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I think that my life philosophy is becoming "It's complicated." Which breaks itself by being pretty simple, but maybe I can complicate it up by explaining? (This can join my other statement of life philosophy, "My preferences and what is of high quality are not a complete overlap of categories," which I have probably stated in a clearer yet pithier manner at some other point. Maybe while drunk.)
I was thinking about intersectionality, really. And prejudice, which is what happens when our brain takes "Life is too complicated for us to think about every single aspect presented to our senses at every moment" and then helpfully simplifies...too far. And about privilege, which is invisible because it's all about the sort of things you don't have to think about it. And about how different types of oppression are different, and there's only so much utility in comparing them, which is still better than not comparing them at all.
I have a tendency, which I suspect is not uncommon, to try to parse the sorts of prejudice I don't have to deal with personally by comparing it to the sort I do. There's that one saying--something like "Homophobia is men being afraid that others will treat them the way they treat women"--that sums up this approach. Take prejudice X, which we are familiar with, and recast it as a way of looking at prejudice Y.
Which is useful! (And pithy, and satisfying, and sharp, if done cleverly.) But it's over-simplified. There are a lot of ways in which homophobia is nothing like sexism, just like there are a lot of ways that sexism isn't like racism, and racism isn't like classism, and classism isn't like ableism, and so on and so forth, even though there are useful and illuminating parallels to be drawn in any of those things.
Because it's all so fucking complicated. There are corner cases and exceptions for everything. And that's why it's so important to remember it's complicated, because otherwise people keep trying to pull out an exception and use it to argue against the existence of everything else, or to simplify everything into binaries. Which is all...Factions. And un-useful. "Choose between us and them" is sometimes necessary, in extreme places, but I hate the reduction of everything to them, because it obscures all the places of overlap.
I like to think that if people paid more attention to complexity, if they remembered the way things overlap with each other, if they remembered that not one of us has the whole story on anything ever--and sometimes that means other people know better than we do (even if we feel strongly about it), and sometimes that means we know better than they do (even if they're claiming to be an authority), and sometimes it means not a god damn one of us really has a good solution to the problem at hand--then maybe there'd be some more empathy and compassion to go around.
I'm pretty sure I'm an optimist, here. But I like to think this nonetheless.
Anyway. I balk at binaries. I think a lot of people do. And sometimes the agnostic's mantra, "I don't know enough to know," is the coward's way out of making a decision on too little information, and sometimes it's a lot braver than leaping in to join one side or the other when the matter is a lot more complicated than Two Sides Fight It Off, One Wins.
And I'm pretty sure I don't always know when the third option--refusing to make a choice is a choice, and sometimes the only way to win is not to play--is a good idea. It'd be much too simple if it were always the right call, after all. (I contemplate Swiss neutrality, and how much that "I refuse to pick a side" approach could sometimes help people, for all that they weren't out Fighting The Bad People.) It's all the harder to figure out if I'm being a coward or taking a stand for "Not enough info" or "There is no one good solution" when I see friends line up against each other, too. Sometimes none of the choices are good, and if I'm not responsible for any of them, can I just say that? Do I still have to announce which one I prefer, out of all the possible imperfect solutions?
I don't know. It's not a conclusion. Just, "Shit, things are complex, aren't they? That makes life hard." And it does. But I get suspicious of easy answers. "It's all the fault of X" and "This could all be solved by X" are equally suspicious when they step outside of video games and math problems. It's complicated. I don't think there's any real solution for that.
I was thinking about intersectionality, really. And prejudice, which is what happens when our brain takes "Life is too complicated for us to think about every single aspect presented to our senses at every moment" and then helpfully simplifies...too far. And about privilege, which is invisible because it's all about the sort of things you don't have to think about it. And about how different types of oppression are different, and there's only so much utility in comparing them, which is still better than not comparing them at all.
I have a tendency, which I suspect is not uncommon, to try to parse the sorts of prejudice I don't have to deal with personally by comparing it to the sort I do. There's that one saying--something like "Homophobia is men being afraid that others will treat them the way they treat women"--that sums up this approach. Take prejudice X, which we are familiar with, and recast it as a way of looking at prejudice Y.
Which is useful! (And pithy, and satisfying, and sharp, if done cleverly.) But it's over-simplified. There are a lot of ways in which homophobia is nothing like sexism, just like there are a lot of ways that sexism isn't like racism, and racism isn't like classism, and classism isn't like ableism, and so on and so forth, even though there are useful and illuminating parallels to be drawn in any of those things.
Because it's all so fucking complicated. There are corner cases and exceptions for everything. And that's why it's so important to remember it's complicated, because otherwise people keep trying to pull out an exception and use it to argue against the existence of everything else, or to simplify everything into binaries. Which is all...Factions. And un-useful. "Choose between us and them" is sometimes necessary, in extreme places, but I hate the reduction of everything to them, because it obscures all the places of overlap.
I like to think that if people paid more attention to complexity, if they remembered the way things overlap with each other, if they remembered that not one of us has the whole story on anything ever--and sometimes that means other people know better than we do (even if we feel strongly about it), and sometimes that means we know better than they do (even if they're claiming to be an authority), and sometimes it means not a god damn one of us really has a good solution to the problem at hand--then maybe there'd be some more empathy and compassion to go around.
I'm pretty sure I'm an optimist, here. But I like to think this nonetheless.
Anyway. I balk at binaries. I think a lot of people do. And sometimes the agnostic's mantra, "I don't know enough to know," is the coward's way out of making a decision on too little information, and sometimes it's a lot braver than leaping in to join one side or the other when the matter is a lot more complicated than Two Sides Fight It Off, One Wins.
And I'm pretty sure I don't always know when the third option--refusing to make a choice is a choice, and sometimes the only way to win is not to play--is a good idea. It'd be much too simple if it were always the right call, after all. (I contemplate Swiss neutrality, and how much that "I refuse to pick a side" approach could sometimes help people, for all that they weren't out Fighting The Bad People.) It's all the harder to figure out if I'm being a coward or taking a stand for "Not enough info" or "There is no one good solution" when I see friends line up against each other, too. Sometimes none of the choices are good, and if I'm not responsible for any of them, can I just say that? Do I still have to announce which one I prefer, out of all the possible imperfect solutions?
I don't know. It's not a conclusion. Just, "Shit, things are complex, aren't they? That makes life hard." And it does. But I get suspicious of easy answers. "It's all the fault of X" and "This could all be solved by X" are equally suspicious when they step outside of video games and math problems. It's complicated. I don't think there's any real solution for that.
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