundskeeping department of any college or university work with power tools all day that have warning labels on them that say, “Can cause serious injury or death.”
A lot of the cleaning staff and kitchen staff at a college, and the maintenance and groundskeeping staff, are immigrants from dangerous parts of the world who had to go through more dangers to come to the US.
So what does it mean for philosophy professors to teach people about ideas when they have almost no first hand experience with ideas so many of the staff at their colleges think about every day?
How much money does your family have to make every year for you to be able to use the ideas your philosophy professor teaches you about?
Here’s a fun experiment you can try. Ask a philosophy professor why soldiers in combat throw themselves onto hand grenades to save their comrades.
A philosophy professor will usually start talking about abstract things like exploring the strange dichotomies of the self interest of the human condition.
Then ask that question to anyone who’s served in the military. They’ll answer it directly with one sentence. Or two or three, to clarify it even better.
The two fundamental differences between a mob and a military unit are leadership and training. In a mob, everyone fights for themselves and their own interests. In the military you train to fight for the people next to you.
Why do so many philosophy professors act like they’ve never heard that answer before? Or like they can just ignore it?
If philosophy professors were really interested in finding real answers to big questions about life, wouldn’t they start by talking to people who have a lot of experience in dealing with those questions?
And if they’re not doing that, what are they doing? Saying a bunch of big words to act like they’re smart?
Scene 4
If you grew up in an expensive neighborhood, your whole life has been leading up to you going to college. Your expensive neighborhood depends on college educations, and all the adults you grew up among know that. College is part of your environment, and you’re well adapted to your environment.
If you’ve had to overcome a lot of hardship to get to college that the people from the expensive neighborhoods didn’t, that means you’ve learned something important along the way. So how do you use what you’re good at to adapt to your new environment?
Scene 5
You’re not going to empathize with each other emotionally this way.
A lot of people want to empathize with each other emotionally, because they believe that empathy is good, and they feel like good people. But you can’t really feel the way someone else feels just by listening to them talk for 5 minutes about how their life is very different from your life.
If I tell you that I broke two fingers in a work accident, how much sympathy do you feel should you show me to show me that you care what happened?
If you grew up around that kind of work, there’s a very simple pattern of cause and effect that made it happen, and it happened because someone didn’t pay attention to something. Nobody died or was permanently disabled, so now it’s just a funny story.
If I hand you a 1 foot high stack of papers with numbers all over them, and tell you to do some math to them, and that if you get the wrong answer you’ll go to prison for 10 years, does that sound like a threat? Or does that sound like an ordinary day at work for an accountant?
We can’t feel the same way as each other when ordinary things that happen to the other person have never happened to us. But we can at least recognize how different decision making factors affect them, and how they try to make the best decisions they can in the situations they’re in. That’s called cognitive empathy.
Scene 6
The purpose of education is to prepare students for the future.
There’s no way for any one person to know the most about everything, because there’s no way for one person to have every life experience.
It’s easier to relate to other people when you can feel their lives along with them.
But if you can help each other see different points of view, you can learn a lot more from each other.