Y’all, I think I’ve got an example of standpoint theory in action.

I wish there were Mariah gifs today, but I’m just not feeling so sparkly! You know? It’s gray outside, and here we are almost a month into the world’s latest heartbreak, and some days feel heavier than others. BUT: standpoint theory, it turns out, might provide a tiny, hopeful way forward for our tired brains and hearts. (If you’re in Big Costume Mode today, go get your pumpkin on, and come on back later.)

OK. Let’s watch some thinkers in action.

Here are three wonderful people—with real, genuine nuance and humanity—trying to understand (1) Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel and (2) howwww other Palestinians could possibly feel even a shred of ambivalence about those attacks.

Spoiler: I think only example 3 is using a ST-style lens. I’m not saying it’s the best of the three, but I think it does offer us an avenue of understanding that’s not available in the other two. Here we go.

Example 1: Individual-style thinking

Beth Silvers, from my beloved Pantsuit Politics, uses her own emotional lenses to try to understand Hamas fighters’ emotional state. She comes up empty and acknowledges that emptiness:

I’ve been thinking about…what Hamas terrorists did on Saturday, and how you get to a place where you're capable of that, just as a person…[It’s] just a level of hatred that I don't know. I don't know what that would feel like, in my body and mind, to see someone as so heinous and so less than human that this would be justified to me.

She seems to be assuming here that Hamas fighters are operating in a realm she does understand—“hatred”—but to an extent that she could simply never understand. I think we do this a lot: see behavior we find incomprehensible and try to make it fit into one of our existing frameworks.

This move makes total sense but fundamentally misses a truth that standpoint theory points out: my frameworks don’t address all of reality. Maybe the framework of “personal hatred”—of the type Beth and I understand as American white women—simply can’t explain the events of October 7.

Example 2: Systems-style thinking

Beth’s co-host, Sarah Stewart Holland, responds to Beth by zooming out to the relevant systemic issues and acknowledging that she can’t understand life from a Palestinian (or Israeli) perspective:

How can I, as a person who grew up with all the gifts of a modern American life—public school, medical care, electricity, running water, a sense of security and safety, always—possibly comprehend what it would be like to grow up under constant threat, constant surveillance? And, look, that's true for many Israelis too. The sense of ‘someone across the border wants me to cease to exist’…I just think that's very difficult to comprehend if you've not lived it.

She recognizes the systemic problems that might inform Palestinians’ perspectives, knows that this is a realm she doesn’t understand, and plants herself there. I do this a lot, too: identify the systemic “known unknowns.” I can’t understand what it’s like to ____. But standpoint theory, I think, responds to that thought with a big, flashing question: OK, then, who does understand it, and what can we learn from them?

Example 3: Standpoint-theory-style thinking

Arielle Angel, the Jewish Israeli editor of Jewish Currents, published an anguished essay a mere five days after the initial Hamas attacks. In it, she is grieved, aghast, enraged, terrified, repulsed.

She is also curious.

She writes about spending some time reading and listening to thoughtful, trusted Palestinian-liberation activists. She’s troubled and challenged by their reactions to the attacks, which include what she calls “a sense of possibility.” She’s realized that they have a standpoint that’s completely foreign to her, and she’s committed to give it some of her attention:

Many Palestinians have felt [a sense of possibility] in [the October 7 attacks], as they have disturbed—perhaps only momentarily, it remains to be seen—the dominant paradigm in which they are condemned to die waiting for their freedom, as so many other nonviolent avenues to liberation have been punished or ignored. [This] reaction appears common to so many of the Palestinians I know and trust that I must try to feel my way into it. (emphasis mine)

You can almost see her picking up her toilet-paper roll here, choosing temporarily to focus her attention on multiple trusted Palestinian-liberation sources. She hears that many Palestinians—alongside their horror at Hamas’s actions—also momentarily thought, “Whoa, maybe we’re not 100% locked down or locked in by the Israeli military, with no hope of escape. Maybe something could change.” She’s not joining or agreeing with their assessment. She’s just saying: “these people have insight about this situation that I can’t have; it arises from their long struggle for their own liberation. I’m coming up empty, trying to understand it from my perspective; I’ll listen to them.” She doesn’t directly reference standpoint theory, but I think she’s using it here.

The next steps, I think, would be to read some of the liberation-thinkers she references, with an open heart and mind and the assumption that there might be entire frameworks that we have not yet considered or experienced.

Hope?

After my intro-to-theory post, the brilliant Karen M asked me: “So, between the lines, are you saying that using theory can offer hope?” What a beautiful question.

Here's what I think: I think that Arielle Angel’s ST-inflected thinking rockets her—at least for a moment—out of her own deep emotional whirlpool.

It acknowledges that her existing mental frameworks cannot hold what she’s observing.

It invites the thinking of other people—people so different from her—to help her hold it.

In doing so, it opens a window that wasn’t there before.

Yes: on this gray day, that does bring me a little hope.

What do you think?

Which of the 3 examples is most like your thinking? Can you see value in Angel’s approach? Can you imagine using it, in reference to world events or your own "getting proximate"?

Love you! xoxo