On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Miles Jackson wrote:
>> An individual morality is as much an oxymoron as an individual
>> language.
>
> Hey, we do agree!
Yep. Now, are you going to go back and rewrite your post? :-)
With all due kidding, Miles, I fear you may be suffering from deformation professionelle. As a professional pscyhologist, you are surrounded by people who think the ultimate reality is psychological. Bashing your head against this wall everyday, you think the sine non qua of discussing anything is to prove that Durkheim was right about social facts.
But nobody on this list is a psychological reductionist. We all start from the idea that society is greater than its parts and exerts a molding power over those parts. You're breaking down an open door. We've all gone way beyond this and are trying to build something on the basis of it. Come out and join us.
> I guess I have a different vision of political struggle. Individual
> persuasion
Again with the "individual." You keep flipping that in like tic. Think socially, Miles. Social change comes from getting worldviews to change, not individuals. Persuade an individual and you've only gotten someone to switch sides. It's only if she and others can change the norms of their group that you've accomplished something. (And "you've" is collective here too.)
> is not how social change typically happens. Rather, committed and ingenious
> activists find ways to change social conditions without the consent of the
> majority; then the majority are forced to change their opinions to adapt to
> the new social conditions. I recognize that this is fundamentally
> anti-democratic, but this is an accurate description of how social change has
> occured in the U. S. from the American Revolution to gay civil rights today.
Wow. We are so far apart, not only in our interpretations but in our account of the facts, that this gulf may be unbridgeable. But I'll put forth my view for the record.
I think your view of the American Revolution is both wrong and irrelevant. Wrong, because you don't win a guerrilla war if the vast majority of the population is against you. Irrelevant because it was a real war, with guns that kill people -- and where the collaborators get exported afterwards. Unless you are suggesting we should attain our goals by taking up arms against the government, this has nothing to teach us.
As for the history of gay rights, I'm completely baffled. This the perfect example of my way of thinking and doesn't support yours at all. Here we have the birth of an epochally new morality that is clearly based on the conscious creation of a new social identity, the gay identity. It was not based on social change, it caused social change. There was no change in the economic basis of gay people (which is famously class independent) and no change in their biology. But they change their ideas, their perspective and their worldview. And that changed how they behaved and what they demanded.
And what they demanded was gay rights -- which is entirely a function of changing the morality of the other 98% of society. And they did this precisely by confronting society with a contradiction between the reality of gay oppression and the American Creed, which defines our national identity. Among its principles are that everyone should be equal and that everyone has the right to happiness. Gay liberation has almost entirely consisted of forcing the rest of the country to face the contradiction between the convictions that define their collective identity and the realities of gay experience. And over time, the country has drastically changed and is still change it's views precisely because of the visceral conflict this causes. Their are other visceral conflicts that resist this change and that buttress homophobia in place. But it turns out that they're not as strong and the need to face ourselves in the mirror and not be ashamed. The amount of change that has taken place in our collective norms in the last 40 years is staggering, esp. when you consider the centuries and millenia over which they didn't. And there has been no correspondingly huge change in underlying economic conditions. What social changes that have been have been the result of this change in worldview and the result of the struggle it created.
In your picture, the gays take power and then force us to recognize them. But you don't really believe that. Only nutso conservatives believe that. The only force that's been applied here is force of moral suasion. And gays, qua gays, don't control shit. It's the moral high ground that is winning them this war.
So this seems a perfect example of (1) how a new identity and a new morality can be born with underlying economic conditions of the group remaining absolutely constant; (2) how a struggle to change worldviews depends on forcing people to face a contradiction between their beliefs and the convictions that define their collective identity; and (3) why the language of morality matters. Because if you don't care about morality, you don't care about gay rights. Because that's what they are.
If you can tell me why gay marriage is important without using a moral argument, I'm all ears.
Michael