I was thinking about racism yesterday. You can’t avoid the topic, although it is manifestly easy and common to fail to think intelligently about it.
Racism, itself, is just a form of tribalism. It is as old as humanity. You attack the clan over the hill because you want their women and food and they are not you. Chimpanzees do no less.
Arabs conquerors started the African slave trade in the 7th century, but it is clear it dates back much further.
Warfare based on ethnic or cultural difference has been endemic to the human condition since long before recorded history, which indeed began with an account of a war. If you find a large area without warfare for any sustained period of time, what you are most likely looking at is an empire, where one group has conquered a number of other groups, and established a set of rules everyone has to live by, enforced by what we might call “internal soldiers”, which is to say police, and what we might call “negotiated warfare”, in which a massively superior enemy–the State–grants to the person who might want to wage war on their rules access to the weapon of reason, and grants victory where that weapon is used successfully according to the rules.
In a properly–as I see it, and as nearly everyone who is not a lunatic sees it–constituted legal system, individuals stand trial for their own crimes. No one is made to stand in for the crimes of someone else.
When groups are punished for some crime–say the assassination of some official or other–then that is warfare. It is different from a legal process. It is understood by all to be necessarily imprecise, and inferior to a judicial proceeding. There is less information, less thought.
It is not overstating the case to say that our system of internal peace, of internal justice, depends on the notion that because only individual hands commit crimes, only individuals, as such, should be made to stand for crimes. You don’t see five people tried together. You see each of the five tried individually, even if they were together when the crime was committed. This process captures subtle nuances of complicity and evidence.
Our system rests on the individual as the only possible locus both of action and perception. “Societies” do not think. Individuals within societies think. Societies do not do things. Individual people within societies do things. In systems run according to Leftist AntiThink, there is usually a dictator who is not called a dictator, and an oligarchy that is not called an oligarchy. 1% of the people make 100% of the decisions that matter, and do so with no accountability, or felt moral need to protect the mass of people to any greater extent than that needed to avoid an open rebellion that is larger than their police forces can handle.
Racism, per se, is in this sense a radical Anti-Individualism. It is based on the claim that all members of any given group, however defined, can be viewed through the same lens. If the group is considered wicked (to be clear, by any given individual), then any random member of that group can be assumed to be wicked. If the group is considered good, then all members are good. The two cannot co-exist. The group is considered monolithic and largely static.
Johannes Fabian (ironically, no doubt, as I will show) describes this process in his book “Time and the Other”:
The anthropologist’s Other is not a partner in dialogue but an individual who the anthropologist observes. In different ways anthropological discourse relegates their Other to other times (ie. as “primitives,” “savages,” or simply as “unchanging,” a “cold” culture in Lévi-Strauss’ case), treating the studied culture as a stable, and more importantly static, object, which is thus available to be studied as it is and always will be. The differentiation between the anthropologist’s time (modern, moving time) and the time of the Other (static, less developed, older) constitutes what Fabian calls anthropology’s denial of coevalness, the denial that anthropologist and interlocutor exist in the same time, or in other words its allochronic (occurring in different times, asynchronous) discourse.
A contradiction thereby exists between anthropological practice, which by necessity occurs in one shared time between anthropologists and interlocutors, and anthropological discourse, which represents Others as existing in different times from anthropologists and the cultures they represent, a situation Fabian refers to as a schizogenic use of time.
Now, this is a solidly Left wing book written to critique Western Colonialism. When one reads about the demonization of the Other, the most important books being referenced, in my understanding, are this one, and Edward Said’s Orientalism.
But as with Howard Zinn, the intent is not to present a complete picture. It is certainly to describe processes which did and do happen. “Othering” people different from you happens. You do it. You do. So do I.
But these authors really only want to use Western intellectual methods to critique the West. They do not want to look at the FACT that every culture on the planet does the same thing. When the Spanish invaded Mexico, and conquered the Mexica Aztecs, they conquered an empire which had “Othered” many tribes and cultures throughout what is now Central America. They conquered them by military force, cut their hearts out on ceremonial altars, and reportedly sometimes skinned them, as in Silence of the Lambs, and ran through the streets wearing robes made from their victims.
Africans conquered Africans. Asians Asians. One tribe of Maori would conquer and enslave another. The Maori kept slaves. I remember posting on this when I wrote about “Once were Warriors”, which is a brutal film. Sakajaweya was a slave captured by one tribe in a raid, and sold to her husband, a much older French trader.
So what Said and Fabian did in their works, in important respects, was Other their own native cultures (both clearly existed in the cultural space of the West). They created a static template in which Western academics always and in all cases created an allochronic, schizogenic discourse, making ALL Western discourse inherently unfair.
But of course this accusation itself is unfair. The ideal was then, and remains now, to paint an accurate picture. Full Stop. In the 19th century no doubt many prejudices which all humans are prey to animated the writings of the professionals, but even then the goal was to be accurate, even if many could not prevent themselves from forming uninformed and romantic notions which were really inaccurate.
Other than its sheer scale of success, there is no perspective from which what the West did differs in any way from what substantially all cultures have done for recorded history. They invaded. They conquered. They enslaved. They stole. They looted.
It was this notion of the Static Other which made it possible for people to claim the war in Vietnam was against the “Yellow Man”. No, we fought alongside one “yellow” tribe, against a different “yellow” tribe, itself supported by another cultural tribe, that of the Communists, whose ancestry was white. Many of them were actual Russians.
This I will call the “Brown Person Fallacy”, which is that “they” are all the same, and that to attack one of them is to attack all of them.
And in our own conquests we did also bring a different notion of time, specifically the notion of moral progress. Clearly, all actually existing societies of the world went through periodic changes, but their world views, by and large–and I’m not the historian to know about some obscure tribe in Africa or the Amazon that does not fit this template–were perceived as relatively static. Their gods changed little if at all. The nature of life changed little if at all. Their customs and mores, if uninterrupted by outside forces, tended to change slowly if at all across large swathes of time. Think small Amazonian tribes, doing what they do for thousands of years.
Only in the West–not in China, not in Japan, not in Africa, not in the Americas–did the notion of steady moral and material progress arise. The notion that our task was to make everything a bit better, generation after generation, even if it meant “subverting dominant paradigms.” Even if it meant change most of us did not want. Once you sign on to the notions of reason and progress, then you have to accept new conclusions when they come down the pike.
And what I would submit is that at some point, large segments of our intelligentsia left this train. They stopped believing in true moral progress. I don’t know if they got scared, but that seems the likeliest explanation.
I would submit that there is a continuum between collective guilt and individual guilt, and that this continuum represents that between atavism and regression on the one side, and a positive, benevolent future for humankind on the other.
This brings me to my point. THE MODERN LEFT VIEWS ALL GROUPS AS MONOLITHIC, MORALLY EQUAL, COLLECTIVELY CULPABLE, STATIC, INCAPABLE OF CHANGE, AND AS SEPARATE.
This is more or less precisely the perceptual blindness which underlies true racism. Leftist “anti-racist” discourse is intrinsically and violently bigoted, at the levels both of principle and practice.
And since I’m a Chicago guy, I will insert a methodological note. Obviously, I myself am making of “the Left” a monolithic whole. This is an heuristic method, which is necessarily inexact. I recognize that “they” fight among themselves about this that and the other/Other.
But the nature of this particular beast, the social dynamic which informs it, as I have argued often, is and necessarily must be social and emotional and political conformity, and at that, conformity to continually changing rules and imperatives. One week, we are underfunding the police. The next week, the police need to be abolished. If you want to keep your standing, you shout the one the first week, and the other the next week.
Such a dynamic allows me, I feel, to make reasonably accurate claims about “them” as a group. And certainly what I am describing matches what I personally witness every day in practice. There is no abuse to reason I see which is not best ascribed to that person’s reflexive and compulsive rejection of their own personal agency and moral capacity in favor of adherence to the screechings of a mutable and fundamentally irrational and inconsistent political bullhorn. They might as well be rolling dice.
Returning to my main point, put another way, the modern Left applies the same methods for the rationalization of conquest that early Western colonialists did with respect to the world. Everything Edward Said and Johannes Fabian accused the West of, their own direct intellectual descendants want to repeat.
Let me take a concrete example. If you have not seen this, it is worth the watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4BveH3iTFM
It is Candace Owens take on the whole George Floyd thing . As she says, in our society, only black criminals are held up as heroes. All other cultural groupings with the United States reject and disown their own, when they commit crimes like what George Floyd committed.
This is a separate issue from Chauvin’s actions, which I won’t examine.
The point is that Floyd is being made out to be some sort of secular saint, a martyr. There is and can be no discussion of what sort of person he was, or how he came to be in that situation.
On another message board I saw a nasty exchange between a guy who is a hospice worker and who often visits our local black community to help people die with peace, and dignity and with someone by their side. It’s heroic work in many respects.
And his point was that not all persons of color are saints. Many of them are no good. In response, he was told he was a KKK member and a racist.
Think about that. A small minority of blacks commit a LOT of crimes. 40% of all violent crimes–as Owens points out–are committed by some percentage of 7% of the population, which is the black males. That number may itself need to be cut in half, and perhaps again. Perhaps 1-3% of people in this country commit 40% of the violent crimes. Some 52% of all homicides. More blacks are killed by other blacks every year, most years, than were lynched by anyone in the whole history of unpunished institutional racism. There were about 4,000 lynchings that are recorded, everywhere, for all time for which we have records (by memory: add a couple thousand if you like) That is awful. 1 is too many. But is getting shot going to work by accident really that much better? If everyone reassured knowing that even though it was random and terrible, that it didn’t involve “racism”? Is there that much less crying for the loss of a loved one? Do you really think blacks are a different species of human being? I don’t. All the details matter, but it is the fact of the loss which matters most. The terror of lynching is the terror of sudden violent, unfair death. Most blacks in most violent American cities live with that fear today.
Here are some randomly selected statistics: https://www.dailywire.com/news/7-statistics-you-need-know-about-black-black-crime-aaron-bandler
Do your own DuckDuckGo search. You know the basic outline is accurate.
But what the Left wants to do is make all blacks into saints, and call racist everyone who disagrees. This does violence to common sense, and it enables actual violence in black communities.
What happens, for example, if the white calls for an end to police presence in black neighborhoods actually gets enacted? Do not more blacks die? Is this a desirable outcome? Of course not.
The whole thing depends on simplistic, bigoted, racist thinking, as I have said, of precisely the sort that animated the Western colonial project.
Current left wing narratives are atavistic, regressive, damaging, racist, They reject the notion of individual guilt.
Rayshard Brooks, for example, was a violent man. It’s unclear what the exact story was, but he did time for hurting his children and seemingly his wife or girlfriend. He punched a cop in the face, and stole another cops Taser, then shot it at the second cop.
This is not a good guy. This is not someone who was an asset to his community. We can debate why, but it seems likely an unhappy childhood, brought on by poverty and an overwhelmed single mother, is the likeliest answer.
We KNOW, beyond any shadow of a reasonable doubt, that all black children would do better in two parent homes. We KNOW that a good education will permanently improve an individuals chances in life, just as a poor education will damage them. We KNOW that good jobs cause general increases in overall material well being, and that that in turn decreases many of the stresses of life.
So why is our focus not on these three obvious items? Why are we not trying to do the things which will obviously work, and which are obviously not being done now?
Here is an idea: elements within our society want to “colonize” our system, broadly speaking, which they would term a “revolution”. It would be a conquest, of one faction–the rational, Constitutionally grounded, progressive faction–by one animated by traditional motives of aggression, hatred, greed, lust and perhaps boredom/ennui.
I will leave you with an image, one which started this whole open ended exercise in talking out loud with my fingers.
I myself am firmly dedicated to improving myself emotionally. As I have written often, I have terrible emotions from my past which more or less come up and attack me every night when I try to sleep, and which tend to make me hypervigilant and paranoid during the day. I am always on the watch for threats. (And I will note that it is the paranoia that makes me look. What I see is clearly there. Just because I am paranoid does not mean there is no they, or that they are not out to get people like me.)
Progress is slow. It comes in fits and starts. But it is being made.
Left wing notions more or less literally consist in the delusion that taking someone like me, locking me up, beating me regularly, and teaching me to repeat emotionally disconnected, imbecilic and irrational cant will somehow actually improve me as a human being.
This was done to millions in all these totalitarian projects in the 20th century. To some unknown extent, it is STILL being done in places like North Korea, China, and Cuba.
And generalized, the notion is that if you do the same thing to a SOCIETY, if you capture it, imprison it, and beat the living shit out of it, that someone a utopia will emerge. To call this vanity is much too generous.
All of these things, all these political myths (of the bad sort) exist for only one thing: to enable a return to the most primitive stages of human cultural evolution. To a Top Ape. To slaves. To a system based on the arbitrary and capricious and often sadistic use of power.
That’s it. All these vegans: they want to kill someone, preferably as a mob.
That will do for today. I repeat myself, but I do continue to believe variations and riffs in the melody fill out the picture in useful ways.