Is oppression an excuse for immorality?
The title of this entry is an exercise in crude attention-grabbery, but it’s also essentially what I’m asking. Violet recently responded to a post by Lisa Kansas in which the latter got fed up with feminists excusing women, including sex workers, who have sex with married men. The discussion continued here, here, and here. Feel free to read it if you’ve got some time, but I’ll give you the quick and dirty and then veer somewhat off topic, so the details won’t be essential. Basically Lisa was pissed that the sister of the woman with whom John Edwards had an affair dared to try to defend her honor. The reason this was relevant was because Lisa believes that the sister’s response was typical of feminism:
Frankly, I’m completely sick of so-called feminists maintaining a tomblike silence on the females who engage in this behavior and the damage it does all those female spouses.
Unsurprisingly, the response was on the whole less than sympathetic (to Lisa). People accused her of slut shaming, and violet even said,
I don’t think in the context of feminist blogging and critique that shaming these individuals is either valuable or appropriate.
which is dangerously close to trying to revoke her feminist card, at least on this issue.
What’s most interesting to me about this hullabaloo is that it gets to the heart of a major difference between liberal and conservative rhetoric and analysis. Conservatives tend to talk a lot about morals and personal or individual responsibility. This is easily explainable via my own theory of ‘how conservatives got that way’: namely, that they start from the assumption that they’re right—that is, that the way of life that they (try to) have is the right way to live, or at least not in any way wrong. Starting from this very convenient postulate, anyone for whom the way things are doesn’t work is simply not doing it right. Any problems that occur are due to someone’s immorality. If a problem is too widespread or persistent to be accounted for by individual immorality, it is due to the fact that liberals have fucked things up to the point that they’re no longer working the way they’re supposed to be. Even in this case, though, the way in which liberals have fucked things up usually has to do with ‘values.’ Liberals have spread values that are not the ones that a given conservative learned from her parents or preachers, and the ever-susceptible masses have fallen for this evil brainwashery, thus causing them to behave immorally in droves.
Liberals, however, begin from the assumption that there’s something more or less deeply wrong with the way things are, and that its up to them to make it better, or at least whine about the fact that the government isn’t [*gasp!*]. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why the morality of individual decisions—even very common decisions like the decision to cheat or engage in prostitution—fades into the background. If lots of people are doing something a liberal considers immoral, she is likely to ask why they’re doing it. What aspects of the way things are make that particular decision an acceptable and advantageous one, socially or economically?
In the case of Lisa vs. violet, Lisa is saying that having sex with someone who has agreed to be in a monogamous relationship is immoral (because it harms that person’s ‘legitimate’ partner), and therefore we should condemn anyone who does this. Violet* is saying that, first of all, condemning individuals doesn’t help us change the fucked up way things are. Second of all, there are reasons why cheating is such a pervasive part of the institution of monogamy. Basically, because (heterosexual) monogamy (especially marriage) is the default. It’s privileged to the point that some people don’t even realize there are other options, and those people who dare to (openly) practice polyamory are denied many many privileges that monogamous (especially married) couples enjoy. This results in a lot of people being in (theoretically) monogamous relationships (especially marriage) that they would probably not have chosen to be in if they hadn’t been subject to cultural coercion. Basically, it’s more acceptable and advantageous, socially and economically, to be married and cheat than to be openly polyamorous. That’s fucked up. We should change it. Or whine about the fact that the government isn’t.
This big picture stuff is all fairly clear—at least to me. But what becomes more murky is what liberals do when they are faced with immorality—especially by oppressed people—in the small picture. So the cultural institution of monogamy sucks, but what happens when you decide to be monogamous, even partially because it’s ‘easier,’ and your boyfriend cheats on you (with a woman)? What do you think about your boyfriend? More relevantly, what do you think about the woman with whom he cheated? Or to take a more sensitive example, young, poor, black men commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes. This is because they are tacitly denied access to professions and lifestyles pretty much in direct proportion to how economically and socially prestigious those professions and lifestyles are, unless they have the money to go to college and learn how to talk, act, and dress like white men. This drives many of them into economic activities that are outside of the hierarchy of social prestige. Since these economies are not protected or regulated by the (threat and exercise of) government (violence), the young black men who participate in them have to threaten and exercise their own violence if they want to make money. This is all extra special flavors of fucked up, and needs to be changed. But if someone you love is a victim of a violent crime committed by a young, poor, black man,** how do you react?
What this comes down to, really, is a certain dislocation of individual agency. According at least some (United States of) American conservative ideology, the individual is the primary actor, the primary constituent of society, the thing that society is built out of and for. It’s your responsibility as an individual to surmount any and all obstacles that social structures may have put in your way and make a whole bunch of money—er, that is, act morally. Or possibly, act morally insofar as it doesn’t hamper your ability to make a whole bunch of money. Or, um, something. I’ve never really been a conservative so I don’t really know. For the liberal, the individual is to some significant extent the product of her society. Maybe sometimes she’s fully responsible for her decisions, but certainly not all the time. One place this eventually leads is the postmodern idea that there is no essential self–that each of us is simply an ever-roiling intersection of cultural narratives. From a (vaguely) Derridean perspective, the ‘individual’ is merely a term in the system of understandings (language) that produces our world, dependent on all of the other terms. It is an entity one of whose functions is to bear responsibility for things. Other such entities, for liberals, are ‘the system,’ ’society,’ ‘the patriarchy,’ Christianity, or ‘the institution of (heterosexual) monogamy (especially marriage).’ Essentially, these are all semi-arbitrary places for the proverbial buck to stop when we’re trying to solve—or at least diagnose—a problem.
What I’m asking, I guess, is where do you stop the buck, and why? If the answer is (it is) ‘it depends,’ then what does it depend on?
* Actually, I’m saying this. But I’m pretty sure it’s what violet was getting at. Basically, any idiocy is likely mine, not hers.
** Which means your loved one is most likely poor and black as well
August 31st, 2008 at 1:53 pm
That’s absolutely weird to me, particularly since I know you personally know what this looks like, having recently participated in such a process yourself.
We know what accountability processes look like, and while they are many and varied, they don’t ever consist in people with no actual connection to the individuals involved talking about them without any input from them, given incomplete and possibly misleading information, and with the goal of determining who is at fault, and how much. If that produces justice, it’s only by accident.
You can’t and I didn’t say, “the buck stops with this social institution,” because social institutions can’t take responsibility. Changing an institution might well be a component of resolution, if it’s within the scope and power of the accountability process. Responsibility, though, has to be a thing taken by free actors, because that is the only way the act is meaningful—I did this thing, which I acknowledge contributed to this harm in this way, and I will take these steps to make us whole from this present harm, and prevent similar from happening again.
Theory, even the informal theory of blogs, is a distant thing, and it can’t participate in this directly. Theory made from a stance of morality and immorality is particularly problematic, because it amounts to writing assumptions about the presence and proportion of blame, effectively short-circuiting any actual restorative process. Moreover, outside of such a process, we’re talking about shaming—pushing blame rather than having an individual accept it upon her self. While there might be some value in shaming as a last-resort in particular situations, I just don’t see a use for it in the context of theory—it doesn’t serve to make whole, make better, or halt future harm.
It’s worthwhile to ask what role theory can play in the healing process. I don’t know the full extent of it. I do think structural critique has an important place. Not at all because it dislocates individual agency, but because it gives us better tools to understand why we use our agency in particular ways. It helps us discover why we act in ways that produce harm, why in some instances a thing is even harm in the first place, and most importantly, how we as individuals can not do these harmful things.
(Also, I don’t identify as a liberal. :p)
August 31st, 2008 at 1:55 pm
P.S. Your stylesheet doesn’t highlight anchor tags with no href attribute. Which I can understand, but it means that all my a::title footnotes above are obscured.
August 31st, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Good point.
I’m not sure I follow. This probably has something to do with the vagueness of the buck-stopping metaphor/idiom thing. What I’m referring to is, when you’re trying to solve a problem, you’ve gotta decide where you’re gonna focus the bulk of your energy—what you’re gonna spend time trying to change. Sometimes the problem can be solved by changing the behavior of a single individual. In that case the “buck stops” with that individual. But when you’re looking at problems like widespread infidelity or violent crime among young black males, it seems more useful to say “it’s the social institution’s fault, and that’s what we need to change” than to say “these people are all immoral and it’s them that we need to change.” And you have argued in the past that groups behave differently from individuals, and saying, for instance, that a particular culture is racist doesn’t mean that everyone—or even necessarily anyone—in that culture is a racist.
I think that it does, to some extent, dislocate individual agency, and I think that that’s basically a good thing. Individualism does a lot of violence to a lot of people, in ways that I may have to make into a post of their own. But basically, individualism denies the fundamental interdependence of all members of a society (in our case, pretty much everyone in the world). And if I use my agency in a certain way because I wasn’t aware I had the option to use it in any other way, am I really using my agency?
Neither do I, but that’s mostly because I’m currently in a state of significant uncertainty about a lot of things—an unusual state for me. I’d be interested to know why you don’t, what you identify as instead (if anything), and why. I might already know one of these answers, but I’d like to hear you explain.
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:38 pm
If you’re dealing with a problem that’s best solved by having someone take responsibility, deal with the consequences, and work on healing the community, you aren’t dealing with a problem that we can address with theory. It’s too distant, it doesn’t involve the participants, it isn’t actually oriented at healing.
That’s what I’m saying.
The closest we can get with theory is to critique our assumptions about how responsibility is apportioned in certain situations—for example, about how we may be inclined to disavow a sexual harasser’s agency, capability, and desire to cause harm.
In that spirit, you can say (as Lisa did), that women who enable cheating in married men by having sex with them aren’t, in general, asked to take enough responsibility for their actions. Which I just disagree with—and this is where the patriarchal narrative bit comes in—because women in that position are typically given an enormous amount of responsibility for men’s sexual behavior around them, to the degree that prostitutes who are raped are branded as sluts and laughed out of the precinct.
But what simply doesn’t constitute valid theory is saying that obviously Rielle Hunter is an immoral person, as obviously are all the other women and “willing prostitutes” in her position, because you don’t, in fact, know their positions.
This isn’t a case of saying, as BFP points out, that it’s just “a personal issue,” or “an individual problem.” And I’m not saying that you can’t jump off from this specific story to a larger cultural narrative (I’m not here to single-handedly deconstruct all instances of metonymy). But you can do that without making assumptions or handing out blame in the individual situation.
In the context of accountability processes, for the most part, individuals are assumed to have agency and are responsible for the consequences of their actions, even if they didn’t know they could do anything else, even if they weren’t aware of how they could be hurting someone.
When we do theory about those social institutions, we aren’t blaming them—the phrase, “I blame the patriarchy” is a rhetorical quip and cute title, not critique.
The utility of theory to healing processes is that they can help the participants to better understand the semi-invisible social forces that inclined them to act in a certain way, or feel entitled to a certain thing, or not actually perceive an action as violent. And, more to the point, it helps them figure out how to work beyond that.
I don’t identify as a liberal because it’s not the right label. My politics are oriented towards radical, grassroots efforts. I don’t, for the most part, work towards liberal reform of the system because I think the system is broken. I don’t think that all efforts to reform it or at least make it less damaging are pathological (I mean, I’ve volunteered for NARAL), but I think they’re often, at best, not especially useful.