Vive la Différance

“Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.” ― Winston Churchill

“The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.” ― Steve Jobs

“If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” ― Emma Goldman

“Categorization is rudimentary theory.” ― Wassily Leontief

I grew up with ideology. So did the world at that time. You were right or left, or, if American, in the self-described middle. My mother called me a “Brooks-Brothers Marxist,” because of my young penchants for suits and leftist world views.

My political education took place in London before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as a result, America seemed like a foreign place, its bland, muddy middle of isms: liberal, conservative, individual, and exceptional. Historical materialism, in contrast, unlocked the secret workings of human society for me, though its very language was taboo outside of academia and in many places inside too. I’ll never forget my conversation (too polite a term) with a Polish woman in a pub about how the communist societies of Eastern Europe did not represent the kind of social systems for which Marx advocated. She would hear none of it, nor would most of the Western world. Mostly what’s left, it seems, is my handedness, one strange expression of which, I just noticed, is a drawer full of left-hand gloves, their partners lost to the daily toll of biological bias.

It all seems like such ancient history. Left doesn’t even warrant its own color any more. A mere news commentator could redefine red as a Republican State at the dawn of the 21st Century. The hierarchy used to be so clear: one’s relationship to the means of production was the primary determinant of human welfare: suffering, happiness, opportunity, freedom. The multitude of cultural, demographic, and even environmental concerns are just superficial manifestations of the fundamental material relationships between us. Marx called them “superstructures”. Take race, class, and gender: your class, no doubt, has greater impact on your life experience than race or gender according to the Left. Women and people of color are generally more oppressed, because they have historically weaker positions relative to the means of production; a wealthy Black woman, for example, would generally have a better life than a poor white working man. OMG, did those arguments seem so insightful back in the day, and now so radically simplistic. Just ask Oprah!

Generalizations and stereotypes are dangerous, but we need them to make sense of the world, or at least we think we do. Without prejudice, or categorical thinking, we would be overwhelmed by difference: lost within infinite diversity. Discrimination, like discernment, can be a value-neutral, even elegant, affair; its judgmental—even hateful—attire is worn when our most craven defensive instincts attempt to bar unlike guests. Even life and death, the ultimate bifurcation, would become just a spectrum of possibilities without our abilities to discriminate. As with variations in aversion to risk, each of us has a uniquely personal relationship to typological rigidity, what kinds and how much we need to navigate comfortably through the day. As days pass, this relationship often changes. My need for ideological distinctions has dissipated over time, but I am well aware that a common definition of aging is the opposite tendency. Old dogs are blindest to their own attitudinal biases. The theories of one generation can make perfect sense to its members, but not jive at all with the experience of the next. And so it went: identity flipped the hierarchy, just as Marx “stood Hegel on his head” (which may be as famous a Leftist misquote as Emma Goldman’s dancing revolution).

Mine seems motley. Maybe that’s because in all apparent respects, I am a member of the most privileged one—hello, well-heeled white American men! Identity politics were created for my opposites, who demanded their just deserts. But I’m also a Jew, and hence not white at all (which would take another essay entirely to explain the antebellum origins of this now-ubiquitous racial category), and one raised by a family dominated by strong, independent Southern women in a largely African-American Northeastern city. At one time, a Black Baptist judge married a Hindu man to a Muslim woman in our Jewish home bustling with a Christmas tree and three kids attending Quaker school. Assimilation was the mantra of my upbringing. We tried to fit in and succeed to the best of our abilities; identity was a private matter: straight, gay, or goy. Much of my subsequent professional life focused on downtrodden populations, because I identified with their struggles, not their identity. I did my mother’s bidding as much as my father’s, still searching for my own. Motley is confusing, because the borders are indiscriminate, yet as a Jew, I am not motley at all, defined by a pure-blooded matriarchal lineage going back to BC.

I once went to a feminist organizing meeting in the 1970s and was asked ultimately to leave, because the women at that time, more than anything, needed a time and place to define their own agenda, a room of their own. I believe in equal rights, but I don’t believe men and women are equal at all. On the contrary, they are quite different, and unlike race, in ways that are as profoundly biological as sociological. Would the world be a better place if women were historically the dominant gender in terms of money and power? Maybe not, but it would definitely be different. We may well be moving in that general direction with women becoming more educated than men, more health conscious, and, I suspect, often more naturally endowed with emotional intelligence, the key power trait in an ever-more service-oriented economy. Do I think a gas-station calendar of pin-up models inevitably demeans young women or deleteriously shapes their self-image? I doubt it. My girls already know they can lead the boys by more than their gazes, though by their gazes too.

What the world needs now is a men’s movement that teaches emotional maturity to the hordes of stunted adult males hell-bent on war and terror and domination and greed whenever they’re given a room of their own. It probably won’t be women who teach them, even if they are in charge, and already among the world’s greatest leaders, artists and thinkers. When a man’s instinct is to let the baby cry herself to sleep, a woman may think that cruel, but the exhausted mother can’t otherwise go on, and the baby can’t otherwise separate “I” from “Thou”. What a foolish stereotype, you say?! Many other stories are just as true. Age has taught me to be slow to judge. I don’t have all the answers, but nor do the isms. Jacques Derrida once mesmerized me at the New School, but I can only vaguely remember his labyrinthine riffs on discrimination and difference. I learn today that he coined the word differance, a French play on differ and defer, and their fundamental roles in language and thought.

The baby waits, the mother cries, the man tries to discern, the world keeps changing as red becomes blue. We reach across a divide. Some notes fall flat, others sound new, maybe echo too. This is about me and you.