debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

19.11.05

The Problem of Good

I've got another long post in the works, but in the meantime I'll link to an interesting article exploring the problem of evil by flipping it around and asking about the "problem of good" raised by McDuffism -- the theory that God exists, but he's a sadistic bastard.

Stentor Danielson, 15:35, ,

Leibnizian Love

I've noticed that there seem to be three basic approaches to romantic relationships, which I've taken to calling "Leibnizian," "Newtonian," and "Habermasian."

Leibniz was an early modern philosopher who believed that the world was made up of "windowless monads." These monads didn't truly interact with one another. Rather, they each had the design of the world programmed into them, and were thus able to perfectly go through the motions specified by that plan without any reference to what the other monads were doing -- sort of like a series of clocks that were callibrated initially and thus all remain in sync through the dictates of their gears. Two monads might appear to bounce off of each other not because their collision affected their velocities, but because their internal programs told them that they should reverse direction at thus-and-such a moment.

In relationships, a Leibnizian expects their partner to already know the script. The rules for how to handle any given situation should already be in their head. For example, a traditionalist Leibnizian woman would expect her partner to know that the man is supposed to pick up the check at a restaurant, and would hold him responsible for spontaneously doing so. Leibnizism comes in two varieties: "natural law" and "jigsaw." A natural law Leibnizian believes that the rules in question are universal. Thus the woman in our example, if faced with a date who attempted to split the check, would consider him to be a bad person who can't grasp the basic and obvious rules of social ettiquette. A jigsaw leibnizian, on the other hand, recognizes the diversity of internal rule sets that a person might have, and sees their challenge as finding a person whose internal rule set matches their own. So if our example woman were a jigsaw Leibnizian, she would reason that while "going Dutch" is not inherently wrong and may work for other women, she happens to like the "man pays" system and is only interested in men who would volunteer to act accordingly.

The Newtonian view of the world is much more familar to us, and hence needs less elaboration. It's a world of cause and effect, stimulus and response. Any action elicits a predictable reaction from an affected object. The Newtonian view sees romance as a game of strategy. The big challenge is to find the right stimuli -- the right set of clothes, the right amount of time to wait before calling, the right restaurant to go to -- that will elicit the right set of responses on the part of your partner. Much attention is also given to deconstructing your partner's stimuli, either in order to make sure you give the right response, or in order to discern their ulterior motives.

The last perspective on relationships is named for Jürgen Habermas, a contemporary German philosopher about whom I've written a number of times. Habermas's work is centered on the idea of "communicative action." Communicative action is not stimulus-response, or even sophisticated social conditioning, type of action. Rather, its goal is to reach freely accepted understanding on the part of the two parties. In a Habermasian relationship, situations of uncoordination (such as our previous example of the disagreement over who pays for dinner) are handled through the offering of explanations and reasons. Such communication requires both parties to show respect for the other's viewpoint and be genuinely open to being convinced of its truth. This communication would take place continuously, not just at the moment of crisis -- so our couple would have discussed their ideas about date financing in advance and ideally come to some shared understanding.

Of course, I've presented all three views in a slightly caricatured form. Nobody adheres strictly to a pure version of one of these paradigms. Each one has a grain of truth in it, and any functional relationship will be a mix. However, there is much diversity in the proportions in which people mix these views (as a rough characterization, I would say that conservatives tend to favor natural law Leibnizism, liberals like jigsaw Leibnizism, and the cynical postmodern generation goes for Newtonism). My own preference leans strongly toward Habermasian relationships, a fact which I now recognize has caused me a fair bit of confusion and frustration in talking to people who prefer to order their lives on more heavily Leibnizian or Newtonian principles.

(And lest you think I could do a post without mentioning Cultural Theory, I would propose the following mapping of the three perspectives. Newtonian relationships correspond to low-group ways of life, falling under either Individualism or Fatalism depending on how in-control the person feels. Leibnizian relationships are high-group, though I don't believe that the natural law and jigsaw variants can be assigned one to Hierarchy and the other to Egalitarianism. Many Egalitarians would try to claim Habermasian relationships, and to some degree they're right, but I think the true home of the Habermasian perspective as I've outlined it is with the oft-neglected fifth way of life, Autonomy. I have further thoughts about the place and importance of Autonomy that I will perhaps blog later.)

Stentor Danielson, 14:34, ,

15.11.05

Cultural Theory, Habermas, and Hugo Schwyzer

Today is a good day, because I get to write about three of my favorite topics. This synthesis was sparked by Hugo Schwyzer, who writes:

[Lynn] Phillips talks about the problem so many young women struggle with: separating their own desires from those of their families, friends, and the broader culture. For many of the women Phillips interviewed, the internalized audience is omnipresent, but never more so than when engaging in sexual activity. The make-up of the audience varies little from young woman to young woman: mothers and fathers, friends and family members, teachers and pastors and peers. Each member of the audience has his or her own set of expectations for how the girl ought to behave, and gradually, those expectations have crawled deep into the psyche. Raised to be acutely sensitive to the wishes and values of others, most young women "internalize the audience" by adolescence if not before. (Mom really can be everywhere!) And of course, once young women begin to interact sexually with others, the "audiences" begin to make conflicting demands.

... Thus I'm convinced that one of the most important feminist tasks is helping young -- and not so young -- women to quiet that internalized audience. Quieting, mind you, is not the same as dismissing. All of us, at times, can be comforted and strengthened by the memory of what some loved one or respected person has told us. On occasion, it's appropriate to ask: "What would so-and-so say if they could see me now? What advice would they give?" We ought on occasion to consider the wishes and beliefs of our culture, our faith (if we have one) and our parents. But though these ought to be factors in our decision-making about food, sex,and pleasure, they ought not to be the decisive ones. Helping young women listen to their own desires, separate from those of the large and loud audience, is a key feminist goal.

The liberatory project that Phillips* and Schwyzer outline is a very appealing one. However, as it stands it seems to be based on an Enlightenment/liberal model of the person that has come in for criticism in the social sciences. The liberal person is autonomous and unified self, with endogenous preferences, experiencing barriers and constraints as he or she attempts to interact in a world filled with other people.

The problem with the unified self seems easy enough to resolve. Poststructuralists have shown that identity and the self are in fact often fragmented and contradictory. Schwyzer's mistake is in assuming that internalized audience may be multiple and conflicting, but that a person's authentic desires are necessarily already consistent and unified. Here I must side with the existentialists who argue that while a unified self is not an automatic reality, it is a worthy goal. We can leave behind the paleo-liberal idea of the naturally unified self without discarding the idea of constructing a unified self. Thus Schwyzer's quest for the "authentic yes and authentic no" requires a (practically linked but conceptually distinguishable) existential project as well as the liberatory project he outlines.

More problematic is the idea of an easy separation of endogenous and exogenous preferences. Schwyzer is arguing for liberating people** from the exogenous preferences that we carry around in the form of the "internal audience." Even social scientists who hold no brief for the grid/group typology often approvingly cite Mary Douglas for the basic premise of Cultural Theory: that preferences are not inborn or given by early and effective conditioning, but rather arise out of social relations. Someone who is fully human cannot be imagined in isolation from the society in which their preferences form and operate.

The easy conclusion to draw from Douglas is that the distinction between endogenous and exogenous preferences -- between the "authentic yes and no," and the "internal audience" -- is illusory. But this runs up against the fact that we seem to experience the distinction as a real one (albeit not always clear-cut) in considering our own motivations. I'm unwilling to dismiss this as a mere Whorfian reading of our own experience through culturally given categories. I also don't think it's enough to distinguish them only as a matter of degree, viewing the "internal audience" as those cultural messages that we haven't internalized as fully as those desires that appear authentic.

Here I think Jürgen Habermas's attention to communicative action can offer some help. Habermas allows us to draw a distinction between being motivated by a sense of duty or a requirement imposed by another, versus motivation by a conviction that something is right. Communicative action is the process by which one person attempts to truly convince, rather than just harangue or guilt-trip, another person. The authentic yes and no can then be understood as those desires that a person has become truly convinced of, either through communicative action or through one's own experience (coupled with self-directed communicative action). The internal audience is made up of those voices whose claims a person feels compelled by but hasn't fully been convinced of -- thus making them appear as if coming from an outside source.

As a final speculation, I'd bring this distinction back to the grid/group typology of Cultural Theory. The internal audience strikes me as the mechanism by which grid is imposed, whereas group operates through cultivating shared authentic yesses and nos.

*Having not read her book yet myself, I can only go on what Schwyzer says about her ideas.
**Schwyzer and Phillips talk specifically about women, and I agree with them that women face greater, and qualitatively different, challenges on this front. However, I think that the general idea is applicable in some fashion to all people.

Stentor Danielson, 09:13, ,

14.11.05

Should Scientists Lie To The Media?

John Quiggin has a post quibbling over the way climate change skeptics have selectively edited a quote by climatologist Stephen Schneider to turn it into a more emphatic endorsement of lying to the media. Here's Schneider's full quote:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but � which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we�d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public�s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This �double ethical bind� we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

What interests me is not so much the debate over whether we should take the generous interpretation that Schneider was discussing the problem of framing and translating climatology into lay language, or the harsh interpretation that he intends to baldly lie. (Indeed, I think it's far less productive to debate programmatic statements like this when we can pull up some articles in climatology journals and mass media reports on climate and compare them to evaluate the actual practice of climatologists.)

I'm interested in the way that Schneider assigns the two competing claims of honesty and persuasiveness to two different roles -- the honest scientist and the persuasive human being. By separating those two roles, Schneider is a big step ahead of many scientists, who believe that it's their duty as scientists to promote a certain policy. The fact is, however, that in the decisionmaking arena, scientists (especially natural scientists) are just well-informed laypeople.

This role separation I think goes a long way toward resolving the conflict Schneider faces in talking to the media. The key thing is that reporters are calling him because he is a scientist. They will attribute his words to him in the capacity of climatologist. Therefore it's improper for him to use his scientific platform to promote his policy views, to try to put the authority of science behind his layperson's views.

Stentor Danielson, 10:16, ,

13.11.05

"Gender Feminism"

In the comments to my previous post, Kevin McCulloch accuses me of mixing "equality feminist" and "gender feminist" ideas:

Equality feminism doesn't try to explain the differences between men and women. It simply observes that our commitment to universal human rights obliges us to give women's interests as much weight as we give men's interests. It's a philosophy of basic fairness and according to its tenets most people are feminists.

Gender feminism tries to explain the difference between men and women in social science terms, attempting to discover the means by which gender is socially constructed. So, for example, a gender feminist would look at your bullet point about "men who feel entitled to sex but aren't concerned about their partner's needs" and try to deduce why men are socialized to be insensitive.

McCulloch's use of the terms "equality feminist" and "gender feminist" doesn't quite match how I've usually seen them used (by and large by anti-feminists), although he does capture the basic idea that equality feminism is "everything feminism has accomplished so far" and gender feminism is "any further changes that feminists advocate, which would go too far and oppress men."

McCulloch seems to see the key difference as being the nature-nurture question. Equality feminism is either agnostic on the question or favors a "nature" view, whereas gender feminism comes down on the side of "nurture." Presumably equality feminists would pursue equality by trying to patch society to cope with inborn sexism or just give up in the face of the inherent differences, while gender feminists would pursue equality by getting to the root of the institutions that create sexism. Stated this way, equality feminism looks rather unappealing.

McCulloch tries to claim the authority of science for the equality feminist view, arguing that personality differences have been shown to be innate. Whether he's right or wrong (and I think the main conclusion has actually been that nature-nurture is asking the wrong question) science has clearly shown that differences between men and women are slight (non-pdf summary here). This indicates that the well-documented social inequalities between the genders are the result of social institutions, rather than being the simple outgrowths of personality. So exploitative sex is an institution -- a learned behavioral template through which personality is expressed -- not just a natural outgrowth of men's inherent insensitivity.

Stentor Danielson, 10:13, ,