Holly Lawford-Smith visits the University of Sydney: Anatomy of a controversial talk on feminism and the right

EVERYONE whinges all the time now

- A philosopher in attendance

Holly Lawford-Smith is a trans-exclusive radical feminist philosopher from the University of Melbourne, she gave a talk at the University of Sydney recently. I summarise it below and then give my contrary views.

Dry synopsis

It has been my habit to religiously attend the Sydney University Philosophy Departmental seminar series. The talk by Associate Professor Holly Lawford-Smith at the seminar, then, caused a conflict of religious duties, since I am deeply opposed to the exclusion of trans women from the category of women, and since many students boycotted the events and protested outside the venue (or outside where they thought the venue was).

In the end, I resolved the conflict as follows. If someone is going to give a talk many find ethically objectionable, then regardless of the rights or wrongs of having the event, it behooves that there be a record of what was said. Making this record, it seemed to me, was the most helpful thing I could do. Thinking through the context of the event and my attendance there moved it from the sphere of moral wrangling to the sphere of strategy. This will be relevant later.

I will do my best to honestly represent the talk, but do not have a recording to rely upon, and was somewhat limited in my note taking by the necessity of not causing a racket through typing.

The talk was based on portions of a book that Lawford-Smith is preparing- Feminism Beyond Left and Right. My understanding is that in this book, she will argue that feminism cannot be identified with either the political left or the political right. The narrower focus of her talk was arguing that it is permissible for feminists to work with both the left and the right.

Notably, the talk was not about trans issues, which were conspicuously neither mentioned in the talk nor questions- though my impression was there were a few circumspect references to the matter. I suspect, though I cannot prove, that given the careful way Lawford-Smith talked around the content of chapter 3 of her book, that the speaker might have been specifically requested not to discuss trans issues. Or perhaps she decided to avoid that herself.

The talk began by considering definitions of feminism. The speaker did not settle on a single plausible definition of feminism but argued that a bundle of them were potentially plausible. She then suggested treating these definitions as a disjunct:

Feminist: A a woman who works for women’s equality (whether of outcome or of opportunity), women’s individual self-determination, women’s liberation, or women’s interests (as she understands them, whether or not that is also as they are); or who works against male dominance.

However, she had a few concerns with this definition- and here I am afraid I might misrepresent her slightly because there was quite a bit of back and forth in the question time. Anyone else present including the speaker should feel free to correct me. Suppose there was a socialist who worked for equal income for everyone but cared naught for feminism specifically on this disjunctive definition she would still count as a feminist, as she would be trying to equalize male and female income, but this, it seemed to the speaker, was absurd, I think because it was not based in a specific concern for women.

Then the speaker did something that, frankly, is always frustrating in intellectual work although sometimes unavoidable- leaning very heavily on the authority of a citation. She argued that prior authors- brothers named Lewis and Lewis had shown, convincingly, that there is no principled distinction between left and right. Instead left and right are tribes with more or less arbitrary assemblages of ideas formed through historical and sociological accidents. She assured us that Lewis and Lewis had considered many attempts to distinguish between left and right, and dismissed them all convincingly. However, she proposed a modification of Lewis & Lewis’s approach- taking left and right as capacious. On this approach, although the left and right are unprincipled individuals might have principled reasons to join the left or right, because this or that side backs the political causes they most strongly care about.

It puts the critic in a rather tough position when so much of a work depends on an approving citation to another extraordinarily controversial work. A controversial work that the critic, along with the rest of the audience presumably, has not read. Still, research is supposed to be cumulative. Also, philosophy allows a trick we might call conditionalization. If there is a controversial premise you have used to arrive at a specific result, rather than arguing for the controversial premise, simply argue that conditional on the controversial premise being true, the conclusion is true.

With this picture of the left and right as arbitrary coalitions in place, and with the addition that there is considerable variation in the right or left as to what policy positions people accept, there is little reason not to work with right-wingers who share your goals. Nevertheless, Lawford-Smith considers a few remaining reasons one might want to not work with rightwingers. Suppose, for example, one held the view that some portion of the bundle of ideas rightwingers accept are morally repugnant, that this makes rightwingers themselves morally repugnant, that working with someone involves the possibility of friendship, might working with the right involve:

Rewarding a bad person with camaraderie, civility and/or the possibility of friendship/romance

(I must admit, it had never even occurred to me to worry that working with the right might lead to romance. I suppose, as a gay man, it always seemed like a distant prospect then again the closet case rate seems to be going through the roof).

Lawford-Smith rejects this worry on a couple of grounds, grounds I largely agree with. Perhaps the most compelling of which- to me at least was even if we accept that rightwingers in general are morally bad and that working with rightwingers involves the possibility of friendship, or is morally a bit like friendship who on earth said that bad people should have no friends? That seems to me and the speaker a ridiculous view, though one that is frighteningly popular in the current period.

Finally Lawford-Smith, in the words of one of the attendees, brings out a blowtorch. She suggests that Schmitt gives convincing reasons to believe in the separation of the political and the moral. Thus, perhaps we should reject the very idea of moral restrictions on politics. Politics is about incommensurable modes of life clashing.- Friends supporting one’s mode of life, enemies supporting an inconsistent mode of life. But, according to the speaker, the contemporary left and right don’t really support incommensurable modes of life- that’s the bad illiberals that have presumably been expelled from both the contemporary left and right.

Still, perhaps one isn’t persuaded by Lawford-Smith’s approving citation of Schmitt and wants to say that there are some moral restrictions on who one can work with politically. Lawford-Smith is inclined to agree, but can’t think of any plausible residual restrictions of the moral on the political that would forbid feminist-rightwing collaboration. The restriction the speaker found most persuasive was a restriction on working with persons advocating interpersonal violence. But according to the speaker this rule doesn’t give a reason to boycott working with the right- on the contrary, if anything, it gives a reason to boycott working with the left because leftists often support terrorism against Israelis. Why similar logic didn’t apply to Israeli assaults on Palestinians - and the support of the right for these assaults- was unclear. Israelis target Palestinian civilians all the time- e.g. when they captured and blew up Gazan freshwater infrastructure.

Perhaps Lawford-Smith took it as self-evident that all Israeli attacks on Palestinians that harm civilians do so as blameless byproducts covered under the doctrine of double effect and proportionality. but this seems like a big premise to assume one’s audience shares. I speculate that more than anything else, the speaker probably felt comfortable in this assumption because, from the perspective of a certain kind of liberalism, there is a world of difference between individual and state violence. Israeli violence then is different because it is the violence of a state. This has always seemed to me, an incredibly dangerous way of thinking. Politics is always about the governance of interpersonal violence. More or less all persons who theorize about politics advocate violence of some sort, the question is just against who and with what justification. The legality of violence under the laws of a state has no direct moral bearing on it, the 20th century showed that a million times over.

Lawford-Smith concludes with a pithy assessment of the situation which I agree with, the problem is that people don’t want to do politics.

Analysis

In sum:

1. I agree with the narrow conclusion, that there is no moral barrier to working with the right in in every case. However, I disagree with both the theoretical background by which Lawford-Smith derives this conclusion and with what I suspect she thinks are the practical upshots of the conclusion.

2. I think that both the talk and the climate it is responding to, are deeply mistaken vis a vis how we should theorize about politics. When day-to-day politics is moralized, something has gone wrong (which is not to say politics should be amoral)

3. I reject the idea that political coalitions are arbitrary, and I think that understanding why they are not arbitrary will help explain the real reasons for rejecting working with the right in most cases. These reasons have little to do with deontic wrongness

It seems to me that when people have power over their circumstances, they think about how the world works, and how they can exercise their power in the service of their goals, whether those goals be personal, ethical, or political. However, when people have little power they think about the intricate details of right and wrong and often fall into the habit of trying to resolve every question by endless moral casuistry, rather than thinking through the consequences of their actions. To bastardize the point a little bit, I think that people with the power to change the world tend to think in consequentialist terms, and people who lack power tend to think in deontic terms. That Lawford-Smith thinks this debate on collaboration with the right is best resolved through a moral deep dive, or through an argument about the limits of morality (a la Schmitt), rather than thinking about strategy and the consequences of that collaboration is deeply telling.

I think, furthermore, that a ubiquitous condition of our age is that everyone thinks they lack power, and thus everyone, to use the phrase in the epigraph, whinges. To an extent, this sense of powerlessness is an illusion, although in part it is all too real.

I agree with Lawford-Smith, for what it is worth, on the moral claim – there is no absolute ethical prohibition against working with the right, in fact, in limited circumstances, I would be willing to work with them. Let us consider an example. At various times in the US, authorities have worked to remove books from public libraries. Suppose a protest was planned for outside the library and suppose some conservatives taking a broad view of First Amendment rights wanted to attend and advertise the protest. I don’t think it would be categorically immoral to work with the right-wing organizations on this, although the tactical and strategic implications would have to be thought through, any problems would not be specifically moral.

But I think Lawford-Smith’s argument misses the intellectual core of the Feminist opposition to working with the right in most circumstances. It is not a directly moral objection, although it is ultimately motivated by moral concerns like all political action, it is rather a strategic calculation that, in the long run, the right will wreak havoc both on feminist causes and on other leftwing causes that feminists- who are at least mostly leftwing, care about. To the extent that some feminists frame their objection as a deontic objection- detached from concerns about the outcomes of working with the right, this represents the degeneration of politics into moralism that is pandemic in our time among feminists, among the left, and frankly among everyone.

In saying that movement politics has descended into moralism I am not saying that healthy politics has nothing to do with morality. I am not Schmittian. I simply think that while politics is motivated by moral concerns, and while thinking about ethics should be an important part of doing politics healthy politics is, in my experience not governed by moral microanalysis of individuals’ rights and wrongs, and finger-wagging, but by strategy. In a sense, I think the moral concerns that guide us should be simple and broad- concern for human dignity and welfare, concern for equality, concern for love and honesty- whereas our thinking about how the world works should be deep and subtle. Your first question, upon hearing a question like “Should we work with the right on X” should be something like “Will it help people” not something like “Is there a special duty to not work with bad people and do rightwingers constitute, in this sense, bad people”. Remember, I am talking of movement politics here- the moral complexities of governing a state are another matter.

An effect of the moralization of movement politics, on both the left and the right is that EVERYONE IS WHINGING NOW ALL THE TIME. Everyone is constantly accusing others of breaking The Rules (TM) rather than trying to serve the good. Do not think here for a moment that I’m coming into this conversation to alleviate moral burdens- absolutely not. If anything, the moral conceptions we should be following are more demanding- actually trying to help others even when there are sacrifices involved rather than trying to position ourselves as holier than thou.

Why has so much political thought turned from mulling over facts to mulling over values in an era of powerlessness? I’d put forward many hypotheses, but here are two:

1. Because engaging in debates over values - particularly of a moralistic and finger-wagging sort- is a way of maneuvering for control of your political coalition - which political coalitions tend to fall into when they feel they cannot exercise power outside themselves.

2. Because political powerlessness is reflected in political atomization, and political atomization makes us conceive of political action as an individual choice- it was notable in this regard that the ethical objections the speaker considered were rooted in objections to associating with individuals rather than collectives, groups or organizations.

So my case against working with the right is strategic- concern that it will help the right, based on morally informed goals rather than moral side constraints. But this reasoning depends on a broad disagreement with the right’s goals- goals that include, but are not limited to restricting the freedoms of women. It would be helpful if we could show that those attracted to feminism should and/or will naturally tend to, have a general opposition to the goals of the right. Thus I should explain why I reject Lawford-Smith’s claim, as supported by Lewis & Lewis (it is a whole book), that the left and the right are arbitrary coalitions. I have not read Lewis & Lewis, but I have read Joshi who makes a similar argument. My reply is as follows:

There is a psychological construct called Social Dominance Orientation. It is perhaps best explained by reproducing the short Social Dominance Orientation scale:

1.       In setting priorities, we must consider all groups.

2.       We should not push for group equality.

3.       Group equality should be our ideal.

4.       Superior groups should dominate inferior groups.

Leftwingers give one pattern of responses, and rightwingers another pattern. I think we both know which is which, dear reader, it’s obvious. And this is probably why there is such a strong correlation between left and right on the one hand, and responding style on the other hand- often correlations about as high as one could possibly expect in this kind of political psychology.

Position on social-dominance orientation explains all sorts of disagreements between the left and right- whether on ‘social’ issues, or ‘economic’ issues. One of the themes that came up during the discussion is the difference between the Marxist left and the identitarian left- the questioners couldn’t see how they were unified. I have serious disagreements with identitarianism, but I think we can see from this vantage point why Marxism and identitarianism are part of the left- rightly understood. Each is committed to the view that the strong should not rule over the weak and that strong groups should not rule over weak groups- whether economic classes, races, genders, sexualities, etc.

Social dominance orientation means that leftwing causes are profoundly intertangled because, as shown by the existence of the Social-Dominance Orientation construct, the left is concerned with non-dominant groups. This explains the vast bulk of left-right differences. Now there are certainly some positions that the left holds that don’t directly follow from this- e.g., how much should government fund physics, but most of the core positions of the left and the right can be understood through this framework.

I think part of the larger project of the speaker, and one that shone through at parts of the talk- was the aim of defining feminism as a quite specific project, one that is intended to serve a specific group. By contrast, I want to sketch a view in which all bleeds into all. However, I want to do so in terms that are separate from the current dominant discourse of intersectionality which, especially in its most popular understandings, replaces enthusiasm for talking about the interlinkings between forms of oppression with depth of analysis.

I want to go further than a merely psychological interconnection between opponents of different forms of oppression. There are many sociological theories on how forms of oppression interrelate, some quite persuasive, and many forms of interrelation. While I can’t cover all such interlinkages (the sociological literature is extensive), let me at least give a typology of the kinds:

1. Theories of intersection- Theories of how the experience of one form of oppression interacts with the experience of another form of oppression

2. Theories of common origin- Theories according to which multiple forms of oppression share some historical root (or, I suppose, in the limiting case, arise from some common feature of human nature)

3. Theories of Common Sustaining Mechanism- Theories according to which the same mechanisms that keep one form of oppression going also help sustain the other.

4. Theories of common purpose- Theories according to which two forms of oppression are sustained for the same reason

5. Theories of support - Theories according to which one form of oppression strengthens another, in the sense of making its effects more severe, or in the sense of making it harder to defeat.

If different forms of oppression are interrelated, sufficiently and in the right ways, then it becomes a strategic mistake to “silo” different campaigns against oppression. The interests of anyone who wants to defeat one form of oppression are aligned with the interests of others who want the same, much like it would be profoundly misguided to seek to defeat the Nazis on the western, but not the eastern front. If, for example, the interests of women rise and fall with those of racial minorities, then the feminist is drawn into supporting both, even if for reasons of mutual interests alone.

One theory of interlinkages between oppression- and only one- would be Marxism or historical materialism. Marxism has a theory about how oppression(s) arise from a common source- class society. Patriarchy and class society are inseparably bound together in their birth (see Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State). Imperialism and war are involved in the creation of, and the expansion of capitalism- capitalists demand them (see Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism). Racism differentiates and divides the working class (see W.E.B. Du Bois Black Reconstruction in America). I present Marxism here only as one example of a well-developed attempt to trace out sociological connections between different forms of oppression.

Regardless of whether or not one accepts the Marxist theory, I would lament that modern leftists all too often content themselves with saying these matters intersect. Deeper thinkers ask how oppression(s) intersect and give an analysis of how the experience of multiple forms of oppression interact in detail, but there is far less discussion of how different forms of oppression form an overarching social manifold, or, alternately, mutual web of support. It is almost like each is a separate unfortunate accident- an accident that worsens the other accidents, but a separate accident nonetheless. It is not that this work remains undone- it is a common subject in sociology and political economy- but it is not discussed often enough.

But even if I am wrong about the sociological interconnectedness of different forms of oppression, the evidence on social dominance orientation suggests that positions on oppression generally are deeply psychologically intertwined. It is not an accident that those who oppose sexism are more likely to oppose racism. This makes left and right into natural coalitions, and that by itself helps ensure that left or right will tend to be winning or losing across their various fronts as a whole- at least tendentially.

When there is both a profound psychological connection between various leftist causes, and a profound practical connection in that different struggles for different ends are mutually reinforcing, is a movement that insists it advocates for a single, isolated feminist cause likely to be sustainable? Its members will have both ideological and strategic reasons to seek to broaden connections with other movements. This, I think, is where the “leftwing monocause” that Lawford-Smith complained of comes from. More generally, I think it sinks her thesis that feminism could be “beyond left and right”. If I am right, the kind of person who becomes a feminist has both practical and ideological reasons to support other left-wing causes.

Finally, a note on the trans issue. Consider two feminists:

Sue starts out with a concern for women (as she understands the category). She observes that women are oppressed, hence she becomes a feminist. In this view, trans-exclusivity may be sustainable depending on what definition of woman Sue started with.

Jane starts out with a concern for opposing oppression, and then from this derives support for various leftwing causes, including feminism. She will observe that trans women are oppressed, and often oppressed in ways that mirror the oppression of cis women. She views the oppression of trans people as sociologically intertwined with the oppression of women. For Jane, I think trans-exclusivity will be far less tempting.

But if I am right, Jane’s form of feminism is much more sustainable- psychologically and strategically, than Sue’s due to the psychological and sociological interconnectedness of different forms of oppression. Hence, in the arc of history, Jane’s conception of feminism will likely win out, and trans-exclusive feminism will continue to lose influence.

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