Too few questions were asked
Further to the discussion of multiculturalism and autonomy for ‘communities’ and family law – Martha Nussbaum’s ‘The Feminist Critique of Liberalism’ is relevant throughout, and particularly relevant in this bit (Sex and Social Justice, pp 63-4):
[A]s many feminists have long pointed out, where women and the family are concerned, liberal political thought has not been nearly individualist enough. Liberal thinkers tended to segment the private from the public sphere, considering the public sphere to be the sphere of individual rights and contractual arrangements, the family to be a private sphere of love and comfort into which the state should not meddle. This tendency grew, no doubt, out of a legitimate concern for the protection of choice – but too few questions were asked about whose choices were thereby protected. This means that liberals too often failed to notice the extent to which laws and institutions shape the family and determine the privileges and rights of its members.
Compare that to, again, Taner’s
[The state] leaves the internal affairs of communities alone. Particularly areas such as family law become the domain of quasi-autonomous communities. After all, if devout Muslims feel that the ability to communally follow sharia law is essential for them to live their religious commitments properly, well, why not? Why interfere?
Because families, especially in ‘communities’ that feel that the ability to communally follow sharia or ‘Catholic teachings’ or other religious ‘law’ is essential for them to live their religious commitments properly, can have differences in power and hence in rights, freedom, ability to choose, and all such liberal shibboleths.
Furthermore, family law, which is what Taner specifies, is not a private sphere of love and comfort; it’s what people resort to when there is disagreement. If all is well, family law is not needed, and it’s beside the point. Family law is there to adjudicate who gets what. It’s there for when the members of the family can no longer agree – so it is no longer an area of voluntary agreement or commitment or choice – it’s an area of coercion. People have a cognitive bias to be over-optimistic; people can be blithe about agreements and commitments when starting out to establish a family, but that doesn’t mean they stay blithe forever. A liberal state will attempt to treat all members fairly; religious law is a different kind of thing. That’s ‘why interfere.’
Remember that story on ‘Islamic marriage contracts’?
Why do Pakistani women agree to marriage contracts without scrutinizing them first and making sure they won’t be sorry later?…My soon-to-be husband had been briefed by the religious scholar presiding. He had also read the marriage-contract papers in detail, making the additions and cancellations he wanted. But I hadn’t seen the document. When I had asked to, my mother had rebuffed my request, saying there was no need, since she had already gone through it. When I told my fiance I wanted to discuss the contract with him, he wondered why I didn’t trust him to do what was best for us.
Nussbaum goes on (p 65):
Liberal reluctance to interfere with the family has run very deep; dispiritingly, many liberal thinkers have failed to notice that the family is not always characterized by a harmony of interests. No model of the family can be adequate to reality if it fails to take into account competition for scarce resources, divergent interests, and differences of power…
But notice that, as Mill already argued, what we see here is not a failure intrinsic to liberalism itself. It is, in fact, a failure of liberal thinkers to follow their own thought through to its socially radical conclusion. What is wrong with the views of the family endorsed by [Gary] Becker, Rawls, and others is not that they are too individualistic but that they are not individualistic enough…[T]hey fail to ask rigorously their own question, namely, how is each and every individual doing?
Taner is making the same mistake.
As I said, in my article, Camels, Gnats and Shallow Graves (http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=1607), here are representative results of “freedom of communities to deal with their own affairs” — which Edis undoubtedly knows, since the last one happened in his natal country a month ago:
Afghani girls have acid thrown on their faces because they are attending school. Saudi girls are locked inside their burning school, because they might run out of the flames “not properly” veiled. Somali girls are stoned to death because they were raped. Sudanese girls have their genitals shredded. Indian girls get set alight for having “inadequate” dowries. And then we have stories like this (composite from several sources):
“Sixteen-year old Medine Memi was discovered bound and lifeless in sitting position in a hole dug beneath a chicken coop outside the family’s house in the town of Kahta in Southeastern Turkey, 40 days after she had disappeared. The hole had been cemented over. According to a post-mortem examination the large amount of soil in her lungs and stomach showed that she had been buried while fully conscious and suffered a slow and agonizing death.
The execution was an honor killing carried out as a punishment for talking to boys. Medine had repeatedly tried to report to police that she had been beaten by her father and grandfather days before she was killed. “She tried to take refuge at the police station three times, and she was sent home three times,” her mother, Immihan, said after the body was discovered in December. Medine’s father is reported as saying at the time: “She has male friends. We are uneasy about that.”
In Turkey’s impoverished Kurdish region, the practice of honor killing has become a well-known ritual that is chilling in its precision: when a young woman is suspected of “dishonoring” the family by wearing tight clothes, having unauthorized contact with young men, or falling victim to rape, a family council is called, and a family member appointed as an executioner. Afterwards, the family will try to pretend she never existed.
Official figures have indicated that more than 200 such killings take place each year, accounting for half of all murders in Turkey. Community workers say the figures are likely higher, as many go unreported. After the 2005 reform, passed to help Turkey join the European Union, a new practice of forced suicide sprang up. According to media reports, victims would be locked in their rooms for days with rat poison, a pistol or rope, and ordered to spare their families the legal retribution by killing themselves.”
The best explanation I can put on Edis’ astonishing screeds is that he wants to be provocative. Or he may be a common knuckle-dragger who is privileged enough not to need to exercise the faculty of empathy.
Before his death, John Rawls pretty much agreed completely with these feminist critiques of political liberalism. This was almost a decade ago, where the hell have these liberal theorists been?
And to beat a dead horse on the community issue, Rawls’ solution (shortened and paraphrased) was that communities could have their own rules and had the authority to enforce those rules, but any member of the community had to have both the freedom and the means to leave the community at any time. When did Political Liberalism come out? 1970? Where the hell have liberal theorists been??
Well, most of them have been middle-class white men in Western democracies, themann1086. They didn’t see the need to worry their heads about this trivial stuff, not even when they saw it happening in immigrant communities in their own countries. If anyone presumed to mention that they were not seeing the whole picture, they got huffy and wrapped themselves in the mantle of free spirits “persecuted by the humorless PC police”.
And of course, whenever economies tank or wars start, women’s rights are the first to be “sacrificed for the greater good”. As James Tiptree said, in The Women Men Don’t See:
“Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We’ll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was [or 9/11 — AA note]. You’ll see.”
As I said in a similar context elsewhere, one month in a burqa in Afghanistan might cure them. But I’m not even sanguine about that.
“As I said in a similar context elsewhere, one month in a burqa in Afghanistan might cure them. But I’m not even sanguine about that.”
Well, if the example of Yvonne Ridley is anything to go by, you’re right to have your doubts!
I agree that all too often, women’s concerns are viewed as peripheral, not very important, a “luxury” and “distraction” from the “main issue” (independence, anti-colonialism, class struggle, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, or whatever the Greater Good is considered to be). How many times have women been told to put aside feminist activism in favor of some “greater” cause, and when that is achieved, then will be the time for feminism — and that time somehow never comes? Women (much like atheists) have to seize their rights, because you’ll wait a LONG time waiting for them to be given to you.
Incidentally, it is pretty disgusting to see white male leftists berating Iranian feminists for giving “aid and comfort” to the “enemy” by drawing attention to what’s going on in the country. How pathetic is that?!? Surely it’s too simplistic to see things through a “support Iran at all costs” vs. “bomb them for being such savages” dichotomy? Or dismissing all Western concern about the status of women or gays or other groups in Islamic countries as merely another example of “drumming up support for war”? (Admittedly, Afghanistan and Iraq loom large in such arguments, but surely the thoughtful alternative is NOT to simply shrug and ignore the entire matter as “none of our concern,” especially when there are plenty of people there who aren’t happy with the situation, either.)
Sorry…that kind of attitude really gets me steamed.
Well, Lisa, there are white male liberals who consider the recent Iranian women’s manifesto that wishes to end polygyny “problematic” because it would be “on the slippery slope to abolish all polyamorous relationships” (!) Taner Edis would/should fall into a bromance on sight with people like that. Talk of swallowing camels and dissecting gnats. The Greeks have a more colorful saying about such mindsets, but it’s profane.
Well…that was me in the comments to that particular blog post over at Russell Blackford’s blog querying about that and requesting clarification…well, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt (I try to be understanding, despite my posts lately excoriating Tanis’s views!), I can kind of see where he’s coming from, given his conception of liberal rights. However, I thought — and still do — that it’s a bit too much of an armchair discussion in that particular context of women living under the Iranian theocracy. Polyamory in the West among fully consenting partners is a very different thing, and shouldn’t be conflated with Islamic notions of polygyny (which, after all, only males can “enjoy.”). Failure to do so can look like extreme insensitivity to women’s rights (vide Taner).
I didn’t realize that was you!
He comes from a place where he never had to prove he was fully human or had his many privileges questioned or suspended. Armchair discussion (risk-free, I might add) is exactly right.
I’ve not really commented much on this, because everything Ophelia, Athena, Jenavir, Eric, Lisa, and everyone else has said has been more than sufficient. I’ve basically been reading the posts and yelling, “That’s right, sistah, can I get a amen up in here?!”
But I do feel ethically obligated to speak up. Taner Edis’ inability or refusal to acknowledge the oppressive consequences of his naive appeal to “communitarianism” is sinister, baffling, and ethically bankrupt. As someone else here noted (sorry I can’t remember who), this attitude could only come from a straight, white male, comfortably ensconced in the liberal society he takes for granted.
Ophelia’s given examples of “some nice community life” that give the lie to Edis’ simplistic formulations. That should have been enough, but it’s not. Let me offer him some more.
I grew up in a “community” of working class, politically conservative rednecks. The “prevailing community standards” considered me, as a gay kid publicly out from the age of 12, as a moral pariah. Prevailing community standards allowed me to be stalked by a neo-nazi skinhead gang at school who waited for me just off school property with baseball bats. Prevailing community standards gave me no recourse, no sympathy, and no protection.
When I went to the Vice-Principal’s office in terror, begging for some sort of protection, she said to me (and yes, I quote):
“What do you want; that’s the price you pay for being different and being so loud about it.”
Women, gays, and many others around the world (and here in the US) have suffered far worse fates than I did – at least I wasn’t killed, and at least I had some larger, more liberal society to escape to.
Edis’ relativism, his easy-peasy-breezy idea that people can simply “choose” to be happy and comfortable in the bondage of an authoritarian society, or “choose” happy and comfortable to being in a liberal society, is profoundly illiberal and anti-humanist. It’s not a fashion choice, Edis.
This is an example of the ugly strain of pomo pseudo-liberal thought that denies any form of human nature, any interests. It fetishizes difference, and makes pseudo-people out of “communities” while denying the needs and common interests that real people (all of them) share.
Individual autonomy, freedom from physical and intellectual oppression, freedom to choose one’s own circumstances – these are fundamental human interests , whether Edis wants to acknowledge them or not. They trump “community” rights. Every. Single. Time. And if you don’t agree, something’s wrong with your moral compass.
Don’t like my absolutism, my reductionism? Fine. I disdain your privileged contempt and dismissal of real human suffering even more.
In case anyone should think I have a simplistic idea that anything an individual wants to do (say, kill her neighbor) trumps the rights of society to prevent murder, I hope it’s obvious I didn’t mean that when I said “They trump community rights. Every. Single Time.”
Wow – ‘that’s the price you pay for being different and being so loud about it.’ That’s some humane Vice-Principal!
All the gin joints in all the world, and Lisa and Athena meet each other again here.
:- )
I have read the discussion on this thread, and I’m doing my best to ignore all the gratuitous personal insults and ad hominems. Still, it’s upsetting, and I have to say something.
I stand by my view that polygynous relationships should not be banned in any country that aspires to be enlightened. That does not mean that any such relationships should be regulated by Shariah law or even that they should be recognised by the state. I also think that polyandrous relationships should not be banned. Again, that doesn’t entail that they should be recognised by the state (or regulated in any traditional way that might be relevant).
I’ve had a lot of experience that is relevant to this, though I don’t usually blather about my own life experience. What matters is the arguments: the premises we use and the ways they are connected. I am a strong advocate of the rights of polys, I’m not going to change that or apologise for it, and, yes, I write from that perspective.
I have NEVER supported the Muslim approach to either monogamous OR polygamous relationships, so sneering at my (presumed) epistemically inadequate life experience and suggesting that I’d drop my support for Muslim polygamy if I had to endure Shariah law is both (1) a viciously personal and irrational approach to argument and (2) totally wide of the mark. You are attacking me for a position that I have never advocated or held.
Athena, I’m not actually interested in fighting about this with you at the moment, partly because the views of mine that you are attacking have nothing to do with those of Taner Edis and especially when you insist on making it personal (hint: speculating wildly in a superior tone about my own life experience will get you nowhere with me … except to make me think that you have no rational arguments to put against my position). Note that you raised this beef with me quite gratuitously and opportunistically on Ophelia’s thread.
If you’ve decided to make me your enemy, fine. So be it. In that case, others please take note.
But I have a principled position on this issue which is perfectly consistent with my criticisms of Taner. I do NOT support polygamous (or monogamous) marriages structured in accordance with Shariah law, and do NOT support allowing a “community” to impose such marital structures. But nor do I support legal prohibition of all forms of polygamous relationships. Apart from anything else, that is highly illiberal. A document worded that broadly needs, at the very least, to be interpreted in some way that narrows or clarifies its meaning (perhaps it could be interpreted as meaning “Muslim patriarchal polygyny” or in some such way, but I’d want that reassurance).
When this came up on my own blog, you could have chosen to discuss it rationally – e.g. discussing with me how the document we were talking about is best interpreted in context. Maybe you could have persuaded me to sign it. As you know very well, I put the document there precisely to assist people who might want to support it. I had divided thoughts and feelings about it, and, when asked why I had misgivings, I discussed them in a candid and, I thought, reasonable way.
Instead of taking the high road of reason, you have taken the low road of misrepresenting me and attacking me personally. If that’s to be your approach, when I have always been friendly towards you and suppportive of you (e.g. inviting you to submit an essay to 50 Voices of Disbelief), then you can work out the implications for yourself.
I’ll await your apology, because you sure do owe me one. I gave you every chance to let the subject drop when it came up previously, but you’ve now decided to use Ophelia’s site to attack me personally in a discussion where it was totally irrelevant and out of line.
Well, I’ll apologize if I’ve misread you in any way, Russell. I know we had an interesting discussion in the comments, at least, even if I’m still not totally convinced. Admittedly, given my own unhappy experience, I flinch inwardly at suggestions that polygny should be allowed, although that’s no doubt due to my own “issues.” However, there is one area that concerns me: if the state were to recognize polygamous marriages, there would be no real way for the state to distinguish fully consenting and equal relationships with Islamic ones where women are not infrequently pressured into accepting it by men insisting that this is their Allah-given right, or threats to accept it or lose their children (in Islamic law, if a divorced woman remarries, she loses her children to the father, since, I suppose, what man wants to raise some other man’s child?), or perhaps something else unpleasant along the lines of saying “I’ll have you out on the street if you don’t consent” to recent immigrant women. Muslim women almost universally loathe polygyny and feminists in Muslim countries have spent decades fighting to get it made illegal, and it is only in the relatively secular states of Tunisia and Turkey where it’s banned. If there were some good way for the state to distinguish absolutely between the two setups, I wouldn’t be so hesitant, but I’m not sure how that would or could work.
Excellent article. It seems like only yesterday when this was the sort of thing that everyone who thought of themselves as the least bit liberal agreed on. It is very unnerving to find that you have to argue for things that everyone you knew once took for granted.
Here you have one of those awkward ‘after the revolution’ scenarios – while acknowledging that in theory three people who want to live together and declare each other to be their next of kin should be entitled to do so, how much account needs to be taken of the fact that, under current circumstances, the greatest likelihood is that such a relationship will be coercive and unequal?
Personally, despite being straight, white, male, very nearly middle-aged and almost certainly middle-class, I’m not comfortable with prioritising a theoretical denial of equal opportunities over actual examples of abuse. Indeed, I’m not really even comfortable framing them as in any way comparable. But then maybe I’m not a liberal? I thought I was, but who knows, since it’s every other political alignment’s favourite cuss-word.
Er. Oops. Sorry, Russell – I realized there were some references to a thread at your place, but I was vague on the details; didn’t mean to pile on.
I do think polygamy is much more tricky than polyandry, for the reason Dave indicates (obliquely).
It reminds me of a funny/horrible interview Terry Gross did with Hugh Hefner once; he was going on and on about the joys of freedom and his multiple women, and Gross kept asking him if it was okay for those women to have multiple men. He kept sounding confused (really? or was he pretending?) and saying no, of course not, the point is for me to…etc.
But it’s also true that polygamy can be entirely consensual, so…
Russell: briefly, since I don’t do this for a living. The relevant exchanges are on own site, and people can draw their own conclusions about who was condescending. Navel-watching is fine, but don’t let the lint go to your brain.