watch thou for the mutant
I have a confession to make: I am possibly the entire person in the world who doesn't like Quakers. Seriously. I googled "criticism of Quakers" and the only thing I go was this, which at least didn't make me feel totally insane, since a lot of the criticisms he relates are ones I share.
I don't hate Quakers, obvs. I wouldn't deny someone a job or human dignity based on their Quakerness. But when someone tells me they're a Quaker I get the same hackles-raising shiver down my spine as when someone tells me that they vote Republican or says that they don't believe in government regulation. I'm open to the possibility that you're not kind of a jerk. I really want you to not be kind of a jerk. But I strongly suspect you will be.
Why don't I like Quakers? Well, that's kind of a story. The short version is this: I was expelled from a Quaker camp.
"Expelled? From a QUAKER organization?" I hear you cry. "Goddamn, girl, we knew you had issues but we never realized you were a psycho."
Thanks, guys. I appreciate the moral support.
There was a girl in my cabin who claimed that I threatened her with a knife. I did, in fact, own a knife. In celebration of my first wilderness camp experience, my dad had taken me out and gotten me a knife, a real pocketknife of my very own. My dad comes from a blue-collar, working-class family. A kid's first pocketknife is a big deal, as big as their first watch. I was so, so proud of that knife, I took it everywhere and whittled constantly, and one time I walked in her general direction while closing the blade, so she told the counselors that I had lunged towards her with the knife and threatened to cut her.
I don't have that knife anymore. They didn't take it away from me, I just lost track of it. I couldn't look at it anymore without remembering, so I put it somewhere and forgot about it. I kind of wish they had taken it away. If they'd done that, at least I'd know that they weren't lying to themselves. Just to me.
I will give them this: I was given the chance to tell my side of the story. But, I was told, in the interests of fairness, I had to leave. I had made her so uncomfortable that she couldn't be in the same cabin as me, and there was no room for me anywhere else. They'd already called my parents.
Well, I asked, meek as the child that I was, could I at least stay to perform the play I had been cast in? It was happening tomorrow.
No, I was told. The story had already spread across the camp, and my presence might make other children uncomfortable. Besides, the girl was also in the play, and she was scared of me, and they had to consider her needs. They were sure I understood that since they didn't know what had really happened, they had to assume that there was some measure of truth to what she'd said.
So I stayed in the office until my parents came to get me. At some point I was escorted back to the cabin and supervised as I packed my things. Like a criminal. I dimly recall the counselor who escorted me acting vaguely annoyed at having to miss the play and the festival to make sure I didn't do anything crazy, crazy knife girl that I was. My parents came and got me. And I left.
And that's the story of how I was expelled from Quaker camp.
It doesn't end there, not completely. My parents just about lost their minds - not at me, but at the camp. The camp offered a variety of reasons for their treatment of me, starting with safety concerns and ending with pocketknives are against Quaker philosophy because they're implements of violence. My parents accepted none of this, and eventually got at the root of the problem: the girl who accused me came from a wealthy family that donated serious amounts of glorious cash to the camp on a regular basis, and was something of a legacy of the camp.
They proceeded to lose even more of their shit. Eventually, the camp gave us a formal apology and invited me back for next year.
I burned their letter.
So yeah, that's why I don't like Quakers. Maybe it's not fair of me to judge them all based on the actions of this one camp: but was it fair of them to judge me in the way they did?
Oh, but it was more complicated than that, I can still hear them weaselling away in the back of my mind. She's such a difficult child, she never really fit in here, she didn't like to play with the other children or do what they wanted to do. Turns out, when you take a kid on the spectrum and tell them that that here is a place where they can do as they please as long as they follow a few simple, common-sense rules, what they mostly want to do is play by themselves, drifting from interesting thing to interesting thing like an untethered balloon. Turns out, they're not going to hear the unspoken caveat: do what you want, as long as it's more or less the same as what everyone else is doing.
Why am I bringing this up?
Well, because one of my classes this semester is basically Social Justice 101, and we have finally, inevitably, gotten to my personal nemesis: interdependence. Interdependence is the idea that social justice will happen when we acknowledge that we do not stand alone, that we are absolutely dependent on one another, and that ability to stand up and say with a straight face "I've never taken charity or accepted a hand up, I did it all myself" is not only a lie, but a blatant one, and a sign of your unexamined privilege.
Oh, how I hate it when interdependence comes up.
I don't disagree with the core idea. The notion that man is somehow an island is one of the most pervasive and toxic ones in American culture, and it is perhaps the most important of all the reasons why we cannot get our collective act together with regards to civil right and social and economic justice. Throughout American history, there is the concept of rights as a zero-sum game; for one group to gain, another group must lose. The pie is finite, and if you want more, than I must have less.
The truth is, as we all know, that everything we do affects someone else, and everything everyone else does affects us. It is impossible to live apart from the world. Even if you loaded yourself in a satellite and took off for geosynchronous orbit, your lifestyle would still have been sustained and made possible by the people who invented the technology, mined the materials, created the parts, and so on and so forth. Survival requires co-operation.
Here's the problem, though: people don't like to co-operate with mutants, freaks, and weird little fuckers. I will admit, I had a very bad experience that has permanently colored my view of the "interdependence" movement, and made me a little irrational on the subject. But I do not think my very bad experience was unique. I think there are a lot of people who have had the experience of going to a place that purports to be a bastion of tolerance and interdependence and respect, only to find themselves rejected for being the wrong kind of strange.
As an individual on the autistic spectrum, social interaction is an inherently stressful and difficult experience for me, and one that I will never sparkle at. As I've gotten older and more experienced at it, that stress has lessened, but it will never go away. As the blog post pointed out, a huge part of interdependence is having the social skills that make people want to co-operate with you. I am lacking in that area, and always will be. Does this make me less a person? Does this make me less worthy?
I acknowledge, intellectually, the validity and importance of interdependence as part of the social justice movement. But my fear - and it is a fear that has been formed and justified by my personal experiences - is that the rhetoric of interdependence can very easily become just another form of oppression.
True interdependence requires accepting the individuals in your community exactly as they are, and being willing to work with them as they are, rather than change them to make them more familiar to you. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis discusses the difference between the parochial and congregational models of community. In a parochial model, the community encompasses everyone within a certain geographical area, without prejudice, and everyone within that area has an inalienable membership in that community and right to its resources. In the congregational model, people are empowered to pick and choose their community, and may admit or expel members based on their similarity to the zeitgeist. My criticism of interdependence as a political philosophy is that it has, in my experience, been used to support a congregational rather than a parochial model. It is easy to turn the rhetoric of interdependence into a tyranny of the mainstream, alienating those who cannot or will not conform as being insufficient community-minded and therefore not entitled to that community. They're just not the right fit, really.
Does this mean we should all say fuck it and go Galt? No. That is genuinely stupid, and unrealistic to boot. What I am calling for is a very serious examination of how interdependence can be made to work in a truly diverse community, one that includes people you don't like, don't agree with, don't understand, and don't get along with. It's not a simple question, and it doesn't have a simple answer.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.
I don't hate Quakers, obvs. I wouldn't deny someone a job or human dignity based on their Quakerness. But when someone tells me they're a Quaker I get the same hackles-raising shiver down my spine as when someone tells me that they vote Republican or says that they don't believe in government regulation. I'm open to the possibility that you're not kind of a jerk. I really want you to not be kind of a jerk. But I strongly suspect you will be.
Why don't I like Quakers? Well, that's kind of a story. The short version is this: I was expelled from a Quaker camp.
"Expelled? From a QUAKER organization?" I hear you cry. "Goddamn, girl, we knew you had issues but we never realized you were a psycho."
Thanks, guys. I appreciate the moral support.
There was a girl in my cabin who claimed that I threatened her with a knife. I did, in fact, own a knife. In celebration of my first wilderness camp experience, my dad had taken me out and gotten me a knife, a real pocketknife of my very own. My dad comes from a blue-collar, working-class family. A kid's first pocketknife is a big deal, as big as their first watch. I was so, so proud of that knife, I took it everywhere and whittled constantly, and one time I walked in her general direction while closing the blade, so she told the counselors that I had lunged towards her with the knife and threatened to cut her.
I don't have that knife anymore. They didn't take it away from me, I just lost track of it. I couldn't look at it anymore without remembering, so I put it somewhere and forgot about it. I kind of wish they had taken it away. If they'd done that, at least I'd know that they weren't lying to themselves. Just to me.
I will give them this: I was given the chance to tell my side of the story. But, I was told, in the interests of fairness, I had to leave. I had made her so uncomfortable that she couldn't be in the same cabin as me, and there was no room for me anywhere else. They'd already called my parents.
Well, I asked, meek as the child that I was, could I at least stay to perform the play I had been cast in? It was happening tomorrow.
No, I was told. The story had already spread across the camp, and my presence might make other children uncomfortable. Besides, the girl was also in the play, and she was scared of me, and they had to consider her needs. They were sure I understood that since they didn't know what had really happened, they had to assume that there was some measure of truth to what she'd said.
So I stayed in the office until my parents came to get me. At some point I was escorted back to the cabin and supervised as I packed my things. Like a criminal. I dimly recall the counselor who escorted me acting vaguely annoyed at having to miss the play and the festival to make sure I didn't do anything crazy, crazy knife girl that I was. My parents came and got me. And I left.
And that's the story of how I was expelled from Quaker camp.
It doesn't end there, not completely. My parents just about lost their minds - not at me, but at the camp. The camp offered a variety of reasons for their treatment of me, starting with safety concerns and ending with pocketknives are against Quaker philosophy because they're implements of violence. My parents accepted none of this, and eventually got at the root of the problem: the girl who accused me came from a wealthy family that donated serious amounts of glorious cash to the camp on a regular basis, and was something of a legacy of the camp.
They proceeded to lose even more of their shit. Eventually, the camp gave us a formal apology and invited me back for next year.
I burned their letter.
So yeah, that's why I don't like Quakers. Maybe it's not fair of me to judge them all based on the actions of this one camp: but was it fair of them to judge me in the way they did?
Oh, but it was more complicated than that, I can still hear them weaselling away in the back of my mind. She's such a difficult child, she never really fit in here, she didn't like to play with the other children or do what they wanted to do. Turns out, when you take a kid on the spectrum and tell them that that here is a place where they can do as they please as long as they follow a few simple, common-sense rules, what they mostly want to do is play by themselves, drifting from interesting thing to interesting thing like an untethered balloon. Turns out, they're not going to hear the unspoken caveat: do what you want, as long as it's more or less the same as what everyone else is doing.
Why am I bringing this up?
Well, because one of my classes this semester is basically Social Justice 101, and we have finally, inevitably, gotten to my personal nemesis: interdependence. Interdependence is the idea that social justice will happen when we acknowledge that we do not stand alone, that we are absolutely dependent on one another, and that ability to stand up and say with a straight face "I've never taken charity or accepted a hand up, I did it all myself" is not only a lie, but a blatant one, and a sign of your unexamined privilege.
Oh, how I hate it when interdependence comes up.
I don't disagree with the core idea. The notion that man is somehow an island is one of the most pervasive and toxic ones in American culture, and it is perhaps the most important of all the reasons why we cannot get our collective act together with regards to civil right and social and economic justice. Throughout American history, there is the concept of rights as a zero-sum game; for one group to gain, another group must lose. The pie is finite, and if you want more, than I must have less.
The truth is, as we all know, that everything we do affects someone else, and everything everyone else does affects us. It is impossible to live apart from the world. Even if you loaded yourself in a satellite and took off for geosynchronous orbit, your lifestyle would still have been sustained and made possible by the people who invented the technology, mined the materials, created the parts, and so on and so forth. Survival requires co-operation.
Here's the problem, though: people don't like to co-operate with mutants, freaks, and weird little fuckers. I will admit, I had a very bad experience that has permanently colored my view of the "interdependence" movement, and made me a little irrational on the subject. But I do not think my very bad experience was unique. I think there are a lot of people who have had the experience of going to a place that purports to be a bastion of tolerance and interdependence and respect, only to find themselves rejected for being the wrong kind of strange.
As an individual on the autistic spectrum, social interaction is an inherently stressful and difficult experience for me, and one that I will never sparkle at. As I've gotten older and more experienced at it, that stress has lessened, but it will never go away. As the blog post pointed out, a huge part of interdependence is having the social skills that make people want to co-operate with you. I am lacking in that area, and always will be. Does this make me less a person? Does this make me less worthy?
I acknowledge, intellectually, the validity and importance of interdependence as part of the social justice movement. But my fear - and it is a fear that has been formed and justified by my personal experiences - is that the rhetoric of interdependence can very easily become just another form of oppression.
True interdependence requires accepting the individuals in your community exactly as they are, and being willing to work with them as they are, rather than change them to make them more familiar to you. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis discusses the difference between the parochial and congregational models of community. In a parochial model, the community encompasses everyone within a certain geographical area, without prejudice, and everyone within that area has an inalienable membership in that community and right to its resources. In the congregational model, people are empowered to pick and choose their community, and may admit or expel members based on their similarity to the zeitgeist. My criticism of interdependence as a political philosophy is that it has, in my experience, been used to support a congregational rather than a parochial model. It is easy to turn the rhetoric of interdependence into a tyranny of the mainstream, alienating those who cannot or will not conform as being insufficient community-minded and therefore not entitled to that community. They're just not the right fit, really.
Does this mean we should all say fuck it and go Galt? No. That is genuinely stupid, and unrealistic to boot. What I am calling for is a very serious examination of how interdependence can be made to work in a truly diverse community, one that includes people you don't like, don't agree with, don't understand, and don't get along with. It's not a simple question, and it doesn't have a simple answer.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth.