One of the odd things about being an intellectually protean young person is that reading practically anything I wrote more than two months ago induces in me massive, debilitating fits of cringeing -- and this pattern has obtained essentially since I first started writing for leisure, at the age of 15 and 9 months (I have, sensibly, put nothing from that very earliest period on this blog). Take my "formal" (political-economic) defence of feminism, for example, one of the "featured posts" on this blog (I made it one of the featured posts because it's very long, and I took weeks to write it (with the pornography section having been crafted, incrementally, over a process of several months)). While I remain impressed by own labours in constructing this long work, I now find that this document to be utterly infested with cringeworthy claims and pronouncements (I was always aware that the whole thing was a shameless exercise in "mansplaining" but I didn't care, because I hadn't yet encountered a political-economic defence of feminism written by a woman (and this is still the case)). The experience of re-reading it last night was like going to the pantry to grab a jar of honey only to find that the jar you seek is covered in crawling black ants and that the liquid itself is abundantly populated with formic corpses and live ants desperately trying to stay afloat above the deadly viscosity. No, you don't really want to put it on your toast, and making it appetising again will require lots of knifework, jar-banging and honey-waste (analogous to editorial excision, addition, alteration, etc); all you can think is, "Fuck".
It's rather funny (if a little disquieting) to think that, when I was writing about sex differences in this work, I had believed that I was being highly nuanced about the subject, and that all the caveats and clarifications I was including were hallmarks of high intellectual integrity. I say it's rather funny because I now believe that I was being way too simplistic, and that I completely failed to acknowledge the immense complexity of the issue and the impossibility of rigorously establishing "innate" sex differences -- which is really a folk, biological-essentialist concept after all: http://philpapers.org/rec/GRIWII. It's a little embarrassing. I suppose I can partly blame it on Steven Pinker, who was really my main influence on the topic of sex differences, and who, in hindsight, also talked in a far too simplistic way about it in How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate (especially the latter, which is, in hindsight, a mediocre book (Pinker's logic: ideology has poisoned science, so I'm going to compensate by filling a book with my own, presenting only those results that support my political views as if they are the consensus, even though they are often marginal conjectures, and creating an incredibly tendentious and distortionary historical narrative of Marxist bias in the scientific academy)).
Of course, I haven't completely changed heart on this particular matter: I don't now believe that sex chromosomes and sex hormones have no effect on people, and I don't believe that human beings are an anomaly in the animal kingdom among sexually dimorphic species. I still think that the claim, "Gender is a total social construct" is a silly dogma when gender is defined as everything that isn't sex, where sex is defined merely as physical features (and not any psychological features). Are there decisive empirical reasons to believe this claim, taken fully literally? No, there are not. Gender is incredibly complex, and I don't think it is optimally described as merely a "social construct" (this way of phrasing things appears to imply belief in the false dichotomy between biology and society). I think it is better just to say what we know: that most humans are born with either the XX or the XY sex chromosome and that these chromosomes have an effect on various aspects of human development, that the gender binary is pan-cultural in Homo sapiens, that there do seem to be many cross-cultural commonalities (and some pan-cultural commonalities) in the distribution of personality-types and behaviour-types between the genders, that we are a mildly sexually dimorphic species, and that these latter three facts suggest that there were probably selection pressures to engineer some sexual differences in our evolution (but it's not to say that there are innate sexual differences, which is an excessively folk-essentialist claim, based on a teleological understanding of human biological development (natural selection is teleonomic, and it is disingenuous to say that whatever is adapted is innate, because development is so complex, and there are different strengths of adaptation (different levels of developmental fixity and environmental insensitivity in adapted traits)). A simplified way of putting the dilemma face in trying to identity "innate sex differences" is that we will never be able to test the development of men and women in a de-socialised environment, and the reason that we will never be able to do that is because there is no such thing as a de-socialised society, and a human raised in isolation is not going to be more 'natural' either; they will just be different, manifesting (phenotypically) far fewer of our species' adaptive traits to do with sociality and cognition than someone raised in a social environment, because many or most or all of these adaptive traits to do with sociality and cognition are still environmentally sensitive to a nontrivial degree (and everything is environmentally sensitive to at least some degree). This poses problems for anyone with an excessively strong view on psychological sex difference -- on either side of the divide.
Of course, one might suggest (as I did in my essay) that we can draw serious conclusions about sex differences from anthropology, because anthropology allows us to compare the ways men and women have existed in an very wide range of social, cultural and physical environments, and therefore should, in theory, help to delineate the boundaries of gender possibility, which should, in theory, tell us something about 'innate' tendencies of maleness and femaleness. One might suggest, in particular, that if you see a certain pattern in enough societies, then you have good reason to think that it's "innate". However, that's not quite right. Indeed, this brings us to the issues that Griffiths raises. The truth is that when you understand the complexity of gene-environment interactions, and the shockingly-counter-to-our-folk-intuitions relationship between the genotype and phenotype -- along with our uniqueness as the one species with highly complex culture and a social world created by consciousness -- you suddenly realise that it is very foolish to say something like, "Oh, well, men must be more innately predisposed to being leaders" just because most societies documented in anthropology have patriarchal structures with the political sphere dominated by males. The world is a lot more complicated than that. Even if there weren't a single direct counter-example in anthropology (even if all societies had a patriarchal structure), it wouldn't be at all scientifically justified to talk about an "innate" complex psychological/behavioural predisposition on analogy to our innate predisposition to grow arms (it's certainly not the case that, just as the kidney excretes blood, the "male brain" (which is not a real thing (though there do seem to be some sex-related, average neuro-architectural tendencies)) 'produces aggression'). And just as long as there's even one counterexample to such a claim -- one society where the women are the major political leaders -- you begin to lose a grip on what innateness means here. Yes, it could mean, 'It's far more likely, because of testosterone (let's say), that there will be societies where most or all of the leaders are male, than that there will be societies where most or all of the leaders are female', but that's not what most people mean by innate, and even in that hedged form, the claim is not suddenly much more solid, because rigorously verifying this biological claim is impossible (how can you isolate the effect of testosterone on something as complicated and 'high-level' as gender differences in a culture?). (To be clear, if I had to state my position on sex differences, I would now say that I am less of a philosophical sceptic about them than Cordelia Fine and slightly more of one than Simon Baron-Cohen.)
Another thing that I didn't mention in that essay is the very real possibility that the bodies of males and females help to shape their minds in a gendered way. It is a very real possibility (in fact, I think it's a probability) that the very fact of men's being taller, more muscular and having deeper voices than the other, softer and smaller sex, affects male psychology to a nontrivial extent -- subtly encouraging males (or some of them) to feel more confident and act in a more dominant way -- and affects female psychology to a nontrivial extent also -- subtly encouraging females (or some of them) to feel less confident and act in a more meek way. This is another subtle point that is worth considering before you to hastily jump in to make claims about "innateness".
As for my comments about rap and racism in the explication of the second mechanism of the Patriarchy Model ("Reinforcing the Paradigm") they are perhaps the most cringeworthy of them all. When I suggested that it is essentially reverse racism that explains why Kendrick Lamar is compared to Shakespeare and Macklemore is not (and that they both deserve no accolades), I was being, well, er, kind of stupid, and, well, I mean -- it does look rather reactionary, doesn't it? I mean, I am still not keen on any rap; my tastes have not really changed (the one recent development in my music listening habits since I wrote that essay is that I have got into Aphex Twin, but this has nothing to do with rap). And, of course, I still can't stand the misogyny that dominates popular music, and there's still no denying the fact that the colonisation of the popular music industry by hip-hop and rap in the 90s did increase the sexism and misogyny of the content of the average lyrics of pop music, and probably led to a rise in the amount of blatantly objectifying videos. But my strident suggestion that white uni students only exalt rappers like Kendrick Lamar and artists like Kanye West for affirmative-action-type reasons was absurd, and does seem, well, somewhat racist. I was projecting my own tastes onto others, and expecting them to view the sexism of these artists as irredeemable. I mean, I still think the sexism of these artists, and most rappers, is indeed irredeemable, and I still find most rap music emotionally cold and corrosive to the soul, and I still think West's lyrics are puerile and empty, and I still find that a lot of the white guys who are fans of artists like Lamar, like them for extremely childish reasons that are themselves rather racist (they listen to these artists because they are rough, ruthless, primal, aggressive, violent, misogynistic black men, an attitude which fundamentally relies on a repugnant kind of Afro-fetishism and an embrace of the stereotype of black men as animalistic) -- but that doesn't mean that people who like these artists have no valid reasons for doing so.
Another problem with the preliminary section of my defence of feminism (the section where I amateurishly discuss sex differences) is that it is too tendentious on "Postmodernism", which actually refers to a fairly wide landscape of different traditions and intellectual movements. I know it is a mistake to lump everyone who might fall under the label "Postmodernist" in the same group (and no doubt the work of people like Butler is not worthless, even if, from what I've read, her prose can be turgid and opaque, and she may not be a scientific naturalist (I don't know because I'm ignorant)).
Yet another problem with the work is all of mechanism 3, "The Disproportionate...". I was far too strident here, because there is actually some evidence that the number of women in parliament can make a difference to policy.
This work also generally evinces an extreme righteousness that is really smarmy and, truth be told, at odds with the facts about my own character (I am no perfect moral saint).
One thing I would say is that I still stand by my unusual, ostensibly Theological views on pornography. Fortunately, I think this perspective is in popularity among young people these days, because more of them are recognising the damage being wreaked by addiction to porn, and the dangers of prolonged habitation in its sordid, unreal and amoral world.
The other "featured post" on my blog, what I call my economic manifesto, is also cringeworthy in some ways (the main problem is that it is a little too dogmatic (with excessively strident phraseology)). Moreover, my exegesis of important chapters from Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is probably inscrutable to those who haven't read the book, or aren't familiar with Neoclassical economics. That said, I beleive there is still a hell of a lot of important stuff in there, and my views haven't really changed on anything of substance.
Another fairly long non-fiction piece I am now quite strongly dissatisfied with is my essay called "What is the best possible society for our wretched species?", which I am planning to significantly revise and improve very soon. My revisions will make clear the aspects of that essay with which I am displeased.
The one long non-fiction piece I am still pretty happy with is "Are Things Overall Good or Bad in the Modern World?"
While I still retain a fondness for most of the old fiction I have posted on this blog, one thing I noticed a couple of months ago, upon reading the first few installments "Bleak Memoirs" for the first time in a while, was that these memoirs are essentially a total artistic failure. I didn't realise this until I read them recently, because it has only been for a little while that I have able to appraise them from a more detached perspective. I had previously thought, with cloudy eyes, that my autobiographical writings might have some aesthetic merit, despite (or perhaps because of) their eccentricity of construction, narration and general content. Indeed, I thought my amusing, mercurial and highly lexically diverse writing style might have been enough to make the disjointed anecdotes from my childhood very aesthetically interesting. But what I learned was that this was definitely not the case.
I will not be updating my memoirs for quite a while now, and I feel zero compulsion to, both because I no longer think the project is of any real value and because, since about February or March of this year, I have become noticeably less narcissistic (narcissistically nostalgic and narcissistically retrospective) than I used to be. (Partly it's just been that I've been much more obsessed with politics and world affairs.) This is, of course, healthy, so I am glad.
As for my early essays on ethics, well, they are rubbish. The one called "Deep Moral Dilemmas and the Futility of Formalisation" isn't terrible, and makes some very important points (although I fail completely to mention "average utility" utilitarianism), but its brief summary of developments in ethics during "the Enlightenment" is nauseatingly bad.
I continue to learn and grow, although usually I think I've grown much more than I actually have.
No comments:
Post a Comment