Arthur and I have an inside joke where, when commiserating over all the madness of society, we periodically shake our fists at the heavens while growling, “Jean-Jacques!” This developed out of our discovery that quite a few things that we consider unfortunate about our culture can be fairly traced back to the demented scribblings of that deranged lunatic. Like I said recently, it’s interesting to note how so many of the intellectual contests in our day and age are taking place on a playing field whose boundaries were painted by Burke and Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago. Here, we can clearly see the philosophical origins of today’s postmodern insanity, where passionate feelings count as irrefutable evidence.
A few years ago, politicians in Berlin made headlines for their attempts to bring gender equality to their city’s crosswalk signals. They wanted to create an “Ampelfrau,” or “traffic light woman,” a female counterpart to the iconic “Ampelmann” invented in East Germany in the 1960s. It became clear right off the bat that Ampelfrau would be laden with biases and complications that Ampelmann escapes. In her motion requesting Ampelfrau, Social Democrat District Leader Martina Matischok-Yesilcimen specified that the figure should represent a self-assured, modern-day woman, yet without any “sexist stereotypes” — meaning no ponytails or skirts, and definitely no high heels or mini skirts — according to the Local.
Sofie, Ampelfrau and other female-designed crosswalk symbols do challenge a male-centric worldview just by existing. They occupy a crucial space in our roadways, where we are required to look at them in their skirts and ponytails, reminding us that there are people besides men and perspectives besides men’s perspectives. However, they simultaneously highlight the difficulty of dismantling that worldview.
For Wade, creating female crosswalk icons — even if it requires us to use imperfect, clichéd markers of femininity — is inherently valuable because it challenges the male-centeredness of our public space.
“It would force men to see themselves in that ‘walking woman,’” she says. “That is actually a really profound thing, because it requires men to see female people as human beings, just like they are.”
So are Amersfoort, Valencia and others wasting (albeit minimal) resources on feminized crosswalk signals? Are these cities attempting to treat a symptom of sexism and hoping it will cure the disease?
So if there is a perfect feminist crossing signal design, we may have many more streets to cross before we find it.
I didn’t notice, but Monday was the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution — did Google feel that was also worth commemorating in a doodle? I mean, that had something vaguely to do with “equality”, too, didn’t it? Perhaps the same SJWs who are currently praising Kochiyama as an inspirational “human rights activist” on Twitter would have likewise been inspired by the heroic example of the Red Guards.
I’d never thought about my gender identity before. It hadn’t occurred to me that not being a “girly” girl meant I wasn’t 100 per cent woman. The point, I’ve always believed, is to expand the categories “man” and “woman”, to tear down pink and blue prisons. So a little girl can like trucks, spacemen, getting dirty and still be a girl; a boy can put on nail polish, play with dolls and be no less a boy.
…The trans cause is hailed as the latest liberation struggle. And we should defend trans men and women from discrimination and the hideous violence many have endured. But this should not stop us opposing a view of gender, spun off from the trans movement, that is as conservative as the Mad Men 1950s. Until recently Eddie Izzard was a transvestite, wearing skirts and make-up: “These aren’t women’s clothes,” he’d say, “they’re my clothes”. Like Bowie, Prince and Grayson Perry, he made the category of man bigger, brighter, less confined. Now Izzard says he has “boy genetics and girl genetics”. Filmed rushing into a manicurist, he gushed: “Being a transgender guy, I do like my nails.”
Men, I’ve found, can’t understand why this enrages women. Why are feminist ladies so mean to Eddie? Well, because he’s no longer saying “I’m a bloke who likes pretty nails”. He has declared: “Because I like pretty nails I am female.” He is reducing being a woman down to make-up and sparkly shoes. By which definition, he’s more woman than “gender fluid” ol’ me.
…The challenge now is how to support genuine, heartfelt young trans people, while addressing an internet culture that lures teenagers, amid the maelstrom of adolescence, towards ever greater confusion. At heart the trans lobby upholds the same nonsense that underpins porn and men’s mags and the Tea Party right: that men are muscly hunks and women are passive pink fem-bots. To feel you are neither doesn’t make you gender fluid – or any of the other 72 crazy gender categories on Facebook – it just makes you human.
As I’ve said before, growing up in the ’80s and imprinting on the norms of glam metal gave me a far more progressive view of gender than the current trans fashion allows. My mom still has pictures of me at four years old, wearing some of her clothes, along with wigs, makeup and nail polish. At that age, the only thought I had about it was that it was fun. As a teenager, I had long, straight hair reaching halfway down my back, and in keeping with the glam fashion in rock music at that time, I liked to wear poet’s shirts, leather boots and gaudy earrings. Again, there was no existential angst involved, no sense of dueling gender identities. I wasn’t a “typical” guy, but I was still unquestionably a young man, and still attracted exclusively to girls. There was never any anxiety over the possibility of being gay, and I don’t think the idea of being a woman in a man’s body would have even seemed coherent to me and my friends. If asked, I would have said that I was expanding the idea of what it means to be a guy. I was rebelling against the idea that you are predictably defined by your clothes or your interests.
And yet, I didn’t feel constrained at all by being defined, in a very basic sense, by biology. By contrast, I know several people who seem existentially aggrieved by the existence of biological limitations and determined to overcome them, but in their rebellion, they paradoxically end up empowering those old social conventions to define them instead. Now, a woman I know who sometimes likes to wear t-shirts and cargo shorts muses that perhaps this means she’s gender-fluid. An acquaintance who “identifies” as an extinct apex predator wants to be addressed by the impersonal pronoun “it”. Social constructions like clothes and language are now considered to convey something essential about you, while the unexceptional fact of biology is experienced as tyrannical oppression.
According to the progressive narrative, glam metal was politically insignificant, culturally irrelevant, one particularly prominent example of why we’re all better off forgetting the ’80s ever happened. And yet, the attitude toward gender norms that can be found in any typical hair band video of the period — playful, irreverent, incapable of taking itself too seriously — is far healthier than the current climate of opinion. The funniest part, though, is that our reigning progressive fashion pertaining to gender is just another fad, no different than men wearing hairspray, makeup, and pink, tiger-striped spandex, and destined to look just as ridiculous in hindsight. They just don’t know it yet.
From Condorcet and Comte down to their latter-day disciples like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer, rationalists have dreamed of turning ethics into a science. If only ethics could be turned into a quantifiable, data-driven exercise, then knowing the right thing to do in any given circumstance would be a simple matter of plugging objective numerical values into a mathematical formula, a technique that could be mastered and used by anyone, with none of this primitive, inefficient, peasant superstition about “wisdom” which can only be gradually acquired over time, through trial and error, and by listening to boring old elders and their interminable stories.
As it happens, though, ethics is more like an exclusive nightclub named Dunbar’s Number, guarded by glowering, musclebound bouncers. “The right thing to do” involves flesh-and-blood people in specific relationships based in particular contexts, not abstract people in an abstract world. There is no a priori answer to every moral dilemma, unless you’re a believer in predestination or absolute determinism.
Let’s stare in amazement as Adam Waytz attempts to square this circle:
In fact, there is a terrible irony in the assumption that we can ever transcend our parochial tendencies entirely. Social scientists have found that in-group love and out-group hate originate from the same neurobiological basis, are mutually reinforcing, and co-evolved—because loyalty to the in-group provided a survival advantage by helping our ancestors to combat a threatening out-group. That means that, in principle, if we eliminate out-group hate completely, we may also undermine in-group love. Empathy is a zero-sum game.
Absolute universalism, in which we feel compassion for every individual on Earth, is psychologically impossible. Ignoring this fact carries a heavy cost: We become paralyzed by the unachievable demands we place on ourselves. We can see this in our public discourse today. Discussions of empathy fluctuate between worrying that people don’t empathize enough and fretting that they empathize too much with the wrong people. These criticisms both come from the sense that we have an infinite capacity to empathize, and that it is our fault if we fail to use it.
People do care, newspaper editorialists and social-media commenters granted. But they care inconsistently: grieving for victims of Brussels’ recent attacks and ignoring Yemen’s recent bombing victims; expressing outrage over ISIS rather than the much deadlier Boko Haram; mourning the death of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe while overlooking countless human murder victims. There are far worthier tragedies, they wrote, than the ones that attract the most public empathy. Almost any attempt to draw attention to some terrible event in the world elicits these complaints, as though misallocated empathy was more consequential than the terrible event itself. If we recognized that we have a limited quantity of empathy to begin with, it would help to cure some of the acrimony and self-flagellation of these discussions. The truth is that, just as even the most determined athlete cannot overcome the limits of the human body, so too we cannot escape the limits of our moral capabilities.
We must begin with a realistic assessment of what those limits are, and then construct a scientific way of choosing which values matter most to us.
That means we need to abandon an idealized cultural sensitivity that gives all moral values equal importance. We must instead focus our limited moral resources on a few values, and make tough choices about which ones are more important than others. Collectively, we must decide that these actions affect human happiness more than those actions, and therefore the first set must be deemed more moral than the second set.
Once we abandon the idea of universal empathy, it becomes clear that we need to build a quantitative moral calculus to help us choose when to extend our empathy. Empathy, by its very nature, seems unquantifiable, but behavioral scientists have developed techniques to turn people’s vague instincts into hard numbers.
Basing our moral criteria on maximizing happiness is not simply a philosophical choice, but rather a scientifically motivated one: Empirical data confirm that happiness improves physical health, enhancing immune function and reducing stress, both of which contribute to longevity. Shouldn’t our moral choice be the one that maximizes our collective well-being? These data sets can give us moral “prostheses,” letting us evaluate different values side-by-side—and helping us to discard those lesser values that obstruct more meaningful ones. These approaches can help us create a universal moral code—something that can serve as a moral guide in all cases, even if we are not able to actually apply it to all people all the time.
As Arthur said via email:
My take-away is that the solution to our moral problems is to be happy. The only way to solve moral problems in a realistic way is to apply a data-driven hedonistic calculus — which is what a lot of amoral people do, anyway. There is something of an antinomy between morality as an absolute — “It’s the right thing to do, come hell or high water” — and morality as relativistic, based on trade-offs between consequences of this or that course of action. The antinomy between these two concepts of morality is itself a moral one. But it is also a philosophical question, and the problem with so many social scientists is their technocratic hubris. They assume science has solved or soon will solve the problems that philosophy could only speculate about, given that Kant and Plato, e.g., were cluelessly embedded in a primitive stage in history, bereft of the only means of testing philosophical hypotheses: lab testing and data-gathering. But philosophical questions keep coming back to bite them in the ass.
Utilitarian ethics are ruthlessly fixated on practical results — whatever is best for the greatest number of people. The problem with this position that it is not in itself necessarily moral: it is based on an unexamined assumption that everyone is a reasonable modern Liberal. and that what will make the greatest number of people happy could never be, for example, exterminating the Jews. Utilitarian and Marxist thinking converge here in consensus group-think, collectivist notions of happiness, and disregard or contempt for individual deviations from “the general good.” Both make claims to being scientific. Both are programmatically devoted to humane values such as social justice. And while it is Marxist “dialectical science” (along with Nazi “racial science”) that has produced totalitarian nightmares, there’s potential for a more laid-back dystopia in utilitarian thinking. Or perhaps we are going to end up with a dystopia that combines the best of 1984 with the best of Brave New World.
But who’s to say you can’t engineer efficient empathy-extension? And I’ll be interested to hear how that FBI-vs.-Apple dilemma is solved by neuroscientists and social psychologists. First, of course, they’ll need to poll the People using improved self-reporting techniques; image their brains to measure their anxiety-vs.-emotional security ratios; and use a software algorithm to produce a rigorous break-even analysis. The result will be a democratic (or at least demographic) moral decision, overseen by guess who? An elite cadre of scientists and social engineers. It’s not as if these disinterested people are motivated by any WILL TO POWER.
In case you don’t feel like clicking through to see the other twenty-five tweets in the sequence, I can go ahead and spoil things for you. The moral of this feeble-minded fable is that privilege is like making use of a million dollars the bank mistakenly dropped in your account. I’m just interested in that word, “shouldn’t”. Honey, what sort of privileged sheltered existence have you been living to get the idea that life’s default setting is one of fairness and equality? It’s ironic, but really, when you think about it, these people are fundamentalist meritocrats. Everyone should apparently begin life as a blank slate, born into completely value-neutral, objective circumstances, so that whatever they “earn” will be solely and truly due to their own merit, whatever that would even mean in such a vague science-fiction scenario. Sounds uncomfortably like we’re saying that people have a true “inner nature” independent of their families, histories, cultures and educations. Isn’t that a problematic notion itself?
Anyway, analogies, by nature, aren’t meant to be precisely equivalent, but even allowing for generous leeway, this one is particularly flimsy. If the bank accidentally credited a huge sum to your account, it would be a relatively straightforward matter for them to figure out where it should have gone. When it comes to the complexity of privilege, however, you can take a recent example as a reductio ad absurdum — reading to your children before bed is more of an indicator of their future success than sending them to private school. If even such an innocuous activity as that contains the seeds of privilege, what are we to do about it? Can we legislate that all parents must read to their kids before bed to make sure none of them are getting an “unfair” advantage? Of course not, but even if you could, it would quickly become evident that certain types of reading material produced marginal advantages, and then a-leveling we would have to go again. Then you’d have to eliminate any disparities traceable to differing story lengths, the gender of the parent doing the reading, and on and on and on. This hypothetical, of course, is just one tiny little variable among countless others, even within the limited context of functional families and how they prepare their children for adulthood. If you seriously wanted to try to analyze all the other variables that go into creating differences of intelligence, motivation, skills, and available resources between individuals or groups and subject them to oversight and regulation for the purposes of ensuring statistical parity… well, let’s just let that absurd thought hang unfinished, shall we? The point is, it’s impossible to achieve equality by turning morons into geniuses and lazy bastards into hard workers through social engineering, so in practice, we would end up settling for the next best thing — bringing those on top closer to the bottom.
It’s common for critics of SJWs to grant them a little rhetorical respect by saying that their ideals are worthy, even if their tactics are counterproductive. What I hope to do, by taking the logic behind this rhetoric seriously, is indicate how misguided this is. It would be easy, and accurate, to dismiss this kind of stupidity offhand as just another serving of moldy Marxist leftovers doused in the sour sauce of resentment. But by making a serious effort to follow the logic, it becomes obvious that the state of affairs they desire, the results they demand, would require the most efficient totalitarian state possible to implement them. This kind of radical, fanatical, Procrustean “equality” has never existed and will never exist naturally. The minute that people are left free to choose their paths and arrange their activities without coercive oversight, inequalities — most of which are benign — will naturally result, which inevitably means that people will never be trusted to make their own choices. Idealism is one thing, but this is a scorched-earth war against reality they’re waging.
In general, the hard left tends to be a slow learner; that’s why there are still thousands of people who think selling newspapers on university campuses is a productive revolutionary activity.
A return to nice postwar social democracy would be far harder to achieve than the total revolutionary reconstruction of the state. If we’re serious about making a better world, the last year should teach us to be not against austerity, but for communism.
In general, the hard left tends to be a slow learner…
If we’re serious about making a better world, the last year should teach us to be not against austerity, but for communism.
…the hard left tends to be a slow learner...
...for communism.
A return to nice postwar social democracy would be far harder to achieve than the total revolutionary reconstruction of the state. If we’re serious about making a better world, the last year should teach us to be not against austerity, but for communism.
As longtime readers are aware, I have a brilliant friend named Arthur with whom I keep a regular correspondence, two plodding thesaurus-sauruses trading emails in an age of smaller, twittering avians and scurrying social media rodents. I recently shared two risible tweets with him, and, as is often the case, his responses were far more cerebral and witty than anything I could have come up with. So, here they are for you to enjoy:
No, no, no, these running dogs have it all wrong. These reactionary hyenas snicker because they are blind to the nuances of cultural subversion as a tactic in the struggle against the Capitalist mode of production–either blind, or so intimidated that they force their awareness back into their Political Unconscious. Buying an expensive SUV from capitalists would in itself be treason against the proletariat who are so easily bought off by bourgeois-accommodationist labor unions and high salaries. Buying a Hummer that was originally a Humvee, a military tool of US imperialist aggression, and turning it into a counter-statement of solidarity with a martyr of the Revolution, is a blow against Power from which the corporate executives of General Motors are still recovering after shitting themselves in their terror–not to mention the Pentagon, where, being made of sterner stuff, the Fascist goons in brass hats are merely pissing themselves with fear. What makes this subversive PC virtue signal even more threatening to the capitalist stooges of Twitter-Land is that it references and re-appropriates for revolutionary ends the fact that Humvees were first deployed in the Afghan War: again, a gesture of solidarity, this time with the brave Third-World freedom fighters exacting just revenge for the depredations of Western Colonialism, sort of.
The complicated dialectical-materialist joke is on them. Hah hah hah. (Remember, not just sex but our senses of humor will be better after the Revolution.)
Feminist concepts of gender performance applied to Canadian mountains in recent peer-reviewed paper pic.twitter.com/3OBEzQZUbz
Because geologists have traditionally thought of mountains like Vesuvius, Krakatoa and St. Helen’s as passive and inert.
Still, it is true that the agentic performativity of mountains has long been marginalized, leveled and even bulldozed by human exceptionalism, despite the obvious fact that they have read Nietzsche and had their will to power powerfully affirmed by his atheistic quasi-animism, which democratically distributes will-to-power throughout the universe without regard to race, creed, color, or mineral composition. Plus, he liked to hike in the mountains. This is a strong indicator that he was free of hierarchizing bio-arrogance.
We need an oro-ontology to include mountains among the ranks of both Being and Becoming, not only among the known but among the knowers–and why not hills? The author shows xir own hierarchizing size-ism in this silencing of the colline voice, that music with the sound of which, as you point out, they are clearly, in a Nietzschean sense, alive. I find the author’s blithe co-opting for careerist CV-fattening purposes of natural topography’s independent capacity for lively engagement and animation (which they possess to the point of magmanimity and lava-ish self-affirmation) symptomatic of a residual human exceptionalism for which xe deserves to be Twitter-shamed and forced to undergo remedial sensitivity training. After all, isn’t xe basically strip-mining the concept of mountains for thesis-ore from which to construct tree-killing academic articles?
