Said Kelley:
>> >the brain research that
>> >shuggests that the brain changes under social conditions ?
Responded I:
>>Look, I didn't mention I saw a dirty great Tiger Snake yesterday, either.
>>But I sure as hell wasn't ignoring it.
Opined Doug:
>Yeah you were kind of by turning to selfish genes, not the tiger but
>what Kelley said in the quoted snippet. Biology is often invoked to
>put an end to debate or analysis. Even such raw biological facts as
>childbirth and lactation take on very different meanings depending on
>social arrangements like household structure, nature of and
>availability of medical care, labor market and welfare state
>features, conventions and representations around childbirth, etc.
I reckon it's important to remember that all kinds of people can make all linds of arguments which appeal to all kinds of definitions of 'nature' for all kinds of reasons. We can't afford to trash the lot coz some of it militates against what we see as human interests.
Now, I agree with Marx, and most here, that nature/physical reality is, to all intents and purposes, sensuous human activity. What that means for me is that 'raw nature' is never to be invoked as an unchanging, untouchable, external conductor of the human orchestra. And, as Kelley suggests (I think), it does not mean our consciousness and relations are usefully to be regarded as outside nature. That social conditions might condition our brains, for example, seems a wholly sensible idea to me. But this need not mean that the complicity of very old (evolutionarily functional?) instinctual tendencies in our behaviour need be jettisoned either.
I often knowingly behave against what feel like instinctual tendencies (it is a good idea when you want to lash back at a huge aggressive drunk, or caress a passing stranger, or eat a commodity for which you haven't paid, for instance). And I sometimes behave according to them. They are not decisive, because they ever occur within a society of proprieties, hierarchies, definitions, meanings, categories, and sanctions. But they are no less real for that - and they might just be important, too.
Some soldiers have killed pleading civilians against their own instincts, and some have braved machine-gun fire to save an injured civilian, again quite possibly against their instincts. If they do the former, they're in an even more fucked social setting than is required for the latter scenario. So there ya go, Kel; I've respect for structure after all.
Now, I take evolution to be a process whereby stuff like instincts interact with society du juour (part of the dialectical dynamo - one affects the other, which, when transformed, differently affects its conditioning agent). Society's business is to regulate instincts that make itself problematic (capitalist societies have their hands full in this regard, for mine, but they've managed okay so far). Mebbe instincts can be bred out of us, but my guess is that'd take longer than capitalism has hitherto had.
Anyway, there being no necessary damage in a young woman falling for an older man, and vice versa, I want to avoid theorising this tendency (which manifests in only some such relationships for only some people) such that the two lovers stand condemned - the man as an opportunistic patriarch (for many blame individuals for structural tendencies - sorry about stating-the-bleeding-obvious but to hate patriarchy is not to hate men) and the woman as a gormless lackey who needs protection from herself and the predator on her arm (for many would happily regulate others in the name of freedom - Marxism has not been above a bit of cruel paternalism in its time).
Carroll might reckon this is all very silly on my trivial part, but I reckon it's all about freedom. My Marxist tendencies come out of my belief that he was a great one for freedom. And my affection for the young Marx comes out my humanistic belief that at play in our ensemble of relations are natural tendencies, of which too many are cruelly stifled by our contemporary relations.
Discourse theory scares me when it aspires to exhaustive explanation, because I believe we are, inter alia, essentially animals - corporeal beings which have developed in mutually constitutive relationship with dynamic corporeal settings - and to regulate ourselves according to theory that misses this entirely (and I don't say Kelley says anything like this - but general warnings are best voiced before rather than after) is to do violence against ourselves. It'd be the sort of idealism-inspired 'political correctness' the right is always (albeit usually tendentiously) accusing us of.
And, lest anyone is tempted to suspect otherwise, all this from one who's never pointed his todger at one of his students and who remains the conservatively monogamous husband of a same-aged woman. But, yeah, an essentialistic, humanistic materialist, I loudly remain.
That's all. Promise.
Cheers, Rob.