38 Comments

1. Stan:

   Illich had surgery for a hernia when it became very painful, and treated himself for pain in conjunction with his cancer by smoking opium (which he managed to talk his way through with at an airport). What he decries is twofold: the body perceived as an “immune system,” and the rule of specialists (technically-credentialled, based in institutions) responding to iatrogenic needs.

   The results are not in on penicillin yet. I myself am allergic to it, and my mother almost dies many years ago from full-blown anaphalaxis. But the real story on ABs is drug resistance,,, a dynamic I think Mike Davis has written about with regard to bird/swine/etc flu strains.

   My own purpose, that seemed to fly over one commenter like a low-flying drone, was to show an example of an accepted episteme illuminated by critique… wow, this was there? The objectivity debate has become mired in two parallel tracks, and we needed a jolt out. Not sure that succeeded.

   Illich restates a pretty basic philosophical assertion, one that he believes modernity (and progress) has foolishly tried to cover up (and at great cost): that life is characterized by many things, among them the so-called negatives – suffering, sorrow, and death. These are inescapable aspects of the human condition; and when we attempt to overcome them (in that Promethian way), nature reiterates its limits on that condition, often with seemingly grim humor. Moreover, the pleasures of life cannot be disimbricated from those “negatives.”

   I do enjoy my afternoon shower – in an almost ecstatic way sometimes – because it comes at the end of a long, hot day, in sopping-sweaty clothes, with sore muscles, a scalp full of grit and sawdust, and a stiff back. I couldn’t possibly receive that much pleasure without the contrast. Both aspects of that experience, and experiences like that, are sacred. Modernity, with its objectivity and the myth of progress, profanes everything it touches – and often in the most shallow pavlovian way – with detached instrumentality and thoroughgoing commodification (and ever more abstruse technical specialization).

   27 August 2009, 5:15 am

2. Shamrock Pat:

   That was funny, I guess everything around here is flying over my head like a low flying drone. Especially the ever more abscess technical specialization.
   Day after day alone on a hill the man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still.

   27 August 2009, 9:39 am

3. Michael Anderson:

   I think another thread that might be explored is our retreat from responsibility for our own bodies—-who among us has not indulged in choices that are inimical to good health (even as described by Illich), and expected the docs to fix it? It seems in the U.S. at least, that symptomatic treatment of conditions that could be remedied with better choices is (a) norm, which is reinforced by Capitalism as a background and ideology—I know of VERY few people who have gone into (standard) medicine for altruistic reasons…they’re in it for the money. I go to a Chiropractor, and he’s the hippest doctor I know! Our Modernist Industrial system lives license to we, the people to think about how we conduct our lives in ways that are inimical to basic health (and common sense). We cannot eliminate pain and suffering, certainly, but we can certainly mitigate it by not being foolish.

   I had somewhat the same experience with my parents as James above, and it has influenced my feelings on health, and end-of-life health for sure—both my parents were admitted to a nursing home, since both my brother and myself live(d) some distance away. I was faced with the rather macabre task of giving permission to the emergency room doctor, after my mother was admitted to the hospital on her final day on this earth, to not resuscitate (as per instructions we signed in the nursing home)—while driving in rush-hour traffic in another city. Talk about a freakin’ cognitive disconnect! My father passed away slowly from Parkinson’s disease, and his last three years were definitely NOT “quality”, but was kept alive by the regular rhythm of the nursing home—meds, meals, and TV. I do not plan to go that way…

   I found Illich’s “Manifesto” at the end of “Brave New Biocracy” to be illuminating, and I plan to use it:

   “I demand certain liberties for those who would celebrate living rather than preserve “life”:

   * the liberty to declare myself sick;
   * the liberty to refuse any and all medical treatment at any time;
   * the liberty to take any drug or treatment of my own choosing;
   * the liberty to be treated by the person of my choice, that is, by anyone in the community who feels called to the practice of healing, whether that person be an acupuncturist, a homeopathic physician, a neurosurgeon, an astrologer, a witch doctor or someone else;
   * the liberty to die without diagnosis.”

   My feelings are still, at this point, slanted a bit towards a national health care system, but one that would incorporate at least some of the above-mentioned statements. Whether that is even POSSIBLE is, I admit, up for grabs.

   Since I’m a musician, here’s a Dire Straits tune:

   Warning lights are flashing down at quality control
   Somebody threw a spanner and they threw him in the hole
   There’s rumors in the loading bay and anger in the town
   Somebody blew the whistle and the walls came down
   There’s a meeting in the boardroom they’re trying to trace the smell
   There’s leaking in the washroom there’s a sneak in personnel
   Somewhere in the corridors someone was heard to sneeze
   goodness me could this be industrial disease?

   The caretaker was crucified for sleeping at his post
   They’re refusing to be pacified its him they blame the most
   The watchdogs got rabies the foreman’s got fleas
   And everyone’s concerned about industrial disease
   There’s panic on the switchboard tongues are ties in knots
   Some come out in sympathy some come out in spots
   Some blame the management some the employees
   And everybody knows its the industrial disease

   The work force is disgusted downs tools and walks
   Innocence is injured experience just talks
   Everyone seeks damages and everyone agrees
   That these are classic symptoms of a monetary squeeze
   On itv and bbc they talk about the curse
   Philosophy is useless theology is worse
   History boils over there’s an economics freeze
   Sociologists invent words that mean industrial disease

   Doctor Parkinson declared I’m not surprised to see you here
   You’ve got smokers cough from smoking, brewers droop from drinking beer
   I don’t know how you came to get the betty davis knees
   But worst of all young man you’ve got industrial disease
   He wrote me a prescription he said you are depressed
   But I’m glad you came to see me to get this off your chest
   Come back and see me later – next patient please
   Send in another victim of industrial disease

   I go down to speakers corner I’m thunderstruck
   They got free speech, tourists, police in trucks
   Two men say they’re jesus one of them must be wrong
   Theres a protest singer singing a protest song – he says
   they wanna have a war to keep us on our knees
   They wanna have a war to keep their factories
   They wanna have a war to stop us buying japanese
   They wanna have a war to stop industrial disease
   Theyre pointing out the enemy to keep you deaf and blind
   They wanna sap your energy incarcerate your mind
   They give you rule brittania, gassy beer, page three
   Two weeks in espana and sunday striptease
   Meanwhile the first jesus says I’d cure it soon
   Abolish monday mornings and friday afternoons
   The other ones on a hunger strike hes dying by degrees
   How come jesus gets industrial disease

   27 August 2009, 12:33 pm

4. Stan:

   It is not the product of a victory or a command. It has no
   finishing line, no final deadline, no fixed definition of
   achievement. Peace is a never-ending process, the work of many
   decisions by many people in many countries. It is an attitude, a
   way of life, a way of solving problems and resolving conflicts.

   – Oscar Arias Sanchez

   27 August 2009, 2:55 pm

5. (Boer) Tom:

   To Shamrock Pat, regarding the question posted on the other thread:
   Let’s take the issue with quantum physics, as cabdriver makes the standard mistake (I think that Heisenberg himself may have made it in his explanation): The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle (a misnomer) applies to unmolested “particles”, as well as measured “particles”, and strictly, it is not a question of uncertainty, but of distribution of particle density (summing over space to 1 for each particle). One can do experiments that show that the “particle” had a distribution in space, e.g. electron diffraction experiments, where one electron diffracts itself, which suggests a wave of density (over position and velocity, for example), rather than some specific position and velocity. For a stationary particle to exist, it must consist of wave-functions that are moving in opposite directions – ‘objectively’, in which direction is it moving? Can it be said to be ‘objectively’ stationary? If it moves (on average) slowly in one direction, it will have component wavefunctions moving in the opposite direction – is it ‘objectively’ moving in one direction rather than another? What does this ‘objectivity’ mean? You might say that the particle ‘objectively’ has some distribution in space and velocity, but you cannot measure it, except by making huge assumptions (namely those of quantum physics) and performing a given experiment repeatedly, and that only allows you to approximate the assumed distribution. All I can say to justify quantum physics is that it predicts the outcomes (statistical and otherwise) of experiments uncannily.

   I feel hungry: Is that objective? I’m quite confident of being hungry.

   I regard USA (and other states) to be guilty of horrendous crimes. Why? I’ve seen evidence of their actions. Is that objective? If it helps, my evidence is incomplete, and must remain so if I’m to survive and do other things, e.g. fight said occupation. A good portion of it is based on hearsay, albeit from sources I trust (subjectivity, no?), and much of it relies on abstractions of patterns that others have identified (correctly? Who says? Objectively? If so, how?), e.g. that invasions and occupations tend to cause violence, as does importing weapons into a society (regarding your earlier question).

   How do you decide what is objective (what are your criteria)? What can you prove about that that is objective, given the defining criteria? Does it involve aloofness toward other parties (disinterest)? If it seeks impartiality, is that not a moral commitment toward all parties, and hence highly subjective?

   Of course, our knowledge cannot be truly justified – the best we can do is act largely within the moral codes developed, see what happens when we act, seek patterns, test them by acting again, and maybe find some pattern that seems to hold up. A radical feminist, whose name I’ve long forgotten, suggested that men tend to act like ‘lower’ mammals, especially showing ‘alpha-male’ behavioral patterns. I thought I’d check. Ditto say the occupation of Iraq, or the question of objectivity: Can anyone prove that Iraqis (or Arabs) are not genetically violent? I find the notion repulsive and corny, and more than a bit ideological: The western states (USA in particular right now) are driving Iraqis to violence in their own defence (aside from any opportunistic actions of different political factions), and such a belief strikes me as a kind of moral projection to avoid responsibility for the actions of one’s own state. That is my conclusion. Is it correct? Objective? Based on what I remember of my Arab friends over the years, or what I choose to remember? Am I any more objective (or less subjective, as I reject the bulk of the notion) than my opponents? Is a lack of subjectivity necessary (or for that matter, helpful) in obtaining justice, or for that matter knowledge?

   I do disagree with Stan on his approach, though, and it seems to be infused with ‘objectivity’ in its own right: He asks you to read a book which implicitly rejects a notion you hold dear, and gives a detailed history of that notion, and asks you to reject objectivity on that basis, i.e. be ‘objective’ about objectivity – he ignores that you have set it as a standard to yourself, and that your relationship to it is highly subjective. You must first reject ‘objectivity’ (if only temporarily), so that you can approach Bordo (or another such author) sufficiently sympathetically as to allow you to evaluate their arguments, and only then can you give the question serious consideration (i.e. after having given each side a sympathetic hearing).

   27 August 2009, 11:05 pm

6. (Boer) Tom:

   I forgot to say above: The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the product of the width of the velocity distribution (‘uncertainty in position’) with the width of the position distribution (‘uncertainty in velocity’) has some minimum.

   27 August 2009, 11:32 pm

7. Michael Anderson:

   This seems to prove Illich’s thesis:

   http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/medical-imaging-radiation-study-business-healthcare-scans.html

   28 August 2009, 1:59 am

8. Stan:

   As human beings we are quite incapable of achieving anything like objectivity. It is part of an ideology, and that ideology is bourgeois in class, male in gender, and modern in its epoch (I count most post-modernism I’ve been exposed to as modernity reacting to modernity). As such, it cannot be validated empirically; it has to be understood historically. That history is concrete… and my reference to Bordo in this case – aside from being one of her fans – is a reference to that situated and contingent history. Why is this repeatedly abstracted? Because we have a hard time escaping our own epistemological habits. We are compelled by our own enculturation to push everything back to a distance, to turn it into an object of study or analysis, and to remove ourselves from that analysis. Except that we can’t. I am typing now on a machine that sends commands from my fingers to a set of quasi-phonetic integers (letters don’t even stand for anything alone, a level of abstraction from – say – Chinese characters that at least stand directly for a word), which form culturally-constituted words in a specific language, that is symbols standing for ideas that are carried culturally and experienced Umwelt to Umwelt. We can say that we are flying, but that doesn’t make it so. Likewise, we can pretend a standpoint from everywhere or nowhere (objectivity), but we are still somewhere… juicy, twitchy creatures reliant on our senses to integrate our actions with a world of which we are a part and also – as an aspect of the alienated condition – apart. Experimental science is a standpoint, one assumed with a high degree of intentionality, and one that produces a high degree of predictability within the tightly-controlled limits of its experimental experience. It is not objective. Many scientists would gasp as the arrogance of this, even as the scientific establishment – part of the larger establishment and sharing its ideology – is content to leave this notion of Objectivity as it is. Charles Sanders Pierce posits a sign-object-interpretant triad as the basic unit of the semiosphere, the universe of meanings in a culture. The interpretant can never be withdrawn.

   Bordo, in her book Unbearable Weight (best thing I’ve read on eating “disorders”), says:

   At different historical moments, out of the pressure of cultural, social, and material change new images and associations emerge. In the sixteenth century the epistemological body begins to be imagined not only as deceiving the philosopher through the untrustworthy senses (a Platonic theme) but also as the site of our locatedness in space and time, and thus as an impediment to objectivity. Because we are embodied, out thought is perspectival, the only way for the mind to comprehend things “as they really are” is by attainment of a disembodied view from nowhere…

   …Descartes… believed that with the right philosophical method we can transcend the epistemological limitations of the body.

   She goes on to show the ways in which we separate the body from mind, then separate them into male and female essences:

   …with woman cast in the role of the body… In contrast, man casts himself as “the inevitable, like a pure idea, like the One, the All, the Absolute Spirit… According to Dinnerstein, as a consequence of our infantile experience of woman as caretaker of our bodies, the mucky, humbling limitations of the flesh” has become the provence of the female; on the other side stands “an innocent and dignified ‘he’… to represent the part of the person that wants to stand clear fo the flesh , to maintain poerspective on it: ‘I’ness wholly free of the chaotic, carnal atmosphere of infancy, uncontaminated humanness is reserved for man.”

   28 August 2009, 5:42 am

9. cabdriver:

   I’m thinking it was a mistake to bring the implications of the Heisenberg Principle into this discussion. This website is devoted to addressing questions related to social phenomena, not theoretical physics. I find the task of drawing that level of connection to be too ambitious. My intended point was to show that there are constraints on the completeness of knowledge; Tom Boer made the counter-point that the knowledge gleaned by the experiments have nonetheless been able to provide a stable base of knowledge with practical value. Once again, a paradox; the surmises about “reality” are necessarily incomplete- yet it’s possible to make determinations and employ the results in ways that work reliably well within that incompleteness. I’ll leave my thoughts at that, because doing otherwise takes the topic far afield of the discussion.

   I’ll reiterate my opinion that the substantial value of Stan’s- and Brody’s- critique isn’t an attempt to overthrow the notion of Objectivity completely; it’s to show how far the concept of Objectivity has been taken in the modern world, particularly when wielded as a justification by power&authority in questions of human social relations, and of the relationship of human technological power to the natural world upon which it acts. And the critique is attempting to show what the errors of that excessive presumption of Objectivity have cost us.

   To bring it around the the medical realm: consider what happens to the Doctor-Patient Relationship when the Doctor views the Patient as an Object to be acted upon, as the Doctor assumes an “objective and dispassionate” stance- and who can deny that much of the way that allopathic medicine is taught in medical schools works to reinforce that view?

   It’s apparent that there’s a high degree of efficacy to treating specific diseases or injuries as engineering projects performed on components of the body- in some cases. But when the limits to that approach aren’t granted, the result is that the physicians is targeting the disease to the exclusion of the rest of the patient. And if all the medical schools do is emphasize that Objective approach- what are physicians trained in that manner to do, when they suspect there’s something more to be done, as part of the healing task? By and large, they lack the support of a background, or even an instructive paradigm, to support that intuition.

   Similarly, patients in this society are very often told to surrender their autonomous power and their input to their team of physicians: “the doctor is always right”, because they supposedly have the Objective view of the situation, along with their wider knowledge base on medical matters. So the patient can find themselves in the position of making an Object of themselves, a thing to be experimented upon. And the prevailing paradigm of Western allopathic medicine encourages this. Still, although there continue to be hopeful signs that the paradigm is changing.

   One of the things that needs to change is the idea of someone- or something, like a pill- doing something TO someone else, instead of valuing and tuning an empathic sensibility, and listening to the story of someone’s mind and body so as to show them a pathway toward improving their own health.

   And Western allopathic medicine still has a long way to go in that regard, in my opinion.

   I read recently that something like 50% of Americans with medical insurance plans are taking some form of prescribed medication on a regular, ongoing basis. I’d say there’s something going wrong there. Although I have little doubt that the pharmaceutical companies would disagree with that conclusion. (And they have the Studies, and I’m a Nobody…)

   28 August 2009, 11:58 am

10. m.c.:

    So a male, modern, bourgeois hasn’t the right(let’s blame the victim; it works almost 100% of the time) to attempt to observe the operations of the world and make valid commentary because that wouldn’t be objective!?

    28 August 2009, 12:25 pm

11. cabdriver:

    “the substantial value of Stan’s- and Brody’s- critique isn’t an attempt to overthrow the notion of Objectivity completely”

    perhaps should better be rephrased as

    “…the substantive value of Stan’s- and Brody’s- critique isn’t an attempt to overthrow the notion of the Objective realm…”

    because I do think that they want to topple the notion of Objectivity, insofar as it’s existence is presumed as a consistent baseline, accessible by the effort of human awareness and will, as long as one possesses a sensibility that’s sufficiently Empyrean.

    I think that critics like Goff and Brody do want to do away with that conceit, and to instead put the ideal of the Objective into play in a more balanced sense: as always related to Subjective points of view that are inevitably disparate, to at least some degree- partaking of different components of the Objective realm, or of the same components in differing proportions.

    28 August 2009, 1:01 pm

12. cabdriver:

    Hmm. This recent article, published in Wired magazine, raises some questions pertinent to the topic at hand- “Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why”:

    Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn’t introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.

    In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck’s research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company’s reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. “To remain dominant in the future,” he told Forbes, “we need to dominate the central nervous system.”…

    http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all

    28 August 2009, 1:30 pm

13. Shamrock Pat:

    Here is another quote for the corner. “People with Doctors Degrees have all kinds of strange ideas.”

    28 August 2009, 2:28 pm

14. Shamrock Pat:

    10 seconds ago I just discovered this site called Moralobjectivity.net. Based on reading only the first page I think that many of the readers here will find it a very interesting site.

    28 August 2009, 2:52 pm

15. Shamrock Pat:

    Cabdriver, that was a very good summary.

    28 August 2009, 3:59 pm

16. Stan:

    My real agenda is to overthrow the notion of progress (as it is for many others who are more erudite than me). Overthrowing “objectivity” is an intermediate objective (pun intended). Our universe – the universe with us in it, that we experience – is never objective or subjective; this dualized concept is the problem. What we refer to when we use this disaggregation are separated-out realms; and that separation does not exist in reality. Look around wherever you’re reading this. The evidence is clear. All material (natural) stuff, but every single bit of it acted upon through a system of meanings, popping with symbolism. Objectivity is understood as a personal or institutional characteristic, not as The Objective. There is certainly much of creation that exists independent of our recognition and attention. But telling humans that they are objective is a bit like saying we live in a constant out-of-body experience. Body here is a key word. So if the claim is true – and I think it is demonstrably true – that human beings cannot be objective, because we are embodied and situated – then what is this characteristic “objectivity” really referring to? I contend that the answer is ideological. It is to assign a higher level of credibility to someone against someone else. It implies a truth-claim, but not an itemized truth-claim… a general truth-claim, a truth-claim that trumps all others. It’s a power gambit, therefore it is deeply political… as we could see in the Sotomayor dust-up (really surprized we lost that thread so easily, since this was a real and public example of this, deployed by the party-of-macho-and-white – and mobilizing something (objectivity) that is considered universally axiomatic – against a woman of color nominated to a peculiar and powerful religious institution called The United States Supreme Court.

    29 August 2009, 5:54 am

17. (Boer) Tom:

    To Shamrock Pat:
    I read the intro chapter of his thesis, and parts of chapter 2. In the second chapter, he opens with some standard buddhist ideas (suffering caused by desires) – I’m too tired to figure out right now if he treats emotions properly. As for chapter 1, try the following experiment: Replace (after about the second paragraph) every occurrence of ‘objective’ with ‘true’, then ‘right’, and see how each reads – does it seem to say something different? How about ‘emotionally distant middle way’?

    You said you’re in Dublin? The public libraries any good? You should be able to get Bordo’s books there, or at least a university library should allow you to read it until the small hours… Out of curiosity, (how) do you understand what is meant by embodied? Just want to get a feel for your understanding of the lingo – the extracts on the link don’t contain it, but seeing as it has been used here…

    And just to stir up some trouble with your example some time back regarding Northern Ireland, given your own understanding, how would you explain such aspects of the situation that are important to you using ‘objectivity’? Could you also define objectivity as you understand it, and show how that definition gives rise to your usage? I have a suspicion (correct me) that you aren’t as interested in the notion’s history or internal structure as much as using it as a stand-in for ‘justified’ and ‘justified knowledge’ e.g. of violence against Catholics.

    To Stan: It is not a question of the qualities of Bordo’s work: There is a strong emotional attachment to (this ill-defined notion of) ‘objectivity’. If you let the men here explore it, Bordo might become less threatening.

    29 August 2009, 11:29 am

18. xavexgoem:

    I’m of the opinion that overthrowing objectivity wouldn’t just be the intermediate goal, but the end goal. The notion of progress — the way it’s typically used — depends on an “objective” POV.

    Heh… “objective point-of-view”. There’s one for ya.

    Anyway… a lot of the talk about progress around these parts is about progress being the conquering of nature (rofl) as an inevitable goal of Good Human Living. So inevitable goal fits into the objectivity scheme on one hand, and the pretty basic connect-the-dots to patriarchy (and related hegemonies) behind the idea of progress on the other… and since “objectivity” is connected fundamentally to both…

    …why all the talk of progress?

    29 August 2009, 4:01 pm

19. Stan:

    Male, bourgeois, et al are categories, ie, classes of people. There’s no name-calling, any more than calling hats hats.

    And there’s no need to take it personally. I’m white. I’m male. Relax. Conditions like these are the product of history and power that existed before we were born. Part of those conditions are the blinders that are built into the categories. Not blindfolds, just blinders. We can make the effort to look around us and see what we might have missed.

    Here is a cross-post from Laura Sjoberg at Duck of Minerva on the Sotomayor “controversy”:

    Thursday, July 09, 2009
    Sonia Sotomayor, Gender, and Knowledge in Politics

    As a closet lawyer, I admit to following the news about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. As someone who studies gender and leadership in global politics, I’ve been interested in what I’ve found. Putting aside for a second the crazy “news” stories, which report that “Sotomayor has been unmarried since 1983 and lives in Greenwich Villiage, New York, a haven for Gays and radical leftists” (stormfront.org), “a racist, feminazi who judges cases based on feeling,” (republitarian.com), and declare “open season on the ‘bitch’” (salon.com), there is an interesting debate to be seen about what it means to know and to decide, not only in law, but in politics, and in life.

    Much has been made over a couple of statements that Sonia Sotomayor has made about how people, particularly judges, know things. CNN reports that “Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor said in a 2001 speech that a judge’s gender and ethnicity does, and should, influence his or her decision-making on the bench.” Particularly, several news sources have quoted judge Sotomayor as having said that she “accept[s] that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that – its an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.” Sotomayor’s critics say that this is an admission of bias, and, as identified by my local Roanoke Times focused on her “gender and ethnicity as near prima facie proof of her unfitness to serve.” On the other hand, her democratic supporters, according to Jill Filipovic on Alternet, “predictably trip over themselves arguing that Sotomayor’s race and gender do not matter.”

    I often feel like the left has missed a real and important debate, and I think the controversy over Sotomayor’s statements about race and gender is a prime example. What of the argument that not only gender and ethnicity, but positionality more generally, influence the way people, politicians, and judges think, and that is a good thing?

    Feminist scholars (generally and in international relations) have long argued that “disinterested” or “objective” knowledge is neither possible nor desirable; instead, that objective knowledge is only the subjective knowledge of privileged voices discussed as neutral. I have argued (in Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq) that this unrepresentativeness hides behind culturally assumed objectivity, where the privileged are licensed to think “for everyone” so long as they do so with presumed objectivity. Instead, feminist scholars understand that knowledge is always contingent, interested, and political.

    There are those who, in recent weeks, have made the argument that “no white men need apply” for Obama Supreme Court nominations. I don’t know whether or not that’s true, but it is a funny statement to me, considering the Supreme Court is both overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male; certainly, not representative of the race, class, ethnicity, and gender diversity of the United States population. When people wonder whether Sonia Sotomayor’s gender and ethnicity will “matter” in her decision-making, I guess I hope that it will. Reading the controversy about Sotomayor’s statements about race and gender, I cannot help but think of Sandra Harding’s (in Is Science Multicultural?) idea of a “strong objectivity” made up of many diverse voices and perspectives, and hope that the (not only the) Supreme Court (but maybe the United States government, governments around the world, and the scholars who study those governments and their interactions) might someday aspire to that sort of “objectivity,” instead of eschewing it because we are afraid to talk about perspective and difference.

    29 August 2009, 5:02 pm

20. Shamrock Pat:

    Tom,
    To me the word objective refers to facts which exist outside the mind of the observer. The word objectivity means TRYING to understand that which exists OUTSIDE of the mind of the observer. As for Bordo, I have 6 books sitting next to my chair waiting to be read. Bordo is not among them. I may get around to reading her some day but right now she is not high on my list. Having gotten just a taste from the link and what I read at Wikipedia I have to make a judgment and my judgment is that I have more important things to do with my time.
    But I remembered something today that I read some months back that pertains to this in an indirect way. That is if overthrowing the idea of what someone perceives objective or objectivity to be is needed for them to do their job, or complete their mission, or whatever, then so be it. If there are negative side effects from such a change in perspective those can be dealt with later.
    You know it is funny that just after I got done writing that sentence a picture of my parents and brother that I had leaning on a book on the edge of the top shelf of a book case fell off the bookcase as if to emphasize my point. Damn isn’t that funny. (Hey I am only implying that a GOD that I do not believe in is on my side. I am not explicitly saying it.)
    Perhaps not living in the US I do not know about something that is going on there about the way the concept of objective and objectivity is being used which is causing this concept to act as a barrier for some people in understanding something about their situation.
    Tom,
    I read some more of the site moralobjectivity.net and the authors emphasis on the pre eminance of using experience to learn what is true and what is not really resonates with me. But I also understand that two people can have the same experience and interpret it in entirely different ways. So it is obvious to me that knowing what is true (objecitve) is very difficult.

    29 August 2009, 6:35 pm

21. Michael Anderson:

    I like that statement about the “…idea of a “strong objectivity” made up of many diverse voices and perspectives…”. BIG light bulb there, thanks. We could turn the terminology around and say that the larger and more inclusive the frame of reference, the more “objective” we can be. But, I wonder if we need to discard the word “objectivity” for the nonce, except as an editorial reference….language can sometimes be a hindrance to expression instead of a help…and I hope I was clear there (!)

    Tom Boer’s topic of the Heisenberg principle may underscore this—-the conditions (setup) of the experiment itself influences the outcome, which is necessarily very specific and ordered, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed about “the system”, it certainly likes order, be it in gender, race, or blindered activity.

    The ascendancy of Newtonian physics corresponds chronologically with the Cartesian duality view….the view of God as a “master mechanic”, when it’s pretty apparent (at least to this reader) that God, or divinity, is certainly much more than that….but that’s another topic, too.

    I admit I did not follow the Sotomayor nomination too closely—I was definitely FOR her, despite my objections and reservations about Mr. O., for reasons that Obama, despite his corporate timidity, is a pretty sharp constitutional scholar (and African-American), which scares the power structure because it will show them up to be the frauds that they are (system racism implicit here); I think she’s a darn smart and rigorous judge who told some some pretty scary (to the power structure) truths, and that the Repugs, to use a male-oriented phrase, were stepping on their own dicks…which I’ll have to admit I enjoyed.

    30 August 2009, 3:16 pm

22. (Boer) Tom:

    To Stan: I still think you are missing the point. It is not so much a conscious hostility to feminism and anti-racism etc that is the difficulty as much as that they interpret the world through the framework of ‘objectivity’ – some might well be feminist, anti-racist etc, and they come to their world-views through the notion of objectivity. The challenge is different.

    30 August 2009, 8:43 pm

23. Stan:

    Objectivity plays its part in the reproduction of hierarchies, often seemingly tangentially (because its gendered history disappears), much as the social relation of capital disappears into the rabbit-hole before the commodity appears (as if by magic) on the store shelf. It is precisely objectivity – as part of a cosmology of “progress” – that has led to the impasse, for example, of liberal feminism or liberal anti-racism. Liberalism, objectivity, the ownership of science, are part of the same epoch. This is the core of the argument by Bordo, Hornborg, and other skeptical anti-modernists who – oddly enough – can merge their critiques with a guy like Ivan Illich – a Catholic ex-priest with very cosmopolitan experience. There is mutual recognition of the fraud being perpetrated (or less personally, perpetuated) by the whole modernist project of “progress.”

    I’m going to blockquote a chunk of Bordo, this time from her excellent book on eating “disorders,” Unbearable Weight:

    Since the seventeenth century, science has “owned” the study of the body and its disorders. This proprietorship has required that the body’s meanings must be utterly transparent and accessible to the qualified specialist (aided by the appropriate methodology and technology) and utterly opaque to the patient herself. It has required, too, the exorcising of all pre-modern notions that the body might obey a spiritual, emotional, or associational rather than a purely mechanical logic. In the context of such requirements, hysteria [critiqued earlier in the book as a womanly "disorder"] and anorexia have challenged modern science, not only with their seeming inistence on the power of the body to behave irrationally and inexplicably… but also because of the spectacle each presents of the patient (however destructively or self-consciously) creating and bestowing meaning on her own body, in a form that is opaque and baffling to the Cartesian mind of the scientist. Ultimately, Freud enabled psychoanalysis to rationalize and make clear the meanings of hysteria and to bring the hysterical body under the proprietorship of the scientist/analyst. Today the same sort of struggle is being waged over the body of the eating-disordered woman.

    In the medical model, the body of the subject is the passive tablet on which disorder is inscribed. Deciphering that inscription is usally seen as a matter of determining the “cause” of the disorder; sometimes (as with psychoanalysis) interpretation of symptoms will be involved. But always the process requires a trained – that is to say, highly specialized – professional whose expertise alone can unlock the secrets of a disordered body. (pp 66-67)

    And here is Illich, from The Rivers North of the Future (a book De graciously sent along to me):

    …when confronted with the medical institution which serves as the public relaitoins agency for the ideological, scientific, and financial conglomerate which is interested in iatrogenic bodies. Increasingly physicians are called in to give some credibility to the body which Windows 95 assumes that I have, that is mine. My argument does not deal with the question of why is this body so attractive. I only say that this body is demanded by the enormous institutional ritual of modernity. You need such a body to take the car, jumping kangaroo-like from place to place, without touching the earth, engaging in hours of windshield view, where you are always looking at somewhere where you are not and where reality, insofar as it still exists, is passing you by. You need it to live in a world where knowledge is always a revelation of an educational agency, whether it’s the school or the help program built into your coffee maker. All these things assume the kind of body the doctor tells you you have. (p 131)

    @ shampat:

    To me the word objective refers to facts which exist outside the mind of the observer. The word objectivity means TRYING to understand that which exists OUTSIDE of the mind of the observer.

    If you understand it, is it still outside the mind?

    You are getting warmer. A missing piece is the imagination that is a kind of bridge between what we know of and what we know about. Mind is an experience (try defining it concretely). Experience (the phenomenological kind) has this stubborn way of remaining irreducible. And we don’t experience through “filters” (the implication here is that there is the mind on one side of the experience, and that dead [objectified] universe on the other side); we experience it through meanings, which we receive and reproduce through culture. (I again point to the remarkable conversation we are having that emerges out of countless years of cultural development, with these bugs that march across the screen (objectively speaking) that manage to communicate intelligibly between us.)

    31 August 2009, 7:35 am

24. cabdriver:

    Stan, you’ve just lost me with this observation: “My real agenda is to overthrow the notion of progress…”

    In what sense are you employing the term “progress”, and the phrase “the notion of progress”?

    I’m going to need some more clarification on that score. I’m not sure if I’m with you on that, or not.

    1 September 2009, 2:12 pm

25. Stan:

    You caught me as I’m getting ready to leave, so I’ll be brief. Illich said, “to hell with the future. It’s a man-eating idol.” At a talk by theologian Amy Laura Hall last year, she did a good job of tracing the idea of progress, as it is currently understood, and reiterated how progressivism – now seen as somehow more humane than other political pov’s – embraced eugenics, supported involuntary sterilizations, etc. Liberal churches were also highly complicit in this around the turn of the 20th Century… all based on the idea that the future can be “constructed,” and constructed in a way that continually “progresses.” The question, of course, is toward what. It’s an inherently teleological idea, but one without an actual telos except what we can measure in things like material wealth, greater energy consumption, more idle time, being well-adjusted, et al.

    2 September 2009, 6:10 am

26. m.c.:

    I think psycho-biography/group psychology/social dynamic groupthink hypotheses have thier limits but the lure or temptation of old men who feel their own mortality and want to leave an imprint on history, wish to start wars which kill & maim younger men and women warriors as well as civilian populations.

    Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Michael Hayden and the others, like McNamara before them surely must be aware of their moral vacuums. Maybe might makes right but isn’t it an evolutionary dead end? Too many clever, high-IQ Reptile Brains….

    8 September 2009, 11:46 am

27. Henry:

    I must object to the twist you put on the notion of objectivity. Objectivity simply refers to the ability of the mind to arrive at truth–I assume you don’t dissolve that notion with your notions. For example, you, Stan, agree with this and disagree with that, like any other person. You are seeking what? Either you can attain what you seek, as a matter of principle, not of fact, with your mind or you can’t. But you subtly sentimentalize and moralize the notion of objectivity–along with certain other philosophical destroyers of the intelligence and of the human essence–and re-define it as it were to fit in with an ideology. In a sense you relativize everything–except your “objectively right” position and judgement, which is contradictory.
    It is either worth bothering to think or it is not. If it is, then one leans, unwittingly or not, upon a capacity of the intelligence that is properly termed “objectivity.” To accept any truth, no matter how relative that truth, how limited by this or that set of conditions and contexts, is to admit that intellectus adequatio rei. If I say, “this is false,” or “this is true,” or even, most generally, “this is that,” I tacitly admit this principle. It is the presence of the spiritual “warp” in the cosmic “weft.” Even the notion of relativity presupposes the “sense of the absolute” which is the essence of adequatio, the very pivot of intelligence, its “unmoved mover.” It is the very essence of the reality–the essentially spiritual and not merely psychic–nature of intelligence. Obviously, the psyche comprises an egocentric bias, and in that sense, and to that variable extent, it is “subjective.” But precisely, we can note that fact, and part of the worth of a human being consists in the capacity and willingness to do so. That is the very core of universal virtue or morality. And if the human being can do so, that is thanks to the capacity for objectivity, which allows us to transcend or rise above ourselves in that sense. The capacity for justice and charity, necessarily presuppose the same capacity for objectivity, that is, for not being wholly enclosed in one’s individual subjectivism. To say merely that everything is in the mind is either trivialy obvious, or it is to recognize that the so-called material world is an contingent content of the animic world, just as the subtle or animic world–of the which the mind, instrument of the intelligence, is a part–is encompassed and generated by the Spiritual or Logos “by which all things were made,” and which is “the light in every man.” This is the traditional doctrine of the tripartite nature of man. These are things that have been known by all great civilizations and their respective traditions–except for the modern world view, the originality of which consists in a vision that leaves out all the essential, and which consequently tends towards dehumanization and chaos.

    21 September 2009, 9:04 pm

28. Stan:

    Objectivity simply refers to the ability of the mind to arrive at truth.

    I don’t think it’s that simple; and that’s why the topic came up. It is a young axiom, this idea of objectivity. No such idea existed prior to the Enlightenment. It is an idea that separates subject and object, giving primacy to the latter; and it has a lot to do with the legal-philosophical chat we are having on an adjacent thread.

    Rejecting objectivity is not the same as rejecting truth, because rejection of objectivity as The Absolute Standard of truth is precisely the argument I’m making. Implicit in this idea of objectivity is what (on the other thread) is identified as “false universalism.”

    We may be arguing semantics, but that’s not the original controversy.

    22 September 2009, 4:25 am

29. Sean:

    I think that anyone who studies biology at a decent depth — perhaps AP Bio in HS, or en route to a BS in Bio in college — and who has a facility for holistic thinking, can see that modern American “medicine” is not about patient health so much as it’s about an income stream. Several of the comments so far have noted this, IMO correctly so. The “system” of medicine in America is about business, not people… profits, not personal corporal health.

    Study pharmacology and the regulatory process overseen by the US Food and Drug Administration and you quickly note the FDA’s status as handmaiden to Big Pharma, instead of watchdog protecting individual Americans from bogus drugs that yield no real benefits. The FDA allows half-studied drugs to be brought to market, with people forming the guinea pig base, with personal injury tort litigation being the only hurdle to absolute profiteering. And Big Pharma is pushing for tort reform!

    In my small northern Rockies town it seems to me the town government has chosen to make “health care” our “growth industry” and our two hospitals have been spending millions on new buildings, new technology, new MDs at NYC-area salaries… and I’m left wondering, who are the patients that will pay for all this “growth” — surely someone must pay for all these expensive additions to the two hospitals, and it’s not going to be the people who work in or operate (“administer”) those hospitals. The net effect is to squeeze more poor people, to gentrify the town as a whole in a roundabout fashion — price health care so exorbitantly that people leave.

    I’m struggling to see how a discussion on “objectivity” fits this problem, however. To me “objectivity” relates to something that isn’t subjected to individual human bias. The simplest examples I know relate to traffic accidents at intersections which are controlled by traffic lights. If a person runs a yellow or red light and that light-running causes an accident, it really doesn’t matter whether the light-runner “believed” he saw a green signal. Subjectively he can think he had the green light, objectively he did not.

    22 September 2009, 10:59 am

30. Michael Anderson:

    “We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning”

    —George Steiner, “Language and Silence”

    22 September 2009, 12:19 pm

31. Michael Anderson:

    http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/142833/we_expect_immortality_from_medicine_–_and_it%27s_destroying_our_health/?page=entire

    24 September 2009, 2:10 pm

32. Sean:

    Michael — thanks for that Lapham essay. About 2 yrs ago I was engaged in an internet debate with some people regarding health care in America. Specifically it was about stem cells and genetic engineering, but the theme I was arguing was Americans’ fear of death and desire for eternal youth. I argued that we spend a lot of money on post-diagnostic care and not much on preventive care, which is very ironic given the way a lot of people refuse to see death as a natural part of everyone’s life cycle. My view is that people should try to live healthy lives, minimize risk to whatever extent keeps them happy (folks like me need adrenaline rushes from high-risk sports), and avoid the ridiculous attempts at cheating death once, for example, a person contracts a fatal disease. So much money is thrown at mortality-escape… so much money.

    It’s an apt metaphor for the American culture generally — escapist, avoidant, unrealistic, fantasy-laden.

    24 September 2009, 10:35 pm

33. Michael Anderson:

    We are a death-loving culture, as far as watching someone else die, often in gruesome slow-motion; especially vicariously on TV; but facing our own (natural or not)deaths are a big no-no. And then, of course, I think of that bumper sticker Stan mentioned awhile back on a 4-wheeler back there—”You will never forget your first KILL.” It’s a mystery to me at present. I’d like to know if there’s literature somewhere that delves in to our death fixation-aversion.

    25 September 2009, 10:49 am

34. Curt:

    I was looking for the article that was about Illich and education. I could not find that one. I only found this one with Illich and health care.
    We had a long discussion around the supper table tonight about education. So I wanted to ask all of the people who think that state mandated and managed education is a bad idea what their alternative would be.

    30 September 2010, 4:05 pm

35. Marcilla Elizabeth Smith:

    Community-based teaching. More like Montessori, but less structured. Let every learner find *their* way, not *the* way. I won’t rule out pedagogy, but this obsession with the cycle of “reading assignment – lecture – questions – study – test – grade” is perverse! Try to teach a child to walk while sitting at a desk, assist a person with autism by lecturing on the value of social interaction, teach someone to speak by giving them a reading assignment, teach critical thinking by rote, learn mathematics without ever seeing what the numbers represent. If our “education” system in the USA was focused on learning instead of indoctrination, it could look nothing like it does today. Learn by doing, OJT, whatever you want to call it – why do you think they say “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”?

    1 October 2010, 8:14 am

36. DeAnander:

    The main thing that insitutional schooling teaches is institutional obedience: training young people to be factory workers. Get up to the alarm clock, go to the institutional building, report on time to the standardised workplace, sit where you are told to sit, do mindless repetitive tasks until released for lunch or assigned to some other task. Prison, factory, school. Rinse, repeat.

    1 October 2010, 11:19 am

37. Curt:

    So would the Montessori system be incompatible with a “Manchurian” state mandated system?

    1 October 2010, 12:14 pm

38. Michael Anderson:

    Sweden has an interesting system—-they recognize that all kids (people) don’t learn the same way (big Homer Simpson “DOH”), so they have a charter system, where EVERY school is a charter school, and have a fascinating variety of education as a result. There are schools that we would recognize as close to our own public system, Montessori, arts, technical, religious, on and on. All kinds of alternatives. I have tried to find a link to a NYT vid on this that I downloaded, but it doesn’t seem to come up there.

    Unfortunately, nationalism is on the rise in Sweden (no doubt fueled by Corporatists looking for another cash cow to gut). The bastards will stop at nothing to stupefy and enslave us all.

    1 October 2010, 12:35 pm

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