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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 422 example of reacting self-protectively to anomalous data that violate a provincial moral theory (an empirical conception of persons is inherently moral), by excluding the anomalous other from the realm of moral concern. In essence, the xenophobe violates the criteria of inclusiveness by failing to recognize and treat the anomalous other as fully a person. Recall that on the proposed Kantian conception of the self elaborated in Chapter II, if we cannot make sense of such data in terms of those familiar concepts, we cannot register it as an experience at all. Recall also the argument of Chapter VII, that pseudorationality is an attempt to make sense of such data under duress, i.e. to preserve the internal rational coherence of the self, when we are baldly confronted by anomaly but are not yet prepared to revise or jettison our conceptual scheme accordingly. We saw that it is in the attempt to make sense of anomalous data in terms of empirically inadequate concepts that the mechanisms of pseudorationality - rationalization, dissociation and denial - kick in to secure literal self-preservation. A familiar xenophobic example of rationalization would be conceiving of a slave imported from Africa as three-fifths of a person. This results from magnifying the properties that appear to support this diminished concept of personhood - the slave's environmental and psychological disorientation, lack of mastery of a foreign language, lack of familiarity with local social customs, incompetence at unfamiliar tasks, etc.; and minimizing the properties that disconfirm it - her capacity to learn, to forge innovative modes of communication and expression, to adapt and flourish in an alien and lethal social environment, to survive enslavement and transcend violations of her person, etc. A xenophobic example of dissociation would include identifying Jews as subhuman, blacks as childlike, women as irrational, gays as perverts, or working class people as animals. This conceives of them as lacking essential properties of personhood, and so are ways of defining these groups of individuals out of our empirical conceptions of people. Similarly, xenophobic denial might include ignoring a woman's verbal contributions to a discussion, or passing over an African American's intellectual achievements, or forgetting to make provisions at a Christmas celebration for someone who is a practicing Jew. These are all ways of eradicating from one's domain of awareness properties that distinguish others as different from oneself. Thus through the pseudorational mechanisms of rationalization and dissociation, xenophobia engenders various forms of stereotyping - racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, class elitism - that are discriminatory in both the cognitive and the political sense. It selects certain perceptually familiar properties of the person for disparagement, and distorts or obliterates those that remain. It thereby reduces the complex singularity of the other's properties to an oversimplified but conceptually manageable subset, and this in turn diminishes one's full conception of personhood. This results in a © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
