April 8th, 2008
by
Laura Q
Okay, this is a long meandering post, mostly musings but rant-like in places, and perhaps only tangentially related to SF, but it is inspired by SF and mixed up with SF in my head, and I promise to weave some SF-ness into the post, too.
Clive Thompson has written of the “next civil rights battle” over the mind — specifically privacy and autonomy of individuals in their own heads, or “mental privacy”. He interviews three men (no women) about these issues.
Naturally I’m receptive to these concerns. Having our mediaspaces be free and unexploited is one of the central themes of the last fifteen years of my life — longer, depending on how one thinks of it.
But come on.
… and this is different how?
First of all, Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy, in her own inimitable and unerringly accurate way, rightfully points out the cultural blindness and ahistoricity of this concern:
Wired is shocked, shocked, at the prospect of such cognitive incursions. As though the potential for state interference in personal brains would be the first-ever instance of third-party annexation of sovereign organs. O silly, dudely Wired. Not an instant has gone by since “civilization” began that women’s uteruses have been free from appropriation by occupying forces.
Brilliantly observed, as usual, and highlights the privilege of bodily integrity that men enjoy — and that is routinely taken from women. (NB: One way to avoid such clear signs of male privilege is to regularly have conversations with other people of different experiences and beliefs, a point I’ll return to.)
… what does “mental privacy” mean, anyway?
Second, there’s something seriously askew with the entire model that Clive is working with. Check out Paul Root Wolpe, one of the guys quoted in the article:
If the skull is not an absolute domain of privacy, there are no privacy domains left.
This view of privacy presupposes some sort of one-way privacy — people looking through the windows of their eyes, out at the world, safe and secure inside their own personal sanctum sanctorum (sanctora?), with all their private thoughts. Thus, someone from the outside looking in — through technology or telepathy — violates this privacy. The major ethical issue of the 21st century, as Thompson argues.
Again, I am completely down with the agenda of protecting privacy and autonomy, but does anyone seriously hold this view of the mind? The mind is one of the least private parts of our body: It is hugely porous and plastic, susceptible to influence and education and subconscious manipulation and outright brainwashing. In fact, the right of parents to brainwash their children in ancient superstition is enshrined in our constitutional caselaw — even when the autonomous rights of the children themselves are in tension (Yoder, Douglas dissent). (see also echidne of the snakes, whose post on this issue was one of the main triggers for this post. and a lot more succinct, too.)
Our minds are constructed of a shared social space, the products of the media we consume, our interactions with others, our mutual memories. Adam Kolber, quoted in the same article, acknowledges some part of this:
To a certain extent, memories are societal properties … Society has always made claims on your memory, such as subpoenaing you.
And a significant portion of some of the deeper more philosophical thinking on what I’ll call the natural right to fair use is premised on the inverse relationship of influence and control: Once a creator (or large corporate copyright-holder) releases information into the wild, they have lost control over some aspect of it — and the more that information is absorbed and becomes part of the cultural fabric, the more influential it is, the more they have (or ought to have) lost control over the substance of that information.
I don’t argue that we shouldn’t be concerned about the implications of these developing technologies. There is no question that technologies this amenable to surveillance will be exploited by the state, by employers, and by the powerful to maintain their power. But I confess I am more than a little bemused by concerns about revealing our minds, when we still have so far to go in protecting our rights to develop our minds.
of freedom and religion
So here comes my rather long discourse on the freedom to develop our minds, and why I have maintained — since some time in college — that religious education of the young is one of the worst forms of child abuse.
Currently, the right of children to have access to truthful information is virtually nonexistent in the United States. Consider the routine “harmful to minors” justifications for censorship and the widely accepted propaganda and disinformation programs of “celibacy sex education”. These and other infringements on minors’ rights to information are propounded in the name of the parents’ religious freedom.
Illinois Rep. Monique Davis knows the truth: Religious faith is inculcated in childhood, and successful inculcation requires ignorance of the alternative. “It’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy [atheism] exists!” The easiest way to grow an untenable belief is to shield it from the light of inquiry and discourse; to make sure that the believers have restricted access to other beliefs; and what access they have is carefully controlled and filtered. Knowledge and visions of the alternatives: This is what education, and art, and literature, and especially science fiction, give us.
I recently read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel. Some of her politics trouble me, but her account of how she became a militant Islamist as a young person is absolutely riveting. Her journey was a clear path of childhood indoctrination and restricted access to information. What led her out was in part access to other kinds of information — romance novels, in part.
This story has been written over and over again, but it bears repeating: Religious fundamentalism is a special instance of rigid, dichotomous, black-and-white thinking. If you look at almost any religious conflict or abuse connected with religion, you can dig just a little and see that kind of thinking, and connect it to control of information, failure to engage, isolation of one sort or another.
complicity and indoctrination
Read the latest stream of updates about Warren Jeffs’ cult in Texas (badgerbag is a good place to start for the current updates; feministe did an amazing rundown of the situation as of 2006). Badgerbag couldn’t help but muse on the women’s complicity in their own oppression.
I can’t help but blame them though, too, for the ways they likely were complicit. If they were enslaved, and it sounds like they were, then, I can’t really blame them. But I wonder at other situations where women have been judged to be accessories to crimes though they were dependent or somehow coerced. There are a lot of grey areas. So while if I were in some legal position to judge or prosecute I would likely figure the women were cooerced… really, in my heart, personally, I judge them some, for not escaping, not risking everything to get their kids out of there, out of where they are raped and enslaved. That is too harsh of me, and I can’t really imagine what it must be like — but that’s how I feel at the moment, and it seems worth talking about even if I’m wrong.
I hear you, badgerbag. It’s a tendency we all have, to want to blame people, especially adults, for abuse of their children. In some ways, it’s a measure of respect: We recognize them as autonomous beings when we consider how they are responsible. But therein lies the real crime of this cult, the crime that will never be prosecuted, and indeed perhaps never could: Mental coercion through religious indoctrination. Each of these people were mentally coerced, with promises of rewards and threats of punishments in the “afterlife”. This kind of coercion the state won’t touch. But mental coercion is precisely what robbed most of these people of their will, their sense, their ability to resist. All power hierarchies rely, implicitly or explicitly, on creating complicity in their subjects. Religious faith and indoctrination is a primary tool of the patriarchy.
The best tool in the kit of those who would oppress and control others is to isolate them from information, to control their access to information. Isolating them from other people is really a way to control their what they have access to, what their minds become. Isolating them from other forms of information — Catholic film lists, Christian bookstores, homeschooling — is a less complete form of the same.
Secondary techniques, like the type of media manipulation reportedly employed in the film Expelled, are only necessary when there is actually some sort of free exchange of information. (See skatje for a more detailed review of the film. In case you don’t know, Expelled is a film by creationists & Ben Stein, arguing that the reason creationist science isn’t respected in the academy is because of a giant conspiracy of scientists and academics against the noble religious underdogs.),The makers of Expelled know they have an uphill struggle to persuade anyone of the tenability, much less the veracity, of their claims; and since they’re doing so in a relatively free marketplace of ideas, they’ve had to rely on a variety of sledgehammer media manipulation tools to try to do it: for instance, interspersing video of scenes of the Holocaust with clips of scientists; lying to their interview subjects; trying to control who comes to their screenings and what they write.
So what does all this have to do with SF?
Now to wrest this discussion back onto the track of speculative/science fiction.
First, I confess that this entire journey was triggered not just by the onslaught of news about religious oppression of women and children — a perennial preoccupation of mine. I was also thinking rather hard about recent postings here and elsewhere, and my own experiences with and passages through religion, feminisms radical and otherwise, politics radical and otherwise, and rigid, binary thinking.
Throughout my own life, I used reading as an escape both metaphorical and actual. I can look back at my own radicalization and history through the lens of the books I was reading, in a way. SF that has dealt with religion, autonomy, social division, and control of our mental landscape has always been among the most compelling to me.
The horror of total control of the person has been a regular topic of dystopias. Orwell’s 1984 continues to be the most prominent and best-known of the dystopias that postulate Total Information Awareness, but for my money Katharine Burdekin’s melancholy vision of a far future fascist regime, Swastika Night, is more moving. I was transfixed by the vision of a far future in which the Nazis had won, and achieved their victory in part through control of information, education, propaganda. The humanity of even fascists, and the realization that such control and slavery is ultimately self-defeating.
Confrontations
The specific problems of cults (and more broadly, religion) in a pluralistic democracy is not a new one, and it’s been handled in science fiction, although not at the lengths that I think it should be. Sheri Tepper in Raising the Stones imagined a world, a liberal pluralistic democracy, in which a patriarchal religious society was tolerated. In this novel, it took the religionists’ threat to take over the whole world to make the liberal pluralistic democracy sit up and realize that some beliefs were incompatible with liberty.
Tepper doesn’t have much of a problem saying that some beliefs are incompatible with liberty. She did it in The Gate to Women's Country — the damned women who run women’s country accept their damnation, their use and arguably misuse & abuse, of authority in order to save the world ultimately. In Beauty, Tepper speaks at length in what is a barely discussed authorial voice, of what it means to let the child molester or torturer go free in the name of liberty. (At least, I am remembering it as Beauty.)
But Tepper is not the only author who’s been unable to come to a satisfactory resolution of these issues. Saab Lofton, in A.D., an anarchist SF novel, looked at the same issue. He envisioned a role for the state: ensuring that children of religious parents received education. Coercion was clearly a part of this; but it was coercion in the service of preventing a greater coercion.
Starhawk, who by my measure is pretty close to an anarchist, has an answer: nonviolent resistance. In The Fifth Sacred Thing, her characters use nonviolent resistance to expose their opponents to a new way of life in the only way that is likely to reach them. If societies are coming into direct conflict, that is an opportunity for education. Le Guin, also pretty close to an anarchist, basically punts the same question in Always Coming Home; the militaristic society basically falls apart of its own weight, if I recall correctly.
But what do we do when there is no outright conflict? When people are just withdrawing more and more, and taking their children with them? Homeschooling is just one aspect of an entire alternate Christian lifestyle in this country. In my view, Jeffs’ cult is not too far apart on the continuum from the experience of people who go to fundagelical “science” museums, homeschool their kids, read their own media, engage only or primarily in their own community activities and alternate “Halloween”s, and so on. Tepper and Saab’s approaches do not give me a lot of hope. Starhawk’s pacifism is deeply appealing, but I have trouble reconciling it with my own sense of outrage, and perhaps more importantly, I don’t see how Starhawk’s method can affirmatively approach the denial of rights to others — the abuses that any activist must want to prevent. She engineered a conflict in The Fifth Sacred Thing, but one could easily imagine the two societies — City of Angels, and San Francisco — going on in their separate ways. But I think of Solomon Burke: None of us are free if one of us are chained.
Marge Piercy’s work consistently confronts the revolutionary and the activist. From her non-SF (e.g., Vida; City of Darkness, City of Light), to her less commonly used SF (He, She, and It; Dance the Eagle to Sleep; Woman on the Edge of Time) she has interrogated exactly what one should do in the face of tyranny, or in the revolutionary moment.
I need to pull out and reread Illicit Passage by Alice Nunn, and finish Timmi Duchamp’s Marq'ssan series. (It’s so hard to find time to read these days!)
At this moment, I’m trying harder than ever to understand the plagues of the coming apocalypse: religion, patriarchy, environmental destruction, capitalism. I’m trying to figure out where we are and what we can do. I’m trying to find some hope and also some way of being in the world as it is while trying to move it toward the world I’d like our children to live in.
I don’t want to end on a purely ruminative note. I want to hear from other people. If you read this far, why? Why are you reading this blog? Why do you read and watch SF? What are you getting from Battlestar Galactica and Margaret Atwood and Arthur C. Clarke and Joss Whedon? Has it helped you move the world? Should it?
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Laura Q at
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A note on disagreement
Filed under activism, feminism | Comments (11)
I don’t know if you can count Hirsi Ali’s religious phase as childhood indoctrination. She was 16, and looking for something to belong to, and she reacted more strongly than her classmates who were receiving the same religious instruction. At the same time, as much as she enjoyed the trappings of Islam – the prayers, and the hijab – she could never accept the role of women in Islam. She credits romance novels, but I can’t help but notice that her grandmother was a strong, independent, self-sufficient woman, and her mother was the head of the household, and her father was absent for most of her life. Hirsi Ali, in other words, was raised by strong, independent women to be a strong, independent woman, and no amount of religious training could ever have taken that away from her.
It’s also interesting what Hirsi Ali doesn’t mention. For instance, nowhere in any of Islam’s holy texts is female genital mutilation mentioned as an appropriate procedure. The highly traumatic procedure that Hirsi Ali and her sister experienced come from the local tribal culture that her grandmother taught her about. Her father – who holds Islam to be so important that he won’t speak to her since she renounced it – opposed the procedure. I mention this because it is by far the most gruesome example of child abuse mentioned in Infidel, and it’s a cultural, rather than religious, practice.
“Throughout my own life, I used reading as an escape both metaphorical and actual. I can look back at my own radicalization and history through the lens of the books I was reading…”
I’m about fifteen years old. I’m reading a Penguin Classics copy of D H Lawrence’s _The Rainbow_ in the garden of our church. It’s a Sydney Anglican church, meaning that it’s “scriptural” (literalist/fiundamentalist) and “evangelical” (conservative/intolerant.)
The Rev, Victor Roland Cole sees what I am reading and says “You shouldn’t read that. That’s a dangerous book. Lawrence was a bad man.”
It later transpired that Vic Cole was getting blowjobs off a teenager in the vestry after services, so he knew whereof he spoke. And in fact I don’t think much of Lawrence as a writer. But I respect what Lawrence was trying to do; Vic, not so much.
That scene has since become my touchstone for the interaction of patriarchy with fiction. Fiction won. I got out of the Sydney Anglican church and landed in San Francisco. Thank fuck.
A few free-association notes…
“None of us are free if one of us are chained” strikes a chord with “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Christine Delphy on the concept of privacy as an exemption from common law.
Oppression and control of information: this Dale Spender quote:
And a passage that stuck in my mind, from And Chaos Died, by Joanna Russ (which I need to reread; it took me ages to find the exact quote again), p. 133 in paperback:
And to some of your questions:
But what do we do when there is no outright conflict? When people are just withdrawing more and more, and taking their children with them? Homeschooling (…)
Political opposition revealed by that phrase, “people and their children”: people vs. children as distinct classes. (Also the economic ramifications of that social withdrawal; the attendant changes in modes of production. Also, a bit belatedly: what makes it work for them but not for feminist separatists?)
Why are you reading this blog? Why do you read and watch SF?
Something I vaguely remember, either from the text of or from a press release included in the copy of Les fées ont soif I read some years ago:
Because reality is an imperfect teacher.
The most effective way to prevent most child abuse, in my own country or in the US, would be to have children’s refuges and the option for children to divorce their parents and continue to receive child support and aliment from their parents until they reach the age of 18 (or older, if the government continues to assume that parents are financially responsible for supporting a child through full-time education).
And children should be able to leave home and go to the refuge, to spend a night or a week or a month or a year or ten years, without having to explain why to anyone, without having to justify why they cannot bear to live with their parents.
Spider Robinson deals with this briefly in a short story, “Lookover Lounge”, and uses it as a background option in other stories. (He mentions Robert Heinlein’s use of child-divorce and children’s homes in Star Beast as a precursor.)
It is absolutely taken for granted, in this culture or in any other, that parents have a right to force children to do or say or publicly assert belief in things that the child finds repugnant. It is taken for granted, partly because parental goodwill is taken for granted (and most of the time, it’s right to do so – parents do mostly want the best for their children, to do right by them: even the horrors of genital mutilation or footbinding are directly carried out by people who are understandably* motivated by the wish to do well by their child) and partly because the essential work of raising children is taken for granted as being done by parents out of goodwill.
*Understandably. Not forgiveably.
This sounds like I’m being terribly “we would all be better off if we were raised in creches” sfnal. I’m not. Parents do care for their children, and children need the security of knowing their parents care for them. But a relationship in which one person has no option but to accept virtually any legal treatment meted out by the other, has the potential to become abusive.
People tend to respond to my idea about child refuges with “But they’d be full of spoiled children complaining about being made to eat spinach!”
(To which I say that the refuges would not be luxurious places where children would get to eat what they liked: they’d be fairly basic, meals would be communal, children would have less option about what they ate and when than they did at home… and doesn’t this trivialization of the human suffering that parents are often with the best will in the world putting their children through, remind you of how people reacted to setting up women’s refuges?)
Parents can and do abuse their children in perfectly legal ways. And there is no mechanism for children to escape from parents who are abusing them in ways which are legal – which means that even when abuse slides over into illegal, the child may not clearly understand the difference.
It is legal for a parent to hit a child barehanded: it is illegal for a parent to use an implement to hit a child or hit hard enough to leave bruises: it is legal for a parent to tell a child they’re going to burn in hell forever for being gay: it is illegal for a parent to force a child into straight marriage: it is legal for a parent to have surgery performed on a child’s intersex genitals to make them look more “normal”: it is illegal for a parent to deny a child lifesaving medical treatment, where it’s clearly understood to be lifesaving: it is legal for a parent to take their child to another country, where the child doesn’t speak the language, away from everyone the child knows including their primary carer, and change the child’s nationality.
I read and watch SF because SF does not put fetters on my imagination.
Yonmei: the thing that leaps to my mind with regard to the use of divorce terminology for the relationship between children and parents is: divorce is the dissolution of a marriage. In that context, the divorcing parties had to marry in the first place, before they could divorce. But, in the case of parents and children, society imposes a codified relationship between those parties without requiring that either consent to it. In fact, one party (children) is legally incapable of consenting, and stripped of its rights, which are mostly attributed to the other party (parents).
Meanwhile, society charges responsability for children onto the parents. But if society deems the parent unfit, it can reappropriate parental responsability and transfer it to someone else. But there is little common social responsability towards children in general, and even less towards parents. (In Western patriarchal societies.) Mothers who receive public funds are vilified as parasites. The one situation where someone is held by society to have a responsability towards a parent is when that person is married to the parent, but then that responsability is up to the spouse’s abilities, personal status, and choices.
The role of “provider”, generally held by men, operates on a supposed tradeoff of dependence for sustenance (mystifying the wife and mother’s work, and the children’s work, which are appropriated by patriarchal society). But while women (as wives and mothers) and children are held legally incapable of representation in their own right, they cannot legally hold men accountable for that responsability, because the very exemptions from common law that create families put men in charge of the representation of women and children to society. So the accountability for men’s actions against women and children rests upon the whim of other men, until the enfranchisement of women and children. Now, in some instances, women have gained enough accountability from society in general to be able to receive, as parents, provisions from public funds when they have no personal connection to “providers”, and from men’s personal funds upon the dissolution of a marriage, and franchise in our own right (whether married or not).
Allowing children to emancipate themselves is a step towards their liberation, but the particular vulnerability of children to abuse (irrespective of their physical vulnerability) will, logically, continue as long as children are disenfranchised from the very beginning of their lives.
To draw a parallel with Laura’s references to indoctrination into religions — children are also indoctrinated into the families of their parents, which are a part of a larger (patriarchal, heterosexist, codified, traditional) social structure.
P.S.: I owe a lot of the background for my analysis here to Christine Delphy’s work; in particular to her essays “L’état d’exception: la dérogation au droit commun comme fondement de la sphère privée”, and “Continuities and discontinuities in marriage and divorce”. Shulamith Firestone also addressed the question of the liberation of children in The Dialectic of Sex, more broadly but less schematically.
panoptical: (1) Ali definitely talks about her strong (fore)mothers; I think she’s very aware of their influence. (2) Novels: Of course, I’m being reductive in pinpointing one thing — there are many aspects that go into anyone’s life and decisions and personalities. But she cited the novels a few times throughout the book, so I take it that she saw that as something critical. (3) As for her teenage turn towards Islamism: Her childhood religious indoctrination wasn’t sufficient for the transformation, but it was certainly necessary.
yatima: what a very familiar story that is. my father forbade me from reading, and my stepmother burned my books — i played hookey from class to go to the school library. i too ended up in san francisco.
yonmei: in terms of emancipations, or divorces, from parents: you have to know that’s an option, for it to be even vaguely possible.
also, i think it’s a poor solution. i realize it may be the only one we have or that is available. but it’s poor. a young person raised in a particular way of thinking, with everything they know from that perspective, and little or no exposure to other people or other ideas or even the concept of critical thinking — if you just offer one isolated, decontextualized piece of information (“you can become emancipated and leave this all behind”) — that is not a true choice for most people. why is it that science fiction seems to have been so unimaginative on this issue? or have i just missed the right stuff? or is there truly no good answer, even in science fiction? i read SF for its greater possibilities, too, but look how fettered even the best SF really is.
ide cyan: thank you for those perfect quotes. … also, thank you for making explicit the religious indoctrination and the more general indoctrination into, let’s just call it patriarchy. no doubt due to my own background i feel religious indoctrination is particularly insidious: capitalism, nationalism, statism, authoritarianism, sexism, racism, body loathing — can’t reason address all of these things, in the absence of religious faith? or at least give people a head start in addressing it? maybe i lean too heavily on reason; my therapist tells me so! <g> … but i confess that i see religious indoctrination as uniquely dangerous in that it circumvents the very faculties we would use to critique and question our other assumptions.
… did anybody read Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross? i found the statist religion in that book to be chilling: clearly stross conceived it as the ultimate negation of humanity. what is the ideological escape from something like that? it becomes problematic because it is not just an ideology; it is a religion — a specific type of ideology that is founded, in part, on the denial of the rational in favor of faith.
i think religion is a major challenge for feminism, and i confess that i am frequently very disturbed by feminists who turn a critical eye on mainstream culture, and then uncritically accept the tenets of one faith or another: crystals, ghosts, some forms of alternative medicine. sure, we all contain multitudes and consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, etc., etc., but shouldn’t we strive for consistency? as feminists, shouldn’t we be looking right at religion and faith as real problems for any kind of critical analysis of the world?
Laura:
Do you read Greta Christina? If you don’t, you gotta.
I do, periodically, and always love her posts on religion & atheism. But you’re right — I think I should move her up to my daily queue!
“None of us are free if one of us are chained” strikes a chord with “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
I cannot, of course speak for her, but having just finished reading Shadow Gate, the second volume of Kate Elliott’s “Crossroads,” her latest series. It seems to me that one of her principal characters, Mei, is slowly becoming emotionally educated in that understanding, in terms of slavery and the slave trade, which are ominipresent in the world, and nothing she’s ever really questioned. But slowly it appears (so far) that her eyes are beginning to see what she hadn’t seen, just because it is always ‘there,’ and so accepted, nobody but a very few question it.
Just one of the many elements that makes Mei one of the more interesting characters — we are not speaking moral value here, but writerly value — I’ve seen.
Love, C.
As for raising children, the model as I mostly witnessed it in Cuba over many years and shorter and very extended stays, living inside a typical extended Cuban family, is the best one I’ve ever seen for children.
Indeed, the bitter protest from those who were no longer infants, children or adolescents is that Cuba is a paradise for them, but when you become an adult, especially a young one, it becomes hell (i.e. lack of jobs and opportunity and choice).
Part of that is that the children are raised by family; the family structures tend to matriarchy — the relationship between aunts and nieces and nephews, and uncles and nieces and nephews is something you seldom see here outside of more recent immigrants. The aunt is a very important person, as are the grandparents. The parents are too busy making a living, so the actual raising is done by others, particularly the grandparents, who can take the smallest children to school and activities like dance class and theater productions.
Part of that is that there are many, many real ‘commons’ in Cuba. It’s difficult to abuse your wife or children there. It is formally frowned upon from the highest levels of government, for one thing. There are too many witnesses to everything you do. Privacy and solitude aren’t strong cultural components.
Also, if things get difficult in your primary home, then, you move to your aunt’s home or a cousin’s, etc. After all, adolescence is adolescene ….
Love, C.
[...] copyright laws (I believe) and a fellow librarian, has opined about the evils of religion over at Feminist SF. It is too bad she is not a Civil Rights lawyer; then she could have stopped all this horrible [...]