I'll Show You the Life of the Mind

One of the more interesting American phenomena to me is the way many of the same people who pay lip service to equality and other all-American values will, at other times, glumly but complacently declare that confidentially, y'know, everybody isn't equal and we need to learn to abandon sentimentality and live with reality.  Those who take this position range from jingoes like the late Robert A. Heinlein to nice mainstream liberals like Christopher Hayes to intellectual leftists like George Scialabba.  Most recently I came upon a post by the blogger and academic Freddie deBoer, written in a familiar more-in-anguish-than-in-exaltation mode.  DeBoer has taken some good, brave stands, but here he fell on his face.  I'm going to quote from his post at some length because deBoer has taken down his blog, and I don't know if this post in another venue will remain available:

To me, the hard political question is the gap after the gaps — the question of what to do with differences in academic and intellectual potential after we have closed the racial and gender achievement gaps. What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?

Perhaps it’s easier to say that I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that hoary old bigotries about the inherent intellectual abilities of different groups are wrong, and though much work remains to be done, as a society we are increasingly coming to shared public understanding that this is the case. Black people are not less intelligent than white, women have no less inherent talent for science, Asian people do not have some sort of genetic superiority in math. Those ideas seem to have largely been discredited and discarded by thinking people, and for that I’m glad.

The bad news is that there now appears to me to be overwhelming evidence that there are profound individual differences in academic potential, that different individual human beings have significantly unequal likelihoods of ascending to various tiers of academic performance. Educational philosophy for centuries has assumed great plasticity in the academic potential of any particular student, that given good teachers and hard work, most anyone can reach most any academic pinnacle. And the case that I would someday like to make, that I have been tinkering with making for many years, is that this appears to be substantially untrue. Instead, it appears that in general and on average, human beings are remarkably static in how they are sorted relative to others in all manner of metrics of academic achievement. In education, with remarkable consistency, the high performers stay high, and the low performers stay low. And it seems likely that this reflects some complex construct that we might call academic talent, which whatever its origins (whether genetic, environmental, parental, neonatal, circumstantial, etc) is far less mutable than has traditionally been understood,

There are many, many things that are implied, and crucially not implied, if we imagine a world where different individual students possess profoundly different academic talents.

• This condition is not rigid, certain, or unalterable; we live in a world of human variability, and individual students will always exist who start out low and go on to excel. There are undoubtedly many exceptions, in either direction. And in fact the degree of plasticity of outcomes itself is likely highly variable. The question, particularly from the standpoint of public policy, lies in trends and averages.
• This condition may be a matter of strict genetic determinism, but it doesn’t have to be. Simply because a given trait is not genetic in its origins does not mean that it is inherently or permanently mutable. Environmental and parental factors are not genetic but neither are they therefore necessarily mutable.
• This condition does not imply educational nihilism, a belief that teaching is pointless or learning is impossible. All students can learn, consistently over time, even as relative position remains stable. Indeed, I would argue that is in fact the reality in which we live.
• This condition does not mean that inequalities in environment are not real, important, or a problem. Individual academic talent is subject to the influence of external forces like any other. Poverty, abuse, affluence, chance — all materially impact outcomes, raising the less talented and restricting the more talented, or amplifying privilege and disadvantage alike. The existence of talent does not imply the irrelevance of external factors, nor does the impact of those factors erase the reality of differences in talent.
• This condition does not imply that our metrics are the correct ones, that the abilities and knowledge that we select for in our tests and schools are the only real, useful, or valid means of sorting human minds. It does not require use to believe in the wisdom or benevolence of our education system or economy. It only requires us to believe that the socially-designated, contingent abilities we have decided are worth rewarding are not equitably sorted or equally available to all.
• This condition does not entail some sort of overall difference in the inherent value of different people. There are many more ways to be a good, worthwhile, positive person than simply to fit into our current Procrustean metrics for what makes you a good student.
• This condition does not imply a conservative, you-get-what-you-deserve attitude towards economics. Indeed, I think it amounts to a powerful argument for socialism

So: good news and bad news, he's been struggling for years with the empirical facts, we have to leave behind romantic illusions and face the cold, hard but still potentially socialist music.

Myself, I don't see any news here at all, bad or good.  DeBoer anticipates that reaction:

This claim is strange in that it prompts both reactions that it is obvious, that “everyone knows” that different individual humans have different academic abilities, and reactions that insist it is offensive, undermining of human dignity, dangerous. What is clear, however, is that in the world of policy, the notion of fundamental differences in the academic potential of different individual students seems bizarrely ignored.

The first thing to notice here is deBoer's focus on "academic abilities."  Though he disclaims it in his bullet-point qualifications, he seems to take for granted that academic abilities are "the socially-designated, contingent abilities we have decided are worth rewarding," and that they the only abilities that matter.  I don't agree that "we have decided" these abilities are "worth rewarding," except in school, and the rewards they receive there are mostly of the gold-star, teacher's-pet variety.  People who excel in school are generally regarded ambivalently in our society; it's proverbial that book smarts aren't worth as much as common-sense smarts; and they are not necessary for worldly or commercial success; not even to get a job and do it well.  The most that can be said is that the years of schooling required to get many "good" jobs have increased over the past century, but this has little or nothing to do with the skills or knowledge those jobs require.  The same high school diploma that used to be a sign of unusual achievement and intelligence will now, maybe, get you a job at McDonald's.  And even that is more because schooling is intended to inculcate obedience, punctuality (the ability to regulate oneself by the clock), neatness (the ability to color within the lines), willingness to take orders, and tolerance of boredom, not the academic abilities deBoer is concerned with.

It's certainly true that "'everyone knows' that different individual humans have different academic abilities."  DeBoer says it's mainly "in the world of policy" that this platitude is ignored, but I'm not so sure.  I recently read the biologist Ernst Mayr's One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Harvard, 1993), and Mayr discussed the interesting problem that although individual variation is a pillar of Darwin's theory, scientists have often tended to ignore it, preferring to view populations as uniform; which, aside from being empirically false (as any naturalist could and did point out), rejects a crucial part of the theory they are using.  Ignoring individual variation in groups is a common, perhaps normal human trait.  It persists, I think, because it simplifies whatever question you're thinking about, but it also leads to false and often destructive answers.  Additionally, as I said, a remarkable range of people say, in public, things like "kids are not created equal," trying to give the impression that they are bravely saying the Unpopular Things that 99% of those in public life haven't got the guts to say.

While 'everybody knows' that students have differing abilities and potential, 'everybody' also tends to ignore this knowledge.  Attending to students' individuality costs more money, for instance, and those who want to destroy public education are always seeking ways to cut costs, especially for the schooling of Other People's children.  But it also conflicts with a traditional model of schooling, that of rote memorization and drill, part of whose function is to sort students, though much of it is intended to even out individual differences.  Those who stand out in approved ways may get special, individual attention and permitted to advance to actual education; the rest will not.

The traditional model is also compatible with deBoer's insistence that his "condition does not entail some sort of overall difference in the inherent value of different people."  Traditional, hierarchical, Great-Chain-of-Being models of humanity generally pay lip service to the notion that everybody has his place in God's great creation: red or yellow, black or white, all are precious in His sight.  Know your place, tug your forelock, don't be ambitious, the nail that sticks up gets the hammer.  Let me stress that deBoer isn't pushing such a model; his point appears to be that, given individual variation, he doesn't know what to replace it with.  I suggest that we already know what to replace it with, at least in practice: attention to individuals with full awareness that they have different talents and abilities.  Plenty of teachers and educational writers have addressed this over the years.

That's why deBoer's crucial question is misconceived: "What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?"  First, in the traditional model of schooling I mentioned, "traditional lines of inequality" often weren't a problem; such schools functioned in 'racially' uniform communities, and their very purpose was to sort students according to academic achievement.  This is true in modern Japan, South Korea, Europe, and other countries with programs to sort students into various vocational tracks or niches; numerous Americans have argued that the US should follow their example. Sexist discrimination was a factor in Japan, for example, but not racial discrimination.  Class discrimination also was a factor, and I am struck by deBoer's failure to mention it, especially given the role class plays in recent efforts by biological determinists to justify stratification based on IQ and other dubious metrics.  In fact, it seems to me that his crucial question is basically that of The Bell Curve, which contrary to what you may have heard, was primarily meant to address the same question deBoer asks, using the same assumptions: What will we do when we've eliminated unfair discrimination and every student, every citizen, is evaluated not by sex or skin color but by their innate ability and merit?

DeBoer also has a short post about a study of Head Start, also available at medium.com, which begins by reassuring the reader that he's

in favor of universal Pre-K on social justice grounds and believe that it’s worth it even if there’s no demonstrable educational gains, as parents should have governmental help in rearing children, particularly so that they can go back to work and be more economically secure. And I’m also in favor of broadening our definitions of success as the study’s authors call for.

But in the second paragraph he bemoans "the complete absence of any frank acknowledgment that there is such a thing as natural academic talent," etc. etc., "And until we recognize that there are persistent inequalities in natural talent, we’re not engaging in a productive discussion about real-world problems."  In the longer post he writes:

Yet consider that society: if even a moderate portion of this difference in talent lies outside of the hands of the students themselves, the basic moral architecture of our supposed meritocracy has been undermined. A system that portions out material security and abundance according to the fickle distributions of academic talent, which children do not choose, is a system that has no basis for calling itself fair. Yet if we successfully combated the forces of white supremacy and sexism to the point that we achieved a racially and sexually equal society, many people would content themselves that the work of social justice had been done. But we would continue to live in a world of terrible and punishing inequality. It would simply be distributed on different lines.

The reference to "our supposed meritocracy" may be the giveaway; it shows that deBoer is evidently as confused as most people who talk about meritocracy.  So let me explain.

First: America is not a meritocracy.  Propagandists and apologists for every society will tell you that rewards and punishments are distributed fairly in their green and pleasant land, no matter how unfair the actual distribution may be.  Whatever differences you observe in the distribution are the result of people's merit or lack thereof, though of course there are malcontents who claim otherwise.  They're just jealous of their superiors and want to drag them down to their miserable level.  Just about everybody seems to agree that people should be hired, admitted to university, etc. on the basis of their merit; the trouble is that most people are convinced that merit is connected to class, race, sex, test scores, and other markers that are not, in fact connected to merit.

Second: DeBoer is confusing inequality and difference, as so many people do, and assuming (probably unconsciously) that you can't have a society of equals as long as there are any differences between individuals.  If you believe that, you do indeed have a problem, but if you jettison that assumption the problem evaporates.  He pays lip service to the contrary position in his bullet points, but abandons it when he sums up the Problem.  In the classroom, for example, equality doesn't mean that every child must earn, let alone be gifted, an A regardless of his or her performance -- even assuming for the sake of argument that performance reliably reflects "potential."  The utility and fairness of grading should not be assumed either; there are good reasons why grading, especially competitive grading, should be abolished.

Third: The preceding is true when we move from schools to society at large.  Equality doesn't mean that everybody has the same things.  To begin with, everybody doesn't want the same things.  Nor does everybody need the same things.  I've had some revealing debates with people who confused equality of outcome with political equality, and who couldn't or wouldn't grasp that equality doesn't mean that everybody must get open-heart surgery or take insulin or get an abortion; or that everyone must live in a penthouse apartment in a big city, or alternatively in a farmhouse with a white picket fence surrounded by amber waves of grain.  None of these is more meritorious than other alternatives.

It could be said as truly that there is such a thing as natural athletic or musical talent, or other talents that are not equally distributed through the population.  As Noam Chomsky wrote decades ago, this is not really a problem either.

... The question of heritability of IQ might conceivably have some social importance, say, with regard to educational practice. However, even this seems dubious, and one would like to see an argument. It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps largely so. Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society? [from For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973, p. 361-362]

There lurks in deBoer's declaration of the Problem the assumption that the difference in potential he refers to must be expressed or discovered in competition, whether in the classroom or in the workplace, and that "material security and abundance" should be parceled out to the winners, with the losers getting less or nothing at all.  If you share that assumption, deBoer's objection that such "a system ... has no basis for calling itself fair" collapses: such a system is fair by definition.  If you don't share the assumption that social "rewards" should be parceled out to the winners of the Game of Life, then deBoer's Problem simply disappears.

Ellen Willis put it very well years ago in a review of The Bell Curve: "If I bought the authors' thesis, I would still be allergic to their politics. I don't advocate equality because I think everyone is the same; I believe that difference, real or imagined, is no excuse for subordinating some people to others. Equality is a principle of human relations, not Procrustes' bed" (40).*  Nor is equality a statement about the talents or other endowments of human beings; individuals are different, but political and social equality has nothing to do with such things.  It means that the person who is less gifted has the same right to a fulfilling life (to say nothing of basic human and civil rights) as the person who is more gifted.  (By which I mean a life that fulfills him or her, even if it wouldn't fulfill me or Freddie deBoer.  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, y'know.)  I find it interesting that deBoer, who makes much of his commitment to socialism and the left, has somehow managed to miss that.  But then, the academic talents of which he makes so much have often served to make excuses for political inequality, by fostering confusion between equality and sameness, inequality and difference.

It may be that by "hard political question" deBoer merely means the difficulty of getting American society to accept the principle of political equality.  That will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, I would agree.  But it's so difficult because people resist it so strongly.  Empirical research can't settle it, because as Ellen Willis said, equality is a principle, not a fact.  That Freddie deBoer is so confused about it is further evidence of people's difficulty in grasping the difference.  So I'm not sure that he is referring to the practical difficulty of getting the idea of equality across; he sees it as a problem because he wants it to be a problem.  And because so many intelligent and educated people agree with him, that's a problem.

* In Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Beacon, 1999).

Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Brain

One benefit, if that's the right word, of using social media is that they bring me into fairly direct interaction with people who are ignorant, misinformed, and don't think very well.  Over the years I've been rather spoiled by reading the work of people who work hard to inform themselves, do their best to think critically, and do a pretty good job of it, at least within the pages of their published writing.  I've also exposed myself to media from a variety of positions, so while I'd hardly claim to be the most informed person on the planet, I'm better informed than most people I talk to.

So it's not surprising that when I've had a discussion with people who not only haven't read much or thought much or ranged beyond the corporate media for news, but who have actively sought to shut out of their awareness anything but Fox News or Breitbart.com or WorldNewsDaily (or Occupy Democrats or Daily Kos), I've been baffled.  I've been asking myself just how much thinking it's fair to demand from people.  As much as I demand of myself, I suppose, but that seems to set the bar much higher than I realized for a long time.

I remind myself that I've arranged my life so as to leave plenty of room for reading and thinking and learning.  People who chose to raise families, who've had demanding jobs that took time away even from spending time with their families, have a legitimate excuse for not pasturing their souls.  Still, I don't think I (or anyone else) is obligated to respect or take seriously the opinions of people who haven't bothered to inform themselves or consider alternatives.

It's a popular notion that people aren't equally gifted intellectually, and I try to bear that in mind.  The doctrine "All men are created equal" is dismissed lightly, mostly it seems by people who assume themselves to be in the superior ranks; again, they don't seem to have reached that conclusion by examining evidence, they just take it for granted.  Yet I find that if I dismiss such people's misinformed, irrational opinions, they indignantly appeal to egalitarianism: Everybody's entitled to their opinion!  My opinion is as good as yours! You're just a smart-aleck know-it-all, you think you're better than everybody else!  It's not really elitism. however, to say that some opinions are worth less than others, and indeed many aren't worth a damn.  (This is where I part company with someone like Noam Chomsky when he says "It is not possible to respond to opinions," especially when he then proceeds to discuss how you can respond to opinions.  Yes, debating opinions is messy and difficult, but so is debating arguments, which Chomsky thinks is possible.)  I think it's significant that people who insist that every opinion is as good or another don't extend that dogma to other people's opinions (mine, for example). 

Politics and religion are probably the most vexed areas for this.  I've come to realize that partisans, whether of Obama or Clinton or Trump, don't care about reasons or factual accuracy where their heroes are concerned.  It's probably not a complete waste of time to show why Donald Trump is a liar, a racist, or a corrupt thug, but it won't have much effect on his supporters, who mostly like his lies, racism, and corruption.  The same is true of Hillary Clinton's supporters.  (And of Obama, but he's old news now.)  On one hand they prefer to be uninformed about her record, but when it gets right down to it they mostly agree with her destructive, warmongering foreign policy history, her corporatist economic policy, and her support for structural racism in the drug war and the private prison system.  Dishonesty and irrationality go with electoral politics like a horse and carriage.  Besides, half of the population is below average, so we must have a meritocracy: our elites have never led us wrong before.

There are other takes on the problem, and all this is preamble to one of them.  Someone I know shared this meme on Facebook yesterday.

He remarked, "... sorry about my many deeply bigoted friends. i suppose they're doing the best they can to get by in a deeply crazy time and place."

I commented, "I can love my neighbor while disapproving strongly of her religion or other beliefs. I disapprove of all religions. This meme reeks of 'Some of my best friends are,' which is one of the Seven Warning Signals of Bigotry."

He responded, "on disapproving of religions. i hate their hierarchies... not their believers (the sin, not the sinner, as one tires of hearing). the believers generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand. when all they have to say is some stuff i've known about since grade-school, it can... it does... become tiresome very quickly. but, with some good faith on both sides, sometimes i can get something out of such a discussion (namely, a chance to tell them something about my life; nothing in social life with one's clothes on can match the feeling of being listened to with attention)."

I replied:

"Hierarchies" are only part of religion, and they are not limited to religion anyway. My objection to religions is that they are false, hierarchies or no. And I didn't say anything about "hate," which is a meaningless buzzword and a sign of bad faith.

"the believers generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand." Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but once it becomes clear that they are not interested in discussing in good faith, I tune them out. There's nothing wrong with that; life is short. Bad faith and dishonesty are part of human nature, but I'm not obligated to pretend that they're anything but spinach, and I say the hell with it.

The same is true of science cultists and conspiracy theory mongers. They too are trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand, but I'm not obligated to pretend that they're either right or honest. We're not children anymore, and there's no obligation to pretend that the crayon scrawl that's supposed to be a superhero looks like anything but random lines. For a five year old, of course; for a thirty-year-old and up, no.

I hadn't really thought about the condescension in his remarks about his "deeply bigoted friends," but it's definitely there.  For whatever reasons, he sees them with a patronizing contempt.  I added that he should extend the same indulgence to the shadowy overlords who control our thoughts with their media machine (my allusion to "conspiracy theory mongers" was directed at him).  Of course the same accusation might be directed at my analogy to children's drawings, but I don't think it's just.  It's my friend who was infantilizing his "deeply bigoted friends."  I -- we all -- expect adults to do better than random crayon scrawls.  There's certainly no reason I can see to pretend that their misinformed, wildly irrational opinions are as good as anyone else's.

One point that I consider revealing is his bit about "their hierarchies... not their believers (the sin, not the sinner, as one tires of hearing)".  The believers are beside the point for me: it's their beliefs.  In practice it's not so easy to distinguish between them, since people are apt to identify themselves with their beliefs, and contrary to "generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand," many believers revel in their bad faith.  I'm not talking only about your schlub in the street, but about educated and sophisticated thinkers.

I can see that my acquaintances, both far-right wing and center-right plus not a few of the lefties, have no idea how to proceed when someone disagrees with them.  From both positions I've been attacked for criticizing what they post.  For them to post something racist, inflammatory, or generally dishonest is exercising their sacred First Amendment rights; for me to disagree with them is to violate their freedom.  I've also been accused semi-teasingly (presumably a "microaggression"), usually by liberals, of "stirring the pot," of just saying what I say to "stir things up."  This is flagrantly patronizing, and I've slapped those people down without compunction.

Are my acquaintances, most of whom are in their fifties at least, too old and set in their ways to learn to think critically?  I don't know how to answer that question.  I don't believe one is ever too old to learn; age is not an excuse.  Be that as it may, I'm old and set in my ways too.  But at least aged bigots, having apparently led sheltered lives, need to be confronted with opposition when they blurt out their bigotry.  Their families may have to let their poisonous views pass, but I don't have to.

I've long suspected that many people love social media because they can jeer at people they think they hate from a safe distance; that their targets might talk back is unthinkable to them.  (Has anyone else noticed how many people will respond to material about a celebrity by stating their love and devotion to the celebrity directly in comments, though the material wasn't posted by the celebrity or her spokespeople?  It's like yelling at your TV in the belief that Dumpf or Hitlery will hear you.)  When one of their targets does talk back, they're flummoxed.  Like most people, they have no idea how to proceed from the point of disagreement.  Come to think of it, since they're not interested in questioning their loyalties and beliefs anyway, I guess there is no way to proceed.  And where would they have learned to think critically in the first place?  The Right has always treated the teaching of critical thinking in school as a threat to civilization, along with the Jews and gay marriage.

The question of 'media brainwashing' is important too.  The media would like to think they can affect opinion, even to manufacture and control it, but this is false advertising much of the time.  Sometimes they pander to opinions already held (jingoism, religion, partisanship, racism) and can intensify them somewhat, but rarely for long; giving them credit for the opinions seems like giving them credit for the rising of the sun because they printed the time of sunrise in advance.  It's a less persuasive claim now of all times, when Trump and Sanders have confounded our wise rulers in politics and the media.  Despite a relentless flood of apocalyptic propaganda, it appears that English voters mostly favor leaving the European Economic Community.  And so on.  Nothing inspires panic in an elite like the realization that the proles are disobeying orders, and they often do, for better and worse.  I often ask those who talk about media brainwashing how they managed to resist it; I've yet to get an answer.

In the end, shadowy overlords or no shadowy overlords (I don't think they're shadowy at all, if you bother to pay attention, but it's comforting to think of yourself as one of the few who can see what the Sheeple can't), we are responsible for what we take from the media, the pronouncements of our politicians.  No one can know everything, of course, but it's possible to apply the basics of critical thinking (summaries by Deborah Meier and Walter Kaufmann quoted in this post) and start asking sensible, relevant questions.  Then it's necessary to recognize that one might be wrong, and to pay attention to differing views until you've evaluated them.  (Whining that someone is making a career out of picking on your beliefs, that they're just a smart-aleck trying to stir things up, is not an acceptable substitute.  I don't believe I've ever done that myself, at least not since the age of six; when someone corrects me, I check the correction, and admit my error if I have made one.  Most of my friends do not.)  What to do from there is another problem, harder to answer, but the same critical tools can help.

Go, Little Meme: Marriage Gravity and Viral Ignorance

I haven't bothered to check whether these memes contain authentic quotations from the men whose photographs they use.  What interests me here is that whether or not Tyson and Whedon said these things, some of their fans were happy to believe that they did.

Okay, I did look this one up, hoping for some context.  Who's "we"?  Tyson and his fans?  I can't find a source for it, so it may well be bogus, like this one probably was.  I did find this article, which I haven't read in full yet but it doesn't contain the quotation from the meme.  But again, what interests me is that it's popular among his fans, as something they agree with, so they take for granted that he must have said it.

Ignorance is not a virus, and reason won't "cure" it.  Ignorance doesn't have to "spread," because it's an inescapable part of the human condition.  What we know will always be limited, incomplete, and subject to revision, especially what we know about things much larger or smaller than human beings.  We will always be ignorant about some things, and I believe that our ignorance will always be greater than our knowledge.  The real problem, once again, is not that people are ignorant, it's that they know so much that isn't so.

I recognize that Tyson didn't mean "virus" or "cure" literally.  That's the trouble.  He's preaching, not sharing information.  He's a revivalist, and he's highly selective in his use of reason.  This meme is an altar call, the very opposite of reason.  Tyson's language shows that he belongs to the ancient religious tradition which teaches that if your spiritual eyes are opened, if you are awakened and enlightened all error will immediately fall away.  It isn't true, but a lot of people believe it, because they want to believe it; and of course it's very satisfying to believe that you are one of the enlightened elite, part of the cure, and the ignorant masses, with their myths and superstitions are the problem.  If anything should be cast metaphorically as a malignant virus, it's that belief.

Joss Whedon isn't a scientist, but he's every bit as incoherent as one.  Even if equality were a "necessity," that wouldn't mean it needn't be striven for -- as his penultimate sentence admits: we need equality, but we don't have it, so I would suppose we need to strive for it, "kinda."  But it's not a necessity, since human beings have managed to live without it for millennia.

No one really knows what equality is anyway.  Amartya Sen wrote a useful book on the subject, Inequality Reexamined (Harvard, 1995), which pointed out some of the conceptual problems involved, but Noam Chomsky did a good discussion as well.

Nor is equality like gravity, which is not really a "necessity" either.  Gravity is a fact, but like equality no one really knows what it is; scientists are still trying to figure that out.  Like many basic realities, everybody knows what gravity is until they try to explain or describe it.  Equality is different; rather like justice, or the Good, it refers to what isn't rather than what is.  Its very vagueness is useful, since people can advocate it without having to think very hard about what they mean by it.  But unlike equality, gravity is something that we needn't be bound by.  Many species have found ways to get around it, and human beings tried to do the same for thousands of years.  If we treated gravity the way Whedon wants us to treat equality, we'd reject the very idea of flight, let alone space travel.  When we're trying to get off the surface of the earth, gravity is our (metaphorical) opponent.

Notice too how Whedon loses track of his pronouns and their antecedents.  The "it" in "It is life out of balance" is presumably meant to refer to misogyny, but in context it points to "equality," which is not what Whedon means at all.

It appears that Whedon was talking about sexual/gender equality, though I suppose he didn't mean to exclude other areas.  And I suppose he was extemporizing here, so it's unfair to blame him for getting lost on the way to his thought; but in that case it's unfair to put his ramblings into a meme and send them, naked and unprotected, into the lethal vacuum of the Intertoobz.

Memes like these are part of the reason I've been in a foul mood lately.  I agree about the value of reason.  I think that equality is important.  But too many of the people who are nominally on my side on these issues are depressingly irrational.  I can't blame them.  I know the limits of my own rationality, and I know how hard it is to use reason, to ascertain facts, to talk about reality, to tell the truth.  But the popularity of people like Tyson and Whedon (and even of people like Noam Chomsky, who knows this and tries to resist it) just reminds me that what many people want is a Champion they can cheer for in the great gladiatorial arena, our guy versus their guy.  And it's largely accidental which side they're on.

Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Academic Disciplines Admit Impediments

The marriage between Queer Theory and Post-Colonial Studies has not always been a happy one.  I've joined a Facebook group, Against Equality, affiliated with a website of the same name that is

focused on critiquing mainstream gay and lesbian politics. As queer thinkers, writers and artists, we are committed to dislodging the centrality of equality rhetoric and challenging the demand for inclusion in the institution of marriage, the US military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation.

We want to reinvigorate the queer political imagination with fantastic possibility!

Anyone who reads this blog will recognize that, as a queer thinker, I'm a priori sympathetic to Against Equality's agenda.  I've written often on their first two concerns, and admittedly rather less on the third.  But so far I'm wary of their work.  They're too prone to throw around the word "privilege," even though as far as I can tell they're fairly privileged themselves.  (And that second paragraph is complacent bullshit.)

Privilege is always relative.  Recently on another site I saw someone, presumably white, argue that poor whites in a particularly disadvantaged county in West Virginia don't have white privilege, but he didn't provide any information about the condition of black people, if there are any, in that county.  (If there aren't any, well... )  It's not exactly a major revelation that white racism in the Jim Crow era functioned (and may even have been deliberately intended) to let poor whites have someone they could feel superior to, and to redirect anger at blacks that might otherwise have been directed at wealthy, powerful whites.  Less well-off racist whites today often complain that blacks have it better than they do: there's a lot of thwarted entitlement in that complaint.  Analogously, graduate students in the US often have it rough, but they are still privileged in terms of status and access to knowledge.  That doesn't mean they have it easy, but it does mean they need to be careful about throwing accusations of privilege at other people.  Against Equality explicitly views the current US gay movement's focus on marriage, gays in the military, and hate-crime laws as dictated by the white privilege of the current leadership.  There's truth in that, but it's an incomplete picture.

So, someone posted a link on the Against Equality page on Facebook about Benjamin Medrano Quezada, the newly-elected gay mayor of Freznillo, Zacatecas in Mexico.  "The fans at Queerty aren't too pleased about this one," commented the person who shared the link, because Medrano told the AP he isn't concerned about gay marriage.

“I’m not in favor of gay marriage, I don’t share that view, because we are still very small town … in short, we’re not prepared, in my view,” the 47-year-old gay bar owner told the AP. “Not yet, anyway, because we have strong roots in our religion, and in our customs.”

Ha ha, take that, you heteroimitative privileged gays at Queerty!  But another member of Against Equality commented mournfully, "(But *sigh* that is exactly how *not* to be critical of gay marriage.)"

Oh, really?  What is the right way to be critical of gay marriage, and who gets to decide it, especially if you're not talking about an American fundamentalist but the singing Third-World mayor of a Mexican town, a status that should confer unquestionable authenticity on Medrano?  He looks güero (that is, "fair"), which confers skin-color privilege on him in Mexico as in the US; and owning a gay bar marks him as petit bourgeois, therefore also of suspect authenticity.  But his reasons for rejecting same-sex marriage are typical of rhetoric from around the world, including queer-theoretical Third World academics: we're traditional here, we're a small town, we're devout, it's not our custom, we don't need your foreign ideas and your atheistic NGOs.  You'd think that devout, conservative small-town people would want their homosexuals married instead of tomcatting around, but there you are.

I recently read a book of academic papers on passing.  Unfortunately, most were quite poor work.  The best, and to my mind the only really good one, was about the drag ball scene documented in Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. The paper, "Mimesis in the Face of Fear" by Karen McCarthy Brown, traced the complexities and contradictions in the ball scene, which goes back to at least the 1920s, and originated as an outlet for urban gayish people of color.  Some theorists, including theorists of color, have imposed their understandings on these performances, and were displeased when the poor black and brown queens turned out to have their own understandings and agenda.  McCarthy wrote that "bell hooks, for example, approached the Ballroom Scene in this mood and then found herself disappointed, even angry, about the quality of resistance manifest there."*

This doesn't mean it's improper to criticize traditional, devout, indigenous ways of being and resisting.  It's just to say that neither I nor the folks at Against Equality should presume to lecture South African township ladies, Dominican bugarrones, beauty-contest-competing Filipino bakla, singing gay Mexican small-town mayors, Thai toms and dees, or black and Latino urban Ball queens on how they can most authentically manifest resistance or construct their identities.  We can argue with them, sure; but we must also listen to them if we expect them to listen to us.

It works both ways, of course.  Graeme Reid quoted the Dutch-Surinamese anthropologist Gloria Wekker's stricture "emic constructions and explanations of same-gender sexual behaviour need to be taken seriously. There is no reason to assume that the Western folk knowledge about sex, which has been elevated to academic knowledge, should have any more validity than folk knowledge anywhere else"**.  Western folk knowledge, even when it has been elevated to academic knowledge, also has no less validity than folk knowledge anywhere else.  Both can and should be argued with, but that's what people like Wekker, Reid, the people from Against Equality, and I are for: to argue about them.

*In María C. Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg, eds., Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion (NYU Press, 2001), p. 219.
** In Graeme Reid, How to Be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-town South-Africa (University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2013), p. 184.