My Note On A Note On My Note Below Trying To Provide A Brief Beginning Account Of Intersectionality

Note to a guy who sent me this note on my immediately below post.

.... I think you pretty much get it. What you do not do is expose its bullshittines. Don't  look to me for advice. I have given up on it all...

Me: 

I wasn’t tying to expose its faultiness, just trying to see if I was “getting it.”

So if you think I “pretty much get it,” then for me that’s mission accomplished.

The word is thrown around so much, is so pervasive in chatter these days, the way “deconstruction” used to be, I suspect that many who use it don’t understand what is meant by those who do understand it. 

So I think it’s at least minimally helpful to try to clarify what it at its core means.

So, again, if I pretty much did that, then I did what I set out to do.

And, again, to tell me I haven’t exposed it as nonsense is to tell me I haven’t done something I didn’t set out to do.

In critiquing intersectionality, I would, rather than focus on its indeterminacy, reject its foundational premises. 

Some are: 

that, regardless of our past, we now systemically oppress the marginalized; 

that the most privileged—that is, the privileged by way intersectionality’s criteria—form a hegemony intent on maintaining its power, advantage and control; 

that the criteria for ascribing privilege form a coherent basis for its assertion and application—essentially identity politics on steroids; 

that the idea of free expression is delusionary since speech is but a mode of power, one of the hegemon’s chief means of oppression and thus sustaining itself rather than a means of pursuing truth; 

that it’s delusionary to say we live in a free society rather than one in which controlling power seeks its own persistence; 

and, generally, the idea of culture and institutions as operating as a kind of superstructure.

But, yet again, none of this was part of what I’d set out to do in trying to clarify what intersectionality means. 

A Beginning Note Of An Account Of Intersectionality

Is this a good beginning of an account of intersectionality?

It’s the allegation of a convergence of different forms of oppression on both individuals and groups that establishes a hierarchy of oppressive victimization with the most aggrieved identities at the top and the most privileged identities, such as white males, at the bottom but with the bottom ruling and suppressing the top.

The convergence, figured as an intersection of oppressions, rests on an analysis of society that, continues the allegation, the causes of oppression are systemic or structural, built into the way society is formed as a matter of its history and its practices, institutional and otherwise, by the hegemonic privileged intent on maintaining their power and control.

Since the rhetoric of liberal democratic values and the noted practices are pretext for the oppression they serve to protect, truth-shattering power lies in the articulation of  experience of oppression. That articulation cannot be gainsaid by studies, scholarship or facts and figures—evidence—that point away and, so, distract us from this truth. 

A Note On Being 4/5ths Through Dickens’s Bleak House And A Theory About It

Note to a friend:

....1/5th left.

Shattered when Little Joe, not Bonanza’s, died.

Dickens with him, as he often does, outdoes himself. He conveys the beautiful, pitiable soul of the boy the way Twain does with Huck, though Huck is neither pitiable or doomed. The commonality is the illimited penetration to the deepest core of these boys and then representing them, especially in their voices, so that their effect on us is as well illimited. 

We’re educated to reject sentimentality in art—a low form of excessive emotion of sadness or regret or tenderness that upsets some presumed balance between our hearts and our minds such that good judgment is offended, but Dickens in his genius makes it transcend itself so as to become high art. He’s able to do this, I’d venture, because of his masterful authorial technique in creating it, that technique being the sum of what it is great writers do in making their fiction great. (List to follow in the next life.)

Btw, back to Dickens’s treatment of women in Bleak House, nobody’s gonna ever refer to Lady Dedlock as “little woman.” And in that a counter thesis is suggesting itself to me: maybe Dickens somewhat unaware is of the devil’s camp. 

The lavish generosity of person he lavishes on most not all of the little women—Lady Snagsby not so much, “not to put too fine a point on it,” to quote Mr. Snagsby—leads to a certain tiresomeness as finally their selflessness involves self abnegation. 

I think of Esther, Charlie, Rosa, Ada up to a point, Caddy. Ada breaks that mould in determinedly defying sense in marrying Carstone. It will not go well for them, I have no doubt. The great goodness of the little woman starts to become boring. Whereas which woman in the novel is more intriguing than the, I’m guessing, homicidal Lady Dedlock, has more complexity, is more compelling? 

Esther, where I’m up to so far, doesn’t know herself. She’s aware that a couple of others, namely Allen Woodcourt and Ada, sense her sadness after she has agreed to marry John Jarndyce. They intuit she’s denying herself in doing so. She has a passion for Woodcourt that can’t break, so far I stress, into her consciousness. She has no reason to think why others detect sadness in her. She is perfectly happy she tells herself and sincerely but self-deludedly believes. Here selflessness clearly leads to self abnegation. Generous goodness faces its own limit, its obstruction to human happiness. 

In all this the novel seems to me to house a paradox, a tension between selflessness and selffulness, to coin a word, between, could it be said, a kind of extreme sense and extreme sensibility, sensibility as Jane Austen has it. Where the demands of the emotional self dominate, when characters seek their fulfillment in following their passions, sensibility, they seem to seal their fate and doom themselves in different degrees of doom, say Ada and perhaps Lady Dedlock. But when they obey the dictates of sense, as in duty and in doing for others, they lose themselves and suffer their own measures of doom. 

Just a working theory right now. 

A Note On Dickens’s View Of Women In Bleak House And His Theory Of Fiction Apparent There

Note to a friend:

I’m where Jarndyce proposes to Esther—about 2/3ds through—but if you’re not there yet I’ll leave you in suspense as to whether she accepts, recalling her suppressed passion for the young heroic doctor, Allan Woodcourt.

But what’s striking me, and has been throughout, is Dickens’s attitude towards women, his personal life aside, as it’s shown in Bleak House. Submissive, retiring, humble, kindly, generous, door-mat-for-men type of women seem to be for him the personification of feminine perfection. The archetypal image of them being the helper, “little woman,” is basically the maid. The cold, aloof, beautiful, cool, haughty types, les belles dames sans merci, Lady Dedlock, intrigue him, the way women are attracted to bad boys, but they don’t get any real slice of Dickensian feminine virtue, it seems. 

P.S. Another thing occurring to me is that within Bleak House is a kind of Dickensian theory of fiction, that fiction manifests the connectedness amongst us all or, put another way, all our (at the most) six degrees of separation. The non Esther narrator quite early on comments on how big and populated and civically disparate is the London citizenry but latent amongst them exists a connectedness waiting for patency. 

I do believe that’s *part* of what’s going on thematically in this magnificent novel. 

My Tweet On Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance

...Finished #mailerstoughguysdontdance

If an impenetrably convoluted, dull story, lifeless characters, dead, unreal dialogue—ie, no one talks this way, the same for all characters, absurd theorizing and overly studied prose all are dancing, then this Norman Mailer is no tough guy...

A Short Note On The Political Fate Of Jody Wilson-Raybould And The Nature Of Political Morality: High Unflinching Principle Against The Reality Of Politics

Isn’t Socrates drinking the hemlock an expression of the ultimate incompatibility between high principle and and real life politics, between the purity of philosophy and the unavoidable impurity of real life, inevitably conflicted, complex, messy, problematic and compromised, on the ground? 

As Richard Posner said speaking of Machiavelli:

...People… have difficulty grasping the distinctive and essential components of political morality, comprising the qualities necessary in a statesman or other leader. Those qualities are strategic and interpersonal (manipulative, coercive, psychological) in character. They are quintessentially social. They constitute the morality, misunderstood as cynicism, expounded by Machiavelli, the morality that Weber contrasted with an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, his term for the uncompromising absolutist ethics that one finds, for example, on the Sermon on the Mount. The ethics of political responsibility implies a willingness to compromise, to dirty one’s hands, to flatter and lie, to make package deals, to forgo the prideful self satisfaction that comes from self-conscious purity and devotion to principle. It requires a sense of reality, of proportion, rather than self-righteousness or academic smarts. The politician must have an ‘ability to let realities work upon him with inner consciousness and calmness.’...

I think these notions of pure Sermon on the Mount morality and contrasting political morality so understood go to the heart of what finally befell Jody Wilson Reybould and Jane Philpott. 

ON STEM AND SOME CONSERVATIVES’ DISMISSAL OF LIBERAL ARTS

First: this 

Then from me:

I wrote the following about one paragraph in this essay.

Me to my friends:

….If any of you care to peruse and comment, I’d be obliged:

As it happens, Ben Shapiro seems to me to have mechanistic view of sex and gender, namely a boy is a boy is a boy, a girl is a girl is a girl and and any individual’s internal confusion over that, gender dysphoria, is a disease to be cured. But without getting into the merits of Shapiro’s view—I disagree with it—what about this?

————————————————————————————————————————

I break down one paragraph from McManus’s essay.

McManus:

….Shapiro and others are well known for their crude arguments against the trans movement. But the argument that the only thing that matters is a purely scientific approach to the world inadvertently supports the position of transgender individuals (as it should)…

Me:

On transgenderism, how but by a scientific approach can we come to understand, then make judgments about it and deal with it? It involves how we’re sexually constituted, genetically wired and how in our minds we relate to our sexuality. By what but the different sciences raised by transgenderism and their integration into a workable theory can ever come to terms with it? Objection can be taken to what Shapiro thinks, but for that to be meaningful, it will need to be grounded in better science than what avails Shapiro.

McManus:

…If all we care about are the facts of the world, and how they can be manipulated to service our ends, there is no intrinsic reason why the fact of our biological sex at birth cannot be manipulated if we so desire…

Me:

Firstly, how does wanting a scientific approach to transgenderism necessarily morph into tendentious reasoning? And what says that Shapiro by his argument only cares about manipulating facts to service his ends? That says he’s being a propagandist of a kind. Maybe he is but who’s to say he doesn’t sincerely reach a good faith conclusion based on his understanding of the science? And why even impugn his motives? Why not make a better argument from better science? And, finally here, why move from a complaint, as I read it, of the bad faith manipulation of facts to serve ends, to the repetition of such bad faith arguing in the service of justifying transgenderism? It deserves better than that.

McManus:

…Indeed, since, according to the instrumentalist position, there can be nothing inherently wrong with pursuing the end of transcending our initial biological sex, we should be applauding those scientists who are better able to satisfy the wishes of individuals by bringing individual biology closer to that of preferred sex…

Me:

McManus earlier in this essay has described instrumental reasoning as:

…the world was little more than a collection of material objects interacting with one another according to scientific laws. The point of reason was to understand these laws, so the idle objects of the world could be manipulated and engineered to satisfy subjective human preferences. As Alasdair Macintyre puts it in After Virtue, instrumental rationality is a way of thinking about the most effective means of satisfying our desires. It remains neutral about the ends we choose to pursue, regarding all kinds of reasoning about which ends good human beings should pursue as embedded in superstitious traditionalism and religious pieties…

As I’ve noted, the dive into instrumental reasoning as here defined and applying it to transgenderism distracts us from and ought to be irrelevant to the issue wanting a proper approach. McManus could say, I suppose, “I’m just showing how Shapiro’s instrumentalism can work against him here.” But I’d say, stipulating for argument that Shapiro so reasons, “So what? It ought to be enough to say that instrumentalism has no place in a good faith discussion or debate about transgenderism and, so, enough said on that.”

McManus:

….Shapiro may object that this is simply unscientific, because sex is determined at birth. But that is no real argument, since the facts about the world simply exist to be manipulated through scientific reason, which can reconfigure reality according to our wishes….

Me:

Isn’t a little incoherent to posit for Shapiro his objection based on science? He either is an instrumentalist—as McManus defines it—or he’s not. If he is, then the posit flies in the face of his instrumentalism since facts are mere means to a desired end. And if he’s not, then why parade him as one and then posit him asserting science and then on top of that then provide an instrumentalist answer to his assertion of science?

McManus:

….Indeed, the more STEM fields advance, the fewer immediate barriers there will be to people doing just that. The only argument against this position is a (bad) moral one, and encouraging indifference to learning about moral argumentation can only entrench the belief that almost everything is a matter of opinion, bias and perspective….

Me:

I can’t make out this conclusion. Who’s to say instrumental reasoning follows from the advance of STEM education (in tandem with the decline in or dismissal of by certain conservatives humanities education, the main theme of the essay)? Who’s to say that STEM graduates are more likely to be instrumentalists than liberal arts majors, that an education in moral reasoning is a barrier to the instrumentalism STEM allegedly breeds? In fact, if we observe what’s going on in the humanities on college campuses, the infection by a kind of dictatorial political correctness emanating from the now current notion of intersectionalism suggests a much greater instance of instrumentalism in the humanities than in STEM faculties, which, to reverse McManus’s argument, seem a barrier to that infection.