And i also understood something from a book on Burdened Virtues by Lisa Tessman. Virtues are burdened when the agent who tries to live ethically only has painful choices. Within an oppressive system (read our society), it is not possible to live fully virtuously – all choices we make are compromises with a moral remainder. It is very difficult within the current economic system to live honoring our interconnectedness. The choices i make are not “perfect” (whatever that might mean…). I did buy some chocolate at the festival. True, it’s fair trade but cocoa production requires a lot of water and the cocoa is transported using energy that wouldn’t be used if i were satisfied with some locally grown fruit.

The spoon, fork, and chocolate are examples to highlight how our simple choices have impacts that go way beyond what is obvious. If we stop being indifferent, if we start paying attention, we quickly feel the pain of the limited impact of our choices – we’re trapped between indifference and anguish, as Lisa Tessman puts it. Overall, we need to rethink how we live, we need to figure out how to enable new choices – choices that move us beyond consumerism and the (false) idolatry of growth. Only if we step out of the current system can we heal ourselves and the planet. And that stepping out is also probably a choice that is ethically burdened…

Here is an article that covers similar ideas in more detail than this note. Hat tip to Ian.

The top ten billionaires are mostly white men. The lone woman on the list inherited her wealth. There are two men of color even though the vast majority of people on Earth are people of color. Does this reflect racism and sexism? Probably. And yet it also reflects something else: Somehow people are able to amass wealth and pass it on down their family. Is their wealth a result of oppression or (unfair) advantage? Are these just two parts of the same coin?

Then i read María Lugones’ essay on world-traveling (a PDF is here). She describes agonistic playfulness as the play as it exists in the Western world, that is, the play of “a conqueror, an imperialist.” And she explains that loving playfulness is spontaneous play without rules. She seems to assign this type of play to non-whites, though i am not clear on that. Aside from some concerns around the stereotypical assignments of play, there is another way of looking at the break-out of these play definitions. Children play lovingly before they learn that play is supposed to have rules. So, the agnostic playfulness is the play of adults who aren’t allowed to have unstructured fun. Agonistic playfulness is life-alienating. Loving playfulness is life-affirming.

I suppose we could tie these different playfulnesses to the dominant cultures. Agonistic playfulness is white. Loving playfulness is colored. What if we step back a little, though, if we step outside of the divisions that the dominant(ing) culture imposes? What if we stop thinking of the dominant(ing) culture as something white, married, wealthy, and male? Or to put it positively, what if we simply start playing lovingly no matter who we are? In other words, is it the attitude that underlies all the slicing and dicing (divide & conquer?) – that divides us along gender, racial, class, sex, and all the other dimensions of oppression – that is the problem? Is there something that the desire to create these dimensions can tell us that would allow us to counteract “all of the above” instead of trying to transform every one of these “isms”? Maybe by stepping back, we can see the leverage point that would bring down the current dominant(ing) system?

I don’t have the answers. With this post, i am starting to articulate my questions. I am aware that oppression is very real and i am not trying to deny any of the painful experiences we have had because we happen to be outside of the white-married-male norm. I also know that there is a danger of raising these questions: They might be perceived as attempts to move toward colorblingness, implicitly racist, stemming from my privilege as a white woman. However, i am not suggesting that we get rid of the dimensions of our identities. I am simply wondering if there is another dimension underneath that can help us more effectively topple the system, just like there might be a way of stepping out of 3-D to explain some of the quantum mechanics puzzles.

I am trying to raise these questions with a lot of compassion and with a desire to figure out how we can change the system. And, frankly, this desire is also fed by frustration around how little has changed despite all the work that has been done to fight racism, sexism, classism, and all the other oppressive isms.

How can we create a culture that does not do that? I think there are some useful kernels of ideas in the work around the ethics of care, especially Nel Noddings’ work. I’ll see if i can build on these ideas…

If we apply this underlying assumption to marriage, it gets really interesting! If we assume that a power imbalance that enables the violence is created by the institution, there must be a power imbalance within marriage. Clearly there is: Men have (generally speaking) power over women. If we then take the next analogous step, we get to this conclusion: Marriage as an institution creates though the intimate access clause the power imbalance between men and women that leads, at least in some cases, to the violent abuse of women within marriage. That is, marriage is an essential component of patriarchy. I am not sure if I am putting words into Card’s mouth here but this seems to be her underlying claim. To me it raises at least one question: If we abolish marriage, would patriarchy also go away?

Young identifies five faces of oppression:

• Exploitation:
  

  The injustice of exploitation consists in social processes that bring about a transfer of energies from one group to another to produce unequal distributions, and in the way in which social institutions enable a few to accumulate while they constrain main more. (53)

• Marginalization:
  

  [...] while marginalization definitely entails serious issues of distributive justice, it also involves the deprivation of cultural, practical, and institutionalized conditions for exercising capacities in a context of recognition and interaction. (55)

• Powerlessness:
  

  [...] most people in [advanced capitalist] societies do not regularly participate in making decisions that affect the conditions of their lives and actions, and in this sense most people lack significant power. (56) [...] This powerless status is perhaps best described negatively: the powerless lack the authority, status, and sense of self that professionals tend to have. (57)

• Cultural Imperialism:
  

  Cultural imperialism involves the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm. [...] Given the normality of its own cultural expressions and identity, the dominant group constructs the differences which some groups exhibit as lack and negation. (59)

• Violence:
  

  Violence is systemic because it is directed at members of a group simply because they are members of that group. [...] The oppression of violence consists not only in direct victimization, but in the daily knowledge shared by all members of oppressed groups that they are liable to violation, solely on account of their group identity. (62)

How do we determine if a group is oppressed? Obviously, different groups experience different combinations of these faces of oppression. And even the form of the oppression might differ. But “the presence of any of these five conditions is sufficient for calling a group oppressed” (64).

Are singles oppressed? Based on Young’s criteria, we are. Let’s look at each in turn. (Keep in mind, though, that this looks at singles as a group. Women who are single, for example, might face different oppressions from single men when we look at them as women as a group):

• Exploitation: Energies are transferred from singles to marrieds in the form of monetary benefits to married folks through those thousand-plus benefits the GAO counted. Marriage is also a greedy institution that sucks away energy from other relationships.
• Marginalization: Singles might be marginalized by being ignored. This is even reflected in our language: If you’re not married, you are unmarried… Although this is probably more cultural imperialism: Being married is the norm – they are not unsingle…
• Powerlessness: The way Young defined it, I don’t think singles face powerlessness (again as singles, certain single people might face it as members of other groups.)
• Cultural Imperialism: This is probably the biggest face of singles’ oppression. We are Other. Marriage is the norm. We are thus anormal, not following social rules, not littering our lives with conventional events. The stigmatization of singles probably stems largely from this oppression face.
• Violence: Young seems to use the standard definition of violence: An act that one person commits against another causing bodily harm. I agree with Mary R. Jackman who argues that this definition of violence perpetuates the status quo because the violence committed by the dominant group is hidden. So, let’s take a look at this.

In her chapter “License to Kill: Violence and Legitimacy in Expropriative Social Relations,” Mary R. Jackman defines violence much more broadly than we usually do:

Actions that inflict, threaten, or cause injury
Injuries may be corporal, psychological, material, or social
Actions may be corporal, written, or verbal (443)

One of the key differences of this definition to the standard version: It allows us to identify violence even if we cannot identify one perpetrator (or a group of thugs). BP’s oil spill is violence (it certainly caused injury!). Violence, Jackman, emphasizes does not require that injury is the primary goal of an act. In fact, only in two of the four categories of violence Jackman identifies is injury the primary goal of the act – either the goal itself (in expressive violence) or a means to reach another goal (in instrumental violence) (448). Injury is the byproduct of the other two categories of violence: Incidental violence (injury is a byproduct of working toward another goal; like profit before environmental protection) and accidental violence (injury is truly accidental) (448). The first three forms of violence – expressive, instrumental, and incidental – are used in “expropriative intergroup relations,” relations where one group takes something away from another. Young called this exploitation. These relations can be marred by violence. Note that it is crucial that we do not have to identify the one person/group or the one act that constitutes this violence, especially in the case of incidental violence! In fact, Jackman stresses that one of the insidious things about incidental violence is that it happens through so many layers of the system nobody can be blamed. It is structural violence, to adapt Young’s description; part of the system. It can only be reduced if the system is changed radically. Also, there does not need to be an intend to cause injury. Based on Jackman’s definition, what is required for actions to be called violence is for there to be injury. Having to pay proportionately more in taxes when single is a material injury. Clearly, most, if not all, violence singles face is incidental – unlike other groups who also face expressive and instrumental versions. But looking at the status of singles from Jackman’s definition of violence is eye-opening: It shows just how wrong the marriage system is.

Let me end with a quote from Jackman, which I find especially thought-provoking and disturbing. It captures the essence of the point Jackman is trying to make in this chapter: Systems with expropriative intergroup relations are fraught with violence. We are blind to this violence because of how we define “violence.” The definition thus functions as a legitimizing myth that keeps the current system in place.

Surely, it is a measure of human callousness when social actors, despite the absence of a deliberate intent to harm, fail to be deterred from a course of action by the knowledge that injuries may or will be the by-product. (447)

The chapter I read was a reprint of an article by Daniel Lehrman originally published in 1953 critiquing Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior (the link opens a PDF to the full article, which is excerpted in the chapter in Cycles of Contingency). I would like to touch on a couple of things in response to reading the chapter: The relevance of Lehrman’s critique to current approaches, especially in evolutionary psychology, and the odd reluctance to adopt systems approaches.

Lehrman provides some interesting examples from animal studies that call into question Lorenz’s claim to innate behavior. His approach lends itself to generalization in answering the question: How do we want to explain the origins of behavior? And his critique seems to echo some of the concerns with evolutionary psychology. His approach can be gleaned from his example on the pecking behavior of chicks. Lorenz attributed this behavior to innate forces: The chicks are born with the tendency to peck; it might require just a bit of maturation. Lehrman points out that research by Kuo provides an explanation based on the embryonic development of the chick. The pecking behavior can actually be traced back to movements that developed while the chick was still unhatched. Hardly innate! The main point Lehrman makes: If we claim that something is innate, we stop the scientific investigation without fully understanding the origin of the behavior. This leaves out important – and fascinating – parts of the explanation because we think we’ve answered the question. As he puts it: “the statement “It is innate” adds nothing to an understanding of the developmental process involved” (30). I think this is also the danger of genetic/evolutionary explanations: If we explain mating behavior, for example, by tracing it back to supposedly genetic origins, we ignore potentially richer explanations that capture all the influences on the development of certain behaviors. I mentioned the development of lactose tolerance in adults briefly in a comment. Lactose tolerance is genetically driven but if we stop with the gene, we would miss that the tolerance in human adults developed only after agriculture became part of our culture. And apparently, it developed independently in several places – in some places with the same genetic change in others with different. Why? Again, the “genes did it” answer misses this question. The answer might be fascinating (I don’t know if scientists have figured this out yet…). Similarly with mating behavior: Maybe monogamy is not innate but so many humans live monogamous (or at least try to), there are obviously forces at play that go beyond the innate tendency. And even with genes themselves: What triggers certain genes to become active while others don’t? This is also very important for understanding certain diseases, such as hypothyroidism, which have a genetic component. But just having a genetic predisposition is not enough. Something must trigger the gene to start acting. It is very important to realize that neither Lehrman nor DST advocate “nurture” explanations. The key is to move beyond the nature-nurture schema, which includes giving up figuring out the percentage contribution of each, but to look for explanations of behavior that integrate all influences.

Lehrman’s article was originally published in 1953. And as Timothy Johnston points out in his introduction to the article, it largely fell on deaf ears. Researchers responding to Lehrman thought he just switched sides by contributing all explanatory power for behavior to learning (aka “nurture”). He does not: Again, he advocates leaving the innate/learning dichotomy behind. It’s not either-or; it’s always both. Similar patterns of reactions to systems advocates can be found in other areas as well. Anne Fausto-Sterling has called for using systems approaches since the mid-1980s. Then again very obviously in her 2006 Bare Bones articles. She suggests that we cannot understand the development of bones if we only look at genes, for example. She identifies seven systems that influence bone development, some biological/genetic, some environmental, all interacting. It is as if nobody heeded her call and she threw up her hands and decided to do the research herself because she is now actively doing research, following her proposal (of course, she might have planned this all along and I might be reading frustration into her “Bare Bones” article but…). A similar thing seemed to have happened with system-justification theory, an approach to explaining internalized stereotypes proposed by John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji in 1994. Their follow-up article written 10-years later reads just as much as a call for using systems-justification theory as the original article. It seems like the systems approach had not taken off. Why this reluctance to adopt systems theories? Systems approaches tend to be more complicated. It’s not just genes (with a little bit of environment or culture thrown in) or ego-justification (with some group-justification added). It is an interplay of various forces that combine to develop certain behaviors and/or traits. Maybe this complication makes these theories less attractive. They seem to make a lot more sense, though, at least to me. System-justification, for example, explains the “weird” phenomenon of people acting against their own self-interest: Even lower status groups, people discriminated against, act to maintain the status quo. System-justification captures this (maintaining the status quo requires that we justify the system). Of course, explaining that behavior pulls in the other systems theory: We need to look at the interplay of cognitive biases, such as resistance to change, and cultural forces, such as pressures to maintain a system, including oppression.