Category — Cultural

I haven’t really been a dedicated watcher of any regular television show for some years now.

Since we finally replaced our ancient tv at Christmastime with a huge flat-screen, I’ve really been enjoying my nightly political news. My hero Rachel Maddow is almost real-size! What a treat it was to finally watch Elmer Gantry, and I got a good chickflick dose with The Holiday and The Notebook.

Sometimes I just feel like relaxing and being entertained. I flip through the channels – most of it doesn’t interest me. I’m not big into “reality” shows, but I sometimes like the ones that show how different people’s lives can be from one another – like Trading Spouses and whatever that one was with the British nanny. I wish that Holmes on Homes guy would come renovate *my* house. I enjoy profiling, and shows like Snapped if it’s an unusual case. The first couple of seasons of 24 were interesting, but I lost interest when they brought in torture (it *was* on Fox!). I’ve attempted to get into a regular schedule with my collections of Twin Peaks and Ultraviolet – but those haunt me so much that I can only watch them once in a while. I like the odd something on the History channel or PBS, but nothing was grabbing me tonight.

Then – I caught a show that’s been on for a long time but I had only caught a minute here or there before. I’m not really in tune with what’s popular, and I had written it off just because of the title.

So now I’m busy every Sunday night at 9 pm, because that’s when Desperate Housewives is on. I just watched two back-to-back episodes – Lovely and The Chase. It looks like tomorrow’s episode follows from there – YAY! It’s been on since 2004! I’ve already missed six whole years?!?!?!

I’m fairly sure that some of my friends will find it amusing that I’m enthralled with this show.

What can I say?

An American Category Sketch of Personhood vs. Non-Personhood – not exhaustive, but representative.

• So much is under debate.
• So much is culturally modulated.
• So much has a history of discussion rather than a solid truth claim.
• So much seems a little strange.

Warning: Your answers may differ.
This is meant to be thought-provoking; sorry for all the things I’m leaving out.

Comments are welcome, but only if you’re civil. All comments are moderated.

For each of the following, is this a person?

Non-living:

• Rock – NO!
• Table – NO!
• Book – NO!

Beings:

• Flower – NO!
• Tree – NO!
• Monkeygrass – NO!
• Frog – NO!
• Beetle – NO!
• Ant – NO!
• Tilapia – NO!
• Worm – NO!
• Dog – NO! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Cat – NO! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Cow – NO! (DISAGREEMENT)

Scale/Boundary:

• Electrons – NO!
• Nuclei – NO!
• Fungi – NO! (LIFE, MAYBE GROUP INTELLIGENCE OF A KIND, NOT PERSON)
• Bacteria – NO! (LIFE, MAYBE GROUP INTELLIGENCE OF A KIND, NOT PERSON)
• Virus – NO – um… probably not! (DEAD/ALIVE, IMMORTAL? SOME UNKNOWN)
• Prions – NO! (DEAD/ALIVE, IMMORTAL? MUCH UNKNOWN)
• Mitochondria – NO! (MAY HAVE DEVELOPED HUMANS, HISTORY OF DISCUSSION)
• Planet – NO! (ECO-REACTIONS, SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Star – NO! (HISTORICAL SMALL DISAGREEMENTS)

Sex/Gender:

• Female – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Male – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Hermaphrodite – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Transvestite – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Transgender – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Heterosexual – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Homosexual – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Bisexual – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Married – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Single – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Complicated – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)

Class/Money/Economy:

• Poor – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Rich – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Middle-class – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Blue-collar – YES!
• White-collar – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Upper-class – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Migrant – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Inner-city – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Rural – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Suburban – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Socialist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Communist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Crony Capitalist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Regulated Capitalist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT) (etc.)

Education:

• Highly educated – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Highly trained – YES!
• Untrained – YES!
• College – YES!
• No College – YES!
• Under-educated – YES!
• Literate – YES!
• Sub-literate – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Intentionally ignorant – YES! (DISAGREEMENT) (etc.)

Political Values:

• Democrat – YES! (CONFUSION AND DISAGREEMENT)
• Libertarian – YES! (CONFUSION AND DISAGREEMENT)
• Republican – YES! (CONFUSION AND DISAGREEMENT)
• Independent – YES! (CONFUSION AND DISAGREEMENT)
• Green – YES! (CONFUSION AND DISAGREEMENT)
• Reconstructionist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Imperialist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Fascist – YES! (CONFUSION AND DISAGREEMENT)
• Nazi – YES! (HEATED DISAGREEMENT)
• Uninterested – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Fanatical – YES! (DISAGREEMENT) (etc.)

Nationality / Ethnicity / Race:

• American – YES! (MINOR DISAGREEMENT)
• Non-American – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Registered US Immigrant – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Non-registered US Immigrant – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• American Terrorist – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Non-American Terrorist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Same Ethnic/Racial Composition as Yourself – YES!
• Different Ethic/Racial Composition from Yourself – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• German – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• French – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Kenyan – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• British – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Chinese – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Iraqi – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Afghani – YES! (SOME DISAGREEMENT)
• Iranian – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)

Religion:

• Christian – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Muslim – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Jehovah’s Witness – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Wiccan – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Buddhist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Fanatical – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Orthodox – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Evangelical – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Reformed – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Unitarian – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Atheist – YES! (DISAGREEMENT)
• Eclectic – YES! (DISAGREEMENT) (etc.)

Corporate Groupings: (UNDER CONTESTATION!!!!!)

• Homeland Security – NO!
• CIA – NO!
• Dept. of Eduction- NO!
• NRA – NO!
• ACLU – NO!
• Catholic Church – NO!
• US Marines – NO!
• Al-Qaeda – NO!
• Taliban – NO!
• KKK – NO!
• Halliburton – NO!
• Chevron – NO!
• Microsoft – NO!
• Google – NO!
• MacDonald’s- NO!
• Citibank – NO!
• Walmart – NO!

Stage / Distinctions:

• Egg – NO!
• Sperm- NO!
• Fertilized egg – NO! (DISAGREEMENT – UNDER CONTESTATION!)*
• Zygote – NO! (DISAGREEMENT- UNDER CONTESTATION!)
• Fetus w/Beating Heart – ALIVE, BUT NOT PERSON! (DISAGREEMENT- UNDER CONTESTATION!)
• Fetus w/Brain Waves – MAYBE! (DISAGREEMENT – UNDER CONTESTATION!)
• Late-term Pregnancy – MAYBE! (HEATED DISAGREEMENT- UNDER CONTESTATION!)
• Baby – COULD BE! (SOME DISAGREEMENT, HISTORICALLY NOT, BUT PROBABLY CONSIDERED ONE NOW)
• Toddler – PROBABLY! (DISAGREEMENT – HISTORICALLY NOT, BUT PROBABLY CONSIDERED ONE NOW)
• Child – PROBABLY! (DISAGREEMENT- HISTORICALLY NOT, BUT PROBABLY CONSIDERED ONE NOW)
• Teenager – PROBABLY! (DISAGREEMENT – PAIN IN THE BUTT, AND SOME CONFUSION ABOUT RITE DE PASSAGE)
• Adult – YES!
• Middle-Aged – YES!
• Elderly – YES! (DISAGREEMENT – HISTORICALLY SO, MAYBE STILL IS)
• Corpse – PROBABLY NOT (SOME RELIGIOUS DISAGREEMENT)
• Australopithecus – NO! (EXTINCT HOMINID! SOME DISCUSSION)
• Neanderthals – NO! (EXTINCT HOMINID! SOME DISCUSSION)
• Early Modern Human (EMH)/Anatomically Modern Human’ (AMH) (also referred to as Cro-Magnon) – UNKNOWN (DISCUSSION and DISAGREEMENT)
• Homo Sapien Sapien – YES! (MINOR DISCUSSION, MOSTLY BY CURMUDGEONS)

* Fertilized chicken egg does not equal chicken either.

The figure of the “evil other” is a pre-ethical fixation for the religiously-minded paranoid. Everything that one most dislikes or finds threatening can be projected upon others and (usually symbolically) murdered in the age-old tradition of the scapegoat. Such projection engenders – and feeds upon – symbolic (and real) violence.

Predatory on the people who cannot bear to examine themselves, leaders of such movements play on fears of contagion, defilement and stain from without – from the evil others – and project a colonization and epidemic spread of the embodiment of such fears. This defensive projection is unstable because hidden in it is more than a grain of attraction and desire for what they have rejected.

The sin bucket is never full because it never matures into a meaningful guilt. The bucket cannot be emptied since what is rejected cannot be seen in oneself, cannot be recognized, cannot be repented of – or forgiven.

This monstrous dynamic demands more and more sacrifices to shore up the fragile selfhood and half-baked ideologies of its victims. Moreover, one finds sometimes a rafter-in-thine-own eye correlation between the prioritized issues and the behavior: the anti-gay closeted homosexual, the undereducated or abusive home-schooler, the priest/preacher sexual predator, the televangelist with the diamond mines. They dance on the edge of a witch-hunt they have helped to create. Maybe it’s thrilling.

Rather than working on their own issues in humility, they isolate, dehumanize, and demonize others. It’s more exciting, and it allows them to continue to avoid confronting themselves.

While a self-protective and isolated local tribal structure might have some use for this psychology (at least, some might claim this, perhaps in combination with folk magic and other elements), it doesn’t work in any positive way today. The neo-archaic conflation of stain with criminality re-employs the rhetoric of evil and the mechanics of scapegoating in a denial of complexity that is as comforting to its followers as it is complicit in the destruction of the lives, spirits and liberties it claims to champion.

Individual insights and wisdom are drowned out in the mistrust and hysteria of the misled masses, and the people are manipulated into beliefs that work against their own interests at every level. It’s not only the paranoid religious who hide their sins – while making claims to authority! – in the distributed masses. The right-wing haters have discovered the vein runs deep in the American public, and have found myriad ways to leverage it. Terrorists and intelligence agencies alike – and many corporations – have learned that a distributed network of the masses works better than centralization – they form cells, nodes, groups and global networks. The avoidance of accountability at the group, national, and global scales works in much the same way. These are horizontal, not vertical, structures. If you deal with one appearance, several others pop up to replace it. Hate groups shall rise again.

Self-integration, individuation, and transformation seem to be impossible for such to mature into, and they appear to be stuck in the shame/stain/defilement space that exists before the existential experience of guilt and forgiveness (and perhaps grace). Because they cannot move along psycho-spiritually themselves, they continue to fling this childish judgment out onto others. They are underdeveloped as human souls.

I have found that direct confrontation with affected persons and groups is usually fruitless, although it must be done.

Action through affiliation, cooperation, and alliance with others are the better strategies. Humor and satire work to undermine propaganda and to culture-jam destructive memes. It’s also good training for ambiguity tolerance, which is perhaps the first step to many solutions.

Setting a better example, in essays and editorials and public performances, can create new possibilities for points of view. Widely-circulated stories and poetry and interviews and photographs make it more difficult to dehumanize others. Jesus urged his followers to visit people in prison, to treat the stranger with hospitality, to clothe and feed the poor.

I have to remind myself of all of this more often than I would like, both for self-reflection and frustration tolerance. I have to remember that no matter how awful, unfeeling, and unethical some folks seem to be, they are also human and they have their own path. Except in very rare cases, we ought to be able to have a dialogue. I try, but I wish that I were better at seeing the sacred within others sometimes. At times I react with sadness and anger. It’s easier to talk with people who have self-awareness and some modicum of ability for meta-reasoning (becoming aware of your processes of thought as they happen, thinking about thinking) – but I often seem to lack the patience to work things through in as loving and civil a way as I would like.

It’s still something that is very important to me to cultivate in myself. Beyond all the ethical reasons why, there is a reward in it. When you do things – including thinking and believing – that welcome understanding, empathy and compassion for another, when you allow the other to speak to you (and in a sense through you) it’s a powerful reminder of just how human and just how numinous each of us really is – and all of us really are. The paradox of that moment for me is that through paying attention to what can resonate in particularity, one also experiences the divine, complex interconnectedness of all.

All you need is love.

I love humor, even when it’s aimed at my heroes. Jacques Derrida was hopelessly misunderstood by much of the American audience, but there is a grain of truth in much of this:

• The World’s Shortest Philosophy Books
• Dennett’s Philosophical Lexicon
• Philosophers’ Cause of Death
• Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Fair enough. But really… let’s think about intellectual courage…

Yeah, Derrida has a lot going on. He is sometimes very difficult to read. And it’s easy to make fun of Derrida and deconstruction, and to think what it means is that there is no basis for justice or ethics. Many so-called religious leaders make this mistake, and far too many academics do as well.

There is no more careful reader than Derrida was – and to start to understand what is at stake, you have to develop the skills to read and to think in ways that are a little different than what you might be accustomed to, but it’s worth it.

A careful reader can easily discern that not only does his work *not* discard or undermine ethics and justice, but it really demands better forms of both than what many of his detractors can offer or (in many cases) care to offer.

The following is probably as clear as Derrida gets on these issues in a short space. Read slowly and carefully, and then try to argue that Derrida was proposing that we have no obligation to pursue (and construct, and deconstruct, and reconstruct) our truths in the light of ethics and justice….

I do not believe that the whole ‘left’ in general is more occupied with cultural identity than with social justice. But if some who call themselves leftists had done so they would deserve Rorty’s critique. On this point and to a certain extent I would agree with him, for then two grave risks would have been neglected: first, though legitimate in certain situations and within certain limits, the demands of cultural identity (and this word comprises all ‘communitarisms’, of which there are many) can often feed into ‘ideologies’ of the right – nationalist, fundamentalist, even racist. Secondly, the left may relegate to the background and gravely neglect other struggles, social and civic solidarities and universal causes (transnational and not merely cosmopolitical, because the cosmopolitical supposes again the agency of the state and of the citizen, be it the citizen of the world – we will return to this). But why must one choose between the care for cultural identity and the worry about social justice? They are both questions of justice, two responses to anti-egalitarian oppression or violence. No doubt it is very hard to lead both of these debates in the same rhythm, but one can fight both fronts, cultural and social, at the same time, as it were, and one must do so. The task of the intellectual is to say this, to mediate the discourses and to elaborate strategies that resist any simplistic choice between the two. In both cases, the effective responsibility for engagement consists in doing everything to transform the status quo in the two areas, between them, from one to another, the cultural and the social, to establish a new law, even if they remain forever inadequate for what I call justice (which is not the law, even if it determines its history and progress).

There is no ‘politics’, no law, no ethics without the responsibility of a decision which, to be just, cannot content itself with applying existing norms or rules but must take the absolute risk, in every singular instant, or justifying itself again, alone, as if for the first time, even if it is inscribed in a tradition. For lack of space, I cannot explain here the discourse on decision that I try to elaborate elsewhere. A decision, though mine, active and free in its phenomenon, cannot be the simple deployment of my potentialities or aptitudes, of what is ‘possible for me’. In order to be a decision, it must interrupt that ‘possible’, tear off my history and thus be above all, in a certain strange way, the decision of the other in me: come from the other in view of the other in me. It must in a paradoxical way permit and comprise a certain passivity that in no way allays my responsibility. These are the paradoxes that are difficult to integrate in a classical philosophical discourse, but I do not believe that a decision, if it exists, would be possible otherwise.

In my eyes what you call ‘a kind of political metaphysics’ would be exactly the forgetting of aporia itself, which we often try to do. But the aporia cannot be forgotten. What would a ‘pragmatics’ be that consisted in avoiding contradictions, problems apparently without solution, etc.? Do you not think that this supposedly realistic or empirical ‘pragmatics’ would be a kind of metaphysical reverie, in the most unrealistic and imaginary sense one gives these words?

One has to do everything to see the laws of hospitality inscribed in positive law. If this is impossible, everyone must judge, in their soul and conscience, sometimes in a ‘private’ manner, what (when, where, how, to what extent) has to be done without the laws or against the laws. To be precise: when some of us have appealed to civil disobedience in France on behalf of those without identifying papers (and for a small number among us – for example in my seminar, but publicly – more than a year before the press began to discuss this and before the number of protesters grew to be spectacular), it was not an appeal to transgress the law in general, but to disobey those laws which to us seemed themselves to be in contradiction with the principles inscribed in our constitution, to international conventions and to human rights, thus in reference to a law we considered higher if not unconditional. It was in the name of this higher law that we called for ‘civil disobedience’, within certain limited conditions. But I will not reject the word ‘grace’ (of the unconditional gift and without return) that you offered to me, provided that one does not associate it with obscure religious connotations which, though they can sometimes be interesting, would call for quite different discussions.