Knowing your place

i always bless the name of jo walton for the following line:

As Jo Walton remarked to me in Glasgow last weekend, explaining her reluctance to visit the US any more, “Being a middle-aged white woman is kind of like having civil rights, but not really an adequate substitute.”

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006624.html

Are there any other literary works you (or other fellow readers) might recommend that deal with the subject of self-imposed constraints, one’s “invisible knapsack”, or internalised class systems? As an aside, this phenomenon is commonly described in terms of the struggle for womens’ rights; whether it’s the CWA in the US or the majority of female quota legislators in Iraq, it would appear that one can frequently observe people constrained through their lives defending those constraints through the tropes of dignity, propriety, moral rectitude or duty.

“…human beings may not want the kinds of autonomy that liberals presume they do…”

I think that, for many human beings, that is very clear. Yet part of being human is a response to autonomy. Many people would prefer to avoid that response entirely (which I take to be one of Ishiguro’s themes), but doing so makes for stunted lives.

Krawk!

“…human beings may not want the kinds of autonomy that liberals presume they do…”

or they may not be yearning for democracy the way conservative warmongers presume they do…

Not a big surprise, slaves have functioned in societies (e.g. Rome) without much fanfare. It is easy to create class distinctions and then to have them maintained by the ones who gain the least – look at politics today for plenty of examples.

Huh, rational utility maximizers possess at least some ability to shape their own preferences? Impossible.

If I wuz smarter I’d link this up to Elster’s “Sour Grapes” or Veyne’s “Bread and Circuses.”

“Some critics have suggested it’s implausible that a whole class of people could be created to donate and die and yet been permitted to drive around from centre to centre and go into shops and service stations. I have no problem with it. The worst tortures are the ones you do to yourself. They are a class, they know their place.”

No, really, it was implausible based entirely on the immanent logic of the story. What is clear in the story is that the clones did find possibilities other than having their organs harvested very attractive. That’s why Kathy H. and Tommy seek out Madame. In fact, the Cottages are pervaded with the clones’ desperation for an alternative other than dying.

Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is, if anything, too Millian liberal (and it isn’t surprising that it got such rave reviews). It struck me that he has such a horror of being tagged as “ideological,” that he robs his characters of any psychological depth.

The class of people conditioned to “know their place” ie slaves, went around poisoning their masters and trying to run away. As well as forelock tugging workers there were unionists and saboteurs.

I could have accepted some, even most, of the clones “knowing their place”, but the idea that all of them just accepted it was straight out of Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional Life (1959), and remains what it was then, a consoling lie.

It strikes me as the sort of insight only an ex-pat could have. I agree this element of Ishiguro’s work is disturbing but it is also bollocks.

And I’m not sure about Walton’s swipe at Piercy either.

#15: I had a response to that but it got eaten, sorry Russell – basically, I think this is more of a problem in theory than in practice. The Cohen seminar is relevant here in that there are plenty of ways in which actually existing liberal societies might make compromises with illiberal ways of life in the interests of reducing the bureaucracy payroll to something consistent with the tax base, and in the interests of minimising the deadweight loss of the inconvenience of being harassed all the time. Also, the liberal society has to be prepared to take no for an answer, as is often the case with respect to Muslim women’s headscarves, for example. But if a social or religious group wants to systematically keep its members uninformed about important things which they need to know about in order to be full and autonomous citizens, then I think the consensus is correctly that this is one of the bright lines of a liberal society worthy of the name, only to be compromised on in cases when it literally physically can’t be enforced.

I’m also, personally not too imprworried about the idea of a liberal state’s language, propaganda, etc privileging one form of life over another. Things like education and public health information have to be organised, which means they have to be organised in some specific way. While members of a minority religious community might find that irksome, their right to live their own way doesn’t extend to a right not to be irked – any more than the rights which a liberal society promises to defend for apostates of such a group include the right to keep all their own mates and stay on speaking terms with their parents.

Wow. I never knew what the book was about. If the movie turns out anything like the description of the book, audiences will be staggering out into the open air looking like they got clobbered in the head with a 2×4.

Sapere aude!

But it can be pretty stressful, granted.

Ted, it means I teach English, and I really do not know about political philosophy, and it feels odd to me for a discussion of a novel to jump right to its political consequences. Instead of to, like, its brilliance with language or its literary allusions or its plot or something.

I figure the relation of culture to politics must be a commonplace, obvious topic in the field, though, because it would be dumb if that were not. To me, the influence of culture on people’s behavior looms much larger and more obvious than the influence of political structures, but I’m sure that’s because I am so much more interested in culture.

In this novel, for instance, it seems clear to me that freedom for clones is practically unthinkable for the characters; it would be like freedom for zoo animals. Their cultural frame shapes their thinking so profoundly that it does not occur to them that they are the same, biologically or morally, as non-clones. They want what they want for themselves, but cannot think one step farther to conceive of having a right to anything they want.

I teach English too and while I found the discussion here very interesting it also seems to me to begin by taking too easily for granted that the novel is a parable or allegory or other instrument for thinking about history and politics.

As a teacher I let and even encourage my students to treat novels in this instrumental way to some degree but I always try to also ask them, at some point, why they think the author wrote a novel rather than an essay or a text in some other genre.

_This entirely trivial incident sticks with me because it’s the way the British class system works—it’s not got much to do with money, nothing stops people from going where they don’t belong except their sense that it isn’t where they belong. This is the inexorable pressure that keeps Ishiguro’s clones where they belong,_

Je ne suis pas sociologue, mais …..

Isn’t it a consequence of Bourdieu’s view that this isn’t as distinctive of the _British_ as people generally think? At least, this “not for the likes of us” dynamic happens in France too, and probably most other places.

The counterpoint I would say to this is that the “lower class” people who immigrated to NZ from Britain were definitely not trying to recreate the British class system. I’ve read accounts by people like Lady Barker’s story of station life of what the early colonists were like, and it wasn’t a case of the poorer people keeping in their place. Lady Barker tells about a servant wanting to borrow her riding habit and hat to go with a horse someone else had lent her to go to the Christchurch races (as a spectator, not a competor). Of course to hop on a sailing ship in the mid 19th century and go over halfway round the world, leaving your family behind for good, means that you must be pretty weird to start with.

And more recently, I know a number of Asian female students who have moved to NZ to study and then refused to go back home because they much prefer the casual feminism of NZ to a much more restricted life in their home countries.

Of course this is not everyone, most people did not emigrate from Britain in the 19th century, even ones who could have afforded to do so, and a number of those who did didn’t do so voluntarily, and most Asian female students do choose to go back home. But autonomy does seem fairly attractive, even if people also find attractions in family and friends.

I’m also curious about one thing you say – you talk about people who might prefer to be defined by their social sitaution, what would someone who wasn’t defined by their social situation look like? I know that I have a lot more control over my social situation than most people, particularly other women, did through most of history and around the world, but I would still say that I am defined by whatever one I pick.

Out of interest is there a website that a British person who doesn’t know what class they are can find out by answering a questionairre or similar? Preferably it would have a list of places I would/wouldn’t be welcome in based on the answer. It seems like it would be a useful thing to know.

Well a good class-marker historically was whether a person went to public school (that, for the benefit of non-Brits is an expensive _private_ school). A test of colleagues over coffee showed that those people at least were rather bad at guessing which type of school others attended. Class — in the Brit/cultural sense – isn’t that hard to fake or change (if you want to).

Not only that, they wrote the book in 1996 – see “Spares” by Michael Marshall Smith.

Larry Niven solved the organ-donor problem without resort to cloning in “The Jigsaw Man.” Gotta watch those traffic violations, though.

but I always try to also ask them, at some point, why they think the author wrote a novel rather than an essay or a text in some other genre.

Perhaps because philosophizing by anecdote is both more widely compelling than, and significantly easier than, reasoning claims out explicitly? We’re liable to form emotional connections with entities we recognize as fellow beings, even through the gauze of a story, and that provides a convenient vehicle for philosophical commentary. Setting aside the obvious examples like Swift and Orwell, there’s philosophizing-by-anecdote aplenty in most canonical works, and to good effect: e.g. I found Gravity’s Rainbow to be a more immediately persuasive critique of behaviorism than the standard criticisms (though the latter provided a more rigorous & thorough case).

Or, perhaps because the desire to write was motivated in part by wanting to develop and express a broad understanding of the world and who its inhabitants are, which is essentially philosophic. The ideal phrasing of this idea escapes me.

Anyway. I can think of novels that I wouldn’t call philosophical, but I can’t think of any novels that are free of philosophy.

people in this society, even the liberals, share a gut-level revulsion at the touch of the clones, at the idea of their existence. They don’t touch them much, or have sex with them.

Really?!? I can buy that there are clones, that they’re a separate, despised caste, that no-one thinks of them as “real people”. I can’t buy that they aren’t sexually exploited. *That* would be against human nature — or at least against every similar example in history or anthropology that I can think of.

rm:

But animals, even apes, do not look human. Even if everyone said and thought the clones were taboo, the fact is that they’re biologically, functionally human — which means they’d be used as sex toys. That’s what people do.

Well a good class-marker historically was whether a person went to public school (that, for the benefit of non-Brits is an expensive private school).

A 1980s Hunter Davies book o’lists from my teenage library (the kind that the internets may have rendered obsolete) defined “upper class” as “grandfather had a title of nobility” and working class as “father worked in manual labour”.

Class—in the Brit/cultural sense – isn’t that hard to fake or change (if you want to).

But there are ways and means, and one of the most effective (lernin’t’talk posh, like) is also potentially the biggest wrench. Cf. Daniel’s CiF piece on the role of accents and Will Self’s related line in Junk Mail: “In Britain, you can make the ascent from working to middle class in one generation, but you can’t top out at the summit. If you have any kind of strong regional accent, you can’t possibly be pukka.”

The “We’re free! Now what?” plotline seems more common and less peculiarly English these days. My suspicion is that it was globalised by the “Yes! We’re all individuals!” scene in The Life of Brian.

I felt that a major theme of NLMG was the gathering impression of what life is like inside a society built on an omnipresent evil, so pervading that even the victims are unable to fully conceive of an alternative way of life. Which then in turn made me think about what is it in our society that might be corresponding. Candidates are not so hard to find.

Clearly the pubman wasn’t parsing “race” the way I’m used to

I knew people like that when I was growing up in the South-East of England. You could sum up the attitude as “I’m a racist, no offence intended”.

Each to their own, OK? It works for us and it works for them. So if one of them tried it on by coming in here, obviously we’d put them straight, wouldn’t we? But you, well, you weren’t to know, were you? You’ll know another time, eh? No harm done – can I get you one for the road?

I didn’t really like the South-East.

I grew up in the agricultural west midlands, and there I think the provisional hospitality/hostility shift was similar — “Your kind not welcome if your being here means lots of like-you will be following; if you’re a random one-off drop-in, then we’re honoured by your exotic presence and what are you having, it’s lovely to meet you?”

And it applied class-wise (to other Britons) as well as race-wise.

oops – different RS from further above

Getting back to the book – isn’t it an inherent weakness of any of this kind of literature/entertainment – that is stories premised on a society that has deemed clones, or artificial intelligence, or whatever as being ipso facto subhuman and with degraded or absent rights – that it tends to fall at the hurdle of plausibility.

Not that it isn’t plausible that people would do this – human history of slavery is proof enough of that – but more that no one seems to be truly engaging intellectually with the question in these (usually) futuristic societies – it is painted as just an accepted fact about the world rather than what would presumably be a massively contentious issue rending society.

” Irish people don’t map well onto the English class system. We’re not entirely foreigners (we were after all part of the same country for centuries), but we don’t fit neatly into the obvious categories, have accents which can be easily assigned to social categories etc ”

Very true.

Despite growing up in Northern Ireland, and spending more than five years in the U.K., I realised I would never truly grok the English class system. But it’s definitely better to have a Dublin, Belfast or lowland Scots accent than having a Scouser, Yorkshire, or God forgive, Brummie accent if you want to work in the City or Inns of Court.

Adapting to the West Coast of the U.S. was a breeze by comparison, although how elites are formed int he U.S. is much less obvious than in the U.K.: the East Coast seems a lot closer to the U.K. in terms of important of family background & private school than the West Coast.

Here in DC class and race are strongly correlated – that doesn’t mean that the reason I see so many black faces working in admin and retail in NW DC/MD while so few are in other jobs, or residents, is to do with race rather than class.

lemmy, that looks great. The amazon reviews don’t give the impression of the bias, but it looks valuable anyway. Reminds me of this 1983 classic that takes the opposite bias — it insists that school should adapt to the kids’ culture instead of stigmatizing parents.