Day: November 1, 2000

Why Reading Is Bad for Women

Like a lot of parents, some of the best times I spend with my toddler is reading to her. It’s fascinating to watch children’s reactions to stories and seem them start to acquire pre-reading skills. Leave it to postmodernist feminists to argue that by encouraging my daughter’s interest in reading I’m committing an act of violence that inaugurates her into hierarchical patriarchal oppression.

Writing for Salon.Com, freelance writer Amy Halloran describes attending an academic conference where the University of Southern California’s Peggy Kamuf likened teaching children to read to a terrorist act. For those of you who don’t follow the wacky world of academic postmodernism, Kamuf is a scholar (and I use that word very loosely) noted for her translations of works by the godfather of deconstructionism Jacques Derrida. To sum up deconstruction very quickly, it holds that the words you are reading right now have absolutely no inherent meaning. If you think this is a description of a recent football game, your interpretation is just as valid as any other. No meaning, no truth — everything is just social constructs (even seemingly biological phenomenon such as pregnancy are just social constructs according to some postmodernists).

So what’s left if there is no meaning or truth? Politics. Rather then whether a statement is true or false, what the postmodernists care about is whether or not a statement is oppressive. This is the basis on which Kamuf attacks reading. Unfortunately, Halloran only paraphrases Kamuf, but here’s how she describes her paper,

She presented a paper (she read it aloud!) to a crowd of about 40 people, most of them academics, in which she insisted that teaching kids to read initiates them into the patriarchal construct of the family unit and society at large. This initiation is, according to her, a brutal and painful rite of passage. It is so painful, she added, that people don’t even recollect learning to read. The memory is repressed, said Kamuf, because the act is violent.

Halloran thinks she can paint Kamuf into a logical corner and confronts her after the reading of the paper by pointing out that if what she’s said is true, then the act of teaching/learning to speak would be the original locus of violent indoctrination. Rather than recoil at this idea, Kamuf simply replies, “Of course, of course. We all know that.” (And Halloran notices a common motif in radical feminist use of postmodernism — Kamuf reserves her attacks for mothers who teach children to read. This is not actually that odd, since a number of radical feminist attacks on things like the family tend to focus on imagined horrors passed on by mothers. A lot of these folks seem to have serious mother-daughter issues that come out in their approach.)

Of course the claim that learning to speak and/or read is oppressive is so absurd that one often wishes to avoid attacking it, which gives it far more weight and credence than it deserves. The main point I take from this report is that higher institutions of learning have largely become refuges for a growing number of morons passing off their ignorance as if it were knowledge. And these are the folks we’re counting on to teach coming generations of college students. Yikes.

Don’t think, by the way, that the attack on reading is isolated to Kamuf or even postmodernists. Surgery professor (!) Leonard Shlain has gotten a lot of publicity and support for his formulation of the reading-as-oppression thesis in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. Shlain starts with a common feminist shibboleth — that men are inherently “left brain”, logical, abstract thinkers while women are inherently “right brain”, holistic, creative, visual thinkers — and takes it to its logical extremes.

Since reading is supposedly a left brain, linear, analytic activity, it follows, according to Shlain, that the rise of literacy and the alphabet was also the rise of misogyny and patriarchy. As his web site summarizes the book’s thesis,

Shlain argues that literacy reinforced the brain¹s linear, abstract, predominantly masculine left hemisphere at the expense of the holistic, iconic feminine right one. This shift upset the balance between men and women initiating the disappearance of goddesses, the abhorrence of images, and, in literacy’s early stages, the decline of women’s political status. Patriarchy and misogyny followed.

Ironically Shlain sees the rise of visual media such as television as restoring equity. I guess I should be encouraging my daughter to put down those books and watch more television. Actually to be fair to him, Shlain doesn’t exactly disparage literacy per se, but his claim that linear thinking (and hence reading) fundamentally disadvantages women vs. men is absurd.

It is interesting that after a couple hundred years we’ve come full circle from when traditionalist anti-feminists argued that teaching girls linear thinking skills was a waste of time, to contemporary radical feminists who argue that teaching girls linear thinking skills is inherently oppressive.

This is progress?

Source:

Is nothing sacred? Amy Halloran, Salon.Com, October 30, 2000.

Stop the Social Security Madness

Last week Cathy Young had a very well done article for Salon.Com arguing that at least one good reason for voting for Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush was his solid approach to Social Security reform. She has no illusions about Bush, hilariously noting that, “Of course it would be nice if Social Security privatization had a spokesman other than Bush; the man probably couldn’t make a convincing case for celebrating Mother’s Day, let alone privatizing retirement benefits,” but argues that compared to Al Gore’s “pernicious … handling of the issue” Bush is a solid alternative.

Now, I don’t plan on voting for Bush but Young’s dissection of Gore’s arguments are sound.

First, there is no Social Security trust fund. Look, by law when Social Security has a surplus the only thing it can do with that money is invest in government bonds. So Social Security buys a ton of government bonds, and the government takes the money and spends it. When Social Security wants that surplus it has to redeem the bonds. And guess where that money comes from? That’s right, out of our taxes. Gore recognizes this since his proposal calls for going one step further and paying Social Security recipients in part directly from general tax funds.

Second, Social Security isn’t a “sacred trust” (as I saw Gore call it recently). Rather it’s an investment opportunity that is so bad the government has to threaten people with jail if they don’t contribute. The return on Social Security is in the low single digits. You could probably get better terms from a loan shark.

Third, Social Security is largely an income transfer from the poor to the rich. Gore goes in front of Democratic audiences and says Bush will never be able to privatize Social Security for today’s young workers while simultaneously keeping its obligations to the elderly. But one of the problem is that Social Security transfers income to the elderly regardless of income. The wealthy retired person with an annual income of $100,000 gets the same Social Security benefit as the poorer retired person with an income of $18,000. And yet the idea of actually means testing Social Security benefits so they go to the elderly who truly need the benefit is anathema to Democrats. Apparently it breaks the sacred trust they have to tax the poor to subsidize the rich.

A system that combines privatization for younger workers while means testing benefits for recipients would go a long way to solving the problems with the poor performance of the SOcial Security system while simultaneously guaranteeing minimum income levels for the elderly poor.

(Which probably means it makes far too much sense to ever have a realistic chance of happening.)

NOVA on Holocaust Denial

This week the PBS show NOVA has an hour-long broadcast on Holocaust Denial focusing on the recently concluded libel trial against Deborah Lipstadt in Great Britain. Lipstadt, author of Denying the Holocaust, was sued in the UK by Holocaust denier David Irving who claimed she libeled him. Even with the UK’s ridiculously lax libel laws — she had to prove not only that the Holocaust was a historical fact but that Irving intentionally distorted historical facts to arrive at his denial position — Lipstadt easily prevailed. The NOVA broadcast apparently recreates some of the issues raised at the libel trial.

The Dark Side of Wicca’s Mainstream Appeal

The other day I pointed out how surprised I was that Wicca is now relatively mainstream (whether or not its popularity is a recent fad or a long-term trend remains to be seen). There is of course a downside to that — the more exposure Wicca gets the more I see articles that are part of a backlash against the religious movement.

For example, a lawsuit by a young Oklahoma woman whom school officials believed was a Wiccan has been covered widely because of the preposterous nature of the charges — allegedly she was suspended because her principal became convinced she cast a spell that caused a teacher’s illness. Unfortunately state laws prevent the school from commenting on the particulars of the case so we’re only getting the young girl’s side of the case, but there have been similar cases, including more serious ones involving child custody cases.

One of the things the young woman alleges is that officials saw a five-pointed star within a circle that she drew on her hand and told her she couldn’t display such occult symbols. It shouldn’t be forgotten that with the big Satanism scare propelled by some Christian fundamentalists and publicity seekers like Geraldo Rivera, some people urged even things like the Star of David be banned as an occult symbol (fringe fundamentalist Bob Larson recommended this in his book Satanism).

Maybe there is more to the story than the young woman is letting on, but the alleged behavior is hardly inconsistent with some of the more hysterical reactions to Wicca.

A common place I see anti-Wiccan articles are in conservative publications who are horrified at the rise of Wicca on campuses and see it as part of a general anti-Christian and/or anti-Western civilization trend. I think these arguments are largely misguided. One of the things a lot of conservatives forget is that, at least on college campuses, the Christian ministers are as likely to be far left wing activists as are anybody else. The most radical pro-socialist anti-Western civilization person I’ve personally met was a campus minister. On the other the basic underlying philosophy of Wicca is very much a pro-freedom ideology, even if the particular views of particular Wiccans definitely aren’t (like many religious people I’ve met, many of the Wiccans I’ve met tend to have a lot of moral distance between their professed moral outlook and their actual particular views which, in general, are very statist).

Another problem with Wicca is that some Wiccans complain about Christianity’s ahistoricism (such as the problem with Halloween I pointed out yesterday), but then perpetuate their own myths as encapsulated in this excerpt from a Reuters story on the Oklahoma case,

The lawsuit alleged Blackbear’s civil rights also were violated when school officials prohibited her from wearing or drawing in school any symbols related to Wicca, a religion that dates back to pre-Christian nature worship.

There is simply no basis in fact for claiming that Wicca is in any way a continuation of pre-Christian pagan religions. Aside from the fact that such claims absurdly oversimplify the incredibly broad range of practices that fall under the title of pre-Christian pagan religions, Wicca is, in fact, very much a creature and product of the 20th century. To say it is a continuation of ancient traditions is deceptive in the same way that the claims of 19th century pseudo-religious movements that they were a continuation of ancient Egyptian religious practices was deceptive (and in much the same way — the claims by those groups created a vast array of misconceptions about ancient Egypt that still persist in the same way that Wicca’s claim to be an extension of pre-Christian pagan religions is creating a series of myths about those ancient religions). In fact one of the things that always strikes me about Wicca is just how dependent it is upon cultural strains that are in many respects Christian in origin (especially it’s individualism).

The lasting impression of Wicca and its practitioners that I have is just how ordinary the religion is. Most news coverage, whether positive or negative, really plays up the exotic aspect that comes with calling oneself a witch. But after you scratch below the surface, Wicca’s pretty much like any of the other countless new religious movement that’s sprung up in human societies for millennia.

PC Data Report on Napster Users’ Behavior

The Register (UK) has a story previewing an upcoming PC Data report that hammers home my point (and, unfortunately, the record industry’s point) about Napster — once people have integrated free music as part of their lives, they stop buying compact discs:

PC Data’s latest survey of the buying habits of some 120,000 US home-based Net surfers shows that Napster users soon cut the number of albums they buy, once they get proficient at downloading songs from the MP3 sharing service.

The company measures sales through online stores. It found that “new Napster users are just as likely to purchase music at cdnow.com after initially downloading Napster software. However, 90 days after downloading Napster software, consumers’ online music purchases plummet”.

The PC Data report also found that after getting familiar with the application, Napster users were far more likely to visit web retailers like CDNow, but they were less likely to actually make purchases — they tended to visit the sites to find out what new music to search for on Napster!