A while back I wrote a piece on Belle Knox’s twin xoJane articles wherein she claims basically that porn is a liberatory force for women. I questioned how that could be, given the available data about working in the porn industry doesn’t paint a very liberatory picture. What I was at pains to illustrate there is that there’s nothing demonstrably liberating in doing porn; it doesn’t make women wealthier, healthier, safer or more politically powerful than other women on average. (It even appears to have adverse effects in some of those fields.)

There were two streams of critical response. One said something to the effect of — okay, so porn doesn’t liberate women, but it doesn’t necessarily oppress them either. Whatever, I’ll concede that point because I don’t absolutely need to prove porn is oppressive for my original refutation to stand. The other, far more common twitter-based reaction was something along the lines of: “Elizabeth Stoker isn’t a sex worker and didn’t talk to any sex workers, so she’s basically an uninformed twit with no standing to comment on this topic.”

If you’re in the profession of Arguing on the Internet, you probably run into that argument a lot: unless you’re part of X group, you’re not allowed to comment on X subjects. You will notice that this tactic, which probably has laudable roots, can be manipulated infinitely: I could just as easily have argued that because I’m a woman and this is a woman-related topic, I have standing; however the proponents of this move will zero down to increasingly smaller in-groups until only someone with a plethora of modifiers is qualified to speak.

This is a weird tendency for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it acts against the very purpose of data, which is to aggregate a huge number of smaller experiences to tell us something about the overall nature of experiences in a category. When we say that data doesn’t count and only individual experiences should have any gravitas in a conversation, we say we do not want to know the overall nature of experiences, but rather the highly idiosyncratic and individual nature of a single experience. Coincidentally this has the exact same effect as a person without any experience of a situation forwarding their (un-grounded) sense of it: that is, it stamps out the reality of the many and general in favor of the singular and anecdotal. The idea of data (and of keeping the argument grounded in what can be known by all participants) is to build workable roads between the general tendency of an experience and all hearers, whether they’ve had it or not; the insistence upon a single idiosyncratic experience is the de-facto destruction of those roads, and the halting of all argument.

So this is why arguing about anything remotely social justice related on the internet is often fruitless and weird and zeroes down in many cases to name-calling and demands to shut up. Conversations are made intentionally un-arguable, and things fall apart. I think a lot of my left colleagues don’t really mind this because the person being shut out is usually somebody we disagree with — and as studies now show, free speech/procedurally just argumentation doesn’t really matter to anyone. But of course, you reap what you sow, and the latest Paul Ryan Poverty Safari stuff is the strange fruit of this tree.

Everybody knows Ryan’s budget would be disastrous for poor people, forcing some $137 billion dollars in SNAP cuts over 10 years. So how is Ryan going to sell his “poverty is a spiritual deficiency to be handled on the individual voluntary level” story without being accused of rank poor-hating? Easy; all he has to do is follow the directions this bizarro litmus test for legitimacy demands: get to know actual poor people, and report their experiences. This is exactly the political tactic he’s currently undertaking:

It would be easy to use stuff like this to ridicule him for his tone-deafness, his white-guyness, his sheltered cluelessness. But Ryan, by his own admission, is receiving his sensitivity training in real time. He has charged headfirst into the war on poverty without a helmet; zealously and clumsily fighting for a segment of the American public that his party hasn’t reached since the Depression-era shantytowns that lined the Hudson River were named after Herbert Hoover. It is frequently awkward and occasionally embarrassing, but it is also better than staying on the sidelines.

At the end of this, whatever it is, Paul Ryan will have an ironclad claim to having encountered, genuinely, the experiences of the actually poor, and the left will have handed him the strategy with this bizarro obsession with the individual, idiosyncratic experience over the broader story, made up of data — which is in this case a story about $137 billion in SNAP cuts. I think this is sort of why the ‘poverty safari’ technique is so bothersome to so many lefties: whether or not it’s genuine, it’s absolutely pulled out of the identity politics playbook, wherein not being a member of a group is permissible only if you talk to someone who is. But what happens after that?

In short, the conversation derails from establishing what should be done about poverty to establishing what being poor is actually like. Abandoning the conversation at hand is enough of an issue, but it’s also compounded by the fact that even if Ryan accurately reflects what he’s heard about poverty from poor people, it will likely only be a reiteration of what the broader culture already tells us about poor people, seeing as poor folks are a part of the same culture Ryan is. Consider this 2003 NPR Survey on Poverty in America. People were asked what made people poor. 57% of people at less than 100% of the poverty line said a decline in moral values were a major cause; meanwhile, 56% of people at over 200% of the federal poverty line thought so. 55% of the <100% FPL group said a lack of motivation made people poor; 51% of the 200%+ FPL thought so. The list goes on. Being poor does not magically or immediately orient you to pro-poor policy, nor does it give you a more positive sense of yourself than society reflects back to you. It isn’t surprising to me that poor people experience a certain disgruntlement with poor people — socially this is how they’re told to feel. But it also means that ‘get to know some poor people’ isn’t really a political panacea.

Nonetheless it will give Ryan the authority to speak on what’s good for poor people, and it will remain for some odd reason in the political toolbox identity politics has given us ill-advisedly. Experiences matter and they exist, and they are very meaningful when arguments about experiential matters such as what being poor feels like come up. They’re less impactful when the matter at hand is how should we respond politically to poverty, and as the case of Ryan indicates can be as harmful to left projects when promoted as political strategies as helpful to it. The sooner ‘get to know a person x/only person x can speak’ is no longer a knee-jerk political strategy to shut down argument, the better off we’ll all be.