not language but a map

Joan Crawford as Joan “Montana” Prescott

am i treating the other person like it's their first day in the real world and need to be taught what to think, or am i doing the basic decent thing and assuming they have put some amount of thought into their existing beliefs with which i must contend and out-reason?

am i advocating for something, or am i just trying to make this other person feel small or stupid?

in the process of this discussion, have i actually made the case that what i'm advocating for will improve the other person's life in a material way?

and if the answer to some or all of these is "no," what you are doing is venting, preaching, or otherwise not helping to make a persuasive case for your beliefs. as we get closer to the midterms in november, it's going to be important to convince and persuade people to support various issues, and the first thing to do is not enter into those conversations with the attitude that all americans are temporarily embarrassed socialists who just need to be lectured about their own moral turpitude until they agree with me. contrary to popular belief within a not-insignificant subset of the internet, persuasion is not capitulation, it's just politics. if people don't see you as someone who genuinely has their best interests at heart, they will eye you and everything you're espousing with suspicion at best and outright anger at worst. and hostility and grandstanding doesn't convince anyone who isn't already on your side! so once again, i really gotta urge people to try to be thoughtful about the language and rhetoric they use to communicate their platforms to others. use accessible language to advocate for policies in a way that meets folks where they're at and assumes their best intentions. most importantly, again, don't treat people like they're stupid - treat them like you're trying to help them. because ultimately, you are.

In an essay for Gawker on how Americans grew so attached to attachment theory, Danielle Carr, a scholar who studies capitalism and neuroscience, writes that “attachment theory offers the consolations of the heuristic, a kind of rough-draft outline for a larger essay on our internal life. This is true of almost any Grand Theory of Everything that explains the unknowable—in this case, the interiority of the other—using a few rough-hewn concepts.” Attachment theory is nevertheless used to explain both parenting (usually relying on the mother-child dyad) and romance (usually relying on the man-woman dyad), which furthers the theory’s hetero-patriarchal feel and allows us to blame even our sexual and romantic relationship problems on our mothers.

At best, however, attachment theory is merely a tool for explaining how growing up in a hetero-patriarchal culture tends to create certain personality types, outcomes that are loosely linked to how our caregivers behaved when we were kids, or how we perceive them to have behaved years later, when we grow into adults and consult the attachment playbooks. At worst, attachment theory can be used to reify bad behavior that emerges from living in a sexist society, tracing it all back to Mom and Dad—but usually Mom. “What are the odds that the vast majority of heterosexuals would sort so neatly into what look like gender-coded slots—the women frantic for explanations for their romantic woes self-identifying as ‘anxious’ and slapping the ‘avoidant’ label on guys who seem to be just not that into them? Does this remind you of anything?” Carr asks. “The whole thing smacks of gender.”

Not surprising, given that the theories we have available on how human development, psychology, and relationships both form and function are all inherited from white men. “I think a lot of that science is bad science,” Kate Manne has said about the sexism that continues to plague contemporary studies on how men and women supposedly perceive the world differently because of biological difference. “There’s no control group in a patriarchal culture,” Manne points out. “There’s no group of women raised such as not to have sexist theories and misogynistic enforcement mechanisms operating on them. Of course some differences will show up. But it doesn’t lead to an enhanced kind of epistemic state, where we know something interesting and new about two different groups.” The same is true for how we interpret the science that says secure attachments with our mothers makes us well-adjusted later in life. Who is to say this is not the result of growing up living in a family that felt “normal,” judged by standards that relegate women to positions of inferiority in motherhood?”]

Arendt saw this hierarchy of work as a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens in the home—a misunderstanding that arose from the unique temporal features of care work and housework: the labor performed in the home moves so quickly, and produces so rapidly, Arendt wrote, that “its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent.” Ancient political philosophers, Arendt writes, at least recognized the vital productivity of their servants, who, they believed, left behind “nothing more or less than their masters’ freedom or, in modern language, their masters’ potential productivity.” In antiquity, the work performed in the home was understood as constant, life-sustaining work that always produced: indeed, it produced the very possibility of public productivity; it created the possibility of shared communal life outside the home.”]