NEW WORLD ORDER DIARY
Hal Pepinsky
September 5, 1993
A LABOR DAY ADDRESS
About the only thing the campus faculty council has decisive control
over is the academic schedule. Ten years ago when I was there the first
time, we made Labor Day and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday campus
holidays. Two or three meetings later the change was reconsidered and
defeated, on grounds that the entire semester's laboratory science
education would be jeopardized if experiments could not be tended by
students Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I long ago decided that
although I was offended by what I consider disrespect for blue-collar
support staff and wanted to attend Labor Day functions, I would not take
my feelings out on students. I honor labor day in my big class this
year by lecturing on how the drive to act on the premise that one's
needs requires that others be treated differently from oneself (here,
that my work is so distinctively important that students and support
staff do have keep my labs going Labor Day; and beyond that, that
everyone else ought to be required to hold classes as a show of
solidarity for my educational needs).
I may only begin this today. I have actually outlined the lecture,
taking the advice given me last week by AI Polly Schloesser. I'll try
to be brief in this summary, but what I've outlined amounts to a new way
to describe a theory of justice/peace which a couple of years ago took
me a book to say otherwise. A reminder: I presuppose that we commonly
say and do peacemaking daily, across settings, across disciplines and
the terms of our formal models. Mine as I see it is essentially a task
of translating from one set of terms to others, here of translating my
syllabus into my students' terms.
BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH PERCEPTUAL CONTROL THEORISTS
My conversation with Bill Powers and other PCT-ists began with Bill's
response to my Alternative Social Control Systems syllabus, where I ask
above all whether exceptions to the Golden Rule promote social security.
If I have pulled back from the PCT dialogue on CSG-L, I have engaged
more with students. As I write now and lecture tomorrow, I am too
focused on communicating in their language to have figured out how to
put this into PCT. But if the syllabus seemed relevant to PCT-ists, I'm
looking forward to their reactions to this explanation of how I think
the Golden Rule works.
WHAT DOES THE GOLDEN RULE HAVE TO DO WITH RAPE?
I. Why I'm lecturing
A. Violates all the preaching I do about avoiding lectures
B. Friday's visits with Polly Schloesser's discussion sections--
I showed Polly on video last Friday and filled in for her while she was
at the national political science meetings. She asked students by
themselves in writing for her and then in groups to share their greatest
hopes and fears for the class. Overwhelmingly, students across the
three groups expressed the fervent hope that they could show they
understand the course material, together with the fear that they would
not "do well" in the class, meaning their grade would be lower than
their expectations of themselves.
There are two ways of reacting to this input. One is to infer that
students only care about grades and won't even bother to get into course
material before whining that they can't do it. Viewed thus, students
reinforced the prejudice that they don't care to learn, not really, and
are just out to get easy A's. To me, this judgment violates the Golden
Rule. To act on this judgment and come down on the students who passed
me this message for it would presuppose that students as a group are
different from what I would be if I were in their position and saying
what they are. I would presuppose I would really want to learn. The
Golden Rule requires I presuppose of them likewise. It doesn't take me
long reflecting on what students are telling me to imagine what I'd be
saying is, "I don't know what you want for a grade, and I don't even
know how to ask you to explain yourself without offending you." Indeed,
one group of students expressed the fear that my viewpoint or the AI's
would be forced upon them, but could not yet imagine what that might be.
I also connect with a feeling I had had in isolation--that I wasn't
quite sure how I myself connected rape to the Golden Rule.
Viewed thus, it is remarkable how restrained and yet expressive students
were. They took Polly and me up on our bid to be honest with us. They
crystallized in my own mind that it was high time I began talking about
how I relate the Golden Rule to the material on rape and battering we
have at hand. By the third discussion section I summarized what I'm
writing and lecturing about now. (Why wait to start, if the issue is
clearly at hand?) As of the second, one student, Christine, gave me a
context for my explanation by expressing wonderment at how warped and
wilfully hurtful someone would have to be to rape a woman and not notice
her terror. I'll point out for NWOD readers that this is precisely how
I describe the element of violence contained in rape at the beginning of
chap. 5 of the geometry book. Because of the choice I make to try
interpreting what students are saying as a genuine attempt to tell me
what I and Polly want to know, and an honest request for help, I find it
is time for me to lecture, at this point time for me to offer a first
answer to my own first question.
B. ...AND GIVE WEEKLY READING ASSIGNMENTS INSTEAD OF LAYING THEM
ALL OUT BEFOREHAND.
I'm glad I only promised to tell you about readings a week ahead on
Wednesdays. Already I'm departing from discussing the questions I gave
you last Wednesday, on how women want, need or deserve differently from
men. Suppose I had to skip this lecture to stay on the syllabus
schedule. Then I'd be dealing with what I presupposed you would want or
need to know before we talked last Friday, instead of acting based on
what you actually told me you hope for and fear. I'd be presupposing
that as a teacher I knew in particular what we ought to be discussing
before our conversation than you did, based on my presupposition that I
know more than you what you need to know. Sticking to a schedule
without taking time to deal with the problems the subjects of your
social are presenting violates the Golden Rule. The violation would
turn you off and let me off without explaining myself. It would screw
up your learning and my teaching. It would increase the odds that I and
AI's thought you were too dumb or unprepared and lazy to get a good
grade. That's the kind of insecurity I seek to avoid. Hence, I'm
trying to make room in my course-life for you and me to prepare
together, and keep on telling each other what we want to know from one
another. (Here I'll offer advice on reading, note-taking and such. I'm
hopeful the lecture will help them understand exam questions well enough
to begin articulating their answers to themselves, to friends, to peers,
to AI's and to me. I'll advise them to scan readings looking for
sections where authors support or differ from their own positions. In
addition, I'll go over this week's readings one more time, informed by
confusion last Friday's students raised with me.)
C. Group work and question 4 on how group work goes--
Bonnie Vesely tells me one group was up in arms over the requirement
that they meet outside class in groups of two or three to help each
other on exams. If I'm right and social security--here security that
one has displayed understanding of course material--comes of acting out
the Golden Rule, then you'll learn more of what you're looking for when
you act on the premise that your peers have as much to teach you as I
do. I'm also surfeited with experience I and teachers close to me have
shared of the frustration students experience over trying to work with
others who aren't pulling their weight. That's why question 4 does not
simply ask what others in your study group taught you, but ask you to
consider what went wrong with the group as well. Either way, you'll
have plenty to talk about.
II. What the Golden Rule means to me...
A. Bonnie reminds me that students in P202 a year-and-a-half ago
inspired my asking about the Golden Rule. I asked them to describe a
peaceful utopia, and some of Bonnie's students wrote it would be a place
where people followed the Golden Rule.
B(1). I presuppose that like me, others want to be asked what we
want or need before others give us what they think we want, need or
deserve.
(2). I also presuppose that others want approval and personal
acceptance as I do for myself.
C. I presuppose that a desire for approval at some social level
underlies all human action. Those who rape and otherwise violate others
predicate their quest for approval on the prejudice that the other falls
into a class of those who want, need or deserve differently from the
actor. When you ask and like me lecturing today, change what you want
(from discussion) accordingly, you are going through the same process as
a man bent on sex who asks about it and allows himself to become
diverted into another form of interaction--enjoying human acceptance in
another form (willingness to talk about what matters to him).
III. ...and rape
A. Women's dilemma: you cannot predict which man you allow
yourself to be alone with or in a group will turn on you...unless and
until you can ask the man what he wants and talk it out. The lesson of
the video and the readings is that one guy you think you know might just
as easily rape you as a stranger--all the more terrifyingly because
someone you trust suddenly turns into a monster.
B. In Criminology as Peacemaking, Fay Honey Knopp cites Peggy
Reeves Sanday (author of the Fraternity Gang Rape book we are reading
excerpts from) for the proposition that you can predict the odds that
any man will rape as among cultures. Larry Tifft and Lyn. Markham do
the same for the conjunction of battering women and battering Central
Americans. In both cases, what matters is the number of messages men
and women pass along that it is valid to act as though women want, need
deserve something different from men. An example, in the video "Someone
You Know," is the guy who knows women are "material" which allows him to
believe that in return he is entitled to sex when he shows them a good
time. He may have grown up with a guy who personally doled out money to
the woman of the house because she was so material she would go on a
shopping binge if he didn't monitor her. That guy didn't have to rape
the woman to offer the message to the rapist that women deserve to be
controlled by men because of their wanton proclivities. The message is
the only artifact we have to manage if we are to prevent rape. Men and
women have to enjoy safe opportunities to learn to ask each other and
take account of what we want as individuals at the moment instead as
members of blameworthy, ignorant, sick or inconsequential categories of
people.
IV. THIS WEEK, we consider whether we ought to treat women or men as
wanting, needing, deserving anything different from each other--whether
any exception to the premise of the Golden Rule is warranted with
respect to the treatment of women and of men. I take the position that
no presumption of gender difference is warranted, and that acting on any
can only aggravate the risk and pain of rape.
V. NEXT MONDAY, we discuss how to respond to rape after it has
happened. The peacemaking chapter by Susan Caringella-MacDonald and
Drew Humphries describes a community response in Kalamazoo following a
rape of a Western Michigan University student. I'll show a video of
members of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation discussing
confrontation of murderers and forgiveness, and we can focus too on Dave
Gustafson's material on victim offender reconciliation between survivors
and those who have committed seriously violent sexual offenses in
Canada. I will argue that healing requires survivors and offenders
somehow to be able to ask each other what they want, need or deserve
now--to explain themselves to one another--in order that survivors gain
security that they will not be raped again, and that offenders gain
confidence that they will not assault women again. Peter Cordella's
peacemaking chapter, which I also ask you to read, presupposes as I do
that healing or reconciliation or reconstruction of community in the
wake of violence requires survivor and offender to confront one another
with their pain, with accounts of themselves. As I see it, in rape as
with all violence, in the aftermath of violence as in prevention, there
is no viable alternative to the Golden Rule path of taking one's
complaint to the source and asking the source about it. It also
requires making any accord the parties reach contingent on what they say
to each other, rather than foreordained, as by legal proscription and
prescription of penalty.
VI. WEDNESDAY OF NEXT WEEK WE'LL GO ON TO LOOK AT THE GULF WAR, but for
NOW, as to rape and the Golden Rule, I'M LOOKING FOR any of three
reactions to the lecture before we get on to looking at whether women
and men ought to be treated differently in any respect: a) I still
don't understand, Hal..., b) I think you're wrong, Hal, because..., or
c) you made me think of a way to answer one of the questions, Hal, how's
this?... Wednesday, I'll start by arguing that there is no more
difference between a man and a woman than between any two men or women,
and predict I'll be inclined to believe any difference any of us
believes exists is an unwarranted rape message. I'll try the question
Bonnie Vesely posed to her students last year: whether when guys talk
and talk and talk and urge a "girlfriend" to go all the way with them,
they are acting on and passing on a rape message as surely as a guy who
forces sex on a woman who still says no or is too drunk to say anything.
Check it out.