Karen Horney, Philip Greven, and the childhood roots of authoritarianism and resistance

This post officially kicks off my series on authoritarianism. It begins to respond to several psychological and psycho-social questions: What causes aggression-authoritarianism in individuals? What accounts for the growth of authoritarian movements? How can we best resist them in the present and prevent their rise in the future?

Horney, Freud, and the childhood roots of authoritarianism

In previous posts, I discussed Donald Trump as a case study of Horney’s aggressive neurotic type. As I’ve noted, both Horney and her colleague Erich Fromm – whose account of authoritarianism I’ll discuss in an upcoming series of posts – were trained in the Freudian tradition. While both developed their theories in the course of working with clients and with anthropologists, sociologists, and political theorists, Horney in a sense stayed truer to her Freudian origins in retaining a focus on childhood.

This apparent similarity is misleading, though. Freud’s arguments, as Horney discussed in depth in her critical New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), in fact revolved around alleged instincts and stages of development common to all (presumptively male) humans; childhood experiences largely derived from the conflict between these drives and the pressures of socialization. In contrast, Horney believed Freud’s claims about innate drives lacked evidentiary support. She contended that the only innate human drive was toward healthy development. So, in her view, childhood experience fundamentally mattered, as it could either provide the conditions and support for this healthy growth or thwart it, leading to long-term psychological problems.

The fundamental difference between these two frameworks led Horney and Freud to have profoundly different views regarding individual mental health, the psychological roots of political and moral development, and the causes of fascism. Freud viewed the rise of Nazism as the inevitable resurgence of aggressive, violent, destructive instinctual drives which “civilization” could never truly suppress or contain.¹ Horney, in sharp contrast, traced aggressive-authoritarian tendencies and movements not to ancient and immutable instinctive drives but to concrete conditions in childhood that prevent healthy psychological development.

Understanding these conditions is essential to understanding contemporary rightwing movements and their leaders, as can be seen in a recent article by Rebecca Solnit - “The Loneliness of Donald Trump: On the Corrosive Privilege of the Most Mocked Man in the World.” Solnit’s otherwise brilliant and insightful piece² unfortunately falls into standard assumptions about Trump’s character. Here’s her description of Trump’s maturation:

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.

Here, Trump’s “bottomless, endless, grating, grasping” greed – presented, unfortunately, with animal imagery – is an unexplained inborn quality, as are his ruthlessness and dishonesty, his destructiveness and irresponsibility, and his attraction to thugs and conmen. If the conditions of his childhood played any role in the development of these traits, it was simply in providing the material comforts and privilege that confirmed him as a spoiled brat.

But by all accounts, Trump’s father was a cold and neglectful parent who taught him to view the world as a hostile place. His older brother suffered terribly until his death of despair, from alcoholism, at age 43. When Trump began to behave aggressively as an adolescent, it was seen not as a natural response to abusive treatment or a bid for recognition from a rejecting parent but as a disciplinary issue, and he was promptly shipped off to a military-style institution where he, like many others, was further abused (and which to this day he praises, as victims often do, for its violence).

Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote The Art of the Deal, offers this description in a recent article:

There are two Trumps. The one he presents to the world is all bluster, bullying and certainty. The other, which I have long felt haunts his inner world, is the frightened child of a relentlessly critical and bullying father and a distant and disengaged mother who couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him.

“That’s why I’m so screwed up, because I had a father who pushed me so hard,” Trump acknowledged in 2007, in a brief and rare moment of self-awareness.”

We tend to treat people with materially comfortable childhoods as having wanted for nothing, and to draw the conclusion that their greed, callousness, or authoritarianism were inborn or the natural result of their wealth and position. But in case after case, when we’re able to look beyond their wealth, we see patterns of abuse and neglect in the youthful experiences of rich rightwingers. Indeed, I’m often struck by the casual revelations of some of Trump’s associates. To take one small example, a recent article in the New York Times about his mendacious goon of a lawyer, Michael Cohen, contains this suggestive anecdote: “In an interview, Mr. Cohen said he became a lawyer to appease one of his grandmothers, who threatened to leave him out of her will if he did not. ‘You don’t really have any money’, he said he replied, ‘to which she slapped me across my face’.”

The Koch brothers had a bullying father and a sadistic nanny. Indeed, many of those at the center of the Kochs’ neoliberal crusade, as described in Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, were similarly ill-treated. (Ironically, this cruelty is often defended as a means of protecting a wealthy child from becoming spoiled or dissolute, as though the only options for parenting were strict and abusive discipline or nothing.)

Trump himself appears to be a bullying, hyper-critical parent. The saddest stories, which are also tragically typical, are those told by his children with a desperate justificatory pride.

Children and authoritarianism in power - can anti-authoritarianism be taught?

Horney’s arguments speak not only to individual cases but to broader questions surrounding the rise of authoritarian and fascistic movements. Her childhood focus can also help us to develop thoughtful and effective means of helping children contend with the political reality of authoritarianism and develop into decent, compassionate people capable of resisting authoritarianism.

In 1939, Horney published a short piece in the journal Child Study on “Children and the War.” Addressed to readers, therapists, and parents in the countries not (yet) under occupation or at war, the article sought to engage not just with the question of how to respond to the war but of how to respond to the rise of fascist movements and regimes.

Then as now, in a moment when authoritarians have come to power and are making aggressive war, destroying democratic institutions, and violating human rights at home and abroad, Horney’s focus on the longer-term psychological effects of childhood experience might seem a luxury irrelevant to immediate needs. “Children and the War” does focus on some immediate matters, including fears about the war among children resident in countries at peace, the anxiety of boys who could potentially be called to war,³ and the challenges of speaking with children about the realities of war and persecution:

The war is a reality which parents cannot, even if they would, keep from their children…. When they come to us complaining of the meanness or injustice which they run into, few of us have the courage to let them know that meanness and injustice are among the realities they will have to learn to cope with. Invariably we try to justify the meanness, to explain away the injustice, to insist on the silver lining in what is sometimes just a black cloud. Perhaps we do all these things because the amount of ruthlessness and cruelty apparent today in the expansion drives of nations the world over is genuinely terrifying. We are frightened, moreover, because similar aggressive drives on a personal plane exist within ourselves. (229)

Horney addresses the central problem of parents who reject or resist the advance of authoritarianism – how to help children to develop as kind and honorable people under these unfavorable conditions:

For most parents, the problems presented by the war are problems in moral education rather than in psychiatric technique. First of all, it is necessary that they think their way through these problems as best they can. How have we ourselves been able to cling to any standards of decency in a world where ruthlessness and cruelty not only are prevalent but seem at times to be victorious? Are we clear as to the meaning of the old warning, ‘What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world, yet lose his soul’, and can we help make it clear to our children? (232-3)

Importantly, she rejects the didactic approach favored by many resisters:

This is the real problem, and if they grasp it, parents will not waste their time by moral preaching, by books describing the horrors of war and the beauties of peace, or by prohibiting war toys, guns, games, and stories of violence. These things never yet caused a child to become aggressive and warlike. They are merely the vehicles through which he expresses his need of aggression. Some of this need…is to be expected in the normal course of things; and, if development proceeds as it should, will in time be spontaneously supplanted by other desires and activities. War and the need to hate and destroy can be eliminated not by learning to hate war but by learning to love life. And the love of life starts in the nursery. It is all-important that the parents’ early relation to children should be free of elements which tend to arouse fears and feelings of hate which last throughout life. (233; emphasis added)

This passage is central to the import of Horney’s psychoanalytic approach to ethics and politics. Her basic contention is that helping children to become people capable of rejecting and opposing authoritarianism, and of being decent human beings generally, isn’t done through (or not only through) providing a “civic education” or preaching peace, love, tolerance, and other values, but through treating children themselves with dignity, respect, appreciation, and love. “A child who is rejected by his parents often cannot consciously hate them,” she argues, “but he ends by hating Germans, Jews, or the ‘enemy’, in whatever guise it is presented” (233).

Certainly, Horney appreciated that historical and sociological facts and positive values need to be imparted to children:

Our explanations must be simple, but in making them simple, we must guard against their becoming untrue. It does children no harm to be forced to realize that there are problems beyond their grasp – beyond adults’ grasp, too, for that matter; and that there are certain things for which they will have to wait until they are older if they are really to understand. (233)

Our older children, however, should be given a glimpse into the complexities of the scene and perhaps need training in something we call historic perspective…. They need a gradual induction into the problems of the human race, which includes a realization of the cruelties and the follies which are inescapable but which also gives them a vision of the aspirations of man and a hope for something better. (233)

But she argued that this education was insufficient, and would fall on infertile ground when children aren’t raised in a family and community environment in which these ideas and values are practiced or when children aren’t treated in accordance with them:

These are the lessons of a lifetime and cannot be imparted formally; they are implicit in the kind of family life of which the child is part and the kind of social attitudes to which he is subjected. If these are sound, children’s values, too, are likely to develop soundly and parents will not be tempted to overstuff children with principles and information which they do not want and which fail to meet their needs. They will be able to listen more attentively to what their sons and daughters are really concerned with instead of rushing to tell them what they, the parents, think they ought to hear. Otherwise, they will shoot wide of the mark and have nothing to offer children in their struggle toward maturity. (233-4; emphasis added)^{4 5}

The Christian Right and authoritarianism by design

Horney’s work on the childhood roots of authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism, significantly, serves not just as a source of valuable advice for parents and caretakers but as a lens through which we can understand the rise of authoritarianism in different times and places. After all, childcare isn’t idiosyncratic – people adopt approaches based in tradition, culture, religion, law, and political and scientific views. Trump and other aggressive-authoritarians are products of their familial/childhood environments, but these environments themselves are shaped by larger political and cultural forces.

It appears, though this remains somewhat speculative, that the Christian Right in the US over the past several decades has intuitively grasped the importance of abusive “childrearing” to the continued growth of their political movement. In his 2009 Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, Max Blumenthal, drawing heavily on Philip Greven’s 1990 Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment,⁶ suggests that the “childrearing” movement led by James Dobson of Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council has worked to mold two generations of authoritarian adults. Dobson is

a quintessential strict father whose influence has been compared by journalistic observers to that of a cult leader. Unlike most of his peers, Dobson had no theological credentials or religious training. He was a child psychologist who burst onto the scene with a best-selling book that urged beating children into submission in order to restore the respect for God and government that America’s youth had lost during the 1960s. (10)

In fact, Dobson’s methods were explicitly conceived as a “backlash against liberalism” (61), aimed at creating authoritarian footsoldiers. As he began his crusade in the 1960s, he attributed challenges to authority to the influence of the popular pediatrician Dr. Spock, arguing that “we have sacrificed this generation on the altar of overindulgence, permissiveness, and smother-love” (quoted on p. 56). Dobson “envisioned himself as Spock’s foil,” believing that

if his teachings reached a wide enough audience, they would forge a new generation of loyal counter-revolutionaries that would return America to the golden days of the 1950s – where boys once again wore pants, girls wore skirts, and, as he wrote, ‘Farmer John could take his sassy son out to the back forty acres and get his mind straight’. (56-7)

Indeed,

the issues that he claims galvanized his activism – abortion and the gay rights movement – were practically irrelevant to Dobson when he first entered the political arena. In the beginning, Dobson was fixated on inducing the submission of unruly children to authority. (53)

Blumenthal discusses Dobson’s two major manuals, Dare to Discipline (1970) and The Strong-Willed Child (1992). While the first “urged parents to beat their young children” (57), the second “extended his advocacy of corporal punishment to unruly household pets” (58) - since both children and dogs were “preternaturally prone to rebellion…both should be ‘crushed’ with violent force” (58). Dobson would have liked to apply his disciplinary methods beyond the family sphere, but had to settle for the time being for offering suggestions to those in power: “Because student radicals were beyond the reach of parental authority, Dobson outlined a ten-point plan that school administrators and law enforcement officers could use to induce their submission instead” (58).

Blumenthal suggests that Dobson’s social-engineering project has found some success: his “draconian methods for ending childhood rebellion…have helped cultivate the authoritarian sensibility of the radical right-wing movement he commands today” (53). As Greven argues in Spare the Child, “Dobson’s violent child-rearing methods served an underlying purpose, producing droves of activists embarked on an authoritarian mission.” In Greven’s words:

The persistent ‘conservatism’ of American politics and society is rooted in large part in the physical violence done to children. The roots of this persistent tilt towards hierarchy, enforced order, and absolute authority – so evident in Germany earlier in [the twentieth] century and in the radical right in America today – are always traceable to aggression against children’s wills and bodies, to the pain and the suffering they experience long before they, as adults, confront the complex issues of the polity, the society, and the world. (quoted on p. 62; emphasis added)

Anecdotally, many of the leaders of the US rightwing, particularly the Christian Right, were themselves victims of childhood abuse. (Greven opens his book with quotations from Billy Graham’s mother and George H.W. Bush’s brother discussing their fathers’ physical punishments.) I’ve already discussed Trump and his associates. Dobson himself was abused by his mother, according to Blumenthal. Newt Gingrich’s stepfather “savagely beat him and his mother” (87). Mike Huckabee, as Blumenthal describes, celebrates parental abuse in his public performances:

The only way to heal the nation’s pain, Huckabee proclaimed, was to mete it out to the young rebellious ones. Again, he channeled Dobson. ‘Yes, I do believe the old-fashioned ways of discipline are good ones’, he remarked with a wry smile. ‘I was the recipient of quite a few. I tell people “My father was the most patriotic man I think I knew. Utter patriotism. He laid on the stripes; I saw stars.” True American patriotism!’ For the first time, Huckabee’s enraptured audience burst into spontaneous applause. (261) ⁷

The results obtained by Samuel and Pearl Oliner in their extensive research on altruism in the Holocaust, described in the 1988 The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, suggest – consistent with Horney’s arguments - a strong link between the environments in which children are raised and their adult tendency toward altruism or authoritarianism. (I should note that these findings also confirm Horney’s sense that it isn’t parents’ or caretakers’ political views or moral and civic pedagogy that are paramount in raising children capable of altruism and resistance to authoritarianism, but the environment of tolerance, compassion, and respect in which they grow and learn.)

It’s not a big stretch to hypothesize, based on this knowledge, that some cultures and institutions (particularly schools) will tend on average to produce more authoritarian adults, and from there to surmise that some people have grasped this and intentionally designed childhood environments with the end goal of creating authoritarians. This sort of authoritarian social engineering is precisely what Dobson and his movement have openly advocated and practiced. In this context, we need to pay close attention to the fact that a representative of the Prince family, long a major funder of Dobson’s organization, is the current Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

The psychological and political ramifications of this abusive culture are many. There’s a feedback loop in which childhood abuse feeds what Blumenthal calls a “culture of crisis” in the Christian Right, grounded in what Christopher Stroop describes as “an essentially cynical view of human nature as hopelessly corrupt.” This view in turn encourages personal submission to authoritarian-hierarchical and anti-democratic movements and ideologies and engenders a profound contempt for humanity. Naturally, this all justifies perpetuating the abuse of children, and on it goes.

Horney’s and Greven’s work offers important insights for today. First, and most important, is their appreciation of the centrality of childhood in the formation of the aggressive-authoritarian character, which enables a far richer – and more compassionate – understanding of contemporary authoritarians and what drives them. Second is their recognition that a didactic approach to cultivating anti-authoritarian resistance is insufficient, while treating children with respect, kindness, consideration, and justice is not only the key to their own happiness and ability to cope with trying political conditions but necessary for the struggle against authoritarianism to succeed. Last is their awareness of how authoritarian approaches to raising children can be consciously promoted and institutionalized by rightwing movements for political purposes, creating a vicious cycle of abuse and justification from which it’s difficult for people to break free.

¹ Herbert Marcuse, debating with Erich Fromm from an orthodox Freudian position he mistakenly took for politically radical, cited Freud’s “hypothesis” about the role of the so-called Death Instinct in the first World War:

“Think of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world,” Freud argued. “Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled placehunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also guilty?” (quoted in Marcuse’s 1965 “The Social Implications of Freudian Revisionism”)

² Solnit argues for a “democracy of mind and heart, as well as economy and polity,” making a compelling case for the connection between political-social-economic justice and epistemic justice and the importance of the latter to our individual well-being:

Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. This is about a need for which we hardly have language or at least not a familiar conversation.

³ Horney offers that a boy’s conflicts “will be heightened, of course, if his home is one in which the ‘sissy’ is despised and physical cowardice regarded as shameful,” noting that “whatever his parents’ attitude, that of society remains the same…he cannot avoid the conclusion that a man, if called, must fight for his country.” Her general counsel: “The boy needs help in facing his real fears and working out greater self-respect and assurance of his personal worth and of his dignity” (232).

⁴ Again, the argument isn’t that explicit moral, political, and historical lessons have no value, but that they’re insufficient and far less powerful when children exposed to these teachings are themselves treated disrespectfully or abusively.

⁵ One problem Horney didn’t address in this article is the fact that the psychological problems of caretakers and teachers tend to make it difficult for them, even when they honestly try to help children to become capable of rejecting and resisting authoritarianism, to avoid repeating the very behaviors – disrespect, abuse, neglect, criticism, control, etc. – that undermine the valuable message. More generally, Horney understood that recognizing and addressing one’s own psychological issues, including but not limited to one’s own authoritarian tendencies, was essential to being able to raise anti-authoritarian children.

⁶ He could equally have discussed Alice Miller’s 1991 For Your Own Good, which Greven cites repeatedly and describes in Spare the Child (xiii) as “of profound importance to anyone who cares about reshaping the ways in which we rear and discipline children.” (I'll have much more to say about this book in future posts.)

⁷ I should note that while there’s no public evidence of which I’m aware that Huckabee was an abusive parent, his daughter’s authoritarianism and his son’s involvement in the torture death of a dog, as well as their father’s public pronouncements, suggest that they may have been raised in a violent, or at least authoritarian, environment. I should also note that Huckabee plagiarized this line from Oral Roberts. In his 1952 Oral Roberts’ Life Story, he wrote “Papa believed in the stars and stripes. He put on the stripes and Vaden [his brother] and I saw the stars” (quoted in Greven, Spare the Child, 26).

Quotes of the day – Nuit debout

Various committees have sprung up to debate a new constitution, society, work, and how to occupy the square with more permanent wooden structures on a nightly basis. Whiteboards list the evening’s discussions and activities – from debates on economics to media training for the demonstrators. “No hatred, no arms, no violence,” was the credo described by the “action committee”.

“This must be a perfect mini-society,” a member of the gardening committee told the crowd. A poetry committee has been set up to document and create the movement’s slogans. “Every movement needs its artistic and literary element,” said the poet who proposed it.

Demonstrators regularly help other protest movements, such as a bank picket over revelations in the Panama Papers or a demonstration against migrant evictions in the north of Paris.

[Source]

Eloïse est professeure de physique-chimie dans un collège. Elle arpente la place de la République avec un panneau annonçant « Sciences debout : posez-moi vos questions ». Pourquoi cette démarche ? « Parce que la science est à tout le monde », sourit-elle. Avec ce vaste espoir de réappropriation (de l’espace, de la parole et du pouvoir) qu’incarne la Nuit debout, Eloïse ne voit pas pourquoi sa discipline resterait « cantonnée dans un laboratoire », victime d’une image élitiste.

[Source]

“A Dream of Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard”

Will wonders never cease? A long article about Rojava in the New York Times Magazine.

Quotes of the day – On the contrary, Judge Doumar, I believe you do have a problem understanding Title IX

Judge Robert Doumar:

“Your case in Title IX is gone, by the way. I have chosen to dismiss Title IX. I decided that before we started.”

“I have no problem understanding Title IX. It’s specific and exact.”

“I am sorry for the Department of Justice. Sanctuary cities. Where are we going?”

“Where the U.S is going scares me. It really scares me.”

“Maybe I am just old fashioned.”

Gavin Grimm:

“All I want to do is be a normal child and use the restroom in peace. I did not ask to be this way, and it’s one of the most difficult things anyone can face. This could be your child. I’m just a human. I’m just a boy.”

[Source] [Source] [Source]

Title IX covers trans and “gender nonconforming” people

Last April, the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education issued a guidance stating explicitly that: “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity and OCR accepts such complaints for investigation.”

I’m somehow just learning about this now, and I have several thoughts:

First, it’s big, and it was a great development, certainly for the trans activists who no doubt led the push for this explicit guidance. The full significance will probably only gradually become apparent.

Second, however, it’s a remarkable development not only for trans people but for everyone. The inclusion of protection for “nonconformity” with stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity potentially affects everyone in an educational community. That’s why I’m a bit bothered by how the guidance was narrowly framed in many reports online as a victory for or recognition of trans people. The way protection against discrimination based on “gender nonconformity” was presented, moreover, for the most part tended to reify the very stereotypical categories from which the policy is meant to protect people. It was almost as though conformity-nonconformity was being portrayed as a spectrum, with trans people at the extreme end of nonconformity. In this way, it was suggested that “nonconforming” people were a subset of the trans spectrum, further reinforcing the idea that the guidance applied essentially to trans people.

Not only do I not believe this is an accurate view of identity and presentation – “conformity” with stereotypical gendered behavior has no necessary or inherent relation to being trans, and vice versa - but it’s inaccurate insofar as the text of the guidance makes clear that any discrimination related to stereotypes, including against characteristics or behavior which are seen as conforming, is prohibited:

It also prohibits gender‐based harassment, which may include acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on sex or sex‐stereotyping. Thus, it can be sex discrimination if students are harassed either for exhibiting what is perceived as a stereotypical characteristic for their sex, or for failing to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity. (pp. 7-8)

Of note, the guidance has this to say about discrimination based on sexual orientation:

Although Title IX does not prohibit discrimination based solely on sexual orientation, Title IX does protect all students, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, from sex discrimination. When students are subjected to harassment on the basis of their LGBT status, they may also…be subjected to forms of sex discrimination prohibited under Title IX. The fact that the harassment includes anti‐LGBT comments or is partly based on the target’s actual or perceived sexual orientation does not relieve a school of its obligation under Title IX to investigate and remedy overlapping sexual harassment or gender‐based harassment. (p. 8)

I’m surprised and disappointed that the coverage of the guidance by advocacy and civil rights organizations didn’t emphasize that the guidance is a victory for everyone and that it challenged the enforcement of stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. If nothing else, this could have been helpful in countering anti-trans propaganda, which often suggests that laws and policies protecting trans people work against, for example, feminist challenges to these stereotypes.

Third, I don’t care for the language of “conforming” and “nonconforming.” It suggests that the policy protects types of people rather than types of behavior or traits or interests, which minimizes the reality that people can’t be sorted in this way. While some characteristics are relatively stable, we’re all at different times behaving in ways that can be seen as either congruent or incompatible with gender stereotypes. Phyllis Schlafly’s actions, for example, have been in many ways gender “nonconforming” (and, like her gender “conforming” actions, would all be protected from discrimination following this guideline). It’s important to keep the focus on the characteristics and behaviors themselves.

It also tends to conceive of all characteristics or behaviors as inherently gendered. A kid plays video games, is a vegan, enjoys crafts, wears their hair long or short, wears a skirt, plays hockey, is sensitive and nurturing, joins the drama club or the debate team,… - none of this is by any means necessarily an element of gender presentation, conforming or nonconforming. It could be, subjectively, for some individuals, but it could also be kids just living their lives as who they are and doing what they enjoy. Just because others want to see it as gendered and use it as a basis for policing and discrimination, it doesn’t follow that the choices and behaviors have a gendered meaning for the person involved. The choices and behaviors themselves are generic. The DOE guidance generally seems good and neutral in its language – e.g., “exhibiting what is perceived as a stereotypical characteristic for their sex” – but this subtlety often tends to get lost in the larger conversation, especially given the suggestiveness of the idea of “nonconformity.”

The notion of “nonconforming” is also misleading in that it implies that dress or behavior which fits with existing stereotypes is “conforming.” In our culture, nonconformity is valued, which can lead to those behaviors, interests, or traits regarded as stereotypical, and the people exhibiting them, being viewed with disdain. (Since we live in a patriarchal culture with a feminist opposition, being seen as conforming to “feminine” stereotypes can be especially scorned.)

As noted above, people make choices for a number of reasons, and not all choices viewed as “nonconforming” are rebellious (in fact, some might be a means of conforming to a different reference group). Of those that are rebellious, the rebellion can have various meanings (for example, it can be a refusal to act in accordance with any rules, or with gender roles specifically, or a specific choice to live according to your own interests, needs, and desires, and so on). And, as I’ve argued, without knowing another person’s subjective reasons for acting in ways that appear to “conform” to stereotypes, we can’t know that they’re actually conforming rather than living freely as themselves. And the idea that simply acting in ways that have been stereotyped itself contributes to oppression serves to delegitimize especially traits and behaviors associated with “femininity”: caring, emotional sensitivity, etc. Instead of concerning ourselves with questions of “conformity,” we should be thinking about choices and actions in terms of our values.

The art of the gouge/model of the market

“Excessive on its face, such largesse at the top is all the more appalling for the widespread poverty and debt enabling it.”

- “The art of the gouge: How NYU squeezes billions from our students—and where that money goes”

“The actual scandal of ‘The Art of the Gouge’ is that even if NYU is a particularly egregious offender of basic decency and honesty, most of the report’s indictments could apply equally to nearly any American university.”

- “‘The Art of the Gouge’: NYU as a Model for Predatory Higher Education”

“[N]eoliberal rationality disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities...and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus.”

- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

Quote of the day

“Reverend Pinckney, as a colleague in ministry, was not just opposed to the flag, he was opposed to the denial of Medicaid expansion, where now the majority of the state is opposing Medicaid expansion where six out of 10 black people live. He was opposed to voter suppression, voter ID in South Carolina. He was opposed to those who have celebrated the ending of the Voting Rights Act, or the gutting of Section 4, which means South Carolina is no longer a preclearance state, and the very district that he served in is vulnerable right now. He was opposed to the lack of funding for public education. He wanted to see living wages raised.

So I would say to my colleagues, let’s take down the flag—to the governor—but also, let’s put together an omnibus bill in the name of the nine martyrs. And all of the things Reverend Pinckney was standing for, if we say we love him and his colleagues, let’s put all of those things in a one big omnibus bill and pass that and bring it to the funeral on Friday or Saturday, saying we will expand Medicaid to help not only black people, but poor white Southerners in South Carolina, because it’s not just the flag. Lee Atwater talked about the Southern strategy, where policy was used as a way to divide us. And if we want harmony, we have to talk about racism, not just in terms of symbol, but in the substance of policies. The flag went up to fight policies. If we’re going to bring it down, we’re also going to have to change policies, and particularly policies that create disparate impact on black, brown and poor white people.

…This flag is vulgar. And it took 52 years, after ’62, to get it down. It was raised because of policy. In civil rights, when Shwerner, Chaney and—excuse me, when the girls were burned up and blown up in the Birmingham [church], and President Kennedy was killed, we got the Civil Rights Act, an omnibus bill to deal with civil rights. When Jimmie Lee Jackson and others were killed in Bloody Sunday, we got the Voting Rights Act—Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. When Dr. King was killed, we got the Fair Housing Act, that made it so you could sue people if they didn't allow you in their community. To suggest that nine lives and taking a symbol down is sufficient to honor nine deaths, nine—nine, nine deaths—is to diminish those lives.

What I’m saying to our brothers and sisters, brothers who are on the phone this morning, is look at what Reverend Pinckney stood for and those members at Emanuel fought for. They fought for more gun control. They fought for Medicaid expansion. They fought for public education. They fought to raise the living wage to—the minimum wage to a living wage. By the way, you deny Medicaid expansion, people die. People die. You deny living wages and create poverty and resegregate the public, people die. That’s been proven in a study by the Columbia University. And so, what I’m suggesting, Amy, is we ought to look at all of these issues. We ought to—and we can’t say the flag is just a start and this honors them. It does not fully honor these deaths.

And if we’re going to start and then wait and then politicize and be political—Lee Atwater said, in an infamous radio interview, he said that we stopped talking about race in a very open way, using the N-word, and we started talking about policies like tax cuts, states’ rights, forced busing. He said they sound benign, but they actually have a negative impact on the lives of African Americans, and they promote this idea that Southern whites—the problem of Southern whites is rooted in the advances of black people. That’s what this young man was, in essence, saying. He was, in essence, saying, you know, somebody’s taking over his country.

And so, I’m calling on persons, Democrats and Republicans—we’re calling the NAACP—if you really want to honor the death, these vicious deaths, then, like we’ve had to do with other deaths in this country, let’s have some substantive policy change. Why not name the Voting Rights Restoration Act, since the Supreme Court has gutted it and we haven’t fixed that in two years, why not name it the Emanuel Nine Voting Rights Act Restoration? And why not every Republican and Democrat come out and say, “We are for fixing the Voting Rights Act, because without preclearance, the very seat that Reverend Pinckney held is in jeopardy”?

Those are the kinds of substantive conversations we need to have. And gun control ought to be among those, as well. And we can do this in an omnibus way. We don’t have to wait another year or two years. We just have to have the moral courage to do it, and we have to follow what the Constitution of South Carolina already says. It’s already in the South Carolina Constitution that we should be concerned about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and doing what is best for all of the people.

- William J. Barber II, on Democracy Now!:

Catholic employment ethics

I posted last month about the church finally accepting the resignation of a Missouri bishop, Robert Finn:

Finn…waited six months before notifying police about the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, whose computer contained hundreds of lewd photos of young girls taken in and around churches where he worked. Ratigan was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography charges.

Finn pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failure to report suspected abuse and was sentenced to two years’ probation in 2012. Ever since, he has faced pressure from local Roman Catholics to step down, with some parishioners petitioning Francis to remove him from the diocese.

It was the first case in the US of a bishop being removed for such an offense, and only came about after a long campaign of public pressure. But really, he was just protecting a child pornographer. That’s hardly as serious as tweeting anti-hate messages:

A priest claims he lost his job as director of Seton Hall campus ministry because of a pro-LGBT Facebook post he made.*

Rev. Warren Hall posted on Twitter Friday afternoon that he was “fired from SHU for posting a pic on FB supporting LGBT ‘NO H8’. I'm sorry it was met with this response. I'll miss my work here.”

…

Jim Goodness, a spokesman for the Archdiocese, declined to comment on the specifics of why Hall was removed from the campus ministry position, but did confirm that Hall's “term as director of campus ministry is ending.”

Goodness said Hall will still serve as a priest in the Archdiocese of Newark, but will have a new assignment.

…

Current and former students replied to his tweet with angry reactions to the news.

“Unfathomable,” user Vito Amato wrote on Twitter. “No better representative of my alma mater than you, Father.”

Hall did not immediately respond to a request for an interview, but did post on Twitter that his supporters should use the incident as a reason to have discussions on LGBT issues within Catholic colleges.

Priorities.

* Of course we can’t be sure this was the reason, but it does seem in character for the institution.

“Blasphemy is just debate”: a report from yesterday’s PEN forum on “Charlie Hebdo and Challenges to Free Expression”

Before I cover the content of the discussion – which was lively and insightful – I want to note that my hopes weren’t fulfilled: none of the group who chose to boycott and protest PEN’s award to Charlie Hebdo accepted PEN’s invitation to take part in the panel discussion.

Now, I wouldn’t automatically attribute this to cowardice – I can think of a number of reasons people wouldn’t want to participate in public debates (though I expect that among the more than 200 protesters one or two debaters could have been found). But before making the introductions, the moderator read aloud a short joint statement from the protesters, attempting to justify their refusal on the grounds that the forum should be for people to get to learn about Charlie Hebdo and what they do. So declining the invitation to participate does seem to stem from cowardice of some sort (…possibly indicating a budding realization that their claims about CH were ignorant?), rooted either in the fear of having to try to defend their smears in person to CH staff members and those knowledgeable about the magazine or in the fear of discovering that they were very publicly and embarrassingly wrong in the first place. It’s also just…strange. Last night’s gala afforded them only the option of protesting symbolically by boycotting or refusing to applaud the award; but the forum would have provided the opportunity to share and exchange views. Why would professional communicators choose the former? (While I was disappointed by this choice, I continue to hope that at least some of them, after some reflection and research, will come forward and acknowledge that they had misunderstood and mischaracterized the magazine.)

In any case, their refusal was unfortunate, since it was the protesters who most needed to learn about and understand Charlie Hebdo. It was also ironic in that, as I’ll discuss below, one of the major themes of the discussion was that at the very heart of their work is a desire to provoke public debate. The protesters’ refusal to engage in discussion and debate with those they oppose wasn’t just disrespectful to the murdered and surviving staff of the magazine – and it was that – but also contrary to a basic principle of free expression. Defending free expression can’t just be about defending people’s right to express themselves, but has also to involve calling for their voices to be heard and engaged with, for people to listen to what they’re saying, to take their ideas seriously.

So…on to the discussion. The participants were the moderator; PEN Executive Director Suzanne Nossel; director of the NYU Institute of French Studies Ed Berenson, who provided an introduction locating CH in the historical tradition of French satire; Charlie Hebdo’s editor Gérard Biard; and CH film critic Jean-Baptiste Thoret. I’ll talk about a few of the major themes.

Understanding Charlie Hebdo

The values promoted by CH shouldn’t have to be emphasized, but in view of the baseless attacks from some PEN members and others, it was useful to reiterate them. The discussants spoke about CH’s commitment from the start to fighting racism and all forms of discrimination – against not just racial and ethnic minorities but women, LGBT people, immigrants, and poor people.

They underlined that their emphasis was on politics and power, and that their principle targets had long been the French Right, and especially the far-Right Front National. Part of a long satirical tradition, they seek to attack political power – institutions, representatives, icons. Religious institutions, representatives, and icons are only a small subset of the “sacred” phenomena they attack - these also include political parties, nations, and so on. They’re about defying and contesting power in any form.

The discussion returned again and again to their mission to provoke thought and debate. The people who murdered their colleagues and commit other such crimes, they argued, don’t want debate. (They pointed out that the recent attack in Copenhagen actually targeted a debate.) For all they know, they could be murdering those who agree with them – what’s important is shutting down any discussion or debate. Their project isn’t a religious but a political one: to impose their views on others and silence dissenters. In contrast, the CH staff see their work – including blasphemous cartoons – as intended to contest power and open debate.

On differences between the US and France concerning free expression and criticism of religion

The conversation covered important differences between US and French law and culture, specifically between secularism as practiced in the US and laïcité in France and between US and French laws surrounding freedom of expression. Critics of the magazine in the US often seem to ignore the difference between US secularism (or “secularism”) and French laïcité. Laïcité as they described goes beyond the separation of church and state – it understands the public sphere and political discourse as a common space in which religion has no role or status, and outside of which religion (for some) is practiced, and respected, privately. In this context, religion is seen as intruding on the public sphere and publicly mocking religious iconography and practices as political targets is acceptable. This can be difficult to understand here in the US because our system is so different in theory and in practice. The US system wasn’t really discussed at the forum, but as I’ve argued many times it’s based on a bogus sort of compromise in which institutionalized religion is (in theory) kept separate from the state, but religious claims and identities suffuse political discourse and public policy, all while people are expected to refrain from criticizing or mocking religion because it’s an allegedly personal and emotional matter. Whatever the problems with laïcité in practice (and Berenson hinted at some, although unfortunately there wasn’t time to return to them), the US system with its tradition and practice of deference to “personal” religion even as religion colonizes public life is ridiculous and anti-democratic.

In any event, people from outside France should seek to understand their system before pontificating about what is or isn’t within the bounds of acceptable discourse there. I think this also helps to understand the perspective of CH a bit better. They see religion in highly personal and private terms. It only comes to be of interest to them, and a target for their critique, when it improperly invades the democratic public sphere and makes political claims to status and power. So their attacks aren’t on individual believers or their dignity but on religion as a political force. They see believers not as representatives of, or represented by, a religion but as equal participants in a shared democratic sphere.¹

Another significant difference discussed is that, while the US has few legal prohibitions on speech, France has speech laws prohibiting, for example, inciting racial or religious hatred, denying the Holocaust, or trivializing the slave trade (I had been unaware of this last one). The panelists differed about some aspects of these laws. Berenson was strongly opposed to all of these prohibitions. Biard disagreed, arguing that there was a meaningful difference between satirizing religion and denying historical facts. Thoret talked about some of the unintended consequences of such laws in this age of social media. Banning language and images from the public sphere and institutional channels, he said, can drive them underground, in a sort of “return of the repressed,” especially into social media where they’re most often seen by the young. The anti-Semite Dieudonné, for example, was removed from French television, and quickly discovered the immensely greater reach of YouTube. Thoret contended that the ideas have to be fought in the public space.

On self-censorship

The problem of self-censorship was raised in two contexts. First, in relation to media outlets and their decisions about whether or not to publish the CH cover cartoon from after the attack or other controversial images from the magazine. All were in agreement, I think, that they believed the media should have shown the images – not without context, of course, but accompanied by relevant contextual information – as a newsworthy subject, as an opening to discussion and debate, and as a demonstration of commitment to the value of free expression.

Once again, they refused to accept the designation of “special” defenders of free expression and other important values, arguing that everyone can and should actively defend them. Biard discussed how the magazine’s original decision in 2007 to publish the Danish cartoons (which they presented thoughtfully, accompanied by commentary) was taken in response to the firing of the editor of another French paper who had published them. It was an act of solidarity when other publications had chosen self-censorship. It’s sad to imagine how things might have turned out had more than one other publication joined them at the time…

Self-censorship was also talked about in relation to individuals. Panelists were concerned about the threats and violence, and the lack of solidarity, leading writers and artists to self-censor. While they made it plain that the attack and public responses haven’t led them to change anything about their approach, they worried about self-censorship creeping in. It’s an especially pernicious sort of censorship since people aren’t always fully conscious of the fact that they’re doing it.

On reading images

Another theme was the question of the different nature of, and complexities in interpreting, verbal vs. visual commentary, words vs. images. Biard and Thoret spoke passionately about the general problem of “illiteracy” (as Caroline Fourest put it in a recent interview) with regard to images, an illiteracy not limited to cartoons or humorous or satirical images but extending to all visual representations. Biard talked about how children are surrounded with images from the time they’re born – on television, in advertising,… - without knowing how to go about interpreting them, and how they’re never really taught how to read them. Thoret, who teaches about film, noted that he’s found his film students often lack the skills to critically analyze images. Both called for public attention to this problem (which has enormous political reach given the use of images by the powerful) and education in reading and interpreting visual representations.

They also alluded to a number of problems with their critics’ attempts to interpret images pulled from their immediate and larger (linguistic, cultural, political, historical) context. Part of the problem, of course, is a basic lack of skill in reading images themselves and of awareness that this skill is lacking or needed. But the difficulties of reading decontextualized images from other cultures, which should be obvious, have been all but ignored, even denied, by the PEN protesters, who’ve arrogantly insisted that not only can they definitively interpret the decontextualized images but that they can speak for people in the French political context.

The moderator asked an important question about the globalization of culture and the issues that can arise when images are seen or used outside of their original context. Biard acknowledged that this was increasingly the case, but cautioned against responses to this phenomenon that would put all of the burden on creators to preemptively address all possible misinterpretations (which would be impossible in any case). He argued that an artist envisioning and trying to guard against all of the ways their work could be misread, intentionally or unintentionally, or cause anyone offense, wouldn’t be able to produce anything. I think this returns us to the question of literacy in interpreting images and the complexities involved with trying to read them across different contexts. Of course creative people have a responsibility to minimize the possibility of misreading and misrepresentation of their work (and I’ve discussed examples of CH staff demonstrating this responsibility), but all of us need to be aware of these problems and, most important, to use caution and humility in interpreting or discussing unfamiliar images.

They also pointed out that CH isn’t just a publication of cartoons. The images appear in the context of words and articles, and are as much a subject of editorial discussion and debate as the written pieces they accompany. Critics, however, tend to treat them as though they’re freestanding, and worse, to focus only on the cover images rather than those within the stories themselves. Moreover, people aren’t, they emphasized, forced to buy or read Charlie Hebdo. Thoret described his dislike of soccer and wish to avoid all things soccer.² But he’s not compelled to buy soccer magazines any more than people are compelled to buy CH. This wasn’t of course an argument that consumption decisions should trump democratic debate. But it was worthwhile to note, because reading some of the articles attacking CH you’d almost be led to believe this small satirical publication had the power to demand that it be read by every person in France.

On “Je suis Charlie”

They also talked about their response to the support for the magazine following the massacre, particularly from some of the institutions they’ve targeted most viciously.³ They stated that they’ve never been naïve – they’ve always known many of these expressions of support were ersatz and politically self-serving and would evaporate in a matter of months or even days. The film critic Thoret, in keeping with their emphasis on dissension and debate, also expressed his discomfort with the idea of a globally shared opinion, which reminded him of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I think the most poignant remarks concerned their response to the “Je suis Charlie” supporters whose support was and is genuine. Naturally rejecting iconic status, with all of the anti-democratic bad faith it entails, and insisting that they’re not the “owners” of the universal values they defend and champion, they called for those who shared their values not to leave it to them but to take action themselves:

OK, you’re Charlie. So take a pencil, take a pen. Stand up for these values…. ‘Je suis Charlie’. OK, so do it.

Thoret said that he dislikes that they have been singled out as especially courageous, arguing that many if not most people can and do also show courage in these situations.

On the history of French satire

I’m going to close where the discussion opened. Ed Berenson opened the discussion by situating Charlie Hebdo in the bawdy, irreverent, anti-clerical tradition of French political-religious satire dedicated to skewering all claimants to power. (These two articles, which I plan to discuss in an upcoming post, go beyond France to fit their work in an older, global tradition.)

One aspect of this history discussed by Berenson that I’d forgotten or somehow never knew was that Voltaire wrote a play in 1741 called Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet. I impatiently await delivery of the 2013 translation.

Some last thoughts

I was already favorably predisposed toward Charlie Hebdo going into the forum, but I was impressed by Biard and Thoret especially given the stupidity of the protest here; Biard’s opening line - “We don’t eat children, and we don’t eat believers” – was funny, but shouldn’t have been. It’s terrible to be ignorantly accused of being the opposite of what you actually are, and I thought they handled it remarkably well. They seemed deeply committed to challenging power in any and every guise and to provoking thought and debate, and talked about their continuing hope that the current controversy helps to bring about more debate. This made the protesters’ blanket refusal to join the panel all the more aggravating and embarrassing.

And one last note. Almost every piece I’ve read, not only the attacks on Charlie Hebdo but the defenses too, includes some line or other about how the author dislikes and won’t attempt to defend the cartoons. They’re puerile, juvenile, unsubtle, unintelligent, ugly, and just “not funny.” I’ve never been a fan of cartoons, including those meant as political satire, but I’ve now seen numerous images from CH and I like them. I’m sure there are many I wouldn’t care for, but overall, yes, I find them interesting, thought-provoking, not exceptionally ugly, and often funny.

¹ I’ll note that their views are less extreme than my own on this subject. While of course I share their concern about religion as an explicitly political force, I also have a problem with “private” belief and the epistemic practices associated with faith. I think faith, even when ostensibly private, always has political consequences.

² He mentioned one player’s name, and then expressed his annoyance that he even knew it, since it was occupying space in his brain that could be used to much better purpose. I know that annoyance very well.

³ They laughed about the ringing of the bells at Notre Dame in their honor, but correctly pointed out in response to a comment from the moderator that ultimately the Pope did not speak in support of them.

A war on the straight world order

If I were teaching right now, I would assign this:



Very much in the spirit of Look, A White!

It’s terrifying for the (so-called) beneficiaries of the order to hear that the others don’t seek, and even reject, their inclusion or tolerance – that they impudently challenge the very premises of the hierarchical order itself. That challenge is exactly what’s happening and needs to keep happening.

On to the anthropocentric world order...

(Via Godlessness in Theory.)

History has shown us again and again

Two more analyses of the US government’s longstanding policy of antidemocratic interference in Venezuela:

James Petras’ “US and Venezuela: Decades of Defeats and Destabilization” (I don’t agree with everything in the article) discusses what a coup in Venezuela would mean for the country and the region:

What the US has in mind is not merely a ‘palace coup’ in which the democratic incumbents are ousted and replaced by US clients. Washington wants to go far beyond a change in personnel, beyond a friendly regime amenable to providing unconditional backing to the US foreign policy agenda…

A coup and post-coup regime is only the first step toward a systematic and comprehensive reversal of the socio-economic and political transformations of the past 16 years!

Heading the list will be the crushing of the mass popular community organizations which will oppose the coup. This will be accompanied by a mass purge, of all representative institutions, the constitutionalist armed forces, police and nationalist officials in charge of the oil industry and other public enterprises.

All the major public welfare programs in education, health, housing and low cost retail food outlets, will be dismantled or suffer major budget cuts.

The oil industry and dozens of other publicly owned enterprises and banks will be privatized and denationalized. US MNC will be the main beneficiaries. The agrarian land reform will be reversed: recipients will be evicted and the land returned to the landed oligarchs.

Given how many of the Venezuelan working class and rural poor will be adversely affected and given the combative spirit which permeates popular culture, the implementation of the US backed neo-liberal agenda will require prolonged, large-scale repression. This means, tens of thousands of killings, arrests and incarceration.

The US coup- masters and their Venezuelan proxies will unleash all their pent-up hostility against what they will deem the blood purge necessary to punish, in Henry Kissinger’s infamous phrase, “an irresponsible people” who dared to affirm their dignity and independence.

The US backing of violence in the run-up to the February 2015 coup will be escalated in the run-up to the inevitable next coup.

Contemporary US imperial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya and past US backed bloody military coups installing neo-liberal regimes in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay a few decades past, demonstrate that Washington places no limits on how many tens of thousands of lives are destroyed, how many millions are uprooted, if it is ‘necessary’ to secure imperial dominance.

Independent regional alliances would be threatened:

According to Washington’s domino theory, Cuba will be more susceptible to pressure if it is cut-off from Venezuela’s subsidized oil-for-medical services agreement. Ecuador and Bolivia will be vulnerable. Regional integration will be diluted or replaced by US directed trade agreements. Argentina’s drift to the right will be accelerated. The US military presence will be enlarged beyond Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and Central America. Radical anti-imperialist ideology will be replaced by a revised form of “pan-Americanism”, a euphemism for imperial primacy.

Dave Lindorff’s “Venezuela, the Latest ‘National Security Threat’” emphasizes that “anti-democratic tactics used abroad inevitably find their way home”:

The real threat to national security in Venezuela and around the world today is the government in Washington. And the US is not just a threat to the security of the peoples of the world, whether in third-world nations, in Russia and China, or in the ostensible allied nations of Europe. It is a threat to the national security of the people of the United States too.

History has shown us again and again that repressive and anti-democratic tactics used abroad inevitably find their way home, where they are then turned against the people of the home country. We’ve seen this happening with the militarization of US police, who now operate in most US communities as if they were occupying troops in a foreign country, carrying military weapons, shooting to kill, breaking into homes in night raids and using brutal force to make the most minor of arrests, treating ordinary citizens as criminals who have no right to speak or to challenge how they or a family member or friend are being treated. We’ve seen it in the massive expansion of domestic spying, and we’ve seen it in the corruption of the courts, where judges in national security trials now deny defendants even the right to present a real defense to a jury, and where higher courts give the government permission to violate almost every Constitutionally guaranteed right in the name of “combatting terrorism” or defending “national security” interests.

The many ways to lose your voice

Ophelia posted earlier today about Deeyah Khan’s article, “Women’s Voices Must Not Be Silenced.” It struck me because it touched on what I’ve been thinking about in recent weeks, especially since learning about the heartrending plight of Tamil writer Perumal Marugan last month. Khan argues:

We need to be able to guarantee the safety of all artists and activists for human rights, so that it no longer takes extraordinary courage to call for a better world – so that every person with the ability to imagine peace, equality, progress and justice can express their dreams and hopes without fear.

We tend to focus on the most desperate cases, on the bravest people who already write and continue writing in the face of threats, violence, and repression. My culture even tends to romanticize so-called artistic suffering, to the point that personal pain and political repression are thought to be the basis for and even a requirement of great art. But even the most courageous artists defending free expression don’t want to be martyrs. They want to live in a world in which there are no martyrs to free expression and in which voices aren’t lost. And there are so many ways to lose them.

If you’re raised to believe you have nothing to say, or nothing anyone wants to hear, your voice can be lost. If you’re ignored, your voice can be lost. If you’re abused or taught to fear and hide from the world, your voice can be lost. If you’re not taught how to read or to express yourself, your voice can be lost. If you’re hungry or malnourished, your voice can be lost. If you’re led to believe that writing isn’t something people like you should do – because you’re a boy, because you’re a girl, because you’re black, because you’re poor – your voice can be lost. If you’re indoctrinated, punished for independent or “sinful” thought, and sheltered from new ideas, your voice can be lost. If you’re bullied and terrorized at school, your voice can be lost. If you’re traumatized as a child by war or mass violence, your voice can be lost. If you’re forced to spend your childhood working on a farm or in a factory or taking care of others, your voice can be lost. If no one in your world understands or believes in you, your voice can be lost. If you have nowhere to share your ideas, your voice can be lost.

If higher education isn’t affordable, your voice can be lost. If every day is a struggle just to survive or to care for your family, your voice can be lost. If you have to work long hours to support yourself or your family, your voice can be lost. If you’re homeless, your voice can be lost. If you’re unemployed and lose hope, your voice can be lost. If you’re terrorized and abused by your partner, your voice can be lost. If you don’t have access to books or research materials, your voice can be lost. If you have to migrate and never have secure legal status, your voice can be lost. If you’re a refugee, your voice can be lost. If you become sick and don’t have access to health care, your voice can be lost. If you have a disability your society can’t or won’t remedy or accommodate, your voice can be lost.

If your country’s government censors or destroys your work, your voice can be lost. If they threaten you or your family, your voice can be lost. If they spy on you, your voice can be lost. If they criminalize writing about the subjects you care about, your voice can be lost. If they block your access to the internet and to communities you could join, your voice can be lost. If they bar you from studying, your voice can be lost. If they secretly destroy your career, your voice can be lost. If they alienate you from colleagues and friends, your voice can be lost. If they blackmail you, your voice can be lost. If they blacklist you, your voice can be lost. If they make you think you’re hated, harmful, or irrelevant, your voice can be lost. If you’re denied reproductive rights, your voice can be lost. If they conscript you into the military, your voice can be lost. If they convince you that it’s futile to continue writing since your work will never be published or have an audience, your voice can be lost. If they (or a corporation) launch an underground campaign to smear and discredit you, your voice can be lost. If they imprison you, your voice can be lost. If they call you insane, if they institutionalize and forcibly drug you, your voice can be lost. If they beat or torture you, your voice can be lost. If your country is invaded and thrown into chaos, your voice can be lost.

If your society ignores, dismisses, or mocks you or your work because you’re a woman, or black, or gay, or undocumented,…, your voice can be lost. If you’re harassed or threatened or stalked online, your voice can be lost. If you’re raped, your voice can be lost. If your family threatens you, your voice can be lost. If they claim you’ve dishonored them, your voice can be lost. If they force you into marriage, your voice can be lost. If your community denies you the right to go out alone, to socialize, to travel, to experience life, your voice can be lost. If fanatics threaten you or your family, your voice can be lost. If they intimidate media outlets so they won’t publish your words, your voice can be lost. If they create a climate of fear by attacking and killing writers and artists, your voice can be lost. If they create a climate of fear by attacking and killing black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims,…, your voice can be lost. If they menacingly protest the presentation of your work, your voice can be lost. If they put a bounty on your head, your voice can be lost. If they convince you that things are only going to get worse for writers, your voice can be lost. If they force you into exile, your voice can be lost.

We should admire the bravery of people like Raif Badawi and his colleagues, like Avijit Roy and Rafida Ahmed Banna, like the staff at Charlie Hebdo, like the women listed by Deeyah Khan. We should honor those martyred for their courage. But we should understand that the struggle to realize the right of free expression involves so much more than these desperate battles, and so much more than the strength and resilience of individual writers. It involves the long struggle for a world that not only does away with the many forces that silence people but actively cultivates free expression. I think this also means greater empathy; it means not demanding some narrow model of heroism from writers.

I’ll leave you with Crystal Valentine, reciting her poem on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show this morning:

Venezuela: “Will they forget that they ever refused to lend a hand?”

Michael Albert has a new piece, “Whispering Venezuela?”, which tries to engage some sectors of the Left in an examination of the causes of their relative silence surrounding the ongoing efforts by the US government, in league with the Venezuelan Right, to destabilize and foment a coup against the country’s democratically elected government. Albert wonders about the reasons for this inaction in the face of a serious threat:

Neighborhoods organized, albeit with great difficulty, into councils, and councils into larger communes. Isn't this what an anti authoritarian, non violent, participation-advocating left wants?

Grass roots missions to solve social problems? Expanded education and health care? Democracy defended and plebiscites repeatedly taken and enacted? Do these and many other positive trends mean the Bolivarian project is flawless? Of course not. Do they mean that concern and criticism are unwarranted? Of course not. Do they mean the Bolivarian effort will succeed without doubt? Of course not. But the alternative to being a mindless sycophantic booster need not and should not be being silent or derogatory.

And in any case, why should Venezuela's project being less than perfect deter people from feeling outrage at the right wing and corporate opposition in Venezuela and at U.S. machinations seeking Venezuela's collapse? Why should the Venezuelan project being less than perfect prevent support for the best of Venezuela's efforts as well as constructive criticism of whatever one finds wanting?*

I think no serious progressive person would say the Venezuelan project being less perfect than some abstract textbook conception ought to terminate our support for it. Ought to silence our voices for it. Yet Venezuela being less than abstractly perfect often has had just that effect. Or so it seems to me. [emphasis added]

The article concludes sadly:

It is not the place of revolutionaries to watch world historic endeavors from the sidelines, either castigating aggressively or whispering unobtrusively due to thinking those endeavors aren't perfect, include errors, don't yet evidence complete and absolute freedom. Yes, someone looking on from the side, that way may, when the dust clears, in the socially worst case, be able to intone over the grave of the effort they rejected, ‘see, I told you so…I got it right. They failed’. What a sad kind of self affirmation that would be. And I have to wonder, in a vastly more preferable scenario wherein the rejected project persists and proceeds, will those same critics say, down the road, ‘I was horribly wrong’, or will they forget that they ever refused to lend a hand?

It’s quite perplexing to me that so many seem not to realize that in remaining silent on the matter they’re not only taking an extreme position on the Venezuelan government but in effect allying themselves with the US government and corporations and their view that they have the right to intervene in the democratic processes of Latin American countries. They’re in effect denying these countries’ claims to collective self-governance. They’re in effect choosing the alternative: a vicious neoliberal regime serving US-corporate interests. I can’t imagine that’s what anyone on the Left consciously wants, but it’s the scenario that history has well shown is made more likely by a policy of tacit abandonment.

A coup in Venezuela would have catastrophic consequences for democracy, for equality, for social justice and liberation (including secular) movements, for health, education, and other human rights, not just in Venezuela but throughout the region. People would die. They would be violently oppressed. Their life-chances would be sharply circumscribed. The power of Northern governments and corporations would be vastly increased, and their covert agencies more confident than ever in their ability to override democracy. If you make this more likely through your silence or inaction, you have no right to speak critically about Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973.

* Here’s a somewhat more critical piece on the government’s policies. And here’s a more general post by me about leftwing movements and governments in Latin America.

What a struggle

A couple of posts at Butterflies and Wheels called to mind one of my favorite sections in Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

[CHARLES DARWIN, 1809-1882]

If Darwin’s ill health was not, as some seem to think, a pretext to isolate himself with his work, neither was it, as Darwin had right to fear, an insuperable obstacle to his work. One reason why it did not prove fatal to his ambitions was the devotion and sympathy of his wife.

GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution

Beginning early in the day, after taking breakfast alone, and a walk, he worked in his study from eight until nine-thirty in the morning. Then he went into the drawing room with his family; he looked over the mail, and sometimes listened as a novel was read aloud, he resting on the sofa. (‘All that we can do’, he wrote, ‘is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio…) He returned to his study at ten-thirty and emerged again at noon. (…that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation, or at intervals, has to struggle for life or suffer great destruction…’) Then he took another walk, past the greenhouse, perhaps looking at an experimental plant, and then onto a gravel walk encircling an acre and a half of land, taking a specified number of turns, perhaps watching his children play, observing a bird, a flower. Or before he took too many spills, taking a canter on an old and gentle horse. (‘What a struggle must have gone on during long centuries’, he wrote, ‘between several kinds of trees each annually scattering its seeds by the thousands, what war between insect and insect – between insects, snails and other animals with bird and beasts of prey - ) After this, lunch was served to him. And then he read the newspapers and wrote letters. If they were lengthy he dictated them from rough drafts. At three o’clock, he went to rest in his bedroom, smoked a cigarette, lay on a sofa, and listened again to a novel read aloud to him by his wife. ( - all striving to increase, all feeding on each other, or on the trees, their seed and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of trees!’) This reading often put him to sleep so that he complained he had missed whole parts of books. His wife feared the cessation of her voice would wake him. (Of the Formica refescens, he wrote, ‘So utterly helpless are the masters, that when Huber shut up thirty of them without a slave…they did nothing; they could not even feed themselves and many perished of hunger’.)

At four he took another walk, and worked for one more hour. Then after another period of listening to a novel, he ate his dinner, played two games of backgammon with his wife, read some of a scientific book, and when tired finally, lay back again to listen while his wife read to him or played the piano. When he retired at ten or ten-thirty, he often lay awake for hours afterward in pain. On bad days, he could not work at all. (Of the process of selection he wrote: ‘…the struggle will almost invariably be most severe between individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food and are exposed to the same dangers’.)

In a letter to Lyell he claimed that he was bitterly mortified to conclude that ‘the race is for the strong’, but that he would be able to do little more than admire the strides others would make in science. (‘…the swiftest and the slimmest wolves’, he wrote, ‘would have the best chance of surviving and so be preserved or selected’.) Because of his own ill health, and that of his grandfather and his brother, and mother-in-law and aunt (And he wrote: ‘…so profound is our ignorance and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being, and we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms…’) and because of the sick headaches which his wife suffered (‘natural selection acts only by preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being…’ he wrote) he feared for the health of his children, of whom one died shortly after birth, one died in his childhood, and others suffered chronic illness.

In 1844, of his discovery of evolution, he recorded: ‘At last gleams of light have come and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that the species (it is like confessing a murder) are not immutable’. (145-6)

Constructive engagement, then and now

Tonight’s All In with Chris Hayes (I’ll post the video when it’s available)

Updated - here's the video:



featured a report on the grotesquely deferential trip made by Barack and Michelle Obama and a twenty-hypocrite contingent from the US to honor the dead Saudi Arabian king. Hayes showed video of Michelle Obama, in reportedly a planned gesture, stepping back to allow her husband to walk in front of her and greet the new king [!] and his delegation first. It also shows them in a sort of receiving line where, in another planned move, Michelle Obama waited for each Saudi Arabian man to make a move to shake her hand first rather than reaching out her hand (too aggressively!) and expecting all of them to shake it as they had her husband’s. Several of the men passed by without shaking her hand.

Imagine, just imagine, if the US government had requested that some of its representatives defer to similar attitudes about black people, expecting them to walk behind white people and to accept that white people might not wish to shake their hands. All of this,* including the transparent rationalizations for obsequiousness toward this oppressive regime - a slap in the face to the women, LGBT people,…, and democratic activists in the country – reminds me of Reagan’s policy of so-called “constructive engagement” toward apartheid South Africa.

An informational 2011 interview with US foreign policy historian David Schmitz concludes with this exchange:

Would you argue that Reagan’s foreign policy extended the life of the regime in South Africa?

Yes. It gave it life. It gave it hope that the United States would continue to stick with it. It gave it continued flow of aid as well as ideological support. It delayed the changes that were going to come. Then you had the big crackdowns in ’86 and ’87. So there was harm in the lengthening. There was harm in the violence that continued.

I think a lot of well-meaning people in the United States bought the Sullivan principles and constructive engagement, because it seems reasonable. Reagan would say, “If we’re willing to talk to the Russians, why aren’t we willing to talk to the South African government?” We’re going to encourage them to moderate and reform — it sounds reasonable. But there was no real pressure. It was all talk. And it was exposed as that.

This is especially relevant given that Obama has argued that it was his opposition to this very policy that drew him into politics. Speaking to students at the University of Cape Town in 2013, Noah Rothman reported,

Obama told the South African students that, when he was a teenager, he was moved to abandon cynicism and engage in the political process in order to oppose his university’s and the American government’s support for the Apartheid South African government.

I wonder how it feels to return to that youthful cynicism.

* Hayes also reported on the Department of Defense plan to establish an essay contest in honor of Abdullah at the National Defense University. Yes, you read that right.

The best books I read in 2014 – philosophy

Given the variety of philosophical books I read last year, it’s surprising that my favorites were written and edited by the same person and dealt with the same subject:

George Yancy, Look, A White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness



and George Yancy, ed., What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question



Both are edited volumes, and so have the typical redundancy and unevenness in quality, and some of the chapters in second volume are…weak. But when they’re good, they’re great. The best philosophy – like the best psychology or history - should help us to look critically at ourselves and our culture, and especially to understand how, often without realizing it, we can be participating in oppression and harming others as well as ourselves. These books are valuable contributions to that humanistic tradition.

The best books I read in 2014 – psychiatry, psychology, sociology

To clarify - these aren’t the best books of 2014. In fact, precisely none of them were published in 2014, and some were published decades ago. They’re the best books, from whenever, that I read in 2014. Technically they span the fields of psychology-psychiatry, history, philosophy, and fiction. But they’re all relevant, in a variety of ways, to enduring questions and to our current troubles.

First, psychiatry and psychology.

For several years I’ve described the harmful pseudoscience of biopsychiatry, and I have every intention of continuing to do so. One frequent response that saddens me probably more than any other is the plaintive question, “If this is false, what’s the alternative?” This question has become increasingly troubling to me as I’ve learned more about this great humanist, feminist, antiracist, anticolonialist, antispeciesist, anticapitalist tradition of psychological-psychiatric writing and activism which draws connections between liberation and psychological well-being. Decades of work and insights have been shoved aside, misrepresented, and forgotten, a situation sadly exploited by psychiatry and pharma. So it’s important to me to continue to talk about these books – to reclaim this neglected tradition and to begin to suggest alternatives.

Karen Horney’s New Ways In Psychoanalysis



is a fair, measured, fruitful examination of Freudian ‘theory’.¹ What lends this and other works by Horney their power and relevance is their solid grounding in humanism, humility, compassion, and genuine curiosity. Even the most theoretical sections, furthest removed from therapeutic concerns, never give the impression that Horney is engaging in criticism as an intellectual game or that her arguments are exercises in spite, oneupmanship, or territory-staking. (In fact, there’s no indication in her analysis of the personal costs of her dissent with Freudian orthodoxy; these struggles are described in Susan Quinn’s A Mind of Her Own, which is also an absolutely worthwhile book.)

In this as in all of her works Horney is intent on preserving what she sees as the most plausible and useful ideas of Freudianism while discarding those that are empirically unfounded and ideological – particularly those precursors of Evolutionary Psychology that claim culturally specific traits as biologically fixed and immutable. I think it would be most useful to read New Ways alongside Fromm’s Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, and The Revision of Psychoanalysis. Horney and Erich Fromm lost – at least in the short term of several decades – the battle for academic inclusion and public recognition with the (other) Frankfurt theorists and orthodox Freudians, but it’s never too late for a renewed recognition of their contributions.

Alice Miller’s Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child



is an angrier book than Horney’s. It draws broadly from Freudian fundamentals in developing an argument about childhood abuse and its effects while condemning Freud for what Miller sees as his betrayal of children. I find some of Miller’s claims in this and other books wildly over the top and reject her suggestion that mothers should act as slaves to children (to be sure, developing a positive model of care and nurturing in a sociopolitical context in which care and nurturing are culturally and institutionally disempowered is complicated and difficult, but her demands on mothers are outrageous); but the book’s original insights outweigh these problems.

Like Fromm, Horney and Miller explicitly recognize the political and ethical implications of their psychological arguments. In the preface to the 1998 edition of Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Lloyd deMause cites Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner’s 1988 The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe



as support for Miller’s arguments about the powerful personal and political effects of the treatment of children. The Altruistic Personality is an extremely insightful work and one which I’ve never seen cited in discussions of the roots of altruism or authoritarianism. It’s valuable as research in historical sociology, especially given that the window in which such a study could be conducted has since passed. And it’s valuable as a work of social psychology concerning the roots of morality and altruism and particularly the role of parenting in the development of the political personality.

The Oliners and their international team conducted extensive empirical research on the question of what led some non-Jews to rescue Jews (and others not to) during the Holocaust. Their concluding chapter, which I found most interesting, discusses the significance of their findings for understanding moral courage. They challenge the cultural script about the Moral Hero (a script which, not coincidentally, resembles the standard one about the Scientific Hero). This script holds that moral courage is a form or expression of autonomy and independence, born of parenting that instills noble principles and the toughness necessary to defend them. It’s a narrative that rests on sexist arguments (which can be found even amongst more humanistic writers like Fromm) about a mother’s role being purely nurturing and thus leading to egocentricity and moral laxness in the child if not complimented by a father’s inculcation of courage, independence, and dedication.

The near-exclusive emphasis on alleged “autonomy” and “independence” in beliefs about the foundations of moral courage is rooted in male supremacy – valued qualities like moral courage and rationality have long been seen as having their roots outside of the lesser-developed “feminine” sphere, dominated by impulsive and unreliable emotion and “animal” nurturing, and in fact are presented as the result of transcending this sphere and entering into complete autonomy and independence. The narrative, which unfortunately also pervades the animal liberation movement,² claims the roots of morality in rational, abstract thought and “higher” principles. (It’s of course easy to see how such a narrative underlies the “civilizing” pretext of imperialism and colonialism.)

The Oliners’ findings lead them to very different conclusions about the roots of courageous altruism. “The importance of relationships in our analysis of what motivated altruistic rescue behavior during the Holocaust,” they describe, “contrasts with the emphasis on autonomy cited by numerous others as the basis for moral behavior generally and rescue behavior particularly.” In The Authoritarian Personality, for example, “Moral courage is…the conspicuous characteristic only of the independent, autonomous, ego-integrated liberal.” They suggest that

the emphasis on autonomous thought as the only real basis for morality continues to enjoy widespread acceptance. The lonely rugged individualist, forsaking home and comfort and charting new paths in pursuit of a personal vision, is our heroic fantasy – perhaps more embraced by men than women but nonetheless a cultural ideal. His spiritual equivalent is the moral hero, arriving at his own conclusions regarding right and wrong after internal struggle, guided primarily by intellect and rationality. It is this vision that underlies much of Western philosophy and psychology.

…In a culture that values individualism and rational thought most highly, a morality rooted in autonomy is considered most praiseworthy. Those who behave correctly – ethically, in fact – but do so in compliance with social norms or standards set by individuals or groups close to them or because of empathic arousal are presumed to be in some way morally deficient. That few individuals behave virtuously because of autonomous contemplation of abstract principles – a finding that has been reiterated in numerous studies including Adorno’s and our own – has not deterred advocates of independent moral reasoning from advancing it as the most morally admirable style.

Instead, they find the roots of the moral courage of rescuers in nurturing family and social environments. “Although no one developmental course inevitably produces an extensive person [one more likely to act with moral courage],” they suggest, “we can provide a composite portrait from the significant differences that distinguish rescuers from nonrescuers.” Basically,

It begins in close family relationships in which parents model caring behavior and communicate caring values. Parental discipline tends toward leniency; children frequently experience it as almost imperceptible. It includes a heavy dose of reasoning – explanations of why behaviors are inappropriate, often with reference to their consequences for others. Physical punishment is rare; when used, it tends to be a singular event rather than routine. Gratuitous punishment - punishment that serves as a cathartic release of aggression for the parent or is unrelated to the child’s behavior – almost never occurs.

…Simultaneously, however, parents set high standards they expect their children to meet, particularly with regard to caring for others. They implicitly or explicitly communicate the obligation to help others in a spirit of generosity, without concern for external rewards or reciprocity. Parents themselves model such behaviors, not only in relation to their children but also toward other family members and neighbors.

…Because they are expected to care for and about others while simultaneously being cared for, children are encouraged to develop qualities associated with caring. Dependability, responsibility, and self-reliance are valued because they facilitate taking care of oneself as well as others. Failures are regarded as learning experiences, with the presumption of eventual mastery, rather than inherent deficiencies of character, intellect, or skill.

A “benevolent cycle of warm parents, lenient with respect to discipline, and modeling caring behaviors” (similar, of course, to the parental ideal put forward by Horney) leads people to develop a basic trust in the world, ontological security, the ability to form healthy attachments, an openness to different people and experiences, a willingness to take risks, a sense of effectance, caring skills, and an experience of being an active part of the world. Altruism doesn’t result from a rational weighing of principles but rather forms a habitually ingrained way of being in and experiencing the world.³ And naturally, “A prototypical developmental course can also be outlined for those who are resistant to altruism, an orientation more typical of those whose lives have been characterized by constrictedness” - the childhood environment of nonrescuers in general was quite different from that of rescuers.

(A few important clarifications to limit the scope for misinterpretation: The Oliners, as mentioned above, don’t suggest that different forms of parenting automatically or inevitably produce different types of children, such that anyone who’s been raised in a “constricted” or abusive environment is destined to be a moral coward. They’re revealing patterns, not absolute cause-and-effect relationships. Further, they find that altruism-encouraging environments don’t vary by class. Finally, they note that when they speak of children’s developmental environments they aren’t talking narrowly about nuclear families, and that older people important in a child’s life who encourage and model caring and nurturing behavior aren’t necessarily parents, much less exclusively mothers.)

The political implications of the Oliners’ work are enormous. People are increasingly making connections between children’s development and political attitudes and identities. Although Oliner and Oliner don’t say much about how different parenting practices emerge from cultural and political ideologies, others (including, importantly, Alice Miller) have explored authoritarian parenting and pedagogical movements and their mutually reinforcing relationship with authoritarian politics.



The Oliners’ work fundamentally challenges the reactionary rationale for authoritarian parenting: that nonauthoritarian parenting produces “soft,” narcissistic children of weak moral fiber. In light of their findings, this has it exactly wrong.

¹ I don’t use scare-quotes to indicate a categorical disdain for all Freudian ideas. I just prefer in such contexts to hold to stricter definitions of terms like “hypothesis” and “theory.”

² I’ve referred to Brian Luke’s excellent chapter on this topic in Animals & Women; Luke expands on these arguments in his 2007 Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals.

³ Oliner and Oliner don’t, it should be noted, claim that abstract thought and principles negatively influence morality, though they do suggest that this approach doesn’t necessarily lead to moral attitudes and acts toward others – indeed, “[i]deology, grand vision, or abstract principles may inure them to the suffering of real people” and “[t]hose who argue that principled people are less subject to the vagaries of circumstances have little empirical evidence to support this claim.” In general, they hope their research findings will help to introduce some balance to the standard narrative:

Just as there are multiple styles of cognition and affect, so there are multiple styles for arriving at moral decisions. The virtue that may arise out of attachments, care, and affiliations with other people is no less meritorious or reliable than that which arises out of autonomous abstract thought.

…Empathy and concern with social norms simply represent alternative but equally profound ways of apprehending moral claims… According to our study, they are the most common ways. Like principles, they too can inspire heroic moral courage.