Thinking About "Their" Problems

The problem with changing intellectual history is that you risk becoming ubiquitous and extensively misused. Hannah Arendt, for one, has suffered this fate for her expression of the "banality of evil" from Eichmann in Jerusalem. Recently, I have been thinking that some important parts of her legacy need to be critically rethought.

However, today I want to try to make sense of "the banality of evil" in that complicity takes a number of locations and dimensions and is not so easy to fix or banish as commonplace moral thinking would have it when confronted with pervasive kinds of violence.

Today, a banal evil that has touched many places is a particular kind of intertwining of authority and sexual abuse. Respected men can get away with a lot, and when it comes out, the accounts start to accumulate, and people around the guy start the recriminating half-denials: he was so revered, how could I have known (the point being I wasn't really responsible for asking questions).

This seems to tarnish very different worlds: from brotherhoods of Christian athletes to the secular frat-houses of the tech industry, from cosmopolitan, orthodoxy-minded religions to smaller, more homogeneous groups, from haranguing moralists in entertainment to the highbrow liberalism of Canadian and British public broadcasting.

Now that such a crime is coming out in Muslim Chicagoland, a sense of banality- of pervasive insidiousness- is due. However, that perspective is not present in the first Times article I saw about it: "Sexual Abuse Allegations Against Imam Stir Rifts in Insular Illinois Community". This article makes the abuse claims a number of women are bringing against a respected leader contingent on the peculiar culture in which they seem to live.

In cases of abuse, victims and the people they talk to don't come forward immediately for a variety of reasons: the men who did it are rich or important, those hurt fear they will not be believed making accusations that are nearly impossible to prove, they fear they will be shamed or called irresponsible or partially guilty, their motives will always be suspected. In other words, they have sadly banal reasons for not talking, but not the Muslims it seems.

For the Muslims, it's because of their particular prurience about virginity. Cultures like this, we learn, always blame the victim. And, if victimized, her parents won't be able find her a suitable mate, which is virtually all women have to live for in their benighted lives of seclusion. Women and girls, or the progressives among them, fight hard against ossified patriarchal thinking to get even basic sex education, and who could imagine such a thing in America?!

Sadly, this orientalizing condescension is a banality of its own in Western media, but what really gets me is a word in the title: "insular". It is not only that I find this unfair and not representative, but it is part of a pattern of seeing difference as a problem of the different: who would not want to be like us? Is it not always the broader and more pertinent question to ask what is kind of politics are extended by the majority to the minority and under what terms and expectations? This, it seems, is something Hannah Arendt had a few things to say about, if not without some problems. Nevertheless, the media we consume every day could use a sense of banality.

Throwing Shade

Fifty Shades of Grey is a silly book that very serious people can't stop talking about. It's not that they are making too much of their interest any more than they are wrong in thinking critically about the macho escapism of American Sniper. Although, the gender-coding of the latter is one of the reasons its film-version will be up for Oscars, whereas the former's almost certainly won't. 

What has most interested me in the bestselling novels aren't esthetic, moral or political evaluations of their content as such, but questions about how they provoke such prurient attention and anxiety when they are packaged as fanciful, fun and forgettable.

I think an interesting answer lies in among contrasts of contemporary desiderata: the need to be needed and the detesting of "neediness"; the demand for total intimacy and the vaunting of independence; the severity and ubiquity of violence and its persistence as a topos of fantasy, as something to retreat to, "all in good fun".

Ross Douthat might have gotten at something like this, and I know he's capable. Unfortunately, he chose to comment that the 50 Shades phenomena show how feminism is a fatuous tradition of unresolvable contradictions its adherents are too self-satisfied to realize even when it's obvious. Presumably, this is nothing like Catholic conservatism in the US, whose tradition is rich and complex, so full of nuance that one must be a sojourner to appreciate the coherences among the  contrasts of varied intellectual programs. 

The main focus of this post is on Chris Hedges' thoughts on the series that takes another easy way out.

It's great to see someone with the prominence and sensitivity of Hedges writing what isn't just another kinkpiece-thinkpiece, and there's much in this I admire and agree with. Unfortunately, I think that overall it's a misdirected broadside. He makes a loud, judgmental and alienating slippery-slope case packed with vitriolic claims and few proper nouns or specific references.

The major objection I have is that he is saying that not participating in this phenomenon is a key part of a principled rejection of neoliberal psychologies and politics. Surely, the greater work for the left is rethinking how and why it is that the big normative forces in modern society- the law, the schools, the family- have become creatures of the marketplace.

As problematic as it is, I don't how a softcore soap opera billed as a guilty pleasure is central to the work of these bigger powers- maybe it is, but Hedges does not explain how the one task is a crucial part of the other.

The more specific problem I have is with his passing references of the work of Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. He calls the former two "true radicals", where the latter are creatures of "postmodernism" and therefore "neoliberalism". 

The former two are best known for calling for a legal prohibition against explicit depiction of sex because it is inherently degrading to women and conducive to violence against them and others. The latter two are not known for this position, or for any position that the liberal state ought or ought not to ban blasphemous, slanderous, pornographic or any other kind of media.

However, it simply does not follow that because Foucault and Butler don't not ask MacKinnon and Dworkin's questions or arrive at their answers that they are uncritical captives of the bourgeois spirit or ignorant to forms of harm concomitant with objectification. Such an impression counters any plain reading of The Use of Pleasure, Gender Trouble or any of the ubiquitous interviews of them.

Perhaps Hedges has a "deep reading" that shows their real reactionary agendas, but he does not even begin to point it out. The reference to the two seems just to point to frustrators of the left as if they were in league with the oppressors.

Butler and Foucault weren't saying such liberal politics and their permissive culture are just fine because everybody's abused and degraded anyway. Rather, they were talking about the deeper problems that the liberal norms evoked by Dworkin and MacKinnon like autonomy and self-expression have in the maintenance of such an order.

Hedges ends by presenting the correlation between pornography and child abuse as a plain fact. From my understanding, neurological research increasingly supports comparisons between pornography and chemical-behavioral pathologies of addiction or compulsion. The old puritanical understanding that porn is like a drug might be closer to truth than is comfortable for many of us.

However, despite considerable work, the goal of demonstrating the causative correlation between consumption of pornographic media and the behavior of violence against women has simply not been reached.

Perhaps scientists are ideologically blinded and not asking the right questions, but Hedges is not suggesting which questions give us the "hard" correlation.

In terms of his accusation of child abuse, as Western society seems to treat more of what used to be called perversions as matters of difference, its tolerance toward sex with minors and the questionably-consenting is reversing.

My point is that we need our critical sensibilities about the media to be sharp, but "judging from nowhere" is not a case of this.

I'll start this last comment of mine by praising Chris Hedges' worry about objectification. A simple understanding of this term might be indifference to the voice of another.* However, I don't see how his declarative polemic is opening a space for the voices of those with whom the debates on violence in the media and affirmative consent should be most concerned: survivors, sex-workers and those labelled sexually different. It is listening to voices from the other side of late capitalism that has disturbed the ease of consumption that depended on silence.

Listening in those different ways might indeed bring about Hedges' clear-cut understanding that "our" values of concern for exploitation of the vulnerable compel us to reject media with the problems of Fifty Shades of Grey, but it would do so in a way very different than he does here.

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*This is only one expression of objectification I have considered, and not even a canonical one. For a formative discussion of this issue, see Martha C. Nussbaum, "Objectification", Philosophy and Public Affairs 24.4 (1996): 241-91.

Addendum:

This post focused on consternation of and concern about the Fifty Shades franchise from people academic or para-academic commentary on popular culture. For  succinct and insightful statement of concern about its broader impact, see Laci Green, "Is 50 Shades About Abuse?", MTV Braless, YouTube, http://goo.gl/PT3h59.

Tantalus in Regenstein

I don't yet know what the relationship between this blog and my proper work is. Whatever it is, it must be subordinate because work is hard: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, and don't get me started on the health plan.

My adviser's preferred metaphor for the difficulties of academic work is one R.G. Collingwood favored: wrestling with fog. Now, he is ex officio more successful than I am, so perhaps I should follow his lead. However, often I think it's more of a tantalizing experience. The needed insight, citation or expression is always just out of reach.

This came to mind today when I read a reference to a translation of Confucius' Analects 論語. Here, the master's beloved pupil Yan Hui 顏回 describes his attempts to understand the logic implicit in humane living (ren 仁). He says

The more I look up at it, the higher it soars; the more I penetrate into it, the harder it becomes. I am looking at it in front of me, and suddenly it is behind me. The Master is good at drawing me forward a step at a time; he broadens me with culture [wen 文] and disciplines my behavior through the observance of ritual propriety [li 禮]. Even if I wanted to quit, I could not. And when I have exhausted my abilities, it as though something rises up right in front of me, and even though I want to follow it, there is no road to take.*

Now if that doesn't say it, I don't know what does. I'll have to take a crack at translating it myself one of these days.

*Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr., The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine, 1998), 128-29. Cited in John H. Berthrong, Expanding Process: Exploring Philosophical and Theological Transformations in China and the West (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), 111.