Avoiding the Sausage Machine

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I attended an excellent masterclass on "Trans-Inclusive Philosophy" with Sophie Grace Chappell last week, put on by The Philosopher magazine. She wrote Epiphanies and Transfigured, and this paper will be coming out in a collection soon. She discussed system-building in a way that lit some lightbulbs for me. I was waiting for the video to be posted before writing about it, but, in lieu of that, here's my transcription of it. 

She starts by responding to a call to build a theory of what gender, transgender, and gender identity are, and she clarifies the problems with gate-keeping off the bat. People will demand that before anyone's allowed to claim they're trans, they first have to define male and female, and she likens this to saying before you can sit on a chair and drink some tea, you first need to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for chair and for tea, which is just ridiculous and very dangerous.

More interesting to me is her second argument, that defining what counts as transgender butts up against bigger problems with any system building. She prioritizing experience over theory because any attempt at an overarching trans theory will inevitably leave someone out. She has her own idea of what fits her, but it won't fit everyone, and other people might have great definitions for themselves, but they don't entirely fit her, either. 

She furthers this argument by comparing it to system building in ethics:

"I believe that constructing systems in ethics, like consequentialism or Kantianism or whatever, is putting us into a position where we're funnelled down an increasingly narrow track, and what we end up doing is trying to produce the perfect sausage machine, the perfect moral theory, which is a function from facts and principles to decisions. It's a kind of sausage-machine view of ethics. You have a situation, that's the facts; you have some moral principles; you crank the handle, and out comes the thing you should do in that situation. And that's what consequentialism and Kantianism in their pure forms are supposed to give us. ... And I just don't think that life is that simple. 

I stopped thinking that life is that simple a long time ago, now, getting on for 20 years ago. And I began to think instead of trying to construct theories, we shouldn't be looking for the perfect theory of ethics or of methods or anything else. We should be looking instead at experiences, not for a simple system which tells us how to live, but at the way we live already and at what we can learn from the way we live, and at the things that are important to us. So I think a question we need to ask ourselves is: What is it like to be a human being? What's it like to be me? What matters? ... There are lots of ways in which that might happen, and that point is precisely the variety. The point is that life is complicated, and a simple theory is never going to give you all the answers that you want. And having taken that view about ethics in general, I want to take it about the ethics of being trans as well. I don't think that we have a simple theory of being trans, and I don't think we need one. I think what counts is not theory, but lived experience. ... I don't want to offer an account of transgender that has that sort of universalist ambition, the kind of ambition that systematic theories of anything have, a theory that's supposed to be, moreover, a world domination enterprise. ...

Systematic theory doesn't have to be this way, but, as usually practiced, systematic theory is all conquering. If consequentialism is true, then Kantianism can't be true and vice versa. ... There are cases which do look very apt for a utilitarian treatment. ... That doesn't mean that consequentialism does everything. ... Kantian principles do something and so do consequentialists. What goes wrong in ethics, in systematic theorizing in ethics, is when one theory is supposed to do everything. ... If these theories were allowed to coexist and each of them do just a bit of the work, then I would be less worried than if any of them is supposed to be the truth about all trans people and the comprehensive truth about all trans. So, that has an implication. ... I can happily say that [the way we conceive of ourselves] is my view of what trans is about, but then immediately add a rider: well, maybe it's not like that for all trans people."

 

When I taught philosophy, I ended the ethics unit with a good three or four days of lively debates on various current issues with students playing the part of various theorists. It helped the class to recognize, hopefully, that some theories were very well suited to certain kinds of issues, and others were better employed elsewhere. There can't be one right theory for all possible circumstances and events in our lives. 

Yet, during Chappell's discussion of system-building, I realized how often I try to boil things down to an answer. We have a desire, or maybe even an instinct, to follow the path of least action or effort by noticing patterns and determining a system or schema or a flippin' stereotype to help us pronounce a simple conclusion with less effort. The efficiency is at the expense of nuance and individuality. It works well when you're actually a machine that makes sausages or anything else, but doesn't work well with human beings. It always misses the tail ends of any perceived normal distribution. It's so devoid of nuance that a machine can be trained to do it with an algorithm, a set of rules to follow. It works just enough on social media to keep people insulated from some arguments from the other side of the aisle, just enough for me to be shocked when Doug Ford was elected a second time (but I wasn't that surprised the third time). And it can be used to direct us to what to buy or watch. But it can't get at who we are. 

It's not just the efficiency that's attractive to us, but the certainty. We love to just know things, to figure something out and be done with that problem. We like to make our mind up about people, but I tend to agree with Katharine Hepburn's character in Philadelphia Story, "The time to make up your mind about people is never." Well, most of the time.

Chappell's talk really furthered my concerns with psychology as an arena that most problematically aims for certainty from system-building. This is seen first in the theory fighting that's similar to the quest for the best ethical theory. In my undergrad, I had some profs that were staunch Freudian and other that laughed at that because clearly it's all about Skinner. The expectation in my psychotherapy program was to understand a bit of all the theories, which is a good step forward (although it might have the side-effect of watering down all of the theories, leading to fewer expertise in any theory). Like the usefulness of consequentialism and Kantianism, there are times that a Freudian lens might work best to understand a behaviour and other times conditioning is more revelatory.

Beyond the arguments between theories, the field can lead us to make gross generalizations and widely inaccurate assumptions about people. An excellent study might show that most people who do X end up with Y result, and that might hit our social media feed with the headline of "X Leads to Y," and we accept that as a fundamental truth of human nature. The field can unwittingly add to the shortcuts we take to understand one another. I wrote about this a bit last year, in discussing my experience with bad therapists falling into two camps, bakers and cheerleaders:

"I've found myself frustrated by the "bakers" in the field who, after finding out about one pertinent detail, it feels like they look up the right page number and follow a recipe. They're a bit better than the "cheerleader" therapists who just tell you how amazing you are, though, but not my much. Sometimes feeling worse after a session means it's working."

When I taught philosophy classes back to back with social science classes, I'd point out in both that philosophy, a humanities course, tells us much about human nature but often in a speculative manner after much contemplation. Psychology, a social science, gives us the illusion of certainty, which is dubious, but that's where the money is. We want to be sure, but we really can't be. We can make some generalization about people as a whole, and predict what a group of people might do, but we're really bad at understanding how little we can know a person. 

I've been singing the praises of Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk for over a decade, for his great analogy to explain human behaviour (paraphrased):

"We're like molecules. As a group, we are very predictable - if it gets cold, we'll move closer together. But individually, we're utterly unpredictable. We know molecules will get closer together, but we have no idea the trajectory of each individual molecule. So, when stats suggest that people do X because of Y, they mean most people, which could include you, but we can't know if it does. We just don't know. This is yet another reason I prefer teaching philosophy over social science: it's more honest about the limits of our understanding of humanity."

Even with this knowledge, we still might attempt to create some formula for understanding how we tick. It might involve neurons or finding the rewards or noticing negative self-talk or a family script or fitting in a specific category of attachment styles. It might be a good starting point of investigation, a tiny piece of the puzzle, but it should never be seen as providing enough of the picture for us to lean back and feel satisfied, as if we really know anything. We're far too beautifully complex for that.