And moreover, as I have repeatedly pointed out, apart from ignorance and fear that the world may not be friendly to our projects, there is a further fallacy involved in this standard leftist/feminist blanket rejection of SB. That is the preposterous idea that biological means hard to change and social means easy to change.
The debate is tiresome, I find myself repeating the same points over and over. No more for me for now.
[WS:] I agree with Carrol on this for a change. There is a certain tendency in human thinking, not just on the left, but in general that discerns in the world only what ought to be, and rejects or ignores all evidence that does fit this idealized picture. It is called idealism.
The denial that human "character" or "nature" might be influenced by biology or other material factors (scorned as "essentialism"), as opposed to be "social constructs" i.e. products of ideas, is but one manifestation of idealism. Other manifestations include, inter alia:
- conspiratorial view of the world both as causality (things happen because someone powerful, a person or a group, will them to happen) and rationalization (things do not seem to happen the way they are "supposed to" only because someone powerful creates an illusion that they do not, but in "reality" - i.e. idealized picture of the world - they do);
- judging historical events by the idealized standards accepted today (X is seen as morally unacceptable today, therefore X has always been morally unacceptable), sometimes followed by ex post facto attempt to "correct" historical events to make them fit the idealized standards (cf. the reparations lunacy);
-panglossian /pandemonic view of real life events i.e. whatever happens is for the greater good or alternatively, for evil purposes; that includes denials (from "he will change because I love him" to "the system is perfect, it is only human error that makes it malfunction"), as well crusades (e.g. "communism/capitalism is evil, therefore anything touched by it is evil and must be fought or resisted").
Idealism is extremely annoying for two reasons. First, it is the ultimate perversion of human intellectual capacity - by employing it to manufacture delusions, rationalizations, and excuses that look and feel like explanations instead of actually analyzing and explaining how things happen in the real (i.e. material) world. Second, it is the ultimate brainwashing tool that asks the audience to suspend their perceptions and judgments, and instead accept those supplied by religion or ideology ("do not believe what you see, believe the "truth" i.e. what I say.)
Wojtek