Guest post: The Maginot line de nos jours
Originally a comment by Djolaman on Rock climbing without ropes.
There’s a trope about militaries building their strategy for any war according to what worked or conspicuously didn’t in the last war, based on the people in charge often having been in more junior roles learning how things worked at the time. Examples include the US treating Vietnam as a rerun of Korea and coming unstuck very badly, or the French preparing the Maginot line to deal with another iteration of world war 1 and finding it was utterly unsuited to the technological and tactical advances that had taken place by thectime world war 2 broke out.
To a great extent we see what we expect to see, and build that expectation on resemblances to things we’ve seen before. The 1960s and their representation in popular culture have provided a lot of people with a convenient model of virtuous, socially progressive political movements ; they’re driven by the younger generations, they use the language of justice and equality, they’re disapproved of by social conservatives and the religious right, and supported by artists and musicians. Heuristically, that provides a simple way of spotting a familial resemblance to the civil rights movement, which acts as as the archetypal progressive movement and tells you how to orientate yourself with regards to this new movement – with the goodies, obviously.
Considerations of the truth or wider implications of the claims being made then get bypassed by the apparent familiarity of what you’re seeing. Whether the passage of time and the growing number of regretful detransitioners expose people to the reality of their faulty reasoning with the same clarity as military miscalculations tend to is for now an open question.
Regretfully, I’d have to say I doubt it. Not to the extent that we’ve seen in wars anyway. Partly because fewer people will be directly affected, but mostly because as a society we are terribly good at blinding ourselves to the disabled, sick, mentally disturbed, maimed, poor, homeless…
In this case, “the claims being made” run counter to physical reality. There’s only so much stuff you can hide under the rug. Fads and fashions will run their course. Nature bats last. The question is how many women and children will be damaged before genderists have power taken from them.
One of the things that disturbs me about the growing number of detransitioner stories is that they will absolutely not register with children and young adults who will continue to insist on, and manipulate people who care about them into providing, the drugs and surgery they demand–because they think ‘that is a horrible outcome for that person, it’s awful that they went through with these medical procedures–but unlike them I actually AM trans, and the outcome for me will be perfect.’
Exactly. It seems to me like most people most of the time are not careful thinkers, but rely on a handful of simple heuristics or rules of thumb that may work better than coin-flipping most of the time but are still very far from reliable. They’re like a moth that flies into a candle flame because it’s heuristic doesn’t distinguish between “light in the dark” and “celestial object useful for navigating by”, or a fish that takes a lure because its heuristic doesn’t distinguish between “glittering object that moves in the water” and “edible prey”.
We have all heard how people are so attached to their ideas and reluctant to give them up. I’m increasingly inclined to think most people most of the time are not in fact attached to ideas – or for that matter causes – at all: They are attached to labels (it’s called “leftism”, “feminism”, “social justice” etc.) and they are attached to ingroups (“my people”/the “right” people are doing it), very much like theists who can’t say anything about what it actually is that they believe in except that it’s called “God” (why not “Ogd” or “Dog”?), or old-school Marxist-Leninists who can’t say anything about what all this talk of “power to the people” etc. is supposed to mean beyond “whatever the Party/the Leader does”.
It might be useful to go all the way back to the Euthypro Dilemma: Is an act moral because it’s approved by the gods, or do the gods approve of the act because it is moral? In my experience, one of the most common ways in which religious apologists rise to God’s defense is by basically defining “moral” – as well as “good”, “just” etc. – as “whatever God happens to be/do/want”, thus turning a sentence like “God is good” into little more than an empty tautology (“God is whatever God happens to be”). In other words the first answer to the dilemma. The second answer might make the sentence more meaningful but requires a lot more thought about what actually makes an act moral and runs the risk of failing to demonstrate God’s moral superiority altogether. Ideas and causes, like morality, are about actual contents and specifics, which is hard and require thinking, whereas tautologies are easy and require no thinking but only because they’re ultimately meaningless.
So let’s say someone once had the idea of starting a movement (let’s call it “feminism₁”) to fight the disadvantages imposed on biological females (let’s call them “women₁”) compared to biological males (let’s call them “men₁”). Imagine further that this movement came to be associated with organizations such as Equality Now etc. Now, imagine that the word “woman” was redefined to include men₁ who think or feel in certain ways best left unspecified (let’s call them “women₂”), the word “feminism” was redefined as (for all practical intents and purposes) “a movement that fights feminism₁” (let’s call it “feminism₂”), and many of the nominally “feminist” organizations abandoned feminism₁ in favor of feminism₂. If people were attached to ideas and/or causes you would expect them to stick to the same contents (and, to be fair, some of us still do), but instead most of the “Left” (let’s call it the “Left₂”) seems to have collectively decided that all of “women’s rights” are supposed to go with the name rather than the actual people. As I have previously put it, it’s as if “veganism” came to be mean “eating steak for every meal”, “teetotalism” came to mean “downing a bottle of whisky every day”, and “pacifism” came to mean “going on a shooting spree”.
@4 Yes, the labels thing is very prevalent. Although the Steve Bannons of the world are trying to remove the stigma associated with being called racist, thankfully there is still a strong social norm that racism is bad; for many people though this only seems to function on the level of labelling. For instance there’s the use of the defence ‘Islam’s not a race’ to justify comments about Muslims being dirty, rude or aggressive, which are clearly ways to say those things about middle easterners and South Asians while pretending you haven’t. If it’s not racist, it must therefore be OK. (There’s also the flip side of that, where people pretend that criticism of the Koran or the political order in many Muslim countries is a racist attack.)
Rather than thinking something along the lines of “racism is bad because it’s a way of generalising about people based on superficialities, therefore I should avoid such generalisations,’ lots of people instead think ‘superficial generalisations are immoral only when they can be categorised as racism’ and then try to shift their own preferred prejudices into some other, more socially acceptable category. Another obvious example is the contention that only white people can be racist.
It seems to me that the Appeal to the Past with its simple heuristics isn’t just driven by a desire for identity (“I’m with the Good Guys”) but allows the believer to become enmeshed in a narrative. There’s a lot of power in a good story. The story of protesting injustice; the story of uncovering corruption; the story of the downtrodden seizing power and the story of a prisoner stepping free into the light to reveal that he was a king all along, confounding those who said otherwise. The march towards progress, enlightenment, or self-actualization is littered with archetypal stories. The gender critical use them.
The trans activists use them better, because they were the first to make a quick and glib analogy to civil and gay rights, recent morality tales which modern cosplayers can now join in as living characters. “I was a Good Guy who was there for the struggle, who is still in the struggle.” Stories provide meaning and purpose.
@Djolaman#5
Another obvious example is “Hate is bad — you disgusting, inhuman piece of garbage.”
One has to wonder just how much cognitive dissonance people can accommodate, how much suffering one is willing to discount. Unfortunately, history gives us little reason to be optimistic. Does Chase Strangio have some sort of Cartesian disregard for the very real pain and suffering that flesh and blood women are already being subjected to because convicted, male rapists are being imprisoned with female inmates? Are convicted, male rapists (who conveniently claim to be women) the [embattled minority group] Jason Stanley really wants to stand up for? How do these people sleep at night?
The capture of large parts of the media makes this situation so much worse, as the damaging, real-life consequences of this ideology are reported dishonestly, or not reported at all. The ideological commitment to this “movement” has turned reporters into advocates, who can no longer see (or cannot dare mention) what is really going on.
I’ve no idea how my nym came out as “Only Sastra” at #6. Autocorrect may be going down a new path, adding helpful little reminders that we’re not really All That.
Sastra @6
That’s true, and unfortunately current social justice movements are drenched in Critical Theory, which says that it’s pointless, if not morally suspect, to search for empirical evidence in which to ground your narrative. Everything is narrative.
I just saw this in action. Peter Boghossian has been going around to college campuses playing an epistemology game. He draws lines in a public square, makes a statement (e.g. “Trans women should play in women’s sports”), and anyone who wants to participate stands on a line corresponding to the strength of their belief on the agree or disagree side (Strongly agree, agree, somewhat agree, neutral, somewhat disagree, etc.) Then he asks individuals what it would take for them to move forward or back.
In the YouTube video I watched today the subject was the sports question. Several young women lined up on the Strongly Agree line and said that nothing would change their minds. Those on the other side were ipso facto bigots. Boghossian stays very neutral in these things and lets the players talk, and his neutrality was suspect. One impassioned young woman was angry that the question was being asked at all. When Boghossian asked her if it was wrong to ask the question, she said no, but then made it clear that asking was OK only if the it was asked in service to the correct answer; she asked him “What narrative are you promoting?”
People have always done this sort of thing, but it’s disturbing to see how popular the wholesale rejection of entertaining opposing views has caught on among academics and secularists. This particular video by PB features youngsters–they all looked like undergrads to me, so, yeah. But I’ve seen another in which faculty were making the same sorts of assertions with the same absolute certainty.