An Abstract of an Essay

[aquaeri]

ETA: Please read this before this post. Note that this is not a post about RaceFail.

My head is full of thoughts and ideas, partly based on my RaceFail readings, particularly thrown up by

Comments

[corivax]

Thank you for continuing to write about this, and share it with us.

> And because I am an evolutionary biologist (it does come into this, honest, I cannot detach evolutionary thinking from anything I think about seriously and I regard this as a strength even if society at large is a bit weirded by it), I apply evolutionary principles: right now is the same as every other time, only we can see right now with a detail we can't see the past, and we can see the past with a perspective and a sense of proportion we can't see right now. And we can see what happened to the past and we can only guess what will happen to right now, but our guesses are likely to be better if we use all the information at our disposal.

How are those evolutionary principles? They seem very general...

[aquaeri]

Yes, they are very general principles, but evolutionary science arose about the same time Victorian scientists started applying these principles consistently - eg in terms of understanding the deep time of geology rather than "biblical" time scales of creation. And when teaching evolution, I notice the most common hard-to-fix conceptual problems are often related to these sorts of principles. So a necessary but not sufficient set of principles for evolutionary biology? I do consider evolution a very broad philosophy applicable well beyond biology.

[heleninwales]

Thanks. That was very interesting. Re your comment that: I can't really see how I am in a group and what's happening to it. I think that's at least partly because we don't belong in just one group. Most people have multiple roles and multiple allegiances. I actually get annoyed when people try to put me in one little box and slap a label on it, because it's always more complicated than that

[aquaeri]

I think the issues of belonging to lots of different groups, and being sometimes the only overlap between groups, is a really interesting point. Thanks for raising it.

And yes, your analysis of TC is exactly why I'd rather let children read the original books. At least they're based on the complexity of real experience. I think if you expose children to lots of different stories from different backgrounds and time periods, including some Biggles and LHotP will work out fine.

[nellorat]

The following (which I think I'll also put in my LJ) is partly a response to your discussion of hierarchichal vs. non-h communication and partly a continuation of my discussion long ago about medium vs. community:

I think I see very important roles for both hierarchical and npon-hierarchical systems of thought and communication; and/but I see a lot of problems coming out of not sorting out the purpose and the medium.

If someone has a certain amount of expertise and doesn't want to go over and over old territory--whether it's Race 101 or Intro to Raising Rats or whatever--then an open LJ entry probably isn't that good a medium, because it IS non-hierarchical and everyone is entitled to play. Similarly, I bowed out of a discussion of Dollhouse by saying we probably should just both publish our views (which we will be, which is cool) because the other person and I came at the show from basically irreconcilable directions

[green_knight]

I really want to comment on all of this and am tearing myself away and back to the recalcitrant database, but I needed to comment on WisCon doesn't look quite so overwhelmingly White to the white bodies there because no, it wouldn't. For me, Wiscon would be made up of Europeans and Americans and people who are culturally from further afield - many (most?) groups look homogenous only from the outside. All white Americans are 'Americans' to a European - whereas for an American they will be New Englanders and New Yorkers and Southerners and Texans and Californians and Midwesterners - or alternatively, will be characterized by their ethnic origins or religion. Just as 'PoC' is an artificial construction, like 'Asians' is an artificial construction etc - it's reasonably clear who belongs in those groups when you define them from the outside (and sometimes, it's entirely unclear, viz. mediterranean Europeans).

[aquaeri]

I was born in Denmark, I'm now an Australian, I've lived and worked in the US (both east and west coast). I think I'm pretty aware of the cultural diversity among white people. We're still all white. If I got into a specific argument with a PoC about a specific issue where my cultural background mattered, I might raise it, but I'd be really, really careful I wasn't derailing.

I think it's okay to be white, and to have the perspective on white you can only have being white. But I think it's also really worthwhile (it has been for me) to spend the time to think about what it looks like from the outside. Because you'll do a better job (if you ever need to) conveying the diversity among white people that way.

[firecat]

This is great in many ways, and I want to comment at length but my brain isn't working that way, so all i can produce is something like a fork in the road:

And we can see what happened to the past

My historiography brain questions this, insofar as I think we in the present day don't "see" what happened in the past so much as construct stories about parts of it.

We certainly have a different perspective on the past than on the present, but I'm not sure the difference is objectivity.

[aquaeri]

I don't disagree with what you say here at all. Did I mention objectivity? I don't remember mentioning objectivity. I don't believe in it. Nevertheless, there's a very large number of possible pasts that clearly didn't happen.

I realise this is something where specific historical training is an advantage over generic evolutionary training, but I have got the broad gist. I know that only a fraction of things leave any evidence, and that there's difference in ability among humans to leave evidence, to modify evidence, and to construct stories about that evidence.

But I'm very pleased with the extent to which modern historians tell quite different stories than past historians, and even the extent to which beneficiaries of the past historians' work, like those rasfc types I spent so much time interacting with, utterly reject the new historians' work, because I think "that must mean they're on to something". Trying to benefit from my experience, I guess.

[firecat]

You didn't mention objectivity. The word "see" in the context of that quote might imply it, depending on who's reading, so I wanted to comment about it.

the extent to which beneficiaries of the past historians' work, like those rasfc types I spent so much time interacting with, utterly reject the new historians' work

Heh!