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Why the need for consensus?

By Petra Bueskens - posted Tuesday, 14 February 2012


 

Of course this doesn’t mean not having a position or committing to it, it means stepping out – just for a minute – and listening to the “other” one(s). In Haidt’s terms, it is only then that we have the chance to step outside the “moral matrix”, or the lack of thinking that occurs once we are snug in our ideological niches. On this point Haidt is clear: “If our goal is to understand the world, our lack of moral diversity is going to make it harder because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open minded thinking.”

What makes his research quite interesting methodologically is that Haidt is himself a liberal and yet he argues the case for conservatism. After conducting international survey research on morality Haidt has found that conservatives tend to use five moral registers to think through problems whereas liberals (or progressives) tend to use only two. 

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Given that the loudest voices who are critical of “MTR” are liberals – whether liberal feminists or left-leaning liberal social commentators  – there is often an uncritical assumption that all conservatism, and all religious faith, is suspect, necessarily oppressive and reactionary.  Although I am myself a secular liberal (though not a liberal feminist, here my leaning is more toward the radical end), it is clear that this criticism implicitly assumes that conservatives have nothing to offer. 

Outing Tankard-Reist’s Christianity, or her concerns about abortion, therefore has a subtext in liberal circles: once identified as such she can no longer be a “real feminist”.  She is not one of “us”. Rather, she is a fake, a counterfeit, a Trojan horse about to unleash an army of conservative ideologies under the guise of feminism. 

By way of analogy Leslie Cannold cites the example of a capitalist pretending they are a communist in order to bolster their own agenda.  She implies that Tankard Reist is re-fashioning herself as something she’s not in order to promulgate her conservative views.  But with Tankard Reist and feminism it’s not that simple. Christianity is not the opposite of, or necessarily opposed to, feminism in the way capitalism is to communism. The two positions are not mutually exclusive and, indeed, if we trace the evolution of modern human rights, we find their foundations in both social contract theory and in Christianity; or, in the words of human rights scholar Micheline Ishay, we find their foundation “in a secularization of Judeo-Christian ethics”. 

Neither does it mean that Tankard Reist doesn’t struggle herself with reconciling her different philosophical, spiritual and political beliefs.  She has openly stated she is of “struggling faith”. It is likely wrong to assume she is misrepresenting herself in failing to centre her faith in recent public discussion; rather, it is likely that her faith is not the most salient dimension in her political activism regarding the sexualisation of women and girls.  Why is that so hard to imagine? Why is the automatic assumption that she has something to hide – especially, as her critics are at pains to say, given that most of her Christian background is on record? 

The more one looks in detail at Tankard Reist’s different positions – her critique of forced abortions in China, her concern about the experience of grief after abortion for some women, her concern about the sexual objectification of women’s and girl’s bodies in pornography and popular culture, her political activism to block sexist advertising - the less the positions look contradictory and the more it looks like her feminism is defined by a passionate belief in women’s human and reproductive rights. 

If we must pigeon-hole, it would appear that Tankard Reist is conservative on some issues and radical on others; at times she combines both perspectives on the one topic. I suspect that this, not her “struggling spirituality” or complex stance on abortion, are what really befuddle.  Reducing her political and philosophical complexity to a charge of deception or hypocrisy is simplistic at best and malicious at worst. One of the reasons, I suspect, that Tankard Reist irritates and confounds is that she holds multiple – dare I say it, nuanced positions – on the one subject.  She also appears to have shifted from a more conservative toward a more radical position over the past decade.

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She is not the first thinker to have done so.  Obvious local examples include Robert Manne whose most recent book and blog are called “Left Right Left”. Early in his career Manne edited the conservative magazine Quadrant while more recently his position on asylum seekers, climate change, and media ownership are unequivocally left wing. His partner Anne Manne is similar – she is a feminist who believes in women’s rights and equality, yet she has serious concerns about the impact of long-day care on children under three, which easily (though I would contend falsely) aligns her with the right.  Helen Pringle is a feminist thinker who challenges the conservative or “wowser” label assigned to anyone who is critical of porn declaring herself both anti-porn and left wing. 

This debate about who is inside and outside feminism, who is an authentic feminist and who is not, who can use the name and who can’t, centres around this need to be the same, to be part of the same group, and to reflect a clear party line – pro or anti. It invokes the psychology of “group think” and closes down the possibility of nuanced, complex or even contradictory positions within groups and individuals. In reality this is more common than we recognise.

While some boundaries do need to be drawn and certainly being for women’s freedom, equality and self-determination is integral to being a feminist (or supporting feminism); however, pointing out the shadow side of liberties such the right to choose, does not and should not disqualify one from “the sisterhood”.

At the risk of sounding sexist, it may be that women hold this group psychology more than most, given our early socialisation in small relatively intimate peer-groups based on mutual identification and consensus.

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About the Author

Petra Bueskens is a Lecturer in Social Sciences at the Australian College of Applied Psychology. Prior to this she lectured in Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University (2002-2009). Since 2009 she has been working as a Psychotherapist in private practice. She is the editor of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal of Australia and the founder of PPMD Therapy. Her research interests include motherhood, feminism, sexuality, social theory, psychotherapy and psychoanalytic theory and practice. She has published articles on all these subjects in both scholarly and popular fora. Her edited book Motherhood and Psychoanalysis: Clinical, Sociological and Feminist Perspectives was published by Demeter Press in 2014.

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