There is a central confusion in this response that I would like to get to, not to mention a fallacy.

Hierarchies are certainly about value, but it's the sort of value that we should be getting at. Some people are faster than others. Some can jump higher. Some know more things than others. Some facilitate meetings better than others. Some learn certain types of skills faster than others. In each respect, of course, hierarchies are going to develop. They are rather organic. Cheetahs run faster than humans. If you were to run a race between animals on the planet, one would value having a cheetah more than a human being.

In a functional sense, hierarchies exist and will always pop up depending on the value needed. If you need someone to make a flyer, are we to pretend that there aren't some people who might better make the flyer that someone else wants to have made?

And, so it can also go with scholarship and ideas. Some are better scholars, and some are better at articulating ideas.

Does that make such people inherently more valuable or more likely to be at the top of an oppression relationship? In the first, no. Of course not. Just because someone may have more intelligence or can phrase ideas better, they are not therefore more valuable as beings (if people understood that insight, they wouldn't abuse animals, the environment, or the minerals and non-living beings of the earth to the degree they do). It may make it more likely that they get treated as though they have more value. That is true. But, the problem then is not with the association of that intelligence to any one being but with the value people place on intelligence to overall value. And, whether someone has a greater degree of intelligence, their voice shouldn't matter more in decision-making, shouldn't be more. The problem is the value people place on either the name association, or in the overall ranking of intelligence in their overall scheme. Instead of seeing it as simply one more thing in a chain of natural hierarchies, people for some reason have a tendency to make it THE most important value.

So, I would say that it's your analysis that's guilty of hierarchical thinking in placing too much value on intelligence, in giving credence to the idea that there is some reason to rank it higher on the scale of hierarchies. It's not more important. We all have to live together and listen to each other all the same. It's useful in fulfilling functions of the group, but it does not make a person inherently better.

And, therefore, it does not make the person who has a particular name inherently better. It just means that people seem prone to value something they shouldn't, and that's what we need to go after. And, that's why I said it was like trying to achieve sexual equality by cutting off everyone's genitals. Instead of eliminating the world of men and women, the problem is that people fallaciously hold something about being either a man or a woman as somehow superior.

Now, we could cut off everyone's name, and we could cut off everyone's genitals, but we would not really have done anything about the true value distinction. If the anonymous blogger has a good idea, a brilliant idea, there is no interacting with that blogger as a being, there is no going into the idea to better grasp it, so that the idea can flourish in a community that's using the idea for discussion. That is, there is no sex of the idea in a community; no intercourse. And, sex, of course, is a beautiful thing, and we would be left with empty ideas that sit on their own attached to nothing but themselves, and yet they would be the most valuable things in the universe. That is the strangest hierarchy I have ever heard.

So, I don't care who gives a name or who doesn't so long as I can relate to them. And, I don't really care whether you have great ideas or crappy ones so long as we are all committed to a process of listening to each other as beings and taking care to maximize the inclusiveness of our community of value.

Apparently, you do, and that's why names threaten you. And, apparently a lot of people do, too, and that's why they spend so much time going to see people like Ward Churchill instead of taking action. But, the threat isn't in the name but in the value underlying the name, and that's where the hierarchy that we must resist really is.

Jim