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Complacency as a Moral Goal
Posted by KTK

Brooklynite, one of our sometime commenters here, has been working on a great essay on white anti-racism - the work that white people are obligated to do to reduce the impact of racism on society, and the difference between that - being actively anti-racist - and being “non-racist”. He’ll be posting it soon, so keep an eye out. But it has prompted some counter-revolutionary thinking on my part, which has caught me predictable amounts of shit over on his blog. Even so, something that occurs to me off and on about the question of the “obligation to activism” - the idea that we are all morally required to put effort into making the world better for the oppressed - has been triggered by that discussion, as well as by the recent furor in the feminist/person-of-color blogosphere over perceived white indifference to POC issues. I never know quite how to express this thought, or what significance it has given the world we actually do live in, but I’ll try it out here in the hope that no one will notice.

What occurs to me is this: anti-oppression activism of all kinds is a kind of contingent undertaking - a reaction to conditions as they are (and should not be) that seeks to achieve conditions as they are not (but should be). It is in a way Utopian, in that it seeks what in practical terms is unlikely, but more to the point in that it is reactive to conditions that simply should not be allowed to exist and conceivably might not if the world were a better place, or if we succeed in making it one in the future. In other words, action against inequality seeks to put itself out of business - to eliminate the conditions that make it necessary. The fact that it is currently necessary is a failure of those living today to undertake the work of eliminating it. To the extent that each of us has not adopted the anti-racist mindset, racism persists; to the extent that we do successfully spread anti-racism, racism will die, and with it the need for and practice of anti-racism. If this is true, the lack of engagement in activism against oppression may be a sign, in some cases, not of anti-progressive attitudes, but of overly optimistic, and progressive, ones.

Anti-oppression activism is different from other kinds of do-goodism, which respond to inherent conditions of the world as the need arises, rather than seeking to eliminate them as conceivable possibilities: it’s not discrimination that causes disease - people will always get sick, so we will always need doctors, even in a world of equity and non-discrimination (though there will not be a lower class at much greater risk of poor health); it’s not discrimination that causes tornadoes - there will always be natural disasters, so we will always need disaster-relief efforts (though perhaps fewer of them in a world where no one is drive by inequity to live in uninhabitable areas); it’s not discrimination that causes house fires - there will always be accidents, so we will always need fire departments (though again less often, and not distributed by neighborhood class status, if housing policies were more equitable). Arguably, also, people will always be tempted to break the law, so we will always need police, even in a world of equity and non-discrimination (though crime and police brutality would look very different in such a world). That is, certain kinds of challenges and harms will always be a part of life - we can’t eliminate our need for protection from disease, natural disasters, or accidents simply by eliminating our own discriminatory attitudes or phobias, and there will always be the need to work for a living also - so the anti-oppression project is not Utopian in the sense of imagining an absurdly sumptuous world of ease and fulfillment. But it is Utopian in imagining a world very much better than the current one, by way of eliminating those forms of suffering that do result from our attitudes rather than inescapable natural conditions. The anti-oppression project seeks to create that world, by doing the work of eliminating those attitudes and the social patterns they promote, in the expectation that doing so is in fact possible (while eliminating hurricanes and house fires is not possible).

So the anti-oppression project seeks a world that is both imaginable and a product of changed attitudes or values on the part of individuals. And presumably, when that world is achieved, anti-oppression activism will no longer be necessary (or at least will be understood largely historically, the way the US abolition movement is understood today). Presumably also, people then would simply live their lives without much regard for problems of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on - those aspects of life would no longer be sources of problems, but instead mere incidental or aesthetic distinctions that people would not generally get very worked up over. Most people would live day-to-day without giving a thought to the color, ethnicity, or (for non-sexual matters) sex and gender of the people they dealt with, and would not fear any kind of discrimination or social tension arising from concerns over such matters - though they would still have distinct concerns for health issues, accidents, natural disasters, and the like. People who did pay unusual attention to such things would be regarded as harmless eccentrics, like people today who obsess over their family heritage and dress up in old-world costumes or whatnot. The post-racist Utopia would be one where “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia” and similar forms of prejudice would simply be empty concepts, like feudalism or witchcraft.

Now, before going further, it’s important to note that there are different ways of understanding what such a society might be like. One often hears of the need for a “race-blind” or “colorblind” society, as if, in a post-racist world, race itself, and not just racism, would become an empty concept. One thing mid-century liberalism had to learn the hard way was that the “colorblind society” was something of a delusion - that the end-product of anti-racism was not necessarily a society where race was a dead letter, but that, in fact, that simplistic vision could be racist in its own way. Inevitably, the “colorblind society” turned out to be essentially white society with Jim Crow removed - it was assumed that what non-whites needed and wanted was to live like whites, and that the harm of discrimination was that it prevented them from doing so. So, segregation had to be combated by putting black kids in white schools, and opening white suburbs to black middle-class homeowners; the ghettos were to be “renewed”, while the people who lived there would abandon their history and community to find better lives elsewhere, in whiter neighborhoods. Of course, many of the attempts to dismantle segregation and economic inequity in the 70s and 80s were ill-conceived, bungled, or destroyed by underfunding and corruption. But it was a surprise to many whites to hear that the basic project of integration was not what non-whites always wanted. Segregating into suburbs and gated communities by class, rather than race, was only a minimal step towards equality. White feminism slowly and inelegantly came to terms with its own racism, classism, and homophobia, and began to embrace “intersectionality” - the idea that oppression has multiple forms and causes. “Urban renewal” was attacked as “Negro removal”, and historical ghettoes were valued as sources of non-white community history, pride, and self-sufficiency. Similarly, there is ongoing debate over gender essentialism - whether certain traits are truly inherently male or female - and in a related way over “gay genes”, and so on: debates that are more sophisticated than the good/bad dichotomies the religious right still insists on hanging on such issues, and which do not insist that some kind of inherent differentiation between groups is itself equivalent to discrimination. The equitable society may not turn out to be a “colorblind” or “gender blind” society - it may be a mixture of distinct and self-affirming societies that have differing histories, sociologies, and memberships, but in which none is dominant or oppressive. The egalitarian Utopia may not need to be a homogenized one.[1]

However, and to get back to the original point, whatever kind of society it would be that arose from the success of the anti-oppression project, and whatever its recognition of and distribution of constituent groups, that hoped-for environment would be one in which the average person just wouldn’t care about oppression or do anything about it, and that would be alright. Where oppression and the attitudes that allow it are gone, there is no reason to spend time working against it, or even (assuming it had really been vanquished, and we were sure of that) to teach children to reject it. Who today teaches children to avoid witches or the evil eye? Who even cares about such things? Oppression may - one hopes - face a similar fate. Once that problem has been relegated to history, and everybody sees it with the same “What were they thinking?” exasperated confusion, it’s done with. There will still be problems to worry about - disease, disaster, and, likely enough, politics - but not the problems of discrimination. In a sense, the post-oppression Utopia will be, in moral terms, like the socialist Utopia of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, in which the population lives at ease because the production and distribution systems have been revised to eliminate inequality and scarcity.

This, I think, is not only a correct (though obviously far-off, and maybe hopelessly optimistic) description of post-oppression (i.e., post-racism, post-sexism, post-homophobia, . . .), it is the one that many people intuitively harbor and would like to see come about. Not merely deeply engaged anti-oppression activists, but confused and guilty fence-sitters, starry-eyed liberals, casual but unengaged liberals, and even the many conservatives who like to use the terms “post-racist” and “colorblind” as an excuse for perpetuating oppression, all look to a much-delayed future in which we can all finally stop talking about this sort of stuff. For some, that will be the realization of their life’s dream and activist work, for some it will finally let them stop feeling awkward and guilty, for some it will let them stop being called to account for their prejudices. But one way or another, the post-oppression Utopia will be one in which we stop working against oppression, the way we have stopped working against polio and (in most parts of the world) malaria. It will be a world in which there’s simply no need to look out for, challenge, defend against, or work on oppressive or prejudiced attitudes, behaviors, or social practices. Also, in that world, it will be impossible to be enlighted about race, sex, gender, or other “disadvantaged groups”, just as today nobody claims credit for being understanding and tolerant about the evil eye.

That all seems like a welcome (if unlikely) dream. But - and here is the point of this post[2] - that Utopian vision may, to some extent I think, explain the persistence of oppression in this pre-Utopian society, and in ways that do not entirely impugn the failure of most people to adopt an anti-racist stance.

Of course, racists are quick to claim we already live in a post-racist world - they then perversely label race consciousness as racist and bewail anti-oppression programs as unfair to their tender sensibilities and cherished privileges. But we know what they’re about. They are of no significance to a clear understanding of the oppression/post-oppression transition.

Of more interest are the allies, potential allies, or vaguely sympathetic progressives surrounding the anti-racist movement (of whom, I have to admit, I myself am more likely a member than of the latter group). Many people today strive to live a “non-racist” life - a life in which they attempt to purge themselves of prejudice, do not act on prejudicial impulses or support oppressive social structures, and in general at least not be part of the problem, or perhaps in some way part of the solution. They want their relations with others not to be molded by unfair prejudices, and they want everyone to be able to take a role in society on the basis of a fair evaluation of their relevant qualities, and not on a discriminatory basis. They may admit that they have to try harder to rid themselves of certain deep-seated attitudes, and they are aware that there are many ways in which society reinforces oppression, and many ways in which they may benefit from privilege resulting from oppression, including ways they cannot avoid participating in. But they do the best they can to free themselves of their own trace prejudice, and minimize their overt benefiting from oppression where they can do so, and then otherwise go about their lives as non-oppressively as they can, without necessarily being activist about it. They have other things to do - they may have a deep seated desire to be a dentist, or a cabinetmaker; they may spend their weekends at SCA jousting tournaments or dog shows or hiking in the woods; they have friends and family they spend time with talking about things other than forwarding the revolution. In short, for most people of good will, including reasonably enlightened and knowledgeable ones, active anti-oppression work (or at least more active than merely frowning at racist jokes) isn’t a big part of their lives, even though they support the anti-oppression project and make a conscious effort to steer clear of oppressive patterns in their own lives. If you forced them, they would admit that their other projects - including purely personal ones not aimed at bettering society - are more important to them directly than are the major social-good projects which they agree are necessary but to which they are not devoting their lives. They might feel sheepish about this, or they might argue that not everybody has to be committed full-time to change in order to bring change about, but they would most likely claim that they’re doing their part by being far more anti-oppression in their own lives than are most other people, and that they are entitled to devote the rest of their time to their own values and goals.

For many of the most-committed progressive activists, that isn’t enough. For some there may be an attitude that “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”. For others, as I think we’ll see in Brooklynite’s upcoming post, there is a question whether mere “non-oppressivism” is enough to bring about the change that is necessary, or whether a more aggressive stance should be regarded as minimal for everyone who wants to be right on these issues. But it’s an age-old phenomenon on the left to savage one another over the question who is most committed, and who has the most correct “line” on any given political question (the original, literal meaning of the phrase “politically correct”). Along with that come accusations of counter-revolutionary tendencies or bourgeois values against those who are not on the front lines. I suspect that there is more to it than that, however. Failures of active engagement, or lack of activist involvement, may represent a (somewhat misplaced) kind of optimism about the current situation, and a (perhaps naively) less desperate view of what is required - one that, paradoxically, vitiates the progressive Utopian vision by hewing too closely to it.

What complacent liberals are doing, instead of being lazy, uncommitted, or dishonest, may be simply seeing the end as nearer than it is, or the problems as more fully solved already than they are. In saying “I’ve confronted my own bad faith already, and now I do other things with my time”, they are essentially living as if the progressive Utopia were already at hand. They are living not as if they are opposed to anti-oppressivism, or think it is unimportant, but as if their part in the project has already been played. Maybe they truly believe in the “post-racist” society. Maybe they just believe that the problem is manageable at the small scale (after all, “humanity” conquered polio, but only a small number of people actually directly took part; maybe large-scale problems are not best solved by having every single person dive right in). At any rate, they are living the kind of life we all should live when the post-oppression society is achieved: they know they should harbor the right attitudes themselves, and they do, but they spend their days doing things that are more fulfilling to themselves personally, because that’s all that’s needed of them. They are like Bellamy’s socialist Utopians, who have copious free time to indulge their own passions because the drudgery of previously-necessary labor has been taken from them.

From this perspective, fence-sitting liberals, and maybe some conservatives of good will, have adopted a kind of “fake it ’till you make it” stance toward post-oppressivism: by living as if we are in the society we hope to achieve, we make that society real. By eliminating any external vestige of discriminatory behavior, we eliminate any reinforcement or perpetuation of discrimination, and simultaneously make non-discrimination the law of the land, in the sense of being the only practical method of getting anything done. And if we continue to assiduously tell ourselves that there is no more discrimination, or at least that we spend too much time worrying about discrimination, we can, in a way, achieve the post-oppression mindset of seeing discrimination as a vague, puzzling artifact of the past. Even less-deluded liberals, who realize the bad faith inherent in the “post-racist society” stance, can believe that they have made themselves the kind of people they should be - they have become citizens of the post-oppression community - by living their lives in a non-oppressive manner, and that that is what is required of them. From that perspective, living like a post-oppressive Utopian is not an indulgence nor self-delusion, it is the actual achievement of the goal of the post-oppression movement, on a small scale at least. And if enough people do likewise, the goal will have been achieved on the large scale.

There are obvious problems with this perspective. For one thing, it seems to require an unusual degree of blindness to conditions as they are now to imagine that we can simply will ourselves into the post-oppression Utopia by choosing to live as it if were real. Almost by definition, anyone who believes the post-oppression project is necessary is likely to believe it’s not close to finished, also. For another, such an optimistically complacent vision seems uncomfortably close to the “post-racist society” shibboleth of the right wing, justifying non-action on oppression on grounds that there is no such thing as oppression in the first place. And finally, such a stance just seems much too premature. The post-oppression Utopia has got to be far more egalitarian on economic grounds, as well as others, than contemporary society, if only because today’s social and economic institutions are still so badly distorted by colonialism, slavery, disenfranchisement of property and voting rights, and other forms of oppression. The mere fact of the vast economic disparity that exits in the US and between the US and other countries today is proof of the persistent effects of oppression, even if all the other proof were swept under the rug; that being so, there is still a great deal of work to do before complacency could be justified.

But for all that, I think it is understandable how many liberals fall into the stance of good-willed, but complacent, non-activism. They are, to the best of their abilities, living the lives they understand we all are to live when our current problems are solved. And not every problem requires a universal solution; somebody still has to be dentists and cabinetmakers, and there is time for private lives as well. For every problem, there needs to be a core of committed activists, but for most problems, being such an activist is commendable but not required. For problems of personal behavior or belief, simply working out your own shit is the answer. And having done that, living an enlightened but complacent life is not only a contribution to the solution, it is the solution, in the sense that living without further regard for anti-oppressivist activism is just what we eventually want to see everyone doing, all the time. It requires a certain kind of obliviousness - as well as a failure of logic - to imagine that, because that is what everyone should be doing eventually, it is what anyone should be doing now. But you can see how such an impulse could arise from good faith and a somewhat optimistic apprehension of the post-oppressive endpoint we all seek.

[1] The question of the roles of capitalism and democracy require a much more complicated analysis. There is also the possibility that, having conquered racism, sexism, and the like, we’ll just invent new categories within which to discriminate against one another. But let’s leave this over-analysis for now. The situation under discussion is somewhat stereotyped to begin with.

[2] You knew it was coming, right? . . . right?

May 3rd, 2008 General, Politics, Culture | 8 comments