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tweakabelle -> RE: Human nature- whatever you wanna say about it (5/1/2011 9:20:40 PM)
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quote:
VincentML
We are speaking to each other from two different world views. If you say that all classification systems are arbitrary and cannot be agreed upon then I can only conclude we are walking in quicksand or more likely back to looking at Plato’s shadows on the wall of a cave. Sometimes you just have to pick a model that is most suitable and this can only be judged by its apparent functional success.
My reaction to the realisation that the answers might not be all I wished for was the same as yours. It’s disappointing and frustrating to discover that a long cherished hope is impossible, unattainable. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it is.
Critics of the approaches I’ve outlined rail against “cultural nihilism” or the “dark pit of relativism” but what choice have we got? We can accept these limitations or we can choose to ignore them. But if we ignore them what’s the difference between that and superstition or religion or fiction? What’s the point?
It really doesn’t matter how we choose to approach it or what we do about it – the impossible will remain impossible, forever beyond us. Proposing that the discussion takes place within the realms of the possible, as opposed to trying for the impossible, sounds like an eminently reasonable pragmatic suggestion to me. It mightn’t be an ideal strategy but it’s the only workable one, the only one that offers a possibility of success.
Most of us would agree that a Utopia is an impossible ideal, unattainable … Does the impossibility of achieving that ideal mean we have to abandon all ideals, that it’s a waste of time to try to change things for the better, to improve society?? Not at all.
There are other rewarding ways of approaching the issue. For instance, does studying the history of a category throw light on the issue? Not many people are aware that all these categories of behaviour have histories. Let’s take homosexuality as an example. Homosexual acts are as old as the hills, but that a person might 'be' a homosexual is pretty new historically. The first definition of homosexuality was in 1869, IIRC. The word didn’t enter the dictionary until 1890, followed by heterosexual a decade or so later. Even Oscar Wilde, nowadays a gay icon, referred to the “love that dare not speak its name”, not homosexuality (which interestingly, suggests he saw it as more of an emotional matter than a merely physical attraction or practice)
My reaction to discovering this was that I was staggered. I had always assumed that homosexuality had been around for ever, that it was a natural universal part of human variation. I was shocked to learn that Sappho had no idea what a lesbian was or might be, or that ancient Greek males, who were so fond of youths, would have stared at me in an uncomprehending fog had I described them as homosexuals. To learn that the idea of homosexuality (as distinct from the behaviour, rather the framework through which the behaviour was understood, interpreted and given meaning) was a recent development turned my understanding of sexual behaviour on its head.
So too the categories of sex and gender have histories that are changing across time, and from culture to culture. It is wrong to assume that these changes happened because of changes or advances in science/knowledge. They don’t. They reflect ruptures in the cultural fabric that underwrite them. Thomas Lacquer, a medical historian has traced this process in minute detail in his �Making Sex� . Most people believe the two-sex model to be natural and eternal. It’s not. What impact does discovering that the model currently in vogue is relatively recent development have on your thinking? It revolutionised mine.
So where does that leave us?
quote:
There are people who are homosexual or transgendered or serial killers or quite ordinary simple shoe fetishists who want to know why they behave the way they do. Was i born this way? Did I learn this behavior? They are looking for deterministic answers. They seek a practical framework that gives them an understanding of their own behavior.
I suppose that depends on what kind of answer satisfies you. You can have one that sounds nice that joins a few unconnected dots in a cause and effect chain that has all the substance of a soap bubble or you can seek the best available description of why we understand ourselves in the ways we do. Or, if you like, anything in between. All these options are open to each and every one of us. The choice is yours.
Should you select one of the lesser options for reasons of expediency (as you seem to be suggesting you’d prefer), then I suppose you need to ask yourself why that choice appeals to you, why you find immediacy preferable to accuracy. That will land you right back at Step 1 a couple of pages and quite a few posts ago. If you’re really interested in gaining insight into human behaviour, I doubt such a choice will be satisfactory. However, lots of people spend their entire lives out there living out the various myths.
There are, IMHO, excellent answers available to the questions posed within the frameworks outlined. But there’s no simple easy route to them that I’m aware of. And there's any number of dead ends.
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