Posted by Bitch Lab at 12:00 am and filed under Academia, Politics, Theory, Ward Churchill ::
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
05-19-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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[...] Bitch | Lab has an excellent series of posts concerning Ward Churchill over at her place. The threads have been great. I’ve said some stupid shit, others have said some smart shit. What I find most interesting and important to the discussion is BL’s analysis concerning professionals censure “not for technical incompetence, but for ethical and political violations of the tacit norms that constitute the very heart of the professions.” Ward Churchill is, I have to say, a victim of this scenario. I do think his academic work is suspect, and I have no reason to doubt the findings of the committee charged with investigating him, but we have to acknowledge that the impetus for the investigation was not allegations of academic dishonesty, but that Churchill breached certain political norms and raised the ire of rightwing pundits and politicians. I still wholeheartedly denounce his “little Eichmans” comment. I still maintain that the comment is a slap in the face to the memory of the Jews who died in the Holocaust. But I also think it’s important to ask why it took that comment to get anyone to investigate his academic work in general. Allegations about his academic integrity have been around long before any of this happened, and it seems that the University of Colorado simply ignored them until it became politically necessary to do so. [...]
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I read this post and more Churchill comments at 6:30 am this morning and thought, wow…a doctor’s refusal to treat a transsexual isn’t necessarily unprofessional.
Especially so for doctors using the DSM to manage conditions where the primary treatment goal is normativity, as defined by the agreed upon standards of particular medical communities.
I do want to say, too, that my thoughts are not directly related to Bosk’s work, nor why Churchill got stomped on by CU. But as a user/customer well acquainted with the culture Bosk describes, I’m fascinated by how I have had to negotiate through their culture.
Change forgiveness to treatment (i.e. hormones, surgeries, the all-important letter) and that paragraph describes to a gesture what I experienced. When a superior (and what is a doctor after all but a superior?) treats us, we are grateful. We must act grateful or else they may withhold treatment. And the gratitude is not because they have given us something truly genuine but because they have the power to withhold it…..
Does that make sense?
This kind of behavior is rampant in any system dependent on hierarchy for its continued function. The military is a great example.
If I were to accidentally shoot and kill a foreign civilian while deployed, I could expect to more or less skate on what, stateside, would classify as manslaughter. But if I tell my platoon sergeant that I think he’s a prick? Kiss my rank and pay goodbye.
Ah, well…counterintuitive, definitely. This is good, a nice statement of one of those things I’ve always sort of known but never looked at too closely to see what was really going on, just sort of accepted in bafflement. This reminds me of someone I used to know, who fought for years to get her license because of some youthful indiscretions, then became rather controversial for her courtroom manner and the way she handled publicity. She smoked too much, cussed a lot, did splashy interviews. She was ultimately disbarred for something that, while disbarrable, I’d always imagined would have been dealt with in much a more civil manner had she not been such a pain in everybody’s ass all along.
[...] Bitch | Lab has an excellent series of posts concerning Ward Churchill over at her place. The threads have been great. I’ve said some stupid shit, others have said some smart shit. What I find most interesting and important to the discussion is BL’s analysis concerning professionals censure “not for technical incompetence, but for ethical and political violations of the tacit norms that constitute the very heart of the professions.” Ward Churchill is, I have to say, a victim of this scenario. I do think his academic work is suspect, and I have no reason to doubt the findings of the committee charged with investigating him, but we have to acknowledge that the impetus for the investigation was not allegations of academic dishonesty, but that Churchill breached certain political norms and raised the ire of rightwing pundits and politicians. I still wholeheartedly denounce his “little Eichmans” comment. I still maintain that the comment is a slap in the face to the memory of the Jews who died in the Holocaust. But I also think it’s important to ask why it took that comment to get anyone to investigate his academic work in general. Allegations about his academic integrity have been around long before any of this happened, and it seems that the University of Colorado simply ignored them until it became politically necessary to do so. [...]
@ Freeman
Yep. The problem is also that professions are grounded in medieval practices of rank and hierarchy. it is even more apparent in the military because no one has to deny that it exists. That is the way it is.
But, the ideology of the Liberal Enlightenment — the idea that merit should rule — is our dominant view of the world. And it co-exists uneasily with institutions where the norms were set up following medieval ideas about the authority of god, king, noblemen, landlords, peasants — passed along in that order.
The counterpart to Bosk’s study is a book called _Moral Mazes_ which asks about how medieval bureaucratic practices exist alongside a capitalist ethos in modern corporations.
The author of that study, Jackall, shows how the two worlds collide and how corporations end up making decisions like Ford made about the Pinto. it is _normal_ for corporations to produce those kinds of decisions. it is _normal_ for people in positions of power to have learned the ropes by learning how to cover their ass by never directly giving orders. Rather, they learn how to commicate what you want done without ever saying it directly.
That way, when the axe falls you will rarely be able to find evidence of a direct order from anyone really high up. CEOs and presidents get to be in those posisitons be/c they’ve demonstrated an ability to get things done without giving the damning orders. That is their special skill and for which they are paid a great deal. In my more mean spirited moements, I’m pretty sure that’s the only talent they have.
I agree with all this, and yet, and yet…
…At what point does one draw the line between “fails to kiss ass sufficiently” and “generally acts like an unbearable asshole?” Because I’ve seen clear examples of both, and a number of grey areas. Admittedly the biggest assholes are the ones who save their assholery for their colleagues and people below them on the totem pole, often while simultaneously kissing up, so they are the ones who tend to stay. then, assuming this person is high enough in the hierarchy, they drive all the relatively normal people away, and other sycophants come to replace them, and the whole organization sickens and stays that way. perhaps this is a phenomenon that needs to be studied in itself, more.
I mean, I get the sociological analysis part of all this; but at the end of the day I can’t help thinking: most people are generally needy and insecure little buggers who love ego strokes and dislike criticism, challenges, competitition, and other perceived threats to their existence. Some people are more like that than others. The fact that the system tends to reward such people is hard to deny; but, my question is, which came first, the chicken or the egg? The fucked-up individuals, the fucked-up psyches, the fucked-up workplace, or the fucked-up culture?
Sorry to be behind Jay, but you example makes perfect sense. Absolutely.
Here’s a quickie as to why and it’s actually _completely_ related to Bosk, just that I hadn’t included a gloss for these posts.
1. the professions are a verypolitical phenom. political in the sense that, when they came together as organizations — AMA, Bar Associations, etc. — they were under attack in the public.
Quacks were running about the country, pretending to be docs and selling bottled cocaine as medicine or alcohols as medicine. Same thing with attorneys.
Similar kinds of problem affected other professions — engineers and theincreasing power they had in designing the technologies that run our increasingly technologically-dependent lives.
With a crisis in public trust like that, professionals came together to address the problem.
They wanted to maintain autonomy, though. After all, one thing that happened in that era was tio increasingly ask the federal government to step in and regulate.
But professionals wanted none of that. not just because they wanted freedom, but also for the very good reason that we might not want politicians involved in deciding what makes for good doctoring or lawyering.
So, in exchange for that autonomy and the power that naturally went with it — and of course, in exhange for the power the professionals naturally have as people who have a _monopoly_ on knowledge — they agreed to police themselves.
You can read pretty much ever code of ethics from a profession and they reveal a recognition of that power.
An attorney friend who I respect a great deal was complaining about the hostility toward lawyers. He said, for all that hostility, don’t forget that it’s an attorney who will save your ass when the cops want your butt.
True, but what Bosk points out is that’s exactly why there are these humbling codes of conduct during training. He shows how this constant humbling in every day little forms is connected to the need for a professional to always be humble about their power.
To the need, IOW, to remember that, whatever a doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. might lose when they screw up by maiming someone on the operating table, losing a case, or building a shabby building, it is _nothing_ compared to what the client loses: life, limb, mental well-being, freedom, livelihood.
A doctor might lose his jobi if he screws up, but that’s nothing compared to the person who lost their life.
Bosks shows, better than I can do justice to in comments, how these rituals of deference and demeanor actually emerge in order to teach professionals in training how to be humble and how to bow to the norms of the profession.
Most people don’t notice the mundane stuff that happens everywhere — the punishments that you receive for not attending to a supervising surgeons desire for hot coffee every time you meet him for rounds. But it is all part of a larger logic and other “learning moments” where it becomes clear that the whole point of it is to show the professional in training that he must take the right attitude toward his/her patients, clients, etc.
Doctors who make you feel like they hold power over you — or any professional for that matter — is forgetting his/her duty to be humble in the face of the fact that his or her monopoly on knowledge — sanctioned by the state — wields enough power over the patient/clietn already. They don’t really need to confront more power that makes them feel beholden to a professional. Rather, they need a professional that makes them feel that they can trust him or her.
Between divorce, a child custody battle, and a recent incident that I can’t speak about, I’ve dealt with a lot of attorneys. One of the things that all of them have done, more or less well, is focus almost all of their attention on making you trust them. They almost always engage me in a way that is obviously designed to convey to me that they understand that I’m in need of their help, that they understand the psychological strain I’m under, that they are on my side, and that they are there to help, hat in hand, humbly recognizing that, whatever their deal is, I’m the one who may be feeling powerless at the moment.
This might help answer Belle’s q’s too.
But more later. client calls.