On the commanding influence of the ethos of vulnerability

Why the regime of vulnerability represents a cultural trap

Part 3 of a series of essays on victim culture

Ever since I remarked on the influence of the morality of low expectations in my study The Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectations (1997)[i] there has been an unfortunate tendency to constantly scale down society’s expectations of the new generations that inhabit our society. Human resilience is fast giving way to the commanding principle of vulnerability and unless this trend is reversed society will gravely suffer from the consequences from this fatalistic cultural turn

As I argued in my recent posts the sacralisation of the victim has become an accomplished fact. The identity of the victim is invariably communicated through the rhetoric of vulnerability, which in turn highlights the supposed fragility and psychological deficits suffered by the victim. In effect the state of vulnerability has become normalised. Four well over the past three decades, the ethos of vulnerability in the western world serves as an organising framework that is at least superficially analogous to the role that religion played in the past.

The ethos of vulnerability encourages society to interpret the human condition in psychological terms to the point that people are depicted as too powerless to take charge of their lives without the help of experts. According to this outlook the condition of vulnerability is not only normalised but also fetishised to the point that terms like ‘vulnerable groups’ and references to ‘the vulnerable’ portray fragility as unalterable facts of life. The ideal of moral autonomy has given way to a sensibility that regards heteronomy as the unalterable fact of life. Heteronomy refers to a condition of fatalistic dependency on external influences and force.

For most people vulnerability has become a taken-for-granted concept that can be used to refer to an ever-expanding dimension of human experience. Our readers are unlikely to know that until very recently vulnerability was rarely used to refer to individuals and groups. The association of vulnerability with the human condition emerged in the wake of the emergence of identity politics and is closely linked with the sacralisation of victim identity.

To place vulnerability in a historical context, according to the Oxford English Dictionary in the 17^th century the word referred to someone susceptible to receiving wounds or physical injury. In the late 18^th century the OED’s entry for vulnerability is ‘Of places, etc.: Open to attack or assault by armed forces; liable to be taken or entered in this way’. During the centuries to follow vulnerability referred to the problems associated with buildings, bridges and the environment. It wasn’t until the last two decades of the 20^th century that this word acquired its current usage became humanised as the property of individuals and groups.

In recent decades vulnerability has emerged as a widely used all-purpose concept that purports to signify an important dimension of the human condition. According to one account the term vulnerability ‘captures the notions of global community better than most’[ii]. Yet it is widely agreed that it is a concept that is continually in search of a definition. As one study noted ‘the concept of vulnerability is an extraordinarily elastic concept, capable of being stretched to cover almost any person, group, or situation, and then of being snapped back to describe a narrow range of characteristics like age or incarceration’[iii]. Indeed, despite or because of its conceptual incoherence, vulnerability has also become a powerful metaphor used in everyday vernacular.

Some terms express the prevailing emotional and cultural mood in a way that does not require explanation or definition. Terms like trauma, stress and self-esteem have become taken-for-granted concepts through which people gain meaning of the experience of the problems of life. A therapeutic language pervades popular culture, the world of politics, the workplace, schools and universities and everyday encounters As Kenneth Gergen noted, therapeutic culture provides a script through which emotional deficits ‘make their way into the cultural vernacular’ and become available for ‘the construction of everyday reality’[iv]. One of the clearest manifestations of this trend is the widespread and unquestioned use of the term vulnerable to signify important dimensions of everyday reality. Vulnerability and its companion terms ‘vulnerable groups’, ‘the vulnerable’ and ‘the most vulnerable’ are used to represent and characterise a growing variety of groups and people. The terms ‘vulnerable man’ and ‘vulnerable women’ hint at unspecified deficits but sometimes connote the positive attribute of someone in touch with their feeling.[v]

An analysis of UK and US based newspapers through the database LexisNexis and the index of The Times and New York Times indicates that since the 1990s, groups that are presumed to deserve economic, social or moral support are frequently described as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘the vulnerable’ or ‘the most vulnerable’. Government reports on health, education, crime and welfare continually refer to the targets of their policy as ‘vulnerable children’, ‘vulnerable adults’ or just as ‘the vulnerable’. Such official reports echo the media narrative of vulnerability which are characteristically imprecise about the meaning of this term.

The past three decades has seen a steady expansion of people and groups who are defined or who present themselves as vulnerable. In the 1960s and 1970s the term was mainly but very selectively applied to children and elderly. In the 1980s, ethnic minorities, the homeless, single parents, the mentally ill, people in care and the unemployed were added to this list. A search of UK newspapers indicates that since the 1990s, vulnerability has encompassed the experience of a new range of emotional distress of ‘depressed men’, ‘stressed employees’ and career women.[vi]In more recent times, young Muslim men, university students, teenagers under pressure to be thin, people addicted to Internet pornography are only a small sample of the numerous constituencies who have been characterised as vulnerable[vii]. In the vernacular, on the media, in official policy statements and even in academic discourse, vulnerable has frequently replaced the terms poor and disadvantaged. ‘One law for the rich, one for the vulnerable’ ran the headline of one broadsheet’.[viii] A similar pattern is evident in the US. By the 1990s the term vulnerable was commonly used to refer to virtually every group facing a difficult predicament. One New York Times headline ‘We’re All Vulnerable Now’ illustrates this sensibility.[ix]

A Statement About the Human Condition

Drawing on the pre-existing culture of victimhood, the ethos of vulnerability constantly highlights powerlessness as the defining feature of the human condition. The conceptual inflation of vulnerability during the past 35 years runs is reinforced by a narrative that implies that humanity is more vulnerable today than ever before. According to this narrative despite the phenomenal development of science and technology humanity is less capable of dealing with the threats it faces than in previous times. As an observer in the New Scientist noted, ‘a growing number of researchers….are coming to the conclusion that far from becoming ever more resilient, our society is becoming more vulnerable’[x]. A headline in last month’s I Paper, stated, ‘In Britain, you are more vulnerable than you realise - ex-Nato chief’s warning to UK’[xi].

Statements like, ‘the illusion of control: why the financial sector is more vulnerable than ever to a financial crisis’ assume that society lacks the resources to deal with the challenges it faces.[xii]. Frequently commentaries and claims about life are framed in the language of vulnerability. Curiously, when someone says, ‘she is vulnerable’ or that ‘teenagers are vulnerable’ there is no need to explain ‘vulnerable to what?’. The question of ‘vulnerable to what’ is rarely posed because the only possible answer to this question is ‘vulnerability to everything’! Vulnerability works as self-reproducing condition that shapes the individual’s identity.

Yet the deification of vulnerability corrodes the human imagination and inhibits people from realising their potential. The ethos of vulnerability disempowers people and distracts them from gaining a measure of control over their lives. It incites people to believe that they cannot be expected handle adversity without the help of professional intervention. Unfortunately, this normalisation of helplessness threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In recent decades the normalisation of helplessness has led to the ascendancy of therapeutic culture and the vast expansion of the mental health industrial complex[xiii].

Once society and its individuals have internalised the ethos of vulnerability it becomes difficult for people to free themselves from the identity of victimhood. The damaging consequences of the institutionalisation of this outlook can be seen in the ceaseless expansion of the number of people who are assigned a mental illness diagnosis. The ethos of vulnerability encourages society to interpret the problems of existence through the medium of mental health. Consequently, the painful and difficult episodes in people’s lives that are a normal dimension of human existence are now reinterpreted as threats to mental health. Tensions at work, the pressure that children face during school exams or the experience of being rejected by friends and colleagues are now frequently re-interpreted as potential markers for mental health related issues.

According to the paradigm of vulnerability distress in not something to be lived but a condition that requires treatment. From this standpoint the integrity of the person is threatened through exposure to adversity. As the sociologist Ian Craib argued, this ‘difficulty in accepting depression, despair and conflict – in a word disappointment – as part of life’ represents a significant ‘inhibition of the self’.[xiv]

An illustration of this regrettable trend is the current tendency to rebrand loneliness as a mental health problem. Some experts have gone so far as to calculate that loneliness is likely to increase mortality by 26 percent[xv]. They claim that loneliness and vulnerability are closely linked and that both are the sources of health problems. This orientation towards vulnerability has led to the reinterpretation of every form of distress; the act of fearing, existential pain, disappointment through the prism of mental health. The outcome of this trend is the downsizing of the ideal human agency leading to a loss of belief in humanity’s capacity to deal with the problems that confront it.

The profound cultural shift which led to the cultivation of vulnerability strives towards the transformation of the human subject which was once understood as an autonomous, resilient agent capable of engaging with uncertainty, exercising judgment and influencing the world. This account of the human subject has given way to one who is steadily scaled down to a fragile, vulnerable individual. Society’s lowering of expectations of the human subject has encouraged a regime of passivity and fatalism towards the future. In effect the influence of the ethos of vulnerability shrinks the moral and political space for the exercise of agency.

So why is it important to counter the influence of the ethos of vulnerability? A society that loses confidence in the capacity of humanity to assume a measure of influence over its destiny turns its people into a disoriented mass fearful of assuming responsibility for the future of their community. The regime of vulnerability represents a cultural trap that weakens the aspiration for moral independence. The only beneficiaries of the maintenance of this trap are the members and supporters of the mental health industrial complex who are given the opportunity to colonise our soul.

Ultimately the future of democratic decision making by individual citizens depends upon pushing back and revolting against the paralysing consequences of subordinating human ambition to the ethos of vulnerability.

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[i] Frank Furedi (1997), The Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectations, Continuum Press: London.

[ii] De Chesnay, M. (ed) (2005) Caring For The Vulnerable: Pespectives In Nursing Theory; Practice and Research, (Jones & Bartlett Publishers ; Sudbury, Mass), p.XIX

[iii]

Levine, C. (2004) ‘The Concept of Vulnerability in Disaster Research’, Journal of Traumatic Stress, vol.17, no.5, p.398.

[iv] Gergen, K.J. (1990) ‘Therapeutic professions and the diffusion of deficits’, The Journal of Mind and Behavior’, vol 11,p.362.

[v] ‘Hey we love a vulnerable man’ observes a report on blind dating. See ‘The Potential Of A Blind Date Can Be Worth All The Pitfalls’, Coventry Evening News; 19 March 2005.

[vi] See for example ‘depressed men “turn to drink”; silent suffering: concern over ignored illness’, The Independent; 24 April 1996.

[vii] See for example The Observer, November 9, 2003 “Dangerous pursuit of beauty: The medias notion that thinness is next to godliness plays havoc with vulnerable young minds”

[viii] See One law fior the rich, one for the vulnerable’ in The Independent; 23 March 1993.

[ix] New York Times, January 12 1998“Is Big Brother Watching? Why Would He Bother?; We’re all Vulnerable”

[x] Debora Mackenzie ‘Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?’ , New Scientist; 5 April 2008

[xi] https://inews.co.uk/news/world/britain-more-vulnerable-realise-ex-nato-chiefs-warning-uk-4195345?srsltid=AfmBOoqL88F5k3kjVUVCkvgKnupoA_J9vSi347PrpiiG1KIYgsxAdyc4

[xii] https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/economics/the-illusion-of-control-why-the-financial-sector-is-more-vulnerable-than-ever-to-a-financial-crisis

[xiii] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022167819830516#:~:text=Abstract,provided%20in%20the%20United%20States.

[xiv] Craib, I., 2002. The importance of disappointment. Routledge. p.158.

[xv] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/25/loneliness-cured-value-solitude-medicalising-epidemic