From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: What to do about homophobes?
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 23:28:22 GMT


In article <TIM.93Jan12062759@ear-ache.mit.edu>
tim@ear-ache.mit.edu (Tim Wilson) writes:

>Jess Anderson (anderson@macc.wisc.edu), writing about
>educating homophobes of all stripes, says:

>>Is not the problem precisely that the
>>majority society is so lacking in ethical values (family or
>>otherwise) that there can exist such a pervasive and
>>irresistible oppression?  It isn't just sexual or other
>>minorities who struggle under the boot of this oppression.
>>It's the entire universe.  There is something basically,
>>fundamentally, and enduringly wrong with this society.  It's
>>as though humans (alone of all things) had some *really* bad
>>genes.

>One fundamentally lacking ethical value is honesty.  I just
>don't see how a social structure based on lying can end up
>being anything but oppressive to someone.  A meaningful
>mapping between words and reality can be an effective buffer
>to the abuse of power.  A better way to put that is that
>lack of such a mapping is an invitation to abuse of power.

I don't disagree with this at all, but in casting about for
ideas about our predicament, I think we have to recognize
that honesty involves more than not lying.  My guess is that
in practical terms, outright lying is the lesser part of the
problem.  What seems more pervasive than falsehood is
self-deception and (often smug) delusion, being vested in
creating and maintaining various views that *prevent* people
from coming to grips with certain realities.  If we see this
as an avoidance phenomenon, it's possible (with no little
stretching of the imagination) to find survival value in it
(see below).

Your point about the misuse of words is especially
important.  Many of the thorns in our various thickets
involve the perversion of meaning, thinkspeak in all its
grisly forms.

>Look at the fuss regarding _Heather_Has_Two_Mommies_ and
>_Daddy's_Roommate_: the bulk of people reading this know
>that there are gay parents, some in child rearing
>relationships, others as single parents.  It seems unlikely
>that those folks, as a group, are any better or worse as
>parents of children than any other group of parents
>identified by something that has nothing to do with child
>rearing.

Yes, but some of the people are so in thrall of delusion
that they literally do *not* know the obvious.  They have
such a powerful identity investment in denial of certain
realities that even to *begin* to admit what you or I would
see as ordinary, everyday reality would cause the collapse
of their entire world view.

It may sound very far-fetched to some ears, but there has to
be something that explains the almost maniacal tenacity with
which people hold to bigotted views.  Ignorance alone is not
enough to explain this, I think; it's something far less
amenable than that to reason.

>For all their talk about parents' rights and values, those
>opposed to such a curriculum change oppose honesty about
>reality.  Their whole power structure depends on their
>ability to control disinformation.

If my preceding ideas cohere, then one might expect the
social structures created upon that same kinds of bases to be
deluded or irrational in similar ways.  And in fact I think
this is broadly the case.

>Maybe it is genetic.  Maybe there was a time and space where
>such a trait had survival value.  I really doubt that it
>does so now.

Not for rational people, probably not (admitting, though,
that defining them is not necessarily easy).  But look what
happens when you're attacked by a lion and your whole arm is
torn right off (humor me by going with the image a minute).
You don't die right on the spot, usually, and chances are
good you don't feel a whole lot of pain, either.  A complex
of reactions, mental and physical, conspire to help you try
to survive this attack.  OK, so this is extreme.  But on the
more ordinary level, the ability to *avoid*, at least (in
the lion case) to postpone, certain pains we see as *very*
threatening, does indeed have survival value.  In the case
of bigots, what survives is the illusion one is a decent
person after all, because everything that would say
otherwise is completely walled out, its very reality denied
if need be.

<> What we see depends on mainly what we look for.
<> -- John Lubbock
-- 
[Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin]
[Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson]
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[---------> Discrimination, Bigotry, and Hate are not Family Values <---------]
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