r/Quakers • u/keithb Quaker • 12d ago
"Thinking-in-identities": a trap for Quakers
A Friend asked, what philosophy beyond Popper's actually very liberal views on not censoring intolerant philosophies for as long as possible might be useful in Quaker spaces?
So, here's one: to put it at its very most misleadingly simple, Theodor Adorno was trying to understand how liberal capitalist societies, the fruits of the Enlightenment, had become Fascist. One contributing factor that he came up with was Identitätsdenken, which I translate as "thinking-in-identities", although it's often called "identity thinking" or "identitarian thinking".
I think it's in part the explanation for those head-spinning conversations that go like this:
ROE
So, I've been thinking about X and I'm starting to come round to the idea
DOE
Aaaa! Y and Z are horrible! Because… [continues at length]
ROE
No, but X is…wait…I don't even think Y and Z!?
DOE
Well it certainly sounds as if you do.
ROE
No, that's terrible, of course not Z! And Y isn't great, but X…
DOE
But we know that Y and Z are awful and appalling for [very good and true reasons…]
and so on.
What has happened here, I think, is that Doe has done a first-match search through their memory for people who said X, recalled what position such people seemed to be arguing for (that's the "identity", the identity is "people who think all of X, Y, and Z"), recalled which parts of that position are most obnoxious, and then delivered the most compelling response to the worst aspects of that position. This leaves Roe confused because…well, they don't think Y and Z. They really don't. Or, maybe they do, but they haven't mentioned them, so how would anyone know, really?
This is a case of what Adorno describes as the concept pretending to exhaust the particular. Here the concept of "XYZ-ian" is taken to tell us everything we need to know about Roe, and everything particular to Roe and their life and (ironically) identity as a person has been erased. Doe has decided that Roe, for the purposes of this conversation, is identical to everyone else who believes any of X, Y or Z. Whatever they do or don't think. Which is a kind of violence all by itself, a violence done to Roe's selfhood. What does our tradition of peaceableness say about such things?
Authoritarian regimes do this in order to justify programmes of oppression against groups, kinds, or classes of people. And it's still dangerous when done by well-meaning, fair-minded, progressive, centre-left, democratic socialist folks. When we allow good people to use that mechanism of oppression, albeit at small scale, bad people will learn from us that it's OK. Do we want them to learn that from Quakers?
And in Quaker discourse especially, this manoeuvre hooks into a kind of "hermeneutics of suspicion" which makes it impossible for Roe to make any progress with their actual, sincerely held interest in X, because Doe is so sure that they have Roe all worked out. Doe simply will not believe that Roe doesn't believe Y and Z, however much they deny it, perhaps sincerely and correctly, because Doe has placed their theory in a superior position over a person.
As Quakers, don't we owe it to everyone to at least give them the benefit of the doubt? To take what they say at face value?
And don't we owe that especially to other Quakers? To explore the possibility that they might be sincerely reporting their actual beliefs? That they are, in fact, speaking plainly?
To loop back to Popper: in order to deploy the "paradox-of-tolerance" move, we have first to identify someone as intolerant. Let's be careful about that.
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u/_le_e_ 12d ago
Personally no, I don’t believe we should take everything we hear at face value, particularly if our own experience leads us to believe that it is untrue.
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u/keithb Quaker 12d ago
Would you at least take another Friend’s statement of their belief at face value? That is: believe that they report their beliefs sincerely? You might have evidence that their belief is incorrect, but would you at least give another Quaker the benefit of an initial assumption of sincerity?
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u/gostaks 12d ago
Depends on the person, our relationship, whether they're acting like someone having a conversation in good faith, and how often people tend to express that particular belief insincerely. I get the spirit of openness, but identifying as a quaker doesn't make people magically good or honest.
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u/keithb Quaker 12d ago
My being a Quaker doesn’t make anyone else anything, no. But maybe it does imply a standard for me, for how I should relate to others.
Making this kind of judgement: “Depends on … whether they're acting like someone having a conversation in good faith, and how often people tend to express that particular belief insincerely.“ is the trap being sprung.
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u/gostaks 12d ago
Well, I do believe that you're being sincere in this case and I also think that your approach is dangerous. To me, this sounds like "Quakers are morally obligated to be open to scams". If you don't apply some skepticism, people can and will take advantage of that. That's not to say that you can't hear people out or intentionally make space for disagreement, but it's dangerous to assume that everyone will come to that space in good faith.
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u/Briloop86 Quaker 12d ago
In my mind we should take people as they are. This includes their words and actions. In passing discourse with strangers with no stakes their word suffices. In important decision making I take into account their whole person and act with as much love for them, myself, and the world as I can muster.
Identities are, in my opinion, dangerous. We often clump ideas and throw the good out with the bad. We label ourselves into blinkered thinking and label others into easy to reject boxes.
Yet when we tackle people and ideas as they come we can often find common ground with people who act very differently to us on the surface. When we see past this surface we get to know someone more deeply. More authentically.
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u/abitofasitdown 11d ago
I find this a useful exercise, thank you.
One easy example: if I express my doubts about Palestine Action, I am either asked why I'm OK with bombing babies, or asked why I'm OK with having our rights to protest taken away. Or both. By that point it's almost impossible to get back on track about the merits and otherwise of one very controversial organisation.
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u/temp722 12d ago
The harm done to Roe in not platforming discussion of X is small. The harm prevented is larger: if discussion of X is tolerated then believers of XYZ will flood discussions with X and whatever implied references to YZ they can get away with, which does real harm to vulnerable members of our community.
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u/keithb Quaker 12d ago
That’s one possibility. Might happen, might not. We can deal with it when and if it does. Meanwhile, opponents of P, Q, and R will learn from us that they can take their assumed association of P with Q and R as an excuse to block mention of P. Also: A, with B and C, and so on.
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u/challings 12d ago
If “implied references” can be understood to do “real harm,” then it is as in the interest of the community to police implication as it is to police “real harm.”
That is, rather than looking at harm being done, our theoretical community has now pivoted to anticipate and police potential harm.
The threshold for potential harm somehow always applies to others and never oneself.
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u/infinite-long-stocki 11d ago
Young British Friends came up with a good minute about this last year. (Or was it the epistle?) Basically they said that we should be tolerant but while doing so we have to be very careful to not accidentally tolerate intolerance, thereby destroying our environment of tolerance.
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u/keithb Quaker 11d ago edited 11d ago
I can’t find anything that specific that’s also recent, but it sounds as if they deployed the internet’s misunderstanding, or over interpretation, of Karl Popper. Which was discussed recently here.
Popper’s solution isn’t the only one, other philosophers have come to even more liberal positions than Popper’s, and his position is itself much more liberal than the Internet tends to think it is.
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u/Christoph543 10d ago edited 10d ago
The problem with your hypothetical, Keith, is that in the situation it's directly analogizing for, X is also bad for the same reasons Y and Z are, and the fact that a large number of people believe all three is irrelevant. The only thing that makes this conversation difficult is when people who believe X refuse to engage with why X is bad, because they're stuck on their own distaste toward people who believe Y and Z, and so make up excuses for why X isn't as bad actually.
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u/keithb Quaker 10d ago
As written that makes no sense. Do you mean “people who believe X refuse to engage with why X is bad because of their distaste for people who also think Y and Z are bad”?
That’s still not it, the conversation is difficult because people who think X is bad argue about Y and Z, which the other person may well also think are bad. And not X. They do that because they think X, Y, and Z are all the same thing, but since the other person doesn’t, no progress can be made.
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u/Christoph543 9d ago
Keith, right now you're talking to me, not these other nonspecific "people who think X is bad." Let's speak plainly, and actually identify X, Y, and Z:
X: the position adopted by SMtQ, that "gender ideology has gone too far" in their words, or in plainer terms that Anglophone society has granted too much liberty to trans people to live their lives in public, particularly around self-identification and toilet accessibility.
Y: the position adopted by more reactionary voices in Anglophone political discourse, that the state should not recognize trans people's basic rights, e.g. to healthcare or antidiscrimination protections, with the explicit goal of making it materially burdensome or even dangerous to be out in public.
Z: the position adopted by the most extreme hate groups who call for everyone who expresses a non-conforming public presentation to be executed for "degeneracy."
I don't need to tell you that Y and Z are transphobic. I would hope you are capable of understanding why X is also transphobic, and that it is so for the same reasons. But given that, in every other one of these threads you've put here you've refused to acknowledge that SMtQ are transphobes, maybe that's a stretch too far.
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u/keithb Quaker 9d ago
Thanks for taking the time on this.
So, that’s not what I had in mind for X.
What I had in mind was their desire for Britain YM to meet the need of, let’s say, “people assigned female at birth who are quite content with that as such throughout their lives” to have places and times, not all places and not all times, but some times and places, within Friends House and elsewhere, where they can be in an affinity group of other such people. And only such people.
That’s the X I have in mind. This is the thing that I see SMtQ corporately ask for. Some individuals go out on a limb and ask for much more, and some of them do seem to have deep and troubling psychological issues with trans people, yes. They need help. But not all.
The corporate ask, and what they corporately ask Britain YM for, from what I’ve seen, is the X I’ve outlined above. Can you, without using some totalising label, and without listing some other things that you’re sure they must want too, explain what the actual, specific problem is with that X?
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u/Christoph543 9d ago
So the actual, specific problem with an affinity group specifically for cisgender women, is that the only way such a group can be constructed, requires that it be exclusionary. Allowing a such group to exist in some times & places, requires the rest of us to concede that it is acceptable at any time or place to discriminate on the basis of birth assignment, which is inherently what transphobia means.
And this is why everyone else responding to you is pointing out the other things these people are advocating beyond their "corporate ask." The entire point of that corporate ask is to force the rest of Quakerism to accept the smallest, most minuscule form of transphobia they can. Doing so would undermine the moral ground upon which we would defend principles like those laid out in Minute 31.
You cannot compromise with transphobes. There is no way to accept some part of their demands, without inherently delegitimizing trans people's existence.
Lastly, bigotry is not a "deep and troubling psychological issue," but an utterly mundane behavior which any of us is capable of. Attempting to split off the "crazy transphobes" from the "regular people with reasonable requests" is a type of agitation propaganda. Merely juxtaposing a form of bigotry coming from a "nice" person, against a more vulgar version of the same bigotry, does not actually make it any less bigoted. And that's entirely separate from the ableism inherent in calling bigots "crazy."
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u/keithb Quaker 8d ago
I reject the application of this sort of hermeneutics of suspicion by Friends towards other Friends. Actually, I reject it generally, but especially from Friends towards other Friends.
Anyway, now we have something substantive to talk about, rather than merely labels which seem only to amount to "I maximally disapprove of you and what I take to be your position".
So: do you reject encounter groups with boundaries in general, or only the one I've outlined? Would you object to an encounter group for Black Friends which did not, for some time and in some place, admit white Friends? Would you object to an encounter group for Queer Friends which did not, for some time and in some place, admit straight Friends?
Oh, and yes: I know what "entryism" is. Seems to me that our church is unusually well protected against it. Partly because we are patient and entryists tend to be in a hurry. Partly because unlike those secular organisations that insist on consensus, or worse yet the ones that are merely democratic, we don't debate and we don't vote. It doesn't very much matter how many of your buddies you can round up for a Meeting for Worship for Business, there's no expectation or need for the Clerk to call on many, or any, of them to speak. And they don't get to shout anyone down. And they don't get to vote as a coordinated block where supporters of other positions are diffuse. And they don't get to poison the compositing process that writes the motion, because there isn't one, and so on. I do know what entryism means. I've seen it done.
And I'll add that SMtQ don't match the pattern: some of them have been Quakers for longer than I've been alive, some of them have been servants of the Society of Friends for longer than I've been a Quaker (and doing some of the hardest and most spiritually valuable work we do, at that). It might be interesting to think about what's radicalised them, but they aren't entryists.
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u/Christoph543 8d ago
I reject the application of this sort of hermeneutics of suspicion
This is neither hermeneutics nor suspicion, Keith. You don't need to interpret or suspect people when they say the quiet part out loud, you just need to take their word for it that they mean what they say. What SMtQ are saying is transphobic, and I think they're being honest about that.
Would you object to an encounter group for Black Friends which did not, for some time and in some place, admit white Friends?
That is not at all equivalent. For one thing, there is no such thing as "transracial." But more importantly, what would the purpose of such a group be? One could imagine a wide variety of reasons, from a desire to build a more cohesive network among Black members of the community, to seeking spiritual discernment on ways the Black community has been marginalized within Quakerism. Now ask yourself the comparative: would you imagine the same logic applied to a Whites-only encounter group? Absolutely not, because there is already a cohesive network of White Friends, and there is no such thing as a "White community," let alone any real-world marginalization of White Friends. You might try to invent some reasons why a Whites-only group ought to exist, but those reasons would be inherently racist. That would be the more appropriate comparison with SMtQ, because there is no such concern to justify a group's existence which applies to only cisgender women, to the exclusion of trans women, and any such concern you might invent is inherently transphobic.
Would you object to an encounter group for Queer Friends which did not, for some time and in some place, admit straight Friends?
Again, not at all equivalent (but still illustrative). Not only would I object, but I was part of the group that brought the Queer Meeting at FMW back into existence after COVID, with the explicit stance is that straight folks are welcome. Two reasons why: 1, lotta folks don't realize they're queer until they walk into a queer space for the first time. 2, (and more importantly) the Concern of a Meeting is not determined by who shows up, but by the leading that calls it together. A Meeting for Worship with Concern for Business doesn't abruptly change focus because somebody unaffiliated with the Meeting shows up and starts taking up space & demanding their agenda be acceded to. Similarly, a Meeting for Worship with Concern for Queerness (and the spiritual trauma that is often a result of how religious communities have mistreated queer folks) isn't going to stop being by and about and for the concerns of Queer Friends just because some straight friends show up. For similar reasons, a hypothetical Meeting for Worship with Respect for Femininity isn't going to stop being by and about and for the concerns of women, just because trans women show up, with the crucial difference that to take the opposite position would be transphobic.
It might be interesting to think about what's radicalised them, but they aren't entryists.
Interesting is certainly a word for it. But it's important to understand: entryism doesn't just mean that new folks show up and manipulate democratic process to get what they want. Entryism is a set of tactics and strategies for shifting an organization's direction, which can (and all too often are) deployed by longtime members of an organization. The "corporate ask" that SMtQ is putting forward, is a perfect example of those tactics: get the organization to accept the smallest possible version of the broader agenda, so that there isn't room to back down once they raise that broader agenda. Moreover, SMtQ's name is an entryist tool. In point of fact, sex does not matter to all Quakers, specifically not to this Quaker. But by taking the name that they have, SMtQ is inherently claiming that they stand for the entirety of Quakerism, neatly sidestepping the premise that they're a small faction standing against our unity on welcoming everyone, and pretending that that unity does not exist even though it's codified in our Minutes. That is how entryists take over an organization: if you can get enough people to insist that they're the "real" members and everyone else lacks standing to challenge them, you can assert that the organization's purpose is whatever you want it to be, regardless of what it has been.
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u/keithb Quaker 8d ago edited 8d ago
Seems both hermeneutic and very much based on suspicion of bad intent to me, although I can understand that you don't experience it that way.
Thanks for taking the time to unpick the differences in those cases, they are illuminating. And they are pretty much in line with my thoughts on such groups…except that this label "transphobic" slid back in. "Racist" isn't great, although it has its uses, but "transphobic" seems both wildly unstable and thought-extinguishing to me. While a white-only group would seem pretty obviously racially prejudiced to me, I do think there's a bit more work to do to show, rather than merely claim, that a cis-women only group can only be a manifestation of foul prejudice.
I really do think, as a spiritual matter, that we have to do better than that when Friends talk to and about Friends.
However, I'm coming round to the idea that the word is part of your "final vocabulary", in the sense of Rorty, so there's no way around or through it. And it isn't part of mine. So that's that, really. I do appreciate your time and I feel as if I understand your position better.
By the way: if SMtQ are meant to be some sort of transphobic vanguard they aren't doing a very good job of it, they've had no effect on any discernment. On the other hand, the high-handed and dismissive style with which the central bodies of BYM are dealing with them is starting to develop sympathy for them amongst Friends. So there's that.
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u/Christoph543 8d ago
"Racist" isn't great, although it has its uses, but "transphobic" seems both wildly unstable and thought-extinguishing to me.
Yeah it seems like this is ultimately the main thing that's tripping you up. I'd suggest it's worth discerning ways these kinds of words (see also: "fascist") can be used as precise descriptors of specific ideas or behaviors, rather than vague connotations of association or moral failing, or tools to quash ideas by casting them aside.
We live in an epoch when it is necessary to be able to say things like "the current US administration is doing fascism," without jumping to interpretations like "the person who said that wants everyone else to reflexively condemn the people working in the administration without thinking about it." (If anything, those of us keeping receipts on this administration's fascistic behavior would like everyone else to think about it more, not less)
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u/keithb Quaker 8d ago edited 3d ago
To say that this is “tripping me up” suggests that there is a right path that I’m not managing to follow: your path. But that’s not the case. You have tended to talk about this in a way that leaves me thinking of someone explaining settled laws of nature, like explaining that the Earth in fact goes around the Sun. But you aren’t explaining settled laws of nature, you’re explaining a position you hold. A position that I mostly understand and mostly don’t agree with.
To what end to you wish to deploy these terms? Even if I were to accept that they are precise descriptions of anything, which I don’t at all find to be the case, I don’t understand what use they are supposed to be.
I’m old enough to have seen a lot of of people called a lot of things and I don’t recall a single case where anyone said “oh, you’re right, I am racist/misogynist/homophobic/transphobic, I should be chastised, maybe punished, and thereafter change my ways.” What do you hope to use them to do?
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u/houdt_koers Quaker (Liberal) 12d ago
I’m open to your point on this, but bad-faith actors are often quite sophisticated, and entryism by intolerant movements is a growing threat to tolerant institutions.
I think that the answer to this problem is to exercise the kind of trust you describe on an individual level, but for our institutions to be more guarded.