Who's Responsible? \/ Trauma and Unreason on the Left \r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n Who's Responsible? <\/b><\/p>
\r\n\r\n\r\nConservatives call themselves the party of personal responsibility,\r\nbut this has always struck me as odd. Liberals feel responsible\r\nfor everything. Poverty, pollution, violence: you name it, liberals\r\ntake personal responsibility for it. The point of conservatism is\r\nprecisely the refusal of personal responsibility. Why are people\r\npoor? It's their own fault (and not mine). Why are crime rates high?\r\nIt's the criminals' fault (and not mine), and besides criminality is\r\nin their genes so it's not even their<\/i> fault. Why do men leave their\r\nfamilies? It's the feminists' fault. Why is the earth's temperature\r\nrising? It's, um, er, they're just making that up.<\/b><\/p>
\r\n\r\nAnd listen to\r\na \"senior Bush aide\" (LA Times<\/i>, 8\/4\/00): \"We are getting past this\r\nwhole era, both the Clintons and the atmosphere they created among\r\nRepublicans.\" Now that's<\/i> a refusal to take personal responsibility.\r\nWhen liberals go around taking personal responsibility for everything,\r\nconservatives mock them for \"liberal guilt\". They have a whole\r\nrhetoric for making fun of personal responsibility. And then they\r\nuse the words in empty ways to cover up. It's true, of course, that\r\nliberals can go overboard with the personal responsibility. But at\r\nleast they believe in it, and act on it, as opposed to simply using it\r\nas a stick to hit people.<\/p>
\r\n\r\n<\/p>
\r\n\r\n\r\nHaving said that, let's also talk about the left for a moment. As\r\nyou might imagine, I received all sorts of commentary on my piece\r\nabout the assault on reason in American political culture. I have\r\nfocused on this topic because of the tidal wave of professionalized\r\nirrationality that is dominating the proceedings in the presidential\r\nelection campaign. But some of the messages that I received from\r\npeople on the left brought back memories, and fairness requires that I\r\ndescribe one major way in which leftists -- not all of them, but many\r\n-- reject reason. <\/b><\/p>
\r\n\r\nFor leftists, the starting point is oppression --\r\nthe various ways in which groups of people are kept down through a\r\ncombination of violence, stereotyping, propaganda, discrimination, and\r\nso on. Oppression is real, and traumatic. The problem with trauma\r\nis that it renders its victim irrational. Not completely irrational,\r\nnecessarily, but locked unconsciously into the oppressive pattern of\r\ninteraction. Oppressors enjoy painting their victims as irrational,\r\nand so a whole world of mind-games get started that twist the norms of\r\nrationality for oppressive ends. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n\r\nOppression as a Box<\/b><\/p>
\r\n\r\n\r\nFor a lot of leftists, this pattern takes the following dysfunctional\r\nform: \"there's no use engaging in rational argument, because you'll\r\nnever convince them anyway\", or (exasperatedly) \"we've tried rational\r\nargument, but the only language they speak is the language of power\".\r\nYou've heard these lines. They are the lines of someone who, at a\r\nbasic unconscious level, is trapped in a small box that contains just\r\nthemselves and their oppressor. Living in that small box, it is hard\r\nto comprehend, much act upon, the political imperative of talking in a\r\nway that 51% of eligible voters can understand. The box has no third\r\nparties in it, no undecideds, no way to imagine the perspective of\r\npeople who have not been traumatized in that particular way, and who\r\nconsequently retain their capacity to reason somewhat rationally about\r\nthe situation. <\/b><\/p>
\r\n\r\nThis explains the perplexing failure of liberals to articulate in a\r\nsystematic way the plain-language, common-sense, concise-and-catchy\r\nresponses to the great outpouring of jargon that has rained down upon\r\nus for the last ten years. When you're living in the box, everything\r\nis always as bad as it can possibly be, and everything, no matter how\r\ndreadful, is just more of the same. This is powerlessness, and the\r\ndemon of powerlessness wants nothing except for other people to become\r\npowerless too. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n\r\nPower and Reason<\/b><\/p>
\r\n\r\n\r\nThat's why the most interesting and useful people on\r\nthe left have focused so much attention on power in the positive sense\r\nof the term: not the ability to do things to people, but the opposite\r\nof an entrenched sense of passivity and futility -- the deep-down\r\nbelief that it is possible to rise up and do positive work in the\r\nworld. This is one reason why I wrote my treatise on professional\r\nnetworking for graduate students: not just to instruct them in the\r\nsteps of a procedure, but to communicate a fundamental set of positive\r\nbeliefs that they were born with, but may have lost. <\/b><\/p>
\r\n\r\nPower in this existential sense is closely related to reason. Reason\r\ndoes not imply its many stereotypes: lack of emotion, fancy language,\r\nexclusionary rituals, throwing oneself on the mercy of the powerful,\r\nthe scientific method applied to everything in sight whether it fits\r\nor not. It is notoriously hard to define reason in a positive way,\r\nin terms of the exact criteria or procedures that make something\r\nrational. It is better explained in a negative way: don't say things\r\nthat don't make sense. <\/p>
\r\n\r\nThe professionally twisted language that I\r\nhave described here is the opposite of reason: if you read it in a\r\ncareful way then you can see, and clearly and calmly explain, that\r\nit does not make sense. Although we are all born with power (in the\r\npositive sense of the world), we are not born rational. That comes\r\nthrough dialogue, and by internalizing our interactions with rational\r\npeople. We all say dumb things and we all make mistakes. We are all\r\nimprecise sometimes, and we all definitely make assumptions that we've\r\nnever thought about. We inherit a lot of this stuff from the culture,\r\nof course, but the main problem is that it's just a big job to think\r\nstraight. <\/p>
\r\n\r\nIf we can have sane conversations, or honest arguments,\r\nor even if we can read good books, then we have a chance to sort\r\nout our thinking and become rational. The traumas of oppression have\r\nthe opposite effect, and the damage to our rationality that oppression\r\ncauses is much of its point. People who cultivate the currently\r\nfashionable political jargon make a point of going around traumatizing\r\npeople with nonsense that pretends to be rational but is actually\r\ncrazy. It is dangerous, and to preventing it from hurting people we\r\nmust persistently place it under a microscope and show people how it\r\nworks. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/p>\n","contact":"","link":"http:\/\/dlis.gseis.ucla.edu\/people\/pagre\/rre.html","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"Two closely-related pieces, one about a classic example of an irrational Conservative claim, the other a look at the role of trauma in generating irrationality on the left. By UCLA professor Phil Agre, reprinted from his online newsletter, the Red Rock Eater News Service.","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2000\/10\/responsb.htm","filesize":"6.6 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2000\/10\/4036.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]}