I only brought things like race and sex up because these two categories are held in such certitude by most people as being fundamentally based in hard science.
When you realize that these categories are contested and contestable as having no real biological basis, then the previous certitude or "common sense" about their truthful or absolute existence ends up being just one more ideological point-of-view.
As to the race issue, without reading anything deep on it, mine was a common sensical conclusion (for which I expect to be labeled far-right).
Pragmatism sometimes looks narrowminded because of its temptation to a slightly simplificating approach what I called the everyday-life sense, or Newton's laws). In other words, rational pragmatism would seem to require brilliant people like Obama or Clinton to really reach a critical mass. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
Same thing.
Thoughts don't appear from out of the blue, neither do values, neither do beliefs.
Ideology is simply one's belief system. If you believe anything, your within ideology. There is no outside.
I just think calls for pragmatism inevitably force me to adopt horrid positions that I don't like. What's pragmatic about pragmatism?
And if you don't read deeply into definitions which most people regard as absolutes (about race for example) aren't you simply deluding yourself?
I mean, I like to know if I'm constantly referring to something I believe is real, but in any sense other than cultural usage, it doesn't exist. There's no essential race out there, neither sociological, nor genetic/biological, not in any field. We can't even define it on the cultural level. There has never been an adequate cultural definition for race, never mind a biological proof that it even exists.
As to race, you are actually protesting against the ideologies of the last 40 years, who defined race in absolute, anthropological and morphological terms. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
By recognizing the total work of ideology, however, you're forced into a more critical and skeptical approach to your beliefs and ideas. You're asked to see them as an interlocking pattern of beliefs that's culturally bound, not solely reliant on logic or common sense, etc. Nietzsche said that the errors in thinking are inevitably the values passed down through the centuries, so that common wisdom never questions itself as long as it regards its bases (DEPTH) as natural or normal or given. Thus, things like sex and race go unexamined. Instead, we argue logically and rationally about the formations of race and sex, but we never actually think beyond that narrative frame to see whether these things have any substance.
"Not solely reliant on logic or common sense"... you say 'not solely', yet you speak about 'recognizing the total work of ideology' and seem to be making an assumption with the hope that it will bring you into a more critical approach by some kind of counter-reaction. Very weird reasoning. One cannot claim that everything is culturally bound, nor that common sense (or wisdom) would always be a mere cultural/social construct. Sometimes they are, other times not so. A rational approach is also about recognizing one's own limits and realizing tendencies of taking something as the final (common sense) base, the absolute truth.
That's why I said that this seems to require people capable of sensing when they start to take as definitive things that are not so, when it is the moment to halt an analysis, or to continue it, or to declare it undecided. I rather tend to say it's a matter of teaching people to think critically, purely and simply, a bit like French school did before the advent of libertarianism in education. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
My approach is to question everything - the critical approach that you seem to think the left are utterly incapable of. Who can really truly say where the line should be drawn on what is culturally bound or not? If you took some of things you consider to be absolute common sense and tried to apply that to a tribe in Africa or the Amazon, would it still stand? Would it still stand if something that is common sense and in no way culturally bound in your opinion, in France was compared to another European country?
You have made a number of assumptions about many different things here, whilst inconsistently saying that these very things should be questioned. Ad astra per aspera
But as I said above, while doubt, keeping an open mind, questioning and self-questioning, are fundamental, this shouldn't stop one from being pragmatic about things, and avoid getting closed in a vicious circle of relativism. If we quit the philosophical scene and leave aside ideologies, we'll likely notice there actually are quite a lot of things we know already, but refuse to see, admit, or whose importance we diminish because it doesn't fit with our previous positions or preferred ideology. The only way to show there's no artificial bias, is sound, honest argumenting.
I gave several examples, that I called obvious:
The only way to show my good faith and my only concern: finding the truth, was to present the two facets and frame it as a question. Can you really not see how precipitated, ill-thought and ideological these conclusions are?
Of course, you can always turn my reasoning at me and say that by claiming common sense, I would decide what is true and what is not, I would bring forth my certitudes. This will always be the risk for rational pragmatists: "how dare you say things are so, impose your own truth, claiming logic and pragmatism? it's just a rhetorical method to exclude others' truths!"
False issues. Theoretical. Ideological. We actually know a lot of stuff as true already; relative stuff is much less than we like to admit. Nuancing is not the same thing as relativism. Seeing both sides of a problem, for instance, the employee's and the manager's, the man's and the woman's, the immigrant's and the local's, is an indispensable tool in finding solutions, and a proof of fundamental good faith. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
And I might not even be able to find an answer. Being a rationalist doesn't mean being all-knowing. As I said before, it is all about the methodology - especially the refusal of any ideology. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
That's not how I live my life.
If you think people don't reject binary divisions of sex in real life then you haven't gotten around much. You'd be totally surprised at the incidence of hermpahroditism. On m college campus there are many many students who live this reality EVERY day.
I'm not being polemical, just noting that I didn't claim rationalism would pretend to give new definitions to things or situations. If incidence of hermaphroditism is relevant (in general, or in a given situation), then it may well be entitled to be declared an absolute truth :) I still don't see the problem. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
That's what I was responding to.
"Gender" in languages signifies cultural norms (say, hierarchical social constructs) and the instrumentality of reproductive capability and political ideologies or economics.
There is too that bio-ethical dilemma evinced in clone technologies yet opposed by law that defeats the "rules" of reproductive politics (cf Mary O'Brien, eg), gender politics (a/k/a "sexism" or "feminism"), and scientific veridical methodologies to which arbiters of Western civilizations appeal for rationales, the legitimacy of punative actions.
Some day being born either male or female will cease to carry institutional value. We all will learn to be it. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
If infertile variations are divided into the group most similar according - the groups constructed from the sexual reproduction schemes - then you are dealing with a socially constructed cathegory that is wider then the biological one. So no, sex is not an incontrovertible term unless you deal solely with fertile individuals. A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!
