Re: Lunatic Left and Name calling

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: Lunatic Left and Name calling
Greetings Comrades,
   Julio Pino notices I wrote about bastards.  His point if related to what
Nestor wrote and is also I think related to the commentary upon a lunatic left.
Julio Cesar Pino,
 Is calling someone a bastard an insult to illegitemate children? All
those famous bastards, from Leonardo da Vinci to Marilyn Monroe, would beg
to differ.
   Nestor writes,
..." No need to enter into such a disgusting name
calling, ..."
Doyle
The way I used bastard in my note was simply as a explicative example and not
directed against anybody.  And it is important to note as Nestor does that name
calling rouses strong feelings, and makes it hard to resolve differences in a
dialectical way.  However, Julio isn't chastisizing me I think about name
calling but observing how there might be a contradiction in my comments where I
use bastard where I was observing the use of lunatic.  I want to expand upon
that in observance of what Julio is asking.
Name calling could be like ad hominem attacks.  There is a relationship, but
usually I think of name calling as more simple than ad hominem attacks.  In any
case the method stirs up a lot of feeling.  And Nestor's point is important, in
the sense that what is the practical point of stirring up feelings when our work
depends upon our practice with each other?
Returning to my use of bastard, in disability politics there are persons with
Tourettes syndrome who involuntarily utter offensive expletives as part of the
cognitive issue of their disability.   A kind of question could be posed by
their disruption of social life through their disability, do they deserve access
to social life even though they create disruption?  The answer is yes, not to
ignore the disruption but to look at how people can participate through
supporting what a disability requires to do work or be in social life.
Underlying name calling is a profound distinction about feelings that arises
from the European Enlightenment.   In a nutshell, the Enlightenment abandoned
feelings to the Church and emphasized "rational" thought.  That in turn arises
because writing systems in Europe mimic the sound of speech, and poorly carry
the information of feelings.  Therefore it was easy enough to conceive of
rationality as something apart from human feelings.  This isn't so in how real
human brains work, but is not clear enough if we rely upon examining writing as
a means of understanding human beings.  Furthermore where feelings are concerned
the disability rights movement points at many deep issues poorly resolved by
capitalist production.  Primarily, because profit depends upon class structure,
and disability is the deepest and most difficult level of oppression in terms of
class structure in capitalism.
In our times there are methods like lie detectors that measure states of
feelings in terms of heart rate, pupil dilation, skin sweat, and so on.  These
measures do not I think detect lies, but do detect more reliably what someone
feels than does written alphabetic speech.  Hence it is difficult to see in
print what someone writing here feels, but a lie detector would tell me that
someone felt very angry when they read my words.  In that sense we can grasp
that how we feel is important to what we communicate.  Or at least the U.S.
government feels that lie detectors are useful in National security.  And I
think there is some validity to that hidden in Enlightenment obscuring of
feelings.
For example when people make the assertion that someone is deranged, what is the
truth of that?  What is the measure of that?  A lunatic derives from the
primitive concept of the phases of the moon affecting madness.  It is not a
clinical term in medicine, though I don't want to medicalize the terminology, I
want to point at political structures that make us think a certain way.  Tools
that would measure feelings might reveal how extensive and useful mental
disabilities are.  We probably have huge numbers of persons who are depressed,
and go undetected, unsupported, and maligned, as well as a broad range of other
problems, like panic disorders, traumatic stress syndrome etc.
Probably not far away in a scientific sense we will know clearly enough who is
obsessive, and we will know who is depressed, and so on, by measuring minute to
minute their interaction with their computer.  Most of those people will
participate in society with support from a system that could make access to
society possible.  There is no reason under the circumstances to think that any
group of people we encounter that has more than five people in it to not have
someone who is deranged.  Because one in five people have depression which is
the most common form of derangement.  Being depressed doesn't mean someone is
not able to produce in society.  There are times when severe depression makes
that impossible, but most depressed people are fairly functional.  In addition
some manic people are exceptionally productive.
Name calling often reflects our fear of what a social system does to people with
disabilities.  For example Paul Robeson, had depression, and his depression was
exploited and abused in the U.S. as a political target.  We all feel strongly
about the "lunatic left", that abusive left groups that fail to do anything and
hurt their members as well as make organizing harder.  But is that really about
their derangement?
Name calling, that is the sort of political provocation that incites an angry
response in an opponent is an ancient form of social organization (clarifying
friend from foe).  It ties into how emotions connect to important parts of human
cognition.  But since our tools like writing poorly show this content in
writing, it is altogether hard to grasp in practice what Nestor rightly points
at.  In other words, it is hard for people to alter their own behavior when they
are told they are name calling, because to them, their feelings tell them they
are right in their wording.   Name calling is related to how well you know
someone.  And that is critical political structure to examine in capitalism.  We
understand what makes someone feel intense feelings as we get to know someone. 
 But
we don't have a good sense of what that labor process is doing.  We do work when
producing feelings in the same sense we do work when we talk or write words.  I
would propose that feelings represent an architecture to our personal space. 
 Even
when words are disembodied seeming as they are in a list serve, there is still a
sense in the writing that someone feels friendly or hostile, and these are
representations of human space.  Words do not reflect nearly as clearly to us
spatial concepts with respect to our bodies as do emotions, because we want to
be close to us those we love, and far away those we hate.  This architecture of
human interaction is what organizing human society arises from.  It is what
computing makes possible in the coming re-organization of work based upon using
computers.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor