[FRIAM] Talent and Moral Luck - Steelman attempt

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Steve, 

 

Well, when good threads are bent, you and I will bend them. 

 

Let me complete my thought:  There are two kinds of feminism here, right?  [Merle, please be kind.]  One claims that women are not different, and therefore should be treated equally.  The other claims that women are or may be different but that males’ and females’ natures are to be valued equally.  I have always leaned toward this sort of feminism.  But I see now that, insofar as it captures every woman I meet in a stereotype, this sort of feminism is itself sexist.  Every time I meet a woman, I engage in the following abductive-deductive logic: 

 

              This person is wearing a skirt (say) and has long hair (say). 

              This person is probably a woman.

              Women are less likely to be aggressive A-holes than men,

              Therefore, I (probably) can relax around this person. 

 

There is no escaping the  sexism of this logic.  

 

I listen every week to a podcast, Strict Scrutiny, which begins with the aphorism:

 

I ask no special favor for my sex; I ask only that you take your feet off our necks

 

I was raised near the end of a rural road during WWII.  My only chum, from about 1 year to adolescence was a girl.  After the War, my parents moved to Boston.  Before we were separated, we had a long chat about gender, she and I, and agreed, sadly, that I was lucky to be a guy. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2021 10:24 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Talent and Moral Luck - Steelman attempt

 





nst> Sorry.  You missed my point.  It was—YPTE—introspective.  I was noticing that I could not believe that a world without women was dreary without being a sexist.  

 

nst> Probably not that interesting a thought if one is under 50, or 60, or 70, or perhaps even 80  

and I submit to all that the main point of the storyline is the sorry/not-sorry (unintended/unexpected/yet-predictable) consequences of using violence (one of the most egregious types of levers).  

The "dreariness" of a world without women would seem to be eclipsed by the personal grief of *virtually* every male on the planet losing his wife/mother/daughters/sisters/female-friends overnight (in the personal) and the abrupt if delayed (by a remaining lifespan) existential grief of the end of a spectacular (if clearly flawed, as demonstrated by the central theme) species.   Maybe a (very few?) fully psychotic misogynists found it a pleasing condition (in which case I "blame the Mother" ;^) )

Unlike most post-apocalyptic storytelling, the misery is not (overtly) miserable health crises (nuclear holocaust) or marauding bands (though they did feature) or competition for exhausting resources, or retreating from an angry/disappointed "mother earth", but rather a simple but profound "absence" and incontrovertable "end of humanity", leaving the men of the world to contemplate (or not) how they treated women before they all went away.

<blatant Moralizing>

  If Marcus' nihilist view that "it is all levers" is more true than not, it explains why this grand experiment of "civilization" seems to be collapsing into a cesspool of it's own making, under it's own weight.  Or it's own hubris.  Or under the self-perpetuating seduction of vengeance and retribution: (don't click if you hate poetry)  The People of the Other Village - Thomas Lux  <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48485/the-people-of-the-other-village> 

My parents taught me (mostly by example) that punishment of children was at best a necessary last resort, resulting from and reflecting upon a failure of good parenting leading up to the need for acute correction.  They were at least a *little* more direct/vocal about the same principle in public life, that our criminal justice system *only* existed, with it's myriad attempts at exacting justice without revenge and finding clever forms of "punitive retribution" to at least appear like "natural consequences" (not a term in parenting vocabulary at that time quite yet, but practiced by my parents and a few others I knew).   

Our current "Lord of the Flies" scene in DC (and across the country) may require all kinds of exacted punishment to re-align elements of society to where we can live together in relative peace, but to not acknowledge that the mere entertainment of the likes of Donald Trump as a national leader represents an abject failure of our culture to "make sense".   The calls for removal/impeachment/censure/disbarment are all reasonable triage actions to minimize continued damage, even if they are in many ways "too little too late".   But I am saddened as I hear a great deal of the rhetoric on the topic armatured around *retribution* and *vengeance*...

Self-Righteously yours, 

- Steve

 

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