Multicultural
Nov. 5th, 2009 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI attended a talk by the philosopher Miranda Fricker, mainly because Screwy wanted to hear her but couldn't make it to Stoke. Although it was advertised with much fanfare, it ended up being one of those things that only a few real keen beens attend, which made it harder to hide my definitely non-philosophical self at the back! The format was somewhat odd, compared to what I'm used to: Dr Fricker literally read a paper, and though she read well it felt like an inefficient way of putting across information I could have read for myself in half the time.
The theme was a concept she calls "testimonial injustice" or sometimes "epistemic injustice", namely the fact that people who suffer from discrimination not only get badly treated, but their knowledge is not transmitted because people silence them or give them no credibility. She gave philosophical examples from feminist theory about standpoint and how the "oppressed" understand discrimination better than the "privileged", and practical examples from the Macpherson report on police responses to Stephen Lawrence's murder ten years ago.
Her view was that oppressing and silencing people is morally bad as we all know, but also epistemologically bad, because we miss out on some of the knowledge that would otherwise be available to us. She admitted that considering the point of view of those being hurt by a particular system is not very useful in highly abstract philosophy, but is vitally important in any branch of philosophy which deals with the real world and societies and so on. Also that it takes effort to listen to silenced voices, you can't just assume it will happen by generally treating everyone equally, you have to actually be aware of unexamined prejudices you may have and do something positive to overcome them, and you have to do something practical to make sure that otherwise excluded people are put in a position where they can speak and testify.
This seems sort of fair enough, although I've heard enough of it from feminists that it didn't hugely surprise me. The problem was that most of the audience got really really bogged down in not understanding the concept of institutional racism. They kept asking silly questions about how it was possible that someone who was not a racist could act in a racist way as a member of an organization. Fricker gave lots of examples of how this might happen, everything from peer pressure to naiveté to subconscious prejudice, and discussed some quite complex ideas about group identity and the idea of committing to a role. I felt obliged to interject and point out that there's no such thing as a "non-racist person" as such, there are only racist actions and non-discriminatory actions, and people can commit the former for all kinds of reasons apart from having an identity of Racist (or "holding racist beliefs", as the epistemologists kept calling it). The simplistic objections on the part of the audience (who are all actual proper philosophy students, unlike me) reminded me strongly of what has gone on in some LJ arguments about race, where lots of people just couldn't distinguish between a person who says something with racist implications and a person who Is A Racist, or in other words an eeeeeeeevil monster. So all in all it was as much frustrating as interesting.
Later in the week I spent a day at an interfaith meeting that I was roped into at the last minute by people from synagogue. I didn't quite understand the nature of the event before I showed up; I thought it was an interfaith conference, but in fact it was a training day run by the local hospice for people who work with dying and bereaved people. So mostly nurses and counsellors with a smattering of chaplains. They were all there to learn from us how different religious traditions respond to death, both practically and theologically. And the consequence was that we "delegates" were very much on show, we were divided between four rooms and each group took it in turns to come and fire questions at us, based on some extremely morbid and contrived scenarios which essentially consisted of "someone dies in horrible agony, how would your community respond?" Mine was a young mother who dies slowly of breast cancer and leaves her husband and daughters devastated at her loss, which I felt I could handle a lot better than the one where a guy goes crazy and shoots his entire family and all the animals, or the woman with Motor Neurone Disease who asks for help to die "with dignity".
I discovered that being surrounded by people with high WIS but low INT is really really wearing, especially when they are doing their warm fuzzy emotional relating thing directly at me. It didn't help that I spent half the day seated so that I was staring directly into the sun, which gave me a migraine, and because I couldn't deal with it by sitting in the dark for ten minutes while I was in the middle of being the Explainer of Judaism to all these people, I finished up with a really nasty headache.
The other problem with the day was that they had tried to create balance by inviting some "humanist" delegates to represent the point of view of people who are not members of any religion and how they want to deal with death and dying. But actual card-carrying humanists are not at all representative of your average post-Christian agnostic, and they tended to obstruct productive discussion by complaining that there's no such thing as an afterlife when someone mentioned their religious views of resurrection or whatever. Most of the participants tended to the view that "religious differences are just labels, our common humanity is far more important, and dying is a universal human experience". Which is all very well, but it is not a particularly useful attitude if you are actually trying to learn about how different communities respond to death. Like, it's a fact that Muslims and Jews prefer very fast burial, whereas some Christians need plenty of notice to arrange funerals. It's a fact that many Christians believe in deathbed prayers and Last Rites and so on, whereas Sikhs believe in releasing a dying person from their earthly attachments. But if you just go around saying "oh, we're all the same fundamentally" you end up with problems like a hospice where apparently they mark deaths by opening a big Bible to Psalm 23 and leaving wreaths on the deceased's bed. That is going to be anywhere from pointless to actively offensive to non-Christians, but if you just assume that religious identities are "just" labels, you are probably not going to notice that.
Also, I felt exoticized, and I have never really had that experience before. The people who weren't insisting that everything I said was irrelevant because what really matters is the unity of all humanity regardless of religion, were quite often raving about how wonderful "your" communities are with all their rituals and support for the bereaved, and how sad it is that "we" have lost all those traditions, and "our" culture is so impoverished. I bit my tongue and didn't insist that I am as English as they are, and that "our" culture is my culture too, because for one thing that would have come across really defensive, and for another many of the other delegates were in fact non-English (Indian, Lebanese and Tibetan, mostly). But I did keep responding to this by saying that we're not here to devalue Christianity or English culture, that centering your death rituals round the funeral is not necessarily worse than having long periods of mourning, etc etc. Lots of the counselling types kept going on about how it's "healthy" to cry and release your emotions and so on, and I was very glad of the otherwise annoying humanist delegate who pointed out that she came from a traditional English boarding school background and would be extremely uncomfortable crying in front of strangers. I said "you can't make people cry, that's part of cultural sensitivity too!" but I am not sure how much that helped.
Very much mental growling at the keynote speaker who made a big deal of what a wonderful and sensitive and loving chaplain he was because when he encountered a dying man with a male partner as well as a wife, he didn't let his face show how horrified and disgusted he was, but instead listened sympathetically.
So that was quite a lot of doin it rong when it came to inclusiveness and anti-racism for the week, but I am heartened that people are trying and glad to be part of it, even if they're clueless.
The theme was a concept she calls "testimonial injustice" or sometimes "epistemic injustice", namely the fact that people who suffer from discrimination not only get badly treated, but their knowledge is not transmitted because people silence them or give them no credibility. She gave philosophical examples from feminist theory about standpoint and how the "oppressed" understand discrimination better than the "privileged", and practical examples from the Macpherson report on police responses to Stephen Lawrence's murder ten years ago.
Her view was that oppressing and silencing people is morally bad as we all know, but also epistemologically bad, because we miss out on some of the knowledge that would otherwise be available to us. She admitted that considering the point of view of those being hurt by a particular system is not very useful in highly abstract philosophy, but is vitally important in any branch of philosophy which deals with the real world and societies and so on. Also that it takes effort to listen to silenced voices, you can't just assume it will happen by generally treating everyone equally, you have to actually be aware of unexamined prejudices you may have and do something positive to overcome them, and you have to do something practical to make sure that otherwise excluded people are put in a position where they can speak and testify.
This seems sort of fair enough, although I've heard enough of it from feminists that it didn't hugely surprise me. The problem was that most of the audience got really really bogged down in not understanding the concept of institutional racism. They kept asking silly questions about how it was possible that someone who was not a racist could act in a racist way as a member of an organization. Fricker gave lots of examples of how this might happen, everything from peer pressure to naiveté to subconscious prejudice, and discussed some quite complex ideas about group identity and the idea of committing to a role. I felt obliged to interject and point out that there's no such thing as a "non-racist person" as such, there are only racist actions and non-discriminatory actions, and people can commit the former for all kinds of reasons apart from having an identity of Racist (or "holding racist beliefs", as the epistemologists kept calling it). The simplistic objections on the part of the audience (who are all actual proper philosophy students, unlike me) reminded me strongly of what has gone on in some LJ arguments about race, where lots of people just couldn't distinguish between a person who says something with racist implications and a person who Is A Racist, or in other words an eeeeeeeevil monster. So all in all it was as much frustrating as interesting.
Later in the week I spent a day at an interfaith meeting that I was roped into at the last minute by people from synagogue. I didn't quite understand the nature of the event before I showed up; I thought it was an interfaith conference, but in fact it was a training day run by the local hospice for people who work with dying and bereaved people. So mostly nurses and counsellors with a smattering of chaplains. They were all there to learn from us how different religious traditions respond to death, both practically and theologically. And the consequence was that we "delegates" were very much on show, we were divided between four rooms and each group took it in turns to come and fire questions at us, based on some extremely morbid and contrived scenarios which essentially consisted of "someone dies in horrible agony, how would your community respond?" Mine was a young mother who dies slowly of breast cancer and leaves her husband and daughters devastated at her loss, which I felt I could handle a lot better than the one where a guy goes crazy and shoots his entire family and all the animals, or the woman with Motor Neurone Disease who asks for help to die "with dignity".
I discovered that being surrounded by people with high WIS but low INT is really really wearing, especially when they are doing their warm fuzzy emotional relating thing directly at me. It didn't help that I spent half the day seated so that I was staring directly into the sun, which gave me a migraine, and because I couldn't deal with it by sitting in the dark for ten minutes while I was in the middle of being the Explainer of Judaism to all these people, I finished up with a really nasty headache.
The other problem with the day was that they had tried to create balance by inviting some "humanist" delegates to represent the point of view of people who are not members of any religion and how they want to deal with death and dying. But actual card-carrying humanists are not at all representative of your average post-Christian agnostic, and they tended to obstruct productive discussion by complaining that there's no such thing as an afterlife when someone mentioned their religious views of resurrection or whatever. Most of the participants tended to the view that "religious differences are just labels, our common humanity is far more important, and dying is a universal human experience". Which is all very well, but it is not a particularly useful attitude if you are actually trying to learn about how different communities respond to death. Like, it's a fact that Muslims and Jews prefer very fast burial, whereas some Christians need plenty of notice to arrange funerals. It's a fact that many Christians believe in deathbed prayers and Last Rites and so on, whereas Sikhs believe in releasing a dying person from their earthly attachments. But if you just go around saying "oh, we're all the same fundamentally" you end up with problems like a hospice where apparently they mark deaths by opening a big Bible to Psalm 23 and leaving wreaths on the deceased's bed. That is going to be anywhere from pointless to actively offensive to non-Christians, but if you just assume that religious identities are "just" labels, you are probably not going to notice that.
Also, I felt exoticized, and I have never really had that experience before. The people who weren't insisting that everything I said was irrelevant because what really matters is the unity of all humanity regardless of religion, were quite often raving about how wonderful "your" communities are with all their rituals and support for the bereaved, and how sad it is that "we" have lost all those traditions, and "our" culture is so impoverished. I bit my tongue and didn't insist that I am as English as they are, and that "our" culture is my culture too, because for one thing that would have come across really defensive, and for another many of the other delegates were in fact non-English (Indian, Lebanese and Tibetan, mostly). But I did keep responding to this by saying that we're not here to devalue Christianity or English culture, that centering your death rituals round the funeral is not necessarily worse than having long periods of mourning, etc etc. Lots of the counselling types kept going on about how it's "healthy" to cry and release your emotions and so on, and I was very glad of the otherwise annoying humanist delegate who pointed out that she came from a traditional English boarding school background and would be extremely uncomfortable crying in front of strangers. I said "you can't make people cry, that's part of cultural sensitivity too!" but I am not sure how much that helped.
Very much mental growling at the keynote speaker who made a big deal of what a wonderful and sensitive and loving chaplain he was because when he encountered a dying man with a male partner as well as a wife, he didn't let his face show how horrified and disgusted he was, but instead listened sympathetically.
So that was quite a lot of doin it rong when it came to inclusiveness and anti-racism for the week, but I am heartened that people are trying and glad to be part of it, even if they're clueless.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 08:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-14 02:16 pm (UTC)Also, I think it's partly that these are people who find that religion is not important to them, because they are happily post-Christian just like nearly everybody else around them. So they don't understand why it might be important to anyone else, except maybe "primitive" people who haven't realized that the sky fairy doesn't actually exist.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 09:40 pm (UTC)The theme was a concept she calls "testimonial injustice" or sometimes "epistemic injustice", namely the fact that people who suffer from discrimination not only get badly treated, but their knowledge is not transmitted because people silence them or give them no credibility.
Yes, also known as "history is written by the victors" and, as any historian worth their salt knows, if all you read are the victors' account, you end up with bad history. TBH, I really do think this is a big deal. I firmly believe that excluding knowledge is immoral regardless of whether the knowledge is about oppression or something relatively fluffy. Misinformation, in the real world, does lead to death and suffering, and not just in medicine either.
The problem was that most of the audience got really really bogged down in not understanding the concept of institutional racism. They kept asking silly questions about how it was possible that someone who was not a racist could act in a racist way as a member of an organization.
That, frankly, is just grade A thickery. IR is not a complex idea. Presumably, they would have believed that a soldier could potentially follow unlawful orders? Did they *really* think that everyone automatically agrees with every expectation their job places on them?? I think, as you say, they were just slightly confused by the word "racist", which in some regards has taken on the role Orwell eludicidated for "fascism" in 'Politics And The English Language', yea 60 years gone, as a word to define oneself in opposition to.
lots of people just couldn't distinguish between a person who says something with racist implications and a person who Is A Racist, or in other words an eeeeeeeevil monster
You know, I did think that you could just change one letter there, from "racist" to "rapist", and you also have a good explanation of why most communities can't deal effectively with sexual violence either. That age-old problem of making the sin characteristic of the sinner, rather than an act to be prevented. It's a very ancient mode of thinking, but doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
The stuff about the conference was a bit face-palmy, but I think I agree with your conclusion that it's still sort of positive that people are *trying*. They can fail better in future, and of course you have plenty to write about in your feedback sheets, right? But srsly, "your" culture?? Jewish communities have "officially" been in Britain for over 300 years, and even during the period where there were officially no Jews about, there's definitely evidence showing there were Jews about. And of course, before that, we're looking at, what, the settlement in 1070? (Leaving aside the question of potential Jews in Roman Britain, but A. reckons there's reference to Jewish merchants in Anglo Saxon church writing.) Hardly what I'd call newcomers. Frankly, I'd hazard a guess you're probably far more English than I am - I only grew up here for part of my youth and I've never, ever felt "English" or "British" or any of that stuff. I'm here cos I speak the language and I can't think of anywhere I prefer! But yet, of course, I'm assumed to be very very English, despite mostly feeling like a foreigner. Aren't appearance-based judgements great? /bitter
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-14 02:20 pm (UTC)I like your connecting epistemology to history, and yes, you are right that bad information has practical consequences. I am not sure why all these highly intelligent philosphers were having such difficulty with institutional racism; scarily, it may be partly that they were too young to understand what was going on at the time of Lawrence's murder. But yes, it is connected to the idea that Racist is defined as that thing that decent people aren't, which makes it hard to have productive discussions about.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-15 01:28 am (UTC)scarily, it may be partly that they were too young to understand what was going on at the time of Lawrence's murder
Now, that's a really interesting thought, and one which hadn't occurred to me before. Shall ponder. Ta.
I definitely think you're right on your last point though - it's about defining oneself in opposition to the things one isn't, not positively in relation to the values one holds and tries to propagate.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-14 02:26 pm (UTC)I wouldn't say I feel particularly English; I would tend to define myself as European first. But it turns out that I am English enough to feel offended when people start saying that "English" culture is worthless and we have lost all our traditions and stuff. Some of the group I think weren't even aware that the beautiful music and architecture people associate with churches even if they are not religious Christians is as much a feature of English culture as sitting shiva is part of Jewish culture.
What I did like was the woman who was officially the Hindu rep, because she made a big point of not judging by appearances. She herself is officially Hindu, but was brought up by a Sikh and an atheist, educated in a Catholic school, and is now secular. And clearly very fed up with people assuming things about her because her appearance and accent mark her as coming from India!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-09 09:54 pm (UTC)Alec read that description and despaired. It is frustrating when interfaith meetings descend into "we're all the same really", but it's even worse when people's dying needs are not going to be met due to their universal humanity. I want my last words to be the sh'ma and be buried ASAP and have people say the kaddish for me, not some fuzzy watered down quasi-Christian rituals*.
Humanists are annoying, particularly the way they muscle in and demand to be heard based upon the clearly inaccurate claim that they represent everyone who isn't particularly religious.** I went to a panel discussion a few weeks ago about different denominations' Christian attitudes and somehow a Humanist had got himself invited "to represent the atheist position". Another Humanist in the audience, who just happened to be a white middle aged man, asked why we were bothering to talk about scripture (the talk was called 'Scripture and Sexuality') and then, having heard the organiser of the event mentioned that her father was Jewish, yelled out that we should consider Palestine, for no apparent reason.
*Obviously they'd likely be some Christian mourning for me as lots of my friends and family are Christian.
**As Alec pointed out, most not particularly religious English people self define as C of E.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-10 11:03 am (UTC)*mostly that any actively religious wossnames (last rights or similar) whilst I'm still alive would not make me a happy bunny (this is probably the view of many atheists). And that I don't believe all life is sacred, and would rather mine were ended swiftly and painlessly than prolonged as long as possible (this is probably not the view of all atheists). After I'm actually dead I guess my family get to decide how to mourn me.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-14 02:36 pm (UTC)Some of the Christians were complaining that there is so much interfaith and multiculturalism these days that Christians hardly get a look in, which annoyed me even more than the pushy Humanists, I can tell you. But I think when it comes to vaguely Christian-ish atheists, agnostics and people who aren't that interested in religion, there is less need for a discussion of their cultural expectations because that is the default culture anyway. That said, I think having an actual discussion with some specific, non-affiliated atheists about things like medical attitudes to the sanctity of life, and death rites that didn't include big chunks of Christianity with the serial numbers filed off, would be very useful indeed, it's just that that was not really what was going on at this meeting.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-15 01:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-16 10:19 pm (UTC)*snort*
Very true!
I find the Brights a bit embarrassing though. Talk about a name that makes your organisation look like a bunch of self-important wankers...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-14 02:32 pm (UTC)I think you're absolutely right that part of the problem with being fuzzy about how people are all the same, is the assumption that vague post-Christianity is in fact universal truth. It's a bit like the beliefs that people call common sense being extremely culturally specific.
I am not against Humanists at all; I don't think they're at all more likely to be annoying than any other community. It's just that if you want to represent not particularly religious people, there isn't an organization of culturally Christian or non church-going C of E folk that you can draw on for speakers. I am not sure that defaulting to the Humanist Association really helps here, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-11 05:18 pm (UTC)Interesting how people think their own social group's cultural habits are representative of the practices of their religion, even though we have multi-cultural geographic groups, access to travel, and the (underused) lessons of history to educate us. "Christian" burial practices, for example, vary widely by place. In England there's often a long time between death and funeral, but this is, I think, not the norm in Europe. Perhaps it has more to do with waiting lists and booking times than customs!
My favourite childhood lesson on the confusion of cultural and religious beliefs was the discovery that C19 British missionaries had bullied people in hot countries into unsuitable outfits which they called "decent Christian clothing". At the age of 6 or 7 I thought it was a serious logical drop-off that black suits and print dresses should be Christian, when all the pictures of Christ and disciples showed them in loose robes.[0]
I want a term to use for the customs and beliefs of a group, which doesn't mean religious or racial or national, but just the way some group does things at a particular place and time (now, 500 years ago, last century, whatever), whether they are all the same religion or from the same racial background or not. Perhaps I should start with a better attempt to describe that...
[0] With apologies to people of my own religious background and to Muslims, who are disturbed by the disrespect of attempting representations of Christ. Another religious cultural difference. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-11 05:47 pm (UTC)I sometimes wonder whether it's that in hot countries there's more of a motivation to develop a practice of disposing of bodies quickly.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-14 02:41 pm (UTC)I am completely aware that humanists and intensely committed atheists are not at all bad people! I generally approve of humanism and secularism, and the individuals in the discussion were not even particularly scary or narrow-minded, just mildly irritating. It was just awkward the way that people with very specific sets of beliefs about religion were being called on to act as their own "community" and expected to provide balance for the different faith groups involved in the event.