The Symbolic Violence of Progressives

I am currently exploring the incorrect, immoral, indecent, or just plain odd behaviors that proliferate in online spaces. As a part of this exploration, I developed a new course for my university, Online Deviance. I am making it up as I go! It’s never advisable to do this, but I’ve learned over time that one grows intellectually when put in situations that require thinking oneself out of them. So, each week, I have to think my way out of the problem of having no content to teach in this new course. It’s painful going through it, for sure. But at the end of the semester, I will have a new course and knowledge base.

Last week, I decided to prepare materials on the set of behaviors online that are so harmful to people they can rightly be considered violent. Not violence inflicted through physical or material means, but violence inflicted on an individual or group through the use of symbols. It is symbolic violence.

In preparing those materials, I realized that symbolic violence is a better way of thinking about the critiques conservatives make about liberal dominance in some of America’s institutions. It also offers a way to address those critiques constructively.

Words are violence?

There are at least two ways to talk about symbolic violence. One way is through the somewhat contentious phrase “words are violence.”