IDEA 50
What Racism and Sexism Have in Common
All generalizations, with the possible exception of this one, are false. [Kurt Gödel]
In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are two main versions of nominalism. One denies the existence of universals — that which can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things (e.g., strength, humanity). The other version specifically denies the existence of abstract objects as such — objects that do not exist in space and time. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Nominalism)
Nominalism is probably the basis on which Gödel rejected generalization, the act of meaningfully describing particulars by some feature they seem to have in common. Thus we have Hegel’s derogatory remarks about Africans in my previous post, or comments, which we will see below, regarding women.
My objection to generalizations of that sort is not that they are intrinsically untrue, as a nominalist would contend, nor that they are inaccurate, insofar as every generalization ignores the exception, e.g., the exceptional African or the exceptional woman, but that they are often ill-intentioned. I consider them to be prejudiced rationalizations of malign attitudes or behaviours disguised as objective factual reporting.
When Hegel says, for instance, that “The Negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state,” he is not by any stretch of reasoning providing a detailed, scientific observation of the sort that naturalists make in the field concerning the Nile crocodile or African nightjar. Rather he is laying the academic flooring needed to justify colonization, apartheid, discriminatory hiring policies, and class barriers by terms such as “wild” and “untamed.”
The same type of discourse has long been common in literary and philosophical references to women. In Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right, Additions, 107, we read: “The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions. Women are educated — who knows how? — as it were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge.”
What is the use of such comments? Evidence, accuracy, and balance are obviously not the main concerns. Once again, we see how lazy, baseless remarks are lent a veneer of respectability by vivid, provocative, or ingenious phrases with a prior aim in mind, namely to demean female status to a level where they can be sneered at, disregarded, or disciplined with a minimum of care or desire for their improvement. Why bother investing time and effort in training a plant to become an animal? Why listen to someone whose opinions are “arbitrary” and whose principles are “vague”?
Let it not be assumed that this is a modern prejudice. In The Annals of Tacitus, Book III, 33-34, we learn about a debate between two senators regarding women accompanying generals and officers on military campaigns. One argued that “A train of women involves delays through luxury in peace and through panic in war, and converts a Roman army on the march into the likeness of a barbarian progress. Not only is the sex feeble and unequal to hardship, but, when it has liberty, it is spiteful, intriguing and greedy of power. They show themselves off among the soldiers and have the centurions at their beck.” A second senator disagreed, in part because “a sex naturally weak will be thus left to itself and be at the mercy of its own voluptuousness and the passions of others.”
In neither side of this debate is it mentioned that women do not benefit from being involved in men’s affairs, that they have important domestic duties such as the nurturing of a new generation of soldiers, or that their virtues and abilities are best developed in peaceful, orderly settings. Rather than praising the higher qualities of women, the vices of a few are dishonestly ladled out as the faults of the entire sex, and their exceptional traits are all regarded as exceptionally bad.
Even Charles Darwin, who has much good to say about feminine character in The Descent of Man, Part 3, Chapter XIX, manages to vitiate a positive comment by this racist generalization: “It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.”
How can a female reader of this sentence understand this remark except as a gratuitous dismissal of her identity as one belonging to “the lower races” and a “lower state of civilization.” Could Darwin have said that to the face of his mother or sister? Probably not, but he says it in a book, and so it gets a pass, sailed over like one wave in an ocean of other ideas of variable worth.
Download the PDF version for free at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’ān – Mont Redmond complete version, or purchase a hard copy at Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an: Redmond, Mont: 9781738842506: Books – Amazo
