Presumably, a big part of the reason why many LBO-talkers are interested in the "psycho-sexual" as explananda and some of them look to the "psycho-sexual" as explanans is our observations of backward or reactionary political behaviors of some Americans -- the behaviors that make left-wing political advances difficult in the USA. More specifically, to use your examples, (A1) some Americans subscribe to the myth of black men's sexual rapacity, the ideal of manliness as the ability and willingness to kill when you are ordered by your commanders to do so, and/or social identities based upon gender-specific roles, (A2) while other Americans don't; and we would like to know (B) what makes the difference, in order to remove the causes of (A1). That's our interest in synchronic cultural differences and causal explanations of them.
We are also interested in historical differences and causal explanations of them as well. When and how did the myth of black men's sexual rapacity arise? What gave rise to it? What changes has the myth undergone? What caused the changes? When and how did the ideal of manliness as the ability and willingness to kill when you are ordered by your commanders to do so arise? What gave rise to it? What changes has the ideal undergone? What caused the changes? When and how did social identities based upon gender-specific roles arise? What gave rise to them? What changes have they undergone? What caused the changes? Historical changes are of interest to us, for the same reason we are interested in synchronic cultural differences; we want to remove the causes of the political problems.
At 8:40 PM -0800 3/29/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>I think it's plausible that in both of these cases it has to do in
>part with specifically sexual anxieties and drives that are rooted
>in the fact, which is prior (temporally) to class, that humans build
>their identities around gender and sexuality first of all.
What makes you think that sexual anxieties are temporally prior to class? Most observable sexual anxieties are clearly new -- evidently quite modern -- in history: e.g., the myth of black men's sexual rapacity, anti-abortion ideology, homophobia. The fear of poor women's fertility is older than homophobia, anti-abortion ideology, and the myth of black men's sexual rapacity, but how old is it exactly?
At 8:40 PM -0800 3/29/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Or if you think that economics is the fundamental level of social
>explanation, there can be no economic explanations, that is, no
>explanations of economic phenomena.
Economic explanations and explanations of economic phenomena aren't the same thing, are they?
At 8:40 PM -0800 3/29/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>not all explanations are or can be reductive.
Sure, but aren't questions that do not require explanans of a different order rather trivial (politically and epistemologically), as in the example you give below?
At 8:40 PM -0800 3/29/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Why is the Shrub Prez? Because Gore bollocksed the campaign. Because
>a GOP dominated S.Ct lawlessly awarded him the job for partisan
>reasons. Because Nader drew too many votes in Florida. What's so
>hard about that?
-- Yoshie
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