"I think spanking is mean."

Long term readers of this blog will know I have a co-philosopher. For her privacy I refer to her simply as the kid. She’s eight now and despite her claiming to be a tween I maintain she is a kid still.

Recently I asked her, “What if I knew someone who loved their kids and who felt the best thing for those kids was to spank them, would it be ok for me to say to them “I think spanking is mean.”

I added that I did feel that spanking was mean so my statement would be an honest reflection of my feelings. After some thought the kid told me “It would be better to say, “I don’t think you should spank kids because…” and then give some reasons, because calling them mean will just make people feel guilty and bad.”

I asked, “Don’t I want them to feel guilty and bad? I want them to feel guilty about spanking so they won’t do it.”

The kid replied, “If they feel guilty they’ll probably still do it and they might even do it more because they’re angry.”

This is an eight year old so I am not suggesting we take her word as that of an expert. She has only just starting watching Dr. Who, and doesn’t even have any idea about Star Trek, so we can reasonably suspect her philosophy is shallow at best. However does she have a point? Or rather does she have two points:
1) Telling someone a behaviour is mean is not effective at changing their behaviour.
2) We can and should find arguments against behaviours other than just saying that they are mean.

This second point needs to be interrogated because, the kid failed to tell me how to finish her alternative to “spanking is mean”. This is no accident. Providing reasons for moral positions is not simple. Some people even argue it can’t be done: that moral language is essential a statement of preference. This can leave us able to make appeals to empathy, i.e. “You wouldn’t like to be spanked would you?”, but leaves us with little by way of logical premises to build an objective case. Pragmatically this dilemma makes too much of the possibility we won’t share some basic assumptions that we can argue from with other people. I do however concede that strictly logical ethical arguments don’t really go anywhere and I do believe that empathy is more crucial than logic to ethics.

My other concern with finding reasons not to spank is that we often mistakenly limit ourselves to certain type of reasons. These reasons are consequences, essentially a justification of one part of our life in terms of another. For example; It is good to exercise because it makes a person fitter. It is good to be fitter because you can be a better lover. It is good to be a better lover because sex is important to maintaining a relationship. It is good to maintain a relationship because this provides a stable place to raise children (or at least garden).  The reason for each choice is not contained in the choice but in some far off set of circumstances – nothing is ever done for its own reasons.

Is there any point in this chain of consequences when you felt a bit echh? Did you wonder whether having sex “for the kid’s sake” was the sort of justification that just might have you running from the bedroom? Or does it creep you out a little that the enjoyment of jogging is treated as secondary to the benefits of jogging to one’s relationship? I think there is a disassociation involved in constantly having these sorts of justifications in our head that constitutes a betrayal of the act we are committing. Does it make sense that we can betray or be disloyal to an act? An actor on the stage knows this is so. There is something tepid and dull about a performance that isn’t committed to. A life lived according to justifications that are never in the moment seems to me to have the same distracted quality.

In contrast to this saying that spanking is mean is riveted on the moment. I’m not saying “Don’t spank your kids because if you do they will hit other kids.” In fact even if spanked kids don’t increasingly hit other kids I’m saying don’t spank them. After all if your own kid’s pain is irrelevant why all of a sudden does some other kid’s pain matter? That other kid is not even real – merely hypothetical. The encounter with them may never even occur. So how on earth does whether they get hit have more value than the interests of the kid who is actually being spanked when the decision is actually being made?

There are two problems that stand out for me  however with the statement “spanking is mean”.  Firstly its unclear what I am referring to. Do I just mean the feeling of being a bad person? If so then being concerned with the meanness of any act is arguably quite selfish. This is possibly people’s biggest counter argument against calling behaviour mean or for that matter cruel. It can sound like someone is simply wanting to live in a fantasy where they are always liked and never have to say no to anyone. This doesn’t treat other people with any genuine concern, hence the saying “you need to be cruel to be kind”. Even that can be an overstatement of the contradiction. Sometimes my children’s “naughty” behaviour is a transparent ask for some limits where I can say “it felt cruel to put her to bed so early but I could tell she desperately wanted me to.”

If this feeling of being a bad person isn’t what I mean by “being mean” what am I talking about? It’s not easy to articulate without referring to consequences beyond the immediate situation which I want to avoid. I think there is something to “being mean” about failing to identify with the other person’s personhood. Not “being mean” means rejecting the notion that the other persons fear and pain are simply levers you can manipulate: the other person has a genuine mind which has to be engaged with. In particular, meanness is unconcerned with the other minds’ enjoyment of life in a good and healthy way. Meanness dismisses this as unimportant. Calling someone mean is calling them to respect this enjoyment – to share in it even.

The other problem with saying “spanking is mean”, and this impacts on its effectiveness, is that it just doesn’t correspond to the spanker’s reality. Here the spanker may be confusing meanness with cruelty. Cruelty relishes in the pain of its victims. Meanness not so much. However still the spanker may be behaving out of a sense of gruesome duty that goes beyond just avoiding being cruel. They may not be indifferent to the recipient’s pain and fear. They may deeply dislike causing this pain and fear. In that context even meanness seems a profoundly unfair sentence to pronounce.

If this is the situation then it might be properly characterized as everyone accepting that the behaviour is mean, even if using that language would not be good politics. At least everyone would agree that without any extenuating circumstances the spanking would be mean. This is when an argument might take place that seeks to disprove  those consequential reasons that justify the meanness. However this is not the same thing as producing consequential reasons not to spank. There doesn’t need to be any benefit to not spanking. The reason not to spank remains located in the moment: It remains that spanking is mean.

This is, according to my logic, describes where arguments over vaccination also belong. Although I am pro-vaccination and anti-spanking, vaccination would surely be as mean as spanking without any extenuating circumstances. It is just that to my mind the extenuating cicumstances make it alright. Does it make sense then to say that when I vaccinate my kids I am being mean, just with good reason? I’m not sure if I want to say it does. I have to admit that an anti-vaxxer who tells me I am being mean by vaccinating my kids has not led with a convincing argument. As my kid correctly guessed it is probably just going to make me angry.

Not politically then, but philosophically, I am disputing my eight year old’s claim that we shouldn’t say spanking is mean. This is despite being immensely proud of her for an attitude which is at odds with our culture. There is a lot of calling people mean on social media today and it sets the tone for other conversations too. Labeling other people as mean also seems to provide the license to not only be mean to those people but to be outright cruel. In this regard we need to really hold on to the difference between saying that an action is being mean and saying that a person is a mean person. Some are, but not all who spank are, certainly.

On the other hand maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all I’m doing is arguing for some sort of anti-rational romanticism, a rejection of the common sense that life shouldn’t be lived only for a moment at a time. I do think there is a time for irrational romanticism to be sure. The gut knows what the head can become confused over. As we’ve seen with Australia’s horrific detention camps supposedly saving people from dying at sea, consequential reasoning can justify anything. But equally following one’s gut leads to its own excesses. Heads often roll. So don’t let me have the last word, let’s have a conversation instead. Tell us your thoughts in the comments.

Partial solutions to the need to pee.

In my last blog post I wrote possibly the most positive press that postmodernism has received in the last decade. (That post backgrounds this one so I recommend you read it first.) Postmodernism peaked in the 90’s and early 2000's as a general search term but as the following graph shows it has encountered a steady fall in popularity since then.


I feel, despite its decline, that postmodern ideas can help out with some contemporary problems. In fact some contemporary problems remind me very much of a situation at university in my twenties when I felt postmodern ideas contained a way to approach an irresolvable conflict.

The problem back then regarded women-only spaces. This was usually a small lounge on a university campus which was reserved for women students. The rest of the university was only nominally a shared space. Men generally took up most of the public space as per our socialization. There were mostly men on the pool tables for example. It seemed to me that amongst the jocks, men dominated groups with casual ease, but I more often hung out with the card playing geeks, where guys hastily claimed every flat surface available to play on with their friends. I was then, and am now, a supporter of women only spaces on campuses, even though I am aware that women can be horrible to other women and that a tucked away lounge is not a substitute for equally shared space. A women’s lounge isn’t a perfect solution but it can provide an alternative organizing space for women to confront sexism.

Whether or not transgender women could access women’s only spaces like women’s lounges was and is a confronting issue. Some transgender activists  back then insisted they be welcomed in to women’s lounges while others pointedly didn’t. To those who opposed transgender inclusion, transgenderism was the colonization of the territory of women by men, with the women’s lounge a totemic example of that territory. There was a real hostility between feminists who supported transgender women’s inclusion in women’s only space and those who didn’t, partly because this was an issue that reflected other divisions - about how to understand sex-work for example. Some women’s departments seemed torn down the middle.

My stance on the issue was simple: This was none of my business. Even involved as I was in Queer politics, even spending some of my time in a dress as I went from class to protest, to café and to pub I didn’t think the inclusion or exclusion of transgender women from the women’s lounge was for me to decide. I knew that I experienced significant male privilege – dress or no dress. In fact cross-dressing to pass at times (where a person basically fools the average joe they are the other gender) taught me there is a lot of misogyny in this world that many men just don’t know about. Dressed as a woman I had a ton of people grab my ass (arse?) and not in a good way. Friends did it, self declared feminists even did it. As a joke, it wasn’t particularly funny the first time and definitely not by the thirtieth. Nobody grabbed my ass when I was dressed as a bloke.

My own public experiences of wearing women’s clothes were mostly around the ages of eighteen to twenty. I was not always thrilled to be perceived as male and resented  the expectation I felt to embrace violence and insensitivity as a bloke. I felt able to escape those expectations by using clothes and mannerisms to appear female. I never identified as female or wanted to be female but then I don’t hugely identify as male or want to be male either. I did however want to be seen as female occasionally just as I imagine most people do. When women want to be seen as female it’s unremarkable however.

All presentations to the world feel like “drag” to me. I put on a suit for court, I dress in a nice shirt and tie for a job interview, I wear a t-shirt and shorts to work with young people in relation to substance use. None of these outfits are the real me. That would be ridiculous. It would mean that I couldn’t exist in some other time such as before the t-shirt's invention. Likewise gender can’t be the real me. Gender, expressed by long hair or short hair or any item of clothing or makeup can’t derive from an essentialist idea of self. These are patterns and they don’t have any more permanence than a style of music. We can feel like the real us is expressed by rap music for example but the us we mean by this is something separate from the expression, and might need other expressions too.

We must be very careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that gender is only self-expression however. We are not alone in society. Everybody else is expressing their views and values too. This is why there is a women’s movement and women’s lounge to begin with; not so much to express one’s own gender but to deal with the impact of other people’s understanding of gender on certain people’s lives. This impact is both externalized in people’s actions and internalized in our thoughts and feelings, so that our “own gender” is mixed up with everyone else’s. As trans-feminist Kate Bornstein describes: “women inhabit women only spaces to heal from the oppression of their number by the larger culture.” (Gender Outlaw, p82)

Each of our individual expressions of gender draw from and contribute to a wider culture (and sub-cultures) around gender. To begin with I have a limited extent to how I can talk about gender based on my imagination, and a part of what limits my imagination are the terms and reference points my culture gives me to begin with. On top of that my self-expression only makes sense to others if I limit myself to terms and reference points they understand. Finally there are real sanctions for deviating from norms around gender and rewards for living up to them. Gender may not be a real part of who I am but it is something I really do have to learn to navigate in the world.

Acknowledging these two sides to Gender is something modernism struggles with. Modernism sees language as essentially a practice of truth-telling: if I say I am a woman this must correspond to the reality that I am a woman. It’s a position that seems obvious. Modernists can critically examine what is meant by reality and recognize there are different kinds of real – all forms of feminism do this to an extent and so does Marxism and many other modernist movements. However Modernism seems to repeatedly fall into the error of talking only in terms of one level of reality and supposing that language should be as direct as possible a description of that reality and nothing else.

Postmodernism always questions what is meant by reality and recognizes that there are different kinds of real. This is inevitable given that postmodern views of language emphasis its many purposes other than truth-telling. Consider how often in our current election campaign we will hear some truth claims about global warming, unemployment, tax-evasion and union corruption from different parties. Even if none of these claims included any lies each party tells the truth they want to tell and glosses over other truths. The purpose of a given selection of truths is not to tell the whole truth but to scare, provoke, please and otherwise motivate voters in a particular direction.

Likewise whenever gender is spoken of there are more purposes than simply truth-telling going on. This cuts both ways. Feminists who want to exclude transgender women from the women’s room can’t rest their case by saying “they are not real women” and equally transgender women cannot claim a right to access women’s rooms because “we are real women” as if that was either clear or a key point. These statements talk about a construct – “real woman” – as if anyone could know scientifically or intuitively exactly what it is and as if that was the organizing principle upon which a women’s lounge was based anyway, a club for “real women”.

One way of differentiating postmodern from modern solutions to this matter is to consider time as a dimension of the problem. Modernist solutions are based on the idea that through truth-telling a solution will reflect a timeless reality. Therefore modernist solutions will be permanent and universal. This is why disagreements can become so high stakes. They are effectively winner-takes-all. Postmodern solutions are not intended to reflect reality but to engage with the circumstances which create the kind of reality that gender is. Therefore postmodern solutions are strategic solutions. Rather than cementing any solution in a constitution that would be difficult to reverse, a postmodern solution would be more willing to come up with policies with a built in sunset clause in recognition that the reality of gender will (hopefully if feminists have anything to do about it) change. A women’s room on one campus might also make a decision different to another women’s room elsewhere because they see their circumstances are different. Different histories and the alliances they have created would be relevant to local communities.

I call these kinds of solutions partial solutions. They are temporal – limited by time, and local – limited by space, and tactical – justified by temporal and local circumstances. A women’s department is itself such a partial solution to the changing problems women face around gender. The establishment of any women’s lounge never reflected a real and timeless right to a small room with couches and an urn regardless of circumstances. This isn’t to say they must be opened up to transgender women. To be transgender is itself to take up a partial solution to gendered culture rather than tell “the truth”.  Does this mean that the transgendered woman doesn’t possess a real and timeless right to the implications of their gender identity? I think it does because everything gender embodies is circumstantial rather than eternal. I also think this applies to cis-gender women too and anyone's gender identity.

The obvious correlation to the issue of transgender women in women’s only spaces is “the bathroom wars” currently raging senselessly across the U.S. Once again we would do well to recognize that the division of toilets into men’s and women’s is not intended to reflect a position on ultimate reality. In our own houses we don’t divide toilets that way because it would be impractical. At most gay venues there is a degree of freedom about women using men’s toilets which tends to share the toilet queues more equitably. Nobody is urinating on a scared binary when they use a toilet of any gender or no gender. Whatever policy is reached in any situation only a deliberately partial solution, local to circumstances, and sensitive to immediate needs makes sense. That’s what toilets are to the need to pee.

This is why the North Carolina law that bans any use of a toilet assigned for the gender not on your birth certificate is so silly. It makes a state issue out of what should have been resolved at the most immediate level and encourages everyone to take a winner-takes-all position for or against the law. We have the idiocy of people who look male being forced to use women’s bathrooms because of what’s on their birth certificate in order that women concerned about men in their toilets feel safe. We have the draconian need for women to present ID proving their birth sex to male police officers entering women's bathrooms. On the other hand making one rule for all to allow anyone to use whatever toilet matches the gender they identify with has its own problems. It can lead us with no capacity to deal with creeps like Mike Huckabee wanting to perv on high school girls  or put us on a fool’s errand to find the technical point at which transition from one gender to another is sufficient. Encouraging flexibility and sensitivity say at an individual school level would be much wiser. Not blowing up the issue on social media for the sake of outrage is probably too much to hope for.

This has been another puff piece for postmodernism in a way. If we are to avoid modernist solutions to problems we also need to properly understand why they are attractive to us. That means I need to talk about what they do well, particularly how we can use the language of rights to anchor socially just outcomes to timeless reality. That timeless reality might be a fiction but it's been fantastically beneficial to believe in it. Given the ridiculous length of this post however I’ll leave this to be explored in the comments or a future post.  I really would enjoy hearing your thoughts.

Postmodernism: A tale with two chapters - and a third chapter with a problem.

Imagine that human history can be broken into three chapters. These chapters are distinguished by three different attitudes to authority, knowledge and progress. These attitudes, which we will call Pre-Modern, Modern and Post-Modern, are dominant in their respective eras but certainly not exclusive. There is a bit of the Premodern attitude in the Modern era and even a bit of the Modern attitude in the Pre-Modern era but between eras there is a shift in ascendancy. This makes it impossible to date these eras neatly. Even within people there is voices from all eras lingering. However someone like Moses or Mother Theresa is firmly Premodern, someone like Mary Wollstonecraft or Karl Marx is firmly Modern and someone like Derrida or Batman is Postmodern. That’s not a joke. Whereas Moses and Marx are proposing plans to fix their societies, Batman, from his position as a criminal, can only achieve partial remedies to Gotham. We will see that this is a hallmark of the Postmodern.

We can’t really say that either Pre-Modern, Modern or Post-Modern worldviews are entirely good or bad. Hitler is modern but so is Martin Luther King. You could say Pre-Modern, Modern and Post-Modern worldviews are suited to their times however they are so pervasive that it might be fairer to say the times become suited to their attitudes. They are broader than what we usually call “philosophies”. Instead they equip us philosophically. I want to get to the point where I can discuss a specifically Post-modern equipped response to some contemporary social problems. Before we can do that I need to try and broadly describe these three world-views.

In the Premodern world-view authority comes from above and beyond ourself. Humanity learns and knows through encountering revelation. Revelation is exactly what it sounds like, something or someone is revealing the truth to us, peeling back the curtain from ultimate reality. A key intellectual virtue of the Premodern era is patience. Faithfulness is also important as the payoff for any revelation is not always immediate. It might even be generations from the time of revelation to when it is proven true. In the Pre-Modern world view there is also no guarantee of positive progress. Sometimes there is even a view of the present as less than the past because we are now further from a moment of revelation or creation in which truth was truly known. More often time just isn’t evaluated as a simple straight line based on human social happiness; prophets arise in our darkest hours while prosperity brings its own corruption and all seasons have their purpose.

In the Modern world view authority is a term with a changed meaning. We are not waiting for a message from an author of the world. We are able to speak with authority ourselves. The basis of our authority is adherence to a process – rational thinking, logic, the scientific method, evidence based practice, reflective practice, client-focused systems, democratic processes and so on. All of these from pre-enlightenment concepts to contemporary buzzwords are processes which are seen as enabling humanity to be like Gods, to speak with authority. Within modernism there are arguments about which process are best and which are broken but there is a fundamental belief that a process is sufficient to guide progress in the right direction – not revelation from beyond. A key intellectual virtue of the Modern world view is therefore rigour – strict adherence to protocols and constraints. Other values which become important are precision and objectivity. There is an unshakable faith that some process will enable the future to be better than the past and the past is generally considered worse than today for not having access to the processes we have.

In the Postmodern world view there is a recognition that this way of breaking up history into three phases puts the postmodern in the literary place of the punchline at the end. Postmodern attitudes will therefore need to have all the answers, complete all endings and supercede both the modern and the pre-modern before it. Postmodernity tries to resist this fate for two reasons – one is that the postmodern world view doesn’t believe in itself in the way that the Pre-Modern and Post-Modern attitudes do. In the Modern world view the Premodern ideas are dismissed as myths and stories, unlike its own beliefs. The Post-modern world view doesn’t just consider that the Modern and the Pre-modern ideas both are myths and stories it accepts this as a fair characterization of itself. The whole shebang of the three world views is a myth! Postmodernism itself is an element in a story. You could consider this hyper-critical response to be a continuation of the Modern into the Post-Modern. On the other hand the way in which this criticism destroys the idea of progress – reflected in Postmodernisms refusal to take the throne as our stories ultimate winner – is an element we find in the Pre-Modern.

The other reason that Postmodernism tries to resist being the stories final answer is to be found in the way that postmodernists, premodernists and modernists are not fundamentally different. Most of them would rather have a full stomach than an empty one, would rather children laughed than cried and would rather not see the tiger go extinct. All of them want to be right and want to be right in order to see the world be better, pre-modernists through faithfulness and patience and modernists through rigour and objectivity. The problem for Postmodernists is their awareness that the desire to be right and pursue what is best for the world has historically been a justification for terrible cruelty. As modernists believe pre-modern conviction is delusional, and pre-modernists think modernist conviction is hubris, postmodernists agree with them both. Conviction is problematic in the postmodern, particularly conviction of a particular type referred to as belief in a metanarrative.

A Metanarrative is the idea that there is one large story for all. For Christians there are many different stories in their church on any given Sunday – Bob is there to thank God for forgiving his adultery, Sarah is there because she finds the company wholesome, Martha is there because she wants to connect with her families heritage, Nick is there to put on the armour of God in his crusade against whatever Nick is fired up about. Each of these stories however are subsumed under one large story of Gods engagement with their creation in which the differences between congregation members are irrelevant. There is not a million different reasons why God sent his son to earth in Christianity, for Bob’s forgiveness and Martha’s traditions and so on, but one reason that defines everyone’s relationship to the story. That’s a metanarrative.

The Christian Gospel is only one example of a metanarrative. The idea that being an atheist will improve people’s lives – not just Bob and Sarah’s lives but everybody’s lives and in some basically similar way – is a metanarrative too. Most if not all feminisms are metanarratives. Capitalism and communism both spew out metanarattives. We find less metanarratives in the premodern era – particularly when we see Gods localized to the degree that we have the God of the Israelites with a story only for them. Traditional African religions don’t operate by metanarratives either – each person has their own spiritual quest. The metanarratives zenith was Modernism, which makes sense given the modern valuing of consistency and theory, while Postmodernism tries to avoid metanarratives all together.

In this regard Postmodernism is always failing. We are stuck in our three world view story. The moment Postmodernism gains any kind of definition as a philosophy, including the definition that Postmodernists reject metanarratives, then we complete the three world view story and we have a metanarrative containing Postmodernism. All of history becomes expressed in a tale with an implied should to it – you too should avoid metanarratives. I think of this as the contamination of postmodernism by the Modern era. It seems impossible for Postmodernism to break free of Modernism’s production of metanarratives – it seems impossible to speak at all without speaking for everybody.

Modernists wants us to reject postmodernism for this failure and inevitable contradictions but why wouldn’t they? This would after all ensure the modern era continues unchallenged and unchallengeable. The Pre-Modern is a foe already on the ropes. Postmodernism has several strategies to resist completely failing (and completely succeeding which paradoxically is the same thing) in separating from Modernism and the chief of these is acceptance. Acceptance is a virtue in the postmodern akin to patience in the Premodern. Postmodernism accepts that it contains contradictions, it accepts that it has to rely on the pre-modern and the modern and can never fully replace them, it accepts that philosophical problems are not solvable. Authority for example is a huge point of conflict between world views. Pre-modernists poke fun at the self-referential nature of moral authority in modernism. Modernists argue that the transcendant in premodernism is simply a God of the gaps and also must be justified by circular logic. Postmodernists accept that living with authority and living without it are both ultimately untenable and therefore any answer to questions of authority has to be tentative and partial, temporary and moderated. The Batman needs Comissioner Gordon who needs the Batman, even though both contradict each other as vigilante and lawman.

“Hi, I’m a Postmodernist” is not a particularly great way to introduce oneself at parties. Partly its because postmodern texts can be chock full of made-up words and elusive content. Reading Post-Modern theory can lead us to feel a combination of stupid and angry that someone is trying to make us feel stupid. There are well publicised cases of people using postmodern language to publish gibberish that no-one dared criticize in case it actually meant something brilliant – a sort of intellectual Emperors new clothes. Once exposed these confidence scams drew ire down on the whole enterprise. In it’s wordy posturing postmodern theory can also seem to encourage a superficial involvement with reality; postmodern Nero doesn’t so much fiddle as he engages in “musical hair-splitting”, while Rome burns.

In it’s defence I don’t think philosophy has been able to talk directly about itself with much clarity for some time. The hyper critical nature of postmodern philosophy in which language and philosophy themselves are being interrogated makes describing this world view directly with language and philosophy terms a fools task. We are better off demonstrating postmodern philosophy in characters set in fiction. Star Trek Voyager is far more postmodern than previous Star Treks for example. The crews preparedness to break their own protocols in order to act responsibly is contradictory. What are they responsible to without those protocols? Elsewhere the Guardians of the Galaxy leave us with the question of whether they will do something bad, something good or a bit of both at the end of their film, never resolving the contradiction of goodies and baddies. Acceptance, partial solutions, imperfect answers are everywhere in our stories. They are not always demonstrated fatalistically and tragically in moral tales that reinforce a need for modernism or the pre-modern. Sometimes we cheer uncertainty and are happy our protagonists are left with the tension of continuing choice.

Postmodernism also gets into trouble because of mistaken identities. Sometimes people hear of French Postfeminism and confuse it with American post-feminism. French Postfeminism is a feminist attempt to construct the self post all the assumptions of gender. This is reasonably associated with post modernism in the field of ideas. American post-feminism by contrast is the claim that feminism’s work is done (by gaining women the vote for example) and we can let liberal capitalism progress now without further feminist critique. This is not post-modern but very modern instead. Likewise there seems to me to be nothing particularly postmodern about Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man with its view that the end of human political evolution has been reached by both liberal democracy and capitalism. American post-feminism and the End of History myth both get lumped under a post-modern banner which the left then forcibly reject. But what they are rejecting are clearly metanarratives that fit perfectly inside Modernism.

Another case of mistaken identity is when conservatives reject post-modernism because they see it as promoting moral relativism. In a way they are right but equally they are wrong. Postmodernism rejects one size fits all solutions and this includes moral relativism as an absolute truth in the way that a modernist might use it – to discount all moral speech as nonsense. The arguments that conservatives use to argue against moral relativism – that it will lead us to a position where no evil can be confronted at all – is met with postmodern acceptance. Postmodernists agree but hold this alongside the awareness that outrightly rejecting all moral relativism is just as problematic. Alternatives that postmodernists explore include local truth in which consensus around meaning might be developed differently in differently settings and the idea that language is tactical and collegial rather than strictly truth telling. This is not the same as saying that language is just individual expression.  I hope I can explore these concepts further on this blog.

This is not an official guide to Postmodernism. I have never heard anyone else use the word acceptance as an intellectual virtue in any context let alone in a breakdown of these world views. You should consider that when writing an academic paper or answering a trivia question. No liability is recognised if you lose a million dollar prize or get a D from quoting me. It’s a profoundly relevant question to this topic to ask how you would establish the authority of this blog post. If your answer is a little bit of this method of verification and a little bit of that method, with a degree of uncertainty never fully dispelled you just might be postmodernist.

For a more mainstream discussion of this topic check out this lovely fellows lecture.

My classroom, my values, of course. - a discussion of the safe schools program.

The furor over the safe schools program has died down. The Victorian Government is retaining it in my home state with absolutely no changes. The Federal government is proscribing changes that will lower its profile and independence, depoliticize the program and restrict some parts of its information to the discretion of counselors. These are matters of concern for the programs supporters. Likewise conservative Christians in Victoria are resenting the complete lack of changes in this state. Oddly the effect of these two polar opposite positions in an area of overlapping jurisdiction is something like a local truce. The chatter and protests over the program are dying down. I doubt very many people will even be switching their votes over these Federal Liberal and State Labor positions that play to each of the parties bases.

This abatement of political rhetoric is a welcome relief as much as the settlement leaves nobody happy. The climax of the Australian Christian Lobby’s attack on the program became an attempt to trip up Malcolm Turnbull by the disgruntled conservatives in his party. Their victory may not have even been as substantial as was crowed for the cameras but LGBTI people saw in this that their lives were still legitimate political footballs. For same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults the campaign raised angry memories of powerlessness that many just want to put behind them. This is admittedly selfish given the ongoing nature of the issue for today’s queer high school students. It also reflects that possibly safe schools isn’t the program everyone would choose to fight for.

For one thing the safe schools program took a position on gender and sexuality that was hardly Marxist despite that characterization being thrown at it. Marxist views on gender and sexuality wouldn’t describe identity as totally self-knowable and primarily about individual expression. Marxist views on sexuality and gender would emphasis how these identities are manufactured by our material circumstances – the means of production we are engaged in, class interests and so on. At best Marxists would say that dominant views of gender and sexuality can be subverted by individuals and communities but that not even our “rebellions” are entirely free or natural.

To give some examples of what I mean; Under the safe schools program it feels very much like if almost every boy in class preferred sports to dolls each boy would be able to conclude this is a natural expression of themselves. The advance made by the program would be that boys who felt differently would also see their feelings as a natural expression of themselves. Some queer theorists would prefer to talk about socialization and market forces involved not only in shaping our preferences but in framing our choices as dolls vs sports or as buy vs buy in most cases. Likewise if someone said they preferred blondes to brunettes a typical Marxist position would be to find this an unsurprising product of racism. A Marxist analysis might also note that the importance of hair colour revolves around the importance of a relationship as a status symbol and therefore want to look into how sexuality in late stage capitalism is often about displaying itself and its “success” to others. The safe schools program could silence criticism of a preference for blondes under a banner of “you can be and like anything you want.” Marxists are just much more dour predictors of how society shapes choices than this.

There was very little space in the heat of the safe schools program debate to make these comments or any other criticisms without feeling like a betrayer of gay rights. In my last post I discussed how overwhelming history was in deciding people’s positions in support of safe schools. I’m not the first to argue we humans are too comfortable moving with our intellectual tribes and listening to what leaders tell us to think. However rather than simply decry this as foolish I hope my last post tried to explain some of why this is the case. Tribalism exists and is rationalized when people feel under attack and that barricades need to be maintained. Trust between LGBTI people and conservative Christians has never been spectacularly high and the safe schools “debate” mired in half truths and distortions thrived on that distrust. I still wonder if any criticism I make of the program will simply be seized upon by people who want to make all mention of non-heterosexuality taboo in high school. That isn’t my position, in case I need to say so.

This Queer/Christian battle line isn’t the only fault line that the safe schools program sat upon. It was simply the most easy one for the media to portray. The Marxist/individualist clash of paradigms I described was never going to lead the nightly news. One other point of conflict over safe schools did gain a small public hearing however; the safe schools program asked us to consider what if any role public schools have in adopting moral or political positions around sexuality. Bizarrely evangelical Christians argued against the program with the language of liberal philosophy; that education should be largely value neutral by avoiding any mention of what is or isn’t normal/healthy/right or wrong. Meanwhile it was the other side who seemed to tolerate explicit teaching of values in order to normalize same-sex attraction and gender diversity. This reflects a wider trend of conservatives casting themselves as champions of pluralism around sexuality – religious freedom fighters – which remains at odds with their defence of school chaplains and heterosexual only marriage. Likewise LGBTI politics embrace of the state to promote health outcomes is a willingness to wield cultural power that usually only a conservative philosophy can justify.

I find this fault line between teaching values and supporting pluralism fascinating as a philosopher and a teacher. The challenge of teaching lies right across it. We are not supposed to use our classrooms as a platform for our moral and political beliefs. I have personally helped students prepare speeches or write essays that argue directly across my own views in line with this. It is ludicrous to suggest that any teacher presents “all the facts” however. I had less than one class to discuss all the politics of genetically modified food with my year nines last year. What would “all the facts” look like on that issue? I chose the story of Golden Rice in the Philippines to humanize the issues for them. There are a hundred alternatives I could have chosen instead but this one struck me as picking up on the most important issues based, frankly, on my values.

A teacher who has no values at all simply couldn’t teach. This is why we don’t simply sit kids in front of the internet in classrooms. We very deliberately provide twenty to thirty of them at a time with a person who hopefully cares deeply about the world, about truth and about human suffering. Our discussion about genetically modified food was in the context of looking at food shortages and food security. Do you want someone teaching kids about those issues who doesn’t have an opinion on whether worldwide hunger matters? Do you want  someone who doesn’t feel a loss over the replacement of the majestic Amazon with soya plantations and who can’t also empathize with poor locals motivation to clear jungle to farm?

Teaching is only superficially valueless. Often I instruct kids to identify stakeholders –a core skill in the humanities. If a student ranks the views of the animal rights activist, or even the chicken themselves, to be unimportant in comparison to the chicken farmer looking to increase sales or the consumer looking for cheap eggs then I have still done my job as a teacher . I have done my job as a teacher if they draw a different conclusion. In this way I can seem to have no values. However on a deeper level by placing the recognition of stakeholders at the core of my teaching, I am promoting what I consider to be a geographers value set – consideration of others, a sensitivity to complexity and the integration of multiple layers of meaning over the same event or location. At the heart of what is good or bad high school geography is not the possession of a set of unchanging facts but a value based relationship to the facts. You could even say that any given set of facts are a product of having a value based approach to the question at hand.

This illustration of the value based heart to teaching in geography describes a scenario in which the victims –Amazonian farmers and damaged chickens  - may not be in the room, although indeed some hungry families may well be represented. The expectation that teachers hold values increases when the subjects of discussions are actually sitting in the class. This isn’t an expectation I see particularly coming from parents or even the school system. Instead it is students themselves who expect their teachers have a moral interest in what they are teaching and even more so when it directly relates to who they are teaching.

This expectation was readily apparent when we looked at groups in Australia who experienced food insecurity. Students were asked to hypothesize why this might be the case for Aboriginal people, young people and the homeless in particular. In doing so they needed to demonstrate an awareness of what are the elements of food security. At the start of this class I spent considerable time talking through the level of maturity and sensitivity people were expected to bring to this topic. Food insecurity is not foreign to every students life and I relayed that some teachers had cautioned me against opening up this discussion because of the relationship between poverty and stigma and thus the opportunity for abuse. I mentioned briefly my own experiences of unemployment and poverty, low paid jobs and housing insecurity so as to destigmatise these conditions.

Some students felt that poverty was connected to laziness and that people without food and on benefits just needed to work harder. They shared these views with me however not to seize some barbed advantage in class but because this seemed plausible to them and they felt I had missed this in my introduction to the task. I didn’t need to correct them The final task was to see whether their hypothesis was reflected in the research. In a way it didn’t matter whether they left class feeling that people were choosing to go hungry due to a character flaw. I would have still taught them about speculation from correlation in the social sciences and introduced them to professional and rigorous explanations of causality. But, and this is a very important but, I don’t think anyone could have accused this class of being valueless or even not having any prejudice. Humility, empathy, generosity, caution and respect were values that informed how the class undertook some basic social science.

Would I have challenged a student if they made a statement that was blatantly racist or included racist generalizations? While that is a question which I thankfully didn’t have to face, I probably would have challenged this. I could have done so in many different ways including inviting another student to provide a different perspective. If a racist comment was made in order to grandstand and treat the classroom as an platform to indirectly bully I would have shut the student down forcefully. I don’t put up with that kind of garbage in my class. If the comment was put forward as genuine opinion, especially with some thoughtfulness about how it might offend others, I could have simply encouraged the student to interrogate their conclusion with further questions. My awareness of the broader reality of racism and the presence of affected students would require me to be more pro-active in challenging racist ideas in class than just any idea I disagreed with.

Returning to the matter of same-sex attraction and gender diversity I don’t think there is an easy answer to say what values a teacher should bring into the classroom and what they should keep to themselves or how biased  a discussion on these matters should be. If a student wanted to grandstand their homophobia in my classroom that is unacceptable but if a student is sensitively critical of same-sex attraction or transgender identity that is not the same thing. The latter student might seem to me to be as misinformed as the first but I would handle it differently because of the core values the latter student is adhering to. I may challenge them gently or not at all even. I don’t see that nuance in the safe schools material.

I disagree philosophically with the idea that I can ever teach without values. This doesn’t mean I have to see every student leave class parroting what I think however. In fact the very best questions I have ever asked a class – “Should Bendigonians have a say in what happens to the Barrier reef?” for example– have been questions where barely any two students have agreed but where all students have considered each others point of view. There seem too few of those sorts of open questions in the safe-schools materials.

There are also other perspectives –that a bit of bullying is just a lark for example – that I would strictly control any discussion over and where students would know my opinion strongly. And there are other ideas - that anglo-australians are superior to others – that I just laugh down if  I heard them. The opinion that same-sex attracted and gender diverse young people should keep their feelings and relationships to themselves is something safe schools materials is and should be biased against.  A proud public position of acceptance of same-sex attraction and gender diversity by schools strikes me as a good thing. Not every opinion is equally tolerable. But I do wonder if the safe schools approach is insufficiently grounded in core values of empathy and respect and too worried about the surface value of the opinions students express. That isn’t where I think teaching values should be at.

A Safe Schools discussion must start with the past.

I’m going to wade, a little, into the Safe Schools debate that in my last post I dipped my toe into. For those who don’t know the Safe Schools Coalition initiative, it can be divided into two things; a series of lesson plans and resources for high school teachers to discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex student issues, and recommended high school policies to support those students (found amongst the resources).  To shrink the language of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex” I will be referring to this grouping as same-sex attracted and gender-diverse.

Although in my younger years some attempt was made to put all the letters of LGBTI under the reclaimed word “Queer” that never took off. For one thing the word Queer became attached to the image of a white wealthy gay male, an inevitability of any singular identity perhaps in a world of ads chasing pink dollars. Many Lesbians insisted on their own particular identity, rather than existing as Queer’s “other”. Queer politics also had agendas that were broader than the LGBTI movement – sex-positivity for example – and whereas Queer tended to embrace Drag, some feminists saw this type of performance as offensive as “black-face”.  Still Queer has an edgeyness that LGBTI lacks. Queer is a little more punk and post-normal. For this reason the term still finds favour today.

This old debate about the universality of Queer is an obscure element of history. If you lived through it and participated in it, it’s easy to imagine that everyone knows why Queer is not generally considered an acceptable umbrella term and why some people, despite this, still use it. I’m not showing off here. I never learnt this stuff. I was just involved in it. Ask me who won any of the Grand Finals through the 80’s and 90’s and I will have to guess because I wasn’t paying attention to that history.

This idea of niche and personal histories is crucial to understanding the debates and discussions around the Safe Schools initiative. Consider the example of the Tasty Raid in Melbourne in 1994. The proportion of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults in Australia who know of this event will be huge. In fact it will be much higher than people who know about why we do or don’t use the term Queer, a largely academic debate. The Tasty raid and the subsequent suing of the Victorian Police was a big deal, but the people who remember it don’t all remember it because they are better historians. Many just remember it because it was about their lives. They either were caught up in it or they learnt about at the time through their networks.

A more chilling example of separate history was reported in an article titled ‘Sydney’s Shame’  (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-shame ). This story reported on systematic gay bashings leading to deliberate murders around Sydney beats, and a culture of police reluctance to investigate. We’re talking here about people found dead at the bottom of cliffs with clear evidence of being assaulted first and the death being ruled as an accident. We’re talking about “fag-bashing” viewed as an ordinary activity to do with your mates. Again this is not necessarily something same-sex attracted and gender diverse people study in specialist classes. It is simply what some have lived through and many more have been aware of as they walk home. Even when these things are reported in mainstream media they become part of the consciousness of some readers and not so much of others.

Incidentally this is what women’s experience of the epidemic of violence against women is like. They hold their keys differently. Take out their phone. Stay close to the lights and avoid the alleys. Notice who is walking behind them. Of course therefore they remember more than men the history of this violence, including incidents of violence, poor political or police responses and community reactions. They will appreciate how every single Mardi Gras through the 80’s and 90’s came with a warning to keep yourself safe as you left venues because the gay bashers always stepped up their activities around that time. They will understand how that warning is a part of some peoples history of events. By the way, maybe they still give out that warning, but living in Bendigo with my family I don’t follow Mardi Gras news much anymore; again separate histories.

The relevance of all this to how Safe Schools is being discussed, is simple. Virtually every argument in support of the Safe Schools program refers to the history of same-sex attracted or gender diverse people, often incorporating the personal history of the author. The Safe Schools programs are seen as correcting for the systematic oppression that has been the life of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. My last blog did something similar – it drew upon my past. The past is very much present when supporters speak of the Safe Schools program. For them an ugly homophobic past is sitting square in the middle of the discussion.

Meanwhile the criticisms of the Safe Schools program are massively ahistorical. They may criticize the program based on its merits, or they may criticize what they have heard is the program based on the merits of that, but they are definitely not evaluating the program in a historical context. How was school for these critics when they were young? Irrelevant. How were workplaces or the media or the law as these critics were emerging into adulthood? They were fine, why would that matter?

Occasionally the past is brought into the conversation from some Safe Schools critics, but it is a fantasy past. It is in fact such a fantastic past as to make their criticisms even more ahistorical for mentioning it. In these pasts everyone is neighbourly and chaste, homosexuality is barely mentioned which one supposes means that same-sex attracted people barely existed, and children respect their parents because God is in the schools where He (sic) belongs. You don’t find this sort of fantasy past promoted by serious critics of the program, but it is there amongst the petition signers and the online angry. In this past there are no gay bashings or homophobia at all. This is why I consider it to be even more a denial of history than simply not mentioning history at all.

The tendency of the more serious Safe Schools critics is to blunt any historical special interest case by generalizing the focus from homophobic bullying to all bullying.  In this way they mirror other ahistorical criticisms of other historical movements. On Q&A recently the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Lyle Shelton responded to comments that same-sex attracted and gender-diverse kids are being bullied, with comments that all bullying is wrong for whatever reason. This is a copy of the white response to the hashtag Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter.  While technically true there is no knowledge of history in either response. It is as if presented with the Sydney’s Shame article the ACL would say “Well, all police corruption is wrong and nobody is condoning any violence here.”

This lack of recognizing their particular history frustrates same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. Weren’t they just sharing their painful pasts moments ago? Were the ACL and their followers listening? This only gets worse when organisations like the ACL claim to be bullied, harassed and silenced today. It was not long ago that being gay was compared to smoking by the then public face and continuing chair of the board of the ACL. The concern the ACL have always shown has been very much like a concern about the uptake of smoking, to thwart any improvement in gay lives lest it encourage more people to take up being gay. Many consider them a source of homophobia.

But it’s not even a question of whether the ACL and its current head Lyle Shelton directly spread homophobia or not. The reality is that all the time Shelton was growing up and when he was a newspaper journalist and editor, when he was a city councilor and a state candidate and when he moved to the ACL, same-sex attracted and gender diverse people have been being bullied, bashed and murdered, fired from their jobs, kicked out of their homes and turned away from services. Not a single element of this history was ever confronted by Shelton as a journalist, editor, politician or lobbyist. Shelton either never knew about this history or never cared. Most likely it simply passed him by like AFL did me. He didn’t have to decide not to take an interest in it – he simply wasn’t involved in it.

Does it seem unfair to you to judge him for this? Does it seem irrelevant to his evaluation of the Safe Schools program? Maybe so in both cases but this is what I suspect is a part of the feeling of the supporters of Safe Schools. For them Safe Schools exists within a history that entitles the voices of same-sex attracted and gender diverse people to speak and disqualifies the speech of people like Lyle Shelton and the ACL. This is a shared feeling, by the way, from supporters of the program who are as heterosexual and cis-gendered as Lyle Shelton. It’s not a Queer thing to privilege Queer voices in this discussion – it’s a historically aware thing. Many even feel it is a human thing – to allow themselves to be silenced by the testimony of the survivors of violence.

Having spoken of the frustration of the Safe School supporters, let’s consider the frustration of its critics. In their minds they are making what they feel are rational arguments. Some of their arguments are not rational at all and some of them are wildly misinformed but some of them raise legitimate areas for improvement. If the filter of personal history is driving how Safe Schools supporters feel about the program and its critics, then they can be easily hostile to any criticism being made, almost regardless of the program’s content.

The Safe Schools program has been developed with the input of numerous same-sex attracted and gender -diverse young people. It has been implemented successfully at a range of schools including a Catholic school, a tiny country school and many large state schools. This all speaks to how useful and positive a program it is, but it’s still just a program. There are bound to be ways it can improve and mistakes that have been made. It seems to me that by being engaged in historical battles Safe Schools supporters are in danger of viewing all criticisms of the initiative as attacks on LGBTI people.  That's not a healthy relationship to any program.

If this conversation about Safe Schools is to improve we are going to need people who can confront the history gap in our community. There are some examples of people who speak for conservative Christians who get the importance of history in this discussion and by that I don't mean a token nod to the problem of all bullying. Michael Jensen,  is someone I disagree with on Same-Sex marriage but he recently made a long Facebook post which indicated his understanding of LGBTI history. It has since been published by the Huffinton Post. What is important about this post was that it never tries to subsume homophobic bullying or racist bullying under the generic title of all bullying. Instead it recognized that homophobic bullying occupies a particular place in our history and delivers a particular harm that can only be imperfectly imagined by those who didn't experience it. That's humility.

John Sandeman provides another example. He is the editor of Eternity Magazine, a Christian non-denominational publication and one which has defended ACL and taken a conservative stance on LGBTI issues.  On the 25th of February this year he wrote an article for the Australian Bible Society website titled, ‘The SMH apologises to the Mardi Gras. What should Christians do?’ This was a genuine admission of the history of conservative Christians in denying basic freedoms to same-sex attracted people and in being involved in their systematic oppression.

Neither of these pieces of writing specifically mentioned the Safe Schools program although Jensen's piece comes close. Perhaps that enables their authors to be freer with their acceptance of the gains of the LGBTI movement for equality or perhaps even that it is to take their point too far. At least they start the conversation off on the right foot. We should all be able to acknowledge that Australian history is a brutally homophobic one and that this is not just more of the “general” bullying, violence or sinfulness of society. It is a specific problem with same-sex attraction and gender diversity that churches have fostered themselves.

From this point I think we should all be able to agree that some kind of program like the Safe Schools initiative is necessary and deserves the paltry eight million dollars that has gone into it. This will be a leap for some conservative Christians but I hope it is one they can make. As Stephanie Judd wrote for the ABC news site, addressing the ACL in particular:
“If you feel some Safe Schools content isn't age-appropriate, then isn't dialoguing with them for modifications to the program a better and more gracious approach than pitting yourself against them by calling for their wholesale defunding?”
Stephanie, whose byline indicates she attends an Anglican Church, goes on to say that  “In the absence of a a satisfactory alternative that addresses the problem that Safe Schools was created to fix, the ACL's statements are going to continue to be received as harsh and unconstructive.”

So long as the critics of the Safe Schools initiative come at Safe Schools with axes of outrage rather than ideas for improvement they will seem to have very little idea of lives outside their own. We can see this in their ahistorical approach to the issue. So long as they propose no alternative at all or a generalised alternative that hides the special historical case for justice of same-sex attracted and gender-diverse people, they will seem to have no idea there is even a problem to fix. On that basis they are not going to be listened to and despite what they might tell themselves it won’t be because they are being bullied now. On the other hand, a proper discussion might be had if the examples of John Sandeman and Michael Jensen, both conservatives, have a genuine influence on their peers.

They Always Keep the Minority in at Lunch.

Memory is connected to prophecy. We use our memories to tell the future and inform the present. What we remember, and how, is full of salience for the decisions we make and the causes we support. Stuff that we don’t think is relevant to our current situation we forget, and then a memory can come back loudly when it needs to speak its prophetic voice to us.

Our prophecies may be wrong. Memories are selective and unreliable. Politics is partly an exercise in competing prophecies. The world that Trump followers fear is different to the world Bernie Sanders followers fear. Those who want to stop the boats are predicting outcomes that are different to those who want to let the babies stay. But these prophecies are powerful to each of us.

For some time I have been haunted by a particular memory with a particular message about our time. Is it true? I think it speaks a certain truth.

When I was in high school, about year eight or nine, each student was required to give a short speech. One student in my class gave a speech which told us that all gay people should be shot. I kid you not. The speech was allowed to finish and the class, the whole rest of the class it seems to me in my memory, clapped.

As a high schooler I was already a leftie. The talk, my teacher’s lack of reaction, the class’s applause for the speaker, all incensed me.  Any protest I made was not received. Instead someone made a snide comment about me for dissenting.

Well, that meant it was on. For the rest of the class I winked and even blew kisses at the guy who had commented about me. He gradually grew angrier and angrier. He was smaller than me and that was probably why I focused on him. Finally he got up to hit me. I stayed calm but the teacher was no idiot and knew I’d been provoking the situation.

After class the teacher made me stay behind. I was in trouble and it was me who would be kept in at lunch. There was some sympathy from the teacher but there was also no doubt that she wouldn’t be taking any kind of recrimination against the student who gave the talk or the one who wanted to hit me. I was the one who needed to be brought into line.

The lesson is that rules are not designed, not in school at least, to be right or fair or to protect a loving view of the world from a hateful one. Rules are designed to minimize conflict. My teacher didn’t have to step in when a student said gay people should be shot because any gay people in the class were too in the closet for this to create immediate conflict. And when I made a conflict out of it, the teacher had a choice to try and affect the views of the whole class or to affect my behaviour. They chose the rational if perhaps cowardly choice to change the single student.

Today there are some religious people who believe that we live in an age of intolerance. We do, but as my memory reminds me it is an age without beginning and only an imaginary end. The intolerance these religious people claim is simply the force that I faced in high school – the desire of institutions to minimize conflict – a force they generally support when it is in their favour. As the world changes, the new minority, in many places, is the student in class who has a problem with homosexuality, who needs to make anti-gay jokes and who wants to make a point of a boy's effeminacy or a girl's machismo. The school fundamentally doesn’t care for who is right. The school will police that minority because they are easier to police than changing the rest of the school.

Now this may be unflattering to describe things this way but it shouldn’t be shocking to us. Consider a hypothetical program called “All kinds of families” In this program the notion of blended families, single-parent families, adoptive families, and families with divorced or separated parents are discussed. Does anyone think this program is interested in young Billy’s Roman Catholic views that divorce and remarriage is wrong? Is young Billy’s definition of family, with its problematising of assisted reproduction going to get a hearing? Of course not.

And here’s what the teachers are thinking. These teachers want to introduce this program for Sarah who has been sad ever since her parents divorced. These teachers note that every single piece of curriculum material from the picture books to the movies they show has two happily married people with their kids all born in wedlock. These teachers may have grasped this material with a real gratitude for it’s reflection of their own lives. For all these reasons and more, these teachers think “Billy can shut up.”

Now when “All kinds of families” was (hypothetically) introduced maybe someone wanted to include same-sex couple’s families. Maybe someone else wanted to include polyamorous partnerships and their families. Most likely if this hypothetical program was produced over a decade ago neither of those families would be included. Again this would not be because of what is right or wrong. This would be because of what stands inside or outside the majority acceptable culture. Excluding same-sex couples and their kids from the program's definition of 'all kinds of family' would minimize conflict up to recent times. Including them now might cause conflict in some places but not so much in others. That is the force that always controls school decisions. Polyamourous families are still out; Way too much conflict there.

To see how things have changed for same-sex families though we can look to Play School. The voice of those opposed to including a same-sex couple with kids on a show about diverse family types is firmly in the minority. What did the ABC think of the Australian Christian Lobby’s outrage about the issue? I reckon they thought “The ACL can shut up.”

In Victorian schools we now have the “Safe Schools” initiative. Some people are shocked that it will normalize homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism. In doing so they fear it will de-normalise their own ideas of sexuality in which non-heterosexuality is unnatural or just plain wrong. This, they claim, will simply shift who is ostracized from those who are gay to those opposed to gay rights. I suppose the answer to that is yes, it probably will. Can it do anything else?

Some people think it is possible for multiple competing ideas of what is sin and what should be celebrated to survive together in society. If we look at something like divorce and remarriage though I think we see that it isn’t particularly possible at all. Yes, conservative Catholics can choose not to recognize remarriages as legitimate. However nobody wants to hear it – at least not at school or in a workplace or on a publicly funded tv show for kids. Yes, the view is alive and well but is it tolerated? Outside of a personal view of how to live one’s own life it is barely tolerated at all.

This is the approach we can expect to take hold around gay marriage in the near future. That you will be required to recognize gay marriages is a reasonable prediction just as politeness requires you now to recognize remarried couples as married. Will you be permitted to add “I don’t agree with homosexuality” at the end of a toast in the staff room when two male co-workers tie the knot? You probably aren’t now. The reason is that conflict minimization is the priority in most workplaces as it is in schools.

This normalizing pressure is also the same reason that in many school environments today teachers still don’t mention homosexuality, and texts and films are all 100% heterosexual. In fact often there are no books in a high school library let alone a primary school one which include gay characters.  As a teacher I have stopped my students from using “gay” as an insult but in this regard I am atypical. This is not a reflection of what these teachers or schools believe is right or wrong. It is just the priority of minimizing conflict.

Conflict is a real concern at the moment because views have been polarised by the pending plebiscite on gay marriage.  We would expect the same polarization to be present if a plebiscite on anything else could materially affect that issue. We find this polarization present even in the religious communities which claim to be oppressed by a new intolerance from outside. If your church disapproves of gay marriage you might even be told you are not a Christian if you support it.  Meanwhile in a church supportive of gay marriage it will be hard to imagine someone opposed to it being welcomed on plebiscite night. This will probably die down once marriage reform is through.

All this might seem terribly depressing. We want to believe that changes in society are the result of enlightenment and reasoning not some force of normalization with a priority of minimizing conflict. Changes in popular opinion might well be the result of good argument. Changes in the hearts and minds of people can also occur through relationships and connections. But policies are not people. Policies change to suit public opinion, after the fact, and in doing so they are always intolerant. They will always keep the minority in at lunch. It’s time we stopped acting like this was something new.

I have my beliefs about what are rights and what are privileges and would rather step on privileges to secure every child's rights. As a human who has know the sting of feeling abnormal for same-sex attraction I hunger for a time when that sting is not delivered. As a man who has found my gender roles stupidly limiting and uncomfortable I enjoy seeing young people play with or reject gender entirely. I am generally favorable towards the Safer Schools materials as a result. But I am not going to be surprised if in some classrooms some of the conservative fears of the program come true and kids who disagree with the materials feel constrained in speaking out.

I think the best thing we can do is to be transparent about the forces we operate under. I think we can invite debate about school policies while being clear that there is actual learning to be done and every student no matter their sexuality or their views on sexuality has the right to the best environment for that learning to happen. As a teacher I try to stop any lynch mob even if they are rounding up someone who I believe has been a complete dick. But at the end of the day something is probably going to be normalised and something else is not.

Beware cheap love.

Christians are called to love others. One of the clearer teachings of their Saviour is the command to love their enemies. In Christian circles therefore it can be a rebuke in a political discussion that a person is not sufficiently loving the targets of their criticism.

Still Christians on the left or right are hardly silenced by this insistence on loving their enemies. The rejoinder against the call to be more loving is that having a critical perspective is in fact being loving. I have heard this defence used to argue that a person loves transgender kids precisely by being loudly critical of their gender identity. They love them so much they want to speak the truth to them although if there are no trans teens around a debate on facebook about them will do.

Likewise stop a left wing Christian from bemoaning men’s rights activists for a second and yes they might claim to love them. They may claim to merely hate their policies, similar to hating their sin. They still love the sinner.

Let's be honest. There isn’t a lot of material loving likely to be happening between people who strongly disagree. How could there be given that they tend to avoid each other? Seldom does any relationship other than the one of criticism actually exist between a right wing Christian and a transgender teen or between a left wing Christian and an active defender of the patriarchy. Generally speaking the love between these groups is hypothetical at best; I would cross the road to help them if they were injured, and if by some remote chance I was passing by.

Often this love is just a romantic notion. Loving is defined as wanting the best for someone else and doesn’t require anymore than the willingness to imagine them happy. The image of their happiness can rely on any number of presumptions about what is best for the other person. It is still loving to steal the children from a person of another faith because you think your faith is the best for them. It is still loving to conceal safer sex information from teens because celibacy is in your opinion best for them. This kind of love can become just another privilege to stand on – a daddy knows best kind of love.

What people may mean by this kind of love is that they don’t hate the other person. Some people do genuinely hate the objects of their political criticism. They delight in any misfortune that befalls them. The person who holds to wanting the best for those they are criticizing, claiming to love them by that definition, is different to this. They are not driven by hate. They may however be driven by fear or self-interest or anxiety. There is a lot of space between hate and genuine love.

Genuine love requires a relationship. Genuine love involves sacrifice and effort. Genuine love does involve the courage to tell the truth. But if that is all you are doing, telling trans teens or complementarians your opinion of them, maybe not even directly, isn’t it more likely you are just enjoying the soap box and frankly couldn’t give a shit about who you are talking about.

I think its commendable and worth noting when hate is not a part of a person’s motivation. This can be demonstrated by reigning in the mockery of peers – maybe suggesting that some criticisms are off-limits and opposing violence most definitely. I think its important to recognize the distinction between a hateful attack and a critique. But I hope we stop calling this not-hate love.

I think the commandment to love our enemies has very little to do with abstract feelings maintained at a distance. I think loving someone also can’t come after we have decided our policy on them. Love involves the respect that requires us to rethink our opinions after listening. Love is so specific that our response to one person may not fit the play book, even while our response to another is exactly as foreseen. Love involves speaking critically rarely and listening mostly. We may merely not hate our enemies and not actually love them because it’s hard to do more than this. We shouldn’t cheapen love to the point that it’s easy.

Likewise we should stop with the rebuke that provokes the cheap love reaction. We should call out speech that is spiteful, gleefully mean and deceptive. However we should stop expecting people to love the objects of their criticism and holding it against them if they don’t.  Sticking up for some population online and in general does not really love them either. It is just a different type of grandstanding and soapboxing. As someone who generally supports trans teens in their transitioning in general maybe love would call me to oppose someone’s transition in the particular.

The very same message applies to all sides; Genuine love requires a relationship. Genuine love involves sacrifice and effort. Genuine love does involve the courage to tell the truth. But if that is all you are doing, telling trans teens or complementarians your opinion of them (a positive opinion even), maybe not even directly, isn’t it more likely you are just enjoying the soap box and frankly couldn’t give a shit about who you are talking about.