| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 449 Unfortunately, to suppress habits of thought from awareness is not to eradicate their influence, any more than to suppress the disvaluee's existence from awareness is to eradicate her influence. Higher-order political discrimination is characterized by that attitude in which a certain habit of thought, namely first-order political discrimination, poisons one's evaluations and behavior, whether one acknowledges this or not. The higher-order political discriminator is inclined, moreover, not to acknowledge this, no matter how obviously incriminating his evaluations and behavior may be to a disinterested observer. For this would expose the painful conflict of conscience the higher-order political discriminator's behavior attempts to suppress. To acknowledge this conflict, in turn, would be to acknowledge the need to resolve it, i.e. the need to work through and overcome the first-order prejudices that gave rise to it. But it is precisely in virtue of those first-order prejudices themselves that such a project of selfimprovement stands very low on the higher-order political discriminator's list of priorities. Unlike the resolution of Oedipal conflicts, emotional problems, tensions in one's personal relationships, or career dilemmas, coming to terms with one's prejudices and learning not to inflict them inadvertently on others just is not, in the last analysis, seen as terribly important by the higher-order political discriminator. But it would be wrong to interpret the higher-order political discriminator as concerned only with personal problems and not with social ones. Rather, the higher-order political discriminator belittles the importance of addressing a very specific personal problem. That is part of what makes him a political discriminator in the first place. As I have painted it, then, higher-order political discrimination is peculiarly the sickness of thoughtful, well-intentioned and conscientious individuals who nevertheless have failed adequately to confront and work through their own prejudices, or who perhaps have been too quickly satisfied by their ability to marshal arguments on behalf of doing so. One implication of characterizing higher-order political discrimination as a sickness rather than a fault is that higher-order political discriminators are, in the last analysis, not morally responsible for their behavior. This conclusion may seem unpalatable in many respects. Nevertheless, direct appeals to reason in higher-order political discriminators are unlikely to work, because their dogged pseudorationality is so inherently a part of the problem. Such individuals are being neither disingenuous nor hypocritical when they deny that a person's race, gender, class, sexual orientation, or ethnic or religious affiliation affects their judgment of her competence or worth. They vehemently insist that this is so, they want it to be so, and they genuinely believe it to be so. They are, nevertheless, mistaken. Their efforts to explain away each manifest expression of higher-order political discrimination on different and inconsistent grounds are unconvincing. And their behavior exhibits a degree of otherwise inexplicable arbitrariness and idiosyncrasy that © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
