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For some time now, I've been interested in history and philosophy and culture. One thing I've found particularly fascinating has been the perspectives that the founders of aristocracies and elites have had towards life, and their view of themselves, along with the self-image which non-Christian cultures have had. Most interesting is their view of human beings, if simply for the way it differs so wildly when compared with our own times'.
One thing which I've noticed in modern discourse about pretty much everything - and discourse includes our forum discussions - has been that many people are judged for their emotions and not their actions. That is, it is often thought, "If you feel x, you are an evil person, to be morally condemned." Another thing I've noticed, specially among feminists, is that many among them behave as if the mind is everything, the body nothing, in the sense that men are expected to judge - from the moment of first sight - a woman's worth to him purely on the basis of her personality/other mental stuff, instead of her looks/other physical assets.
Most of the time, the naturalistic fallacy is invoked to refute any opposition to these stances, by saying that "is" and "ought" are two totally different things, and ought not be conflated. The problem does not arise there. The problem arises when the discussion takes the bizarre turn of falling into the anti-naturalistic fallacy, where "is" and "ought" are separated by such a large gulf that natural facts are held to have no bearing whatsoever on moral judgements.
I've thought about this a little, and I've come to the conclusion that these two problems are inter-related, in the sense that they spring from the same view of man, a view which is still so ingrained in Western culture that it is almost undetectable unless you have a very good nose for bad odours.
The first point:
The dualist view of man - and I'm not talking about philosophical dualism, but culpability/moral dualism - was probably a legacy of Christianity. Under this view, moral judgements are made completely in the mind, and only by a process of free-willed decision-making by some agent who is morally culpable. Under this view, it is the mind/thinking and judging organ which constitutes the "person" or "individual" as we know it. The body is not much more than some sort of locomotor device for this "person", and more often than not a source of anti-moral impulses which the moral agent must then fight against in order to remain morally unblemished.
What happens after that is that people are also judged on the basis of their impulses. If you look at the list of the Christian seven deadly sins, you will notice that many of them aren't actually actions which anyone can choose to perform or not, they're physiological responses. Pride, lust, jealousy are all pre-programmed emotions, not something which a person usually chooses to invoke. But still, they are made a basis for a moral judgement passed on that person. Now this leads to a lot of unnecessary guilt, which is probably what keeps people bound in the religion itself - they need some way to absolve themselves. Again, this is a generalisation, not necessarily applicable to every adherent, so please take it as such.
Another thing this leads to is that the culture produced by such a world-view tends to teach the individual to distrust and sometimes despise their instincts, because they are seen as somehow "evil". This leads to all sorts of really undesirable consequences, because everyone is repressed in some way or the other. It also leads to a culture of weakness, because most of man's instincts fundamentally tend towards strength. It also leads to a glorification of weakness and a distrust of strong people, in all forms. For instance, it is this culture which is responsible for the anti-intellectualism which has been an ever-present threat to Western society, and has manifested itself in various ways throughout history in the Western world. The suppression of dissent, the burning of midwives as witches, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo and Copernicus, all of these were symptoms of the fear that this culture of weakness felt towards anyone who knew more, and was thus stronger intellectually.
Though most feminists claim that they have liberated themselves from this judgementalism, I notice that they have inherited the same underlying world-view, and it manifests itself in most discussions, here and elsewhere. It usually takes the form of the anti-naturalistic fallacy, when a feminist claims that women's' bodies should have no effect on how they are treated, everything should be based purely on personality/the mind, or "who they are". Well, the problem is, they're using the same definition of "who a person is" as the Christians were doing, and with that comes all the baggage which they were trying to discard in the first place!
I think this is one of the reasons why attitudes towards what constitutes "liberated" behaviour are so widely dispersed across the feminist spectrum. There are the pro-porn feminists, and there are the rabidly anti-porn feminists. There are the pro- and anti-promiscuity feminists. There are the pro- and anti-marriage feminists. The conflict, I think, stems from an attempt to reject a world-view seen as wrong while still holding part of that world-view themselves. So feminists in countries where beauty pageants are frowned upon see them as liberating, whereas many feminists in the more culturally liberal countries see them as degrading and objectifying. This fundamental contradiction in the world-view, this fundamental fallacy, expresses itself in too many ways to count, and in large part contributes to the image of feminism as inconsistent.
The second point:
While I was reading up on pre-Christian and non-Christian cultures (thankfully, I am myself from one, so I find it much easier to switch mental culture-frames), I came across a very different view of life and the world. The mind was not the sole definition of "person". The locus of individual identity lay as much in the body as in the mind, and instincts and impulses were not within the domain of judgement, but actions were. That is, a person was moral based on what he did, not on what he felt. So a person giving up something dear to him for what he thought was a greater cause was a morally admirable act precisely because of the difficulty of the action involved, not because of obedience to some God-given commandment. Here, there were no self-destructive moral actions.
Also, these people did not have what is commonly referred to as an "integrated view of body and mind", because there was nothing to integrate - the mind-body dichotomy, or separation, even if it existed in some small form, was never anything significant anyway.
The third part:
It seems to me that most people would do better to adopt the second view of human nature - the one in which you don't have to worry about an integrated body and mind because you never separate them at all. You don't have to worry about being "in touch" with your instincts, because you know that you are your instincts, there is no need to speak of them as dichotomous.
This gets rid of the fundamental weakening contradiction at the core of most of modern culture - the cultural and moral, yet still artificial and damaging, duality between body and mind. It also gets rid of the anti-naturalistic fallacy. Judgements will no longer be conferred on a person's feeling or instincts, but on their actions. And instinct not being regarded as somehow "evil", human interaction will become far more fulfilling, for the simple reason that they aren't born of a tortured nailing together of contradictory ideas and emotions. When it is recognised that an act is immoral because it is revolting to one of our instincts, and not because of some external absolute moral authority deeming it so, morality and law will accord far more with human nature than they do now.
As an amusing afterthought, this also gets rid of the geek-jock fallacy, because both are what you get when you accept the mind-body dichotomy and artificially starve one part of yourself, or neglect it. Both are, in a sense, broken. The mind without a body is as incomplete as the body without a mind.
The fourth part:
This will also force us to accept some facts about the natural world, and about ourselves, which modern culture will frown upon. I'll illustrate with an example.
This post was inspired by feminism, so I'll start with the most common objection there. Feminists will have to accept "objectification" as a biological fact of life. The body being as much part of the individual as the mind is, there is no moral condemnation attached to judging both men or women by their bodies. Your fitness shows, to a great extent, how much you value yourself as a person, because, remember, your person is also your body.
Secondly, what is called "objectification" today is pretty much innate to humans. When a man looks at a woman for the first time, the first judgement made is to place that woman on the scale of 'bang ability'. This isn't conscious, by the way, it's completely subconscious. The only thing men consciously have access to is the result of that judgement. The in-built assessment circuitry says, "That woman is an X on the scale", and that's that. From there on, it cascades. Training can change the criterion of judgement - as you become healthier, so does your taste, generally - but not the fact that the judgement occurs.
Another factor which feminists may be loath to admit, yet is as true as the "objectification" one, is that women also have in-built assessment circuitry. It is more complex than that of men, because it has to measure physical intangibles, but it no less potent. The in-built assessment circuitry for women assesses three things:
a) Resource provision capacity - more specifically, in today's context, the man's financial stability
b) In-group social power - in our context, status in whatever hierarchy the male is competing in
c) Genetic fitness - this is usually a function of the above two, as that is what matters from the long term for genetic fitness, but occasionally, due to the quirks of human sexual selection, a specimen comes along with all the indicators of sexual attractiveness. This is the one most closely resembling the physical "objectification" most feminists so despise.
The point here is that women also innately "objectify" men, but it is more subtle, as a function of their earning potential and social dominance, rather than just their bodies. The same way that feminists complain that men see only their bodies, men may well complain that women see only their bank accounts (or indicators thereof - clothes, watch, car, et cetera) or their rank in the social hierarchy (how dominant a person appears).
Both complaints are essentially pointless whining. This assessment instinct is innate, and instead of trying to block it and make everyone unhappy, why not accept it as a fact of life - which, after all, it is - and move on? The fact that this instinct exists does not mean that men are incapable of seeing anything beyond a body, or that women can see nothing beyond wealth and status. What it means is that these are the first, and probably most powerful things, which will catch our attention. Acknowledging that is better than suppressing it.
Thoughts and comments?
One thing which I've noticed in modern discourse about pretty much everything - and discourse includes our forum discussions - has been that many people are judged for their emotions and not their actions. That is, it is often thought, "If you feel x, you are an evil person, to be morally condemned." Another thing I've noticed, specially among feminists, is that many among them behave as if the mind is everything, the body nothing, in the sense that men are expected to judge - from the moment of first sight - a woman's worth to him purely on the basis of her personality/other mental stuff, instead of her looks/other physical assets.
Most of the time, the naturalistic fallacy is invoked to refute any opposition to these stances, by saying that "is" and "ought" are two totally different things, and ought not be conflated. The problem does not arise there. The problem arises when the discussion takes the bizarre turn of falling into the anti-naturalistic fallacy, where "is" and "ought" are separated by such a large gulf that natural facts are held to have no bearing whatsoever on moral judgements.
I've thought about this a little, and I've come to the conclusion that these two problems are inter-related, in the sense that they spring from the same view of man, a view which is still so ingrained in Western culture that it is almost undetectable unless you have a very good nose for bad odours.
The first point:
The dualist view of man - and I'm not talking about philosophical dualism, but culpability/moral dualism - was probably a legacy of Christianity. Under this view, moral judgements are made completely in the mind, and only by a process of free-willed decision-making by some agent who is morally culpable. Under this view, it is the mind/thinking and judging organ which constitutes the "person" or "individual" as we know it. The body is not much more than some sort of locomotor device for this "person", and more often than not a source of anti-moral impulses which the moral agent must then fight against in order to remain morally unblemished.
What happens after that is that people are also judged on the basis of their impulses. If you look at the list of the Christian seven deadly sins, you will notice that many of them aren't actually actions which anyone can choose to perform or not, they're physiological responses. Pride, lust, jealousy are all pre-programmed emotions, not something which a person usually chooses to invoke. But still, they are made a basis for a moral judgement passed on that person. Now this leads to a lot of unnecessary guilt, which is probably what keeps people bound in the religion itself - they need some way to absolve themselves. Again, this is a generalisation, not necessarily applicable to every adherent, so please take it as such.
Another thing this leads to is that the culture produced by such a world-view tends to teach the individual to distrust and sometimes despise their instincts, because they are seen as somehow "evil". This leads to all sorts of really undesirable consequences, because everyone is repressed in some way or the other. It also leads to a culture of weakness, because most of man's instincts fundamentally tend towards strength. It also leads to a glorification of weakness and a distrust of strong people, in all forms. For instance, it is this culture which is responsible for the anti-intellectualism which has been an ever-present threat to Western society, and has manifested itself in various ways throughout history in the Western world. The suppression of dissent, the burning of midwives as witches, the Inquisition, the persecution of Galileo and Copernicus, all of these were symptoms of the fear that this culture of weakness felt towards anyone who knew more, and was thus stronger intellectually.
Though most feminists claim that they have liberated themselves from this judgementalism, I notice that they have inherited the same underlying world-view, and it manifests itself in most discussions, here and elsewhere. It usually takes the form of the anti-naturalistic fallacy, when a feminist claims that women's' bodies should have no effect on how they are treated, everything should be based purely on personality/the mind, or "who they are". Well, the problem is, they're using the same definition of "who a person is" as the Christians were doing, and with that comes all the baggage which they were trying to discard in the first place!
I think this is one of the reasons why attitudes towards what constitutes "liberated" behaviour are so widely dispersed across the feminist spectrum. There are the pro-porn feminists, and there are the rabidly anti-porn feminists. There are the pro- and anti-promiscuity feminists. There are the pro- and anti-marriage feminists. The conflict, I think, stems from an attempt to reject a world-view seen as wrong while still holding part of that world-view themselves. So feminists in countries where beauty pageants are frowned upon see them as liberating, whereas many feminists in the more culturally liberal countries see them as degrading and objectifying. This fundamental contradiction in the world-view, this fundamental fallacy, expresses itself in too many ways to count, and in large part contributes to the image of feminism as inconsistent.
The second point:
While I was reading up on pre-Christian and non-Christian cultures (thankfully, I am myself from one, so I find it much easier to switch mental culture-frames), I came across a very different view of life and the world. The mind was not the sole definition of "person". The locus of individual identity lay as much in the body as in the mind, and instincts and impulses were not within the domain of judgement, but actions were. That is, a person was moral based on what he did, not on what he felt. So a person giving up something dear to him for what he thought was a greater cause was a morally admirable act precisely because of the difficulty of the action involved, not because of obedience to some God-given commandment. Here, there were no self-destructive moral actions.
Also, these people did not have what is commonly referred to as an "integrated view of body and mind", because there was nothing to integrate - the mind-body dichotomy, or separation, even if it existed in some small form, was never anything significant anyway.
The third part:
It seems to me that most people would do better to adopt the second view of human nature - the one in which you don't have to worry about an integrated body and mind because you never separate them at all. You don't have to worry about being "in touch" with your instincts, because you know that you are your instincts, there is no need to speak of them as dichotomous.
This gets rid of the fundamental weakening contradiction at the core of most of modern culture - the cultural and moral, yet still artificial and damaging, duality between body and mind. It also gets rid of the anti-naturalistic fallacy. Judgements will no longer be conferred on a person's feeling or instincts, but on their actions. And instinct not being regarded as somehow "evil", human interaction will become far more fulfilling, for the simple reason that they aren't born of a tortured nailing together of contradictory ideas and emotions. When it is recognised that an act is immoral because it is revolting to one of our instincts, and not because of some external absolute moral authority deeming it so, morality and law will accord far more with human nature than they do now.
As an amusing afterthought, this also gets rid of the geek-jock fallacy, because both are what you get when you accept the mind-body dichotomy and artificially starve one part of yourself, or neglect it. Both are, in a sense, broken. The mind without a body is as incomplete as the body without a mind.
The fourth part:
This will also force us to accept some facts about the natural world, and about ourselves, which modern culture will frown upon. I'll illustrate with an example.
This post was inspired by feminism, so I'll start with the most common objection there. Feminists will have to accept "objectification" as a biological fact of life. The body being as much part of the individual as the mind is, there is no moral condemnation attached to judging both men or women by their bodies. Your fitness shows, to a great extent, how much you value yourself as a person, because, remember, your person is also your body.
Secondly, what is called "objectification" today is pretty much innate to humans. When a man looks at a woman for the first time, the first judgement made is to place that woman on the scale of 'bang ability'. This isn't conscious, by the way, it's completely subconscious. The only thing men consciously have access to is the result of that judgement. The in-built assessment circuitry says, "That woman is an X on the scale", and that's that. From there on, it cascades. Training can change the criterion of judgement - as you become healthier, so does your taste, generally - but not the fact that the judgement occurs.
Another factor which feminists may be loath to admit, yet is as true as the "objectification" one, is that women also have in-built assessment circuitry. It is more complex than that of men, because it has to measure physical intangibles, but it no less potent. The in-built assessment circuitry for women assesses three things:
a) Resource provision capacity - more specifically, in today's context, the man's financial stability
b) In-group social power - in our context, status in whatever hierarchy the male is competing in
c) Genetic fitness - this is usually a function of the above two, as that is what matters from the long term for genetic fitness, but occasionally, due to the quirks of human sexual selection, a specimen comes along with all the indicators of sexual attractiveness. This is the one most closely resembling the physical "objectification" most feminists so despise.
The point here is that women also innately "objectify" men, but it is more subtle, as a function of their earning potential and social dominance, rather than just their bodies. The same way that feminists complain that men see only their bodies, men may well complain that women see only their bank accounts (or indicators thereof - clothes, watch, car, et cetera) or their rank in the social hierarchy (how dominant a person appears).
Both complaints are essentially pointless whining. This assessment instinct is innate, and instead of trying to block it and make everyone unhappy, why not accept it as a fact of life - which, after all, it is - and move on? The fact that this instinct exists does not mean that men are incapable of seeing anything beyond a body, or that women can see nothing beyond wealth and status. What it means is that these are the first, and probably most powerful things, which will catch our attention. Acknowledging that is better than suppressing it.
Thoughts and comments?
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