(1) I was not trying to shift the moral onus of violent coercions
onto all coercions. I was trying to consider the _consequences_,
or if you like the _normal functions_ of socializing coercions. I
was trying to do this in a vaguely semi-quantitative way: to
assume some minimum of structural constraints, inevitable pain,
unavoidable coercions, and then to seek to understand how the
vast excesses beyond that, in a society as hellbent on
controlling and uniformizing people's behavior as ours is,
function. My thesis is that these surplus coercions are entrained
in the service of the continuity of privilege to the extent of
their excess, and in the service of necessary social cohesion
closer to their minimal degrees. A little coercion makes things
work; a lot of coercion lets a few exploit many.
(2) My aside about fathers was understandably offensive, and I
put it in only because such unsayable things need, I think, to
get said sometimes. I was not specifically objecting to the
occasional abusive father as Phil read me. I was objecting to
something much more pervasive and explosive: the cult of
masculinity and its positive norms. I think all children could do
with a lot less of it, and that abusive fathers are only the
extremal case of unhealthy role models of what constitutes a good
human being. I don't really want to discuss this further now,
because I believe this issue would divert us from topics about
which we are carrying on productive dialogues. I write this only
as clarification.
(3) Negotiation as such does not require parity of power, of
course. It is only _justice_ in the outcomes of negotiations
which would appear to depend on such parity. And perhaps the
social harmony of perceived justice as much or more than any
putative Habermasian universal justice.
(4) Phil's appeal to innocuous (relatively) cultural
transmissions (like how to drive a car) as a justification for
the 'minor' coercions of education (minor in respect of violence
per incident, but vast in their cumulation over years of control)
seems curiously like the conservative view that all laws are like
'traffic laws': mere social conveniences, neutral in their
application. These are not the consequences of coercive education
that I had in mind.
Finally, while raised a white middle-class liberal, I hope I am
no longer fundamentally a liberal, though I am not sure just what
sort of post-liberal I might be. I can respect a faith in
rational discourse and democracy (though I no longer believe they
can be defined satisfactorily), and I can understand that any
cultural value-system is going to justify its efforts to
reproduce itself in the next generation. But I believe more and
more that the values, and certainly the practices associated with
them, which liberals believe will, once perfected, ground a more
just society, in fact operate to ground the kinds of privilege
and inequity which have their historical origin in the same
matrix as these values. I don't think the liberal middle-class is
doing anything much more in this, whether hopefully or in guilt-
paralysis, than serving the interests that created it. JAY.
---------------
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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