The value of discrimination 

The question to be asked about value hierarchies and discrimination isn’t, do they exist (because they are default bad for us, they’re the foundation of the definitions of, discovery of, and pursuit of the good). The questions to be asked about systems of value are, are they well-justified, are they accurate, are they useful, do they shut out the things that we need to shut out and let in the things we want to let in, are they too loose and vague or are they too rigid and inflexible, do they cover the things we need them to cover and do the work they’re supposed to do?

Discrimination itself isn’t wrong (unless you’re a committed postmodernist or a complete ethical skeptic or some other brand of irrealist or nihilist or determinist, or you’re just absurdly, irrationally optimistic and deluded). But there are a hundred different ways discrimination can go wrong. That’s sort of the heart of the problem that ethical nihilism and postmodernism are trying to solve.

We’ve seen so many of the immense ways discrimination can go wrong that we’ve decided it’s better to just give up on the faculty altogether than it is try to agree about it, guide it, reform it, or police it. If there was ever an apt situation for the metaphor of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” this is it. Postmodernism takes a scorched earth approach to discrimination, seeking to burn down the whole forest because certain parts of it have grown diseased and deformed over time.

There are certain key mythic assumptions, cultural narratives about the nature of the world and about people that make this obliterative, irrealist approach viable in today’s culture. I can easily pick out three of rhem that provide a lot of the undergirding that informs this approach and make it seem compelling and rational (if you can accept these cultural meta-narratives and foundational premises). And I will list them in a moment.

Often, when I hear modern arguments on many subjects, they trouble me, but I’m not sure how to respond to them. Because often, the problem doesn’t seem to be with the basic facts, or even necessarily the stated goals and desired outcomes and values. So where is the problem? It’s often hard to identify. There’s just something that seems wrong in the overall structure of how the facts and goals are being interpreted and how they relate to one another. And that makes them terribly hard to criticize and point out their problems.

I don’t want, after all, to deny the facts or the value of the stated goals. And if I do either, I’m likely to be shunned and ignored by the other person as someone who lives in an alien world of alternative facts or incompatible, reprehensible values. So where should I look for what’s troubling me?

I believe that it’s at the level of the mythic assumptions, the cultural meta-narrative, that I’m detecting problems. These are the premises that determine what the facts mean and how the arguments work. They’re the story, the framework, that the facts are laid upon, a bit like a garden trellis. The facts are like knots or bindings where the vines are tied to the frame, concrete points of fixation where the growing, purposive activity of human endeavor is secured to the framework of the undergirding meta-narrative, and that connection allows the vines of human action and thought and purpose to climb toward its desired end and ultimate flowering.

Each fact we uncover provides a stepping stone to reach higher and further toward the desired and needed direction, but those facts gain their place in the structure of overall meaning, and the vines find their direction in the growth of human endeavor, as a result of the overall structure and tragectory of the underlying frame of mythic assumptions. They provide the organizing principles that govern meaning and it’s relation to purpose and action.

So often lately, I feel that it’s not the secure points that are wrong, the knotted confluences of knowledge, the facts, nor is it the lofty goals of sunshine that the growing vines reach toward. But somehow both go wrong because of the structure that governs their order, meaning, and relationships, creating a horticultural display that somehow has gone awry, that is flowering poorly, and is not growing into the thing it aspires to be.

So, to return to my original question, what are some of the premises that undergird the modern system of thought, that make the structure hold together and give it it’s shape? In particular, what are the premises, the mythic assumptions, that make the postmodern vision of discrimination as a universal evil coherent?

Three big ones come to mind. First, the myth of the Tabula Rasa, or Blank Slate. And just a side note here, by myth I don’t mean untrue, I mean a foundational story that has archetypical significance; it’s a fundamental narrative that illustrates and figures/pictures/embodies an idea about what we are or what the world is. So, the first myth is the blank slate. The idea that there is no essential, fixed human nature, that human nature is essentially constructed (most likely socially conditioned and socially constructed).

The second myth is the myth of the Noble Savage. That humans and human nature are, by nature, benevolent, peaceful, harmonious, idyllic, cooperative, and good. Goodness is the fundamental natural state of humanity, good outcomes are the natural product of all human activity, and it is only by subversion and oppression and construction and conditioning that it goes wrong.

The third myth I don’t have a good name for. And unfortunately I’ve forgotten what it is and failed to write it down. So I guess I’ll just leave it for now until it comes back to me.

All of these myths have different cultural and philosophical orgins. All of them slowly gained traction in the post-Enlightenment world, and in some cases are the one bit of a philosophy that caught on in the public imagination and survived to be integrated into the later intellectual outlook of the postmodern era. Most people watching the movie Avatar absorb the mythic noble savage narrative about the Navi as familiar without any idea of the articulation of this idea by Rousseau. They just recognize the tropes and the generally accepted cultural narrative we take for granted as true and legitimate.

The myth of the Blank Slate was championed in intellectual circles by John Locke, but it has had a life much greater than the fame of the man himself. Almost any person who you asked, “Who is John Locke?” would reply “Who?” But these same people repeat the ideas of the blank slate to themselves daily in a casual manner any time they discuss parenting or politics. Everything from Baby Mozart to prison reform.

We discuss and embrace these ideas, we build on the shared understanding that there is no fixed, enshrined nature for men and women determined by the gods, written in the stars. Rather, we talk as though we believe that we are shaped by our experiences, by social conditioning and construction, that our idea of what a man is or should be, or what a woman is, or what an American, or what any kind of person is or should be, is all a relative, constructed concept (rather than an instance of a transcendent, objective, fixed rule).

Curiously enough, there’s also a substrand of determinism mixed into a lot of postmodern thought, a vague assertion that I am what I am and it is sovereign and unchangeable and above criticism. It’s hard to know what to make of this fact, since it seems to run counter to the constructionism and radical sense of self-determination and artistic creative license we ascribe to our lives.

Is our nature entirely pliable and perfectable, or is it so fixed as to be involuntary and so non-moral? Postmoderniats often seem to be arguing both, depending on the situation and how it suits them. But then consistency was never a fundamental value of postmodernism. So long as the answer to the question, “Who is to blame, who is responsible?” is never me (or the person or practice I’m defending), then either answer will do.

The argument that the acts and nature of the criminal are not his fault because he did not choose his criminal nature but had it forced upon him by arbitrary social forces is one we often hear reoeated. He’s a product of his culture, which is to blame.

On the other hand, we prize identity above all, as something sacred and fixed and unquestionable, above criticism partly because it is so fixed and determined. We cannot blame people for being what they are, and whatever they are is beautiful and not a voluntary moral issue.

This creates a rather confusing moral landscape, particularly in areas like sexuality, where non-traditional practices and preferences are viewed as innate identities and so are all fixed, non-moral, unquestionable, and by their inevitably compulsory nature praiseworthy and valuable. And traditional practices and preferences are often viewed as entirely constructed, toxic, parasitical, relative, and in need of remediation and re-education.

You would think it would be all one or all the other. In a morally neutral universe with no fixed, transcendent, compulsory moral order, it’s not clear why we should assume that homophilia is entirely innate and natural and homophobia is entirely constructed and unnatural. Why, in un unfixed moral world, assign different moral values to each? It’s not clear that a purely naturalistic, materialist view of the universe compels any such different conclusions about similar questions.

If whatever is good is whatever is natural, and whatever is natural is simply however people actually are, whatever they prefer, having been conferred on them irrevocably by the universe and their nature, then surely homophobia has just as good a claim to being natural, maybe more so, as homophilia.

Given the same structure for justification of claims, it’s hard to see why you should be compelled to get the results people seem to desire. Everything is just as natural as everything else, by that evaluation structure. Rape, war, slavery, murder, torture, and cannibalism are all natural occurrences in the animal kingdom, whatever the proponents of the noble savage myth might argue about humanity. They’re all very natural instincts of the human creature, part of our preferences and behavior. Are you going to break the system and tell me that those things are wrong in some transcendental way, regardless of preference, regardless of their present nce in natural behavior, even among animals? Where do you get off suddenly smuggling objectivism and transcendentalism and moral tyranny back in? What gives you the right to tell me I’m wrong?

This is the problem with the food label “natural”. It doesn’t actually mean anything. Anything can be natural if you simply mean, whatever happens to occur. Humans are part of nature, therefore everything they do is, in a sense, natural. And if there is no system of value that transcends us, no thing to which all are beholden, regardless of inclination, then you don’t really have any rational grounds for criticizing anyone other than you prefer your position to win, because. It’s me vs you. My preferences aren’t any more legitimate than yours, yours aren’t any less legitimate than mind, but that isn’t going to prevent me from fighting you and trying to convince you otherwise, against your own naturap preferences. Unfortunately, if I succeed and I actually manage to convince you and to change your preferences, that brings up a whole new problem. Because I wasn’t supposed to be able to do that. Those things were supposed to be fixed and so exempted from judgement and discussion because they couldn’t have been otherwise.