Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 6

I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.

By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.

In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.

In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.

In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).

In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.

In part 5, I evaluated analytic philosophy and the limits of its conception of meaning.

Part 6: On Taking Responsibility

The concept of moral responsibility has been at the heart of my journey through analytic philosophy. The first philosophical system I encountered which inspired and moved me was existentialism, a position that has moral responsibility as its foundation and centrepiece. This stands in direct opposition to the determinism which characterised much of 20th-century analysis.

Science has long been thought to promise a perfect system for predicting human behaviour (I choose my words carefully here, since few practicing scientists have embraced this belief - it belongs more to the realm of 'popular' or at least establishment commentary). It's a classic modernist tenet, and for a while scientific discoveries did seem to be progressing in that direction. Neuroscience and psychology made great strides through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Still, as early as 1942, Isaac Asimov could acknowledge, with his invention of 'psychohistory' in the Foundation short stories, that a truly determinist understanding of human behaviour was out of reach, prohibited by the fundamentally probabilistic character of quantum physics. This is not to claim that prediction of human behaviour is impossible, only that it can never be done with complete certainty.

Philosophers, who have been arguing with Laplace's demon for two centuries now, were slower to catch on. Even ten years ago, when I was in my first year at university, hard determinism was still discussed as a plausible theory, rather than merely a far-fetched possibility. So great was my determination (hah) to hold onto moral responsibility that I once refused to read an assigned article because of its determinist slant, which is about as defiant as I've ever been towards a teacher ever.

Determinism and scientism suit the analytic approach. They are theories of absolute knowledge and certainty, of everything in its place, clear and predictable. In denying the possibility of free will, they deny the meaningfulness of the aesthetic, reducing emotions, beliefs and principles to the purely causal.

This outlook has persisted despite the eventual demise of hard determinism. The philosophers who would have been determinists in a previous generation now begrudgingly begin their papers with 'we know that hard determinism is false, but...' and go on to argue that quantum randomness leaves the defender of free will no better off.

The point is not entirely without merit. Fundamental randomness does not guarantee a meaningful freedom of will. Free will theorists have long held that free will is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. The best they can claim from quantum theory is the existence of a narrow sliver of space in which freedom of the will might hide.

More insidiously, the post-determinists have targeted moral responsibility itself, even as free will theorists began to abandon the connection between will and responsibility (the resulting positions are myriad, and better covered in detail elsewhere). The essence of the new determinist argument concerns motivation, understood as whatever mental state in an agent results in their action.

An agent is morally responsible for an action, the argument goes, if their action is a product of a motivation in an appropriate way (that is, not subject to hypnosis or other control). Motivations, though, are products of the agent's character, and said character is a product of the agent's birth and upbringing. If we are to hold agents responsible for their actions, then, it seems that we must hold them responsible for their upbringing and their ancestry. This, the post-determinists argue, is absurd.

And, on the face of it, it does sound absurd. A person cannot literally be responsible for their own birth - this would distort time itself. This argument, the causal argument, seems to present a profound challenge to the existence of moral responsibility.

And yet... Let us come at this from another angle. Critical theories, such as Marxism, feminism and queer theory, recognise differences among birth circumstances as important social phenomena. The concept of privilege is vital to understanding these models, and their well-grounded demands for social justice.

These days, it is common to hear reactionaries crying that it is not their fault they were born male, or white, or middle class, or straight, or cisgendered, or able-bodied, or neurotypical. Strictly, they are not wrong - but then, you will find no serious feminist arguing that they are. What the reactionaries are doing, though, is relying on the same simplistic, causal understanding of moral responsibility as the post-determinist analysts.

Responsibility for the circumstances of our birth, for the privileges and attitudes therefrom, is something we take. It is not something we are born to, nor something we are morally entitled to ignore. The essence of maturity, of adulthood, is making this transition; this is the sense in which children are innocent.

Practically speaking, the act of taking responsibility consists in critical self-reflection, the willingness to examine our own behaviour and the attitudes which condition it, and the seeking of ways to change them where appropriate. It is the act of taking seriously our relations, both structural and specific, to others, rather than viewing ourselves as isolated particles predestined to bang into one another with whatever arbitrary results a crude social physics dictates.

Theoretically, taking responsibility requires detaching responsibility from the purely causal, embracing the messy illogicality of a putatively free choice to escape the fist of determinism. The result is not a neat theory; it has little of the clarity that analysis craves. But it is honest and liberating, and above all else it allows a hope for general, meaningful change that the determinist mindset can never offer.

(part 7)

Everyday sexism (that I am guilty of) part 2

Actually, this time it's not just sexism - it's every other dimension of privilege as well.

I'm working on a lengthy and complicated thing about white male identity and 'gamers' - my identity, basically. What I'm trying to do with it is address self-identified gamers defensive of our identity on the grounds that it's the only thing we have. I examine why it's possible to feel this, and how to think more broadly about our identity.

But it's really hard to do that without feeling embattled. 'Gamer' is an identity with a lot of really toxic associations. 'White' and 'male' are even worse, both having a long history of oppression and brutality. The urge is always there to get defensive, to rationalise or try to explain away my association with those identities. It's the urge to mansplain, whitesplain etc. (I'm not sure that 'gamesplain' is a thing yet, or just regarded as a combination of 'all the above') -  call it xsplaing in general.

The problem with xsplaining is difficult to state succinctly. It's most problematic when a privileged person butts into a conversation about a problematic pattern of privileged behaviour to explain why - even if not done in an explicitly abusive way, this reinforces existing power dynamics by demanding that every conversation be limited by our comfort. It also equates our discomfort with the actual harm suffered by other groups, which is dismissive of their experience as well as flat-out inaccurate.

Another problem is in demanding 'they' solve 'our' problems - the attitude of 'if you don't like it, you tell us what to do'. We're adults. If someone criticises us, we've got to be able to take responsibility for that. Before demanding specific attention from someone - adding to the burden you've already imposed on them - do some googling, or at least some self-reflection, to try to understand the problem.

This goes doubly for issues of identity. The piece I'm writing is an attempt to collect some criticism of 'gamer' and develop from that a better model of the identity. I don't agree 100% with everything I'm quoting, so there is some editorialising, but my primary purpose is not to refute or dispute those criticisms; it's to identify what we can learn from them.

So I have to be very careful of where I'm pointing my arguments. How often do I have to check for xsplaining? Every. Damn. Sentence. That's really what I want to get at here (as with last time out); this isn't something to only worry about occasionally. It's not even limited to times when you're actively engaging with someone from a different background (though that's when it's at its absolute most important).

It's so hard to resist the urge to make excuses, to haggle, to move from addressing the problem to denying it. And this is in an article specifically addressed to our concerns - I'm not trying to join an existing debate (though I am responding to one). It's even harder when engaging with people 'live'. But you can't learn or grow while rationalising; xsplaining serves your ego at the expense of your mind - not to mention at the expense of other people's peace of mind.

Everyday sexism (that I am guilty of)

I was walking across campus on Monday and it so happened that the person in front of me on the path was female and attractive. I made a conscious effort not to ogle, and yet, when she was greeted by a group of her classmates waiting outside a lecture hall, I still had this weird moment of cognitive dissonance. Suddenly, she was a human being interacting with human beings, rather than a shape taking up a central chunk of my visual field.

Was this entirely a sexist response? I don't know - it was, after all, Monday morning and I'd just been giving a lecture on semantics for quantificational logic, so I was a bit spaced out, and maybe there's an argument that I was just startled by the intrusion of voices in what had been a quiet environment - but I think I can tell the difference between sensory and cognitive startlement. My point is this: it's that easy (for me as a man) to dehumanise a woman, even despite a conscious effort not to. That's how insidious sexism can be.

Another example, this one perhaps a little less everyday, but more stark. Over the last couple of days, Crash, the dog belonging to game developer and favourite gamergate target Brianna Wu, took severely ill and died. Wu mentioned this on Twitter and was barraged with abuse in the form of mockery of Crash, photos of mutilated dog corpses, and at least one fake account for Crash proclaiming 'lol I'm going to die soon'.

All of which is horrible and reprehensible, but that shouldn't need saying. What does need saying is this: I felt a new level of shock and outrage at this kind of abuse, compared to the 'usual' abuse Wu has been receiving (threats of rape and murder against her, her family and friends, and her business, which among other things drove her from her home).

To put it bluntly: abuse aimed at the dog had more emotional impact with me than abuse aimed at the woman.

Perhaps it's tempting to say something along the lines of 'well, yes, but the dog's innocent, gamergate shouldn't be dragging a pet into this'. That's stupid, though, because it implies that Wu is in some way not innocent. That she deserves some part of what's happened to her, which is bullshit.

My point, guys (and I do mean guys) is this: these subconscious psychological mechanisms don't go away when we decide to try to care about other people. I don't know whether these two responses are things I've learned or are innate in some way, but they're habits of thought so deep that even when trying to be conscious of them I miss them working.

And they are responses I am responsible for. Even if I was born with the tendency to think about women this way, as long as it has the power to affect my behaviour, I am responsible for making sure that it doesn't. I am responsible for making sure that my poisonous habits of thought don't spill out into the real world.

That requires an effort of constant vigilance, regardless of whether it's Monday morning and I've just come from lecturing on difficult logic. And it really matters, because (for example) a huge part of the problem of stopping gamergate, and of taking it seriously as something that must be stopped, is a lack of empathetic understanding of what life is like for gamergate targets - of how damaging harrassment can be.

It's exactly the kind of empathy that I've failed at (at least) twice in the last week which we (men) most need in order to recognise, understand and tackle this problem.

'Ownership' of a tragedy

There are at least three major political topics involved in the discussion that has followed the mass shooting last week in Isla Vista, California; gun violence, violence against women, and the link between violence and mental health. This article focusses on the first and last of the three, while this one discusses the second (they aren't necessarily the best articles on any of the points involved, just ones I found on facebook this morning).

All three of those debates are weighty and difficult. They are also very important, but many people are better-placed than me to tackle them in writing. What motivated me to write today is an argument I saw (also on facebook, because that's pretty much my only contact with the outside world) between people discussing the gender dimension of the tragedy and someone arguing that the 'real issue' was gun control.

I have subsequently seen more of this tug-of-war over how we should respond, politically, to the tragedy. You can argue it any of the three different ways, in both directions - from the obvious ones, like whether or not male gun control activists should be 'allowed' to dismiss women talking about sexual violence and the 'men's rights' movement (they shouldn't), to the perhaps-less-obvious, like whether mental health should be blamed (and I stress, people identified as having mental health issues are far more likely to be the victims of violence than its perpetrators; the media's insistence on blaming psychological problems is hugely damaging to campaigns for rights for disabled people).

But this isn't a zero-sum game. A tragedy is not a pot of political capital, finite in depth, from which different campaigns must compete to draw. Treating it as such cheapens both it and the people doing the treating. For anyone outside the circle of people with an immediate personal link to the event, a tragedy is a lesson, and it is a poor lesson that has only one thing to teach.

Would Elliot Rodger have been able to kill and injure as many people as he did if access to guns in America was more tightly controlled? Almost certainly not. Was his attack driven by misogynistic motives and a misogynistic culture? It seems so. Would he have turned to violence at all if he had had access to better support for his Asperger Syndrome? That's a very complex question, and worthy of deep investigation.

No one group owns this terrible event, except possibly the families and friends of the victims. No one person speaking about this has the right to tell another that their view is irrelevant or wrong (again, except perhaps to ask them to be more considerate of the feelings of those directly affected). No such division should be allowed to get in the way of learning from Isla Vista (and Sandy Hook, and Steubenville, and all the other towns that have lost their names to human disasters).

The Only Mansplaining I'll Ever Do

(hopefully)

We seem to be having quite a mansplainy week, kinda. Or at least, I've been talking a lot about male psychology as a perspective on gender issues. I've tried not to make excuses or suggest that any of the explanations I've offered make the behaviour I'm explaining forgivable.

Today, to round everything off, I present my grand unified theory of masculinity. I'm going to reduce the whole social construction of the male gender to its simplest, most basic point.

Actually, it's not my theory, really. I got it from David Willis. For those of you not clicking the link (or not generally familiar with classic webcomics from ten years ago), that's a comic in which the female lead had recently been turned into a man by an evil alien's gender-swapping ray gun or virus bomb or something. Asked what it's like being a guy, she opines that it's 'Like keeping a little dog around that barks at everything.'

And that is very much the truth. We can refine the metaphor a little bit - being a man is like taking the dog out for a walk just late enough in the evening that someone might object if it barks, and then the dog has a barking fit, and you're not sure if anyone's noticed or cares, but you know that if they have, you're in for a lot of shame and disgust.

There's only one other thing that needs to be added. The social construction of gender is such that men are told constantly that sexual arousal - the dog's barking - is the only good guide to what we like. And since the dog barks at even the slightest provocation, we're told we're indiscriminate and simple, easily pleased and easily led.

Now, I don't want to come over all 'Oh, woe is modern man, all denigrated and shamed'. We still have it pretty good. But being male doesn't actually free you from oppression by the patriarchy. The power that the patriarchy - our concept of masculinity - holds is not a power of individual men (or at least, not most individual men - a few insane Republican senators and clothing company moguls seem to do alright). It's a power of the role of 'man'.

We are only empowered so long as we play the role that has been set out for us - a role, basically, of this poor guy (watch with sound). This is the reason why we can't - much as an increasing number of us would like to - snap our fingers and fix the patriarchal bias of society. It's the reason why each individual man who tries to do something different seems (and feels) so ineffectual and powerless.

The thing is, the power of the patriarchy is inertial. Very, very few people of either gender actually want this. But as long as it is hard to fight, individual steps taken to fight it will seem ineffectual. That doesn't mean they are. They add up, over time. Progress is made, however slowly. The desperate extremes of rape culture and the anti-abortion movement in the modern age are the signs of a fading memeplex.

More and more men are coming to understand that much of the problem is not the weakness of women but the weakness of men. Progress is not inevitable, but it does generally breed more progress. The braver we are, the more we seek to make the path easier for those behind us, the easier the path will become for us as well.

These are platitudes, in a way, but there are no easy answers. It's easy to say that we shouldn't let patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes go unchallenged, but much harder to challenge them, and even sometimes to spot them. It's easy to say that we should learn to not think of what the proverbial dog barks at as something we actually want, but harder to ignore it (not, of course, that one should necessarily ignore it all the time - just don't let yourself be ruled by errant, atavistic biology).

Be something more than the guy in the Fenton video. It's surprisingly liberating.

Where does rape culture come from?

Let's start with a definition. Rape culture is a form of victim-blaming. It's saying 'If a woman is raped, it's her fault for not preventing it, for dressing or acting provocatively, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time'. The implicit corollary to this is that a man will rape unless prevented from doing so, and that he has a right to act this way unless explicitly denied consent (this, as I understand it, was the actual defence used in court by the Steubenville rapists).

When you put it like that, it's an obviously, almost comically, repugnant position. It's so absurd that a Scooby Doo villain would be ashamed of it. The problem is that it's everywhere. It's a deeply ingrained cultural ideology ('memeplex', I guess?). And I believe that whenever a culture adopts a principle this absurd, there is an explanation of how it came to do so.

Note: I said explanation, not excuse. It's not my intention to defend any of this, or to excuse or forgive the Steubenville or any other rapists (or for that matter the defenders of rapists). But I believe that we cannot hope to change our culture without understanding how it has come to operate in such a poisonous way. I hope that in analysing the genesis of rape culture I can find a weak link, a belief that we may be able to change or disprove, on which the whole culture depends.

In essence, I think it comes down to three great cultural myths;

1) The myth of virile masculinity. This is probably the most obviously problematic of the three; the myth that if a man, particularly a young man, is not sexually active then he is a failure. This is a myth that every man feels the pressure of, and it comes from somewhere very deep and primal in our idea of masculinity. We throw it around perhaps more, or at least more viciously, in the modern age than ever before, in everything from soap operas to deodorant adverts and back again.

2) The myth of Mars and Venus. Whether you think this one is a problem or not probably depends on who you most often hear it from. Sometimes it takes obviously dangerous forms, like when lads say to each other 'Oh, women never say what they mean. She might be saying no, but she's just playing hard to get', but sometimes it's more subtle. I was the shy, introverted, endlessly-heartbroken kind of adolescent, and some of the best role models I've ever had - teachers, my father etc. - consoled me with 'Don't worry, it's not just you - no man ever understood women'. It's the same myth, that men and women are in some way so fundamentally different that clear and accurate communication between them is impossible.

3) The myth of a just universe. I don't want to sound cynical - I do believe justice is possible in many, perhaps even most, cases. However, where there is justice, it's something human beings have to consciously create. The universe isn't just, it doesn't care about being fair to individuals. If the universe is even-handed at all, it's only as an average over a near-infinite number of objects, an averaging so vast that any quantity of individual suffering is rendered statistically insignificant. But all of us, I think, still expect fairness in our own cases. If we have bad days, we seek explanations - I must have been a bad person yesterday, or in a past life, or I'm saving up karma to have a good day at a later date - that rely on the idea that our own lives will even out of their own accord.

How do we get from all this to rape culture? Via a surprisingly short sequence of steps.

First, you have to understand that (3) includes the belief that no-one should be doomed to failure. In a just universe, heartfelt and sincere effort will always be rewarded.

This has an obvious consequence when linked with (1) - if it's failure for a man not to be sexually active, then society must be such that all men can be sexually active.

Of course, society doesn't prevent men being sexually active, it just requires that to be sexually active, a man must have consent from those he wishes to act sexually with. And this is where the problem comes in, because if (2) is taken to heart, then it's impossible to get consent, because if as a man you believe you'll never understand women, you'll never be sure that you have consent.

For the fairness requirement set by (1) and (3) to be met, then, the requirement for consent must be removed. And that's rape culture in a nutshell - consent is either assumed or treated as irrelevant, because otherwise it's not fair.

Now, I'm not saying that this is a conscious process that any rapist actually reasons through. I do think that most men feel there's something unfair about sexual politics - you can see this personified in the desperation of the Jason Biggs character in 'American Pie' (playing very much to the myth of virile masculinity), or in pretty much every Hugh Grant film ever (playing more on the myth of Mars and Venus). What I'm suggesting is that this is a subconscious process, perhaps even a process that works mainly in the collective cultural subconscious.

Can we stop it? Perhaps. While (1) is obviously problematic in a whole range of ways, it's also very deeply rooted in our culture. It also seems to be a very effective marketing tool, which means there's a lot of money invested in it. That in turn means it's going to be very hard to shift (though I dearly wish we could shift it - more on that in a moment). (3) is similar - in fact, (3) is rooted so deeply that I think most of us don't even notice or believe that we believe it.

The thing is, (2) may be the myth that plays the key role here. And while there's a grain of truth to it - all human communication is a bit flawed, so of course men and women will never perfectly understand each other, but then neither will men and men or women and women; gay couples run into all the same communication difficulties, I'm sure, as straight couples - I think it's probably also the easiest of the myths to overturn.

Sure, on all sorts of things, and particularly when there's any kind of romance or lust in the air, human communication is an awkward, unclear thing. But in my experience, consent is an exception to this rule. Now, I'm a virgin (it's complicated), so my experience is limited, but on the couple of occasions where I have received sexual consent (really not kidding about the 'complicated'), it's been very clear, and so have any conditions that were applied. I have no reason to think that either case was exceptional in that respect, or to believe that I'm in some way more empathic than other men.

It may be true that women sometimes play mind games in romance, or play hard to get, or say things they don't mean. But when it comes to saying important stuff, women are as straightforward (perhaps even more so, though I'm sceptical of drawing generalisations about women that aren't also generalisations about humans) as men. And, heck, the person I communicate with best and most clearly in all the world is a woman, so communication can't be that hard.