Power imbalances and the internet

This is tangentially about both RaceFail and AmazonFail, but only in that they’re both examples of the phenomenon I want to talk about. And I’m not drawing any direct comparisons between the two incidents.

Let’s take a sequence of events: Somebody is Wrong on the internet. And not just Wrong about, you know, gun control or abortion or whether to vote Democrat or Republican (or whether the rest of the world outside the USA actually exists as anything more than a fable or source of rhetorical ammunition) but displaying bigotry against some minority group. Because the internet is inherently a public medium, people who belong to the minority group are going to notice, and are quite likely to express their hurt feelings. What happens now?

People don’t like being criticized in public, especially when it’s something that touches an important part of their self-image. A bigot is a bad person in most people’s understanding these days, so it’s hard to hear “this action or comment has bigotry-promoting consequences” without hearing “you’re an evil bigot!” So the accused person is very likely to get defensive. In scrabbling to find reasons why the accusation can’t possibly be true (because I’m a good person!), they’re likely to cause more harm. For example, they may accuse the minority group of being over-sensitive or stupid, or claim that bigotry is a thing of the past. If the targeted minority was hurt before, being called stupid or told that their experiences of discrimination don’t really matter to real people is likely to make them incensed. Because the internet is the internet, they’ll deal with this by complaining to all their friends. The friends will rush to support the target and try to make the originally accused person see reason. Inevitably, the accused person will also get support from their friends, and the more tempers run high the more random second-degree connections and eventually total strangers will start following links and everything will get amplified and messy. (I very much like CartesianDaemon’s comment on outrage: if I’m a little bit outraged, it might either look like (a) I think amazon were only a little bit culpable or (b) I only care about discrimination a little bit.)

Once things get horrible in public, people who don’t really know the original facts will conclude that the whole thing’s just a pointless flamewar, and that both sides are equally at fault. The people who are complaining about bigotry get accused of dogpiling, of ganging up, of being too angry and aggressive. And because emotions are already running high, you hear the rhetoric of violence, talking about mobs or lynching or angry hordes.

I think what really drove this home to me is that some people are taking this line regarding the AmazonFail story; the people who twittered about it and got large groups of people shouting about how Amazon is homophobic and they’re going to stop buying from Amazon until there’s a proper apology are being classified as an angry mob, getting carried away by the crowd dynamics, rushing too quickly to violence before they know all the facts… Waitaminute! Deciding to buy books from Barnes and Noble instead of Amazon because you don’t like Amazon’s homophobic policies is not violence. It’s not even a little tiny bit like violence. Googlebombing is not bombing. A commercial boycott is neither social shunning nor, most certainly not, declaring war! And this is Amazon, this isn’t even an individual person who meant well but said the wrong thing in an internet discussion and ended up getting their feelings hurt and understandably their friends want to take their side.

Part of it is an instinct to go against whatever the crowd is doing; if everybody is angry with Amazon, it’s natural to want to defend Amazon, to feel like a balanced person who sees both sides of the argument. But realistically, Amazon is not the underdog here. Straight, gender normative, able bodied individuals are not the underdog here. (Some of the worst of this is in the Making Light post on the subject, and again understandably, the mods are not very happy about the comparison to RaceFail. Which is why I’m taking this here rather than trying to comment in that thread.)

The other thing I want to talk about is the asymmetry. On a very crude level, it means something different when a white person calls a black person stupid, from when a black person calls a white person stupid. A white-only club is a very different thing from a club for an ethnic minority group to get together and provide mutual support. But there’s another aspect to this. There are some techniques which the powerful use against outsiders, such as shunning and social exclusion, such as getting a big group together to gang up on one individual, such as shouting and aggressive mannerisms, and so on. That’s definitely bullying, and since many people who make their social life on the internet were bullied as kids they’re very sensitive to it. But when a group of hurt people get together and decide that they don’t want to socialize with someone who keeps hurting them, that’s not the same as social exclusion. When people get support from their friends in order to defend themselves against bigotry, that’s not the same as ganging up or piling on. When a member of a minority gets angry about being constantly mistreated based on a superficial characteristic, that’s not the same as a powerful person yelling at someone in a subservient position in order to intimidate them. Refusing to do business with someone because you don’t like their skin colour is not the same kind of action as refusing to give your money to a business that discriminates.

Equally, some of the dynamic I’m seeing is that people with power are adopting some of the tactics used by discriminated groups to try to lessen discrimination. For example, suing institutions for discrimination against white people or men if they have policies to try to support POC or women. Accusing people of intolerance when they complain about bigotry. Again, complaining about homophobes is not at all equivalent to discriminating against gay people!

There’s another aspect which is a bit harder to define. Often, part of unconscious prejudice against minority groups is that the same reaction is perceived as being more aggressive than coming from a higher status person. This is partly because of direct stereotypes about the group (eg “black people are violent and animalistic”), and partly because groups that experience discrimination often learn to be extremely polite, deferential and conciliating and any deviation from that is perceived as threatening (eg a woman who complains about sexism instead of trying to adapt to it is “a man-hating feminazi”). It’s also partly because people are quite naturally more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people like them, and if people like you happen to run society, then they get a whole bunch of automatic credibility on top of that. Also, it’s a big problem when a group that is generally not subjected to violence uses the rhetoric of violence to dismiss the complaints of a group who do fear actual, literal violence.

In the probably vain hope of forestalling annoying responses to this, I want to point out that I am NOT saying that anything that a person from a discriminated background ever does is right, or that anyone who shares characteristics with the people who generally wield social power is automatically in the wrong. I’m saying that I’ve seen a lot of dynamics where an argument between powerful people who are behaving in a bigoted way, and vulnerable people who are complaining about that bigotry is perceived as “both sides are just as bad as eachother”. Or when both sides do in fact behave badly, the less than perfect behaviour of one or two representatives of the minority is treated much more seriously than all the bigotry which led to the situation in the first place.

In conclusion: calling someone a homophobe is really not equivalent to calling someone a f*ggot. Calling someone a racist is really not equivalent to using a racial slur.

Hard cases make bad law

There’s a really sad story in the news here at the moment: it concerns a premature baby, whom the medical team had decided couldn’t be saved so they agreed to turn off the life support. They followed normal procedures and sedated the baby so she wouldn’t experience distress, but the dose was miscalculated and the baby died from the sedative. The consultant responsible for the overdose has been arrested and imprisoned, facing charges of euthanasia, ie murder because euthanasia is not legal under any circumstances in Sweden.

Even if it transpires that the doctor deliberately gave an excessive dose and killed the baby, there doesn’t seem to be much moral logic in punishing her for ending the baby’s life a little faster than she was planning to end it, legitimately, anyway! Every step leading up to the doctor being in prison is perfectly reasonable, but they add up to horrible unintended consequences.

I think it’s right to prohibit euthanasia, because although in theory I accept that it can be moral for a doctor to assist a patient to commit suicide, in practice there is no way to enforce the law to prevent its abuse by those who want to murder “undesirables”. In a society where people with disabilities, poor people, and old people were fully valued, legal euthanasia would be morally good, but we’re a million miles from such a society. I think it’s right that causing death by giving the wrong dose of sedatives should classify as murder (or manslaughter depending on intent). I even think it’s right that the accused doctor has been temporarily imprisoned; the Swedish legal system jails people arrested on a murder charge, purely in order to take witness statements without the suspect interfering in any way. Once this process is complete, the doctor will be released on bail and await a full trial like any other criminal defendant.

It seems likely that the doctor will be found innocent when the case does come to trial. If not, I foresee a new unintended consequence: doctors in an end of life situation may be reluctant to give adequate pain relief in case they are held criminally responsible for hastening the patient’s death. There has to be a distinction between active killing, and simply ceasing treatment (otherwise doctors would have to go to extreme lengths to save patients in every case, and nobody could ever be removed from life support). The problem is that dividing line is ludicrously fine in practice.

When I was a kid we had a neighbour who was found to be carrying a foetus with spina bifida. Being Catholic, she would not consider abortion, but when the child was born, simply didn’t feed her until she died. I can’t help thinking that it would have been “kinder” for the baby (if you believe that an unborn child has the status of a baby) to be killed by a lethal injection at an early stage in pregnancy, than to be brought to term and then starved to death. Similarly with this case: surely being put to sleep with an excessive dose of sedatives involves less suffering than being taken off a ventilator. Yet, on a technicality at least, the crueller alternative avoids active killing.

Comparisons are odorous

Lots of different things recently have led me to ponder the situation of being a member of a minority group while also being white. This is mostly just stuff swirling incoherently round my head, but I want to write some of this down and I don’t think waiting until I have a polished theory is going to work.

I’ve been applying for jobs and therefore filling in equal opportunity monitoring forms. Like many white people with liberal leanings, I used to be opposed to the whole idea of monitoring: obviously we all know that race is just a made up excuse for powerful people to be horrible to less powerful people, so what’s the point of collecting statistics that make people declare themselves to belong to a category that isn’t even meaningful? Then I learned that basically no person of colour objects to them, and thought about it some more and realized that you actually do need to collect statistics in order to detect and deal with discrimination, you need to count how many people do believe in race even if you don’t. But I still keep getting enraged by the the categories chosen; they come from the 2001 census (and really, the argument for including race on the census at all is a lot weaker than for putting it on equal ops forms), and they’re a horrible mishmash of skin colour with geographical origin, and completely fail to cover the major UK minority groups properly. Also “Black Irish” means something entirely different from “Black British”, but hopefully people know how to interpret things in context.

So as usual I tick “white other”. (Thuggish Poet wrote a satirical piece about the fact that Jews always tick that category, but I don’t have a copy I can quote here.) But anyway, that makes me think about two aspects of being in a white minority; one is that in online race discussions, white people always get defensive about being white, they say, I’m not white, I’m part German and part Scottish, or I’m not white, I’m a mutt, or even, I’m not white, I’m disabled / gay / Pagan / special snowflake. This is partly to do with white being the default so people don’t think of it as a racial or ethnic identity, and partly to do with wanting to be on the side of the oppressed, not the side of the privileged. (The latter of course is to do with one of the worst features of online debates, that it becomes all about “sides”.) But there’s another aspect: the fact that some white people actually do have a recent or even current history of racial discrimination.

Clearly, it’s a very bad thing if PoC are trying to talk about incidents of racism, and a bunch of white people shout them down and talk about vaguely relevant things like the fact that white people get stared at when on holiday in Japan, or the way a black person called them a mean name once or whatever. But the way the dialogue goes at the moment, there is no good way to talk about the experience of being Irish or Slavic or, well, Jewish. Furat emptor linked to this essay about being caught in the middle, which is partly about being mixed race, with a background that isn’t really covered by the usual definition of “mixed”, but also partly about the fact that there’s no framework for her to talk about her father’s experiences coming from a Slovak background.

I have sympathy for the “but I’m not white” people, and I know I’ve been there myself a few times. Ten years ago I was dating a non-Jewish guy, and he reported to me that he was cutting contact with someone he’d thought of as a friendly acquaintance, because this person turned out to be a scary racist. The ex-friend disapproved strongly of “interracial” relationships and had been vile towards another friend’s ethnically Chinese girlfriend. And my boyfriend told me this guy would probably be ok with me, since I’m white, and I really reacted against that; if someone is being racist, I’m supposed to be among the people they hate, not among the people they think are racially acceptable. And more generally, I don’t like being counted as one of the people with unconscious privilege, or part of the dominant / hegemonic culture. But obviously there are many ways that I do benefit from having pale skin, and many experiences that I never have because although I might be weird, people can’t tell at a glance that I am.

And that’s another thing: a friend asked me if I considered Jewishness to be an ethnic identity. My first reaction was that that isn’t a valid question. Then just after we’d had a really interesting conversation about this sort of issue, I was teaching my adult ed class, and we were discussing what makes a service meaningful. One person, a transplanted (stereo)typical New York Jew, talked about the sense of connection with other Jews, both present at synagogue and as part of the world-wide Jewish community following the same traditions. Another member of the class, who is a convert and very vocal about this background, tried to dismiss that as “just an ethnic thing”, which people who didn’t have that ethnic background couldn’t connect to. I wasn’t having that, I looked round at the class full of blonde Swedes (with a few equally blonde Germans and Finns and English people) and said, seriously, are you saying that our sense of community comes from an ethnic identity?

The truth is that the majority of Jews in western Europe and the US are in fact members of an ethnic group as well as a religious one, as most of us are from an Ashkenazi, central and Eastern European origin. Indeed, lots of Jews have hardly any religious connection at all, but are Jews purely because they share that ethnic background. Many Jews do experience racism based on appearance, as they are often darker and with visibly different features from the western European majority groups they live among. Note that plenty of Jews actually are people of colour and it’s awkward if they get forgotten about when talking about racial dynamics. Also, plenty of Jews are fair, including me. They may be converts or descended from converts, and like nearly everyone in the world the majority of Jews are very unlikely to have only Jewish ancestors throughout history. (My friend Joanna looks, to my eyes, pretty “Jewish”, but apparently people consider it appropriate to speculate, to her face, about the likelihood that some of her ancestors were raped to give her the genes which made her hair auburn rather than dark brown.)

Now, me, I have fairly “Jewish” (ie Ashkenazi) features, but I also have fair skin and light brown hair, so most people don’t think I “look Jewish”. I know about some fairly close relatives who aren’t Jewish, but many of the Jewish ones on my mother’s side are just as fair as I am. So generally I make an initial impression of being white. I do get slightly impatient with people who refuse to believe my own statements of my Jewish identity because I don’t look like their stereotypical idea of what a Jewish appearance is supposed to be, but I have it a lot less bad than my Jewish friends who are actually blonde, and a whole lot less bad than the ones who are Indian Jews or Jews from an east Asian background via adoption or conversion.

I have been in situations, rarely, but it happens, where I feel uncomfortable with people knowing that I’m Jewish. In those situations I can choose to remove items of clothing that make my religion obvious, and keep quiet about topics that would identify me. I’m lucky both in that I can do that (and I’m not breaking what I consider an absolute religious principle by removing my head-covering, hiding my fringed ritual garment or revealing enough flesh to fit in with social norms), and in that I very rarely need to.

The thing is, “passing” is almost certainly preferable to being constantly visible whether you like it or not. But passing isn’t without cost either. This certainly applies to people with invisible disabilities, or queer people, and I expect it applies to PoC who happen to have light skin. Also, there are lots of people who, appearance-wise, pass at a glance but not if observant people are looking for signs that they might belong to a despised group, even without having to lie about or conceal part of their life.

Oxford

j4 has been posting a series about <a href="http://j4.livejournal.com/332418.html"how she ended up at Oxford, and this seems an interesting exercise, so I’m copying her idea.

I’m very much the sort of person that people expect to be at Oxford. Those expectations are not entirely fair, but the facts are: I’m intelligent in ways that show up well in conventional education and exams; my parents are both university graduates (my father was at Oxford himself), and sent me to an academically competitive girls’ private school. Between all those, I’ve always been encouraged to think of myself as the sort of person who could do well academically, and given resources to make it easy to convince other people of this. I think when I was five or six I was talking about how I was going to be a maths professor at Oxford, having little idea what maths was or what a professor did other than being good at it.

Realistically, though, it was about midway through secondary school when it was clear that I was keeping up steadily good marks and not being thrown off course by puberty, that my teachers started taking it for granted that I would be in the Oxbridge stream. Mind you, the kind of school it was that really only meant being in the top quartile of the sixth form. I had a really hard time choosing A Levels; the only GCSE subjects I was happy to drop were English and physics, English because I couldn’t stand literary analysis, and physics because the kind of people who ended up teaching physics at a girls’ school tended to be a bit wet. Chemistry and maths were pretty much a given, and I let myself get talked into further maths without much persuasion. but that only left me with one more slot. I wanted to take French, but a combination of the teachers, my mother (a biologist) and my best friend Spanish M persuaded me that I’d be better off with biology. I was still really unhappy about having to give up French, though, and somehow or other it ended up happening that my French teacher took a public bet that I could get an A in French A Level if I just showed up to some of the classes and didn’t bother doing any homework that looked like it was going to interfere with my important subjects. School managed to fiddle the timetable so that I could take five subjects, which wasn’t really allowed, though I wasn’t the only one who did. The school had I think about 80 girls going into sixth form, and they prided themselves on giving everyone total free choice in subject combinations, not forcing you to take related subjects. I think they achieved this by all the teachers spending a week in the summer vac shuffling labels around until they could make it all work like a giant sudoku.

I had some really fantastic teaching at A Level, going way beyond what was in the formal curriculum and inspiring real curiosity about the subjects. (In retrospect, physics A Level would likely have been fine, because the teachers I looked down on for their inability to control a class of recalcitrant 15-year-olds would have been fine with sixth formers who actually wanted to learn.) I learnt to speak French nearly fluently, and just started to get the hang of analytic reading that had been so opaque and deathly in English GCSE. I loved the intellectual challenge of maths and chemistry, like a complex puzzle where all the clues were properly in place and if you really exerted yourself you could come up with a satisfying solution. And I got into biology enough to understand that it wasn’t just a collection of miscellaneous facts to memorize, and to discover that there was a whole field of molecular biology which was exactly like the genetics I’d loved as a kid.

There was some amount of support for Oxbridge candidates, advice on how to choose a college and practice papers for those subjects where you needed to take an entrance exam or S / Step papers. But the most useful stuff was available to everybody, interview practice and advice on filling in UCAS forms and most importantly, general confidence that we were intelligent and could expect universities to be fighting over us. I wanted to do some kind of joint honours, biology and chemistry, or biochemistry and French (still having that problem with dropping subjects I was enjoying!) but that wasn’t offered at Oxford, and I didn’t really want to stay in Cambridge or go for the Natural Sciences tripos. So I applied to Oxford for biochemistry, and Manchester, York, Nottingham and Sussex for weird joint honours or modular degrees. And, um, Southampton I think as an “insurance choice”, somewhere that would take me if I bombed out of A Levels. I went through the Oxford prospectus trying to get “vibes” off the different colleges; I assumed that all their descriptions were exaggerated, but I could get some good ideas based on which unrealistic claims they thought worth pretending to. I ended up with a shortlist of three colleges, and since one of them was my father’s old college, Merton, that seemed a reasonable deciding factor.

Interviews were in December. I dressed up smarter than I had in my life up to then, a matching tartan skirt and waistcoat and a nice blouse. Almost the only thing I remember about the interview days is meeting MK and instantly getting into the kind of deep, wonderful conversation that only happens when you’re 17 and you’ve just met a soulmate. His future wife was up for physics and he was so busy talking to me that he didn’t even notice her. At some point it got late, all my good intentions about spending the day before the interview doing more reading and making myself noticed by influential people were quite forgotten, so we decided to leave the JCR and continue the conversation in “my” room in Rose Lane. My whole upbringing had told me never ever to invite a strange man up to my room, but I was so high on wonderful conversation that I really didn’t care. Of course MK had no dishonourable intentions at all, and this led to me entirely rejecting all the messages about why I should never trust men. That might have been the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, but not assuming men are predators has stood me in good stead. And it was very liberating to be able to consciously throw out such a frequently repeated piece of life advice, it was the realization that I was my own woman and could make my own judgements, albeit based on limited experience.

I got through the interview itself on adrenalin replacing sleep. Tim Softley interviewed me, and I can’t remember who else. I had been prepared to be thrown curve ball questions, and I felt very confident. I think I didn’t care if I got into Oxford or not; I was fairly certain that one of the redbricks would take me, and I felt like having met MK would be worth it whatever happened. The interview was largely fair; they asked questions that probed my ability to think about biology rather than specific domain knowledge. I think the only unreasonable question I got was: I can see from your CV that you’re quite religious; how do you think you will cope attending a university that has produced such famous atheists as Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkin? I was quite indignant that they thought my convictions so weak I might tremble at the prospect of being in the same city with people who didn’t share my views.

Other than that, I remember the candidates buzzing with rage about the story that a candidate for Medicine from Brunei had been asked why she wanted to bother studying modern medicine that relies on the latest technology, when she would just go back to her primitive third world country and all her knowledge would be irrelevant. Even if they were trying to see how she’d react to an outrageous question that was inappropriate. The next day MK got called for interviews at pool colleges, and I got sent home.

I was annoyed with the university for keeping me on tenterhooks for weeks after that, and then demanding a firm commitment within three days when the offer finally arrived. I later learnt that they’d had nine candidates for three places, six indistinguishably excellent (really, what can you say about a bunch of 17-year-olds beyond their predicted A Level marks?) and three reasonably good, and had rejected the three weakest, offered places to the three of us who had both chemistry and biology A Levels, and pooled the rest (including MK). In a way that wasn’t totally fair, because the university literature said that only chemistry was a requirement and they didn’t care what subjects you did as long as you had three solid A Levels, and anyway there were pooled candidates like MK who were not English and therefore didn’t take A Levels at all. In a way it was, though, because if they had nothing to choose between us, they might as well go for some minor difference that would make our lives easier when we joined the course. So I was lucky that I got good advice from my school that if you were intending to read science at uni you should have at least two science A Levels.

MK was treated very badly by his pool college, Christ Church, and ended up at Imperial. Even aside from the fact that he met his wife there, she having been turned down by Merton also, this suited him much, much better than Oxford would have done. If the aim of the admissions system was to choose the most brilliant scientists, they should certainly have picked MK over me, but if the aim was to pick the three people most likely to thrive at Oxford, they made the right choice. MK would have been very impatient with all the quaint Oxford customs and the education designed, even today, to make you a gentleman as much as to prepare you for academia, whereas the truly excellent scientific education at Imperial was exactly what he wanted.

If you have that political inclination, it’s easy enough to read this and conclude that I only got into Oxford because I had a whole bunch of privileges in my life up to that point. Certainly I did have many advantages that made Oxford seem attainable and desirable. But when I got there, I found that the place was not at all filled with people like me. I met people of every different background imaginable, different countries, different social strata, different ethnic background, different ages and life situations, you name it. And you simply couldn’t tell someone’s background by how they took to Oxford society; the people from conventional middle-class backgrounds and private schools with lots of extra coaching weren’t all mediocre but confident beyond their ability, and some of the most appallingly posh tweedy, braying types actually came from poor backgrounds and schools that didn’t believe in sending their pupils to university, they just chose to adopt that persona and social set.

It seems plausible that there are some people who are at least as objectively “clever” as I am, who didn’t go to Oxford because they came from the wrong backgrounds. But I think it’s more likely that they never got to the point of applying in the first place, than that they were unfairly rejected because of not being middle class enough. At the same time, I did see direct evidence of unfairness, in the form of Christ Church telling MK that his inhumanly high Abitur scores were an obscure German qualification that didn’t count for anything, and the way that the Merton medics were openly racist towards one candidate.

What it comes down to is that Oxford is going to end up with several uniformly excellent candidates for each place available, and almost any means of choosing between them is going to have the potential for unfairness. That doesn’t mean that unfairness is a good thing, of course. But I don’t think it’s as simple as the system being rigged to favour people from posh schools.

Cultural sensitivity – ur doin it rong

may be turning into one of those American style liberals…

One of the most interesting conversations I had was with a guy from the relatively new Progressive community in Warsaw. (Incidentally, he doesn’t look like a stereotypical Progressive Jew, he has a beard and discreet but present sidelocks and a black velvet skullcap.) An English klezmer musician was enthusing about the klezmer revival that is happening in Poland at the moment, and our Polish friend was very dismissive, saying it was run by non-Jews for non-Jews and had nothing to do with the exciting Jewish cultural stuff that is happening over there. Musician and I both argued the view that you don’t have to be Jewish to play or enjoy klezmer, culture belongs to everybody. The musician is more of a fluffy spiritual type than I am, and had more time for the counterargument that klezmer comes out of a particular religious and cultural tradition, and simply playing klezmer style music in a band at a concert isn’t as meaningful as playing it as part of living a Yiddish life and using klezmer for religious celebrations. But even so, neither of us was completely convinced that the non-Jewish character of the Polish festival scene was such a big problem.

Then we heard about some of the context: apparently after the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, there was one street left standing, which became known as “Emptiness street” in the period after the war where there were too few Jews left alive to move back into their former homes, so the street was simply abandoned to the depradations of time and weather. The klezmer festival involves putting actors and stage sets in this street, to make fake stalls that mimic the kind of shops that would likely have featured in the pre WW2 Jewish quarter. The actors dress in the seventeenth century style black clothes associated with ultra-Orthodox or stereotyped Jews, giving the musicians a cute, olde worlde backdrop, while ignoring the historical reality of a pre-war Jewish community that was highly assimilated and secularized, and most certainly ignoring even the existence of the modern day real Jewish community.

I know a lot of people reading this don’t believe in cultural appropriation. But while I agree that art, culture and music belong to the whole world, I don’t think this is at all a morally acceptable way to celebrate world culture. Even though the people running the festival are not remotely the same people responsible for the atrocities of the past, there is something rather queasy about turning the place where thousands of Jews were forced to live in overcrowded and degrading conditions, and where they were eventually rounded up to be murdered, to stage a kitschy, romanticized version of Jewish culture, and make money which absolutely doesn’t trickle down to the contemporary Jewish community who are really struggling. I think appropriation is the only word for that.

I also had a series of much less interesting conversations with a particular attendee at the conference, a Catholic guy who has fallen in love with Judaism and is thinking of converting. Fine. Not so fine is the way he insisted on interrupting every single discussion to “give the Christian perspective”, ask totally irrelevant questions, or just enthuse about how wonderful and beautiful Judaism is. And he kept cornering people outside the sessions in order to pour his heart out about he’s just so in love with Judaism, and how difficult it is going to be for him to leave his Catholic background. When he did this to me, I actually told him in so many words, look, Christian perspectives are very interesting, but we’re trying to accomplish something specific here, as Progressive Jews learning and networking together, so this isn’t the right situation for you to talk about this stuff. It didn’t help. I think he was hoping that we’d be so delighted (and flattered) that he was considering joining us, that we’d bend over backwards to encourage him, whereas in fact most people expressed polite interest and wished him luck on his spiritual journey; Jews aren’t generally interested in interfering with other people’s religious choices.

A large part of the problem here is that this guy is self-obsessed and has poor social skills, which is nothing to do with the fact that he’s Christian. But I think the best way to describe this may well be the frame of saying he has an excess of privilege. He simply takes it for granted that he will be listened to, even when he has less than nothing to contribute, and this expectation is probably not unconnected to the fact that he’s a white, middle-class, Christian male. He took advantage of the fact that we’re the kind of group who are very careful not to exclude anybody, because we all know what it’s like to be a Jewish minority in a Christian world, and even a Progressive minority within a largely Orthodox leaning Jewish world. The amount of irritation he caused by trying to make every single possible conversation, both public and private, about his bloody spiritual search and his feeling of being welcome or unwelcome in the Jewish community, made me suddenly see the possible benefits of minority-only spaces, even though I’m reflexly against that kind of segregation. In truth there’s no real way we could have banned him from showing up, because he’s been attending a synagogue for a while and we generally don’t want to keep people out just because they haven’t finished converting yet. But perhaps it would have helped to be able to say, sorry, this is a Jewish event, it’s not about your relationship with Christianity or your enormous sense of entitlement.

(I stole the subject line from Joanna, by the way…)

Snippet

I know you shouldn’t eavesdrop, but the group at the table next to me this lunchtime weren’t speaking quietly or confidentially. They were having a loud, cheerful discussion of how difficult it is for a man to mention any of the fundamental biological differences between men and women. In fact, the way that is is hard for men to have a voice in feminist circles is just like the way that certain topics to do with race are taboo for white people. It’s a big problem for feminism, this unwillingness to listen to men and to put the movement on a sound, objective scientific basis rather than just clinging to victim identity and unempirical but ideologically sound political theories.

These are Swedish men, a sociologist and a couple of ecologists I think, the sort of people who would be deeply offended if you implied they were anything other than staunch feminists. They knew all the right buzzwords, they talked about the difference between sex and gender, and decried essentialism. They rather deplore the fact that women are under-represented at the senior levels they belong to, though they expect it’s probably mostly a matter of time lag and the fact that so many women choose family over career in spite of all the opportunities available to them.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain, perhaps a generation ago a similar group of middle-ranking academics would have bonded by means of loud conversations about the fuckability of their secretarial staff. And they really do mean well, they really do seem to feel hurt about not having an equal voice in feminist discourse. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that they were having this discussion with the deliberate intention of making female colleagues feel unwelcome. It’s just sad that people who have lived most of their lives in a remarkably egalitarian society, people who strongly believe in principle that women and men are absolutely equal, people who by the sound of it are better versed in feminist literature and theory than I am, just so fundamentally don’t get it.

Fledgling feminist

Having decided I’m going to be a feminist, I should actually do something about it. I’m somewhat in trepidation about discussing directly feminist ideas in public like this, but I’d be pretty useless if I kept silent and never dared to say anything about my convictions. But I am certainly not claiming to be any kind of authority on this stuff.

When I posted about taking a more active interest in feminism, Raving Glory offered to lend me a collection of feminist essays by Ursula K Le Guin, Dancing at the edge of the world (copyright 1989, ISBN 0-8021-3529-3). Well, books of feminist essays are not my number one favouring thing, but I definitely need more education in feminist issues, and I thought Le Guin’s marvellous writing would go a long way to sweeten the pill.

I enjoyed many of the essays, and was infuriated by a few of them, but the combination of Le Guin’s very persuasive prose and my determination to overturn the anti-feminist biases I’d acquired encouraged me to keep turning the ideas over in mind instead of throwing the book away in disgust. On reflection, I don’t think the message is that success, leadership and rational investigation are inherently male qualities, more that a just and balanced society ought to value things like community, compromise, and kindness as well.

I was particularly impressed by the last essay in the book, The fisherwoman’s daughter, from 1988. It’s riffing on Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own idea. She conveys the idea that most women historically have had to run households and fit creative endeavours around that; in recent decades, some women have been grudgingly allowed to pursue careers or artistic visions, but almost none of them get the kind of practical support that a man would have had in the pre-feminist era. A woman who wants to be the best in her field is expected to give up any sort of family or personal life, and essentially gets male disadvantages without most of the advantages. Le Guin argues that giving women the option to choose between motherhood and fame is an improvement on forcing everybody into the domestic sphere, but really we should be more ambitious than that, we should organize society so that mothers can also pursue their dreams. It’s all concepts I’ve come across before but that essay draws them together very well indeed.

(That said, I’m still pretty incensed at the 1978 essay on abortion, Moral and ethical implications of family planning, which is not only gender-essentialist but argues that women are naturally predisposed to put immediate practical concerns over abstract moral principles. The most hair-raising parts seem to be quoted from one Irene Claremont de Castillejo, but Le Guin quotes her approvingly, describing as natural, unperverted feminine morality the view that the thalidomide tragedies…of course [should] be aborted! It is criminal to make a woman carry a deformed child! But then, in The Princess, Le Guin writes extremely movingly about her own experience of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, and I don’t think she really means to imply that the feminist thing to do is to kill the weak to ensure group survival.)

Anyway, the very strong impression that I took away from the collection is that in Le Guin’s eyes, I’m basically a man. I’ve always been encouraged to do whatever I want to do, and have picked an academic and technical path. I’m far more rational than intuitive, I expect to be taken seriously, I’m a capitalist at home with hierarchical systems, and I’ve always had as much freedom to follow my own desires (whether in life decisions or expressions of my sexuality) as economically feasible. I’m nobody’s wife or mother and I don’t intend to be. Now, Le Guin is aware that she herself is in a pretty masculine position; she describes herself as a princess precisely because she had a lot of opportunities in life that aren’t available to most women, and she has plenty of recognition in the male world as a successful writer. But the point is that I had to be convinced by intellectual argument that there was a point to feminism, in the same way that most men have to be convinced rather than knowing all about sexism from their own personal experience.

It is by no means an insignificant achievement of the feminist movement that people like me have been able to live more or less as men, and encounter only a few dinosaurs who look at my breasts and conclude that I can’t possibly be a man. It seems that feminism still has some ground to cover, and in two ways: firstly the obvious one, of making sure that all women have the freedom that I do, to live as men if they want to. But the second goal was not very clear to me before I read Le Guin’s book: feminism needs to bring about a world where women who choose to live in a more feminine context are just as valued as those who are competitive and ambitious. I would add that if caring for others and doing practical but mundane work and so on were adequately valued, men who were temperamentally inclined to such roles would be able to take them up without losing status or being despised.

I find myself in a discussion where I am trying to explain why feminism is a matter of justice. Atreic comes from a similar place to me and feels alienated by feminism telling her that she’s a victim even when her life is in fact perfectly satisfactory. Lizzip has a strong sense of the need to make the world a fairer and more welcoming place for women. And all three of us find ourselves in conversation with men who don’t see why they should bother with feminism, because at least this part of the world is basically equal already, and there are feminists making sloppy, man-hating arguments all over the internet.

I am working on the basis that the men who don’t see the point in this discussion and a whole lot of other similar are mostly coming from a position of good faith. (Not absolutely all of them; there are clearly some people who just like to disrupt feminist discussions because they feel threatened or just like the attention they get from literal trolling.) But it’s perfectly possible to genuinely and sincerely care about women, and still not get it; I didn’t for a long time, after all. At some level, I want to convince such well-meaning people, but at the same time I feel really, really uncomfortable with any kind of proselytizing.

I’m also all dewy-eyed and naive and actually taking an explicitly feminist position in a highly charged internet argument is a novelty to me. I can really see both sides of the argument so well it’s almost dizzying. I can see the weary frustration of seasoned feminists who have to deal with a huge wall of denial every time they mention a sexist incident. I can see why many might not want to argue at all, or might not want to be polite and patient, with men who might possibly deign to care about injustices against women if they can be convinced that feminists have a cast-iron rational case that would stand up in the strictest court. Everybody who complains about sexism has to answer for every feminist who might ever have said something negative about men, or something more emotional or hyperbolic than rigorous. At the same time, I can completely see why feminism can look really alienating; it alienated me for a long time, and for exactly the same reasons being raised in this kind of conversation.

I am going to propose a theory about why it’s extremely difficult to report sexism and systematic discrimination. This is probably obvious to experienced feminists, but it might be helpful to people who don’t see the point. Anyway, it’s a conclusion I’ve come to recently. If you talk about individual incidents, people can (and seem particularly inclined to) always propose reasons why that particular incident might not be sexist. Even if someone believes that the most likely reason why a woman was disadvantaged is sexism, she’s still rather in a double bind: if the incident was minor, she’s making a fuss about nothing, but if it was major, then it wasn’t mere sexism, it was viciousness by someone so far beyond the pale of normal human behaviour that there’s no hope for them.

To avoid this problem, you have to go to systematic analysis to look for overall trends. The problem with that is that it becomes very abstract, people don’t relate emotionally. And it’s a lot of work, so it ends up being its own academic discipline, with its own jargon and community that is not very accessible to outsiders and a sort of self-perpetuating orthodoxy. Like most complex subjects, feminist studies and positions get misquoted and over-simplified by ignorant internet people. At the same time, if someone posts to a blog complaining about an annoying sexist remark, they don’t want to and quite likely can’t justify their complaint by giving an overview of all the feminist studies and theory ever to have been performed on the topic.

So it’s easy to get to a point where someone who has done a fair amount of reading and thinking about feminist issues is going to dismiss a well-meaning but relatively ignorant man out of hand, if he starts demanding detailed arguments why he should believe her complaint. This can end up looking a lot like telling him that his opinion is worthless just because he’s male, which is not at all likely to encourage men to be sympathetic to feminism.

Obviously, the fact that something is hard to demonstrate doesn’t make it true! But what I would like to see is a little less readiness to look for reasons why sexism might not be sexism. I want people to at least consider the possibility that something might be true, and realize that some of the apparent causes for scepticism would still apply even if it were true. Also, the fact that some people who consider themselves feminists say ridiculous things fairly obviously doesn’t make every claim that might be interpreted as feminist prima facie ridiculous!

Watson lecture

*sigh* Watson’s talk was even more pointless than I had suspected it would be.

First of all the organizers did something very stupid, namely scheduling the talk for a tiny little lecture theatre which was in no way big enough for such a famous speaker. It was also hard to find, so I was ten minutes late, by which time the place was absolutely crammed like a pre-Hillsborough football stadium and I found myself at the back of the crowd in the doorway. Obviously it was impossible to see or hear from there, and it was also boiling hot, and I was very tempted to give up, but in the end patience paid off and enough other people gave up first that I ended up just inside the doorway.

So I heard the lecture standing jammed between sweaty bodies, which may not have been the ideal circumstance. My expectations were not that high; I assumed Watson would follow the pattern of most grand old men and speculate a bit about where biology is going, with a little bit of gossip about his career. But he didn’t talk about biology at all, and realized that he is famous enough that anyone who cares knows everything about his career already. Instead he provided some careers advice, most of which was obvious, and a lot of which was more applicable to 1950s America than modern Europe. So even if I had been younger and more inclined to hero-worship, I don’t think I would have got a lot out of it. I think the most interesting he said was that it’s very important to collaborate, and you’ll never get anywhere if your goal is personal glory; you must ask for help if you’re stuck, you must talk to others in your field even if they are your rivals, you must seek out people who are more intelligent than yourself and who are experts in related fields.

There was a little bit of “yay, atheism”, and a little bit of dismissing RNA biology as just a fad (I think he’s wrong there; DNA is important, sure, but it’s part of a system, you can’t these days get away with only caring about DNA). But he rather lost the thread of what he was saying, overrunning his allotted time by rather a large margin, and degenerating into a rambling diatribe against Franklin by the end. He’s apparently moved on from calling her unnatural and unfeminine, to calling her “autistic”, which he probably thinks is less offensive. It really did just come across as completely pathetic; the poor woman has been dead for half a century. He didn’t appear to notice the irony of complaining (at excessive length) about how Franklin was arrogant and difficult to work with, where in another part of the talk he commended us to work with scientists who have a reputation for being arrogant and to care more ability than niceness. He was also rude about Linus Pauling, so I suppose he isn’t only misogynistic.

He made a bunch of random snide, but not actively offensive, remarks about Jews (the whole of biochemistry in the 40s and 50s was massively dominated by Jewish scientists who had fled Germany and Russia, and indeed most of Watson’s major scientific influences were Jewish). He was extremely rude to Georg Klein, who was as usual sitting in the front row; I don’t know their history enough to know whether it was just friendly teasing or being deliberately offensive.

I didn’t bother staying for questions; it was too hot and crowded and Watson had really lost my interest by that point. Oh, he did make one rather cute remark to finish; he said that if they ever made another film about him he would like to be played by Sacha Baron-Cohen.

I cut him slack for being vague and rambly on the grounds that he’s eighty. But I don’t cut him slack for his sexism for that reason; he’s just not old enough to remember a world where it was reasonable to assume that women are naturally incompetent and all the serious work is done by men. Female scientists were still the minority back in the 50s, but hardly unheard of; he himself mentioned that Franklin was one of a couple of dozen women in the chemistry department at King’s College London. Even if has been completely unable to adapt to the changes in society in the past fifty years, there’s no excuse to make comments about how you should make sure to spend time in conversation with other scientists and not waste too much energy gossiping about politics with your wife. I don’t think he even intended that remark to be offensive, unlike some of his comments about “the feminists” who were so meeeeeeeeeeean to him and made a totem of Franklin just because she was a girl even though she wasn’t particularly competent (sic). He just unthinkingly assumed that all scientists are men, and women only talk about trivial things. I think for someone to be too old to understand that women are people, he would have to be at least 150, which is to say, there’s no excuse any more.

Political correctness

I think it’s a given that it is morally worthwhile to pick polite words rather than rude words. No, seriously. Nobody who expects to be taken seriously uses openly racist terms in public, for example. But the question is how far to take this basic principle. This gets into philosophical questions of how far language influences reality, and also political questions about where the ideal balance is between avoiding offence and using language expressively. Actually, both those principles are pretty important to me. I strongly don’t want to insult anyone by using an inappropriate term to describe them, but I also care very much about precise and meaningful communication.

We all agree that racism is bad

On one level, it’s a matter of basic respect. Yes, it can sometimes seem as if the fashion for which terms to use changes with the wind, and the whole system can look very fraught and complicated, or in many cases silly. But the thing is, if you can’t be bothered to find out how someone wants to be referred to, that essentially means that you can’t be bothered to make even a small effort to avoid insulting and hurting them. Of course, you can innocently get it wrong, because yes, the correct word to use is going to depend in a detailed and unpredictable way on the preferences of an individual and the situation and so on. I think the appropriate response in that case is to apologize and switch to the preferred term. Insisting on continuing to use the offensive term once you know it’s offensive is extremely rude. Of course, a lot of the time you’re just talking about a group of people in the abstract, and you don’t have a specific individual around to express a preference. I think it’s morally right to make a reasonable effort to find what the generally accepted terms are in that sort of situation.

Having said that, I am wary of euphemisms. It seems to me that a statement like “It’s a well established fact that African-Americans have lower IQs on average than Caucasians” is much more racist and dangerous than a statement like “See that black guy over there? He works with my mum.” (For that specific example, I feel very weird about the term “African-American”, because very few of the black people I know are either African or American. However, see the previous paragraph about respect; if someone prefers to be called African-American rather than black, it’s rude and obnoxious for me to grumble about that preference.) To me, though, the formal sounding terms for ethnic groups actually promote the idea that “race” is a real and important characteristic, and allow people to say things that are actually really offensive while superficially coming across as rational and objective. I also really don’t like the hodgepodge of skin colour terms with geographical terms, nor the implication that there’s something insulting about mentioning the fact that someone is black.

It’s more of a grey area when we get into terms that are not direct references to ethnic groups, but are metaphors and figures of speech which may or may not have insulting connotations. It’s not helped because there are loads of urban myths around such terms; no, niggardly is nothing to do with thinking that black people are mean. (Though if a particular person felt offended at this term, I would probably avoid it in their presence, even though they’re wrong on etymological grounds.) At the opposite end of the range, a thoughtful person probably should look for an alternative simile to replace working like a black. There are lots of examples in between; is it racist to use fair for beautiful, for example?

What about gender?

When it comes to sexist language, there seems to be much less broad agreement than with racism (though as I’ve outlined, there’s still a range of views about that topic). Even actively insulting terms for women (bitch, cunt, pussy, etc) are arguably acceptable in some circumstances. Though I think that someone who referred to women in general as “bitches” would probably face as much social opprobrium as an open racist. I am not absolutely convinced that calling a mean person a bitch or a cowardly person a pussy hurts women in general, but it seems likely that it might, so I’m leaning towards the opinion that I should stop using such epithets. Then there are terms which are thought of as sexist, but aren’t insults as such, like bird, chick, sometimes girl, and so on. I think they’re pretty context dependent in many cases, but it’s good to be aware of them.

The other hot button issue is terms which do not insult women, but which seem to imply that men are at least the default, if not actively superior. I’m really conflicted about those. The argument that saying chairman rather than chairperson makes it harder for women to take charge of meetings and companies seems really implausible to me. However, there does seem to be increasing evidence that this sort of thing really does matter. Words that mark women as exceptional seem to be a bad idea; I don’t at all regret the demise of lady doctor / doctoress or undergraduette. Things like actress and waitress seem to be heading the same way, but some people think that actor and waiter are explicitly gendered masculine, and want to say waitron / waitstaff, and er, what’s the gender neutral form of actor? Although it grates, altering words which actually refer to a man is probably worthwhile, though replacing them with reasonable neologisms seems more likely to succeed than using clunky constructions where man becomes person. I really can’t buy in to the idea that it’s needful to find-and-replace every possible incidence of a syllable that sounds like it might have to do with men, because that just leads to monstrosities like herstory, girlcott, a-people, personscript and the like.

Pronouns. I think English very much needs a true epicene pronoun, and I think any effort to create one is very nearly doomed. (Mainly I think it’s needed to allow people to opt out of picking sides in the gender binary, but I think that too is a feminist goal, as well as helping uncomplicatedly female identified women.) Short of that, the question arises about what to do when writing about hypothetical people. I was resistant for a long time to altering the generic he which has become standard at least for formal writing, but now I know more about the history of how singular they was deliberately marginalized, I am prepared to relax my prescriptivist stance and accept that singular they is correct because it comes naturally to most native speakers. (Swedish people speaking English tend to use the formally correct generic he, and it’s actually starting to sound weird and stilted to my ears.) Also, partly because feminists have kicked up a fuss about it, he now sounds explicitly male, and therefore should be avoided. I think it’s more important to think about the content of writing, and not assume that a generic person is male unless otherwise specified, but making an effort with pronouns may help to counter that lazy assumption. It should go without saying that when speaking about an individual, I will try to find out, and subsequently respect, that person’s choice of pronoun.

Gender neutral liturgy

One subset of the debate about gendered language is how one handles religious texts to avoid implying that God is male, or that worshippers always are. This is something I’m very much involved in, because I end up leading services and dealing with liturgy a whole lot. Of course, in this case, there are pretty strong conservative forces, as there’s a real value in keeping texts familiar. I am generally on board with altering language to get away from the metaphor of God as an old man in the sky, primarily because God is not supposed to be a super-powered person, as much as because that might lead to people thinking God is male. So, let’s translate God’s name as “Eternal One”, rather than “Lord”; the latter is a translation of a euphemism, but it definitely carries unwanted connotations, and it seems more theologically valid to refer to God as the root of existence (though of course we don’t pronounce the Divine name in Hebrew) than as a powerful feudal leader. I don’t know if the use of the male pronoun for God historically meant that God was seen as male, but it certainly comes across that way now, so I generally avoid pronouning God at all where I can. Of course, there are also plenty of neutral and abstract terms for God, Almighty, All-present, Holy One, Most High, and so on.

In contrast, I don’t think we should throw out the metaphors which talk of God in masculine terms. Source of our life and our Sovereign is a horrible, weak rendition of Our Father, our King. There is an emotional resonance to talking about God as Man of war, Lord of Hosts, Hero, Champion etc, which is completely lost if those are replaced by gender neutral terms which also happen to be completely abstract. My preference instead is to emphasize the feminine metaphors for God alongside the masculine ones. Let’s talk about God as Maternal and Nurturing, not just Merciful or Gracious. Let’s delve into the texts which cast the Shechinah, the In-dwelling Presence of the imminent aspect of God, as explicitly feminine.

When it comes to talking about the worshippers, mostly the same arguments apply as for using gender-neutral language about hypothetical people in a secular context. The vast majority of the liturgy uses “we” anyway, so gender is a non-issue there. But where that doesn’t work, I think it’s good to be sensitive and make it clear that the community includes women. What I’m not so keen on is the attempt to find a female counterpart every time a historical male figure is mentioned, saying Abraham-and-Sarah in place of Abraham, and so on. I think that’s actually counterproductive, because it makes the women seem like appendages to their husbands and brothers. Miriam wasn’t the “counterpart” of Moses, she was a person in her own right, so let’s talk about her actual history, rather than attributing the stories about Moses to Moses-and-Miriam. The thing that really riles me is people taking the noun adam, which explicitly means human (not man), as if it were the proper name Adam, and changing it to Adam-and-Eve. That’s just illiterate, and actually takes away one of the very few gender neutral terms available in Hebrew.

(I am talking mainly about translation here. Hebrew has no grammatical neuter at all, it’s a purely bi-gendered language, so trying to make it gender neutral just linguistically doesn’t work. I suppose one could try to use the feminine plural as generic in place of the masculine, but it would be very unnatural and not particularly helpful, because there’s just no way round the issue when talking about anything in the singular. Also, it’s a lot easier to update translations than change original texts; I’m willing to change prayers when there’s a good reason, but not gratuitously. And like most Jews across the spectrum, I’m not willing to alter Scripture in any way.)

Extending the argument

If I haven’t stirred up controversy by now, I suspect I’m about to, when I talk about other discriminated groups. Note that I’m not saying that other forms of prejudice are analagous to racism, but rather that some of the same arguments apply. We want the world to be a better place for people who are currently disadvantaged, and we want the people we are talking about to feel respected. The same question therefore arises, how far can deliberately politically correct language help with these goals, and is it worth the annoyance of having to change habits and slightly restrict what can be said?

The issue I feel most strongly about is also the one that is most difficult to convince people of. I want to think very seriously about using language which may potentially hurt people with disabilities. At least among politically aware circles, people are just starting to notice that it’s not appropriate to throw around terms like retard and spaz as insults. But even that basic politeness isn’t anything like universal. Aside from using disability related terms as actual insults, many people use outdated words and phrases to talk about people with disabilities in what they believe is a neutral manner, but is actually perceived as offensive by many, words like cripple, handicapped, wheelchair-bound and so on. I understand why people are resistant to changing their habits with this sort of thing, because it’s distressing to learn that you are accidentally offending people when you think you’re a perfectly nice person (but just haven’t kept up with the latest trends).

Indeed, it seems to me, as an outsider to the disability rights community, that there isn’t quite a consensus yet about how to use language. For example, I am following the so-called “person-first” mode of saying people with disabilities rather than the disabled, but among groups that have a strong cultural identity, such as the Deaf and autistic communities, this isn’t favoured, because they often don’t want to talk about an impairment as a separate thing that has happened to them, but rather as an element of who they are. I don’t claim to be an expert at all, but it’s something I’m aware of. Even though it can be fairly fraught, I do think it’s worth it to try to use language in a way that makes the world more friendly to a large minority who have dealt with some really horrendous issues of discrimination both historically and currently.

If it’s hard to convince people to say uses a wheelchair rather than confined to a wheelchair, it’s next to impossible to put the argument regarding disability related metaphors. I suspect part of the problem is that people actually do hold ableist prejudices, so it’s not as simple as everybody agreeing that we should support people with disabilities, but arguing about whether politically correct language is an effective way to do this. Instead, a lot of people are stuck on the so-called “medical model” of disability, seeing disabilities purely as bad things which can happen to people, and obviously you can use a bad thing as a metaphor for another bad thing. But if you take into account the idea that a disability may also be part of a person’s identity, then it can become problematic to throw disability terms around to indicate that something is bad, horrible, stupid or non-functional. Again, it’s clear to me that it’s necessary to be sensitive to context and not just find-and-replace “bad” terms with euphemistic equivalents.

I am trying to cure myself of saying that somebody is crazy, lunatic, mental or a nutcase when I mean that their point of view is irrational. Terms for stupidity are awkward, because almost all of them (even idiot) have been used as medical terms at some point in history, and as insults at other points, but ideally I’d like to see cretin and similar terms consigned to the same bin as retard. I am willing to at least hesitate before using crippled or paralysed in a metaphorical sense, or blind and deaf to mean unperceptive. I am rather expecting to get angry comments about this paragraph, because every time I’ve seen the topic raised, even among generally politically aware people, I’ve seen major, major resistance to the idea.

Along similar lines, though again not making any direct analogies, I personally would be much happier if fat were not used as a negative intensifier. You can perfectly well call someone a bastard without calling them a fat bastard. And if some unpleasant person happens to be fat, why not criticize them for being unpleasant, rather than implying that everybody with a similar figure is equally disgusting.

Arguments against

Let me try to preempt some of the arguments I expect to be made against the view I’m taking. Yes, linguistic precision is important. If you read my journal at all, you’re probably aware that I care very much about both correct grammar and choosing the most apt word to express what I’m trying to say. To some extent, artificial terms created to avoid offence can go against established ways of using the language, and can block off certain forms of expression. I am not dismissing this argument, and it’s probably the major reason why I am not full of enthusiasm for political correctness. I think there’s a balance between insisting on speaking the same way people did 50 or a hundred years ago no matter who gets hurt, and hacking the language to bits and speaking like a stupid bureaucrat to avoid any possible hint of offence.

Yes, the goal of making language reflect the more just society we want can be subverted by stupid identity politics. Politically correct terms can become shibboleths, which are mainly used to catch out outsiders who don’t use vocabulary the same way as a particular activist group. That’s what the originally perjorative term “politically correct” was satirizing. Indeed, it is very often people who make “activist” a big part of their identity who make the most fuss about terminology, sometimes ignoring the wishes of the people they are supposed to be supporting. I have read articles about people of American Indian extraction getting into arguments with white people who insisted on calling them “Native Americans” against their express wishes, for example. I think the only thing to do about this down side is to be as educated as one has time for, making sure to listen to members of the relevant minority group as much as possible, not only to advantaged activists talking about them. But that’s a good idea in general if you want to work for a fair society, so I don’t see this as a major extra burden.

Yes, political correctness can be taken to ridiculous extremes. However, I think a lot of the obviously comic examples are made up by not very witty comedians or people who want an excuse not to have to bother, or even to carry on being bigoted. I don’t believe anybody ever seriously proposed the term vertically challenged as a euphemism for short, or insisted on saying chalkboard because blackboard was racist. Certainly nobody outside over-zealous left-wing local authorities in the 70s. Along similar lines, I have little time for the argument that being deliberately politically incorrect is a sign that you’re a really direct, honest sort of guy, bravely resisting some vague conspiracy to keep middle class straight white guys down. That kind of argument is almost always a preemptive excuse for making offensive remarks. A person who really objects on principle to any kind of language alteration, or who really can’t manage to remember the appropriate terms to use, doesn’t need to advertise how bluff and hearty they are. It’s a slightly more sophisticated equivalent of saying “I don’t mean to be rude, but.” It’s nothing to do with “free speech” and certainly nothing to do with the surveillance-based dictatorship of 1984.

What to do with people who disagree

In short, nothing. I have very little interest in telling anybody else what they can and can’t say. There are certain obviously offensive terms which I will object to hearing, but even those I am not even slightly advocating for making illegal. And for most terms which are arguably offensive, I might think less of someone who uses then, or I might point out why they are considered offensive if the speaker appears to be genuinely ignorant. But I’m not going to take any active steps to get people to change their usage. Language is a very personal thing and people have to make their own decisions about what terms they want to use or avoid. What I’m asking for in this post is for people to be mindful, and think about the ramifications rather than just casually using borderline words because they come naturally. If you decide to put the boundary between offensive and acceptable in a different place from me, I don’t have a problem with that decision, but it should be a decision.

I would argue very strongly against censoring any media which contains offensive terms or even offensive concepts. Censorship is bad, mmkay? I’m totally in favour of criticizing media which promotes offensive views or uses dubious terminology, or refusing to support it financially if it’s really extreme. People in public positions, particularly politicians [arrgh alliteration alert!], should face career consequences for expressing racist and bigoted views, but they should be perfectly allowed to express them. I should probably mention older works which use terms which would be unacceptable today; I don’t give anyone a pass because “everybody was racist in the olden days”, or something, but to my mind there’s a big difference between using a no longer valid term, such as negro, and actually taking a racist view. It also seems obvious to me that fictional characters are sometimes going to express offensive views and use offensive terms, and that sort of rigour with viewpoint shouldn’t be compromised because the author and readers don’t agree with the offensive opinions.

Basically, you can say what you like, the question is whether you should.

I’ve been writing this in bits for a while, but have been very busy. I hope it hasn’t grown too rambly and incoherent, and that the thread of the argument is still clear with all the tangents I’ve included! I’ll be surprised and disappointed if it doesn’t raise some strong reactions…

Conversion

I think I might be a feminist after all.

I’ve probably been headed in this direction for a while now. My sporadic habit of delving into feminist writing seems to have developed into an ongoing interest, and I’ve been finding myself more and more taking feminist lines in discussions I’ve been involved in. At the same time, I’ve been getting increasingly angry about sexual violence in various forms. I am not completely sure that feminism is the optimal way to address this problem, but there’s not much else available in the way of movements organized around the issue, and it’s important enough that I feel I have to do something. I can’t just dismiss it as somebody else’s issue when so many women’s lives are constrained by the fear of rape, and when that fear has proved justified for so many of my friends.

There are undoubtedly some people who define themselves as feminists who are not at all nice or even rational people, but I’ve become increasingly aware of feminists I strongly admire. (Not just people I admire who happen to be feminists, but people I admire because of the way they live as feminists specfically.) It’s never a good idea to judge an ideology by its worst adherents!

The immediate cause for making this decision now is to do with the discussion around and reaction to the incredibly stupid Open Source Boob thingy. I found myself following links and reading posts about it almost compulsively, and some of it was really amazing and insightful, but some of it was incredibly, crushingly depressing. I’m not going to talk about it much because really absolutely everything original that could possibly said has already been chewed over about five hundred times. But the point is I was feeling more and more strongly that I want to be on the side of the people who are making insightful and compassionate analyses all over the place, and not on the side of the people who keep coming out with crass and depressing comments.

I don’t really expect the Sisterhood to welcome me with open arms, mind you. I still don’t really believe in the Patriarchy or Privilege or eliminating the syllable man from English, and I’m still really not an enthusiast for abortion. I don’t particularly want to police anyone else’s gender expression or sexuality, and I get defensive when people try to proscribe mine. Also, I’m not generally terribly good at being a Sister, because I don’t fit well into groups organized around gender identity. I think this is part of the reason why I was so reluctant to embrace feminism for so long: I don’t really identify as a woman very much, either in the positive sense of thinking that being female is an important aspect of who I am, or in the negative sense of experiencing difficulties in my life because of being female. But I’m starting to realize that gender is a major force in society at large, even if it isn’t a major force in my life. And, well, it’s a moral thing to combat discrimination regardless of whether you personally are disadvantaged by it. To quote the inestimable , don’t be an ally because you think it will get you something; be an ally because you don’t want to be an asshole. So it’s very much not about being liked and accepted by the feminist community.

Talking of the feminist community, I’m very much not interested in sitting around discussing whether trans women are real women, or whether disabled women should grudgingly be permitted to exist as long as they don’t cause too much burden on their caregivers, or whether it’s acceptable to appeal to racism in order to promote the feminist cause. The thing is, though, that activism for women’s rights which isn’t transphobic, ableist and racist is still called feminism. I think the danger with this sort of ideological movement can be that it becomes a mechanism for perpetuating its own existence, feminism for the good of feminism rather than for the good of women. That doesn’t mean that all feminism is like that, of course, but it’s an outcome I’m rather wary of. Even my religion is non-dogmatic and non-proselytizing, so I certainly expect as much of my political affilations. I want to commit myself to feminism as a pluralist, which means I don’t want to waste my energy defining who gets to be in the club or striving to be in it myself.

What I do want to do is align myself with pro-women and anti-sexist causes. That’s probably going to mean giving money at least initially, but I hope I can get to a position where I can contribute my time and effort as well. And more generally, I want to consider my decisions, opinions and actions in the light of whether they are likely to contribute making the world safer and freer for women. I want to notice what effects ways of telling stories may have on the position of women in society, and make sure that I communicate in positive ways.

Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m pretty arrogant and opinionated, but I will make a point of taking more experienced and knowledgeable feminists seriously if they criticize me for not living up to my newfound feminist ideals. I suspect this is going to make me uncomfortable; up till now, I would just have brushed off such criticisms by saying “who cares, I’m not a feminist anyway”. But I am coming to think that from a moral perspective I need to deal with that discomfort and think seriously about whether I’m actually harming women or just genuinely have a different opinion about what is good for women from some other feminists. It might also happen that I’ll get attacked by people who abominate feminism or think the whole concept is mean and unfair to men, but I doubt I’ll ever be a major target for that sort of thing, and any such attacks would likely make me more convinced that affiliating with feminism is important.

Recanting a long-held opinion is a bit painful, isn’t it? Last time I went through a process like this was in my early teens, when I realized that caring about the long term environmental effects of my lifestyle was actually morally important, and not just some stupid trendy bandwagon. It’s a big part of my self-image that I am capable of changing my mind if I’m convinced by better evidence or arguments, and that allows me to overcome the cognitive dissonance and just general embarrassment of admitting, actually, I was wrong.

On being the wrong size

Body image and fat prejudice is a topic I’ve been trying to talk about almost ever since I started this journal, and I keep reading things that bring me back to it, and every time I start a post I give up because I’m pretty sure I’m going to offend people. Quite often I upset myself too. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that the best way to start discussing the question is to be very personal. I’m going to talk about my own experience of being fat, and not draw any implications yet.

I’ve been fat ever since I hit puberty. To be precise, I’ve been on the borderline between the “overweight” and “obese” BMI categories pretty much that whole time. On the whole, that hasn’t really affected my life very negatively, but it has coloured my experience of the world.

My parents were absolutely scrupulous never to criticize my weight; that’s a pretty important thing, and I’m very grateful for it. In fact, my mother didn’t even complain about her own weight in front of me until I was past the most vulnerable age. I had a little bit of grief from Granny, such as occasionally complaining that I shouldn’t wear certain things because they draw attention to my huge bottom. She held back from the worst of what she subjected my mother to when she was growing up, and I knew quite clearly that she has issues about body image and her relationship with food, so I was never strongly bothered by the fact that she’s a tiny little woman and I’m (like Mum) positively huge compared to her. Oh, and my little sister went through a phase of constantly mocking me for being so fat; she’s five years younger than me and was a late developer, so she was a scrawny kid throughout my adolescence. But I was older than her and bigger, and knew more about almost everything, and also knew exactly how to push her buttons and frequently did, so the only advantage she could hold over me was being thinner, so I wasn’t exactly impressed by her teasing.

My other grandmother, who was a paediatrician, was the one who measured my weight and height at regular intervals, and compared me to her BMI charts and warned me to keep an eye on my weight and diet when I slipped into the “obese” category. With her medical background she knew that the only way to maintain weight is to eat a sensible, balanced diet and do plenty of exercise, so she never gave me stupid advice, and was much more focused on encouraging me to be healthy than thin. She also had a very good understanding of what it’s like to be short and stocky and show our shared eastern European ancestry. (Apart from my fairer colouring I take after her quite a lot physically.) I clearly remember a conversation about how my tall, thin, glamourous cousin getting her first little black dress, and my grandmother commented that cousin E looked “slinky” in the dress, whereas she and I would never be slinky.

On the whole, I didn’t get much trouble from my peers either. I attended an academically competitive girls’ private school, where dieting was not socially encouraged. For a start, it showed that you valued appearance more than brains and personality, and were therefore probably a bimbo, and besides that we were always acutely aware of the plague of anorexia; There were always a couple of those nightmare skeletal faces reminiscent of the Belsen photos in most of my classes. A few of the teachers used to make snide remarks about my figure sometimes, but that was so obviously inappropriate that I ignored them. I quickly became aware that it was social death for any boy to be even polite to me in case he was suspected of fancying the fat girl, but being in a girls’ school meant I didn’t have to have much to do with boys, and I was not particularly interested in their approval. I assumed I would never have that coveted status symbol, a boyfriend, but since this meant never having to kiss disgusting teenaged boys, I was secretly quite relieved. Once I figured out that any boy who was nice to me was actually setting me up for humiliation, I became impossible to humiliate in that way. I doubt I would have had much success with boys even if I’d been thin, unless I had been fashionable and pretty as well.

So the first time I started to be concerned about my figure was when I was 14 and spending time with Spanish M. M was (and still is) drop-dead gorgeous in the stereotypically Spanish way, tiny and slender and high-breasted, and she was very active as a teenager, dancing quite seriously and doing a lot of other sports. She took it into her head that I was going to drop dead of a heart attack because of being so fat. I could hardly resist my best friend in tears, so I started trying to lose weight. Thanks to my grandmother’s good advice I went about it pretty sensibly, and did slim down a little, but not enough to make a very visible difference.

Then I found Naomi Wolf’s The beauty myth. I don’t even know why I picked it up, cos I wasn’t very interested in feminism. Wolf impressed me a lot; I didn’t absolutely swallow everything that she wrote, but I really liked the way she presented evidence for her views and gave reasonable consideration to opposing ones. So instead of dieting I presented Spanish M with a comprehensive bibliography showing that heart disease is barely correlated with weight in women. And I learnt to be skeptical of the whole dieting industry (I didn’t need so much innocculation against the beauty industry more generally, because I had no interest in being beautiful).

I hated “games” at school. Largely because I was incompetent at most of it, but also because the school so prioritized academic subjects that sport was badly squeezed. There was “gym” in a tiny, outdated little hall with almost no equipment, and swimming in a horrible grotty little pool we borrowed from a local boys’ school, so much too small for the class that you were lucky to get five minutes in the water in a double period. Netball, which I have always hated. In summer, a little bit of “athletics” and tennis both taking place on a hankie sized bit of uneven grass, totally uninspiring; the girls who were competent and interested usually had access to athletics clubs if not their families’ own private tennis courts and pools and so on. The only thing that slightly appealed to me was hockey, a game I found sufficiently intellectually stimulating to justify the pointless running about.

At one point when I was 17 or so, one of the games teachers told me that I might make quite a useful little hockey player if I lost some weight. Really, she should have told me that I’d be a useful player if I could improve my fitness; it was perfectly true that my skills were good but I didn’t have the stamina to support them. So that led to my second attempt to diet. Again, I was sensible, I ate smaller portions of the same foods I would have eaten anyway, and ruthlessly cut out any snacks between meals, and ran a mile every morning before school. I saw some results; my fitness did improve, and I lost that classic 20 lb which is easy to lose if you restrict your diet in almost any fashion. I came back to school after a holiday and got lots of positive comments on the weight I’d lost; one teacher even looked at me and commented, woah, what happened to you? and did the hourglass gesture, which offended me deeply. But my asthma and my lack of any guidance in how to get properly fit were both against me, and it was also at about this time that hockey abolished the offside rule, and we started playing on Astroturf instead of grass. Even at my fittest, there was no way I could keep up with a game in those conditions. The teacher who started the whole thing put me in the hockey squad, which meant I was practising twice a week, and occasionally she would pick me for the B team, I think probably out of pity.

At my thinnest, and when I was as fit as I knew how to be, I was still towards the higher end of “overweight” according to BMI. I remember a friend taking me aside and explaining to me, with the utmost delicacy and tact, that I should realize that I was never going to be a model even if I lost weight. I was incredibly grateful to her for taking the extreme risk of insulting me to point that out, but I reassured her that I wasn’t trying to be beautiful, I was just trying to make the hockey team and improve my general health. Then there came an evening in January, where I was sitting on the substitutes’ bench during hockey practice as it was starting to get dark, freezing to death in my sports kit of polo shirt and short skirt, and hungry as I was constantly during that period, and absolutely craving chocolate to the point where I was practically hallucinating. I realized at that moment that I would rather be fat and unhealthy than spend the rest of my life hungry. I quit the hockey team and the diet, and never looked back.

So, by the time I left school I was almost exactly the figure I am now: 5′3”, and about 12 stone. Most of that is genetics, a little bit is how little I was active during my teenage years. During the critical period of puberty, my mother was feeding me, which meant that I ate fairly large quantities, but always extremely good, nutritious and balanced food. My sister, who has always been more active than me and who has eaten a lot better since we left home and she became a chef while I became a scientist who often doesn’t have time to cook properly, has a pretty similar figure to mine, slightly thinner but still pretty solidly built. I’m lucky enough that I ended up reasonably curvy with that; I carry a lot of weight on my hips and thighs, but I have round, full breasts and a small waist in proportion to my size. But I don’t take credit for a vaguely socially acceptable figure, any more than I feel ashamed because I’m so much bigger than my so-called “ideal” weight.

Now, when I was a teenager, I had no idea how to deal with my appearance. I was convinced I was ugly, I think partly because of the weight but also just that the ideal of pretty available to me was very narrrow and I obviously didn’t fit it. I also genuinely didn’t care, not in a sour grapes way, but because of the environment I was in, where appearance was so devalued, I wasn’t in the least bit upset about being ugly. Clearly, thinking that you’re ugly is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I also wore completely unflattering clothes. After I left school, I gradually became more confident in my appearance. Various factors affected that, I think the main one was meeting adults who felt confident enough to express a range of tastes in body shape rather than pretending to like only tall, thin, blonde women because that was socially acceptable. I still don’t feel very excited about putting effort into appearance, but I know I can “dress up pretty” if I want to, and I know that a certain proportion of people find me attractive, and at least a fair number of people, though of course by no means everybody, think I’m at least acceptable aesthetically.

I still don’t do anything like enough exercise, but I don’t think that has much to do with my weight. I occasionally get comments that I “ought” to lose weight, even from medical professionals who should know better, but I tend to ignore them. For example, last time I was in the Family Planning Centre trying to get the Pill prescribed, the nurse said I could “stand to lose a couple of stone;” I didn’t argue with her, because I wanted my contraceptives more than I wanted a debate, but she really, really should have told me to do more exercise, not to lose weight. I strongly suspect that if my lifestyle were absolutely perfect I wouldn’t be a lot thinner than I am now, maybe a little thinner, but not a lot, and short of actual starvation I don’t think I’m capable of reaching the “normal” weight category even if I wanted to. In short, at different times I’ve been both fat and ugly and fat and pretty, and fat and energetic and fat and lazy. (I have been thin and ugly, but only as a prepubescent child, so that doesn’t count.) Note, though, how “fat and ugly” and “fat and lazy” roll off the tongue, whereas the positive pairings aren’t idioms at all.

What upsets me is not that the hand I was dealt was one that included being so-called obese. It’s the constant irritation of encountering hateful comments about fat people, even from sources that are otherwise quite sensitive and respectful. Sometimes people reassure me that they don’t mean me, they mean really fat people. I’m not “fat”, because I’m not ugly, or lazy, or stupid, or irresponsible. Well, guess what, most other fat people aren’t those things either, or at least they’re no more likely to be so than thin people. It’s clearly true that many people are much fatter than me, and have often had a much, much more difficult time as a result than I have; I’m not trying to be a drama queen or look for sympathy here. But the thing is, any time somebody is making the assumption that there’s some kind of size boundary above which you’re a disgusting pig with no self-respect or willpower, the fact that I fall below that boundary in their eyes isn’t much of a comfort to me. The boundary of what is defined as “fat” is very much dependent on context, and as I said at the beginning, the official medical definition makes me obese.

Another pattern that sometimes happens is that people justify their prejudiced comments because being fat is “unhealthy”. But even if being fat is bad for you, which is debateable, there’s no excuse to make prejudiced assumptions about people or even call for restrictions on their rights because they happen to have some unhealthy behaviours.

I’m going to leave this contentious topic at that for the time being. I just want to make it absolutely clear that comments about how disgusting fat people are, or about how fat people shouldn’t get healthcare, or hurtful “jokes” about fatness, or anything along those lines, are comments about me. I hear them as comments about me, and in extreme cases, as threats to me. And I’m not prepared to hate my body in order to avoid being emotionally affected by those comments.

de mortuis

Some very right wing American political thinker died recently; frankly I hadn’t heard of him until his death, but he sounds like he was an absolute piece of work. Of course, this has reignited the usual debate about whether it’s acceptable to say that someone who recently died was a disgusting racist. I started a comment to that Making Light thread, but in the end decided that it was too long and rambly and not really on topic (given that I barely know who Buckley was anyway), so it is better as a separate post than a comment on someone else’s blog.

I think there is some value in the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum. It’s mainly a principle of etiquette, though; in personal relations, if your friend is grieving over a loved one, it’s absolutely the wrong moment to enumerate all the reasons why you didn’t like the deceased. I think most people who have any manners at all realize this! The question is, should the principle be applied to people writing articles and blog posts about the deaths of public figures, particularly those who were basically famous for being exceptionally evil.

I believe in trying to see the best in everyone. This is a moral principle which can be controversial, but I do believe that each human being has their own unique value. I try to avoid speaking lashon hara, ill speech, about anyone. But that applies even more when a person is alive (and might be hurt by what I say about them) than after their death, so it’s not specific to this situation. It is somewhat relevant in how I will decide to comment on the death of a notorious public figure, though.

A more important principle than politeness or even than purity of speech is the principle of historical truth. If a person did terrible things, the fact of their death (which of course will happen sooner or later) should never be used as an excuse to whitewash history or effectively erase the memory of their victims. One should be suspicious of those who try to use de mortuis as an excuse to defend an abuser and exploiter. Stating that Buckley was a disgusting racist is not equivalent to interrupting his funeral to harrangue his grieving family, and rhetoric that tries to equate the two is probably serving a nasty agenda.

However, I don’t think it’s appropriate to gloat over a death either. Some people love to talk about dancing or pissing on someone’s grave, or take pleasure in the pain that they suffered at the end, or even hope they suffer eternal torment. Even if you were personally hurt by someone’s actions, that’s not a noble way to behave. Obviously, asking for moderation from direct victims is hard, just as asking them to see the humanity of someone who has directly hurt them while their abuser is alive is hard, so there ought to be some compassionate leeway. But for bystanders, I think that taking this kind of joy in someone else’s suffering and death morally diminishes the person doing the rejoicing, and doesn’t actually do any good in terms of helping the deceased’s victims, or even punishing the dead person; they’re dead, they don’t care.

There’s also a logical, even a theological problem with this attitude. Everybody dies eventually; we are not in a position to award immortality to the most deserving. How does it help if the occasional person dies who is really evil enough that we feel comfortable stating that they “deserved” the worst possible fate? You can’t treat death as a punishment if it happens to everybody, absolutely without regard to moral standing. Since we all have to die, most people hope to reach a good old age in security and among loved ones, and then to die swiftly without too much suffering. That’s about the best outcome you can get, so it’s very odd when it suddenly becomes a source of glee if it happens to an evil person. When my neighbour died the other week, I was tempted to find it comforting that she was 82, in very good health up to the last few months, happy, active and so on; she was a good person, and she deserved the very best life available in this imperfect world. But realistically that’s just coincidence; Buckley, who spent his life spreading racist and harmful ideas and oppressing those less fortunate, also died at the age of 82 after a successful and (to him, presumably) satisfying life. And all those of my neighbour’s peers and family who were brutally murdered by the Nazis before they even reached adulthood were surely far less evil than Buckley. It’s a travesty to look for justice in that sort of direction.

I am certainly not saying that everybody should hypocritically pretend to weep and wail over the deaths of hateful people. I have seen journal posts by people whose abusive parents finally died, and of course, being human, they felt relief rather than sadness. Anybody who expects otherwise is badly lacking in empathy. But there’s a difference between acknowledging the death of an evil person and the improvement in the average moral standard of the world for not having them in it, and actively gloating and celebrating a death. And I don’t understand the justification which says that this person was evil, they gloated over others’ deaths during their lifetime, so it’s only fair to do the same to them. That doesn’t make sense; if gloating over death is a wrong thing to do, which I agree it is, then it’s just as wrong to do so in revenge. (Presumably the evil person celebrated the deaths of those they considered to be morally bad in their turn!)

Pain is bad. Mortality is bad. The fact that sometimes they affect despicable people doesn’t really improve things very much, in my opinion. And part of the definition of not being evil is that you don’t take pleasure in someone else’s misery; using the excuse of their past bad behaviour to indulge in fantasizing about such things is morally dangerous.

What is cancer?

We’re being graced with an official visit from Bob Weinberg this week. One of the things he wanted to do was make an opportunity to meet a group of PhD students and other junior scientists. This strikes me as an excellent instinct because these vastly famous people doing their tours of honour will always have the chance to meet the other famous and important scientists at the host institution, and they will usually have a chance to be paraded for the general public, but it’s quite easy for them to miss the actual working researchers. So, I signed myself up to be on the waiting list if there were any spaces for post-docs after the opportunity had been offered to the PhD students, and there were some extra spaces, so I attended the meeting yesterday.

Someone asked me what exactly Weinberg is so famous for: basically he did the original work to prove that you can turn a normal cell into a cancer cell by blocking a couple of genes and injecting another couple, and what the minimum set of genes is. And he’s by no means a one-hit wonder, he’s been doing lots of exciting stuff in the quarter century since that landmark achievement. It’s actually quite surprising that this was the first time I’d heard him speak; I’d have expected to run across him at conferences by now.

His talk was mixed; I could clearly see why he is so respected both as a scientist and as a communicator, and indeed I’m writing this post because I’m excited about what he had to say. But at the same time he didn’t live up to his towering reputation. He talked down to the group quite badly; this may well be because his expectations of PhD students are based on the American system where a new PhD student has only had a science “major” and is still very much learning. So his talk was pitched at the wrong level for European PhD students who have completed an entire degree in their specialist subject, and are used to being treated as professional scientists albeit at an early stage of their training. He also admitted half way through the talk that he was sleep deprived and in a really horrible mood, and apologized for being unusually grumpy as a result (he was really thrown by some annoying computer problems at the beginning, when it took nearly 20 minutes to get the system set up to display his Powerpoint slides).

Both his grumpiness and his slight tendency to patronize caused me to behave rather abrasively, which I’m not particularly proud of. He started out by saying that he expected to be interrupted with lots of questions, so I took him at his word. But instead of asking questions which show how intelligent and engaged with his ideas I am, I found myself jumping on apparent flaws or omissions in his arguments and generally being a bit arsey. I doubt he was offended, but I also doubt I made a glowingly positive impression.

He started off by making what I thought was a really odd argument about cancer epidemiology. He showed some figures that point out that pretty much the only thing correlated with cancer incidence is access to screening and diagnosis. So ok, there’s huge reporting bias in how we track the prevalence of types of cancer in populations or over time. I didn’t find this as surprising or significant as he seemed think it was. I think the point was supposed to be that in spite of huge changes (usually alarming increases) in the reported incidence of various kinds of cancer, the (age-adjusted) death rates didn’t really change between 1930 and 1990, or between different countries studied. So he postulated that one way to read these figures is that human intervention basically has no effect on cancer mortality; a certain proportion of people with a given type of cancer die no matter what anyone does, and a certain proportion survive because they were destined to survive anyway, (though they are likely to attribute it to some kind of faith healing or quackery).

OK, 1990 to the present there has actually been a measurable decline in mortality from breast cancer and a couple of types of leukaemia. So it’s not all fatalism; medical advances are making a really profound difference here. He said that part of the decline in breast cancer mortality is explained by awareness of the risks of HRT so that it is no longer pushed at women as it was a generation ago. I wasn’t convinced by that, because it is really only in the US that every middle aged woman took HRT, and then everyone stopped because of the breast cancer scare. According to Weinberg screening programmes and knowledge of some of the major genetic factors haven’t made much difference, but he didn’t really justify dismissing those factors. Breast cancer does also benefit from two of the only three new drugs that unquestionably outperform any therapy attempted since the 30s: tamoxifen and its friends, and the antibody-based therapy herceptin. The third unquestionably successful drug is Gleevec for a certain type of leukaemia. That gives really stunning results, like improving the 5 year survival rate from about 20% to about 95%, but it is only useful in one particular relatively rare type of leukaemia, so it doesn’t register as a blip in overall population statistics.

If the glass is half-empty, it’s depressing that humanity spent 60 years and unimaginable sums of money without making any measurable progress. If the glass is half-full, there have been three genuine breakthroughs in the past 15 years, so it could be that we’re finally on the right track. (Also, no measurable progress might mean that the survival rate is improved from 5% to 10%, meaning thousands of people are alive who otherwise wouldn’t be, or it might mean that patients get a year of decent quality of life rather than 6 months of misery, but of course would still count as mortality statistics.) FWIW, my old boss, who is not as famous as Weinberg but pretty famous, reckons that cancer will be a curable disease in our lifetime.

This stuff is more or less what all famous cancer researchers say. Some of you probably don’t get as many chances to hear famous cancer researchers giving their spiel as I do, so I’m writing it here because I think it might be of interest. The really exciting bit was the second part of the talk though:

One of the most exciting results in cancer biology recently is that the only cells that are capable of giving rise to tumours are adult stem cells. This means that cells that normally don’t grow don’t suddenly turn rogue and start growing all over the place, as used to be believed (recently enough that I was taught this model at university in the late 90s). But in fact, cancer happens when cells that normally do grow, ie stem cells, start making tumours instead of healthy tissues.

If you generalize from this, you start to wonder how far cancer cells are really normal cells in the wrong situations, rather than total aberrations. Bear in mind that all cells in the body contain exactly the same genes, but use a subset of them to perform their correct functions. Cancer cells probably have, oh, half a dozen mutations, genetic changes. But that might mean they have six altered letters out of three billion which are identical to those of normal cells. How do such tiny changes alter the whole function of the body, even fatally in many cases? What if these altered cells aren’t something entirely new, they’re just switching to the wrong sort of program.

There are two circumstances where cells are “supposed” to grow rapidly and relatively independently. One is when the embryo is developing, when it has only a few months to grow from a single cell one tenth of a mm wide, to a baby-sized baby 50 cm long (there are very few tumours that grow that fast!). The other is when a person is injured, and needs to rapidly make new tissue to repair the damage. Weinberg suggested that both these situations are relevant in a tumour.

So, we can argue that a tumour acts like a wound site when there is no wound. It rapidly makes new blood vessels, which act to provide oxygen and nutrients to the centre of the tumour mass, but the blood vessels don’t “know” that that is their “goal”. The blood vessels start to grow because the body somehow “thinks” there is a wound there that needs to be repaired. The parts of the immune system which usually deal with wounds are all present at the sites of tumours; it was previously thought that this was a response to the presence of the “foreign” tumour, but in fact this doesn’t make sense because the tumour isn’t really foreign in the way that bacteria or other parasites are. So another way of looking at it is that the immune system, triggered inappropriately, actually causes the tumour. The immune cells are responding to a wound that isn’t there, so they send out chemicals which signal the tumour cells to grow, as they would normally signal new tissue to develop and repair an actual wound.

Weinberg also pointed out that this may mean that surgery is a really problematic way of dealing with cancer. You cut out the tumour, which obviously does need to happen. But. It’s impossible to eliminate absolutely every cell, and even a single stem cell left behind can regenerate the whole tumour, because that’s what stem cells do. Even worse, surgery causes an actual wound, so all the immune system gubbins which is around will go into hyperdrive, making a really ideal environment for those stem cells to get going and grow like anything.

If this were the whole story, most cancers wouldn’t be fatal. A tumour that does nothing except grow inexorably bigger is usually referred to as benign (this is a relative term, of course!) A malignant tumour is much more dangerous, for two reasons. Firstly, it actively invades the surrounding tissue, breaking down healthy tissue to make room for the tumour to grow. And secondly, pieces called metastases can break off and be carried round the body in the blood stream and lymph system, and cause new tumours all over the place. These metastatic tumours often can’t be removed by surgery as there are too many of them, and it’s often only a matter of time before they get into vital organs and cause a total system failure, otherwise known as death.

But there are some normal cells that are meant to invade the surrounding tissue, and meant to be able to move around the body and start growth at new sites. Namely, the cells of the early embryo. Weinberg’s theory is that malignant cells turn on genes that are normally turned on at the moment when the blastocyst, the ball of frog-spawn like cells, starts to turn into an actual embryo with recognizable features. These genes help the cells to move around to position themselves in the right places to form specialized tissues, and also to invade other parts of the embryo and mother’s uterus as necessary. So if these genes get turned on in an adult, you can get metastatic cells.

This feels like it could be a really productive novel way of looking at cancer. And I think it’s cool!

Further reading:
1. Stem cells: the real culprits in cancer?. Rather impressive Scientific American article on cancer stem cells, aimed for a popular audience.
2. Reya et al, Stem cells, cancer, and cancer stem cells is a decent review of stem cells and cancer, if you have access to Nature and want to read something at a more advanced level than SciAm.
3. Campbell & Polyak, Breast Tumor Heterogeneity: Cancer Stem Cells or Clonal Evolution? is a less good review, also written by people who are skeptical of the cancer stem cells model, but has the advantage of being free.
4. Yang et al, Exploring a New Twist on Tumor Metastasis is a recent review by Weinberg himself of some of this connection between embryo development and metastasis.

Privilege

There was a meme a while ago where people had to take a list and bold the “privileges” they experienced growing up. I know I’ve left it too late to address this, but I think it leads to some interesting ideas in general, so I’m going to babble a bit.

To deal with the meme itself: it originated from a teaching exercise developed at Indiana State University. Most people who filled in the meme commented that it isn’t terribly well thought out. Some of the criticisms are a bit off-target; yes, it is US-centric and yes, it concentrates on class to the exclusion of other kinds of privilege, but that’s because it was designed to teach American college students about class, not to be used as a meme in the rather international and highly varied context of the blogosphere, or to make a profound statement about privilege in general. Several people argued that it fails even to address even American class privilege in a sensible way; I don’t know enough about that to be able to comment. My reading of it is that somebody who bolded most of it would have the following advantages: a financially stable background; guardians who were committed to education; to some extent, though the list doesn’t cover this as well as it might, a culture which is socially valued. Those are definitely advantages which some people have and others lack, which is not to say that everyone who has them must have a wonderful and perfect life and everyone else must be living in misery!

But I think the reaction to this meme is a good example of why those privilege lists don’t really make the point they are trying to make very well. I believe the original “privilege list” was Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay Unpacking the invisible knapsack. It’s worth reading her original article to see what she was trying to say before her meme (in the literal sense) started being used all over the place to make vaguely related points. I must admit I find the article rather annoying, albeit intelligently written. It very obviously comes out of second wave feminist ideas about male privilege, and McIntosh has come to the realization that the experience of black people in a white-dominated society is somewhat analogous to the experience of women in a male-dominated society. There are some immediate glaring problems with this, most notably the fact that, um, black women exist! And I would probably like the list a lot better had it been written by a black person, because it’s hard not to find it smug and patronizing as it stands. It’s also assuming that there are two races, “black” and “white”, and making what I think are rather dangerous analogies between gender and race. On a structural level I think a lot of her examples are pretty much repetitions of the same thing.

Basically, what she’s saying is that white people get treated as individuals, black people as representatives of their race, and this can cause real problems even in the absence of overt, deliberate racism. This is a useful point to make; I assume the list leaves out all the other disadvantages that POC may have to negotiate due to historical or current active racism because its audience can reasonably be expected to know about those. I’m just not sure that privilege lists are a good way to make this or related points.

Privilege is a really loaded word. I have a hard time seeing it as a problem that (some) white people can go shopping without getting harassed; it’s a problem that some POC can’t. But calling that a privilege makes it sound like white people are oppressing POC just by going shopping, which is a bit ridiculous. As pointed out (I can’t find the reference now, sorry), going through your life without being assumed to be a criminal or subject to violence or excluded from jobs and institutions is not a privilege, it’s a basic minimum that everyone should have. Redbird said something really intelligent distinguishing privileges that can only exist at the expense of the unprivileged from general unfairness. If everything from arguments to job interviews favours white people at the expense of POC, then making things fairer would at least in the short term disadvantage white people.

A big problem with the privilege list way of looking at things is that it can only really look at one axis at a time, and in fact most people are probably members of less favoured groups in some respects and more favoured groups in others. Lots of people looked at the class privilege meme and complained because it assumed middle-class people to have loads of advantages, without considering things like health, appearance, race, good versus bad (or even abusive) parenting, sexual orientation, gender identity, social ability and so on, which obviously have a big effect on whether someone has a good or bad childhood. I also don’t think it’s wise to make facile analogies between the different ways that some groups may be at a disadvantage; sexism is not the same thing as racism is not the same thing as ableism is not the same thing as fat-hatred. I also don’t think it’s wise to discuss as if all these things can readily be separated.

The original privilege list didn’t do this explicitly, but it is often used in this way, and I think it’s not surprising given the choice of term and the whole political context of this sort of list: someone who “has privilege” is automatically assumed to be deliberately wielding that privilege to hurt people who “lack privilege”. It’s common in a certain type of identity politics to talk about “the oppressor class” and “the oppressed class”. Yes, there is a very important difference between a white person making a racist remark to a black person and a black person saying something disparaging about honkies or whiteys. That doesn’t mean that all white people are racists and all black people are saints.

What happens when privilege gets brought up in (online) discussions? Sometimes it’s used to make people considered to be privileged shut up; their opinion isn’t valid at all because they have too much privilege or “entitlement” or “internalized whatever-ism”. In some cases this is a feature; if members of a minority feel that they are always being shouted down by members of a majority, and they want to create a community where that dynamic is reversed, fine, good for them. It may well be more important to hear the views of members of a (hopefully relevant!) minority. But in other cases the members of the minority are actually trying to have a discussion with the members of the majority, and appealing to privilege tends to spoil this. I think the main reason is that couching things in those sorts of terms just makes the people from a dominant background defensive. People are generally willing to accept that they have advantages compared to others, but to call those advantages privileges makes lots of people upset. Emotionally, an extremely likely reaction is to point out that your life isn’t that great after all, and I’ve seen far too many discussions derailed into hopeless shouting matches. The activists in favour of some oppressed group are accusing everybody in sight of exercising privilege (the activists who do this are as likely as not to belong to the culturally favoured group themselves, mind you), and the members of the dominant group enumerate all the disadvantages in their life and protest that they are not whatever-ist.

The thing about privilege is it’s an unanswerable argument. Anyone who criticizes it is open to the accusation that they’re just acting out of privilege which lets them deny their privilege so that they can contribute to the oppression of the unprivileged. Undoubtedly, this is sometimes the case. But assuming that it always is leads to a lot of really unproductive and circular discussions.

We will remember them

They don’t have Remembrance Day in Sweden. This makes perfect sense, since Sweden wasn’t involved in either of the World Wars. But it’s odd to come into November and not see any poppies.

Just like it’s odd to go to villages with no war memorial in the centre, and it’s odd to have to consciously break the assumption that people of my grandparents’ generation will have service experiences. The phrase “in the war” has almost no referent here. I’m living in a society that didn’t lose huge swathes of the entire male population in two successive generations. There was no baby boom here, but rather an economic boom when the rest of Europe was crippled in the post-war period and Sweden wasn’t (that was the time when Sweden became a nation of immigrants, because the sudden expansion of industry created a huge labour shortage).

The Jewish community remember the war, WW2 at least, but for them the war is tangled with Nazism and the Holocaust. This week we marked the anniversary of Kristallnacht; there are proportionally more people here who were personally affected than in England, I think. Those who were already in Sweden by the 30s remember what it was like with Occupied Norway on one border, and Axis Finland on the other, and Occupied Denmark just across the water. And the Swedish government allowing the German trains to travel through their supposedly neutral country, and the general atmosphere of relative sympathy for the Nazis (did anti-Communism or anti-Semitism come first? It’s hard to say.) But none of that is the stuff I’m accustomed to remembering on this date.

Facebook and LJ reminded me of the date, and having been reminded, made me feel I wasn’t remembering on my own. So I am adding my post to what seems like a kind of virtual ceremony.

Commonplaces

A human is built from dust and their fate is dust. They spend their life earning a living. A life like a breakable cup, like withering grass, like a fading flower, like a passing shadow, like a melting cloud, like a fleeting wind, like scattering dust, like a fading dream…

High Holy Days liturgy, R Amnon of Mainz, c 1100

Cities and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

This season’s Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year’s;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days’ continuance,
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o’er-kind,
To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
“See how our works endure!”

Rudyard Kipling, 1906

Snippets of poetry on the theme The map is not the territory from Making Light:

a child may move from myth onto the map and find that truth requires a kind of lie a world half glimpsed between the game and nap a shape that’s written on the empty sky elves that tread quietly and dare to tap your sleeping shoulder and stare in your eye and then we grow up and the world’s just crap you work your arse off and you have to die we have fresh apples now and wine in flagons but see no unicorns and spy no dragons Fragano Ledgister, 2007

Once Upon a Time Libraries were replete with sense of wonder Books were maps to places I might find Rocketships and magic rings, and under All, unspoken hope in humankind Ad astra. Tesseract. The game’s afoot The unicorn is searching for her kin Toad Hall and Rivendell and Warlock put Me on the road to battles yet to win That universe held wonders. I was one. Now my reading’s lessened by misgiving I’ve lost the run to joy, the will to run Eaten, not by dragons, but by living Too much mundane, I’m weighed down till I snap Alas, my territory’s not the map “OtterB”, 2007

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:2-9, c 250 BCE

Let’s discuss logic

Consider the following pair of statements:

A] God created the world.
B] A combination of random mutation and natural selection gives rise to new species.

There seems to be a persistent assumption that A implies not B. Even worse, there is a minor industry based on the false corollary that B implies not A, which really has no logical basis at all. This annoys me, because a lot of energy is being expended on debates which are logically stupid, but which also have harmful effects.

A is of course commonly known as creationism, and B is commonly referred to as the theory of evolution. I would argue that the two statements are almost independent. Without violating logic, a person could easily assent to both statements, or hold that both statements are false, as well as the more typical configuration of assenting to A and not B (the stereotypical fundamentalist Christian creationist), or not A and B (the stereotypical strictly materialist atheist).

Consider, for example, a Buddhist who does not believe statement A, because he holds that the world has always existed, and that there is no supreme being who could reasonably described by the English word God. I don’t think we can predict anything about what this person believes about whether or not new species evolve by mutation and natural selection. Consider also a positivist materialist type who is absolutely convinced that no such thing as a deity could possibly exist (not A). There is no reason to assume that this person believes in Darwinian evolution (B); she could for example be a strict neutralist, who believes that the persistence of some variants in a population is totally stochastic and natural selection has no significant effect. As for someone who assents to both A and B, I don’t have to make up an example; I myself hold both statements to be true (though my attitude towards the two statements is not at all identical).

Clearly the root of the problem is not in fact poor logic, it’s the existence of a very vocal group of people who say that they believe A, when in fact they also believe α, namely that the creation account in the book of Genesis is “literally” true. α can reasonably be said to imply not B, because if all the species were there at the moment of creation, then there is no speciation and no evolution. In fact, it’s not totally unreasonable to say that α and B are fully mutually exclusive; B doesn’t strictly imply not α (because Genesis could be literally true, but the standard interpretation of its literal truth could be wrong), but it’s close enough.

The people who are putting serious effort into convincing everybody of α and not B are, I believe, rather dangerous. Let’s call them political Creationists (to distinguish them from the much larger group of everybody in the world who believes A; that distinction is going to be important for the development of this argument). I don’t think that ultimately, political Creationists really care whether the account in Genesis is literally true. The originators of this philosophy are American fundamentalist Christians, and they have two rather unsavoury aims. The first is to force their brand of Christianity into a position of direct political influence, including in public schools. That means they’re working to undermine the US Constitution whose First Amendment prohibits establishment of any religion. In one way that’s kind of a local issue, but American politics does tend to spill over into the rest of the world.

The second aim is to undermine the credibility of science in general. In order to increase the powerbase of a fundamentalist religion, political Creationists are trying to make critical thinking more difficult. That’s what makes it really scary for those of us who are not Americans. It also explains why people who are not at all American fundamentalist Christians are getting involved in this, including a growing minority of Muslims and a few rather wacky Jews, as well as some other Christian groups. It seems like these other groups want a slice of the power that fundamentalists in the US are accumulating, and political Creationism looks like a way to achieve that.

It’s understandable that people are worried about this phenomenon. But I find there’s a big problem with the measures being taken to combat it. I think the people who are writing books and making TV programmes in which they eagerly try to convince people that evolution really does happen, claiming that this shows all religion is false, are actually allowing the unpleasant element to frame the debate. I am not saying that arguing with them gives them legitimacy, exactly, but more that arguing with them on their terms is already giving them a significant advantage, even if their arguments are weaker. (There’s also the fact that the militant atheist crowd annoy me because of the lack of logic mentioned at the start of this post; there’s no good reason to assume that all people with any religious views at all necessarily believe α, and it’s entirely fallacious to claim that evidence in favour of evolution is evidence in favour of atheism.) But more seriously, arguing as if verifying the Darwinian view somehow “proves” that God doesn’t exist (B implies not A), is only encouraging people who don’t understand or don’t find the theory of evolution satisfying towards the theist, creationist view (not B implies A). For one thing the theory of evolution is hard to understand and not at all intuitive. For a second thing, Darwin himself said some things that were wrong, and other evolutionary biologists have also occasionally said wrong things. Nobody sensible is claiming that scientists are infallible. But the way the debate is being framed by the political Creationists, and the way that framing is accepted by the militant atheists, make it tempting to infer that if Darwin was wrong, then fundamentalist Christians must be right.

In order to “win”, all the political Creationists need to do is to convince people that there’s a legitimate controversy about the theory of evolution. They don’t have to convince people that their version of the origins of life is correct, simply that the standard scientific model is “just a theory”, and it’s a matter of pure personal preference whether you decide to “believe” in evolution or in literal-according-to-the-fundamentalist-interpretation-of-Genesis Creationism. That’s enough to challenge the scientific edifice. Once this false controversy is legitimized, it’s easy to promote other similar false controversies, because you’ve encouraged an atmosphere where the scientific method is worthless, and it’s all just a matter of what view seems most appealing. There are similar bits of propaganda about climate change, with a false controversy about whether human activity is altering the global environment or whether God promised there would never be another flood so no person of faith needs to worry about sea levels rising. And about the effectiveness of various kinds of contraception and exactly how certain medical procedures work. If there’s believed to be a controversy, most people’s sense of fairness means that they want to give equal consideration to the two “sides”, even if in fact one side is utterly disingenuous and will say anything until they come up with something that sounds plausible, while the other is based on empirical evidence and entirely open to legitimate challenges.

Let me make a note about the different values of belief for the two statements. A is clearly a statement of religious belief. You can try to challenge it on logical or empirical grounds if you really want to, but you’re probably just going to end up annoying the people who hold the belief. I would venture that the vast majority of people who hold religious beliefs do not hold them because they are completely convinced by some practical evidence or some irrefutable logic. They hold the beliefs because they find them emotionally appealing, or perhaps because they come from a community where those beliefs are common currency. That goes for a lot of atheism too, I would argue. People who hold a particular philosophical or religious belief may try to rationalize it by presenting arguments and evidence, but in the end the justification is primarily a way to make them feel better about themselves, it’s not the reason for believing a certain way. (My personal opinion is that anyone who claims they can “prove” God’s existence is believing in something that isn’t God, and anyone who claims they can prove God’s non-existence has misunderstood the nature of religion.)

B is a scientific theory. I happen to think the evidence for it is pretty solid at this point, and it does seem to make good predictions about how biology works. Rationalists defending the theory of evolution often make pious (sic) pronouncements about how scientific theory can always be challenged by new evidence or a better interpretation of current evidence. In principle that’s true, but really, how many people have personally examined all the evidence in favour of Darwinian evolution and found it satisfactory? I know I haven’t, and I’m a professional biologist! So to some extent people believe B as a matter of trust; we believe in the scientific method, with its empiricism, its peer review, its assumption of induction. And we believe in the scientific establishment as people who are true to the principles of the scientific method, and who genuinely are willing to revise their models when new evidence appears. We accept things as being true because scientists have come to a consensus on them, which is essentially an argument from authority, when it comes down to it.

Now, I do happen to think that science is about the best method we have of understanding the world. But I also think that we shouldn’t go too far in assuming that “Science” has access to the Ultimate Truth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is an element of trust and assumptions involved. This situation also implies that scientists have a responsibility to communicate their results clearly and honestly to the non-scientific world, and people who are not scientists have a responsibility to be educated enough to maintain a reasonable level of skepticism.

Anyway, the main conclusion is that statements A and B are independent because they are different kinds of statements. If people want to argue for or against one, they shouldn’t muddy the waters by trying to talk about the other. The secondary conclusion is that there are some extremely unpleasant people who have a vested interest in convincing people of not B, and that decent people should be very careful in how they argue against such unpleasant elements, to avoid accidentally playing to their hidden aims.

Women online

I posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek essay to my OKCupid journal recently, on the topic of men who whine that women on OKCupid are rude to them. I give several possible reasons why women might be rude in an online dating context like OKCupid:

1. The major one: most women have the experience of being pestered and hassled by men who won’t take no for an answer. Polite friendliness is taken as a definite come-on, mere polite refusal may be ignored or used as an excuse to try to persuade, so many women jump straight into blunt refusal, or simply ignoring unwanted overtures altogether.
2. In person, women are afraid (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the person and the situation) of violence. Often, women try to turn men down as gently and politely as possible, not because they really care about hurting the guy’s feelings, but because they are afraid things will turn ugly if they are too direct. It’s a balance between making it unambiguously clear that you’re not interested, and causing offence which might put you in danger. I personally hate having to judge this balance, but it is a fact of life.

   However, online the threat of violence is much less, and even verbal violence can be avoided by blocking messages from a harasser. Men who (without realizing it) are used to a certain degree of deference from women they approach in person, find it shocking when women online are free to say what they really think.

3. In an online dating context, women have quite a significant advantage over men; simply being female means you are in demand to a certain extent. That means women can afford to be picky, and in fact probably need to be picky, if they don’t want to spend their entire life managing their social network on dating sites.
4. Some women are just rude, superficial, etc. The online context allows the worst of women to behave like the worst of men, whether it’s rudeness, impossibly high standards, pursuing sex aggressively or whatever. It’s dangerous for women to do this kind of thing in real life, so few do.

Basically, my suspicion is that men have the upper hand in in person dating contexts, because of their social position and to a minor extent greater physical strength. When they lose these advantages in online dating, they are distressed. Some of them are distressed because they are genuinely decent people who are utterly unaware how a certain proportion of jerks behave towards women, and don’t understand how that benefits them in person (because they get let down gently when they approach a woman who isn’t interested), but disadvantages them online (because women are on the defensive and expect to be hassled). Some of them are distressed because they are sad cases who enjoy having power over women and can’t deal with any diminishing of that power.

The version I posted on OKCupid was a lot less harsh than this. I filled it with disclaimers about how I’m sure all the men doing the complaining are basically decent people, and how I understand that it’s really upsetting if a woman is rude to you because of other men being jerks to her in the past. Even so, within minutes I got a comment from a guy whining that I was expecting men to be omniscient, and how unfair it is that women are so mean to him. (I suspect this is partly a ploy, he wants me to come back to him and try to prove that I’m not like those mean horrible women that he’s complaining about.)

I’m also reminded of this long and tangled discussion on Making Light. There was a thread that was vaguely about feminism, and a commenter showed up with an anecdote about an incident of fairly standard harrassment of a woman by men. The reaction to it was kind of amazing. Many women started talking about how she might have been in physical danger, and ways to assess the probability of and hopefully avoid really extreme things like gang rape in that sort of situation. Many men started talking about how the guy sounded like he was a bit clueless but he didn’t mean any harm, and there was no need for her to overreact so much, she should have been more polite. (Her supposed rudeness, by the way, consisted of: So I take off the headphones, look him dead in the eye, and say, “I would like to be left alone. I thought by now that would be obvious. Good night.” And I put the headphones back on.)

Now, the discussion wasn’t divided purely along gender lines, but the gulf was definitely significant. The thread unfortunately devolves into people yelling at eachother, with some trying to frame the whole discussion with standard feminist theory and others not understanding the asusmptions of said feminist theory, and I don’t think any of that is helpful. But I think it’s part of the same phenomenon I’m talking about in this post. Men just don’t know what it’s like to go through the world being female, and don’t understand why a lot of women make an assumption of malice when an unknown man approaches them. Also, they don’t see malice when it actually exists; the guy in Nicole’s story wasn’t just socially inept, he was getting off on having power over her, but he was keeping his threats deniable.

I’ve never been offended by a man chatting me up or expressing interest in me, if it’s genuine. I am offended by men being sleazy and lechy because they can get away with it. I really don’t like having to be wary of men; by nature I’m very friendly and will chat to pretty much anybody who approaches.

Things to read

I’m in that annoying stage where I don’t quite have time to write about the things I want to write about. This is partly because I’ve been spending my free time following links around and reading other people’s writing, instead of posting.

So I might as well share some of the gems. The internet is full of instant gratification, but this year I’m starting to find myself drawn to full-length, properly though out essays much more than in the past, and the fact they’re online rather than in foreign newspapers I wouldn’t otherwise read is just a matter of convenience.

Michael Pollan’s NYT essay Unhappy meals was getting mocked a bit when it came out. People pounced on the comment about not eating what your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, which out of context is a ludicrous remark. But actually now I’ve read the whole essay it makes a lot of sense to me. I think it may well be important that food is food, not a formula of a certain number of calories plus a certain set of chemicals that we define as “nutrients” or “vitamins”.

There simply isn’t a short-cut to eating healthily, you just have to eat healthily. However, even if you can get away from the mindset of looking for a magic supplement to add or a demon ingredient to avoid, it’s easy to get carried away with the idea of eating “healthily”. The attitude to health I discussed in my Health and Virtue post last year is totally pernicious, and it’s something that really frequently comes up when the issue at hand is food and diet. (Also, eating healthily has a reasonable chance of making you healthier, but there’s no guarantee at all it will make you thinner. There is essentially no reliable way of losing weight long-term through dieting.) The worst extreme of making a moral issue out of healthy eating (whether that’s environmentally healthy or healthy for you or both) has been defined as orthorexia, a mental unbalance which I think is rather prevalent in our society.

There’s also the issue that eating well is more effort than eating badly; in some cases, it’s the healthier eater who is making the extra effort, and that’s fine. But that’s not always so, and very often the extra work falls to the poorest sectors of society, and disproportionately on women. Chris Clarke’s essay on unpaid labour is well worth reading. It’s wide-ranging, not only discussing food, but it does underline the point that it is very well worth questioning where the extra labour is coming from in preparing real food from fresh, locally grown, organic ingredients. (Yes, it is often possible to spend extra money instead of extra work, but that just means that someone else unseen is doing the extra work instead of you. And sometimes they’re getting the extra money in return, but sometimes they’re not. It’s good to be aware of these things.)

On a completely different matter, try Charlie Stross’ essay on a future without privacy. His premise is interesting one and he’s a persuasive writer, though I think he’s over-estimating the technology and under-estimating the complexity of human society. Myself, I’m leaning more and more towards the view that rather than trying to keep my various online identities separate and private (ultimately a futile task), I should just make everything open and take care never to post anything that I could be ashamed or embarrassed about. One point of Stross’ that is applicable to our current technology, let alone his projected future, is that you can’t protect your own privacy online because you don’t have control over the people who interact with you and what they publish.

Hm, so much for not having time to post so I’ll just put up a few links! That turned into a long essay after all. Let’s see if I can harness that verbal energy into writing the review I’m working on.

Leading services

I’ve been doing various bits and pieces of running services in the last few months, both the egalitarian traditional service with Ploni bat Ploni, and on my own, and I want to talk about my reactions to this.

I should make it clear that in Judaism, any competent adult can lead the service. It doesn’t mean that you’re especially holy, and it’s somewhat prestigious but less so than some other ritual roles which work out as rather less effort in practice. It’s preferred to choose someone of high moral character, given the option, but I don’t know many communities where they turn people down for not being moral enough! So when I talk about leading services, it’s just a minor skill I happen to have, I’m not showing off about some amazing accomplishment or high office.

The thing that started off this train of thought is that people were being appreciative when I led the Progressive service back in March. I found this slightly awkward for two reasons. The people who congratulated me on my lovely speaking voice and my interesting explanations and so on made me feel awkward because it’s not meant to be a performance, it’s meant to be prayer. But even so, it’s undeniably true that there are some elements of stagecraft involved, and the service is likely to be more enjoyable if the leader does have talents in that direction rather than not. And yes, I am good at it on a purely pragmatic level. (Well, apart from the bit where I’m totally unmusical, but in recent months I’ve been working in tandem with people who make up for that deficiency.) Compilerbitch pointed out to me a while ago that I have in fact been doing this sort of thing since I was eight (from 8 to 12 it was children’s services and fragments that don’t have ritual import, because being an adult is in fact a necessary qualification). So it’s not surprising that I know what I’m doing, and she’s right too that this kind of skill does overlap with other kinds of public speaking such as presenting my work at scientific conferences.

Even more awkward were the people who gushed about what an amazing spiritual experience it was and how I made them feel closer to God and so on. I suppose that is the aim, but it’s a very weird thing to be appreciated for. And that too is partly a matter of technique. Lowering my voice at the right moment, using my expressions and body language to underline the emotional import, judiciously picking music and texts that will evoke a reaction, making lots of eye contact to give the impression that I’m speaking personally to each member of the congregation, even crying a little if it seems apt. Stagecraft, in short, but intentionally manipulating my audience’s emotions is more acceptable in a secular context. A generous interpretation is that I’m using these techniques to help people to relate to their own spiritual feelings, and certainly it’s the case that what you get out of a service depends ultimately on your own emotional context, however skillful the leader may be.

The thing is, I don’t find it possible to be sincerely religious and lead a service at the same time, so I have to fake it a bit. It takes a lot of concentration to hold an audience like this, watching the body language of several dozen people to make sure everyone is with you, and worrying about the logistics and the timing and putting in order what I want to say and reading the Hebrew correctly at the same time. Even if it is partly acting, when it’s going well I am making a genuine emotional connection with people I don’t know very well, and that takes effort. I am certainly not praying while I’m holding all this stuff together. I usually find I’m exhausted by the end of the service, and it’s a real ordeal to be all smiley and friendly afterwards when people come to commend me on a successful service.

And to be honest, I’m not in a very religious phase of my life at the moment. I am doing lots of Jewish stuff, but I’m connecting to the community rather than to anything metaphysical. I do think that sort of commitment to the community is at least as important as personal spiritual ecstasy, mind you. When I lead a service I start with the kavannah, the statement of intention: Behold, I am ready to perform the positive commandment of loving one’s neighbour, and that definitely represents what is most meaningful about the process for me. I have this talent, and it’s something the community needs, so it’s a good fit, a good opportunity to contribute.

Not that the reaction is universally positive. The Progressive group has the usual problem of trying to be all things to all people, and there are people who are annoyed because the service is too traditional and might as well be Orthodox, and other people who are annoyed because I change what they consider immutable. Those criticisms don’t really bother me, because they’re basically inevitable in this sort of situation. We have a very new Progressive community that doesn’t have a strong sense of positive identity yet, and almost all the members are either dissatisfied ex-Orthodox people or seeking formerly secular people. Also, we’re somewhat a breakaway group from the main, Conservative community and there inevitably going to be some people who feel threatened by that and don’t approve of the Progressive concept anyway.

But I’ve had a couple of more personal and somewhat upsetting confrontations. One woman backed me into a corner and harangued me for not doing enough. She meant well, she was trying to say that my services are wonderful and she wants more, but it came across as really harsh. Never mind that I’m taking charge of at least some part of the liturgy more than once a month, and doing the bar mitzvah teaching, and taking on a good proportion of the adult education in the Progressive group, and doing a bunch of behind the scenes stuff such as being a member of the board. She made it all my fault that we don’t have enough depth of knowledge in the Progressive group, and one service a month isn’t enough to create a strong sense of community, and we should be running a comprehensive educational programme for all levels.

Then today a older man from the main community came and had a go at me for dividing the community and stealing congregants away from the main service. He said that he feels empty and spiritually hurt when the congregation is depleted because lots of the regulars come to my service instead. And since the Conservative community have voted to become egalitarian, why do we need to create discord by having an alternative service? (He would have more of a point if he were talking about the egal minyan rather than the Progressive group, because Progressive Judaism is very different from even the most feminist Orthodox-style liturgy.) I have just about enough Swedish now to say vaguely placatory things but this tirade really wanted a detailed discussion of some quite abstract ideas and I couldn’t manage that.

*Shrug* This kind of thing is pretty much an expected hazard of the job. Some of the positive enthusiastic people were trying to convince me I should become a rabbi, and I gave my usual flip response that I really don’t need to move into one of the few careers that is worse paid and less secure than academia! At this point, though, I think I could make a tolerable job of being a rabbi. It requires a lot more than just being able to lead services, mind you, but it no longer seems like quite such a ridiculous suggestion as it has in the past.

Another good thing about leading services is that it gets me noticed. Now pretty much everyone in the community greets me by name and I’ve had several invitations to meals as a result of doing the job. For example, last night I ended up going out for a meal with some of the Americans who attended the service. (Foodwise it was nothing special, just mediocre generic Euro-Asian, but it was a nice occasion.) So there’s some material reward as well as the satisfaction of using my talents in a way that benefits the community.