According to The Online Etymology Dictionary, beginning around the start of thirteenth century of the Common Era the verb blame meant “to find fault with” someone or something, as opposed to praising or commending that person or thing. Around a century later, however, the verb blame came to mean "lay responsibility on for something deemed wrong." The same entry for the verb blame also goes on to tell us that the roots of that word eventually trace back to the Late Latin word blasphemare, meaning literally "to blaspheme,” that is, “ ‘to speak lightly or amiss of God or sacred things’,” which also had a sense of “ ‘revile, reproach’.“
All that is pertinent to what I wish to address in today’s post, so please keep it all in mind as you read what follows. If you do not, you will have no one to blame but yourself.
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Whenever we encounter a problem of some sort, we are called upon to find out what is to blame for that problem in the sense of causing it. We are called upon to find what is to blame precisely so that we can then try to fix whatever has gone wrong. All other considerations aside, blaming of that sort, which pertains to the endeavor to fix problems, is itself praiseworthy, which is to say it is worthy of commendation.
On the other hand, whenever someone or something is blamed simply for being who or what that person or thing is, we should do what we can to defend whomever or whatever is being blamed, pointing out that no one and no thing is to be blamed for the sheer fact of existing. Blaming of that sort, which finds fault with persons and things simply because they are who and what they are, is itself blameworthy, which is to say it is worthy of condemnation.
Mere fault-finding may serve psychological purposes. It may, for example, be a way of building up one’s own ego by tearing down someone else’s. Or, to give another example, it may simply provide momentary relief from some disturbing emotion one is feeling, diverting one’s attention from that emotion by focusing on finding faults in others. Of itself, however, such blaming does not entail any deliberate, conscious attempt to fix any acknowledged problem. It may be servile, but it is of no service.
In contrast, locating the source of some disorder in hopes of fixing it has nothing servile about it. Instead, it is animated by a worthy animus, in the sense of that term also, like blame, derived from Latin and which means “basic intention or underlying spirit.” The spirit of the endeavor to fix the blame for a problem in the sense of identifying what caused that problem is a spirit of service altogether free of servility, whether that servility be to those who exercise coercive power over one, or just to one’s own emotions.
That spirit of blame deserves applause.
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[. . .] Lyon-Martin Health Services, a San Francisco health clinic focusing on transgender people and cisgender women, was forced to shut its doors amid COVID-19, thanks to budget cuts passed down from parent company HealthRIGHT360. Many of Lyon-Martin’s clientele were uninsured or underinsured, and most felt invisible, unsafe, or unheard by the practitioners at general clinics. Clinicians at Lyon-Martin were offering COVID-19 tests to transgender people living in shelters, a necessary service that is now gone. Some blame HealthRIGHT360 for not prioritizing Lyon-Martin, others blame the city of San Francisco for not offering financial assistance.
Blame, however, won’t keep the doors of needed services open. [. . .]
—Kitty Stryker[1]
If we’re attempting to do praiseworthy blaming — that is, if we’re trying to locate the source of some problem in order to fix that same problem — then we need to be careful about not misplacing the blame. Precisely because we are looking to fix whatever has gone wrong, it is of crucial importance that we not only correctly identify what is really to blame, but also identify and actively address what we can and should do to rectify the underlying problem for which it is to blame. If we cannot see our way toward any solution to our problem, then our inquiry into what is to blame for that problem has not yet inquired deeply enough. We need to ask more questions until we finally see our way clear to begin doing something about the underlying problem.
Blaming alone is never enough, even if the sort of blaming in which we are engaging is itself of the praiseworthy rather than blameworthy sort. After all, as I’ve already written, even and especially praiseworthy blaming is never done for its own sake, but always for the sake of finding solutions. Blame alone will never solve our problems, as the author of the citation above indicates in the last line I have citated.
Kitty Stryker is an activist and writer endorsing and contributing to the creation and spread of “consent culture” in “alternative communities.” “Consent culture” means no more and no less than genuine culture itself — that is, culture arising from and continuing to depend upon the knowing consent of all who belong within it. Such true culture stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the coercive false- or pseudo-culture imposed upon everyone everywhere by the contemporary global capitalist market-system. Calling for and helping to build such genuine culture is dwelling in the solution, rather than in the problem — which includes, as a necessary component, placing blame where it truly belongs.
In the article from which I have taken the lines above, Stryker clearly identifies what accounts for the sort of discrimination that struck especially against “transgender people and cisgender women” by denying so many such individuals access to the sorts of healthcare so many of them, along with the rest of the population of this nation, needed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Stryker’s telling argument is that what was to blame for such unfair, discriminatory, community-destroying denial, during the Covid-19 pandemic, of needed healthcare to so many such people in the Bay areas of California, where Stryker lives and works as an activist and writer, is the entire system of capitalist exploitation of which such entities as San Francisco’s Lyon-Marten Health Services, or even the whole city of San Francisco as such, are but parts. To blame those parts, rather than the system as a whole, is to misidentify what is to be blamed, a misidentification that only hides what is really to blame, and therefore any useful endeavor to correct the unacceptable situation.
What’s to blame for such blameworthy misdirection of blame itself? Once again, no single part or individual, nor any combination of many parts and individuals, within the whole system is to be blamed. Rather, to repeat yet again, the entire system is to blame.
What is the remedy to such a system, the use to which such praiseworthy, correct identification as Stryker’s of what’s to be blamed for the destruction wrought by the system itself as a whole is to be put? Why, what else than to build and dwell in “alternative communities,” just as Stryker commendably recommends?
May we all take part, each as befits each, in such cultures of consent as we dwell all together in all our differences in such alternative communities! That would really be a world worth living in!
[1] “Seeing Queerness in the Time of COVID-19,” in Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies, edited by Scott Branson, Raven Hudson, and Ray Reed (Oakland: PM Press, 2023), p. 77.
READERS PLEASE NOTE: After this post, I am taking my annual holiday break. My next post will not occur until January 8, 2024.