There is more to all this than flaming. There is the question, raised by
one ecofemmer, whose name I have regrettably forgotten and whose post I
regrettably deleted, of the relationship between ego and truth (I may have
quite misunderstood her point, in which case that's a third apology I owe
her). There is a great deal implicit in these conversations, especially in
the posts from Nicole Richards, about how experience validates opinion and
indeed establishes truth. "My grandmother told me, and my aunt knew, and
some of my best friends have...."
I certainly don't seek to deny the value of witness, but I also am not sure
where it takes us. I will use my own family in these examples, although I
feel uncomfortable about recruiting them to an argument without their
permission, and about even appearing to use their experience to justify my
position. But I feel that it would be worse to use anyone else's:
My grandfather fought for two years in the First World War until he was left
for dead on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, was captured by the
Germans and spent the rest of the war a prisoner. Does this make *me* an
expert on WW1--I think not. Nor, in fact, did it make *him* an expert on
WW1; nor did he ever say that it did. However it distressed him that I
used the little he ever said about his experiences to justify my own
near-pacifist views.
Or: my grandson is black (in Britain at least, you are treated as 'black'
if you are not 'pure' white): does that make *me* an expert on racial
discrimination in this or any other country? It does not; but at the same
time, because he is only nine, there is a very real sense in which I know
more about it than he does. And if my grandson were not black, how would
that affect what I had to say about racial discrimination?
Some of the problem is solved if we focus on what the question is: my
grandfather surely knew more than most about what it was like to live in
water-filled rat-infested sniper-targeted trenches for weeks and months at a
time, watching your childhood friends being blown to pieces around you; but
because I have read the novel Birdsong, and saw a documentary recently about
the long-secret activities of sappers in that war, it is likely that I know
more than he ever did about what was going on in the ground beneath him;
and I am pretty sure that at one time at least I knew far more than he ever
did about Austro-Hungarian diplomacy in the lead-up to August 1914. And
people like Helen Bamber, who treat the trauma of torture victims, probably
know more than he did about why it was that he only really spoke of his
experience once, just before he descended into senility.
However, the problem of how to treat witness--our own and others, alive and
dead--remains. White racists say, have said to me,'it's all right for you,
you don't have to live amongst "them"'; I can and do answer 'But I do';
but what makes my nice white liberal witness superior to their nasty white
illiberal witness? Who decides whose witness counts?
Susan Hoyle
