Keywords of the Moral Life: Social Location
Is there Any Hope for a Shared World, or is it All just Fragments?
Some editorial notes about the rest of 2022, and an engagement with how our “social location” and the moral life intersect.
A Brief Editorial Word: The Remainder of 2022
I realized this morning that the rest of 2022 is about to barrel down on me like a runaway train on Harrison Ford1, and that taking on a new series on virtue vis-a-vis Thomas Aquinas just isn’t in the cards until 2023. Between work travel later this week, Thanksgiving, finals, and prepping for the Spring semester, it’s pretty wild. And so, with that in mind, two brief bits of housekeeping:
The remainder of 2022 will be a kind of miniature Keywords2: brief engagements with minor moral concepts which have a lot of power culturally. Some of these will be paywalled going forward.
If you’re interested, come try a month free of the paid version. Offer good until the end of the year.
With that in mind, I want to turn first to the notion of “social location”, and what it does and doesn’t do.
Social Location: The Good and Necessary
First, a brief definition and background:
“Social location” references the particularity of persons, what they know by virtue of being that person and how to value and include that knowledge. In moral discussions, it helps us to be able to acknowledge that people come shared life from different vantages, and that this doesn’t have to be an insurmountable challenge to having a shared life. Versions of this abound, but I’ll choose this representative definition, from the National Council on Family Relations’ report on diversity and inclusion:
An individual’s social location is defined as the combination of factors including gender, race, social class, age, ability, religion, sexual orientation, and geographic location. This makes social location particular to each individual; that is, social location is not always exactly the same for any two individuals.
If you’ve heard of DEI initiatives, or diversity and inclusion work, social location is part of what helps it tick: the notion that each person is comprised of complex particularities which contribute to what they in a demographic fashion. Note that the definition above doesn’t say anything about what to do about this intersecting sense of identity: it’s just acknowledging that people don’t exist hegemonically.
So far, so good. If you’re in higher education (as I am), DEI is a prominent framework and at its best, it promotes a kind of awareness in spaces that need to be more self-aware than they are, and can work toward concrete solutions in frequently myopic institutions. When I was teaching in Florida, one of the life-changing events for me was being tasked with teaching Global Christianity: in the process of preparing and teaching it, I realized that my reading diet was overwhelming white, male, and European, and that there truly has been some amazing constructive theological work happening globally. It was a season of coming to terms with the unconscious habits of my own reading, and resolving to do differently.
All of this was done without the mechanisms of DEI, institutionally speaking: it was simply a recognition that South Florida was a microcosm of the world. Our neighbors were from Senegal and Jamaica; my students were from Germany, Brazil, El Salvador and all over Central and South America. To teach theology for the whole Church means to listen, learn, and promote theology coming from within the whole Church. DEI becomes, then, a kind of secular analogue to the process I lucked into, and lucked into through attending to my students who found themselves—many for the first time—learning theological texts written by folks who knew their worlds firsthand.
Are the forms of implementation of DEI great? Do I think that the training sessions on university campuses accomplish a significantly greater sense of inclusion? Not necessarily: changing people’s attitudes and long-term habits of thought and behavior takes much more than a few training sessions. But that being said, the intention is not bad. And insofar as it fosters our ability to join together, to see that our social locations are diverse, and to not sink into enclaves, may its tribe increase. The problem comes when social location begins to not move toward a commonly-held world, but to create private worlds.
Social Location Doesn’t Let You Create Your Own World: The Downside
Social location isn’t just some relic of academic hierarchies, but an assumed framework of ordinary social discourse: people bring their differentiated experiences to the table because that’s simply who they are.
As I indicated in my experience of clumsily learning to teach Global Christianity, my habits and way that I view my own discipline changed. I don’t want to sound too grandiose about it, but it really did change significant parts of my life: it caused me to be more curious, less defensive, and more attuned to contemporary dynamics of what it means for me to be a white American Christian. Life is hopefully long enough to do a lot of unlearning.
But remember the intent of social location—identifying the intersecting aspects of a person are en route to a better shared social space. By definition, then, the aspects of what make you, if they are meant to foster inclusion in a common space, are not uncontestable.
In fostering a truly shared space, your insights into that common life should be received with charity, in that the insights you share are an extension of your person—social location means that a person’s knowledge is intrinsic to their sense of self. But if social location is the currency by which we enter a shared space, then that shared space means that it will bring with it contestation in pursuit of a shared world. Some insights and readings of a shared world are welcome, and some disrupt settled arguments, but that’s all part of being in a world that I don’t own but share with others who see common objects and pursue goods.
Social Location: Does It Give Us an Uncontestable Place to Stand?
If social location, as described above, is meant to help us access a shared world, then the way it frequently gets used popularly is very different. For social location, if it is about expanding who gets to be in our shared world, means that we do not get to have private, uncontestable discourses: the price of entry of a shared world is to bring your stories and your self into the party, and to let others ask questions and offer their own accounts in kind. Social location in fact invites contestation, not seek to defend against it!
Social location, the experiences of being who we are, may very well give us something like a new vision. In my review that I sent out Friday, on a recent book on Dorothy Day, much of the book’s method hinges on the identity between the author’s social location and Dorothy Day’s life. This is, in some ways, just life: Dorothy looks differently to me as a man married with two children but not living in shared community than she does to one who is Catholic, living in an intentional community.
We connect to ideas, movements, and historical figures in different ways: with figures as complex as Day, there’s going to many, many access points that people find inspiring. People have connected with her as a social activist, as a mother, as a Catholic, as a pacifist, and more. When people connect with me, it’s typically not all of the facets of my life, and the way in which we connect is part of the mystery of two distant persons refracting off of each other in ways which are frequently an accident of time and space.
But the danger, I think, is this: that unless social location is deployed for the sake of a common, inhabitable world, our particular place in the world gets reduced to private, irreconcilable opinion, and which makes it impossible to pursue anything like shared truthfulness. The point here is not to dismiss the concept, but to ask if social location, so used, has a future. If this version of social location is all we have, the future is more fractures and incommensurable witness, not overlapping witnesses but clashing accounts for which there can be no coherent way . There can be no shared discourses, except for one committed to there being no master discourse. And there can be no shared communities, only tactical allies for mutually exclusive projects.
The World in Fragments: Which Version of Social Location To Seek?
The payoff for all this for the moral life isn’t academic: it’s how we think about the challenges of injustice in the world, how we hear different voices within church, how we think about the nature of the wisdom we accrue. Do we listen to wisdom in other voices, asking questions in charity that we might all learn? Or do we assume that our social location provides us with privileged access to something, such that counters to our vision are either operating with malice or ill will? The option of being persuaded with something like purely objective arguments, and dismissing personal stories altogether is attractive if this is the only other option.
Social location, in its defensive form, destroys our ability to have a shared conversation. There is a right and true impulse within it to advocate for the forgotten and the lonely, to tell new stories that need to be heard. But once even those rightly-intended movements begin to use social location as a buffering of our position against others, we are saying that each position in the contest is just that: a different position. Unless we risk our own stories possibly being in error, or perhaps more complicated than we want, we are stuck in a series of isolated islands, with no common currency by which we might be able to adjudicate between which social locations are superior to others or which should be served prioritized above others. Once social location is used as a defensive move, every island is granted its own priority, in an ocean of sameness.
The solution isn’t to dismiss something like personal stories and narratives, though. Social location can help pry open false unities and make room for new vision, an entryway into a shared world, to remind the powerful that the weak are members of Christ’s body and must be prioritized. Social location can be used to foster humility: that our world is unlike the world of Scripture or other times in church history, and that we should seek to learn as much of it as it we can, including the portions that make us uncomfortable. Or social location can be used to defend private readings and experiences as inviolable. God help us all if that version of social location is the future.
Reading: Andrew Root’s The Church After Innovation. Helpful for untangling, with great nuance, why everything in church life feels new and exhausted at the same time. Still plugging at the third volume of the Ember Falls series with the kids: things are getting pretty dark. After carrying it in my backpack for seven months, finally read William Mattison’s The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: a mostly convincing read of the Sermon, but probably best for specialists.
Why have you forgotten that The Fugitive was one of the best films of the 1990s?
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society was a book by cultural critic and erstwhile Marxist Raymond Williams, in which he explored more than 300 terms by way of their cultural meaning, not their etymological meaning. A word can be broken down to its analytic origins, but Williams wants us to see them more in terms of how we make use of them, and the power they hold.