The role of fantasy
I’m wondering how much the potential for doing something useful in a movement for political change relies on a rejection of fantasy.
By fantasy I don’t mean an optimistic vision for the future, I don’t mean ideas about how things should be, I mean actual pretending that X is so when it’s not.
My hunch is that the answer is: a lot.
Many MRAs and other anti-feminists claim that feminism is largely based on fantasy, but that relies on the belief that women really are stupider and less competent than men, and that’s something of a fantasy itself.
Feminism isn’t the belief that women are magical god-like beings. It’s the belief that women are people coupled with the belief that people should have equal rights. It doesn’t require any fantasizing at all, and it doesn’t rely on ordering people to accept fantasies as describing reality. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to other movements for equal rights. The whole point of universal rights is to detach them from value judgments in order to make them apply across the board, no matter what.
I think a politics based on fantasy has some problems.
Is there a specific fantasy you’re musing about?
Social Darwinists, I guess, think that egalitarianism is such a fantasy. They think a fundamentally ruthless and predatory Nature determines the social reality of biological beings. However, while I agree that Nature is fundamentally ruthless and predatory, it is also fundamentally co-operative and nurturing. Perhaps Social Darwinism is so grotesquely mistaken because it bases a normative program on deficient ontological foundations. Addressing or assuming the ontological prior to addressing the normative seems obviously necessary. Even Kant’s categorical imperative relies on the existence of rational beings. The abortion debate is similar: whether a foetus counts as a person or not clearly has ethical implications.
(off topic)
@ 2 Emily Vicendese
Unfortunately, usually given more weight than the ethical implications of whether the host counts as a person or not.
(/off topic)
Lately I’ve been thinking about the fondness among young progressives for word policing. Not perfectly reasonable requests for human decency (e.g. “Don’t call people names like ‘cunt’ or ‘nigger,'” “Don’t mock developmentally disabled people or call them ‘stupid’.”) No, now colloquialisms are banned on what seem to me spurious reasons: we’re all supposed to purge our vocabularies of words like “stupid” and “crazy” because these supposedly stigmatize intellectual disability and mental illness, respectively. In fact, where I live, mental illness (for one) is less stigmatized than it’s ever been, and I’m confident that this excellent reality has had zero to do with scolding people who use “crazy” as a metaphor for “irrational” or “fucked up.”*
* Diagnosed crazy person, here.
@Lady Mondegreen:
Agreed… I swear that progressives are even more aggravating than the RWNJs these days.
@ 4 Lady Mondegreen
Sounds like you think they’re being a bit daft (oops!).
*tosses rotten veggies at Silentbob*
Magical god-like beings throwing rotten veggies? Oh, my. That’s Social Darwinism at work. That’s the irrefutable proof that egalitarianism is a fantasy. Emily #2, your talk about “deficient ontological foundations” won’t fool anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Lady Mondegreen, you are one of *many* people I know with mental illness who think that crazy is an excellent word. I think people who have actually been in an uncontrolled irrational state and know how it feels to them are even more likely to see it an apt metaphor for uncontrolled, irrational behavior in others.
The difference, of course, is that my friends can take their crazy pills and feel better, whereas all too many people celebrate their own non-reality-based thinking.
You can add me to that list.
And I have come to the belief that there are people who surf the ‘net just looking for people who use the “wrong” word so they can correct them in all their smug self-righteousness. They aren’t interested in engaging with arguments or thinking; they just want to throw out a pat phrase about privilege, without thinking about whether each and ever word that can potentially be used to put someone down really needs to be purged from the language altogether (especially since people can turn ANY word into that sort of thing, which means we would all be reduced to grunting and pointing).
Reading these excellent comments, one such fantasy occurs to me – the Rousseau-based one about Life in a State of Nature aka The Noble Savage – that humans are born lovely and then warped by civilization. It’s a fantasy that humans are born lovely.
Yeah, I prefer the words of Leonard the Wizard:
“People are terrible.”
It’s the ability to rise above the terribleness that truly makes us human beings (and adults)… just a question of whether or not people actually choose to use said ability.
We’re mixed. It’s also illusory to think we’re terrible all the way down (though maybe not as illusory…); compassion and generosity are instinctive too.
@Samantha Vimes
Well to be fair, some of the word police I’ve seen online are mentally ill too. But it’s like they don’t want there to be any admission that being crazy is actually, you know, a bad thing. Because “stigma.”
Also too, someone posts a comment full of rambling, repetitive paranoid ideation? Don’t suggest the author might be mentally ill. That’s “diagnosing over the internet,” and it’s a sin.
It is a good litmus test of whether the person you’re reading is a reactionary. The sliding goal-post invocation of ‘Human Nature’ to justify the intolerable. All the social-darwinism and evo-psych crap just slots in perfectly where ‘God’s Will,’ or The Revealed Word used to do.
A simple reducto ad absurdiam is to concoct equivalent ‘just so’ stories about (for example) race, where public sensitivity hasn’t been numbed.
I usually encounter the resistance to the casual use of the word ‘crazy’ in the form, “Don’t give the shitfuckers the excuse.” The idea is that since it’s generally accepted that mental illness can reduce (though not always eliminate) culpability in some circumstances, it’s better to not use the terms associated with it when discussing asshole-ish behavior. It’s better to make it absolutely clear that you hold the individuals in question responsible for their conduct.
Just because someone adheres to a belief that is demonstrably false doesn’t make them ‘delusional’–it may just be that they are astoundingly arrogant. (See: Donald Trump, and most of his supporters.)
OTOH a few years ago (that is well before the current campaign) I was at a professional talk about genes associated with bipolar disorder, and the speaker gave Trump as an example of someone who to their opinion is very likely bipolar based on his financial ups-and-downs (as well as some other biographical details that I no longer remember).