In Defence of Unsophistication

This (well, most of it, anyway) came up in my Google Plus stream yesterday:

It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people [and that therefore we "elitists" should not claim to know better and to take it away from the less sophisticated.]
If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with.
Isaac Asimov, The Humanist

Mr. Asimov was perfectly correct in saying that solace and comfort are not the sole standard by which we should judge behavior. But what this quote lacks is any indication of the standards by which we should judge. The standard that comes immediately to my mind, that of unwarranted and/or unjust harm or cost to others, is independent of whether or not the behavior that caused it is rooted in superstition, pseudoscience or some other form of irrationality. In this regard, superstition and pseudoscience do not, in and of themselves, define "behavior we ought to interfere with." Or to my way of looking at it, even behavior that we have an affirmative right to interfere with. The simple fact that a belief can be demonstrated to be false, or that it commonly understood to be, is not enough reason to campaign against it. Smokers, drinkers, addicts, gamblers and sociopaths, while they may be disagreeable people, are not automatically barred from solace and comfort. Tobacco, alcohol, drugs, the fall of cards, the run of horses, cruelty and violence should not be interfered with simply because we don't like the people who engage in them, but because we have identified a harm that is being visited upon people unwillingly. If a sociopath can somehow indulge in cruelty and violence without bringing hurt to the unwilling or breaking the law, what business is it of mine? Therefore solace and comfort need not be a defense against a charge of superstition and pseudoscience because it is no indictment of a person's solace and comfort to say that it is rooted in superstition and pseudoscience.

This is not to say, however, that given solace and comfort, all things are permissible. Or that all beliefs are of equal merit or worth. It is simply an argument for defining beliefs that we should take away from "the less sophisticated" and "behavior we ought to interfere with" by a more consequential standard than whether or not we, as the self-determined intellectual élite, understand its genesis to be rational. The fact that we may know better than those less sophisticated than ourselves does not grant us authority to dictate to them what they should understand about the world. If it is important to us what they believe, then we should be prepared, not simply to debunk their superstition and pseudoscience, but to demonstrate to them, on their terms, that we can provide the solace and comfort they sought in them just as well.

P.S.: Part of the problem with quotes, perhaps especially those found on the Internet, is that divorced from the remainder of the context in which they were first made may or may not mean what we understand them to mean. I do not know where this quote by Asimov first appeared, and so have not read the whole of the work in which it was included. One thing that I have noted, though, is that when many secular people post this, the section between the brackets [] is absent. it was presented to me this way, and so even though I have supplied to quote in its entirety, I bracketed the section that had been missing.

The Culture - The Quick And Dirty

It's easier to understand if a given disputed culture exists if you have a working definition of culture and then compare the proposed culture to it, and see if it meets the definition. Having borrowed a definition of culture from the University of Minnesota, I looked at "African-American Culture" and "Rape Culture," two cultures that some people understand to be real, others understand to be fictional, and that my meanderings through the Web have drawn me into thinking about over the past couple of days.

African-American culture bears the greatest resemblance to the UM definition. But it's worth noting that African-American culture is fairly narrow. And not all African-Americans are members of it, and not all members of it are African-American. But the idea that culture and race operate in lockstep is strong in the United States and leads to an incorrect understanding that culture and race should be able to stand in for one another. And because, I believe, people tend to over-estimate the similarities between people different from themselves the narrow similarities between different African-Americans can easily be perceived as the sum of the African-American experience. But because people are also just as likely to see the narrow similarities between all Americans as the sum of the American experience, the cultural differences that exist can easily be chalked up to individual idiosyncrasies.

Rape culture, on the other hand, lacks a specific group of people to which you can attach the aspects of a culture. Accordingly, it may be best thought of as a related cluster of cultures, that share a certain acceptance of levels of sexual violence. Because it's defined more by behaviors and interactions, rather than a specific group of people who share a number of traits, this understanding that there isn't a single rape culture is needed to keep it in line with the UM definition. But, you could also just as easily say that what we understand to be rape culture is actually the pieces of other cultures that lend themselves to specific sexual acting out. By this understanding, rape culture ceases to become a singular thing, and is instead a byproduct of other cultures.

In the end, the ecosystem of cultures can be considered a forest. What tends to drive debate is the degree to which a culture is or is not a single, locatable tree. For me, African-American culture is, but it's nowhere near the only tree that describes the experiences of African-Americans in the United States. Rape culture, on the other hand, isn't, but it's such a dense tangle of limbs, leaves and branches that it appears to be a singular object.

The Culture - Two

For the purposes of the Intercultural Studies Project, culture is defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group.
University of Minnesota Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition

Two things had me thinking about culture this morning. A discussion that turned to African-American culture is one, and an article about rape culture was the other.

Being a guy, I stumbled into the idea of rape culture primarily through its use as a bludgeon. Something I would do without thinking about it would earn me the charge of perpetuating rape culture. Of course, I would push back, mainly because I had a hard time understanding the difference between being labelled a member of rape culture and being labelled either a rapist or someone who was okay with rape.

Having the definition of culture from the top of this post in mind when I read "How Not to Talk About a Culture of Sexual Assault" on The Atlantic gave me a better frame of reference to think about the topic. (As an aside, do "Men's Rights" activists and anti-Feminists have radar for these sorts of discussions, or what?) Still, what constitutes members of the rape culture group is a bit fuzzy for me, and so it's difficult to use the definition of culture as clearly as I could when thinking about African-American culture. Linked to that is the idea that rape culture is more about normalizing and legitimizing a specific set of behaviors. So perhaps the definition should be worded differently:

A culture is defined as a group, distinguished from those of another group, that, through a process of socialization, learn specific, common, cognitive constructs and affective understandings. This group learning identifies shared patterns of behavior and interactions that are seen as legitimate and normative.

That work? I think from there, we can better define "Rape Culture" because now we have rape, and other forms of sexual assault, on one side of the equation, and we can then work to solve for the other side. Actually "solve" really isn't what we're after here - the question isn't what is on that side of the equation, but is there something on that side of the equation. Sure, it's helpful to know what it might be, but we don't need a high level of precision in the answer. So the question becomes: "Is there a defined group, distinct from other groups, that socializes its members to see the world in a certain way and understand others' emotional and mental states in such a way that it normalizes and legitimizes rape and other forms of sexual assault?"

Now - here's where I run into trouble. I'm not a researcher. I'm not really in a position to evaluate whether or not there is an independent rape culture or not. It's something that I had always understood to be baked into other, more accepted understandings of culture. So, for instance, in many different cultures, a man's sexual desires are referred to by "a man has needs." And, it's common in a lot of cultures to view needs as begetting entitlements. Cross the two, and you wind up with the idea that if a man needs sex, he's entitled to take it, even over certain objections. This, to me, was less indicative of a specific "rape culture" than it was of aspects of other extant cultures that lent themselves towards an incidence of sexual assault. But here's where an understanding of the definition of culture is helpful. As I noted before, cultures are not mutually exclusive. When we're talking about groups of people, "the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization" can be viewed as a single, cohesive set. That is, the same set of people can always be one culture. As long as the same set of people is involved, any changes to the rest don't spawn a new culture. But, there is nothing about any specific behavior or interaction, a particular cognitive construct, or individual affective understanding that limits it to a particular group. Groups, even those that are clearly different cultures, can share.

So perhaps it's more accurate to speak of rape culture as a group of cultures, where what they share is certain behaviors and interactions. In other words, if a certain legitimization and/or normalization of sexual assault are the "behaviors and interactions" that we're talking about, there are multiple groups for which this is true. It is simply a subset of the groups broader shared patterns.

In the end, the one of the issues with "Rape Culture" is one that it shares with what one can call "Racist Culture." It is, to a degree, something that is defined by the viewer, moreso than by the members of the culture themselves. While there are people who understand what the rest of term as rape is justified (just as there are people who happily self-identify as racists), that is a small, and often considered fringe, group. Most people who are identified as being part of rape culture want nothing to do with the practice. That is, they don't intentionally socialize themselves or others with an eye towards making sexual assault acceptable.

Just as a culture can be invisible, and thus seemingly non-existent to people outside of it, it can be the same to people within it. But the issue with invisibility is that it becomes difficult to understand if someone doesn't see something because it's invisible, of if they don't see it because there's really nothing there. Just from my own musing about the subject from writing these blog posts, I'd be inclined to say that there is no singular "Rape Culture," given the understanding of culture that I'm working with. But I would say that several different cultures have aspects to them that, when viewed from a distance, can create the appearance of a homogeneous rape culture. It's in the forest, but it isn't a single tree.

The Culture - One

For the purposes of the Intercultural Studies Project, culture is defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group.
University of Minnesota Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition

Two things have happened recently that have me thinking about culture. One was an online discussion about McDonald's outreach to black communities in America. (As an aside, do White Supremacists have radar for these sorts of discussions, or what?) The other was reading an article in The Atlantic about the debate over the term "rape culture" (and how that debate has become dysfunctional).

Now when we talk about "African-American Culture" and "Rape Culture," it's worthwhile to keep in mind that these are related concepts, but very different things. African-American culture in the United States identifies members of that culture and distinguishes non-members. As a marginally attached (at best) member of African-American culture, I can attest to this, as I'm often effectively a non-member. When we talk about rape culture in the United States, it's more about the process and cultural constricts behind normalizing sexual violence against women - membership or non-membership is very much secondary.

But are these concepts "real?" For many people, the idea of African-American culture is simply racist people-sorting with an academic-sounding name - they would attach the words "so-called" to the front it whenever they could. But having grown up black in a nearly exclusively white neighborhood, I noticed that there are specific patters of acting and dealing with others, thinking about the world, and understanding other people's emotional and cognitive states that I learned through being around people and fitting in with them. And the patterns that I learned from my parents and extended family were somewhat different than those that I learned from my peers, my classmates and the adults that we interacted with. But what really drove it home for me was going to college. I spent my freshman year at Hampton University, a Traditionally Black College/University in (not-surprisingly) Hampton, Virginia. It was the first time that I'd ever been in a large group of exclusively African-Americans that weren't relatives. And they, I found out, had shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understandings that were more or less consistent between them - and nearly completely foreign to me. It was literally weeks before I could understand people well enough to converse with them without screwing it up.

Where the cultural and the racial collided was in the idea that as someone who was visibly black, I was also, by default, automatically culturally black. And so the white suburban culture that I expressed (the one that I had grown up in) was a deliberate affectation - an attempt to mimic a culture that I had not been socialized into, in order to identify myself as a member of a "foreign" (and often hostile) culture, while distinguishing them as being of "another group." They felt that rejection keenly, and we fought over it. While members of my extended family understood me as different (and I them), family carries a lot of weight. They understood that my parents had moved away from the inner city in search of better jobs and less dangerous streets on which to raise my sister and I. The people I met for the first time in college saw me as just another random person, and were unaware of any mitigating history.

I only stayed at Hampton a year. The culture clash resulted in a constant, behind the scenes, conflict that I was tired of navigating. And when the whiff of money entered the picture, things became even more complicated. And so I went to school closer to home, more on the borderlands between cultures, so that I knew my avenue of retreat was always open. But, it's not like white people were immune from the idea that race and culture went hand-in-hand. My ability to play their game as well as they did was often a source of surprise (I lost count of how many times people remarked on how "articulate" I was - as if someone with a Liberal Arts Bachelor's degree should be anything but) and I often dealt with first impressions where people assumed that the fact that I looked a certain way meant that I would behave in a certain way, and understand certain things. I was being distinguished as belonging to another group.

It's worth understanding that racial/ethnic culture in the United States is learned, and I'm not the only person who failed learn the one that people expect of them. There are a lot of cultural outcasts - some by circumstance, and others by choice. The reality of the concept does not lead to its ironclad universality. The United States is a large place, full of groups that don't always interact with one another. This allows for the evolution of many different shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understandings as the processes of socialization vary from place to place. And cultures are not mutually exclusive. What we term "African-American Culture" is actually a fairly narrow set of cultural artifacts that tie a widely disparate group of people together. The consistency I noted in college was simply a result of proximity - interaction demands a common frame of reference, and so the individual, local cultural aspects people brought with them were downplayed in favor of the common, broader ones. To my freshman math teacher, an African immigrant, we were likely all a single homogeneous group. The conflicts between me and the other people in the class were likely completely invisible to him. Similarly, to a Greek student I knew later in college, the entire United States was a single, homogeneous cultural group. The narrow set of cultural artifacts that wound throughout America were the whole of all American culture to him, and the bits and pieces of different subcultures were simply individual quirks.

And I've learned that it's not simply people from outside the United States that understand things this way. For many Americans, certain cultural constructs are invisible, and so are the cultures that they then represent. From high enough up, everything is the same.

P.S.: By the way, if you're not hip to "affective understanding" here's a quick rundown. This describes how people would like it to work for machines, but since that's basically just a model of what people do, you may find it enlightening.

Working For Work

[W]e want people to reach their potential and so the dignity of work is very valuable and important and we have to re-emphasize work and reform our welfare programs, like we did in 1996. We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.
Paul Ryan (R) Wisconsin

When I go to work every day, I am unconcerned with dignity, value or culture. I, for my part, am concerned with a paycheck. If, by some chance, the paychecks stop, then I will no longer go to work. Instead will apply myself to either looking for a new job - one that comes with a paycheck, or to acquiring certain skills and/or tools that I may lack that, once I have them, will make it easier for me to find a new job, and the resulting paycheck.

But I have known, and still know, people who do not work. And I do not consider them to be lacking in values, culture or dignity. Living, as I do, in the general vicinity of Microsoft, I've encountered a few Microsoft Millionaires - some of whom have availed themselves of the opportunity to retire early and fill their time doing things that are important to them, but that we do not normally consider “work.” Would Representative Ryan decry them as not having the value or culture of work? Or consider them to have fallen short of their potential and lacking the dignity of work? (Not, I suspect, as long as their checks are good.) And what about those people who retired after a lifetime of work, but are now, effectively considered poor and making a living from welfare programs? Are they in this tailspin of culture? If not, why not?

On the flip side of the coin, as anyone who has fruitlessly hunted high and low for a job in “this economy” can tell you, employment, work, does not grow on trees. We are no longer a significantly agrarian society. The resources required to keep oneself clothed, housed and fed are not available simply by going back to the family farm and picking up a hoe or a scythe. But even back when it was a possibility for many people, their labor wasn't about dignity, value or culture - it was materal support for their livelihoods. The famed “Protestant Work Ethic” that many people claim is lacking from the inner city was not about a love of toil - it was about not starving to death. And, for the record, some people starved anyway.

But as the Industrial Revolution took hold, and people moved from the farms to the city, they didn't do this because they decided that were uninterested in the dignity, value or culture of farm work - they did so because they saw better opportunities.

When I was growing up, my parents drummed into me the idea that I had to work twice as hard to be considered half as good. I finally asked my mother to stop saying that, asking: “Do you know how demotivating that is?” The Japanese, I am told, have a saying along the lines of “don’t do worthless things.” In an economy where there are more job-seekers than jobs and people with low skills are consistently last hired and first fired, looking for a steady job is often a useless thing. (We won’t even talk about the effects of having an arrest or conviction record, both common in poor neighborhoods) Work, effort, toil - whatever you want to call it, is not an end in itself. It’s intended to be a means of support, and once the idea that it isn’t takes hold, what’s the point of it?

In this light, the best way to create a “culture of work” is to create a culture in which work pays off. If one wants people to learn the “value of work,” then the rewards from work need to be valuable. And that means creating an economy where labor is needed, so that work is needed, and therefore pays. Put that in place, and dignity or none, more people will go to work.