What can early modern practices of duelling teach us about the contemporary ‘culture wars’ over identity politics? According to Dr Clif Mark, a lot more than you might think. Join us for this episode of the Counterintuitive Series on the Governance Podcast.
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The Guest
Dr Clif Mark is a political theorist turned freelance writer. He writes on political theory, culture, wellness, psychology, relationships, and other topics. His work appears in CBC, The Atlantic, and Aeon.
Full Transcript
Paul Sagar
Hello and welcome back to Counterintuitive. A Governance Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Paul Sagar, a lecturer in the Department of Political Economy here at King’s College London. And this podcast is made in association with the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London. Each week on this podcast, I invite a speaker to come and defend an idea. That is, to some degree counterintuitive. I play the role of devil’s advocate or sceptical inquirer, in order to see where the ideas will take us. Of course, whether you agree with me or my speakers, is, in the final instance, entirely up to you. Today I’m speaking to Dr. Clif Mark.
Clif holds degrees from McGill and Oxford Universities and took his PhD in political theory from Cambridge. He’s written on a wide array of topics for both academic and general audiences, ranging from specialist peer reviewed journals to magazines like the Atlantic and a on most recently, however, he’s the host of an excellent new philosophy podcast called Good in Theory, the first season of which just came out at the time of recording. And by the time you hear this podcast, there may be more seasons out so do check that out. Again, it’s called Good in Theory, and you can get it from all the usual places, you get your podcasts. Cliff, welcome to counter-intuitive.
Clif Mark
Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Dr. Mark, that is a name I haven’t heard in some years.
Paul Sagar
Well, as listeners hopefully know, by now, the idea behind this podcast series is to explore ideas that are in some way, unobvious, paradoxical, surprising. Clif, yours may be one of the most unexpected ideas of all that we examine here. Because you want to tell us that we can learn something important about contemporary identity politics, from some of the complex issues surrounding the history of duelling.
Clif Mark
That’s, that’s exactly right. And I think the first thing that we might learn, I don’t usually use the word identity politics that much, because what I’m going to tell you is that I don’t think identity politics, for the most part, is about identity any more than duelling was really about lying or cowardice.
Paul Sagar
Well, why don’t why don’t you like to help us out to see where you want us to get to you by telling us something about duelling? Because I imagine most people have an idea of vague idea in their head, you know, it’s a couple of guys one insults the other and then it is your pistols at dawn or Sabres and, and you know, and it’s all something to do with honour, but but I would imagine most people listening to this podcast, don’t really know much about how the practice actually worked historically. So why don’t why don’t we start there?
Clif Mark
Great. Yeah. So there’s a few things you put in there that were exactly right. And I want to really highlight one is honour, and another is insult. And so I’m gonna get to both of those. But first, if you have in your head an idea about a duel as a contest, where people are just showing off demonstrating how good they are with a sword or a pistol, or trying to win the heart of the young woman. Just forget about that, for the time being. Let’s talk about honour and insult. So the first concept is honour.
For a long time, honour was a very important social concept. And I don’t mean just as a quality of character, meaning you’re an honest honourable man. It’s a social status, you have to be a certain level in society and occupy a certain position to be considered to have honour. Sometimes this means just the nobility; later it can include all sorts of people, bourgeois people, the Gentry, etc. Now, what honour means, essentially, is that you are owed a level of respect, you have the status, if you’re honourable, I’m honourable. That means we have to treat each other on some level as equals, think of it kind of as analogous to dignity.
Now, everyone who’s honourable even though there’s inequalities there, right, you might have a big fancy Duke, you might have just a common Gentry, you’re supposed to treat each other as equals. But sometimes that goes wrong. Sometimes someone says something that’s a bit off, they look at people the wrong way. They seduce someone, sister, that kind of thing. And that would be an insult, right? So what an insult is, is anything and really anything could set off this kind of thing. Anything that implies that the other person is not an equal.
And that is what starts to duel. That’s what starts every one of these corals and so we’re both honourable. You talk to me, like I don’t know you would talk to one of your undergraduate students. I think that’s not the proper amount of respect. I take offence in duelling culture. Taking offence is actually just like a euphemism for issuing a challenge to a duel. I come up and I say hey, you can’t talk to me like that. I’m your equal so you better do something about it.
And usually you could apologise and that would be it. If you don’t, if I don’t accept your apology, then we go on to arranging pistols or Sabres at dawn, etc.
Paul Sagar
Okay, awesome. So what happens then if I come along to you and say you’ve spoken to me in a way that doesn’t respect my status. And you think, yeah, that’s what you deserved.
Clif Mark
So that is a question here about who gets to call out who in this honour culture. Right, exactly. So this is a really interesting thing that I thought is, you know, analogous with today. But we’ll get to that. It’s that insults don’t really travel across class barriers, if I’m honourable, and you’re not honourable, because I don’t know you’re like, defend a chimney sweep. Whatever you have. Whatever you say to me, I’m not going to take offence to it, because like what you say, it doesn’t matter. Your respect, in your opinion, doesn’t matter to me, you’re below me. And similarly, I’ll speak to you however I want. And if you get angry about it or upset, I can ignore that. But if you’re my equal, and I say something that offends you, and you come up to me and say, You’ve insulted me, I want satisfaction. I can’t easily ignore you. If I try to ignore you, I can be dishonoured because I’ll look like a coward for not, you know, giving you the respect of listening to your complaint. But if I ignore your offence and get away with it, that just reinforces it that just puts you back down in your place.
Paul Sagar
So with the example here, the one that I know you’ve drawn in your work of a famous 18th century philosopher Voltaire, who notoriously wanted to claim satisfaction from a member of the aristocracy and insulted him, and I think, as you as you wrote in your work, the response was, instead of satisfying him with a jewel, this aristocrats sent out his lackeys and had Voltaire beaten with sticks, which kind of was very much made the point, you’re not my equal, so you don’t get to call me out in a jewel, right? Like now I think of Voltaire, at least in my mind is one of the great arrogant assholes of Western culture, right? So to see him get his comeuppance, I find it kind of funny. And people looked at each other as Oh, you know, this, this great champion of free speech in the Enlightenment, an enemy of the aristocracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s like the voice of modernity. But actually, they’re challenging this guy over and over to a duel because he feels he’s been insulted. And then what happens is, so the Duke of Rowan or the you know, the shut down the Idaho home he insults Voltaire once and then Voltaire starts challenging and then he Yeah, he has them beaten. He sends his lackeys around to ring the doorbell. Well, Voltaire is at a dinner party. The servants call it Voltaire, and then they just drag him out in the street and beat him with sticks. Well, the night of Rowan is sitting in his carriage saying, well, try not to hit the head, something good still might come out of there.
Paul Sagar
This is a fantastic exemplification of Voltaire that is not permitted the status of issuing or being having his challenge recognised. And so what we’ve got here as a sense of is very much like you said a minute ago, a class division. But what changed them because one thing that we know is that during culture, it didn’t stay static, went through phases and became wider and more and more people were allowed to partake in it until it eventually, of course, disappeared. We don’t fight anymore in the streets, and it’s not supposed to, we certainly don’t issue jewels. So how did it get from Voltaire have been beaten with sticks, because he was below the status required to issue a duelling challenge through to some situation in the 19th century where you have so many people dying in joules, and Napoleon has to try and outlaw jeweling, because he’s losing too many officers. And there is it’s threatening the integrity of the French military, right?
Clif Mark
Well, there’s been all these efforts to eliminate duelling from the beginning of its history, which is in the 15th 16th century. But the Voltaire story is kind of interesting, because this is an inflection point, right? At this point. Voltaire doesn’t have the status challenge. And his friends tell him so and Roland doesn’t get in any trouble at all for just treating Voltaire however he wants. But he wouldn’t get away with that, say 100 150 years later, because as the mediaeval hierarchies of the aristocracy kind of disintegrated in society became more equalised. The middle class was rising, they joined the officer corps, they started going to universities, that meant that there was a wider pool of people who are considered to have honour. So this status that was formerly just restrained to the aristocracy, gradually spread throughout society, not throughout all of society, but it became wider. And as it became wider, new people thought of themselves as having honour, and they started demanding to be treated as of the head on it. And that’s why everyone started fighting duels. It became much more widespread over the next couple of 100 years from that point. Great. So I think that’s given us a really good sense of the history, the basic history of June again, the social dynamics of it.
Paul Sagar
How on earth can that teach us anything about contemporary conflicts over identity politics, if we’ll use that label, at least for today.
Clif Mark
All right. Well, before I get right to that, I just want to say one more thing about what happens with the actual show. I just want to say, oh, clearly the dialectic What’s happening? So imagine, we have equal respect. you violate it, that’s an insult. When you take offence, that’s trying to respond to the insult. You’re saying, No, no, I actually am your equal, whatever. And when you do when you actually fight, there’s a kind of magic that happens, which is that before the insult castle wins, honour and doubt, then the challenge casts the other person’s unearned when you duel, because you would only ever do it with an equal. Right? Ron wouldn’t do it with Voltaire, you would only ever deal with an equal that just by fighting, you’re recognising each other’s equality. So when you’re done fighting, usually nobody dies. Maybe there’s some minor injuries. You might not wind up best friends, although people often did. But the insult was erased and the beef was squashed, as we would say now.
Paul Sagar
So what can this tell us about identity politics?
Clif Mark
Well, as you know, as long as I can remember there have been these recurring fights in the media about these people, you know, they’re taking offence to everything. There are a bunch of crybabies whining, snowflakes, etc, etc. There’s political correctness. Now we talk about cancelled culture. The idea is there are people taking offensive stuff. And on the one side, people are saying, Well, yeah, we’ll stop saying racist things, stop saying sexist things, this is actually really bad. And we don’t want to be taught to like that. Great. And on the other side, you’re being too sensitive. You can’t take a joke. You can’t say anything anymore. And there’s this, there’s this fight. And I was thinking that. So how do you defend taking offence? Because I’m quite sympathetic to it. I don’t think that you should have to sit down and take being spoken down to because you’re a woman or of a minority or any reason at all, really. But how do you justify Telling someone off? And the most common justification I hear is that racist speech, sexist speech, offensive speech in general is wrong because it harms you, right? So this is an idea of offence as harm. So if you look at there’s books on critical race theory, like Mary Matsuda words that wound and that is exactly the metaphor, people are going for their words, they wound, they hurt people, they cause psychological damage, they make people not want to go outside because they might hear something offensive, they reinforce social hierarchies, etc, etc. And so I think that that may be true in a lot of cases. But that cannot account for a lot of the stuff that we actually see people in the media fighting over. Because if your justification for being mad about, I don’t know, white people’s dreadlocks or Robin Thicke, Blurred Lines, or something like this is that you’re being traumatised, and it’s really hurting you. Not a lot of people are gonna relate to you and want some other kind of justification. So that’s how I pull the whole theory about honour and duelling into identity politics. I think offensive speech is about insults and not about harm. okay to just talk us through that a little bit more in detail then.
Paul Sagar
So what is it exactly that you think makes a lot of the complaints in this area more understandable? If we understand them as complaints about insults as presumably then it’s about status. What you’re saying here is that the real issue that people have here is not that they’re being harmed by this speech, or sometimes they might be there. There are certain kinds of words that wound but the pervasive problem, the more paradigmatic if you like, is that these kinds of words are denying people a certain kind of status. Is that what you’re saying?
Clif Mark
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. And I think one way to illustrate this, right is, if you say something that is kind of racist To me, it might be alright. And I’m deciding whether to take offence to it. Or I’m asking my friends whether you’re wrong to do that. Right. The operative question that I’m asking myself when I’m deciding whether to tell you off isn’t, well, how do I feel? Are my feelings hurt? Am I sad, distressed, etc? No, what I’m asking is what Paul said racist. Right. It’s about what you said. And what would make it racist is that you’re constructing me as lesser than based on my race. It’s a matter of an expression of my status, not how you affect me psychologically. So if that’s our process of thinking, then creating. These theories about what kind of harm you might cause caused me. That might be important in a different way. But that’s not triggering. What makes me mad. Okay.
Paul Sagar
Would you say, therefore, that the recent wicked debate on how recent upsurge in identity politics is better explained then on your model? Because I take it, you want to say there’s maybe an analogy here between the way that jeweling culture became more extensive as more people were granted the status of being able to claim quality with a wider set of people. But something similar has gone on here with the relatively recent rise in people affirming this equality of status through identity.
Clif Mark
Right, I think I think that’s, I think that’s right. So one of the common, one of the common critiques of people who take offence, or political correctness, or whatever you want to call it is that, hey, listen, we understand that back during Jim Crow, and back in the battle days of sexism, that you had a lot to complain about. But now everyone has equal rights. There are no racist or sexist laws, there is official equality. So maybe you should stop complaining. And there’s a philosopher, Claudia card, and she makes just this argument, right? She says, Well, look there.There is a case to be made that racist speech, offensive speech can actually harm people. But it only harms you when it’s backed up by being enforced by the state. Racist insults only really work during Jim Crow is basically what she’s saying. Whereas for her, there were very sexist library rules in the college that she went to, girls weren’t allowed to use the boys library. But boys were allowed to use the girl’s library whenever and she said, Look, I had a lot of privilege, I was getting a university education. And I just don’t think that this is something to be that upset about. And, to my mind, if you try to institute that policy today in any university, right, people are going to be upset. And I think I think they would be justified, right? This is a there’s no way you’re gonna get to go and get away with that.
Paul Sagar
And so the question is, why is that? Why are we upset about white? Why if women now have equal rights, as credit card said, Why don’t they have nothing to complain about? Why are they fussing over small things? Well, I think what the honour analogy shows is that equal rights, a basic official equality, isn’t something that eliminates offence or insult, that’s actually a precondition for it. Because we have to be equals, in some sense for me to take offence to what you say, just like Ron and Voltaire, and we have to be equals in some way for me to take your offence seriously. So for this whole, I’m offended. And now I feel like I have to apologise for that whole dialectic to get off the ground, there has to be some underlying idea that we’re equal. And so you’re asking, why do we have all this upsurge in offence in recent times, after we’ve had all these great civil rights movements and movements for quality, and now people are still complaining?
Clif Mark
Well, those movements established the quality that gives us the basis for complaint. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me intuitively, that it’s precisely because gains have been made that people now feel that they can claim the status. You could imagine, say in the 1970s 1980s, a lot of women, a lot of people of colour, wouldn’t dare to make these claims, because they would feel too insecure in affirming their status of equality. They won’t want to rock the boat in some way, it’s a sign of progress that people feel that they can make these claims on others. Do you think that means that we may, in fact, see the end of some of the more heated controversies in the way that Julian eventually died out? Will once people feel affirmed in their status? Assuming we don’t catastrophically slide backwards into worse forms of social organisation? That is, is it likely that this may go the way of julik? Or is that too difficult to say? Well, I would say that, you know, it only took us 500 years to work through duelling. So maybe on that timescale thing. Um, I think that as long as the norm of equal respect is important to us, as long as that idea of equal status, there’s always going to be something happening with regards to insult and retribution. And I think retributive justice is restorative justice. So I think that this whole idea of insult in demanding respect, this is a dialectic that helps construct categories of equal respect. I don’t think that we really could have respect for each other if this wasn’t always a possibility. So I never think it’ll be gone completely. But I do think that as people become more secure in their status, they might be less inclined to make this kind of fuss.
Paul Sagar
A problem for your thesis, though, is that a lot of the proponents of what is often referred to as woke politics, that’s usually an insult now would push back and say that no, it’s it’s it is about harm. So one sort of question mark, I have here is your analysis sounds very plausible to me, except, I wonder how many people who are pushing these demands would would would recognise it as a description of what they themselves feel and think, because I agree that your model fits the gives me certain plausibility of an empirical observation, except for the fact that most of these claims are couched in the language of heart.
Clif Mark
Well, I mean, part of making a new theory right is to give people new theoretical options to articulate what they are already feeling. So is it a problem for my case? I don’t think inherently. So first, I want to say that I do think that the harm the harm argument is true in some cases. And it’s true to a certain extent, I just don’t think you can account for the range of things that we want to talk about when we talk about offensive speech and taking offence. And the way I would frame it, offering my theory is not Hey, I’m going to tell you why you’re really mad, because that’s enormously condescending.
What I would say is, look, if if you ever wanted to tell someone off if you’re ever offended by someone, but you didn’t want to construct yourself as having been harmed and damaged by it, and being crying out for help, but instead you felt that by taking offence, you were asserting your own self respect. I think that this is the understanding of offence taking, that makes the most sense. So you take someone like Bernard Boxhill, right. And he wrote an article called self respect and protest. And this was, at least for me, quite an influential article. And what he’s saying is, so many political protests have no hope of improving your situation. But people do it anyway. And why, and if they were just crying out for help, if they’re just crying out in pain, then that just kind of makes them look bad, like they were doing victim politics, but you take someone like Frederick Douglass, he saying, he might not even have hope of changing everything by his protest, but it’s an assertion of self respect. And so, the reason I thought this up is because when I see people taking offence, and complaining and fighting these fights that they, you know, say for justice, I see strength in indignation and kind of righteous anger. And to me, that’s a very different attitude than hurt victimisation, which I think it’s a mistake to try and fit everything into that image, because that’s precisely what their enemies are playing off of by calling them snowflakes and crybabies and so on. So, yeah, you don’t want to be cared for compared to a duelist. Because everyone thinks they’re macho jerks. But on the other hand, they did have a lot of self respect. And a lot of people want it to be Julius right. That’s the whole story of more and more people wanting in on this culture.
Paul Sagar
So there’s something interesting that you mentioned just a second ago, the so-called snowflake critique. So I wonder, what do you think your analysis adds or maybe improves upon with regard to say someone like Jonathan Haidt, who in his book, The coddling of the American mind, suggests that what’s going on here is the outplay of parenting practices, particularly in the wake of 911. And a culture of fear amongst parents who haven’t let their children be exposed to harm and to risk and to failure, and have created a generation of young people who can’t take disagreements. And I think that your thesis is that that can’t be the whole story. If it’s a story at all.
Clif Mark
I don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t even think that is a major part of the story. I think you can probably find some spoiled children. All right. And where’s John Height? Is he like, is he at NYU? Or I’m not sure where he’s at at the moment. He may be at NYU at the moment. I mean, you’re in a very elite University, you’re going to find a few spoiled kids. That much, I can’t deny. But I just don’t see that. I mean, I spent a fair time in university and I did not see this group of an entire spoiled generation who can’t argue or conflict. I think that this is just a failure on people’s part to recognise genuine sources of grievance that people often rightly have. And also, I think that this whole right wing media industry is just based around getting mad at the kids these days, and what are they taking offence to? So I do think that actually this whole thing about you can’t see anything more. Everyone’s a snowflake. I think it’s overblown
That’s not in my experience, how it actually is in universities. And so the thesis that there’s an entire generation of people who are just these kinds of psychological, glass glass children is not convincing, convincing for me. Just in that area, I wonder if one of the things your analysis can attach to potentially help us understand is why so much reason so called identity politics is particularly uninterested in the question of intentionality. So if you go back to your duelling analogy, I presumed that it didn’t always matter if one person disrespected another intentionally. If I fail to give you the proper accord and respect in a social setting, and you issue me with a challenge. The fact that I hadn’t done it intentionally may not have been all that decisive; the fact that I’d done it would be more important. And I wonder if that’s another similarity, because one thing that does recur with a lot of the identity politics and claims is that we’ll. It doesn’t matter if somebody intended to be racist, it doesn’t matter if somebody intended to be sexist, what matters is that they did the thing. And I again, wondering, does that make more sense on your model of it by doing that they disrespected the status of the other person. And the fact that they didn’t intend to, is kind of neither here nor there.
Will in duelling, culture, intention could be very important, actually, it was important. So if you do something that’s kind of insulting, and I say, hey, Paul, that was out of line. And you say, That’s not at all what I meant, I fully respect you as an equal. I meant something else. Usually, I can let that go. Right. It’s sort of up to me. I don’t have to, sometimes I can say, Well, look, you said what you said, and now I want satisfaction, right?
And that’s sort of my option. But what’s interesting to look at here is what the person who’s taking offence is doing and achieving by taking offence. Right? What I’m doing is kind of extorting a display of respect from you. Because if you do, fight me, if we do duel, then you by fighting me recognise me as an equal. And everyone sees that, right. So let’s say I’m kind of insecure in my status. I think that people don’t respect me.
I might go around and look for an insult, just so I can force this display of respect, that will then establish me as an equal. And there is actually a really interesting history of this in duelling. So whenever a class of people was rising or falling, they tended to get really punctilious about their honour. So when viswanathan entered universities and entered sort of the military establishments to become officers in various European countries, they always got a reputation for being really, really fussy about honour and challenging people to more duels. And in the early 20th century, in the late 19th century, there was also the phenomenon, especially in France, of Jewish tooless of people, Jewish guys challenging anti Semites, just to force them to display the dual display of respect. So you have people writing these anti semitic tracks, they get challenged to all sorts of duels by Jewish men. And so they either sit there and take the insults, in which case they look like punks, or they do them, in which case, they have acknowledged the Jewish men that they’re doing as their equals. And this is explicitly formulated. This isn’t just me making it up. There are in the diaries of Jewish doulas saying this is what I’m doing. I’m forcing them to respect me.
So I think that in many cases, that function is still being performed today. Like we might want to say, Look, I’m going to take offence to this and you’re going to say, I’m sorry, that’s how I didn’t mean it. And now we’ve already achieved something, because you recognise that my offence is legitimate. And you talk to me that way. Yeah, there is a case to be answered. A final thing that I’m wondering here, again, radio listeners can probably tell that I’m quite persuaded by the argument in various ways, is it also helps us to explain something that was remarked in, in particular the week of the 2016 American election, which is that white people behave as an ethnic group that they voted in that perceived white identity interest. Is there a way of telling the story on your terms, which is that? Well, when the group that has previously had most of the status suddenly feels like it might have to share that status? It’s not surprising if it reacts in a way to lock down its privilege?
Paul Sagar
Well, yes, I don’t. I don’t think that’s surprising at all. I think that every group as far back as you can look when they’re being asked to share their status don’t usually share it easily. SoI’m not sure what the question is. Well, I suppose maybe it’s just more confirmation of your thesis. Cliff that was fantastically illuminating. Thanks so much for taking the time. It’s my great pleasure.
Clif Mark
Thanks for having me on. Cheers.
