My November column for The Freethinker is out.
It asks a question.
What do we do with the thought that some things are more important than others? Specifically, how do we deal with the awareness that some human problems are more urgent and pressing than others? How do we sort them, how do we rank them, how do we decide which ones we should pay most attention to?
I talk about the variety of things I discuss on my blog (hey that’s right here) and say that I don’t really know how to rank them, and don’t particularly want to.
I understand the thinking behind good-faith efforts to rank degrees of misery. There is such a thing as being spoiled, and failing to realize the magnitude of one’s good fortune and prosperity. There’s such a thing as shouting the house down about a tiny wrong done to oneself while ignoring massive injustices done to other people. There’s the fact that some of us prosper off the exploitation of others, and that we don’t do enough to find out about it and try to do something about it. There’s all of that and more. And yet – broadly speaking, I don’t think people should be chivvied or scolded for talking about, say, sexual harassment in the workplace when they could be talking about child marriage in Bangladesh.
Or vice versa.
So… as long as I’m doing something good, you don’t mind much what it is? And what I ignore, the while?
Seems reasonable…
Nor should people be scolded for worrying about false accusations of rape when the underreporting of rape is a bigger problem.
There is no such thing as “we”. There is “me” and there is “you” and there is “him” and “her”.
Each individual ranks their priorities…and for that person, that’s the correct ranking. Criticizing someone for focusing on their personal concerns and ignoring someone else’s personal concerns is an authoritarian position. And most of us around here don’t “do” authoritarian.
Or, to put it another way…
— Richard Dawkins.
md @ 2 – No, wrong. That’s not an example of “worry about this instead of that because this is worse than that.” It’s an example of something else…something quite unsavory.
The danger of making a vague and sweeping statement like this as a proxy for the specific argument you really want to make (but which you probably know won’t be well received) is that you often end up saying something stupid or horrible.
Take this statement to its logical extremes and see how it holds up. Is it okay if someone cares more about their right to harass women than they care about the women being harassed? Is it okay if someone cares more about their personal “right” to say whatever they want, on whatever platform they want, than they care about the damage their words are causing? Should these people be immune to any criticism? (And moreover, what if my “priority” is to criticize people who make horrible comments? If I’m criticized for that, wouldn’t my critic be “authoritarian?”)
These are obvious implications of your statement, and they are obviously horrible. So either you didn’t think very long about what you said, and what you said was stupid; or you fully realize the implications of what you said, and what you said was horrible. Either way, I wholeheartedly disagree with your post and I highly encourage everyone else to join me in disagreement.
The flip side of this is that we are allowed, and able, to criticize those, who like md@2, have fucked up ‘priorities’. 😀
Obviously the right of the fist to swing about willy-nilly musty be circumscribed by the right of the nose not to get pummeled. There’s nothing remotely authoritarian about scolding the fist. Moreover, we can bring up the Categorical Imperative as a general yardstick — by way of a shorthand for it: what if everybody was just as big an asshole as you (the theoretical “you”, not Ms. Benson)? So I think criticizing excessively selfish thoughts, words, and behaviors is entirely fairplay. Fuck personal priorities. I mean, hell, that’s what raising a decent child is all about, teaching them the difference between their desires and the interplay of their desires with the rest of the world. The Terrible Twos (also known as Libertarianism) are the child learning to deal with that concept.
Id like to respond to you Ophelia, but I find this statement unclear. Could you be a bit more precise with the pronouns? A lot of “that’s this that that It’s else” and I get lost. No snark intended.
invivoMark @ 5 – You seem to have changed Kevin Kehres’s claim about “concerns” into one about “rights” – and thus gone off the rails.
I do not think that I have. If one is selfishly more concerned about one’s ability to say or do things without consequence than they are about the impact of those words or actions on others, then that person has bad priorities. I do not think that it is “authoritarian” to criticize such a person for having bad priorities.
This point regards a ranking of concerns, as Kevin Kehres was discussing, and not a ranking of rights. I apologize if I was not clear in my post.
Ok, but then that’s not what we’re talking about. I think it’s pretty clear from the context that we’re not talking about being “selfishly more concerned about one’s ability to say or do things without consequence.” That’s a change of subject.
Okay, I may have misunderstood the context. Sorry.