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REALISM DESTROYS THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
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- REALISM HURTS WOMEN
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REALISM DESTROYS THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT1. REALISM PERPETUATES MATERIAL ACQUISITION, WAR, AND DEATH Eric Laferriere, professor of humanities at John Abbott College, and Peter J. Stoett, professor of international relations at Concordia University, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY AND ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT, 1999, p. 92. But as the strong must remain strong, it must devise a system of accumulation and control which ensures that energies are channeled to a focal point, at the top, so as to protect the vertically integrated entity (the nation-state) against a hostile environment of functional equals. The necessary state, the good state, will not survive without entrenched hierarchies—this is where realist description becomes policy prescription. In its mildest expression, realism merely warns against the omnipresence of power exertion. But the realist logic effortlessly and understandably extends a theory of omnipresent war and death, which legitimizes the power apparatus. 2. REALISM TREATS NATURE AS AN UNENDING RESOURCE Eric Laferriere, professor of humanities at John Abbott College, and Peter J. Stoett, professor of international relations at Concordia University, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY AND ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT, 1999, p. 93. Certain ecological worldviews presumably cultivate the flowering of differences in a community, as an essential guarantee for stability and renewal. Realism, however, dictated by its own approach to peace and stability, is forced to uphold the reverse. As history and nature are fundamentally conflictual, the constant threat of war demands a high level of discipline which, as discussed above, hierarchy provides, and which is necessarily accompanied by an ironing out of differences—for obvious purposes of efficiency, predictability, and control.
1. REALISM ENSURES WOMEN’S OPPRESSION D. S. L. Jarvis, lecturer in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE CHALLENGE OF POSTMODERNISM, 1999, p. 157. Despite the tacit pluralism in such ambitions, however, the focal point of feminist International Relations scholars remains an expose of male violence as a “global war against women.” Realist theory, positivism, the conventional research agendas of security studies, the Enlightenment, modernity and rationality, or the precepts of state security, and all really the encoded masculine ethos of multiple strategies to coerce, control, dominate and subjugate women. This is not just male egocentrism manifest as chauvinism, but a functional element of class, state, international political, and capitalist reproduction that requires the domestic indenture of women. 2. THE ADVERSARIAL INTERNATIONAL FRAMEWORK TRAPS WOMEN IN INFERIOR ROLES D. S. L. Jarvis, lecturer in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE CHALLENGE OF POSTMODERNISM, 1999, p. 157. As Cynthia Enloe observes in the case of the diplomatic class, “Government men depend on women’s unpaid labor to carry on relations with their political counterparts. So long as the conventional politics of marriage prevailed, no government needed either to acknowledge or to accommodate diplomatic wives and women careerists. They could use marriage both to grease the wheels of man-to-man negotiations and to ensure that no women reached positions of influence.
Introduction How very liberating is the idea that we should not judge others! In a time when the past century has seen every conceivable evil—totalitarianism, racism, imperialism—and seen those evils justified through the use of “absolutes” and the marginalization that occurs as a result of those judgments and absolutes, the idea that everyone, or every culture, has their own moral standards, promises to deliver us to a more tolerant and democratic way of thinking. However, in this essay I will try to demonstrate that the call to abandon judgments and universals is both immature and premature. It is so because it ignores the inevitability and importance of judging human action. Human action, if it is to be improved upon, requires some standard of judgment; and even if that judgment comes from our collective deliberation rather than some metaphysical well of truth, it is still judgment, and will still be seen by some as “intolerant.” Types of relativismRelativism is the philosophical orientation that argues, “There are no absolutes.” For relativists, there is no logical, metaphysical, or ethical basis for judging the actions of others to be desirable or undesirable. Although such judgments seem natural and form the basis of entire communities of law and ethics, relativists argue that these communities never really achieve the aim of improving the human condition. Relativists point to the changing nature of norms and standards of human conduct as evidence that absolutism is untenable. For example, most of the laws of the Old Testament—how to bathe, which crimes are punishable by death, who may enter cities or temples, and even the types of punishment assigned to particular crimes—have been abandoned even by those religious communities and individuals who claim to uphold the Old Testament. They have been abandoned because they served a particular historical and contingent purpose, but no longer do so. Moreover, relativists argue that the attempt to impose standards on others is itself a kind of imperialism, an unethical behavior because it breeds intolerance and violence. The standard relativist argument against religion, for example, is that religion breeds conflict, as “unbelievers” are seen as a threat. For relativists, even purportedly non-religious moral absolutes are a form of residual religion, a holdover from a time when it was believed people had to be fooled or scared into doing what was right. Finally, relativism has both moral and epistemological components. I have already spoken of the moral component of relativism: Intolerance is wrong. The epistemological component works something like this: In order for me to judge your action right or wrong, I must be standing at a vantage point where I can see the totality of differences between right and wrong actions. Since there is no such vantage point, I cannot possibly judge your actions to be right or wrong. True, I may be able to judge whether your actions cause others pain and suffering, or joy and happiness. The problem is that these particular words—“joy, happiness, pain, suffering”—are “emotive” words that lack any kind of meaning apart from their observational value. I can see that someone is suffering, but that does not give me the metaphysical authority to say that such suffering is morally unacceptable. Now I will explain the two most common manifestations of relativism in value debates: Cultural relativism holds that societies determine which actions within them are right or wrong. A common example of cultural relativism is the observation that some indigenous cultures once engaged in a practice known as “infant exposure,” where a newborn baby was placed out in the cold for a night. If the baby survived, the village knew it would be a strong and healthy child, and eventually become a productive member of the group. If the baby died, this helped to control population, and was also a sign that the baby probably would not have been healthy, and would thus be a drain on the resources of the village. Cultural relativists note that “modern” society would be disgusted with this practice, but that it made perfect sense to those who practiced it. Similarly, some cultures engage in polygamy; ancient Greek culture engaged in homosexuality, and some cultures leave their elderly members to die. Relativists claim that all of these practices made sense to those who engaged in them, and that it would be meaningless and intolerant to say that such practices were wrong. Ethical relativism holds that individuals in societies each have their own moral code. What is right for me may be wrong for you, and what is right for you may be wrong for me. Given such a state of affairs, ethical relativists argue that the best society is one with minimal laws and regulations. While some rule making may be inevitable in order to protect a few basic standards of rights, ethical relativists want as few moral rules as possible. 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