Ceding the Field

(shortpost)

There’s a thing people do that dismays me. It’s not quite throwing one another under the bus, but it’s pretty close.

Another version of this shows up when people with a mildly taboo orientation or fetish or hobby or personal trait hasten to differentiate themselves from those much worse people with their much more taboo orientations or fetishes or hobbies or personal traits.

(“I mean, haha, just kidding, it’s not like I’m a furry or anything. 😅😅😅”)

Instead of dismantling the machine that is victimizing both them and the other guy, they shove the other guy forward in order to put themselves further back in the line that leads to the gallows.

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Another version: saying that they burned witches at Salem. There almost certainly were some people, among those murdered by the church, who were practitioners of what we would now call wicca or similar; people who “really” were “witches.”

But they weren’t witches in the way their murderers claimed. They weren’t the thing the bad guys wanted you to think, and when you refer to them as if they were, you’re letting the bad guys win.

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Another place where this shows up: talking about whether certain groups are inferior, when it comes to their fundamental dignity and the rights that a civilized society should grant them.

Like, often nazis or misogynists or whatever will try to start demonstrating that [some group] is objectively inferior on [some axis], and often the opposition will come right back with NUH-UH, [group] IS EVERY BIT AS CAPABLE—

I think there’s a mistake, there, and I think that mistake is acting like that would matter, even if true. Playing into the frame of the bigot, letting them set the terms of the debate, implicitly conceding that the question of two different groups’ equality or inequality is the crux of the issue.

It isn’t.

Don’t cede the ground.

I happen to think that the claims of the racists and the misogynists are false in many cases; my sense is that even if the bell curves for different groups peak in slightly different places and have their tails in slightly different places, they basically cover the same ground and overwhelmingly overlap anyway, so whatever.

But even if it were demonstrably true that [group] was 15 IQ points inferior (or whatever), that wouldn’t change my sense of moral obligation toward them in the slightest! It wouldn’t change my beliefs about what kinds of treatment are fair or unfair!

I know for a fact that I have more raw intelligence than most humans. It’s as inarguable as being four feet tall makes you shorter than most humans. Even in nerd circles, I’m more-than-half-the-time in the upper quartile of whatever room I’m in, and guess what! Doesn’t matter! Practically every human outstrips me in some domain or other anyway! I can’t step to someone’s unique expertise, nor can I compete with them along domains orthogonal to intelligence (e.g. physical prowess), and even if I were hypothetically superior to some particular person along 10 out of 10 of the most important axes...

...EVEN THEN, I do not think that gives me the right to dictate the terms of their existence, cut them off from opportunity, or take a larger share of the social pie!

The whole point of civilization is moving away from a state of base natural anarchy, where your value is inextricably tied to your capability. The whole point of building a safe, stable, cooperative society is making it so that you don’t have to pull your whole weight every second of every day or else be abandoned to the wolves or enslaved by strongmen.

(“Wages are for people who can demonstrate the value of their labor within a single hour,” says my colleague. “I can’t do that, which is why I have to be on a salary.”)

The thing we're trying to build here is a world where the absolutely inferior—

(To the extent that’s even a category that exists; a lot depends on your point of view and what axes you consider relevant.)

The thing we're trying to build here is a world where even the absolutely inferior get to have the maximum achievable amount of sovereignty, and agency, and happiness, and health, and get to participate in society to the greatest possible degree permitted by their personal limitations and the technology we have available.

(Both literal technology and social/metaphorical tech.)

And IDGAF if you can “prove” some group’s “inferiority.” It means nothing to me. It changes nothing. It was never the key hinge of the conversation. Superiority is not the foundation of my sense of my fellow humans’ dignity.

(Not to mention that there is a huge difference between demonstrating some difference between groups at the statistical level and saying anything at all about an individual.)

I think it’s good to push back on bigots when they are spreading straightforward falsehoods. I’m not saying “don’t fire back with facts” in these conversations. If someone is arguing that [group] is inferior on some axis and you know that they’re not, actually, please do speak up!

But the fire with which people fire back seems to me to be ceding the field. It seems to be an implicit validation of the bigoted frame. Acting outraged at the mere possibility that some group might be measurably inferior to another, as if that would be morally relevant in any way whatsoever—

I dunno. I kind of fear that those defenders are closer to the bigots than I might wish. That they respond with such fervor because they do believe, on some gut level, that if groups are different, then the moral standards must necessarily also be different. They don’t want to conclude that the moral standards should be different, and so they object with desperation to any evidence that threatens to show actual differences between groups.

Which is just … bad. Don’t do it. Don’t endorse the enemy’s frame.

Recently, someone posted a funny gif on my Discord server, of a cat making what looks to human sensibilities like bedroom eyes, while flapping its tongue in a way that looks to humans like it’s lascivious.

And one of my server friends was sort of halfhearted and apologetic and said “yes, I know, it’s actually totally wholesome but it’s funny to imagine otherwise.”

And my objection, in the moment, was to the claim that the sexual interpretation was unwholesome.

The cat was obviously not doing a sexual thing, but the joke is not corrupt or dark or evil or harmful. The joke is funny. Sex is funny. Hastening to reassure that we know it’s not actually base and corrupt just reinforces the (wrong) background cultural narrative that sex itself is fundamentally unwholesome.

It’s not. That’s a psy-op. As is calling the murdered women (and men, and children) at Salem “witches.” As is feeling the need to insist that nuh-uh, there’s no such thing as a competence difference between races or sexes, because otherwise that would be bad.

Potential competence differences between groups don’t matter on a moral level. Or at least, let me-and-my-philosophy be an existence proof to you: they don’t HAVE to matter. You can build a society that doesn’t give a fuck if people are fundamentally inferior, and that does its best to be fair and moral toward them anyway.

That's the society you should be trying to build—if for no other reason than the fact that that’s going to be YOU one day, when you break a leg or have a stroke or just succumb to the vicissitudes of time. If for no other reason than the fact that that could be your kid, or the kid of someone you care about.

(There are other reasons, too, but that’s one that’s hopefully at least a little bit persuasive even to selfish egotists.)

Competence is not the measure of worth. Fundamental equality is not the justification for fair and moral treatment.

Build your ethics on firmer ground, please.

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