On Sun, 26 Jul 2009, Miles Jackson wrote:
> I know we've had this discussion before, but I will offer my opposing
> perspective for consideration: moral distinctions are the product of
> collective struggles, not the source of them.
I have a lot of sympathy for this position. It's largely true in the abstract and is a good guiding principle. But when you assert it as a description of concrete reality it's undialectical and reifying, if you'll excuse the expressions. It's also the source of bad practical advice.
It's undialectical because moral distinctions both express differences between social groups *and* partially constitute those groups. This central doubleness goes all the way down to the ground in the study of ideology. Social being determines consciousness. But consciousness is also part of social being. (Ditto with "reality:" social relations reflect productive relations. But social relations are part of the productive relations.)
It reifies because it mistakes the ideas that define us Marxians, the ones we joy to believe in, for reality. Leftists have ideology too, just like capitalists. There is no ideology-free part of the universe.
Now don't get me wrong. I delight when I can sketch with conviction how a moral or aesthetic struggle (or even a joke or remark) expresses a struggle between different social existences. But when you start to do that seriously -- and it was once my planned life's work -- what you find is that reality is terribly mixed up.
IMHO, the greatest work in sociology is _Distinction_ by Pierre Bourdieu. The entire book is devoted to precisely this project, to mapping every sort of evaluative scheme onto class fractions. It's quite beautiful. But it depends on making everything into ideal types and pretending its reading it off of the data.
What happens whenever you try to analyze actual symbolic struggles is that you quickly find that many of most important people involved don't have the jobs they are supposed to have, or the origins they are supposed to have -- or they have both but the wrong beliefs. You can twist and turn and come up with more and more pre-Copernican circles but eventually you have to admit it: they're exceptions dammit, but so important you can't just ignore them out as unimportant and claim to have explained anything. How they personally got to where they are is almost always explicable in biographical terms -- they turn out to be exceptions prove the rule. But eventually you'll find out that on some level every person is an exception -- that none of us can be reduced the values of our social groups. We all deviate from the ideal types. It's what makes us individuals. This doesn't deny that groups define us. But there are so many of them that define each of us, and so many ways to resolve (or ignore) each conflict between them, that the connection between the two levels is fully of indeterminacy.
This doesn't invalidate the ideal types. On the contrary, this is exactly what ideal types are for: disambiguating the details of reality by being used in combination. But mistaking ideal types for reality -- that is reification. And the mapping of value schemes onto milieux is an ideal-typical operation.
To put that a different way: who's on each side in the culture wars is much clearer cut that what social groups are each side. We can talk about urban/rural, Northeast/Southern, and other ideal-typical axes. And they all have some truth to them. But you'll find lots of exceptions to every rule -- which won't invalidate the rules. We'll rather say the people are exceptions. Which means that we're privileging the values over the reality as a means of defining the groups, whether we admit it or not. We don't have any choice. You can't explicate the clear by the less clear.
Lastly, there's the bad practical advice. As Carrol has often rightly said, you only persuade people on your own side. It's only when two people share a collective identity that they take their differences seriously, take the argument seriously, and take the solutions to heart. So the first step in persuading anyone is to find at what level you share a collective identity and to assert it, and to get it mutually accepted that, for this question at least, you actually are both on the same side, that you share common ground. Otherwise it's just shouting across a divide, with both sides actually feeling more reassured the less they agree. It's quite affirming and enjoyable but it's got nothing to do with persuading people who don't already agree.
Clearly the more specific the collective identity -- the more you share -- the more you'll take each other seriously. But to have any real argument -- any argument where people might actually change their ideas -- you have to establish some collective identity you share and agree mutually that you do. If all else fails, in a dispute about national policy it will be your national identity. (Of course people can refuse even that. It's what the charge of unAmericanness is all about. And by definition, arguing with such a person is pointless precisely because you don't share an identity.)
And once you've determined a collective identity you share, so that serious argument is possible, you then have to evoke it. Because unless people feel their defining convictions, and have them articulated and present in their minds at the same time as the point at issue, they can't feel the contradiction you're trying to get them to face. And if they don't feel it, it won't trouble them.
And that's what evaluative terms are for: evoking the convictions that define people so that you can show that the point at issue contradicts them. Or that it is a satisfying realization of those convictions -- an affirmation of what they believe in and who they are.
> To attribute the causes of complex social movements to individual moral
> beliefs is capitalist ideology through and through.
Nobody's doing that in this debate. Everyone on the pro-morality side considers morality a social phenonenon. Nobody considers it an individual phenomenon.
An individual morality is as much an oxymoron as an individual language.
Michael