Challenging Choice Without Creating Victims.

Many politically contentious arguments rely on the reality of choice; the idea that humans are able to weigh up and elect to follow one of a few alternative courses of action. Three relevant topics which come to my mind are debates about euthanasia, abortion and sex work in which the ability to make a choice for people who want to die, or have an abortion or engage is sex work is broadly assumed. Philosophically though, choice is a contested idea. There are diverse arguments that we don’t make our own choices because we are under delusion, driven by our unconscious, slaves to our desires or bound by historical paradigms. More mundanely we make choices within a set of possibilities we don’t get to entirely invent. If we consider freedom to be the capacity to make maximal choices, we can appreciate that having money, the invention of the airplane, and the state of conflict in Syria all decide how free we are to choose to holiday there. These mundane restrictions on our capacity to choose are what I want to focus on in this post.

What is motivating me to write this post is a reaction I have encountered when I question the reality of choice. The opposite of a belief in choice is often interpreted as the desire to overlook a person’s agency and to reduce them. especially amongst all creatures, to a victim of their circumstance. This is possibly a result of those arguments against choice which depend on saying a person is deluded or unconsciously driven. The reaction is righteously fierce because these arguments contain within them a core of arrogance. The person making the argument is claiming that they are enlightened enough to see the others choices as unenlightened while lacking any insight that this would be what a deluded person would think of themselves too. This fierce reaction creates a duality where in order not to cast a persons as a passive victim we must accept they are making completely free choices.  I want to explore a way past this duality where a person can have their choice respected as coming from a person who is, in no way especially, a victim (no more deluded than the arguer) but still the complete freedom of their choice can be challenged.

I’ll start with the innocuous issue of Sunday Trading. Bob is a hypothetical businessman who wants to open his supermarket on a Sunday in a small town with Sunday trading restrictions. Let’s imagine Bob’s costs are being covered by the other days of the week with enough profit to make the business worthwhile. A Buddhist might argue that Bob is oppressed by ignorance unless he is a Buddha and a Freudian may suspect some other driving force, but I can accept for practical purposes that Bob is making a free enough choice to open on a Sunday that we can call this his autonomous decision. But equally, Bob is not making an entirely free decision. Bob can’t also decide to fly his shop around town or to have a successful business selling only his toenails. Bob’s options are constrained by reality, and this includes economic realities.  That much is obvious, although Bob probably wouldn’t consider it relevant when defending the freedom of his decision to open on Sunday.

We should acknowledge that Bob’s acceptance of reality is of great immediate benefit to him. What purpose could be served if Bob allowed himself to constantly remain aware of gravity preventing him from soaring about with his supermarket? What kind of businessman would Bob be if he didn’t accept from the outset that the nature of doing business was meeting consumer demand? It seems better for Bob to simply incorporate these kinds of restrictions into his idea of freedom and enjoy or demand freedom only within their bounds. This practical acceptance of reality is entirely taken for granted by Bob.

But although Bob has been told that the reality of business in this town is not to trade on Sundays, he reads this as the result of other people’s decisions and not an unchosen state of reality. He doesn’t accept that not trading on Sunday is a boundary within which he can have all reasonable freedom – instead Sunday trading laws are a boundary running through his reasonable freedom like an unwelcome fence through his garden rather than a natural border around it. Bob is likely to be supported in this way of looking at his world by people who either agree with Sunday trading or don’t. If Bob was to bemoan his inability to fly his shop around he might face more opinions that consider him eccentric at best and insane at worst.

Bob’s (and our) acceptance of reality’s restriction raises concerns. There are a number of elements of Bob’s world which are just as clearly the result of people’s decisions and not an unchosen aspect of the world. Bob’s shop depends very much on people paying for the goods they want and if they don’t they must face some consequence enforced by the community. This is not some natural state – although a philosopher Locke might claim it is. Every iota of stuff in our world is bounded and owned in some way, usually with disregard for indigineous claims and certainly with disdain for the natural state of anything. Bob’s isolation of Sunday trading as if it was especially a rule running across the field of his freedom, rather than a natural limit around it, has no basis. Bob accepts other rules as just “reality” when they are just as apparently imposed.

We are not always in cultural agreement about what rules we consider realities that are beyond the scope of questions of freedom, and what we consider to be mere rules constraining freedom. Forgetting his failed toenail line for a moment, Bob might also have dreams of selling t-shirts in his shop. This too might be impractical because of an exchange rate which favors imports and a tax regime which encourages online purchasing. Should Bob accept these commercial limits as beyond the scope of what constitutes his freedom or should he perceive his freedom as extending beyond them and hampered by them? That is a political question. Are globalised free markets just base economic realities? Is freedom what happens inside these realities while these realities are not themselves restrictions of freedom?

This is the political world Bob lives in but it is also the world Bob shapes. Bob knows that a smiling checkout operator brings return business. Bob decides to hire and fire on the basis of who is the biggest grinner. Is this the sort of reality that Bob’s employees must accept (they are still free to smile or quit) or can they see losing their job due to not smiling as a limit cutting across their freedom? What if Bob wanted them to wear rabbit ears at Easter? What if they were required to work nude on Naked Gardening Day? At one point we might believe the people who are working there remain free because Bob’s demands are reasonable. Once they cease to be reasonable we may consider Bob’s workers’ freedom to be at risk.

The important thing to note here is that the person who has no problem smiling more for their job, just like Bob who has no problem opening on Sunday, is not a victim. Not especially. We do not have any justification to look down on them in any way. They are not delicate flowers that need protecting. We can accept that their decision is as much their own as any decision we would call our own. We might even want to think of them as braver, more confident and harder working than their peers. That doesn’t change if they are willing to wear rabbit ears or remove their clothing. We don’t have to think of them as poor victims of exploitation if they make these choices.

What we do need to consider is that their willingness to make those choices affects the realities of other peoples choices. If I am a particularly unhappy fellow I will not get a job at Bob’s emporium, while it is acceptable to smile one’s way to employment. I don’t need to see this as an incentive to be weak and join all the other victims of exploitation. I can see it as a simple trade off – I get to be guaranteed a smile when I shop but I need to smile if I want to work. It’s a trade off I might be keen to accept if I like smiling. I can choose to accept as a given economic reality the need to smile at customers, within which I am free to smile or not, or choose to perceive it as a restriction that curtails my freedom to frown. In fact I must make that choice. There is no objective way to decide the issue. There is no absolute definition of what is reasonable freedom and what is demanding a ridiculous amount of choice.

The mechanisms by which our choices affect everyone’s reasonable freedom are sometimes apparent. The most easy to see is the business council choosing to ban Sunday trading. Also fairly visible is if I accept, when applying for a job in a competitive marketplace, certain conditions, such as smiling. We can understand how this acceptance pressures other applicants to do the same. We can understand how through business competition, one business improving their sales in this way can pressure other businesses to do likewise, or even to imagine further expansions of what constitutes customer service. (Did you make the customer feel like a king today?)

My attitude towards sex work relies heavily on this sort of understanding. I don’t consider sex workers to be necessarily victims, or their work to be necessarily exploitative. The fact that sex work happens to be largely exploitative and workers are most often victims of trafficking around the world is possibly partially a result of its criminality. My concern is that arguments for sex work often contain extremely individualistic assumptions about the nature of choices. Engaging in sex work is seen as a choice which only impacts on the worker and their client and maybe someone the client goes on to interact with. In fact sex work legitimizes a type of service and doing this has an impact on all people who either provide services or want to or face expectations to. In other words, everybody. The fact that sex-work is a separate industry to Bob’s supermarkets is only a thin barrier. When someone is looking for a job they may well be looking at both industries, and businesses in both are competing for the same discretionary spending.

I am frustrated when I hear the argument in defence of sex work that one cannot tell a person what they can do with their own body. For one thing, this blurs the distinction between saying that a person cannot have sex and a person cannot obtain money for sex. Such a distinction is important for a range of situations. We ban the sale of human blood for example while encouraging its donation. Even if the owner of the blood wants to sell, genuinely preferring some money to a pint of easily replaceable blood, we prevent this transaction from being possible, while making no objection to them giving it away. Likewise we prosecute people for commercial surrogacy. We don’t do this because the exchange necessarily and always involves one party being oppressed. We likewise make every worker on a worksite wear a hard hat – no choices allowed. We do this because of how it shifts the realistic expectations which frame freedom for everyone, perhaps in the hope that less oppression (or head injuries in the case of the helmets) will result. Whether talking about helmets, or blood, there is no absolute autonomy for each person over their own body

Harder to understand is how the sorts of controversial choices of abortion or euthanasia affect what is real and acceptable for other people. I believe these choices still do. If a student has an abortion because having a baby would derail their studies, implicit in this is the idea that babies derailing one’s studies is a restriction that is beyond the scope of reasonable questions of freedom: one shouldn’t expect to be free to both study and have a child, one’s freedom exists only to make this choice. Likewise euthanasia can carry with it the presumption that certain health and lifestyle outcomes of illnesses or disabilities are not themselves to be railed against but are realities we must accept. Our only freedom is in how we respond to such outcomes. This is severely problematic for disabled activism which attempt to challenge the outcomes of disability that are determined by our societies prejudice and frankly monstrously ableist evaluation of peoples worth.

This doesn’t establish that sex-work, abortion or euthanasia should be illegal. For one thing individuals always have to make choices inside realistic expectations. We simply ought to acknowledge that on a broader level when sex-work, abortion and euthanasia are legal we are shaping those realistic expectations. I think it is possible to be entirely pro-choice in regard to abortion out of regard for women’s bodily autonomy while recognizing that under capitalism abortion serves a purpose. It is one way that women can be expected to remain the most useful worker unit without adjustments to workplaces or men’s lives. I think we should hold on to the sense that anyone encouraging a woman to have an abortion for “common sense reasons” is shifting the conversation around legitimate freedom. I would hope it is still taboo for an employer to make that suggestion to an employee for example.  I likewise am concerned that mainstreaming sex-work might require unemployed people to justify why they turn down a sex-worker position. I certainly wouldn’t want that to happen. It’s bad enough when the labour market expects everyone to smile.

For me there are still plenty of good arguments for the legality of sex work, abortion or euthanasia. I am not thoroughly convinced by them but I am certainly not convinced against them. I want to acknowledge that I’m not trying to engage with these arguments here. I am simply want to challenge the reality of choice as a basis for supposedly left positions. Across a number of previous blog posts I make references to myself as a big-ass lefty. I recently told a friend, tipsy on a couple of wines, that I am only interested in the left wing take on things because the left wing take is what cares about people. Hyperbolic as I was being, there’s a truth to that for me. I don’t think I have betrayed lefty principles by being critical of the individual choice rhetoric that is used to argue for the legalization of sex-work, abortion or euthanasia. In fact I think it is imperative for lefties to be critical in this way. Yet, uncritical belief in free choice rhetoric in these areas can seem like a measure of one’s progressiveness. Perhaps here is the difference between left and progressive and if so I am more left than progressive. 

"Fair Cop": Towards a Theology of Closeness.

Following on from my recent blog posts about closeness being valuable in ethics I’ve been pondering a question;
If I committed a crime and was convicted would I feel I would get a fairer sentence from a judge who knew me or one who didn’t?

Have a go at answering this for yourself. Don’t rush. Roll it around in your head for a day or two and then come back here and read the rest of what I’ve written. It will still be here but if you read on now you wont have the pleasure of your own thoughts first.

Seriously. See you tomorrow.


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Welcome back. I hope you genuinely enjoyed the question. I want to interrogate my own thoughts with you in the hope they are similar to your own but I’d also love to hear any unique thoughts you have in the comments. Firstly I wonder if your early thoughts were about the notion of bias. Is fairness a similar thing as unbiased? You may have asked this question with the assumption that, if lacking bias is what you mean by fairness in this situation, certainly the judge shouldn’t know you. To know you is to be biased towards or against you.

But is this always true? Aren’t there many people who are biased against Muslims for example precisely because they don’t know any? If you, as a Muslim, stood before a random Anglo-Australian on the street as your judge, you might suspect they would be less biased against you if they knew you as a person rather than simply knowing facts about you, like your religion. So maybe the relationship between being unknown to your judge and a lack of bias doesn’t exist anyway.

That would mean that a judge who doesn’t know you only really brings an impression of being unbiased. This seems an inadequate description of fairness. Given time I imagine the word fairness would give you more and more trouble. It can be a fuller, richer word than we first concede. Is it fair that Joe Bloggs goes to prison? Can we answer that only knowing what Joe’s crime was and what the sentence for such a crime usually is? Do we need to know Joes whole story from birth? Or is it something in between these extremes; A mile long walk in Joes shoes, whatever that means?

You may have felt a need to confess; maybe those who know me actually know me the least for it, maybe I fool the most the ones who know me the best. This is where we need to define knowledge. I’m not referring to a judge who plays golf with you, a judge who has been to your house or a judge who you used to do grafitti runs with – the kind of social knowledge that creates reciprocal obligations even between people who couldn’t provide a paragraph towards a eulogy for each other. I’m talking about accurate knowledge of your strengths, limits, foils and capabilities. I’m talking about the ability to not be fooled by you – to know when you really need some slack cut for you and when you are just slacking off.  This idea of knowledge also requires the knower to be miraculously immune to bias. If they distort what they know about you so that the picture they make from it is untrue this wouldn’t be perfect knowledge.

With this idea of knowledge in mind I believe that perfect knowledge is essential for perfect fairness. I would go further to say the more our judges knowledge of us approaches perfection the more fairness we can expect. This knowledge might not agree with our own self-perception. I can imagine someone else knowing me hypothetically at least better than myself. Certainly at times I can be very self-deluded, sometimes stuck in hopelessness and sometimes thrilled with confidence and an external mind can see that my situation hasn’t changed with my mood.

Perhaps like me you thought that maybe you don’t want the judge to know you even if fairness is the result. We might all rather be sent to jail by a stranger rather than lose a friendship over it. Maybe we don’t even want perfect fairness anyway. Fairness is kind of a terrible thing. If the judge doesn’t know you then you can say that the judge made the fairest decision they could but they didn’t know the whole truth. Nobody wants to be treated deliberately unfairly, that offends us, but accidental unfairness is not that. Perfect fairness robs you of the ability to grizzle at the sentence you receive in the end. Perfect fairness robs us of our self-delusions.

How beautiful does that sound though? To be robbed entirely of our self-delusions. The terror of it is overshadowed by a sense of relief. Pretense and self-doubt, born of being unknown, is a burden. If the price of this moment of being both perfectly known and given our sentence is the consequences of perfect fairness then I don’t see how we can refuse to pay. Imagine a community of people who willingly rejected this exchange. How empty would be anything they have to say about themselves and how qualified would their freedom be given its reliance on turning away from an opportunity to receive perfect fairness? By comparison there is something actually holy about the words “fair cop” uttered by the person receiving a truly fair but harsh sentence and how genuinely freeing would a pardon be if it was based on perfect knowledge.

This idea of perfect fairness from perfect knowledge was always a profound attractiveness of the Christianity of my youth. God who knows us completely will one day be our judge. Somewhere someone even told me of a picture of heaven in which everyone's sins were shouted from the roof tops. I can’t imagine this without cringing. I will never probably be brave enough to make this happen in my life, a mumble from my rooftop is more likely. This is despite my suspicion that you and I probably are the same long distance from perfection regardless of our fronts. But this is what Christianity offered – the chance to realize this suspicion one day and not only experience the perfect knowledge of God but to share in a community of people perfectly knowing each other.

To bring together this ethical value of closeness with Christian theology is to produce some interesting conclusions. A God who knows us is a better judge than a distant one. A God who judges from afar, first reading our name with incorrect pronunciation from a book on our judgment day, is pretty much ignorable. They might be biased against us or fooled by our suit on the day. But a God who travels with us and shares in all of our life, knowing our story from birth, offers us something precious in their judgement, something we never know if we can even give ourselves. Whether this seems feasible to us, it is pretty cool. It puts a different spin on the purpose of the incarnation even. It suggests that God must know what is to be a woman, a poor person, a rich person, a grieving parent, a spoilt child, an alcoholic, a sinner like the rest of us. It promises everyone that they will one day be able to say with all their heart, "fair cop."

Now or Later: Distance as an Ethical concept.

In my last blog post I tried to defend the legitimacy of saying that a behaviour “is mean”. I was arguing that saying something is mean (or unkind) is more than just the equivalent of blowing a fart on your hand and kissing it at someone. Saying that something is mean is saying something. In particular I argued that saying something  is mean is as legitimate if not more so than saying we shouldn’t do that thing for X or Y reasons.

In making this claim I assumed a range of the thoughts that have been a part of previous posts I’ve written. To make them explicitly:
1. Morality as a purely logical system of premises doesn’t work. There simply is no logical argument against “I don’t care”  which can be leveled against any primary premise. Concern is the root of all Morality and its a “leap of concern” as to why we should possess it.
2. Empathy is the particular type of concern I consider most relevant to any conversation about morality between people. Empathy-led ethics is my term for ethics which is specific and messy and values proximity to the subject. It doesn’t preclude looking at consequences or holding to ideals but it identifies these things up close with others. It doesn’t believe in working out consequences and ideals away from others.
3. Proximity and Distance. These are very important concepts in Empathy led ethics. Distance can be distance from the person and the situation but it can also represent the distance between a metaphor we are using and the actual act we mean it to refer to. An example of this is “you wouldn’t steal an old ladies purse” as an argument against illegally downloading a movie. The distance between the two acts tells us this is not an empathy led ethical argument. General ethical principles and rules allow us to maintain distance and the more general the rules, (a rule against all stealing rather than all downloading or even all illegality rather than all stealing) the more distance is enabled.
4. Distance can also be in regard to time and this type of distance was the key concern that motivated me to write the last post. The more consequential our moral reasoning the more distance we have from what is happening now and potentially the less empathy. We can justify behaviour we can barely look at because our gaze is on a distant future which makes it all right. This needs to be resisted.

This last point might be the most contentious. After all a person who doesn’t consider any future implications of their actions wouldn’t be able to make a coffee because what on earth would getting the cup out be for (and wouldn’t that be a tragedy my morning brain thinks). Even without going to such a logical extreme what drives anxiety sufferers to panic is living too “in the moment”. This is why the phrase “this will pass” can be a powerful cognitive tool to cope with stress.  We tend to place on a hierarchy from wise to foolish those who can think about the future to those who cant. Certainly the Ant, although a little dull, is considered more adapted to life than the Grasshopper.

But this type of morality has failed us over and over again in a way that I find particularly disturbing. We are all embroiled in perpetuating injustices which cannot be broken because of “what if” scenarios. The homeless are homeless because “what if” we just built homes for them. Countless millions are spent on submarines because “what if” we didn’t. Debts can’t be forgiven or, in the case of what Australia owes its first inhabitants, can’t be recognized, because “what if” we did. We are so constantly frightened of loosing anarchy upon the world that we are bound into obeying structures that we hate. In post after post I have tried to indentify this entrapment and seek its philosophical remedy.

My greatest loathing is reserved for when we make terrible compromises in the vain hope of future bliss. I make this statement despite knowing of studies that have shown that the capacity to delay gratification is a marker for both material success and happiness. The marshmallow test (see the above clip) is well worth a look, if only because kids yielding to sweet temptation are just too darn cute. Such cuteness is tempered however by the ominous predictions for those who can’t wait for pleasure: addiction, crime, divorce and early death. Better to work now and play later. Eat your veggies before your desert. Be the kid who saves.

I feel these mottos make their point by looking at the problem at too small a scale. When we pan back we see that delayed gratification is also internalized oppression. To accept justice delayed is to accept justice denied. The terrible promise of scientific and economic progress is a world of harmony and equality. What makes the promise terrible is that just one more period of unemployment, one more cut to health or education, just one more wall built around our diminishing prosperity, one more power to the surveillance state or one more war, is required to get us there. And then one more again. And then one more. Obviously one day we will have a world in which refugees wont live in cages but only if we build the current electric fences higher. Young people must be willing to work for free if we are ever going to solve their poverty. It’s insane.

Certainly it is possible to phrase many of our problems as not being future minded enough. We divide the planet now as if we won’t need to live on it in a decade. Even our detention of refugees doesn’t think ahead to what might happen if we became refugees. I could take this tack and trump those who claim to speak for the future with a bigger picture of the future than them. This is an interesting aspect of moral speech. We can find different routes to the same destination. If I sometimes take these different routes though, I find them unsatisfying, like a cyclist on the bus due to a flat tyre. I prefer to struggle to express all ethical considerations as a part of the immediate – that the possibility of us being future refugees can be experienced instead as the moral sense that we are the refugees now through a shared humanity.

Part of my reason for not wanting to rely on the future in ethical arguments is that hypothetically at least the future might not happen. If we imagine ourselves at the very end of the universe I think we should still be able to say putting a cigarette out on a childs arm is wrong. The wrongness doesn’t depend on the child being traumatized as an adult or any other future consequence. It certainly doesn’t depend on the idea that we might one day be vulnerable and defenceless as we age. If all those possibilities were certainly not going to happen this shouldn’t change the moral weight of our action.

Perhaps if I was a better philosopher I could distinguish between the sorts of consequences I think should inform our present moral choices and those I want to avoid. I think planting a tree next to your house needs to take into account whether the shade is in the right place and whether the roots will damage your pipes. That’s thinking of the future. But there is something deeply inauthentic to me about many applications of future thinking to our human ethics. Take the safe schools program. I can deal with arguments about whether the program will diminish or even increase bullying. I just can’t deal with the idea that we need to be concerned that bullying leads to anxiety and stress in adults. I’m sure it does but even if it didn’t bullying would be wrong. Otherwise where do we end things? Do we need to indicate some consequence of anxiety in adults before we care about that too or can we stop there? And would it be okay to bully if bullying actually “built character” in some positive way?

Still these logical challenges are besides my main point. Why I fear distance and praise proximity in ethics is pragmatic. Ethics in history has been a lurching from one authority to another. From heart to head we toss with the violent excesses of one Romantic revolution replaced by the death worship of Economic Rationalism. Neither guides us true. Fundamentalists rush in here and say they have the answer beyond our heart or head but history has emptied their claim of difference. They also have blood on their boots. Everywhere that peace has broken out it seems to me that getting to know ones enemy has been crucial. We may hurt each other when we know each other but I think it is harder to do so and much easier to live rightly by each other.

How does this value of proximity relate to whether its defensible to say that something is mean? Poorly perhaps. The example of spanking used in the last post was an example given to my eight year old to explain a conversation I was having with my partner about same-sex marriage. Is it meaningful to say that denying marriage to same-sex couples is mean? Should we accept that such language is unfair to opponents of same-sex marriage? I think we should resist any direction that consequential reasons, and general principles are the only types of legitimate moral speech. I think we need to try and stay within the immediate situation and consider what would happen if the opponents of gay marriage and a gay couple who wanted to get married knew each other. I suspect nobody would stop the marriage because it would too obviously be mean.

"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.