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Mar. 4th, 2002 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verbminxI woke up after not a whole lot of sleep and still feel like I'm going to vomit...
this is not good. I took a shower, and it hasn't helped.
As I have mentioned to a couple of people, I embroiled myself, somewhat foolhardily, in an online and heavily politically-charged debate on affirmative action. After a lot of soul-searching and two days of persistent consideration, without much motive or opportunity to keep up with the discussion since then, I've decided to withdraw from the discussion. But if you are curious about my reasoning or my basic feelings on the issue, clickez le linque, s'il vous plait.
My problems with affirmative action are these: first and foremost, that it involves the reduction a person to a type, and I'm heavily suspicious of anything with those mechanics. I do not mean just the hypothetical white male who is hypothetically losing out on a job; I also mean the hypothetical black female who is getting a job. Rather than attacking the problems of sexism and racism directly, AA attempts to circumvent them using the same logic used to justify these things, only turned on its head. Something about it just feels wrong to me, despite the fact that A)it's a well-meaning concept created by well-meaning people, and B)as a woman, I do stand to benefit from its application.
The second problem, I suppose, is part of the first. Someone mentioned a hypothetical situation in which two equally-qualified candidates, a white male and a black female, are up for a job, and the black female is given the job under AA policies. Well, fantastic! Really. & at first I could find nothing to disagree with there. But then I had two days to think about it, and my feverish little brain made up at least one scenario in which the AA policy has a negative social impact: the black woman is 24, single, and employed in a financially comfortable job - but shopping around, because she's bored with her current position. The white man is 34, widowed, unemployed, and has a six-year-old daughter who he is supporting. If the white man is passed over because of his reduction to type, it has a negative impact on the life of the miniature woman he's raising... and that sure as hell doesn't "help women." Even taking the hot-button issue of race out of the mix, you end up with a situation that's messy (like, you know, LIFE). Needless to say, that's a far-fetched situation! But my brain likes to consider exceptions, hypotheticals, stories. (& I fear that AA might also have the negative social impact of convincing the majority of people, let's call it the random sampling of the average American, that the problems of racism and sexism in the workplace and in education and etc are solved, full stop.)
The third problem is... when I tried to point out that definitions of important terms in use need to be clear, someone actually said, apparently with a straight face, that "not everyone agrees with the dictionary definition of a word" - well, guess what? You're online, you don't even have gesture or facial expression, words are all you have. If you want to use language as a tool for communication, there are certain generalized rules, compromises, that everyone has to agree on; if not, then you have to assume that most of your "communication" is actually going to be miscommunication, and no consensus or even meaningful dialogue will ever be possible, because you have personally decided to not speak the same language as everyone else involved, and might as well be writing in Urdu. My suggestion is to perform linguistic experiments in your private writings, as an art form, but don't expect them to be swallowed whole in an online forum.
I'm just... not a person who enjoys discussing hot-button issues with people. I don't enjoy arguments on politics, though I try to educate myself by making at least a portion of my reading somehow related to political issues. I know what I believe... and I also know that I'm pretty much contracting my future in such a way that I will most likely spend a good portion of my life plugging away in a museum basement somewhere, so really, my input on political issues is not profitable to anyone, and more an intellectual exercise than anything else. & since I suffer from anxiety disorder, the stress that comes from hot-button discussions fucks with my body chemistry and general peace-of-mind too much to be worth the general pointlessness of "participation in an online discussion"; I do not need to have my fight-or-flight mechanisms activated just so that I can occupy a couple of hours of my time (which might be spent more productively elsewhere anyway).
I get accused of shallowness, but honestly, my way of dealing with life and with how much it hurts is to want to make the world a prettier and happier place... or rather, to stress the possibility of finding and creating and engendering beauty and enjoyment and happiness. Aesthetics, to me, are not shallow at all. Neither is history (that is to say, history that is unrelated to, say, radical politics and related concerns), because I believe that the study of history teaches us about humanity, about people, about the way the world actually is. Critiques of "Yeah, but who's writing the history? What's their agenda?" are not unfounded... but remember, no historian sitting down to write something ever thought that they were not "in modern times". I read about Heian Japan and Restoration England not because it is an escape from "today", but because despite their philosophies and their toils, these people had a lot in common with anyone else from any other time in history. They worried about whether they were going to get laid, whether they were going to be able to feed their family, about what they had to do to either avoid or suffer social censure. I want to know what these constants are, and I think an interesting way to find out is by reading firsthand sources and also checking out interpretations and commentary.
If I stay in discussions like the one I'm leaving, I eventually lose patience, the things that I am likely to say are not likely to add to my point in any useful manner (except to defend it, and honestly... why bother?), and ARE likely to get increasingly irritable and eventually possibly hurtful, particularly if I think someone's else's argument is more motivated by their ego than anything else, and/or if that person starts namecalling. I would rather just walk away and have some people think that I "look stupid" or that I backed down, if the alternative is seriously distressing myself AND potentially causing even more suffering in this world.
So, that's why I'm not posting anymore in the affirmative action thread in question. That's why I've found more and more need over the last few years to leave any online debate that gets... debatey. I'm not being a coward or backing down: I'm exercising self-restraint. & it's HARD, but it's what I have to do.
this is not good. I took a shower, and it hasn't helped.
As I have mentioned to a couple of people, I embroiled myself, somewhat foolhardily, in an online and heavily politically-charged debate on affirmative action. After a lot of soul-searching and two days of persistent consideration, without much motive or opportunity to keep up with the discussion since then, I've decided to withdraw from the discussion. But if you are curious about my reasoning or my basic feelings on the issue, clickez le linque, s'il vous plait.
My problems with affirmative action are these: first and foremost, that it involves the reduction a person to a type, and I'm heavily suspicious of anything with those mechanics. I do not mean just the hypothetical white male who is hypothetically losing out on a job; I also mean the hypothetical black female who is getting a job. Rather than attacking the problems of sexism and racism directly, AA attempts to circumvent them using the same logic used to justify these things, only turned on its head. Something about it just feels wrong to me, despite the fact that A)it's a well-meaning concept created by well-meaning people, and B)as a woman, I do stand to benefit from its application.
The second problem, I suppose, is part of the first. Someone mentioned a hypothetical situation in which two equally-qualified candidates, a white male and a black female, are up for a job, and the black female is given the job under AA policies. Well, fantastic! Really. & at first I could find nothing to disagree with there. But then I had two days to think about it, and my feverish little brain made up at least one scenario in which the AA policy has a negative social impact: the black woman is 24, single, and employed in a financially comfortable job - but shopping around, because she's bored with her current position. The white man is 34, widowed, unemployed, and has a six-year-old daughter who he is supporting. If the white man is passed over because of his reduction to type, it has a negative impact on the life of the miniature woman he's raising... and that sure as hell doesn't "help women." Even taking the hot-button issue of race out of the mix, you end up with a situation that's messy (like, you know, LIFE). Needless to say, that's a far-fetched situation! But my brain likes to consider exceptions, hypotheticals, stories. (& I fear that AA might also have the negative social impact of convincing the majority of people, let's call it the random sampling of the average American, that the problems of racism and sexism in the workplace and in education and etc are solved, full stop.)
The third problem is... when I tried to point out that definitions of important terms in use need to be clear, someone actually said, apparently with a straight face, that "not everyone agrees with the dictionary definition of a word" - well, guess what? You're online, you don't even have gesture or facial expression, words are all you have. If you want to use language as a tool for communication, there are certain generalized rules, compromises, that everyone has to agree on; if not, then you have to assume that most of your "communication" is actually going to be miscommunication, and no consensus or even meaningful dialogue will ever be possible, because you have personally decided to not speak the same language as everyone else involved, and might as well be writing in Urdu. My suggestion is to perform linguistic experiments in your private writings, as an art form, but don't expect them to be swallowed whole in an online forum.
I'm just... not a person who enjoys discussing hot-button issues with people. I don't enjoy arguments on politics, though I try to educate myself by making at least a portion of my reading somehow related to political issues. I know what I believe... and I also know that I'm pretty much contracting my future in such a way that I will most likely spend a good portion of my life plugging away in a museum basement somewhere, so really, my input on political issues is not profitable to anyone, and more an intellectual exercise than anything else. & since I suffer from anxiety disorder, the stress that comes from hot-button discussions fucks with my body chemistry and general peace-of-mind too much to be worth the general pointlessness of "participation in an online discussion"; I do not need to have my fight-or-flight mechanisms activated just so that I can occupy a couple of hours of my time (which might be spent more productively elsewhere anyway).
I get accused of shallowness, but honestly, my way of dealing with life and with how much it hurts is to want to make the world a prettier and happier place... or rather, to stress the possibility of finding and creating and engendering beauty and enjoyment and happiness. Aesthetics, to me, are not shallow at all. Neither is history (that is to say, history that is unrelated to, say, radical politics and related concerns), because I believe that the study of history teaches us about humanity, about people, about the way the world actually is. Critiques of "Yeah, but who's writing the history? What's their agenda?" are not unfounded... but remember, no historian sitting down to write something ever thought that they were not "in modern times". I read about Heian Japan and Restoration England not because it is an escape from "today", but because despite their philosophies and their toils, these people had a lot in common with anyone else from any other time in history. They worried about whether they were going to get laid, whether they were going to be able to feed their family, about what they had to do to either avoid or suffer social censure. I want to know what these constants are, and I think an interesting way to find out is by reading firsthand sources and also checking out interpretations and commentary.
If I stay in discussions like the one I'm leaving, I eventually lose patience, the things that I am likely to say are not likely to add to my point in any useful manner (except to defend it, and honestly... why bother?), and ARE likely to get increasingly irritable and eventually possibly hurtful, particularly if I think someone's else's argument is more motivated by their ego than anything else, and/or if that person starts namecalling. I would rather just walk away and have some people think that I "look stupid" or that I backed down, if the alternative is seriously distressing myself AND potentially causing even more suffering in this world.
So, that's why I'm not posting anymore in the affirmative action thread in question. That's why I've found more and more need over the last few years to leave any online debate that gets... debatey. I'm not being a coward or backing down: I'm exercising self-restraint. & it's HARD, but it's what I have to do.
