Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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theory and pain
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
6:42 AM
Some days I feel like a moderate. Others, I am solidly in the Howard Zinn left wing "I don't believe these people haven't learned from history and their greater environment" camp.
Last night I had a lively back and forth with a friend about unions. He said that, all things being equal, if he had a choice between a company with a mandatory-membership union and one without one, he'd choose to buy from the non-union company. I asked if he realized "union" implied a unified bloc as a bargaining unit. He did. I asked if he realized how difficult it was to keep a union in a place where the edges could be nibbled away by intimidation and such. He did. I asked if he thought unions were necessary in places where bad employers know they can act with impugnity. He did.
He said, "Just because something is necessary, doesn't mean that it's acceptable or good. I don't need to support it."
While I found this attitude logical, I found it so drastically impractical. Why erode an institution without the will to reform or replace it, ideally with a better model! I came off as disdainful of his attitude. I hurt his feelings, and probably his opinion of me as a rational debater.
After all, I don't usually champion sentimentality over reason. It's just that, sometimes, I think compassion changes the parameters of an argument. Human cost. Human values. The art of the possible trumps the art of theory.
This morning, walking in to work at the Kennedy School, I remembered a recent reaction to the KSG dean's recent editorial about Katrina relief. An associate with my e-government group slammed the dean for sentimentality -- essentially saying that he saw no evidence that there was systematic ghettoization or deprivation of the poor, and that people concerned with poverty should be thinking more about how to motivate people to take power over their own lives.
These may seem like very different arguments, but to me there is a common thread. Both of these people, I feel, are judging situations on a theoretical basis of "What Should Be," theoretically, rather than "What Can Be," or even "What Is."
And "What Is" is pain.
I hear people with opinions about poverty and the disadvantaged who have never lived among poor people, and it makes me wonder. It makes me dubious, because they have never live outside of the American Dream. They will never have to tolerate a bad employer. Their education and class give them an excess of empowerment.
"Just because I've never been poor," they protest, "doesn't mean I don't have a right to an opinion."
And, admittedly, just because they're rich doesn't mean I truly get to dismiss them out of hand.
But to me, this is much the same question as that of pain management.
The experience of pain is very person and individual, yet universal. I remember hearing people say that babies don't feel pain -- and being a mother, I don't believe them. I remember the old argument that you shouldn't administer pain relief to people in chronic pain for a variety of proper, upright, neo-puritan justifications. But once someone has been in pain, chronic pain, living with pain -- even if their personal decisions don't change, it's likely that their sympathies with others will.
It's typical that people of privilege commenting on poverty or race or gender or disability take high horse theoretical positions that almost universally have a subtext of "GET OVER IT! Get over the pain. Why can't you just take power in your situation and make it work? Get some backbone. Why can't you be like me? I don't have problems with these issues, and I bet I wouldn't in your position either."
I wonder if any of these people would be willing to gut chickens in a processing plant in rural North Carolina for a year, or to try to raise a family of four on an AFDC check or two minimum wage salaries? I wonder if these people would feel hurt if they were taken less seriously in their professions because of the color of their skin, their accent, or the size of their bust?
I wonder if these people are even aware that they should be grateful that they can have an opinion untinged by the kind of chronic, relentless, numbing and demoralizing pain and resentment underlying the systems they theorize about?
They have a right to their opinions. And I have a right to my skepticism, however personally they may take it. This is not class warfare -- just a frank statement that some things can't be weighted by theory without experience.
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