November 13, 2010
Seconds Out, Round Two
My post In Praise of Riots attracted an undue amount of attention. Several people have asked me to clarify my position, and others have challenged me directly. This seems reasonable, as the original piece is indeed confusing. I’m thus taking this as an opportunity to expound some thoughts at length. PDF for the faithful; subsequent treatise not for the light of heart.
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Any adequate analysis of the use of non-peaceful direct action – i.e. the causing of physical damage to property, thus eliciting the potential of violent confrontation with the coercive power of the state (in the form of police or possibly even military) – must divide into at least two sub-components, which are, however, necessarily and intimately interconnected. I label these the “analytic” and “strategic”, and address them in turn, though division is necessarily somewhat artificial.
Analytic
Under this heading I consider the bare principle of whether citizens may damage property – and elicit potentially violent confrontation with the state’s forces – as part of a political protest against the policies of an incumbent government. I take the answer to be straightforwardly that at certain times, in certain circumstances, such action may be justified.
This is for the reasons broadly set-out in my original post, and which I stand by. Namely, that it is possible for a government to pursue policies which are so detrimental to the interests and well-being of citizens that those citizens are entitled to resist non-peacefully. I will broadly steer clear here of using the controversial and emotive label “violence”, both regarding acts of vandalism by protestors, and of what a government may do to (sections of) a citizenry via its policies, which may not however involve the (direct) use of jackboots and truncheons. Instead, I simply make the claim that if (sections of) a citizenry find that their interests are intolerably threatened by a government, then they may retaliate, with the aim and purpose of forcing the government to abandon – or at least ameliorate – its policies.
Importantly, I do not propose to (be able to) set a threshold for when citizens may non-peacefully protest. I take it that a) it is not possible to set such a threshold a priori, that b) it is pointless to attempt to set such a threshold a priori, as what matters is when citizens themselves judge things to have gotten so bad that they choose to act non-peacefully, and yet that it is c) nonetheless self-evident that at some point citizen-interests may be sufficiently threatened such that no reasonable person could deny an entitlement to non-peaceful protest in attempts to safeguard those interests.
Point c) needs clarifying. Although I cannot – and do not wish to attempt to – demarcate a threshold above which non-peaceful resistance is justified, I take it that 1) such points can be reached and 2) there is no inherent reason why governments in western democratic societies cannot reach those points (though they may be less likely to do so than other forms of regime). To expand: imagine a (fanciful) society in which the government of the day enacted a law which decreed that the first born of each family in a given sub-territory would be taken into slavery. The interests of families and of the first-born (as well, perhaps, of wider communities) would be dramatically threatened – and it seems obvious that they would accordingly be entitled to resist the government’s actions, and to resist them non-peacefully, especially if we also further assume, for argument’s sake, that no peaceful measures could possibly succeed. I take it that no reasonable person would disagree with this, because the only alternative to non-peaceful resistance in this (fanciful) thought experiment is for families to passively sit-by as their first-born are enslaved. (As for those – if they exist – who would continue to adhere to non-reasonableness as I have labelled it on my schema, I simply have nothing further to say to them as they do not fall within the level of political exchange that I can tolerate. This line of argument is not addressed to their views and concerns; they are outside the “discourse” of politics within which I conceive it possible to purposefully engage. I trust, however, that this will encompass relatively few readers, especially when any lingering worries about political process are addressed below).
This example is, of course, extremely fanciful. I use it only to make the point that some things that governments may do are so bad that forcible resistance can (obviously) be justified. I do not mean to say that this is some sort of minimum-threshold example. Government policies which are less (but still substantially) damaging to the interests of citizens may nonetheless still be considered as sufficiently threatening to the point of legitimating methods of non-peaceful resistance. Of course, deciding which cases do and do not qualify will be (inherently) controversial. This is a matter of political judgement, about whether or not the threshold of harms has indeed been reached, as well as of judgement for the individuals directly affected both in terms of harms-incurred, and of successful strategy worth pursuing (more on which below). Cases at the margin will be contested, and probably ferociously.
As for point 2), I again take this to be acceptable to all reasonable people, though I suspect it is likely to be more controversial. The most obvious – and oft-heard – objection to the use of non-peaceful protest in western nation states is that it goes against the norms and mechanisms of democracy. For example, it might be argued that non-peaceful protest is never justified in a democracy, because the social settlement in a democratic state provides explicitly for the non-use of violence, such that citizens have agreed to pursue politics at the ballot box, and at the ballot box only (or almost only; issue-campaigning, private lobbying, joining of parties and pressure groups etc. excepted, as being supplementary or constituent activities to the democratic process). The line of objections I am considering, however, claims that: the use of non-peaceful protest in a democracy is illegitimate ipso facto, just because of the fact it is a democracy being considered.
I take this argument to fail for two sets of reasons. However the first set rests on a controversial understanding of democracy; it can therefore be jettisoned by those possessing more “ideal” views of the processes and mechanisms of politics in Western democratic nation states. The second set of considerations I take to be nonetheless decisive, even if taken alone.
The first (controversial) argument is that modern mass democracy in Western nation states is sufficiently non-ideal so as to defeat any claim that non-peaceful protest is ruled out ipso facto by the mere existence of democratic structures. For I take it that the systems of rule we currently experience are founded upon histories of class-privilege and exploitation that were ultimately established to safeguard the rich and privileged from the poor and destitute. Ours are societies founded upon violence, and maintained by the continued threat of violence by the agencies of the state. As Adam Smith remarked when reflecting on the historical foundations of society:
“some have great wealth and others have nothing, it is necessary that the arm of authority should be continually stretched forth, and permanent laws or regulations made which may ascertain the property of the rich from the inroads of the poor, who would otherwise continually make incroachments upon it, and settle in what the infringement of this property consists and in what cases they will be liable to punishment.” (Lectures on Jurisprudence: Feb 22, 1763)
Furthermore, the system of government we experience today is not one of the “people” ruling in any identifiable sense. It is a system of rotation between (usually extremely wealthy) political elites who vie for the balance of favour amidst a tiny number of crucial voters, in turn returning parties to government based on wildly general (and frequently broken) manifesto pledges representing programmes of government so eclectic and enormous it cannot be said that the “people” have seriously endorsed any such a thing. Given that I take what we call “democracy” to be in fact rule by rotated elites, I find the claim that non-peaceful resistance against the policies of such elites can never be justified to be bizarre, and due more to a romanticised and unrealistic understanding of “democracy” than to any rational analysis of the conditions of real-world government and politics.[1]
Yet this view is controversial, so I do not rest my case upon it. Instead I make the more straightforward point that just because a government is elected via democratic mechanisms, it does not follow either that it is somehow incapable of harming the interests of (some) citizens beyond a tolerable point, nor that those citizens lose any entitlement to resist non-peacefully simply because a government harming their interests was selected via a certain form of (electoral) mechanism. If a government – democratic or otherwise – enacts policies that are sufficiently damaging to the interests of (some) citizens, I take it to be obvious to reasonable people that those citizens are entitled to resist non-peacefully if necessary. What is not (always) obvious is when the threshold for non-peaceful resistance has been breached in any particular instance. And again, I admit that is a matter of judgement and therefore likely to be of (extreme) controversy in any particular instance. But to continue to claim regardless of the above that non-peaceful resistance is “never” justified in a democracy is in fact to miss a major point of why democratic government is usually desirable in the first place: that it leads to and secures (amongst other things) the respect and protection of citizens. When democratically-based governments fail in this crucial aspect, they lose a large component of their underpinning legitimacy, justification and the very grounds upon which they deny the entitlement of citizens to use force instead of the ordinary democratic channels of political communication and action alone. To fail to see this is to fall into a form of process- or system-worship, whereby the reasons for preferring democratic processes and systems are abandoned in favour of an infatuation with processes and systems themselves.
Thus far I take myself to have sketched the grounds for accepting the following (basic) claim as obvious to all reasonable people: that governments may harm the interests of citizens, and that citizens may resist that harm non-peacefully at certain times. Of course, the question of when that harm-threshold is crossed becomes paramount. But I repeat: that is a matter of case-specific judgement, and we cannot say in advance of any actual context and circumstance in which to judge. For what it is worth, I believe that the policies of the present Coalition government are in the process of crossing the line in terms of harm to (some) citizens, and thus non-peaceful action in retaliation, with the aim of halting or ameliorating the current Coalition policies, is likely to be justifiable in terms of a reaction to harm-inflicted. Others will disagree. I accept that it is reasonable for them to so disagree; because the core analytic point I am making here – that non-peaceful resistance can be justified – is not the same as saying that, on Wednesday, it necessarily was justified. Reasonable people may well say that the relevant harm thresholds have not yet been breached (or, further, that non-peaceful protest was likely to have worse consequences – though again more on that below).
However, before turning to the question of “strategy”, some final points in relation to and based upon the above need to be addressed. Many responses to my original piece complained that d) I would not support direct non-peaceful action against other targets or for other causes (e.g. against the Labour Party HQ, or in the name of racist bigotry), and that e) I was opening the door for mob rule.
Charge d) is misplaced. Whilst it is true that I may not support particular instances of the use of non-peaceful force – say against Labour HQ, or in the name of bigotry – this simply means precisely that in those instances I would oppose the use of direct non-peaceful action. This does nothing to undercut my general position that sometimes non-peaceful action is justified, nor my case-specific judgement that on Wednesday, in relation to the policies of this Government, non-peaceful direct action was indeed probably justified as a reaction to harm-about-to-be-incurred.
As for charge e), my response (in addition to the above) is that mob rule is a perennial danger in any political society. It is true that I would not like it – and no right-thinking person should – if government were dictated-to by pitch-fork wielding hordes. But I take one of the key functions of government to be to create circumstances in which pitch-fork-wielding hordes do not arise. The control of violence by the state is, after all, one of its basic functions. If such hordes are arising, then a political society is in serious trouble. But to suggest that a belief that citizen use of non-peaceful force can sometimes be justified in turn opens the flood-gates to mob rule, is to employ a somewhat implausible picture of how prone citizens are to demand direct power over decision-making at the point of a pitch-fork, and of the similarity between non-peaceful protest and the coercive position of an armed and angry rabble able to dictate terms to a (by implication, seriously weak) government. In short, the idea that endorsing some acts of non-peaceful protest either opens the flood-gates to mob rule, or is somehow synonymous with endorsing mob-rule, is simply implausible, and can be dismissed.
Strategy
I take myself to have established that it is reasonable to hold that citizens may use non-peaceful means to resist – or attempt to influence or dissuade – governments that are harming their interests sufficiently. The question that now arises – intimately connected to the question of judgement repeatedly encountered above – is whether the use of non-peaceful protest can be justified in terms of a systematic policy, chosen and consistently pursued, in order to exert pressure upon a government.
In order to get an adequate grasp of this (very challenging) question, we need to delineate two possible circumstances, one of which does not apply to Britain at present and one which probably does. However, there is likely to be no firm point of demarcation between these two situations (and within the broad sketches I will draw there will in reality be enormous variation). And again, deciding when a country is in one or the other (or neither) of these rough situations is a matter of judgement, about which reasonable people may, again, disagree.
The first situation I wish to consider is one in which a government (democratic or otherwise) systematically attacks the fundamental interests of (a group of) citizens such that (some of) those citizens organise themselves in a concerted manner so as to resist that attack, and resist it consciously and with full meditation. Examples of this might include South Africa under apartheid, the situation of blacks in the American South in the 1950s, and (more controversially) the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by Israel, or (at the far less extreme end of the scale) mining communities in the Britain during Margaret Thatcher’s battle with the National Union of Mineworkers.[2]
In these situations, organised resistance is likely to be directed by leaders of the group(s) whose interests are being attacked (whether directly or indirectly, whether by commission or by continued omission of recognition) by the government. In such a stand-off situation – which may well begin to approach something more like civil war, or secessionist struggle, though this will not always be the case, as the Thatcher example indicates – a decision will fall to the leaders of the threatened groups as to whether or not to pursue non-peaceful (and perhaps even overtly-violent) methods.
In this context it makes sense to talk of “strategy”; it makes sense to discuss whether a group (or the representative or sections of a group) would do well to direct members and associates to pursue non-peaceful action. Whether the answer is in the affirmative will depend heavily on contingent context-sensitive factors, and ultimately be a case of judgement for the people choosing to resist (though often in practice, for the leaders of a resistance-organising group). In some cases peaceful action may be pursued, and pursued successfully (e.g. Ghandi’s policy of non-violence in India, and the non-violent strands of the Civil Rights Movement as when led by Martin Luther King). In others, non-peaceful (and even violent) options may be pursued, successfully or otherwise (the ANC in South Africa, and more controversially Hamas in Palestine).
Yet it seems to me clear that the situation faced by Britons today is not analogous to any of the above. At present, the harms inflicted by the Coalition are more anticipated than experienced. And there is no clear citizen-interest group(s) that is in a position to co-ordinate mass action against the government, opting to choose a policy of non-peaceful protest in resistance to government policy. Which is not to say that such a situation cannot arise. Indeed, it is arguable that such a situation precisely did arise in the Miners’ Strikes of 1984-5. And crucially, in such a context, whether or not it is strategically sound for government opponents to use non-violent measures will become a matter of judgement for those involved. Yet it is also important to note that it is only in something like that sort of context that it will make any sort of sense to talk about strategy at all.
At present, we are not in a situation where it is possible to meaningfully discuss whether or not to use a “strategy” of non-peaceful protest. This is because the outbreaks of non-peaceful action seen on Wednesday were spontaneous (and indeed, spontaneity tends to be more a feature of “riots” proper than co-ordinated, pre-planned programme of non-peaceful direct action – a distinction I failed to draw in my original piece, but which perhaps is not so important after all). They were the non-coordinated venting of anger by students seized by rage of the moment. Now, one may lament that those students so-acted; one may think that given the negative coverage in the media that resulted their non-peaceful actions did more harm than good, not least by being liable to alienate public opinion. Conversely, one may believe (as I actually do) that the images of rioting splashed across the national media would have sent a useful chill down the spine of Coalition ministers. (My sense is also that politicians happily ignore peaceful demos as utterly quaint and untroublesome, and hence just ignore them. Tumults are altogether more troubling). Furthermore, the non-peaceful protest in Millbank was pretty much the only reason the demo got anything like the serious media coverage it did (as the media simply didn’t bother to turn up until things were being smashed). However, this rapidly turns into an argument about consequences and likely outcomes, and nobody has final answers on that. Historians will have to decide.
But the point is that at present no group, or leader, is in a position to call for a co-ordinated use of non-peaceful measures against the coalition government. So in an important sense any talk of “strategy” is currently misguided. And I can now attempt to explain why I used the following sentence (which was pretty misleading, and in hindsight should not have been employed):
“British citizens should do it [non-violently protest] again and again, until our lords and masters understand.”
This gives the impression of advocating a concerted, thought-out use of non-peaceful action to resist the Coalition’s policies. In truth I do not think we are yet at the structural situation whereby this can be brought about by any organised group, or can yet be justified in terms of harm (definitely) done by this government to citizen interests (though I suspect both of those points may come sooner than many think – and I may well then decide, on balance, that non-peaceful methods are justified).
What I actually intended to convey (however misleadingly in practice) was the sentiment that if people are angry enough to riot then things are getting very bad, and that is something the government needs to have directly channelled back to it to ensure consideration of a policy change. More fundamentally: I take it that the vast majority of people prefer a quiet life. If significant numbers of them feel so angered as to destroy property and risk violent confrontations with the police, then that is indicative that lives are being seriously disrupted and interests seriously harmed. In such instances, the use of non-peaceful methods sends a vital communication to the government, and warns them that the policies being pursued are at the very least dangerous (in at least two senses), and in the eyes of the protestors, and those who support the protests, severely unjustified.
This is not a position about “strategy”; it is a position about the instrumental importance of spontaneous resort to non-peaceful methods – and how that is not necessarily a bad thing when recalling that such non-peaceful resistance may be a response to a real harming of people’s interests by the government, that in justifies the use of non-peaceful action (though, again, reasonable people may disagree about whether this is in fact the case).
Conclusion
I take it that citizens may resist governments when their interests are sufficiently harmed by that government, and no reasonable person can deny this. However, deciding when this is in fact so is a matter of judgement, and reasonable people may disagree on this (and in practice, almost certainly will). To talk of strategy in the use of non-peaceful methods presupposes an organised capacity to enact and co-ordinate such a strategy. Deciding whether to employ such a strategy will be a matter of judgement, both in terms of whether such a strategy of non-peaceful protest can be justified, and whether it is likely to succeed. Reasonable people can disagree about those things, too. However, there is another form of non-peaceful protest: the spontaneous form, as witnessed on Wednesday, and which is better characterised by the term “riot” than pre-planned non-peaceful direct action. It is ipso fact pointless to talk of “strategising” spontaneous non-peaceful protest. However, spontaneous non-peaceful protest also exhibits a relation to judgement, albeit judgement existing after the fact, i.e. relating to whether such a case of spontaneous non-peaceful action was justified in terms of a resistance to harms being suffered, and also from the perspective of whether that action was likely to succeed.
Clearly, one thing that emerges is that “judgment” is complex issue in these matters, and that its meaning and different application is going to impact not only how people decide, but what the nature of different options under consideration turn out to be, and how different people view them. Unfortunately, any attempt explore the concept of political judgement further is clearly far beyond the scope of this piece. Nonetheless, I hope that the above demarcation moves some way to mapping the terrain of the use and justification of non-peaceful protest. Or rather, what the terrain looks like to me, and where I take it people can have reasonable and unreasonable (or confused) differences about the use of non-peaceful protest.
[1] Which is not to say that I oppose modern mass democracy. I do not. It is quite clearly the best system of politics and government yet tried. But that is no reason not to see it for what it really is.
[2] I should point out that I do not think these cases are straightforward or posses anything like moral equivalence. The point I wish to make is that it is at least prima facie plausible that they may be considered as structurally similar.
November 11, 2010
In Praise of Riots
“I say that those who condemn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs, appear to me to blame those things that were the chief causes for keeping Rome free, and that they paid more attention to the noises and shouts that arose in those tumults than to the good effects they brought forth…And if the tumults were the cause of creation of Tribunes, they merit the highest praise, for in addition to giving the people a part in administration, they were established for guarding Roman liberty.”
So wrote Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discorsi, perhaps the first great work of modern political theory.
It would be misleading to extrapolate too much from Machiavelli’s concerns about the governing of a 16th century Italian city state. But regardless, like Machiavelli I have no inherent problem with “tumults” – or as we would now call them, riots.
Machiavelli’s core point is that rioting safe-guarded freedom. It was because the Roman plebs took arms against the nobles that the latter remembered not to push things too far. That made rioting a useful corrective, and a check against the abuses of the powerful.
It’s not clear that anything has changed today. If a party is elected to government on a series of manifesto pledges, and then reneges on them systematically, it may be no bad thing if the betrayed express their discontent via physical public unrest.
Indeed, Machiavelli also held a connected and crucially important view:
“If the object of the Nobles and the People is considered, it will be seen that the former have a great desire to dominate, and the latter a desire not to be dominated and consequently a greater desire to live free…so that the People placed in charge to guard the liberty of anyone, reasonably will take better care of it; for not being able to take it away themselves, they do not permit others to take it away”
Those in positions of power will seek to dominate the weaker. To defend freedom of the (city-)state, the ruled must possess the ability to strike back at the rulers.
You can see where this is going, even if it needs updating by 500 years.
If the NUS organises a 50,000-strong rally in London, and sections of the protest attack physical property owned by the powerful Conservative Party, then forcibly confront the police, this is not an inherently bad thing – and especially if nobody is seriously hurt.
Of course, the usual suspects sitting in their usual swamps have already spouted the tired old clichés about “a few troublemakers” and the importance of “peaceful protest”. But I disagree when the implication is that rioting can never be justified. There is no fail-safe reason why the populi cannot, at times of extreme discontent, employ physical force against the mechanisms of an authority which is committing violence against them.
And I do mean violence. Because when a government decides that (for example) the seriously diabetic are not “really” disabled, and can thus have their disability allowances halved over-night, rendering many unable to meet the rent – that is a form of violence.
When generations of young people suffer government policies rendering higher education more exclusive whilst reducing employment prospects for the millions already out of work – that is a form of violence.
When the unemployed are to be compelled into slave-like forced employment schemes (or rather, ultra-expensive hypocritical gimmicks aimed at a tiny minority of tabloid hate-figures) – that is a form of violence.
In short: if government systematically attacks the interests and well-being of citizens, this constitutes a form of violence. That such violence is achieved by bureaucratic mandate and the mechanisms of officialdom is irrelevant. The policies of the current Coalition Government are attacks of violence upon the fabric of British society, and the British people themselves.
Yesterday, tens of thousands of students gathered in London. Some of them fought the police, and attempted to damage the property of both the state and the Conservative party. Good. British citizens should do it again and again, until our lords and masters understand.
If rioting secured the liberty of Rome, perhaps it can salvage the welfare state of Britain. After all, who else is going to bring this radical and destructive juggernaut to a halt? Not Nick Clegg, that’s for sure.
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UPDATE: I should – in the vain effort to avoid confusion and misapprehension – make clear a suppressed premise in the above: namely, that people generally don’t riot unless they are really pissed off. When it gets to the point that significant numbers of people are sufficiently pissed off that they are rioting, that means things are seriously bad and that this is a dramatic wake-up call to the government of the day. And that is as useful a mechanism for political pressure and safe-guarding today as it was 500 years ago.
Further, I think people are misguided if they see any worthwhile moral difference between the vandalism being done to our welfare state by a tiny minority of privileged millionaires, and the smashing of a few windows in London. Especially if they think the former is fine and dandy, but the latter is in need of solemn tut-tutting, finger-wagging and pensive sighs of disapproval. Or if they can’t connect up doing the latter with stopping the former.
November 9, 2010
Offensive Words and Sexist Norms?
Over at Crooked Timber there’s a somewhat bizarre discussion taking place beneath this video (warning, Not At All Safe For Work)
What various Timberites are arguing over is whether the use of language like “sad twat” and “stupid cunt” is sexist and misogynist. Interestingly, we can use this as a case study for applying some recent philosophical theories of meaning and interpretation that have been advanced in the 20th century.
In the study of intellectual history, perhaps the most influential and important contribution to theories of interpretation and meaning was made by Quentin Skinner in this paper, which became a significant plank in what emerged as the “Cambridge School” approach. Skinner’s basic claim was that to properly understand and interpret a text from the past – and to avoid reading one’s own anachronistic contemporary prejudices into it – one had to recover its author’s intentions in writing it. To do this, the text has to be located in its relevant social and intellectual context, to see what arguments it was engaging with and which specific historically located concerns it was informed by.
We can apply this intentionality-based approach to our case of swearing above. The key question is: did the 15 year olds who made this video intend to use language that was derogatory towards women? Reconstructing the context of 15 year olds in Britain, the answer would appear to be that they did not. For as a commenter at CT points out, in contemporary Britain the words “twat” and “cunt” are predominantly used as insults for men. (Indeed it is quite rare and odd-sounding for a women in Britain to be called a “cunt”, in particular).
So can our 15 year olds be cleared of the sexism charge? Not so fast.
Yale professor Ian Shapiro has long argued that the Skinner intentionality approach is not the end of the story. Shapiro urges we acknowledge the possibility of agents un-knowingly reproducing power structures and dominant modes of thinking without realising it. For example, whilst an author may “intend” to produce an argument criticising (say) a current governmental regime, they may unwittingly be reproducing a pattern of argument that simultaneously presupposes that (say) a third of the population ought to continue to be kept as slaves. As the author’s argument becomes widely disseminated, it surreptitiously reinforces a norm that the author did not in fact realise they were endorsing (in this case, that slavery is acceptable).
Whilst that’s an oversimplified example, we can clearly apply the thought-process to the case of our swearing children: they may not have intended to reinforce sexist and misogynistic norms, by using language that portrays female genitalia as the basis for gross insult they unwittingly reproduced and re-enforced sexist and misogynistic values.
On this view, the use of “sad twat” and “stupid cunt” does appear to be misogynistic.
Yet perhaps we can go further. Much of the “post-structuralist” work of Michel Foucault, and the “deconstructionist” approach of Jacques Derrida, emphasised the extent to which individual subjects are themselves the products of power structures and “discourses” beyond their control.
On a (simplified and crude) reading of a general Foucault-Derrida approach, it might be said that these 15 year old children are intimately the products of societies which are ruled by “discourses” (i.e. legitimated ways of speaking, interacting and thereby thinking) that have developed in ways that systematically privilege men and relegate women to the status of subservient, exploited, secondary and controlled members of society. On a certain reading of this approach, what these 15 year old children are doing is redeploying and re-enforcing the gendered sexist norms of a society which is structured so as to systematically dis-empower one gender in opposition to the other. In turn, to focus on what these specific children happen to have done is to basically miss the point: the real action goes on elsewhere, at a more (if you like) “fundamental” level of social analysis.
The famous objection to this approach, however, is that it leaves no room or hope for individual agency. And this indeed seems a proper criticism to make: these children chose to use these offensive words. They could have chosen otherwise, and indeed would have had the phenomenological experience of the possibility of choosing when they made this video, rather than being mere automatons in the power matrix. These children’s actions are not straightforward functions of deeply-seated societal power structures; to forget that renders any analysis inadequate in providing a complete picture.
What we need to do, therefore, is reconcile all of the above considerations in some way. If we do that, I reckon the correct response to the question “was it sexist and misogynistic to use words like twat and cunt?” is clearly both “no” and “yes”.
It’s “no” insofar as these children, possessing their own sense of choice and agency, in a context in which these words are generally used as insults for men, probably did not intend to produce a sexist and misogynistic video. But it’s “yes” insofar as these children (unwittingly?) perpetuated the use of words that take female genitalia to be the height of insult, embedded in a structure of norms that assign women a more lowly status than men, reflective of deep power imbalances between the sexes whereby one group is generally placed in positions of control over the other.
Now, you may think that’s a damn obvious conclusion to draw, and that it shouldn’t have taken a thousand words plus much talk of interpretative theory to get there. Maybe. But then, re-read the CT comment thread and see what happens when people pick either “yes” or “no” and keep slugging it out regardless. Sometimes long-winded theory is helpful on getting clear, even if it yields what appear to be fairly obvious answers by the end of the process.
November 8, 2010
Workfare, Slavery, Libertarians and History
Don Paskini demonstrates how unworkable the Coalition’s “workfare” plans will be in practice. Yet thinking philosophically about the implications of “workfare” – i.e. the state forcing people to work – can also be fruitful.
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State minimalist libertarians are fond of arguing that taxation is a form of slavery. Apparently, if you pay 30% of your income in tax, then allegedly 30% of your working time is owned by the state, and that allegedly means you’re enslaved for that period. Although intricately fancy, such arguments are in fact relatively straightforwardly refuted.
But if anything looks prima facie like state-imposed modern slavery, it’s forcing some group (e.g. the unemployed) to work for nothing. Indeed that description might appear a plausible candidate for a starting definition of slavery. Yet appearances can be misleading, so let’s consider the obvious objection that “workfare” is not a form of slavery: that unemployed people will not work for nothing because they will receive unemployment benefit which will now be conditional upon the aforementioned work.
Viewed from a careful philosophical and historical perspective, however, this argument may generate more problems than solutions – for libertarians in particular.
Firstly, benefits are – by their very nature – not a form of remuneration for labour undertaken. The whole point of out-of-work benefits is that they exist to support those who would otherwise be destitute. Benefits are a safety-net, a source of income for those without other means of support.
Secondly, benefits have never been part of some 20th century egalitarian revolution, the tides of which are being turned by making benefits “conditional”. Unemployment benefits (in particular) are a pragmatically-evolved political response in the post-war era to the realisation that leaving people to the mercies of capricious market forces will – in times of economic hardship – push the destitute into the “solutions” of desperate political extremism, like fascism, Nazism and communism. Benefits are a safeguard against the extremist politics that grow in the fertile soils of disempowerment and economic hardship. That is – historically – a major reason for their existing as precisely unconditional supports, supplied by the state and financed from general taxation.
Out-of-work benefits are thus not – and never have been – remuneration for labour. To make them such entails that they are no longer benefits. In turn, to threaten to take away such now-conditional “benefits” from those who do not undergo state-prescribed work placements is to effectively force people to labour for (barely) subsistence remuneration. It’s: work-for-the-state, or be destitute in the gutter.
To re-iterate: if “benefits” become dependent upon work, then that work becomes – for those who would prefer not to starve in the gutter – enforced labour extracted by the power of the state. Accordingly, that now starts to look rather like a form of state-enforced slavery in the context of societies that have developed legal structures and norms that previously provided for the unconditional protection of the most vulnerable. The more general point being that these sorts of issues cannot properly be analysed out of the relevant historical context.
A switch to benefit-conditionality cannot, as a basic fact of reality, happen in vacuo. Its impact upon state-citizen relations must be understood against the background of what has gone before. Hence: if people were previously guaranteed a basic subsistence minimum, and now they will only get that if they work for the state, there is a strong case for saying they are now being forced to work for the state. And forced work is, at some level, at least analogous to slavery.
I’m happy to admit that the analogy with slavery will not hold anything like all the way down, however. The psychological and moral dimensions of actual slavery – the rendering of thinking, feeling human beings into mere property, left wholly at the mercy of owner-dominators – are deeply objectionable, and put slavery-proper on a different moral and political plain to the Government’s “workfare” proposals. But having said that, “workfare” may look a lot closer to slavery-proper than the polemical libertarian suggestion that paying tax (via a developed and established legal-social structure, ratified democratically, and backed by rule of law) is akin to slavery, because of the alleged appropriation of worker’s labouring time by the coercive extractive power of the state.
Unless, of course, you’re a libertarian. Then, your response is likely to be: the state is not forcing anybody to work via “workfare”-type proposals, because if people would rather not work they can forego their “benefits” and starve in the gutter; it’s their choice.
What I want to end by suggesting today is not simply the usual charge that this is a bizarrely brutal political outcome to advocate, and which strikes most ordinary people as abhorrent and very possibly mad. (After all, the proposition that the worst-off should be abandoned so as to “protect” the property rights of the already more fortunate, who would allegedly be “enslaved” if they were forced to pay tax to fund wider welfare support systems, looks blatantly bonkers to especially the non-philosophically minded majority).
To that oft-repeated observation, I would add two further points however. Firstly, that the libertarian response is defective insofar as it refuses to engage withthe reality of a preceding practical context against which to understand the state-citizen relationship in something like “workfare” reforms.It is just not good enough to attempt to analyse political interactions and changes in vacuo – at least if one wishes to produce a serious and rounded analysis. Changes and power structures happen in concrete political and historical contexts; abstracting from those tells you only about your abstraction, not about the world people actually must live and interact in.
Secondly, that much libertarianism is astoundingly historically ignorant, insofar as it does not pay attention to why systems of benefit support have evolved in our societies. And in turn libertarianism is naive, insofar as no attention is paid to the empirical evidence that when people are left to the capricious mercies of the market they do not sit around picking their noses, but agitate for (often violent) forms of political extremism to address social and economic short-comings.
Thus, the irony: because libertarians are generally historically ignorant and naive, they advocate likely self-defeating political programmes. In the short term, the newly-established Republic of Libertopia would see benefits (etc) withdrawn and taxation drastically reduced to defend the (alleged) property rights of the better-off, so as to prevent their “enslavement” through “coercive” taxation. Yet in the longer-term, the inevitability of economic strife at some point* would push the destitute and abandoned to seek-out radical political solutions that would not only over-turn the libertarian arrangements of the status-quo, but (if the 20th century is any guide) risk instituting forms of political organisation that would be drastically more antithetical to the aims and desires of most libertarians than the oh-so wicked tax regimes of western liberal democracies. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Adolf Hitler was rather more of a threat to people’s liberty and property-owning prosperity than Clement Atlee or FDR.
Perhaps it is therefore fortunate – for want of a better word – that most libertarians in practice don’t actually go Galt at all. They just live in affluent American suburbs, and vote Republican.
–
*To those who would reply that under the (Austrian?) economic system of state-minimalist Libertopia there would be no economic crises or hardships, we simply reply with the derisory silence this sort of self-assured refusal to engage with reality (by living in imaginary sky-castles of convenient a priori theory) deserves.
November 4, 2010
Blogging, Status and Nasty Competitive Animals Like You
Shift your gaze to the sidebar no the right. See that little Wikio icon, which gives me a UK-wide blog ranking? The one that is replicated across hundreds of blogs in the UK. What’s that little button doing there?
I guess I’d like to say that it’s for purely instrumental reasons. That when people first visit this site they will note it as widely endorsed, and thus pay more attention. But let’s not pretend that’s doing the serious work.
That little button is there partly as a marker of my status. It’s there to tell people “not only is this a popular blog, but it’s author is successful”. That little icon is thus a mark of my competitive tendency – and more importantly, of my success in that competitive process. I take the same to be true for all the other blogs carrying such icons.
Am I just an over-competitive freak, who needs to get a grip and swallow a heavy dose of modesty? That’s certainly possible, and people have been suggesting so for a very long time. But it may not be the end of the story.
Much of what I’m reading at the moment – like this, this, this and this – argues that competitive status-seeking is in some way what fundamentally characterises absolutely all of us, even if we seek and achieve it in different (often secret) ways.
That is, and to simplify horribly: human beings are creatures who are inherently disposed to compare themselves to their neighbours. But when they compare poorly, this causes them psychological pain. As a result humans develop strategies to successfully compete with – and ultimately dominate – their neighbours, thus achieving reflected glory in the minds of the more lowly.
In stable politically organised societies, the more brutish outlets for competition and subjugation – violence, murder, rape, enslavement of rivals – are prohibited and controlled (perhaps even “monopolised by the state”, as some have had it). But nasty, comparative-competitive humans don’t suddenly become placid saints. Rather, they find new outlets for competition and domination. Like having the fanciest most expensive clothes, or the biggest cars. Or, if they’re really clever, developing self-assured auras that tell others that they don’t care about fancy material goods, because they are above all that.
This is potentially problematic, for leftists in particular.
Typically, rightists – example – aren’t troubled by this diagnosis of inescapable competitive-comparison. They shrug it off or even embrace it as a fact of life, and look for systems to channel, direct and control it without worrying about its consequences for human well-being (which they generally deny or downplay).
Leftists, however, don’t tend to like this sort of thing at all. In fact they really hate it. But here comes the nasty rub, inspired by giving a careful reading to this guy and this guy.
Most leftists tend (I think) to assume that nasty competitive comparisons are a product of material inequality: that because some have more than others, psychological hierarchies emerge and mental and emotional suffering for losers is the result. But what if it is in fact the other way around? What if material inequality – i.e. wealth, unequal possessions, riches and the power they all bring – are employed by already competitive-comparative animals as markers of differential status? That is, material inequality doesn’t so much cause competitive status-seeking and psychological inequality, as the reverse (though the process will be complex and dynamic, and to an extent flow in both directions at different times).
Indeed if that is the case, then there may be a bleak outcome for leftists: reducing material inequalities may well temper the worst excesses of status competition and subjugation, and potentially halt vicious cycles of psychological decline. But the nasty competitive animals will remain, even in a more equal world, and promptly seek out new ways of asserting their deeply-desired status superiorities. Thus, whilst a more equal world may very well be nicer than the one we currently live in, it may inevitably be a lot less nice than many leftists would like to imagine.
UPDATE: Chris Dillow’s response to/development of the above ideas is very much worth reading. Here.
November 2, 2010
Hume on Fry
“Despite claiming to have been misquoted by Attitude magazine, Fry is on record in several other interviews opining that women don’t really like sex – for if they did, they would ‘go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush.’ “
So reports Laurie Penny, in her scathing put-down of Stephen Fry’s very silly comments about women not liking sex. Laurie handles the contemporary political demolition with aplomb, and I’ve nothing more to say on that front. Philosophically, however, Fry’s attitude is a nice excuse (as if I needed one) to talk about the ideas of the great David Hume.
On Hume’s picture, Fry is falling into a very straightforward sort of error: he is taking the product of habituation and artificial practice, and mistaking it as natural and original. To see why, a quick summary of Hume’s ideas about virtue (and morality more generally) is in order.
For Hume, “virtue” – i.e. the staple of what morality revolves around, but taken in a very wide sense so as to encompass emotive reaction, motivation, duty, obligation and considerations of consequence – comes in two alternative forms.
First, there are the “natural virtues”. These arise spontaneously from the natural sentiments of ordinary human beings. The classic example is the benevolence of a father for his child. This sort of moral sentiment does not need to be inculcated or habituated into a person (assuming they are normally functioning, morally speaking). It just exists as a part of being a (good) father.
But there are also “artificial virtues”. These only arise when general practices have been established which create a system of mutually understood rules, whose repeated iteration across time generate both a clear sense of their mutual utility, but crucially also a psychological disposition to embrace the “virtues” promoted by the long-established rules.
Hume’s classic example is justice. If we imagine solitary individuals with no experience of any social living, they would be completely baffled by the concept of “justice”, when this is understood as respecting specific rules which dictate who can do what with various bits of physical stuff (i.e.possessions and property). “Justice” – as a set of socially-enforced rules determining who can do what to what – makes sense only after repeat iteration of the rules, and repeated long-term conformity to them. Eventually, all mutually recognise the advantage of obeying the rules in the short term (i.e. leaving another’s possessions alone) so as to gain in the long term (i.e. having security of one’s own possessions).
But crucially this is only half the story. Over time, human beings become psychologically disposed to internalise the rules of justice originally established to secure possessions over time, and extend the concept to one of full-scale moral virtue. That is, it becomes not just a matter of practical convenience that the rules of justice be generally observed, but people begin to respect the rules as in themselves morally binding. Indeed in really sophisticated societies where justice has been long-established, people will forget where the concept of justice came from, and the psychological tendency to see the rules as having autonomous normative force will lead them to think of “justice” as a special sort of moral virtue wholly independent of any practical co-ordination problems. (And modern Humeans might add: some people in such societies then go off and write books called things like A Theory of Justice, which from the Humean perspective look deeply misguided indeed).
Hume holds that the rules of “chastity” regarding women’s sexual propriety are, like justice, artificial in origin. Indeed Hume gives short shrift to the idea that women are “naturally” modest and sexually reticent. Rather, women and men have roughly the same natural propensity to want to sleep around, but “the vast difference betwixt the education and duties of the two sexes” that we see every day in fact derives from one very simple social fact.
To cut a long story (and blog post) short, Hume argues that because men can never be sure whether a partner’s child is really theirs (despite having to labour for its sustenance and survival), men have over time constructed systems in which to minimise the opportunity for women to get impregnated by other men.
Rather than positing any natural female modesty, Hume is adamant that society inculcates women into being modest and celibate because this is in the interests of men who want to make sure the women they impregnate aren’t sleeping around. A crucial component of this social inculcation is to discourage female sexual license and profligacy by creating systems of collective social disapproval, which women deeply imbibe into their own psyches. Thus, the artificial virtues of “chastity and modesty” are impressed upon women from infancy, but ultimately so as to serve the interests of husbands and fathers labouring for children they cannot ever be completely sure are theirs:
“In order, therefore, to impose a due restraint on the female sex, we must attach a peculiar degree of shame to their infidelity, above what arises merely from its injustice, and must bestow proportionable praises on their chastity.”
But as with justice, people are apt to forget the genesis of this artificial virtue. They instead look at contemporary practice, and assume it to be a straightforward indicator of natural tendencies and determinations. Stephen Fry therefore makes the classic mistake the Humean account cautions against: he looks at a socially inculcated outcome – not shagging behind the bushes on Hampstead Heath – and is himself so well-integrated into the relevant social practice that he fails to spot its artificial origin in social convention:
“Education takes possession of the ductile minds of the fair sex in their infancy. And when a general rule of this kind is once establish’d, men are apt to extend it beyond those principles, from which it first arose.”
Thus, although it is stretching things too far to claim Hume as an early feminist, it remains the case that his historically-minded account of morals and social practices should be of great interest to many modern feminists today.
November 1, 2010
Markets, Power and the Browne Report
Stefan Collini’s dissection of the Browne Report on higher education reform is both excellent and depressing.
Unquestionably, the Browne proposals are a dramatic threat to this country’s ability to foster learning and culture for their own sakes, regardless of whether such worthwhile activity promotes national output and growth.
As Collini makes clear, Browne’s suggestions for university finance have ramifications far beyond the present debate about what graduates should eventually pay for their degrees. Rather, the report champions a wholesale transformation of the British post-war settlement on higher education.
In short: rather than university education and research being a public good financed by public money, Browne envisages education as a private good financed by the preferences of private consumers.
The axes upon which the entire report turns are the claims that “students are best placed to make the judgement about what they want to get from participating in higher education”, coupled with two further beliefs: that “student choice will drive up quality”, and that the measure of quality is “student satisfaction”.
The model is that of a competitive market. Courses, and eventually entire departments, will only survive if they can keep attracting students who are willing to pay the fees demanded. Students, however, will likely assess courses not only (or even primarily) on whether the teaching is good and the learning offered worthwhile in itself, but whether graduates of such courses tend to go on to successful (i.e. highly-paid) careers.
Collini explains why this is a very bad idea at length, and I agree with him. But to focus on just two things:
Firstly, students are very poorly placed to make decisions – especially at 17 – about what a good university course offers, even simply in terms of its actual teaching. That’s something experienced academics are placed to correctly judge, because they know what is important for students to learn and struggle with even if students at the time don’t always like it.
Secondly, if significant numbers of students pick courses because of expected long-term economic pay-off, then smaller subjects and departments – doing valuable research and offering excellent educations to students interested in more niche areas – will end up being closed-down because the “market demand” isn’t there to sustain them. But that will show only that the market has failed, insofar as it is drastically insensitive to values and goods not directly appreciated or preferred by a particular group of “empowered consumers”.
And that last point is the one I really want to get draw attention to: that the Browne Report is very much about power. Under the Browne proposals, instead of experienced academics having the power to determine teaching – and eventually in turn, departmental research – provisions, power will be handed to students acting out the role of market consumers.
Now the zealot wing of the Market Defence League may think this is fine and dandy: that turning university education – and by chain of consequence, university research – into a function of what 17 year old children demand is exactly how it should be. If they truly believe that (somehow) “student choice” just will “drive up quality” and that “quality” is unproblematically defined in terms of “student satisfaction”, then they will no doubt be happy that power is being shifted in this direction and welcome it in full consciousness.
By contrast academics, and those who see the capricious market-demand of 17 year old children as a poor method of securing the myriad complexities of quality higher education provision, will lament such a transfer of power.
But what I strongly suspect is that Lord Browne and the co-authors of the Browne Report would be quite surprised by my claim that this is about power at a pretty fundamental level. I suspect they would likewise be bemused by my connected insistence that the Report is therefore a deeply political intervention, insofar as it seeks to re-arrange power distributions in foundational ways.
And if I’m right, the Report’s authors may actually posses – possibly without knowing it – a specific and deeply-seated conception of what power is. Indeed, this wouldn’t actually be surprising, given that the conception I have in mind has been ascendent in Britain for some time: namely, that consumer power in a market framework is not simply the only power that should exist, but the only form of power that really can exist.
For those of us who find that last sentence to be profoundly misguided, the Browne Report may prove deeply worrying on a great number of levels.
October 28, 2010
Ideology vs. Fantasy
It’s been frequently suggested that our current Lords and Masters – messrs Cameron, Osborne, Clegg et. al. – are pursuing a hyper-ideological agenda. How else to explain a government cutting public spending at a pace and depth that might make Old Maggie weep?
Some suggest that this ideology is forefront in the Lords and Masters’ minds; that they know exactly what they are doing. I’ve flirted with that explanation myself. Others, like John Gray, suggest that any ideology is deep and thereby virtually subconscious. That Cameron, Clegg et. al. are so wedded to a state-minimalist right-wing worldview that they do not see this to be ideological any more than fish see water to be wet.
In general there is a consensus (at least on the left) that our Lords and Masters must have some underlying coherent purpose. After all, it’s generally acknowledged that what is being done to the economy is – at best – astonishingly cavalier. Quick re-cap: economic theory and history indicate that Boy George’s cuts are more likely to slow down or reverse recovery than aid it, whilst suggestions that bond markets will punish Sovereign Britain if her deficit is not immediately and drastically reduced appear both false and incoherent.
But assuming that our Lords and Masters know this, the puzzle correspondingly emerges: why carry out the cuts regardless? “Ideological agenda” slips-in as the obvious explanation.
Yet it’s always important to guard against inadvertent projection (or at least recognise it when it’s happening). By that I mean: we must be careful about not reading ourselves into the world around us, then mistakenly believing we have found something new.
Right-thinking people look at the assault on the economy – including many measures which will save miniscule sums but have dramatic effects on the lives of thousands – and conclude that it must be motivated by something coherent, i.e. something like an ideological agenda. After all, that’s what might motivate them, if they were in equivalent positions of power.
But what if this is a mistake? What if our leaders are actually not motivated by anything coherent at all? What if they are actually…mad?
Hypothesise with me: what if our Lords and Masters are conducting this savage economic assault because they talked-up deficit reduction so hard in the run up to the last election that they now believe their own strategic rhetoric, and have forgotten that it was precisely that. Accordingly, they may have lost their grips on what the rest of us would class as reality.
We have evidence that this sort of stuff happens, after all. For a start, intense high-level politics apparently requires a certain level of insanity in order to function on a daily basis. Indeed, look at recent case studies. Gordon Brown is by some accounts a pretty deranged individual. Tony Blair appears to have taken a long vacation from reality. His wife appears to have joined him, as evinced by her mad-cap schemes to auction off Blair’s autograph for a tenner a pop.
It’s thus very possible that our current Lords and Masters are not crafty ideological head-bangers, but individuals who’ve become dangerously detached from reality. And that need not be because there is anything especially wrong with them; that would be to commit the fundamental attribution error. It may simply be that life at the top of politics pre-requires and necessitates a certain level of delusion. Mixed with the present context, however, this may have very unfortunate consequences.
But here comes the twist: does this alternative possibility actually matter?
We will probably never know whether Cameron, Osborne, Clegg et. al. are really ideological Thatcherite crusaders, or just delusional rightist fantasists. And one key reason we may never know is, precisely, because the outcome may well be the same either way.
October 27, 2010
Necessities of War
Saturday’s Wikileaks revelations – of British and American troops in Iraq covering-up civilian deaths whilst systematically ignoring and facilitating torture – have begun to expose the full horrors of a war that long-ago went terribly wrong. Yesterday’s Guardian revelations – that British troops systematically employed torture methods that violate the Geneva Convention – makes the picture darker still, even if only by adding detail.
One consequence of the latest revelations is that they demonstrate the nonsense-thinking behind the original case and “justification” for war.
A central plank upon which the Mad Mesopotamian Adventure was floated was the claim – made tacitly or overtly – that this would be a new kind of war. Our troops would not be invaders but liberators; warriors of peace welcomed by grateful Iraqis. Smart bombs would target military installations only ensuring a minimum of civilian deaths. The Axis of Evil would be confronted by the Forces of Freedom; if there was violence only Bad Guys would receive it, as Good Guys basked in the death-lite glory of Shock and Awe.
Such, at least, were the assurances given by a Bush Administration salivating for war.
Connectedly, what came to be known as the “Decent Left” in the UK criticised those who refused to back military action. The Decents chastised what they claimed were the gutless faux-principles of an anti-war left which wouldn’t put its cruise missiles where its mouth was.
Underlying this rhetoric of decency was precisely the American assurance that a new kind of war could and would be fought. A very special kind of war, in fact: one which transcended the horrors that history teaches have attended every other war in history. Somehow the Republican Party – with Tony Blair in tow – would negate the logic of all previous conflict and be back in time for Christmas.
Hence: no longer would the presence of armed victors over invaded peoples lead to the use of planned and calculated violence against civilians. No longer would senior officers employ violent tactics to deal with rebellious native populations who viewed their “liberators” as oppressive invading conquerors. No longer would scared and exhausted young men (sent into a country to act as killing machines and operating in permanently hostile environments) enact revenge on civilians or suspected enemy fighters they (rightly or wrongly) believed had killed their comrades and were trying to kill them.
Rather, the logic of what armies do in conflict situations – or even what individuals in positions of power are prone to do to those they control – would be magically left behind. The Bad Guys would get their comeuppance, the Good Guys would ride off into the sunset. This would be, precisely, a Decent War.
We now know for sure that it didn’t work that way. Abu Ghraib, for a start, was no aberration. “Our” side did profoundly horrible and nasty things for the fundamental reason that profoundly horrible and nasty things are constituent features of all wars – and they are perpetrated by all sides, albeit in varying degrees in varying places and times.
Chris Bertram is thus right when he says:
“During an earlier phase of discussion, when those advocates [of war] were still unapologetic, but whilst the slaughter was well underway, we were treated to numerous disquisitions on moral responsibility: yes there is slaughter, but we are not responsible, it is Al Qaida/the Sunni “insurgents”/Al-Sadr/Iran ….
Well the latest Wikileaks disclosures ought to shut them up for good (it won’t, of course). “Our” side has both committed war crimes directly and has acquiesced, enabled, and covered up for the commission of such crimes by others. The incidents are not isolated episodes: rather we have systematic policy.”
But we can and must go further. The latest revelations are much more than just a reminder that the advocates of war were wrong in this instance. They drive-home a fact about war that should never have been forgotten in the first place: that war is always, and by necessity, hell.
The next time a Bush (or a Blair) comes offering “humanitarian” war of liberation, we would do well to remember such a basic fact. Iraq now sadly confirms an already long-established judgement of history: that “humanitarian war” is inevitably oxymoronic. Even if some wars, very occasionally, have to be fought regardless.
October 25, 2010
Feminism’s Complexities
When I was being born the doctor in charge of the procedure ordered a forceps delivery. He was about to go off shift, and the birth was taking “too long”. A trainee midwife was ordered to perform the procedure so that my birth did not over-run into the next doctor’s time. However, the trainee missed the side of my head and cut a gash in my face, about an inch from my eye. I still have a small scar on my right cheek – lucky, really; I could be walking around half blind.
Is this a feminist issue? After attending the excellent Feminism in London conference on Saturday, I believe it is. The reasoning is simple.
We start by noting the brute fact that only women give birth to babies. We then observe that birthing procedures in western countries have become institutionalised. That is, it is now the dominant expectation that women have their babies in hospitals, lying on their backs, overseen by a team of medical professionals administering various drugs at the instruction of a lead doctor. But this latter development has fostered a practice of viewing birth as a factory-like operation; women are put through scheduled timetables and medical processes designed by the institution to facilitate what is now deemed a “normal” pregnancy.
Unfortunately, “normal” is dictated and determined by doctors, who are in charge. And like any institutional practice, the rules are shaped by the preferences of decision-making professionals. Hence women receive epidurals, skip-loads of drugs and sometimes caesarean sections – or forceps deliveries that might go horribly wrong – not because they need or want them, but because this is what works best for medical professionals calling the shots in a busy daily schedule.
The result, however, can be trauma for the mother as she is processed through the system, especially if things go wrong. This trauma that potentially rebounds onto the child, immediately or in the longer-run. (Watch this documentary for more information).
The important point to take away today, however, is that something can be a feminist issue – i.e. a phenomenon which disproportionately impacts negatively upon women – without being the result of deliberate discrimination, prejudice or exploitation. Combining the “factory” approach of hospital birthing with the brute fact only women give birth, we end up with a situation in which specifically women (as well as their babies, depending on how wrong things end up going) but not men risk being subjected to highly undesirable practices and potential outcomes.
This helpfully illustrates one way in which feminism properly appreciated incorporates an extremely broad set of considerations. It encompasses far more than some crude thesis that women are straightforwardly “persecuted” by men. (Though having said that, it is worth pondering whether child birth would be viewed in the way it is – and women treated in the way they often are – if the medical profession hadn’t been dominated by male doctors for so many years).
But then the crude – though sadly common – view that feminists are mere paranoid simpletons screeching that all men are evil and out to get them has far more to do with the backlash than with the women’s movement itself. Whilst many men do hate women – and this deep hatred seeps into much of our society – no feminist worth her or his salt would say that’s all there is to it.
