getting past feelings

Dan Denvir has written a piece that articulates many of my thoughts on the current state of social liberalism today. (I don't, of course, suggest that he would agree with me in turn.) It's a great essay, and you should really read it. His essential point is that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, conversations and discourse in and of themselves don't move us towards justice. What's more, because we tend to define success based on getting people to say the right things (an indication, we hope, that they think the right things), when we get there, the push loses steam, and little is accomplished. As I've said here before, having come up through the humanities, I can't tell you how many times I've seen fellow students preface their remarks by checking their privilege. Privilege is real, and it's important to recognize yours. But once you've check it, so what? What's been accomplished? That's the beginning of action. Not the end.

Denvir's piece comes in the shadow of a national conversation on marriage equality. I've been struck, following the discussion, by how different the marriage equality fight is from so much of the rest of social liberalism. Winning the right for same sex marriage is a specific, identifiable goal, one that can be achieved through the legislature or through the judiciary, and you know when you've achieved it. It has precious little to do with feelings; every person in the country could feel the right way about gay people and gay rights and it wouldn't change the systematic and material inequality that a lack of marriage rights represents. I don't think it's at all a coincidence that a cause within social liberalism that has the most specific goals is a cause where we've seen the most meteoric success.

I've been following this Adria Richards controversy, and one thing that strikes me is the fact that there's so little consideration, with this topic, of argumentative capital. By that I mean the notion that we have a certain reserve of political will that we can summon at a particular time, and that people experience outrage fatigue, and so we have to play our cards intelligently. What has often struck me is how we have issues on which we are pushed to think nothing but strategically, such as the drone issue (conscience must always take a backseat to politics), and issues on which we almost never consider political strategy at all. I will show my cards: I cannot imagine a better way to inspire a backlash against the nascent feminist movement within tech. I spoke the other day about the backlash against the Antioch Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, and the larger backlash that it was a part of, in part because I interact daily online with those who seem blind to the very idea of backlash. The question is whether this blindness is chosen. There is, after all, social percentage in it.

For every piece I read online about legal challenges to women's rights and equality, such as the recent criminalization of abortion in North Dakota, I read at least three about how someone said something mean at the bar. It's important for people not to say shitty things, it is. But from the vantage point of a man for whom many of these issues must remain necessarily theoretical, it is not as important as a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy. I remain, as ever, willing to be convinced otherwise.

When I think about the focus on pure thoughts, pure feelings, and pure people within social liberalism, I think of bankers and Wall Street. People really don't like Wall Street and the financial industry. But it doesn't matter; they have power, and economic, material power renders personal insult irrelevant. For this reason, I find the essentially strategy of social liberalism writ large-- get to pure thoughts, good feelings, and well wishes first, and from their achieve power-- to be fundamentally flawed. The line runs backwards. Achieve power first, then good thoughts will come or won't.

This attitude will inevitably engender resistance, as it should, and not merely from the usual suspects. The focus on feelings comes from places both legitimate and not. Legitimate, because human beings are emotional creatures, who live suffused in emotion, and for those of us who enjoy the rare privilege of basic material security, social and cultural comfort is essential to the commission of day-to-day life. The prioritization of the material over the affective must not be confused with the denigration of the importance of psychic distress or the imperative to end it. But it is incumbent upon all people of conscience, who seek to make the world into a more just and equitable place, to articulate the endpoint of their political desires. There is no need for one's political goals to be "realistic" in the myopic sense that presses good people to accept the petty cruelty of short-term political realism. There must be, however, a profound fear of the proud uselessness of a politics of personal righteousness. For too many, all ideology collapses into a sorting mechanism into which the righteous and the unclean are sorted, and for such people, it is better that more remain to fill the latter category (and provide an example against which to demonstrate superiority) than that they be brought to the side of justice. You know that, though in the short term it might be convenient for you to deny it.

There is no contradiction between the necessity of a politics that is articulable in the idiom of material change and the moral poverty of a politics that cares only about what is immediately plausible. Indeed, a politics that insists on the achievable while it refuses any narrow predictions about its odds for achievement is the only kind of any real use.

The internet's potential is forever being mistaken for its actuality. Because the internet is a communicative medium, or set of mediums, those who are most engaged with it flatter themselves to believe that they use it effectively to understand the world. In fact, it's been my experience that those who are most connected within the world of internet media are among the least aware of the wider world. The seductive tendency to imagine that one's blogroll or Twitter feed represents the world at large can become overpowering. Occasionally, because I am always fighting and because I am frequently the subject of conversations in which I don't participate, I am asked by sympathetic emailers if it hurts. I always tell them: all I have to do is close my laptop and walk outside. There lies a world where the various controversies of the day-to-day outrage cycle, so inflamed and bloody when viewed through the prism of a Chrome tab, are pointless and mute. So few people out there know that the self-aggrandizing edifice of internet political commentary even exists to be embroiled in controversy; even fewer take the ritualistic, rhythmic ebb and flow of the daily scream seriously.

This is not an endorsement of that worldview. It is, indeed, a kind of myopia, if occasionally a healthy one. Much as how the assumption of a superiority in the particular ignorance of middle America to the lived experience of the coastal elites is, on cursory examination, insulting to both, so thinking that the online world is somehow worse for its particular solipsism than its digitally disconnected counterpart is mere reverse snobbery. I do not posit a superior virtue of the less connected. I mean only to point out that the most prominent netizens are generally guilty of a similarly limited perspective, and that this is a profoundly dangerous tendency. For within online worlds, such as that of online social liberalism, which is ultimately a small one, the tendency to see the opinions and convictions of those around you as those of the world can be irresistible. I remember reading many people assert that "everyone" hated Seth McFarlane's job as host of the Oscars. I could only think to myself, everyone in a position to broadcast their opinion to you hated it. The world is broader than you know.

The fear, therefore, is that progress within the elect is mistaken for progress within The People, and this is disastrous for all social movements. I will tell you plainly: I think that, outside of the specific (and wonderful) advance of marriage equality, social liberalism is losing, and losing quickly. You might, if you're inclined, check polling on who self-identifies as a feminist, or how many people think that racism is a thing of the past. I simply try to remain as alive to the opinions of those next door as I do to those who write on a prominent blog, and I detect reason for discouragement, perhaps panic. But then, I am treating this question as empirical, not theoretical, and surely there are many who would bring their considerable skills in inter-liberal combat to bear against me. Some have, and often effectively. For my part I can only say that I have sat through enough seminars to see bell hooks and Fanon and Butler shot across classrooms like rubber bands, and I no longer know what this internecine warfare accomplishes even theoretically. Except, that is, to elevate one true believer over the next.

Theory, of course, is necessary. The notion of a division between theory and practice is not helpful. As the man said, nothing is more practical than a good theory. The failing begins when the commission of theory becomes oriented towards the short-term interplay of individuals, rather than towards being woven into a broad fabric of productive behavior.

The odd thing is that the vast work yet to be done is alternatively understood or not by the people I am here considering. To the credit of social liberalism, it recognizes the immense injustice and casual bigotry that still pervades our culture like asbestos slowly seeping out of an old building's walls, dangerous not despite its slow-acting nature but precisely because of it. When feminists speak of a profoundly misogynist culture, or when people discuss the casual racism at the core of the American character, it drives conservatives nuts, and yet I think only this frankness and only this honesty could possibly lead to productive work. Yet for all of this wise understanding of all the work to be done, I find that in a strange sense most social liberals profoundly underestimate how hard it will be to shake the foundations that they identify as rotten. Somehow, the work is monumental but straightforward; the mistaken must be educated, and the ultimate vehicle for this education is always the same, the aggressive condescension and heaping irony that has become the dominant idiom of social liberalism. I can only say again: from my limited perspective, the circle is not widening. The accelerating rage of those within it, as understandable and necessary as it is, seems to be mistaken for the efficacy of their utterance.

Perhaps I'm wrong here, empirically, theoretically, personally. I would be happy to be proven wrong, and I'm sure there are those who would delight in doing that proving. Perhaps we'll both end up happy. But when I observe the young people around me, I truly fear for the future, and I am struck once again by the division between those who populate the undergraduate classes and those who live in the graduate world-- and the numerical dominance of the former compared to the latter. My students, writ large, are neither beacons of young righteousness or symbols of creeping reaction. But they are, in my view, overly confident in their own blamelessness, and not possessed of a feeling of personal responsibility to make the world a better place. This is true here at Purdue, and it was true at the University of Rhode Island, and if I can be forgiven for engaging in such crude generalization, it seems true of youth culture. And they will go on to rule the world.

Why are they this way? I would argue that the problem is not that they have not learned the lessons of today's social liberalism, but that they have learned them too well. Because they have emerged into a culture that associates doing right with being right, because they have been told that the way to fight racism and sexism is not to be racist or sexist themselves, they look around the world and see nothing to be done. As they consider themselves to be the furthest thing from racist or sexist (whether or not that self-perception is terribly deluded), and the world of social liberalism has focused so intently on crimes of thought and crimes of feeling, they cannot conceive of a personal duty to social justice that transcends the self. It is, really, a profoundly American conviction: the world is as good or bad as I live it to be. That they recoil from the label feminist, I take to be the product of a ruthless conservative campaign of dishonesty and ridicule. But that they see social movements in and of themselves as at best quaint curios of a premodern world and at best as actively wicked agents of controversy for its own sake, I feel something akin to hopelessness.

All of this, as is typical, will likely be seen as terribly critical of those engaged in online social liberalism, but this is not my intent. Who could fail to understand the focus on feelings? I understand, too well, the prominence of emotions, because I have them. More, I have the understanding that, not the victim of systematic regimes of degradation and marginalization like so many people are, I can only imagine the psychic costs of so much assumed disrespect, stirred into our culture like bleach into coffee. Just as, indeed, the material costs of racism, sexism, homophobia, and similar social failings remain for me unalterably academic, despite my desires to understand. I cannot and I do not take any pleasure in seeing so much failure in the people who are working daily to live my convictions. I see them, after all, as my people, even as I know that a vanishingly small number of them see me as one of theirs.

But I insist on a clear, unromantic, and ruthless self-critical perspective on the path of progress, and have neither time nor patience to waste on all the many people who see social justice as yet more fodder for the endless game of social sorting, the ceaseless contest between insecure people to establish their value relative to others. I am done applauding sad stories that have no earthly expression in actual progress, and I am tired of those who mistake the cataloging of injustice for action against the same. We are losing. And that condition cannot change while we occupy the same mindset with which it was first fomented. If business as usual within social liberalism was really moving us closer and closer to justice, we would be so much closer than we are now. You must see beyond the social conditions that compel you to heap praise on your fellow travelers, and the numbing optimism that has infected the political internet, to see the world's continuing, elementary brokenness.

I have and will accept the persistent unpopularity of opinions critical to business as usual, particularly those who exercise their progressive politics purely defensively, working tirelessly to occupy a place of permanent apologia that will save them from becoming the target of political critique. Such people are a dime a dozen, and they are, taken as a whole, a force for reaction. They bring heat but no light; they weigh the movement down. Instead, what is needed now is the recognition that all positive political action comes first from self-implication, and then the insistence on the privileging of concern for material conditions over more pointless braying over crimes of the mind. The pleasing, false narrative of ascendancy through personal purity must fall away, and in its place the only question of enduring value, the fierce, urgent indictment of "what is to be done?"