Doesn’t matter if you’re green with purple stripes

I’ve started reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. I’m about 200 pages in and so far nothing much has happened, though it’s a fairly pleasant sort of nothing. But there’s something about it which I’d characterize as self-indulgent, and it’s reminding me of the tenor of some long-running internet discussions about social justice related stuff.

The common thread I’ve noticed among some people who identify with geek subcultures is that they think of themselves as totally free of prejudice, and also they experienced social exclusion as kids / teenagers (often to quite a severe extent), and therefore understand what it’s like to part of an oppressed minority. Both these assumptions are partly true, but taking them as absolutely axiomatic in all circumstances leads to a lot of frustration.

Being free of prejudice seems to be partly to do with identifying as being very (or even completely) rational and objective. There’s no rational reason why women should be inferior to men, people with darker skin should be inferior to people with lighter skin and so on, so your typical geek rejects these irrational prejudices. There’s an ideal, and one that I have a lot of time for, of being meritocratic, and judging people only on their intelligence rather than superficial aspects of their appearance.

The problem is that things like culture aren’t seen as objective facts, and indeed discrimination itself is assumed not to exist because it isn’t rational. This means that geeks can be entirely accepting of people who differ in superficial characteristics in theory, but in practice, if the superficial characteristics have tangible practical consequences, this kind of geek gets into a panic because that makes it not superficial any more, whereas the theory has already dismissed the differences as superficial. For example, if it turns out that women are a rather less likely than men to find rape jokes funny, or object to being constantly subjected to images of hypersexualized “babes”, then there must be something wrong with the women. No rational person (who, like me, was unaffected by them) would object to these things, and women are just like me, therefore they must be totally irrational in objecting!

The other problem with this attitude is that intelligence itself is a mixture of two things. One is in fact a superficial characteristic just like skin colour or height or whatever; intelligent people aren’t inherently morally superior to people of low intelligence. The second is that there are behaviours that are often confused with intelligence, but are more reflections of social class than anything else. Things like being educated and knowledgeable, especially about areas that are considered prestigious (knowing a lot about sport or fashion isn’t prestigious, knowing a lot about history or physics is). Things like being skilled in logical argument / rhetoric (at least as much a matter of training as innate intelligence). This is particularly noticeable when the topic is of purely intellectual interest to some people in the debate, but of personal, emotional impact to others; it’s easy in this situation for geeks to assume that the second group are less rational or even less intelligent.

Of course, the holy grail of geekdom, being competent with computers and the internet, is only accessible to people who have enough money to afford computers and broadband subscriptions, and enough leisure time (or sufficiently indulgent bosses) to be able to spend many hours a week online. Now, it’s true that these things are fairly, though not universally, accessible now, but people who have only been able to spend lots of time with computers and the internet for a few years rate as less intelligent, and therefore less worthy, than geeks who have been part of that culture for decades, and that’s going back to a time when you had to have a lot of advantages in life to be online regularly.

The result of these assumptions about intelligence is that geeks often find themselves most comfortable surrounded by people from very similar backgrounds. It’s still admirable, but not all that difficult, to respect diversity when it’s largely variation between middle to upper-middle class, anglophone, educated, straight, white, not too severely disabled males. Of course there are geeks who don’t completely fit that picture, and it’s definitely a good thing that these people are welcome in geek circles, but the point is that most of them are people who can pretty easily act as if they did fit the standard geek profile. I very much count myself in that category; although I’m Jewish, the ways I’m Jewish mean that my lifestyle differs very little from that of a secular post-Christian, and I’ve experienced very little serious antisemitism, and my appearance doesn’t really mark me as non-white. Although I’m bi, my presentation is such that I’m assumed to be straight and conventionally gendered. Indeed, although I’m female, many of my interests, my upbringing and my personality are those typically considered masculine. In fact I have so much in common with straight WASP male geeks that I am planning to marry one of their number!

The trouble is that people aren’t always willing or even able to pretend that the things that make them different from the standard don’t exist. This causes a surprising amount of friction. I think it’s partly because any mention of difference can be read as accusing geeks of being prejudiced, which they’re just axiomatically not. Another issue is that people may well not want to spend time, either online or in person, with people who treat them badly. The decision to avoid someone who makes you feel physically / sexually unsafe, or who constantly hurts you with racist micro-aggressions, is confused with shunning or ostracizing, and ostracizing is evil. Geeks who understand far too well how painful it is to be excluded from a social group, but don’t have any direct personal experience of how painful it is to be subjected to misogyny, racism etc, may well end up creating an environment that is far more welcoming to bullies than their victims, even if they themselves are genuinely not sexist or racist or otherwise prejudiced. Part of it is putting too high a value on being “objective”; there’s no merit, and much harm, in trying to have a neutral, balanced debate about whether certain groups of people are really human.

The other side of it is the belief that being bullied as a kid means you understand systematic oppression. It’s almost always a mistake to compare one kind of prejudice and exclusion with another; the impulse to build on your own experiences to generate empathy is admirable, but it can easily be taken too far. Beyond that, though, there is a difference in kind, not just in degree, between bullied because you like D&D better than football, and being subjected to racism. One of the things that’s bugging me about Anathem is that there is a group of people, the Ita, who are portrayed as being somewhere between Jews in pre-modern society, and highly excluded nerds. And some characters who are clearly supposed to be analogous to autistic / Asperger’s spectrum people in this world. Between that and the whole setting where a certain style of rationalism and logical argument is literally elevated to the status of a religion, I’m feeling a little impatient with the book.

When I started thinking about this sense of irritation, I was reminded of a whole bunch of things which are annoying in similar ways: the absolutely painful, awful conversations that happen when Making Light tries to discuss racism or religion (even though in fact it’s a pretty diverse community in terms of the declared identities of regular commenters). The stupid argument between the Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong crowd and some of the LJ social justice people about how racism and sexism are totally unimportant because they’re not cognitive biases or logical fallacies. Some of the discussions around Among Others (not the book itself, just some of the smugness of its readers who seem to be using it to justify their sense of superiority over the mundanes). A lot of tiresome reductionist arguments about how there’s no such thing as sexism because women on average have very slightly different brain structures from men, and obviously socially constructed gender is irrelevant because it’s not “objective” like physical measurements of the brain are. Some of the annoying bits of New Atheism.

I think what I’m saying is that sometimes admirable working principles can lead to negative practical consequences. I hope that if I write this down it will help me to appreciate all the positive things about geek culture, without falling into the trap of feeling superior to non-geeks or thinking I am knowledgeable about stuff I’m really ignorant of! Or perhaps I’ll just annoy everybody, I’m not sure.