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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 452 This often creates additional difficulties in identifying cases of higherorder political discrimination for what they are. Because a disvaluee's insight usually remains morally unrecognized by the surrounding community, thus violating inclusiveness criterion (3) of the preceding chapter, her testimony suffers a credibility problem at the outset. This problem is severely exacerbated if the testimony concerns a higher-order political discriminator whom others have every reason to regard as a saint. Under these circumstances, any charge of inconsistency - whether it comes from others and targets the disvaluee, or comes from the disvaluee and targets the higherorder political discriminator - is in the eye of the beholder. For higher-order political discriminators regard coarse, tasteless, or brutal behavior toward disvaluees as called forth by them and so warranted; hence as fully consistent with the most highly refined manners and courtly civility toward others. Yet unlike former President Lyndon Johnson, who conferred with his cabinet through an open bathroom door, while uninhibitedly and indiscreetly performing his morning ablutions, the higher-order political discriminator cannot be supposed to commit these boorish excesses with any offensive intent. Rather, he regards his response to a person's disvalued properties as socially innocuous; as an acceptable variation in social etiquette, keyed to the variations among the personality traits of the variety of individuals he encounters. A third example of such distorted behavior is the implicit treatment of disvaluees as being obligated by different rules of conduct than those which govern oneself and those considered to be one's peers. One may apply different criteria of interpretation to the behavior of disvaluees: Whereas enigmatic behavior by valuees is excused, overlooked, or given the benefit of the doubt, similar behavior on the part of disvaluees is interpreted as proof of vice or malevolence. This interpretation motivates the higher-order political discriminator not only to avoid, but also to justify the avoidance of direct interaction with the disvaluee, and thus avoid the conflict of conscience described earlier. Or one may apply rules of honor, loyalty, and responsibility only to those considered to be one's peers, but may have no scruples about betraying the trust or confidentiality of a disvaluee, who is implicitly viewed as unentitled to such consideration. Alternately, one may hold disvaluees to far more stringent moral standards than the members of one's own community in fact practice among themselves. Any violation of these standards by the disvaluee then creates an irradicable moral blemish to which the valuees are invulnerable, by reason of their status as valuees. These cases express quite clearly the conviction that disvaluees just do not have quite that same status, hence are not to be subject to the same standards of treatment, as members of one's recognized community - at the same time that the higherorder political discriminator vehemently and in all honesty denies that any such discrimination is taking place. Indeed in all of these examples, the © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
