The Identity of Movements

This thread is inspired in part by some nice, provocative comments made elsewhere on this forum:

These comments are similar to statements I've seen elsewhere, both in the internet and in person, and I thought they operated in really interesting ways such that I really wanted to comment on these but thought that the subject deserved its own thread. So, I'll be raising some objections here to each side of the argument so far. Remember that there are many angles this issue can be represented from, so feel free to concoct your own separate responses that take both or neither of these sides. And as always, please remember to make your responses at least somewhat comprehensive by responding to other members' points; feel free to also mention how this relates to your experiences.

On to my views, then.

This topic covers a broad array of issues, both social and political. I first think that it's apparent that we don't like to generalize groups based on the actions of some of their members. If, for example, one calls oneself a Brony, one need not be uncomfortable that one's neighbor calls herself a Brony and also happens to be an axe-murderer. This is an association without casual connection; if, for example, you see that axe-murderer and understand what she did, and then I tell you I am also an axe-murderer, you will make a association of definition between myself and your neighbor. If she killed someone because she is an axe-murderer (often, this would be perceived as a bi-conditional, but we only need observe half of it for this thought-problem), and I am an axe-murderer, it stands to reason that I also would kill someone. This we would consider to be morally objectionable under most worldviews. However, we need not be worried that you would kill someone because you are a Brony; rather, it would appear that there is no connection between those two categories to which your neighbor belonged.

But what about other categories? Tyro mentioned two.

Let's separate the two points, as Atheists and Feminists may be different sorts of things and would thus be best categorized in different manners. They are, like Bronies, a category of persons. But how are they functionally different as categories?

Atheists, by definition, lack a belief in any deity. It ought to be noted that the social pressures on Atheists to identify in other ways often come out of deep-rooted religious institutions as well as the reaction the people whose ideologies are born -- at least in part -- out of those institutions have towards the push-back of Atheists against those self-same institutions. Picture a tug of war, with part of society on one side and the rest of society on the other? Where have you pictured yourself as standing? Note that if you said anywhere but either of the two sides, you are by definition incorrect (read: even inaction is action, and all action is participation); in a sense, we are as much the rope as we are the people tugging on it. So, we're all playing this big game. We all have opinions, with varying degrees of subtlety or acceptance, about this group of people. But it does not seem to be that we are necessarily bound to act or believe one way or the other; we could always switch sides. Many Atheists are converts, as are some non-Atheists. But there's nothing in the definition of an Atheist that appears alarming, at least not when we consider the contradictory views of multiple religions around the world. Under that view, Atheists are just one more category.

Feminists function in a similar way. Like an Atheist, a Feminist by definition has a set of core beliefs. There are also societal pressures that influence Feminism; the tug-of-war analogy also operates very well here. However, Feminists seem to take a step that Atheism does not, where they not only observe certain traits of the world but specifically focus on an idealized re-imagining of that world that fixes the flaws which they have previously observed.

We can learn something from these categories; different categories are grouped using different working definitions and therefore function differently as identities. If we ask ourselves if we're worried about my identity as an axe-murderer (note: in truth, I have never murdered anyone, with or without an axe) given that our old axe-murderer neighbor did things we didn't like specifically because she was an axe-murderer, there appears only one answer: yes! I might, therefore, wish to choose a different identity.

But how much choice do we have?

If I have never killed anyone with an axe, you might say that I am not an axe-murderer. Simple, right? Well, that's a label you're ascribing to me, not my actual identity. If you think I'm a natural blonde because I dye my hair, you have ascribed the label of "natural blonde" to me. But that might not be my identity. Perhaps my hair is "naturally" (note: we're using a colloquial working definition for "natural" here, as all things existing in nature, which could be said to be everything, could be said to be natural) red. It would seem as if our identified category could vary, with no relation, to our ascribed category.

Here, then, is my proposal for separating these three categories by functionality:

1. Brony -- This term describes something I like about the world.

2. Atheist -- This term describes a quality of how I believe the world already is.

3. Feminist -- This term describes a quality of how I believe the world ought to be.

Thus, by the barest definitions, we have three separate categories. It should, of course, be observed that there is some room for argument as to what the exact definitions of these things are, but that puts me in mind of something a professor of mine once told me. To paraphrase: there is room for disagreement within a category. For example, if you and I are both Atheists, we might disagree about the deeper implications of what that means in our personal lives. That's alright; these different categories weren't concocted to deal with those sorts of disputes, but rather for the singular purpose of identifying a functional difference between these sorts of things. It's a relatively self-serving mechanism.

We can learn something here. To be a Brony is not, inherently, to champion a cause. A Brony might do such a thing, but not because they are a Brony. The same could be said of Atheists, yet they are different from Bronies in that theirs is a metaphysical belief system as opposed to an appreciation for a work of art. Feminists are the third type of category, with a statement about what a more ideal world would look like and how it would function, as opposed to a commentary about how it already functions (which, I can tell you, is often a subject of fine-grained debate within Feminism).

I hope this has been somewhat provocative. I wanted to jumpstart a discussion while also unloading my thoughts into this thread.

 

Thanks, love.

My attempt was categorization for the purpose of understanding the function of the different things. It became apparent to me very quickly that the three proposed categories worked in different ways, and that undressing why they were different might shed some light on the issue as a whole. That was the principle, anyway.

I think talking about categories is really as far as it goes; the ultimate conclusion I reached in this post -- and I am sorry if it wasn't explicit enough to be clear -- was that a lot of people feeling the "fandom" is "sullied" because of an indirect correlation they make between a negative experience and the community.

The rest of the post is about what it means to have an identity and how identities can function in the proposed cases. I would also like to make clear the fact that I do not wish the belittle the experiences or reactions that people have to their individual circumstances.

 

You're absolutely correct; my example drawing on atheism was a tad shallow, although I think it worked in context. Out of context, yes, atheism deserves credit for being much more broadly applicable.

 

Well, there's your problem. There are other reasons that a person might have for capitalizing words other than their status as proper nouns. I did do in the original post to identify the system of thought in terms of its social weight to further the rhetorical comparison I was making. I wasn't giving it a whole lot of thought in my response to you, since there was a reasonable amount of time between my original post and my response to yours, and I was also responding to how you used the word while simultaneously acknowledging that it can carry a different weight in the discussion (arguably a relevant point to what we were saying) by the nature of making that grammatical choice.

EDIT: For what it's worth, I find the arguments against using Atheism/atheism as a proper noun to be tenuous, at least insofar as they are often strangely beholden to a dichotomy of believing that either "atheism" is a lack of belief in a deity or "Atheism" is a social movement but never both. This distinction is often spun in favor of ruling that the word should not be capitalized. I do not, however, hold with that black-and-white diagnosis as I feel both that it fails to capture the essence of how Atheism operates in our culture(s), and that sometimes words can mean more than one thing (not a revolutionary proposition, by any means).

So, in short, my answer to your question is -- rather unhelpfully -- that the concepts were are talking about are more complicated than absolutist grammatical assertions can capture.

EDIT 2, ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: It occurs to me that this may have slipped through the cracks in my explanation, so allow me to add extra emphasis: you noted that I said Atheists lacked belief in any deity, at which point you noted that atheists simply lacked a belief in some number of deities or even a singular deity, at which point I agreed that atheists did so. If you look carefully, one of my descriptions characterizes Atheists while the other characterizes atheists. If we're looking for some sort of separation between what is implied by the capitalized word and what is implied by the non-capitalized word, I at least must say that I believe the two are both inclusive in their boundaries and different in their meanings.

 

It's on topic, but I don't find that I, as an atheist, am altogether convinced that Atheism is necessarily New Atheism. I don't think it's really that simple, but will agree to disagree.