Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Aristotle & Baron-Cohen & Summers & Sommers: On Difference

A good friend of mine (an academic, a literary scholar, a rhetorician, not a feminist) wrote me last Friday (to share with me Christina Hoff Sommers’s op-ed piece “Academic Inquisitors”). He said:

I wanted to share with you a very interesting, if divisive and perplexing, article from today's Wall Street Journal. The article makes me wonder, don't feminist scholars want to show that women have a different perspective and epistemology? Or does that thesis depend on whether one finds herself (or himself) in the humanities or in science?

Others of you more qualified than I and more personally vested in the rhetoric here should have good answers to these questions. Please feel free to comment! But because my friend asks me, and because I can’t sit quiet when I think (with the mother of my children) about our first-born (our son) in the academy and our other children (our daughters) not far behind, here’s what I say:

Yes, women and men are different and have valuable differences. You and I are different (whoever we are). Gender makes different; race makes different; class makes different; place makes different; disability makes different.
No, finding myself in the humanities or in science does not erase the difference of one human body from another. Or the difference of one human brain from the next (whether autistic, if that’s the “far end of the male norm -- the ‘extreme male brain,’ all systematizing and no empathizing” or “wired to be . . . better empathizers” if that’s the other extreme in the female norm, as per scientist Simon Baron-Cohen, as per journalist Sommers.)

So, I ask:
Aren’t all men and women created equal (if we are different in body and brain and perspective and epistemology and rhetoric)?
And is Aristotle a humanitarian or a scientist when he declares that
Greeks are different from (and therefore superior to) Barbarians;
natural born masters are different from (and therefore superior to) natural born slaves;
males are different from (and therefore superior to) females, who are merely

males botched in the biology of conception by the mother’s mal-functioning;

and males are different from (and therefore superior to) females, because males have more teeth and males have heads full of sperm and have backbones that de-seminate the powerful fluid from the brain to the testicles, the natural receptacles for in-semination (if the females serving as mothers would just get the procreation process right)?

3 comments:

Suzanne McCarthy said...

On average I find far more difference between individuals of the same sex than between the sexes, in thinking patterns. I am fairly strongly of the opinion that men and women are more alike than unalike although culturally worlds apart in a few areas.

I don't know how scientific it is, but it is a useful hypothesis for most of my working relationships.

Anonymous said...

Kurk,

Some thoughts:

That's an interesting extension of Baron-Cohen's explanation of autism. Perhaps, not so much an extension as another aspect that I wasn't familiar with. In the autism community, for the most part, Baron-Cohen is a household name for his concept of Theory of Mind (TOM). TOM is consistent with the male/female categorization, too--autistic people, the theory goes, don't understand that other people have minds (i.e. their own desires, ideas, methods), and they don't realize that their desires/ideas/methods are the product of an individual mind.

To a great extent, I think TOM is an accurate description of the autistic empathy problem. Minds are very abstract things; there's nothing we can physiologically point to an label a mind. It's an idea, sort of an agreement about where personality/creativity/thoughts/spirituality come from. Or it's a story we tell about the complex synapses and neurological processes. From a literal, rigid standpoint (as is it is often with autism), the "mind" doesn't compute. This spirals into a host of problems as there is a disconnect when it comes to understanding a fundamental assumption about human beings: many minds, many subjectivities.

If we're using male-ness and female-ness as constructs to describe different kinds of thought patterns, I would agree that autistic thought has more to do with male-ness, as the concept is conceptualized. But, it also strikes me that Baron-cohen is using a qualitative measuring stick (linguistic/epistemological/sociological/rhetoric constructs of male-ness and female-ness) to make quantitative/scientific claims (i.e. This is what constitutes an autistic mind). Their's an heir of scientific rationality/ethos in Baron-Cohen's theory. It also occurs to me that theorizing, here, is done from an ostensible subject-position of "normalcy," (i.e. the "normal" exhibit social awareness and expression is such and such way. Anyone who does not do it this way is lacking something (say, an overall Theory of Mind))

But, I'm willing to use Baron-Cohen in so far as it works for me. For the most part, TOM can be an accurate gauge to describe of differences between the more neurotypical and people on the "autism spectrum"; autistic male-ness, going with the construct, can be an accurate description.

But, what if the essence of male-ness or female-ness where suddenly questioned/complicated (as it surely has been)? Would that cut the legs out of Baron-Cohen's theory? I think it would. That's why I agree with Spelke, too, that Baron-Cohen's ideas don't constitute "settled science"--it's buttressed by some beginning a priori assumptions. For me, if I'm being thorough and critical, these assumptions a too tidy, too sweeping.

It's very difficult to make claims about neurology: whether we're talking about autistics, (fe)male rhetors, or (wo)manly traditions of rhetoric. Even the claim about women and men dominating certain occupations, I think is on shaky ground. Do women go into certain fields because they're a natural fit, or are they nurtured into them over a lifetime of interpreting womanliness? I don't think I would go so far as to say that we're all blank slates--i.e. that there's no inherent male-ness and female-ness in men and women; there's something there I think. But just what that is is mired beneath layers and layers of cultural understanding and belief, and so I think we have to be careful about how scientific or stable we present our categories to be; the extent that the theorizing is done from a supposed position of "normalcy." We also must be sensitive to the fact that there are so many continuums of human cognition that further complicate these broad claims. Some continuum probably go along gender and sex lines. Others correspond to things like the autism spectrum. But, we can never be too sure about the finality or zero-sum nature of these general distinctions. For example, though I agree that John David, my autistic son, has less TOM than a typical 4 year old, he does have some empathy. He's far from totally devoid of it, and many autistics, likely, have a great deal of TOM, I would guess. What do we do with that? What about the male autistics who don't struggle as much with empathy? They're out there.

Anyway, I think Baron-Cohen's theory is useful to a point (for describing some general characteristics; as a tool to open up some conversations about neurodiversity), but I just don't know how much further it can get us--toward understanding the etiology of autism, or the essence of male-ness and female-ness. To be honest, it scares me a little that he's using constructs of male-ness and female-ness. I guess I might need to have a better understanding of these terms. But, my main point is, if constructs become operative and unquestioned, how slippery that slope might become! That, in many ways, is central to my own diss.

Sorry for hijacking this discussion. Maybe I've been talking more about my project that yours here.

J. K. Gayle said...

>Suzanne,
I am fairly strongly of the opinion that men and women are more alike than unalike although culturally worlds apart in a few areas. I don't know how scientific it is, but it is a useful hypothesis for most of my working relationships.

>Anonymous,
But, what if the essence of male-ness or female-ness where suddenly questioned/complicated (as it surely has been)? Would that cut the legs out of Baron-Cohen's theory? I think it would. That's why I agree with Spelke, too, that Baron-Cohen's ideas don't constitute "settled science"--it's buttressed by some beginning a priori assumptions.

I think there is other scientific evidence, as you two suggest there might be -- with huge implications (i.e., whose science? whose rhetoric? whose world and work and ways must be predominant?).
Here's scientist Rosalind C. Barnett with journalist Caryl Rivers on "The difference myth: We shouldn't believe the increasingly popular claims that boys and girls think differently, learn differently, and need to be treated differently," from Sunday's edition (10/28/07) of the Boston Globe.