"Why are they supposed to be listening?"

Happy International Women’s Day, everyone! Here’s a take from a prominent activist (formerly the head of Afghan research for Human Rights Watch) that’s striking, forceful and profoundly wrong:

Diplomats may not be the most morally courageous people, but let’s think about the implications of this.

The Taliban nowadays take social media seriously, so Twitter dunking is absolutely a valid form of resistance to their rule. But their international critics have more than one option today. They can tweet: “Banning girls from school is immoral, according to an ethical framework invented during the European Enlightenment and codified in international human rights conventions.” Or they can tweet: “Banning girls from school will make Afghanistan weaker.” Which is more likely to have some practical effect?

It’s important first to address two objections to this line of thinking:

• Liberal ideas are more than a European creation, with historical roots in other parts of the world that didn’t get much attention until recent decades. (Nowadays they get much more, and in the current academic environment it’s predictable that some dubious claims have been put forward. But it’s not hard to find examples of liberal thought in non-Western history. Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian looks at some examples from one major culture, closely linked to that of Afghanistan.)

• Even if liberalism were entirely Western in origin its opponents would still have to address one of its central claims about itself, namely that its origins don’t matter. Liberalism purports to be something discovered, not invented: a set of truths about ethics and politics that has universal application, even if people in some places and times have been unable to recognize it. This may not be true, but then something needs to be said about why it isn’t true. At this stage in human history it’s no longer enough to point to your own cultural distinctiveness.

These are valid observations but in the context of Barr’s complaint they seem beside the point. The current rulers of Afghanistan don’t think any ethical doctrine has “universal application”, apart from Islam. Now it may be possible to show they’re mistaken about this, and that some other doctrine is correct. Kant and other philosophers in the Kantian tradition, such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick, claim to have developed methods of reasoning which can achieve this goal and generate a fleshed-out political theory. But apart from the fact that all these writers recommend somewhat different methods of reasoning (and end up with drastically different conclusions—think of Nozick’s disagreement with Rawls about the scope of property rights), there’s a deeper difficulty here.

In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams nails the problem with two rhetorical questions: “Who is supposed to be listening? Why are they supposed to be listening?”

It’s possible that some still-undiscovered mode of argument will demonstrate the rightness of gender equality, free speech and religious tolerance, even to people who don’t already support those things. It’s also possible that the same mode of argument will demonstrate its own rightness as the way to reason about social justice, even to people who think the correct method is to study the Quran. (In fact it has to do that first, otherwise its specific conclusions won’t persuade anyone.) Nobody seems to have found this technique yet, but there’s always hope.

But how likely is it that the technique can be presented in a tweet, or even in a very long Twitter thread? And assuming it can, how likely is it to convince the men the diplomats are addressing?

There’s something very wrong with Barr’s approach, and I think another one of her tweets today helps to show why:

It’s important to be clear about just why this is a problem, because there’s already a well-established literature on the proper role of anger in feminist praxis. Setting aside the gendered aspect of the question, it’s easy to deplore anyone who thinks the main problem with Twitter is insufficient performance of outrage. And once gender is brought back in, it’s hard to avoid acknowledging that many men don’t respond well to angry women. (Women don’t always respond well either, which is arguably a more serious drawback.)

The counterargument here is obvious. Anger can be an effective political tool, and if certain groups of people are socialized not to display it they’ll predictably get the short end of the stick. But before concluding that more demonstrative anger from those groups is always the right response, I think you first need a theory of why the commonest responses to anger vary so widely in the first place.

It’s tempting (and fashionable, these days) to invoke explanations from evolutionary psychology. There might be a Darwinian “just-so story”, perhaps involving sexual selection, implying that humans who shut down in response to female anger are more likely to pass their genes along, whereas the same response to male anger is counterproductive. This style of argument always needs to be taken with a few grains of salt, but it could still be correct.

I don’t think it’s necessary to go in that direction, though. There’s a simpler explanation for this form of gender bias that doesn’t require any controversial claims about inclusive fitness. What seems more relevant here is that the natural human response to displays of anger almost always makes allowance for agency, or lack of agency. The anger of socially powerful people motivates obedience—there’s a Darwinian explanation for that, and it doesn’t involve gender—but the anger of the powerless tends to evoke completely different feelings. With any luck those may be feelings of sympathy, but one of the most common default (unsocialized) reactions is contempt. In cultures where women have less social authority than men—almost all of them, in other words—a gendered response to anger may not demand much more analysis than that.

Does Barr understand how this is relevant to Afghanistan in 2022? The country spent two decades under armed occupation, but for all practical purposes the international community’s agency there has collapsed. Expressing outrage at the Taliban’s attitudes towards women felt one way when the Taliban were being bombed and shot at (partly because of those attitudes, though not entirely). At this point it feels… different, and not in a good way.

The only coercive measures being directed at the Afghan government now are the US-led regime of economic sanctions, which has had catastrophic effects on civilians of both sexes. To their credit, Barr and her colleagues at Human Rights Watch have campaigned against the embargo, because they realize it’s very unlikely to change the status of Afghan women at a reasonable human cost (or at all, for that matter). But without some alternative strategy for inflicting harm on Afghanistan’s leaders—and let’s face it, inflicting harm is the literal purpose of anger—their criticism of the Biden administration’s policies makes their parallel criticism of the Taliban’s policies very hard to situate. It’s easy to see what there is to be angry about, but not what is there to be angry for.

To be clear: it’s not about being a woman. Regardless of their gender, angry people who are visibly helpless to affect the situation are unlikely to inspire much respect in their adversaries. And if their anger is motivated by an abstract political doctrine their adversaries don’t share, it’s unlikely even to evoke much comprehension. You have to meet people where they are.