Opposed to Bill C-38? You’ll get over it.
An interesting phenomena discovered by social scientist was a revelation that, at first, seemed counter-intuitive. It was commonly believed that to know a person’s attitude on certain subjects and situations was to be able to reliably predict their actions. To know “John” hated ice cream would allow you to predict how John would behave when offered ice cream, right?
Well, what the experts were astonished to find was that attitudes do not account for actions very well at all. In fact, the general rule discovered was that attitude accounts for 10% of the variance of behaviour, meaning you are still uncertain what an individual will do 9 out of 10 times.
With a title like that, where am I going, you ask? Hang on…
Now, what I find the most interesting is, in fact, behaviour generally leads to attitude change - completely fascinating. Once John eats ice cream, even after proffessing abhorrence for the stuff, John is very likely to change his feelings about ice cream. A simple example, one that could be eplained different ways, but this phenomenon is a proven relationship; behaviour causes attitudes.
So, if action feeds attitude, can laws change your own ardent view point? Can your strongly and deeply held belief actually be circumvented by legislation? Results from the laboratory and history resoundingly say yes.
For example, seat belt laws, in the beginning, were heavily opposed and viewed as an onerous and a waste of time. Now, seat belt use has risen exponentially as has attitudes towards their use. Desegregation and the various civil rights acts of the 1950’s and 60’s in the US were often met with outright hostility and even violence. Now, this type of behaviour is viewed as bigoted, discriminatory, and immoral. Nearly everyone in the US favours integration in the not only the educational system, but in the public realm as well.
Interestingly, this type of evidence lends itself to the idea that morality can be legislated. However, this is not the aim of this post. I could endlessly debate, on either side, such a nuanced and complex concept, and I am sure you could too. What I want to relate this to is the passing of Bill C-38.
Officially recognizing gay marriage is a move to uphold the basic rights and freedoms guaranteed to us as Canadians, and as human beings. To deny such to a certain group, one that has historically been denied equality and continues to be denied is to marginalize that group while promoting immorality. Canada has taken a historic step, one that we should be proud of. Of course there are others who do not feel the same as I. For instance, Brent Colbert proposes to continue the fight for traditional marriage, the people at Novopress have continually advocated for the protection of what they deem as important values.
I am here to tell those people that the fight is over. The social forces and mental processes involved in the phenomena I described above are already hard at work. In time gay marriage will gain the recognition it deserves from Canada as a whole, and discrimination will take a severe blow. Some of your fellow traditionalists have already shifted their perceptions (somewhat, at least) to align with the recent legislation. Measures taken to ensure safety, equality, or morality are often fully recognized for their worth, and Bill C-38 is no exception. So, not only will you get over the passing of this bill, in time, you’ll come to believe in it.
I think the majority of people simply end up following a law because they are unwilling to oppose it.
Critics of the Non-Smokers Health Protection Act legislation have all but disappeared.
C-38 puts all citizens on equal footing in respect to civil union, it is a fair bill, and we should all work to support it.
Comment by R — July 5, 2005 @ 2:31 am
I wouldn’t say that I’ve “shifted [my] perceptions” at all really. I’m still of the mindset that the government has no place in the marriage business whatsoever.
It should sanction civil unions to everyone who wants one (provided a few basic rules) and then let people/churches work it out amongst themselves.
Comment by Andrew — July 5, 2005 @ 2:45 am
Andrew,
I did write the addenda “(somewhat, at least)” in reference to you. I realize your beliefs may not be with the legislation as yet, but you have already begun to justify your behaviours. This is the first step of what I was talking about.
Comment by Tommy Eliot Steele — July 5, 2005 @ 11:50 am
The last thing the government will do is let the people handle it themselves. They are an institution of control, and usually it’s constituents rely on it’s power to put change into effect. Essentially, we are incapable of creating change unless the government approves of it.
Democracy…What a system.
Comment by R — July 5, 2005 @ 7:59 pm
J’aime vraiment votre emplacement.
Vous êtes vraiment très futé.
DÉFAUT DE LA REPRODUCTION SONORE ! Vous avez si raison.
Je conviens totalement.
Je souhaite que j’aie dit cela.
Comment by Jo — July 5, 2005 @ 10:15 pm
ED NOTE: Reposted comment by Brent Colbert. Unnecessarily Killed by spaminator. grrrrr
My opposition to Bill C-38 is all about the protection of rights and as someone who respects the Constitution, flawed as it is, I must continue to fight against a law that seeks to remove the free expression of religious beliefs.
The expansion of “rights” to a minority group should not come at the expense of others rights.
I will agree with you that the pro same sex marriage forces are working their way into the mainstream but if it was only the recogingtion they seek then I would be less inclinned to keep up the fight but the fact that this is mearly the first step in what I called the manifest destiny of the left and their desire to drive some people’s freedom of expression out of the public square means that those of us that respect the charter must continue to oppose these
attacks.
See my post on the Manifest Destiny of the Left
http://brentcolbert.com/blog/2005/06/13/the_manifest_destiny_of_the_left/
And The End of Religion in Canada
http://brentcolbert.com/blog/2005/06/24/the-end-of-religion-in-canada/
Comment by Brent Colbert — July 7, 2005 @ 5:28 pm
Canada simply gets what it deserves I guess. A culture with no morals deserves laws with no morals. When the government defines morality you are a servant to that government. I hope that the kind treatment and sheltering of Islamic radicals in Canada is a law that will be changed so that the Canadians don’t suffer the same homegrown terrorism that will has affected London. Hello from Minnesota, Eh.
Comment by Midwest Jay — July 21, 2005 @ 4:48 pm
Canadian Steele’s Errors: a Syllabus [#1]
I wrote a rip-snorter in reply to Tommy Steele’s what-I-thawt-was-his-wrap-up on the Gmarriage debate (generic-marriage as a business deal) - July 5, “Victors of battle proceed with ideological mop-up [Canadian Steele]; diehards battle on [Colbert’s Comments]. And there I led off with a barrage in Tommy’s direction, in my own intended wrap-up fulminating against his blog entry (also I played for the first time with the semiotics of punctuation signs as cuss-outs, as in the old comic books).
But Tommy posted a comment, saying that I hadn’t answered his blog entry, claiming that I hadn’t even addressed his long rhetorical journey to his bottom line - posted comments?, something I’m unaccustomed to, and was not Johnny on the spot in replying, as tho I have to reply to every Tom, Dick and Hari who may comment. I got an email pertaining thereto, and tried to reply to the address given, but Blogger doesn’t work that way. It didn’t even dawn on me that there’s a little envelop colophon next to the “Comment” tag, and that perhaps that would suffice to email Tommy. So, being heavily invested in other concerns, I let the matter slip by, after all Tommy doesn’t set my agenda for writing or even attention, as perhaps he would like. But still I notice today that my original blog entry was, again, something of a rip-snorter. So if I can ever get up the energy and interest in the subject matter, which left me quite exhausted by the time the vote in the House of Commons was over (and has proceeded at least to Second Reading in that gaggle of Liberal appointees farcically called a “Senate”). The legislation is passed, and those who have tried to articulate some sense while the debate was on, need no longer tilt at windmills against the Gmarriage Machine.
Those of us who had and continue to have philosophical objections are no longer forced to marshall arguments off-the-cuff. Still, my reply to Tommy was too heavily-toned to satisfy me now. On the other hand, I’m also not yet ready to work at the philosophical argumentation behind the wrap-up piece, an argument I had gone over many times online here and there.
In lieu of that fuller address to the complex of issues (many of which I have dealth with elsewhere), I pick out one item from Tommy’s discourse that rather interested me as I passed by. It includes a telltale detail, containing what for me has a kernel of truth where he and I just may have a pinpoint of agreement. I quote Tommy:
“To deny such to a certain group, one that has historically been denied equality and continues to be denied is to marginalize that group while promoting immorality.”
The gist here is that the state promotes “immorality” among homos when it denies them (please, let’s not use the term “marriage” here, but) recognition of (please, let’s not use the term “same-sex” here, but) either 2women intimate unions or 2men intimate unions.
What speaks to me out of this morass of misconceptualization offered by Tommy, is not the State’s alleged promotion of immorality; but, relevant to my case and life-story, the Christian community’s past promotion of only two options for homos: celibacy (when people were not called to it - contra, eg, Roman Catholicism’s false encouragement of monastic callings among children too young to know their own sexuality and the strength of their own libidos when in good health, as they grew up); and second, if one lapses, one at least has not planned a life-time union with the intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all but the one partner, which planning to sin would be the greater sin. That’s how that “moral teaching” was presented. And it was what I picked up from my very narrow conservative Presbyterian milieu. Planning for the embedding of sexual expression within a long-term and intendedly-permanent homo male intimate union, to the exclusion of all others, was the very worst thing one could do. The very best one could do was to remain a male virgin forever, no matter what libidic energies one had (thus, masturbation would be the only outlet, and is understood even by RC confessors as not as bad as actual sex with a partner … by the way, the distinction between celibacy and chastity is common in the sinology of such theological sexual ethics).
Which is a long way, it may seem to Tommy, from my effort toward an actual appreciation of a kernel of truth in his allegation that the State promotes immorality by not providing for 2women or 2men state solemnizations of intimate unions (again, please, can we dispense with the misnomer “civil union” by noting that the union is between the couple; the state can only give state-recognition to it and its two members, generically as is now the case in Canada - or in its specificity as a particular kind of intimate union - not the case now, nor ever has been in Canada). Returning to “immorality” in our search for a hidden kernel of truth in Tommy’s concept; his assertion, on the face of it, is a point with which I disagree: it isn’t immorality that the State would foster in this lack of recognition, if it would be fostering anything at all. And it isn’t the State with which we should be primarily concerned here. The Canadian State has not visited the bedrooms of the nation since Trudeau’s day.
But I do agree with a kernel I find in Tommy’s verbiage that points to the the foreclosure of options for singles (I won’t speak of female singles here but only male singles) by the Christian community (again, I won’t speak of other religious communities than the ones which tried to foreclose it in my regard and those of my friends and acqaintances), so that sexually-expressive intimate unions are verboten. This misbegotten moral guidance would lock the single guy into a straitjacket where he must live with either enforced virginity / celibacy with no time horizon of hope for either a marriage to a woman or a solemnized intimate union with another man (I’m talking of vows before witnesses, not churches or state, in the first instance when I use the term “solemnized).. This kind of guidance seems to me to promote actually a series of episodic lapses, akin to the sexual pattern of stray dogs almost, which becomes over a long time a pattern in itself and fosters an inability to make a commitment to one person with an intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all others.
It is in actuality, not a fostering of immorality because it leaves no path open sufficiently for another option to such single men. Rather, it makes promiscuity a moral option for them - in the teaching I oppose, they have no chance for a solomnized vowed life as a partner with the intention of permanence to one other man, to the exclusion of all others. I for one, as a lay ethical thinker (ethics as a science of morals) can’t label promiscuity in itself for such persons “immoral.” I see three valid options for persons brawt up within the conservative Protestant and Roman Catholic options for male sexual morality: celibacy, intimate union (the three kinds of which are marriage of 1woman1man, intimate union of 2women, intimate union of 2men), and promiscuity.
The most serious sin is not a single promiscuous event or a developing pattern of such lapses into a fully promiscuous pattern. The most serious sin of sexual expression is, on the one hand, witholding affection and sexual expression from a vowed partner to an intimate union; and, on the other, adultery against anyone’s intimate union.
So, if Tommy can sense on this one point that turns on his attempt to allege the State’s responsiblity for immorality, the fine point (hidden away within his far-reaching philosophical assumptions) with which I can neverthrless concur would be a point of agreement around a kernel matter that arises from the insites of a very different set of philosophical assumptions in regard to ethics and the subject matters of morals upon which ethics reflects: in that case, we would share a little something in common.
Where the Christian community changes its moral teachings to permit intimate unions of 2women, as well as those of 2men, along with the already special-status ascribed to 1woman1man marriage according to the traditional definition, then the community (at least a sector of the Christian community) itself benefits from a more morally-sound guideline in fulfilling its task. It does so by making space for another option, and thereby gradually obviating the recourse of many of its homo people to the option of promiscuity that that the Christian community presently fosters, willy-nilly, among them.
I tried in the foregoing not to appropriate the voice of women, nor Christian women in particular; as well I tried not to appropriate the voice of other religious communities beyond those I am closely acquainted with; likewise, I did not speak for atheists, secular humanists, or other secularists. So far, Tommy has not disclosed his ultimate values as they may influence his deployment of the term “immorality.” Why he implicates the State in a question of “immorality” on any of these issues, is quite beyond me.
As to the entirety of his sentence prior to its final word in the quote, it all assumes a background in victimology, with many dubious terms jammed together. I still find it nauseating, but to attempt to be a bit more analytical I shall intersperse within brackets my various responses to Tommy’s rhetoric in the passage that leads up to “immorality”:
“Officially recognizing gay marriage [no such thing] is a move to uphold the basic rights and freedoms [false, marriage is not a business-deal generic but a 1woman1man specific kind of intimate union] guaranteed to us as Canadians [it’s not inscribed in the Charter of Rights, but has been overlayed onto the actual text a distorting gloss imposed by misguided activist Courts relying on a specious philosophy of jurisprudence dominant for some time in Canada’s law schools, legal profession, and appointments to judgeships], and as human beings [this is an unprovable assumption so ultimate in its reference that it is religious in character, and points to the irreducible difference in religious presuppositions that obtain between Tommy and myself]. To deny such to a certain group [mark you, marriage is not denied to homos, many homos are married in the traditional and only valid sense of the word, many homos in 1woman1man relations keep their vows with the intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all others - these people Tommy just wipes out because they do not fit with his ideology], one that has historically been denied equality [this is using the term as an incantation, with no specificity, so that we can not judge in precisely what regard “a certain group” has been unequal; it’s obvious that the male group is unequal in average income, as the group has a higher average income than almost any other group in Canada] and continues to be denied [it’s been a long time since homos have been denied much of anything as a group or as individuals - actually, in many places the Gay ideologists are privileged, whereas the exGays are marginalized (I am not an exGay, I am a homo; Tommy’s gambit here is to saddle “the group” with the distinguishing feature of a victimology only] is to marginalize that group [the rhetoric of marginalization holds only as you procede down the income-level of the demographic in question; Tommy doesn’t make distinctions within the “group” because its internal differences are more significant than its similarities] while promoting immorality [so, by the time we get to this word, we are pulling so much of Tommy’s presumptuous verbiage along with us, that a full engagement with a moment of contact across our two different religio-philosophical value-ultimates and frameworks therefrom, is difficult to make … but I have tried above]. Canada has taken a historic step, one that we should be proud of [not! - It’s about to be the law of the land; we may even assume it is the law of the land because of the character of the Yes Man chamber that the Liberals hold as their own party-fiefdom; but the law itself is conceptually-poor legislation in extremis. I intend to accomodate myself to the new status quo, but never to accede to the philosophical point that marriage is between 1woman1man, and that there are other kinds of intimate unions of 2women and of 2men, and that the new bad law does not explicitly recognize any of them in their differences, nor provide for them legally in the unqueness of each, in their differences and different needs and different responsiblities perhaps.]
My main argument, which doesn’t appear here, is not around religio-philosophical ultimate values, but about the evidence from women’s medicine and anthroplogy. Tommy seems to know nothing of this data and theory, while he seems to think that the social science is “inconclusive” (am I conflating someone else’s remark to this effect?), in any case a point on which I am agnostic and wonder how one would know this. But that’s another argument.
Canadian Steele’s Errors: A Syllabus (#2)
In a previous entry, I began my replies to Tommy Steele’s insistence that I deal with his July 5 entry on his blog Canadian Steele in a more than summary fashion. I had had in mind that I was then wrapping up my rather long and detailed treatments of the matter during the course of the Parliamentary address to the issue of demotion of the traditional solemnized wedbond between 1woman1man. Tommy was annoyed that I didn’t deal with his meme theme, nor thereto bow on bended knee. I may have annoyed him further when I got around to the reply for which he asked, perhaps annoying him by first addressing at greater length what was of greater importance to my long well-developed ethical reflection from the standpoint of the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea as it pertains to ethical science, especially in regard to the three kinds ethically-qualified institutes of human existence (marriage, family, and friendship). In this I followed ethicists André Troost and James Olthuis, from whose work I learned much but whose approaches I have tried to take a step or two further. Especially, in my reflections to date I have blogged and posted on scholarly and Gay fora only on marriage and family. In blogging here on refWrite I have concentrated on marriage, but have done so within the context of then-proposed legislation in Canada and the USA pertaining to the planned demotion of the traditional public-legal definition of marriage to that of a generic definition.
I proposed instead a philosophical-ethical appreciation of three forms of intimate union, one of which is traditional marriage, while arguing for everyone’s general acknowledgement that de facto the other two forms of intimate union do exist: those between 2 women, and those between 2men. I have argued that there is in principle sufficient grounds to argue not only that the state should continue to recognize and support in appropriate ways, first of all, the unique and irreducible structural principle of the distinctive journey intended for life and to the exclusion of all others, the 1woman1man intimate union, and that doing so continues to be in the state’s own interests. However, I made most clear that the other two forms of intimate union which do exist within the fabric of both Canadian and American societies, had good grounds to be recognized each in its own uniqueness and irreducibility, whereby both could not be rationally reduced to marriage or two one another, the internal character of the bond of a 2woman intimate union, in comparison to that of 2men. I did not mount a sustained and systematic argument to the effect that all three in the uniqueness and irreducibility of each not only should be recognized (rather than consigned to a realm of denial by the state) but should be supported to the degree and in the manner in which it is in the state’s own good interest to do so. I often cite the results of women’s medicine and anthropology as the best starting place for the background material in the Congressional and Parliamentary committees that would explore such legislation. This has never been done by them in the least, to my knowledge. I would also expect such bodies to explore at length the distinct responsiblities and rights that may accrue to the distinct forms of intimate union should each be recognized in its distinctness and uniqueness in public law, in contrast to what we have now on both sides of the border; but I always defer to the specificity of the jurisdication/s involved, in the States to the several states, in Canada to the several provinces, each thru its appropriate legistlative bodies. The question of family is a different question from that of marriage. Tommy Steele seems to conflate them. And, as said, I do not yet blog on friendship, but any systematic treatment in a full-fledged philosohically-responsible ethics would do so.
Now, what I put forward in my previous July 5 answer to Tommy’s July 5 blog entry, “Canadian Steele’s Errors: A Syllabus [#1] - ” Ethics: Sexual Morals: Do refWrite and Canadian Steele share a kernel of truth in common?,” said much of the foregoing, but dug more deeply for the possiblity that there was some point at which we mite agree were we able to hone mutually our senses about Tommy’s deployment of the term “immorality” which he wanted to blame on the state, where I would lay any blame on the religions of Canada, especially Christianity in not maintaining the uniqueness, distinctness, and priority to the state of the 1woman1man bond, but more to the point, denying a real moral guidance to its own people in regard to a horizon of hope of ethically-qualified instituting (by either 2women or 2men intimate unions, with full moral room for sexual expression within those bonds). That would undercut the pressure toward a life which for many is experienced as a pressure toward promiscuity by lapses from the Christian communities moral teaching, instead of a healthy bondedness with intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all others. I think that was a point Tommy too wanted to make, but stumbled over his own statism. I thawt perhaps Tommy could see that this is the problem of Roman Catholic, Fundamentalist Protestant, and Evangelical Protestant teaching in Christianity - poor moral guidance based on inadequate ethical reflection (ethics = the science of morals).
————————————
Here, I shift over onto Tommy’s ground and enter into his philosophical framework for the ideas he expressed (he may have other philosophical frameworks for other areas of his thinking, but we can attend only to what he expresses in his blog entry; in the earlier response, I dealt with his approach to jurisprudence where he doesn’t even acknowledge that there are different scientific frameworks, coloured by different philosophies of law and reality in the notion of “equality” dominant today in Canada). Tommy argues in the following text from the standpoint of a different science - one of the psychological sciences, behaviourism. Let’s look at Tommy’s key thetic statement of his position.
Now, what I find the most interesting is, in fact, behaviour generally leads to attitude change - completely fascinating. Once John eats ice cream, even after proffessing abhorrence for the stuff, John is very likely to change his feelings about ice cream. A simple example, one that could be explained different ways, but this phenomenon is a proven relationship; behaviour causes attitudes.
So, if action feeds attitude, can laws change your own ardent view point? Can your strongly and deeply held belief actually be circumvented by legislation? Results from the laboratory and history resoundingly say yes.
First, note Tommy’s deployment of the rhetorical device “in fact.” The facticity of what he wants to claim as absolute, is only such on the basis of the presuppositions and the methodologies, indeed on the basis of the specific methods of studies he has in mind and which he wants us to swallow whole around the metaphor of ice cream and the probabllity statistics of people who say they “hate” ice cream, then eat some, and change their minds.
Second, note the abstractness of Tommy’s next deliverance: “behaviour generally leads to attitude change.” Note further that Tommy uses the term “generally” - so he leaves open the possiblity that behaviour does not always lead to attitude change. Let’s look at such not always cases, hypothetically, the possiblity of which Tommy does not go so far as to rule out. Some people may say they “hate” ice cream, then willingly put that attitude to a test or instead may be forced to eat ice cream thus again testing their attitude in an alternate way. In these varying cases, these people tested, let’s say, in two sets - one set tested by their own willing choice and the other set tested by coercion - were they to conclude that they “hate” ice cream would not be anomalous by Tommy’s own statement. Indeed, there are other kinds of cases also: some people may discover they are actually allergic to ice cream, that it induces extreme illness, that it may create phobic reactions merely to be in the same room when it is noticed to be present, etc.
So, we’re back to Tommy’s “generally.” We find that the word “generally” can be used to erase the difference, to hide it and the minority who adhere to what counters it. In an exercise, let’s not let the word slip by us, due to its mere rhetorical position in the sentence Tommy profers. Let’s re-order the sentence without changing its formal semantics: “behaviour leads to attitude change, generally.” This may help us isolate the abstractness of the statement under which so much legerdemain lurks. Indeed, we could make this statement completely outside the scientific claims of behaviourism altogether. We could simply say that when things happen in history, as a conflict settles, people tired of the conflict, go along with the winning result, at least for the time being. That seems to me to be true enuff, and platitudinously so. We don’t need the debatable apparatus of behaviourism to see in terms of historical dynamics, that especially in a country of good democratic order like Canada, people who dissent from a long hotly-contested dispute on a matter will try to find a way to accomodate their victors, and make the best of the new status quo, while in many cases still creatively looking for ways to preserve outside the law the cultural element that they had previously valued so dearly but which now has no standing, has been devalued by the public-legal realm with its police backup, and in the ranking of things, demoted. This is what happened to legal definition of marriage, according to the Canadian tradition, which has now been demolished in favour of a generic definiton that does not recognize in their specificities the intimate unions of either 1woman1man (across the differences, and thus distinct from the other two), or 2women (a sameness that perhaps should be recognized as relevant to certain special responsiblities and rights, and not reducible to the sameness of the third…), or 2men (which becomes privileged in the very least in that it benefits doubly from the male-paradigmed medicine that dominates Canadian medicine, according to medical analysts who have made this their locus of expertise).
Once we note the platitudinous of Tommy’s preoccupation with behaviourism, and get behind that facade to the well-ordered usual response in a democracy when one side has been outmanoeuvered in Parliament and has gone down in defeat to another side that packages in the Canadian flage its product of generic marriage only, selling said product in the name of an unreflective but dominant theory of “equality” regarding marriage, so as to interpret into the small blank spaces between its words a huge discourse that is not enshrined in the Charter of Rights but has been interpreted into it, as said, by the same school of uncritical juridical theorizing, we come to a multi-factoral set of results that can not yet be historiographically evaluated. Too many features of the results are still in motion. But, Tommy can shortstop historiography by invoking behaviourism. As to the contest’s outcome: one side has lost something dear and vital, a side that is not limited to people of the couples of trad marriages, as many homos also feel that something dear and vital has been lost in the victory of the unthinking and uncritical, sloganeering, flag-packaging winning side.
Let’s return to Tommy’s text: As stated, where Tommy finds a certain deliverance from on hi, in the theoretical realms of the admittedly counter-intuitive psychological school of behaviourism to be “completely fascinating,” I find it, when translated to a general historical rumination, to be platitudinous. In other words, “completely fascinating” is froth, chaff which the wind driveth away, not some startling revelation. So, while sticking with Tommy’s text, let’s turn from the abstractness of his first statement in the quote to his second, thereby to get something of a critical perspective on the abstractness itself. “Once John eats ice cream, even after professing abhorrence for the stuff, John is very likely to change his feelings about ice cream. A simple example, one that could be explained in different ways, but this phenomenon is a proven relationship; behaviour causes attitudes.” Notice how Tommy’s metaphor and example of “John eats ice cream” floats up out of concrete reality into isolation from any consideration of whether John is going against his “hate” of ice cream as a result of wanting to test his “hate” by free choice, or whether he has been forced or more subtly coerced into doing so.
Or, maybe John is dating a girl who has let him know she’d love to have him take her to an ice-cream parlour, as such establishments used to be called, but let’s update the establishment to a Baskin Robbins outlet. He doesn’t mention his antipathy to ice cream, he is single-mindedly desirous of doing exactly what this young lady desires of him for their date. He likes her a lot; so, he will eat ice cream, even tho in comparison to 10,000 other possible edibles, he would prefer almost anything else than ice cream - his “antipathy,” thus, amounts to a strong range of preferences. So, we see how lacking Tommy’s abstractions are, floating above any historical specificty, just as in John’s case his “hate” may be a strong preference for almost any other kind of food or drink, or it may be due to an allergy to dairy products. Let’s say, he gets a choice at Baskin Robbins between real ice-cream which is a dairy product, and a vegan product which is composed entirely of vegetables (excluding peanuts). So, even in the latter cases, we see that in so individual and personal a matter as foods we “hate” and foods we like, choice vs coercion is a factor that de-abstracts the behaviourist construct, and also that a huge array of variables that configure uniquely in the case of each person provide the co-factoral elements in the specificity of any particular “attitude.” Now, let’s proceed with this second element of Tommy’s text by looking more closely at his slide from one meaning to another, that he thinks he can impose on his readers with impunity.
“[B]ehaviour …leads to attitude change[, generally] … professing abhorrence … very likely to change his feelings about ice cream.” Earlier, Tommy used the term “hate” in reference to liking or disliking ice cream. There are cases where people do indeed hate ice cream, but the hatred involved usually is real and is the result of experience, not simply a notion untested in the vicissitudes of life. So, “hate” in conjunction with “ice cream” is more likely not to indicate an emotion, but as Tommy plays with the concept to this point, it is ambiguous and draws on “hate” as an idiom of hyperbole for a mere attitude untried by any real experience of eating the stuff. However, having used the word “hate” in so ambiguous (and to the unwary reader, misleading) a way, suddenly Tommy is tilting the word to an emotional-intensifier that admits of no such ambiguity, and even forecloses on the misleading ahistorical abstract juxtaposition of “hate” and “ice cream” (again, most people who hate ice cream have real reason to do so, but most people who “hate” ice cream and have never tasted it, don’t actually hate it, and those who “hate” in this idiomatic hyperbolic usage of the word, actually dislike it only in the sense that they have strong preferences and would enjoy other kinds of edibles or drinkables in preference to ice cream … but for his lady friend, John who “hates” ice cream, may be quite happy to eat and pretend to enjoy it or even enjoy in order to please her in the enjoyment of it together - but since she breaks up with him later that evening, John never even thinks about eating ice cream again … perhaps he becomes merely indifferent to it).
In any case, by a rhetorical shift, Tommy tilts against what he has misled the typical unwary reader into thinking was a mere matter of attitude. What he has waited to do, is exploit the ambiguity of the word “hate” in ordinary parlance (back to the ice cream parlour and Baskin Robbins) in regard to “ice cream.” So, now two words are intensified to high emotion-laden semantic values, mid-discourse: “attitude” suddenly becomes intense emotion, and the implicit and idiomatic hyperbole “hates … ice cream without having ever tried it” suddenly becomes an unambiguous “abhorrence.” This is not good logic; this is rhetorical finesse to the point of trickery.
Now, no matter how words can harbour several meanings at once (see Umberto Eco, Semiotics: An Introduction and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language), and no matter how a crafty writer can avoid clarifying the meaning-usage he wants to hold back until the moment when disambiguation is most likely to benefit him, in contrast to his previous lack of thereof; for his rhetorical purposes, having mislead his readers, still we must note that in the shift from “attitude” as used by behaviourists in the would-be scientific testing along the line of Tommy’s thesis, to Tommy’s additional slide to the word “feelings,” takes us one additional step in fathoming the trickery of Tommy’s misconceptualizations at the root of his argument. “Attitudes” and “Hates ice cream, tho untried” becomes hatred, abhorrence, and intense feelings.
I believe I have already proven that Tommy has not made his case with his use of terms, which are bedevilled with illogical breakdowns in consistency of meaning. Now, I want to make the point that the entire construct so analyzed around “hates … ice cream” just can’t carry the metaphorical weight that Tommy wants, when he tries to evoke a general rule in a behaviorist fashion in regard to predicting the feelings of those who lost in the social conflict about displacing and demoting the traditional public-legal definition of marriage.
Tommy seems to think that attitudinal testing by the behaviourist school of psychology is directly applicable to the case before us - demotion of marriage, displacement of it by gmarriage (generic marriage) - according to some general rule putatively established. “…[A]ttitudes do not account for actions very well at all.” This thawt, says Tommy, is “counter-intuitive,” which means that most of us balk at it as seeming on the face of it, misleading. The truth is that we are not here called upon to decided that attitudes alone account entirely for any particular action. Nor the opposite. What we find instead that is that attitudes, especially when strong and emotionally-charged with moral convictions, are likely to be co-factoral in regard to action or lack of action. Tommy’s construct places us in a binomial situation of either/or (the exclusive disjunct in logic). But in historical dynamics, even our own personal actions, attitudes are co-factoral only, and actions rarely occur without any attitudes whatsoever. There is no either/or, or one-factor causality known to a good historiography. But apparently, behaviourism - or at least, Tommy’s take on behaviourism - has been able to invent such a single-factor doctrine of human causality. “In fact,” Tommy goes on to say (my boldface added - Owlb) “the general rule discovered was that attitude accounts for 10% of the variance of behaviour, meaning you are still uncertain what an individual will do 9 out of 10 times,” once you have ascertained what you consider to be his/her attitude, Tommy neglects to append. And just look at the conceptual thinness of what must in all honesty be appended. Tommy’s reliance on this kind of “science” puts him way out on a limb.
To generate this so-called “general rule,” its progenitors and Tommy have to use the soft meaning of “attitude/s” (their “in general” and “generally”) - not the cases of previous experience, not the cases of strongly-held beliefs about moral institutions attached to ultimate values of the individual, and not the cases where strong emotions on the level “abhorrence” are invested in the instance, especially an instance of the kind contested around the traditional public-legal definition of marriage. What behaviourism needs to do to give its construct any crediblity at all (maybe it has, but Tommy isn’t aware of it or has suppressed it, sorry Tommy but that’s a logical possiblity here) is to provide for any Tommy-style argument, an internal structural ranking of various categories of its data - from attitudes toward trivial matters at one end, along a spectrum, to attitudes on vitally important matters to those surveyed. Now, with that in place, Tommy’s whole discourse on “hating ice cream … tho never having tried it,” is not only rhetorical sophistry here (tho it wouldn’t be to ice-cream marketers), it is also an instance of trivialization.
Attitudes toward trivia can be changed by eating ice cream, which one “hated” when one had never tried it. Attitudes toward the public-legal definition of marriage may also be trivial for some people, may become trivial for some people for whom it wasn’t trivial before they had to live with the new legislation in Canada for awhile; but we can invoke no general rule nor the rubric Tommy wants to marshall that “attitude accounts for 10% of the variance of behaviour,” because that rubric takes no acccount of the internal structural differences of the kinds of variance being lumped together to produce an abstraction and generalization that doesn’t distinguish what kinds differentials make that statement true, and what kinds render it patently false and absurd. This procedure is not authentically scientific. It is uncritical of the behaviourist methodologies, and it is uncritical of the actual methods used and the questions asked in making this broad and sweeping undifferentiated set of generalizations about “attitude,” “change” and “behaviour” in regard to the displacement and demotion of the public-legal definition of marriage for a neologism (gmarriage, generic “marriage”).
Lastly, today, we must recognize that science at its best (and this offering by Tommy and his uncited sources also) only gives one kind of knowledge - probabilities. Science cannot tell us at any time - when it says “what an individual will do 9 out of 10 times” - what that means for this time, this case, this instance, this loss by one side and win for the other side. Time will tell. One thing is sure, that many people who “ardently” opposed the winning legislation will accomodate themselves to it, and some will come around to approve of it later on. The vote was an historic moment, But, contrary to Tommy’s dubious science, the situation could reverse itself. And the last place to turn, if you’re a betting person, is to Tommy’s behaviourism, if you want to suss out the odds, to place a wise wager. My guess would be, that this move is just one feature of a great spiritual shift by which secular Humanism (a spirit of the times) is seeking to disenfranchise Christian participation in the public square. But the public-legal issue in itself is not peculiarly Christian; no religious community and no philosophical orientation held even by numerous secular Humanists to the contrary of the new law, will benefit from the demotion and displacement of 1woman1man as integral to the public-legal definition of marriage.
But, hey. I’ll give Tommy the last word, since he is his own reductio ad absurdam on the issue, which he implored me to debate with him. “So, if action feeds attitude, can laws change your own ardent view point? Can your strongly and deeply held belief actually be circumvented by legislation? Results from the laboratory and history resoundingly say yes.”
Endnote: It will take some time before I am ready with Canadian Steele’s Errors: A Syllabus [#3].
Comment by Albert Gedraitis — July 21, 2005 @ 7:38 pm
Wow, albert, that was long.
I am a little too busy to respond in kind (I am preparing for the GRE), but I promise, you will have my reponse soon.
Just a quick point, however,. I think you were misled by the word ‘behaviour’. The phenomena of behaviour leading to attitude change is best accounted for by a theory called ‘cognitive dissonance’, which is a social psychological theory, not a behavioural theory. I think much of your analysis is misguided by the speciousness of this thought.
Comment by Tommy Eliot Steele — July 21, 2005 @ 10:49 pm
Really interested in the expert view you cite in the first paragraph. I have long intuitively felt that marketing’s (in particular) reliance upon the received wisdom that attitudes drive behaviour is flawed….. a suggestion as to where to read more would be very well-received. Thank you.
Comment by Dan Parkinson — August 5, 2005 @ 12:51 pm
Well Dan, some good sites are
http://http-server.carleton.ca/~rthibode/chapter4.html,
http://www.colorado.edu/communication/meta-discourses/Theory/dissonance/index.htm,
or Zimbardo’s very interesting lecture Transforming People into Perpetrators of Evil.
To read more simply look up any social psychology text, and you will find some great info there.
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