The tyranny of agreement: a response to a response.

I say what I say. I do not say what I do not say.

--Alfred Korzbyski

I speak for myself. I sometimes speak to others about others.

--Robert P. Pula 

All human knowledge is conditioned and limited, at present, by the properties of light and human symbolism.

--Alfred Korzybski

Negative stereotyping is seriously misevaluative; so is positive stereotyping. That's why we need to index even those groups that we generally approve of.

--Robert P. Pula

Yes, Reader, I will end that last quotation with a preposition. I'm in charge here! (Thanks to General Haig. Besides, with relation to the preposition, Winston Churchill gave me his permission.)

I am in the happy position of a teacher (some have called me "mentor") who has been challenged by his now matured clients. Now that's time-binding! As Alfred Korzybski so challengingly urged in 1920, "We are the masters of our destinies; the responsibility is ours to correct the mistakes of our ancestors." I don't quite qualify as an ancestor to Katherine Liepe-Levinson-Martin-Levinson, but the time-binding before-and-after and current interchange relationships are in place. And it is quite appropriate that they (or `it,' since `they' claim to represent a unity) have called me on what they perceive as an Homeric nod -- nay, an outright snooze. In making their challenge as one (una-uno voce) they participate in the great tradition of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc who, as knights of resurgent Catholicism in the 1930s, so intimately blended their views that they were nicknamed "The Chesterbelloc" by Bernard Shawl.

It makes no scandal that my young friends find my formulating wanting -- especially since they first declare that they have "avidly read and appreciated" my glossary definitions. As my title for this essay indicates, I am wary of the tyranny of agreement -- that urgent requirement and expectation that, if we do our general-semantics right, we will (should) all `think' the same thing, come up with identical neurolinguistic structures: evaluations and formulations. The great linguist and general semantics semanticist (and great friend) Allen Walker Read gently reminds us of how he learned about the inappropriateness of that expectation:

Such is the variety of general semanticists as people (how

fortunate that is!) that they will give a different weight to

different issues. This was bourne in upon me as long ago as

the presidential election of 1948. A carload of us had left the

summer seminar in Connecticut and stopped for a visit at a

friend's house in Westchester County [probably Harry Maynard's:

RPP]. In the course of a desultory conversation,

someone made the remark: "It's very clear that the principles

of general semantics would lead us to vote for just one

particular candidate." We all nodded our heads sagely in

agreement, without mentioning the candidate's name. As

we were about to let the matter slide, a wisp of worry

crossed my mind. Was one particular member of the group,

whose politics I knew, deserting the Republican party?

Hesitantly I asked him, was he dissatisfied with Governor

Dewey. Oh no, he said, he was voting for Dewey. Others

of us were voting for Harry Truman, and it turned out that a

young instructor from Columbia University was voting for

Henry Wallace. Thus we were divided among the three candidates.

All of us were intelligent and had some training in

general semantics, but our discernment and weighing of

particular issues differed. We had to be satisfied with the

workings of the democratic process. (2)

I confess that I am pleased to note that Alfred Korzybski (in 1947) expressed disdain for "the Missouri mule" (Harry Truman). (3) Presumably he did not vote for him in 1948. I also recall a heated discussion about the Vietnam War (c. 1969) at a meeting of the New York Society for General Semantics. I, like Allen Walker Read in 1948, expected unanimity among general-semanticists -- in this case, opposition to the war. My expectations were not met. We both learned something from our experiences: that general-semantics is not designed to lead us all to make the same evaluations; it is for the improvement of our evaluating processes. There is no `official' general-semantics position on any political-social issue that I know of -- except that whatever we do ought not to frustrate positive time-binding. (4)

Now let's examine the document that encouraged this (my) extended semantic reaction. I deem their effort well written and I respect its committed tone and corrective intent. Much of that correction is directed to Dr. Sommers, yet it is also directed, directly and indirectly, at me. I will, in turn, suggest some corrections for them.

The Levinsons (may I call them that? -- what a pity to experience such stresses in an open human exchange!) first, in their very title, question whether or not (two-valued) I am "glossing over" feminism. (From a strictly literary point of view, that's keen usage.) This targets their first misreading of my Glossary entry XI. The glossary term in question is extensional devices, specifically, indexing, dating, etc. My subject was not "feminism" per se. How presumptuous, even perverse, it would seem to address so vast a tumult in a scant four pages! I surely did not intend a "description of contemporary feminism," "too brief" or otherwise. My precise purpose was, given the over/underdefined character of the terms "feminist" and "feminism," to gently encourage their differentiation, their extensionalization. By way of example, I indexed and dated feminists of whom I approve in varying degrees as well as nodding toward those of whom I disapprove in varying degrees. For clarity, you know. In so doing, I did not say anything I did not say, all deconstructionist attempts to the contrary.

Since I made no attempt to describe the `field' of "contemporary feminism," I will not respond in detail to much of "`Glossing Over' Feminism: ..." I will, however, counter several points made therein, and, along the way, suggest that I have read more in the `field' than the Levinsons seem to suspect.

Kathy and Marty (may I?) object to Christina Hoff Sommers's division of feminists into "two distinct, either/or camps." (How about this either/or division, expounded by some "gender feminists": feminists of the proper persuasion and women? You know, the poor benighted majority.) Sommers seems in her book to be concerned with making a first cut, in itself a kind of indexing. That seems to me quite legitimate, especially if (as Sommers does) the writer proceeds to further differentiate (index) within each group, thus generating a gradient system (continuum) from, say, Mother Theresa to Andrea Dworkin. But it is not my concern, here, to debate the overall or partial acceptability of Dr. Sommers's formulations. My concern in these pages is (having been asked) to teach some general-semantics; to, in this instance, encourage the avoidance of knee-jerk (undelayed) semantic reactions to the terms `feminist' end `feminism.'

I see the Levinsons as in error on the either/or issue. It is not a principle of Korzybskian general-semantics that one can never make an either/or evaluation.

In mankind's cultural evolution its current abstractions became

codified here and there into systems, for instance,

the aristotelian system, our main concern here. Such systematizations

are important, for, as the Talmud says, "Teaching

without a system makes learning difficult." In analyzing the

aristotelian codifications, I had to deal with the two-valued,

`either-or' type of orientations. I admit it baffled me for

many years, that practically all humans, the lowest primitives

not excluded, who never heard of Greek philosophers,

have some sort of `either-or' type of evaluations. Then I made

the obvious discovery that our relations to the world

outside and inside our skins often happen to be, on the gross

level, two-valued. For instance, we deal with day or night,

land or water, etc. On the living level we have life or death,

our heart beats or not, we breathe or suffocate, are hot or

cold, etc. Similar relations occur on higher levels. Thus, we

have induction or deduction, materialism or idealism, capitalism

or communism, democrat or republican, etc. And so

on endlessly on all levels.

In living, many issues are not so sharp, and therefore a system

which posits the general sharpness -- of `either-or,' and so

objectifies `kind,' is unduly limited; it must be revised and

made more flexible in terms of `degree.' This requires a

physics-mathematical `way of thinking,' which a non-aristotelian

system supplies. (5)

So Korzybski's point is that `either-or' as an orientation, as the basis for a system, is inadequate, not that we cannot or never should make either-or evaluations. Multi-valued systems include two-valued moments as special and sometimes vital cases. Feminist swimmers who fail to respect the either land or water dichotomy may die by degrees, but if they eventually drown, they're dead. And it doesn't matter if they were formerly defined as `equity' or `gander/radical.' By the same token, the fuzzy software embedded in some particular hardware at space-time (S-T)n, works as intended or not.

On page 443 a pantheon of "noted feminists" is marshaled, with complaints that Sommers fails to note differences among members of the same "camp," and also fails to note "similarities that exist between theorists whom Sommers so blithely [?] separates into opposing camps." That's between the Levinsons and Sommers. Then they say that I neglect to define Sommers's "sex-gender feminism." Again, that was not my mission. I was not writing a review or critique of Dr. Sommers's work. I did use her as a (feminist) source for differentiating (indexing) the terms "feminist" and "feminism."

I claim the right and responsibility to disdain Gloria Steinem's `blithe' approving of a process used during the Chinese "Cultural Revolution" (equating it with procedures of the U.S. civil rights movement of the 60s) (6), just as I claim the right and responsibility to applaud the well-reasoned, historically grounded and documented essay-review, "Feminists and Philosophy," by Martha Nussbaum. (7) [Feminist.sub.1] is not [feminist.sub.2], etc.

I had no intention of explaining "the ideology of `sex/gender feminism'." My intention was to alert the reader to not identifying (confusing) feminists of one stripe with those of another. The movement of my entire text, which was clearly referenced as an extension/continuation of three prior glossary entries, (8) was inexorably toward "... the concept [formulation] of indexing the many practitioners of feminism only in the very last sentence ...." I built it that way from the beginning, not as a last-minute "disclaimer."

The history of variegated feminism that follows is interesting and may be instructive for readers of ETC., who aren't familiar with it. What may be of greater interest for the reader, however, might be to speculate that at least half of the Levinson team strongly subscribes to some of the more severe formulations listed there; and that that may be the engine which drove their evaluations of my `misevaluations'; that that might be why their response was to a lot of things I did not write.

The Levinsons challenge my characterizing of the pronouncements of some (note that qualifier) feminists as representing "socio-biological pathology" and using "an intensional description" in doing so. Apparently, they think of "intensional" (not intensional orientation) as a `bad thing.' In general-semantics we do not refrain from making inferences, interpretations, evaluations; we just try to be conscious of our own abstracting as we do it. We distinguish facts (we observe, which sometimes means reading a text) from inferences, but we do make (can't avoid) inferences. When I read that someone holds that all heterosexual intercourse is rape, my evaluation is that that's sick, loony, rabid -- and to be therapied away if possible. If such misevaluations ever became dominant, the implications for the species would be devastating.

The Levinsons mix-read me when they assert that I consider "positional feminists" bad feminists. My distinction was between individual (indexed) feminists and feminists in the plural who share a position. There could be any number of groups referred to by some position, say "pacifist feminists." (9) Each of the collectivities would need to be individualized -- indexed and dated -- to respect the degree to which the members shared and may still share the `same' position. Once again, that was the theme of my glossary entry, for which I used the terms "feminist" and "feminism" because they are in such widespread use in our culture today.

Our. The Levinsons observe that I use such expressions as "our glossary," and raise the question "For whom do Pula and Sommers speak?" I won't speak for Sommers but, as the Reader has noticed, I can speak for myself. As noted in my second header above, "I speak for myself. I sometimes speak to others about others." When I write these pieces I write them specifically and collegially for and to the readers of ETC., whom I take to constitute a sophisticated body of students (like me) of general-semantics. My glossary represents my communicating with them about general-semantics. That's what the "our's", "us's" and "we's" refer to.

There's a preposition again. Let's end with it.

* * *

I deem this exchange to have been most useful. In the process of agreeing and disagreeing and disagreeing about what we disagreed about, we may have achieved some clarification regarding our formulating. And that, it seems to me, is one of the purposes of this journal.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

(1.) "Discussion of `Principles of Industrial Philosophy,' A Tribute to H.L. Gantt by Walter N. Polakov," in Alfred Korzybski, Collected Writings: 1920-1950. Collected and Arranged by M. Kendig. Final editing and preparation by Charlotte Read, with assistance of Robert Pula. Englewood, NJ: International Non-Aristotelian Library/Institute of General Semantics, 1990, p. 9.

(2.) Allen Walker Read, "Is General Semantics Compatible With Utopianism?" General Semantics Bulletin, No.52, 1985. This quoted passage appears on. Dr. Read's paper was delivered at the Tenth International Conference on General Semantics, University of California, San Diego, at La Jolla, CA, August 16, 1985. As a corollary to his report, we can remind ourselves that, in a democracy, demonization of the opposition (those who differ with you) does violence to the system.

(3.) Alfred Korzybski, Autobiographical Statement (Keyes Document). Typescript of disc recordings prepared and transcribed by Kenneth and Roberta Keyes, 1947. As I have noted before in these pages, the Keyes Document is part of the Korzybski Archive in the Butler Library, Columbia University.

(4.) This raises the issue of "general uncertainty," which Korzybski placed at the core of general-semantics. For a discussion of it, see the Glossary entry in the last issue of ETC.

(5.) Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 1933.5th Edition, 1994. Preface by Robert P. Pula (1993). Englewood, NJ: International Non-Aristotelian Library/Institute of General Semantics, p. xxxiii.

(6.) As a movement we got into this impersonal place in an understandable way. When this second wave was beginning, small-group feminism was more natural because that's what we usually were: a few "crazy" women in each town who met in living rooms, coffee shops, and church basements. As Ann Forer, Carol Hanisch, Kathie Sara-child, the small group then known as the Redstockings, and other pioneers of consciousness raising demonstrated in the late 60s, this method that paralleled the "testifying" meetings of the civil rights movement and the "speaking bitterness" meetings of the Chinese Cultural Revolution allowed the truth of feelings and experiences to lead to theory and to action. (Ms., Vol. III, No. 3, Nov.-Dec., 1992, pp. 24-29. This strikes me as a prime example of naivete born of ideology. A serious ms. representation.

A further indication of Steinem's overwrought, thoughtless revolutionism (ibid):

Women of all races, classes, ethnicities, ages, personalities and

abilities are still the only oppressed group that doesn't have a

nation....

The next stop, presumably, will be to declare females a separate species. Again, with disastrous big-social implications. Ms. Steinem might one day realize that it is precisely because she is a citizen-member of an evolving nation-state that by design provides for it, that she is free to make such public statements. As David Attenborough recently observed on a TV program about science/technology, but with application here, "Never have so many understood so little about so much."

(7.) Martha Nussbaum, "Feminists and Philosophy," The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, No.17, October 20, 1994, pp. 59-63. The review is of A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, by Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt. I note, indexing further, that Barbara Epstein shares chief editing duties on the New York Review with Robert B. Silvers, and that Elizabeth Hardwick is Advisory Editor. Indeed, if we update ourselves, we can realize that many mainstream journals are now edited by women.

(8.) See "Extensional Orientation as Orientation" (VIII), ETC., Vol. 51, No. 2, Summer 1994, pp. 224-226; "Extensional Devices: Indexing and Dating" (IX), ETC., Vol. 51, No. 4. Winter 1994-95; and "Extensional Devices Revisited; Over/Under-Defined Terms," ETC., Vol. 52, No. 1, Spring. 1995.

(9.) For a sharp discussion of pacifist and `just war' feminists, see Jean Beth Elshstain, "Realism, Just War, and the Witness of Peace," in Linda S. Kaufman, ed., American Feminist Thought at Century's End: A Reader. Cambridge MA and Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1994.

Robert Pula edited the General Semantics Bulletin from 1977-1985 and served as Director of the Institute of General Semantics from 1983-1986. He was recently named Director Emeritus by the Board of Trustees of the Institute of General Semantics.

See "`Glossing Over' Feminism?: A General Semantics Critique," by Katherine Liepe-Levinson and Martin H. Levinson, ETC: Winter 1995-96.