Organization: The American University - University Computing Center
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 20:02:58 EDT
From: <HERSCH@auvm.american.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.homosexuality,alt.discrimination,soc.motss
Subject: Re: Genes, Categorical Hypostatization, and You
 <Bv0KoE.576@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> <92267.204350HERSCH@auvm.american.edu>
 <1992Sep26.174456.23668@sun0.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>

Before I go further, I would like to say that I actually agree with
Gene Smith on a lot of this stuff, even where he disagrees with
me. Yes, that's possible.

In article <1992Sep26.174456.23668@sun0.urz.uni-heidelberg.de>,
gsmith@lauren.uucp (Gene W. Smith) says:
>
>In article <92267.204350HERSCH@auvm.american.edu>
>HERSCH@auvm.american.edu writes:
>> Homosexuality as an identifying
>>characteristic of a person, as an interior identity, as a part
>>of one's essential person-hood...people mean all of this when
>>they use the term "homosexual", or "homosexuality", or even "gay"
>>or "queer". These dimensions are part of that terminology.
>
>Not everyone means this by homosexuality.  It is highly unlikely (after
>all!) that the people who are trying to find homosexuality in the brain
>somewhere mean this.

Well, perhaps they would deny it. I argue, however, that the whole
modern notion of *sexuality* has been imported into what these
people trying to find homosexuality in the brain are, in fact,
trying to find. The best way that I can support that argument is
to refer you, and whoever else is interested in this subject, to
the radically different contours of the expression of homosexually-
expressed lust discernible through time and across space. In our
culture, the pattern is homosexual persons. In other cultures it
has been homosexual classes, or homosexual phases of individual
lives. There are ancient cultures still existing in New Guinea
where ALL adolescent boys have sex (ritualized to some extent, but
apparently enthusiastically enjoyed by all parties) with older
boys or young men, but where virtually no one can be found to
engage in homosexual behavior or even to admit to homosexual lusts
as a life-long pattern. Is there a sudden eruption in these
people's genes that then goes away?

Much has been made in various ways of the experience of classical
Athens, but if one thing is clear, it is that grown men had sex
with boys, and never with other grown men. Not every grown Athenian
man had sex with boys, but it was rather general. Was the homosex
gene, if I may so name it, so different then that the lust it
provoked took such a different form from its modern descendant?

>One could parody this argument as follows:
>Suppose left-handed people start a Sinister culture, and identify as
>lefties.  People then use this to "prove" that left-handedness is a
>cultural artifact.

As you say, that's a parody.

>This is a logical fallacy, and it is one that
>critics from the humanities and sociological side seem in danger of in
>some of their rejectionist critiques of this kind of work.

A better parody would be the Deaf culture that already exists. Indeed,
a cultural superstructure, as in the case of deaf people, does not
demand a cultural basis. I admit that deafness, construed as the
inability to hear, is not culturally determined. But it does not
follow that every cultural superstructure can be explained in
physical terms, and when there is as much variation in the expression
within culture as exists with the "homosexuality" that these
people are trying to explain by an appeal to genetics, then it
seems to me that the burden is on them to show that they're not
doing what I say that they're doing: trying to explain a social
construct in irrelevant genetic terms.

>
>Moreover, I dispute the history.  Did "Il Sodoma" call himself that, and
>*not* mean to identify himself as (in modern terms) a homosexual?  It was
>clearly a deliberate affirmation of sexual identity.  The fact that the
>*word* homosexual had not as yet been coined is a ludicrous red herring.

I admit, actually, that there is indeed a little more room for dispute
than I implied in my earlier rants on the subject. However, Il Sodoma
was, I think you'll have to admit, eccentric to a degree that the
modern queer is not, when each is granted his own historical context.
How many people, if you could poll the people of his time, would, when
confronted with Il Sodoma's example, have said "Yes, I'm like that"?
But yes, there's a lot of ground to defend here, and I'm not going
to try to cover it.

>
>The distinction between the homosexual person and the heterosexual
>person certainly existed in Plato's head when he wrote the Symposium,
>since the myth of Aristophanes has people coming in two types--what we
>would now call gay and straight.

Yes, certainly. In that formulation there is certainly an analogue
to the modern categories. I won't try to maintain that the modern
categories were *inconceivable* to the ancients. But I don't think
you will succeed in convincing me that they were paradigmatic within
Athenian life. And *even if they were*, what happened to them in
medieval Europe? Where are they in the tribal cultures of New Guinea?
You can, of course, argue that the underlying reality remains the
same even when there is a cultural non-cognizance of it; the converse,
as it were, of what I'm saying. I think you'd be wrong.

>The null
>hypothesis here is that people "back then" were much the same as people
>now.  It is not sensible to assume they were radically different unless
>and until they can be proved to be similar.

Since when does one side in an argument get to decide what the null
hypothesis is? I don't buy this at all. I can say with just as much
confidence that the null hypothesis is that human behavior that is
culturally expressed is culturally determined. It is not sensible
to assume a biological basis for behavior that has wildly different
cultural manifestations. You don't buy that? Well, I don't buy your
supposed null hypothesis either.

>
>I don't agree at all that "virtually everyone" means by homosexuality
>what you mean by it.  And therefore, it is very much a matter of debate.
>*I* am quite happy to talk about homosexuality in Canada geese, and I think
>the qualms about this are silly.  A lot of people are the same, if you will
>bother to check the usage.

I'm willing to concede this. The terminology certainly has a lot of
baggage, though, that ought at least to be acknowledged and confronted.
Is that done? Perhaps in some cases. Not by some of the people who
have posted here and so irritated me.

>
>>Which is a very strong argument
>>why other disciplines should defer to history when human society
>>is involved. When they don't, you get nonsense like the search for
>>a genetic basis for "sexuality".
>
>While I am not a fan of scientism, your whole attitude shows why people
>in the humanities are often regarded with suspicion if not outright
>derision by scientists.  I see no reason why the usage of the word by
>neurologists should "defer" to history, especially when the reading of
>history to me appears tendentious and selective.
>

And I, from within the humanities, can return the suspicion and even
the derision. There is, of course, no reading of history that is not
tendentious and selective; that's the nature of the beast. One's
tendency and one's principles of selection are, it is to be hoped,
clearly articulated, dispassionately applied, and above reproach.
Haha, yes, I know that's funny. The problem here is huge, and
crucial. On the one hand, you have the humanities, history in
particular, saying "We have something to say about the human experience,
something you should hear. We can check your errors. We can interpret
in ways that you can't." And on the other side, you have science or
its partisans saying "We may err in our collection of data, or in
our reading of it, but we are incapable of making a fundamental error,
because we are objective." That is to say, politics, ideology, and
philosophy are ruled out of court by science; history doesn't attempt
this very often. And maybe *good* scientists don't do this either.
The article that provoked my original comments on this certainly did.

This "scientistic" attitude, that *people* are capable of a completely
objective point of view that has no implications, no politics, no
dangers--this is disturbing and scary. It puts me in mind of the
doctors and researchers in Nazi Germany who coolly and complaisantly
used the opportunity of helpless human research subjects to treat
human beings in ways that we wouldn't treat rats. And it also calls
to mind another, similar project of our day, which apparently enjoys
considerable popularity: finding a genetic basis for criminality.
As if it were not sufficient that people be marginalized, immiserated,
and brutalized, society must now set science to peer into their
unwilling bodies and declare them genetic perverts as well. Please
forgive me my squeamishness in the face of this sort of undertaking.

>>You misunderstand me *profoundly*. I am arguing that in the realm
>>of human society, the *humanities*, not the soi-disant social sciences,
>>must be granted their prerogative and listened to before science
>>goes off half-cocked. History as the Queen of the Humanities --
>>Clio enthroned -- is my touchstone here, not some dreary social
>>science with its tattered questionairres and its insistent
>>irrelevance.
>
>Fine.  As an ex-philosophy person, I can now argue that History
>must in turn defer to Philosophy, as the ultimate arbiter of conceptual
>categories.  Unless some linguist comes along, and then so it goes...

I couldn't agree more. Yes, I certainly *insist* that History
defer to Philosophy as you suggest. And the deference to the
appropriate discipline cuts across all disciplines...but I hope
history will never have to defer to computer science.

>
>First you insist that homosexuality in some sense *means* its
>hypostatization into a homosexual identity, as something real in the
>world that someone *is*, and now you give a sermon on the evils of
>hypostatizing analytical categories.  Can you have it both ways?

I don't think I'm trying to have it more than one way. I suggest that
"homosexuality" is constructed within culture and within cultural
discourse. Treating it as a phenomenon is hypostatizing a category.
That is almost always a barrier to understanding. How am I working
both sides of the street by saying this?

H.

Herschel Browne
"The" American University