Words and things, pt. 3

True to the logic of fighting the last war, I am completely, unequivocally on board with the project to use language in affirming rather than demeaning ways. (Note: ‘denigrating’ is often used in these discussions but shouldn’t be, because of the notorious ‘nigr’ root. It means ‘blackening’ and careful speakers should question whether they think that should be their image of a bad thing.) In principle, no word that may cause distress should be used by any thoughtful person. Care for the feelings of all others should be a profound moral duty. I really think these things; and they are enshrined in law in many jurisdictions.

Yet, when I get history papers from students that take this moralizing form I gently diagnose them with a case of the shoulds. It’s not that one doesn’t agree (although I also get “all illegal immigrants should be rounded up and deported” kinds of should papers) but that the level of analysis is so low. Young children can produce formally adequate shoulds. A should basically stands between an implied real and a projected ideal. But because the real is only implied, then swiftly gutted for its poor fit with the ideal, the actual relations and dynamics of actual human beings in diverse contexts and situations are obliterated. Further, this procedure reflexively guts the ideal, because without reference to practical relations in the world it can’t actually be clear where the ideal is coming from and whether it is possible or even desirable. To get there from here we need a really good grasp of the here, which is what and why I teach. Even then the paradox of unintended consequences haunts the shoulds.

Putting context aside for a moment, let’s look more carefully at the proposition that distressing language should not be used, and what happens if we follow it through to conclusions. There are many words in a variety of categories that commonly qualify for excision from polite discourse because they distress; examples include (brackets indicate clinical usage here; it’s alright, I am a Doctor) [shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits (yes, Carlin's famous old seven words, see below), bitch, midget, kike, kraut, guinea, we all know a couple that are missing here, faggot, dyke, damn, cripple, etc.]. Each of these, one of which is incidentally my family name, has a history and current practice of oppressive or at least intentionally offensive use; each is associated for some fraction of the population with involuntary emotional and even physical distress. Readers, it’s just much nicer to certain real human beings to never, ever use these words.

Here are a few more words that also qualify as traumatizing for some fraction of the population: [prick, muffin, clam, beaver, salami, vegemite, monkey, chick, castrate, clitoris, crazy, dormitory (my university desperately, aggressively wants them to be called residence halls), puke, priest, father, school, Republican, no]. In most of these cases the distressing association is either more indirect or more idiosyncratic, but I don’t suppose I need to dwell on explaining the problem with each of these for certain real human beings.

The second list is tricky for at least two reasons. First, the words each have common, everyday meanings for many of their users that are not associated with trauma. They are “part-time” dirty words, as Carlin says, although this distinction evaporates if they cause full-time distress to someone(s). Second, those traumatized by them are smaller or more plainly idiosyncratic minorities than those for the first batch. From the standpoint of universal morals this should not make a difference. This is not a slippery slope, it’s a principle. If the rule is that distressing language not be used, if the motivating ethic is care for the person and commitment to do no harm, the undistressed majority may not use their emotional privilege to tyrannize the distressed minority. We do not get our way simply because there are more of us than you. Morally speaking we need to not be using words that hurt anyone. At all. Ever.

Eventually we realize that each of us has a variety of words that cause us intense involuntary distress; and without question, life would be better without them in it. As an example, I have many, including, thanks to kind training from friends, most of those in the first list. More personally, I am deeply traumatized by that odious combination of otherwise innocuous words with which I am asked if I just got a haircut. The reasons for this have to do with the petty cruelties of a suburban adolescence and long apprenticeship in the sort of intensive feminism for which any scrutinizing gaze is objectifying. Although this example is trivial and you’ll have to take my word for it, the question kicks my adrenal glands into high gear, prompts an anxious fight-or-flight response, and knocks me into a defensive, angry, one-down personality that I do not recognize as myself.

We do not need to use words to empower ourselves by judging others, any more than we need monkeys as metaphors for our amusing failures to reach our full human potential or we need our savory cured meat products to be shaped suggestively like penises. Every one of these outrages against care and decency is arbitrary and optional, and should be eliminated. To clarify the resulting world we do need a Harrison Bergeron for the infliction of verbal harm. I imagine a society in which we each carry a clicker and brain implants with which we can electrically jolt each other’s language centers to disrupt utterances we each find distressing. Eventually we would learn to keep our big mouths shut and just smile and nod to each other, which would be very pleasant, and put George Carlin out of business.

This nightmare dystopia of personal veto over any conceivable utterance follows directly from an obviously correct ethic of care for the feelings of others and an equally obvious rejection of majority tyranny. Since the consequence of following the logic of these sound principles through is a disaster, but I don’t suppose we’d want to draw the conclusion that we shouldn’t care for others or that we should tyrannize the weak, there’s some incentive to see if something’s missing from the analysis. Fortunately, there is at least one unstated premise. The above fully follows only if we make speakers radically responsible for the consequences of their speech. If you remark that I’ve had a [haircut] and my defense systems go into an uproar, or I wear a t-shirt advertising jamaican [cock] soup and yours do likewise; or, to be less coy, you call me a [cocksucking faggot] and I call you a [fucking mental midget] (and if both are in some less offensive sense true, so not merely laughable), we are responsible not just for being [churls] (oops sorry, a classist reference there). We have caused and are morally culpable for that emotional harm the words did.

Well yes, duh. And with all of the power and responsibility in the situation thus assigned to speakers, the only morally acceptable remedy is to modify the speakers’ behavior, by diplomacy if possible and by force if necessary. This is the slippery, sloping one-lane road of moral purity that leads straight to the personal veto and the shocking cortical implants. When people fret about censorship of plainly harmful speech this is why.

Hm. Without abandoning the notion that we’re responsible for our speech and morally tasked with self-censoring right down to silence if need be, let’s pause a second to doubt that all of the power and responsibility between speakers and hearers is lodged with the former. Do hearers have any power other than that of righteous censorship? Is it possible that we too have a responsibility to the other in conversations we find distressing?

First, responsibility. Yes. The same ethic of care for the feelings of others we’d like to require of speakers requires hearers not to reject or silence speakers. If the remedy for distress is itself reciprocally distressing, a compound harm has occurred. Rejection and silencing are distressing to speakers. So we have a mutual responsibility not to offend as speakers and not to take offense as hearers. This is not a slippery slope, it’s a principle. Out of care for the other we may well have some leeway to encourage them to use their speech more affirmingly; but only within the limits of respect for their feelings.

Finally, power. As hearers of upsetting language we have a common interest in not being upset; we would therefore like (and we humanly deserve) the power to manage our situations so that we are not upset. If our only mechanism to accomplish this is to compel the actions of others, our serenity depends on the actions of others, so this is by definition a highly contingent and dependent empowerment. Even if there were no jerks in the world, I could get complete polite compliance on the don’t-comment-on-my-haircut rule from every person I ever met and still live an uncertain and uneasy life as new people come into it and need their training. Just because some of the more common offending words can be handled in a more wholesale way does not change the basic problem. To give the agency of our serenity to others is inevitably a form of subservience, unless our aim is to control others absolutely. Machiavelli’s Prince is a cautionary tale.

I’m reminded of the legendary emperor who wanted to have all the roads paved with leather, until an advisor suggested that strips of leather be tied to the bottoms of his feet instead. The obvious solution is to take what power language has within ourselves; and to deny to all others, known and unknown, trained and untrained, well-intentioned and evil, clod and jerk, the power to distress us with a word. Since we cannot be certain of our ability to control their behavior and we may be responsible not to, even to our own detriment, our locus of control is our own interpretations and reactions. Treating words as offenses may be emotionally ingrained, but it is intellectually optional. Bracketing our emotional responses (feeling them but not acting on them) is hard but well within each of our power, much more so than controlling the language of the whole world.

Sticks and stones. So go ahead. Say something about my [haircut]. You shouldn’t, but I should have it covered.

Alternative assignments

For a long while I had a section in my syllabi on alternative assignments. Students could skip papers and invent just about any way they wanted to engage with the course and materialize their learning. The only condition was that as part of the project they had to tell me how to tell the difference between a good version of what they’d done and a bad version of what they’d done.

I had various students take me up on the alternative, but none who actually satisfied the requirement to think through and explain the criteria of competence and excellence in the field they’d chosen. As a result, I devised my own standards and the alternatives rarely did very well. Eventually I dropped the offer altogether as I realized that the vast majority of my students are not usefully aware of the critical continuum between incompetence, competence, and excellence within fields of accomplishment. So now I use teaching them how to write papers as a means to teach them this much more important lesson.

So You Think You Can Write a Paper?

Rachel and I occasionally enjoy the talent shows that currently populate the airwaves, although I really miss the gong. Last night we were watching “So You Think You Can Dance” and I was struck by how much like writing and grading papers the show is. Perhaps the facts that I just finished the Spring semester by reading about a thousand pages of student final essays and journals and I’m about to wing to Colorado for a week of reading high school essays in the AP World History Gulag are shaping my thoughts?

There’s a real contrast between the singing shows (“American Idol” and “Eurovision” just wrapped up) and the dancing shows. With singing there’s very little talent or skill involved in the selection and outcome. A basic ability to loudly hit intended notes most of the time is of course critical, although not even that is essential, as Sanjaya mythically showed. Once through the wringer of this very basic requirement, contestants are judged chiefly on their style and emoting. It helps if the notes they miss are at the top of their range, since this makes them sound intense, sincere, and a little vulnerably desperate. (Bono has made a whole career out of this trick.) Winning one of these shows is like winning the lottery, which is lots of why they’re mass favorites.

The dance shows are much different. Although the quasi-celebrities on “Dancing with the Stars” can get away with some pretty minimal competence for quite a while — e.g. Billy Ray Cyrus, Marie Osmond — eventually a focused and systematic ability to get the body to move in exactly the right way is key. For the amateurs on “SYTYCD” this is even more true. They don’t have celebrity going for them; more of them than needed are conventionally and/or edgily attractive; shaking it is no advantage since doing some genre’s version of that skillfully is the aim of all. To even be considered past the first round of the show, which true to format is mostly dedicated to weeding out and publicly humiliating the wannabes and clueless losers, they have to be pretty good dancers.

Judging the goodness of a dancer turns out to be a lot like judging the goodness of a student paper. It’s actually quite a while before the judges get to the more properly aesthetic or ’subjective’ levels of assessment. First they look for levels of competence. Level one, I noticed last night, involves the distinction between ‘moving’ and ‘dancing’. Dance wannabes who can’t move are like students who can’t articulate thoughts in complete sentences. The judgment is easy, and so is the prescription. Work. Much. Harder. (I would like very much to be able to say what those judges say next, which is some version of “Go away, and don’t come back until you’re at least moving and it’s not a torture to watch you make that godawful twitching.”)

Movers are people with a basic ability to control their bodies in relation to music. You wouldn’t be embarrassed to be on the floor with them at a bar. They’d be in play on “American Idol,” but on “SYTYCD” they’re not even in the game. In the world of student papers the movers are the kids with a basic ability to control written language in relation to a thought. They may be perplexed or offended that this is not enough, as are many show contestants. I find here that my grading is more “AI” than “SYTYCD,” because my movers will usually get some kind of a D or low C when really, they ought not to be getting through to the next round at the college level.

At the lowest level of skill the dancers can do actual choreography without looking too spastic. They have muscular control and some sense of genre; they’re not just interpreting their feelings by flailing around. You can see what they’re up to, although it’s pretty rushed, choppy and imprecise. There’s a general tone that says ‘dancer’. In student papers, I’d begin to see a recognizable introductory paragraph with an assignment-appropriate topic statement here; maybe some raw flair but probably not much of a thesis; and rambling yet underelaborated paragraphs with something like evidence and a tenuous thread of continuity between them. We’re solidly into the C range here.

Next up in the world of tv dance are the contention fodder, whose destiny is to get culled through the early competitive phases of the show, much to the consternation of their adoring hometown fans. They’re moderately skilled in all the technical aspects of their genre. Although the performance is a bit mechanical and they have no real feel for what they’re doing, they hit their marks and positions with some flow and formal grace. They’ve mastered the plastic smile but haven’t got the nuances of making it look like authentic joy. A paper like this has all the elements it’s supposed to — correct but probably not fluid writing, by-the-numbers introduction with topic/question/thesis, logically outlined body paragraphs with evidence reasonably chosen and analyzed. There’s nothing much wrong with a solid B dancer, or paper. They’re fully competent; you could eke out a living with that. I get a whole bunch of this kind of paper from kids who were in the top 10% of their high school classes. They’re the ones for whom an A is an entitlement and a B is a cosmic injustice.

Competence is not excellence. I remember seeing Baryshnikov some years ago. Not knowing much about ballet I was really impressed with the dancers in the opening numbers. They seemed very good, and I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be waiting for with the big guy. Then he came out and did his thing, and within moments it was clear. Where the other guys were technically proficient dancers, his mastery was so complete that what he did was more than mere dancing: it was artistry using dance as the medium. There was no sense that he was dancing at all, no feeling of choreography or effort to perform. He flowed and glided and soared about the stage as if he was translating a special thought into motion on the fly. Skillfully creating, as Hines says below, “the illusion of the first moment.” I suspect this is what the movers think they are doing.

Genius is not a fair standard for either dancers or student essayists, but it helps to clarify in my mind what’s happening in the shift from a B paper to an A paper, just like the shift from a competent dancer to a really terrific one. The dancers who have a shot at winning the show are going to do more than master the steps and movements of the various genres and choreographies. They’re going to understand the inner logic, inherent grace and opportunity for expression in those forms and use that to create something that’s uniquely, virtuously and fascinatingly their own.

Back when I first started teaching, for Revelle College at UCSD, I worked as a T.A. in the writing program attached to the core humanities sequence. We got a lot of support that did a great job of showing us how to take the students up to the B range. But they did not and I’ve never seen anyone since explain coherently how to make that next step. I had a student named Martin who was with me through the whole five quarters of the sequence, and he worked his way up from the low C to the high B range, then stuck. And stuck, and stuck. Then finally I read a paper of his that was a new sort of thing — fully masterful and genuinely interesting. An A paper. So wanting this for all my students I asked Martin what had done the trick for him. He said, I don’t know. Something just clicked.

Since then I’ve had many students make that leap, and I still ask them how. And it’s always that something just clicked. I’ve never seen that click happen without a solid, practiced, mastered and habituated grasp of the fundamentals of competence, however. It’s when that’s in place that the magic has a chance to happen.

EDIT: Heehee! Good for them:

Words and things, pt. 2

Bobby P. was like the evil twin of a Victorian gentleman. No one was more careful with their language around ladies than these profoundly sexist patriarchs. After all, they thought, proper ladies are delicate flowers of virtue for whom fainting couches and smelling salts must be provided lest the slightest vulgarity upset their fragile equilibrium and bring on the vapors.

Women were actually being used symbolically there (or participating actively in a class and family project that gave them some relative perqs; analyses differ in their subtlety on this point) to demonstrate the distance of the Victorian bourgeoisie from vulgarity on two fronts: the working class on one hand and their own non-noble pedigrees on the other. Propriety was the thing – a very strict, gendered discipline the middle classes deployed to leverage themselves into position as the heirs of the civilizing process and the rightful wielders of power and status in the new modern world. This discipline may have had its origins in the protestant ethic, but its elective affinity with the industrial and financial bourgeoisie’s rising entitlement and the marginalization of the old nobility fully vested only in the 19th century. The new elite took over the old one’s touchiness about honor and propriety as part of their power grab.

Working women and the working class in general were a different story. Their feelings were not the issue. They were expected to get on with the task at hand regardless. This attitude persisted well into the 20th century. I vividly remember hearing an old working-class black guy marveling (critically) at the younger generation: “Used to be guys just worked. Now guys got feelings.” Beside this stoicism fractions of the working class trending upward struggled to create spaces where they could support their own hierarchies of offendability, while others resisted the class stigma by reveling openly in their vulgarity and toughness, e.g. by ritualizing mutual insult in games like ranking or the dozens.

This contrast is instructive, because it spotlights the class and gender relations behind aversion to coarse or vulgar vocabulary. In terms of Western cultural history there are two kinds of people who can lay claim to offense at the words used around them: the delicate, and the entitled. Both delicate and entitled, the ‘ladies’ of the Victorian bourgeoisie enjoyed the kind of defenses against upsetting verbiage that had previously been reserved for princesses, although in both cases because of the delicacy it was men’s job to do the actual work of policing interactive entitlement.

Of course, the luxury of touchiness is rooted in economic power and a certain leisure. People with imperative stuff to do can’t afford to be touchy. The ability to enforce rules and vocabularies of interaction and to take offense at their breakage, i.e. to become ‘classy’, looks like a victory for the oppressed in the 20th century, and in a sense it is. But the success of this strategy lies in its dependence on the expansion of the capitalist global economy. History is chock full of impressive freedom-fighters who never got much of anywhere with it; conditions have to be right. In the core of the global economy women, the working class and minorities have been pulled into and up the professionalization scale of the production side by this expansion, and entitled on the consumption side by their paychecks and access to credit. Despite wage gaps and credit crunches more people are more distant from the vulgarity of starvation than at any time in history.

In this process women, the working class and stigmatized minorities are following the trajectory laid out by the European bourgeoisie in the 19th century. Although gender delicacy remains as a culturally-embedded interpretation of insistence on linguistic propriety around them, the dominant dynamic is one of class entitlement.

But because everyone is now entitled, power is spread very thin and there’s little discipline to be found anywhere. Funny.

Words and things, pt. 1

More than twenty years ago I began and ended my career as a formal activist, working as an outreach fundraiser with a progressive political organization in Pennsylvania. My co-workers were serious, committed people with definite ideas about how the world would be a better place, which for the most part I shared. Among the things they knew for sure was that there was no place in a right and just world for words that, because of their racist, sexist, ableist, or other oppressive histories, were hurtful to folks. This notion is still alive and well among people I respect and admire. I have heard many passionate and/or well-reasoned arguments for it. But I have some doubts.

I grew up in a lefty family, so oppressing and hurting folks was never my thing. We are also a family of smart-asses, with a special penchant for word play. Our punny humor often involves using words according to their sounds rather than their definitions, pulling them out of context and incidentally showing how arbitrary their meanings are. It’s like speaking a second language. Explaining this to my activist organization’s co-directors was of no help; I got ten minutes-worth of consciousness-raising about the inherently offensive nature of the word ‘chick’, especially in substitution for the word ‘check’. Hm. Noted. “Progressive” is an especially inflexible language.

Contrasting with my privileged linguistic oafishness was my colleague Bobby P. Bobby was a real catch for this group. He was a working class boy from northeast Philadelphia, a real man of the street. I liked him and so did everyone else. He made the middle-class organizers feel like they were effectively reaching out and creating cross-class coalitions. What made Bobby even better is that he came with the right principles, took the cause very very seriously and quickly became a polished speaker of Progressive. Perhaps I should have been more like Bobby.

The second-drunkest I have ever been in my life was the night Bobby and I went out and did Jack Daniel’s and Schlitz boilermakers for hours while we shot the shit about this and that. Bobby liked me a whole lot because of my honesty. He always knew what I thought and where he stood with me. I was authentic to him. So after a couple of hours he clued me in to his purpose at work. It was to get paid and get laid. He didn’t give a damn about ending sexism or cleaning up Superfund sites. And he’d figured out that the chicks at work (he knew to call them women) were suckers for a line of snappy progressive patter in politically-correct language from a real nobly-oppressed man of the masses. So he fed them what they wanted to hear — one after another. In a matter of months he slept with half a dozen women in the organization, that I know of, including one of those co-directors. Bobby was a smooth operator. I knew his type. Politics does make strange bedfellows. But we never went out drinking together again.

To be continued.

Battle of the sexes

I was already thinking a thought about sexes when I happened upon some help from the most excellent Hoyden About Town, writing about a newish dating service that thinks sex is more complicated than one from column A and one from column B. Well hallelujah, brothers, sisters and friends, let’s run with that for a moment.

Much of third-wave feminism has been about troubling the categories of the body, by taking seriously the huge variety of human experiences of embodiment and in particular, of gender/sex/sexuality. Morals and practices are often quite narrow and rigid about these things, but vary dramatically from place to place and from time to time. Grappling with these differences in what parochially seem to be fundamental categories of our existence is now one of the ordinary requirements of a liberal education, which is my biz.

A favorite resource for me as a teacher lodged in history is Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Laqueur shows that in Europe well into the early modern period, and supported by close anatomical study, the dominant understanding of sex was that there was only one. Basically, they thought that everyone was a male but either an innie or an outie; depending on the body’s heat the goodies either got pushed out or retained inside. Ovaries are retained testicles, vaginas are inverted penises, and so on. (I’m simplifying Laqueur’s rich discussion quite a bit and he simplifies a rich history filled with a variety of understandings to make his point. See Joan Cadden, The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture for a far more nuanced and comprehensive analysis.)

There were some interesting corollaries to this view, including the ones where both partners (obviously) had to orgasm for conception to take place, and women were (obviously) the natural sexual aggressors because they wanted to incorporate men’s heat, aka precious bodily fluids:

Laqueur shows that in this as in so many other ways the modern advances of knowledge and civilization of the 19th century were a load of crap for women, who went from being second-class but sexually empowered to being second-class and sexually repressed. More than this, he shows how our ‘readings’ of the body are always mixed up in our cultural preconceptions and political agendas. (A neat parallel discussion about weight and dieting is at Savage Minds.)

So, to boil this down even further, it used to seem obvious to educated European persons that there is one sex. Now it seems obvious to educated Euro-American persons that there are two. History and anthropology show that a three-sex model is not at all uncommon. This is all by people living within, looking at and thinking about ‘the same’ physical bodies.

It’s all very well to play with the wrong wacko theories of other deluded folks, but fortunately we now have things properly sorted out and there are two sexes, no more no less, right?… except I can’t see any final reason to believe this, even if we take a very strict scientific view. Science went from one to two before, and science does not deal in settled truths, it deals in robust theories (e.g. two sexes, evolution, laws of thermodynamics) subject to new findings. It may well turn out that there are biologically three sexes, or six, or forty-two, with all sorts of surprising consequences for getting the pairings wrong.

Let’s say there are six. There are various ways this could work. The above-mentioned dating service points to one. Protein, hormone or immune-system variances may turn out to sort into sexualizing packages one through six, such that ones and fours are well-mated but ones and fives are not. It could be that twos and sixes can only work with help from a three or four. Could something like this explain reproductive difficulties? Was Henry VIII a three looking for his six but foolishly marrying one five after another? Maybe he ought to have smelt their pee more carefully….

How about if it turns out that the gender continuum — ultra-masculine to ultra-feminine — actually contains sexualizing thresholds, creating natural sex/gender composites? So the six sexes might be: masculine male, neutral male, feminine male; masculine female, neutral female, feminine female. Who knows how this is written into the genes, I’m speculating here. Sexuality might still have little to do with any of this, as is the case with the current two-sex theory. Or it might turn out to run most smoothly through the ‘gender’ component of the sex composite (masculine to feminine, with neutrals most open to anything), with conflict inherent at the extremes. Or it might turn out that same-to-same works best. Although this version of the hypothesis obviously feeds off of a lot of old stereotypical gender garbage, it would certainly naturalize, explain and demarginalize a lot of things about transgendering and transsexuality, as well as a variety of familiar failures in normative hetero/homo relationships.

One thing’s for sure. We don’t know the full truth of these matters yet; or rather, we know a variety of mutually-inconsistent truths about them. And maybe, given how people abuse the truths they have, it’s better that we don’t. My vote is for Burkean existentialism.

Empowerment and entitlement

“Any attempt to ’soften’ the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their ‘generosity,’ the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well.”

“But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or ’sub-oppressors.’ The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 1.

Being nice to weak people is a way for the strong to reinforce their power. And weak people’s first inclination when they get power is to abuse it. There are so many traps here.

The horns of this dilemma seem to me to spring from a distinction I’ve been trying to work through — between empowerment and entitlement. Entitlement is visible all over; in Freire’s much-criticized but actually quite apt gendering, it is the attitude of men and people trying to become like men. With nobilities in mind they imagine that power means they should get all of what they want, that everything should go their way, and that others will be means to their ends. Any sort of compromise with complete autonomy looks like subordination, any challenge to it gives offense.

With this as the contrast, empowerment has to start with rejecting the subjection of others to one’s projects, desires and prescriptions. It means radical responsibility for having one’s own junk together and not taking it out on anyone else. First. For example, not offending but also not taking offense.

Reciprocity, compromise, responsibility, interdependence, respect all go into empowerment. But I’ve run out of steam so this post must have been mostly about entitlement.

Extremism

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” – Barry Goldwater.

“The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality” – John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., paraphrasing Dante.

Well, there you have it. Something that the left and the right in U.S. politics agreed upon quite recently. The ’60s which, as we all know, were the good old days of activism what with all the draft card and brassiere bonfires. Of course, what they did not agree upon was what the correct content of extreme moral commitment ought to be. That’s the tricky part. How to find such agreement whilst shouting from up on those holy mountain-tops.

Extremism makes nuances and opportunities disappear. Here’s a more common example. On another blog by a respected colleague and its comments I read a compelling account of interpersonal dynamics in which the two options boiled down to getting to talk however you want or being silenced into complete servility. This is a classic extremist analysis. The first option is the dream of complete empowerment. The second is the nightmare of total oppression. These extremes do not describe many real-world situations. Living as if they do must be very stressful.

Vulgarities

This post from Perverse Egalitarianism about a new introductory commentary on Derrida’s (in)famous Of Grammatology combined with all the other mishmash in my head to make me think about vulgarizations of theory. (I will not be talking here about the many ways that theories may be improved by their contact with audiences.)

The most famous instance of this to many of us is the “vulgar Marxists.” Sort of legendary figures (no specific person quite qualifies, when you look at them closely and sympathetically), they stripped out a basic, simple, rough-and-ready theory from Marx and Engels’ massive and complex oeuvre that then became, as far as their readers were concerned, “Marxism.” In response to early versions of this Marx famously said that he was not a marxist. If you’re old enough to have been taught in school that Marxism is bad, that’s vulgar Marxism. (If you’re young enough to think it’s a ‘good idea on paper that would never work in practice’ there may be hope for you. Go sit in a corner and reflect on the Bible and the Constitution until the light bulb goes on.)

Marx himself was not much of an activist. There’s a way in which anyone who actually acted on marxism was a vulgar Marxist. His theory is just too complex to be an action handbook. Hell, no historical conditions under which a revolution has been attempted or carried out have ever been much similar to what he thought would produce likely success: complete development of capital industry, highly concentrated proletariat, vestigial agricultural sector, regular and intensifying crises of overproduction, etc. The ideas and practices of revolutionaries, such as maoism or that odd kludge marxism-leninism, never end up looking much like Marx to people who know their Marx.

Well, folks are dumb, lazy, obsessive, impatient, distracted, ignorant, what have you. What are the chances that a really smart theorist finds all readers ready and capable to ‘get’ the whole message, no matter how clear she gets? So theories get vulgarized, not to mention flat misunderstood, caricatured, repurposed, or ignored in something like direct proportion to their complexity.

Is that something we need to blame someone for, and if so, whom? In particular, do theorists have some responsibility to be aware of their inevitable vulgarizers and design in safeguards against dangerous kinds? Think what a different sort of world it would be if Marx had paid more attention to the sociology of vulgarization. Then again, who could control a Stalin with mere words on a page?

How democracy works

Sometimes you lose. When you lose, people who disagree with you about stuff get to do things their way for a while. When you win, you get to do things your way for a while, to the dismay of people who disagree with you. You would like them to be good losers, and they’d like the same from you.

If you always lose, there are two basic possibilities. It’s not really a democracy, or you’ve defined your citizenship very narrowly. If you always win, there are also two basic possibilities. It’s not really a democracy, or you’ve defined your citizenship very broadly.

When Republicans win, they try to rig things so that when Democrats win later they’ll be forced to act like Republicans. When Democrats win, they try to rig things so that when Republicans win later they’ll be forced to act like Democrats. To do this, they each use laws, staffing, and faits accomplis, among other strategies. This is why politics are worth the effort.

Some of the authors of the Constitution knew all of this very well. That’s why they made it so damn hard and slow for the government to get anything much done. We only want government to be effective and efficient when we all agree on what it should be doing, which is rare, or when we are on the winning side, which is not always. Democracy is not an efficient way to get things done. The model of efficiency in government is fascism. The great thing about fascists is that they get stuff done. The bad thing about fascists is the stuff they get done.

Conservatives are people who think there’s only one right way to do things. There are Republican conservatives and Democratic conservatives. Liberals are people who think there are various acceptable or at least understandable ways to do things. There are Democratic liberals and Republican liberals.

Conservatives of any sort may be many good things, but they’re damn lousy democratic citizens. In this they are joined by a third group, the folks with daddy issues. No matter who wins, they’re agin’ ‘em.

All of this should be common sense. Why isn’t it?