Punching down is a failed idea

For a while now I have been considering the concept of punching down.

Punching down means that you are criticising somebody who is in a weaker social position to you.

Cards on the table - I am against multiculturalism.

The way I see it multiculturalism is often sold as this idea that we should all tolerate each other's cultural eccentricities - that we are enriched by the presence of people with different backgrounds.

So far so good right?

The thing is in practise it seems to more often end up meaning different people have different rights. Human rights become phrased as colonialism, mainly because the people who are abusing those rights define their abuses as their culture.

Within a multiculturalist context it becomes all about the group and defining the group - such that you may say "Muslims are offended" when actually it isn't "Muslims" it is just some dude that the media decided speaks for Muslims.

This is one of the great weaknesses to how media deals with religious minorities in general, it is one of the things we atheists actually have in common with Muslims as a whole.

We end up with some guy being taken as "this is what atheists think" and half the time we haven't even heard of him.

And when we have, well, Sam Harris' defence of hypothetical torture stands in direct contrast to how a majority of non-religious people oppose torture, and yet he is presented as this voice for atheists.

And this is why I am anti-culture as a whole, a lot of the time what is seen as being 'cultural' is based on the words of some guy (and, unless we are talking about feminism, it is almost always a guy), not the actual people that are supposedly being described.

Thus I think the culture shouldn't matter, the individuals are the ones who matter.

When you throw in the whole idea of power dynamics, and western guilt, you get something like what Kiran Opal describes as Kaffursplaining, where only the kaffurs get to have any culture or history or politics or even agency.

Before I go on with the quote, a quick note on the word here - in this instance kaffur actually mostly refers to westerners. It is not being used racially (and if it was it would be white people) but as a reference to religion and culture.

"Insisting that Islamists who murdered over a dozen people in Paris, or over 2000 people in Nigeria, or over 135 children in Pakistan were all somehow disaffected with your Western hedonistic countries’ ways, and had no agency or thoughts beyond thinking of you and how much they hate you , because the universe revolves around you and your country, and your culture, and your history, and your colonialism."

"Note: Nobody else has a history of their own. No other cultures, communities, groups have their own power struggles, their own hierarchies, their own history of imperialism. It’s not like Muslims have had multiple empires of their own. It’s not like Muslims ran the longest running slave trade and the longest running empire in human history (look it up). It all somehow circles back to *you*," Kiran wrote.

This is where the concept of punching down fails, when what you see isn't individuals with their own agendas and ideas but a collection of power dynamics.

It is no better really to accept a bunch of stereotypes and champion them, because what you end up doing is missing the individuals in the equation.

Germaine Greer a few years back defended female genital mutilation on the grounds of criticism of it being cultural imperialism - sure the groups she stood up for were probably very happy, but what about the little girls who were getting their genitals chopped up?

With the current issue around censorship and hurt feelings -  Lama Abu-Odeh's piece at Butterflies and Wheels is an important one.

His whole argument is basically asking people to think about who loses with a blasphemy law - and points out that the list includes a fair chunk of the French Muslim community, that chunk that wants to assimilate, that chunk that doesn't want censorship of things they disagree with.

"By empowering the offended religious Muslim with his underlying rage, you have alienated those assimilated French Muslims who nevertheless insist on their membership in the community," Abu-Odeh wrote.

When fighting against oppression it is important to keep the individuals front and centre in your mind. A wall intended to protect people can work just as well to trap and imprison them.

Worse it makes the whole issue revolve around you - and not everything does.

Punching down as a concept can be a decent rule of thumb, but it also misidentifies what it is that's wrong with punching down.

Most of the time when punching down fails it isn't strictly because the one party has more power than the other, but because having that power can create a sort of ignorance that gets things wrong. That is the nature of privilege.

A boss is in a more powerful position than an employee - but that shouldn't shield the employee from their employer's criticisms if they are valid. It is the validity of the complaint, not the power dynamics involved that is central.

This is also why one should always be careful when criticising other country's entertainment and political cartoons - they operate in a context which is very hard to understand unless you are living it.

By phrasing it as the power dynamic and not the ignorance that dynamic can cause, the concept can end up as a barrier to understanding rather than an aid to it.