From: gsmith@euterpe.uucp (Gene W. Smith)
Subject: Re: Genes, Categorical Hypostatization, and You
Organization: IWR, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 92 19:22:24 GMT

In article <92273.200258HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> <HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> writes:

>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.

Good, I agree with a lot of what I said too.

>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. 

Sexuality in the sense of "sexual orientation" is indeed the notion
they appear to be using.  However, it should be bourn in mind that the
paradigm here is not so much a possibly naive reading of human society,
but animal models.  Gay rodents and homosexual rams, in other words.

>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.

In our culture it is a variety of attitudes and behavior, which we tend
to see as persons of particular sorts.  Other cultures view things
differently, but there is always the question of distinguishing how
behavior is looked at or put into a theoretical or societal context and
what in fact it has been.  My suspicion, which is no more than that
really, is that the differences have been exaggerated by the practice
of taking a society at its own estimation of itself.  

>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?

One thing I would object to is the uncritical acceptance of this kind
of anthropological data as simply factual, while regarding things like
brain research as radically dubious. Greenberg typifies this.  He
attacked the Levay paper (which started all this), but his book is
filled with stuff like this, accepted as factual and with no real
attempt at critical analysis.

Why is this?  There are hundreds of little communities in New Guinea,
with quite different customs and languages.  When I read Margaret Mead,
it sounded as if she would just breeze in, learn enough about the
language to get by, go on the the next tribe, and then draw some grand
conclusions.  I don't really know very much about anthropology, so
perhaps my scepticism is misplaced.  But when someone quotes a single
study done years ago as "proof" that some tribe or other never even
heard of same-sex relations, I am sceptical.  I am also dubious about
the example above.  What is the *attitude* towards admitting adult
same-sex relations?  How easy would it be for someone who wished to do
so have them?

One general reason for scepticism is that these examples always seem to
come from small tribal groups. This is not so helpful if you are
interested in what people will do, given the opportunity.  Find me a
large, urban society which embodies some pattern (exclusive
heterosexuality, for instance) and it is a much better argument.

Moreover, the remark about genes is puzzling.  The innatists and brain
people are not claiming a genetic basis, that is a quite different
question.  Moreover, this sort of variation might be just what you
would find in small, isolated communities if varieties of sexual
behavior were largely genetically determined.  I find it far-fetched,
but one might imagine a genetic predisposition to boy-boy sex in this
tribe, but not to adult homosexual activity.

>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. 

This not only is not "clear", it is false.  Sex with grown men wasn't
as respectable, is all.

>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?

Probably the argument would be that sexual behavior is only partly
determined by innate factors.

>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.

This Deaf culture thing in fact shows us a case where not every
cultural superstructure is explained in an innatist way, but the
fundamental fact of deafness itself is.  This, I think, is what people
are attempting to do with homosexuality.

>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.

This is an ideology which gets converted into a belief.  That is, one
moves from the idea that science is supposed to be like that to the
idea that scientists are in fact like that.

>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.

I don't see how this really connects with your previous point.  There
may be a problem with viewing people as objects of study and at the
same time viewing them as people. This would be a problem with all
doctors and researchers, not jsut the Nazi ones.  And I don't see how
it is helped in the least by giving up the myth of objectivity, when
the Nazi mythology was (in that case) the real problem.

>And it also calls to mind another, similar project of our day, which
>apparently enjoys considerable popularity: finding a genetic basis for
>criminality.

People have been working on and off on this since Lombroso.  The
difference is, they do not seem to be making any progress.  The brain
of a sociopath seems to be annoyingly similar to any other brain.  The
xyy chromosome turned out to be a bit of a flop.  So it goes in the
world of Mad Nazi Science, I guess.

>>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.

Oh dear.  I was not really proposing this seriously.  I've read enough
philosophy of mathematics to become convinced that mathematicians are
better off not deferring to philosophers, for instance.  My point was
that Clio, the Muse of History does not really take intellectual
precedence any more than Pluto, the Muse of Disney, or any or Muse
which may amuse.  

People are well advised to consider criticism from without, in order
not to fall into an intellectual rut.  In the end, though, I think we
will usually be better off leaving nematodes to the nematologists.  If
they appear to be making a mess of things, then criticism from without
is appropriate.  But we should not preface it by saying "as a mere
nematologist, you *must* listen to me, an X".  The X doesn't have a
special standing simply by virtue of being an X.

>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?

To identify as a homosexual, you must treat homosexuality as a
phenomenon, as something which someone can be.  If I understand you
right, that is what homosexuality means to us in our culture today.  So
hypostatizing a category is something which any homosexual must do, in
order to be a homosexual.  Standing (how do you do that, by the way?)
at some point outside of society and looking in, you see that this is
merely hypostatizing a social construct, and so presumably see that the
homosexual identity and therefore homosexuality itself, inextricably
bound with that identity, are in some sense an illusion.  In the "real
world", so to speak, we see that there really is no such thing as
homosexuality, and therefore there can be no real explanation for it.

But this "refutes" the idea of an explanation for homosexuality by
denying its conceptual base, while at the same time talking *as if* the
idea was one which was accepted (in your other role as a member of
society, perhaps.)


-- 
     Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/IWR/Ruprecht-Karls University 
               gsmith@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian,alt.society.anarchy