I'll be chairing a session Friday afternoon on Aggression [conference program here] and commenting on three interestingly-different takes on the subject. Here's what I think I'll be saying.
Comments on Aggression - SAAP, Indianapolis-3.9.18
Concurrent Session V, 4 pm-
Session Chair: Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State UniversityWhat's Aggressive About Microaggressions?Emma McClure, University of TorontoDiscussant: Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State UniversityThe Moral Equivalent Of FootballErin Tarver, Emory University, Oxford CollegeDiscussant: Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State UniversityJane Addams, “pragmatic” Compromise, And Anti-war Pragmatism [latest revision] Tadd Ruetenik, St. Ambrose UniversityDiscussant: Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University
Introductions & overview. Welcome to what promises to be a fascinating and multi-faceted conversation on aggression in our time, in multiple modalities - verbal, behavioral, dispositional, recreational, militant, … - and the various attitudes, habits, practices, and implicit or explicit expressions and permissions that enable and sustain it in our culture, at a moment of apparent transformation when so much seems so fluid, when so many long-unexamined assumptions about gender, human nature, power, violence, entitlement, and much more are being closely scrutinized.
Our panel is full, our time is short, and so should be my own initial remarks. I do just want to indicate my sense that each of our panelists is calling us in one way or another to reaffirm the classic pragmatists’ commitment to perseverance in the spirit and the letter of amelioration. The operant assumption is that we must do better in our interactions, our recreations, our uncompromising commitment to anti-aggression - and we can. This is the right assumption, I think we’ll all agree.
As Sarah Bakewell said recently in her favorably against-the-grain review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, “if you think this world is already as good as it gets, then you just have to accept it.” That makes you a fatalist, not a meliorist. We’re not fatalists here.
Of course, though, as my favorite bumper sticker has it, even fatalists look both ways before crossing the street. So let us proceed, with due caution.
Our panelists are
- Emma McClure, GS at the University of Toronto, who “work[s] on the ethics of conversation. My dissertation focuses on microaggressions and the moral responsibility we have for these unintentional harms. In addition to engaging with the psychology research, I draw from feminism, critical race theory, existentialism, and philosophy of law."
- Professor Erin Tarver of Emory University, who “ specializes in feminist philosophy, American pragmatism, and poststructuralism. She has particular interests in the relationship between popular culture and the self. She has written on a range of topics, including politics, sports, William James and Michel Foucault. Beyond philosophy, she loves sports, cooking, and south Louisiana, where she was born and raised.” She is author of The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity
- Professor Tadd Ruetenik of St. Ambrose University, who teaches courses in American philosophy, critical thinking, philosophy of life, and philosophy of religion. He is author of the forthcoming Demons of William James.
What's Aggressive About Microaggressions? Emma McClure, University of Toronto
Perhaps the place to begin, in thinking about microaggressions, is with even more basic questions: what’s aggressive about aggression, and what’s objectionable about it?
I think Emma McClure quite correctly identifies the problem in terms of violated boundaries, forced narratives, preempted time, and co-opted subjectivity. Aggressors presume unilaterally to set an interpersonal agenda that devalues or disregards another person’s own agency. The effect, whatever an aggressor’s intent, is indeed presumptuous and potentially harmful of that person’s autonomous selfhood.
Controlled aggression of a precisely-designated sort may have its place, on battlefields and playing fields (more on that shortly) and in some professional environments where rules of engagement are enforced to promote equal opportunity, fair play, and procedural recourse for infractions and fouls.
But aggression for the sake of self-promotion, self-advantage, self-amusement, or self-aggrandizement without due consideration of other selves is arrogant. It may well be “hostile, belligerent, bellicose, truculent “etc. (some standard near-synonyms), and in the absence of mutual regard and reciprocity definitely does not deserve the more positive spin suggested by approving words like “assertive, forceful, vigorous, energetic, dynamic” and the like.
The targets of such intended or inadvertent aggression, which may qualify as micro-aggression when “brief and commonplace” (etc.), may understandably and correctly experience a micro-aggressive encounter as overtly harmful, offensive, wounding, insulting, time-consuming, discriminatory, and (at the least) gratuitous - again, whether or not the aggressor intended harm, offense, insult, etc.
McClure and Bonnie Mann are surely right: “Whether or not [an aggressor] realizes what he is doing is not central,” his intentions matter far less than the “damaging and constrictive effects of his actions”... And yet, as actions go, physical aggression does tend to be more damaging and constrictive than verbal aggression. Doesn’t it? And isn’t this precisely because the perpetrator of physical aggression lacks any intention of behaving correctly?
And what, then, to say about the great indiscriminate breadth and un-subtlety of the broad spectrum of offense, that lately has dragged a justly-damning net over egregious rapists and assaulters but also has dragooned less overtly harmful agents of ineptitude and inadvertence, individuals who would never think to lift a finger against another but whose failure was to reflect on the potential harm of careless, thoughtless, misdirected words and gestures?
(Consider the case of radio journalist Tom Ashbrook, for instance. “When the whole #MeToo movement broke, my first thought was, “Thank God, that has nothing to do with me.” It feels awful to have been anywhere in that vicinity. I am really glad to have been cleared on that front. I fully expected to be.” But his career and reputation were severely, peremptorily damaged nonetheless. He does say he’s learned to seek “More workplace humility and more empathic imagination.” Smacked wide awake)
Surely the first thing to say is: degrees of offense matter, intent to harm matters, consequences (but not only consequences) matter. But can we be more precise in delineating the relative harm and offense that are inflicted in different degrees, according either to intent or inattentiveness to how one’s words are heard and assimilated, and how the consequences of micro-aggression unfold over time?
Also, can we address the difference between micro-aggressions perpetrated by strangers and those by acquaintances and friends?
And can we consider whether an individual target need be present and in earshot, in order for a micro-aggression to have occurred? If a slight or slur is spoken in my (white male) presence about a woman, a gay, or a person of color, has a micro-aggression occurred?
Micro-aggressors steal moments of our lives, force us to engage with them, and in that way not only intrude upon our space and invade our time but actually rob us. Isn’t it true, though, that every human interaction threatens that result? Should we all, in that light, be a lot more hesitant to initiate every sort of contact, a lot more timid about initiating conversation? Isn’t it sad to think so?
Regarding Mann’s “bad faith” example of creepiness that traps a young woman “in the narrative he’s already chosen,” a young millennial of my acquaintance - my daughter, a recent college graduate who describes herself as a progressive feminist - insists that this sort of portrayal, in which the aggressor is described as “active, free, powerful” while his target is “passive, restricted, violated,” reduces her to a fragile and defensive victimhood that no self-respecting woman will accept.
Martha Nussbaum has said that the way we must all cope with our human fragility “is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.” Does the bad faith posture of social interaction not subvert that kind of openness and trust, possibly rendering all sorts of interactions too fraught to risk?
More generally, isn’t the larger problem of micro-aggressions not the way in which an individual may perceive his/her autonomy and dignity to have been affronted by an offending remark, catcall, or dominance display but rather the way in which such behaviors, left unchallenged, sustain and perpetuate the oppressive patterns and structures that strengthen and uphold social injustice?
And if that’s the problem, the larger, simpler solution is surely the one proposed by Indy’s late great Kurt Vonnegut:
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.” God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
[If time and conversational direction allow, I might mention one or more of the following: a recent New Yorker parody: “How to DIsmiss Harrassment Like a Frenchwoman” 2.5.18- an amusing comparison of differing cultural attitudes that may be relevant to our discussion, beginning with Catherine Deneuve’s “witch-hunt” charge. Also, “Thank You for Asking” (nyt 2.24.18)-on Antioch College’s pioneering “Sexual Offense Prevention Policy”... And, this recent piece on intra-feminist contention over #MeToo… And this on the impact of newly-raised consciousness in pbs-world… Frank Bruni 3.3.18… Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, Daily Beast “When MeeToo Becomes YouToo”
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The Moral Equivalent Of Football Erin Tarver, Emory University, Oxford College
Erin Tarver’s point about our culture’s long-standing, misplaced emphasis on aggressive masculinity and manhood as embodying the preeminent virtues of ambition, competition, and achievement hits the bulls-eye.
The best things about football (though perhaps not the things most loved about it, by so many of its more rabid enthusiasts) are in fact the contributions it makes to building connections and communities, to instantiating and ennobling the value of teamwork, cooperation, and individual sacrifice, to reinforcing qualities of perseverance and resilience, etc. None of this assumes “the necessity of preserving masculinity and hardness, or the necessary valor of bodily destruction.”
The best things about football, in other words, are things it shares with other sports and activities that don’t involve the particular nexus of violence and ideals of masculinity that have grown up around our version of the game. “This is not to say that the solution to this problem is a move to another football,” viz. Soccer, says Professor Tarver.
But may I respectfully suggest that the other game we used to acknowledge as our national pastime did in fact achieve all those good things without all the violence, and without all the misplaced assumptions of manliness? (That's not to claim a dearth of sexist chauvinism in the culture of professional baseball, but simply to note that it's not intrinsic to the very structure of the game itself.)
William James's student, the pragmatist Morris Cohen, once published an essay entitled Baseball as a National Religion in which he reported actually bringing the idea to James's attention. Cohen records, "When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on 'A Moral Equivalent for War' (sic), I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value. He listened sympathetically and was amused, but he did not take me seriously enough. All great men have their limitations . . ."
The late great humanist misanthrope George Carlin, as I hear him, was not so limited in this regard. I’ve been impudently informed by tin-eared football fans that George was dissing our great national pastime, but it’s very clear to me that he meant to praise Abner Doubleday’s mytho-pastoral game for eliciting the better angels of our nature as none other. Judge for yourself.
Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.
Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who's up?
In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.
In football the specialist comes in to kick.
In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Baseball has the sacrifice.
Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog...
In baseball, if it rains, we don't go out to play.
Baseball has the seventh inning stretch.
Football has the two minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit: we don't know when it's gonna end - might have extra innings. Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we've got to go to sudden death.
In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.
And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I'll be safe at home!
And that is our larger object in life, is it not? - to be safe, as Erin says, in our communities, regions, families, and schools; to celebrate teamwork, cooperation, and individual sacrifice for something greater; to respect, cherish, embody, and transmit our more humane impulses and values; to teach our children well, and keep them, as best we may, from harm’s way.
A news item from just this past week offers a glimmer of hope, on this front. “In states where football appears to be on the wane, including those in the Northeast, disputes [in court between parents who disagree about their children’s participation in organized youth football] are less common because both parents have already decided that the game is too dangerous for their child to play.”
And so, as Spring Training 2018 proceeds in the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues and as I prepare my own next conference presentation at the annual Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference in three weeks, I encourage Erin and all of you to say with me: Play ball!
[A reading list I may reference in the course of our discussion, time and circumstancre allowing:
- I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind (Emily Kelly)
- Football's Long Eclipse (David Remnick)
- Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto
- Why do fans riot after a win?
- Concussion Protocol (video)
- Baseball as a National Religion, in Faith of a Liberal (Morris Raphael Cohen)
- Can a Feminist Love the Superbowl? (Mary Magada-Ward)
- Football’s Brain Injury Crisis Lands in Family Court (nyt)
- George Carlin on baseball versus football.]
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Jane Addams, “pragmatic” Compromise, And Anti-war Pragmatism Tadd Ruetenik, St. Ambrose University
I agree with Tadd, the common-parlance parsing of “pragmatic” to mean conciliatory, expedient, and compromise-prone has unfortunately and falsely tarred pragmatists as lacking in conviction and perseverance. A good pragmatist is a good and “persistent” meliorist who sees the greater good in terms of palpable movement away from a status quo ante that fails to advance, and thus is bound in conscience always to ask if compromise in any given situation is potentially a rear-guard retreat and a movement in the wrong direction.
In these terms, a good anti-war pragmatist wants to ameliorate social and political life by fostering a progressively-lessened proclivity to settling differences on the battlefield. AWPs want to advance the cause of peace, not make their own private and personal peace with militancy and militarism. This requires reflective gradualism, with reflection sometimes counseling cooperation and alliance, sometimes resistance and confrontation.
Pragmatists also, of course, want to be “practical” and relevant, actively engaged with the debates and discourse of their day. This must be the reason why some pragmatists are considered more “virtuous” than some pacifists, who-- as Mark Twain said of nudists, in contrast to clothes-horses --have very little influence in society. If clothes make the man, then so does “getting things done” make the polemicist/culture critic/pragmatic philosopher.
But, it’s crucial to insist that the things getting done actively contribute to the kind of influence and accomplishment actually desired by the pragmatist who endorses and participates in the doing.
Was John Dewey’s eventual support of the First World War pragmatic in this sense, conceding the battle as it were, in hopes of winning Woodrow Wilson’s larger war to end war? If so, our hindsight so many wars later clearly indicts both Dewey’s and Wilson’s judgment as miscalculation and naivete.
And yet, ours is a hindsight perspective. I cannot say unreservedly that Dewey ought to have known better, or that any of us in his position might not have been similarly allured by the promise of a world at long last made safe for democracy. Would that have felt like compromise with the powers that be, or more like a bold challenge to cynicism and realpolitik?
Dewey predictably and perhaps to a slight extent creditably met the charge of “acquiescence” with a slap at ivory tower self-indulgence. But, again with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to see his notorious and recriminatory falling out with Randolph Bourne as anything but a stain on Dewey’s pragmatic legacy and a personal embarrassment.
Bourne represented the youthful, hopeful future of a movement that already saw itself as the vanguard of a democratizing world order that would rapidly repudiate politics-as-usual. Adding tragedy to sadness, the 1918 influenza epidemic cruelly denied him and so many others of his generation an opportunity to embody and realize their idealistic dreams. It’s not hard to understand this cohort’s feeling of having been sold out by the very mentors who’d first imbued in them their confidence in a new awakening.
So, it’s entirely understandable that this episode would have left a bad taste of betrayal in the mouths of Bourne’s generation Is it fair to Dewey, though, to suggest that his judgment was motivated by anything other than the strongest pragmatic intentions?
His political progressivism was always modulated by temperamental moderation, and perhaps moderation as such merits reservation. I don’t think it deserves automatic association with the worst connotations of “expedience,” “conciliation,” and “compromise.” Maybe Bourne and Jane Addams “got it right, and Dewey got it wrong” - but wrong in good faith, not wrong for compromising the highest democratic and melioristic ideals of Deweyan pragmatism in exchange for “political efficacy” or unrestrained militarism.
And that might be enough, the clock may say it’s enough, to launch our discussion…
But if it’s not, here are a few additional observations/provocations:
On the annoying notion that “military intelligence” is oxymoronic: is it not at least debatable whether the specific form of intelligence that strategizes armed conflict is a far less inclusive intelligence than Dewey always stumped for, an organic and anticipatory intelligence that looks far beyond present battlefields, skirmishes, and geopolitical circumstances and contemplates our situation as links in the chain of the “continuous human community”?
On James’s statement that peace and war mean much the same, in military mouths, with only a temporal qualification (peace now implying war later): the analogy which sees a parallel implication, with pragmatism now taken to mean compromise (in an unflattering sense) insinuates that pragmatic philosophers lust for compromise in the way some military men are popularly supposed to lust for battle. I don’t believe I’ve encountered that form of lustfulness in most of my pragmatic comrades.
On Napoleon’s contempt for compromise: if our overriding pragmatic aspiration is to make non-militaristic resolutions of conflict more frequent and likely, earning a Napoleon’s respect for our non-compromising intransigence seems highly unconducive to that end (if in fact it’s historically correct that the only honorable course recognized by military conquerors is the pursuit of conquest).
On James’s claim that war is an instinct “bred into our bone and marrow”: that’s rhetorical excess, surely, but must be understood as also recognizing our “instinct” to live life strenuously, energetically, effortfully, amelioratively… not just to fight for fighting’s sake. Indeed, that wider instinct is the very condition for the possibility of wanting to identify moral equivalences for war in the first place.
“a pragmatist is more like a Sisyphus, fighting against even these supposed facts of human nature. And when Camus famously concludes that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, I propose here that we must imagine Sisyphus pragmatic”: Sisyphus is contemptuous of such facts but not in denial of them. If he’s pragmatic, it’s because he acknowledges and repudiates the only visible alternative - just as he acknowledges and repudiates the possibility of suicide. In both cases he stands for life.
“anti-war pragmatism says that if neither of the two major political parties in United States politics sees anti-war as live option, we should create a party that does”: party or movement… our system does not reward 3d parties, while effective movements do sometimes alter parties constructively.
“Common pragmatism gives in to the voices; common pessimism says nothing can be done in the face of those voices; prophetic pragmatism takes a risk in continuing to oppose those voices”: I get that. But in our most recent presidential election, would a prophetic pragmatist have supported “Bernie or bust,” given the far more ominous risk of electing Trump?
[Fiala…]
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In conclusion: these are aggressive, unstable, uncertain times. We could use a stable genius at the helm! Our panel's consensus, it seems to me, is that in such soul-trying times we need to be more aggressively selective in expressing our aggressive tendencies (both native and culturally instilled) in some arenas, and repressing them in others. Again, controlled aggression has its place.
But in this place, on this subject, Mr. Vonnegut (whose museum and tweeting typewriter I look forward to visiting before heading home) gets the last word, once more:
"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
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Appendix-
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Appendix-
The Moral Equivalent of War by William James
The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet… (continues)
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This essay was originally a speech delivered to students at Stanford University in 1906. It was later published in an essay collection.
Charles Darwin (
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