Heard the expression “don’t blame the soap for the dirt?”
Western Civilization sheds its crappy parts, albeit with resistance from conservatives and reactionaries. It also absorbs used ideas from other cultures more than the reverse: sure, Arabs love luxury SUVs and Japanese love Elvis, but culturally they resist Western philosophies more than Western intellectuals resist nuggets of wisdom from outside.
That was a generic ‘you’. I didn’t mean you personally.
I’d agree with that, but there are very significant differences between left and right in what is considered fair.
Is it fair that some people are better at math than others? If not, does that imply that schools shouldn’t provide advanced math education in middle/high school, since it means that advanced students can run ahead of the rest?
One definition of fairness says yes, we shouldn’t let any one group get too far ahead of another just because of their circumstances. Another definition says that everyone should have the right to get courses suitable to their capability. These lead to exactly opposite outcomes.
Once again, I’m not claiming that people don’t often apply ideas of oppression in inconsistent or hypocritical ways. I’m just saying that trying to talk about the concept of oppression as though it isn’t inherently dependent on notions of good/bad, right/wrong, etc., is nonsensical. It’s not some kind of “postmodern” substitute for morality: it’s fundamentally entwined with morality.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Look at all the non-western countries that have “western-style” parliamentary structures, universities, legal systems, etc.
These are WAY more profound cultural fusions than just a little bit of consumer-goods enjoyment.
Those are indeed two definitions of fairness. Bad ones, because they are simplistic, overly binary, and not representative of how people apply the concept of fairness in the real world.
We don’t know all the sources of unfairness, so it would be impossible to perfectly eliminate them. But we know some of them, and we can figure out ways of minimizing them. A progressive would find that work very important because of their values – it’s the belief in the value of the work that makes the progressive, not a particular theory about solving it, or an expectation that society somehow become perfect.
There would be no need for the language of oppression if it were always rooted in some other factor. You could just name that other factor.
I agree that it’s nonsensical to consider oppression as a core value not rooted in other concepts. That’s a reason why I think progressivism is antithetical to liberalism, even though the two share some values.
That it’s held as a value by itself is one reason why we see so many obvious paradoxes, like “Queers for Palestine,” who seem to be genuinely confused when they find that the population they support generally wants them dead. They can certainly hold their belief that there’s some unjust oppression going on, but they don’t seem to have coherent enough views to realize that on the LGBT axis, they’re supporting the wrong crowd.
Political outcomes are usually binary. Either you do something, like offering Algebra I in middle school, or you don’t do it, which is what the SFUSD tried to do. So while it’s all well and good to say that real-world notions of fairness are fuzzy and complicated, ultimately the outcome will be one thing or another.
You’re right about that. Although we both have our dissenters:
“Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate Governor of Aden, once told Labour politician Denis Healey that 'when the British Empire finally sank beneath the waves of history, it would leave behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression “Fuck off”
No and no. People should have access to whatever they need to reach their full academic potential.
I happen to be really distressed by prisoner abuse. I think it’s partly a PTSD thing but also I find it morally abhorrent to dehumanize and abuse people who are utterly helpless. I’ve lost sleep over the whole deportation to El CECOT thing. For my second book, I got quite interested in the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo. Some of them were almost certainly guilty, but it really didn’t make a difference to my overall sense of horror and injustice.
While I can sort of understand what it means to feel little or nothing about people who have done egregiously bad things, I think it’s really problematic to decide anyone deserves any sort of abuse, including rape. Once you start marking the difference between deserves/doesn’t deserve for any sort of person, once we accept that sometimes it’s okay for someone to get raped, we lose all moral credibility and orientation. That’s how I feel about it.
Also I think most people really don’t understand how traumatic it is to be imprisoned in any case. To lose all your rights and power and identity indefinitely or forever. I agree it is sometimes necessary but I think it is, in and of itself, terrible punishment for anyone. The idea that it’s fine to heap further trauma on top of that I also find horrifying.
I think my empathy meter may be calibrated a touch higher than is healthy, though. I’ll concede that. I also have a very vivid imagination. No, I don’t sleep well these days.
I agree. That’s not the definition of fairness that the SFUSD applied recently.
I am with you about prisoner abuse. I don’t support that under any conditions. However, I don’t think the state of being imprisoned is inherently evidence of oppression. It is an oppressive environment to be sure. But if the law was applied evenly, there is nothing unjust about it.
I don’t think many people have a well-calibrated empathy meter. Two major factors I can think of:
If we’re talking about the result of elections, I guess. What was the binary political outcome of the Free Trade Agreement?
I think I’ve lost you again, but in general I’d say that the populist left and right are against free trade. Even when they say things that are the opposite of what they said a few years ago.
You said “Political outcomes are usually binary.” The Free Trade Agreement was a political outcome. I think it’s one that has had a lot of complex ramifications, so it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to call it ‘binary.’ I think most political outcomes are like this. You seem to think otherwise, maybe because what you call a ‘political outcome’ is different than what I’m thinking of.
In the same way, I think political outcomes around education are complex. ‘Binary’ doesn’t seem like a useful way of classifying them if you really want to understand the ramifications.
ETA: I’d venture to guess that you and I have an overall philosophical difference about how complexity works and how to engage with it, and that leads us in different political directions.
I know a bunch of people in the Queers for Palestine movement. Haven’t met any that are confused about how Islamic countries generally treat queer people, nor any who are laboring under the assumption that a free Palestine would be any better. I’m sure they exist - there are idiots everywhere - but I don’t think it’s descriptive of the group as a whole, who generally just believe that being a homophobe doesn’t mean you deserve to have a bomb dropped on your kids.
An FTA is a complicated thing, but contains all sorts of individual components that are themselves binary, or at least fixed. Some items have tariffs under the FTA, some don’t. Some products have quotas, some don’t. And so on.
At any rate, I think it’s a bad example because FTAs aren’t usually created on the basis of some abstract notion of fairness. It’s just pure negotiation.
But other political outcomes are much more rooted in philosophy, and different definitions can lead to wildly different outcomes even when they all value “fairness”. Even if you don’t want to call that “binary”, the possible set of outcomes can be very far apart. It’s not just a smooth gradient of possibilities.
I dunno. Why not? There’s a pretty big spectrum of what constitutes being a homophobe, including just putting all LGBT to death, and Islamic countries tend toward the latter. At a certain point, it does become a moral right to drop a bomb on them (and their kids).
Yes, that’s what I was referring to before, when I said it was the belief that this sort of analysis is important is what makes people politically progressive, not specific policies. If you (again, generic) don’t value fairness as much as progressives do, you are unlikely to bother with it and just conclude that trying is a waste of time.
Everyone of all political stripes had an opinion on the SFUSD algebra thing, and they all had some fairness-aligned argument. Conservatives and traditional liberals thought that eliminating the classes was unfair to advanced students. It was only the progressives that thought the fair thing was to eliminate the advanced classes, and did so on the basis of equity. And sure, it wasn’t perfectly divided on political boundaries (what is?), but that was the general pattern.
Well, that’s deeply horrifying.