Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 12:46:59 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Easy Virtue or Hard Choices (was ethics and intentions


G'day Carrol and Yoshie,

Here comes some of my bourgeois innocence again.  Apologies in advance.

>>I agree with Yoshie that there is no necessity for such "hard choices" to
>>exist in a minimally decent society, or at most to be marginal. I do not
>>think it even remotely utopian to believe such, since in fact humanity got
>>along very well without bourgeois morality (i.e. a morality of "hard
>>choices") for about 100,000 years.

I wasn't aware we went without hard choices for 100 000 years!  This may
well have been so, but I'd love Carrol or Yoshie to tell us why it might
have been.  Hard moral choices explicitly appear in folk stories going back
to the first written records of extant folk tales (eg the  *Epic of
Gilgamesh*).  Are you merely saying that instrumental necessity in hard
lives effectively gave the sorts of choices we call 'hard' much 'easier'
(ie, 'We must leave our children to die, else we all die'' or 'We must take
those women from their tribe by force, else we will die out')?  Obviously
the conditions of 'primitive communism' - an externally imposed necessity -
don't apply now - where communism would be the product of voluntary action
in conditions of plenty and relative security.  I guess I just don't have
the imagination to see what you're arguing.

>>My prime example of what seems to me an absolute LUST FOR HARD CHOICES is
>>the insistence of so many people that though they are fully for freedom of
>>choice on the issue of abortion, they want that choice to be a HARD CHOICE
>>for the woman. So I would further suggest that the LUST FOR HARD CHOICES
>>is most often at least a remnant of patriarchy, more often positive
>>misogyny. It was in opposition to this lust that I insisted in an earlier
>>debate that we had no right to question a woman's reasons for abortion,
>>and that if she wanted one on a whim, there was no reason to condemn or
>>even frown on that choice.

Seeing a hard choice is necessarily reflective of a 'lust for hard
choices'?  How do you justify that leap?

>Damn right, Carrol. Moralism is always pornographic. It is almost true that
>the "LUST FOR HARD CHOICES is most often at least a remnant of patriarchy,
>more often positive misogyny." But I want to make a qualification. It is
>not a "remnant" of patriarchy. It is a defining feature of the marriage of
>capitalism and patriarchy, which was not widespread before its emergence.
>Cultural forms that emerged with capitalism (such as the bourgeois novel
>and melodrama) thrive on the *sadistic gaze* cast upon *female agony* as
>well as *masochistic identification* with it; visions of women racked by
>HARD CHOICES are materials out of which both generic and gendered
>discourses of bourgeois individualism have been staged.

Certainly such discourses have been staged on the angst of women's hard
choices.  And plenty on men's too.  So?  And, anyway, the agony of others
is not necessarily engaged with sadistically (although I'm personally aware
of an indentification tendency, which might _very broadly_ be deemed
masochistic) - do you imagine Madam Bouverie's agonies sexually arouse us,
Yoshie?  They don't.  Just as Hamlet's don't.  Just because a widely shared
view effectively causes suffering for many women, does not mean that view
represents misogyny.  Just as the traditional view that men should do the
dangerous work (eg soldiering) does not reflect a loathing for men (or, if
it does, 'tis a self-loathing).  You can not so easily read intention or
inclination from consequence.  You may be seeing the consequence of a
complex of relations - and most of us are agreed those amount to
patriarchal capitalism - but I think the word 'misogyny' is far too often
thrown at people.

I'll shut up before I get myself in more trouble.

Cheers,
Rob.







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Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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