The “Blank Slate” Smashed
Forever!
Philosophers Have Debated for Millenia
the Limits of Human
Understanding of the World.
An 18-year-old
South African Track Star
May Have Settled the Debate For All Time.
October 17, 2009
In the summer of 2009, a new face burst onto the scene of international athletic competition. Caster Semenya beat the reigning women’s 800-meter track champion by a huge lead of 2.45 seconds, a month after shattering her own personal best time by a full seven seconds.
After her stunning victory at the world championships in Berlin, German officials at the International Association of Athletics announced that they wanted to give the athlete more than the gold medal. They challenged the muscular, deep-voiced competitor to submit to testing to verify her gender as a woman.
Following the announcement, a flurry of news and editorial columns appeared, suggesting that “gender” is actually a complicated topic. It’s not as simple as looking into someone’s underwear, they suggested. There are chromosomal issues that could reveal that people who look like normal men and women, may be, in truth, the opposite. Further reports came out that certain people may be born hermaphrodites, with both gender organs, but physically display only the signs of one gender on the outside. Rumors arose that Caster Semenya was in fact just such a hermaphrodite.
The athlete’s family and townspeople rallied around the athlete in support. Recently, the Associated Press reported that South Africa’s governing party wants Caster Semenya to continue competing as a woman, regardless of the results of gender tests. Party Spokesman Jackson Mthembu said that Semenya had been brought up as a girl and should therefore “continue to run as a woman.”
This is not the first time that such a challenge has been raised. Other women’s competitors have been disqualified after failing to “verify” their gender. It might seem rude to subject an athlete to shame and ridicule by thrusting his or her personal medical condition into the public scrutiny. But let’s remember the stakes and the charges involved: we’re talking about the title of fastest runner in the world, and a charge that someone who is really a man is masquerading as a woman for personal advantage.
Is it reasonable to test the qualifications of an athlete for world-class competition to determine if the athlete is really a woman? In the context of competitive sport, at least, there are fundamental questions of fairness that need to be addressed in a simple yes or no fashion.
But there might be greater lessons to learn from this strange story. In fact, the fall of Caster Semenya might finally put to rest a vicious lie that has been swirling around the academies of learning for thousands of years.
Philosophers have long sought to discredit the institutions of social morality. One of the best ways of doing that is to claim that the people who are telling us what to do, such as religious and social leaders, in fact, have no idea what they are talking about.
What are the concepts of “man” and “woman,” really, it has been asked. Perhaps the categories of “man” and “woman” are only just convenient ways of categorizing the world.
These are the questions put forward by Professor Judith Butler, a radical feminist critic, in her theory of “performative identity.” Professor Butler suggests, in all sincerity, that no true human identity exists. What we call our own identity is merely the product of endless repetitions of recycled roles that society imposes on us, from the outside. There is no “identity” in and of itself, Professor Butler argues. Rather, we “recreate” our own identity through performance.
Professor Butler applies this theory of “performative identity” to gender, suggesting that there is in fact, no true essential gender to human beings. Rather, by engaging in a series of societal and cultural rituals and repeated “performances” people become habitually indoctrinated into the understanding that there are in fact two distinct genders, of man and woman. In the Preface to her work, Gender Trouble, (Routledge, 1999) Professor Butler explains:
“The view that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, positioned through the gendered stylization of the body. In this way, it showed that what we take to be an ‘internal’ feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an [sic] hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures.”
Yes, you read that right. Professor Butler suggests that the categories of “man” and “woman” are nothing but a hallucination, reproduced on a massive scale based on the sheer force of habit. She suggests that we take the time “to imagine alternatively gendered worlds,” citing, as an example, “the berdache and multiple-gender arrangements in Native American cultures.” (page 194, fn. 8).
Before any reader injures him or herself while attempting to imagine the human body with its organs repositioned in new, “alternatively-gendered” ways, Richard Trexler, in his book Sex and Conquest (Cornell University Press, 1995) exposes the falsity of the use of the berdache as any kind of model for a “multiple-gender arrangement.” According to Mr. Trexler, the berdache were a group of adolescent boys forced to dress as women to accompany soldiers to war for unsavory purposes.
“Owning large numbers of women was one way rulers built their property base… but male passives were stronger than women. Controlling the physical strength of gangs of male adolescents was, and is, a basis for executive power.” (p. 95). Professor Trexler summarizes, “An honest conclusion of this book requires us to draw the connection between the ancient treatment of the berdaches and the present problem of child abuse.” (p. 11).
What does Professor Butler, and those who would attack the concept of gender roles and gender identity, stand to gain from their posturing? Are they just looking to make some creative noise? Or is there something more sinister at work behind the attempt to blur the distinction between the sexes.
The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy identifies the struggle between two warring views of human knowledge.
“The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.”
Or, in the words of Webster’s Dictionary, empiricism is a “theory that all knowledge originates in experience.”
To paraphrase, a rationalist believes that there is a fixed world outside his own perception, and human beings are capable of using their intellects to understand the true essence of things. Empiricists say there is really no world outside our senses; even if there were, it does not matter, because we have no way of understanding things outside of our own perceptions of them. In the end, to an empiricist, all human knowledge is simply a fabrication, the by product of our sensory experience alone.
This is not a question of whether we use our senses to accumulate knowledge. No one is arguing that we don’t use our eye muscles and retina to read a page of a book and send that sensory data to the brain. Tthe question is whether in fact we ever really know anything outside of our own impressions. Or are we just doomed to live with our own made-up imaginings of what the world might look like, and never know anything for sure?
Empiricism goes far beyond the portrait of a loveable, grouchy skeptic. Empiricism argues that all our knowledge is limited to what we derive from sensory data, and thus has no true connection to world outside our senses. If that’s the case, they argue, then the concept of “causality” as we know it is also a fiction, a fairy tale invented to explain phenomena that we can never understand.
Take a white towel, bring it over to a bowl filled with red wine. If you drop the towel into the wine, you might think it is the wine that causes the towel to turn red. According to an empiricist, we have no way of knowing why the towel turned red. In the style of the school of the Mutakallimun, early Muslim philosophers, a white garment that has been put into a vat full of wine and has become dyed, has not been dyed by the wine. According to them, there is no body at all endowed with the power of action. Rather, the ultimate agent is Gd, and it is He Who, in view that He has instituted such a habit, created the redness in the garment itself when it was brought in contact with the wine.
As a result, they say that mankind is incapable of truly knowing the world, and is doomed to constantly replay the contents of our own imaginations. This cuts off any discussion of meaningful human choice. There can be no human choice, where, according to their logic, there is no such thing as causality.
People who would argue that there is no essence to the world, accordingly, only ascribe value to human virtue and moral duty in the sense of practical social dynamics. At its core, they would argue, there is no true essence to the world, and hence no real duty at all for man to his neighbor, or to the Almighty Gd.
The debate has theological, and political consequences as well. It’s not by accident that one of the pillars of empiricist philosophy was Avicenna, a Muslim born in 981 who lived in Persia (now Iran). Present-day fundamentalist Muslims claim to worship the One Gd as they cry out “Allah Akbar” “God is Great.” They believe that Gd is completely Omnipotent, to the point that, should He will it, Gd can change the world upside down and inside out for no reason whatsoever. Anything they can imagine, they claim, is possible, because Gd is omnipotent and can do whatever He wants.
As a result, villains who take refuge in such a philosophy end up enshrining as a deity itself the trait of chutzpah, brazenness. After all, if there is no fixed essence, the Iranian dictators reason, for example, all you need to do is hammer your will forward long enough and the world may eventually just relent to your desire.
People can wake up one morning, according to this logic, and the world of yesterday can be forgotten. If there’s no underlying essence and no consistency, no continuity of a world outside our senses, why not? If there’s no strength to the world itself outside human perceptions, go ahead and deny facts that as clear as day. The only thing that keeps them alive is people’s belief in them.
The vision of the Almighty Creator as an unstable despot Who would do anything that can be imagined is a gross mischaracterization of Divine power. In fact, the Almighty Himself chose to subordinate His own power, if this can be said, when He gave mankind rules of conduct to live by. The Seven Laws of Noah, given to the nations of the world, and the Torah, for the Jews, are not merely good advice or suggestions. These Laws are the foundation of Divine justice and basis for an interaction between the Almighty and human beings. One who follows the Laws can look to find Divine favor, and one who breaks these Laws, Gd forbid, can expect Divine punishment.
But fundamentalist empiricists who claim to worship the power of Gd in fact believe themselves to be merely puppets in the hand of their deity, incapable of their own free choice. They follow their own impulse as if it were a Divine commandment. As a result, they are capable of the most egregious horrors, delighting in bloodshed and inflicting destruction and misery on others. Their rationale? “If I’m able to carry out my own desires, Gd must want me to do them, and if Gd doesn’t want me to do this, let Him stop me!”
It’s interesting to note how nicely empiricist doctrine fits in with societies that live under the hand of despotic rulers. For example, the champion of rationalist empiricism, David Hume, had formed his conclusion that belief in an external world is not justifiable by reason, but accepted only by custom, while he lived in Scotland. He died in 1776, the same year that some colonial upstarts declared their independence from King George of England.
So, to an empiricist, an athlete who was raised wearing dresses, and who felt like a woman, should be perfectly entitled to run in the women’s track and field competition. After all, what matters is just one’s own impression. Or, as Professor Butler would suggest, the concept of a “woman” is just the by-product of endless repetition, and human beings are free to redefine the sexes as they see fit.
On the other hand, an athlete in the women’s track and field who has a pair of testes hidden inside her body and an unusually high level of testosterone might be violating a simple rule of fairness, no matter what kind of clothes she wore growing up.
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