The case becomes interesting and even illustrative because it pits two camps against each other that I both subscribe to: open communication (and sexuality) advocates and feminists. And because the fascinating issue of „privilege“ (in this case the classic „male privilege“) comes in, which I’m starting to find a useful figure of thought in a number of social issues. To give my conclusion away: I’m siding with the feminist critique. And here’s why:

The woman who made public her complaint about the guy’s behavior is Rebecca Watson, and here’s her summary (quoted from an article of hers about the back-and-forth discussions):

You may recall that last week I posted this video, in which I describe an unpleasant encounter I had with a fellow atheist that I thought might serve as a good example of what men in our community should strive to avoid – basically, in an elevator in Dublin at 4AM I was invited back to the hotel room of a man I had never spoken to before and who was present to hear me say that I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed.

I unfortunately couldn’t watch the video (yay, developing world internet) but on second reading I find it noteworthy how much apologies she feels she has to offer for taking offense — „he heard me say I was tired before“!

A probably prototypical criticism of her complaint is this, quoted by Watson from Stef McGraw from UNI Freethinkers:

My concern is that she takes issue with a man showing interest in her. What’s wrong with that? How on earth does that justify him as creepy? Are we not sexual beings? Let’s review, it’s not as if he touched her or made an unsolicited sexual comment; he merely asked if she’d like to come back to his room. She easily could have said (and I’m assuming did say), “No thanks, I’m tired and would like to go to my room to sleep.”

Now, I see two criticisms here (without any claim to being exhaustive). The first is the one Watson makes herself, saying that the comment in its first sentence

[…] demonstrates an ignorance of Feminism 101 – in this case, the difference between sexual attraction and sexual objectification. The former is great – be attracted to people! Flirt, have fun, make friends, have sex, meet the love of your life, whatever floats your boat. But the latter involves dismissing a person’s feelings, desires, and identity, with a complete disinterest in how one’s actions will affect the “object” in question.

True, but the to me more relevant line of thought starts when rising numbers of (especially male) commentators weigh in, like it seems even Richard Dawkins did (quoted from a comment by Jen McCreight):

The man in the elevator didn’t physically touch her, didn’t attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn’t even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that.

If she felt his behaviour was creepy, that was her privilege, just as it was the Catholics‘ privilege to feel offended and hurt when PZ nailed the cracker. PZ didn’t physically strike any Catholics. All he did was nail a wafer, and he was absolutely right to do so because the heightened value of the wafer was a fantasy in the minds of the offended Catholics. Similarly, Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‚creepy‘ was her own interpretation of his behaviour, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

What he basically says is: it’s all in her head. She had the freedom to interpret the guy’s „only words“ and it’s her own fault she interpreted in a way that offended her. And he ignores there are certain interpretations delivered by the context and history of men and women interacting, which he can be (and is) oblivious of because he is on the happy side of the gender divide in this respect. As Jen McCreight elaborates:

Words matter. You don’t get that because you’ve never been called a cunt, a faggot, a nigger, a kike. You don’t have people constantly explaining that you’re subhuman, or have the intellect of an animal. You don’t have people saying you shouldn’t have rights. You don’t have people constantly sexually harassing you. You don’t live in fear of rape, knowing that one wrong misinterpretation of a couple words could lead down that road.

You don’t, because you have fucking privilege.

And she links to a „privilege 101″ that has a nice metaphor about a furry dog and a lizard living together in a house in a temperate area, where the dog controls the air conditioning to keep the temperature low and nice for him. Now, when the lizard complains about the cold, the dog has no clue what cold feels like, because being too cold is no experience in his life. That’s his privilege, which, as is explicitly pointed out, is not his fault. The problem (and his wrong behavior) arises when he denies the feeling of cold could exist because he doesn’t know it, and makes a „in your head“ argument similar to Dawkins.

This is illustrated for human life with a (sadly commonplace) exchange about leering:

A man has the privilege of walking past a group of strange women without worrying about being catcalled, or leered at, or having sexual suggestions tossed at him.

A pretty common male response to this point is “that’s a privilege? I would love if a group of women did that to me.”

And that response, right there, is a perfect shining example of male privilege. [emphasis in the original]

Back to the dog and lizard, it looks like this:

So one day, she sees the dog messing with the A/C again, and she says, “hey. Dog. Listen, it makes me really cold when you do that.”

The dog kind of looks at her, and shrugs, and keeps turning the dial.

This is not because the dog is a jerk.

This is because the dog has no fucking clue what the lizard even just said.

Consider: he’s a nordic dog in a temperate climate. The word “cold” is completely meaningless to him. He’s never been cold in his entire life. He lives in an environment that is perfectly suited to him, completely aligned with his comfort level, a world he grew up with the tools to survive and control, built right in to the way he was born.

So the lizard tries to explain it to him. She says, “well, hey, how would you like it if I turned the temperature down on you?”

The dog goes, “uh… sounds good to me.” [emphasis in the original]

Back to humans, the relevant male privilege in a nutshell: „you don’t ever have to be wary of sexual interest“ [emphasis in the original].

This, as some commenters have rightfully pointed out, is of course not true, and that’s the twist in the privilege argument that I’m happy I found brought up and answered in the comments. Men do have to be wary of sexual interest in some circumstances, and not in all of them the perpetrator is another men (which isn’t even relevant to the argument, but an important point in its own right). In addition to that, one could talk about the (female) privilege of receiving sexual interest in the first place, the lack of which seems to be the reason why some men react so dismissingly to complaints about sexual harassment in the form of leering etc. The problem lies in the perspectives, as commentator LoneLobo sums up:

The parable is self-refuting because it both claims to offer knowledge of the subjective states of the dog and the lizard, then claims that precisely the reason privilege is incomprehensible to many dogs is because this sort of knowledge is impossible. That’s a big contradiction.

The practical effects on the parable are obvious: we have no way of knowing if the dog would not suffer equally by any change in temperature, or even if the dog also currently suffers as much or more than the lizard in the situation he is in. Thus, it is impossible to establish who has privilege in a situation, because that would require one of them or a third party knowing what both of them feel (which the parable says is impossible). It’s a logical contradiction. So the parable may be a fine illustration of the concept of privilege, but what it reveals is that this concept is severely flawed.

Which sounds reasonable, and can throw you into the abyss of relativism and so on. But got very wisely answered by a lauraT, thank you:

Listen, one thing. No the Lizard does not share some absolute knowledge of the Dog’s subjective existence, but he does have a better grasp on it than vice versa. Why? Because he lives in the Dog’s world, interacting with all of the structures that benefit the Dog and impede the Lizard.

This is like saying that any minority can’t possibly understand the majority world because they aren’t the majority, when the majority dominates almost every aspect of our shared culture and society except in the tiny niches said minority may have carved out as places to share their common aspect.

This minority, which doesn’t actually have to be a minority for this to be true, usually understands the dominant group better because they have to, they are constantly exposed to it and subjected to and often to exist on its terms.

The Other is not unfathomable, there is no “absolute otherness” in play here. We observe each other constantly, and part of the process of rectifying privilege is actually paying attention to the realness of the other persons experience, and that they may not have the option to conduct themselves on the same terms as you.

So, as always, a sound relativism or perspectivism is — relative. No side can objectively judge what the other side feels, nor is either side forever barred from learning and empathizing. But the starting point is obviously better (in terms of understanding the other’s life) for the party that has to live their life in the other’s world, so to speak, and has to do a lot of learning to get along.

But this is only a starting point, and in the knowledge of it we have to find ways of negotiating „privilege“, which so often finds the typical „but I am disadvantaged in this other area“ response (see my comment on Oppression Olympics if you haven’t already). We need to find a way to answer sentiments like increasing numbers of white people in the US feeling on the worse side of racism now [!], as indicated in a study also quoted by that same critical commentator. Again, this will have to be somewhere between objective and subjective. What in qualitative social research is called inter-subjective…

I highly recommend that FAQ for a brief and broad entry into how modern feminism (including masculism) should be understood. And want to quote the section on the „Kyriarchy or the Oppression Olympics“ here, which explains how to work together from different angles, instead of against each other:

What the actual fuck is a kyriarchy or the Oppression Olympics?

A kyriarchy is basically the term for everyone oppressing everyone else. For instance, a rich black person may be privileged on the axis of class, but unprivileged on the axis of race; a poor white person is the converse. The privilege and lack of privilege both show up in different circumstances: a black person is more likely to be pulled over and searched for drugs by police; the poor person may be unable to get health insurance. There are many ways in which a person can be privileged or unprivileged– everything from religion to weight.

The way multiple oppressions interact is called intersectionality. For instance, a poor black person is likely to have a different experience than a rich black person or a poor white person, simply because he is both poor and black. Saying that one oppression is worse than another (“yeah, sure, you’re black, but I’m poor! That’s way worse!”) is called the Oppression Olympics, and it is not productive. The point is not to tote up ways in which each oppression sucks and then give a medal to the poor black mentally ill physically disabled lesbian undocumented immigrant Muslim with a weight problem and autism. The point is to get people to stop oppressing other people.

For more about the kyriarchy, read this post.

Nothing to add, except: I think the world is moving forward after all.

Zunächst finde ich es bedenklich, wenn Politiker_innen den Glauben an ihr eigenes Tun verlieren, das erinnert mich an Sloterdijks Zynismus, ein Thema das ich sicherlich wieder aufgreifen werde.

Ich erlebe, dass Politikerverdrossenheit heute eine Ausweitung erfährt: nicht mehr nur von Bürgern gegenüber Politikern. Inzwischen sind Politikerinnen und Politiker häufig verdrossen, verdrossen über ihre eigene Tätigkeit und ihre Rolle, die ihnen noch zukommt, verdrossen über ihren schwindenden Einfluss.

Zum anderen war es gut für mich, ein zentrales Problem der modernen Politik auf den Punkt gebracht zu lesen: Es ist gut und in vieler Hinsicht unabdingbar, dass Politik zunehmend International passiert. Und es ist auch so, dass damit leider Demokratie geschwächt wird.

Intergouvermentales Agieren geht zu häufig auf Kosten von Transparenz und Nachvollziehbarkeit. Es kostet Vertrauen. Deshalb müssen Entscheidungen angemessen kommuniziert und erklärt werden.

Im Gegensatz zu Wulff sehe ich das Problem mit Transparenz und Kommunikation keinesfalls als gelöst an. Es müssen vielmehr in dem Maße, wie Entscheidungen eine höhere Entscheidungsebene als den Nationalstaat benötigen, diese höheren Ebenen stärker demokratisch legitimiert werden. Und für die EU haben wir da ja schon eine parlamentarische Struktur, die nur gestärkt werden muss. Noch internationaler ist natürlich kniffelig, aber in die Richtung sollten die Bemühungen gehen. Nationale Volksabstimmungen zu internationalen Themen können jedenfalls auf Dauer nicht die Lösung sein.

Zum Abschluss ein unerwartetes Lob für die Grünen, das ich teile und das ein zentraler Teil meiner Verbundenheit zu dieser Partei ist:

Ich empfinde es als positiv, dass die Grünen einen Parteitag zur Frage der Energiewende abgehalten und dort um ihre Position gerungen und darüber abgestimmt haben. Es hätte auch denen gut angestanden, zu einer solchen fundamentalen Richtungsveränderung der deutschen Politik einen Parteitag einzuberufen, die diese Veränderung jetzt vollziehen und noch vor Monaten eine andere Entscheidung – auf einem Parteitag – getroffen haben.

I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.

Simplifying to the extreme I define post-modern as incredulity toward the metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences; but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of ligitimation corresponds most notably the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university function which in part relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great voyages, its great goal (Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Post-modern Condition, 1977).

He obviously has both the Marxist Left’s („emancipation of the […] working subject“) and the economical right’s („creation of wealth“) holy cows under attack there.

I also like the author’s summary:

Lyotard regards as metanarrative all philosophical and social conceptions that proceed from the possibility of arriving at a general understanding of the world and society—a scientific understanding which could then provide the basis for consciously changing the world. Lyotard firmly rejects any such conception.

I would very much underline the word general understanding here, though — otherwise the impulse becomes nihilistic, a fate which apparently some, but certainly not all, post-modern thinkers have suffered.

The author first turns to the political past of the post-modernists:

A cursory investigation of the roots of many leading figures in the post-modernist movement reveals at some point either membership in, or, at very least, close contact with Stalinist or left-wing radical organisations. […] The further degeneration and move to the right on the part of Stalinism in the post-war period, the party’s crimes in relation to Algeria and Vietnam, the betrayal of the radicalised student and workers‘ movement in 1968, and finally the collapse of the Soviet block were crucial in spreading disillusionment and disorientation and catapulting a part of the intelligentsia to the right.

A good summary of what that means is quoted, interestingly, from Czech President Vaclav Havel:

The fall of Communism can be regarded as a sign that modern thought—based on the premise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalised—has come to a final crisis (quoted in Intellectual Impostures, p. 181).

The more or less parallel experience of the fascist / nazi cruelties plausibly contributed to a disillusionment with the concept of history as a progressive process.

Of course, this should not and did not make most thinkers of post-modernism unpolitical Foucault is quoted with an explanation of the possibilities for political action and „resistance“ after abandoning the big meta-narratives:

“There is no locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case.”

Together with Deleuze, Guattari and Lyotard, Foucault emphasised the necessity of developing micro-politics and micro-struggles. Such a strategy has an obvious appeal to advocates of single-issue type politics: separatists and nationalists of every shade, environmentalists, feminists, and so on.

So far, all this makes a lot of sense to me. But I am equally fascinated with the promise of an alternative, to be found in the idea of „dialectics“, a word right now even harder for me to fill with meaning than the term „post-modern“. I do like the phrase of a „relative relativism“ a lot, though:

“We communists are also relativists, but our relativism in not absolute, but relative.… Comrade Chuzhak argues not according to Heraclitus, who asserted that everything flows, everything changes, but according to Zeno, who proposed that it is impossible to step into the same stream twice, for ‘everything flows, everything changes.‘ Heraclitus was a dialectician, while Zeno was a metaphysical relativist. In the camp of bourgeois scholars there are now very many such relativists” (Aleksander Voronsky, Art as the Cognition of Life. p. 107).

Unfortunately, the article fails to provide any insight into what exactly a „relative relativism“ could look like, but to pursue that concept will still be on my intellectual agenda for the year to come. Exciting!

PS: The article I’m citing from is actually a book review, but obviously goes way beyond that with a line of argument of it’s own. The parts describing the books content are again quite predictable and boring, and I suppose so is the book (Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont).

This randomness is of course the source of what we often deplore as procrastination, but I’m realizing it can also set free creativity, by presenting side by side concepts that seem only very loosely related at first. So here is my starting point, a very insightful remark on what difference it makes if we speak about Capitalism or Free Market Economy, from John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-American economist and author, published in the article Free Market Fraud in The Progressive magazine in 1999:

Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes–indeed, deletes–the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

He goes on to denounce many instances where we (as a society as well as our appointed specialists on that matter, economists) fail to see the power workings of the „Free Market Economy“ and especially its influence over the government.

This argument, including its reference to how the public discourse about the issue is confused by objectivist language, could come straight out of a sketch-book of my own critiques of Capitalism (see NeuerPlan, „new plan“), even though the article is very short, and mostly stays on common knowledge grounds using the american military industry as its main example. (Oh I wish I’d come around to completing my own series of critique begun long ago!)

Now, this thought is not new to me in itself, but became more urgent when I came across a definition of Fascism that has some authority, coming from the Italian self-described „philosopher of Fascism“ Giovanni Gentile and being endorsed by Mussolini:

Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

(This, by the way, is quoted from the FAQ of the „Political Compass“ where you can localize yourself and some historical figures politically on the dimensions of „Economic Left/Right“ and „Social Libertarian/Authoritarian“. The FAQ is much more interesting than the actual test, though.)

And the suggested consequence, that increased influence / merger of corporate interests and government leads onto the continuum of fascist politics, is pretty plausible to me. And reminded me of a (only partly humorous) postcard I found when I was in Stanford almost three years ago, which features a summary of „Early Warning Signs of Fascism“ (claiming to be from independent research on actual fascist regimes, but according to a quick search more plausibly just written down in an Op-Ed in 2004, itself still worthy reading and considering):

The argument, which the author (Laurence W. Britt) also put forward in his book „June, 2004″ is that in the Bush era, America was visibly moving in that direction. How implausible is it to assume that again, corporate interests‘ hold of the government had a role to play in this?

True to my current randomness, and to end on a more cheerful tune on this sunny Sunday afternoon, here a cartoon of Capitalisms core problem by Dan Perjovschi.

Obama has been told by Israel-firsters in the US that his position on moving rapidly to a two-state solution endangers his ability to fund-raise among Jewish Americans (who provide a vastly disproportionate amount of money for political campaigns, estimated as high as 65% among Democrats) and therefore could imperil his campaign for a second term.

A quick research on Wikipedia contrasts this with the percentage of the US population identifying as of Jewish religion: 1.7% (by the way making them the leading non-Christian faith, excluding Atheists I suppose).

Now, there unfortunately is no source for Informed Comments numbers, but this is stunning. At the same time, the claim that the percentage of donations from Jewish Americans is especially high among Democrats would illustrate that the Israel question is not what motivates them the most. I remember a fascinating and disturbing discussion (more of a lecture actually) with a self-proclaimed „New York Jew“ back in California who told me that even though he is at odds with pretty much everything the Republicans stand for, he still votes for them because they are the only party with clear sight on Israel and „Islamo-Fascism“. It seems that, luckily, most of the people who share his faith don’t share his beliefs.

Anyway, another example of how money distorts politics, giving power to marginal interests. Unfortunately not as easy to solve as the ones relating to corporations, where a law limiting election-related spending seems like a pretty good idea to me. It has unfortunately recently been abolished by the Supreme Court.

It has so many important things to say about science, culture, and psychology that I believe it should be on every psychologist’s and non-psychologist’s bookshelf, but one part I like to refer non-psychologists to most frequently is about „relativism“, or as I prefer to say: Constructivism.

These are actually two parts, one on „epistemological relativism“ and one on „values relativism“, which have an insightful aside on motivation as an intermezzo, which I have omitted here.

If culture forms mind, and if minds make such value judgments, are we not locked into an inescapable relativism? We had better examine what this might mean. It is the epistemological side of relativism, rather than the evaluative, that must concern us first. Is what we know „absolute,“ or is it always relative to some perspective, some point of view? Is there an „aboriginal reality,“ or as Nelson Goodman would put it, is reality a construction?[31] Most thinking people today would opt for some mild perspectival position. But very few are prepared to abandon the notion of a singular aboriginal reality altogether. Indeed, Carol Feldman has even proposed a would-be human universal whose principal thesis is that we endow the conclusions of our cognitive reckonings with a special, „external“ ontological status.[32] Our thoughts, so to speak, are „in here.“ Our conclusions are „out there.“ She calls this altogether human failing „ontic dumping,“ and she has never had to look far for instantiations of her universal. Yet, in most human interaction, „realities“ are the results of prolonged and intricate processes of construction and negotiation deeply imbedded in the culture.

Are the consequences of practicing such constructivism and of recognizing that we do so as dire as they are made to seem? Does such a practice really lead to an „anything goes“ relativism? Constructivism’s basic claim is simply that knowledge is „right“ or „wrong“ in light of the perspective we have chosen to assume. Rights and wrongs of this kind–however well we can test them–do not sum to absolute truths and falsities. The best we can hope for is that we be aware of our own perspective and those of others when we make our claims of „rightness“ and „wrongness.“ Put this way, constructivism hardly seems exotic at all. It is what legal scholars refer to as „the interpretive turn,“ or as one of them put it, a turning away from „authoritative meaning.“

Richard Rorty, in his exploration of the consequences of pragmatism, argues that interpretivism is part of a deep, slow movement to strip philosophy of its „foundational“ status.[33] He characterizes pragmatism–and the view that I have been expressing falls into that category–as „simply anti-essentialism applied to notions like ‚truth,‘ ‚knowledge,‘ ‚language,‘ ‚morality‘ and other similar objects of philosophical theorizing,“ and he illustrates it by reference to William James’s definition of the „true“ as „what is good in the way of belief.“ In support of James, Rorty remarks, „his point is that it is of no use being told that truth is ‚correspondence with reality‘ … One can, to be sure, pair off bits of what one takes the world to be in such a way that the sentences one believes have internal structures isomorphic to relations between things in the
world.“ But once one goes beyond such simple statements as „the cat is on the mat“ and begins dealing with universals or hypotheticals or theories, such pairings become „messy and ad hoc.“ Such pairing exercises help very little in determining „why or whether our present view of the world is, roughly, the one we should hold.“ To push such an exercise to the limit, Rorty rightly insists, is „to want truth to have an essence,“ to be true in some absolute sense. But to say something useful about truth, he goes on, is to „explore practice rather than theory … action rather than contemplation.“ Abstract statements like „History is the story of the class struggle“ are not to be judged by limiting oneself to questions like „Does that assertion get it right?“ Pragmatic, perspectival questions would be more in order: „What would it be like to believe that?“ or „What would I be committing myself to if I believed that?“ And this is very far from the kind of Kantian essentialism that searches for principles that establish the defining essence of „knowledge“ or „representation“ or „rationality.„[34]

Let me illustrate with a little case study. We want to know more about intellectual prowess. So we decide, unthinkingly, to use school performance as our measure for assessing „it“ and predicting „its“ development. After all, where intellectual prowess is concerned, school performance is of the essence. Then, in the light of our chosen perspective, Blacks in America have less „prowess“ than Whites, who in their turn have slightly less than Asians. What kind of finding is that, asks the pragmatic critic? If goodwill prevails in the ensuing debate, a process of what can only be called deconstructing and reconstructing will occur. What does school performance mean, and how does it relate to other forms of performance? And about intellectual prowess, what does „it“ mean? Is it singular or plural, and may not its very definition depend upon some subtle process by which a culture selects certain traits to honor, reward, and cultivate–as Howard Gardner has proposed?[35] Or, viewed politically, has school performance itself been rigged by choice of curriculum in such a way as to legitimize the offspring of the „haves“ while marginalizing those of the „have nots“? Very soon, the issue of what „intellectual prowess“ is will be replaced by questions of how we wish to use the concept in the light of a variety of circumstances–political, social, economic, even scientific.

That is a typical constructivist debate and a typical pragmatic procedure for resolving it. Is it relativism? Is it the dreaded form of relativism where every belief is as good as every other? Does anybody really hold such a view, or is relativism, rather, something conjured up by essentialist philosophers to shore up their faith in the „unvarnished truth“–an imaginary playmate forever assigned the role of spoiler in the game of pure reason? I think Rorty is right when he says that relativism is not the stumbling block for constructivism and pragmatism. Asking the pragmatist’s questions–How does this view affect my view of the world or my commitments to it?–surely does not lead to „anything goes.“ It may lead to an unpacking of presuppositions, the better to explore one’s commitments.

In his thoughtful book The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford notes that cultures, if they ever were homogeneous, are no longer so, and that the study of anthropology perforce becomes an instrument in the management of diversity.[36] It may even be the case that arguments from essences and from „aboriginal reality,“ by cloaking tradition with the mantle of „reality,“ are means for creating cultural stagnation and alienation. (p. 24–27)

[…]

Both the irrationalist and the rationalist approaches to values miss one crucial point: values inhere in commitment to „ways of life,“ and ways of life in their complex interaction constitute a culture. We neither shoot our values from the hip, choice-situation by choice-situation, nor are they the product of isolated individuals with strong drives and compelling neuroses. Rather, they are communal and consequential in terms of our relations to a cultural community. They fulfill functions for us in that community. The values underlying a way of life, as Charles Taylor points out, are only lightly open to „radical reflection.„[40] They become incorporated in one’s self identity and, at the same time, they locate one in a culture. To the degree that a culture, in Sapir’s sense, is not „spurious,“ the value commitments of its members provide either the basis for the satisfactory conduct of a way of life or, at least, a basis for negotiation.[41]

But the pluralism of modem life and the rapid changes it imposes, one can argue, create conflicts in commitment, conflicts in values, and therefore conflicts about the „rightness“ of various claims to knowledge about values. We simply do not know how to predict the „future of commitment“ under these circumstances. But it is whimsical to suppose that, under present world conditions, a dogged insistence upon the notion of „absolute value“ will make the uncertainties go away. All one can hope for is a viable pluralism backed by a willingness to negotiate differences in world-view.

Which leads directly to one last general point I must make-one further reason why I believe that a cultural psychology such as I am proposing need not fret about the specter of relativism. It concerns open-mindedness–whether in politics, science, literature, philosophy, or the arts. I take open-mindedness to be a willingness to construe knowledge and values from multiple perspectives without loss of commitment to one’s own values. Open-mindedness is the keystone of what we call a democratic culture. We have learned, with much pain, that democratic culture is neither divinely ordained nor is it to be taken for granted as perennially durable. Like all cultures, it is premised upon values that generate distinctive ways of life and corresponding conceptions of reality. Though it values the refreshments of surprise, it is not always proof against the shocks that open-mindedness sometimes inflicts. Its very open-mindedness generates its own enemies, for there is surely a biological constraint on appetites for novelty. I take the constructivism of cultural psychology to be a profound expression of democratic culture.[42] It demands that we be conscious of how we come to our knowledge and as conscious as we can be about the values that lead us to our perspectives. It asks that we be accountable for how and what we know. But it does not insist that there is only one way of constructing meaning, or one right way. It is based upon values that, I believe, fit it best to deal with the changes and disruptions that have become so much a feature of modern life. (pp. 29–30)

Notes

31. See Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters, for a well-argued
statement of the philosophical foundations of this position.

32. Carol Fleisher Feldman, „Thought from Language: The Linguistic Construction of Cognitive Representations,“ in Jerome Bruner and Helen Haste, eds., Making Sense: The Child’s Construction of the World (London: Methuen, 1987).

33. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

34. Richard Rorty, „Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,“ in
Consequences of Pragmatism. Quotations from p. 162ff.

35. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

36. James Clifford, The Predicament ofCulture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1988).

40. Taylor, Sources of the Self.

41. Edward Sapir, „Culture, Genuine and Spurious,“ in Culture,
Language and Personality: Selected Essays, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 78–119.

42. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1972).

What I like especially is that the argument doesn’t stop where many constructivist arguments unfortunately do stop, at convincingly dismantling our usual essentialist view of reality, but also has a very convincing alternative way of dealing with things, what it calls the „pragmatist’s question“.

The first one deals with power of the masses, and why they so often don’t use it:

NOTHING appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.

Wow! After elaborating this opinion into opinions of interest and right, the latter again in right to power and right to property, the quote finishes with a paragraph about the relationship between power and property that absolutely stunned me, because I feel it anticipates much of what my „NeuerPlan“ line of thinking criticizes in our modern Capitalism-Democracies:

A Government may endure for several ages, though the balance of power, and the balance of property do not coincide. This chiefly happens, where any rank or order of the state has acquired a large share in the property; but from the original constitution of the government, has no share in the power. Under what pretence would any individual of that order assume authority in public affairs? As men are commonly much attached to their ancient government, it is not to be expected, that the public would ever favour such usurpations. But where the original constitution allows any share of power, though small, to an order of men, who possess a large share of the property, it is easy for them gradually to stretch their authority, and bring the balance of power to coincide with that of property.

Apart from the obvious implications concerning, e.g., the upper 1%‚s political influence, I think this can be easily extended to make understandable how corporations extended their reach from the beginnings of this legal institution to the elimination of restrictions on their spending in political campaigns in the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

PS: Concerning the first quote, I find a small comment on the original post quite interesting, as well as a link provided there:

This leaves open, of course, how anyone, subject or mamaluke, learns the opinions of their fellows regarding rights and interests; but this is one thing public political action is for.

Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

This is immediately followed by a description of what inequality does to society, and what the distorted representation of interests does to politics (apart from creating rules that sustain itself):

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

Looking at the similarity of this situation with what stirred public anger to the point of revolution in Arab countries, his conclusion is:

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Sounds pretty improbable, but then, that’s what everybody would have said about the „Arab Sping“ before it happened. And I think there is a lot of anger in the American society, just that the powers right now do a god job at directing it away from its real cause, and solution.

Life in the zone comes at a hight cost for the individuals and species involved:

They have gathered a rising mountain of data and published dozens of papers, all suggesting that the chronic low-level radioactivity of the zone and the hot particles that find their way into the soil and food in the area cause long-term damage to the organisms that live there. In barn swallows, they found deformed beaks and eyes, tumors, damaged toes, and asymmetrical tails. (All of these changes, of course, can make the birds less successful at catching food, migrating, and breeding.) They also found high rates of dead or deformed sperm in birds nesting in the most contaminated areas, further demonstrating the reproductive cost of living in the zone. When they examined a wider sample of bird species, and then invertebrates and spiders, they found similar results: “a very strong signal of contamination effects on abundance and biodiversity,” Mousseau says. In other words, populations declined as radioactivity increased. The evidence of the damage caused by the contamination was alarming: Gathering their results on abnormalities in barn swallows for a Biology Letters paper that same year, they described the external examination of 7,700 individual birds, declaring it “the most extensive data set on abnormalities in animals ever recorded.”

So much so that it seems it requires a constant inflow of animals to sustain the populations.

Most startlingly, in 2005, Møller and Mousseau did a chemical analysis of the feathers of swallows captured in Ukraine and Denmark to identify where each bird had spent its winter migration. They compared the results with those from specimens caught in Ukraine before 1986, found in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History in Kiev, and noticed a distinct pattern. Barn swallows were now coming into the zone for the summer from a greater number of locations than before the accident. This suggested that the population of birds living in contaminated areas around Chernobyl was not sustaining itself without outside help: The area was a sink. Given the low survival and fertility rates, the population could only be propped up by constant immigration. And what is true for swallows might also be true for the other species whose presence in the zone, drawn in by the absence of humans, has seemed so remarkable.

There are of course also critics cited, but it seems much of it is due to the politics that the science either way would have direct and strong implications for. The argument sounds pretty solid and differentiated to me:

“I’ve never seen any data related to any kind of census, any kind of quantitative assessment of numbers,” Mousseau says. (Indeed, Gaschak’s assertions about the population density of large mammals in the zone are based on observational estimates.) This year, Møller and Mousseau hope to finally gather enough data to conclusively establish the density and abundance of mammal populations in the zone, returning with a team to conduct a widespread census. In the meantime, they have continued to produce attention-grabbing research on avian life. At the beginning of February, the online journal PLoS ONE published their latest paper, showing that birds they captured within the zone had brains 5 percent smaller than those they found outside it. “Microcephaly,” Møller says. “A common condition in humans in Ukraine in these contaminated areas.”

Which raises a key point: If the entire debate about the ecosystem of Chernobyl were simply about the fate of barn swallows or wild boar, the conflict might be easily dismissed as arcane bickering between biologists. But the stakes are much higher, because the animal studies may shed real light on the effects of long-term radiation exposure on humans. Post-Chernobyl, obtaining statistically significant epidemiological data on cancer was complicated by Soviet-era secrecy and disinformation and by the scattering of the hundreds of thousands of workers who participated in the cleanup and then returned to their homes across the Soviet Union.

But one of the few certainties to emerge from research into low-level radiation since 1986 is that different species react to chronic exposure in different ways. Pine trees cope less well than birch. Migrant barn swallows are apparently very radio-sensitive, resident birds less so. Winter wheat seeds taken from the Exclusion Zone in the days after the disaster and since germinated in uncontaminated soil have produced thousands of different mutant strains, and every new generation remains genetically unstable, even 25 years after the accident. Yet a 2009 study of soybeans grown near the reactor seemed to show that the plants change at a molecular level to protect themselves against radiation. No one can be certain where human beings might fall on this continuum of DNA damage and long-term adaptation. “That’s what we want to know,” Møller says. “Are we more like barn swallows or soybeans in terms of radiation-induced mutation?”

Finding the answer to this question may take decades or even centuries. The genetic effects of chronic radiation exposure on each species studied so far have often been subtle and varied and only conclusively shown after many generations. The potential genetic changes in human beings—only now producing their third generation, as the children of the liquidators themselves raise families—may take hundreds of years to fully unravel. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government, seemingly satisfied with the anecdotal evidence of the zone-based research team, is pushing ahead with its plan to open the zone to tourism. Sergey Gaschak fears that future plans will include repopulating the Exclusion Zone at the earliest opportunity.

Some of the chemistry involved:

While iodine-131 decayed long ago and the strontium and cesium are slowly becoming less potentially lethal, the hot particles of plutonium-241 scattered across the landscape are actually decaying into an even more toxic isotope, americium-241. A more powerful emitter of alpha radiation than plutonium, americium is also more soluble and can easily find its way into the food chain. Americium-241, in turn, decays into neptunium-237, another energetic alpha emitter that has a half-life of more than 2 million years. As of yet, the long-term effect of americium-241 on animals remains largely unknown.