A Caring Society
Defining the Solarpunk Self, Part 22
Also available on YouTube and Spotify.
Recap:
The purpose of this series of essays is to create a map to guide you toward your own definition of the solarpunk self. While each essay is written to stand on its own, together they constitute a full picture that is important to see in its entirety. As with all of my essays, I apply theory to my own life and experience, but I end the essay with principles for application to your own situation.
To help orient you, solarpunk societies are egalitarian, nature-oriented technological cultures, and they, perhaps obviously, require solarpunk selves in order to be created. Such selves should be understood as relational, or created out of their relations with others. According to Anderson, Levinas and Beauvoir separately believed that romantic relations are exemplary of the ethical.1 As such, if we want to understand what the solarpunk self is, we can use romantic relations as a case study for defining the solarpunk self through developing sexual citizenship. Hirsch and Khan define the sexual citizen as one capable of sexual self-determination and of respecting the same in others.2
This will obviously make the most sense if you’ve seen the entire picture, but you’ll get a hang on things with this essay. So, if you like this essay, which is the twenty-second, then consider starting at the beginning with Solarpunk Selves and Sexual Ethics.
Essay:
In previous essays we’ve discussed the necessity for a culture of trust and care in creating sexual citizens, but also in creating a sexual culture in which there are fewer demands placed on people in order to have healthy sexual relationships. If we live in high trust and care cultures, then there’s more reason for people to interact with one another, because they feel safe enough in order to do so. This in turn creates more opportunities for people to feel like they can trust each other.
However, it must be emphasized that I’ve said, “trust and care”. Virginia Held has criticized the notion of a culture of only trust because it fails to emphasize the importance of care. She makes the claim that care is fundamental to moral frameworks based on the autonomous rationality of the liberal individual:3
“I now think that caring relations should form the wider moral framework into which justice should be fitted. Care seems the most basic moral value. As a practice, we know that without care we cannot have anything else, since life requires it. All human beings require a great deal of care in their early years, and most of us need and want caring relationships throughout our lives. As a value, care indicates what many practices ought to involve. When, for instance, necessities are provided without the relational human caring children need, children do not develop well, if at all. When in society individuals treat each other with only the respect that justice requires but no further consideration, the social fabric of trust and concern can be missing or disappearing.”
In other words, this is what happens when we only care about self-determination without enough concern for another’s self-determination. This is a bit counterintuitive because if we live under what Held refers to as a “justice” moral framework, that of the liberal individual, then we can very easily delude ourselves into believing that we care about other’s self-determination.3
This can happen when we reduce self-determination to mere agency, to the pursuit of one’s own self-interested goals. We become blind to how agency emerges out of caring relations. As Held argues, if we see care as fundamental to justice, self-determination, and agency, then we’re able to see how someone who has suffered a severe lack of care could never develop true self-determination. We can delude ourselves into thinking, “everyone has self-determination, including the self-determination to make horrible mistakes and fuck up.”
Again, this completely misses the fact that they may not actually have self-determination. By focusing solely on self-determination we forget that this is something that has to be developed. By including care in our understanding of morality and agency we’re better able to see how the most just action would be providing a more equitable distribution of caring relations such that all people are aided in becoming capable of self-determining autonomous rationality. This is the compassionate hospitality for the mistakes of the student that I’ve discussed in my essays on agape.
Held writes further about how care is fundamental to trust within a society:3
“Trust, however, is not enough for a flourishing society. Trust implies little about actually doing the work of care that needs to be done or doing it well. […] To have a flourishing society, we would need to specify the ways in which persons should trust one another and what they should trust one another to do. To say ‘I trust him to take care of me when I am ill,’ or ‘we trust our neighbors to support an increase in funding for education when it is badly needed,’ are in no way redundant. Trust does not itself imply that the care on which flourishing depends will be forthcoming. To have a caring community, persons would need to trust one another to respond to their needs and to create and maintain admirable caring relations.”
This is important for creating a culture of trust because to trust someone is to trust that, when push comes to shove, they have the agency to pursue what is right. In other words, when it comes to the pursuit of self-interested goals, they have the capability to see how helping others is in their own self-interest. Part of my definition of the sexual citizen has been a person who has sexual agency and communion. Not as separate capabilities, but as affording capabilities. To have the trust in another’s agency, we both need the communion necessary to enact self-interested care for the other.
This may seem paradoxical, but it’s actually aligned with research covered by Cislak and Cichocka.4 I include a more detailed look at their writing here, but I’d like to cover their contradictory finding that increases in power can actually increase prosocial orientation and make people more accurate in assessing the emotional states of others.4
So…why this contradiction? They identify the great irony of increased power leading to increased self-interest. If you already value prosociality, then becoming increasingly self-interested means that you care more about the prosocial values you already believed in. In other words, when you start with high prosociality, with high care for others, with high communion, you’re more likely to become more prosocial the more power you attain.4
Those who are purely agentic, by contrast, are likely to see an increase in the egocentricity we typically associated with power. In fact, such unilaterally powerful agents are likely to prefer agentic traits over communal traits in others. They also tended to view those beneath them more instrumentally as tools to be used, and better tools require more agency.4 Through their greater power they create systems with selection pressures for more and more agency and less and less communion.
Clearly then, for a prosocial solarpunk society in which people are afforded the care to become autonomously rational enough to be sexual citizens, care ought to be considered fundamental. Yet, what exactly do we mean by “fundamental” to autonomous rationality and the moral frameworks based on it?
As we discussed in essay 19, the answer is the integration of capabilities that produces higher order capabilities. For example, walking is a stage above coordinated limbs for crawling, abdominal strength for holding oneself upright, and the movement of the legs in a walking motion (and more). Walking can depend on each of these parts, yet walking cannot be reduced to those parts and only those parts. If we looked at all the parts that typically make walking possible, we’d likely see that not every walker has all those parts.
A person with a disability might be able to walk despite issues holding themselves upright, but their walking is afforded by a cane or some other tool that makes up for that lack. When it comes to emergent capabilities we sometimes cannot say that the same parts are always necessary, even though we can see how the part is beneficial to that higher order capability. This is referred to as multiple realizability and means basically that you can have multiple ways to realize some higher order capability.6
In this sense, the part is not necessary for whichever higher order capability, but it is fundamental to that capability. One can develop rationality without care, but the kind of rationality they develop will be more likely to have boundaries that leave care on the outside. Russia is likely currently in the hands of a profoundly rational psychopath with a higher degree of agency than most human beings will likely ever attain.
If we base our moral framework of “justice” on mere autonomous rationality, then we can’t be surprised when Russia or technofeudalist America are the logical end point. In this sense then, care is not a necessary fundamental of autonomous rationality or even justice, but the autonomous rationalities capable of the highest orders of justice are afforded by care as a fundamental.
By seeing care as fundamental, we’re able to see how to give people the education or scaffolding they need to become sexual citizens capable of self-determination and of respecting the same in others. Differentiating between needs and wants, healthy and unhealthy communication, connection and extraction, and then integrating them in ways that afford positive sexual experiences or their rejection, requires a level of sexual complexity that far too few adults ever attain. To clarify that point, to increase one’s complexity requires a level of complexity that too few have.
To understand what I mean by scaffolding a bit better then, this includes the support systems or training wheels people need to grow. The right scaffolding can help you develop a new stage of complexity, but it can also make up for the fact that you miss parts necessary for ever developing that capability on your own.
For example, Fischel covers the case of two severely disabled people who had issues communicating and were wheel-chair bound. He details how, after they had fallen for each other, their caregivers created an elaborate contraption that would allow them to have sex.5
When I read this my first response was disgust at the image of some Lovecraftian contraption that was necessary to give these cripples the ability to masturbate with each other’s deformed bodies.
Please forgive how dehumanizing that sentence was, but it was to make a point.
Fischel writes about how frequently such people are dehumanized via being desexualized.5 We cringe at the thought of the severely disabled being sexual beings that desire the deeply emotional connection of mutually enjoyed sexual pleasure that we all find so meaningfully fulfilling. Yet, when I put it like that, it’s astonishing how we ever could.
Despite everything I’ve written throughout these essays my immediate response was to dehumanize these two human beings. Thank God that their caregivers were capable of giving enough care to see that, despite lacking so many of the parts necessary for the complexity to be sexual on their own, they could still desire it and be afforded it by the right scaffolding. It takes the autonomous rationality of a truly caring person to see beyond the social norms that crippled the disabled so that they can be given compassionate hospitality for their mistakes, flaws, and abjectness.
Given their disabilities, these people will never have the parts they need to develop sexual autonomy on their own, but through scaffolding they can access a new level of complexity such that they can develop capabilities at that level of complexity. Just as walking opens new worlds that are inaccessible to the crawling, these people gain access to a new world where they can develop the capabilities of sexual citizenship that few typically abled adults ever even think to care about.
Hopefully, at this point in this series, you’re past just thinking about caring about sexual citizenship. Nussbaum has written that the horror of Dante’s hell is that its denizens have been denied hope for growth.7 To have solarpunk and sexual citizenship, we require a culture that doesn’t abandon hope for the salvation and potential of its members and of those outside. We need a salvation that is not a parasitism of the Same of assimilation, but a transcultural movement toward a coherent pluralism of Same and Alter, in which their dialogue produces better games with better players.8
Cultures of care, trust, and education are necessary for the higher order freedoms afforded by sexual citizenship. Together they produce a possibility space such that people are able to do the things they want because they have access to capabilities and communities in which they can satisfy those desires. Fischel refers to this as a democratically hedonic sexual culture, but again, this is merely a case study for the kinds of citizenship and culture that might be necessary for solarpunk selves and society.5
To have sexual citizens is to see how we as persons are citizens to the extent to which we have been socialized into a system of justifications that can actually afford access to a democratically hedonic sexual culture in which sexual self-determination is equitably distributed. We’ve gone through all of that in these essays so far.
If being friends is the ground from which we bloom as better people, then the culture of trust and care is the context we seek to create in order to become that person in order to further create that context. So a solarpunk culture is a trans-contextual context in the sense that it spreads across all contexts. You can go to a nightclub to develop your social skills and meet new partners, but the nightclub as it currently stands is not a culture of trust and care. You will be forced to create yourself out of one of the most hierarchical, neoliberal, androcentric environments.
There’s a meme within Red Pill communities that women have more power in a nightclub because they get free access, free drinks, and are able to select among the many men who talk to them for the highest quality man. Even though this isn’t necessarily wrong, there is a lot that exists outside the boundaries of its truth.
Firstly, these environments are most often owned by men, and they use women as a commodity to attract men who will spend money. They select these women based on emphasized femininity, or those women who conform most to what the dominant modes of masculinity require from women, regardless of whether or not it is necessary or even damaging for fulfilling sex or romance. Those women who exist outside the demands of men socialized within technofeudal patriarchy are not sufficiently attractive commodities and are thus not given personhood or humanity.5,9
All of this speaks to how we as selves are created out of the quality of our relations with others. Despite everything I’ve written so far I have not gone deeply enough into the specifics of the ethical relations that we must be created out of. Given that we’re using sexual citizens as a case study for solarpunk selves, we need to outline how we are created out of sexual relations, both as technofeudalist individuals and as solarpunk dividuals. That’s where we turn in the next essay, Why Do Powerful Men Assault Women? (title will be linked when it releases).
Principles for Application:
1. Each essay I write has this section. Sometimes multiple essays’ will build on each other, other times they’ll be self-contained. In previous essays you’ve selected some domain of citizenship, be it sexual relations and masculinity as I did, your own gender, a previous or current religious affiliation, a political party, or anything you find intrinsically interesting. Remember that you’re answering these in the context of creating solarpunk in the domain of your interest.
2. When has your care for someone led them to trust you?
3. What has someone’s care for you led you to trust them?
4. When has your lack of care for someone led them to distrust you?
5. When has someone’s lack of care for you led you to distrust them?
Until the next one, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on solarpunk, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
References:
1 – Anderson, E. (2019). From Existential Alterity to Ethical Reciprocity: Beauvoir?s Alternative to Levinas. Continental Philosophy Review, 52(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9459-3
2 – Hirsch, J. S., & Khan, S. (2020). Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. WW Norton.
3 – Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford University Press.
4 – Abele, A., & Wojciszke, B. (Eds.). (2019). Agency and Communion in Social Psychology. Routledge.
5 – Fischel, J. J. J. (2019). Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice. University of California Press.
6 – Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. The MIT Press.
7 – Nussbaum, M. C. (2021). Citadels of Pride: Sexual Abuse, Accountability, and Reconciliation. WW Norton.
8 – Freinacht, H. (2019). Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two. Metamoderna ApS.
9 – Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House.