nonfiction
Kathryn Paige Harden, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality: Interesting though perhaps not fully convincing argument for liberals caring about DNA. Key point: existing research, largely carried out on white people, shows that genetic inheritance can explain about as much divergence in educational outcomes and perhaps even economic mobility as class can among otherwise similarly situated white people. What we don’t know, and what Harden argues we should study, is how this works for humanity in general, so that we can identify measures that can improve things for the worst-off in the genetic lottery, in Rawlsian fashion. Important sub-arguments: explaining individual variance within a population may often have nothing to do with explaining variance among populations; for example, in the US, being foreign-born is highly correlated with not being literate in English, but the states with the highest percentages of foreign-born residents also have the highest rates of English literacy, because immigrants tend to settle in states with high literacy, so knowing that there are a lot of foreign-born people in a state has the opposite relation to state literacy levels that you’d expect if you thought that individual stats predicted population-level stats. And discrimination can account for a lot of variation-when people with dark skin are denied educational and employment opportunities, the genes for dark skin will be correlated with bad outcomes, but not because they’re “genetic.” (Apparently research suggests that, until recently, genetic variation accounted for a lot less of the variation in white women’s educational attainment than white men’s, because opportunities were too limited for genetics to play much of a role.) So even if we explain a fair amount of variation among American whites (who, because of US racial categorizations, generally do have almost all European ancestry) with genetic variation, that doesn’t mean that it will explain variation among groups.
Likewise, causes can be genetic but solutions can be non-genetic: My myopia is largely genetic, even if aggravated by years of indoor reading, but my glasses correct both the genetic and behavioral parts of that. A specific genetic error causes PKU, which can permanently harm people who have it, but the treatment is not gene therapy but careful dietary management. Thus, Harden argues, a just society is one that gives to each person what they need to succeed under the conditions in which they find themselves, including whatever genes they inherited. Harden doesn’t really address what happens when the dominant group finds that project too difficult and prefers subordination instead, but I don’t think a geneticist could solve that one. The ultimate question is whether we'd do anything differently if we thought that genetic variation "explained" some part of intergroup differences, but since I agree that justice requires the answer "no," the real point of work like this is explaining to racists that they misunderstand science.
Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World: America’s foreign policy supported dictators and mass repression, but what did that really mean? Bevins recounts how it worked in Indonesia, including funding military coups, supplying right-wing rebels with weapons, and cutting off trade and aid to governments deemed insufficiently anticommunist. And he traces how the Indonesian model of mass executions of Communists, or those considered Communist (one telling quote from an American involved in these programs explains that people could be Communist without believing that they were), spread through Asia, Latin America, and South America, mutating from political extermination to ethnic genocide in some cases. The spread was encouraged by right-wing groups within the affected countries as well as by American funders; it was deliberate; and its effects are far from over.
Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Fascinating, challenging work of feminist philosophy. On intersectionality: a movement “that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of colour, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.” In her discussion of sex under patriarchy, she posits that law might just be the wrong tool to deal with many kinds of bad sex produced under patriarchy (e.g., sex that men get women to affirmatively consent to but that they don’t actually want).
She discusses her students’ openness to earlier feminist critiques of pornography, since they grew up with the awful misogynistic stuff readily available. “Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he first wanted it, or didn’t want it, in front of a screen. And almost every woman in the class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been.” But law is not a good tool for dealing with the consequences; the UK prohibits porn from featuring spanking, watersports, ageplay, physical restraint, humiliation, female ejaculation, facesitting, and fisting as well as several other things, including “penetration by any object ‘associated with violence.’” As she asks: “Does a man’s penis count? Presumably not.” The UK prohibits depicting female ejaculation, “an act that is emblematic of women’s pleasure,” as well as things like facesitting associated with femdom porn, but leaves unregulated basic male-focused porn. “But the whole point of the feminist critiques of porn was to disrupt the logic of the mainstream: to suggest that what turns most people on is not thereby OK.” Her students don’t want further legal regulation of porn, but not because they were free speech absolutists; rather they recognized that laws would be used against the marginalized (what she calls a “sex positivity of fear,” motivated by fear of authoritarian alternatives). Relatedly, she asks, “is the fact that there is relatively little porn fetishising Native American, Aboriginal or Dalit women evidence that they are not oppressed? … Anti-porn feminists are too confident in their assumption that images of sexual and racial domination on screen can do nothing but exacerbate sexual and racial domination off the screen.”
She also discusses the extent to which it is possible to critique individual sexual desires without suppressing sexual minorities-“no fats no fems no Asians” is individual, but also political and cultural. There are no easy answers in her discussion; when she talks about Asian women who prefer to date non-Asian men, she notes, “[s]ometimes when we say that Asian men remind us of our cousins, we are saying: we know too much about how these boys and men are raised.”
There’s also an interesting essay about prohibitions on student-teacher sex as implementing not primarily feminist principles but pedagogical ones: If the very real erotics of education are diverted to physical sex, then students-primarily women-lose important educational opportunities. The proper object of students’ erotic energies is not the professor, but what he represents: “knowledge, truth, understanding.” Students want to have the professor’s capacity to understand, “not just the pleasure of watching him exercise that capacity,” or maybe they aren’t sure whether they want to be like him or have him; in that case, it’s very easy for the teacher to steer inchoate desire in the anti-pedagogical direction, especially given “the way that women are socialised to interpret their feelings about men they admire.” Not having sex with students isn’t the same thing as treating them like children.
There’s also a great essay about anti-prostitution campaigns. She’s against abolitionism because she’s most interested in improving conditions for women. Criminalization leads to unchecked violence against sex workers by johns and the police; legalization/regulation benefits men but still excludes women from being primary beneficiaries and leaves a subset of sex workers who can’t meet the legal requirements criminalized. And making buying but not selling sex illegal leads johns to demand greater privacy and thus impose greater risks. Thus, none of these regimes make sex workers, as a class, better off. She argues that abolitionists want to punish men who buy sex “as individuals, but also as stand-ins for all violent men,” and that this isn’t worth making life worse for sex workers. Abolitionists conceive of this as a necessary step, but she doesn’t believe that criminalization of any kind genuinely gets us closer to a world without sex work, any more than banning abortion decreases abortions.
Feminist policymaking has many of these wicked problems: mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence “reduced the amount of violence perpetrated by employed white men while increasing the amount of violence perpetrated by unemployed black men,” but poor abused women are not given the option of having the state provide employment to their male partners, only of having them locked up. She’s generally anti-punishment because “once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will mow down.” I’m personally skeptical that it’s truly impossible to make distinctions, but I take the point that feminists should be realists about who’s going to jail. More generally, she argues, there “is no settling in advance on a political programme that is immune to co-option …. You can only see what happens, then plot your next move.”
The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence, eds. Philip Dwyer & Mark Micale:Lots of essays critiquing Steven Pinker’s argument that things are generally getting better in terms of human violence, some more successful than others. (If you count violence against the environment, for example, matters look different, or emotional violence-but I might actually not want to count the latter.) Still, interesting points about how violence varies across cultures; how Pinker way overstates the physical violence of prehistorical and medieval periods; and other relevant considerations. For example, comparing homicide rates to those in the medieval era in which there were no antibiotics and no understanding of things like sudden infant death syndrome, for which mothers were often blamed, does not make a lot of sense as a measure of relative rates of violence.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Likewise, causes can be genetic but solutions can be non-genetic: My myopia is largely genetic, even if aggravated by years of indoor reading, but my glasses correct both the genetic and behavioral parts of that. A specific genetic error causes PKU, which can permanently harm people who have it, but the treatment is not gene therapy but careful dietary management. Thus, Harden argues, a just society is one that gives to each person what they need to succeed under the conditions in which they find themselves, including whatever genes they inherited. Harden doesn’t really address what happens when the dominant group finds that project too difficult and prefers subordination instead, but I don’t think a geneticist could solve that one. The ultimate question is whether we'd do anything differently if we thought that genetic variation "explained" some part of intergroup differences, but since I agree that justice requires the answer "no," the real point of work like this is explaining to racists that they misunderstand science.
Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World: America’s foreign policy supported dictators and mass repression, but what did that really mean? Bevins recounts how it worked in Indonesia, including funding military coups, supplying right-wing rebels with weapons, and cutting off trade and aid to governments deemed insufficiently anticommunist. And he traces how the Indonesian model of mass executions of Communists, or those considered Communist (one telling quote from an American involved in these programs explains that people could be Communist without believing that they were), spread through Asia, Latin America, and South America, mutating from political extermination to ethnic genocide in some cases. The spread was encouraged by right-wing groups within the affected countries as well as by American funders; it was deliberate; and its effects are far from over.
Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Fascinating, challenging work of feminist philosophy. On intersectionality: a movement “that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of colour, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.” In her discussion of sex under patriarchy, she posits that law might just be the wrong tool to deal with many kinds of bad sex produced under patriarchy (e.g., sex that men get women to affirmatively consent to but that they don’t actually want).
She discusses her students’ openness to earlier feminist critiques of pornography, since they grew up with the awful misogynistic stuff readily available. “Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he first wanted it, or didn’t want it, in front of a screen. And almost every woman in the class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been.” But law is not a good tool for dealing with the consequences; the UK prohibits porn from featuring spanking, watersports, ageplay, physical restraint, humiliation, female ejaculation, facesitting, and fisting as well as several other things, including “penetration by any object ‘associated with violence.’” As she asks: “Does a man’s penis count? Presumably not.” The UK prohibits depicting female ejaculation, “an act that is emblematic of women’s pleasure,” as well as things like facesitting associated with femdom porn, but leaves unregulated basic male-focused porn. “But the whole point of the feminist critiques of porn was to disrupt the logic of the mainstream: to suggest that what turns most people on is not thereby OK.” Her students don’t want further legal regulation of porn, but not because they were free speech absolutists; rather they recognized that laws would be used against the marginalized (what she calls a “sex positivity of fear,” motivated by fear of authoritarian alternatives). Relatedly, she asks, “is the fact that there is relatively little porn fetishising Native American, Aboriginal or Dalit women evidence that they are not oppressed? … Anti-porn feminists are too confident in their assumption that images of sexual and racial domination on screen can do nothing but exacerbate sexual and racial domination off the screen.”
She also discusses the extent to which it is possible to critique individual sexual desires without suppressing sexual minorities-“no fats no fems no Asians” is individual, but also political and cultural. There are no easy answers in her discussion; when she talks about Asian women who prefer to date non-Asian men, she notes, “[s]ometimes when we say that Asian men remind us of our cousins, we are saying: we know too much about how these boys and men are raised.”
There’s also an interesting essay about prohibitions on student-teacher sex as implementing not primarily feminist principles but pedagogical ones: If the very real erotics of education are diverted to physical sex, then students-primarily women-lose important educational opportunities. The proper object of students’ erotic energies is not the professor, but what he represents: “knowledge, truth, understanding.” Students want to have the professor’s capacity to understand, “not just the pleasure of watching him exercise that capacity,” or maybe they aren’t sure whether they want to be like him or have him; in that case, it’s very easy for the teacher to steer inchoate desire in the anti-pedagogical direction, especially given “the way that women are socialised to interpret their feelings about men they admire.” Not having sex with students isn’t the same thing as treating them like children.
There’s also a great essay about anti-prostitution campaigns. She’s against abolitionism because she’s most interested in improving conditions for women. Criminalization leads to unchecked violence against sex workers by johns and the police; legalization/regulation benefits men but still excludes women from being primary beneficiaries and leaves a subset of sex workers who can’t meet the legal requirements criminalized. And making buying but not selling sex illegal leads johns to demand greater privacy and thus impose greater risks. Thus, none of these regimes make sex workers, as a class, better off. She argues that abolitionists want to punish men who buy sex “as individuals, but also as stand-ins for all violent men,” and that this isn’t worth making life worse for sex workers. Abolitionists conceive of this as a necessary step, but she doesn’t believe that criminalization of any kind genuinely gets us closer to a world without sex work, any more than banning abortion decreases abortions.
Feminist policymaking has many of these wicked problems: mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence “reduced the amount of violence perpetrated by employed white men while increasing the amount of violence perpetrated by unemployed black men,” but poor abused women are not given the option of having the state provide employment to their male partners, only of having them locked up. She’s generally anti-punishment because “once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will mow down.” I’m personally skeptical that it’s truly impossible to make distinctions, but I take the point that feminists should be realists about who’s going to jail. More generally, she argues, there “is no settling in advance on a political programme that is immune to co-option …. You can only see what happens, then plot your next move.”
The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence, eds. Philip Dwyer & Mark Micale:Lots of essays critiquing Steven Pinker’s argument that things are generally getting better in terms of human violence, some more successful than others. (If you count violence against the environment, for example, matters look different, or emotional violence-but I might actually not want to count the latter.) Still, interesting points about how violence varies across cultures; how Pinker way overstates the physical violence of prehistorical and medieval periods; and other relevant considerations. For example, comparing homicide rates to those in the medieval era in which there were no antibiotics and no understanding of things like sudden infant death syndrome, for which mothers were often blamed, does not make a lot of sense as a measure of relative rates of violence.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.