With the Olympics over we can turn our attention back to the election. Clinton has a huge lead and will probably be the first woman US president. But her election to the presidency may give her opponents moral license to attack her viciously without being accused of misogyny. For our next meeting, we will explore moral licensing and how it applies to Clinton and how misogyny originates in men.
- Malcolm Gladwell explains moral licensing
- TED Talk on how the culture of manhood leads to misogyny
------------------------------ Updated 9/2/16 --------------------------
Here are the other video shown at the meeting:
Feminist Activists Protest Rousseff Ouster
America’s powerful female politicians tell us how they broke the glass ceiling
Trump Appeals to Blacks, at 6:36 to 8:46
Here are the other video shown at the meeting:
Feminist Activists Protest Rousseff Ouster
America’s powerful female politicians tell us how they broke the glass ceiling
Trump Appeals to Blacks, at 6:36 to 8:46
Why should people who didn't vote for Hillary feel licensed to attack her. If they didn't vote for her, where do their bonafides come from?
ReplyDeleteI hope there are lots of women at the discussion.
In 2009, when Obama became the first black president, many felt that America became post racial. This gave cover, at least initially, to his harshest critics, even though they did not vote for him.
DeleteThere is a school of thought within social science that argues that human beings create stories about the world and their place in it in order to give themselves meaning and significance in what might otherwise be a chaotic universe. And once we have created such a story (best shared with others), we are loath to give it up. Therefore, when we act in a way that is contrary to our life-sustaining story (whether out of doubt, guilt, social pressure, etc.), we do so with some hesitation and may even use that action to justify our persistence in holding to our original narrative. If this theory is valid, it would not only help explain moral licensing but it would go far in explaining why humans will go to such great lengths, including killing and dying, to support a narrative—whether one that validates the superiority of a race, nation, gender, religion, ethnicity, or whatever.
ReplyDeleteIf the narrative put a person in a superior position, he would be reluctant to give it up. But what if the narrative puts a person in an inferior position? Is it possible that some people do not want to give up their inferior roles? Does this explain why some women support Trump?
DeleteThe woman who supports Trump may do so because she perceives that his message resonates with the “truth” as she understands it, and it is the “truth” that places her in a “right” relationship with reality. Certainly, being in a right relationship with the ultimate meaning and purpose of the universe puts one in a preferable position, but only because being right is better than being wrong and not necessarily because it makes one superior.
ReplyDeleteIt is important to recognize that the narratives we’re talking about here are those sometimes referred to as grand narratives, that is, those produced and sustained by cultures and which transcend any individual life or experience. Christianity and Islam are current examples of such grand narratives, as is liberalism, or conservatism, or “American Exceptionalism,” and so on. That is, they are the kinds of stories that cultures have produced to sustain themselves in the face of chaos and meaninglessness for tens of thousands of years or longer. Without such stories, humans are left alone to face mortality, and as Ernest Becker argued in Escape From Evil (1975:4), “what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.” That is, we need to believe that our lives count for something.
In order, then, to ensure that our lives matter we imbed them in these larger cultural narratives. Peter Berger in The Sacred Canopy (1967:54) speaks of “nomoi” and observed that: “The nomos locates the individual’s life in an all-embracing fabric of meanings that, by its very nature, transcends that life. The individual who adequately internalizes these meanings at the same time transcends himself. His birth, the various stages of his biography and, finally, his future death may now be interpreted by him in a manner that transcends the unique place of these phenomena in his experience.” Thus, in order for the narrative to have maximum benefit in shielding one from the fear of chaos and insignificance, it needs to be shared.
A woman who supports Trump may do so, then, because she perceives his views on women to be more consistent with the narrative that gives her and her fellow travelers meaning than with the views on women held by Clinton and her supporters. As Berger suggests, it is that larger story that sustains her in the face of meaninglessness and chaos. She and those who share her views would likely argue that it’s better to have less power in this world than to be out of step with the transcendent narrative (better to save the soul and lose the world, etc.), a narrative that she and her co-religionists most likely believe to reflect the wishes of the Almighty. Thus, in reinforcing her story about humanity she is not placing herself in a disadvantaged position in the larger scheme of things. Indeed, she is attempting to secure her place in the “right relationship” on center stage, precisely where she is “supposed” to be, not unlike Muslim women who fight for the “right” to wear the “burkini.”
In a more extreme example, the suicide bomber gives up his or her very life in order to reinforce the larger narrative that places them and their co-believers at the center of the story of humankind, as evidenced by the phrase in praise of Allah often shouted at the moment of death. So the consequences of reality production can be profound.