There is a common criticism of allies in social justice movements as “seeking cookies.” The prototypical interaction goes something like this:
Straight person: I think gay people should be allowed to get married!
Gay person: Good… for you?
Straight person: I don’t say the word ‘faggot’!
Gay person: I’m glad?
Straight person: I have never in my life beat up a gay person for being gay!
Gay person: …do you want a medal?
This is, of course, very silly behavior.
There is also a very common argument in animal rights movements that goes something like this:
Alice: Meat is murder!
Bob: That’s not fair. A lot of people don’t know how to be vegan. We should encourage people to reduce their meat consumption as much as they can and accept that a lot of times they’re still going to be eating meat.
Alice: Um. Animals are literally getting tortured.
Bob: Yes, that’s why I’m saying we should get people to have Meatless Mondays or maybe switch to free-range eggs.
Alice: Meatless Mondays? Would you support Murderless Mondays?
Bob: If the average person killed more than one person a day YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT I WOULD.
I think both of those interactions are getting at the idea of praiseworthiness.
“Praiseworthy” is different from “good.” “Good” is about the effect your actions have; “praiseworthy” is about where you’re starting from.
If you accept the child-in-the-pond argument, not donating $3000 to malaria relief and being an assassin paid $3000 are morally equivalent actions. However, they aren’t equally blameworthy. You would have to be an unusually bad person to become an assassin, but a saint to donate all your money to charity. Becoming an assassin is doing much worse than you could be expected to do; giving all your money to charity, much better.
If you grow up in a liberal environment, it is not praiseworthy to support gay marriage. Everyone supports gay marriage. It would be unusually homophobic of you not to support gay marriage. On the other hand, a person who grows up in an evangelical Christian environment might have to go through a lot of struggle and personal growth to conclude that homosexuality should not be illegal and LGB people should be treated with compassion and love, although homosexuality is still against the law of God. Although the former is better than the latter, the latter is more praiseworthy, because the person’s default was worse.
Why does this matter? Because shaping.
Shaping is a principle of behavior modification. Imagine that you wanted to train a dog to fetch the newspaper. First, you’d reward him for going outside when you said “fetch”, or maybe even heading to the door. Once he got the idea, you’d gradually stop rewarding that and start rewarding the dog walking in the direction of the newspaper. Once he starts doing that, eventually you’d reward him when he began to mouth the newspaper. And so on and so forth.
There are two errors you can fall into in this process. First, you can say “the dog should already know how to go outside! I am not going to reward him unless he goes to the newspaper!” But it doesn’t matter what the dog should do. If he doesn’t know to go outside, he’s not going to go to the newspaper, and he is never going to find out that he would get rewarded for it. Second, you can say “the dog knows to go outside! What a good dog! I should reward him a lot!” But you aren’t actually looking for the dog to know to go outside; you’re looking for him to fetch the newspaper. If he keeps getting rewards for something he knows how to do, he’s not going to try to become better.
The same principles apply to humans. We want to shape ourselves and each other to become ideally virtuous humans, and part of that is rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. Therefore, we should avoid both of the possible errors: we should reward people for doing the best they can, even if the best they can is slight; and we shouldn’t reward people for doing what they’re supposed to do, even if it’s objectively speaking better than what the previous person was doing.
Thing of Things 
This is the perfect post to make anti Jesus comments on!
“So you also, when you shall have done all these things that are commanded you, say: We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which we ought to do.” Jesus, to a bunch of people who he had required to abandon their homes, families, all their worldly possessions, and risk torture and death for him.
I know you’re against sjw as a pejorative, but Jesus Christ what an sjw.
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But Jesus was saying that to the people themselves, while Ozy’s talking about what other people should say to them. He never said, “When someone else has done all the things that are commanded them, yell at them, ‘You’re an unprofitable servant!'”
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He is the one doing the yelling? He is the one saying “you are unprofitable” to people who sacrificed all their possessions and relationships and security for him, and who were literally risking torture and death for him? He is the one saying that LITERAL SAINTHOOD (all the Apostles except Judas were canonised) is still inadequate?
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“He is the one saying that LITERAL SAINTHOOD (all the Apostles except Judas were canonised) is still inadequate?”
“Unprofitable servant” – he’s saying not to expect rewards because it’s not about rewards, it’s about a relationship, and the correct state of that relationship is utter dependence on God, not bargaining with him, trading good deeds for blessings.
Jesus rejected justice and ethical behavior. That’s the scandal of Jesus. Every time someone came to him with a question about the justice or injustice of some situation, he either deflected the question onto some other focus or refuted the basic premise that the universe runs on justice – right up to the point of acceding to a totally unjust trial, conviction and execution.
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Well, Christians were saying that God doesn’t grade on a curve long before transhumanists started doing it.
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ginko: yeah, but then that relationship sounds abusive. “give me all and don’t dare expect anything at all!” Yeah, sure.
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The argument is less “I deserve praise for supporting same-sex marriage” and more “I support same-sex marriage, so stop calling me a bigot”.
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It depends on the context. I agree that there are lots of people (especially but not exclusively children) on tumblr who see complaints about allies without realising the context, get very upset, then make posts which get misinterpreted as “wanting cookies”
But there are also people who treat lgbt people as sources of social kudos and want praise for not actively do in us harm.
Also there are cishet people who go above and beyond, who do things like opening their homes to lgbt youth kicked out by their parents, or my best friend who spent a huge amount of time talking me put of killing myself for being bi, and those people do deserve cookies and applause.
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Well, sometimes it’s “I support same-sex marriage, so stop calling me a bigot for doing this other bigoted thing”.
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Or more charitably- you claim that X is a bigoted thing thought/done by bigoted people. I disagree. I think/do X, and I’m not a bigot. Here is my evidence- I hold many of the same views you do.
It’s not a good argument, in that, true or not, it won’t convince anyone against whom you might have cause to use it.
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I basically agree with this comment. Praiseworthiness is the flip-side of scornworthiness. It might be good to praise people doing the best they can, and not praise people doing what they’re supposed to, but don’t scorn people doing what they’re supposed to.
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That is the position of every evangelical Christian of my acquaintance, and also (I believe) the official position of most evangelical conferences. Of course, their idea of “compassion and love” is “help them not to act on their homosexual urges”, which seems like the mirror image of your dog-training analogy. Evangelicals are not the Westboro Baptists; they are, in my experience, mostly kind and well-meaning people.
As an aside, this is why the “born this way” messaging strategy of the LGBT movement has always struck me as misguided: they are scoring no points with Christians by playing into what the evangelicals already believe, i.e. that everyone is born into sin. Not that I think messaging strategies have much to do with actual social change, mind you — it just highlights the gulf between the Red and Blue tribes, and their inability to model one another.
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The “born that way” argument came about as a direct reaction to lots of anti-gay types saying that being queer was a choice (you still sometimes see this as “why should they get special civil rights protections for a choice”, as though religion was some sort of innate characteristic like eye color…but I digress). I don’t see it so much these days, and you may be right that it’s time to retire it; but it wasn’t made up by progressives out of whole cloth, or out of a misunderstanding of what their opponents believed.
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Ironically, “it’s my choice” was originally an LGBT talking point, back when people thought that framing things in terms of the personal and private might convince conservatives that this wasn’t their business.
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The “born this way” talking points really surprised me when I started to read newspapers in English. In France (at least until the second half of the 00s), the “it’s my choice” position is the one you’d most frequently come across. In fact I found the “born that way” repelling at first, as potentially implying that there actually is a moral failing to excuse.
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Well, from a Christian (and Muslim I guess, Jewish too maybe?) point of view, there is certainly a moral failing happening. How big of a moral failing it is depends on your brand of Christianity.
This is probably not very relevant to the French, being the degenerate atheists that you are. Of course “it’s my choice” shouldn’t have been relevant either, since you’re also statist drones.
This could mean that my stereotypes are flawed and simplistic, but it’s probably just that I need to add “hypocrites” to the list.
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Well, there are *facts*, and we might care about those.
Was I born trans?
Actually yeah, I think I probably was. I mean, I don‘t know for sure, but it’s definitely something that *came over me* and not something I chose freely from a list of options.
I suspect the prenatal hormones theory will prove to be correct. Which, that’s an empirical question and we are very far from clear answers, and sex/gender is a pretty amorphous thing anyhow. We understand it in coarse ways, such as who has uteruses and can make babies, stuff like that. But there is so much we don’t know, the social stuff, the brain stuff. That’s the big shit that shapes our lives.
But anyway, yeah, born this way. Probably.
For gays? Yeah, it seems like at least some of them are born that way.
But on the other hand, it shouldn’t matter. There’s nothing wrong with being gay.
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Political communication is less about what’s true than about what you choose to emphasize. I, of course, completely agree that there is nothing wrong with being gay, which is why it makes no difference to me whether people are born gay or choose it. But I’m a bit of a weirdo.
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Hmm, this is a useful thought!
I think an important thing here though is that something being praiseworthy like this doesn’t obligate people to providing that praise at cost to themselves.
Like, if someone is like ‘I used to believe in conversion therapy for queer people, now I don’t, but I still believe it’s bad to be that way’, I still get to decide that I don’t want to be around this person, and I’m not somehow obligated to be like ‘go you’ – that would be oppressive (in the emotional sense, not just the sj sense).
Like, in the analogy I’m the one who got a dog and now want to train it to fetch newspapers. But if I’m having issues with my neighbor’s dog, and people tell me I should train it, they’re being victim-responsbiling jerks.
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Agreement.
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Everything you wrote strikes me as absolutely true.
Im still not sure the cookie argument is ever really the best phrase to say it though. Most of the times when somebody responds, when it’s justified, with do you want a cookie, it feels to me like they’re being either condescending or tokenizing, both of which are totally valid criticisms in there own right. Also giving too much praise to somebody who ask for it is mildly annoying, but I’m skeptical that it actually has especiallly bad effects given the sort of mild snarking behind their back it’s likely to engender.
Conversely almost every time I’ve seen the cookie argument out in the wild it’s in the form “stop giving people/organizations cookies for making genuine self sacrifices/fighting against genunine norms in there social groups that might cause social damage to themselves and putting themselves in worse positions in order to help women/gays/black people/trans people, it’s the least they can do as the oppressive class, no cookies for basic human decency 2k15”. I do not think the issue with activist communities is, in any way, that they are too kind to people who are in the process of learning to be better persons and honestly listening to these shpeals reminds me of hacker communitiies fretting over whether making things slightly less unneccessarily tedious or difficult would be mollycoddling new comers, but whereas in the hacker community I can see why, even if unhealthy, there is value in not having your values be fairly mainstream. I don’t see how pushing people away from social justice beliefs is healthy. (I think the implicit response from what I’ve seen is we are happy to push people away if it radicalizes the core and makes them less willing to question social-justice doctrine from the right, and that having more people will invariably de-radicalize and mainstream the social justice movement after which it will become useless which, in terms of de-radicalization, might be a fair point).
More generally, can we please not generally endorse social norms which go along the form “we generally extend far too much principle of charity to outsiders and people trying to get into the community, we really need to cut back on that”. They seem to virtually never be correct. (On that note, if somebody could give a less snarky version about why being mean to newcomers through regular aggressive callouts and lack of support in social justice communities is warranted I’d appreciate it, I feel like it does support radicalization but I’m finding it absurdly hard to be overly charitable or strongman it)
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J,
Miri had a thoughtful post about how difficult it is to find the right ways for SJ-type people to respond to newcomers. She agrees SJ-type people are often unduly harsh to newcomers and that this is a real problem, while maintaining that this is not as clear-cut an issue as it may seem, because many newcomers are likely to become confrontational themselves (or disruptive in some other way). So, many SJ people are understandably on high alert for that kind of thing, even though the results are sometimes unfortunate and there is much room for improvement.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/brutereason/2014/12/27/educate-me-go-google-it/
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We will very shortly, in my country, have a referendum on legalising same-sex marriage. Up to now, my position has been that I’m neutral, I’d agree to civil marriage on the grounds of natural justice, but I’m not enthused one way or the other.
However, if anything is going to make me vote “no”, it will be the Yes campaign (which is also being pushed by the government, even though they’re supposed to be neutral when it comes to referenda). What made low-grade irritation boil over into “That’s it, I’m fucking well going to mark a huge giant NO FUCKING WAY on the ballot paper” this morning was a radio ad for the Yes side where a comedian, most renowned and successful for old-style female impersonation (he’s not a drag queen, he’s not glam enough or gay), was doing a heart-string tugging piece on why this is all about love and happiness and (s)he (I’m deliberately using that because he was doing all this in his Mrs So-and-So persona) finished up with “I only want my son Ruairí to have the same chance of love and happiness”.
Wait a goddamn minute, this is a FICTIONAL CHARACTER talking about their FICTIONAL SON WHO IS NOT THEIR SON IN REALITY who is played by a guy who is NOT GAY IN REALITY and who even if he was gay might not necessarily want to get married – and we’re supposed to melt into a cloud of goo and vote “yes” because a sit-com character might want a soap opera wedding?????
It’s the general air of “Of course you’ll vote yes, you don’t want to be one of those knuckle-dragging bigots who hates love and happiness, do you?” and the sheer lack of refusing to face the fact that yes indeed, this change WILL mean a change in law and a whole lot of change and re-definition of marriage and family law.
In my day-job, I see a lot of separated couples, and generally the rule is that, unless she is a truly dreadful mother (and “shooting up heroin in front of your kid” is not enough to classify you as a truly dreadful mother, at least not according to social workers), the mother will get custody of the kids.
What do you do in a custody case where there is no mother? Or two mothers? Who is the mother there – the woman who physically carried the baby to birth? What then is the role of the other woman as partner/spouse? Or two men who may have adopted a child and are equally fathers?
All this kind of consideration will turn up eventually, because while the campaign may be all about “happily every after”, there’s no guarantee that marriages or relationships will last, and people go running to the courts to sort all this out.
The government is backing this not because they’re romantics and/or liberal progressives (some of them are, most of them are not) but because (a) it won’t cost them a penny in political capital; they may lose some votes but not enough to be a problem (unlike if they did something to piss off their business friends who so kindly donate to the party coffers) and (b) they’re actually peddling it as “if we look like a liberal modern country, multi-nationals will come and invest here” – so it’s about money not principles when you get down to it.
As I said, up to now I’d generally have said “Yes” in an unenthusiastic manner to civil same-sex marriage, but I’m getting so pissed off by being cajoled and bullied about “You’re not a hard-hearted nasty mean bigot who wants to make kittens and puppies cry, are you?” that it’s pushing me to go YOU BETTER BELIEVE I AM, I FEAST ON THE TEARS OF ORPHAN KITTIES!
Also, it offends what poor pretensions to rationality I have to wrap this all in a gauzy pink tissue of “it’s about Twu Wuv” and pretend that no, it’s not at all a huge change in the definition of marriage and will inevitably have consequences for all kinds of matters to do with money, property, children, tax, former or new spouses, etc.
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This seems like a terrible way to approach referendum voting. The officials/comedian who are the source of your irritation are not the people who are being harmed by you voting no out of spite. The actually yes-really gay couples that would like to get married are.
Plus you explicitly say you don’t think the politicians endorsing the referendum honestly care about the issue — which means they don’t give a damn about your spite anyway.
Policies are probably good ideas or they aren’t, and that is only rational reason to vote for or against them.
Also
n my day-job, I see a lot of separated couples, and generally the rule is that, unless she is a truly dreadful mother (and “shooting up heroin in front of your kid” is not enough to classify you as a truly dreadful mother, at least not according to social workers), the mother will get custody of the kids.
Perhaps your country should figure out that this policy is fucking appalling, and change *that*, rather than irrationally refusing to legalize gay marriage on the basis of such things. (I consider myself lucky to have gotten sole legal and physical custody of my children in the US, and I’m bloody glad I don’t live where you do.)
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@Matthew
I’m not sure what you mean by “irrationally” here – even if incorrect, this seems like a more or less consequentialist reasoning. I don’t think it’s a good argument against same-sex marriage though. Roughly 25% of same-sex couples are raising children (with subgroups topping at 43%), as opposed to something over 90% of heterosexual couples. Furthermore, even in the US about 40% of children are unplanned, which won’t be an issue for same-sex couples, and I dare to speculate that the parent of planned children are less likely to divorce. Thus, the odds of running into problems with such policy are low enough for the benefits to outweigh them by a large margin.
But changing the policy of (nearly) always giving custody to the mother is much easier said than done. Even in the US, the percentage of single fathers has a very slow upward trend – http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/07/02/the-rise-of-single-fathers/. According to this article, the ratio of single fathers to single mothers in 1960 was 6, and by 2011 it dropped to 3 (in other words, the percent of single fathers among single parents is 23%), but it’s still an enormous gap, so you should indeed consider yourself very lucky for getting the sole custody of your children. I checked the statistics on Sweden – the poster child of social justice movements: 26% of single parents are single fathers – only slightly more than in the US. In Russia, however, it’s 1%. So on one hand, good job, USA, for being better than Russia on gender issues, and only marginally worse than Sweden, but there’s still a looong way to go. And if you don’t know what to do to make the US go from 23% to something closer to 50%, there’s no particular reason why @Martha O’Keeffe should know how to fix that in their country.
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“In my day-job, I see a lot of separated couples, and generally the rule is that, unless she is a truly dreadful mother the mother will get custody of the kids.”
This is a horrifically sexist norm. If gay marriage makes this rule harder to apply hopefully it will get people to realize how terrible the “mother gets the kids” method of assigning custody is. If anything the “muddying the custody issue” is a plus for Gay marriage.
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@Maxim Kovalev — I think this is the most petty thing I’ve yet read on this blog. You should feel shame.
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Martha O’Keefe,
Christ, I can’t think of a more self-defeating approach for the yes campaign to take. Bullying of that kind is probably quite effective in a place like Germany, but in Ireland it can only be laughably counter-productive.
“this change WILL mean a change in law and a whole lot of change and re-definition of marriage and family law.”
Well it won’t be the first time in Ireland for that. The Breathamh Laws laid out the shades and grades of polygamy and all the inheritance implications and ramifications arising therefrom in the minutest detail. It took the Church centuries to root that out.
This will be a huge change, but then so was the repeal of miscegenation laws. The last one in Europe was repealed in Germany in the 1870s. As feared, that move in societies across the West has resulted in “the confusion of ranks” that people feared so much – Anna Nichole Smith’s “marriage” springs to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Nicole_Smith – but the world did not fly to pieces as those people also feared.
“”this change WILL mean a change in law and a whole lot of change and re-definition of marriage and family law.”
Yes, it will cause some changes. Why can’t people just own that and dare the detractors to show the harm?
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@veronica: Are you confusing Maxim Kovalev and Martha O’Keefe? Because, although I think Maxim’s numerical analysis has a few unstated assumptions that are at least partially incorrect, I really don’t see anything petty (or, more broadly, vicious) about it.
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Oops. Yeah. Sorry Maxim.
I was talking about the “I didn’t like the commercial so I’m voting no” thing. That’s pretty terrible.
Which had nothing to do with what Maxim said. I fucked up.
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Julia Serano wrote a great article about cis/trans that discussing “reverse discourses.” http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/11/cissexism-and-cis-privilege-revisited.html . She discusses the benefits of a reverse discourse even though she accepts it requires a certain level of hostility to the “not marginalized” group.
A long quote from the article:
“A second and rather different way in which the naming of the unmarked majority can be employed is as part of a reverse discourse.[2] A reverse discourse occurs when a group takes a designation or distinction that has historically been used to marginalize them (in this case, being “trans”) and uses it as a standpoint from which to prioritize their own beliefs, desires, and perspectives. So instead of the cis majority defining, discussing, and critiquing trans people, trans folks now define ourselves and describe our own identities, lives, issues, communities, and culture. What cis people say about us, our predicament, and perhaps even gender more generally, is rendered irrelevant—we are the only authority on issues that impact our lives. Indeed, in a reverse discourse, cis people and perspectives may even be deemed as inherently suspect, illegitimate, or oppressive”
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@stargirlprincess — +1
Yeah, I think it is important that trans people get to set our own vocabulary, our own boundaries. Which, everything is a negotiation, and this stuff will never be *stable*. The conversation is never over.
The thing to understand is this: placing *meaning* on another person can be a hostile act, and trans people have historically been the targets of pretty relentless hostility. So this is essentially a struggle, and fights are ugly business.
So when a cis person wanders into the discourse, flapping their mouth, spouting ignorant nonsense that they picked up who-knows-where — well, that doesn’t go over well. There’s no reason it should.
See, *that* is the struggle. We are never *talking about* the struggle. It does’t work that way. There is no meta.
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@veronica d
Is it any better if a trans person does so though? I can give you links (mostly non-English, sorry) to the entire transgender communities who are totally on board with the concept of autogynephilia (and female privilege, on a side note), and judge whether newcomers qualify as transgender based on whether they “pass” or not, to trans people whose interpretation of their gender is “I’m a man, but I desperately want to be a woman”, to trans people who deny the existence of non-binary identities based on the idea that nature has only two complimentary sexes. To the extent to which it can be established through online-only communication, I’m pretty sure they’re not cis trolls, but genuinely trans, and yet an average cis person from my social circles in Bay Area has a far better expertise in gender theory than they do. An average trans person from the same circles knows even more, but as far as the ability to not say complete offensive nonsense goes, I find the overall political views and background a better predictor than gender identity itself.
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@maxim — Some trans people are wrong sometimes.
Look, these communities are not hypothetical to me, insofar as I actually move around in such spaces. I know old school drag queens and crossdressers, and there is never such a bright line between “trans woman” and “crossdresser” as people would like. Many of these people are my friends. My social space does not begin and end at the boundaries of queer-Tumblr.
Some of them are wrong. We talk about it.
That’s not the point, however. The point is this: discourse always-always-always happens in a context, and that context is actively expressing power at every moment.
And if you’re a “white cis guy” all bitter that the SJW’s won’t ever “let you” eclipse your white-cis-ness — well it’s not our fault that discourse always-always-always happens in a context, and that context is actively expressing power at every moment.
The “trans community” (such as it is) has a long and barely documented history, but it was there, voiceless and bullied, and dependent on a medical community that did not listen to us —
cuz they didn’t think they needed to listen. Obviously they didn’t need to listen.
Obviously.
Two nights ago I sat in a scummy gay bar and listened to a gaggle of cis-queens pontificate on the Bruce Jenner situation. Ignorant ass fucks. My girlfriend pulled me away.
If you go onto trans-Tumblr, you are seeing something really new. For pretty much the first time we’re finding our voice — like out in the open talking loud, not out of sight and ignored like the old forums. It’s better. Now we speak up and (some) cis people listen and we get retweeted and reblogged and publications seek out trans folks to write for them, and then let them *really speak*, instead of editing down the message to milquetoast.
And this is really cool.
And people see this happening and think we got it all for free, and darnit why can’t my boring white-male-cis ass get something just like that for free?
Which is called “everyday life” actually. As if there are not a 34802398409809234949 online forums basically filled to the gills with white-male-cis folks rambling on about their white-male-cis lives.
And that’s fine, actually. Each person should get their voice. I can’t see why (for example) a gaming forum can’t just be organically open to whoever comes. It kinda *shouldn’t* matter if you’re cis or trans.
I mean, unless you’re a bigoted jackass. Obviously.
But when the *topic* is trans-ness, yeah, we have a say. We didn’t used to. We had to fight for it, and social media makes that fight much easier in a lot of ways, but it’s still a fight. And it sucks, a lot, all the time.
This doesn’t mean we always agree or that we are always right or any such thing. It’s just, we have to talk really fucking loud.
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@stargirl, thank you so much for the link to the article.
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The problem most of the time is the egotism of the concern over whether one is a “good ally” or not. I remember an editorial in Out a few months ago where the writer was all angsty over whether or not he was a good enough ally to trans people. Almost then entire piece was about his actions or statements or whatever, with hardly a word about trans people or their needs or even what actual trans people had said they looked for from allies. Actual trans people, as opposed to objects of his loving concern, appeared quite secondary to him.
This is different form getting angsty over whether or not what you are doing is decent or not with regard to trans people or whomever. the difference is the focus – is the focus on the action or the person doing it?
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Idk my anxiety about “am I bad?” is very self focused but I don’t think socially punishing me for being anxious about being a bad person is gonna help
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What social punishment are you referring to? No one has a damned thing to say to you about it. Yhis is where they butt out. “An ye harm none..” and all that.
That self focus harms no one but you, and whether it’s even a harm or not is completely your call.
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(Conent warning: scrupulosity, animal abuse)
If we’re framing this as behavior modification, I think they people you’re describing favor something like negative punishment, where we all try to make the lives of the privileged as miserable as possible until they give up their privilege and put an end to oppression. In the assassin example, under this view, you punish everyone who doesn’t give all their money to charity until they do, and you punish assassins even more. The dog example you beat him until he does outside, then beat him successively less for doing the correct behavior. I dislike this approach because I believe it does more harm than good, but at the very least it reconciles both anti-cookieism and a basic knowledge of behavioral modification.
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I think that most people would say reward != not punishment in importnnt ways.
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The “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” theory of social justice.
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Fortunately, negative punishment doesn’t work as well as rewards.
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…for the animal being trained.
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Even for the animal being trained, rewards work better. You have to be alert and catch them doing good and reward them, and that’s when you swoop in with the scratch behind the ear or whatever. Random rewards are like crack, I mean truly psychologically addictive, and they will expectantly behave as well as they can, once they twig to what you consider good behavior.
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That’s only fortunate if people notice that negative reinforcement training doesn’t work and then try something else.
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For a cruel person, applying negative reinforcement constitutes the process working. And if the cruel person can be seen as working for a higher good, so much the better.
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I’m pretty sure that quite a few of them rationalize it this way. But that’s not how it works. If you punish people for associating with you and trying to be good, they are likely to stop associating with you (and may also try less hard to be good, depending on how independent their morals are). It matters very little that you’ll think even less of them when they do it, because you aren’t actually able to punish them even more once they’ve gone away.
(And then there’s also the tale of Chen Sheng that Scott quotes in a different context in “Radicalizing the Romanceless”, which tells us that there are two ways to escape punishment: Reducing the expected amount, and reducing the likelihood. Hint: You don’t want to force people into choosing the latter.)
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What bothers me is the implicit assumption that ingroup members are automatically (or at least semi-automatically) on board with the ideals of movements that fight or claim to fight for their wellbeing, and it’s the outgroup that has to be educated and recruited. I agree that they’re more likely to be on board – there are more LGBT people among LGBT activists than non-LGBT, there are more women among feminists than men, and so on (probably with the exception of communists – even the Soviets were having hard time maintaining working class majority in the party, and had to introduce quotas). However, especially outside of major liberal cities and countries, far from every gay person is an LGBT rights supporter (with canonical counterexamples provided by http://gayhomophobe.com/), and quite obviously not every woman is a feminist (not to mention that actually feminist movement fights for gender equality, and cares about sexism hurting everyone, regardless of their gender, so all men who aren’t feminist are also failing to support their best interests too). Furthermore, although ingroup members are more likely to perceive their position as a fight for their own interests, while outgroup members supporting their cause would perceive that as an altruistic act (thus, perhaps, feeling more virtuous), ingroup members that actively oppose the egalitarian movements demonstrate, that contra our intuitions, their selfish motivations can contradict the group’s cause. But it also means that some ingroup members supporting the cause may be doing so only as an altruistic act, without (or even contradicting) their selfish interests. Thus, it strikes me as premature to conclude that the problem of recruiting ingroup members is a solved problem, or that it’s fundamentally rather than quantitatively different from recruiting outgroup members. And therefore I’m not sure if separating the members of the movement to proper ones and allies is a good idea to begin with.
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The idea that a woman is necessarily part of the feminist ingroup, or that a gay person is necessarily part of the LGBT-movement ingroup, is a fiction. It’s popular because it obviously improves the legitimacy of those movements, and because a lot of members of those movements live in liberal cities and countries and (because of social segregation) don’t really interact with any anti-feminist women or gay homophobes. But it’s still a fiction and doesn’t reflect where people actually draw the lines socially. Obligatory link to http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
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That’s exactly my point, and for me it’s fairly easy to see after meeting so many Russian gay Putin supporters, and seeing my female high school classmates share statuses along the lines of “women are incomprehensible, but we make good sandwiches”. But the concept of “ally”, and the first example dialog seem to imply that it’s obviously expected from a homosexual person to be at least a passive supporter of equal rights movements, and it’s the heterosexual people who are in question.
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Randy Boehning is apparently a hypocrite for using Grindr and voting against a bill to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
I would be very interested to hear someone who believes that explain the logic behind it.
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…for those unfamiliar with the story, the minor detail that nydwracu left out is that Randy Boehning used Grindr to send dick picks to other dudes, because Randy Boehning is gay (he’s now claiming bi but who knows, we obviously can’t take his word for it given that he’s been misleading people about his sexuality for decades).
The purported hypocrisy is based on the belief that it is hypocritical for Randy Boehning to oppose a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity when Randy Boehning himself is, apparently, a [formerly] closeted homosexual.
Technically, it’s not hypocrisy to be a closeted gay man and be hostile to laws that would make it easier to be an un-closeted gay man. But he sucks so I’m not going to argue about the precise shape of the verbal rocks people throw at him. Waste of my time.
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“ingroup members that actively oppose the egalitarian movements demonstrate, that contra our intuitions, their selfish motivations can contradict the group’s cause.”
Yes, because the group’s cause contradicts that person’s best interest, and what that best interest is in not the group’s right to determine. This is an occupational hazard of being in the vanguard party – you come to think you know better than everyone else, including the people you think you’re trying to help. They see you as hurting them.
Andrew Sullivan talked about this a lot. Back when he first started pushing for marriage equality, a voice crying in the wilderness, some of the fiercest opposition he ran into was from self-appointed gay advocates who howled at what they called assimilationism. (Of course now they all swear they were behind the effort, hell, even that they kicked it off. Success has a thousand fathers.)
This happens to be one of the main reasons cited by women who resist identifying as feminist, that they want equality and the feminism they have experienced was not about equality.
“And therefore I’m not sure if separating the members of the movement to proper ones and allies is a good idea to begin with.”
I completely agree, if only because ingroup is never really monolithic enough to allow these easy distinctions.
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It seems you’re making the mistake of conflating “rights for marginalized people” with “groups that claim to fight for those rights” and assuming that shunning or questioning the latter means denouncing the former. don’t think that I’m “failing to support my best interests” as a non-feminist woman. I believe in women’s rights advocacy. Whether or not I identify with a specific political movement is incidental to that.
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True, these are separate issues – disagreement with goals, with methods, and with particular movements.
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This reminds me of a story I read on a mostly-feminism-SJ-forum, about how an ally brought food to a protest that didn’t match the protesting group’s (religious, ethical, can’t remember) needs and was therefore the most horrible person ever.
Granted, that forum is pretty much my only datapoint when it comes to inside-SJ-politics, but that was the prevailing mood there. If you’re an ally you’re privileged and have to earn your right to not be beaten for walking into the un-privileged camp to help out.
It was also really telling how their behavior changed when I declared my being trans, which basically turned me from never-good-enough to sister-in-arms-here-take-all-the-cookies.
My point is, I guess, as far as I had the joy to interact with SJ-types in the ally-role, it was war and I was the collaborateur at best. I got to hang out on The Good Side, do The Good Deeds, but I could never shake the mark of the oppressor.
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A great deal of the animosity toward allies in SJ spaces can be explained by the truism that nobody likes a snitch. You may be their traitor, but you’re still a traitor.
The slang term for converted Jews in Spain after the Alhambra Decree was sin escrúpulos, the unscrupulous ones.
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Do you think SJ people would agree with this characterization?
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“A great deal of the animosity toward allies in SJ spaces can be explained by the truism that nobody likes a snitch. ”
The same way we don’t give security clearances to defectors who come over.
I don’t think that’s what’s going on because that’s not what those people say. They say you can never escape your privilege. And there is truth in that. It’s about original sin, and they have had the good luck not to be born with it – which is totally not the same as privilege!
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I can grumble about tribalism in SJ with the best of them, but this is a bit stronger of a claim than my experience would dictate. Is ‘privileged people’ really seen as a coherent enough group for allies to count as ‘traitors’ to it? I thought most social justice types thought of straight white males as ideologically fallow, rather than ideologically opposed.
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Not in so many words, but the sentiment is there. Take this Amanda Hess piece on male feminist allies, which describes them as “self-preserving”, “gross”, “in denial”, and, no matter how good they seem, “taking up space a woman might otherwise have occupied”. It also questions their “ulterior motives” — a germane question, to be sure, but in context a risible one.
Hess is careful to end on a positive note. The Alhambra Decree did, too.
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It says that men who guiltily disclose every sexist behavior they’ve personally exhibited can sound gross. That seems like not the same group as male feminists; most male feminists I know don’t do that, and tbh I agree with the sentiment. I cannot find the phrase “in denial” at all; the closest is the statement that male feminists identifying as one of the good guys can feel like a denial of their role in the problem, which can easily be interpreted as male feminists denying it to other people, not to themselves. “Taking up space a woman might otherwise have occupied” is a description of something someone else said, in a paragraph describing how different feminists feel about male allies and that, in context, is clearly about how there is massive disagreement about how male allies should behave.
It seems like a bit much to compare a feminist blog post critiquing male allies to the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Nazis too overplayed?
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“The confusion over the role of male feminists is a prism for viewing fractures within the movement itself: Is feminism most effective as a radical fringe movement or a broad coalition? Should it stay grass-roots or go corporate? Is “feminist” a label that every person defines for themselves, or does it reference specific political beliefs and commitments? Should feminism focus squarely on women, or on gender itself?
If you’re a man, don’t answer those questions.”
Useful article, thanks for posting it. I believe that the article is less about men and more about the ways that (female) feminists respond in contradictory ways to allies. In other words, it uses allies as a tribe much more strongly than it uses men as a tribe.
Speaking personally, it also does a pretty good job of highlighting the reasons why I avoid identifying as an ally in the social justice sense. It’s fairly clear an upfront about the double-binds and second-tier status that comes with that label, including the ‘cookie’ stuff.
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This is rather ironic. Theoretically, the enemy should be kyriarchy itself, not privileged people personally. The goal isn’t to make the privileged people suffer, but to make everyone’s life just as good. Moreover, sometimes kyriarchy screws the privileged people too, should they diverge far enough from their social roles (e.g. white heterosexual cis men wearing pink nail polish, and risking to get beaten up over it), so they should even personally benefit from social justice movements, that would provide them more choices in life. It is only the active supporters of kyriarchy who can be considered enemies, and consequently, only people who deconverted from far right could be considered traitors, not regular supporters whose social group is privileged. Feminism is about gender equality, not just women, and so are other egalitarian movement. Yet, this whole “nobody likes a snitch” approach, if it’s true, would imply that it’s not the case, at least on the subconscious level.
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Let me put the important part in block quotes:
@stillnotking, your reading of the article is grossly unfair.
Let me lay it out: IT’S NOT MY FUCKING FAULT THAT OPPRESSION SUCKS AND THAT ALLYSHIP IS HARD.
Feminism is a mess, because sexism is a mess, cuz society is a mess, cuz *people are messy*.
Get that. I’m sorry that social justice movements are less than perfect, as we sadly are people who fuck up.
But on the other hand, we really do encounter shitty allies and cookie-seekers and men who show up with chests pushed out and ready to help the “little ladies” on their struggle for (not-)equality (but actually it’s about his dick).
No really. That happens. It’s not our fault.
And plenty of cis folks are terrible to trans folks, and we really are desperate for good allies, but it’s *actually hard* to be a good ally sometimes. Cuz transphobia is messy and people are traumatized and folks come to allyship for all kinds of reasons, some of them not-so-good.
“Well, just be happy I came at all” — which gets a big fuck you, and shouldn’t it?
You can ask me what I want. I can say, “For transphobia to entirely vanish from the world, for sexism to entirely vanish from the world, for conversations like this to seem meaningless, cuz the term ‘injustice’ denotes nothing in the world.”
And while we’re waiting for that I can deal with being an enormous tranny and all that comes with that. While some cisbro deals with being a kinda crappy “ally,” but actually maybe he really does have a ton to learn.
This is hard because IT’S ACTUALLY HARD.
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>This is rather ironic. Theoretically, the enemy should be kyriarchy itself, not privileged people personally.
You can’t screencap the kyriarchy and then post the image online for cookie points.
Or rather, less snarkily, to be effective, you have to go for concrete objectives. Protesting the Patriarchy will get people to walk away bored 3 minutes into your explanation, but you might get an individual/business/whatever to change their behaviour.
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“It was also really telling how their behavior changed when I declared my being trans, which basically turned me from never-good-enough to sister-in-arms-here-take-all-the-cookies.”
This here is why I don’t believe there’s ever been a real equality movement. All we have are groups of people who are tired of not being at the top of the totem pole (please forgive my cultural appropriation of the term!!) and instead create a new hierarchy where they get to have power over others. So you have just as much racism, sexism, genderism, and classism, you’ve just inverted the roles and added a heaping helping of hypocrisy to boot.
Which explains perfectly the special snowflake syndrome Ozy wrote about recently – the more oppressed I get to claim to be, the more cookies I get and the more I can be a shithead to everyone who is less oppressed.
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I’d rephrase this somewhat. It’s not that ‘real equality’ is an inherently nonsensical thing to value, or anything like that. It’s just that any sociopolitical organization around such ideals is also going to fall prey to status jockeying, because monkeys.
We have seen some pretty notable failures by lefty groups on this count. The one-dimensional privilege model and other academic constructs have paved the way for a lot of ‘us vs. them’ zero-sum thinking. But we can acknowledge those failures without giving up on the stated goals of mutually dignified coexistence. History makes it obvious that we are, actually, making some progress on that count.
There’s no such thing as a ‘real equality movement’, in the sense that individuals and groups are subject to all kinds of weird biases and flaws and status games. But there *is* such a thing as a movement that tends to make its society more equal, despite its flaws.
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I don’t think the point of ally-bashing has anything to do with shaping, or training, or advancing any particular movement. It’s about angry people wanting to take their anger out on someone who will be hurt by it.
It’s not surprising that a good number of once-allies decide it’s not really worth it to fight the good fight while being attacked by the same people they’re fighting for. Life’s too short.
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Thanks for the article! It is so refreshing to read articles on social topics written by rational people.
Speaking about conditioning and shaping, think about this: Changing other people’s behavior by rewards usually works better (or approximately the same) than trying to change their behavior by punishments. Yet people usually believe that punishments are more effective. Why this difference?
The trick is to realize that in every human interaction there are (at least) two people; and each of them is influenced by the interaction. When a person X punishes person Y for doing Z, there are two people being conditioned here. Usually the attention is on Y, and the explanation is “they were punished for Z, so I guess they are less likely to do Z in the future”.
But what exactly happens with the person X? They had an opportunity to use power and act higher status. Which happens to be rewarding for a human. So while X was punishing Y for doing Z, X was also rewarding X for punishing Y. That’s why after a while, to avoid cognitive dissonance, X will start professing that punishment is a great tool, even if they have no real data to support it. It’s like giving someone a button that will activate a reward center in their brain, and after they keep clicking the button for a while, asking them to evaluate whether the button is good or bad. It would require a lot of self-awareness to realize the button is not really that good.
So, I think the answer is that people in social justice movements (and other movements) are so often hostile towards those who do not perfectly follow the norms simply because… being hostile feels good. There is this tiny voice in your head that reminds you that you should actually feel bad for being hostile, but you can silence the voice by repeating to yourself that you are doing this to make the world a better place. While in reality, you are just pressing the button connected to your reward center, while hurting other people.
Shaping good behavior by social rewards is the strategy that works. But it’s less intoxicating, and often frustrating. So it is less popular, especially online.
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Giving people rewards is also status-boosting, though. (Think potlatches, or the Oscars.) The biggest difference is that it’s not as attention-grabbing; denouncing someone is more interesting to the audience than praising them. That has particular relevance in the online clickbait wars.
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If you give rewards publicly, you speak in the name of a group. Speaking in the name of a group is high-status, whether you reward someone or punish someone.
But your audience does not get the reward from leading the group. They are mere followers. They still get good feelings from being part of a group. But a follower who joins the punishing is still higher-status than the person being punished, while a follower who joins the rewarding does not get any additional status from that.
To simplify it, if your boss punishes someone publicly, the status hierarchy is “boss, you, the target”; if your boss rewards someone publicly, the status hierarchy is “boss, the target, you”. Does not make a difference for the boss, but makes a difference for you. — However, in a long run, the boss will learn they have more popular support when punishing people than when rewarding people.
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The important distinction is that handing down punishment as a sign of higher status is very hard to fake. You just won’t get away with punishing superiors, period.
With rewards, they might notice very clearly that you’re only (or mostly) trying to assert higher status, but in the absence of clear hierarchies and rules, they can’t call you out on it without looking mean themselves.
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My experience is probably different from yours, since, as an anti-SJW, I’m more likely to see conflicts between SJWs and others than internal fights within the SJ movement. That being said, my observations of people (both myself and others) being accused of wanting cookies have looked less like this:
than like this:
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For added fun, make X “feminism is the radical idea that women are people,” and then make Y any given lengthy, theory rich argument that probably wouldn’t pass muster if expressed in plain English.
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Yeah. I was thinking of the other end of things, e.g. X is “the state should not compel florists to make flower arrangements for gay weddings” and Y is “homosexuals are inferior to heterosexuals, and don’t deserve basic human rights,” but you’re right, the same dynamic prevails in the other direction as well.
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I’m uncharitably amused by the twin claims “feminism is the radical notion that women are people” and “men should not call themselves feminists.”
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Have you read Nomy Arpaly’s Unprincipled Virtue?
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