Where do our values come from, anyway?
Aug. 18th, 2006 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
morgan_dhuWhan and how did you arrive at your essential political, ethical and religious/spiritual philosophies? Have you always tended in certain directions and simply found the influences that brought you to where you are today, or did someone or something teach you/influence you/make you think about these positions and values?
Last night, I was talking with my partner
glaurung about some of the books and authors from my youth that I've been re-reading of late (details available on my book journal, bibliogramma. I noticed that a lot of them, quite unbeknownst to me at the time, were fairly radical in some ways - Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Suzette Haden Elgin's At The Seventh Level, Samuel Delany's work... in fact, the other night, I was re-reading Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset, published in 1963, and ran across a small passage in which her attempt at a historical King Arthur is looking around at his band of companions, sitting around socializing after a hard day's work of hunting down Saxons, and sees two of his warriors having a cuddle in the corner. His thoughts are basically - lots of warriors form such relationships while on campaign and away from women, but these two really seem to be in love, which is only going to make them better warriors because they won't want to fight poorly in front of their lover.So I was sort of wondering if perhaps, it was all of this stuff I'd read as a child that had started me on the path to becoming a left-wing radical with some very strong feelings about social justice, a pagan animist with some very strong feelings about the unity of all things, and all of those other values that underpin who I am.
But then my partner pointed out that I'd also read everything Heinlein had ever written when I was a child, and a lot of books by other people, some fairly right-wing, militaristic, crypto-fascist, etc., and hadn't been particularly influenced by them, other than to think about what was wrong in their worldviews, from my perspective, anyway.
Having a working mother back in the early 60s when this was not really common for a white middleclass child may have had something to do with my becoming a feminist at a very early age, but my mother was far from being a radical in political terms. I was raised until the age of about 12 or 13 without any continuing religious influences, except for one grandmother who kept trying to put me into Bible classes, but I didn't see her often at all. Then my mother converted to Judaism, but I was old enough that she simply asked my to keep kosher in the house out of respect for her, so while I studied the basic principles with her, I wasn't being pressured to adopt any particular faith, which was a good thing because by then I'd already developed the basic structure of my own beliefs, which were not at all like those of Judaism or Christianity.
So what was it? What made me initially susceptible to a left-wing/socialist and at the same distinctly spiritual and mystical set of perspectives on the world I live in? Sometimes it seems to me as though I have always felt this way, and that I uncovered my core beliefs rather than developed them, as I would read or hear one thing that said to me "yes, of course, that just feels right" and then read or hear something else and feel that there was something basically wrong about it - and that the rest was simply refining my feelings of "rightness" and "wrongness" with evidence and reason.
And how about you?
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-18 07:32 pm (UTC)I stuck with the political values, but not the religious ones. I think the main reason I stuck with the political values was that once I left the shelter of my parents' home, I was poor, and at the time the NDP was the party supporting the poor. [The provincial NDP later turned on poor people and used them as scapegoats to try to win support from the more conservative voters, which makes me reluctant to support the provincial branch of their party. But they're still better than the alternative.] Realizing that my sexuality was not heterosexual led me to explore different religious systems, which eventually led me to the left-leaning church I support today.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-18 10:50 pm (UTC)But I wasn't really conscious of what that meant - difference - until I was closer to adolescence, and I didn't figure out how I wanted to identify until I was in my 20s. But I can't say for sure if I was always accepting of queerness becausee I knew I was queer for an early age, or if being accepting of being queer at a very early age made it easy for me to feel good about realising I wasn't straight for the beginning.
Books and Values
Date: 2006-08-18 08:59 pm (UTC)I was an angry, rebellious kid; one of my strengths, as I now think. At twelve I was arguing with my father over his sexist attitudes, which for him were enjoined by the Bible. Again, I think the deciding factor for me was that male superiority didn't make sense in terms of my own experience. I knew I was cleverer and more capable than most of the males I encountered!
I have no doubt that having a bolshie, critical outlook helped me survive the experience of recognising that I was gay, in what was then a pretty hostile cultural environment. Books helped; oddly enough, the passage from Sword at Sunset you cite was one of the first positive depictions of a gay relationship that I ever met with. This was back when I was about thirteen. I didn't begin to identify as gay until several years later.
On the other hand, coming out as gay reinforced my sense of being an outsider, made me more inclined to identify with outsiders and outsider figures, and more inclined to be critical of conventional social values and sceptical about what I was told by those who claimed to be authorities.
Re: Books and Values
Date: 2006-08-18 11:13 pm (UTC)So I simply didn't accept anything on face value. An authority has to earn my personal respect, they're not going to get it just because they have a degree, a title, a position, experience, whatever.
I'm also pretty sure that reading *a lot* of books had a great deal to do with it - I was certainly exposed to a vast range of human possibilities, and they certainly did not all agree with each other. I just wonder, sometimes, if I'd read different books, would I now be a closeted, xenophobic, fundamentalist Christian with a highly conservative worldview, or would I have come out a radical anyway?
It's interesting that you recall the passage from Sword at Sunset - I didn't, until I read it again. But then it dawned on me that there had probably been a lot of queer or gay-positive material going on, and not always in the background, of a lot of what I was reading at the time (from Mary Renault to Samuel Delany) and I hadn't registered it becasue it simply seemed right for it to be there.
The first depiction of queer sexuality in science fiction/fantasy that really struck me in a memorable fashion was in Diane Duane's Door into Fire, which I read much, much later - and that was because bisexuality was pretty much the norm in her created society, which enabled me to say "aha, that's what I've been saying about myself, this is how it works for me, I'm not crazy or fooling myself or being a political lesbian or exhibiting internalised homophobia, there can be something that works like this for some people."
And considering that both you and
I know, I'm really revisiting the whole nature vs. nurture argument at one level, and it has always seemed to me that it's not just that both influence, but also that they degree of influence each has may be dependent on the individual nature and the individual nurture we're talking about.
Re: Books and Values
Date: 2006-09-05 12:46 am (UTC)I strongly suspect you would have been a radical anyway. What you would not have had was the theory behind it and the support of knowing how many other people felt the same way you did.
I say that in part because you said you were a rebellious child anyway (though I don't quite see how you could have been that and not angry, but anyway) and in part because I think if I had read those different books you mention, however much I might have been influenced by the arguments those theorists used, in practice I would have hated the regimentation and conformity that goes along with the fundamentalist world-view.
Re: Books and Values
Date: 2006-09-07 10:18 pm (UTC)About the "rebellious but not angry" thing - maybe rebellious isn't the right word. I simply never really wanted to do what everyone else was doing, or to do what adults expected me to do. So when I could avoid doing those things, I did.
I had some flat-out confrontations with adults, mostly about things that seemed just plain stupid (why can't I wear pants to school, why can't a girl grow up to be an astronaut, why do I have to take a nap in kindergarten when I never do at home, why do I have to do X, Y, or Z?), but my recollection of myself isn't of being angry, more of being totally bewildered.
That still happens, by the way. The bewilderment at various kinds of human behaviour often comes first, and then I get angry once I figure out the nastiness that's often behind whatever I've been bewildered by.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 04:59 pm (UTC)I'm not sure where the left-wing side of me comes from because while my folks aren't conservative Republicans they really aren't left-wingers either. They're just kinda cynical towards all politicians.
I definitely know where my bitter hatred of corporate America comes from ... when I was in sixth grade, Mobil Oil bought out the Montgomery Ward retail chain and proceeded to close the entire catalog division. My folks owned a MW catalog outlet which they had poured their entire life savings into, not to mention hours and hours of work every day, so much so that Mom actually wound up in the hospital. So with one swoosh of a pen or whatever, years of my parents' hard work went down the drain and we were basically destitute for the next four years. Not fun.
Spirituality, I have no idea. My views are so totally different from anyone in my family or even from R's. I'm really just kinda doing the whole freaky lone gunman thing with all that. My family were never church people. Dad grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist family, the kind that went to church four days a week, and Mom grew up strictly Catholic, and I think they just kinda burned out on church. I remember going to church when I was really little but stopping at around age four. I always liked the Bible as a story and read it a lot on my own, but not so much for spiritual purposes. Around age nine I started going to a Free Methodist church up the street from my house, but not because I felt any kind of devotion - I was just really bored and lonely and wanted some people to hang out with. So I got into the whole Youth for Christ thing with walkathons and rollerskating parties and all that, until about age 13. Not sure exactly why I stopped going, just got tired of it, I guess.
I think the thing that sets me apart from everyone else in terms of spirituality is that I really, truly, genuinely do not believe in a Higher Power or Creator. I wholeheartedly believe that the Earth did not come to be through any divine action but wholly from the beauty of scientific accident and the chaos of nature.
However, I do not see myself as an atheist either. I do believe there is another dimension, call it heaven if you want (I don't), a spiritual dimension where we all go when we die. I believe that spirits are all around us at all times, watching over us. Not angels with wings and harps and all that, just spirits. Maybe family, maybe friends, maybe strangers who are just attracted to our energy.
I believe that every spirit has the freedom to choice whether to remain on the spirit realm or to come back and try again. I believe that all of us have lived before, numerous times, and that the "unknown" part of our brains is past life memories that only a few of us have figured out how to access but all of us can get to if we really try. The goal of coming back for another existence is to try to resolve stuff that ended badly before, to apply lessons we didn't know before. (Of course, not being able to access specific past memories makes this more of a challenge). I read in a book by Linda Goodman that there is a hierarchy to the zodiac wherein people born under Aries are the youngest souls and so on up the signs to Pisces, which are the oldest souls. I don't know if that's true or not but it's an interesting theory.
I believe that we can communicate with the spirit world and that they can communicate with us because I've seen it happen with other people, although I've never been able to do it myself.
Finally, getting back to my original point, what turns me off about pretty much every organized spirituality, including R's, is that there is a Higher Power, a Creator, a God, a Goddess, someone or something that oversees it all, made it all happen, and is basically running the show. I believe that in the spirit realm, we are all one, we are all equal, nobody is better than anyone else, and there is no need for any power of any kind. There is no need for a hierarchy because there is no personal conflict. It is serenity. It is Being.
Like I said, I'm a freak.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 06:56 pm (UTC)Oddly enough, this is something I could have said about my own spiritual belief. so, I guess we're both freaks. No gods or goddesses, just spirit everywhere, in everything, sharing a mutual ongoing act of Being. No One makes it happen, it simply Is.
I call myself an animist rather than a theist or an atheist. For me, the spirit/life energy/whatever is everything - what we see, touch, sense is the manifestation of spirit in this way of being in time and space.
I know that some of my beliefs come from reading - everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Seth book by Jane Roberts - but I did a lot of that reading because I was looking for ways to understand a host of involuntary and spontaneous experiences with altered states and perceptions that I had as a child - everything from seeing auras to having precognitive dreams and moments of apparent egolessness and unity with everything. Strange stuff for a kid to deal with when there are no shamans hanging out in the neighbourhood to explain what's happening.
Of course, years of meditation have made these states more-or-less controllable, to be entered into at will rather than involuntarily, but it was the need to find out what was happening to me and build a spiritual framework for myself that would allow me to integrate these experiences that led to both the reading, and to the beliefs.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 03:33 am (UTC)For me, the question of values is like an archaeological dig, in which one goes down through the layers.
My parents are a little more left wing than myself and we don't always agree about current events, particularly overseas. Usually, we do though. Both are Labor voters. Their values (as opposed to their circumstances) tend to be staunchly working class. For example, shoes are functional and to be worn not until they are shabby but until totally worn out and non-functional. Their generation of the family was skeptical of the worth of education but have had a change of heart since mine demonstrated it - a change of belief without change of values.
The headmaster of my school used to day that a function of a school was to remove children from the influence of their parents. (He said a lot that we didn't take seriously enough at the time.) School attempted to put a middle class gloss on us and succeeded to some extent. In dealing with my nieces and their choices in life, I keep harking back to one of his favourite passages, the Parable of the Talents (Mt xxv:14-30).
Later the Army built on this. It is your privilege to lead because you have special knowledge. I retain an abiding belief in the value of discipline (particularly self-discipline) and compulsion.
I didn't read a lot of books as a child. I taught myself to read so I could read comic books. I loved the marvel superheroes of the late 1960s. The dedicated Mr Fantastic, the noble Thor, the angsty Spider-Man.
At high school I read a sci-fi by the authors of the day, like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert and Usula LeGuin. (These are not the main ones read, just the main ones remembered.) For some reason, over time I tended to favour books by female authors. I read a lot more history books, mostly on military topics. In those days there were few Australian publications, so most were British. As opposed to the comic books, I doubt that these had much impact.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 08:06 pm (UTC)I remember reading comics that were mostly in the DC universe- Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman (this was back when she was the original Wonder Woman, not the martial-arts UN interpreter or whatever came after that), my all-time favourite Black Canary, and many of the other Justice League of America heroes. But I also read Marvel comics - including the Fantastic Four, Spidey, Thor, X-Men and Daredevil - but not quite as many of them.
I think that, at the time I was reading Marvel comics, their stock of female heroes was pretty lean - Sue Storm Richards really wasn't as powerful or as prominent as the boys were in F4, at least not in my comic-reading days. I gather that at some point after I stopped reading comics, Marvel got a lot better in this regard - certainly the modern X-Men seem to be crawling with strong female heroes, when in my day all they have was Marvel Girl, who, like Invisible Girl, didn't get as much face time as the boys.
But I'm pretty sure that the comics were one powerful source of my conviction that it is imperative that one stand up for what one believes is right - especially when it involves harm or injustice to others - even if no one else will stand up with you. It's possibly also a part of the beginnings of my very ambiguous feelings about vigilantism and sabotage. There's a part of me that sees these as neutral means, rather than intrinsically "evil," and I'm pretty sure that some of that has to do with very early images of all of these heroes working outside of the law to achieve good ends. And while my higher moral sense tells me that the ends do not justify the means, something inside me can accept these means if there are no others, and the ends are good enough.
For instance - I've never supported the invasion of Afghanistan, because it meant the death of too many civilians, who were in no way implicated in terrorism and were mostly just trying to survive under the Taliban, and because it was a declaration of war against a third party - Afghanistan did not attack the US, some people living in Afghanistan did. A big difference in law, in my eyes. But I could have accepted a covert mission directed against Bin Laden, assuming that all other diplomatic means had been tried and failed (which they were not, as far as we can tell based on information that was public) - if the mission was to capture for trial rather than to kill.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 10:42 pm (UTC)Things changed in the 1970s. New characters were ceated and older ones were revamped in response to the Women's Liberation movement. I should add that most of my reading and buying was in the 1970s. But the 1960s stories were earlier and more powerful and made a greater impression.
Without doubt, comics were also source of my conviction that it is imperative that one stand up for what one believes is right - especially when it involves harm or injustice to others - even if no one else will stand up with you. Which remains one of my core beliefs.
However, there is a couple of overlays here. There was the Gen-X view of the world that tends to be darker and less optimistic than that of the older boomer generation. Also, in the 1980s, Army training was firmly grounded in the experience of Vietnam, which was refought in training exercises. So we were drilled to expect suicide bombers; told that children were often booby trapped; that wimmin were usually combatants.
So I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and strongly disagreed with the Women's Electoral Lobby who held that life for wimmin was better under the Taliban. And the consequences for civilians moved me but troubled me much less because in my mind, when you reach an accomodation with evil, when you decline to stand up for what you know is right, then you are accepting all the bad consequences as well.
The Australian Army will court martial you for obeying an order as easily as disobeying one. You always have to do what is right.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 12:29 am (UTC)And there, of course, is the rub. In the final analysis, you have to balance all the facts you have, the frameworks for making decisions you have, and then decide, hopefully with your gut and you mind in some form of agreement, based on your values, and knwoign that there will be consequences, whether you're right or wrong.
And people of good conscience and conviction often differ, even after they're thought it all out carefully, because their values differ. Witness our disagreement concerning Afghanistan. I believe that you are an honourable person who evaluated the situation based on your knowledge and values and formed your opinion accordingly in the belief that it was the best possible thing to do in the face of harm or injustice, and I'd hope you would grant me the same courtesy - a courtesy which I don't, unfortunately, grant to many of the people who actually made the decision.
(As an aside, I'd never argue that life was better for women under the Taliban - but I'm more likely to argue that political and economic pressure, and direct support to women's organisations on the ground, such as RAWA, might have done more good in the long run, since women's lives so far have not improved all that much in a great many parts of Afghanistan, and aren't likely to, IMO, since the mission was never actually about helping women, that was just the cover story used to sell it to liberals. I suspect that if a strong governemnt could pull itself together and take control of the country, and take on the job of hunting out what remains of the Taliban and any of Bin Laden's associates still in the area, The Powers That Be wouldn't give a rat's ass if that government continued to vicimise women and allow women to be victimised - as Karzai's goverment does, because he hasn't the power to make changes that no one there who has power wants.)
It's actually comthing I think about a lot - I *feel* that my decisions and opinions are as right as an imperfect person who is really trying in the face of imperfect information can manage, but I know that I can't really know that I'm right. But to do nothing is almost always wrong, at least in the kinds of situations I'm thinking about.
I sometimes envy the people who, at least so it seems, have the kinds of values and worldviews that can allow them to be certain of the rightness of their decisions and actions.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 09:34 am (UTC)People like John Howard and Mel Gibson, who "know in their hearts" that they are not bad whereas I am never sure...
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 06:38 pm (UTC)But it's a very seductive thing, to be able to know that you're right, saved, going to heaven, whatever - which is probably why it is inviting to so many people to suspend their own agency in terms of making the big values- and ethics-based decisions.
If one has a book or a nice, neat philosophy with no room for doubt, and a professional class of decision-makers (priests, party policy wonks, think-tankers, whatever) to apply the rules to new situations so that it's not necessary to actually think about the implications one's self, it can save a lot of wear and tear on the conscience.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 12:57 am (UTC)*Ever since the Geneva Convention, I would presume. Note that I never have been in the military, so all my information, such as it is, is second-hand.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 09:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 01:12 am (UTC)I agree with Morgan that there's a big, big difference between a terrorist attack done by some people living in a country and a terrorist attack done by that country itself. In fact, the 9/11 attacks were primarily done by people who came from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan. It would have made at least as much ethical sense to invade Saudi Arabia as it made to invade Afghanistan. But on the whole, I wouldn't support invading either one, because it's not the ordinary people living there who did the 9/11 attacks, or planned them, or approved of them, or knew anything whatsoever about them.
Now, to a significant extent people do get the governments they deserve, in that when pushed to the maximum they can and have successfully overthrown tyrannical governments. But the cost of doing that is high, high, high, which is why it's not often done. And in the case of Afghanistan, the women were not only largely unarmed but probably separated from one another (though I don't really know that).
Assuming it was known who planned 9/11 (does anyone *really* know it was bin Laden, or could he have just decided to take credit for it?) I would probably support a covert operation to take him out -- preferably for trial, but even an assassination would not be out of bounds in my view. Invasion of Afghanistan didn't even succeed in that objective, did it?
As for the Taliban and its oppression of women, I think that was a terrible thing. Insofar as the invasion resulted in the end of the Taliban, it did have good effects. Note that I say "insofar"; it's not clear that the Taliban, or for that matter the attitudes it cultivated, is really gone, except perhaps in Kabul. OTOH, there's something to be said from getting that particular lot of tyrants out even from one city. But no, that wasn't the reason for the invasion of that country, anymore than establishing democracy was the reason for the invasion of Iraq.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 10:43 pm (UTC)Make no mistake, you simply cannot run organisations like bin Laden's in isolation. You cannot live in the mountains without supplies much less keep it in tank and artillery ammunition. Such a force requires the direct support of thousands of ordinary people. It receives support in the form of money and aid from hundreds of thousands. (Australians are know this well from Vietnam, which is studied in schools these days.) Legally, every one of them is a legitimate miltary target under the Geneva Convention. Moreover, in my country, if you assist a crime in any way, you are considered legally as well as guilty of the crime. So the people in the bar in The Accused (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094608/) would be charged with rape and recive the same sentences as the rapists.
I understand that it must be horrible to have terrorists park a rocket launcher on your front lawn. I understand that it would dangerous to fight against them. But if they fire, you have 75 seconds before the counter battery fire destroys your house.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-07 11:08 pm (UTC)As a philosophical choice, that runs all the way up - I'll support a small scale intervention (like that attempt to capture bin Laden I discussed above) if it's demonstrably the only way to deal with the situation.
I need to have a hell of a lot of evidence that everything else has been tried and nothing else can possibly work before I can feel that a large scale military intervention is justified.
Such a force requires the direct support of thousands of ordinary people. It receives support in the form of money and aid from hundreds of thousands. (Australians are know this well from Vietnam, which is studied in schools these days.) Legally, every one of them is a legitimate miltary target under the Geneva Convention.
I try to balance two points of view at once. I agree that people must be held accountable for their actions.
I also feel that people who have been victimised and forced or deceived into supporting a criminal action, committed either by a state or by an organisation located within a state and receiving support from that state, should not be victimised a second time.
It's far too clear to me that large scale engagements end up hurting not just the people who wanted to commit some form of aggression, and the people who were willing to provide support, but also the people who had no idea what was going on, the people who were terrorised into standing by, if not actively supporting, the wives and children and employees of supporters, who in many countries may have no way at all to choose other than their husband/father/employer has chosen, and so on.
I think we are seeing that bombing a country and killing large numbers of civilians - complicit or not - is not an effective way of saving the people of that country from oppressive and/or criminal leaderships.
I freely admit that I have no idea what might be an effective way, and I sometimes suspect that there is no way to do it - one has to wait until the people themselves are ready, and then, if you want to support them, fine, but leave them to lead the regime change in their own country. I am becoming more and more sure that military occupation or imposing "peace" or "democracy" isn't the answer.
Afterall, it was a totalitarian and military rule that kept warring factions in both the former Yugoslavia and in Hussein's Irag working relatively well together for decades in both countries - remove the force imposing peace from above, and chaos ensues.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-08 09:01 am (UTC)Yes, I know, it failed dismally. Then the Americans tried aerial bombing without success. Finally, they provided direct support to the rebels, which worked. But this is hindsight... and Afghanistan.
It's far too clear to me that large scale engagements end up hurting not just the people who wanted to commit some form of aggression, and the people who were willing to provide support, but also the people ...
I was at a military conference discussing East Timor and a colonel put up a slide showing a sattelite photo of a scattered mass of people with arrows pointing to it saying "terrorists", "militias", "Indonesian Army", "bystanders", etc. Illustrating the intelligence problem involved.
Yet the ethical problem is not neccessarily to spare the innocent, because ethically we have to trade off these people against office workers, firemen and airline passengers. Failure to invade Afghanistan in 1998 was highly unethical because it led to the loss of thousands more lives than invasion utimately cost. (Which, as you may recall, was what I was saying back then -- not just hindsight.)
But that doesn't mean that I disagree with you. Far from it. We can impose peace. We can even impose democracy. But we just can't breathe life into the governments of these places. We have already tried and failed dismally in Vietnam, in New Guinea, in Vanuatu, in the Solomon Islands and in East Timor. I just cannot see how one can ever expect anything better in countries where people would rather fight than engage in any meaningful discourse with each other.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-08 09:49 pm (UTC)This is the core of the problem. And so far, I can only think of two general lines of response:
1. Intervene diectly in these kinds of states over and over again and hope that eventually something shifts
2. Stand back, using only minimal direct intervention to limit the risks these states pose to the rest of the world, and see what develops - while trying, where appropriate, to support progressive factions within the country and using diplomatic/economic measures to encourage change (as with South Africa).
The problem, as I see it, with the first tack, and at times to a lesser extent with the second tack as well, is that you risk alienating the populace, to the point that whatever develops, develops in directions that you don't want - for instance, ending up with most of the citizens of Lebanon supporting Hezbollah.
I think there are some places where the accumulated weight of everyone's actions, on all sides, over decades or even centuries (in those places where the consequnces of colonialism and imperialism are underlying everything else), is such that there are no ways to act at the present moment that will end in solutions everyone would accept. In those places, my inclination is to try to figure out what action would cause the least blow-back, if you will.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-08 11:41 pm (UTC)(2) was the general strategy that had been used, and it seemed pretty good as it had worked in most parts of the world and was seen as a low-cost minimum effort strategy which worked well in South Africa and the Cold War. However, it was failing spectacularly in the Middle East. In Iraq, the sanctions and thrice-weekly bombings seemed to be becoming cruel and making no little or impact (although we now know that the 1993-2003 bombing campaign was more effective than first assumed). [Also, the death rate attributed to war and sectarian violence still, inexplicably, remains below that attribted to sanctions.] But, as the Ethics profs drummed into us, inaction also has its cost and consequences. And in the wake of 9/11 and Bali, that was seen as too high. Now it turns out that the reaction of people in the Middle East when their government is corrupt or oppressive is to turn to Islam - and it will be because Islam is the root of their problems in the first place. So it turns out that (2) is actually as agressive as response a (1), because the West remains on the offensive economically, scientifically and culturally. So all we can expect from this approach is escalating violence and conflict, as the Middle East sinks into economic depression and in response into religious fundamentalism.
New strategy urgently required.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-08 11:59 pm (UTC)Agreed. Both existing appraoches have had some modest sucesses in some places, and spectacular failures in others. I suspect that where either has had any success, it's been because the people planning the strategy thought very carefully about what was the "best" approach in those precise circumstances, and how "best" to implement it (bearing in mind that "best" may not be very good), and got lots of good information both on the situation and on what was possible in terms of their own resources. Either that or sheer luck.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 07:20 pm (UTC)That's what consciousness-raising is, isn't it? The synthesis of theory and experience.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 09:38 pm (UTC)What I'm talking about here wasn't so much that, as reading something and feeling that I was being told something I alredy knew - no "click," no "a-ha," more of a "well, duh, of course," to be highly colloquial about it.
Or perhaps they're simply two aspects of the same phenomenon.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-05 01:18 am (UTC)My friend P. was asking me the other day where I got my intense drive for justice. I told her about being raised in a radical lefty household. But she said, and I think she's probably right, that that didn't seem enough to account for it. I suspect I went through the same process of refinement of my feelings of rightness and wrongness that you did.
I also suspect that reading comic books in the late sixties had something to do with it too. There was a strong theme of one powerful hero fighting for justice against seemingly overwhelming odds, and winning. I always wanted to be that hero. The point here, though, is that the comic books not only showed him (or sometimes her) fighting for justice, but they showed him winning. It's never as easy as the comic books showed, but I had it deep within me that it is at least possible.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-07 11:11 pm (UTC)It's not just the desire to fight for justice, it's the definition of what justice is - the values you hold.
Which brings us back to square one. ;-)
radicalization
Date: 2006-12-10 09:09 pm (UTC)for me, i was raised by a fairly conservative southern family, with a strong dose of fundamentalism in my teen years on my father's side.
and yet from an early age i had certain values that were not in line with my family's -- i was opposed to the death penalty from the moment i understood it existed; opposed foreign anti-communist intervention without understanding anything about communism (if it's bad, people will figure it out; if it's good, then they have a right to do it); supportive of queer rights while dealing with my own internalized homophobia ("i'm glad *i'm* not a lesbian but people should be able to do what they want").
i didn't get any of those views from my family ... reading is the only source i can come up with.
laura
Re: radicalization
Date: 2006-12-10 10:37 pm (UTC)It is indeed a fascinating topic, the processes that lead us to who we are, and the question of what triggers radicalisation in some people, while others exposed to similar circumstances remain content with the status quo.
I have no doubt that reading is a part of it, at least for some of us - I guess what bemuses me about my own early radicalisation is why the radical books had so much more of an effect on me than the books that supported a mainstream, or even a strong conservative or fascist perspective - because they were part of what I read, too. Reading exposes us to ideas outside of the ones current in our immediate environment - but then, there's the question of what causes us to accept or reject them, and that's the crux of the matter.
I'm would be interested in hearing more about the oral history of radicalisation you mentioned - have you collected any accounts at this point?
By the way, please forgive me if this question seems inappropriate, but I'm curious as to what brought you to read my journal, and comment on this entry, at this time.
Re: radicalization
Date: 2006-12-10 10:46 pm (UTC)(a) i have collected some, but not officially; in other words, i didn't do release forms, i didn't organize & prepare, my recordings are a mess. so, in interviews, really i need to re-do what i've done. however, it's one of my official Goals for 2007 to get my ass in gear on this project, and get it officially Under Way.
(b) i've seen your journal before, no doubt via various feminist sf meanderings. today i came to it via a comment on ide cyan's LJ (since erased), and was just ... well ... procrastinating a more pressing task by puttering about on the internet and looking through interesting journals. this one caught my eye and i figured it wasn't *too* old (only two months) to respond.
best,
laura
Re: radicalization
Date: 2006-12-11 12:11 am (UTC)Re (b) - I'd wondered about the timing. I'm glad you chose to comment - I'm pleased to "meet" you.