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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2021
Suffering can make sacred, so it may partly be nature, and not culture alone, that leads us to apprehend a sacred aspect in victims of oppression. Those who recognize this sacredness show piety—a special form of respect—toward members of oppressed groups. The result is a system of social constructions often dismissed as “identity politics.” This essay starts with an analysis of the intentionality of piety and sacredness and how they relate to suffering, sacrifice, sanctions, pollution, and purification. It then argues that the sacralization of oppressed groups is an expression of the perennial human disposition to acknowledge sacredness and to respond piously. The essay then analyzes this sacred status as socially constructed. Based on the sacred-making (that is, “sacrificial”) power of suffering, the sacred status elicits piety, gives its bearers special authority, surrounds them with sanctions, and calls for symbolic sacrificial punishments of the impious. By dissecting sacrificial politics as a system of social constructions, we see that, although the oppressed groups are made sacred, certain people in the oppressor groups—“the Pious”—continue to exercise fundamental power. This essay, by displaying the inner logic of this cultural phenomenon, helps us both to sympathize with and to critique the system and then to pose questions about what good or bad the system might be doing.
1 Émile Durkheim defines the sacred as what is “set apart” by a community from its complementary category, the profane. This would make the sacred and profane symmetrically set apart from each other, parallel domains. For Durkheim, the sacred exists to serve social unity and organization—the maintenance of a church (Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [1915], trans. Joseph Swain [London: Geo. Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1964]). Instead, in my account, the consciousness of sacredness apprehends (whether rightly or wrongly) the sacred thing as possessing a higher ontological status. It is this apprehended quality, and not the effect of social organization, that defines the sacred. A similar comment should be made about René Girard’s theory, heir to Durkheim’s, that the sacred essentially functions to protect a community from spirals of mimetic violence; for Girard, beginning with a hydraulic theory of human violence, sacrifice is a cathartic safety valve that produces sacredness to contain violence (Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977]). Both theories reduce sacredness to a profane social effect reconnoitered by the theorist. Instead, sacredness resists definition by profane purposes. This does not preclude impious people from using what others hold sacred in all manner of ways. This also does not prevent the sacred from being incidentally beneficial for solidarity and peace and for the organization of social statuses, and it does not prevent beliefs and practices related to the sacred from spreading and surviving because of such incidental benefits (as in natural selection). We should not, however, let incidental properties into a definition (the featherless biped fallacy).
2 On the Latin terms sacer and sanctus, see Benveniste, Émile, Indo-European Language and Society, trans. Palmer, Elizabeth (Coral Gables, Fl.: University of Miami Press, 1973),Google Scholar
bk. VI, chap. 1. While both are translated as sacred or holy, the sanctus becomes so because it protects the sacer.
3 I here follow, with adjustment, the features of sacrifice articulated by Louis Dupré in “The Structure and Meaning of Sacrifice: from Marcel Mauss to René Girard,” Archivio di Filosofia 76, no. 1/2 (2008): 253–59.
4 That is, offense against the sacred/set apart/untouchable might render a person cursed/excluded/untouchable, putting the violator in something like a negatively charged version of the sacred state. (The Latin for “sacred,” sacer, can also mean “cursed.”)
5 I thank Allen Buchanan for this point.
6 To say that the Pious have apprehended something as sacred and constructed a system of statuses in response is not to criticize or insult them. On the contrary, it is an insult to say a person holds nothing sacred.
7 “Privilege” talk is ambiguous. In its more precise usage in the scholarly literature, “privilege” names the inverse of oppression possessed—of necessity—by the non-oppressed. Namely, the non-oppressed in a context of oppression are spared certain injustices; statistically face certain decreased risks and increased chances of goods; likely receive indirect benefits resulting from others’ diminishment (especially in the case of zero-sum and positional goods); can afford to be insouciant about the oppression; and may possess a prerogative to mistreat the oppressed in certain ways. (See Blum, Lawrence, “‘White Privilege’: A Mild Critique,” Theory and Research in Education 6, no. 3 [2008]: 309–321,CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a perspicuous account that distinguishes between types of privilege.) This privilege belongs to the non-oppressed as such, regardless of whether or how individuals personally exercise it or benefit from it, and regardless of whether they are disadvantaged in any number of other ways. So possessing these privileges does not entail being blameworthy or objectively advantaged. Still, critics complain that privilege talk blames innocent non-oppressed people for the oppression and casts them all as objectively advantaged. A social construction account clarifies the disagreement by exposing the ambiguity: It is common for a thing to be confused with the use to which society puts it. What happens in sacrificial politics is that the Pious feel their group’s privilege as pollution. “Privilege” as mere inverse-of-oppression gets operationalized into the “privilege” of guilt and inferiority, used to justify a socially constructed Polluted status attributed to all members of the category. In the latter sense, “privilege” can be used to imply complicity, to suggest people deserve not to have the goods they possess, and to undermine their opinions. The ambiguity obstructs people’s ability to hear and understand an important point about how oppression works.
8 Here are two points from Aristotle that may illuminate motivations. Regarding the oppressed who participate: “a city stays together by paying things back proportionately,” and when people cannot “pay back evil” to those who have done them evil, it “seems to be slavery” (NE V.5, 1132b35–1133a1). Regarding the Pious who participate: “People seem to pursue honor in order to be convinced that they themselves are good” (NE I.5, 1095b27-28). References are from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE), trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002).
9 Although not understood at the time by human beings as a sacrifice, according to a dominant theological account, it was understood by God as such: intended by God the Father from the beginning of time, and performed by Jesus, who served as both priest/sacrificer and victim/sacrificed. That is, one must buy a particular view of divine providence in order to believe that the crucifixion is a sacrifice, in the precise sense. It isn’t clear to me whether there is a view of (perhaps historical) providence operating in sacrificial politics.
10 For an excellent philosophical treatment of this phenomenon, which Fricker, Miranda calls “testimonial injustice,” see her Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. She advocates an Aristotelian corrective virtue by which hearers practice neutralizing their prejudices. The bestowal of Sacred authority is not this virtue. Rather, it reverses the prejudice by (selectively) elevating certain speakers above questions of credibility and downgrading others. Fricker articulates a second type of epistemic injustice—“hermeneutical injustice”—in which persons are denied the resources to understand themselves and the world of their experience. By anathemizing even benevolent dissent, Sacred authority may contribute to hermeneutical injustice.
11 This structure is illuminated by a reflection on the history of “Feminist Standpoint Epistemology,” which made precisely this claim on behalf of women. For example, consider Alison Jaggar’s argument that “Women’s subordinate status means that, unlike men, women do not have an interest in mystifying reality and so are likely to develop a clearer and more trustworthy understanding of the world. A representation of reality from the standpoint of women is more objective and unbiased” (Feminist Politics and Human Nature [New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983], 384). See the Feminist Standpoint Reader: Intellectual and Politics Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004) for a representative collection.
12 Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.,” Peace and Freedom Magazine (July/August 1989): 10–12.
13 Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Random House, 1984).Google Scholar
14 The common claim that a person of a privileged category “cannot understand what it is like to be” a member of an oppressed category contains, of course, a significant amount of truth. Yet, taken as fully true, it suggests a few unlikely claims: that not directly experiencing something means you cannot understand it; that directly experiencing something means you understand it; that understanding is binary, either on or off; that people cannot understand other people; that people understand themselves. A better claim: Those who lack sympathy will not let themselves understand.
15 Putting sacrificial politics in the context of social ontology helps us see the ambiguity of claims about intersectionality. Intersectionality initially names the multi-dimensionality of oppression that follows from the complexity of the person. Oppression takes on different patterns for different people, as a person’s many features interactively contribute to her social location: for example, both racism and anti-gay prejudice tend to affect women differently than men. (The locus classicus is Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 [1989]: 139–167,which establishes the need to consider discrimination intersectionally.) Critics complain that intersectionality establishes a hierarchy of oppression, while scholars reject this “additive” reading of intersectionality as a misunderstanding. A social construction analysis clarifies the disagreement: It is common to confuse a thing with the uses to which society puts it. What happens in sacrificial politics is that intersectionality as the scholars mean it gets operationalized into the hierarchy the critics lament. It gets used as a tool for the distribution of social statuses.
16 See Mathew Rodriguez, “Trump’s Plan to Decriminalize Homosexuality is an Old Racist Tactic,” Out Magazine (February 19, 2019) https://www.out.com/news-opinion/2019/2/19/trumps-plan-decriminalize-homosexuality-old-racist-tactic. The countries with the harshest penalties for homosexuality—including imprisonment and execution—are disproportionately Muslim or African.
17 Being socially constructed does not make something arbitrary or false. For example, in the case of a system of constructions of the sacred type, one can ask whether the attributions of sacredness, which anchor the system, are true or justified or coherent. One could ask, also, how fittingly or how wisely the system of constructions expresses its piety for the sacred, and how well the system harmonizes with other aspects of human life. For an account of the possibility of rationally or truthfully grounding constructions, see the author’s “A Realer Institutional Reality: Deepening Searle’s (De)Ontology of Civilization,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20, no. 1 (2012): 43–67 (published under the name M. B. Flynn).
18 Searle, John R., The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar and Searle, Making the Social World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
19 Asta, Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
20 This power is flagged in Pious texts with the abbreviation “etc.” When listing Sacred categories, the Pious standardly write something like “black, gay, female, etc.” It is worth wondering, who is included in the “etc.,” and why are they included only elliptically? The “etc.” expresses pious fear toward oppressed groups left out of the list (there are too many to list), and it also expresses deference to the Pious of the future—we know other groups will later make the A-list of oppressed categories. So, while expressing piety, the “etc.” indicates potency, the power of standing that determines who is oppressed enough to be listed. The “etc.” signals that it is the author and others like the author who bestow Sacred status. They do not have this power individually. They move like a school of fish.
21 Consider, for example, Sally Haslanger’s definition of “woman” as “systematically subordinated.” Significantly, she defends this definition not on purely descriptive grounds, but as useful for a liberationist movement. See “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be?” Noûs 34, no. 1 (2000): 31–55.
22 Ásta in Categories We Live By explains the way that social constructivist accounts often operate: “the aim of the debunking project is to reveal which property is operative in a context. Understood in this way, the widely held but erroneous beliefs concern which property is operative in a context, and the debunking consists in revealing that some other property is really operative in the context from the ones that are widely held to be operative” (37).