The problem with feminism (and Christianity, and ....)

[Alinestra Covelia]

Originally posted by Elok
"Like monkey-headed Hanuman throws his feces at the other gods, which is gross."

LIES!

...

Throwing feces is hilarious.

[Fake Boris]

I wouldn't believe in a God that doesn't throw feces.

[Riesstiu IV]

Aneeshm, why do you continue to practice a archaic polytheistic religion developed by primitive people? There is only one true god and his name is Allah. Mohammed is his prophet. You must convert to Islam if you are to be saved. Salam, friend.

[BeBMan]

Salami

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Oncle Boris

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.

That's interesting.
As far as I know, medieval thought didn't put any serious emphasis on moral sentiments. The beginning of the movement can be traced to 18th century England, with philosophers such as David Hume or Adam Smith, who wrote full theories of moral sentiments.

I don't know how things are in India, but it's true that political communication strategies often involve a politician showing the emotion most appropriate for the context. It was (and is) for instance Sarkozy's strategy in France.

Precisely.

Originally posted by Oncle Boris

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.

This paragraph sounds like it doesn't work.

You describe the "naturalistic" fallacy as a statement that "is" and "ought" are two different things.
Then you claim that the "anti-naturalistic" fallacy is to separate "is" and "ought" with a large gulf.

???

The naturalistic fallacy argues against the derivation of ought from is. Basically, just because something is natural doesn't mean that it is necessarily right.

The anti-naturalistic fallacy is the one that one falls into when one claims that natural facts have no bearing whatsoever on ethics or morality. It's like trying to derive an ethical system with no regard to the actual world, treating it as an abstraction with no connection with reality.

An instance - when I look at a good-looking woman passing by, and the first impulse is, "Wow, I'd do that", feminists may cry "Objectification!". The point here is that that impulse and assessment has nothing whatsoever to do with my conscious choice, it's automatic. What matters is what I do. If I make some rude remark, or do something similar, then that is what judgement must be passed on, if on anything at all. Simply claiming that I'm an "evil person" for having an instant automatic evaluator built into my head thanks to billions of years of evolution makes no sense.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Riesstiu IV
Aneeshm, why do you continue to practice a archaic polytheistic religion developed by primitive people? There is only one true god and his name is Allah. Mohammed is his prophet. You must convert to Islam if you are to be saved. Salam, friend.

Muslims aren't supposed to say Salam to non-Muslims.

[Fake Boris]

I would like to point out that even though your observations are interesting, it's false that Christian civilization altogether didn't see through the bull****.

Spinoza pointed in the right direction, Nietzsche paved the way, and the rest is the history of 20th century philosophy.

[Riesstiu IV]

Originally posted by aneeshm


Muslims aren't supposed to say Salam to non-Muslims.

I'm a progressive muslim.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Oncle Boris
I would like to point out that even though your observations are interesting, it's false that Christian civilization altogether didn't see through the bull****.

Spinoza pointed in the right direction, Nietzsche paved the way, and the rest is the history of 20th century philosophy.

That's where I derive a pretty large part of my inspiration from, actually.

I think you missed one, though - Kant. He showed that another direction was not only possible, it was inevitable.

A reading of these philosophers has given me a better perspective on understanding the history and past way of being of my own culture.

[Fake Boris]

Kant saw the light at the end of his life - when he finally admitted that "God might only be a concept within me".

Spinoza had understood that 150 years earlier, and at a young age.

[aneeshm]

True.

But Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, which pretty much nuked philosophy as we knew it till then. And it's good for a nice brain**** when you finally "get" the primary division into noumenal and phenomenal. Then Nietzsche comes along and says, "Why give a crap about that division? It's all pointless masturbation anyway. Just get off your ass and live life like it's supposed to be lived."

[Elok]

Re: The problem with feminism (and Christianity, and ....)

Leaving out "a good nose for bad odors," I'll just examine what's wrong with your first point.

Originally posted by aneeshm
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.

As you've been told, dualism predates Xianity, and is mostly to be blamed on Plato. Plato was integrated into the Christian faith, though strictly speaking we're more of a "triad-ism," body, soul and spirit. We generally do think of only body and soul, though, so eh.

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.

To be fair, this isn't ignorant so much as just plain silly. What do you make decisions with, your pancreas? Your spleen?

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.

This sounds like you got your whole idea of Western Values (TM) from a very strict Catholic school education, and is drastically oversimplified, but in the essentials it's correct. Moving on...

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.

...aaaaand here's the real ignorance. Having the impulse is one thing. It's the human condition, and most every Christian faith I know of accepts that it's not our fault that the impulses come. Calvinism even goes a little overboard in that respect. Sin enters the picture when the impulse is consciously entertained. So: noticing that your friend's wife has a luscious booty--not sin. Fantasizing about bending her over a table and tapping said booty--sin. Admiring your neighbor's car, wishing you had one like it--not sin. Grumbling to yourself that a douche like him doesn't deserve such an awesome automobile--sin. Feeling thrilled that you won an award--not sin. Looking down on others as pathetic losers because they didn't win awards themselves--sin. And so on. Your mileage may vary, depending on denomination.

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.

I don't mind that it's a generalization. I mind that it's a grotesquely patronizing generalization, and therefore rude. "I think you're an atheist because you like the idea of being immoral without having to fear divine punishment or retribution. That's probably what keeps atheism going."

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.

Again, what Sister Mary Frances says =/= Western Values. It also doesn't chime with my experience of American life, at least. Look at the GOP, the more religious wing of American politics and therefore (presumably) the more inclined to believe in dualism. They're much more fond of the wealthy than the more secular Democrats. I'll leave it to someone with more knowledge than I of politics and history to explain why, but I believe it involves a thing called the "protestant work ethic." Weren't you around for Philosophizer and his long speeches about how the wealth of WASPs and Jews proves that they are divinely favored? Also, I don't know how India stacks up, but I find it hard to imagine a culture that worships pro athletes, supermodels and other celebrities more than America does. It's sick, really.

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.

A very bare assertion; you're speculating on the motives of hundreds of thousands of people from an alien culture five hundred years ago and more. Care to actually support it? Leaving out that Galileo's persecution was largely caused by his publicly ridiculing the Pope, are you implying that common people in India, China, and everywhere else you call The East do not resent those who are stronger than them? No peasant revolts in India?

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!

This sounds like your usual, and not descriptive of most feminist screed I've heard. Some of the most rabid feminists can be distressingly obsessed with their special hormonal impulses. They go into study-citing shpiels about how women are more nurturing and sensitive consensus-builders, as compared to dumb violent men who rule by coercion.

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.

Or it might be that it's a relatively new movement claiming to represent the best interests of a little more than one half of the human race, coming from many diverse backgrounds with different perspectives and responding to the differing status of women in different areas.

[BeBMan]

Yup. It makes not much sense to id a fundamental contradiction as kind of "fallacy" when speaking about fundamentally different views on a certain problem. The pro-pron and the anti-pron feminists can very well have these totally different ideas about pron and still say that they're feminists. They just disagree how feminists should react to porn. In that way "feminism" *is* inconsistent, but not because it's per se irrational or not thought out well (if that was your point), like Elok said it's a result of diversity.

Just like a party can have a left and a right wing. Both may hold totally different opinions on a number of issues, but *only* that doesn't make "conservativism" or "communism" or whatever the party is about a contradiction.

[Ben Kenobi]

Why the rant against Catholicism Elok?

It has nothing to do with us.

[Elok]

Eh, just playing to stereotypes which my few brought-up-Catholic friends insist are mostly true. It's not core to the discussion and, come to think of it, Aneeshm probably isn't too familiar with Catholic-school stereotypes. So consider it retracted.