debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

8.7.06

The Real You vs A New Creation

In describing his efforts at recognizing privilege and becoming a better (pro)feminist, Malachi at Feminist Allies writes:

A major part of the problem is that I *do* have a lot (some say an excess) of self-confidence, a forceful personality, and some take-charge instincts. Thanks, patriarchy. But disentangling what’s really me form what’s the patriarchy’s influence, what’s self-confidence and what’s self-aggrandizement, what’s inspiring leadership and what’s privileged domination is no mean feat.

What interests me about this bit is the implied distinction between the "real" self and the constructed self, which is a common one in thinking about the effects of oppression systems on individuals. The model here is that there's some inherent pre-social and morally neutral real personality. Then patriarchy came along and added some stuff on top of that, stuff that is bad because it leads to harming others. Malachi's task is then to strip away this fake addition to reveal the real egalitarian person underneath.

I don't want to criticize the substantive changes Malachi is making in how he lives his life, since as far as I can tell from his few posts so far he's on the right track. (I don't mean to pick on him personally, he's just the latest person to raise a common idea.) But I do want to raise some questions about the model of identity -- call it "real core with fake trappings," or RCFT -- that he uses to explain himself. I think the RCFT model points us in the wrong direction (at least as far as understanding the identity of those in positions of privilege -- not being oppressed in any way myself, I won't presume to speak for what models are accurate representations of that experience).

The first problem with the RCFT is that it locates the criterion of value in the wrong place. Self-confidence is good because it benefits people, not because it's a feature of a real underlying self. And self-aggrandizement is bad because it hurts people, not because it's a fake accretion slapped on by social forces.

But perhaps more importantly, I don't think you can separate a "real," presocial core identity from a distorted or less real identity built up by social forces. Your socially constructed identity is your real identity. What exists independently of social construction is at best a set of underdetermined potentials and constraints, not a fully formed identity. If you're a man living in a modern Western country, being patriarchal is part of who you really are.

In thinking about a better model of how to conceptualize becoming less of a patriarch, I thought of a line from one of history's greatest sources of sexism*, St. Paul. In 2 Corinthians 5: 17, he wrote:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!

Replace "in Christ" with "a (pro)feminist,"** and you have a better way of looking at the process people like Malachi (and myself) are engaged in. Whatever you think of the moral value of the conversions that Paul achieved in building the early church, he had seen quite a few people adopt new outlooks on life by the time he wrote his letter to the Corinthians, so he had some insight into the psychology of it. Becoming a Christian was not a matter of stripping away some sinful trappings that had been added by the devil or the world in order to reveal the real godly core. It was a matter of taking someone who had a real identity as a pagan and remaking them so that their real identity became Christian. So men who want to become better (pro)feminists have to recognize that we have a real patriarchally-constructed identity, and then replace it with an equally real "new creation" -- or better, "new construction" -- along feminist lines. It's a matter of remaking, not stripping away.

*Lynn Gazis-Sax has some interesting thoughts on whether Paul himself was actually that sexist, but in any case it's undeniable that his words became fuel for generations of later sexists.

**My UU side would argue that the two are equivalent, because the Bible should be read such that to be "in Christ" has nothing to do with holding factual theological-historical beliefs about some carpenter from Nazareth -- rather it means nothing more or less than adopting an attitude of love toward all persons, which is achieved (in the realm of gender) through feminism. But these theological issues are beside the point of this post, especially since I presume people not from a Christian background aren't going to be too keen on being told "you should be 'in Christ,' except that that what I mean by that is totally different from what it sounds like or what most people mean by it."

Stentor Danielson, 07:43, |

7.7.06

Us vs Them and the Ad Hominem Defense

I mentioned this in a comment to Amp's post about the "ad hominem defense," but then I decided it was worth a full post. An ad homiem defense is when a liberal rattles off their lefty credentials in response to some specific criticism from the left (or mutatis mutandis for any other ideology). There's a particularly egregious example at the end of this Hank Fox post. Fox came in for a lot of criticism for saying that he wouldn't eat at an Arby's where one of the employees had a facial piercing, because he finds piercings disgusting. (In the linked post, he tries to defend himself by claiming that his problem is that people with piercings care too much about what others think, as if the clean-cut and wholesome look isn't just as much a show put on for others, and as if his vocal boycott of Arby's isn't essentially a demand that other people should care what others think about their appearance.) After his painfully self-righteous rationalization, Fox hauls out his liberal bona fides to prove that his anti-piercing views couldn't possibly be a case of bigotry.

Fox's post is interesting to me because it makes so clear one important element of the ad hominem defense: its use of the Us vs Them frame. He asks us to imagine a room full of people, and reminds us that if Rush Limbaugh and his ilk were on one side of the room, he and his critics would end up together on the opposite side. This is a vision of politics in which there are only two camps. Criticism may only be made against the other camp. If someone's liberal enough to get into the liberal camp, then they're one of Us. If you criticize someone, you must be implicitly seeing them as one of Them, an enemy on the same level as Rush. The choice is between total solidarity and total animosity. The only debate is over where to draw the line -- to we, like the users of the ad hominem defense, draw a magnanimously wide tent in order to focus on our real enemies on the far right? Or do we, as ad-hom-defenders' critics are assumed to, draw the line narrowly to include only a pure in-group on the "Us" side?

But of course this is not how politics works. So far as I know, nobody who criticised Fox's views of pierced people thinks that he's therefore wholly in Rush Limbaugh's camp. As I said to Hugo Schwyzer a while back,

... a person's membership in the cause is never all-or-nothing. Your sins don't wipe out the other good work you've done, but the other good work you've done doesn't earn you indulgences.

I think the mentality behind the ad hominem defense goes some way toward explaining why white people are reluctant to engage in deep discussions of race (and men in discussions of feminism, etc.) -- and I don't claim that I'm immune to this. There's a fear of discovering that while you thought you were one of Us, you are actually one of them. It's easier to pretend that race doesn't exist than to risk feeling lumped in with the KKK because you said or did something racially insensitive. Strategies like the "don't you have bigger fish to fry" argument that Amp discussed serve to keep the fundamental line between Us and Them in a comfortable spot. (Note that this is a problem with the assumptions privileged people make, not with anything that their critics are doing.)

Stentor Danielson, 19:00, |

6.7.06

Blaming Bush For Natural Disasters

John McGrath makes an offhand remark citing Hurricane Katrina as evidence that Bush's climate change policies have led to disaster (analogous to the way his WMD policy led to the disaster in Iraq). I agree that Bush's policies on climate change are deplorable, and that Bush's deplorable policies bear a fair bit of responsibility for the Katrina disaster. But the share of the Bush-blame that can be attributed specifically to his action on climate change is very small. Climatologists remain divided on the question of how much climate change will alter the frequency of severe weather events, and how much of that alteration is already visible.

Blaming Katrina on Bush's climate change policies may be politically convenient as a way of generating pressure to change those policies. But it's politically inconvenient in a broader sense, because it reinforces the "natural disaster" frame for understanding what went wrong with Katrina (and what continues to go wrong in many other hazard events).

The "natural disaster" frame envisions society as moving along innocently, minding its own business, when wham! it gets hit by an extreme geophysical event that causes destruction and death. Causal responsibility, and hence blame, lie on the side of the geophysical event. So therefore interventions to prevent or mitigate disasters focus on controlling the event, a "hazard-side" strategy.

Over half a century ago Gilbert White -- the father of natural hazards research, and hardly a political radical -- pointed out that "natural disasters" are actually the result of the intersection of natural and social conditions. Whether there is a disaster, and what kind of damage it does, depends on how social practices and individual choices put human values at risk of being undercut by changes in the natural environment. Later more radical thinkers elaborated the idea of "vulnerability," with the slogan "there's no such thing as a [purely] natural disaster." We have to focus on the reasons why humans become vulnerable to extreme geophysical events.

Framing Bush's responsibility for Katrina as a matter of his climate change policy places our focus on the hazard event. The problem becomes the fact that there was a Category 5 hurricane, and the change we need is to control greenhouse gas emissions so as not to increase the frequency of Category 5 hurricanes. This focus ignores the central role in the disaster played by New Orleanians' (and our whole economy's) vulnerability to hurricanes. This vulnerability is the product of an economic system dependent on oil and the creation of economic inequalities, a system of racial oppression, and a hubristic attitude to the environment. Across a broad range of issues, Bush's policies have served to maintain this system (though he is of course far from the sole creator or sustainer of it).

The "blame climate change" redirection of attention is especially unfortunate given that the sources of vulnerability in the case of Katrina are so fundamental to what's wrong in so many other facets of modern America. Big events like natural disasters are powerful political-rhetorical resources. They need to be used wisely, to cut at the most fundamental problems.

Stentor Danielson, 03:02, |

5.7.06

Guest Blogging

For reasons beyond my ken, Ampersand has invited me to be a guest blogger on Alas for the next month. Everything I post there will be cross-posted here, but I imagine the comments threads will be more lively over at Alas.

Stentor Danielson, 21:58, |

Backward Ethics

Eric Schwitzgebel asks why ethics professors don't live their lives any more ethically than the rest of us. Assuming that the empirical claim (for which he offers only anecdotal evidence) is true, and assuming that it makes any sense to speak of a single scale of the ethicalness of behavior independent of any particular ethical theory (to which most ethics professors woulnd't adhere), the answer seems simple. The philosophical discipline of ethics is not about changing your behavior, it's about justifying it. Ethicists begin with their intuitions about which behaviors are ethical, and then work out some explanation that justifies and systematizes them.

Admittedly I've only read philosophical treatises on ethics as a hobby, but I have yet to encounter an ethicist (Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer being partial exceptions) who said "while I and many other people assume that X is morally right, the basic principles that I have proposed entail that X is morally wrong, so I will now assert that we should not do X." I recently read some of R.M. Hare's work, and though I generally like his system of basic principles, I was embarassed by his constant protestations that nothing in his system could possibly ever produce a counter-intuitive conclusion.

So the difference between ethicists and regular people is not the content of what we believe is right or wrong, it's how sophisticated our justifications for those beliefs are.

Stentor Danielson, 03:58, |

4.7.06

Lay Off Lieberman

I admit I have't been following this, or any other, race very closely, but I don't really get the vitriol directed at Joe Lieberman over his decision to run as an independent if he loses the Democratic primary. I'm no Lieberman fan -- aside from a few environmental bills he's sponsored, he's done little but give aid and comfort to the conservative agenda, and I'll be thrilled if Ned Lamont manages to oust him. So on the merits, I don't want Lieberman to be Senator, and am therefore unhappy about any turn of events (such as running as an independent) that increases his chances.

But much of the criticism paints his decision as wrong in itself (and so presumably it would be equally wrong for Lamont to run as an independent). There seem to be two lines of reasoning here: loyalty and democracy. The loyalty argument is easiest for me to dismiss, because I see loyalty to the party as a fairly minor virtue, if indeed it is one at all. Given that the party appears poised to reject him, I see no obligation on Lieberman's part to place the interests of the party institution above his obligations to fight for what's best for the people of Connecticut, America, and the world (though of course I think Lieberman is deeply mistaken about what's best for the people of Connecticut, America, and the world).

The democracy argument is that it's somehow undemocratic for Lieberman to continue running after losing a vote. This would be true if he were to continue to insist on being the Democratic Party's nominee. But he's running for Senator of all of Connecticut. The goal is to have the Senator with the broadest support among all the people of the state. If a candidate is solidly on one side of the political fence (as Lamont is), then the primary can serve as a useful test of popularity. But with a centrist like Lieberman, the views of the most liberal third of Connecticut's voters (the one who would participate in the primary) say little about the will of Connecticutians as a whole. It's quite plausible that 50% of the people of Connecticut want Lieberman for their senator, but that because those voters are spread out across both parties as well as the independents, he wouldn't get 50% of the votes in the Democratic primary. An independent run is the only way that a coalition like Lieberman's supporters, who don't sit neatly within the ideological ambit of either major party, would be able to make their will known.

Related is the idea that Lieberman's move somehow undermines the purpose of the primary. If you see the primaries as basically ways to reduce the number of candidates on the final ballot, this is true. Too many candidates on the ballot is confusing and -- in a system without IRV -- can lead to vote-splitting between closely allied candidates that ends up putting a person with minority support into office. But this justification works best when the primary system is open -- anyone can vote in either primary. This gives the system the flexibility to focus on the matchups that most need to be settled before the final ballot is printed. It's important to note in this regard that Lieberman vs Lamont is not a classic vote-splitting scenario, given Lieberman's centrism (as described above).

A closed primary system -- like Connecticut's -- serves a different purpose (albeit one also served by an open primary). A closed primary is an instrument of the party. It acts as a screening tool for deciding which candidate the party should throw its endorsement and resources behind. But this purpose is in no way jeopardized by Lieberman's independent run. He will make his run without the expectation of any support from the institutional apparatus of the Democratic Party. But there isn't, and shouldn't be, any rule that says only people who have a party institution behind them can run for office. In this sense, Lieberman sticking it out after he fails to get the Democratic Party's endorsement isn't much different from Lamont sticking it out after he failed to get the AFL-CIO's endorsement.

Stentor Danielson, 19:27, |

3.7.06

Taboo vs Sin

Hafidha Sofia mentions having been frequently asked about the consequences of accidentally violating Muslim laws -- e.g. eating food that you didn't know contained pork. She says that Islam is quite clear that you aren't held responsible for violations of the law that result from ignorance or necessity.

On the one hand, the question about accidentally eating pork isn't so off the wall -- it's just getting at the difference between sin and taboo. With taboos, the connection is causal, so all that matters is whether you do something -- just like the way you'd still be dead if you ate some cyanide by accident. (I recently read an interesting article about how indigenous people in the Andes will sometimes see misfortunes as punishments for having stepped in a holy place that nobody knew existed.) Sin, on the other hand, is a justice system, so the punishment is withheld if you have a good excuse, like ignorance or necessity.

But one has to wonder why the sin/taboo distinction was such an important issue to so many non-Muslims. Part of it may simply be that it's just that our culture has set these questions up as a standard "imponderable," which people fall back on in trying to make conversation (much like the supposedly deep and problematic question of whether vegetarians can engage in fellatio).

It may also be due to the connection between taboo and primitiveness*. To the Western mind, Islam's developmental status is ambiguous. On the one hand it has various intellectual trappings like a holy book, and it claims to be the next step in the Judeo-Christian tradition. On the other hand, it's stereotypically associated with cruel barbarian hordes from the East (including terrorists). Some people will seek confirmation of Islam's primitiveness (as evidenced by its use of taboos) so that they will be able to dismiss it as an intellectual threat and so that they can look down on its followers. Other people (and I suspect this motivation is more common) seek confirmation of its non-primitiveness (as evidenced by its use of a sin framework) so that they feel less threatened by their Muslim neighbors.

* Obviously I'm speaking here just of how our culture perceives things. Modern Western culture has its share of taboos -- just think of the pervasive anxiety among men that certain acts may "make me gay."

Stentor Danielson, 19:17, |