Silence implies consent vs acceptance of what is

[rva_jeremy]

As to the question Jeremy I don't really have a prescribed expectation of who should have said anything. No one owes me anything.

I think this is an excellent place to start, for what it's worth. We're not as far apart as it may seem if we take this for granted.

And truly, anything that is a duty is not freely given and therefore not as polarizing. Help that comes out of a sense of obligation is not expressing as much love, I believe, as help coming from a genuine desire to see love and healing. What I dreamed to see, Glow, was you and e_s clash a bit, back up and see if you can hear each other, and find out where you disagree and agree so we could get back to the spirituality of all of it. I guess I'm a bit of a fool.

You ask though if you saying something could have helped, yes.

Someone (generally a man so it's not seen as a woman being triggered) saying anything even that you don't personally agree or agree to that extent or almost anything really would have completely shut down my defences.

Although I recognize you're not demanding anything, I am sorry I didn't empathize more with you. Perhaps if I had I could have seen this need at the time, the need that you are clearly expressing now. I don't think it would have helped the community in any direct way if I had intervened more forcefully, but it might have helped you, and that's not without merit. You are worthy of help, and my lack of action is not any statement on that.

I genuinely would rather let toxic stuff die on the vine rather than pick it, tell everybody how bad it is, and then stomp it to jelly. I think this adversarial bent of the culture wars is really misguided, this idea that the way to promote social justice is to tell anybody off who behaves in a way of which I disapprove. Many of my comrades disagree with this. It doesn't surprise me or offend me that you would disagree with me, Glow, on this matter.

Tactically I think leftists and those who want to inculcate a different culture in the West get this wrong all the time and have little to substantively show for all their struggle. It's not an issue of principle so much as one of what it is one believes one is accomplishing and how to go about it. I think feminists, for example, actually draw a lot of attention to conservative ideas by their fierce opposition (as an aside, this relates directly to the points I was making in another thread about critical theory) when what would be more useful in many cases is to simply demonstrate the kind of behavior, culture, and world you want to see. I don't see a lot of value in fighting for the moral high ground when, after all, we seem to have so many values at odds with each other in today's hyper-ideological world.

I think you have a strong voice, your heart's in the right place, and your principles are sound, Glow. It does strike me as a bit weird and sad to see a feminist asking a man to stand up for her. I get what you're saying--that it's an issue of communication, and sometimes changing the speaker's identity can help the message get heard better--but you give yourself too little credit. What I think that conversation really needed is more patience, more time, more backing up and reexamining claims, less reaction and more listening, from both sides of course. It doesn't need a man like me to lend you or SMC's points credibility.

What I was trying to get at, Glow, is this: it seems like you wanted my help in part to help defeat earth_spirit in debate. I have no interest in that, really, because first of all I don't think winning arguments makes you right or losing them makes you wrong. That's exactly the mindset of waiting to counter what somebody said instead of actually hearing them and their story. I can just tell you that after 20 years of that I don't really have any stomach for it -- not because I can't but because I don't think it really delivers what you are looking for, Glow.

On the topic of "silence=consent vs accepting things as they are", I am still balancing this after a great deal of time as a radical activist. For what it's worth, there was an episode of "In the Now" where I discussed this with Gary, Austin, and Jim, because we tend to think of activism as inherently about not accepting things like injustice and bigotry, that that lack of acceptance is what motivates action and change in the first place. I'm working on a piece about exactly this topic, but first I think Eisenstein has the best writing here.

That said: I do not think silence implies consent, because we're in a diverse age where it's unsafe to judge anything as necessarily implying anything else. Silence means somebody didn't have something to say. To infer something else usually means one has an agenda, a need to put diverse people into pat groups that they can generalize about so they can make a sweeping judgment. Not my bag.

As for acceptance, I think you accept what you're seeing as real without needing to personally validate your own values by judging it so quickly and finally, and that's the beginning of true activism IMHO. Because you can't bring the right channeling of love to bear on the situation without seeing it clearly, and you can't see it clearly if you're judging it, measuring it up against yourself. The ideological approach of having a hyper-acute sensitivity to things judged right and things judged wrong actually leads us to filter what we're seeing through that robotic ideological mindset, to prioritize judgment over acceptance, and foist our idiosyncratic personal dramas on these things happening in the world (more to say here). On the one hand, these dramas are perfectly legitimate in terms of working through our own issues. On the other hand, they're not necessarily attenuated to the so-called objective, collective situation in our society, being so tied up with our own personal stuff. So yes, I think acceptance is how you figure out whether silence is appropriate or not, in a way. Does that make sense?