Musing about “The Distress of the Privileged”


A Facebook friend suggested reading a column on The Weekly Sifting, “The Distressed of the Privileged.” This morning I set aside time to print, read, and ponder this “sifting.”

I found much to think through, but am drawn to one the “first things” in the column—privilege. I’m always on guard for conclusions slipping into lines of reasoning at the point of stating the premise. I would want to ask the author how he would define privilege and how he would distinguish it from advantage. Secondly, I would ask why he sees such a tight linkage between privilege [or advantage] and a sense of entitlement.

There are some other spots that give me reason to pause. One is where he seems to say that only certain people deserve justice. That seems to be a self-defeating or internally inconsistent notion, because if one’s concept of justice is that only some deserve justice, the critique could be that the concept is, in fact, an exercise in injustice.

I think he slips another leap in logic into his piece where he identifies an instance of “privileged distress” when “employers’ religious freedom is threatened when they can’t deny contraception to their employees.” The Catholic Church—I’ll assume this is what he means by “employer” —is not denying anyone the freedom to purchase contraception; it is simply making the argument that religious freedom is fatally compromised when the government asserts that it may decide what constitutes the free exercise of religion.

Anyway, that’s a sampling of thoughts that “The Distress of the Privileged” elicited in me this morning. It illustrates how essential is the task of clearly defining one’s presuppositions and terms, because while many of the same words are used by people who hold mutually contradictory positions, the framework of thoughts underlying those words begins with distinctly different beliefs about the nature of the world.


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