Judy points up, as I too briefly tried to when I wrote, that the
system-level view of fairness is not enough, certainly for
personal decision-making, and so probably also for social policy
decisions made by us as individuals. Why? What more do we need?
What more can we have?
People _do_ make personal choices in relation to social-category
dimensions, parameters, 'differands'; when we don't like them we
call this 'prejudice', judging an individual or a situation on
the basis of our acquired dispositions towards categories (a
woman, a black, a gay, a kid, 'Asian') rather than (it takes more
work, more time) working past these to the level of individuality
of persons and situations. The categories will even then still be
operative in some sense (this is where topology helps; matters of
degree are involved, of the in-betweens and mixed cases of unique
real Individuals), since in our culture differences _of the kind_
that we lump together under oversimplified headings like class,
gender, age, culture, etc. do matter to us. The complex of
multiple dimensions _is_ relevant; it's only the social
categories as such, the assumption of what typically or
necessarily goes together, that dissolves at the Individual level
of analysis.
Should we, ethically, make local decisions based social
categories? I think not. Here I agree with Eugene; we should make
them on the basis of individuals _but as fully conscious as we
can be_ of our own positioned dispositions to differently value
individual qualities. This is the other hard work, the hard work
of critical, reflexive, 'self-' analysis. What we value is a
function of our own experiences, and those experiences are
embedded in social networks in which there is systematic
variation in what is valued as a function of the complex of
multiple dimensions we too simply gloss by our social categories.
But again, dissolving the categories does not vitiate the
relevance of these dimensions to our dispositions and values.
This for me is what is at stake at the individual level: not that
I should vote for a female candidate because she is female and we
don't have a 50/50 proportional balance of male vs. female, but
that I should figure out what it is that I tend to systematically
value more and in more cases about the speaking, writing, manner,
priorities, etc. of people who have had the experiential
trajectories more common to those construed in our society as
'male' and correspondingly value less or in fewer cases for those
socialized as 'female'. And it's not just male/female (as
oversimplified as that is), but middle/working class,
older/younger, etc. and, really, certain salient more specific
'differands' that underlie both these categories and my own
judgments. To the extent that I can understand my own valuings as
_positioned_ (and not simply as functionally justified), I am in
a position to appreciate that the candidate that seems to me
'less qualified' may in fact be equally or more 'qualified' by
criteria I am positionally disposed not to emphasize, or even
that 'more' of what I usually value may not be 'good' for the
department, students, the discipline, society, but only 'good
for' people positioned like me.
I believe I have had a few such 'revelations' in my life. The
easier ones are 'additive': some new values or criteria are
included. The hard ones are 'replacive': what I valued before, or
thought I should value, came to seem to me actually negative.
When I occasionally rail against, call it 'hyper-masculinism', or
against some aspects of 'euroculturalism' (includes EuroAmerican
culture) or 'modernism' or 'rationalism', my odd views come, I
think, not from sheer perversity (not really my temperament) but
from a sense that some of the dominant cultural values toward
which I've been socialized promote interests contrary to those of
larger, more important units of analysis.
This is a very complex matter to sort out. It amounts to
formulating a sort of meta-ethics: how do we judge the values by
which we judge? This has, of course, to be done by me from the
individual-level point of view, but with some sort of 'input'
from higher levels of the system. One way this can happen, again
topologically, is through my interactions with Others, by taking
their viewpoints and interests into account, and not just my own
and those of people most like me, when devising a model of the
interests of the higher levels. It has to involve a sort of
discomforting hybridity, either from hybrid-positional experience
(belonging for various reasons to rather different worlds in
one's life), or from 'cross-cultural' experience (same sort of
situation, but a different relation to it, 'interacting with'
more than 'belonging to'). Then I am in effect 'levered out' of
my own positioned dispositions to some degree; or in other terms,
my attitudes are being shaped by a wider spectrum of the larger
system than is usually the case. You can view the whole universe
from one point within it, but you can't judge the bias in that
viewpoint unless you move it around.
So when Eugene praises empathy and collaboration as means to
participate in some ways in the viewpoints of Others/others, I do
agree (and we all know it isn't easy to be really 'open' in such
collaborations, willing to let the Other view influence us). But
this way of broadening our links into the larger system is not
the same as having spent years being in the position of the
Other. The first does not lead to the same changes/differences of
viewpoint as the second. Sometimes the second is almost
impossible (the channels of possibility are forbidden or
unavailable in the culture). So when my goal is to be responsive,
as an individual, to interests larger than those I have
experienced by being in some position (say, 'male'), I want to
interact with people who have been/ are in very different
positions ('female'). I'd also like to interact with someone like
myself who has developed an empathy for Others of different
sorts, who has had those interactions (eg, a man who women say
understands women's views well). But I wouldn't consider the
latter as good as the former for my purposes (i.e. towards the
good of a larger whole). This is what I meant by saying I
wouldn't want to accept men representing women's viewpoints in
politics (much less dominant caste people claiming to represent
everyone's viewpoints). You can represent viewpoints you've come
to understand, but you can't 'project' those viewpoints into new
issues and domains; that comes only from the dispositions
developed by having lived the lives that give such viewpoints.
If we scale the reasoning up, from Me+Other trying to achieve a
view more representative of the whole than Me alone, then if _I_
succeed I might make a better 'politician', but if We want the
ideal political Assembly according to this logic, then it would
not consist of people all of whom 'belonged to' some narrow range
of social positions (in the subtle, complex multi-dimensional
space; not just by simplistic categories); it would consist of
people (hopefully ones who like me or Eugene were 'better'
politicians by virtue of empathetic collaborations) who had lived
the primary experiences of being in the widest possible range of
social positions. Of course there would also be still other
'qualifications' for office, once these distributional criteria
were met. But notice once again, in terms of practical voter
decisions, that there is a contradiction (or incommensurability)
with respect to levels. You can't use my logic to pick an
individual Representative; you can only use it to put together an
entire Congress. Correspondingly, you can't use it to judge the
qualifications of a candidate (for Congress or an academic job),
but you can use it to judge the 'wholeness' of an entire
Congress, department, or university.
Such a judgment is not _statistical_ in its basis, but 'holistic'
or 'synergistic', as it must be when regarding a higher level of
organization of a complex interacting system. I thank Judy D. for
calling attention to the similarities and differences between
System:Instance in linguistics (where purely formal relations
constitute the System level) and System:Individual in ecosocial
dynamics (where coupled interactions constitute the higher
levels). The role of statistical indices is different in these
cases, and since the former is actually an abstracted special
case of the latter, it's also where the Climate:Weather analogy
needs amplification. The Earth's climate (as dynamic system) is
not just a function of averages over time of weather seen
separately at each and every place on Earth (which would be
Climate as formal representation of weather averages); it is a
function of the interactions between the weather at successive
times in different places, organizing as a whole at a higher
system level.
Even changing the political weather separately at each place will
not change the political climate as we expect if we do not take
the synergies of the whole into account. This does mean we
shouldn't do good locally. It does mean we shouldn't assume that
even everyone's doing likewise is enough to change things
fundamentally. Take Eugene's recipe for empathetic collaboration,
add my logic that diversity among collaborators tunes the group
better to the larger systems at stake, and prepare for a long,
tough chew. JAY.
Explanatory Note: The making of bagels was traditionally a
collaborative activity; the dough is extremely glutinous, flour
particles being linked inextricably together in very long chains,
resulting in the bagel Ideal: a certain jaw-busting chewishness.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU