Not all people who do oppressive things are privileged. See also: Michelle Malkin. Trans women who believe in Harry Benjamin Syndrome. Misogynistic women from Phyllis Schalfly to Suzanne Venker. “Ex-gays.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is a natural fucking consequence of the fact that marginalized people are not a hivemind. Sometimes marginalized people believe different things! Sometimes they believe actively evil things, or things that are oppressive to themselves or other people! I literally have no idea where you people get this idea that “people who have suffered” and “people who are assholes” are non-overlapping groups.
It’s relatively common for social-justice-type people to say that they don’t care about the precious feefees of some white cis dude, they care about being welcoming to the women of color he’s oppressing. Okay, cool. But there are women of color who think that affirmative action is unjust, or white people should be allowed to say the N word, or whatever the white cis dude was yammering about. Do you care about welcoming her? Do you care about her precious feefees?
As far as I can see it, your options here are as follows: say that you don’t care about the precious feefees of people who are doing oppressive things, including trans/queer people, women, and people of color who are doing oppressive things; not be a douche to people until you’ve confirmed that they’re white cis dudes; or not be a douchebag to anyone.
Unfortunately, the online social justice community has decided to go with a different plan, which is as follows:
- Pretend anyone who disagrees with you is a white cishet man, even if they aren’t. (Seriously, until you’ve seen a woman of color told that she’s ignoring the voices of women of color, you haven’t lived.)
- Classify trans people who were female assigned at birth, white cis women, and gay men in the “we’re allowed to be as douchey to them as we want because they are PRIVILEGED OPPRESSORS” category.
Not all people who don’t like anger are privileged. To oversimplify a lot: there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are angry! about! INJUSTICE! and want to shout a lot about it, probably with lots of insults. And there are other people who don’t want to be yelled at.
There is a certain tendency to assume that marginalized people are the ANGRY ONES and privileged people are the ones who don’t want to be yelled at. I have no idea where this conclusion came from. I mean, I could argue that privileged people have the spoons to get angry about social justice, and marginalized people have to deal with oppression all day every fucking day, including people being angry at them constantly, and would really just like a place where people are calm and civil and kind and they can relax a bit.
But I’m not, because that’s stupid. Instead, there are angry people who are oppressed, and people who hate anger who are oppressed, and while some of this has to do with oppression a lot of it is just natural personality variation.
Not silencing people is not an option. Not silencing people is a great plan; I am totally okay with everyone being able to speak out. But not silencing anyone is not going to work. If you say “no, you have to stop yelling and insulting people,” you silence some of the people who are angry! about! INJUSTICE! On the other hand, if you let people yell insults whenever they like, you are silencing the people who are afraid that if they speak up they’ll be yelled at. And the second group is not going to loudly spew insults about how they’re being oppressed; they’re just going to be quiet and stop talking and censor themselves and eventually leave the movement altogether.
I’m not sure what the ultimate solution is to the problem, other than “everyone becomes more compassionate.” For instance, when I get angry, I need to recognize that there is another human on the other side of my computer screen, one that has life circumstances I don’t know about, and avoid hurting them. On the other hand, when I end up sobbing because someone else is angry at me, I also need to understand that their anger comes from a place of suffering and pain and to have empathy for them.
The block button exists. This is advice I’m directing at both groups! If you are so angry at someone that you can’t do anything except scream contentlessly, then perhaps it would be better to block them. On the other hand, if someone is making you sob or curl up in a ball of triggered, then perhaps it would be better to block them. Thankfully, online, you don’t have to put up with people you don’t like.
I think that might be Part Two of the angry people/people who hate anger solution. Both groups can say their piece, but not necessarily in the same social circles.
Furthermore, there is no ethical requirement that you try to convince every idiot who stops by. If you are unlikely to change your mind, the person you’re talking to is unlikely to change their mind, and your readers are unlikely to change their minds, DON’T TALK ABOUT IT. If taking care of yourself requires that you don’t engage, DON’T ENGAGE.
Rational arguments work better. When you argue with someone online, you’re not arguing to convince them, you’re arguing to convince the other people who are reading your argument. Arguing to convince someone who is firmly enough convinced of their point of view to argue about it on the Internet is unlikely to be effective. (Exception: if you’re arguing with someone who already has deep respect for you.)
With that in mind, consider. If you happened to stumble across people arguing about some topic you don’t know anything about– the Singularity, Israel vs. Palestine, whatever– are you going to be more convinced by the person who uses logical reasoning and facts and cites their sources, or the person who screams DIE DEATHIST SCUM?
My point.
I’m not convinced that rational arguments work better. Rationalism can be a way of hiding biases, of condescending, and of shutting down conversations by expressing class privilege.
The only arguments which have ever changed my mind about anything have been compassionate arguments. Basically situations where people are interested in learning what I mean and what I feel, and interested in me learning what they mean and what they feel. But such arguments require intimacy and trust which is rare on the internet and basically impossible in a lot of contexts.
I’ve been trying to move myself more towards disengaging from people who are hurtful (for whatever reason: many are my friends IRL and I agree with them, I just find their links about rape or racism all day every day too much to deal with) and trying to foster communities of trust where I can have the sorts of interactions I want to have.
… Not sure if it’s working or not yet.
I think the social justice community in general has a HUGE problem distinguishing between “things people should be allowed to do” (rant, swear, refuse to answer questions, yell) and “things that are effective persuasive discourse.”
Anger can be persuasive! Sometimes it’s exactly what’s needed! But not always. And the alignment between “things that make you angry” and “things that can be fixed by uninhibited expression of anger” is never going to be a perfect match.
The only arguments which have ever changed my mind about anything have been compassionate arguments.
There’s actually research behind this. (Which I’m going to helpfully cite as “I think I read somewhere.”)
Marriage-equality advocates have found that the most effective arguments to change people’s minds about gay marriage weren’t the angry ones (“It’s our right and we deserve it”) or the rational ones (“studies show that children raised by gay parents do great”). They were the sympathetic ones–”We love each other and want to protect our families.”
Which is kind of galling, from the Tumblr-SJ sort of viewpoint. It means making yourself vulnerable in front of people who are on the fence about whether you should have human rights. But… sometimes that’s the way to get them off the fence.
Better yet, it is possible to be both rational and compassionate, and get the best of both worlds. That’s why the best, most persuasive arguments tend to combine logos, pathos, and ethos.
Yeah. This is a fundamental problem in online SJ communities. If you are going to say “we must listen to xyz voices” then you have to listen to xyz voices even if they say something that you think is wrong. But too often it turns out that “we must listen to xyz voices” really means “we must listen to xyz voices that say the right things.”
I think generally aligning oneself with a group tends to make people utterly incapable of properly listening to people they deem to be outside that group. Groupthink is powerful and fast-acting, its comforts are either available in healthier forms elsewhere or not worth having.
I’ve ran headlong into the “white straight cis males don’t have feelings” bullshit before in a community otherwise pretty finely calibrated to detecting oppressive bullshit, except they had a severe blind spot when it came to mental illness and anti-male aspects of patriarchy. I’m pretty damn sure they would’ve been better at listening if they hadn’t been able to shove me in an “out-group” box first.
“I’m not convinced that rational arguments work better. Rationalism can be a way of hiding biases, of condescending, and of shutting down conversations by expressing class privilege.”
This is stupefying. Rationalism is about exposing bias, not hiding it. The answer to bad rationalism is BETTER RATIONALISM, not ABANDONING REASON ALTOGETHER.
“The only arguments which have ever changed my mind about anything have been compassionate arguments.”
Jesus fucking Christ, I’m sure glad you weren’t born in Nazi Germany. Any charismatic, passionate speech will do, eh? Fuck. Me.
Really, that’s awful.
Just. Wow. You’re not even a little bit embarrassed to say something like that?
Interesting stuff here. I will quietly and bitterly watch from he sidelines as you continue writing about this and hope this opens up discourse in the wider “community” (so I can come back).
This I agree with.
This, I do not. Benlehman said compassionate arguments, not just any passionate argument. The latter does not have to be the former, and in the case of Nazi Germany, certainly wasn’t.
I think the debate over which kind of argument is most convincing is a non-starter, frankly. Movements function best when there’s a number of different styles of debate and arguments, and most people are convinced because of a cumulative effect, not because of a single line of argument or kind of argument. The “good cop, bad cop” dynamic can also be very effective as well; had the entire civil rights movement gone the way of MLK, they never would have gotten anywhere. The presence of more radical speakers, like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers both helped galvanize black communities and make MLK look like the reasonable alternative to white people. When a movement doesn’t have a spectrum, it loses momentum.
I think that anger is a great thing, actually. I think that the American people should be more angry at the things that are done to them on a regular basis. But at the same time, there’s a difference between using your anger and letting your anger use you. I really do have a helluva temper with regard to things that I feel passionate about, and if I just let it go, it makes me stupid. My vocabulary dwindles to about twelve words and everything I ever knew on the topic evaporates from my skull, which is why I’m really cautious about cutting loose in political discussions with certain in-laws.
All that said, the problem that I have with callout culture is that it often seems driven more by a need to score points than anything, and in the long term, the quality of the community and the conversation degrades significantly. It is in some ways a very masculine way of talking, and it’s the thing that I never liked about being in all-male environments; the dynamic is one of constant competition and one-upsmanship, rather than bonding.
The thing that makes this difficult to talk about is that there are some times when it’s *entirely* appropriate, and the line is difficult to draw.
> Jesus fucking Christ, I’m sure glad you weren’t born in Nazi Germany. Any charismatic, passionate speech will do, eh? Fuck. Me.
Volte, Cliff said “compassionate.” Don’t go all Godwin at such an early stage here. There’s little that can be considered compassionate about Hitler’s speeches. They may be passionate and charismatic, but they’re also characterized by xenophobia and militarism.
“This is stupefying. Rationalism is about exposing bias, not hiding it. The answer to bad rationalism is BETTER RATIONALISM, not ABANDONING REASON ALTOGETHER.”
But rationalism without ethics can’t have useful goals. Say that I found the most rational way to ensure the superior economic status of my race above all others. You can’t logic me out of that. (I’ve seen arguments that racism drags the whole economy down, but I’m sure there’s a way to fix that and still be racist. Sufficiently rational racists could find a way.)
You have to appeal to morality or emotions or something fuzzy, or rationalism only gets you highly efficient bigotry.
“Jesus fucking Christ, I’m sure glad you weren’t born in Nazi Germany. Any charismatic, passionate speech will do, eh? Fuck. Me.”
wtf???
I don’t think “I’m most swayed by compassionate arguments” leads straight into “I believe anyone charismatic about anything,” Captain Godwin.
But racism is not rational. So actually, yes, I could logic you out of that (whether you’d be capable of changing your mind is another question). It would be more complicated than just saying “your plan on the surface level is irrational” — but nonetheless, at the basis of your plan is a fundamental irrational belief.
I thought we all stopped using Hitler comparisons around 2003.
Anyway, this is a good post and I don’t have much to add but I will say that I don’t think it’s that people think “people who have suffered” and “people who are assholes” are exclusive groups, I think it’s that some people have the idea that if you’ve suffered, anything you do because of that suffering is automatically justified. Which you touched on in your last post, but I’ve seen similar sentiments among people who don’t use Tumblr and aren’t at all feminists so I think it’s a society-wide problem (or human brain problem?) that the attitudes in a lot of internet activists circles have acerbated.
I also think some people think any disagreement with them that isn’t sugarcoated is “yelling.” If you don’t yell or swear or even get particularly angry, but do disagree with someone in a blunt way and don’t go out of your way to be nicey-nice to them, some people will take that as “yelling” at them because they can’t handle any disagreement or conflict. Which can be a legitimate emotional need but it’s probably not a good idea to bring that need into a space meant for discussing things openly.
But, the thing is, it’s kind of hard to tell when someone is being unreasonable in that fashion when other people are legitimately being yelled and screamed at, or called names, or threatened, or whatever, because then when someone goes “omg I got yelled at” because someone disagreed with them, the people they’re talking to picture being screamed at and called a cunt, not someone just saying they’re wrong about something.
AKA, “Why the Slacktiverse Imploded, Pt. 2″
I think generally aligning oneself with a group tends to make people utterly incapable of properly listening to people they deem to be outside that group.
While not absolute, this problem is compounded by the fact that in our culture there are some quite populous boxes labeled “thinks being in a box is evil”, “not in any boxes” and the like.
Jesus fucking Christ, I’m sure glad you weren’t born in Nazi Germany. Any charismatic, passionate speech will do, eh? Fuck. Me.
That’s quite the irrational, highly emotive argument you’re making there.
I think the debate over which kind of argument is most convincing is a non-starter, frankly.
That’s an interestingly common pragmatic argument which completely dismisses the very human practical psychological need to attribute actions and decisions to an apparently consistent, coherent ideology.
That said, I agree that movements work best when they are diverse.
But rationalism without ethics can’t have useful goals.
I don’t recall seeing anybody mention rationalism without ethics. Regardless, one can easily make the argument that a given ethic is self-defeating, which is usually counted as a rational strike against it. Ethics are not simply the foundation upon which rationality must build, they are also subject to rational analysis. Regardless, emotive arguments only work when the ethics in play on all sides are at least somewhat compatible.
I also think some people think any disagreement with them that isn’t sugarcoated is “yelling.”
Absolutely, yes.
I figure that we internally vocalize text as we read it (I know I do this, and I suspect that others do as well). Unfortunately, a necessary part of internally vocalizing text is to attribute to it vocal and sub-vocal inflections and extrapolated aspects of facial expressions and body language, none of which is necessarily indicated in the text itself. This makes it much easier to misinterpret the intention of a sentence when it is written down than when it is spoken, and thereby we get arguments conducted entirely within a text-based medium having a tendency towards misinterpretation of emotional content.
Put more simply, person 1 can write something with an internal voice which is compassionate and soothing, whereas person 2 reading that very thing can attribute to it an internal voice which is provocative and sarcastic. This seems to me to frequently happen without bad faith (I dislike that phrase, but it’s the only one I can think of) on anybody’s part.
That’s why I deliberately interpret text-based conversation in a neutral, blasé internal voice, and employ that same voice when writing.
Lastly,
If taking care of yourself requires that you don’t engage, DON’T ENGAGE.
What if learning to not be evil requires you to engage? In other words, what if you are presented with the choice, by circumstance and personality, between doing harm and being unhappy?
Sometimes I know that the person I’m responding to is unlikely to change their mind, but I say something anyway because:
1. I want to make it less comfortable for them to utter racist, sexist, or otherwise awful commentary in my presence, or even when I’m not there. Now they know that opening their mouth and spewing crap is not necessarily going to be a cost-free option.
2. Other people are listening. I’m showing them that A) not everybody agrees and B) not everyone finds the original person’s statement acceptable.
(I think you covered this in the “if your readers don’t agree” bit, though).
Have I mentioned I’m glad you’re back? I am! I’m enjoying reading your new stuff here at your new digs.
Also, this really makes me want to go back and reread Voltaire’s Bastards by John Ralston Saul, which is a book about how reason can create dystopias (I think. I also think I only understood about 40% of what he was saying). I really liked his Massey Lectures, though, which are available for free online in audio form here: Massey Lectures 1995: “The Unconscious Civilization,” John Ralston Saul.
One last thing: I feel like the things that changed my mind were indirect. That is, I was more likely to be swayed when I felt people weren’t talking to me (or criticizing me) directly. Just in the past couple of years, my mind has really been changed around asexuality, and mostly just by reading or listening to things about asexuality that weren’t directed at me personally. I think it helps me to have time to reflect and not feel like I’m “on the spot” or under pressure to change my mind immediately.
Another thing I find really persuasive is reading/listening to stuff that makes me aware of ideas/assumptions I don’t realize I have; to go back to the asexuality example, discussions of asexuality made me realize certain assumptions I had about how sex made relationships different or “more than” in a way that I’d just absorbed from the culture rather than turned over in my mind and decided for myself.
“On the other hand, when I end up sobbing because someone else is angry at me, I also need to understand that their anger comes from a place of suffering and pain and to have empathy for them.”
Some people are just bullies.
Saul’s book is not about how reason can create dystopias, imo. He argues essentially the following:
(1) current Western governments and societies adhere proudly to the Enlightenment tradition of prizing rationality
(2) however, they have distorted the meaning and practice of rationality from its origins so as to in fact be
(3) perpetuating irrationality and unreason
For example, he spends a lot of time focusing on how Voltaire argued that truly rational behavior can only be achieved from the mastery of as many subjects as possible, from as much knowledge of the world as possible, whereas in current western societies rationality is increasingly associated with experts confined to smaller and smaller domains of knowledge.
Ironically, my grandparents were Jewish refugees from Germany. (Didn’t stop my grandfather from being kinda an asshole, though — on topic!)
Reason and rationality are tools, which I appreciate as very powerful tools. I have studied a hell of a lot of mathematics and physics, which gave me an appreciation of their power and also their limitations.
Reason can, under some conditions, provide you with new facts that follow from existing facts. It can’t generate facts whole cloth (you need observation for that) and it can’t cope with particular areas (very small things, very heavy things, very fast things) with any accuracy. One of the realms in which reason has traditionally been faulty is human social interaction, especially ideologies.
Rationalism, which is the ideology that reason trumps everything — and btw is what’s making you compare me to a Nazi for discussing my experiences with respect to compassion and understanding — is a pretty flawed doctrine that has historically been responsible for some terrible, terrible things. It is anything but rational.
So, let’s use this as an example: If you were interested in an effective means to try to get me to understand rationalism and maybe adopt it, you would be better served by telling me about your personal experiences with rationalism as a doctrine, why you think it’s important, and what it means to you, while listening to my experiences and thoughts without dismissing or ignoring them. In my experience, this is the kind of discourse most likely to change my mind about things, as I said.
Yet, you’ve decided instead to insult, belittle, and shame an outsider. Even though you think you’re trying to change minds, you’re not pursuing a course that would lead to that end. You’re trying to create an environment where it is unsafe to voice any opposition to your doctrine. In-person, this is a form of indoctrination which can work (cults and schools alike both use it) because it works (like almost all persuasion) at a subrational level, hitting us in the social joiner buttons that make us agree just so we can all get along. On the internet, though, it just makes people avoid the space and reject it altogether.
Fortunately, I have more than enough positive experiences with reason that I’m not going to reject it because a rationalist was a dick to me on the internet. Likewise, I trust Ozy and I’m not going to stop hanging around here because of it. Because that would be sad. But often, with feminism and anti-racism, that’s something that happens, and I am sad when it does.
There’s a balance in activism between education and exclusion. You want to have an other group to attack, because that’s what rallies people around. But at the same time, unless you’re planning armed revolt, you want to eventually be able to attract a large enough group to be a significant political bloc. You can’t just do the exclusion thing and hope to get anywhere in a democracy.
Cliff Pervocracy:
“I don’t think “I’m most swayed by compassionate arguments” leads straight into “I believe anyone charismatic about anything,” Captain Godwin.”
How do you sort “charismatic but asinine” from “charismatic and astute” without appealing to reason? If reason has to be the arbiter, why should anything else matter?
My main problem with this is you guys seem to be mistaking a flaw in human intuitive reasoning for the way discourse should be conducted. Mud-slinging and slander may well be effective tools, but anyone who suggests I use them or that they’re a good thing can go to hell. Anyone that finds themself being swayed by emotions rather than reason should resist not, not indulge it.
“But rationalism without ethics can’t have useful goals. Say that I found the most rational way to ensure the superior economic status of my race above all others. You can’t logic me out of that. (I’ve seen arguments that racism drags the whole economy down, but I’m sure there’s a way to fix that and still be racist. Sufficiently rational racists could find a way.)”
Oh God. Really? You want to do this? We can do the Epic Moral Epistemology Argument thing if you want but it’ll be the mother of all derails. =/
But yeah, my stance is basically that I think reason has something to say about ethics, and can safely deliver us from conclusions like “increase racism because economy!!”.
Lily:
“One last thing: I feel like the things that changed my mind were indirect. That is, I was more likely to be swayed when I felt people weren’t talking to me (or criticizing me) directly. Just in the past couple of years, my mind has really been changed around asexuality, and mostly just by reading or listening to things about asexuality that weren’t directed at me personally. I think it helps me to have time to reflect and not feel like I’m “on the spot” or under pressure to change my mind immediately.”
The problem with trying to pinpoint exactly what made you change your mind is that humans are hilariously bad at it. There are plenty of studies demonstrating this. A pretty illuminating example was one where scientists measured how well random groups of people got on with eachother. Every participent had their own nice little just-so story explaining why some groups worked and some didnt, but it turns out the only common denominator was whether the scientists served hot or cold beverages.
But beside that, it sounds like reason appealed to you anyway. Being convinced by a reasonable argument isn’t necessarily like solving a math equation, especially when it comes to something as ridiculously complex as gender issues. It might take you an entire year to sort through every worldview clash as you absorb a new idea. Even people absolutely committed to reason, discussing subjects revolving entirely around evidence and reason (i.e. scientists! engineers!), rarely change their mind instantly in the face of a superior argument. Changing gears that quickly is extremely difficult, there’s a large amount of post-processing that has to be done before people are willing to admit they’ve changed their mind. Even then pride often gets in the way.
Volte:
I do know that high-handedness doesn’t convince me, but if you think that people can’t know their own mind, feel free to make a false consciousness argument that I won’t be swayed by
Lily
Reason can, under some conditions, provide you with new facts that follow from existing facts. It can’t generate facts whole cloth (you need observation for that) and it can’t cope with particular areas (very small things, very heavy things, very fast things) with any accuracy.
Mathematics is a tool of reason. As you claim to have studied math and physics, I’ll assume I don’t have to provide details of how mathematics does an exceptionally good job of modelling, explaining and predicting the behaviour of very small, very heavy and/or very vast things, in fact it’s the only thing that does.
Don’t confuse reason with common sense, intuition or instinct.
Rationalism, which is the ideology that reason trumps everything
I would have defined rationalism as the belief that reason/rationality is the best and most reliable guide to understanding.
and btw is what’s making you compare me to a Nazi for discussing my experiences with respect to compassion and understanding
Notice how I called his statement irrational earlier? Notice how Cliff Pervocracy pointed out that “compassionate” isn’t the same as “passionate”?
I can’t speak for Cliff but I consider myself a rationalist, and I think your straw vulcan could use some work. Also, it’s making rational defense of your statement of experience more difficult.
is a pretty flawed doctrine that has historically been responsible for some terrible, terrible things.
You show me the terrible, terrible thing, I’ll point out how the people who carried it out weren’t behaving rationally. Isn’t this game fun?
If you were interested in an effective means to try to get me to understand rationalism and maybe adopt it…
(Sorry Volte, I don’t know your preferred pronoun.)
… would be using a combination of ridicule and ostracism with sympathy and compassion. Of course posts so far have been lacking in the second two, but it’s well established that the social carrot and stick method is the most effective way of convincing someone, with humans usually in its good cop/bad cop form. Of course I choose the more ideologically sound and less effective method of reasoned argument in order to maintain my own internal consistency. Chances are you’ll interpret the preceding statement as a means of sharing my experience with you, and it is. It is also done specifically for the purpose of slightly building an emotional bond that such sharing tends to do among members of a social species such as ours. But it is also specifically chosen in such a way as to be rationally based and rationally bounded, hence it can become a part of a reasoned argument.
Volte is right that people are terrible judges of determining why they change their mind, or why they hold any specific opinion for that matter. That doesn’t make the opinion incorrect, but it does mean that subjecting it to rational analysis might be a good idea.
To paraphrase Richard Woolsey (played by Robert Picardo) on Stargate: Atlantis,
“The rules work for 95% of the people 95% of the time. The other 5% have to abide by the same rules because everyone thinks they’re in that 5%.”
Yiab:
Of course you can explain to me why they weren’t acting rationally. Rationalists are rarely rational, they’re idealogues. Regardless, “no true Scotsman” remains a fallacy.
Mathematics does an exceptionally good job of modelling things, but science isn’t pure reason. Good luck trying to explain to a rationalist of the time that A != A for different observers. To understand that, you need observation. In order to get the details of science right, you need a sense of history (repeated experiments and peer review.) And now we’ve got at least two other ways of knowing involved in the process of figuring stuff out. Add in ideology, which allows for a functioning scientific apparatus, and you have the big four (empirical, rational, historical, and ideological.)
It’s a tag team of human knowledge!
All of these means of knowing are important. (So are others, such as emotional, aesthetic, intuitive, etc.) All of them have their downfalls where we have to rest upon the others. Myself, if I have to pick one as superior, it’d be experience (aka empirical). This reveals my background in physics, rather than mathematics or computers: the proof rests with the experiment, the rest is commentary.
But, of course, there are limits to experience: it can’t handle things that can’t be detected and measured. It is also really bad at handling probabilities and improbable events. This is fairly obvious, so you see a lot less people arguing that experiment is the universal form of knowledge than you see people arguing that reason is the universal form of knowledge. We can pretend that reason is universal, rather than just powerful, because the holes in our reasoning are often invisible, and when they’re not, they are fairly easy to paper over with justification and assertion.
I’m sharing my experience of myself. It could be that I’m right or wrong about what changes my mind. That’s fine. But I’ve yet to see anyone successfully argue that being compared to a Nazi on the internet successfully changes anyone’s minds. Nor that presenting a formally reasoned case is the best way to change anyone’s minds. Just because you can assert the almost-certainly-true statement that “people don’t know what really works to change their minds,” doesn’t mean “thus the thing I prefer is what works.”
Here, you are making a plea to social hierarchy (I know that you’re wrong therefore you should believe that I’m right), rather than reasoning it through, in a situation where reason would be more likely to give you an accurate result.
Also, seriously, the quote you gave is stupid and risible. The rest of what you’re saying is less so, so I’m responding on the assumption that you don’t really believe that, you just like the show. But don’t pull that out again please. Thank you.
Yes–although I’m not sure that “effective persuasive discourse” is the only reason. I think “allowed to do” gets confused in people’s minds with “should do”. I think there might be an idea behind it that doing/not doing something (for example, refuse to educate people) will train the more privileged people to not expect people to do that or will get them used to the less privileged people standing up for themselves. There may even be some merit in this idea, but I’m not sure that that’s the case the majority of the time. Not answering questions because you genuinely don’t want to is different from feeling that you shouldn’t answer them.
“Rational arguments work better.”
You’re assuming that the goal of callouts is to persuade people to change their minds. That’s certainly a good goal, but I would guess most callouts are meant to serve one or more other goals:
1. Blow off steam
2. Demonstrate solidarity with the victims of the called-out behavior
3. Enforce community rules against those deemed unable to be persuaded
4. Deter the called-out behavior from occurring again
5. Retribution against those who have wronged you
Also, I get the point that it’s not as simple as oppressed call-ers versus privileged call-ees. But I also think that in a lot of situations you can say to someone “you’ve benefited from a life of privilege, so the least you can do is suck it up and stay engaged when someone who’s hurting doesn’t choose the most compassionate and optimally persuasive way of expressing themselves.” It’s a problem when people are wrongly presumed to be white cishet dudes, but nobody owes actual white cishet dudes a damn thing.
This is not the common definition of rationalism, it is a subset of the philosophy not the entirety, so you really shouldn’t be surprised if you use it this way and get into some pretty intractable disagreements. Rationalism does include philosophies described by your definition, but also includes more moderate rationalist philosophies which embrace empiricism. As the latter is the more common view in the present time (in contrast to, say, when Kant and Leibniz were writing), you might want to ask people first what they mean by rationalism before assuming they’re referring to the most extreme philosophy possibly covered by that label. Indeed, there’s quite a bit of intersection currently in philosophy between rationalists and naturalists.
@pslaplace
Thank you, I did not know that. I have crap all for (western) philosophy background.
To the above folks: If you are a rationalist that acknowledges the limits of reason, we’re all good and I apologize for insulting you. I have now been learnt.
benlehman:
Regardless, “no true Scotsman” remains a fallacy.
Yes, and yet it remains possible to exclude individuals from a well-defined set based on whether or not they meet the criteria for inclusion. If someone claims to behave rationally and doesn’t, then we have no obligation to agree that they behave rationally.
Good luck trying to explain to a rationalist of the time that A != A for different observers.
I would be very curious to know of an example of an object (not a quantity) to which this applies in either relativity or quantum mechanics. Of course even if such a thing can be provided it does not challenge the fact that A=A, as the context in which that logical statement is formulated involves a previously fixed perspective. I’m still curious, though.
(So are others, such as emotional, aesthetic, intuitive, etc.)
I would argue that these are not actually ways of knowing, except inasfar as they are ways of knowing facts about themselves. For example, “emotional” is a way of knowing your own emotions, but cannot reasonably extend beyond that, at least until we have a much more detailed theoretical understanding of the relationship between conscious experience and its neurological correlates.
experience (aka empirical)
I wouldn’t exclude the accumulated weight of evidence from the experience and measurements of others from the term “empirical”. For example, I empirically know that Australia exists, even though I have never experienced it myself, based on a theoretical framework (the assumption of incomplete dishonesty), simple logical deduction (A implies A), and indirect experience (the reports of others, satellite photos, etc). I would include all of that under the umbrellas of rationality and empiricism. If you include the aggregate weight of the experience of others in the term “empirical” as well, then I apologize for the misunderstanding and please ignore this paragraph.
But I’ve yet to see anyone successfully argue that being compared to a Nazi on the internet successfully changes anyone’s minds.
Nor would I try to argue this.
Nor that presenting a formally reasoned case is the best way to change anyone’s minds.
That depends on what is meant by “best”. It is not the most effective or even the most cost-effective means of persuading a person, certainly. I would argue though, that if one wishes to argue honestly, presenting a case which is at least consistent with a formally reasoned case (often left unstated) is the best way to go.
Also, within certain specialist areas (i.e. specific sub-disciplines of math), it most certainly is the best way to change someone’s mind. But here I’m showing my training as a mathematician.
Just because you can assert the almost-certainly-true statement that “people don’t know what really works to change their minds,” doesn’t mean “thus the thing I prefer is what works.”
Granted. I did not intend to imply this. To try another way of expressing what I am trying to get across:
You might be wrong about what persuades you. Also, unconnected to that, I choose the means of rational argument to try and persuade people because I have moral restrictions about which methods of argumentation I am willing to employ. (By the way I am aware that those moral restrictions may very well be arational, but my identification as a rationalist is rather an indication that my moral restrictions are in favour of rationality.)
The quote is silly and was not intended to be interpreted directly. Rather, it was a way of saying “Most people think that studies (like the ones which are done about persuasion) don’t apply to them. Nevertheless, the studies (broadly speaking) apply to most people.” I would like to believe that I could only be persuaded by reasoned argument, but I know that this is not true. If I hadn’t been willing to seriously consider that a study might directly apply to me, I might never have paid enough attention to spot the evidence that convinced me I can be otherwise persuaded.
pslaplace:
Thank you for saying one of the things I was trying to better than I could.
@Volte:
That depends a lot on what exactly “aligning” means. People who base their identities around being included in a particular community are going to be very opposed to attacks on the structure of that community. (“Ohnoes, what if they kick me out of the community? or what if the community fractures?”) Whereas people who participate in a community because that community appears to support beliefs the person had independently, are going to be a lot more receptive. (“Ohnoes, they don’t actually believe the same things I do!”) Tying one’s identity to group inclusion is quite different from participating in a group because of one’s identity, yet both of these behaviors are called “aligning”. As are numerous other modes of interaction, including: alliance for PR reasons rather than actual affinity; political coalition in spite of disagreements; rephrasing what you want to say in order to make it more palatable to a particular audience;…
Rationalism has often been a tool of oppression and exclusion. The Mismeasure of Man gives a very clear perspective on the use of “rational argument” in order to “prove” that minorities are in fact inferior. This use of rationalism in order to assert the superiority of the educated white upper-class male has been around ever since the birth of the very idea of “rational argument”. Moreover, making “rational argument” requisite is tantamount to the explicit exclusion of those who are not privileged enough to have access to the right kind of higher education. Because, in point of fact, it does not matter how rational a person is when making an argument, that argument is only deemed “rational” if it is couched in the right kind of language, an artificial kind of language which must be learned in a formal setting. Moreover, just go back and reread the classic philosophical texts of any Famous Dead White Guy— or even better, read any modern critical analysis thereof which attempts to situate that FDWG. The use of “reason” and “rationality” has ever been a means to veil one’s personal beliefs in a shroud of legitimacy. And your chest thumping about the virtue of not abandoning reason altogether is just the same old strawman that has been used over and again in order to prop up that shroud. Noone advocated irrationality. But there’s far more to life than mere rationality.
stentord: “Nobody owes actual white cishet dudes a damn thing”? Uh, yes they do. First of all, those white cishet dudes might be disabled, or survivors of rape or abuse, or mentally ill, or poor, or illiterate, or any other of the axes of oppression people can experience.
Second, I feel like I owe *everyone* basic human decency. Even the person who’s never had anything more difficult to deal with in their life than deciding which kind of Starbucks coffee to drink today. If you’re going to be rationing out compassion based on how oppressed someone is… well, great for you I guess, but I’m not going to cosign that.
I feel like “try to stay engaged in conversations when someone is not using the most compassionate and optimally persuasive way of expressing themselves, because they might be hurting (while of course remembering that your own mental health comes first)” is a good rule for EVERYONE to follow. Regardless of privileged/marginalized status.
Yiab:
So let’s be clear about what we’re talking about.
Reason is deduction of facts from other facts using logic and other, similar methods.
Rationalism is the belief that reason is only legitimate means of obtaining knowledge. It is, itself, not rational. It’s an ideology. (you note that your preference for rationality may itself be arational so that indicates that you know what’s up.)
(Apparently modern rationalists admit that there are limits to rationality and take into account other forms of knowledge. Those people are awesome, but you don’t seem to be one of them.)
Rationalists have done a great many terrible things, historically. It is possible, after the fact, to pick holes in their reasoning. But it is possible, after the fact, to pick holes in any line of thought (religious people do this all the time, explaining why the inquisitors weren’t “real Christians,” say). And regardless, that they behave irrationally does not exclude them from the ideological category, because just because they are — ideologically — rationalists does not make them perfectly rational. They’re humans, and thus have human brains, and thus are susceptible to the same cognitive biases as anyone else. If we exclude all people who act under cognitive bias from the group “rationalists” we have excluded all humans, which nicely solves the problem of them behaving badly, but isn’t really satisfying.
My experience with ideological rationalists is random atheists asking me “so you’re a physicist, can you show me the proof that there’s no God?” or trying to disprove QM from first principles because “it’s irrational.” (Which, formally, it is, because it involves i, but I don’t think that’s what they meant.) You can understand, from this, why I have a pretty strong aversion to the ideology.
I’m not sure you can discount aesthetic, emotional, intuitive, and other forms of knowledge so easily. Yes, we shouldn’t rely on these entirely. But on the other hand we shouldn’t discount them. Rather, what we should do is, when confronted with them, check them against other knowledge systems to try to find a match. Exactly as we should when we reason to a conclusion, or when we receive historical wisdom, or when we have a strange experience, or when we learn of a new and appealing ideology.
In my personal experience (and I know I’m not alone in this) most of my major breakthroughs (in physics or, now, in game design) come in dreams. This doesn’t mean that anything that I dream I believe is correct. But it means if I have an intense dream I will try to write it down and hold it up against reality. This is totally intuitive and subconscious, and sometimes it’s junk, but sometimes it isn’t. And it’s non-junk way more than random guessing provides. (My best work in math was from a dream I had about a string particle system. My best work in game design was from a dream I had about playing a game.) This shouldn’t be terribly surprising: the dreaming brain is still the brain, after all, and dreams are more than just a test pattern.
In terms of activism, I’m not interested in artificial restrictions on how to persuade people. I will take whatever works, and am generally in favor of an all hands approach. Personally, I’m bad at emotional appeals such as anger (PTSD means my emotional expression is fraught and sometimes inappropriate) and I find rationalist debate deeply angering, even though I’m good at it. So, for myself, I try to use a mix of statistics and demographics along with descriptions of my personal feelings and experience, and listening to the feelings and personal experience of others. Telling stories, and listening to stories, basically.
Is it optimal? I dunno, probably not. It works for me, in terms of what I can offer to the movements I care about, and I know from observation that it has changed other people’s minds, as well as my own, in ways both dramatic and subtle, but serious changes that have affected our day-to-day lives.
This comment is pretty much just directed at Ozy. I’ve been wondering if you might want to use your blog for a little bit of an experiment, and idea I had (I do not have a lovely and widely read activism blog, so you’re in a better position to perform it). I’ve been thinking that it might be cool to apply a tabooing your words policy to comments. It might require more stringent moderating, but maybe once snarl words develop (in this thread, rationalism being one, but you’d get different ones in different conversations), put a link to the taboo your words essay, and start a list of tabooed words for the thread? Just a funny thing I’ve been tossing around, and think would be interesting to see implemented somewhere other than the LW comment treads, which to be fair I basically never visit anymore.
Me and my science PhD wish to cosign everything benlehman said.
Just to clarify, I wasn’t trying to say you were wrong about rationalists or that *all* modern rationalists admit there are limits to rationality. That would be false. Just that there’s a significant number who do, which makes the use of the term confusing. (As much as I wish it wasn’t true, the Austrian School of Economics is still going strong, with its insistence that we can figure out all laws of economics through pure rationality sans empiricism.)
Seriously? That’s…..depressing.
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benlehman:
I see we already have a disconnection when it comes to the meaning of words. One of the things I have been trying (and possibly failing) to say has been to draw a distinction between reason and rationality. Rationality includes reason but is not limited to it, it also takes into account empirical data, and possibly other things depending on the definitions in use.
I am confused as to why you have the impression that I think reason does not have its limits. Obviously reason is limited in its capabilities. I do, however, think that everything should, in principle, be amenable to reason should reason be able to act on it. Hitchens said it better than I could: “We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.” (from Got is Not Great)
Funny, I’ve never thought of i as irrational (rather: imaginary or unreal), but I suppose you’re right. As to trying to disprove QM through application of common sense, I can certainly agree that those attempts are irritating and doomed to failure, and I can understand why you generally dislike identified rationalists.
I do, however, think we need to separate the affiliative from the definitional identification in this regard. Anybody can affiliate themselves with any group simply by claiming it, and nobody can deny their identification with that group in that regard. However whenever we have a well-defined group (which I don’t think “rationalists” is, per se, but you seem to have a good definition in mind) then their desire to affiliate with the group does not mean that they are definitionally a part of it.
Say that we define, for the purposes of this example, “feminists” as anybody who believes that every woman should have rights at least equal to those held by every man.. Then say we are presented with a man who believes that men should be free to beat their wives, but not vice versa, and who nevertheless identifies as a feminist. We should have no trouble in this circumstance dismissing his identification, as he clearly does not meet the definition for inclusion in the group.
The way you have described use of the intuitive is something I have experienced as well (I too do a lot of my best math in and around sleep), but it is not something I would call a “way of knowing”. I would say that it is suggestive of a direction for investigation, it is a “way of deciding” which approach to attempt or for which goal to strive, but that you do not “know” until you have done the logical and/or empirical work. I can think of many instances where the emotional, intuitive and/or aesthetic senses can direct learning in very important and meaningful ways, but I cannot think of a single example (other than the self-referential ones mentioned earlier) in which one or all of them is sufficient to grant something the title of “knowledge”.
I for one am very much in favour of restrictions on the means of persuasion and I expect once you hear my first example you will agree that you are as well. I believe that it is wrong to torture people into changing their minds, and I hope you do too. I am in favour of activists (and everyone else) being legally restricted from torturing people regardless of the ends they hope to achieve. I am not in favour of anybody being restricted from lying to each other (in most contexts), but it is not something I am willing to do in order to persuade people to my conclusions, and I would not want to affiliate with an activist group that regularly used deception as a persuasion technique. It is along similar lines that I have a personal distaste for purely emotional arguments, though I do not have a problem affiliating with those who use them, so long as they are honest about it.
By the way, I would include statistics and demographics under rational debate.
It sounds like we don’t have that much in the way of substantive disagreement, mostly semantic disagreement. I for one think that semantics is actually quite important, but nowhere near as important as human rights and many other things, so I hope that, if our disagreement is primarily semantic as I suspect, that we can let it slide. What do you say?
I’m happy to leave it here, I think that we’ve both said what we’re going to say and no one is walking away from this with a changed mind, but we’ve both learned some things, but let’s leave it at “net gain.”
yrs–
–Ben
Lily:
“I do know that high-handedness doesn’t convince me, but if you think that people can’t know their own mind, feel free to make a false consciousness argument that I won’t be swayed by”
This isn’t an ideological/philosophical thing, science has settled this argument. People are often wrong about why they think they do things, fact.
Anon:
On the group stuff, I think what I’m talking about is essentially tribalism. There’s being part of a formal organisation and there’s feeling like you want to agree with everyone in your group (or want everyone to agree with you). So yeah, I think we basically agree here. I’d probably be pretty okay with joining a feminist book club or something (as I’d be free to leave the second they got crazy) but I think labelling myself a feminist is a pretty bad idea considering the sheer amount of contemptibly batshit people (and strawmen) who share that label, who I’m bound to be confused with.
On the rationalism stuff I’ll guess I’ll do this point for point:
“Rationalism has often been a tool of oppression and exclusion.”
No, the guise of rationalism has. No society has ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
“The Mismeasure of Man gives a very clear perspective on the use of “rational argument” in order to “prove” that minorities are in fact inferior.”
And they were wrong. Convincing people who think they are being reasonable is not the same as being reasonable.
“This use of rationalism in order to assert the superiority of the educated white upper-class male has been around ever since the birth of the very idea of “rational argument”.”
Dude are you…are you trying to make a rational argument for why rational arguments don’t exist?
What’s with the white guilt, by the way?
“Moreover, making “rational argument” requisite is tantamount to the explicit exclusion of those who are not privileged enough to have access to the right kind of higher education.”
I can read this two ways, I’ll respond to both
1) Higher education is not a prerequisite, or even a guarantor, for being rational. However, if higher education is doing its job it should correlate positively with more rational arguments. That is the POINT of higher education. This is an utter non-problem.
2) We should value well-informed opinions over ignorant opinions. Yes, this implies that stupid people may never make a meaningful contribution to a discussion. I don’t have a problem with this, do you?
“Because, in point of fact, it does not matter how rational a person is when making an argument, that argument is only deemed “rational” if it is couched in the right kind of language, an artificial kind of language which must be learned in a formal setting.”
This is kind of fascinating. By couching this stupid idea in reasonable-sounding language you seem to be trying to make your point. The fact that I can detect that it’s nonsense seems to prove mine.
Yes, you can obscure bullshit with clever language. Especially when you are dealing with people who are intimidated by people who sound intelligent or just love intelligent-sounding language (WASSUP, SOKAL AFFAIR?). But it’s not impenetrable armour; broken logic is still broken no matter how much you polish it. Anyone with critical thinking skills can rip such well-dressed bad ideas to shreds, and plenty of beautifully astute ideas have been phrased in utterly pedestrian language.
“Moreover, just go back and reread the classic philosophical texts of any Famous Dead White Guy— or even better, read any modern critical analysis thereof which attempts to situate that FDWG.”
Just because someone claims to value reason it does not mean that everything that tumbles out of their mouth is reasonable.
By analogy:
Valuing kindness does not imply one’s acts are always kind.
Valuing patience does not imply one is always patient.
Humans make mistakes, even ones that value not making mistakes. This does not mean avoiding mistakes is a bad philosophy.
“The use of “reason” and “rationality” has ever been a means to veil one’s personal beliefs in a shroud of legitimacy.”
I wouldn’t say ever, but I will agree that the main problem of The Enlightenment was people automatically assuming their opinions and beliefs were reasonable. But, as I said earlier, you can use reason to cut through reasonable-sounding bullshit.
“And your chest thumping about the virtue of not abandoning reason altogether is just the same old strawman that has been used over and again in order to prop up that shroud. Noone advocated irrationality. But there’s far more to life than mere rationality.”
No one is suggesting that there is nothing more to life than rationality. But I am very seriously suggesting that there is no way to discover objective truth without trying to avoid bias and promote intellectual honesty as much as possible. I cannot conceive of any objective truth that has been discovered by other means. I cannot even think of any SUBJECTIVE truth, off the top of my head.
benlehman:
“. It is possible, after the fact, to pick holes in their reasoning. But it is possible, after the fact, to pick holes in any line of thought”
This is pretty bizarre. You seem to be suggesting that using reason to pick apart bad ideas after they have been uttered proves that reason doesn’t work.
Do you expect that reason should should kill all bad ideas BEFORE they are uttered? Do you honestly think that no one mounted reasonable attacks on, say, eugenics at the height of its popularity? Is it a slight against reason that our reasonable arguments against eugenics strengthened over time as more people brought their guns to bear on it?
What’s with the white guilt, by the way?
Seriously? We’re talking about how well rational arguments work in a social justice context, and someone brings up a true historical example of how rational arguments have been counterproductive to social justice goals, and that’s… strange to you?
I’m actually generally pro-rational argument, with some important qualifiers, including that rational argument only works if you have your facts straight, and that rational argument has nothing to say about what your ultimate goals should be. (For example, if your ultimate goal is fairness and equality, reasoned arguments can help you decide if feminism is a good way towards that goal, but it can’t tell you if fairness is a good goal–unless fairness is itself a consequence of yet another ultimate goal.)
“Rationalism has often been a tool of oppression and exclusion.”
No, the guise of rationalism has. No society has ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
So… those historical examples weren’t true rationalism? If people who make mistakes in their arguments are fake rationalists, then no rationalists actually exist. I’ve gotta agree with benlehman WRT “No True Scotsman”. I’m also seeing possible equivocation on “rationalism=reasonable”. I think you’re trying to call up an idea of “reasonable” that would exclude reasoned arguments like those that “The Mismeasure of Man” critiques. (If I’m right, does that mean you’re not “really” a rationalist?)
I think there’s a difference between some of this stuff and what you said in your previous post. I agree some things are not okay no matter what and I’m fine with saying you should never dox people, threaten to kill them, or tell them to kill themselves no matter how mad you are.
But I think that there’s a difference between saying “Don’t do these specific things because they’re not okay no matter what you’re trying to accomplish.” and telling people to always be civil. If I’m arguing to convince someone (either the person I’m talking to or potentially people reading along) then yeah, I will do my best to be civil and respectful.
But I’m not always arguing to do that. Sometimes I just want to blow off steam or send a message to people that a certain kind of a talk is not permitted somewhere, or sometimes I think someone is trolling and I want to let other trolls know that I don’t suffer them gladly. In a case like that, I still won’t tell people to kill themselves or threaten them with physical harm, but I will call them an idiot or an asshole if I think that’s what they’re being, even if it might hurt their feelings, because their feelings aren’t my first priority in situations like that.
@Volte:
Rationality has nothing, per se, to do with being reasonable. If one is reasonable, then they must admit at some point or other that rational approaches must fail. Sorry, life just ain’t that crisp and clean. Conversely, a reliance on rationality is distinctly unreasonable— that’s the whole point! To not be convinced by rhetoric or sophistry, to not be convinced by reason, to be beholden only to things one can derive logically from first principles. The whole point of rationalism is to upset the throne of “being reasonable” by claiming to set a higher standard. You argue for the supremacy of rationalism, and when called on the point you backtread and say that “no reasonable person” would do whatever it is your dear rationalists have done. In so doing, you’ve not only conceded the point that rationalism is flawed but also acted in a distinctly irrational manner whilst doing so.
As for your other quips, I fail to see how it is a bad thing to acknowledge the long history of educated upper-class white men throwing their weight around in order to subjugate everyone else (including in the name of “rationality”), nor how the mere acknowledgement of this history constitutes an expression of “guilt” that one should be shamed out of. If you find such acknowledgement uncomfortable, then perhaps you should look in yourself and ask why that is.
Deathist scum? You gotta be kidding me. I thought our people should all be better than that.
On True Scotsmen and Rationalism: I’d say that’s basically a special case of the claim that ‘arguments have been a tool of oppression.’ ANYthing can be a tool of oppression, although there are an awful lot of people who absolutely suck at rationalism no matter how many buzzwords they know.
Also, reason/rationality involves at least two different practices. The first consists of making *convincing arguments* and is VERY often used to argue preconcieved ideas by basically everybody, including the illiterate. The second is superior, it consists of trying to figure out what is true, and if you want to convince somebody to share your views on what is true you can explain to them how you got there.
Sexist interpretations of evolutionary psychology often involve the first type. So do telling people what logical fallacies they are using. (although logical fallacies are still a very real, bad thing.)
You can screw with people who are just trying to make arguments by giving them incorrect facts that seem to justify their arguments, and then revealing that those facts were wrong.
Finally, rationality is not mere. People often get this image of Spock or whoever. Spock is a TERRIBLE rationalist and many philosophers (Please, you can’t refute something just by showing that it consisted of white men in older days!) also are terrible rationalists. Rationality can be intuitve, although that’s not as good as when you think things through. It is however fully general. There is no fundamental difference, no wall of thought, between atomic physics, politics, music, and love. These are distinct practices, but they are not seperated. Also, rationality can help you puzzle out your preferences.
I do not mean to claim that a lot of correct arguments have been ignored because they failed to give shibboleths. We kind of suck at this. But it’s all we have.
Oh, also, ethics are TOTALLY a part of rationality/reason. The Enlightenment was largely made out of changes in ethics based on reason.
I think the problem here is that people are confusing several different things including Straw Vulcans, a very limited set of old-timey reason/rationality, argumentative rationality, Continental reason that disdains empiricism, and Highly Advanced Modern Rationality that recognizes empiricism for what it is (both good, and imperfect) and doesn’t have such tight boundaries.
LTTP, but Cliff:
> But rationalism without ethics can’t have useful goals.
I think this is part of the unintentional problem, because “ethics” always comes back to the position of “x, y and z are right; a, b and c are wrong” and then we find ourselves back in the same boat we began in where the “ethically emotional” takes precedence over the logical/rational.
Perhaps even deeper, one could see a logical huge chasm that has been bridged by the very ingrained idea of “the personal is the political”– The whole concept inadvertently creates a pseudo-logical “leap” from one’s own experience to generalizing about (not just groups) but the whole world. It’s the sort of logical hoop-jumping that sees a positive to silencing, for example, women who inevitably come forward in, again for example, something like the #1reasonwhy collective outrage. A woman could make any sort of claim of discrimination (and, let’s be honest, there were a lot of tweets under that tag that made a lot of people scratch their head in wonder) and have it ratified and supported based on personal experience but if a woman came forward to say that she, personally, has no issue with sexism in games it’s another round of “well, you don’t count because you don’t fit the narrative”.
When the “personal is the political”, what else are we to rationally conclude than that the anger that comes from personal experience is primarily true due to the personal nature of the anger. When you leap to “the political” you’re, de facto, making a logical claim.
I had a big “ah hah” moment of semi-clarity awhile back when someone very close to me was getting upset about big ideas like “rape culture” and “patriarchy” to the point of it having an effect on her day-to-day life. When I was asked for advice my response was simple: “You can’t bear the weight of every injustice; fight your battles and take care of yourself first.” So simple, but so true in a lot of cases.
We see a lot of people getting really upset over and over again. But when you engage in a process of discourse you have to put that aside and break the leap of logic which keeps you personally invested in the lives of people you don’t even know or it will eat you from the inside.
If anything, part of this whole issue is that we conflate personal experience into a depressingly awful, conspiratorial sociology which insists that we be paranoid, miserable and forever full of rage. It’s precisely taking the hard ethics out of it that creates an open-minded, exploratory process in discourse due to the critical approach.
It would be more accurate to say that reason is a part of ethics, insofar as to make ethical judgements you need to have some concrete knowledge about the world and reason is a valid approach to gaining knowledge about the world, but that’s a matter of using reason to implement ethical principles in a useful, consistent way. You’d be hard-pressed to convincingly argue that reason itself has anything to say about the ethical principles themselves (although plenty of philosophers have certainly tried).
Thank you so much for these comments about anger. Anger is triggery for me, I don’t care which side uses it. I recently unfollowed (in multiple media) a fellow feminist who had some excellent ideas, but was using a lot of angry language. When I asked zim to consider that the tone of hir rants was excluding me (and possibly others) from the conversation, ze replied that they were not aimed at me (they were aimed at the Oppressors), and then wrote a separate rant about people sticking their noses into arguments they weren’t a part of. If ze didn’t want other people’s input into the discussion, then why did ze post it publicly where we could see, not to mention cross-linking from other social media? Go ahead and post angrily wherever you want, but trigger warnings would be nice and especially don’t ask for my input and then get angry at me when I give it.