cured-spadefish

[cured-spadefish]

tools not rules: the importance of critical thinking

More than once, I’ve talked about the negative implications of Evangelical/purity culture logic being uncritically replicated in fandom spaces and left-wing discourse, and have also referenced specific examples of logical overlap this produces re, in particular, the policing of sexuality. What I don’t think I’ve done before is explain how this happens: how even a well-intentioned person who’s trying to unlearn the toxic systems they grew up with can end up replicating those systems. Even if you didn’t grow up specifically in an Evangelical/purity context, if your home, school, work and/or other social environments have never encouraged or taught you to think critically, then it’s easy to fall into similar traps - so here, hopefully, is a quick explainer on how that works, and (hopefully) how to avoid it in the future.

Put simply: within Evangelism, purity culture and other strict, hierarchical social contexts, an enormous value is placed on rules, and specifically hard rules. There might be a little wiggle-room in some instances, but overwhelmingly, the rules are fixed: once you get taught that something is bad, you’re expected never to question it. Understanding the rules is secondary to obeying them, and oftentimes, asking for a more thorough explanation - no matter how innocently, even if all you’re trying to do is learn - is framed as challenging those rules, and therefore cast as disobedience. And where obedience is a virtue, disobedience is a sin. If someone breaks the rules, it doesn’t matter why they did it, only that they did. Their explanations or justifications don’t matter, and nor does the context: a rule is a rule, and rulebreakers are Bad.

In this kind of environment, therefore, you absorb three main lessons: one, to obey a rule from the moment you learn it; two, that it’s more important to follow the rules than to understand them; and three, that enforcing the rules means castigating anyone who breaks them. And these lessons go deep: they’re hard to unlearn, especially when you grow up with them through your formative years, because the consequences of breaking them - or even being seen to break them - can be socially catastrophic.

But outside these sorts of strict environments - and, honestly, even within them - that much rigidity isn’t healthy. Life is frequently far more complex and nuanced than hard rules really allow for, particularly when it comes to human psychology and behaviour - and this is where critical thinking comes in. Critical thinking allows us to evaluate the world around us on an ongoing basis: to weigh the merits of different positions; to challenge established rules if we feel they no longer serve us; to decide which new ones to institute in their place; to acknowledge that sometimes, there are no easy answers; to show the working behind our positions, and to assess the logic with which other arguments are presented to us. Critical thinking is how we graduate from a simplistic, black-and-white view of morality to a more nuanced perception of the world - but this is a very hard lesson to learn if, instead of critical thinking, we’re taught instead to put our faith in rules alone.

So: what does it actually look like, when rule-based logic is applied in left-wing spaces? I’ll give you an example: 

Sally is new to both social justice and fandom. She grew up in a household that punished her for asking questions, and where she was expected to unquestioningly follow specific hard rules. Now, though, Sally has started to learn a bit more about the world outside her immediate bubble, and is realising not only that the rules she grew up with were toxic, but that she’s absorbed a lot of biases she doesn’t want to have. Sally is keen to improve herself. She wants to be a good person! So Sally joins some internet communities and starts to read up on things. Sally is well-intentioned, but she’s also never learned how to evaluate information before, and she’s certainly never had to consider that two contrasting opinions could be equally valid - how could she have, when she wasn’t allowed to ask questions, and when she was always told there was a singular Right Answer to everything? Her whole framework for learning is to Look For The Rules And Follow Them, and now that she’s learned the old rules were Bad, that means she has to figure out what the Good Rules are. 

Sally isn’t aware she’s thinking of it in these terms, but subconsciously, this is how she’s learned to think. So when Sally reads a post explaining how sex work and pornography are inherently misogynistic and demeaning to women, Sally doesn’t consider this as one side of an ongoing argument, but uncritically absorbs this information as a new Rule. She reads about how it’s always bad and appropriative for someone from one culture to wear clothes from another culture, and even though she’s not quite sure of all the ways in which it applies, this becomes a Rule, too. Whatever argument she encounters first that seems reasonable becomes a Rule, and once she has the Rules, there’s no need to challenge them or research them or flesh out her understanding, because that’s never been how Rules work - and because she’s grown up in a context where the foremost way to show that you’re aware of and obeying the Rules is to shame people for breaking them, even though she’s not well-versed in these subjects, Sally begins to weigh in on debates by harshly disagreeing with anyone who offers up counter-opinions. Sometimes her disagreements are couched in borrowed terms, parroting back the logic of the Rules she’s learned, but other times, they’re simply ad hominem attacks, because at home, breaking a Rule makes you a bad person, and as such, Sally has never learned to differentiate between attacking the idea and attacking the person. 

And of course, because Sally doesn’t understand the Rules in-depth, it’s harder to explain them to or debate with rulebreakers who’ve come armed with arguments she hasn’t heard before, which makes it easier and less frustrating to just insult them and point out that they ARE rulebreakers - especially if she doesn’t want to admit her confusion or the limitations of her knowledge. Most crucially of all, Sally doesn’t have a viable framework for admitting to fault or ignorance beyond a total groveling apology that doubles as a concession to having been Morally Bad, because that’s what it’s always meant to her to admit you broke a Rule. She has no template for saying, “huh, I hadn’t considered that,” or “I don’t know enough to contribute here,” or even “I was wrong; thanks for explaining!” 

So instead, when challenged, Sally remains defensive: she feels guilty about the prospect of being Bad, because she absolutely doesn’t want to be a Bad Person, but she also doesn’t know how to conceptualise goodness outside of obedience. It makes her nervous and unsettled to think that strangers could think of her as a Bad Person when she’s following the Rules, and so she becomes even more aggressive when challenged to compensate, clinging all the more tightly to anyone who agrees with her, yet inevitably ending up hurt when it turns out this person or that who she thought agreed on What The Rules Were suddenly develops a different opinion, or asks a question, or does something else unsettling. 

Pushed to this sort of breaking point, some people in Sally’s position go back to the fundamentalism they were raised with, not because they still agree with it, but because the lack of uniform agreement about What The Rules Are makes them feel constantly anxious and attacked, and at least before, they knew how to behave to ensure that everyone around them knew they were Good. Others turn to increasingly niche communities and social groups, constantly on paranoid alert for Deviance From The Rules. But other people eventually have the freeing realisation that the fixation on Rules and Goodness is what’s hurting them, not strangers with different opinions, and they steadily start to do what they wanted to do all along: become happier, kinder and better-informed people who can admit to human failings - including their own - without melting down about it.   

THIS is what we mean when we talk about puritan logic being present in fandom and left-wing spaces: the refusal to engage with critical thinking while sticking doggedly to a single, fixed interpretation of How To Be Good. It’s not always about sexuality; it’s just that sexuality, and especially queerness, are topics we’re used to seeing conservatives talk about a certain way, and when those same rhetorical tricks show up in our fandom spaces, we know why they look familiar. 

So: how do you break out of rule-based thinking? By being aware of it as a behavioural pattern. By making a conscious effort to accept that differing perspectives can sometimes have equal value, or that, even if a given argument isn’t completely sound, it might still contain a nugget of truth. By trying to be less reactive and more reflective when encountering positions different to your own. By accepting that not every argument is automatically tied to or indicative of a higher moral position: sometimes, we’re just talking about stuff! By remembering that you’re allowed to change your position, or challenge someone else’s, or ask for clarification. By understanding that having a moral code and personal principles isn’t at odds with asking questions, and that it’s possible - even desirable - to update your beliefs when you come to learn more than you did before. 

This can be a scary and disquieting process to engage in, and it’s important to be aware of that, because one of the main appeals of rule-based thinking - if not the key appeal - is the comfort of moral certainty it engenders. If the rules are simple and clear, and following them is what makes you a good person, then it’s easy to know if you’re doing the right thing according to that system. It’s much, much harder and frequently more uncomfortable to be uncertain about things: to doubt, not only yourself, but the way you’ve been taught to think. And especially online, where we encounter so many more opinions and people than we might elsewhere, and where we can get dogpiled on by strangers or go viral without meaning to despite our best intentions? The prospect of being deemed Bad is genuinely terrifying. Of course we want to follow the Rules. But that’s the point of critical thinking: to try and understand that rules exist in the first place, not to be immutable and unchanging, but as tools to help us be better - and if a tool becomes defunct or broken, it only makes sense to repair it. 

Rigid thinking teaches us to view the world through the lens of rules: to obey first and understand later. Critical thinking teaches us to use ideas, questions, contexts and other bits of information as analytic tools: to put understanding ahead of obedience. So if you want to break out of puritan thinking, whenever you encounter a new piece of information, ask yourself: are you absorbing it as a rule, or as a tool? 

[cured-spadefish]

“Men need therapy” has become a mainstream idea in feminist circles but the conversation never, ever moves past that point because if it did it would inevitably brush up against the implication that the way we raise boys is inherently traumatizing. And that would complicate their nice neat theories about how maleness is only ever a privilege and femaleness is only ever oppressive.

[cured-spadefish]

No one was ever born incapable of goodness. Evil is a choice anyone can make, and so is compassion. Acting like certain categories of people are simply destined to be evil just shits on the very concept of free will and doesn’t solve real problems.

[cured-spadefish]

Scientific Community Shocked! Men And Women Same Species All Along!

So fucking act like it.

[cured-spadefish]

[cured-spadefish]

I think tumblr in particular, and progressive spaces in general, have overadopted the idea that being a member of a marginalized group means that you a) understand all of their issues and b) won’t have that particular bigotry. I have met misogynistic women. Antiblack black people. Psychotic people who specifically hate other psychotic people. As this is tumblr, I presume people are fairly familiar with how transmedicalist trans men went viciously after other trans men.

I refuse to call this internalized because though they do apply it to themselves sometimes, a lot of the time it’s about not being like “those” people. Once the bigotry is something you’re hurting other people with, it’s no longer just internal- it’s a weapon you’re wielding against others.

I think that “All people in the oppressing group are automatically socialized into bigotry and need to confront that.” was a good step. I think the next step needs to be “We all are socialized in the same society to the same bigotries. Being a member of a marginalized group just means that you are more likely to do the work to unlearn bigotry against you.”

[cured-spadefish]

Antis will really tell you to “think critically” about your fiction like it’s anything but hilarious to hear that from someone who didn’t even understand the moral of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

[cured-spadefish]

It’s called free will, motherfuckers! 

stop saying empathy when you really mean compassion. im gettin sick of saying it

[cured-spadefish]

*taps the glass* hey, y'all know that what you might want isn't necessarily what's best to legislate?

[cured-spadefish]

I don’t think you’re ready to have an adult conversation about politics until you’re able to admit that there are things you love and enjoy that would not and should not exist in a just world. $8 billion dollar budget movies every other month don’t exist in a just world. New 900 GB AAA video games every year don’t exist in a just world. Next day delivery doesn’t exist in a just world. 80 different soda brands don’t exist in a just world. 

All of those things come from exploitation on some level, and if you wouldn’t trade those for a world where everyone can eat and have a home no matter who they are or what they do, I don’t know what to tell you. 

[cured-spadefish]

It's 2022 and we're having a brand new resurgence of "are Slavs white" discourse.

We should use this opportunity to criticize how whiteness is a socially constructed class that has malleable and conditional ingroup-outgroup dynamics, that certain groups have conditional whiteness that stays under the surface but maintains a silent within-group power dynamic, and ideally have the whole exercise result in an overall weakening of the construct of whiteness and accompanying white identity.

Instead, people are recreating whole cloth the building blocks of the ""race hierarchy"" that Hitler and the nazis used to rank the purity of different European ethnic groups. Let's...not do that.

[cured-spadefish]

Not to sound like a sap but I think we as a society would be so much better off if we stopped constantly assuming the worst of each other.

[cured-spadefish]

im gonna go out on a limb here and say thats its pretty harmful to generalize everyone who uses the word transandrophobia as white

is it possible that white privilege does help some transmascs turn a blind eye to issues? yes. but also, to pretend that every person who thinks transandrophobia is a thing is a (passing) white dude sits really weird with me.

as a poc, the word transandrophobia helps me explain and discuss my own unique experiences with transphobia, *and* the type of invisibility i feel within my own community. and, as a poc, these experiences are amplified due to cultural norms and stereotypes.

so yeah, something about ppl pointing to transmascs and going: haha, privileged white guys seems a little like erasure

[cured-spadefish]

[cured-spadefish]

Transandrophobia is real. Acephobia and Arophobia are real. Biphobia is real. Panphobia is real. Trans men, mspec lesbians, lesbians who are also men, pan people, nonbinary people are all real and valid and not hurting anyone by existing.

Fatphobia is real. Fat people are not worth less than anyone else because of what their body is like.

Ableism is real. Disabled people deserve accommodation and understanding.

There is no amount of people to be thrown under the bus in exchange for acceptance by a society that wants us gone. Fighting amongst ourselves only makes us weaker. We are stronger together.

[cured-spadefish]

if minors (people ages 18 and under) can’t be asexual, then they can’t be homosexual, bisexual, pansexual or any other orientation (except the default, straight. ofc /s). and if you believe that, then you’re just parroting homophobic rhetoric that gayness is inherently sexual and not safe for kids.

on that note, if homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, etc, are just umbrella terms that include both romantic and/or sexual attraction, then why can’t the same be true for asexuality? plenty of people use ‘ace’ as a general umbrella term. not every ace person uses the s.a.m.

[cured-spadefish]

people love to find progressive ways to say we should all be arranged into separate groups and try our hardest to not relate to one another