In many varieties of activism, there’s a drive to argue that our cause is the most important thing in the world, or at least somewhere up there among the top priorities.
For example, in atheism, there has long been the notion that religion is the “root of all evil” or that it “poisons everything”. I think most people who say that are being hyperbolic, although it’s hard to say to what degree. Certainly, there is a conscious attempt to assign religion more blame for the evils of the world.
In some socialist/communist/Marxist circles, it is argued that class struggle is the root of all oppression, including the oppression of women and ethnic minorities. And sometimes it is argued that much of feminism is pointless because all it fights for is for more women to become part of the ruling class.
There are also some feminists who have tried to interpret everything through the lens of feminism, for instance blaming homophobia and transphobia on the patriarchy. Gender critical feminists (aka TERFs) demonstrate an extreme version of this thinking; they argue that trans people’s problems will go away once we abolish gender.
It’s natural for activists to argue for the importance of the causes they fight for. Although, as an ace activist, I tend to have a different perspective. Generally speaking, ace activists do not believe our cause is the most important thing in the world. We do not believe that ace/aro-hate is the root of sexism or ableism or whatever. Because, frankly, that’s just implausible. At best, ace activism is just a thing that we personally care about, or something we are well-equipped to do.
By the way, I’m not saying that atheists/communists/feminists are wrong to make the above arguments. Perhaps atheists are correct to say that religion deserves more blame. Perhaps socialists are correct to criticize the way feminists favor wealthy women. Perhaps feminism really can offer important insights into homophobia and transphobia.
Activists want to argue their activism is important, and that is well and good, but there’s a risk of sloppy reasoning. For example…
- Interpreting large-scale social problems through a single-dimensional lens. Rejecting other lenses.
- Believing that large-scale social problems would be fully solved if you were to achieve your goals.
- Dismissing other social movements as relatively unimportant.
- Dismissing causes within your own social movement as relatively unimportant.
- Justifying relatively unimportant causes by drawing strained connections to more important/shocking problems.*
- Getting burnt out when it becomes clear that there are indeed other more important causes that you aren’t equipped to deal with.
I think this is a particularly important message in the age of Trump. A lot of us feel powerless to address the world’s biggest problems, but it’s still okay to chip away at the little problems. Anyways, this is what I try to tell myself.
*One particular example comes to mind. Historically, a lot of people have argued against transphobia by bringing up the shockingly high murder rates of trans women. Critics have pointed out that most of the murder victims are women of color, and it’s sketchy for white women to use their deaths as rhetorical tools while omitting that important bit of context. Anyways, when I looked around it appears that critics got their way, and now it’s widely noted that most murder victims are women of color.
I’m having trouble understanding your “particular example”.
Well, okay. There’s a lot to say about this, but here I’ll limit myself to this: If they are using the deaths of trans* women of color to argue against the oppression of trans* people, how could that possibly be
The anti-cissexism cause is the cause created in response to, among other things, the murders of trans* people. Are you saying that “arguing against transphobia” isn’t the same cause as arguing against anti-trans* murders?
I am … very confused.
I understand the critiques to be about neglecting racism. That in no way means that arguing against trans* oppression is not arguing against the murders of trans* people of color. Those murders are indeed easily and naturally contained within the label “transphobia” when the “cause” is defined. So I have a hard time seeing this as an example as “drawing strained connections to more important/shocking problems”.
There has been quite a bit of racism committed by white trans* advocates. There has also been quite a bit of racism committed by white feminists. That doesn’t mean that strong connections don’t exist between expressions of cissexist violence against people of color and cissexist culture writ large.
I’m really not certain how and why you think that this supports the particular bullet point to which you’ve connected it.
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Separately, I take your broader point that we should be willing to honestly and skeptically examine the importance of our own causes and own activism/actions. The same can be said about branches of science. Some things that people study can honestly and accurately be said to be “less important” in at least some important senses. While I think study of the Olmec specifically and paleoanthropology generally is incredibly fascinating and want to see it continue, research that permits a transition to non-polluting forms of energy generation, transportation, and manufacturing can all reasonably be said to be “more important” by at least some measures. Yet, some people are good at paleoanthropology and motivated to do it well. I don’t want those people leaving their field to begin uninformed, amateur efforts at creating new battery chemistries.
Likewise, fighting war, hunger and disease might all reasonably be said to be “more important” than fighting trans* oppression. But i’m a terrible gardener and unlikely to be a good farmer. My background isn’t in the social psychology of war, and I have no training in medicine. Trans* oppression hurts people. I have some small ability to counter that harm. I can and should do it, even if some other person can and does contribute to humanity’s well being more than I do, when the value of my life is summed at its end.
Thanks for making this argument.
@Crip Dyke,
The funny thing is I remember Natalie Reed or someone making this point about trans women of color, but when I looked around I absolutely could not find it, which probably means I misremembered it. And hardly anyone seems to make the point anymore because it’s just so widely understood that most of the murder victims are women of color, even the HRC seems to have internalized the message.
Anyways, I may have garbled the argument people were making, and you might have a better handle on it. I probably shouldn’t have included that footnote, since it was just one of those free association things that I felt I had to share. I do think the footnote is an example of something, even if that something isn’t a “strained connection”.
This part is confusing to me:
Out of context, I think I understand it well enough, but I don’t get how it’s supposed to be an example of sloppy reasoning or to somehow be risking that. It sounds like it’s describing what may happen after you realize your former views were mistaken, not what may happen while you engage in some kind of sloppy reasoning or risk doing so in the future. I mean, if it is clear that you’re unequipped for things you now recognize as genuinely more important, then presumably your thinking about both causes would be somewhat less sloppy than it had been.
I’m not sure what you intend by the phrase “getting burnt out” … burnt out about what? Is the implication supposed to be that you should carry on (not get burnt out) with less important causes for which you are well-equipped, not think that you must turn your focus on the more important ones for which you’re unequipped? Although it’s not exactly what you said, I agree that sometimes the latter approach may not be very reasonable, but it also seems like it could be reasonable to better equip yourself if it’s really so important. So, I’m just not sure what you really had in mind there.
@consciousness razor,
It sounds to me like you understood what I was getting at. I wasn’t making a deeper point that you’re missing.
When I was talking about “sloppy reasoning” I wasn’t trying to lay out a set of rules. I don’t think I *could* lay out such a general set of rules. I was just listing arguments and behaviors that seemed suspect, and which could be critically examined.
Okay, that makes more sense. I was reading it as “here’s another example of sloppy reasoning (number 6 out of 6),” but you were sort of gesturing in that general direction rather than spelling out what in particular is supposed to be sloppy or risky. The others were more clearly expressed as mistakes, so I was expecting more of the same and had a hard time putting my finger on what you thought the last one was supposed to be.
Yes, and we should look both ways before we cross the street. I think you might be running afoul of Sturgeon’s Law (90 percent of everything is crap); it’s very easy to look at any discourse and identify a lot of crap. It is, I think, unhelpful to identify a load of crap in some discourse and draw any general conclusions; similarly, it is unhelpful to speak of the crap in some discourse at any level of generality. In practice, I think 90 percent of the crap in any discourse is obviously crap, and can simply be ignored; the remaining 10 percent deserves specific criticism.
Of course, 90 percent is a lower bound; some discourses are 100 percent crap, and those discourses deserve general criticism. But this kind of argument requires more evidence than the generally true observation that there’s just a lot of crap there, which is not, I suspect, an argument you want to make about socialism, feminism, or trans* activism.
Well… I do in fact make at least similar arguments, and I appreciate the disclaimer, backhanded as it is. But I think it’s worth talking about the actual arguments… or at least my actual arguments. When I talk about socialism, I spend 90% of my time trying to overcome inaccurate and frankly lazy summaries such as your own. And if I charge you with laziness, you are at least in good company: I know from personal experience that too many of my fellow socialists are prone to lazy inaccuracies.
If you’d like a capsule summary that is at least less inaccurate from a True Socialist™ (i.e. me), economic classes are the inevitable expression of some (but not all) social relations of exploitation and oppression, and if we do not talk about class, we cannot talk about those social relations and their concomitant exploitation and oppression. In just the same sense, if we do not talk about race, we cannot talk about racial oppression. The argument should be not that class is everything, only that class is not nothing, and I reject arguments that we should not talk about class because it somehow gets in the way of other goals.
I would agree that a lot of feminism is focused on ensuring that women are fairly represented in the capitalist and professional-managerial classes, but I would not argue that these feminist goals are “pointless”. Ceteris paribus, capitalist without sexism is better than capitalism with sexism. I simply say that if your goal is the liberation of 20 percent of all women, and you are unwilling to address the exploitation of the remaining 80 percent (so long as this exploitation is not gendered), you will not earn my enthusiastic support.
Oh, and by “you” in the last paragraph, I am not referring to you personally, Siggy; I am using (poorly) the generic “you”.
@Larry,
I appreciate the critique. And I would agree my summary was lazy here–I mean, I only wrote a paragraph about it, and I did so fairly quickly. You don’t need to pull that punch.
I think this is a conversation that people have been having since Bernie Sanders’ campaign and subsequent failure in the primaries. Since Bernie Sanders was more of a socialist (kind of), while Clinton appealed more to POC voters, lots of Bernie supporters were/are arguing that economic issues were just more important than “identity politics”. They’re basically advocating that Democrats drop any emphasis on race, gender, muslims, and LGBT people. And I don’t agree with that at all, even though I think economic class is pretty damn important.
That may just be me reacting to the 90% crap of socialists, but it’s obviously important for people to speak up about if they want to keep “identity politics” on the Democrats’ agenda.
I think this is you reacting not even to the 90 percent crap of Sanders’ supporters, but to what was at best a fringe element of his campaign and at worst Clinton propaganda.
I haven’t seen Sanders’ say anything even remotely like dropping any emphasis on race, but Clinton did say,
This seems like a pretty direct statement trying to shut down any emphasis on economics, and it’s hard to claim that Clinton herself is part of the standard 90% of centrist crap.
The proviso in the middle is patent BS. We already know the big banks deserve way more than being broken up.
@Larry,
It’s a fringe element of Sanders supporters that seems to be well-represented among my friends. More well-represented than, say, TERFs, and you didn’t complain about me mentioning TERFs.
It’s not clear to me that the Clinton quote you pulled is in fact a “direct statement trying to shut down any emphasis on economics”. If we reversed the quote to “If we ended racism tomorrow, would that end economic injustice?” would you say it was a direct statement trying to shut down any emphasis on race?
Maybe you need smarter friends!? ‘-) Just kidding!
That’s because I know exactly zero about TERFs. I know slightly more than zero about Sanders.
As a political campaign soundbite, I absolutely would, especially if my opponent were running on a platform of ending racial injustice. And if Sanders or an official Sanders’ spokesperson said that, I would hold Sanders to account. It’s terrible.
A better soundbite is, “Ending racism is important. A huge component of racism is economic injustice. It’s not the whole project, but ending economic injustice will help reverse some of the effects of racism.”
Oh! I see what you did there! Nice!
That’s fair enough.
Sanders did in fact make public comments back in November criticizing democrats’ focus on “identity politics”, which seems to be a euphemism for race and gender. (Citation. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any articles which provided a direct quote.) I think I would interpret his comments more charitably, but as a political soundbite a looser interpretation may be warranted. I have evidence (which I will share at a later date) that “identity politics” became more popular after his statement. And regardless of what Sanders meant by it, its later usage is less than benign.
Although, I think I may have been unfair in attributing this to communism/Marxism/socialism. As you are well aware, Sanders is hardly a socialist, and the meme of “identity politics” has reach well beyond democratic socialists.
Yeah. I don’t even know what “identity politics” actually means. If Sanders meant what he seems to mean in the article you cite, i.e. “It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!'” then I agree with him: I’m not going to vote for a woman just because she’s a woman.
More to the point, we have a lot of evidence that Clinton probably doesn’t even understand economic injustice; I don’t think she considers economics to be a matter of justice in the first place, any more than people having differing heights or IQ scores is by itself a matter of justice.
And we have a lot of evidence that Sanders is not a racist, and has indeed given fair attention to racial injustice. So I think the implication that Clinton doesn’t care about economic injustice is warranted; the implication that Sanders doesn’t care about racism seems dishonest.
Of course, dishonesty in politics is hardly a modern innovation.