On misogyny and child marriage

I’m not sure it’s enough to label child marriage as misogyny. The cause of child marriage isn’t just that men don’t like women or are bad to women (even if that’s true and this is an example). It’s not a sufficient label of the cause. There’s a lot more to the story and the problem. And it doesn’t get solved by defining and addressing it at that level. It’s not just misogyny, maybe not even primarily misogyny at heart. And it’s not just being done by men but by misguided and callous men, who are lodged inside of a misguided and callous social value structure and understand and justify their own actions within that context. But people are much more reluctant these days to call a whole culture and the values that its members nestle inside to task. It’s much easier to single out the main perpetrators and their identity and focus on that.

But the problem isn’t that small, and can’t be solved at that small a level. The problem isn’t just men, or even bad men. It’s human dysfunction itself: ignorance, bad social traditions, outdated medical responses, callous social values (many of which had some history and perceived social value behind them, which we don’t like criticizing, it’s scary to make the claim that an established traditional social structure is on some higher level of criticism actually worse or incorrect). The problem is something that’s lodged in all individuals and transcends all particular individuals (and even classes of them). It’s a kind of sickness and deformity within humanity, in this case endemic to a particular community and culture and history. And it needs solving on a systemic level, at the level where it filters down to inform and define and justify the decisions and responses of everyone involved.

None of that changes the fact that men are the most obvious perpetrators and girls are the most obvious victims. But it’s insufficient as a diagnosis and approach to treatment to reduce it to misogyny. And it may, possibly, shift the focus in diagnosis and treatment in ways that actually make the problem harder to solve. The problem isn’t just men, or even bad men, it’s social relationships, marriage, men, and in many ways whole sections of social value and approach and education and response, and also medical beliefs and responses, all gone wrong.

We might characterize the primary way that that sickness and evil is expressing itself as an example of misogyny. It feels simpler and easier to attack it that way. It’s a form of condemnation we’re comfortable with, and is easy to justify, and it makes us feel good to have a label to stick our understanding of injustice firmly to. Whether it’s a medical sickness or a social sickness, humans take a lot of satisfaction from diagnosis and being able to put a name to something. It affirms our solidarity in our recognition of the problem and provides an effective shorthand for treatment, where the problem needs to be attacked to be solved.

In this particular case, although it might be a good way to characterize the main expression of the problem, it’s not entirely clear that such shorthand for diagnosis or treatment is sufficient, though. The problem, especially as it’s understood and experienced and communicated in the culture, is bigger and more complicated and systemic. And so the solution needs to be too. It needs to address the history and traditions, the social conventions and structures, and the medical beliefs and responses (incontinence shunning is an old fashioned kind of medical response, from the days before there were other options).

The solution needs to shift everyone from a bad, dysfunctional way of doing things that is causing harm, not producing the value they think it’s producing, not protecting what it should be protecting, to a better way, and get them convinced and invested in it.

Long afterword on the philosophy of different theories of where moral value is defined and expressed.

That’s one reason there’s been such utility in the concepts of sin and virtue as negative and positive categories of human behavior. They’re useful because they’re both personal and universal. They’re something that everyone can share in and everyone can work on. They transcend identity and simplification. You don’t get to be good or bad merely by birth or alliegance or category, an outlook that tends to reduce human conflict and interaction and morality to a power struggle.

Because value is defined transcendently, everyone can participate in them, for good or for ill. No one is above going wrong, no one is without recourse for getting better. There’s room for all groups and categories to go either good or bad, to get worse or better. It makes life and history and morality more than just a power struggle. It allows problems to be recognized at the highest level (general human function or dysfunction, health or sickness) and addressed at that level so it applies and gets passed down to everyone who needs the treatment. And you don’t accidentally let the problem persist in one group when you thought you had defeated it by defeating it in another group, because you’re efforts and focus weren’t on the group but on the sin or virtue they were expressing. (A persistent problem in revolutions that address only the dark flower of power and expression and lose focus on the transcendent root of the problem. You tend to destroy one group of oppressors only to replace them with a new class.)

It’s also an approach that’s fundamentally personal and individual. You personally can be participating in sickness and need treatment, and you personally can work toward health and value, no matter who you are. You don’t get to define sickness and health, but you personally are the place where it’s expressed and lived out and creates tangible consequences. So you have immense power and responsibility and privileges, but you aren’t god, you aren’t above criticism and failure and dysfunction. By locating expression at the individual level, but the definition of transgression and virtue at a transcendent, universal level, you cover all possible cases for harm and beautification, and you open up all possible responses. Your values apply everywhere and are accessible positively and negatively to everyone. So you can criticize and praise no matter how big or small the expression, a single person or a whole society. And you can go dangerously wrong or wonderfully right at any level, from a single person up to a whole culture. Anyone and anything could be part of the problem. Your cultural traditions, your specific knowledge, your personal attitudes, your practical practices, your social institutions. And anyone and anything could be part of the solution. Anyone and anything can be corrupted and anyone and anything can be perfected. Our battle, in a sense, isn’t against one another, but against ourselves. So we can find the enemies within ourselves as well as in others, and we can make a friend and helper of others as well as ourselves. No one is completely safe, and no one is hopeless.

This might seem like splitting hairs when it’s all the same moral instincts (this thing bad). But part of the problem is with people not being on the same page about their moral instincts. And the truth is, the context and approach you take, the structure in which your moral instincts are nested makes an enormous difference in your approach to and interpretation of and response to the problem. When you try to address a problem, you’re not just addressing the outcomes, you’re addressing the whole system those people’s moral instincts are nested in. The whole system that produced those outcomes. And there really is a substantial amount of disagreement, even legitimate disagreement, and as long as there are just different sorts of people with different histories and beliefs and personalities and concerns and strategies and goals and weaknesses and problems, that disagreement will persist. That conflict will persist. And we’ll need a way to arbitrate and settle those conflicts (apart from what you might call direct selection: I determine whose system will determine the outcomes by destroying your expressions and protecting my own, by destroying you directly or by out-surviving you in some other way, increasing our group by our success and letting your group suffer and die out because of your mistakes. An effective but costly strategy. It’s always better to let our ideas die rather than ourselves, if possible. That’s the advantage of being thinking creatures.).

If you bring in a conclusion from your system, a criticism maybe, and try to force it into theirs and expect it to have the same effect, it might not function as you expected. It might even create resistance and conflict, because it’s not just the instinct that’s being challenged (the outcome), it’s its validity of the context of the whole system. So really you’re really challenging the whole system without realizing it. And the system is huge, way bigger than any one person or group or even time. It’s a complex of beliefs and traditions and values and history and knowledge that is the basis for that group’s survival and is broadly distributed in every corner of their culture. If someone sees you as attacking and threatening that system, that’s threatening their very lives and understanding of how to see and live in the world. So you need a means to address and criticize the whole system and make it work for you instead of against you. You want to find the higher level mistakes happening in the system and address them at a universal level so that when they run the mental calculus of their nested moral system they reach the same conclusions, and you find yourselves working toward the same ends. The good news is, even though the system is extensive, and its affects and value transcend mere groups and categories, it lives at the level of the individual.

In Western society, we highly value the individual. We grant the individual special freedoms because we believe the individual has special responsibilities. We believe that the individual is the fundamental unit upon which all social and moral structures are built. That’s there’s a special power and responsibility in each of us. That each of us can individually decide to embrace sin or virtue and promote either life and order or death and chaos. That’s a lot of weight to carry, a lot of responsibility. So we balance it with a deep respect for the value of the individual. It’s a respect for that power, for being the thing where being and moral expression value find their fundamental expression.

Where things tend to go wrong, philosophically, is the failure to maintain the tension between individual responsibility and transcendent definition. What I mean is, if you try to collapse everything into one side or the other, you get into trouble. If you think good and evil are being defined and expressed at the same level, you’re treading in dangerous ground, and it’s a problem. Being defined transcendently but expressed (and being responsible) individually is the fundamental working tension of the Judeo-Greek moral outlook. It’s what makes the concepts of sin and virtue coherent. Everyone has a connection to and potential for good and evil, everyone has a potential for them and responsibility for how they participate in them, but they don’t own or define them, they don’t belong exclusively to any particular group. It democratize moral value by making it possible for any person to either better or worsen themselves (and the whole world). Nothing and no one gets excluded. And everyone has to shoulder that burden of responsibility and possibility. But it doesn’t become a tyranny of the people, with value being defined merely by majority opinion. A single individual has the power to legitimately criticize the group, or one group has the power to challenge and be challenged by another group, because the grounds for definition belong to none of them but are common to and transcendent above all. One group or person might be better able to grasp and practice a particular aspect of that transcendent ethic, but it doesn’t belong to them. It could be universally communicated and given to and recognized by others who are quite different. We’re not appealing to something particular to us, even if who we particularly are affects what we’re likely to notice and think. And so we can all come together and discuss and refine and add perspectives to the system. Not because perspectives define being (it would be pointless if that were the case), but because all perspectives address transcendent being.

If perspectives define being, if the individual both expresses and defines moral value, then all discussion is really just a cover for negotiation between power conflicts (and that’s largely the post-modern outlook). There is no higher reality to appeal to or share in or arbitrate on the grounds of. The individual is god, and therefore has all the rights and no responsibilities, because there are no claims above their own definitions that can legitimately be laid upon them. At the other end of the spectrum, you could go all in on transcendent definition and expression. That moral value and action only lives at some higher level and the individual is nothing, just a mote in the movement of larger forces.

Historically, assigning group blame tends to provoke group conflict, rather than producing individual or group change. Not that there isn’t some use in it, particularly when you’re doing it yourself, so what it really is is a collection of individuals admitting individual blame and seeking transcendent correction in individual expression. If you don’t bring the transcendent correction to the whole system into it, you’re not likely to get a lot of results (especially if the person doesn’t share your moral instincts and calculus, especially if they see that your instinct doesn’t follow from their system, meaning it’s really a challenge to their system, not an argument from within it). And if you don’t bring individual responsibility and expression into it and respect that, you won’t see many results either. Action lives at the individual level. If individuals don’t recognize their role and their power and their resultant responsibility, nothing will really get done.

It’s a small difference. It’s the difference between saying “Badness is because of you” vs “Badness is because of universal X and is expressed by you.” Often people can tell the difference between these two statements or the potential problems and advantages between these two statements. There’s actually a world of difference, it’s just harder to see it in the near cases, cases where everyone shares similar ideas, instincts, structures, history, etc. Where problems start to arise is at the outliers, at the far cases, where history and instincts and temperament and approach and values and beliefs don’t align and there are real conflicts and real problems and consequences. And unfortunately those are actually the cases where it really matters.

It’s not easy to briefly explain why all these things are the case without delving into some serious work on ethics, comparing different systems and how they work, testing theories with a selection of difficult cases and historical examples, and so on. Most people only think in terms of basic moral conclusions and intuitions that work from within their system. They aren’t designed work across different systems or withstand challenges from a competing system (except as direct emotional or intuitional appeals or assertions). They take it for granted that you share the mechanisms that led to your result, and assume that you’re just a very unpleasant person who chooses to be a jerk and act contrarily.

I’ve watched a number of ethical debates that came down to little more than name calling, emotional appeals, and character judgments in the end. The people didn’t agree on fundamental assumptions. Their meta-narratives, their whole systems, were in conflict, so they couldn’t even really have a debate about whether this conclusion or that was right. Their entire processes for reaching their conclusions were in conflict. We tend to assume that everyone see the world as we do, and that if they acted differently from how we would have, it’s because they’re just jerks who were deliberately being jerks. And sometimes that is the case. We often don’t do what we know we should. And people have been puzzling over that curious fact for centuries. There’s a whole Platonic debate about why knowledge of good doesn’t translate to good actions, and whether the answer is that they don’t really believe the good is good and maybe there are other better competing goods. And maybe humans are just complex and contradictory and stubborn, contrary sort of creatures. But whatever your opinion on those questions is (and they’re good ones) a huge amount of all the wrong ever done was done because it was believed to be right. This is also true about good. A certain amount of the good people have done they did because they just felt like it, but a lot of it was also done because people believed it to be right. People have generally agreed throughout time that we do what we do because we see value in it, because it’s right, and we avoid doing what we avoid because we see harm in it, because it’s wrong. And they have often agreed about what the categories are, what the big questions and issues are, while not agreeing on all the details of the conclusions.

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