The Blog That Isn't A Blog

Meditations On The Issue of Rape And Its Statistical Analysis

2009-03-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

In a class I was taking, a discussion on rape turned to an area that made me uncomfortable: The oft-cited claim that 1 in 4 women will be raped in their lifetime. The statistic is commonly thrown around, but it's a very contentious point and statisticians and sociologists are still discussing it.

For example: According to a BBC News article, "one in 20" women ages 16-59 were raped (1). Now, the fact that the data didn't include earlier pre-teens may throw it off, but there's no compelling argument that says that the the gap between 5% and 25% would be filled by such a statistical change. It is true that this data is specifically for England and Wales, but it would be very strange for America to be so drastically different from comparable European countries. In fact, the only crime where America is simply off the charts from all other industrial nations is in gun crime. Seeing this number, I become very skeptical when I see statistics that claim that the incidence in America is an order of magnitude higher.

Further, the data that suggests that rape is that prevalent is often woefully antiquated. As Fahrenthold suggests in the Washington Post, "The number of rapes per capita in the United States has plunged by more than 85 percent since the 1970s, and reported rape fell last year even while other violent offenses increased, according to federal crime data." (2). Critics of this data argue that non-reporting plagues the numbers. That's true, but there's two problems with the assertion. First: Non-reporting cuts the data both ways. If a large portion of women don't report the crime to police or other authorities, it becomes very difficult to get a real handle on the amount of rape and sexual abuse in the population. Second: There is NO reason to expect that there has been an INCREASE in women non-reporting, and certainly not by enough to compensate for the 85% plunge in per capita rapes. If since the 1970s the population of women who were raped but didn't report it didn't increase, that'd mean that the total amount as WELL as the reported amount went down by 85%. And we have every reason to believe that, in fact, reporting of rape has INCREASED, as Special Victims Units become better trained, feminism makes impacts on the broader society, and shows like Special Victims Unit show the social issues behind rape.

And the victimization of men data is bizarre. For example, in the total population, "3% of American men experience rape". Yet 1 in every 10 victims were men in 2003! (3) This indicates changes in the data that are very large: 3% to 10% of men being victims. This makes some sense if total rape has declined and if feminism has made a real impact in the prevalance of rape. More importantly, the sharp change indicates just how difficult it is to talk about sexual abuse for the entirety of the US population with any degree of statistical certainty.

According to RAINN, "1 out of every 6 American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime (14.8% completed rape; 2.8% attempted rape)" [my emphasis]. Now, this is a horrible statistic. But one solution (far from the only or primary solution) would be for men, women and police to acquire techniques to turn more completed rapes into attempted rapes and more attempted rapes into no rapes. More importantly, that's the difference between 16.6% of the population and 25% of the population. (3)

Yet another source suggests, "Colorado's rape survey invited banner headlines-and got them. '1 in 7 women raped,' said the Denver Rocky Mountain News, and that was a restrained interpretation compared with the official press release, which claimed the survey 'revealed that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 17 men have been raped.' But the results are much more ambiguous than that, and the headlines are dangerously misleading." (4).

Note that, even before looking at the results, we see that one source referring to the same survey got 1 in 7 women while another source got 1 in 4!

According to "Women, Men and Gender" by Mary Roth Walsh, many of the statistics of "rape" include discrimination against lesbians! Note that that citation is from people who do not believe that rape statistics are overblown. (5) I concur with Walsh that to dismiss the incidence of rape as mere feminist exaggeration is foolishness of the highest order, but I feel that it is vital to bear in mind the real variation in the data. These are not easy questions to answer, so numerous studies arrive at different figures. Choosing the highest figure of a broad range smacks of arbitrary propaganda.

Then we have to start looking at definitions of rape. These are hard questions. It seems obvious that a man who sleeps with a woman who is flatly unconscious thanks to alcohol is probably committing rape. But what if the woman insisted beforehand that he do so? If we don't accept prior consent as nullifying apparent lack of consent, then BDSM and rape fantasy games are flatly out the window. Plenty of lesbians who share these fetishes will just love that assertion. At what threshold does intoxication from alcohol or other drugs make any sex rape? .1 BAC? .2 BAC? Being a little tipsy? Being stone drunk? Many people, men and women alike, even married couples, use alcohol to get past socially-programmed, sexist, Puritanical impositions and inhibitions. To say that all of that must be rape begs some harsh questions.

If someone gets convinced to sleep with someone else thanks to a "hard sell" or pressure but was under no implied or real threat of force, how do we evaluate that? Clearly rape is not simply every sexual act that one regrets. I'd say a large portion of the population has regretted some dalliance they've had, some boyfriend they've dated, some clingy girlfriend, but none of those acts constitute rape. Yet, quite clearly, someone who takes someone who is alone and scared, as the man in the article "Confessions of a Date Rapist" did, and makes them afraid to say no by the strength of their sell and the force of their words is doing something questionable, even if not out-and-out rape. If the victim fears that there was a clear threat of force and the men had every opportunity to be aware of that and rectify it, I believe there is a strong case to be made that that IS rape and that the man is culpable! Not everyone agrees with my position, however; some think that you have to offer real indication otherwise. Wendy McElroy has gone so far as to define rape as exclusively being sex due to force or the direct threat of force! I think her definition is a poor one. How highly do we rank the verbal "coercion" or strong convincing? Some people argue that rapists who use violent means or the threat of violence are preferable to those who ply their victims with GHB. Yet many argue the opposite, that the chemical and memory-altering effects of GHB make the process of recovery and confronting the traumatic event harder. Whom should we believe? What should we value more: The recovery afterwards, or avoiding physical harm during the actual event?

Suffice it to say that these are not trivial questions, and exactly how we ask them alters the data. Many studies that arrive at the higher figures in the range (1 in 4 women to 1 in 6 women as opposed to 1 in 8 women, 1 in 16 women or 1 in 32 women) aggregate domestic abuse, questionably broad categories of sex under the influence of drugs (no matter how minor the threshold), etc. This isn't necessarily bad science. Unlike men's rights reprobates, I'm not going to argue that this makes the data empty feminist propaganda. But it means we have to be careful exactly what we cite for and not merely make empty assertions.

Then we have to take into account race. Minority women are far less likely than the average member of the population to report a rape, due to a variety of factors (fear of a racist criminal justice system, in-group loyalty, the idea that one does not air one's "dirty laundry", etc.)

Only Neanderthals and extremists in the men's right movement think that rape is not a serious social phenomenon, but like most social phenomena it is difficult to actually say if it is 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/6, or 1/32 of women who experience rape. Different studies, geographical areas, definitions, etc. report different things. And, unfortunately, the fact that women and men do not report many of their attacks makes it very difficult to get a handle on the data. What is clear is that the aura of fear needs to be dispelled, that we need to see only a minority of victims not reporting their attackers, and that the legal system needs a massive overhaul in order to accommodate this goal, from entry-point police officers being trained in sensitivity to end-point judicial practices. But using statistics that are questionable without noting the variation only makes us less credible in doing so. The fact that many of my fellow feminists routinely cite the highest number in a range of data for an issue that even they admit by their very nature is almost impossible to study with certainty does nothing to shore up good will.

Further, to say that high incidences of rape demonstrate an assault upon women by men is to ignore one simple, vital fact: Repeat offending. A large amount of victims, male and female, share attackers or victimizers. If we buy the "Confessions of a Date Rapist" piece, then it becomes clear that a particular category of men is the type overwhelmingly committing date rape. Now, it is true that gang rape would be a factor in the opposite direction (since one man would victimize many women), but gang rape is a very small section of the data. Further, most gang rapists are also repeat offenders, returning the balance sheet back. At the end of the day, while a large portion of the female population will be raped or abused (the majority by acquaintances within their extended social network), this does not mean an equally large portion of men are rapists. Taking that into account, it becomes far less tenable to say that a war is being waged by men against women. If a small group of bastards are assaulting a large group of women, while a large portion of men are decent and would never dream of raping someone, then the situation is more complex.

Of course, to those who think that rape says NOTHING about the broader gender oppression, one merely need to look at the overwhelming amount of male prison rape. Remove women from the picture and men use sexualized violence against each other. So there clearly are a broad variety of gender factors, and people who declare that rape is purely criminological in nature with no influence from patriarchy or sexism are missing a big part of the picture. For example: Frat houses routinely make rape possible by cultivating deeply patriarchal, masculine attitudes and encouraging a "Within the club" mentality. In my opinion, a standard "test" for fraternity membership should be to see what someone would do if they saw a rape occuring. If they would not call the police, tell a frat brother, rush into the room to stop it, or do some other proactive measure, they should be kicked out of the frat. THIS would prove that men are ready to deal with rape.

An exercise we did in this class was to list things men and women do to avoid rape. The supposed point was that men do almost nothing and women do quite a lot. I was unable to point out that one thing men concerned about rape do is avoid going to gay bars and avoid going to prison; obviously nowhere near the amount of stress that the common rape-prevention rituals among women have, but these are things. But I also pointed out that the long list of things women do to protect themselves from rape (have their apartment on the second story, take self-defense classes, strengthen their locks and deadbolts, be prepared to use their keys as improvised weapons, watch their drinks at parties, have chaperones or travel in groups) is virtually the same list men are instructed to do to protect themselves from other crime. This underlines one key fact: Crime rates in general and rape rates in particular in our country have been declining, yet the media racializes and amplifies the data. Throughout the 1990s, crime went down yet media presentations of it went up more than six fold according to some media scholars! (See Bowling for Columbine). Many feminists properly point out that high rape rates are a real concern, but they also usually point out the vital fact: Most rape occurs from acquaintances. Virtually all of the things that we listed that women do to protect themselves are things that will not stop acquaintance rape.

Rape is a serious issue, but it has also been artificially inflated and racialized by a media determined to use fear to foment apathy and mistrust in order to insure ruling class dominance. The fact that for many white women the image of a rapist is a black mugger or burglar rather than their next door neighbor or the friendly neighborhood priest is the factor I am talking about. And the problem with simply saying, unadorned, that "1 out of 4 women are raped", is that while it MAY raise consciousness about gender issues, it sabotages our brothers and sisters of color by making many people conjure up racial spectres of black men raping women left and right. These unconscious racial fears were expressed in the mythology about rape in the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina.

I work with victims of rape constantly. I view rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse as monstrous actions that may be worse than murder, in that both a living person and their families and social networks have been destroyed and harmed. And the closest I have come in my life to assaulting another human being has been when I have been aware of sexual abuse. I am intimately, tragically aware of the veil of silence that protects victimizers and destroys victims. This tragic background doesn't need the inflated use of otherwise good statistics to amass social interest and outrage.

Footnotes:

1. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2146077.stm

2. "Statistics Show Drop In U.S. Rape Cases". http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/18/AR2006061800610.html

3. "Who Are the Victims?"

http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assault-victims .

4. http://socialissues.wiseto.com/Articles/EJ3010081205/

5. http://books.google.com/books?id=dCDbL3WyjFMC&pg=PA243&lpg=PA243&dq=rape+statistics+one+in+four+is+an+exaggeration&source=bl&ots=i9qbd7ccDI&sig=cipUsRlLmc9GSCmXbS8-sRG8VJk&hl=en&ei=nq6tSb2jOonKtQO_iYzSBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPA244,M1

Reply to Jonathan Krohn

2009-03-04T01:20:00.000-08:00

In response to a request from my roommates, I watched Jonathan Krohn's speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vz1TVpwme0&feature=related . As a impromptu reply, I posted this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LeFn9N6k1U&yt . Now, the people filming were determined to applaud, and the battery on the camera ran out, so my reply was not as long or as audible as I hoped. Further, some replies have since come up. This blog post is intended to grapple with these issues.

My first thought when viewing the comments to the video so far is, "Talk about 'talking points'". So far, every conservative hack that has bothered to reply to the video has said SOMETHING about Jonathan Krohn's age, defending it by saying that the message and the messenger are separate things, etc. It's as if they are defensive about Jonathan's age, as if this idea has been thrown at them many a time, as if they were secretly aware of the absurdity of the situation...

The fact is, I made quite clear that I was saying almost nothing about Jonathan's age. True, I have some concerns that someone who is a pre-teen can really have the independent mind needed to make judgments separate from those around him. That doesn't mean, as I made clear, that we shouldn't listen to him. But when I was 13, I said things due to my peer groups, my parents, and other subtle influences that now I would reject. For example: When I was 13, I hypothesized that race in this country was primarily the effect of past discrimination and racism combined with occasional discrimination and color-blind factors such as the way the industrial economy worked. Now, I would reject that position, given the wealth of evidence that indicates that race is an independent social factor above and beyond class, gender and politics.

No, my argument, as I repeated twice, was that it says something about the people who listen to Krohn that they are buying a book and listening to a speech from a 13 year old. In my opinion, it indicates that many of their policy opinions are woefully simplistic, or that they need good propaganda from an innocent to sell their political beliefs.

Further, I made clear that I applaud Jonathan Krohn for having political opinions at his age. And for writing a book. And for being articulate, and polite, and wearing a suit, and all that. Those are all good things. Nothing I say to the young man should be taken as discouraging him; indeed, I went through the same process. But the way I grew as a political thinker was in part to be challenged, to have people ask for my sources and demand footnotes and quotations and citations, to make logical arguments. In any respect, the only comment I was making for the first part of the video was that there was a sense of absurdity (a delightful, Daily Show-worthy sense) to seeing grown men and women applaud a child for speaking platitudes.

More importantly, none of the commentators wanted to grapple with my serious argument: That these were, indeed, just platitudes, that the arguments he provided sounded nice but had no basis in reality and thus functioned as empty, willful propaganda.

It is tremendously easy for someone to come along after a political group has been in charge for the last 8 years and become immensely unpopular declaring that, "Oh, no, all of you got it wrong, we actually believe in these key principles." The problem with Krohn's viewpoint is that it's just semantics: He is simply redefining what the word "conservative" means, rather than providing any actual argument about real policy. As with all semantics, we can conclude one of two things.

A) Krohn means to refer to real-life "conservatives": Republicans, some Independents, and people generally defined as the right wing. Given that he is speaking for CPAC, I am guessing that this is how his comments are meant to be taken. If this is the case, Krohn's statements are simply, verifiably, and directly false. The people he is talking about overwhelmingly do not hold these principles, as can clearly be determined. Perhaps some peripheral "true believers" do in fact hold these opinions, but the majority of both the rank and file seem to not hold such opinions and vote for candidates who do not hold such opinions. The case becomes more difficult when we include voter data that indicates that a majority of people voting for Bush and Reagan actually opposed their policies, but insofar as Krohn is offering propaganda that helps exacerbate such misconceptions and continues to keep elections about platitudes, Krohn is amplifying this problem.

B) Krohn seeks to redefine the group of "conservatives" to include people who share his four principles. If this is the case, nothing has changed. Krohn has created a new, trivial definition within which almost no one fits, and which ironically includes a great variety of liberals and leftists). Certainly, this definition does not describe the intellectual movement which most people accept as "conservative" or right-wing. We must now find a new definition for people who are politically right, vote Republican, and tend to be pro-war, pro-gun, pro-military and pro-religion.

It is possible that Krohn is talking about traditional conservativism rather than religious neo-conservativism. But if that's the case, he is again using semantics to paper over real ideological differences, differences that are tearing a party apart.

So, let us examine the circle of people whom Krohn seems to be talking about and whom CPAC as a group supports. (CPAC, of course, postures as independent and non-partisan, but their past speakers have included Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, David Horowitz, George W. Bush and Newt Gingrich). Let us compare the actions and real policies of this group to the four principles that Krohn alleges conservatism is defined by.

Respect for the Constitution? The PATRIOT act, wiretapping, and the various means through which the Bush Administration undermined the First and Fourth Amendments alone throws this out the window. Add in the fact that Bush was illegally, in violation of US law and the Geneva Convention, detaining suspected terrorists without trials and without serious charges or arrests being made with limited access to lawyers and with brutal, "cruel and unusual" torture and we have a clear cut case.

For those who don't understand my point about the Presidents since World War II and treaty violations: Article VI of the US Constitution declares that, "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." [my emphasis].

This means that the supreme "Law of the Land" includes any treaties ratified by the US Congress. Judges and legal authorities will be bound by them, above and beyond any state laws (which is irrelevant when federal agents carry out the actions).

As Noam Chomsky declared in Manufacturing Consent, "If the Nuremburg accords were enforced, every post-war American President would have been hung." (1). He further gives examples as to how every President violated various laws in his article, "If the Nuremberg Laws were Applied..." (2). Eisenhower's actions in Guatemala, Kennedy's actions in Cuba, LBJ and Nixon's actions in Indochina... All are serious war crimes.

The United States refuses to make honest steps towards disarmaments and has as official policy the willingness to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear NPT signatories: That is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Almost every war the US has waged since World War II has been in blatant violation of the UN Charter, which declares that states cannot unilaterally attack other nations except in response to imminent threat (which has a specific and unequivocal meaning: forces either in the country or directly being sent to the country, not nuclear weapons that might at some distant date be used to possibly deter the US from doing something). The US routinely flouts the Geneva Convention, such as with its waterboarding practices that even many in the Justice Department knew were clearly torture.

So we see a pattern of the incumbent President and of almost every President before going back to Truman flouting the Constitution and engaging in routine impeachable high crimes. This disproves that conservatives, as defined in the real world, are pro-Constitution.

His second prong is "respect for life". But this is even more of a joke than the first part of his principles.

How is "respect for life" held by a party which bombs innocent Iraqis and Afghanis? How is "respect for life" held by a party which held the ideology that we "have to fight them there so we don't fight them here", which declares that it's okay to turn other peoples' countries into flypaper for terrorists so you don't have to suffer loss and they do? How is "respect for life" held by a party which undercuts social policy that is designed to protect the poor? Even if one accepts that all of these things have justifications, they don't have to do with "respect for life".

It's clear that Jonathan is trying to reconcile the anti-abortion stance of many conservatives with the incredibly ugly contempt for life conservatives hold in almost every other domain. Sorry, Jonathan, but it just won't work.

Further, "respect for life" is an empty platitude. Any of his supporters can get out of my above allegations by simply redefining what the phrase means, ad nauseum, to suit their goals. Why isn't "respect for life" demonstrated by people who want to insure that pregnant mothers have options that don't involve forcing them to have a child they don't want? Protecting the rights of fetuses or unborn life isn't by itself a bad thing, but the problem is that both sides are coming at the problem with an idea of what "respect for life" constitutes that ends up being mutually exclusive.

His third "principle" is "less government". At this point, we do not even achieve the level of farce.

How can the party which demands ever-higher military budgets be for "less government"? The party that wants to expand the capacity of the state to pry into our personal lives is somehow for "less government"? Are these comments intended to be read seriously?

There are some honest libertarians out there who support less government all around. Only even they mysteriously seem to like folks like Ron Paul, who honestly thinks that black youth in Washington DC should be treated differently by the police than white youth (3).

In fact, "conservatives" are truly radical statists. They want the state to expand their wallets, attack their enemies and protect their interests. They use the mantra of "less government" as a generic bludgeon to beat back anything the state does that does not satisfy those interests and hope that people's attention spans don't last long enough to recognize the hypocrisy and self-contradiction.

Real "conservatives" would actually hold very few of Krohn's positions. Rather, conservativism as a philosophy stems from the idea that social change should happen slowly and organically rather than rapidly because of the fact that societies are complex systems. In this sense, Noam Chomsky, the anarchist, is a conservative! He argues that change should come incrementally from social movements. As I said in the video: The word "conservative" has become much-maligned thanks to the radical statists who have cloaked themselves in its hallowed halls.

Finally, Krohn declares that the fourth and last principle is "personal responsibility".

This would make an ounce of sense if conservatives did not come out of the woodwork with an array of irrelevant and offensive apologies to protect their favored persons from said personal responsibility. If conservatives stopped excusing Ann Coulter's argument that we should nuke people for fun, and stopped excusing every new racist who drops the n-word and blaming the victims for being too "sensitive", and stopped excusing war crimes committed by their government, this would be a fair argument.

In fact, conservatives are all too willing to pass the buck of personal responsibility onto everyone else. (4).

So, for example, when they tell black folks and women to "Get over it" (that is, get over centuries of oppression and disenfranchisement which continues), they are passing the buck onto those people to solve the racial and gender problems in the United States. They could "Get over it" themselves; that is, white, male conservatives could just admit that bad things happened in the past and stop lionizing folks like Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. They could acknowledge that the country is built on the land of a nearly exterminated native population. But instead of taking that "personal responsibility", they demand everyone else change. This is especially egregious given that it is generally them with the power, wealth and influence, so one would think that they could afford to be magnanimous.

The irony of wagging the finger at others to have more personal responsibility is one of those many things Jonathan is apparently too young to recognize.

And what of his claim that the Republican Party is merely "the shell"? If this is the case, shouldn't people stop voting for a Party when the elected officials presented by that party routinely flout the principles Krohn cites? No, that is merely hand-waving, deceptive apologia, and no more.

Or what of his claim that conservatives are unique in that their policy is principle based? Surely Mr. Krohn must be joking. Refusing to allow a grandmother to starve, the principle behind Social Security, is a principle that animates policy, whether or not Mr. Krohn likes that particular principle. (Of course, he should, given his ostensible concern with the "right to life"). Opposing unjust, vicious, colonial wars is not only deeply principle-based but tremendously courageous, unlike Krohn's platitudes, given the real social costs those who speak up against jingoist conformity face.

In short, Mr. Krohn seems to be unconsciously relaying myths his parents, adult figures in his life, and perhaps his friends and peer groups suggest to him. But it doesn't seem that he is capable of making arguments that stand serious muster. Again, this says nothing about him. To have written a book and to be able to address adults at his age is a true feat, and something worth applauding. No, it says something about the innumerable adults who have no such excuse. It says something about the people who have graduated from high school and prestigious universities who aren't able to correct Krohn where he errs and show Krohn how much more complex the world is. It says that they are either hopelessly ignorant ideologues or hopelessly cynical demagogues.

Footnotes:

1. http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s514consent.html

2. http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm

3. "Ron Paul Is Not Your Savior". http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/17406 . To wit:

But it gets a lot worse: Paul's political literature has stated that it is sensible to be afraid of black men; that "95 percent of African Americans in [Washington D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal"; that black male children (but not white ones) should be treated and tried as adults for crimes they commit beginning at age 13; and he referred to two black men that were interviewed by Ted Koppel after the Los Angeles 1992 uprising as "animals". Kanye West was right when he said, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Guess what? If his own political literature is any indication, Ron Paul loathes black people.

4. Tim Wise discusses this phenomenon frequently. See: //www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/racism-reflex-reflections-conservative-scapegoating

http://www.sodahead.com/blog/44007/blame-shifting-and-buck-passing-conservative-style/

And, of course, so much more can be said in this vein.

Racial Color-Blindness: Just As Bad As Regular Blindness

2008-11-10T00:16:00.000-08:00

There is a common hypothesis, becoming increasingly popular on the eve of Obama's election (an important step forward in the history of race relations and a major change from the last eight years of Republican neo-conservative decimation, but hardly a revolutionary or progressive vanguard-to-be), that likes to call itself "color-blind". The reasoning goes somewhat like this: "The foundation of racism is seeing race, recognizing ethnic and racial groups. So if we want to end racism, we have to be color-blind. We have to stop seeing race or talking about race. And that means we can't do affirmative action or talk about racism, because that's just bringing back the problem. Nope. We're all Americans here. After all, I don't see race, and if you do, you must be a racist." I call it the Colbert hypothesis or position on race, after Stephen Colbert's brilliant reducio ad absurdum parody of this argument.

The fact that such an idiotic position can become remotely commonplace says nothing but that a lot of Americans will accept whatever is spoonfed to them thanks to not having been immersed in the critical thinking and resistance environments that might engender different outcomes.

Let's begin with the quibbles first. Race doesn't come from seeing race any more than sexism comes from seeing gender and sex or classism comes from seeing the poor. It comes from attaching onus, by definition. It is perfectly possible and indeed quite common for people to honor each other's racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds without being divisive, insulting, racist, offensive or attaching stigma and stereotypes to the discussion.

Also, there is no we. Due to the existence of a racial caste system and a racialized opportunity structure, "we" has always only referred to white folks or black folks, never both at the same time. (Note that, of course, a progressive activist can use "we" to refer to the poor and therefore the white AND the black poor, but this is not what I'm talking about. Such an activist will be the first to point out that, in that parallel class instance, there is no such thing as "we" either, since the rich and the poor have diametrically opposed class interests).

Now, let's get to the core problem with the argument. It is two fold. First: Color-blindness is an impossibility. Socialization, history and the institutional facts on the ground make being honestly color-blind quixotic. But, second: Were it possible, it would be a disability, just like, well, red-green color-blindness.

For the first: Implicit Attitude Tests conducted by, among others, Professor Brian Nosek and his partners Tony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, have shown that whites tend to associate negative words and concepts with black faces. Even progressive whites often do this. Though I myself scored well on the IAT, actually associating black faces positively, this is clearly not the majority. But Nosek is only demonstrating scientifically what decades of sociology as well as the results of common sense and activism makes clear: People have prejudicial notions deeply socialized, from ethnic slurs to various stereotypes. This makes sense: They're part of history, part of common parlance, part of the way we talk to each other.

There's no problem with this, per se. These attitudes, stereotypes and concepts can be battled with consciousness and awareness. But that's the point: It requires one to be conscious.

The "color-blindness" school thus, far from denying or reducing racism, actually allows it to flourish, by prevent the consciousness that would allow us to question subconscious stereotypes and implicit beliefs. An employer may pretend to be color-blind, but when it comes to evaluating resumés, he simply won't give the applications with the black-sounding names as much attention or time.

And, of course, how many times have any of us, even those who do believe in color-blindness, heard someone say, "I'm not a racist, but.. [some incredibly racist statement]?" Undoubtedly plenty, especially those who engage in any anti-racist activism.

Simply put: It is impossible to be color-blind in a racist society. And anyone with pretenses to the contrary is not only lying to themselves and everyone else by extension, but is also perpetuating racism.

This becomes especially true when the unwillingness to bring up race and racism means being unwilling to hear the experiences of black and ethnic communities with racism and with the positive elements of their own culture. Whatever one thinks of multi-culturalism, the problem with cultural invisibility, simply pretending that cultural differences don't matter, is that it acts as genocidal cleansing by the dominant culture (who have the power to make sure their culture is what's left behind as the "non-cultural" norm) against the subservient culture. So, for example, whites who overwhelmingly declared that Katrina told us nothing about race were engaging in a racist exercise. Not only were they denying what blacks overwhelmingly experienced about what was happening to their community, but they even denied that such a disagreement said anything about race and racism in this country. I was so appalled by this fact precisely because to even hold it means to believe that black opinions about racism don't matter, that they say nothing about race and racial relations whatsoever, an opinion that can only be held by those who implicitly believe that blacks opinions in general do not matter.

And that brings us to the second problem: Color-blindness, even were it possible, would be stupid.

It boggles my mind to think that it could be a virtue to be blind to any part of reality, social or otherwise. Failing to see things, understand things and cope with things never has, never is and never will be the appropriate strategy. Being blind to really existing racism is just as much a disability as being blind to anything.

One can, I suppose, deny racism exists. Doing so is fundamentally idiotic, of course, and has absolutely no theoretical, common sense or social science support to it. Reasonable people can disagree about the salience of race in modern American society, but to literally believe it has no impact whatsoever and never appears to changes events is to subscribe to dogmatic idiocy. But this assessment on my part is moot. Suffice it to say that only if most of those discussing the matter agree that racism didn't exist would it become even conceivable to declare that bringing up race and racism would be problematic. If the issue of the existence of racism is still a contentious point, then to deny the matter exists is as foolish and misguided as believing that, since the issue of the existence of the graviton is currently being debated, we must act as if gravity does not exist.

South Park, for example, made this error some years ago with an episode about Chef being offended by the South Park flag, which shows a black man being lynched by white men. Chef realizes at the end of the episode that the children, who were debating the issue, didn't realize that a black man being lynched by white men was part of a racist past. South Park lionizes the childrens' ignorance here, ironic given their later episodes that mock the concept of following or admiring children for their oft-vaunted childish innocence. Suffice it to say that the children being ignorant about the history of lynching in this country does not prove that racism is over, but rather that American school systems whitewash history for the sake of the dominant majority and those who truly run the society, or that white children can afford to be ignorant about racism thanks to the privilege that makes such ignorance possible and not a severe debit. Eric Cartman's repeated barrages at the Jews alone demonstrate this point.

Imagine some hypothetical color-blind scholar. This color-blind scholar either does not know about race or racism, or does know about it but is perfectly capable of putting aside stereotypes and history and making completely fair analysis without any mention of race or racism. He analyzes American society and finds that, surprise, some people are poor and some people are rich despite merit, that there is extraordinarily low social mobility, and so forth. He thus develops a theory of class relations.

But then he discovers that a number of people are even poorer than their class situation would merit. Similarly, they are treated with predictably worse outcomes at every level of society, from mortgages to education. He must assume that their class has nothing to do with it, and finding no other explanation, must turn to an innate explanation, saying that those people really DO deserve the worse treatment they're getting. And he would do so even if he remembered that racism against this group did exist in the past, because past racism is not sufficient to explain disparate achievement and living standards between black and white groups.

Thus, unsurprisingly, the logical extension of color-blindness in a racist society is racism. Because if we cannot explain disparate achievement by hypotheses about racism, we must either not explain them or explain them by some innate property of the group, a definitionally racist hypothesis.

Is it any wonder that it is overwhelmingly whites, who have quite a bit to lose from racism being rectified (even if they also stand to gain in some ways as well), are the ones who push this idea so hard? Who have sold it into the mainstream and into the psyches of otherwise intelligent people?

Yes, it is possible that when we discuss race and racism, we will implicitly bring up not only racist but sexist, classist and statist concepts and ideas thanks to the deep ingraining of those concepts into our socialization. But to say that this means we should instead give up is not only to do injustice to the entire idea of activism, but also simply to engage in a fallacy of perfection.

Yes, it is possible that by bringing up racism and trying to deal with it we might go too far and inadvertently hurt some groups that do not deserve to be impacted, or that some people may misidentify racism or malice when it is not there. But to deny social justice by the logic that social justice might hurt and be difficult to achieve is, again, repugnant. This is especially true when it is proferred by those who daily do the same thing, who daily are complicit with a system that hurts some groups who have never deserved to be impacted yet have been for centuriesm, and who routinely misidentify malice on the part of blacks.

Tim Wise in his comments system called this idea, "New Age shit", and I am inclined to agree. Color-blindness as an idea is impossible to achieve, intellectually anemic, repugnant, and benefits only racists and those too tepid or lazy to deal with racists and racism. It does have the effect of clamping down on the worst, most overt racists out there, when it is applied evenly, which it rarely is. After all, how many "color blind" whites rushed to defend Don Imus or any number of other public personae who dropped the n-bomb or other slurs? How many "color blind" whites move out of their neighborhood when too many blacks move in? How many "color blind" whites nonetheless go out and buy the Bell Curve, which says that those blacks they're supposed to pretend don't exist actually ARE genetically inferior?

But even when it is evenly applied, color-blindness only deals with the most repugnant but also the most superficial racists. Those whose prejudice is slightly less palpable yet who nonetheless express it in their hiring decisions, corporate policies, lending paradigms, educational proposals, pedagogy, philosophy, racial profiling, and jurisprudence are at the end of the day far more dangerous. And color-blindness buys us, at its best, not having to deal with the obvious KKK and neo-Nazi racists at the cost of making it impossible to deal with the more subtle racists.

This is especially tragic for many reasons. Because there is no need to do so: There are alternatives to both color-blindness, racism and some of the sillier parts of multi-culturalism. Because the people who have this more subtle prejudice are generally our neighbors, our friends, decent people whose prejudice could be cured or mitigated relatively simply. And because these people are the real threat to black advancement, success and equality.

"My Family Didn't Own Slaves": Argument, or Copout?

2008-03-19T16:49:00.003-07:00

I recently was having a complex and sophisticated interaction about race and racism at, of all places, YouTube. One of my interlocutors offered this argument: "none of my ancestors were slave owners (italian family)" . Another on a different site offered this observation: "My great-great grandparents came here from somewhere else, so kindly don't count ME in with the people that may have oppressed YOUR great-great grandparents."

Indeed, this seems to be the white national mantra: "I wasn't alive for slavery." "My family had no involvement in slavery". "My ancestors were dirt poor farmers." It is such an effective standard because of course everyone falls under it. Even direct descendants of slaveowners with access to intergenerational wealth can claim that they weren't around for slavery. Since many of us (myself included) are descended from immigrants more recent than the end of slavery, and the slaveowners formed a tiny elite, it is a perfect apology.

But it is also a microcosm of everything wrong with the white national narrative about race. The amount of things wrong with this argument is so staggering that saying it should require an instant remedial US History and Government class.

The first mistake it makes is to imply that the only bad thing that has happened to the black community as a whole, institutionally, is slavery. As if blacks as a whole never suffered under Jim Crow, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, restrictions on where they could take a drink or go to the bathroom, lynchings and terror. As if black life trajectories and possibilities weren't reduced by racial covenants, inability to access Federal Housing Assistance loans (an amount in the TRILLIONS of dollars, or as Tim Wise put it, "more than the outstanding mortgage debt, all the credit card debt, all the savings account assets, all the money in IRA's and 401k retirement plans, all the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and our entire merchandise trade deficit combined."), rampant employment discrimination, inability to acess GI Bill benefits, and so forth. Many of these injustices are in recent memory, such that there are those alive who remember them and were affected by them. Certainly their immediate descendants continue to feel the loss of these opportunities. So the very claim shows a complete contempt or ignorance for the suffering that blacks went through, as if segregation is not an injustice that deserves to be righted.

It also implies that we do not bear responsibility for what our government and communities are doing right now to virtually every black man and woman, a claim that inspires not only amusement but contempt. I hope I do not have to go into the extensive documentation on institutional racism, nor answer claims varying from "What about the Oprahs?" (yes, what about them? as if individual success stories invalidate an extensive backdrop of evidence) nor "What about the white poor?" (yes, social categories are complex, but to be black and poor is to be worse off on average than to be white and poor, even white poor have a benefit from being white and even the black rich have a disadvantage from being black). Instead, it should be sufficient to say that given the extensive racist treatment and barriers blacks endure in education, employment, treatment by police, selection for prosecution, prison sentences, loans, mortgages, housing, firing, and so on, this claim is a call for whites to ignore their responsibility to terminate currently existing injustice.

Third, it obscures the notion of intergenerational wealth and thus intergenerational responsibility. For while only those who owned the slaves directly injured those slaves, everyone from the Founding Fathers to the man on the street to the early capitalists benefitted from the slave's picking of cotton, rice, sorghum, tobacco and other crops. They also bore both the benefit and the cost of the racial hierarchy enhanced (if not actually created) by those in power to turn poor blacks and poor whites against each other rather than against the rich masters. That wealth continues to this day. There are millions of families living on homes provided almost exclusively to whites under the Homestead Act. The Naturalization Act of 1790 and other laws enabled the very presence of our ancestors by naturalizing whites and giving them rights far beyond people of color. The wealth produced by the South was even instrumental in the Revolution, meaning that slaves are owed part of our very existence as a nation! So while those whose ancestors immigrated after slavery may not have been quite poor, they nonetheless benefitted from slavery and from the existence of other laws occurring under the rubric of the racial caste system.

In line with this, it also ignores institutional and social responsibility. After all, when Volkswagen and other German companies were forced to give reparation to some Jews they had victimized, while it is true that they did not pay to Jews writ large and only paid to living people, they nonetheless had changed as an organization, but the organization owed restitution. The American state owes the same to blacks. And even if it does not, in that sense, it would make sense for social policy to be designed to engineer social equality instead of inequality. In this sense, the "my family wasn't responsible for slavery" is the racial equivalent of buckpassing on a national level.

Why Reject Genetic Food?

2008-03-19T16:49:00.001-07:00

So reviewing another group of pro-environmental yet anti-environmental-group centrist-type computer nerds' comments on Cracked.com, I felt the need to comment on genetically modified food. It's been awhile since I've written about this issue. It's an issue that anyone with an opinion on seems to be set in. Per usual, I have a different opinion than a lot of the left and 99% of anyone right of Dennis Kucinich. (On a side note: Applause to Dennis for JUST NOW getting out of the race. Fight the good fight, man.)

Let's get the bombshell out of the way:

I don't have a problem with the idea of genetically modified food.

*gasps*

Yes, despite being anarchist, leftist, pareconist, feminist and polyculturalist, I don't have a problem per se with genetically modifying organisms, or with nuclear power, or with a lot of other things I think the Left is dogmatic on for no especially good reason.

Why?

Well, because I agree to some extent with Bookchin's notion of humankind as intelligent guide for evolution and nature. I note that we have already engaged in massive genetic modification for the entirety of human history: It's called breeding, animal husbandry, crops, etc. Any vegetarian environmentalist type who decries Frankenfood then eats lettuce, or corn, or spinach, or tofu has to feel just a BIT hypocritical when bearing in mind those crops' conscious engineering for superior traits for millenia, right? After all, what the Native Americans originally cailed maize looked NOTHING like what we call corn. It was scraggly grass. The brilliant genetic engineering and scientific work of Central and South American tribes turned it into the juicy yellow beauty we have today. The same can be said for a lot of New World crops.

Using genetic modification in line with safety standards and a fully holistic ecological sensitivity could allow us to potentially clean up our environmental catastrophes, produce more food per hectare and therefore allow more room for crop cycling or reduce the amount we irrigate, etc. Smart application of technology should be part of our toolkit for a sustainable human race.

So what's the problem?

There's a lot of them.

1) Safety and food regulatory issues. The difference between the type of breeding our ancestors did and what currently goes on in Monsanto's lab is obvious: It's qualitatively different. There are attempts to splice spider silk into goats to mass produce said silk for industrial applications. There are ideas to take genes from plants and put them in animals, fungi and put them into plants, and all sorts of swapping from between kingdoms, phyla, and every other taxonomy one can imagine.

A few thousand years of effective product testing is a pretty good way of insuring that what you produce is safe. If a particular breed is obviously toxic or massively destructive, one will be much more likely to pick up on it. But the way that GMOs are being produced now, one is lucky to have two decades between theoretical development and appearing on shelves. This has caused innumerable debacles which forms a large part of the anti-GMO material.

One can argue that patent and regulatory agencies should take care of that. The problem with that reasoning? I wouldn't trust the FDA to regulate my Corn Flakes. That ties into our second problem...

2) Capitalism. These developments are occurring in for-profit labs whose job is to provide wealth for the shareholders, period. Companies like Monsanto are profit-seeking corporations, and that causes a number of problems.

a) Years and years of fomenting by radical business groups have eroded at the effective enforcement of a number of regulatory agencies. They simply don't have the time, energy, funding or people on the ground to do an effective job.
b) It gets worse. In principle, many of the free trade agreements and organizations like GATT, the WTO, NAFTA, etc. make it so that if a panel of corporate lawyers and scientists determine a product to be safe, a government CANNOT ban it from their shores. This has been a major sticking point for Europeans in particular, where the backlash has been especially strong. So even if the FDA DID its job, it's entirely possible that a private unaccountable body would overturn their decision.
c) The way that these foods are being produced violates the "holistic ecology" criterion I mentioned above. Some of them, for example, have powerful toxins growing in the plants that are deadly to bugs. Even when it can be proven they are always and invariably harmless to humans, no matter the mutation, these plants are often quite destructive to the soil and to the bugs themselves who do after all form part of the ecosystem. Some of these plants are quite aggressive indeed, functioning as invasive species and devastating local ecologies. The vast majority of these products occur in a Green Revolution-type environment which uses conventional massive irrigation, massive capital investments particularly of fossil fuels, no crop cycling, etc. etc. So the potential of the technology is subverted for profit. This is no big surprise, of course.
d) The patent problem. Companies like Monsanto patent their "inventions". This prevents innovation, like most patents do, wherein farmers take their neighbors' strand and experiment, making something even better. But it gets worse. Farmers have been tried when Monsanto seeds that were on their neighbors' property took over their fields and they gave up and simply grew the Monsanto seed as part of their crop.
e) In line with the patent problem, companies like Monsanto include things like "terminator seeds". A standard model of agriculture, particularly among peasants the world over, is to grow a lot during harvest then save some for reseeding the next year. The problem is that Monsanto's seeds die. You have to buy new ones from Monsanto. They genetically engineer dependance on the company. That ends up producing monoculture as well as poverty and destruction... but we'll get to monoculture at point #4.

3) The right of people to not accept or buy products they don't want or trust. Whether or not the GMO corn is the best, tastiest, most efficiently grown corn in the world, if I find it disturbing for whatever reason that octopus DNA was part of it, I have a right not to purchase that product. And I have the right to be informed of what I'm purchasing when I buy it. And I have the right to demand that companies be legally obligated to tell me what I'm buying.

The problem is that the aforementioned free trade laws are being used to undermine this right. Europeans are asking for the right to informed consent: If they don't want to eat something, they shouldn't have to, no matter their reasons. But because a GMO label is a major damper on products, companies are resisting even being required to label their foods. If by some arbitrary standard the end product is identical, totalitarian unaccountable organizations have decided that you should have no problem with where your food comes from.

This was part of an extraordinary explosion of racist indignation. African countries have refused to accept aid of GMO corn for their people, expressing safety concerns. Western commentators lambasted them as dictatorships and idiotic for doing so.

So let me get this straight. Their estimation of their own safety is stupid, whereas our own insistence on giving them food they don't want instead of just agreeing not to subsidize our GMO corn and simply send over the regular stuff instead is prudent?

How racist is that?

4) Monocultural agriculture. The problem with any GMO crop, no matter how awesome, is that it's frequently used as the one crop that a farmer grows. Monocultural agriculture is well known to exhaust soils, require massive capital input (fertilizer, oil, machinery, etc.), and so on and so forth.

5) Dubious advantages. As R.C. Lewontin has documented extensively, many of the crops in question actually do worse, and most of the rest have only marginal benefits. While I think there is potential in the technology, it has yet to unambiguously show itself.

6) In line with #5: The propaganda that this is how to solve the starvation crisis in the world. Monsanto and the rest of the rogue's gallery behind "Frankenfood" frequently like to run a guilt trip argument. How dare these environmentalists resist feeding the world! Don't they know that if we could just produce 20 more units of corn per acre, there would be no more starvation in Africa!

It'd be a good argument if it weren't blatantly false. It'd be an argument that didn't curdle the stomach and enrage the heart if it weren't the VERY SAME COMPANIES who are some of the principal roadblocks against feeding the globe.

There is enough food to feed the planet. In fact, as Kofi Annan points out in his Facts, it wouldn't take that much money. We produce so much food that we actually subsidize farmers to destroy some of it. The problem of starvation has always been a problem of access, not of availability.

The problem? Monsanto and food companies in general are those who keep the food away from the poor.

This is the debate that goes into the GMO discussion.

Now, I imagine that some of you have heard some of these points, but very few have heard all of them as a unified case. Why is this the case? Well, sometimes environmentalists make it an issue of dogma and don't present the points back to back to make their argument compelling.

But the much more serious phenomenon? Reasonable commentators on all side are being shunted aside by powerful media institutions to make the debate one-sided and repetitive. We don't want to acknowledge that there's enough food out there, so go Monsanto spokesperson! Castigate leftists for starving Africans! Never mind that this is wholly out of character for them to do so!

Whatever people's opinion on genetically modified food, it behooves humanity to have a reasonable discussion about it, with evidence and without propagandistic distortions. And the same thing that makes genetically modified food insures that that conversation must occur despite effort to stop it: The destructive organs of state capitalism.

A Militant Rejection of Militant Atheism

2008-03-19T16:48:00.001-07:00

Some of you may have heard arguments from a growing militant atheist movement among intellectuals. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others have launched frontal attacks on religious institutions, belief and faith. Though their critique focuses on "Abrahamanic" religions like Islam, Judaism and Christianity, they rarely spend the rhetorical effort to differentiate Abrahamanic religion from religion per se. They argue that religious and spiritual philosophies are inherently destructive, spreading intolerance, and that scientific and rational thinking must be atheist.

Dawkins in a speech featured here in front of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) reiterates these arguments: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/113 . They don't hold water.

For one, he tries to correlate IQ and religious thinking. But any serious scientist has to know that the IQ test is in no way, shape or form a serious metric of "intelligence". It tests a particular type of intelligence poorly and is heavily class and culturally biased. The same data is used across populations to declare people of different races to be stupid. Dawkins compounds this error by implying that religious thinking is also negatively correlated with socioeconomic status and education. But neither of those vectors are true indications of intelligence otherwise, because we do not live in an intelligence-based meritocracy. We live in a class, race and gender-riveted society where perfectly capable people are artificially denied equal wealth and educational opportunity.

This social understanding is one of the Dawkins/Hitchens school's most severe misunderstandings and utter failings. There was hardly a more antagonistic atheist on the globe than Bakunin, who as an anarchist declared that were there to be a Lord of the world he would try to overthrow that Lord as he would all others. But Bakunin also knew that scientific oligarchy or rule would be just as onerous and disgustinig as rule by a priesthood. I think quite a bit of people's knee-jerk reaction to Dawkins and his ilk is their extreme contempt for people's views and their quite clear implicit belief that those people do not have equal capacity to discharge their rights as human beings.

Why have we seen an upsurge in fanatical religious thinking the globe over? Well, globalization and American foreign policy have intentionally deprived governments of the capacity to control their own societies. There is a "democratic deficit" that is quite alarming. When people's faith in secular political institutions decline, their faith in religious institutions as an alternative civil society grows. This can occur even without religion: The fascist uprisings in Europe were roughly the same phenomenon. One can harshly oppose fanaticism and inflexibility of
all kinds while bearing in mind their structural causes.

One might argue, as a good friend of mine has, "So what? Everyone has their battles. Why not let them focus on the religious fanaticism?" The problem with this is manifold. For one, Hitchens in particular are in support of the very institutions that propel fanatical thinking. Putting aside Hitchens' support for globalization and conventional "capitalism", he also has been in support of the American imperial project in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet a greater hotbed of Abrahamanic fanaticism could hardly be found. "Christians" (read: radical statists subverting authentic Christian belief) use crusading rhetoric and real bombs to devastate Muslims (both ordinary, innocent, decent people and a tiny nasty minority), while "Jewish" Israel slips further and further away from democracy and towards a military-run state.

Second, people like Harris go further and even let their monomaniacal focus on religion obscure obvious truths. Harris has declared that there is a "problem with Islam" that inherently drives terrorist acts. The fact that this argument could fit in George W. Bush's living room does not seem to bother him. This kind of rhetoric that views the beliefs of Arabs and Muslims as somehow inhuman and less than worthy is an integral part of the problem. Of course, the true phenomenon is that butchers on all sides point to justifications as they always do while fighting for their own interests.

Third, religion per se is not the problem. One can look superficially at the Crusades and see that, yes, people of varying religions battled. But then why the siege of Constantinople? Why the horrible atrocities on all sides? Why the enslavement of the Children's Crusade? The answer: Religion was the pretext. The Muslim empires and the rising European empires were destined to battle. The way to mobilize ordinary people was religion.

One could look at the above and say, "All right, religion was still a problem though, it was still the pretext used for recruitment." But religion is by no means the only way of getting the message out. Nationalism, racism, fear, greed, any number of justifications and appeals can be used to spread war and violence. The solution is to eliminate the war and violence, not the religion.

One can go down the line with this logic. Religious fanatics? Get rid of fanaticism, not religion. Religious intolerance? Get rid of intolerance, not religion. Religion leading to closed minds? Get rid of closed minds, not religion. There has been no argument anywhere, precisely because it's absurd, that religion can't be separated from those bad outcomes, that there is no way to have faith and spirituality without accepting negative consequences.

Dawkins also makes a quite abusive analogy, taking advantage of Douglas Adams (a man who I have nothing but admiration for), by pointing out that religious thought has been made socially inured to challenge. I agree that this is unnecessary and problematic. So do almost all religions. The Trickster mythos in almost every religion I'm aware of, from Nasrudin in Islam to Coyote to Ananasi to Buber's irreverant interpretations of Judaism, is a myth that defiles the sacred in order to remind people of what really matters. Being able to discuss openly any aspect of life, religion included, is essential, and anyone who opposes that because they favor their dogma is wrong. But that includes atheist dogma. What many Christians and religious people derive their hostility to people like Dawkins and Hitchens from is not the notion of having the discussion but the notion that the discussion will inherently be from militantly hostile people who have it in their minds that the only right answer to the questions they're asking is their own. No one willingly gets into that conversation. The answer to dogmatic religion is not dogmatic atheism.

Dawkins goes on to extend Adams' analogy far beyond what it was ever intended to say. For Dawkins, anything that we can't subject to rigorous scientific analysis is bunk. Well, say goodbye to ethics then, because there is no litmus test in the world that will tell you why murder is wrong. One must have an ethical edifice that says so or not. Indeed, most human inquiry is largely immune to scientific analysis. Some of it is simply the limits of science: Things like human emotions, say. But others are in PRINCIPLE beyond any empirical or objective argumentation: Aesthetics, morals, etc. Dawkins doesn't dispense with these because he sees that there is more to life than science. But he inconsistently dispenses with religion on that ground. Unfortunately, the reasoning is just as bad in this context.

When faith and science clash, that is when there is an empirical fact that science has observed that faith disagrees with, who should win? By and large, science. But that's neither here nor there.

Dawkins focuses almost entirely on Hitchens' Abrahamanic religions, the monotheisms of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, any number of other religious thoughts simply do not fall under his criticisms. For example, it is not actually the case that we are all atheists except for one God. Most polytheistic religions are perfectly fine with throwing in another God from another culture. But Dawkins nonetheless repeatedly says the term "religion".

This is a problem much deeper than semantics, though. Dawkins has irresponsibly coupled dozens of aspects of religious and spiritual inquiry, including myths, faith, spirituality, organizations and institutions of religion, dogma, laws, etc. Religion is not a monolith: There are dozens of facets, some not so good and some quite good.

Dawkins reminds me of the anti-science postmodern crowd. For these people, science's failures, its creation of the nuclear bomb, make it completely destructive whereas its successes, say the theory of relativity, are irrelevant. The entire project begins with the notion that we should deliberately throw the baby out with the bathwater and hope a new baby springs to life when we run the tap again. The answer to Dawkins is the same answer given by scientists to postmodernists: Get rid of the bad and keep the good, because the bad is not intrinsic to the structure.

Has religion done destructive things? Yes, depending on how you define your terms; so has science. Have religious people been dogmatic, been jerks and warmongers? Yes; same for atheists, science, people with political or economic dogmas, people named Jeff and Bob and Nancy, and indeed pretty much every person alive at some point in their life. But what these thinkers are never able to do is make the argument that would say that there is no context, no proper deployment, for spiritual thought, precisely because the argument would be both offensive and stupid. If spiritual feeling is kept within its sphere of inquiry, it can be the source of brilliant and wonderful passion, philosophy, ethics, and beliefs.

One can look into the stars and see the wonder of the universe, or into the woods and see the wonder of life, and be profoundly moved whether one sees God or not. One can embrace basic human decency, respect, tolerance, compassion and ethics whether one is religious or not. Religion can help with acquiring such moral guidance, but so can other means. The point is that the questions of faith and spirituality are ones that we should answer ourselves, and that there are an array of rational choices, not just one.

I reject militant atheism. I support people embracing their beliefs, whatever they are, and being ready to proudly discuss them. I look forward to a revival across the globe of what China succeeded at: Realizing that many spiritual ways are all in fact on one path, trying to resolve core questions about who we are, what makes us happy and what is out there. Across the millenia, if we commit to a society of discussion, might we find that all of the spiritual thought we had was deeply inadequate? Absolutely, as with science, philosophy and any other worthwhile sphere. Will atheists have a part to play in our journey? Yes. Atheism is the null hypothesis. It answers the spiritual question by saying "Nothing on the table is valid". If we can't explore the null hypothesis, we cannot fully explore the question. Atheists act as skeptics, as people who will help to buoy our wildest notions and anchor our philosophies. In the end, I hope we will collaboratively as a human species find a spiritual truth that resonates as brilliantly and logically as any other essential philosophy we have discovered.

9/11: Shifting Blood

2008-03-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

Reviewing South Park's take on the 9/11 truth movement ("The Mystery of the Urinal Deuce"), a classic bit of satire, I began thinking to myself about the 9/11 truth movement. I was wondering, as I often do, what common ground progressive and radical people could have with these folks. And I began to realize: Neither story of what happened that day, the conventional explanation of a cell connected to the bin Laden-oriented movement or the various 9/11 truth hypotheses about sleeper cells or the US government having advanced warning and allowing the planes to hit or bombs being planted in the basement or missiles being fired at the Pentagon or any permutation, really actually changes anything. Either or both could be true and we as Americans, we as a species, would face some irrespective truths.

It wouldn't change that thousands of innocent people died for no justifiable reason, and millions more were collectively terrified of losing loved ones, saddened by death, and angered by violence. It wouldn't change that Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, and their respective systems are without question responsible for innumerable atrocities and should be brought to justice.

It wouldn't change that the US government used the atrocities of that day and sullied the memories of those who had died by launching a new cycle of hatred. It wouldn't change that the US government and its elites had a vested motive in seeing their own people die because, whoever the perpetrator, the attacks facilitated military, economic and political objectives of an extraordinary reactionary nature. It wouldn't change that we have a political system that benefits from, indeed in a twisted sense needs and feeds off of, chaos, disorder and violence.

It wouldn't change the fact that, either way, the events of that day in September are extraordinarily poorly understood given their extensive study by just about everyone in the world. And it wouldn't change the fact that this ignorance is due to the imperial system refusing to investigate what happened, blocking the 9/11 Commission and others trying to discover everything about how and why the events transpired. It wouldn't change the motive for this refusal: That a simple myth of Osama masterminding the entire enterprise on dialysis in a cave in Afghanistan is far more useful to imperial prerogatives than the truth, whatever that truth is. (Of course, if the US government were behind the attacks, it would provide an additional motive, but the one I mentioned is more than sufficient). It wouldn't change Chomsky's sobering argument that even months after the invasion Mueller and US intelligence agencies could only be "probably" sure about what precisely happened and about Afghanistan's ties. It wouldn't change the fact that funding for the enterprise supposedly came from Germany and the United Arab Emirates, nor would it change that neither of those countries were bombed (unlike Afghanistan), because that would have been insane.

It wouldn't change the fact that the attacks opened an exceedingly short window wherein the majority of the world expressed compassion for the United States, compassion that in large part stemmed from their own knowledge of what it feels like to have your buildings blown up and your people in terror. It wouldn't change the tragic reality that the Bush Administration squandered that opportunity to advance their and their true constituency's core interests at the cost of insuring that hatred and violence would become even more entrenched. It wouldn't change the alternate reality that could have been, where that sympathy for the globe was parlayed into a sea change wherein America would abandon its imperial domination of the globe and work with others to root out terrorists whereever they may be and bring them to justice, even if those terrorists are white and on cushy book tours or even American Presidents, current and former.

Osama bin Laden could have hijacked every single plane and escaped in a Cobra Commander-esque rocket pod and it still wouldn't change that he, and the mujahadeen, and Saddam, and Islam Karimov, and the Shah, and a long list of others owed their power and existence in no small part to the CIA and American imperial power. It wouldn't change that the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq were criminal idiocies that turned both countries into cauldrons of chaos, terror and death. It wouldn't change that Saddam Hussein had no connection with Osama bin Laden and no plausible connection with any serious terrorism, yet the invasion of Iraq caused an explosion of new opportunities for radical Islamic terrorism. It wouldn't change that al Qaeda as a whole is stronger now than in 2001, that Osama bin Laden has not been brought to justice, or that the State Department estimates that terrorist actions are becoming more, not less, common in the world. (And it wouldn't change that the State Department's interpretation of terrorism would never include US terror against the globe). It wouldn't change that justifiable rage at what Osama did was no justification or excuse for anything that came after, for retribution and death being visited upon Afghani civilians who had done nothing to Americans and were Osama and the Taliban's victims.

It wouldn't change the fact that all one needs to know about the bankruptcy of the system is in plain view, easy to find. It wouldn't change the fact that one can tell something about the bankruptcy of mainstream culture when it can be seriously argued that it is justified to bomb a country and turn it into a terrorist battleground because that way "we'll" fight them "there" not "here"; in short, using innocent people who have done no wrong to you as human shields so you don't have to be inconvenienced. Or that no one bothers to mention that bombing a country that has weapons of mass destruction is not especially likely to allow one to secure those weapons, but is much more likely to lead to those weapons and materials being looted and sold on the black market. It wouldn't change the fact that conservatives may end up being vindicated in a tragically ironic way when Americans are killed in a chemical weapons attack or by a dirty bomb facilitated by the capture of Iraqi material... thanks to the invasion. It wouldn't change the fact that the average American needs no more reason to resist the system than what their own eyes and ears tell them. They know how bad it is: They suffer from the poverty, the failing health care system, the myths of opulence juxtaposed against the failure of slowing growth rates, the "outsourcing", the mind-numbing work that condemns them to eight hours of servitude daily in a supposed democracy. It wouldn't change that all that is needed to foment change is not stories about US government complicity in yet another crime (as if adding a few thousand more dead really turns the government from saint to sinner compared to their millions) but a movement that can unmask both the injustices of the system and its vulnerability to courageous resistance. And, as South Park's creators Trey and Matt point out, it wouldn't change the fact that, barring hope that the system can be confronted, all the majority of the population accepting their theories would do is further amplify the belief that the system is invincible.

It wouldn't change the fact that the mainstream corporate media is structurally designed to obfuscate essential truths, to safeguard the egos and guilt of the rich that it serves, that power in our society is concentrated in a very small set of hands.

And even if the CIA planned every step of the hijackings, even if the Pentagon was struck by a missile, even if the plane sent to hit the White House was shot down, even if bombs were planted in the WTC buildings, it still wouldn't change that the 9/11 truth movement seems to cling to some disturbing myths. Like the quasi-racist notion that a group of Muslims couldn't pull this off: It had to be white people and their intelligence agencies. Or the apparent belief many of them have that America was at one point a city on a hill and only recently has it been corrupted by bad politicians. Or the lack of insight they have into the core fact that all the conspiracy theories would prove is that a small group of people did something horrible, saying very little about the whole systemic injustice the world faces. It wouldn't change that their singular and often fanatical focus is used by the mainstream media to ridicule those who resist atrocities. It wouldn't change the fact that a large portion of the population does already believe them and that there has nonetheless been no revolutionary upturn in activism, a sign of the real impact of their critique: Hopelessness and cynicism.

And what if the American government were somehow behind the attacks? Would it change the extraordinary incompetence of FEMA in New Orleans (an incompetence especially palpable to those with a better "tan"), or the inability of regulatory agencies to stop massive corporate fraudsters from ripping off even the rich the government protects, or the failure of the strongest military on the planet's surface to battle an underfunded and underarmed insurgency in Iraq? Would it change that the private insurance system the US runs by costs more per person to operate and is therefore by definition deeply inefficient?Would it change that the system as a whole is riddled not only with criminality but actual inability to perform basic tasks?

And what if the American government were not behind the attacks? Would it change their complicity in creating a climate of hate and violence that facilitates attacks like 9/11? Would it change that even Eisenhower knew that the perception of America and Americans as evil had to do with the US government's campaigns of warfare, overthrowing elected regimes, installing dictators, blocking economic growth, and securing control of other peoples' natural resources, and that he and every President after made a decision to continue this pattern even if it would harm Americans? Would it change that many of the organizations that are responsible for these atrocities were created by the CIA to punish the Russians during an invasion that Brzezinski claimed he was responsible for? Would it change that the US government should have been able to prevent the crimes of that day had they not made several crucial mistakes along the way? Would it change that the FAA should have noticed the planes making massive deviations from planned flight paths, that the FAA should have alerted trained scrambler jets, and that if they were not in on the attacks the US government's bureaucracy must then be guilty of truly colossal ineptitude? Would it change that even the CIA admitted sadly that had Clinton not been so determined to crucify the Sudanese he could have accepted data they had compiled that may have allowed arrests and investigations to be made that would have prevented 9/11? Would it change Time's allegation that, due to the government failing to actually adopt Richard Clarke's recommendations, that "many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat[?]" Would it even change the fact Michael Moore decried post-2001 that people were being allowed to bring lighters on board thanks to pressure from tobacco companies?

I suppose if the American government was behind 9/11, one might be skeptical about moves like PATRIOT and undermining the Geneva Conventions to reduce civil liberties in the hope of catching terrorists; after all, 9/11 truth activists point out, the terrorists are right here on American soil. But a conservative could accept that the US government planned 9/11 and nonetheless argue that there are real threats from abroad and that there needs to be enhanced means to deal with them. More importantly, perfectly mainstream understandings are more than adequate to respond to PATRIOT and moves to justify torture. After all, if the US government had been doing its job, it wouldn't have needed PATRIOT. It could have stopped antagonizing Arabs, or not created the mujahadeen in imperial war games, or accepted the Sudanese data, or listened to the warnings and fears of its intelligence agencies. It could have prevented the attacks years ago by making any number of different moves. Adding more plays to the playbook of a team that can't throw the ball, to use an oft-maligned sports metaphor, seems hardly the correct move. If even after the US stops behaving in ways that the Left has rightly predicted would spread hate and the desire to strike back with terror, if the US' bureaucracy is brought under control and actually does its job with the knowledge and capacities it had, if the US military stops creating enemies by invading countries and killing innocents, we still have a risk of terrorism, then perhaps we can talk about curtailing civil liberties (and not simply be rushed into doing so by fear and unaccountable political systems). And the usage of torture's mainstream success record has been providing "intelligence" that Osama was connected to Saddam Hussein and that Saddam Hussein was imminently capable of destroying the world, hardly a stellar performance. (And, of course, that "intelligence" is not only obviously wrong in hindsight, but was clearly and transparently wrong then, and the CIA knew it). After all, torture has been banned not just because we have come together to say that there are minimal standards of human decency and treatment but because torturing people causes them to tell you what you want to hear, not necessarily the truth. All PATRIOT and easing of human rights restrictions allow is the capacity of the American government to harass peace activists, innocent Muslims and Arabs, and all sorts of other groups it doesn't like.

Oh, and I almost forgot about racial profiling, which 9/11 truth movements would theoretically undermine. Of course, racial profiling is idiotic and unfair because it assumes that because of the actions of a tiny minority of any population, however disproportionate to that population, it is justified to harass the majority. It is idiotic and unfair because no one recommended looking for white skinheads after the Oklahoma City bombing. It is idiotic and unfair because it is not the case, as Bill Mahr seems to think, that al Qaeda is exclusively Arab: As anyone who pays attention knows, it can recruit Asian Indonesians, black Sudanese, and even the occasional John Walker Lindh. It is idiotic because such policies alienate precisely that group of people who need to be most communicated with: Muslim and Arab communities, who could be valuable assets in preventing terror. It is idiotic and unfair because ordinary people's ability to identify "Arabs" or "Muslims" has been severely called into question by their abusing Sikhs, who are generally neither but wear a turban and therefore match the stereotypical concept of those groups. It is idiotic because it makes people look for criteria that have an infinitesimal chance of true positives and a colossal chance of false positives, i.e. people's skin color and appearance, rather than criteria that all terrorists of all colors and ethnicities share. And, as rude as it may be to point out, it's idiotic and unfair because we will never racially profile for those who are truly responsible for massive terrorist acts: Primarily rich old white men.

Neither truth about that day would change corporate malfeasance, or ecological destruction, or the omnicidal risk of nuclear war that has not declined noticeably since the Cold War, or the major nuclear powers' undermining of non-proliferation norms and treaties, or cruise ships dumping their waste in resplendent coral reefs, or the thermostat being slowly and inexorably turned up on the world, or Bill Gates and the Walton family having more wealth than most countries, or the utter failure of market and corporate economies in providing for the majority of the world, or the criminal Israeli persecution of the Palestinians, or the elections Bush stole in 2000 and 2004. It wouldn't change that the American economy is being spent on a seemingly endless imperial war, that several thousand American soldiers died for this unjust cause, and that both the latter charges are mainstream but the million or so innocent Iraqi lives and the million or more refugees are beyond the pale to mention.

No, I'm afraid that the 9/11 truth movement's ultimate goal is even less effective than swapping deck chairs on the Titanic. It is simply reallocating blood from one set of hands, the al Qaeda network, to another, the American empire. The crucial insight is that both hands are already soaked with carnage.

I'm not saying that there's no utility in investigating the truth of what happened, nor at taking the American government to task both for its inability to actually close the books on 9/11 (i.e. figure out what happened and bring all the perpetrators and connected individuals to justice) and for its cynical usage of 9/11 to promote its own goals, damn the consequences. I'm not saying that it's impossible that the US government could have performed such a task. I'm skeptical if only because the political ramifications for being caught would make Watergate look like South Park's Closetgate. I'm also skeptical because motive alone does not prove a crime: After all, in some ways the US government benefitted from the tsunami, yet no one alleges that the US government built an earthquake machine. Questioning the government about the true meaning and implications of 9/11 in all its forms is vital. And I think that many in the 9/11 truth movement are expressing skepticism about the motives of leaders and hope that they can be brought to justice, motives that no one in the Left should lambast.

There's one more thing these critiques don't change. They don't change the courage and humanity of the global resistance to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They don't change the need, the possibility, the responsibility to replace our existing systems of death and violence with systems that promote peace, justice, tolerance, diversity, efficiency and freedom. They don't change the bankrupt nature of the nation-state, or archaic forms of authority, or capitalism, or racism, or sexism. They don't change the fact that it is possible for us to create a new world, one where all the above facts chang, hopefully even the need to be angry at institutional injustice. Because if we do our job right, all of the above will be a sad memory of a time of hate and violence long since transcended.

The Human Rights Council and Israel

2007-10-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

The United Nations Human Rights Council has come under some attack recently. The extent of the hysteria on this topic was recently revealed to me when, on a David Peterson blog post about Iran (http://blogs.zmag.org/node/3226 , the debate heats up on the bottom of the first and the whole of the second page of comments), a commenter accused the HRC and the Left of demonizing Israel (whether it was because of anti-Semitism or other motives was never quite clear). The argument is that the HRC's resolutions against nations overwhelmingly focus on Israel. I will contend this is wholly justified.

(Let's dispense immediately with any Nazi/David Duke/conspiracy theorist garbage about the tail wagging the dog, Israeli interest groups controlling everything, Jew-run media, etc. American white supremacist imperial power controls Israeli “Jewish” power, not the other way around. Period).

It is utterly absurd, by the way, to argue that this focus by the HRC suggests anything about the Left, or the mainstream European culture, or the UN. Indeed, the UNC is the exception that proves the rule. Israel has long been out of compliance with a host of international laws, ranging from the UN Charter to the Geneva Conventions. It flouts nuclear non-proliferation norms (it unfortunately can't be accused of violating the NPT because it didn't sign it). It receives unprecedented aid and support from not only the US but other Western countries. Even countries that used to be in support of an authentic peace have changed their stance in the last two decades (see the Oslo Accords). Its military occupation of the Palestinians is almost entirely dependent on Western, primarily US, arms. For all this, it has gotten slaps on the wrist, largely due to the protection the US affords it thanks to its Security Council membership. (Even Israel's entry into the UN was contingent on it doing things it never did). The one deviation from this overwhelming international silence and/or inaction has been met with a storm of condemnation, including by both Kofi Annan and Ban ki-Moon.

But what are the core arguments against this demonization position?

Firstly: The evidence for this claim is extraordinarily weak. The HRC has also launched condemnations against Sudan, Myanmar, Belarus and Cuba, among others. Yes, condemnations of Israel have been more frequent and possibly with more strident language. But the argument that people who put forward this hypothesis comes down to, “Israel gets specified more often.” That may be true. But the majority of the HRC's resolutions do not mention particular states. They have authored resolutions on issues such as the right to food, the right to access to drugs for HIV/AIDs and other diseases, torture, the use of mercenaries, etc. And while the US is guilty of either directly engaging in or funding such behavior, a number of the nations that people lambasting the HRC say deserve more criticism (such as many African nations) are guilty of these crimes as well. If one notes the nations that would be criticized by these recommendations, the anti-Israel bias becomes a non-issue.

Further, many of the nations and groups that people say deserve the HRC's criticism (Sudan, Russia, China, etc.) already get criticism. They get resolutions and efforts to send peacekeepers (which the US usually blocks or at least fails to assist). They get condemnation from human rights observers, mainstream media outlets, etc. Many are at least in principle willing to negotiate on the outstanding issues. Israel, as I will go into later, is truly unique in terms of its ability to continue to prosecute genocide (not just in the sake of extermination but in the sense that Jews after the Holocaust insisted upon: the organized destruction of people as a people)

Second: The scale of Israel's crimes deserves condemnation. It's not just the 3-to-1 death rate between Palestinians and Israelis, or the crimes of aggression Israel is guilty of against many states in the region (Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, etc.). It also includes the curfews that have wrecked 100,000 families in Gaza; the 8000 citizens deprived of water in Urabdiya and the Palestinians drinking sewage while Israelis have lawns and golf coursesl the 40% of Palestinian children born anemic, blind or deaf; the 80% of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip living below the poverty line; B'Tselem's estimate that 400 Palestinians a month in 1991 were interrogated and tortured; etc. There is extensive documentation for all of these statistics and a long list more. It is truly soul-crushing.

Third: It's not simply the scale of Israeli atrocities. It is that these crimes against humanity have continued for decades without interruption. That this dispossession of the Palestinian people has been codified by laws. That the Israelis are able to unilaterally control Palestinian tax funds if they don't like who's been elected. That the legal apparatus defending the occupation is further enhanced by Security Council members. South Africa received similar international condemnation, with the same responses from apologists: Why not focus on Russia? Or even apartheid in America? Yes, all those are relevant, but to have a member of the supposedly civilized club able to institute racist apartheid while being called a democracy and receiving extensive Western aid is a uniquely destructive crime against humanity.

So I propose a test. Let's not dismantle the HRC until their issues with Israel have been resolved to the satisfaction of Palestinians and of external observers. Let's continue to hold Israel to task until such issues as the treatment of Lebanese detainees in Israel, or the occupation of Palestine, or the statistics above have been changed and reparations made. Then, if the demonization of Israel continues by anybody, we can fairly allege that anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head and consign such organizations to the dustbin of history.

"Interventionism?"

2007-09-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

While reading Howard Zinn's perennial People's History of the United States, I was considering a thought about language as it pertains to politics with a perennial debate: The isolationism vs. interventionism debate (always closely tied with the appeasement debate as it pertains to World War II).

Isolationism is almost always talked about in the context of two wars: World War I and World War II. But it does intellectual injustice to the notion of non-involvement to use those as examples. The American economy was practically dependent exclusively on the shipments of war material to the Allies in World War I. (Not to mention that the US, by then with a pretty substantial sphere of influence in Latin America, was hardly interventionist: That's what the isolationists of the time, including some amazingly moral business leaders forming the Anti-Imperialist League, pointed out. Oh, if only business nowadays could approach those heights...) And in World War II, America backed the fascists then found all sorts of clandestine ways to assist the Allies when the fascists turned sour. After the war, they continued to back the fascists (though by then the Cold War was beginning in its infancy and thus America could hardly be considered isolationist anymore). That doesn't fit any definition of isolationism I can think of.

The same thing applies to appeasement, of course. Did America and the European powers really appease Nazi Germany because of fear or some other motive conservatives impute to them? Or was it simply because the victims of the Nazis weren't important enough to merit challenging the right of imperial states, not to mention someone who was very good at fighting off the Commies? Obviously the question is a difficult one to ascertain (there's probably elements of all of the theories involved, though of course I lean substantially to the latter hypothesis), but insofar as the answer was that the West simply could care less, "appeasement" is the wrong way of thinking.

This, of course, bears on Kelvin's point to some degree, but I think it illustrates a difficulty [Kelvin's initial article can be found here: http://blogs.zmag.org/node/3220#comment-62980]. Is the problem that the words "isolationism" and "appeasement" are inherently tainted? Maybe, but it doesn't seem so: While the exact definition may vary according to power preferences, the terms seem to be coherent enough. "Isolationism" pertains to the theory that America should be uninvolved insofar as possible with global affairs, while "appeasement" pertains to the attempt to "buy off" dictators with treaties and other means. What is the problem is the context: The mistaken belief that America is just too kind, too naive, and needs to buckle down and be prepared to deal harshly with the unwashed of the world who have yet to have reached our pinnacle of achievement and prosperity. Myths about World War I, II, American empire, the efficacy and justness of military force, etc. all are involved. But they don't bear on the language, though I guess Kelvin's point about "consumer tropes" would be fair enough: They bear on the context that the language is deployed in and the connotations of the words themselves and the context. That means that we have to go beyond deconstructing language. We have to present alternative contexts, alternative ways of thinking, which is a completely anti-postmodernist way of thinking. (Kelvin cites pomo, and while I don't think he matches with the priests of that bizarre little segment of academia, there has nonetheless been a bit too much of the bathwater taken).

Now, I tend to think the term "isolationism" in particular is just the wrong way of thinking about the problem. I think all nations' authority, including ours, should be subordinated in relevant areas and jurisdictions to a global system of governance, which is the first step in constructing a post-statist society that can be authentically free and equal. I think America has so much to do in context of this global arrangement to repair more than a century of privations and atrocities. I think that cultural exchanges, immigrations and emigrations, etc. are overwhelmingly positive. And so on. But I have to give some kudos to the Pat Buchanan type, or to the business and elite leaders so long ago, who seem to at least recognize that empire is wrong.

To put it succinctly: If the choice is between playing in our own sandbox and beating up other kids in theirs', the obvious choice, the only moral choice, is to confine oneself to the playground. It's up to Americans to determine if a third alternative is possible.

"I Love My Job"

2006-12-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

Recently I had to sit through a training session on a certain supermarket's secret shopper program. As you all know, during the hiring process for many companies there is a period where the many benefits of the company are hyped, its superiority to competitors is extolled, and an attitude of blind subservience and corporate jingoism is instilled. (This isn't to say managers are bad people or anything of the kind, to be clear.) The particular mouthpiece for the company in question described how she was once a bagger (or "Courtesy Clerk") and has now ascended the rungs of the company. She then said, "I love my job."

Of course, my political mind is always operating, and I was wondering how I could rebut this presumption on her part. I don't know her; might she enjoy her job?

Absolutely. After all, being in a managerial echelon, she had some degree of self-management and control. And even if she had been a menial worker at the bottom of the totem pole, one can always find individuals in a society who, for whatever reason, collaborate with oppression or at least tolerate it enough to lie to themselves that they "love" the roles that they play. But comments she made indicated a lot of what lay even under her attitude.

For one, she mentioned that it's not "worth it" to lose a job over theft. While this is somewhat ambiguous, it seemed to me that this indicated that, like everyone else, she viewed a job as an economic asset, not a treasured personal one. She surely did not speak about her labor the same way she spoke about her children. She went on to further imply this by saying that, were she to lose her job over a commodity, it would be a "$900,000 car" or something very valuable. It's pretty clear that she views her job in economic, not personal, terms.

Just ask yourself for one moment: Imagine any of those people you have heard who say they love their job. Now, first, ask how many of them were janitors, fry cooks or even bottom-of-the-corporate-ladder programmers. Then ask what I think is the most important question: If they won the lottery tomorrow, winning, say, $30 million after taxes (just to give them enough that they really wouldn't need to work ever and could survive on $200,000 a year for 50 years with $20 million left), would they come into work? Any kind of work?

I can think of virtually no person who would do so. A possible exception would be the Professors at my university. People animated by passion in a generally much freer environment who can define their own work conditions, despite working very hard.

The point? Until we replace our economic system, most people won't love, or even like, their job. They will loathe it, no matter how large their insincere smile.

The Best Case is That... We're Cowards?

2006-11-01T17:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, my blog has seen virtually no action for some months; this will hopefully change as of now.

There has been an argument, famously lampooned on the absolutely genius Colbert Report, that in essence says, "Fight the terrorists there, not here", regarding Iraq.

Now, this argument should be laughed out of any serious person's mind and consideration. It is a sign of total desperation, an absolute smokescreen. First of all, the argument takes advantage of the coincidence (and that is what it is) that there have been no mainland terror attacks post-9/11 (aside from the anthrax scare, Reid, etc.) Why can we be certain it is a coincidence? Because terror cells don't attack on a set timetable of any kind. Consider the most famous al Qaeda actions of the 90s: Participating in the war in Bosnia on America's request, the USS Cole and the first WTC attack. Only one occured on American soil during Clinton's entire presidency, and it was a failure in a way 9/11 wasn't. How this history proves that Bush is fighting terrorism is beyond me. Yes, no attacks have been made on the United States; instead, al Qaeda is seemingly with impunity attacking European nations writ large, including Spain and Britain (assuming the British subway bombing was AQ-involved). In fact, terrorist attacks have increased during the Bush presidency across the world. (By the way, that conclusion was reached by a no less august authority than the State Department, which would be just SLIGHTLY friendly to Bush: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042802181_pf.html ) In fact, during 2005, attacks increased fourfold.

The assumption of the "Fight them there, not here" argument is a few-fold: First of all, that we're actually "fighting them" ; second, that al Qaeda is the only Muslim or Arab terrorist organization that could ever exist and that its membership can never grow or alternately is growing; and, third, that this strategy has somehow increased security for the world or America. But all assumptions are stupid and uncontroversially so.

The first is very clear: While some high-profile al Qaeda members have been captured, Osama bin Laden is famously at large, and in terms of actually undermining any real capacity of al Qaeda to prosecute attacks, the Bush administration has done virtually nothing. To be fair, it is very hard to bomb a loosely-tied affinity network that ranges from Indonesia and the Sudan to the entirety of the Middle East into submission... only that's exactly what the left and liberals have been saying to no rebuttal for six years. The way to deal with non-state criminals is police work. The few states who we are confident have actually been funding or have had funders in their borders, such as Germany, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have obviously not been victims of US bombing, and with the exception of Germany have been attempting to be allies in the US war on terror. Remember: al Qaeda is an American-created phenomenon, and its funding, membership and training come from a shadowy set of institutions that are all US-created or attuned and backed.

The second is even less controversial. New and old organizations aside from al Qaeda are being formed or exist, such as Hezbollah, which has been scarcely harmed whatsoever (in fact helped) by the war in Iraq and the Israeli bombing campaigns. Recruiting by radical Islamist organizations has skyrocketed since the Iraq war, and radical Islamist groups are very clearly saying that the war in Iraq has been a boon to them. Indeed, the best way to think of the conflict is a cycle of reinforcing barbarisms, to borrow another left writer's brilliant phrase. Every al Qaeda attack causes Americans to back even more reactionary candidates, who in turn prove al Qaeda's statements about American policies and people right through violence and strutting and thereby increase the power of al Qaeda and similar groups. It's a cycle of violence where only the crazies win. So while some are indeed fighting the "infidels" in Iraq, and thereby costing American taxpayers money, American soldiers their life and sanity, and military families their sons, daughters, husbands and wives, others are using the new level of recruitment

Remember: There never was a suicide bombing in Iraq before the US invasion. Whatever the terrorist status of Iraq (pretty obviously none, since the groups like Ansar al Islam that the US argued were terrorist links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were actually in US-controlled regions and had no substantial connections to AQ anyways) before the invasion, it is obvious to any reasonable observer that its status has become much more dangerous.

The lynchpin of the argument is that, since terrorist activity has gone up in Iraq, it must have gone down everywhere else. This assumes a constant of terrorism. Actually, the Bush administration has increased terrorism EVERYWHERE, giving them a new arena to fight in in addition to (not at the exclusion of) the old.

And the third is also clear: North Korea has possibly tested a nuclear weapon, Iran is becoming more dangerous, and proliferation and terrorist threats to everyone have increased. There is no single provable improvement in American security since the war in Iraq and several obviously harms.

All of the above was just because I can't resist debating stupid arguments ad nauseum. Luckily, it's a ploy that American voters aren't buying, precisely because it is so transparently laughable. But there is something very disturbing (though funny in a very dark way) about the argument's logic.

What it says is that we are willing to sacrifice at least 30,000 lives (by Dear Leader Bush's admission) and more likely 400,000 to 800,000 lives (see the new John Hopkins/Lancet report), invade a sovereign country and depose its leader in violation of basic tenets of international law, all to turn their innocent people who have never (regardless of the crimes of Saddam Hussein) done anything to Americans, Europeans or indeed much of anybody into flypaper so that they, their loved ones, and our soldiers can die, all so our comfortable lives on our "city on the hill" need not be confronted or disrupted.

What the Republican Party is loudly saying, hoping people don't hear it, is that Americans are craven cowards who, far from saving another people or liberating them, are in fact using them as human shields. Their own argument, said in smarmy and self-righteous tones, proves only their utter inability (or unwillingness) to question their racist, classist privilege. They hope that American voters will not understand this, and further will not notice this position's utter incompatibility with the notion that we are liberators (a claim that itself requires a full blog post to summarily dismiss) fighting out of sheer generosity and not out of lurid oil desires and geopolitical considerations. Now consider just for a second how antagonistic to authority our "liberal media" must be: Which talking head have you seen utter this elementary point of logic derived from the Republican's very own arguments? Has Alan Colmes or Bill Mahr confronted their Republican opponents? Have you seen any of our vigilant Democratic Senators do so?

If Americans vote in Republicans in 2006, they will be proving to the world that they are indeed the type of cowards who would use others as proxies for their own security, or at least the type of fools who can't call their ruling party on such backhanded compliments. Obviously voting Democratic won't prove to the world that America has had a change of heart, nor will it accomplish anything of real value in the long run. But it will be a marginal improvement.

Contradictions On Exposition Round CXI

2006-02-22T14:18:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have heard about Kofi Annan and others' comments on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Now, given the confirmed pictures not to mention the numerous outside observers and other testimonies that there was torture and violence, the response of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show is quite apt (a paraphrase): "Oh, so you only tortured BEFORE? Those pictures of degradation are old news?" This from the same people talking about Saddam's treatment of the Kurds and telling lurid tales of rape rooms.

The contradictions only get more ironic. You see, the response of McClellan and Rumsfeld has to Kofi Annan has been, "They haven't even been to Guantanamo!" And crime scene investigators are sometimes not and George W. Bush was not at the area of the crimes that they speak confidently about. Moreover, the reason why this is not the case is because the US put roadblocks in the way of such investigations, including not allowing UN or other investigators to speak to prisoners. The reason? "They've been trained to lie." Clearly unlike administration officials or CIA agents. Of course, with actual people (not the Arab or terrorist subhumans), the accused have rights and all relevant witnesses must be asked. Since these prisoners presumably would have allegations, and if they are perjuring themselves that must be proven since they have a presumption of innoence, this response indicates nothing but a contempt for human and Constitutional rights. To use a common conservative mantra: Why be scared if you have nothing to hide? (Whatever responses these neo-cons use, such as the possibility of an unfair trial in the literal sense or in the court of public opinion, are wholly fair to throw back at them in the domains they offer the above excuse.)

And, the final point of irony I will note: While these war criminals may mistrust the testimony of these prisoners when it besmirches "America" (read: the reputation, already stained, of the imperial machine), they have no difficulty using such testimony to provide a justification for an illegal and immoral colonialist war.

Socialism: Dream or Institution?

2006-02-15T17:50:00.000-08:00

I have been questioning the meaning and value of the word "socialist" and "socialism". There are roughly two outlooks that the Left generally holds. The first is held not only by Marxists but also anarchists like Noam Chomsky, while the second is held by other anarchists (a primary example would be Michael Albert).

The first is that socialism is a good dream which has been conjured for evil causes. This view describes socialism through the dreams of all the revolutionaries who have been inspired by it, talking about worker's control of the means of production, the end to capitalism (or, at least in the early days, its reform and humanization), and the sharing of the resources of society to benefit and enrich all. I am sympathetic tot his view because of the extensive history of the term, because of the acceptance of it in the majority of the world, and because I don't feel I should have to back down from a term because capitalists or tyrants have sullied it through propaganda. If the Left backs down from every such word, they will have given the field to the powerful. These men for institutions often point to the soviets or parecon or libertarian municipalism as socialist institutions.

However, the second points out that there is something disingenuous to the way that each generation of the Left attempts to recapture the term while describing concretely quite distinct institutions. Further, most socialist parties that come to any kind of power advocate market or central planned socialism (whether democratic or totalitarian). While it is true that most socialist advocates reject what happened in the USSR, indeed calling the collapse of the USSR a victory for socialism, there is also something disingenuous about dismissing the ideology of it too quickly as not socialist. Those men could spout Marxism and offer paeans to freedom just as well as anyone else, and Lenin had some quite libertarian writings. Whether it was something unique about Russian culture, or the influence of the state, or what have you, something went wrong... or did it? That may not be the most authentic formulation. It may have been that Marxism or Leninism or socialist institutions propelled the USSR by design. Further, when someone says "socialism", whether in Europe or America, what is implied (aside from connotations, whether negative or positive) is what happens in Europe: good to be sure, but not remotely the ideal a serious libertarian socialist or anarchist would commit to. Even completely non-capitalist market socialism is not my goal. Even the word, "socialism", implies a social focus rather than a libertarian or individualist focus.

So I'll open this up to whatever viewers I have. What would you argue is socialism? What comes to mind when you hear it? Should parecon advocates or advocates of other alternative economies call themselves socialists or not?

Communication? That Was My Major!

2006-02-14T19:53:00.000-08:00

Communication seems so natural if unexamined. One uses the best words one can find to express what one is feeling. Of course, virtually everybody knows that this is a simplification at best: misunderstanding, confusion, limits of vocabulary, preconception and all sorts of other barriers are an everyday occurrence. What is not so clear is the remarkable degree to which culture (as well as polity, economy and gender) impact communication, negatively if interlocutors do not pay sufficient attention. Everything from eye contact to hand gestures to conversational pace and perception of interruption varies according to cultural distinctions (Blauner 2004, 144-146). Because of this fact, attention to such variation is vital for any discussion group, especially one occurring within multicultural societies.
The first, and relatively surmountable, difficulty with intercultural communication is the semantic difficulty. Language is fundamentally arbitrary: There is no objective problem with calling a dog “a cat”. What different individuals mean by the same term can be quite distinct. One of the ways that these terms become variegated is across cultural lines. For example: In my experience, what radicals or many black commentators mean by the word “racism” are any forms or practices, especially institutional ones, that have the effect of privileging or benefitting one group or another, whereas most liberals, conservatives or white commentators typically believe it means concrete prejudice (the classic “racist effect v. intent” debate; incidentally, I am not alone in this position: Bob Blauner describes precisely this phenomenon in “Talking Past Each Other” and Tim Wise does as well in “White Like Me”.1) In a discussion about racism in a multicultural classroom, a whole conversation could be sidetracked by whether or not a practice should be called “racism” rather than discussing the content of the practice. This is relatively surmountable if the atmosphere in the discussion is at all informative and if the instructor is sufficiently attentive to the distinction between semantic and substantive argument. Obviously there may be difficulties if literally different languages are being employed, but those are relatively trivial cases and can be surmounted by a facilitator with tact and grace.
Next, distinct cultures provide differences of substance in belief and opinion. For example, even two very closely aligned individuals (i.e. a black or Aboriginal feminist and a white feminist) may end up having drastically different tactical judgments and indeed understandings about the nature of oppression owing to distinct cultural backgrounds (Lake 2001, 7).

This may also manifest itself as silence. For example, Native American interlocutors may be hesitant to describe their unique cultural practices because of fear of being dismissed as primitive or silly (Robinson and James 2003, 81). Unfortunately, silence cannot be enumerated or responded to.

Further, the very way that people discuss will be altered by culture. A Greek participant in a forum may view impassioned argument as a sign of respect or flattery, while a Asian participant might view this as problematic and prefer to change the subject (Bucher 2004, 155). People from different cultures will vary in the way they perceive issues to be resolved or discussed.
And the very perception of the existence and nature of institutions and authorities will alter across cultural, political, etc. lines. Someone from an activist culture or childhood will be more likely to view authority as an adversary or at best something to be tolerated than someone raised in a military environment.

In each of the above cases, various prejudices and preconceptions interfere with the resolution of the barrier. Someone with sufficient prejudice may refuse to alter one's terminology or explain themselves, or respond with a kneejerk to a position that is viewed as offensive without questioning if there is simply a terminological quibble at stake. The fear of prejudice may cause silence, and challenging of substantive differences may be viewed as an attack upon one's person. Misunderstanding of anothers' relationship or understanding of institutions or authority figures and their perception of the proper way to discuss may artificially abort discussion or cause unnecessary conflict.

As I argued in a discussion group [and on this blog], our culture is one wherein serious discussion with attention to logic and relentless questioning of stated positions, in other words with the prerequisite for any authentic comparison of ideas, is abandoned in a majority of cases by a metaphorical rush to the state, to repressive mechanisms that allow one to win. The solution that most multicultural advocates end up proposing as an alternative is a strategy often described as “dialogue versus debate”: Everyone has an opinion; ergo, one should treat each opinion as inviolable, and discussion is largely based on opinions proferred in some kind of relevant order. I view this as people retreating into hermetic containers only sticking their head out to look for crossfire. This is superior to angry and acrid argument, but that is a “lesser of two evils” position. The alternative? Respectful and attentive debate, with no disruptive interruptions, with ideas being proposed, discussed, compared and rebutted, with warrants and evidence insofar as is available and people being asked to provide reasons for conclusions and premises. This strategy has any number of subsets, but it resolves the above difficulties by providing a mechanism that is only as limited as the available logic and evidence. The cause of truth and learning is served by such comparison because even ideas brought up that end up being rejected served a purpose in causing thought and, if the logic was sufficiently rigorous, being eliminated thus eliminating an unsatisfactory idea and thus establishing more worthwhile discussions.

It may be worthwhile to notice the various roles that people play in such a well-regulated discussion. The first is the Debater. The Debater is actually adopting a position, whether she believe its or not, for a prolonged period of time, arguing from that perspective and defending it from rebuttals. The Debater can be affirmative and/or negative: that is, they may argue to defend a particular concrete position or proposal, argue to undermine another such position or proposal, or do both. The Debater is typically the centerpiece of this strategy: whatever the agreed upon topic being discussed in a group is, she provides the meat. Everyone in a group may be a Debater, but this is unlikely. To keep track of the distinct positions and rebuttals offered by seven other speakers is a task likely only on an Internet forum and even then with substantial investment of time. Typically, the people with established or passionate opinions and experience in the area in question will be these voices.

But they are not the only possible role, and indeed the best conversations will include more. Another vital role that should be played, at the very least by the facilitator or group leader, is the Devil's Advocate. This classic position is to argue for a moment from a different perspective or with different reasoning than one would normally agree with or utilize, so as to make sure that an obvious position is heard and that those arguing a different position have taken it into account. There are a few caveats. The devil's advocate should announce that they are function as a devil's advocate. They should do so sparingly, as the risk of the Devil's Advocate is that unimportant, irrelevant or unenlightening positions may be advocated without an appropriate check. And, while this is difficult to detect, some may use the pretense of being a Devil's Advocate as a way to express what they actually believe or perhaps a slightly more extreme variant of what they believe. Unfortunately, this has the risk of devolving into immature discussions or simple controversy or offensive statements for their own sakes (what in Internet parlance would be called “trolling”). When this is occurring, it may be because the forum is not sufficiently open to dissident or alternative viewpoints.

Two more roles individuals play are the Commentator and the Questioner, very closely related. During the course of discussions, topics will come up that some may not have extensive argumentation to provide for but that do beg questions or invite comments. These participation types should be encouraged almost without limit as they are very brief, vary the pace of the discussion, and can be quite insightful and valuable. However, if the questions or comments are excessively rhetorical or confrontational, they should be aborted.

And, of course, no one should be afraid to provide their own personal opinions, experiences, outlooks and philosophies, to whatever degree and in whatever depth they wish to. If they are personal experiences, they should not be denied, though it is fair for someone to question the relevance of the experience (respectfully), and if someone flags that they wish to not have an opinion challenged, it should be only responded to generally or used as a springboard rather than an argument. My model does not exclude opinions being presented and then not challenged or at least not challenged directly. Another thing to note is that value claims can not be demonstrated to be “wrong” per se, and since it is quite likely that people will come to the table with rather distinct value sets and estimations of the worth of various entities, the majority of the time if the remaining debate is upon distinct values the debate should be jogged along, as those debates are not likely to end in resolution.

The facilitator or discussion leader's job in such a system is complex. If the debate and discussion does not represent a sufficient cross-section of viewpoints, she should broaden the debate and discuss new viewpoints, hopefully proposing readings. She must make sure that there are sufficient pauses, prompts and opportunities to allow everyone a sufficient chance to chip in, especially if the grade in a discussion section is linked to participation. Part of this includes enforcing a reasonable limit on discussion time (most of the time this shouldn't be necessary, but if it becomes a problem comment “tickets” can be used, or perhaps a timer or hourglass circulated around the class), including cutting off someone who has spoken for some time or who is rambling. This may mean stopping the thought process of someone who thinks vocally, but unfortunately time is limited; however, if possible, the person should be allowed to continue if it makes sufficient sense. In line with this, the facilitator should be prepared to allow substantial backtracking to make sure people who had a thought can bring it up. When an argument is developing in ways not likely to be productive or conducive, they should be prepared to gently shove the discussion a different direction. If factual difficulties are encountered, the ideal situation would be for the facilitator or the relevant participants to do some research and circulate it through group e-mail. And the pace of argumentation and discussion must be controlled.

We have an obligation to tolerance. But we also have an obligation to truth. The way to resolve these values is to not simply incorporate and tolerate more viewpoints, not to simply look for and applaud what is good, but also to identify and discuss what is bad, to test and compare viewpoints. It is the only way to truly respect and tolerate others, to move past simple multicultural tolerance to polycultural interaction and exchange.

1. Blauner, Bob. “Talking Past Each Other.”

I'm On Top Of The World! (Now Can I Get Off?)

2006-02-14T05:42:00.000-08:00

We all like to think that our position is due only to our own skill, our own ability, and yet we know that cannot possibly true. Regardless of our political opinion, it is simply a point of logic that without a great social system that created roads, educational facilities, and in general the whole economic and social thrust of society, we would be as nothing. Clearly those in other societies had at least as much merit and skill as us, yet throughout history living standards have obviously changed. The reasonable question is not, “Is success socially defined?”, but rather “Is this social definition based in justice?” To be intellectually honest, I should put my own life under examination and see how much justice was involved.

My parents were both white professionals with college degrees. But privilege is not a simple thing. For the first eight years of my life, my mother was a homemaker and my father a small and somewhat lazy businessman, both involved with a spiritual community. Yet my parents could still turn to their parents, who had homes and saved income, if they truly needed help, and I never went to school hungry or couldn't get a toy I really wanted. Moreover, when my father, after probably a decade of barely working, was able to parley his connections and MIT Math diploma to almost immediately get cushy management jobs in programming firms and become upper-middle class, while my mother became a rather successful translator able to work less than forty hours a week and continue taking care of the house and providing for my needs, it implicated me in privilege no matter my preference. Privilege is more than a high salary; it is connections, resources, educations, acculturations, and accesses that can surpass and even replace a high salary. Why wasn't a black candidate who had actual recent work experience hired over my father? Not least because there weren't many out there thanks to educational inequity, but that can't explain everything. Rather, that even those qualified black candidates had not made good with the bosses in the past (owing to not attending elite colleges or not having rich and well-connected parents), so their work experience was almost irrelevant. Even my parents' relatively hardtack beginnings were nothing compared to the reality of the truly poor in this country.

Early on, teachers recognized that I had a certain degree of talent and intelligence that put me into the “gifted” track, the position in the educational hierarchy involving extracurricular activities, spelling bees, honors and AP classes, debate clubs. Though my community was white enough as it was, in retrospect the honor track was even more white than usual. Even Northwestern University recognizes this fact; this is why they have pioneered an approach wherein they look at the context of the student's life, including economic and educational opportunity, in order to evaluate the “objective” indices of GPA, SATs and AP scores. It should be elementary that a student who went to a school without AP or honors courses should have their grades looked at differently. Yet few colleges have the resources or ability to perform such analysis with each application. Inaction sustains the system just as much as action: like the Red Queen's Race, one has to run as fast as one can to stay in the same place.

And what of my friends in high school? Those jocks, geeks, preps and emo kids who all spent their weekends drowning their sorrows with liquor and weed? Did any of them face consequences for illegal activity? Or rather was it, as I remember from a football meeting (long story short: I was in Football PE but not on the team), covered up and “forgiven” on the rare occasions it was even detected? Did anyone go to prison when the cops finally busted parties that had over a hundred people attending, including Sacramento gang members? Yet those excuses and those courtesies, while wholly proper (indeed, drugs should be legalized), are only extended to the whiter and richer among us. When Rush Limbaugh (who even admitted that “[T]oo many whites are getting away with drug use”) was caught abusing Vicodin and Oxycontin, he went to a rehab center, almost a health spa, not federal prison1. This anecdotal piece of evidence generalizes. As the Sentencing Project reports (“Crack Cocaine Sentencing: A Racist Policy?”), “The 100:1 quantity ratio in cocaine sentencing causes low-level crack offenders to receive arbitrarily severe sentences compared to high level powder cocaine offenders. The quantity distinction has also resulted in a massive sentencing disparity by race, with African Americans receiving longer sentences than the mostly white and Hispanic powder cocaine offenders.” And it's not just crime where white offenders consistently get their excuses listened to and their habits made unproblematic by institutional fiat. Gregory Squires' piece, “The Policy of Prejudice”, establishes that, “mystery shoppers' [were matched] in terms of the structure and value of their homes, their incomes and occupations, and other socioeconomic factors. The only difference was the racial composition of the neighborhoods.. when testers from white areas called to inquire about the availability of insurance agents generally attempted to sell them a policy. But when callers from minority areas inquired... [agents] discouraged the callers from pursuing a policy with them.” (147-148).

And what about my male privilege? I can't isolate many concrete incidences when being male helped me, but that is just as much the problem as anything else. As Steven Lukes argues in his three-dimensional model (Power: A Radical View, page 366 in the reader), “...the bias of the system can be mobilized, recreated and reinforced in ways that are neither consciously chosen nor are the intended result of particular individuals' choices.” How many times did I stand idly by when a sexist joke was made? When a female companion of mine was made uncomfortable but pretended to be “fine with it” precisely because of the consequences of not being fine with it? Recently, friends of mine created a “point system” as an incentive for them (quite geeky friends, to be fair) to engage with women. The “point system” did not offer incentives for what men call “playing” (and what with women we call “sluttiness”, owing to differential sex roles, often called “The Madonna and the Whore” in the literature), but it still had not occurred to most of them how disturbing many might find it that women were being reduced to “points”. My debate partner in high school was a Latino girl one year younger than me, and I can't imagine how many times I must have tried to force a submissive relationship, especially in the male, white and rich-dominated world of competitive high school debate (luckily, if nothing else, she was a spirited woman, and would not take that crap). And recently, after having read “You Just Don't Understand” by Deborah Tannen, I had come to realize that the way I had perceived my mother as supposedly interrupting me was created by gender, race, and geographical reality, and in fact she had just wanted to assist or to handle other topics (though admittedly she still did try to change the conversation a lot). To quote, “Women and men feel interrupted by each other because of the differences in what they are trying to accomplish with talk... Nothing is more disappointing in a close relationship than being accused of bad intentions when you know your intentions were good, especially by someone you love... And a left jab meant in the spirit of sparring can become a knockout if your opponent's fists are not raised to fight...” (122). More subtly, Arlie Hochschild in “The Second Shift” describes the phenomenon wherein women (women like my mother or any wife or girlfriend I might potentially meet and become involved with) work just as hard (incidentally typically still making less, as they are not perceived to be the primary breadwinners) during the day and then work an additional eight hours a day spread out among the week, typically meaning late nights, early mornings or weekends. That means that any woman I live with is highly likely to be more stressed and poorer than I am, a major advantage. Yet is it an advantage I really want? Is it worth it to have someone in your house who is too tired to do anything? The institution makes that choice for me, the cost of privilege.

Arguably, all this is nothing compared to American privilege, or imperial privilege, or the substantial advantages that come from living in the most economically and militarily powerful First World nation. Walton's chapter on The World System describes the history of European colonial plunder and economic control, then goes onto point out that, “The new stage is no more favorable to the underdeveloped nations of the periphery than the last two. On the contrary... they may be less obliging in particular ones.” And make no mistake, these systems of class, race, empire and gender are united. Anton Foek offers a poignant example in “Sweatshop Barbie”: “I cannot help thinking of Cindy Jackson... who has had 19 cosmetic-surgery operations to make herself look like Barbie – at a cost of some $165,000. I wonder what Jackson would say if she could see these sick and dying women and know how brutally they have been exploited in order to make dolls for First World children. Pramitwa, Sunanta and Metha have never heard of Cindy Jackson, but my guess is that they are glad not to be in her shoes.” The terms of trade are increasingly being rigged for the already powerful. Going to a relatively elite university like UC Davis virtually insures contacts, expertise, social standing and a perception of skill and ability that guarantees ostensible success. And once I'm in that position of success, I am quite likely to not only see my class grow richer and stronger, but also not be knocked out of that class. Robert Reich describes the well-known statistics that describe enhanced global inequity: The poorest fifth of American families became 8% poorer and the richest fifth became 13% richer, and this inequity generalized across the world, both inbetween and internal to nations. Reich makes clear that this problem is structural: “The conservative tide... certainly has many causes, but the fundamental change in our economy should not be discounted... It is now possible for the fortunate fifth to sell their expertise directly in the global market, and thus maintain and enhance their standard of living, even as that of other Americans declines.” And this has also manifested as a lack of social mobility as well.

Now, I am admittedly not always a recipient or beneficiary of privilege. My parents were once poor, and still are not in the highest echelons of society. Being involved in the activism I have been doing has led to death threats (but not actual assault or death), punitive responses from school officials (though not the same degree as “problem students”, disproportionately poor or black), and have been misquoted and misunderstood by journalists and people who can only hear limited parts of my arguments because of the script of the society.

But even my lefty principles and action implicate me in systems of privilege. I'm not just talking about how movement leadership tends to skew upwards in terms of class and race, as Lipsky in “Protest as Political Resources” indicts. Rather, that if I express opinions, my opinions are not taken to be emblematic of a group as such, a privilege not afforded to blacker individuals; when I do express my opinions, it is likely they will get a far more attentive audience than the same opinions expressed by those less privileged; and expressing my opinions is not likely to actually end up harming me. Consider Dave Chappelle's comment in his stand-up Showtime special, “For What It's Worth”: “I almost protested the war [in Iraq] to begin with, almost. Until I saw what happened to those Dixie chicks. I said, 'Fuck that'. If they'll do that to three white women, they'll tear my black ass to pieces.” Of course, Lipsky's comments are quite relevant, particularly about the skewing upwards of protest organizers.

And do I have to be involved in activism? Is it a matter of survival for me? Not especially. Actually, the things that I propose, like tax equalization across school districts, progressive taxation, full employment, etc. are likely to harm me. If I quit, or “sell out”, does anyone besides a small and insular group care? Indeed, doing so might give me more opportunities, as I join the ranks of David Horowitz and other former lefties who “saw the light” and get book deals and conservative think tank funding. Further, what makes me, and all those other rich and/or white leftists out there, think that success is possible or necessary? Why should I have to convince someone that doing the right thing might have good consequences? Shouldn't they do it anyways? Leftists despaired when the Iraq war was declared despite incredible resistance. This was ignoring that any protest before a war began was historically unprecedented, let alone principled international opposition. But hadn't the Iraqis fought for their rights for decades, and blacks against segregation and slavery for centuries? What made us think that a few years camping on college lawns and shaking some signs would stop a war machine of that magnitude with that degree of social backing? In short: The famous propensity of the Left to conceptually snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is also implicated in classist and racist biases, that the notion that we can fix anything we see is an illusion that only those who have had relatively easy lives can maintain.

I even have the option to use a different language to speak about race (or class or gender or empire or...). As Blauner indicates in “Talking Past Each Other”, whites often speak about race and racism as a problem that occurs when overtly racist people behave in a particular way, that “Whites saw racism largely as a thing of the past. They defined it in terms of segregation and lynching, explicit white supremacist beliefs, or double standards in hiring, promotion, and admissions to college or other institutions”, as contrasted with the black language of racism as a combination of history, governmental and economic policies, and acculturation practices.. Now it is quite true that whites often hold illusions about even those things, but the point is that blacks could understand, indeed had to understand, the complex interplay of forces that create “institutional racism”, whereas a white man or woman could afford to live in ignorance, as it might never affect them.

Had even a bit about my class, or race, or gender been different, my life would have been radically different, and likely for the worse. Had I been in a black neighborhood, chances would be much higher that I would be going to a poor or underfunded school even if my parents were well-off, like one of those schools Kozol describes in “Savage Inequalities”; and even if I went to a rich school, I would likely be tracked into remedial or non-honors classes. My radical activism would be simultaneously necessary to survive and often punished. Were I a woman, many of my successes would be viewed as “bitchy”, and my already often competitive attitude would be magnified; moreover, I would face lower wages and my educational possibilities would be artificially circumscribed by sexist pressures leading to certain majors and certain occupations. Were my parents less rich, they could not have afforded to pay for the high school debate that almost assuredly secured my place at this university, the camps and the flights and the long trips to Los Angeles.

My whole life has been corrupted, tainted and made impure by the presence of inequity and domination, just as surely as the victims of that inequity and domination. My position at this university, and this university, are no less implicated. This is not a reason to feel guilt. If anything, it is a reason to feel rage. But the most important thing: to act.

1. Michael Bradley, “Stoned Rush Limbaugh Makes Hypocritical History By Demanding Harsh Penalties For Other Drug Users”. http://www.bradleyreport.net/commentary/StonedRush.htm

Bureucratic Tunnel Vision

2006-02-14T02:44:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, one of the underlying themes of my leftism is to point out that the supposed dichotomy between efficacy and liberty that is implied by the classic debate about anarchism/socialism and libertarianism is an utterly false dichotomy, that in fact those institutions of domination (capitalism, bureaucracy, the nation-state) are inefficient at accomplishing human ends, among their many other debits. If that is the case, the statement "Anarchy [or parecon or so on] doesn't work" becomes even more problematic: aftter all, such a statement implies a comparative, i.e. not just "It fails" but (if the argument is to be relevant) "It fails worse than what we have".

In line with this, I extend an ironic line of reasoning: the critique of bureaucracy commonly argued by conservatives. And one of the many problems is what I call "tunnel vision", or more precisely an effectiveness-efficiency mismatch: The adoption of normalized standards and practices that end up being counterproductive to the broader goal of the institution. A perfect satirical example is the episode of South Park where the detectives do not arrest a man with severed human hands on his wall because the serial murderer they are looking for does not cut off that side of hand.

Today I experienced another such example, from my midterm:

"Answer the following questions in a clearly written essay of 5-6 pages in length (typed, single sided, double spaced, with normal font and margins). Your essay is due on February 14. Please e-mail the essay directly..."

Notice a problem? I'll let you all read a second.

For those you haven't figured it out:

If I'm e-mailing it to you, what does it matter if it is set to be single-sided or double-sided?

This is a prestigious university with a well-respected lecturer making this mistake.

It's funny. And on another level, completely disturbing.

"Chocolate City?" (Courtesy of Tim Wise and Z Sustainers)

2006-01-29T15:54:00.000-08:00

If you're looking to understand why discussions between blacks and whites about racism are often
so difficult in this country, you need only know this: when the subject is race and racism,
whites and blacks are often not talking about the same thing. To white folks, racism is seen
mostly as individual and interpersonal--as with the uttering of a prejudicial remark or bigoted
slur. For blacks, it is that too, but typically more: namely, it is the pattern and practice of
policies and social institutions, which have the effect of perpetuating deeply embedded
structural inequalities between people on the basis of race. To blacks, and most folks of color,
racism is systemic. To whites, it is purely personal.

These differences in perception make sense, of course. After all, whites have not been the
targets of systemic racism in this country, so it is much easier for us to view the matter in
personal terms. If we have ever been targeted for our race, it has been only on that individual,
albeit regrettable, level.

But for people of color, racism has long been experienced as an institutional phenomenon. It is
the experience of systematized discrimination in housing, employment, schools or the justice
system. It is the knowledge that one's entire group is under suspicion, at risk of being treated
negatively because of stereotypes held by persons with the power to act on the basis of those
beliefs (and the incentive to do so, as a way to retain their own disproportionate share of that
power and authority).

The differences in white and black perceptions of the issue were on full display recently, when
whites accused New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin of racism for saying that New Orleans should be and
would be a "chocolate city" again, after blacks dislocated by Katrina had a chance to return. To
one commentator after the other -- most of them white, but a few blacks as well -- the remark
was by definition racist, since it seemed to imply that whites weren't wanted, or at least not
if it meant changing the demographics of the city from mostly African American (which it was
before the storm) to mostly white, which it is now, pending the return of black folks.
To prove how racist the comment was, critics offered an analogy. What would we call it, they
asked, if a white politician announced that their town would or should be a "vanilla" city,
meaning that it was going to retain its white majority? Since we would most certainly call such
a remark racist in the case of the white pol, consistency requires that we call Nagin's remark
racist as well.

Seems logical enough, only it's not. And the reason it's not goes to the very heart of what
racism is and what it isn't--and the way in which the different perceptions between whites and
blacks on the matter continue to thwart rational conversations on the subject.

Before dealing with the white politician/vanilla city analogy, let's quickly examine a few
simple reasons why Nagin's remarks fail the test of racism. First, there is nothing to suggest
that his comment about New Orleans retaining its black majority portended a dislike of whites,
let alone plans to keep them out. In fact, if we simply examine Nagin's own personal history --
which has been obscured by many on the right since Katrina who have tried to charge him with
being a liberal black Democrat -- we would immediately recognize the absurdity of the charge.
Nagin owes his political career not to New Orleans' blacks, but New Orleans' white folks. It was
whites who voted for him, at a rate of nearly ninety percent, while blacks only supported him at
a rate of forty-two percent, preferring instead the city's chief of police (which itself says
something: black folks in a city with a history of police brutality preferring the cop to this
guy).

Nagin has always been, in the eyes of most black New Orleanians, pretty vanilla: he was a
corporate vice-President, a supporter of President Bush, and a lifelong Republican prior to
changing parties right before the Mayoral race.

Secondly, given the ways in which displaced blacks especially have been struggling to return --
getting the run-around with insurance payments, or dealing with landlords seeking to evict them
(or jacking up rents to a point where they can't afford to return) -- one can safely intuit that
all Nagin was doing was trying to reassure folks that they were wanted back and wouldn't be
prevented from re-entering the city.

And finally, Nagin's remarks were less about demography per se, than an attempt to speak to the
cultural heritage of the town, and the desire to retain the African and Afro-Caribbean flavor of
one of the world's most celebrated cities. Fact is, culturally speaking, New Orleans is what New
Orleans is, because of the chocolate to which Nagin referred. True enough, many others have
contributed to the unique gumbo that is New Orleans, but can anyone seriously doubt that the
predominant flavor in that gumbo has been that inspired by the city's black community? If so,
then you've never lived there or spent much time in the city (and no, pissing on the street
during Mardi Gras or drinking a badly-made Hurricane at Pat O'Brian's doesn't count).
If the city loses its black cultural core (which is not out of the question if the black
majority doesn't or is unable to return), then indeed New Orleans itself will cease to exist, as
we know it. That is surely what Nagin was saying, and it is simply impossible to think that
mentioning the black cultural core of the city and demanding that it will and should be retained
is racist: doing so fits no definition of racism anywhere, in any dictionary, on the planet.

As for the analogy with a white leader demanding the retention of a vanilla majority in his
town, the two scenarios are not even remotely similar, precisely because of how racism has
operated, historically, and today, to determine who lives where and who doesn't. For a white
politician to demand that his or her city was going to remain, in effect, white, would be quite
different, and far worse than what Nagin said. After all, when cities, suburbs or towns are
overwhelmingly white, there are reasons (both historic and contemporary) having to do with
discrimination and unequal access for people of color. Restrictive covenants, redlining by
banks, racially-restrictive homesteading rights, and even policies prohibiting people of color
from living in an area altogether -- four things that whites have never experienced anywhere in
this nation (as whites) -- were commonly deployed against black and brown folks throughout our
history. James Loewen's newest book, Sundown Towns, tells the story of hundreds of these efforts
in communities across the nation, and makes clear that vanilla suburbs and towns have become so
deliberately.

On the other hand, chocolate cities have not developed because whites have been barred or even
discouraged from entry (indeed, cities often bend over backwards to encourage whites to move to
the cities in the name of economic revival), but rather, because whites long ago fled in order
to get away from black people. In fact, this white flight was directly subsidized by the
government, which spent billions of dollars on highway construction (which helped whites get
from work in the cities to homes in the 'burbs) and low-cost loans, essentially available only
to whites in those newly developing residential spaces. The blackness of the cities increased as
a direct result of the institutionally racist policies of the government, in concert with
private sector discrimination, which kept folks of color locked in crowded urban spaces, even as
whites could come and go as they pleased.
So for a politician to suggest that a previously brown city should remain majority "chocolate"
is merely to demand that those who had always been willing to stay and make the town their home,
should be able to remain there and not be run off in the name of gentrification, commercial
development or urban renewal. It is to demand the eradication of barriers for those blacks who
otherwise might have a hard time returning, not to call for the erection of barriers to
whites--barriers that have never existed in the first place, and which there would be no power
to impose in any event (quite unlike the barriers that have been set up to block access for the
black and brown).

In short, to call for a vanilla majority is to call for the perpetuation of obstacles to persons
of color, while to call for a chocolate majority in a place such as New Orleans is to call
merely for the continuation of access and the opportunity for black folks to live there. Is that
too much to ask?

Funny how Nagin's comments simply calling for the retention of a chocolate New Orleans bring
down calls of racism upon his head, while the very real and active planning of the city's white
elite -- people like Joe Cannizaro and Jimmy Reiss -- to actually change it to a majority white
town, elicits no attention or condemnation whatsoever from white folks. In other words, talking
about blacks being able to come back and make up the majority is racist, while actually engaging
in ethnic cleansing -- by demolishing black neighborhoods like the lower ninth ward, the Treme,
or New Orleans East as many want to do -- is seen as legitimate economic development policy.

It's also interesting that whites chose the "chocolate city" part of Nagin's speech, delivered
on MLK day, as the portion deserving condemnation as racist, rather than the next part--the part
in which Nagin said that Katrina was God's wrath, brought on by the sinful ways of black folks,
what with their crime rates, out-of-wedlock childbirths and general wickedness.
In other words, if Nagin casts aspersions upon blacks as a group -- truth be told, the textbook
definition of racism -- whites have no problem with that. Hell, most whites agree with those
kinds of anti-black views, according to polling and survey data. But if Nagin suggests that
those same blacks -- including, presumably the "wicked" ones -- be allowed to come back and live
in New Orleans, thereby maintaining a black majority, that becomes the problem for whites, for
reasons that are as self-evident as they are (and will remain) undiscussed.

Until white folks get as upset about racism actually limiting the life choices and chances of
people of color, as we do about black folks hurting our feelings, it's unlikely things will get
much better. In the end, it's hard to take seriously those who fume against this so-called
reverse racism, so petty is the complaint, and so thin the ivory skin of those who issue it.
Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull,
2005) and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White (Routledge, 2005). He can be
reached at timjwise@msn.com

Taylorism and Ehrenreich

2006-01-25T23:43:00.000-08:00

Note: Taylorism stems from a “scientific management” expert, Frederick Taylor, who most eloquently formulated the modern system of automation and management most exemplified in the fast food restaurant: deskilled workers, simplified tasks, etc. This is an essay discussing Taylor, Adam Smith and Barbara Ehrenreich.

It should be noted, firstly, that there is a myth that Taylorism is about efficiency. This claim seems to be squarely at odds with the fact that Taylorist mechanisms and mechanization are undertaken even when this actually reduces profits, and the note that increasing worker's participation even nominally actually raises productivity. The contradiction is resolved when we remember “efficiency” means efficiency at preserving the interests of the managers, or the masters: Not only profit, but the conditions that stratify power and social mobility to allow them to retain that profit. As Paul Street put it in his article “The Corporation and Frankenstein”, the corporation is the market's Frankenstein's monster: a creature made by it to master itself but that ends up undermining its very logic. Nonetheless, the general rift between Smith, who as a pre-capitalist respected the artisan and the free man, and Taylor, who as a capitalist wished to sacrifice everything for the power and profits of the rich, remains. It is quite clear that the modern era is a Taylorist and not a Smithian one. As Ehrenreich makes clear on p. 210, “...if low-wage workers do not behave in an economically rational way [noting that employers believe they do not], that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in way democratic.” This disdain for workers' ability to be productive and for freedom held by the employers is noted quite clearly by the phenomenon Ehrenreich notes in the Evaluation, one that even conservative economists have commented upon: the stagnation or actual decline in real terms of wages concurrent with quite expanisve increases in productivity: clearly the upper class views the working class as replaceable. One could note, given the Evaluation (particularly pp. 216-217), that for the rich and powerful employers to have any opinion about the poor, they must actually know them, and given the sharp stratification of modern society, that isn't likely. This allows employers to view their workers as stupid and incompetent, rather than blaming institutional mechanisms that propel poor results.

The human consequences of the Taylorist view are quite obvious. If those who control the means of labor construct labor in such a manner as to reduce the skills and intelligence utilized when working, the labor process will become increasingly stupefying to the mass of workers. Even if other inequities of power and wealth are resolved, this is the seed for new inequity, as those with more empowering and intellectually maximizing jobs will inherently gain decision-making advantages, connections and privileges. Note that this has nothing to do with the intents of the bosses: Though Ehrenreich describes many insensitive and even cruel bosses, even kind ones will be forced to do what they must by the exigencies of the market or be forced out. Further, such continued deskilling of workers will raise inequity by lowering wages, which (as Dani Rodrik has noted) lowers growth, and reduce worker participation and usage of intellectual ability, which means those in the best position to evaluate the success of certain policies on the ground will be precisely the people least skilled to do so. However, the Smith view is not adequate. Even a market system that enshrines artisans and skills will never allow the full political and economic participation in decision-making of all parties: even capitalists admit that “externalities” are rife in market systems, forcing costs onto those not party to the direct consumer-producer transaction.

Layers of Identity and Polyculturalism

2006-01-25T23:40:00.000-08:00

People identify themselves through many filters: Family, friends, culture, ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, species, etc. Normally, these are not in conflict, nor are they actively in operation at any one time. Yet conflicts between these identities occur frequently. Does one go to war even though doing so harms one's family? Or might one take the longer view and believe that defending one's nation is actually how one benefits one's family over time? To argue that assumes things about what “the nation” is, a belief that one's nation will in fact defend its composite members, a belief that some (Jews in the 1930s, for example) were mistaken in holding.

Belief in nationality is typically, though not always, associated with a belief in some kind of consistent border or homeland. Even the Jews, who have been in diaspora for millenia, view themselves as belonging to a homeland that they believe they can sketch out the borders of. The Kurds demand Kurdistan, the Quebecois an independent nation-state, and so on. Unfortunately, the European combination of the ethno-cultural nation with the political state has created situations where those who were not represented in the initial divisions of power feel underrepresented. Further, to gain resources, other groups typically must suffer a proportional loss of resources or territory. These two phenomena create the foundations of much civil and international war.

It is quite unlikely that such long-standing divisions will cease immediately, even after revolutionary alterations in the economy or polity that admittedly solidifies such divisions. It seems to be human nature to form tribes of some kind. Tribes are combined with borders to create in-out dichotomies, and of a wholly artificial nature. A Californian is, according to the demands of national culture, supposed to be more concerned with the fate of Rhode Islanders who he has no economic or cultural ties with than of Mexicans who he is quite close to and integrated with, and conversely so with the Rhode Islander and Canada. While borders of management do make some sense, nations regularly choose wholly artificial places to put such borders, and even when a logical location such as a river or mountain is chosen, ecological consciousness is regularly forgotten. Pollution does not stop at borders: whether in the air or in the oceans, it ignores human constraints and moves across geographies only. The same can be said for ecosystems that emerge, unified in nature's eyes but divided in men's.

Anarchists such as myself have quite extensive literatures on how to deal with nationalism, statism and other pressures. Roughly speaking, regarding ethno-national identity, anarchists have two solutions.

The first is a political and economic one: federation. Whatever ruling bodies (ruled by the people in direct proportion to the degree to which decisions affect them) emerge should be primarily local at the first level, to allow direct participation; then, if delegation is required, councils formed from layers of delegates to deal with issues of larger and larger scale. If group divisions do remain, such solutions allow them to rule over localities and regions that they view as theirs while still retaining a proportional stake in decisions that still affect them but also affect other groups.

Regarding guaranteed representation: While requiring a degree of guaranteed representation along ethnic lines is an appropriate solution for initial trust-building, the unfortunate consequence is that these ethnic divisions become encoded artificially into ruling structures, acquiring new and distinct meanings even if groups are in the process of fluid shifting. It also artificially undermines the direct rule of people as people.
The second is what Justin Podur calls “polyculuralism”, which is a cultural-behavioral change. The notion here is to recognize precisely this hierarchy of identity that all human beings have and to thus strike a middle ground between assimilation and multiculturalism. Assimilation has the benefit of eliminating certain groups from calculation and thus preventing them from causing trouble. This is fair enough, except, as Podur notes in “Revolutionizing Culture”, “Assimilation gets rid of the problem of a powerful community oppressing a less powerful community by absorbing the less powerful into the more powerful.” Even when it does not do this, keeping equal parts of each culture (and historical examples are few and far between), it eliminates a human component, something that makes people uniquely “them”, and thus would be avoidable. But the alternative, multiculturalism, is typically quite lazy. To assimilation's “melting pot”, it proposes a “salad bowl”, with each component living in harmony but nonetheless separated. This begs the question of a human rights advocate: what of the nasty undersides of each culture, the internal repression? Here we are seeing a identity conflict. Let us take a patriarchal culture. A woman's place in it is a conflict with their ethnic status: one seeks to overwhelm the other. Multiculturalism has the initial appeal that it categorically avoids the issue of cultural imperialism and unwarranted interference or protection of other cultures, but it has the downside of preventing warranted interference. As Podur puts it, ”What is lacking in it is a notion of what happens within these ‘cultures’ and between them. If we have a multicultural society where every ‘culture’ gets to ‘govern itself’, does this mean that ‘culture’ can be used to justify sexism, or homophobia, or capitalism? What rules govern the hundreds of interactions across cultures that will happen every day? How will conflicts between people of different cultures be solved? Multiculturalism doesn’t provide the right tools to understand these problems or to deal with them.” Polyculturalism instead proposes recognizing at least two levels of identity: an area where each culture can safely exist and co-exist as a culture, intermingling and trading insofar as they please; then a shared area, the polity and economy, where cultural conflicts that arise are put aside. In this shared area, every individual has guaranteed rights, and if a certain culture seeks to deprive it, the individual wins.

To introduce such mechanisms would require radical alteration of existing economic and political structures, indeed revolutionary alteration, as it is the imposition of borders, resource conflicts, flags, and power that statism creates, as well as the rush to the bottom that capitalism creates, that helps foist and foment ethnic conflict. But, to quote a culinary advocate of multiculturalism, Alton Brown, “that's another show”.

Brief Post To Get Back Into It!

2006-01-10T19:23:00.000-08:00

Oh, ye frequent readers: I apologize for the lack of posting over the last two months. A new apartment, a difficult quarter and other barriers reduced my posting. Let me simply note a few comments that came to mind from my various classes.

The first came when I was in my Multi-Cultural Societies class. Of course when discussing matters of race, racism, culture, ethnicity, etc., especially with undoubtedly one or two conservatives in the class, the possibility for a highly unproductive dialogue to emerge is quite profound. Yet the way most university classes, including this one, have resolved such difficulties is to resort to a, if I may, namby-pamby approach. You know the one: "Everyone has an opinion. You should all listen to each other and respect people from different backgrounds." Yada yada yada.

Now, far be it from me to undermine the importance of dialogue, particularly polite dialogue, or to rebut that people should be kind and non-judgmental to each other. Nonetheless, I am afraid that this tack does not engender critical dialogue. For one thing, it seems to put a Stop sign on actual substantive debate.

You see, in our society, we have created a dichotomy (false though it may be) between "argument" and "dialogue". In part this is a linguistic confusion: The word "argument", except for some logic folks and debaters, typically connotes a caustic 'discussion' filled with interruption, bile, anger and very little substance, listening or alteration of position. Clearly this must be avoided! But I think that there is also a deeper problem here that the linguistic problem covers up. Our society teaches people to accept particular dogmas (ironically, one of the dogmas is "Don't accept dogmas".) Instead of devoting the requisite time and intellectual energy to really gripping an issue, understanding things, resolving disputes (semantic or otherwise), and coming upon some kind of agreement or understanding, we prefer to sit in our hermetic containers and occasionally stick our head up, fearfully looking for crossfire. Unfortunately, America's political climate, filled with bile and rage and very little logic and thought, further propels this difficulty.

And so every University professor, come the start of a new quarter, will march out a string of platitudes and bromides about "discussion" and "respect" and "courtesy". But one should listen to someone not only for what might be quite right, but also what is quite wrong. And one should be listening carefully, without preconception or anger, not only because not doing so is not conducive to anything, but also because doing so is the prequisite to effective rebuttal.

Tim Wise once pointed out that, particularly in the context of classes like I'm attending, this statement that everyone will be safe and protected is in fact not directed at minorities in the classroom but really the majority, saying, "Don't worry, you won't have to step outside of your comfort zone here." Never mind that blacks, women, politically left and poor people have to step outside of their comfort zone practically every day if they wish to offer their political opinion. This point was eloquently and angrily made by someone in one of my discussion groups, who pointed out that there is a fundamental inequity (though this is not a justification for violating freedom of speech) in the situation where the neo-Nazi and the Black Panther discuss. Even in a liberal university, the neo-Nazi can go back home, secure and quiet in his racism and confident that he was the dissident voice of reason, while the supposedly "emotional" Black Panther will be bothered by a tack that says he should not exist, a script s/he has heard every day and often decidedly in decidedly unsafe environments. Even in the rare cases where the Black Panther is saying something akin to "Kill whitey", the white person will rarely feel actually scared, or be in any real danger, because of the innate power relation (magnified in dispro white college campuses).

Yes, if the choice is between an acrid and vicious debate and silence or people sheepishly offering their "opinions", the mature part of me will pick the latter, but that shouldn't be the choice. Administrators have a responsibility to allow the third, actually good alternative: Where people passionately defend positions, with appropriate logic and points being actually addressed and rebutted.

The second note is more for my own comfort. If you find it excessively fatuous, go ahead and skip to something else.

In a discussion about Aristotle and ethics/political philosophy, I proffered my solution to the classic dilemma of order versus freedom: Free people will obviously disagree on many things; ergo, in cases where a decision must be made, various sytems of redress, appeal, individual rights guaranteed by some kind of constitutional order, etc. must be available to allow compromise. In the normal give-and-take of any social unit, no matter how vital and really free, compromises will need to be made. Just think of any family. Few would dispense of it, yet within it people constantly fight and have disagreements. This isn't a problem regarding freedom if there's enough respect for each individual and no one tramples on each other legitimate rights. To which my Professor responded, in essence, "That is basically Aristotle". Aristotle, who believed Plato's pap about "philosopher kings" who, by dint of superior education, would be in a superior way moral and kind; who viewed the vast mass of people as inferior vulgates who need to be indoctrinated by force and order (what he called taxis and noos); and so on.

Though a broader treatment of my anarchist philosophy is still in the works, let me summarize my ethical opinion. In my view, ethics and freedom are not mortal enemies, as we often imagine, but in fact blood brothers. To be free is to have the possibility to act in an ethical, or rather unethical, manner. The only way someone can prove themselves as an ethical entity and acquire the maturity for freedom is precisely to have that freedom in the first place. I view any restriction upon private freedom as a limitation of someone's ability to be free. Unfortunately, a few restrictions to prevent rights conflicts and allow the fullest and freest expression of liberty are essential, but aside from these cases (i.e. legislation against murder and theft), societies should not restrict private behavior, even unethical behavior.

So what makes me different from Aristotle?

1) I believe the common woman has all the requisite intelligence to run their own affairs.
2) Even if they didn't, there is no justification for repealing the solemn rights of free people.
3) Unlike Aristotle, who implies that family and the state of nature is fundamentally a barbaric and brutish one, I view family as not only an economic entity that provides food/shelter/child-rearing, etc., but also a real, organic emotional support network. Everyone can call their mother or father if they feel bad and are likely to get a quite positive and supportive response. This denigration of familial nurturing is, of course, representative of Aristotle's position as a sexist male in a deeply stratified society. Further, I think that tribal and "primitive" forms have much to recommend them, though I don't view them as the best alternatives.
4) My notion of the compromise between the individual and the community includes:
a) Direct democratic participation
b) Guaranteed individual rights
c) The ability to secede
d) Substantial redress, appeal, etc. processes
e) Federation and multiple levels of loyalty

Something Is Rotten In Denmark. Like Eggs. Rotten Eggs.

2005-11-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

There is a certain rapture to the lucidity of madness. Madness is often a type of liberation from social norms of behavior, a freedom of responsibility, an opening of the floodgates of thought and feeling. When Hamlet feigns madness, he is able to tap into this lucidity and put it to good use. He is able to get away with eliminating Polonius, mocking his father, insulting his mother, and generally being an obnoxious twit. He feels morally sanctioned to do this because he is on a mission: he must regain his throne from the vile, incestuous usurper and reclaim his family’s honor. However, that heady mix of social freedom and self-righteousness soon places Hamlet in a position in which he feels that he is God’s hand on Earth, prepared to be judge, jury and executioner. He soon becomes intoxicated and becomes much like an equivocator, and thus descends down the slippery slope into madness. By the end of the play, Hamlet is mad in a determinedly more sociopathic way; after all, “My thought be bloody or be nothing worth!”
Initially, we see that Hamlet is acting the part of the madman, nothing more. “As I perchance shall hereafter shall think meet/To put an antic disposition on” (Act I, scene v, lines 191-192) indicates that Hamlet is intentionally putting on the show. Even Polonius sees that Hamlet’s comments are suspiciously accurate (“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t.” Act II, scene ii, lines 223-224). Playing the madman will allow Hamlet to investigate without hesitation, to terrorize his mother and father, and to cede responsibility if caught. He can also act without Ophelia obstructing his way. But already we see a darker, crueler Hamlet emerge, and already Hamlet is making sacrifices in the way he treats other people for his cause of justice.
The turning point is when Hamlet decides to wait to slay Claudius. Initially, Hamlet is thinking in fairly just terms. Hamlet was planning on showing Claudius the mercy Claudius did not show Old Hamlet: a quick death right after Claudius is absolved of his sins. (Ironically, though Claudius does ask for forgiveness, he recognizes that he is likely damned, as asking for forgiveness for theft while keeping the stolen items is an empty gesture at best). But, Hamlet decides instead to be cruel and zealous in his distribution of punishment. “When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage…” (Act III, Scene iii, line 94) will Hamlet kill Claudius, and ensure Claudius suffers in hell or in purgatory, much like Old Hamlet is.

From this point on, Hamlet’s thoughts are bloody and bloody alone. Even the next scene speaks volumes of Hamlet’s newfound cruelty. Hamlet hears Polonius yelling, and thus says “How now, a rat?” (Act III, Scene iv, line 29). Hamlet knows perfectly well who the voice must be, but he ignores it and stabs Polonius without a second thought. When his mother protests, his only response is “Hah! Look at you! You married your brother!” Hamlet does not even make a pretense of remorse for Polonius’ unfortunate demise. He describes with a twinkle in his eye how one could find Polonius in heaven, or hell, or in the stairs going into the lobby. Polonius’ death causes Ophelia to fall into madness and in turn die, nearly ending that family unit. We do see one sign of hope, however. Hamlet does ask for forgiveness from Laertes for what happened, and makes a reference to his madness. At this point, the game is almost up: Hamlet knows that he must eliminate his uncle soon or he himself would die. Why would Hamlet make an admission of madness at that point in time? Perhaps because what was left of Hamlet’s decency and mercy was allowed one last chance to speak.

The combination of vengeance and freedom causes Hamlet to fall precipitously, much like Lucifer fell because of the same pride. Hamlet forgot the cardinal rule of Jesus’ teachings: mercy. And that is what took a decent young Catholic man from a steadfast and reputable character to a person responsible for many deaths.

Emelia Under A Fragmented Gaze

2005-11-21T12:10:00.000-08:00

Abstract:It is my contention that feminist scholarship has in general looked at characters in plays holistically, averaging the sum of their complex parts and determining if they are gender heroes, cowards or villains. I find this practice arbitrary, and I will instead analyze Emelia's character and actions in terms of possibly competing aspects of her personality, dictated by her emotional state and position vis-a-vis a broader social context. Emelia is conscious of the power of social influence and of common gender dynamics. She is the gender parallel to Shylock, simultaneously offering a profound reason to reject the status quo while reifying it. Emelia and Desdemona are mirror images: Emelia being conscious of oppression but acquiescing to it, Desdemona being unconscious but willing to confront it. Shakespeare's work, despite his own parochialisms, is largely consistent internally and can withstand a progressive interpretation. To find the revolutionary woman, one must find the permutation of Ophelia and Emelia, instead of critiquing one against the other and unconsciously confirming the view of society that such individuals are pathological and at some level deserve what they got.

Some historians attuned to gender conflict have theorized that matriarchal societies passed into patriarchal societies when men realized that sex produced children. At that point, it became valuable to control sex through marriage and incredibly restrictive laws and practices that kept women essentially in solitary confinement. In this sense, relationship and kinship dynamics form the bedrock upon which more complex forms of oppression are built. Othello is a complex entity in this regard. While it was written by a man certainly trapped in his zeitgeist, it is a good enough story that it has a life of its own, and only peripheral looks at Shakespeare will be necessary. The problem is that all of the main women characters (Desdemona, Bianca and Emelia), while being empowered and talented women, tolerate abusive relationships. It is my contention that feminist scholarship has in general looked at characters in plays holistically, averaging the sum of their complex parts and determining if they are gender heroes, cowards or villains. I find this practice arbitrary, and I will instead analyze Emelia's character and actions in terms of possibly competing aspects of her personality, dictated by her emotional state and position vis-a-vis a broader social context.

Emelia is conscious of the power of social influence and of common gender dynamics. When Desdemona asks, “Wouldst thou do such a deed [abuse one's husband] for all the world?”, Emelia responds, “In troth, I think I should... not for any petty exhibition; but, for all the whole world – 'Ud's pity! who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch?” (Act IV, Scene III, lines 66-73). This response is complex. It indicates that she values power over dignity, a deep character flaw. But it also indicates that she associates her success with that of her husband's; that is, that she would be willing to abuse her husband to give him power. A question immediately arises: Is she censoring herself to avoid shocking Desdemona, or does she truly want power only for her husband?

The matter is complicated by the lines coming immediately after these. Emelia blames husbands for the pathologies of their wives; “But I think it is their husbands' faults/If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties/And pour our treasures into foreign laps” (same act and scene as above, lines 82-84). She blames husbands for infidelity; after all, if men did their jobs in satisfying women, would women seek out other men? She then goes on to issue a familiar-sounding proclamation (same act and scene as above, lines 89-99):

Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them. They see, and smell,
And have their palates both for sweet and sour, as husbands have.
What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is. And doth affection breed it?
I think it doth. Is't frailty that thus errs?
It is too. And have we not affections,
Desires for sports, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well, else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instrust us so.

This paragraph is the gender parallel to Shylock's speech on race and religion in The Merchant of Venice. In both cases, a character considered within the context of the play to be a villain is momentarily raised in status and given a brief humanity. In both cases, while courageously speaking out against the stereotypes and the norms and societal roles that hold them down, they immediately return to proactively filling those roles to the tee: Shylock by being a greedy Jew, Emelia by being a passive wife always seeking to satisfy her husband. Emelia, however, gives up the game in her speech: She points out that, while both men and women commit depravities, women are placed onto a pedestal by society. It is key to note that, like the “model minority” myth for Asians, that the “holy mother” image of women, while appearing to be reverent, is in fact a fairly crass carrot-and-stick manuever. It constructs a behavior model that, however admirable the model may be, implies a group behavior. When members of that group do not fulfill the expectations, they can be branded as aberrants and be severed off from their fellow group members; in this case, if a woman cheats on a man, she is being sincerely devilish since no good woman does that. (The model in question, of course, also assumes docility and puppy-dog-like loyalty to be virtues and independence to be something to be sharply curtailed, but that is of secondary importance; any model will do fine). Emelia points out that women have to stick to this model or else risk showing men something men don't want to see: That the majority of immoral actions committed by women are caused by the system being rigged in favor of men in the first place.

In this sense, Emelia and Desdemona are mirror images. Both have powerful husbands in important positions in the military. Both of their husbands are aware of, at some level, an injustice against them and a precariousness to their position (Iago is snickered at because his wife supposedly slept with Othello; Othello is a foreigner who must walk a very narrow line, and still faces racial slurs from the likes of Brabantio and Iago when he does walk the line). Both are talented, privileged women with obvious intelligence and wit. And both kowtow to their husbands' demands, retreating into a state of passivity precisely as their husbands become more abusive. The flaw in the mirror image is exactly the same as the flaw in the reflection between Iago and Othello. Desdemona comes from a position of innocence; she is not used to abusive relationships. Othello has a similar naivete; he blindly trusts Iago just as Desdemona blindly trusts Emelia and Othello. She seems unaware of the reality of the racial and gender dynamics in the society. Iago, being a manipulator, is inherently aware of the tools he works with, and Emelia is similarly conscious. She knows that the game is rigged against her gender; she is aware of Othello's status as an alien; and, most importantly, she knows that she is in an abusive relationship with a man who cares very little about her. Ironically, this conscious acquiesence to her society keeps Emelia alive longer than Desdemona, but both attitudes are unsustainable. What would be needed would be Desdemona's bright-eyed view combined with the information and pragmatism Emelia possesses.

It is key to note that Shakespeare had to appeal to a very heavily gender-biased audience. For evidence, look no further than The Taming of the Shrew, a comedy about wife-beating. Elizabethan England was severely polarized in almost every sphere of life: the state was a totalitarian monarchy, the economic system was feudal, a man could drink away his wife's life savings, and ethnic Others were horrendously mistreated, not to mention the corrosive effect of the Church on the body politic. Given this context, it is amazing that Shakespeare's work has the implications it does. Whether or not Shakespeare himself was liberal or conservative by the standard of his times is a chimerical question: his work takes on a life of its own, one with progressive implications, I believe. Nonetheless, asking the question would have one implication: If there is not a simultaneously self-empowered and conscious woman in the play (Desdemona being self-empowered, Emelia being conscious), is this because Shakespeare chose not to write such a character for whatever literary or social reason, or simply because he could not imagine such a woman, so antithetical to his social order?

The contrast between Emelia and Desdemona becomes clear in Act II, Scene I. Iago accuses Emelia of idiocy, back-talking and infidelity (Act II, Scene I, lines 100-102, 104-107, and 109-112). He then goes on to joke about every possible combination of women. He finally describes his ideal wife, a woman indistinguishable from the worst kind of slave. During this time, Emelia only says “You have little cause to say so” and similar weak retorts (same act and scene, lines 109 and 116). Desdemona, on the other hand, rebuts Iago's chauvinist diatribe at every turn. Desdemona even comments that Emelia “has no speech” and tells Emelia to ignore her worse halfs' ramblings (lines 103 and 159-161). Desdemona seems unaware that such behavior is a faux pas in her society; Emelia keeps her mouth shut. Only when she is away from Iago does she confide about her understanding of the world that she lives in.

In the end, Emelia is complicit in the chain of events that lead to the death of Desdemona, Othello, herself and Iago. Her desperate desire to please the man who, despite his wanton abuse, she still loves, does her in. But her pragmatic acquiescence to her gender position does keep her very briefly alive; only at the end of the play does she slip, and she is immediately snuffed. It is ironically often the strongest women who let themselves be abused by their lovers, and I view Emelia as a paragon of strength, if not a blazing courage. It is far too easy for radicals to attack the individuals who make less than admirable decisions in the context of oppressive social structures. The relevant question is not, “Why did Emelia not behave in a revolutionary manner, despite her obvious consciousness of her condition?”, but rather, “Why is society designed in such a way that such a woman is kept relatively powerless?” Institutions do not just assign roles: they alter perceptions and make rebellion difficult. It carries deep personal costs to resist the status quo. Within the context of the status quo, people will make all sorts of decisions. Radicals should focus on attacking the context that propels repugnant decisions rather than the individuals who made them. To do otherwise is to unconsciously reify the structure that views such behavior as pathology. To find a revolutionary, one must seek out both Desdemona's intolerance of injustice and Emelia's consciousness of the same injustice. This search will not be done in dusty archives, but in the consciousness of humankind.

Special Election Blues

2005-11-21T12:08:00.000-08:00

An opinion came up among scholars and commentators, as in a letter to the Union on Oct. 21, during the special election. It was bemoaned that millions were being spent and that the Legislature was being run-around.Of course, Arnold was using the special election to play “chicken” with the California Legislature and make the inequity of political access between the poor and rich even more radical.But there is something disturbing about this argument, found among liberal commentators, that shows how tepid their critique is. It is that, well, democracy just isn’t that worth it, certainly not worth millions of dollars (out of the billions in the state budget alone). We even hear that the initiative process needs to be “reformed” because people are too involved in their democracy, and that the fox (state Legislature) should be allowed to watch the henhouse (initiatives that would undermine their interests).This same difficulty shows in the Democratic Party’s inability to describe the elections in Iraq for what they are: a colonial front, itself won by popular resistance. Instead we hear about WMDs endlessly, a worthy topic to be sure, but not the one that the Iraqi people, our victims, care about.

Film: Trivial and Dangerous or Powerful and Reactionary?

2005-11-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

What better defines a romantic evening than a dinner and a movie? One absorbs food to food the body and entertainment to feed the mind and soul. Movies define and are defined by culture: they are vanguards for the dissonant voices that form a society. Sometimes they are propaganda of varying qualities, such as with Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Passion of the Christ; other times they embody some spiritual criticism of modern culture, such as in American Beauty; and elsewhere, they are embodiments of militarist values, such as in every vapid action movie from Commando to American Ninja. Critiques of film follow roughly two paradigms. The first is, loosely speaking, a “conservative” paradigm. Film is viewed as a triviality, vapid entertainment that through its very frivolity encourages violence and sex to be desensitized and glamourized. This aspect of the media is considered to be dominated by liberal forces who question sanctified truths and thus launch a headfirst attack at the moral fabric of the nation. However, this critique fundamentally regards films as such simplistic entities that they can be regulated by state intervention or community activism, so basic and trivial that such basic intervention is unproblematic. While there are disagreements internal to this paradigm as to the strength of the media, the underlying assumption seems to be that the structure of film is a simplistic way of communicating narratives, and the only thing that should and can be changed is the content of those narratives. The “liberal” paradigm is markedly different in crucial respects. While the advocates of the paradigm also disagree sharply over the exact degree of impact the films pose, the general consensus is that film is capable of at least rivalling, if not surpassing, the complexity and depth of symbolism and meaning of the novel or philosophy textbook. Here, if glamorizing violence or sex or racist values is a concern, it is not because the media is so frivolous that it encourages these subjects to be portrayed frivolously, but because the art form of film has such untapped reserves of potential. To this paradigm, abstract or non-sensical narratives, documentaries, and cultural criticism are all within the capabilities of the art form. The concern here seems to be instead that the media, by wasting and squandering its potential, instead serves as a reactionary bulwark for society. Both paradigms ignore that film is like any other art form: it is capable of vapid triviality, inciting dangerous and unchecked change, and equally capable of squandering beautiful potential and acting as commissar and thought enforcer.

The conservative notion is expressed in the Hays code and in the outcry of the Legion of Decency. Its tactics are described in James Rorty's August 1, 1934 piece, “It Ain't No-Sin”: blacklists, whitelists, boycotts, arguments that the “government should do its duty”, and an attack on the industry as a cesspool of filth that distributed these trivial substances masquerading as art, almost like heroin packaged in the Mona Lisa. Rorty points out that private distributors kowtowing to the pressure of the Legion placed blame on the distributors' “block booking” and “blind booking” practices, where one was forced to buy all but 90% of the block of movies from a company, yet these exhibitors used these privileges to cancel 'Cradle Song' and other wholesome and artistic films yet didn't use the privileges to cancel 'I'm No Angel' or similar sexually charged films. The criticism of this opinion scarcely focuses on businesses as economic entities and instead characterizes and constructs them as cultural forces that are naturally regressive and seek to peddle filth for profit. The disgust comes from the filth, not the profit. Often, this criticism is bounded together with ethnic hatred, as in the case of the Warner Brothers producing Confessions of a Nazi Spy (see Steven Ross' article in the collection Warner's War), where the Warner Brothers were attacked by anti-Semites, thinly veiled and not-so-thinly veiled. The conservative criticism rarely offers a guideline for films' artistic content; they simply demand that certain social and political questions not be breached and that certain types of narratives and language (such as obscenity, sex and violence) be restricted by community and government intervention.

The liberal commentary is slightly more nuanced. Here, film is discussed as a complex institution, often a reactionary one. In Maltby's “It Happened One Night: The Recreation of the Patriarch”, it is argued that It Happened One Night is a traditional narrative of an independent woman infantilized by a powerful male figure, a narrative attempting to explain the neurosis of the Depression Era's crisis of capitalism as a crisis of patriarchy. The film business is understood as primarily that: a business with the profit and power considerations of market capitalism constraining the possibilities of film. The captains of the film industry are portrayed not as demoniac peddlers of perversion but rather as cowards kowtowing to popular demand simultaneously for filth and purity; as Rorty puts it, “... the industry was too cynical, too hypocritical, and too scared to fight.” What is decried is not the violence or sex per se, but the exclusion of any other content whatsoever; Rorty accuses film of “emptiness” and a “lack of genuine social and artistic content”. Understanding of film as a complete artiface and not a delivery system of perversion, however incomplete and distorted this understanding may be, is also part of this paradigm. Dale's :”What Are Motion Pictures For?” does not simply describe the negative (“They're not supposed to spread perversion”) but instead argues that if film is not progressive and socially conscious, it will not be apolitical and harmless but will in fact be reactionary and socially bereft. In his words, “The motion picture, then, should show you just what problems people are facing today and the different ways that these problems can be solved.” Film is not simply art or storytelling, but in fact carries the potential for activism. Peterson and Thurston also stress this conception in their “Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children”, cataloguing how multiple films stressing the same message can cause a cumulative impact greater than the sum of its parts and thus implying that film should be careful about the assumptions it makes. The alternative here is not censorship or regulation; rather, the liberal critique is an appeal to filmmakers to broaden their horizons. Such a critic may appreciate It Happened One Night as an excellent comedy and yet, as Maltby does, criticize it strongly for reifying the role of the patriarch and act as the knight in shining armor in more ways than one for an oppressive social institution. Admittedly, there is quite a bit of hypocrisy in this narrative. WaltL industry and an artist, yet the dissonance of the two roles is never called into question. “Exposing Mickey Mouse” does nothing of the sort; rather, it focusses on narrow technical questions. This is possibly because “Europe's Highbrows Hail[ed] Mickey Mouse” and because, according to the 1933 Literary Digest piece, “The picture [Three Little Pigs]... has many... virtues, which helped to make it the film darling of the intelligentsia”. Cartoons are not dismissed as frivolous distractions; rather, champions of modernity such as Soupault, Morienval and Jazarin stress not the author but the work, arguing that animation can breach the wall between reality and unreality and end the “tyranny” of traditional art.

Both conceptions conveniently ignore film's true nature. It is neither a predatory monster spewing an addictive drug to snare the young and impressionable nor an entirely untapped cultural heritage. Possibly the best secondary material in the reader discussing this ambiguity is “Black Face, White Noise”. Though the piece does criticize the racial injustice portrayed by black face, it simultaneously shows how The Jazz Singer helped to end an era of silence associated with patriarchal values and how the movie used black face to empower the Jewish singer, bridging the gap between the poor and the rich, the weak and powerful. All film is thus ambiguous. A good story may contain aspects that, viewed in isolation, beg serious questions. Yet the entire work is rarely dragged down by such aspects; rather, the context makes film more than the sum of its parts. Thus, one can watch Dirty Harry and comment on how it enshrines patriarchy and violence, yet it also criticizes bureaucratic ineptitude and creates an almost revolutionary figure. The perennial weakness of both liberal and conservative critiques is that they isolate particular subnarratives of film and make these the centerpiece, in a way that is never done with a novel. When reading Shakespeare, one can see the parochial influences yet still marvel at the handiwork, the skill at crafting the language, the wit and subtlety mixed in with crass and base humor, and the social commentary. If we wish to treat film like a novel, we need to understand it as such: each a story composed of multiple narratives, none of which can be isolated without doing injustice to the whole piece. Film is not simply a trivial drug, because it can deeply inspire and teach in succinct and memorable ways complex lessons, such as in Cabaret; yet it is also not simply a squandered artistic resource, as it does contain elements of pacification and excessive violence and filth. As Rorty says, “The movie magnates have treated the American people like cattle. They have exploited the prurience of our Puritan mass culture, made films to exploit and incidentally confirm that prurience, and added for a good measure a little of their own... Of honest sin or honest sainthood they have given us practically nothing. Fake sin, fake sex, fake social and moral values: how can a culture achieve a healthy maturity on that diet?” Overwhelmingly, film is too complex to wish away to simpler times with one-size-fits-all government regulation or snide liberal critique. It must instead be taken as it is and used
as a vehicle for discussion, as any other story. Otherwise, it will become the worst of its parts: reactionary, encoding militarist, racist, sexist and other values and thus serving as a cultural smokescreen and bodyguard for oppression; trivial, distracting and corrupting for its own insiduous ends through excessive sex, violence and obscenity, all sound and fury signifying nothing; complex, so much so that it becomes a morass of competing nothingness; and dangerous to the utmost.

Potential or Realization? Differing Analyses of Aesthetic Quality

2005-11-21T11:50:00.000-08:00

When giving platitudes to the creator of a piece, one can approach the comments from roughly two different angles. The first is to honor the piece in a vacuum: aesthetically, for its mastery of the tricks and turns of the trade, as a good story or construction, much like an architect could analyze a building's harsh beauty. The second is to honor the piece's external potential, either as a blueprint for further work within the art or as a vehicle for achieving some other goal, much like an architect could admire a building for the uses to which it will be put. These two distinct possibilities can be seen most profoundly with Walt Disney and The Jazz Singer in the one hand, and Sunrise and Scarface in the other.

Reviewing the analysis of The Jazz Singer and Walt Disney shows that the concern is not exclusively or primarily with the value of the works themselves, but instead commenting on the potentials that the technology and technique of each could be used to break the stultifying tyranny of dominant forms. As Crafton makes clear in “The Uncertainty of Sound”, The Jazz Singer was not acclaimed for rising out of a vacuum (pun intended) and blasting a horn of a new era of sound. The institution of sound was a gradual imposition from sound as a novelty to sound as an expectation that sometimes was not used because of aesthetic choices (watching Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is disorienting, as Chaplin intended it to because, because sound is used in snippets of appropriate dialogue, but at other times sound disappears to strengthen the impression of the panopticon operating in the factory that suspended all comfortable and natural feeling). Rather, The Jazz Singer bridged the gap between silence and sound: it was a transitory film and not an epochal and novel film, but yet all the more epochal because of it. The Jazz Singer, according to Crafton, uses sound and the lack thereof to symbolize freedom and repression, love (sexual and otherwise) and the squashing of that love, etc. in dichotomous representations. It actually leverages the incomplete application of sound to accomplish its art.

Yet The Jazz Singer is imperfect and incomplete: it “excised... social struggles that united Jews... in trade unions, radical movements...” It even “contains no jazz” in the strict sense, exorcising the essence of the minstrel to opportunistically use its face as a mechanism for Jewish solidarity. The analysis that Crafton makes focusses on the one truly original part of the movie, a relatively minor one in terms of screen time: the racial and sexual implications of the dress-up as black, the “sexual drag”. The subsequent news articles focus on the novelty value of the sound genre, the novelty of Jolson as a singer and of Cantor Rabinowitz, and most importantly on the potential, but not the actuality of the media, expressed most strongly in “Moving Picture Audiences Differ from Musical Comedy” and “'Jazz Singer' Scores a Hit”, both pieces that underscore how Jazz Singer is viewed as a blueprint for a paradigm shift for the movies but not the paradigm shift itself. “Europe's Highbrows Hail Mickey Mouse” describes this same phenomenon with Disney. Jazarin argues that “The animated drawing has fought for its life. It is on the point of triumph... Doesn't it permit the expression of the wildest conceptions...? The animated drawing alone can unite evocative power of design with the impalpable motion of life, with speech and with music. Thus it becomes a complete art...” Morienval says, “The moving and sound drawing has as a matter of fact no limits...” There is little to no discussion of the literary or artistic merits of the Walt Disney pieces as such. Instead, the focus is on their potential, what animation can do in terms of broadening the scope and style of storytelling.

Meanwhile, Sunrise itself is considered to be “Opening A New Day in Movies”. German critics, according to Saunders, viewed Sunrise as a uniquely German-American film, composing something new from more than the sum of its parts, arousing “superlatives for overcoming deeply entrenched beliefs”. Both its critics and its supporters recognized that something new was at work. Sunrise was viewed as an independent masterpiece of raw technique, rather unlike Disney's relatively simplistic animation that ended up reifying the traditional tyranny of story forms and The Jazz Singer's lackluster direction. It had “fantastic cinematographic achievements... capturing ambience with light, lens and rhythm.” The criticisms of it were because of what was believed to be an un-German and even contra-German sentimentality and hope for a good and happy ending, yet it was conceded on all sides to be a hallmark film capable of capturing an aesthetic sensibility without doubt. Scarface was considered so dangerous in constructing a charismatic devil figure who the audience identifies with that it was changed to have artificially-inserted sermons on public responsbility to stop crime. Scarface constructs a reverse Macbeth figure: a character who, while being a monster of viciousness, falls because of his own truly human and positive characteristic, his love for his sister. With masterful lighting and characterization, it was recognized as a tiger that the movie industry had by the tail, something that could glamorize crime and the gangster life.

These two patterns of critical reception occur over and over: the film viewed as a flawed epochmaker, and the film viewed as so perfect that it almost breaks the epoch by destroying any possibility for a film to be anything but a pale imitation. Sunrise became the silent film's last gasp, while Jazz Singer became the sound film's first tentative breath. Who knows when the action film will finally see its perfect realization and finally die?