2 posts tagged “the other”

So, I was a lit major for quite a while, until I discovered linguistics.  I was always chronically irritated by my lit classes because, for the most part, there was no rigor there.  People would stroll into lit classes and just sort of say whatever they wanted to say and, by and large, as long as what they were saying reflected the accepted "politically correct" view, they skated by with it, no matter how stupid or unrelated to the text.  In short, it was everything I hate, except that I like to read novels.

In the course of my literature career, I had to read Kate Chopin's The Awakening several times.  It's an alright novel, though I am of the opinion that it is famous mostly because its writer was a woman.  It's certainly not a bad book, but I'd rather read Carson McCullers any day.

But what really irritated during all those tedious class discussions is that people consider this a "feminist" book and the main character--I hesitate to say "protagonist" because I find her not very sympathetic--a sort of heroine.  I don't see it.  The woman isn't oppressed; she's bored.  There's a difference.

It's been a while since I read it, but let me see if I recall the details.  She is married to a reasonably wealthy man.  She has "octoroon" nannies for her kids--weren't they octoroon, or maybe quadroon?  (What a great word!  I want to be an octoroon!)  She doesn't have to work at anything, really, since she doesn't have to make money, take care of her kids, do her own housework, cook their meals or any of it.  Her husband even goes so far as to permit her an affair.  Sooooo, she's oppressed how exactly?  Oppressed by ennui, no doubt, but there is a good reason why that is a reflexive verb in French--she is boring herself. 

I was just reading something, maybe on Salon, that again referred to this damn novel as a feminist novel.  Feck!  If that is a feminist novel, making some huge statement about bored upper-class women, then little wonder I never seem to find myself having anything in common with "feminism."  Meh.  I'm crying a river for bored ladies everywhere.

Incidentally, since we're talking about my infamous career as a literature major, there are two things worth pointing out.  The first is that in a heated discussion about WEB DuBois I was, in fact, labeled a "racist" by my (very white) professor and the majority of the class, virtually none of whom had read the text.  I would later be labeled a "racist" by all the white people in my Harlem Renaissance class but NOT the African-American professor who actually knew what I was talking about and saw my point, even if she didn't 100% agree.  Besides, WEB DuBois was totally a tool of the Japanese imperalists.  Booker T Washington FTW!

The second is that I did finally find some rigorous lit classes.  Freudian interpretation was *extremely* rigorous and I worked my ass off for that class, and then the Literature of American Imperialism seminar was also very good and rigorous although my viewpoint that I really didn't care whether every novel had serious female characters and was fully comfortable with some novels being focused on men--we were talking about Heart of Darkness at the time--was scoffed at because I guess every story needs great female characters even if it would be a detriment to the plot line or realism or whatever.  Are there enough good female characters in the canon?  No.  Does Heart of Darkness need one or more?  No.  Does it offend me to read novels that are all about men doing manly things?  No.  Better than reading novels that have nothing to say except that rich housewives are bored.

Anyway, by the time I found a couple of professors who did not accept this kind of laziness and made students actually consider what they were saying, I was already lost to linguistics.  Oddly, my linguistics professors could talk about literature more competently than some of my literature professors.  The clear difference was that in linguistics, if you hadn't read the text, you couldn't really bullshit your way through it (although some people certainly tried) and we talked about data and evidence and syntagms.  It was awesome.  And we managed to get through entire semesters without anyone being labeled a racist or a misogynist, which I found admirable. 

I think I mentioned once before here that I gave a paper at a conference that the audience entirely failed to understand.  It was the paper I wrote for Literature of American Imperialism, and it wouldn't have been so difficult if the audience--mostly lit majors with a few creative writing majors just to throw everyone's game off--were accustomed to rigorous thinking.  What I was saying was definitely not the approved perspective on the politics of The Other, but I could have been talking about why monkeys like potato chips for all they knew. 

Rigor, people!  I want more rigor!  Not stories about upper-class ladies who are bored!  I prefer the women who, like, do stuff.  Stories about bored people are usually, prima facie, not very interesting.  Stories about chicks who kick ass, now that is a different kettle of fish altogether.  But most of all, if you're going to claim something as "feminist" at least make that claim reasonably defensible.  OK?

I've had the Mormons* over a few times now--you know, the earnest young men in suits who come around trying to convert you, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, only Mormon instead.  T thought I should have shooed them off a long time ago, but I like having company.  They've been putting my lack of faith to the test, and it's been interesting.

No, no, I'm not converting, not at all, but it was interesting trying to explain to people who clearly have a lot of faith in God what it means to have none at all and how you could come to be like that (to be honest, I don't know how I came to be like this--I just am and always have been, though certainly living with an archaeologist and a physical anthropologist has not helped). 

Anyway, it got me to thinking about atheism.  I've been an atheist as long as I can remember, but for me it means exactly what it says--a lack of belief.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It has never meant to me that I'm absolutely dead certain that no god exists or has ever existed.  It does not profess some alternate belief.  It does not define me or anything about me.  It only means I don't believe in God or any other god (and, OK, it also means that when confronted by that heinous song, "Our God is an Awesome God" I am prompted, unlike Christians, to ponder whether any of the other gods implied by the phrasing are more awesome or at least equally awesome--the song does not rule out such a possibility, which I think would really piss the Old Testament God off a lot.  Ahem.)

The point is that I was always somewhat confounded by the accusations occasionally hurled by Christians that atheism is a religion, too.  But looking around at other atheists, including but by no means limited to the Atheist group on Vox, I can kind of see their point.

Atheists, let me ask you this:  Whence the fucking moral superiority?  I understand you think people who believe are stupid and intellectually inferior because they have just not seen the light understood the wonders of science as deeply as you have.  Also, you think "religion kills" which is akin to saying "guns kill" or "silver hammers kill"--the point is that none of those things kill in the absence of people (and specifically, people named Maxwell). 

Let's start there.  The first point is obviously falsifiable.  Stupidity has plenty to go around and it does not spare those who do not believe in God.  Some of the smartest people I've ever known have been religious.  The rest of the smartest people I've ever known haven't been.  There has been no discernible difference in quantity or quality of intelligence between the two groups.  It seems to be true that more educated populations tend to be less religious, but that doesn't say anything about the intelligence of any given individuals, and even in less religious societies you will find intellectuals who believe in God. 

As to the second point, "religion" does not kill and cannot, being a concept rather than a concrete thing.  Certainly, all manner of craziness and slaughter has been perpetrated in the name of religion.  On the other hand, there has been all kinds of craziness and slaughter perpetrated by humans that had nothing to do with religion or had to do with religion in name only.  The current quagmire in Iraq would be a case in point, I believe.

Furthermore, just as we insist that you cannot prove the existence of God (and you can't--if St. Thomas Aquinas failed, if Descartes failed, then so, surely, will you), neither can we prove the nonexistence of God.  It is generally held to be logically impossible to prove nonexistence, but even if this were not the case--if nonexistence of a thing can be proven--and even if we thought we had proved that the Judeo-Christian God does not exist, this does not demonstrate that no other god or gods exist, and so the work of disproving "god" is not ever really going to be done, even if it were theoretically possible (with an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters...). 

There are good arguments that gods generally and God specifically are inventions of the human mind.  Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Julian Jaynes put forth a whole slew of direct and indirect arguments that this is so, enough that I find their logic compelling.  It is worth noting two things about that, though.  The first is that I was already a person lacking faith.  The second is that the fact that we invented god/God does not mean God didn't or doesn't exist.  Hear me out.

If the notion of "god" is a product of human imagination, this would have to mean that no god exists independently of humans, that the gods we usually think of, and certainly God as written in the Bible, do not exist in the absence of human consciousness.  But to say that something cannot exist if it is the mere product of our minds is, again, patently false.  We would have to say, then, that music does not exist, that language is not real, that consciousness itself is nothing.  It's true that there are differences between language and God or music and God, yes, but there are also similarities (not the way Christians think of God, as a being who created us and exists completely independently of us, no, but in the way that I think gods came to be).

To me, faith is a beautiful thing and belief in God is not essentially less worthwhile than sincere appreciation of music or linguistic art.  That's not to say that I believe in God or any god.  I don't.  While I do appreciate music and especially linguistic art, my faith component is missing.  I look to other sources to explain the same things that people who believe explain via gods (or I just don't explain them and let things be all cool and mysterious), but I don't think this makes me a better or smarter person than someone who has the faith that I don't.

Back in the grad school days, when I was taking a lit seminar called The Literature of American Imperialism (one of the best classes I ever took, by the way), I wrote for my seminar paper an essay about otherness.  Obviously, the class was permeated with opportunities to curse Privileged Dead White Men--it was an excellent survey of the peculiar sorts of horror that colonialism and even just the imperialist attitude can perpetrate.  "Other" was a term that got tossed around a lot, too, and in the wrong hands even such a simple word takes on an air of jargon, but generally speaking, it means someone who is not like you, but particularly someone who is oppressed in some way by you and people of your ilk.  The idea in such seminars is that the Other who was once objectified and silenced is now given space and respect and individuality and Thou-ness (to borrow somewhat obnoxiously from Buber). 

But apparently that meant that the former objectifier--the aforementioned Privileged Dead White Man--became the objectified, the vilified, the silenced.  Now I am not so silly as to have tried to argue that the Dead White Man was right in his opinions and actions--certainly not--but I was naive enough to venture the argument, just occasionally, that these Dead White Guys were Other to us now.  Even though we're white (we all were in that seminar, go figure) and think we are therefore similar, we are actually not.  Not only has the elapsed time made us think much differently than they did, the changes in religion vs secularism, changes in science and education about the world, et cetera, have made us so different from those guys (OK, sure, not the guys who perpetrated the Vietnam War, but from Columbus and Cortez?  Uh, yes) as to make them unknown and Other to us.  We think, because of our skin color, that we know them, but we don't and if we silence them, we never will--and that means not understanding our own history as well as the histories of the Others (because those histories are intertwined, see?).

It was a long essay, and I'm oversimplifying here (the actual essay was apparently so complicated, and so infused with Heidegger, that when I presented it at a conference, some of the audience confessed to me that they hadn't understood it at all--okayyyyyyyy), but the point is that it's become commonplace for atheists to denounce Christians as stupid bigots, and maybe you think that since they are the majority there can be no serious bigotry against them (which would mean you don't believe in "reverse racism" and so forth either, probably).  But I say that that is wrong--wrong and immoral.  The fact is that since everyone is Other to you in some way, everyone deserves identical respect as an individual and an equal, fair hearing.  Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what college it went to.  And I'm having no more of it.

Obviously, my general contempt for humans remains.  Sure, I can think we all suck equally and still provide everyone, no matter their race or creed, an equal opportunity to suck.  We suck as a species, and the general self-righteous bigotry from all sides just kind of supports that thesis.  A few days ago I was sad about William Buckley's death because I had a lot of respect and admiration for him, even though we obviously disagreed about many, many things.  Doesn't matter, see?  It isn't only the people who are like you already who are worth listening to.

*By the by, is anyone else surprised to hear that Mormons and Jews each constitute approximately 1.6 percent of the US population?  I would have thought there were many more Jews than that and certainly more than Mormons, but apparently it is the case. 

**A lot of this post probably needs further development to make it really coherent and sound.  But it's very late, and I'm getting tired, so it will have to wait.  No doubt my brilliant commenters will have things to add, too, that I never even thought of.  I hope so.  The era of my moderation is still in its infancy, and it could use some help growing up.