i listened to about the first half of the left of philosophy podcast and i thought it was really interesting! (about halfway through the people with the chainsaws next door started up again and i couldn't focus on it anymore.) even before the chainsaws, though, it was a difficult listen to me, a lot of which i think is that i'm not an academic, i don't have that kind of background. i've learned a lot by listening to and paying attention to academic leftist discourse, particularly in terms of challenging my own biases and preconceptions. at the same time there's this video essayist i follow and one of the things she says a lot is "read theory", and i _don't_ read theory. i think it's valuable and interesting work and just isn't really accessible to probably most people - not just as a matter of paywalling and academic gatekeeping and elsevier and all of this other stuff, but because a lot of it is very jargony. it's not a dialect i'm fluent in. i struggle to keep up.
the thing about academia to me is that a lot of it is very abstract. which i think is... i mean when one is in a situation where one doesn't have a lot of _practical_ ability to put one's ideas into practice, i think one of the more valuable things one can do is work on what i'd say is a... a healthy mindset. it's interesting because drilling down to things i don't see it as an intellectual practice, i see it as kind of a moral or ethical practice. when the time comes to make radical change, when crisis comes, a lot of times a bunch of fucked up shit happens, like, not even on purpose. people are trying to do their best but it's really fucking hard to do the right thing when crisis hits, and sometimes people mean well but wind up fucking shit up anyway. yesterday i was talking to a friend who, like me, used to be a boy scout, and she talked about trying to "be prepared" in a time of often overwhelming change. and for me a lot of it is "what the fuck is going on, what is even happening".
i grew up steeped in the tradition of liberal thought, which i _do_ think is distinct from the tradition of leftist thought. the tradition of liberal thought left me completely unprepared to deal with trump's victory. like, my idea was that under liberalism, something like this Should Not Happen. and once i did that i found out liberal thought had disadvantaged me in other ways, like, i was not theoretically equipped to understand or accept my own gender identity through a liberal framework. doing that required me to understand and accept some radical concepts... there's this idea of "gender incongruence", i guess i'd say when gendered expectations are incompatible with one's own subjective well-being, and like... for me, i'd say that my gender is incongruent with the liberal political philosophy i had.
which isn't to say that i wholeheartedly and uncritically embrace leftist thought methodologically! i definitely think there's a strong intellectual and theoretical component to my own leftism. being "transgender", for instance, that's an abstract framing of a concrete lived experience, one that's more suited to who i am than "transsexual" or "transvestite" were. it's just the idea of "social science", that framing, that gives me pause. in practical terms, framing something as a "science", you know, that had a material advantage in terms of access to resources, and i think that's valuable. i mean one does have to make compromises and i think that was valuable.
at the same time i look at academia and it doesn't offer what it used to. there's not the sort of security in it that there used to be. this is the challenging thing to me is that the theoretical leftist tradition sometimes seems to me to be getting in the way of effective leftist practice. i don't think the idea of the "ivory tower" is a fair or useful framing, but i do feel sometimes that there's a layer of abstraction between academic understandings of leftism and people's practical experience.
which is why the part of the podcast that i heard was so interesting to me... because building coalitions comes from multiple different directions. like, how do you make sense of somebody's lived experience that isn't yours? that's inevitably going to involve abstraction, figuring out what's the same and what's different between two groups of people. and i think saying look, why do we have to compare everything to hitler? is a valid question. like everything bad comes down to the nazis, that's the yardstick by which everything is judged, and it's a terrible yardstick. it's like if someone isn't Literally Hitler it doesn't get seen as a problem.
one of the things that i've taken an amateur interest in is genocide studies, the way that gets framed, the way that it was inceptionally a matter of _norm entrepeneurship_, and the first people to take up that framing after lemkin's original framing, after the UN gave it the seal of approval, was _We Charge Genocide_, in 1951, where Black Americans said "ok look what you're doing to us is genocide". and that wasn't taken seriously, and that to me is a major failure of the attempt to fight "fascism". because then you have a liberal democratic norm, you know, gatekeeping. the charge was basically ignored and nothing was done, and that inaction sent the message that the way the US was treating Black Americans was, I guess, acceptable.
so like as a theoretical concept terms like "genocide" and "fascism" are only important to the point where one can, you know, perform norm entrepeneurship, in _every individual case_, to convince the people who have the power to stop it that they should use that power to stop it. that's gonna be an adversarial process. as an outsider i'm trying to convince people to put themselves at risk to support my values. and the only leverage i have is, you know, the power to walk away. to say "these people aren't my allies, they're acting against my values". and then i gotta be in community with other people aren't part of "the system". i can say that oh i'm an anarchist, i don't believe in systems of coercive power, but ultimately my goal _is_ reform, is for there to be a system that has a _place_ for me and the people whose values and interests i share. if i call myself an "anarchist" or a "communist" that doesn't mean anything other than "i am not your ally", by declaring myself a member of a group that liberals _don't_ see as allies i'm trying to communicate that i'm not on liberals' _side_, while at the same time i'm declaring that people with a certain set of values and beliefs, i do work to ally with them. people who will not compromise on trans rights, people who oppose what the israeli government is doing to the palestinian people, people who oppose the racist carceral justice system, these are people whose values are congruent with mine, whose goals are congruent with mine.
of course by doing that i'm taking a risk, but it is a calculated risk, an intentional risk. the less people have to lose, the more extreme risks we're willing to take. in general, most liberals probably have more to lose than i do.
idk. i don't think about politics a lot, i don't know if that's coherent. just some random thoughts. these fucking chainsaws are giving me a headache. i'm going to lie down.
― Kate (rushomancy), Tuesday, 28 May 2024 16:43 (four weeks ago) link