LUDIC LOG

Interesting conversation today with some of my imaginary computer friends. Today's entry will be pretty disjointed and jumpy; please forgive the indulgence. In the future, I promise to use this space less for sorting through my thoughts and ideas, and more for pointless, impotent political tirades and jokes about Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman's sex life.

I. THE SUBJECTIVIST CRITIQUE

One barrier often encountered when I try to engage in meaningful conversation is that I pretty much de facto opt out of any discussion that turns around a question of morality right away. My metaphysic is materialist and my ethic is postmodernist; and since the kernel of almost all political questions is a religious opinion, I go into the debate shrugging my shoulders in resignation. This is a problem for me, because there's always someone in the crowd who's going to say "well, you could make the same argument about (insert terrible crime here)" or "you're essentially saying that there's nothing inherently immoral about (insert horrific act here)", and I have to admit, yes, you could, and yes, I am.

However, that aside, it seems to me that one problem with the liberal/radical critique is that it too often lets itself be defined by its opposition. In other words, it starts from assumptions it does not share: it lets the battle be waged on a skeleton of faith, of tradition, of Judaeo-Christian assumptions that are entirely in the hands of its enemy. Rather than entering a debate by saying "We must begin from the assumption that homosexuality is acceptable; it's up to you to prove otherwise", they timidly work their way out of "Let me try and prove to you that homosexuality is not immoral". This is a losing battle in every concievable sense, but it's one that informs almost every debate about "consensual crimes" and ethical issues. A terribly ingrained fear of the illusory public morals leads advocates of liberty to start from a place where they reject a subjectivist critique, and the comfortable and efficient shift in the burden of proof it grants, and instead enter into an argument where they build from an absolute foundation of right and wrong. Such a foundation is designed to aid power and status; it's meant to uphold tradition and promote reaction. There's no way to win from that approach.

II. PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Related to the above is the idea that practical matters -- who does this harm? What is its impact? Does the debate that's being engaged in concerning this issue reflect reality, or abstraction -- are almost always shunted to one side, and people on both sides start talking about imaginary conseqences, hypothetical situations, theoretical people, and appeals to a sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of truth and falsity that have pretty much nothing to do with anything, and can fairly be said not even to exist. Approached from a practical standpoint, the question of whether or not any given individual prefers homosexual sex, heterosexual sex, or a little of both cannot possibly be of any consequence to anyone but the person they're having sex with; but because the debate so quickly assumes the level of metaphor, because the discussion rapidly moves to a realm of abstraction, because it stops being a question of behavior and starts being a question of character, this gets lost and nothing useful is being done. Our insistence on confusing actions with identities, on mistaking what one does for who one is, stops understanding dead in its tracks.

III. NATURE & NURTURE

The debate over sexual identity (one which completely encapsulates the point above -- in practical terms, sexual identity is completely meaningless, and the only reason it's so widely discussed is because we have an overwhelming desire to compartmentalize, and therefore, to judge) is often predicated on a question of whether it's "chosen" or whether it's "natural" -- that is, whether it's something that people want to do, or whether it's something that they do because they were born that way. Unfortunately, the words are ill-selected (choice is largely an illusion, and "natural" describes anything occuring in nature and therefore is utterly useless as a descriptive) and the debate stillborn.

The "people are born homosexual" argument seems to me the most fatuous; it assigns a sexual role at the time of birth, when human beings sexual mature and develop for decades; it inflates (as do most arguments on the topic) sexual behaviors to an identity rather than an activity -- you are gay/you are straight -- and discounts the incredible variety of behaviors to be found in the spectrum of human psychology; and it almost always is accompanied by statements like "I can't help being gay" or "it's not my fault I'm gay", both of which assume that help is needed, or that fault is to be assigned. It also creeps dangerously close to arguments over eugenics; if homosexuality is an "inherent vice", like Downs' syndrome or acromegaly, then like these other birth defects, it's something we should be working to eliminate. Finally, it has at its base not science but superstition; it is essentially a way of saying "God made me like this, so he must have wanted me this way". This is just another means of letting the opposition define the terms of the argument.

However, the "homosexuality is a choice" argument is iffy too: it lends primacy to notions of choice and self-determination that are awfully hard to defend; it ignores the fact that many people -- perhaps even most -- have engaged in both homosexual and heterosexual sex acts; it likewise awkwardly tries to stretch a behavior into the empty suit of an identity; and it generally fails to take into account that an individual is not one person, but thousands of people, made up of millions of influences and environmental and social factors, and that who a person is depends entirely on where he is, what he's doing and what choices are open to him at the moment. It's only our desire to see things in opposing poles instead of the more practical and factual way of seeing them as points on a line stretching into infinity that gets us stuck in the rut of this false dichotomy.

IV. SCIENCE

Science is, unfortunately, always on the side of the devil. It does not concern itself with notions of good and bad; so it's of no help in finding one's way through this maze if you start from the entrance marked "Morals". Since science doesn't care about morals, any attempt to enlist it to settle an argument founded on moral assumptions is going to end up a shambles. What science does tell us is a whole lot of nothing: every attempt to provide a genetic "cause" for homosexuality has been shown up as shbby and inconclusive. The major citations (most of which involve some minute biological difference in "gays" and "straights") are based on incrediby shaky research. The strongest evidence -- that a large majority of identical twins share sexual identities -- is extremely questionable, because most twins are raised by the same parents and have the same social and environmental factors in their formative years. What science doestell us reinforces the point that we've completely lost sight of practical considerations: the animal kingdom, and most especially our closest kin amongst the primates, are numbingly bisexual, self-indulgent and amoral. They mate when they like, they engage in all sorts of sex acts with all sorts of partners of either gender, and they masturbate constantly with no regard to the jeopardy in which they are placing their souls. And somehow, we don't bother to consern ourselves with whether or not their "sexual identities" were formed from birth or molded by growth. To claim that a chimp who just jerked off his best friend is a gay chimp would correctly be considered absurd.

I'm reminded of the attempt to drag animals into entirely human ethical debates involving diet (almost all of which, similarly, have some moral value judgment at their center): animals are inherently vegetarian/animals are inherently carnivorous; animals will eat this/animals will not eat this; animals are taught to be omnivores/animals are inherently omnivorous. The fact is, most animals don't care what they eat. Their restrictions are purely biological in nature, they are incredibly opportunistic, and many can live a long happy life eating one type of diet while others of the same species can be equally happy gorging on whatever treats are made available to them. Our attempts to layer a matrix of right and wrong, of "natural" and "unnatural", over their behavior is arrogant, presumptuous, and indicative of our inability to distinguish things from ideas.

V. IDENTITY POLITICS OF DIVISION

The whole debate over sexual identity is shot through with a terrible lack of recognition of power structures. People "choose" (or are forced into) their identities by dozens of factors, many of which are in absolute conflict: social acceptance (or marginalization), the desire for material comfort and wealth, parental/social expectation, opportunism, reinvention, the urge for respect, the desire to oppose something or be a part of something, the urge for self-expression, a need to belong (or to be left alone), and many, many others. Alas, people get so caught up in defining these roles -- and, back to our urge for polarity, and our mistaking of acts for identities, defining what constitutes a rejection of those roles, or the opposite of those roles -- that they lose sight of the power dynamic that really stands in opposition to them.

One of the principles I have found it vitally important to apply to my life was formulated by Jacques Derrida. He said that whenever you encountered any human construct -- a statement, a text, a film, a piece of art, a moral principle -- you should ask: "who says this, and what do they have to gain if it is believed?" By dividing into sets, sub-sets and micro-sets, by fashioning an identity out of a behavior, and excluding or including other people who engage in the same behavior based on their compatibility with that identity, by sniping endlessly over what things "mean" instead of what things are, you play precisely into the hands of those who wield the balance of power, and who have a vested interest in insuring that you don't question your own assumptions too closely, because the next thing you know, you'll be examining theirs. By further allowing the debate to take place on their terms and under their assumptions -- about morality, about identity, about absolutes and either/ors, about the accursed notions of the "natural" and the "inherent" -- we get even farther away from wisdom, and even more removed from revolution.