Okay, I chickened out. My original NSFW title for this post was going to be "Chickenshit Comes Home to Roost." It seems like an obvious phrase, but as far as I can tell from Google, no one else seems to have used it. And it occurred to me right after I watched this video clip (via):
Not because Will Phillips is chickenshit -- far from it. To refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance in your Arkansas classroom because it's not true until everyone is free and equal, until same-sex couples in America can marry, even with supportive parents, takes a lot of courage. Parents can only protect you from so much, and there are teachers and fellow students who'll get in all the licks they can.
No, it's because President Obama is chickenshit -- not just on same-sex marriage, where he misrepresents the issue anyway, but on just about everything. And his supporters encourage him. Oh, he can't do this and he can't do that because the Republicans will call him names. They call him names anyway. The media will pillory him. They pillory him anyway. His poll numbers will drop. They're dropping anyway, and precisely because of his cowardice. He might lose in 2012, and then he'll lose the chance to do anything good. He may well lose in 2012 anyway, and he won't have done anything good; even if he wins, he still won't do anything good, and he'll have plenty of excuses for that too.
Will Phillips is exactly right: the President has a "bully pulpit," but he refuses to use it. Has he said anything since he was elected that wasn't cleared with focus groups, run through the poll-meter, and stripped of any substantive content -- has he said anything that took any kind of chance? Not that I've heard; certainly not the big-ticket speeches, the Inaugural, the speech on the Middle East, the Nobel Prize address, and all the rest. It doesn't matter, you see, whether the things you say from that pulpit win adulation or agreement, or lead to legislation passing in the Congress. It matters that you say the truth as you see it, and damn the torpedoes.
Now, I have no real use for Teddy Roosevelt, who was a vicious, racist, bloodthirsty pig. I don't suppose his speeches were really any more daring than Obama's. I'm talking not about TR, or Obama, but about what they aren't. And every time I hear Obama speak nowadays, I'm struck all over again by what a poor speaker he is, pointy finger and all. Where, oh where, did his fans get the idea that he was anything but a hack?
It's ironic, with all the media blabber about the President of the US being the most powerful person on earth, and then all the media blabber about how he's hamstrung by political pressure and necessity so he can't really do anything. It's not that there aren't limits on his power; of course there are. It's not that he can't do everything he'd like to do; of course he can't. It's that he won't do anything, for fear of ... of what? Fear that Rahm Emmanuel will call him a pussy? Deal with it. Fear that Rahm will break his fingers? I really don't think there's much danger of it, but think of the press on that.
A ten-year-old boy in Arkansas said what he thought was right, even though it might get him laughed at, called a fag, and maybe even beaten up. That makes him worth a dozen President Obamas, who isn't worth chickenshit. Especially since we all know now that Obama really cares as much about equality or justice as George W. Bush did.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
That Persian Rug Was Just Sitting There, Your Honor
Looking back over the previous post, I'm not sure my argument was as focused as I wanted it to be. So let me return to Michael Ruse's discussion of rape, and what I take to be the core of his argument:
As shown by the Biblical examples I quoted at the end of the previous post, though, traditional prohibitions of rape are based on the assumption that women are chattel, owned by men. Ruse's argument works only in that context, and that may be why he falls prey to the confusion that so many straight men can't seem to escape: between sex in general, and forced sex. Women going into heat, or not, is irrelevant.
Even in species that have rutting season, females are selective about which males they'll accept. (Here's an interesting, prize-winning, undergraduate student paper on the subject, with references. How can a clear-headed Darwinian like Ruse exhibit such amazing ignorance? Could it be wishful thinking?) There's no reason to assume women in heat would be any different. As things are, even when a human female is consciously interested in sex, and goes out looking for a sexual partner, she is looking for one she wants, not just any. I've known a number of young-ish straight males who can't understand why women will turn them down when they promise that the woman will get an orgasm too; they can't get it into their heads that, regardless of their erotic competence, those women don't want to have orgasms with them. It's sad, but it happens. One kid told me he believed that as a straight male, he had the right to give women pleasure. (Of course, he didn't plan to achieve this by jumping in a lake, wearing a paper bag over his head, or taking vows of chastity.) He did have that right, I suppose, but they equally have the right to decline his offers. This seems to be extremely difficult for many men to grasp.
Ruse seems to assume that estrous females take on any and all comers. Since they don't, his thought experiment is worthless from the start. He also assumes that males, including human males, are helpless in the presence of available estrous females, and they just have to throw themselves at them. But this assumption already animates many if not most of the excuses for rape in the human world. It's not the woman's consent that concerns rapists or their defenders. For that matter, even men are selective, though they often pretend otherwise. Still, it might be worth pointing out that obese women are raped, "ugly" women are raped, old women are raped, six-month-old infants are raped; being in heat simply has nothing to do with it, though the rapists defend themselves by claiming that the victims needed it, wanted it, begged for it, should thank them for it. It took years of feminist agitation to get police, prosecutors, and courts to stop thinking in terms simply of male craving and need, and to start seeing rape as a crime with a (usually) female victim. And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a professional philosopher of some distinction still sees rape as the unfortunate consequence of the fact that women don't go into heat. We haven't come a very long way, baby.
I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance. Having to take a shit is a physical adaptation, and it makes silly the moral claim that you ought never shit -- although it does not affect the claim that it is wrong to go to your supervisor's home for supper and end the evening by crapping on his Persian rug.I think this remarkable passage makes it quite clear that Ruse hasn't got the foggiest idea what the fuss over rape is all about. Rape does not mean a man "fucking the female if he got the chance." It is not comparable to going "to your supervisor's home for supper and end the evening by crapping on his Persian rug." (But what if the rug was in heat? What if it was begging to be crapped on? What if it had a sign on it, saying, "Take a crap on me or I'll die"?) Most tellingly, the prohibition of rape is not analogous to "the moral claim that you ought never shit", because, as Ruse concedes, no one would make such a moral claim; a closer analogy would be a moral claim that you ought never to have sex at all, which is of course an ideal in numerous moral traditions. Ruse's is closer to the claim that you oughtn't shit on your supervisor's Persian rug unless he gives you permission, but even here the analogy breaks down, because a Persian rug is not a sentient being and a woman is, and what counts in sexual intercourse is the woman's (or partner's) consent, not that of her putative owner.
As shown by the Biblical examples I quoted at the end of the previous post, though, traditional prohibitions of rape are based on the assumption that women are chattel, owned by men. Ruse's argument works only in that context, and that may be why he falls prey to the confusion that so many straight men can't seem to escape: between sex in general, and forced sex. Women going into heat, or not, is irrelevant.
Even in species that have rutting season, females are selective about which males they'll accept. (Here's an interesting, prize-winning, undergraduate student paper on the subject, with references. How can a clear-headed Darwinian like Ruse exhibit such amazing ignorance? Could it be wishful thinking?) There's no reason to assume women in heat would be any different. As things are, even when a human female is consciously interested in sex, and goes out looking for a sexual partner, she is looking for one she wants, not just any. I've known a number of young-ish straight males who can't understand why women will turn them down when they promise that the woman will get an orgasm too; they can't get it into their heads that, regardless of their erotic competence, those women don't want to have orgasms with them. It's sad, but it happens. One kid told me he believed that as a straight male, he had the right to give women pleasure. (Of course, he didn't plan to achieve this by jumping in a lake, wearing a paper bag over his head, or taking vows of chastity.) He did have that right, I suppose, but they equally have the right to decline his offers. This seems to be extremely difficult for many men to grasp.
Ruse seems to assume that estrous females take on any and all comers. Since they don't, his thought experiment is worthless from the start. He also assumes that males, including human males, are helpless in the presence of available estrous females, and they just have to throw themselves at them. But this assumption already animates many if not most of the excuses for rape in the human world. It's not the woman's consent that concerns rapists or their defenders. For that matter, even men are selective, though they often pretend otherwise. Still, it might be worth pointing out that obese women are raped, "ugly" women are raped, old women are raped, six-month-old infants are raped; being in heat simply has nothing to do with it, though the rapists defend themselves by claiming that the victims needed it, wanted it, begged for it, should thank them for it. It took years of feminist agitation to get police, prosecutors, and courts to stop thinking in terms simply of male craving and need, and to start seeing rape as a crime with a (usually) female victim. And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a professional philosopher of some distinction still sees rape as the unfortunate consequence of the fact that women don't go into heat. We haven't come a very long way, baby.
Monday, March 15, 2010
If Anything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted
Back to A Very Bad Wizard. The first discussion that caught my attention was with Michael Ruse, a prolific writer on philosophical topics whose Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (Blackwell, 1988) I read but remember nothing much about. He's written several books defending Darwinian theory against Creationism (and testified in the famous Arkansas "creation science" trial of 1981). His interest for Tamler Sommers lies in his attempts to connect evolution to ethics.
Starting on page 96:
It seems to me that both Ruse and Sommers are unclear about what rape is; I want to argue that whether human females go into heat is irrelevant to the moral question Ruse is talking about.
What got my attention as I read this dialogue was that as Ruse frames the issue, rape is a moral issue between men. Women barely feature in it, as is typical of both adaptationist-oriented discussions and traditional moral and legal codes down to very nearly the present. (Yes, Ruse says that he wouldn't want his wife or daughters to be raped; while laudable, it still means in context that he's concerned about the safety of "his" women, and more important, he puts it in terms of "reciprocation", where males try to agree to leave each other's women alone. Not to spare the women's feelings, which are curiously absent from the field, but to spare other men's feelings.) This relates to some previous posts I've written on the subject, from Thornhill and Palmer's Natural History of Rape to other sociobiological grappling with male rut.
Since Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape it's been a cliche in pop-evolutionary talk about sex that, unlike many other species, women don't go into heat -- they're always potentially sexually receptive. Maybe the ethological knowledge has been refined somewhat since then (I found a couple of articles referring to research which indicated that women might be more sexually receptive when they're ovulating, and send out pheromones that bring all the horndogs running; seems to be mostly boyish wishful thinking though), but as I recall, even in species where females do go into heat / estrous / season, they are not totally indiscriminate in accepting males, and males may struggle ("compete") to keep other males away from a female they want to inseminate. The "sexual selection" so touted by evolutionary psychologists really has more to do with women's choices about the men they accept than men's selectivity about the women they pursue; women constitute a reproductive bottleneck in this scenario, since once they're fertilized they won't be available for further breeding for several years, a troublesome obstacle for males who seek to maximize their reproductive success. And blah blah blah -- this is old hat.
In Homo Sapiens sapiens, that's certainly the case: men try to hoard women, preventing other men from getting access to them, and the morality of "rape" is more about keeping women secure and intact from other males than about respecting women's wishes or decisions. I've been annoyed, in the "evolutionary" discussions of rape I've seen so far, by their careful avoidance of the fact that in the real world, rape is not considered such a bad thing after all, that women are presumed be wanting it secretly, and that men are constantly trying to construct scenarios in which a woman forfeits her right to say No. (For example, by saying, "I do" -- once a woman says Yes, she can never again say No.) Indeed, women are regarded in traditional discourse as untrustworthy, devious, wandering critters who'll jump the fence if they can, then blame an innocent feller who didn't even get his wick wet. Did he really force her, or did she lead him on? Did she struggle, did she yell, did she prefer to kill herself than receive his embrace, or was she really willing all along? Why was she walking alone at night in that part of town, dressed that way? Did she have her fingers crossed behind her back?
So Ruse's distinction is probably bogus to begin with, since women's potential approachability has nothing to do with the state of their ovaries, neither does the morality of rape have anything to do with it, partly since he takes for granted that men are always "in heat." It's noteworthy that he throws in that little joke about deferring to a colleague; the "pretty girl" is not consulted, and "I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance." But that is the rationale of rapists in the actual state of human biology. "What could I do, Your Honor? The bitch was out there all by herself, without a chaperone or an armed male escort. A woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can run with his pants down, haw haw haw. She didn't rip my throat out with her teeth, so I could tell she wanted it. How can you condemn a man for fucking the female if he gets the chance, especially a chance like that? Besides, she's ugly as all get out, she should thank me. She wanted it, she wanted it, I could tell she wanted it."
And so on. Pardon the offensive litany of rapists' excuses; I thought it necessary to spell them out since they are a routine part of male culture and therefore of our evolutionary heritage, and yet the evolutionary psychologists' discussions proceed by pretending that they don't exist. (Except when Thornhill and Palmer, for example, drop trou and prescribe classes to teach young women to avoid rape by not dressing "provocatively.") I'm not saying that Michael Ruse would accept them, either; I'm sure that as an educated Western moral philosopher he would reject them in high moral dudgeon. It's just that his discussion never does consider women as full human subjects in the matter; as I said, he frames it solely in terms of men, and ignores the actual moral/legal approach to rape in the real world, in which a woman's consent is secondary to the primary question of whether the man had licit access to her.
Look at Deuteronomy 22, where the disposition of rape cases depends on the circumstances. If a bethrothed virgin is raped out "in the field", the rapist is to be executed and the victim spared, because she "cried, and there was none to save her" (vv. 25-27). If a betrothed virgin is raped in the city, she is to be stoned to death along with her rapist, because she didn't cry out (vv. 23-24). If the victim was not betrothed, the rapist must pay a fine to her father and marry her (vv. 28-29). Rape in the Bible is a crime between men, against each other's property, not a crime against a woman. Ruse's discussion is just as male-centered. That's clearheaded Darwin-informed moral philosophy in the 21st century for you, after forty years of feminist agitation.
Starting on page 96:
TS: So it's not morality itself, but this feeling of objectivity in morality that is the illusion -- right? But doesn't that mean that as clearheaded Darwinians, we have to say that there are no objective moral facts? And therefore that it is not an objective fact that rape is wrong?I disagree with Ruse here, because I disagree with Dostoevsky. It's hard to prove a case in fiction, and I wasn't convinced by Crime and Punishment, where the protagonist Raskolnikov tries to prove his superiority to religious morality by robbing and killing an old woman. He botches the job, and eventually turns himself in -- just as the police are closing in on him anyway. Within the terms of the novel and the problem it poses, this only shows that Raskolnikov isn't a superior being after all; old-fashioned "slave morality" is good enough for the likes of him, and you, and me. There are other objections to Dostoevsky's argument, such as the fact that he considered the state qualified to do things (like killing people) that are immoral for individual citizens, so he had at least a two-tiered morality, and of course God's ways are not our ways, etc. But they aren't pertinent here.
MR: Within the system, of course, rape is objectively wrong -- just like three strikes and you're out in baseball. But I'm a nonrealist, so ultimately there is no objective right and wrong for me. Having said that, I am part of the system and cannot escape. The truth does not necessarily make you free.
TS: The truth here being that there is no real right and wrong.
MR: Yes, but knowing that it is all subjective doesn't necessarily mean that I can become a Nietzschean superman and ignore it. I take very seriously Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky points out that even if we have these beliefs that there is no right and wrong, we can't necessarily act on them. And, you know, I see no real reason to get out of the system, either. If I rape, I am going to feel badly, apart from the consequences if I get caught. And the reciprocation -- I don't want my wife and daughters raped. But even rape is relative in a sense to our biology. If women went into heat, would rape be a crime/sin? I wrote about this once in the context of extraterrestrials -- is rape wrong on Andromeda?
TS: I'm not sure what you mean by "within the system, it is objectively wrong." Do you mean that because we have laws and norms against rape, then rape is wrong? Or do you mean that for our species, given our biology, rape is objectively wrong? If it's the latter, aren't you violating Hume's Law, too?(Hume's Law is the dictum that you can't infer "ought" from "is", values from facts.)
MR: ... There is no ultimate truth about morality. It is an invention -- an invention of the genes rather than of humans, and we cannot change games at will, as one might change from baseball if one went to England and played cricket. Within the system, the human moral system, it is objectively true that rape is wrong. That follows from the principles of morality and from human nature. If human females went into heat, it would not necessarily be objectively wrong to rape -- in fact, I doubt we would have the concept of rape at all. So, within the system, I doubt that we would have the concept of rape at all. So, within the system, I could justify it. But I deny that human morality at the highest level -- love your neighbor as yourself, etc. -- is justifiable. That is why I am not deriving is from ought, in the illicit sense of justification. I am deriving it in the sense of explaining why we have moral sentiments, but that is a different matter. As an analyst I can explain why you hate your father, but that doesn't mean your hatred is justified.Sorry for the long quotation, but I wanted to do Ruse's argument justice, and there's plenty more where this came from.
TS: So then by analogy, Darwinian theory can explain why we have moral sentiments and beliefs, right? So let's get into the details. Why was it adaptive to have this moral sense? Why did our genes invent morality?
MS: I am an individual selectionist all the way. Natural selection has given us selfish/self-centered thoughts. It had to. If I meet a pretty girl and at once say to Bob Brandon [the philosopher of biology at Duke University], "You go first," I am going to lose in the struggle for existence. But at the same time we are social animals. It's a good thing to be, we can work together. ...
TS: I wanted to ask this before -- what is it about human females not going into heat that leads us to be moral?
MR: Human females not going into heat does not make us moral or immoral -- but it is an important fact of our sociality and it is an important fact when we are making moral judgments (which are always matters of fact plus moral principles). I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance. Having to take a shit is a physical adaptation, and it makes silly the moral claim that you ought never shit -- although it does not affect the claim that it is wrong to go to your supervisor's home for supper and end the evening by crapping on his Persian rug.
TS: That's what I meant -- why would it not make sense to condemn someone for raping a human female, if human females went into heat?
MR: Look, in my view, as a naturalist, I think epistemology and ethics are dependent on the best modern science. Look at Descartes and Locke and Hume and Kant. The point is that if women went into heat, then biology really would take over and we would lose our freedom. ... The point is that ought implies a choice, and if women went into heat then there would be no choice. I wouldn't have a hell of a lot of choice even though they also wouldn't. So it's not that we are always moral -- we certainly aren't -- but we have the urge to be moral as one of the package of human adaptations.
TS: Okay, I see why selection has given us selfish thoughts. A trait that leads you to give up the girl to Brandon every time is not going to get passed on to the next generation. Because you need a woman to pass on traits of any kind. At least for now, with the cloning ban. ...
It seems to me that both Ruse and Sommers are unclear about what rape is; I want to argue that whether human females go into heat is irrelevant to the moral question Ruse is talking about.
What got my attention as I read this dialogue was that as Ruse frames the issue, rape is a moral issue between men. Women barely feature in it, as is typical of both adaptationist-oriented discussions and traditional moral and legal codes down to very nearly the present. (Yes, Ruse says that he wouldn't want his wife or daughters to be raped; while laudable, it still means in context that he's concerned about the safety of "his" women, and more important, he puts it in terms of "reciprocation", where males try to agree to leave each other's women alone. Not to spare the women's feelings, which are curiously absent from the field, but to spare other men's feelings.) This relates to some previous posts I've written on the subject, from Thornhill and Palmer's Natural History of Rape to other sociobiological grappling with male rut.
Since Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape it's been a cliche in pop-evolutionary talk about sex that, unlike many other species, women don't go into heat -- they're always potentially sexually receptive. Maybe the ethological knowledge has been refined somewhat since then (I found a couple of articles referring to research which indicated that women might be more sexually receptive when they're ovulating, and send out pheromones that bring all the horndogs running; seems to be mostly boyish wishful thinking though), but as I recall, even in species where females do go into heat / estrous / season, they are not totally indiscriminate in accepting males, and males may struggle ("compete") to keep other males away from a female they want to inseminate. The "sexual selection" so touted by evolutionary psychologists really has more to do with women's choices about the men they accept than men's selectivity about the women they pursue; women constitute a reproductive bottleneck in this scenario, since once they're fertilized they won't be available for further breeding for several years, a troublesome obstacle for males who seek to maximize their reproductive success. And blah blah blah -- this is old hat.
In Homo Sapiens sapiens, that's certainly the case: men try to hoard women, preventing other men from getting access to them, and the morality of "rape" is more about keeping women secure and intact from other males than about respecting women's wishes or decisions. I've been annoyed, in the "evolutionary" discussions of rape I've seen so far, by their careful avoidance of the fact that in the real world, rape is not considered such a bad thing after all, that women are presumed be wanting it secretly, and that men are constantly trying to construct scenarios in which a woman forfeits her right to say No. (For example, by saying, "I do" -- once a woman says Yes, she can never again say No.) Indeed, women are regarded in traditional discourse as untrustworthy, devious, wandering critters who'll jump the fence if they can, then blame an innocent feller who didn't even get his wick wet. Did he really force her, or did she lead him on? Did she struggle, did she yell, did she prefer to kill herself than receive his embrace, or was she really willing all along? Why was she walking alone at night in that part of town, dressed that way? Did she have her fingers crossed behind her back?
So Ruse's distinction is probably bogus to begin with, since women's potential approachability has nothing to do with the state of their ovaries, neither does the morality of rape have anything to do with it, partly since he takes for granted that men are always "in heat." It's noteworthy that he throws in that little joke about deferring to a colleague; the "pretty girl" is not consulted, and "I am simply saying that if women did go into heat, then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance." But that is the rationale of rapists in the actual state of human biology. "What could I do, Your Honor? The bitch was out there all by herself, without a chaperone or an armed male escort. A woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can run with his pants down, haw haw haw. She didn't rip my throat out with her teeth, so I could tell she wanted it. How can you condemn a man for fucking the female if he gets the chance, especially a chance like that? Besides, she's ugly as all get out, she should thank me. She wanted it, she wanted it, I could tell she wanted it."
And so on. Pardon the offensive litany of rapists' excuses; I thought it necessary to spell them out since they are a routine part of male culture and therefore of our evolutionary heritage, and yet the evolutionary psychologists' discussions proceed by pretending that they don't exist. (Except when Thornhill and Palmer, for example, drop trou and prescribe classes to teach young women to avoid rape by not dressing "provocatively.") I'm not saying that Michael Ruse would accept them, either; I'm sure that as an educated Western moral philosopher he would reject them in high moral dudgeon. It's just that his discussion never does consider women as full human subjects in the matter; as I said, he frames it solely in terms of men, and ignores the actual moral/legal approach to rape in the real world, in which a woman's consent is secondary to the primary question of whether the man had licit access to her.
Look at Deuteronomy 22, where the disposition of rape cases depends on the circumstances. If a bethrothed virgin is raped out "in the field", the rapist is to be executed and the victim spared, because she "cried, and there was none to save her" (vv. 25-27). If a betrothed virgin is raped in the city, she is to be stoned to death along with her rapist, because she didn't cry out (vv. 23-24). If the victim was not betrothed, the rapist must pay a fine to her father and marry her (vv. 28-29). Rape in the Bible is a crime between men, against each other's property, not a crime against a woman. Ruse's discussion is just as male-centered. That's clearheaded Darwin-informed moral philosophy in the 21st century for you, after forty years of feminist agitation.
Last Summer It Was "Star Trek" ...
... this summer it will be "The Karate Kid" that tedious screaming weenies are claiming has been defiled by Hollywood, their childhood ripped open and gutted so that Hollywood could make money, and "the movie isn't out yet, but the trailers are all over the web and, well, this is about principle." You have been notified.
Meanwhile, for those who take their cinema seriously and laugh Hollywood to scorn, this good news.
Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourism Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier
Meanwhile, for those who take their cinema seriously and laugh Hollywood to scorn, this good news.
Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourism Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Gleaning My Teeming Brain Again
I don't know if I'm exactly over what I've had the past week -- I'm still coughing a lot, and haven't decided whether to go to the doctor about it -- but at least I'm able to read again, and I feel a certain compulsion to write. Which is a very nice feeling.
So I'm dipping into a book called A Very Bad Wizard: Morality behind the Curtain (Believer Books, 2009), a collection of nine conversations between the philosopher Tamler Sommers and "ten acclaimed researchers in the burgeoning field of moral psychology" as the back-cover blurb describes them. I have a feeling I'll be referring to it here with some frequency in the days to come.
In the conversation with Joseph Henrich, a researcher with a background in anthropology at the University of British Columbia, there's this (page 127):
Where to begin? Well, first, of course, there was never any intention on the US' part of bringing "democracy" to Iraq in the first place. Nor did the British have any such intention in India or the rest of their Asian and African empire. The US and its collaborators invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in order to gain control of its oil reserves and establish US military bases there. Elections were not on Bush's agenda until they were forced on him by mostly Shi'a nonviolent resistance, and then they were a mere public-relations formality, which he overrode at his pleasure. The election results in Iraq have signaled Iraqis' demand that the US withdraw its occupying army, a demand affirmed without compliance by the Status of Forces Agreement concluded at the end of Bush's second term. The situation has not changed under Obama, despite or because of all the handwringing over Iraqis' alleged refusal to take responsibility for their government. One might as honestly speak of Saddam's trying to "stick a democracy" on Kuwait in 1990. Yet neither Sommers nor Henrich seems to be experiencing any cognitive dissonance at their application of the term.
Second, then, I have to wonder what Sommers and Henrich mean by "democracy" in their exchange. The meaning of the word isn't clear under the best of circumstances, and it appears to me that they are using it here in its normal, North American propaganda sense: the American way, just like we have in the States: elections, a legislature, courts, an executive, lobbyists, mass media, corporate donations, with plenty of structural and practical barriers to keep the majority of Americans away from the levers of power. (Henrich was teaching in Canada at the time of the interview, but he had lived and worked in the US until 2006.) Of course you couldn't easily transplant such a complex, expensive, and corrupt system just anywhere overnight, but who in their right mind would want to?
Third, the Fijian setup Henrich describes doesn't sound all that un-democratic. (Without the quotes.) There's an executive, the chief, who "makes the decisions," but the Fijians do "give equal voice to everybody." If the Fijians have a "hierarchy," so does the US, even in theory, from local to state to federal, and ladders of influence and power within each branch.
Seriously, I can't imagine what Sommers and Henrich think they're talking about here. On the face of it they're simply indulging in a very familiar self-congratulatory white-guy view of the dusky races, and Henrich in particular seems to be gesturing toward the idea of anthropologists functioning as consultants to imperial power in the metropole on dealing with subject peoples in the far-flung protectorates. I'm just surprised, given the amount of self-criticism among anthropologists in the past half-century for having played that role in the past, to see him so complacent and open about it now. His criticism of past efforts seems not to consider that other people in other "regions" might have a right to direct themselves (that would be "insulting"), nor even that "informal local norms" should be respected for their own sake -- only that "you can't ... take a formal system from one place and just plop it on top of another place, and expect it to work." If the systems of control are tailored to "informal local norms", they might work very well -- for the outside controllers, anyway.
As I say, this is nothing new. I was just mildly surprised to find it rearing its head in such a nice liberal-minded discussion. Knowing what I know, I shouldn't have been; indeed, it's exactly where I should have expected to find it.
So I'm dipping into a book called A Very Bad Wizard: Morality behind the Curtain (Believer Books, 2009), a collection of nine conversations between the philosopher Tamler Sommers and "ten acclaimed researchers in the burgeoning field of moral psychology" as the back-cover blurb describes them. I have a feeling I'll be referring to it here with some frequency in the days to come.
In the conversation with Joseph Henrich, a researcher with a background in anthropology at the University of British Columbia, there's this (page 127):
TS: What do you think the social and practical implications of your research are?Whew. That took my breath away all over again as I typed it in -- the sheer arrogance and stupidity that exude from every sentence, uttered by two very intelligent, highly educated and thoughtful men. One reason I want to pass it along is to see if anyone else has the same reaction I did.
JH: One practical implication of all this is that things like formal institutions, legal systems, laws, formal government, they have to be well-fitted to the informal local norms. And so what you can't do is take a formal system from one place and just plop it on top of another place, and expect it to work. Because there's no fit. That seems to have all kinds of implications for economic development, for all kinds of things.
TS: Maybe a certain war we're engaged in? Trying to bring our values, democracy, to a region where it might not fit -- is that something you'd think is unwise?
JH: Sure, that definitely comes to mind. Of course, the Iraq situation is just the latest installment of this same notion that happened a lot throughout Africa. Instituting a British parliamentary system or something like that. And it's really hard to get those things to work because it doesn't fit with the local system of values. The idea of doing democracy in a Fijian village, for example, is actually insulting to its people there because they have a hierarchy that's based on the chief. And we've been studying why they think the chief has the right to make these decisions. They have an existing system which isn't a democracy, although it does give equal voice to everybody. But it is a decision-making system. If you tried to just stick a democracy in there, I can't imagine what would -- things just wouldn't go well.
TS: The norms are too entrenched for that to work.
Where to begin? Well, first, of course, there was never any intention on the US' part of bringing "democracy" to Iraq in the first place. Nor did the British have any such intention in India or the rest of their Asian and African empire. The US and its collaborators invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime in order to gain control of its oil reserves and establish US military bases there. Elections were not on Bush's agenda until they were forced on him by mostly Shi'a nonviolent resistance, and then they were a mere public-relations formality, which he overrode at his pleasure. The election results in Iraq have signaled Iraqis' demand that the US withdraw its occupying army, a demand affirmed without compliance by the Status of Forces Agreement concluded at the end of Bush's second term. The situation has not changed under Obama, despite or because of all the handwringing over Iraqis' alleged refusal to take responsibility for their government. One might as honestly speak of Saddam's trying to "stick a democracy" on Kuwait in 1990. Yet neither Sommers nor Henrich seems to be experiencing any cognitive dissonance at their application of the term.
Second, then, I have to wonder what Sommers and Henrich mean by "democracy" in their exchange. The meaning of the word isn't clear under the best of circumstances, and it appears to me that they are using it here in its normal, North American propaganda sense: the American way, just like we have in the States: elections, a legislature, courts, an executive, lobbyists, mass media, corporate donations, with plenty of structural and practical barriers to keep the majority of Americans away from the levers of power. (Henrich was teaching in Canada at the time of the interview, but he had lived and worked in the US until 2006.) Of course you couldn't easily transplant such a complex, expensive, and corrupt system just anywhere overnight, but who in their right mind would want to?
Third, the Fijian setup Henrich describes doesn't sound all that un-democratic. (Without the quotes.) There's an executive, the chief, who "makes the decisions," but the Fijians do "give equal voice to everybody." If the Fijians have a "hierarchy," so does the US, even in theory, from local to state to federal, and ladders of influence and power within each branch.
Seriously, I can't imagine what Sommers and Henrich think they're talking about here. On the face of it they're simply indulging in a very familiar self-congratulatory white-guy view of the dusky races, and Henrich in particular seems to be gesturing toward the idea of anthropologists functioning as consultants to imperial power in the metropole on dealing with subject peoples in the far-flung protectorates. I'm just surprised, given the amount of self-criticism among anthropologists in the past half-century for having played that role in the past, to see him so complacent and open about it now. His criticism of past efforts seems not to consider that other people in other "regions" might have a right to direct themselves (that would be "insulting"), nor even that "informal local norms" should be respected for their own sake -- only that "you can't ... take a formal system from one place and just plop it on top of another place, and expect it to work." If the systems of control are tailored to "informal local norms", they might work very well -- for the outside controllers, anyway.
As I say, this is nothing new. I was just mildly surprised to find it rearing its head in such a nice liberal-minded discussion. Knowing what I know, I shouldn't have been; indeed, it's exactly where I should have expected to find it.
No One Could Have Foreseen that Spring Is Icumen In
... and already I've made the first sighting of a Democrat trying to defend his President in amusingly familiar terms:
No one could have foreseen that Saddam didn't have WMDs.
No one could have foreseen that the levees would break when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana.
No one could have foreseen that the US invasion of Iraq would lead to civil war, chaos, endless US occupation.
No one could have foreseen that deregulation of banking and finance would lead to abuses.
No one could have foreseen that the stock market would collapse in the late summer of 2008.
And so on. Except that many did foresee, but they don't count, because all they care about is ideological purity. What counts is being willing to get your hands dirty in the service of hegemonic pragmatism, not fussing over a few hundred thousand human lives.
And then there's the guy, another perennial Obama hasbarista, who rebuts with "Avedon, if Al Gore had won in 2000 things would have turned out differently. Nuff said." There's a realist for you.
This was at a time when we had every reason to believe that Obama would support Medicare for all, would withdraw troops from Iraq, would end discrimination in the military, would support a strong jobs bills, would hold the banks accountable, would not torture, and so on. He is not an awful president, just not the caliber of leader we need for a time of crisis.The Democrat is Charles II, commenting on a post at the Sideshow. (I don't know if I've actually managed to track down a permalink for his comment there. Woe, woe, to the purveyors of JS-Kit software! A lake of fire and sharp-toothed demons await their toes.) He and I have differed in the past. The time he's referring to is the Democratic Primary season of 2008. Quite apart from the falsehood of his basic claim, which was ably shown by the commenter vastleft before I even got to Charles's original comment, I was struck by Charles's deployment of a version of the "No one could have foreseen ..." line that we've heard so often in the past couple of years from pundits and apologists for power.
No one could have foreseen that Saddam didn't have WMDs.
No one could have foreseen that the levees would break when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana.
No one could have foreseen that the US invasion of Iraq would lead to civil war, chaos, endless US occupation.
No one could have foreseen that deregulation of banking and finance would lead to abuses.
No one could have foreseen that the stock market would collapse in the late summer of 2008.
And so on. Except that many did foresee, but they don't count, because all they care about is ideological purity. What counts is being willing to get your hands dirty in the service of hegemonic pragmatism, not fussing over a few hundred thousand human lives.
And then there's the guy, another perennial Obama hasbarista, who rebuts with "Avedon, if Al Gore had won in 2000 things would have turned out differently. Nuff said." There's a realist for you.
Rejoice, and Believe in the Gospel!
... The gospel (which means "good news") of True Science, that is. I just finished reading James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Harvard, 2001). Brown, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and an admitted heterosexual, tries to provide a nice middle-of-the-road take on the science wars of the 1990s. He concedes that scientists aren't perfect, but insists that they are awfully good. He opposes scientific orthodoxy to "social constructivists," who are usually postmodernists, and we know about them, with their silly jargon and all.
I admit I'm out of my depth in some of Brown's discussion, because I have little formal training in science and haven't read nearly enough of the "constructivist" works he cites. (I need to read more Bruno Latour, for example.) But in those instances where I have read the writers he discusses, like Paul Feyerabend and Stephen Jay Gould, I found problems. To sum up while oversimplifying a bit, Brown seems to think that every critic of scientific orthodoxy is a "social constructivist," even Gould it appears, and he really should know better than that. This can be seen in his discussion, about halfway through the book, of science and homosexuality.
It's in his account of the "constructivist" that Brown falls flat on his face. I can't claim that I've read the constructionist literature on homosexuality exhaustively, but I've read a representative sample, probably more than Brown has, and I can't recall ever seeing a social constructionist claim that sexual orientation is a choice. The first few times someone accused me of thinking that homosexuality is a "choice" because I reject biological theories of its cause, I was taken aback because the accusation seemed wilfully irrelevant. The first person who did this was a political operative for a state-level gay-rights organization, and it was less an accusation than a lackwitted stereotype; the second was a graduate student in psychology with a vested interest in biological determinist theories, who should have known better. Brown, as a philosopher, definitely should know better, but apparently his professional education didn't extend to basic issues in philosophy like the free will vs. determinism debate.
So, let me repeat what I've said before: the point (I could mischievously call it the essence, but Diana Fuss beat me to it) of social construction theory is that many traits or behaviors or customs that people consider "natural" -- built into our human nature / blood / genes / DNA by God, Nature, Evolution -- are in fact, products of culture, learned, acquired. Not "chosen", except perhaps in some obscure technical sense of the word, because, again, the interest of social constructionism is to highlight features of human life that we take for granted, things we didn't choose because they are Natural. "That's just the way things are, that's all," though some wicked and perverse souls might decide to rebel against Nature, God's Will, Common Decency, and the American Way.
The key point that gives away Brown's misunderstanding / ignorance is his remark that for "a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless." The best I can say in mitigation is that, as far as I know, social constructionists have not been able to come up with scientific-sounding explanations of how social construction works; that is, how people come to be convinced that what they have learned is something they were born with. But then, essentialists have never managed to explain how, say, a smaller INAH3 manifests itself in a talent for interior design and an obsession with ABBA.
Notice too how casually Brown minimizes the yawning gap between "biological" and "psychological fact." Language, for example, is probably both a biological (in the sense of being rooted physically in our brains and other body parts) and psychological fact, but there is no biological difference between an English speaker and a Chinese speaker. I once angered a gay advocate of biological determinism by pointing out that there probably is a correlation between speaking Chinese and certain physical traits (black hair, dark eyes, etc.), so that by her logic Chinese, like homosexuality, must be inborn.
Brown seems unaware that according to social constructionists, "race" is socially constructed. Even "orthodox" scientists have conceded that race is not, after all, a natural category in human beings, but here, as with "sexual orientation", the debate is as much about the status of the scientific evidence, and many white scientists at least find it difficult to rid themselves of the traditional racial categories. I was startled, a couple of years ago, to find some white liberal bloggers blithely declaring that "race is as real as nappy hair." The motif circulated for a month or two, then faded. It's worth remembering that social construction works with human bodies; the existence of a biological trait like skin color or hair texture does not prove the validity of essentialism. No social constructionist doubts that skin color, for example, is biologically determined; the question is whether skin color constitutes a "racial" trait, how it relates to culture, and so on.
Social constructionism is also compatible with what Brown calls scientific orthodoxy. Before we can really discuss the status of essentialism with regard to sexual orientation, we must first have some solid scientific results to work with, and so far there are none. The scientists involved, especially but not only Simon LeVay, have been explicit all along that they had decided in advance what they were looking for. LeVay told reporters that if he hadn't found evidence to support his beliefs, he'd have given up science. (I doubt the truth of that boast, by the way. True believers can always bend reality to fit their preconceptions, and one could ask whether by demanding that reality conform to his beliefs, LeVay hadn't abandoned science at the outset.)
To be fair, Brown concedes some of these points on page 111:
Further, Brown oversimplifies (to put it kindly) with his assumption that "an immutable characteristic [as he assumes sexual orientation to be] ... should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do." It isn't only immutable characteristics that are protected by antidiscrimination laws: religious affiliation, which is neither inborn nor immutable, is also protected under US and Canadian law. This is a common mistake, also made routinely by gay-rights advocates, including scientists trying to justify their sloppy research by touting its supposed political usefulness:
I admit I'm out of my depth in some of Brown's discussion, because I have little formal training in science and haven't read nearly enough of the "constructivist" works he cites. (I need to read more Bruno Latour, for example.) But in those instances where I have read the writers he discusses, like Paul Feyerabend and Stephen Jay Gould, I found problems. To sum up while oversimplifying a bit, Brown seems to think that every critic of scientific orthodoxy is a "social constructivist," even Gould it appears, and he really should know better than that. This can be seen in his discussion, about halfway through the book, of science and homosexuality.
Research on homosexuality involves an inextricable mix of science and politics. “Pro-gay” and “anti-gay” represent the respective political stances of being in favor or out of favor with improving the social situation of gays and lesbians. Debate tends to flare between the “essentialists” and “constructivists.” (For better or worse, these are the standard terms.)In fact, "constructivist" is not a standard term in this debate; "constructionist" is. I couldn't say for certain, but I have the impression that "constructivist" is used in this context only by critics of constructionism, and not even all of them. According to Wikipedia, "constructivist" and "constructionist" refer to different theories anyway, which means that Brown's consistent and insistent use of the former term undermines his entire book. (And to nit-pick, "out of favor with" is not the opposite of "in favor of".) It's also an enduring and much-noticed irony of the debate that almost no one actually claims to be an essentialist.
The former [the "essentialists"] claim that one’s sexual orientation is a condition that is either biologically determined or imprinted at an early age and remains more or less immutable through life. On this view, one is objectively gay or lesbian, whether one knows and accepts it or not. For a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless.This is wrong too. Brown describes the "essentialist" position somewhat more accurately, though as he must know, being a philosopher and all, the key is not biology or imprinting but essence, being, nature. As Foucault famously described the concept, "Nothing that went into [the homosexual's] total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitively active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature." This isn't an especially scientific notion, by the way; it's almost mystical. Many people, including scientists, simply beg the question by assuming that biology equals essence; and we know what happens when you assume.
It's in his account of the "constructivist" that Brown falls flat on his face. I can't claim that I've read the constructionist literature on homosexuality exhaustively, but I've read a representative sample, probably more than Brown has, and I can't recall ever seeing a social constructionist claim that sexual orientation is a choice. The first few times someone accused me of thinking that homosexuality is a "choice" because I reject biological theories of its cause, I was taken aback because the accusation seemed wilfully irrelevant. The first person who did this was a political operative for a state-level gay-rights organization, and it was less an accusation than a lackwitted stereotype; the second was a graduate student in psychology with a vested interest in biological determinist theories, who should have known better. Brown, as a philosopher, definitely should know better, but apparently his professional education didn't extend to basic issues in philosophy like the free will vs. determinism debate.
So, let me repeat what I've said before: the point (I could mischievously call it the essence, but Diana Fuss beat me to it) of social construction theory is that many traits or behaviors or customs that people consider "natural" -- built into our human nature / blood / genes / DNA by God, Nature, Evolution -- are in fact, products of culture, learned, acquired. Not "chosen", except perhaps in some obscure technical sense of the word, because, again, the interest of social constructionism is to highlight features of human life that we take for granted, things we didn't choose because they are Natural. "That's just the way things are, that's all," though some wicked and perverse souls might decide to rebel against Nature, God's Will, Common Decency, and the American Way.
The key point that gives away Brown's misunderstanding / ignorance is his remark that for "a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless." The best I can say in mitigation is that, as far as I know, social constructionists have not been able to come up with scientific-sounding explanations of how social construction works; that is, how people come to be convinced that what they have learned is something they were born with. But then, essentialists have never managed to explain how, say, a smaller INAH3 manifests itself in a talent for interior design and an obsession with ABBA.
Essentialism is compatible with that view of science I have called scientific orthodoxy: sexual orientation is a biological or psychological fact whose nature and causes can be discovered by orthodox science. (This includes both the ontological and epistemological senses of objective, but the emphasis here is on the ontological side.) On a constructivist account, by contrast, such facts simply don’t exist, at least not objectively. Instead, one’s sexuality is constructed – self-constructed at that.This is more of the same; one' s sexuality is not "self-constructed at that" -- it is socially constructed, shaped from outside as well as inside.
Notice too how casually Brown minimizes the yawning gap between "biological" and "psychological fact." Language, for example, is probably both a biological (in the sense of being rooted physically in our brains and other body parts) and psychological fact, but there is no biological difference between an English speaker and a Chinese speaker. I once angered a gay advocate of biological determinism by pointing out that there probably is a correlation between speaking Chinese and certain physical traits (black hair, dark eyes, etc.), so that by her logic Chinese, like homosexuality, must be inborn.
Brown seems unaware that according to social constructionists, "race" is socially constructed. Even "orthodox" scientists have conceded that race is not, after all, a natural category in human beings, but here, as with "sexual orientation", the debate is as much about the status of the scientific evidence, and many white scientists at least find it difficult to rid themselves of the traditional racial categories. I was startled, a couple of years ago, to find some white liberal bloggers blithely declaring that "race is as real as nappy hair." The motif circulated for a month or two, then faded. It's worth remembering that social construction works with human bodies; the existence of a biological trait like skin color or hair texture does not prove the validity of essentialism. No social constructionist doubts that skin color, for example, is biologically determined; the question is whether skin color constitutes a "racial" trait, how it relates to culture, and so on.
Social constructionism is also compatible with what Brown calls scientific orthodoxy. Before we can really discuss the status of essentialism with regard to sexual orientation, we must first have some solid scientific results to work with, and so far there are none. The scientists involved, especially but not only Simon LeVay, have been explicit all along that they had decided in advance what they were looking for. LeVay told reporters that if he hadn't found evidence to support his beliefs, he'd have given up science. (I doubt the truth of that boast, by the way. True believers can always bend reality to fit their preconceptions, and one could ask whether by demanding that reality conform to his beliefs, LeVay hadn't abandoned science at the outset.)
To be fair, Brown concedes some of these points on page 111:
Now to the interesting philosophical point. The crucial thing about these [scientific] criticisms of essentialism that come from constructivists is that they are wholly within the framework that I have called scientific orthodoxy. Every objection would be recognized – at least in principle – as perfectly legitimate from the point of view of standard scientific method: Don’t use crude tests when better ones are available, don’t beg the question when setting up a classification, don’t take people’s judgments of others at face value, don’t ignore obvious alternative possible explanations, don’t confuse correlation with causation. The list could go on. These are principles that any champion of orthodoxy happily embraces.Perhaps so, but they don't apply those principles. Brown himself frames the whole discussion in terms of "constructivism" vs. essentialism, but the scientific discussion, such as it is, has little to with this philosophical debate. The question is the validity, within the terms of scientific orthodoxy, of the research on sexual orientation. It's even debatable whether such critics of biological determinism as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Stephen Jay Gould, Hilary and Stephen Rose, or Richard Lewontin are social constructionists, given that their criticisms are primarily of the quality of the research on its own terms, not whether it conforms to constructionist theory. Brown simply takes for granted than anyone who doubts that every psychological fact is biologically determined must be a social "constructivist," and that doesn't follow.
The essentialist/constructivist debate cuts right across the pro-gay/anti-gay debate. The pro-gay essentialist claims that sexual orientation has a biological character and is perfectly natural, and so completely unobjectionable. It is an immutable characteristic, so it should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do. The anti-gay essentialist is likely to see it as a nasty disease that ought to be appropriately treated. By contrast, the pro-gay constructivist sees sexual orientation as a choice, one that should certainly be tolerated, if not celebrated. The anti-gay constructivist agrees it is a choice – a wicked one that must be morally condemned.The trouble here is that the people Brown calls anti-gay constructivists are really essentialists: they believe that human nature is heterosexual, and that sodomites are merely rebels against Nature/God. (This passage makes me suspect that Brown's only source for his discussion is Andrew Sullivan's 1993 tract Virtually Normal; the above paragraph is virtually a paraphrase of Sullivan's, um, argument.) The same claim was made for years by gay Christian essentialists arguing about the interpretation of Romans 1:26-28, who declared that their nature was homosexual, and so for them to try to be heterosexual would be "unnatural," "going against their nature."
Further, Brown oversimplifies (to put it kindly) with his assumption that "an immutable characteristic [as he assumes sexual orientation to be] ... should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do." It isn't only immutable characteristics that are protected by antidiscrimination laws: religious affiliation, which is neither inborn nor immutable, is also protected under US and Canadian law. This is a common mistake, also made routinely by gay-rights advocates, including scientists trying to justify their sloppy research by touting its supposed political usefulness:
A typical essentialist is Simon LeVay, who claimed as a result of post-mortem studies that a cluster of brain cells in the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus is larger in heterosexuals than in homosexuals. This, he said, shows that “sexual orientation has a biological substrate” ... Another famous work is that of Baily [sic] and Pillard on twins. They found that identical twins were more likely to be consonant for homosexuality than were fraternal twins. Given that identicals are closer genetically than fraternals, Baily [sic] and Pillard drew the conclusion that “genetic factors are important individual differences in sexual orientation” ... In a more public piece they stated that “science is rapidly converging on the conclusion that sexual orientation is innate,” and they concluded that this is “good news for homosexuals” [“Are Some People Born Gay?” NYT, Dec. 17, A21].Added to his general intellectual slovenliness, this shows that James Robert Brown is not competent to discuss these issues. Can these people really have forgotten that biologically-rooted difference has generally been used to justify discrimination, based on race and sex? No one doubts that women and blacks are "born that way"; that "biological fact" is used to argue that they are incapable of full citizenship. Whether homosexuality is "innate" is not an important question, and mainstream gay-rights advocates have wasted a lot of time and energy letting bigots set the terms of the debate by claiming that it is. At the same time, I've winced when some half-informed gay people have lobbed the term "socially constructed" at essentialist opponents, whether pro-gay or anti-gay. It just isn't pertinent to the controversy until you've cleared away a lot of deadwood first -- and by the time you've done that, you don't really need the label.
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