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Notes 1-11 | Note 12 | Notes 13-25

13. p. 234/35: "Let me again quote the French scholars Ferry and Renaut: 'The style of the sixties... can be grouped around a pathos of victimization.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " French Philosophy of the Sixties, p. 14." Lesa Powell continued (from Kim's notes):

      "Note also that, as Cook-Greuter pointed out, the green individualistic self tends to see orange conspiracies everywhere (see IC lecture 4). This is not to deny that humans are involved in rich webs of relationships. It is to deny that that is all they are. Instead, human beings are holons, or agency-in-communion. Postmodernism denied the agency and emphasized solely the networks of communions, either as linguistic systems or as sliding chains of signifiers--and thus denied agency and responsibility, and hence inadvertently ended up supporting victim chic.

      "Small wonder that postmodernism has actually been brought into the legal system to explain why none of the various criminals are responsible for their actions. Since in reality we are all nothing but parts of a web of relationships, then the web of relationships is actually to blame. 'When a suburban Philadelphia woman dressed in army fatigues went on a shooting rampage in a shopping mall, killing and wounding several people before being captured, [Swarthmore College psychology professor Kenneth] Gergen insisted that society should apply a "postmodern" concept of justice to the case. In Gergen's view, this means recognizing that "the concept of the individual who chooses wrong loses tenability."' The death of the subject, you see. Thus, blame 'should not be attributed to the individual alone but to the array of relationships in which he or she is a part.'

      "Gergen goes on to point out that the idea is 'to vitally expand the sensitivity to the network of relations in which we participate'--a network we can therefore sue the daylights out of if anything goes wrong. Gergen notes with great satisfaction that, in the case of the woman who opened fire on the mall, 'Lawyers have broadly extended the network of responsibility, bringing suit against mental health officials who knew of her distraught condition, the local police department... the shopping mall... the shop which sold her a weapon, and so on.'

      "Of course the self is embedded in endless networks of relationship, and of course those relationships are partially constitutive of the self. Nonetheless, the self is also a focal point of consciousness, will, and relative autonomy, and as such, the adult self is responsible for its general behavior (barring severe and specific dissociative pathology, which affects, not 374% of the population, but less than 1%). Were I Gergen, I might pause to reflect that, with only six degrees of separation, Gergen himself, if what he is saying is true, will soon enough be found guilty for all those shootings."

14. p. 237: "'Only genuine victims can claim "sensitivity" and "authenticity"... in which victim status and the insistent demands for sensitivity are played as trump cards....'"

     Carlton continued reading (from Kim's notes): "'Victimspeak,' says Sykes, 'is the trigger that permits the unleashing of an emotional and self-righteous response to any perceived slight. Victimspeak insists upon moral superiority and moral absolutism and thus tends to put an abrupt end to conversation; the threat of its deployment is usually enough to keep others from even considering raising a controversial subject. Ironically, this style of linguistic bullying often parades under the banner of 'sensitivity'" ( A Nation of Victims, p. 17).

15. p. 237: "This implies... 'the opinions, feelings, and prejudices of private individuals are a legitimate target of political action.... The effort to control not only the behavior of citizens, but the thoughts and feelings of persons.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Quoted in A Nation of Victims, p. 167."

16. p. 238: "'In almost every case,' as one reporter notes...'The listed effects of such intangible harassment include... a sense of embarrassment from being ridiculed.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " A Nation of Victims, p. 171."

17. p. 239: "Carlton threw her arms up... the audience squirmed uncomfortably."

     Margaret Carlton continued (from Kim's notes): "For example--and people, please, look what is happening here--in the late 1980s, the University of Michigan adopted a sweeping 'speech code.' Students were warned that they could be suspended or expelled for any act, 'verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap....' Because the policy was so broad--and vague--it raised the obvious question of how it would be enforced. How would students know exactly what constituted stigmatizing someone on the basis of, say, 'ancestry'? More important, what proof of offense would be needed? The university's answer was direct: No proof is needed.'

      "Why was no corroborating evidence required? 'Experience at the university,' a UM publication explained, 'has been that people almost never make false complaints about discrimination.' That included incidents where there were no witnesses. In all such cases, the accused is presumed guilty. Since the crime is hurt feelings, the only evidence required is the hurt feelings."

18. p. 240: "Carlton finished... I put a copy in my notebooks."

     Margaret Carlton on multiculturalism and the politics of recognition (from Kim's notes; Kim's comment in the margin says: "This topic is continued with Lesa Powell's lecture, note 23").

      "We have seen that, according to virtually all schools of developmental psychology, the postconventional waves of selfhood and identity (orange, green, and integral) all rest on an ethnocentric, conventional, blue-meme base. That is, the individual self rests upon--and grows out of--a network of conventional dialogue, membership, and shared experiences. G. H. Mead called this 'the generalized other,' which means that the subjective self is actually formed in an intersubjective process of dialogue and common recognition. (The cases of 'wolf boy'--humans raised in the wild--show that a human being, left on its own, will not develop a personal self.) I can only become aware of myself as a person in a community of others who recognize me as a person. That is, I have to be able to take the role of others--and see how they see me--in order for me to see myself as well! Thus, my very identity is formed through a process of reciprocal recognition with the cultures and subcultures in which I find myself. Moreover, out of this ethnocentric blue-meme foundation, a more expansive postconventional identity (orange and higher) can then be formed. In all cases, a cherishing of ethnocentric roots is indispensable for further growth, and thus a society ought to attempt to accommodate a multicultural richness on the way to a worldcentric compassion.

      "Agency-in-communion (and intersubjectivity) is true at all levels of the spectrum, but becomes especially foundational at blue. That's an important technical point. In this argument I am not saying that it is only at blue that intersubjective processes become important, because intersubjectivity itself (the Lower-Left quadrant) goes all the way up, all the way down. But at blue, or mythic-membership, these intersubjective structures and processes are especially crucial, because they help to define the specific cultural forms that will mold subsequent development.

     "That is another important truth contained in multiculturalism and what has been called the 'politics of recognition.' Since my identity is formed in part by exchanges with the surrounding culture, then if that culture treats me in a demeaning and degrading fashion, my very identity might be crippled from the start. As one scholar summarized this view, 'The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves' (Charles Taylor, in Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, p. 25).

      "All of which is generally true, I believe. But then the further claim is made that, since the attitudes of the dominate culture can cripple the identity of the minority, then the attitude of the larger culture must be changed to an attitude of mutual respect--not just tolerance, but respect. And here the multicultural argument once again slides into extremes, driven by a noble green intention gummed up with grandiose dreams. A society can definitely legislate tolerance, which applies mostly to exterior behavior (I don't have to like you, but I am not allowed to kill you). But a society cannot legislate respect, compassion, or love, which apply to interior psychological states, not exterior behavior. In fact, as we saw with Carol Gilligan, mutual (nonethnocentric) care and respect come into full blossom only in the postconventional waves of development--which is less than 20% of the American population. (Depending on the developmental scale that is used, the percentage of the adult American population at a stable postconventional moral level is anywhere from 10% to 30%; the most adequate generalization is less than 20%.)

      "The green meme, once again, is taking some of its own characteristics and attempting to foist them on the population at large, without taking into account the realities of the situation or the actual effect on most people. For the actual affect of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition, as generally preached, is to simply encourage fixation and/or regression to ethnocentric blue-meme identities. Not a way to honor our ethnocentric blue-meme roots and then from there to move into a worldcentric, postconventional, and mutual respect for all peoples, but simply a way to remain ecstatically mired in our ethnocentric identities and grotesque prejudices: there is the actual effect of multiculturalism as generally preached by the green meme and as made a rapturous religion of fragmentation by the boomeritis version.

      "If we truly want a society based on the politics of mutual recognition, then we must not simply demand that everybody be the sensitive green self, but rather find ways to help people grow and develop to the sensitive green self (and even higher). This requires at least six stages of hierarchical growth--a hierarchical growth that green aggressively denies (because green misguidedly rejects all hierarchies). Thus green is actively fighting the path to green--and then persecuting people who are not green!

      "Well, this boomeritis version of multiculturalism has seized control in liberal politics, in education, and in social services. It has become the lingua franca of the mean green meme; to challenge it is to suffer the wrath of the kindly Inquisitors. Jeremy Bernstein is surely right when he says, of this 'ideological multiculturalism' (which champions ethnocentrism as an end in itself and not as means to worldcentric compassion), 'The fact is that assaulting the establishment, declaiming against the racism and sexism of society, reiterating the approved phrases about oppression and exclusion, promising to uncover previously neglected worlds, these require not a jot of courage these days. These are the sanctioned activities of the counter-establishment, the gestures and idioms that gain approval and lead to good opportunities, to jobs, to prizes, to book contracts. It takes no bravery to be a multiculturalist.... Indeed, courage is now required to transgress the dictatorship of virtue' ( The Dictatorship of Virtue, p. 344).

19. p. 241: "'Today's obsession with difference is distinguished by... "essentialists".'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Twilight of Common Dreams, p. 164."

20. p. 241: "As one critic puts it, 'Today's obsession with difference... cultivate a rapture of marginality in the protected enclaves of the academy.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Twilight of Common Dreams, p. 149. See Professing Feminism, by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, for an insightful look at professorial feminism."

21. p. 241: "Powell paused... She smiled."

     Powell added (from Kim's notes): "In all of this, isn't the regression obvious? The regressive trend from worldcentric to ethnocentric is hard to miss, even by reporters who do not couch it specifically in those terms: 'There was a swerve, in short, toward conventional interest-group politics, paralleling the philosophical swerve from universalism (worldcentric) to the denial that any but group-bounded perspectives were possible (ethnocentric). The universalism of the early women's movement, which sought for women the rights and powers guaranteed for all by the Enlightenment, yielded to a preoccupation with the inner life of feminism and the distinct needs of feminists. So, too, with people of color, especially blacks--the swerve from civil rights, emphasizing a universal condition and universalizable rights, to cultural separatism, emphasizing difference and distinct needs.'" The Twilight of Common Dreams, p. 153.

22. p. 241: "... as David Berreby puts it, 'Americans have a standard playbook for creating a political-cultural identity... changing how the group is seen by those outside it, for instance.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Sciences, March/April 1997."

23. p. 241: "It's just that... I attempt to salvage my ethnocentric identity in a way that effectively sabotages, destroys, its very acknowledgment."

     Lesa Powell (from Kim's notes; her margin comment says, "This is the follow-up to Carlton's points, note 18").

      "Kwame Appiah, Professor of Afro-American studies and Philosophy at Harvard, points out that when individuals define themselves merely in ethnocentric terms, such an identity cripples--actually sabotages--their own growth to autonomy and full self-realization. His argument is compelling, sophisticated, and complex--but we can summarize it simply by saying that, if you wish to remain identified merely with your blue meme, then you will never find your own orange, green, or integral capacities. This is not to say you should demean blue, deny it, or oppress it, obviously; only that it should, as always, be transcended and included in your own--and your culture's own--ongoing growth and development. Appiah agrees that if any ethnic groups have been disadvantaged, then that disadvantage should be directly and compassionately addressed, which might include a type of politics of recognition. But if that is where the story ends, then we have simply ' replaced one kind of tyranny with another.' (In Charles Taylor et al., Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition.) Yet such tyranny is the inevitable shadow of boomeritis pluralism.

      "In that book-- Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition--Charles Taylor advances an argument for multiculturalism that includes the segregated preservation of ethnic cultures, an argument that is rejected by Appiah and by Jürgen Habermas (in the same volume). I agree with Appiah and Habermas, for the reasons they state, but I add another: Taylor argues that mutual recognition is a necessary fact in the healthy formation of identity; that any dialogues that are not mutually respectful can cripple and deform identity; since everybody is potentially capable of a dialogue of rational exchange of mutual respect, then everybody should be accorded equal respect. But potential dialogues cannot have an effect on actual identity. And it does no good to simply declare that somebody has a potential for mutual recognition, for that is not sufficient to generate actual mutual respect. In fact, the portion of the population actually capable of postconventional mutual recognition is less than 20%, as we have often seen. Therefore any democratic society cannot, at this time, make mutual recognition a foundation for politics. Mutual tolerance, which demands only behavioral conformity, can--and should--be a foundation; but mutual respect--which demands interior growth--cannot be legislated.

      "Moreover, since such a small percentage of the population are at postconventional mutual respect, such respect is clearly not necessary for self development. In fact, truly great selves are often born from rising above the brutalities of their origins. It is true that a self is always a self-in-relationship (agency-in-communion; see note 12), but the self also has a degree of transcendence, wherein lies its potential greatness. How could we ever have produced a Martin Luther King, Jr., if mutual respect were necessary for good development? The fact is, genuine respect is merely one of dozens of factors affecting development. Of course I am in favor of it; but making it the most important factor or even the sole factor is misguided.

      "That all individuals would grow to a postconventional level of mutual respect is an ideal I hope eventually comes to pass; but it is not an ideal that can presently be the basis of a constitutional democracy, because in the large majority of the population, this is a potential, not an actual. The only type of politics of recognition that we can have at this point is one that is put into play by the present democratic citizenship of equal rights and responsibilities, behavioristically grounded, not ethnocentrically preserving or promoting.

      "This conclusion is similar to that reached by Appiah and by Habermas, summarized by Amy Gutmann as follows: 'Can there be a politics of recognition that respects a multitude of multicultural identities and does not script too tightly any one life? Both Appiah and Habermas... point to the possibility that some form of constitutional democracy may offer such a politics, based not on class, race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality, but rather on a democratic citizenship of equal liberties, opportunities, and responsibilities for individuals.' I agree.

      "Further, as Habermas points out, the potential for a type of respect for multiculturalism is already in place with the system of liberal rights in constitutional democracies, even if it needs to be continually unfolded and correctly understood. Any further rights--such as legally protecting the existence of certain ethnic cultures--are not only not necessary, they would actually cripple the free choices of those ethnic cultures, thus destroying their own authenticity.

      "Again I agree. I would only add that, ideally, any multicultural culture would be based on the Prime Directive, not originating as a legislation but as spontaneously embodied in postconventional development among citizens. This would encourage all individuals to grow and develop to those waves of existence where mutual respect can become a genuine reality, not a vague wish or cultural pretension, and such development would eventually find its way into uncoerced substantive legislation arrived at through procedural means. This is, in a sense, a middle way between those who wish a procedural republic of mere rights, and those who wish to specify a substantive form of the good life which democracies should politically inculcate as responsibilities. This middle way suggests that the development of consciousness brings individuals to a point where the procedural republic will be postconventional in crucial ways, resulting in a substantive version of the good life that protects everybody's version of the good life. We cannot impose on people, nor legislate for, the capacity for postconventional care and compassion. We can only provide the circumstances--educational, cultural, political--that will allow (but not demand) the most number of people to develop to the postconventional waves of existence, at which point the democratic system of rights and responsibilities will ensure, to the degree it is pragmatically possible, the best versions of the good life available, arrived at through procedural means, thus uniting substantive good life with a procedural republic (without regressing to blue-meme versions of the good life that wish to impose their versions of the good life on others. This is a postliberal, not preliberal, substantive stance)."

24. p. 242: "True pluralism... is not ethnocentric pluralism but universal pluralism."

     Lesa Powell continued (from Kim's notes):

      "Universal pluralism or integral pluralism has also been technically called 'integral-aperspectival,' which means that rich multicultural differences are cherished within a worldcentric universal space, in contrast to ethnocentric pluralism or pathological pluralism--or boomeritis pluralism--which recognizes only the aperspectival, but not the integral, not the universal, not the worldcentric.

      "The book Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law, by respected law professors Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, is a careful overview of boomeritis pluralism--which they call 'radical multiculturalism'--in the American legal system, and is highly recommended. Farber and Sherry particularly focus on critical race theory (e.g., Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado), radical legal feminists (Kathryn Abrams, Robin West, Catherine McKinnon), and critical legal studies. As legal theorist Richard Posner says in his review of the book ('The Skin Trade,' The New Republic, Oct. 13, 1997), 'The postmodern left is radically multiculturalist, but it is more, for the 'West' that it denigrates is not historically specific; it encompasses liberalism, capitalism, individualism, the Enlightenment, logic, and science, the values associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition, the concept of personal merit, and the possibility of objective knowledge. The postmodern left is well ensconced in American universities....'

      "'The most useful service that Beyond All Reason performs,' Posner concludes, 'is to cull from the extensive publications of the [radical multiculturalists] representative statements, such as that "racism and the Enlightenment are the same thing," or that "if you are black or Mexican, you should flee Enlightenment-based democracies like mad, assuming you have any choice."' To which Posner adds, 'Flee to where, I wonder?'"

25. p. 243: "Maya Angelou: '...This man, not born white, not born free, said I am a human being.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Discussion in the Shambhala Sun, January 1998."

Notes 1-11 | Note 12 | Notes 13-25