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Seth:
By the way, there are no repugnant questions – just questions. The repugnant aspect is a value that we choose to associate with the question in our mindsets, and the choice is often out of consciousness in a manner that leads us to forget that it is a choice. We lose ground in ourselves by allowing the assumption that repugnance is an externally existing quality rather than one we are choosing to project.
The respect I have for you prevents me from using a phrase involving the word “hippy” and some swearwords. But to a certain extent you’ve lost me by veering into a kind of apolitical speech that is either therapeutic, spiritual or both… Surely you’re not going to tell me that you support the abandonment of all moral absolutes? The idea that there are no repugnant questions, only questions, relies at the very least on a disbelief in the existence of rhetoric, or at least in the existence of rhetoric which can be both powerfully effective and not immediately apparent. I say “at least” because I’m unclear as to whether you’re saying that the hypothetical “repugnant aspect” is not “an externally existing quality” at all, or merely that it does not always exist directly and inarguably within the question being asked. If you mean the latter, then I would say there is a case to be made that “not every question that appears to be repugnant is in fact a repugnant question”, but I would not go further and entirely deny the existence of repugnant questions, because they clearly do exist.
I mean yes, I could choose not to react negatively to racism or homophobia or sexism, I could choose not to react negatively to the mistreatment of large numbers of the world’s population by smaller numbers… In fact, those are choices I make all the time, when I choose to participate in capitalism, say, by doing my weekly shopping, or when I choose to enjoy various forms of art that contain reactionary content, because they have other content which I appreciate (aesthetically or otherwise). Some of those choices are made more consciously than others, some I feel better about than others. The point is, I and many other people have made the choice to draw a line when it comes to Barbelith and say “in this field, I will not concede ground to the forces of reaction any more than is necessary”. A solemn oath. One worth keeping.
I suppose I essentially agree with you that it ought to be possible to provide, each time, a refutation of the assumptions that lie behind a question and the rhetoric that is being employed and the political implications that are being subtly conveyed, and that this can be done without actively flaming the person asking the question – in fact, flaming as I understand it is not conducive to effective refutations of this sort, and so in terms of strategy is a deeply unworkable and undesirable tactic.
However, what I call flaming and what other people consider to be an overly hostile response are not necessarily the same thing. On a related note:
While we’re at it, consider the word “offensive.” It’s an aggressive word, and again the quote above seems relevant: feeling offended is a protection response. That’s a response we choose to have (again, a lot of the time that choice happens out of consciousness). We can choose other responses, which sometimes takes a lot of personal work. There have been times when I’ve had to examine myself very harshly for being offended, because I know that it’s not necessarily a response that is in keeping with the person I’d like to be. That’s my choice to not accept my own sense of offence. The other choices would be to leave myself unchallenged and divorce myself from the source of the offence (in this context, leave the board), or to leave myself unchallenged and offend right back… I realised very early on that acting offended just wasn’t useful to them or me.
Myself, I try to avoid the term “offensive” (not always successfully, because it’s a common shorthand, but I try), precisely because it suggests that what has been said should not have been said because of the emotional response it produces in another person. This is clearly no way to approach discussion: firstly because people may indeed be offended very deeply and in a way that feels real to them, but only because they hold dear to mistruths or deeply harmful and wrongheaded perspectives; secondly because it can lead to a situation in which the rightness of someone’s argument is judged by the extremity of their emotional response rather than the content of their argument (eg, while I do not necessarily disagree that it would be wrong to treat Holocaust denials with more severity then certain other repugnant views, I think it would be a mistake to do so because the emotional response was more severe than the response to those other repugnant views); thirdly and finally because it suggests an aversion to objective truth. Witness the famous crocodile tears of the American ambassador on Question Time, weeping because someone dared talk about the real, human victims of US foreign policy so soon after 11 September (because those victims don’t count). Sadly, there are times when this same behaviour has been seen on Barbelith: “do not draw attention to the very real crimes of the military and government of a nation state to which I rather arbitrarily pledge allegiance, or I shall treat it as a personal insult”.
But I strongly resist the idea that a negative response is always a result of too much personal investment, or of a choice – consciously or otherwise – to “find” offense where none is “meant”. When I object to racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise reactionary statements/questions, I do not do so because I have been “offended”. I object because I perceive the statements/questions to be wrong/harmful. This is a common misconception in all the discussion about “PC”, and those on the same side of the argument as myself often do themselves no favours by ever conceding that the aim is to avoid people being “offended”. If everyone went around worrying about causing offence, how would truth ever be spoken? If I verbally assaulted someone for saying all women were hysterical, or that all Muslims were violent extremists, I would want them to know that I was not doing so because I had been offended or because I was worried that a woman or a Muslim might be offended, but rather because what they were saying. Was. Just. WRONG.
I always resist calling people “bigots” or “stupid.” Because I like to believe that the way people act is not equivalent to their identity, and labelling them as such is making a statement about them rather than their behaviour.
You’re completely correct that we ideally we should avoid labeling people as things themselves rather than talking about the content of what they’re actually saying, but I find that in practice people tend to treat the latter as if it were the former: say “well I think it’s a bit of an ill-founded generalization to say that you can’t get a bus in Hackney without being threatened by a ‘gang’ of black kids”, and the response “how dare you call me a racist!” will surely follow. Moreover, while people’s identity is not necessarily limited to their actions or words, surely nor are the two entirely separate. By their fruit you shall know them, right? |
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