On religious conflict and the dialectic

 Listening to a podcast about the defenestrations of Prague made me think about how dialectics work. I'll explain both just in case someone reads this.

First, the defenestrations. Basically, some protestants threw some Catholics out of a window and it sparked a brutal conflict in what is now Czechia and I think Slovakia. That region anyway (I'm just not sure which exact area saw fighting).

Second, dialectics. Marx's understanding of history was that things constantly change, and often new ideas arise that compete with old ones. The old ideas, or structures, cling on and elements of them are still evident. This can be as simple as noting that people have wealth that was based on structural factors that no longer exist: for instance, the descendants of Colston don't keep slaves but they likely still have plenty of dosh. The new structures and ideas often show up the contradictions in the old, and the old will eventually collapse when its contradictions become simply too great to bear.

You can easily see this process in protestantism. The corruption in Catholicism was hugely contradictory to the message of poverty and charity that many Christians saw then, and see now, as fundamental to their religion. Something would have to give. 

Now the problem is that these are systems of belief. Both protestants and Catholics are as right or as wrong as each other. You cannot resolve a question such as "there should be a leader of the whole church" with reason or logic or any of that palaver. It's something you believe one way or the other. Does the cracker turn into Jesus's body? Well, I mean, obviously it doesn't, but for Christians, it's something you believe or don't, not something you could ever prove factually. Many rationalise the factual disproof (spitting the cracker out and seeing that it's still baked mush and not flesh) by saying it is metaphorical. Disproving metaphors is a task for philosophers, not scientists.

Take one of today's fierce conflicts -- certainly it's where my mind went. You essentially have two sets of beliefs: one is the "old" belief that there are two genders because there are two sexes and  you are defined by sex. The other is the "new" belief that what sex you are born doesn't define you at all. It's barely even important.

Now these are both philosophical, almost religious beliefs. You're stunned. You think that whichever one you believe is a fact, and the people who don't share your belief are wrong wrong wrong. But try to convince them otherwise. You know that you're not dealing with a fact because you have to refer to things that are nothing to do with the question, try to endow meaning to things that don't bear it and other things of that sort.

So this could be easily resolved by saying oh well, these people believe one thing and I believe another, live and let live, no biggie. The old believers, as it were, could simply be asked to be courteous to the new believers and to use people's pronouns even if they think it's silly, and the new believers could be counselled to understand that change doesn't work at the same pace in every mind, and since what they are changing to is just another belief, that's fair enough. The same kind of resolution would end conflict between Catholic and protestant, Sunni and Shia and even to some extent liberal and conservative.

But that resolution is impossible. Because humans have the need to believe in unitary good and bad. So people who believe in genderology are all paedos who want access to children, a belief you can readily find if you look, or they are trying to destroy Western culture, or they are trying to infiltrate women's toilets and do something nefarious. Now, it's certainly true that some are paedos, unfortunately; some do you want to destroy Western culture or end sexual distinction or whatever; some do want to jack off in the women's bogs. None of these things is necessarily common but you can easily find examples of them. The other side is full of hate, we are told, transphobes who want all trans people to stop existing, return to the 1950s, whatever it is that some of us believe. And again, that's true of some number of terves, but probably a smallish number. I'm pretty familiar with the terf position and I think it's largely made of people who adhere to a social distinction that was an essential part of their lives but now has become much more fluid. The "fight for women's spaces" was important in the past for various reasons. Some use those reasons to justify opposition to things where they don't apply. Even if you think a transwoman is a dude in a frock and lippy, well, she's not doing any harm by taking a leak in the stall next to you.

In medieval Prague, most people were still Catholics. And most were quiet, ordinary people who believed in Catholic things but were not in fact in league with Satan, or willing to hurt other people for it, or really anything very bad. But the protestants made out they were. They were sinners, trying to drag the whole world to oblivion.

We're not any different. I've seen many times people saying that JK Rowling, as an example, should be killed, or even raped, for not agreeing that trans women are precisely like her. And in religious wars, men justified rape on the basis that the women they were raping were the evil other sect. The Christian admonishment that rape should not be permitted was put aside because *the rules didn't apply* to people who didn't share their beliefs. They weren't *really people*. You see the same thing with politics now. I often see liberals say that people who disagree with them are "fascists" -- the modern version of being in league with Satan is sharing politics with Hitler, of course -- who should be expelled, jailed or simply murdered. 

In fact, Rowling is a gentle lib. She doesn't say that trans people should be disrespected or hurt or shouldn't exist. She doesn't say you shouldn't say you're a woman when you're what she believes to be a man and she doesn't say you shouldn't use whatever pronouns you choose. Possibly, like many, while she'd understand that particularly young people aren't fond of the gender roles that are themselves legacies of "old" beliefs, being "nonbinary" is not a particularly useful or sensible reaction. She'd possibly see it as more constructive to reinvent the sex you are to allow you to express yourself in whatever way you choose. So I think those are not hateful beliefs. They might be beliefs you don't share but you know, get over it, not everyone agrees with any of us. 

Rowling also believes, in a fundamental sense, that women are the "weaker sex". This doesn't actually have to mean that they are less valuable or that they don't have strengths that should be recognised. It can literally mean they are usually less strong, less aggressive, less dangerous than men. So they needed safe spaces where stronger, more aggressive, more dangerous people were excluded. That idea is less true than it was, and the idea that men and women can be strictly delineated belongs to a prior age -- and was never really substantiable. There are remaining benefits to delineation but those aspects of it that see men advantaged over women are not very popular in these times (and rightly so in my view). It's important to understand that this view was never based in fact. These beliefs are not observations about the world. They are beliefs that structure how you observe the world and that's different.

Safe spaces for women are in many ways a contradiction, an ossification of a previous structure or theory of the world. Do we need segregated bathrooms? Well no. Most of us have unisex bathrooms in our own houses. Do women need segregated sports? It probably isn't as crucial as some make out. It's only really the intrusion of money -- part of the old structure -- that makes it so. Do women need separate prison estates? Yes, this is probably well founded, isn't it? Men are still stronger and more aggressive than women and that doesn't change when you adopt a different gender role. Do women need preference in the workplace? Less and less. Do they need to be treated like porcelain dolls? Not at all. Do they even need to be a distinct sex class? Can men say they're women if they want to? Probably they just can and no one will actually be hurt. It may *feel* wrong to some of us, in just the same way that eating a cracker and thinking you're eating Jesus *feels* wrong, but if you're me, you understand that religion, like all structures, can take time to fade away. It's not all revolution. Sometimes it's evolution. But one thing Marx noted, and I think that liberals who think they're "winning" because they have the "new" and not the "old" belief should pay this mind, is that you cannot easily predict how those contradictions will be resolved and what the dialectic will end up leaving you with.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:47 am