Category: Philosophy

Critiquing the concept of “White privilege”

I’ve long been uncomfortable with the concept of “White privilege,” mostly because I feel that the concept doesn’t really tell White people why they should give up their White privilege. I envision a conversation that goes something like this: “Hey, check your White privilege.” [reply spoken externally] “Oh, right, sorry!” … [reply spoken internally] ((Wow, I got White privilege? that sounds pretty good, I’m gonna hang on to it.))

That’s not a serious critique of the concept of White privilege. It’s just this feeling of discomfort that I have. Yet the feeling is strong enough that I find myself not wanting to use the phrase “White privilege,” due to some kind of nameless fear that it’s just going to reinforce the behavior in us White people that the phrase is supposed to put an end to.

In an essay titled “How ‘White Privilege’ Obscures Black Vulnerability,” Mukasa Mubirumusoke, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, provides a more serious critique of the shortcomings of the concept. Mubirumusoke ends his essay with this rhetorical question:

“In what ethical universe could the possibility afforded by whiteness to dominate another human being just because they are Black be considered a ‘privilege’? In the ethical universe of white America today, apparently.”

(Parenthetical note: The essay appears on the Public Seminar website, which I hadn’t seen before. Looks like a lot of good stuff there.)

But wait, there’s more. In a recent post on the American Philosophical Association blog, Lewis Gordon offers a constructive critique of Mubirumusoke’s critique. SCroll way down to find it, and (as I understand it) Gordon’s basic point is that Mubirumusoke’s critique is based on Afropessimism, an intellectual approach that Gordon finds unsatisfactory.

In the course of his longer discussion of Mubirumusoke, Gordon asks a question that may provide a better grounding for a critique of “White privilege”:

“[W]hy center so much of reality from white perspectives?… Fanon, after all, stated that the Black (‘Le Noir’) had no ontological resistance ‘in the eyes [that is from the perspective] of the [White].’ But he never claimed the White was correct. The White needs that lie. I can go on, but at this point, it should be clear that I’m concerned that Mubirumusoke gives too much credence to the problematic, almost Zeno-like forms of problematic argumentations of impossibility as well as the concomitant Stoicism of individual resignation — perhaps even ressentiment — that such arguments occasion….” (N.B.: in this quotation, the notes in brackets are Gordon’s.)

Gordon’s philosophically nuanced critique of Mubirumusoke takes the critique of “White privilege” to a whole other level. It’s a level above my pay grade, to be honest. But let’s be clear, Gordon is not some “anti-Woke” political conservative, like the ones who dominate U.S. politics these days. Trump and company cannot take comfort from this philosophical conversation. By the same token, political liberals who get uncomfortable when their White privilege is called out aren’t going to find much comfort in Gordon’s critique, either. Gordon even goes so far as to criticize that idol of liberalism, the individual:

“Added to all this is the larger history of Euromodern thought as emerging with the global expansion of enslavement while centering freedom in its discourse. The history of political theology and its role in racism and the advancement of capitalism offered rationalizations of a philosophical anthropology in which ‘the individual’ collapsed into stoic models of rationalization instead of understanding the fundamental incoherence of an individual, treated as real in and of itself like an Aristotelian substance, or, worse, a minor, or perhaps egologically inflated sense of self as, a god.” (N.B.: in this quotation, the emphasis is mine.)

Whoa. Take that, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Gordon is striking at the root of our theological commitment to “the individual.” Because — following Emerson — we Unitarian Universalists really do have this tendency to treat the self as a god. Which is idolatry. And we are fundamentally opposed to idolatry.

Well, as I say, all this is well above my pay grade. But I’d also say both these essays are worth reading. Every time I read Lewis Gordon, I find myself getting insight into problems that have been bothering me. And based on what Gordon says about Mubirumusoke, he might be another one of those thinkers….

The wrong kind of atheism

Still reading Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). When Gutting interviews Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology, he asks Ruse about Richard Dawkins’s arguments against the existence of God. Ruse has a good reply:

” Like every first-year undergraduate in philosophy, [Richard] Dawkins thinks he can put to rest the causal argument for God’s existence. If God caused the world, then what caused God? Of course, the great philosophers, Anselm and Aquinas particularly, are way ahead of him here….”

There actually are interesting arguments to be made about the various proofs for and against God, but Dawkins remains stuck at the level of a certain kind of college freshman who is both ignorant and arrogant.

Noted without comment

From an interview with Howard Wettstein, in the book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), pp. 58-59:

Gary Gutting: “You say you’re a [religious] naturalist and deny that there are any sujpernatural beings, yet you’re a practicing Jew and deny that you’re an atheist. What’s going on here? What’s a God that’s not a supernatural being?”

Howard Wettstein: “Let’s begin with a distinction between participation in a [religious] practice and the activity of theorizing, philosophically and otherwise, about the practice. Even an advanced and creative mathemetician need not have views about, say, the metaphysical status of numbers. Richard Feynman, the great physicist, is rumored to have said that he lived among the numbers, that he was intimate with them. However, he had no views about their metaphysical status; he was highly skeptical about philosophers’ inquiries into such things. He had trouble, or so I imagine, understanding what was at stake in the question of whether the concept of existence had application to such abstractions. Feynman had no worries about whether he was really thinking about numbers. But ‘existence’ was another thing.

“It is this distinction between participation and theorizing that seems to me relevant to religious life.”

Book worth looking at

In preparing for upcoming sermons, I’ve been reading some basic texts that I think provide the foundations for today’s lived religion for many Unitarian Universalists. I started with Nietzsche, because a great many Unitarian Universalists echo some of Nietzsche’s pronouncements about the death of God.

By the way, in Twilight of the Idols, the eighth of Nietzsche’s “Maxims and Missiles” is this: “From the military school of life. — That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Today this has become a much-repeated religious maxim. I wonder if people would repeat it so often if they knew that Nietzsche included it in one of his books.

In any case, although Nietzsche is actually quite a good writer, unlike many philosophers, the quality of his prose is inconsistent, and he can descend to bombast and even incoherence at times. Nor do I find him especially likable; perhaps the better word is, I don’t find that he is sociable; he doesn’t seem to like human society all that much. I can only take a few pages of Nietzsche before I need to read something else to clear my mind.

It occurred to me that Spinoza is another writer who must provide the foundations for much of today’s Unitarian Universalism — his insistence on reason and rationality, his advocacy for freedom of thought, and for democracy — we owe a great deal to Spinoza for being the first Western writer to articulate these values so well.

I had been introduced to Spinoza in an introductory philosophy class, and found him unreadable. A philosophy major who knew more than I told me that we were reading from a notoriously bad translation, but that it was the only English translation of Spinoza that was in print at that time. Whatever the reason, that class put me off Spinoza, and I never wanted to read him again.

But I discovered that Edwin Curley had published new translation of the Theological-Political Treatise in 2016. Curley is supposed to be a well-regarded expert on Spinoza. I thought I’d give his translation a try.

Curley’s translation turns out to be wonderfully readable, and relevant to today’s theological and political situation. Take, for example, this passage from Chapter XX, which has the chapter title, “It is shown that in a Free Republic, everyone is permitted to think what he wishes and to say what he thinks”:

“These examples show, more clearly than by the noon light, that the real schismatics are those who condemn the writings of others and seditiously incite the unruly mob against the writers, not the writers themselves, who for the most part write only for the learned and call only reason to their aid. Again, the real troublemakers are those who want, in a Free Republic, to take away the freedom of judgment, even though it can’t be repressed.”

Today, those who call themselves conservatives and those who call themselves liberals have both descended to condemning the writings of others; and have both tried to take away freedom of judgment. Both the conservatives and the liberals have advanced good reasons for condemning the writings of others. But, as Spinoza points out: banning books in libraries, or banning speakers from college campuses, really amounts to taking away freedom of judgment, even though that judgment can’t be really repressed.

I’ll end this post with one more quote from this same chapter, that could have been written about the recent U.S. presidential election campaign (note that “liberal studies” here does not mean politically liberal in the U.S. sense, but rather in the sense of the liberal arts):

“Liberal studies and trust are corrupted, flatterers and traitors are encouraged, and the opponents of [liberal studies and trust] exult, because a concession has been made to their anger, and because they’ve made those who have sovereignty followers of the doctrine whose interpreters they are thought to be. That’s how it happens that they dare to usurp their authority and right, and don’t blush to boast that they’ve been chosen immediately by God, and their their own decrees are divine, whereas those of the supreme powers are human, and therefore should yeild to divine decrees, that is, to their own decrees. No on can fail to see that all these things are compmletely contrary to the well-being of the Republic.”

In his day, Spinoza’s books were banned and he had to fear persecution by the religious and political authorities. No doubt he would suffer the same fate if he lived in the U.S. today. This sad reality may help explain why colleges are cutting philosophy programs: God forbid that there should be a course of study that might include a thinker like Spinoza.

Gender and philosophy

Although I’m not a philosopher, I was trained in philosophy. So when I hear arguments, I tend to want to ask some questions about any given argument. What’s the origin of this argument — is it a perennial argument, or did it begin at some point in time? What’s the purpose of this argument? Since most arguments do not reduce to Boolean logic, what are some of the diverse positions taken in this argument?

Currently, there are arguments in pop culture about sex and gender. Pop culture usually reduces these arguments to a simple binary: traditionalists vs. progressives. But even a cursory examination shows that the so-called “progressive” camp includes a diversity of opinions.

I found a useful essay that surveys these diverse opinions on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender” by Mari Mikkola (18 Jan 2022 revision) gives a summary of some of the more prominent issues.

Especially useful are the tidbits of intellectual history scattered through this essay. Take, for example, the origin of the current distinction between sex and gender, which dates only to the 1960s:

“…Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match. Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable….” [Section 1.2]

So “gender” is a relatively recent concept. But our concept of “sex” is also fairly recent:

“…Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly [sic], those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context…. It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism.” [Section 3.2; emphasis is mine]

Thus, our current understanding of “biological sex” is not an ageless, universal concept. To use Theodore Parker’s terminology, “sex” and “gender,” then, are transient concepts rather than permanent concepts. All this is useful to know when someone tells you, with great sincerity, that a certain definition of “sex” or “gender” is the one true and correct definition. That may be true at this moment, but it was not necessarily true in the past, and it won’t necessarily be true in the future.

None of this should distract us from the very real injustices that stem from widely-held concepts of “sex” and “gender.” But this may helps explain why we humans seem to take such a long time to achieve justice. Remember what Parker said about justice:

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Indeed, our eye reaches but a little ways along the arc of the moral universe. And nor can we yet “calculate the curve.”

Ethics and “AI”

On the Lawyers Guns and Money blog, Abigail Nussbaum writes:

“The companies that make AI — which is, to establish our terms right at the outset, large language models that generate text or images in response to natural language queries — have a problem. Their product is dubiously legal, prohibitively expensive (which is to say, has the kind of power and water requirements that are currently being treated as externalities and passed along to the general populace, but which in a civilized society would lead to these companies’ CEOs being dragged out into the street by an angry mob), and it objectively does not work. All of these problems are essentially intractable.”

What interests me here is how she focuses in on the main ethical problem with “AI” — the huge environmental impact of “AI.” Yes, it is evil that the “AI” companies steal people’s writing and steal people’s artwork. Yes, it is evil that the plutocrats want to have “AI” replace real humans (though as Nussbaum points out, if you factor in the real environmental costs, human labor is cheaper than “AI”). Yes, it is evil that “AI” is a product that doesn’t provide consistently good results. Yes, it is evil that”AI” is another way that the plutocrats can steal your personal data.

But here we are in the middle of an ecological crisis, and “AI” uses huge amounts of energy, and huge amounts of fresh water for cooling. “AI” is an environmental disaster. That is the real ethical problem.

Another alleged genocide

The attention of the United States remains firmly fixed on alleged genocide in Gaza. But another alleged genocide has received little or no notice. Human Rights Watch alleges that a genocide has been committed in Sudan. The BBC reports:

“A genocide may have been committed in the West Darfur city of El Geneina in one of the worst atrocities of the year-long Sudanese civil war, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW). It says ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity have been committed against ethnic Massalit and non-Arab communities in the city by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and its Arab allies. The report calls for sanctions against those responsible for the atrocities, including the RSF leader, Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti. The UN says about 15,000 people are feared to have been killed in El Geneina last year.”

Here’s the full BBC story. Be warned: it makes for unpleasant reading.

The reason I mention this alleged genocide is that wars and violence in sub-Saharan Africa don’t seem to get much attention in the US. Take for example the brutal war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The DRC has close to three quarters of the world’s cobalt reserves, and cobalt is a key ingredient in the lithium ion batteries that the U.S. and other countries are counting on the halt global climate change. Yet we rarely hear about this war in the US, and there are no protests calling for divestment from companies that profit from access to cheap cobalt for their lithium-ion batteries. Similarly, little attention has been paid in the US to the Mahgreb insurgency in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and other nearby countries, even though al-Qaeda is behind much of the violence. Perhaps Americans have grown weary of hearing about al-Qaeda, but I would have expected a bit more media and social media attention paid to a conflict featuring a stated enemy of the US. Or what about the conflict in Ethiopia which began in 2018 and may now be slowly winding down — estimates of the death toll vary from 180,000 at the low end to over 600,000. I saw no widespread outrage in the US over the atrocities committed in that conflict.

So why does the war in Gaza and Israel draw so much attention? I suspect this is partly it’s because psychologically we humans have a limited capacity for compassion. Compassion fatigue is a real thing, and if you’re paying attention to Ukraine and Gaza/Israel, you probably don’t have much compassion left over for alleged genocide in Sudan. I suspect the lack of attention is also due in part to the fact that most people in the US have little interest in what happens in Africa. When I’m looking for news and information on Africa, I don’t find much on US news outlets or US social media; I have to go to the BBC. But I don’t really have an answer to this question, except maybe to say that we in the US reserve the right to choose which atrocities we pay attention to.

Another view of war

Vera Brittain served as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse during the First World War, serving in Malta, France, and London. Having seen the horrors of the “Great War” first hand — and after having her fiance, her brother, and her two best male friends die in the war — she became a committed pacifist. In 1937, while the threat of another European war kept growing, she said this in a pamphlet published by the Peace Pledge Union:

“I hold war to be a crime against humanity, whoever fights it, and against whomever it is fought.”

[Quoted in “Vera Mary Brittain,” Poetry Foundation website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vera-mary-brittain accessed 29 April 2024.]

Plant morphology

I’ve been doing a deep dive into plant morphology. I went down this rabbit hole while doing planning for some ecojustice workshops I’m planning this summer. One of the activities I like to lead is dissecting flowers— it helps participants see things from a new perspective, and a great deal of ecojustice is learning how to see things (like society) from a new perspective.

If you’re going to dissect flowers, why not dissect non-flowering plants as well? However, ferns, green seaweeds, red seaweeds, mosses, etc. — differ in their structures from flowering plants, and thus they have their own terminologies. Even grasses, which are a flowering plant, have their own peculiar terminology.

I quickly decided the terminology of grasses was too complicated to present to casual workshop participants. Awn, floret, panicle, pedicel — I could envision everyone’s eyes glazing over as they heard those terms.

The basic terminology for ferns and seaweeds, though, was easier to present. And there were some interesting contrasts with flowering plants. For example, flowering plants have stems; seaweeds have stipes. Flowering plants have roots; ferns have rhizomes.

There is a transcendent point in all of this. Life on Earth is filled with incredible diversity. Our human language really can’t encompass that diversity. But we can use words to help us see some of that diversity a little better.

A drawing of a seaweed with the parts labeled.
Parts of seaweed, shown on Bladderwrack, Fucus vesiculosus

On average, Amazon charges you 29% more than they should

Maybe Amazon has the lowest online prices (maybe), but odds are that if you shop from Amazon you’ll pay more than you should.

Legal scholars from Boston University have been researching Amazon’s anti-competitive practices. They have documented how Amazon manipulates buyers into paying 29% more, on average, than they should be paying:

“As one of many examples, we present the first evidence that Amazon’s search results systematically bury the lowest priced items even if they have high ratings.(18) We find, for instance, that the best deal on the first page—factoring in ratings and price—was on average located in the seventeenth slot, where few consumers look.(19) Moreover, consumers who chose the first relevant item returned in the search results would have paid on average 29% more than if they had located the best deal.(20) One of the reasons these findings are important is that more than half of Amazon’s regular customers always purchase the top result provided.(21) And filtering the search results by ‘Price: Low to High’ does not solve these problems on most searches, particularly since this feature still ignores unit price and shipping costs.” Rory Van Loo & Nikita Aggarwal, Amazon’s Pricing Paradox (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 2023), pp. 4-5.

Footnotes 18 and 21 in this paragraph give essential information to help understand how Amazon manipulates your behvior to get you to pay more:

“(18) Our findings, posted to SSRN in May of 2023, build on previous research showing that Amazon and other online companies also manipulate consumers and engage in behavioral pricing by not displaying shipping costs or by preferencing their own items. See, e.g., Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, Search, Obfuscation, and Price Elasticities on the Internet, 77 ECONOMETRICA 427, 449 (2009) (using purchase data to show that online third-party sellers of computer parts can raise prices by 6% to 9% through obfuscation strategies, such as hiding the shipping costs); Julia Angwin & Surya Mattu, Amazon Says It Puts Customers First. But Its Pricing Algorithm Doesn’t, PROPUBLICA (Sept. 20, 2016, 8:00 AM), https://www.propublica.org/article/amazon-says-it-puts-customers-first-but-its-pricing-algorithm-doesn’t (analyzing 250 items, each with multiple options for which vendor sells it, and finding that Amazon’s product pages push items fulfilled by Amazon to the “buy box,” even though once shipping costs are added that item would be on average 20% more expensive than the cheapest alternative); Adrianne Jeffries & Leon Yin, Amazon Puts Its Own “Brands” First Above Better-Rated Products, THE MARKUP (Oct. 14, 2021), https://themarkup.org/amazons-advantage/2021/10/14/amazon-puts-its-own-brands-first-above-better-rated-products (finding that Amazon systematically puts its own products at the top of search results, without looking at the price impact). Unlike our research, Ellison and Ellison were focused on behavior by the end seller rather than the platform and did not empirically study Amazon, Angwin and Mattu focused on obfuscation in a specific item’s product page rather than in Amazon search results, and Jeffries and Yin do not measure the extent of burying or higher prices paid as a result of self-preferencing….
(19) See infra Part I.B.
(20) Id.
(21) FEEDVISOR, THE 2019 AMAZON CONSUMER BEHAVIOR REPORT 14, 16 (2019) (‘For those who buy products on Amazon daily or almost everyday, more than half [54%] always buy the first product listed on Amazon’s search engine results page [SERP].’)”

Not to put too fine a point on it, Amazon is deliberately misleading its customers in order to squeeze more money out of them. Buying from Amazon is a sucker’s game, where in the long run the consumer always loses. (If you don’t want to read the entire scholarly article, Cory Doctorow summarizes some of the key points here.)

Yet another reason why friends don’t let friends buy from Amazon.