Civil servants are being given lessons instructing them not to roll their eyes or look at their mobile phones while dealing with members of staff. Such behaviour can be deemed evidence of sexual or racial discrimination, examples of ‘microaggressions’.

As the Times reports today, more than £160,000 has been spent by the government since 2021 on hiring public sector consultants to train staff to recognise ‘perceived slights’ in the form of microaggressions. Complaints of microaggressions are even being brought to employment tribunals after Acas, the arbitration service, decided to include them in its guidance against discrimination. Elsewhere, in the same time period, the Education and Skills Funding Agency has spent more than £1,000 per worker on microaggression training for a small number of staff.

There is no conscious way to know we are making a microaggression and so no way to prevent ourselves from making one

A microggression, an idea derived from the school of Critical Race Theory, is the concept that someone might innocently or unconsciously display a dismissive or hostile attitude through unwittingly made minor gestures. The word was coined in 1970 by the psychiatrist Chester Pierce; and the psychologist Derald Wing Sue has since described microaggressions as ‘brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership’.

One class of British civil servants has recently been taught the following definition: ‘Microbehaviours are tiny, often unconscious gestures, facial expressions, postures, words and tone of voice can influence how included (or not included) the people around us feel.’ The definition pointed to examples such as ‘insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate unfriendly, critical or negative messages’. Elsewhere, Berkshire Consultancy, which has been teaching staff from the Competition and Markets Authority (which has spent over £60,000 on lessons), explains that microaggressions ‘are usually delivered by well-intentioned individuals unaware that they have engaged in harmful conduct toward a socially devalued group.’

There is of course one glaring contradiction inherent in the idea of teaching people how not to make microaggressions: you cannot avoid making an unconscious gesture. The unconscious by its very definition is unknowable to the rational mind. There is no conscious way to know we are making a microaggression, and consequently, no logical manner to prevent ourselves from making them. Furthermore, the consequential offence that they might generate is all in the eye of the beholder, beyond the ken of those putatively causing the offence: it is entirely subject to the interpretation of anyone sensing – or seeking – offence.

No wonder the fruits of such lessons have been disappointing, to say the least. ‘Feedback from trainees after one series of lessons was scathing,’ reports the Times. ‘Most respondents said that the training did not meet their objectives, did not enhance their knowledge, they did not feel they could apply what they had learnt to their work and would not recommend the sessions to others.’

Nevertheless, the whole notion of microgressions chimes with the times. They resonate with a culture that places a premium on feelings and subjective interpretation above dispassionate objectivity. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay wrote in their influential 2020 book Cynical Theories, one of the most significant shifts in culture at the end of the twentieth century was that ‘the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted.’

In the wake of the 1999 Macpherson inquiry, our legal system came to enshrine such subjectivity into the definition of a racist incident, which is now described as ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim’. Now it’s not the intention, conscious or not, of a word or action that matters, but the subjective perception of it.

We have witnessed the corresponding elevation of feeling in the radical trans movement, which holds that so long as one believes oneself to be of another sex, or ‘identifies’ oneself as such, that belief should be respected or even enshrined in law. The Scottish government may be have been thwarted in December in its plan to make it easier to change one’s sex by law, basically by basing it on a personal decision, but it captured a zeitgeist that is enthral to subjectivity or. to put it less charitably, irrationality.

Microgressions resonate, too, to ‘woke’ ideology, and one of its central tenets: that power is exerted in an invisible, not obvious fashion – hence the presence today of such similarly nebulous and unverifiable concepts as ‘unwitting racism’ and ‘implicit bias’. Allied to this is the belief that those exerting power are invariably white and male and those at the receiving end are those categories who have been historically oppressed. This conceit has ostensibly been borrowed in its entirety by the civil service, who have made it the assumption that any microgression must be racial or sexual in its nature. As if a sensitive white male like me can never perceive a slight.

So far, the success of lessons on microaggressions in the civil service seem to have been limited. But don’t expect to hear the last of them. They are very much of our era.