Carl, Karl, Carl & Karl: VENUS VALLEY’S favourite philosophers

Bittersweetly, it’s almost time for me to finish doing what I’ve been doing and hand over to you, queerly beloveds: Over to you, to take what you’ve hopefully learned from what I’ve hopefully taught, and give it a go yourself.

For anyone just joining in here at the end of my blog series, let me quickly catch you up on what it’s been, so you can see where that first sentence is coming from:

My LGBTQIA-centric philosophy-learning-&-teaching book-in-progress, has been released chapter-by-chapter in blog form, inviting you my rainbow community readers, to debate, discuss, question, contribute; your inputs and insights become my edits, so the finished book is more than just my voice shouting into my soft pink fabric pillow, and does a hopefully half decent job of speaking for and standing up for our colourful queer community. I’ve deconstructed my Christian upbringing, by looking back over it from a queer eye view; and along the way, I’ve learned what a perfect lived example of almost every kind of sexual, political, religious philosophy, historical queer figures’ lives - both ancient and modern - have been. Now I’m inviting you, my readers old & new, to take what you’ve hopefully learned from what I’ve hopefully taught, and give your own mental muscles a stretch: Cast your own queer eyes over my favourite examples of something that any kind of philosophy study has in plentiful supply: Old straight white guys. Welcome, Gentles & Lady-Men, one more time, to Venus Valley: Queer Philosophers’ Forum!

Over the pages you’ll have hopefully read by now (but don’t worry, there’ll be some summary content in this chapter to pull it all together) I’ve done what I can with the limited power of my mental muscles and social media reach, to platform voices from various races and religions - from Pride protest pioneer and “Street Transvestite Action Revolutionary” MARSHA P. JOHNSON, and her sisters in system-smashing SYLVIA RIVERA, STORMÉ DELARVERIE and MISS MAJOR GRIFFIN-GRACY (to read their chapter click HERE); to Persian prophet-poet RUMI, and the man who was his “True love, not in body desiring union with body, but soul with soul” SHAMS TABRIZ (to read their chapter click HERE) - to show what a different view of both Christianity and queerness we get when we look at them from outside.

And now that I’ve done my best at that, and hopefully along the way shown you a little bit of how to do the same, here are some of my favourite old straight white wealthy western men philosophers - a type that seems pretty squarely in the majority in most philosophy forums - for you to have a try at judging them like a drag queen at a comedy roast. If you want a short-cut introduction to the philosophers you’d be forgiven for expecting to read about in a philosophy forum - like “critic of pure reason” KANT, university theologian KIERKEGAARD, confuser-of-conservatives HEGEL or romantic critic SCHLEGEL - who don’t have chapters of their own here, because they’ve got too many chapters of their own elsewhere already - then here’s a handy chapter for that too, as Carl, Karl, Carl & Karl are the famous figures who were influenced and inspired by them.

Carl 1:

JUNG

Because this isn’t just any philosophers’ forum, it’s a Queer Philosophers’ Forum, I’m zooming in closer to what the Carls & the Karls said about sex than I am about politics and religion, which are the conversations (sorry, if I want this to sound like proper professional philosophy study, I mean THE DISCOURSE) they usually get dragged into. And psychotherapy pioneer Jung gets to be Carl 1 because he probably had the most to say about it of them all. According to him, like I’ve said if you haven’t already read, everyone male has his hidden inner feminine, and everyone female has her hidden inner masculine, called ANIMA & ANIMUS; and if we push them down, they push back up, in the forms of neuroses and psychoses like PROJECTION - seeing the things we hate about ourselves in the things we hate about others - INFLATION - overcompensating ‘til it takes over our personality - and TRANSFERENCE - substituting our “mummy/daddy issues” with unhealthy attachments to figures like teachers and doctors as surrogate parents. (Side note: why is having “mummy/daddy issues” always used to criticise the children, not the parents?). He wrote his critiques of Christianity, Aeon and Answer To Job, when the Catholic Church officially declared the Virgin Mary eternal, heaven-bound, divine and worthy of worship (all of which happened surprisingly recently), painting it as the ANIMUS church recognising its ANIMA - the “Mother Church”; the “Bride of Christ”. Weirdly, since the two usually think of each other as enemies, he was critical just as much of COMMUNISM as he was of Catholicism, saying that anything that expected you to make the community the core of your identity, was the enemy of individual self-discovery. You can either make yourself just one of many elements in a whole; or, you can take the many elements of yourself and make them into a whole. At least, according to Carl.

Karl 1:

MARX

Speaking of Communism! Which, surprisingly even to myself, we haven’t much yet… The co-writer of its (in)famous Manifesto discussed homosexuality with FRIEDRICH ENGELS (the other Manifesto guy) in the terms it was understood by back then: To them, it was illegal; it was an illness; and ancient Greek “homosexuality” was just sexism, slavery, pedophilia and prostitution. But, modern European homosexuals could be useful to the bigger picture of social struggle, if they saw themselves together as an oppressed minority, and did something about it. Marx and Engels’ Manifesto answered their critics who accused Communism of wanting to abolish traditional family values (sound familiar?), by showing up the fact that:

(1) Women and children were just being kept in their place to be useful to men’s materialistic productive lives, and that’s just as much exploitation as sex slavery is, and would be quickly disposed of as a system if it wasn’t profitable. And,

(2) Communism wouldn’t need to artificially create any alternative community for women and children if that happened - community is women’s and children’s natural state of being, that would naturally assert itself in the absence of any men’s demands on their time and effort.

Convincing everyone that their way, instead, is the normal, natural, neutral way of the world, says the Manifesto, was the only way society was ever converted to CAPITALISM - earning personal freedom by the pursuit of finance - and FEUDALISM - sovereign landowners vs. subjugated labourers - in the first place.

Carl 2:

SAGAN

There are features on the surface of Mars that their discoverers had fun calling “Carl’s Marks” - after their astronomer colleague: Author of Cosmos, the book that explores how Earth’s environment caused life to develop in the shape that it did, and what that can teach us about how life might develop in the environments of other planets; and presenter of its companion TV series exploring the history of astronomy; one of the founders of S.E.T.I. - SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE - and author of the book that was made into the movie Contact, in which iconic lesbian actress JODIE FOSTER’s character does exactly that. He’s a mixed bag of mostly progressive pacifist philosophy and it shows in his work; especially with his wife, the producer and director ANN DRUYAN. On the one hand, when they worked on the images of humans that would go into space on NASA probes designed to leave the solar system, they advocated for including ethnically diverse face and figure designs; on the other hand, their writing describes life on Earth in very ETHNOCENTRIC and ANTHROPOCENTRIC ways - resources are plentiful, and natural disasters are rare, are statements that betray a wealthy, white, western worldview as if it’s the normal, natural, neutral worldview. On the one hand, Sagan’s son told the story of when he defended a gay school friend against bullies, and was given a sit down lecture by Daddy Carl about how homosexuality went against natural human reproduction and evolution; on the other hand, Daddy Carl’s gay colleagues talked about him defending them against professional prejudice; and the co-editor of Sagan’s The Cosmic Connection, JEROME ANGEL, also compiled the work The Radical Therapist, including the Gay Liberation Manifesto by author and activist CARL WITTMAN (yep, he’s a Carl too!).

Technology, said Sagan, is at the point of ending life on Earth as we know it. If we use it in agreement with each other, it can end it in a good way by taking us to a new life in space; if we use it in disagreement with each other, it can end it in a bad way by blowing us all up. Maybe alien civilisations faced that choice too - maybe some of them got it wrong - maybe that’s why they’re so few and far between and hard to find?

Karl 2:

POPPER

If I’m ever remembered, by anyone who cares, as any kind of professional philosopher (Side note: What exactly qualifies someone to actually be called A Philosopher?), then I’d like my “law” to be: The more they justify their prejudice and bigotry by saying “it’s just science”, the less they actually know about science (I’m not sure what to call it, since Cole’s Law is kind of already the name of something else!).

Enter, Popper - and I don’t mean the pills, or the deadname of The Kid from transgender-allegory sci-fi spin-off cartoon-compilation DVD The AniMatrix. Somehow managing to make his autobiography also be a science textbook, even more than Sagan did, in Unended Quest Popper tells us how his early education and employment in child welfare and the history of music began a lifelong fascination with how the mind develops. Along the way, he gave us principles for testing what we’re told and what we’re taught. Whether they’re scientific tenets that put philosophy to the test, or philosophical tenets that put science to the test, depends on who you ask.

1. ONE BLACK SWAN.

Imagine you’re told something like, All Swans Are White. What it would actually take to fully VERIFY it - completely prove it true - is seeing literally every white swan in the world. But all it would take to fully FALSIFY it - completely prove it untrue - is One Black Swan.

2. THE PARADOX OF TOLERANCE

If we’re tolerant of everyone and everything, then that will include being tolerant of others who intolerant of us. Their intolerance, once included, won’t tolerate us, and so we and our tolerance will be got rid of and gone. To create a tolerant society, then, we must INclude the tolerant, and EXclude the INtolerant. And he lived through 1940s Europe, so he knew what he was talking about when he was talking about this!

I’ll leave you to have fun figuring out how both those principles apply to being LGBTQ+ and having to argue your existence like a master philosopher every time someone decides they don’t like you online!

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Jung’s COLLECTIVISM vs. INDIVIDUATION; Marx’s COMMUNISM; Sagan’s apocalyptic predictions of COLLABORATION vs. COMPETITION; and Popper’s PARADOX; are the most modern - or POSTMODERN - don’t make me try and fit explaining the difference between those two into the word count for this chapter - versions of the SOCIAL CONTRACT.

Oh, fine, I’ll very quickly squeeze in what all those things are, and since you’ve been well behaved enough to read this far, I’ll even throw in an honorable mention to one of the historical names from the straight people’s philosophy books.

Sometimes someone has to rebel against the idea that mainstream tradition is the definitive or default way of seeing and saying things, and realise that every generation has a new normal when it comes to standards and sets of values and virtues. Ta-da, MODERNISM. And then, when that generation grow up and they themselves become the traditional mainstream default viewpoint, someone has to do it again, until eventually we agree to stop letting any viewpoint be the default, and instead start to equally value viewpoints on their own merits, regardless whether they’re in line with either mainstream tradition or the new normal. Hey presto, POSTMODERNISM. Their natural opponents are, obviously, CONSERVATIVES, since the whole point is to CONSERVE mainstream tradition for the sake of social order. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the specific mainstream traditions they’re trying to conserve are the ones where their own particular age group, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, religion and social class are the ones at the top.

Anyway… In between being a romantic writer, and influencer of future French revolutionaries - despite living in a polyamorous throuple with French noblewoman FRANÇOISE-LOUISE DE WARENS and her steward - JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU gave us the most popular version so far of the idea of the SOCIAL CONTRACT: The community, society, population, or nation, looked at like it’s one big thing - THE BODY POLITIC - will either end up with each one living in service to all - CITIZENS - or, we’ll all end up in service to one - SUBJECTS. Which, whatever its Conservative opponents try to paint it as, is the cornerstone concept of SOCIALISM - hence the name!

So which Social Contract will you sign your name to? Carl’s, Karl’s, Carl’s, or Karl’s? Mine, to tie a neat bow on the whole reason this chapter is in the book, is LGBTQ+ Pride. Like all the above, it’s progress, but not perfection. Parts of it throughout its history have gone into the box my regular readers will be pretty familiar with by now - the one labelled Daringly Progressive Then, Problematically Dated Now. But it’s a combination of partying to celebrate the rights, freedoms and equalities we’ve won; protesting to combat the wrongs that still survive; pausing to commemorate what, and who, we’ve lost along the way; and its fundamental feeling of FOUND FAMILY - that what matters is being bound together by love, regardless if we’re bound together by blood, no matter how many insist it’s the other way round!

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So… she says, equal parts sadly and proudly… that’s it!

So now I think it’s time for you to take on what you’ve read; look back at it through the eyes of your own queer identity; unpick the threads where your thinking about your own queer identity has been because you’re looking at it through the lenses that you’re “supposed to” see sex, politics and religion through; learn how to answer when you’re questioned on it; and see what philosophies you form of your own!

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