WEEK 5: HUMAN CONFLICT

1. As we saw during the previous lectures, for modern individualists, identities are the stable cause rather than the changing effect of political actions and relationships;
2. In contrast, postmodernists maintain that identities are not independent variables but products of a social environment that is infused with changing relationships of power;
3. The US Declaration of Independence, 1776 (analyze its relationship with the contemporary autonomous individual Americans;1) Jefferson’s suggestion that his words simply reflected the preexisting identity of the American colonists tells only half the story for the same words have heavily contributed to the construction of contemporary American identities; 2) Jefferson’s assumptions about the autonomy and independence of individuals were themselves products of a particular social, economic, and historical context;
4. Craig Calhoun about contract theory: The individuals joining in the social contract… were prototypically educated, property-owning male speakers of the dominant language of the nation. Thus individualism ironically repressed difference;
5. Yet words’ meaning might change with the change of the historical context where they are used: in our century, Jefferson’s words have been employed by women, African Americans, native people, and other minorities to assert their political, civil, and economic rights;
6. Identities provide us with sets of (conceptual, psychological, and emotional) lenses that allow us to make our way in the world;
7. The politics of identity is concerned with the way in which differences are politically generated and negotiated;
8. Identity politics generally refers to political movements (ethnically or racially defined organizations, for example) that base their power on the assumed uniformity of interests and values among their members;
9. Politics is about the exercise of power that does not slip over the line into the realm of force. Violence erases difference by destroying the other or by eliminating the other’s opportunity for meaningful resistance or self assertion;
10. Politics is threatened whenever the exercise of power suppresses difference in order to mimic a harmonic existence;
11. True harmony never occurs in political life. When claims of complete harmony are made, politics is in jeopardy.

LIMITING POWER AND RESPECTING DIFFERENCE
1. Affirmation of difference should not: 1) create unnecessary divisions or become an apology for neglect, provincialism, or narrow partisanship; it should broaden our beliefs, values, and interests, not to narrow them; 2) become an apology for divisiveness when it does not exist genuinely; we should also avoid the assumption of homogeneity;
2. The exercise of power in collective life is unavoidable; we need to determine which uses of power are good and ought to be cultivated and which uses of power are pernicious and ought to be avoided;
3. For methodological individualism, identity is mainly exogenously given; it is related to some inner human inclinations toward rational behavior; identity is mainly unchangeable;
4. Postmodernists: one sense of self and identity is largely a product of the relatively anonymous and ambiguous forms of power that embed one in a network of social relations;
5. Martin Luther King, Jr.: People will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
6. Judgments: political life demands good judgment; it must be publicly defensible on practical, ethical, and epistemological grounds; it helps us to refrain from both thoughtlessly yielding to power and thoughtlessly rejecting its use;
7. On human behavior toward power: a normative assessment with Golden Rule flavor: resists power exercised on you and allow others to resist power that you exercise on them;
8. Way of resisting power: 1) an appeal to ethics (the Golden Rule); 2) Sheldon Wolin: defend the diversity of your own environment; 3) Alasdair MacIntyre: understand oneself by way of social relationships we form.

RACE, RELIGION AND OTHERNESS
1. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: despite being famous an explorer, Columbus (1451-1506) never really explored the other; he remained a captive of Christian, European identity;
2. Differently, in 1519, Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, mistook Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) for Queztalcoatl and allowed him access to the Aztec capital;
3. Bartolemé de cLas Casa (1474-1566) asserted the humanity of the native people; yet the natives were seen by him simply as potential converts;
4. Politics is about the exercise of power that does not slip over the line into the realm of force; violence erases difference by destroying otherness; the attempt to impose harmony is also dangerous; politics is threatened whenever the exercise of power suppresses difference in order to mimic a harmonic existence; true harmony never occurs in political life—when claims of complete harmony are made, politics is in jeopardy;
5. Genocide—the destruction of a race or people.

GENDER AND IDENTITY
1. Kate Millett’s feminism (Sexual Politics) and the debate between the personal and the political: “personal is political;” according to feminists, privacy should not be abolished and our lives become wholly politicized: certain distinctions ought to be maintained between the public realm and the private realm; feminists contest the way the line separating these realms traditionally has been drawn and that line is not so thick, so straight, or so impermeable as is often assumed; that line is itself a political demarcation;
2. Patriarchy as oligarchic politics;
Development of feminism
3. In ancient Greece, women could neither own property nor vote;
4. The Industrial Revolution diminished the economic power of women;
5. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), A Vindication of the Right of Woman, 1792: despite all the grand talk of equality, Paine and the republican revolutionaries left women wholly out of the picture;
6. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869: women equality is the surest test and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age;
7. Abigail Adams and her plea with her husband John Adams;
8. 1848. The Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, the first gathering of women for publicly asserting their rights: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal;
9. Women’s suffrage movement: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; 1920—the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted American women the right to vote;
10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1952 and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963 challenged the notion that women find fulfillment only in childbearing and homemaking; de Beauvoir: gender roles are largely a function of the historical period and cultural environment―”one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman;”
11. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 1970, wrote from a Marxist perspective: we should blame the division of labor that keeps women at home; that division of labor is built at the expense of women; they find themselves subordinated because pregnancy weakens them physically; in order to resolve this situation, women must give up their motherhood and human reproduction must be performed by machines;
12. Equality under the law and equality of opportunity: the dilemmas of the affirmative action;
13. Gender justice demands the pursuit of equality grounded in the recognition of difference; it demands that this recognition be translated into cultural mores no less than political policy and legislation;
14. Women segregation;
15. Mary Daly argues that women who worship a male deity are subject to a subtle form of psychological self-deprecation; women should assert their equality in religious matters.
16. Equality versus difference and masculinity versus femininity;
17. Hence the question of feminine epistemology and ethics versus masculine epistemology and ethics; Carol Gilligan: the mores that structure men’s and women’s ethical choices differ; women’s “morality of care” (Nancy Chodorow: a communitarian epistemology)/(dangerous self-sacrifice) versus men’s “morality of rights” (Nancy Chodorow: an individualistic epistemology)/(selfish individualism); those are not innate structures within the male and female psyche: they may be artifacts of culture;
18. Gilligan’s solution: balancing these moralities;
19. Chodorow’s solution: fathers should take a greater role in childbearing;
20. Liberal feminism, socialist feminism, conservative feminism, and radical feminism;
21. Liberal feminism fights for women rights through the rule of law; critics of liberal feminism point out that liberalism has no place for women as women―women must think and act like independent men to fit into a liberal world;
22. Women in the role of the victim: the danger is that this perception might actually lead to the reinforcement of such a position.

CLASS AND IDENTITY
1. Karl Marx (1818-83): the greater division in human society is not the gender but the class one; the former will be resolved with the latter; contemporary feminists disagree by pointing out that this neglects the significance of the biological reproduction); yet, insofar as the economic oppression affects gender politics, many feminists rely on Marxist theory;
2. Marx began with the critique of liberalism in religious issues: he acknowledged the role it plays in guaranteeing “religious freedom;” yet Marx argued for “liberation from religion”―the end of religious belief altogether; Marx: religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people;
3. Marx studied the dynamics of economic disparities; they create alienation;
4. Alienation is the condition of keeping humans strangers from themselves, from the world, and from their full potential as human beings;
5. The naturally existing poverty versus the artificially produced poverty: the latter is a product of economic inequality;
6. According to Marx, humans are in essence “species being,” inherently collective or communal in nature; yet the communal life is destroyed by the alienation, but for the poor this is more severe;
7. Four ways of alienation: 1) from the product of their labor; 2) from the processes of labor; 3) from their fellow human beings; 4) from themselves.
8. The solution: social revolution that would abolish private property;
9. The critique of idealism; Hegel (1770-1831): action follows thoughts; Marx: ideas are the effect not the cause of the material conditions in which we live; hence, humans must be raised in the proper social and economic environment;
10. Marxism (the labor theory of history) emerged as a mixture of Hegelian belief in progressive historical development and Feuerbach’s materialism;
11. Ideology: a system of ideas that distorts or inverts reality but becomes widely accepted as true owing to the power of whose interests these ideas primarily serve;
12. Marxism: moral values, religious beliefs, and social relationships are all products of the “forces of production” = means of production + the mode of production;
13. The discrepant development of the latter two brings social tensions and social enhancement;
14. Communistic society would end alienation in all its forms; the end of labor division: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs:” the end of history (along with the class struggle);
15. Communist society would be born only out of particular historical conditions and revolutionary struggle, not out of wishful thinking;
16. Bakunin, a Russian anarchist, theorized the proletarian revolution but opposed the dictatorship of proletariat;
17. Marxist fallacy: “circumstances make man just as much as men make circumstances;” note this switch from cause-effect to endogenous relationship between circumstances and men;Socialists reject revolutionary methods in favor of strong governmental regulations―gradual reform and taxation is sufficient to avoid inequality; nationalization only of vital branches of economy; socialists are concerned in preserving individual liberties that the revolution might quash; socialists are skeptical of the possibility of a fully egalitarian society.