E pluribus unum? Unity from Diversity?
Signatures of all things I am here to read, sea-spawn and sea-wrack, the
nearing tide.
James
Joyce
It is fantastic and unbelievable the level of
prejudice and discrimination against blacks in US history. Start with slavery
from 1619, and then 250 some years until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863
and the 13th Amendment in 1865. Slavery was an absolute abomination,
unjustifiable in any way other than the law of pure club and fang. The 1857
Dred Scott decision, slaves as property and not people. A Civil War ostensibly
to abolish slavery and preserve the Union but after which black’s social and
economic status reverts back to slavery in all but name. A hundred years of Jim
Crow laws, segregation and KKK terrorism. Black people afraid to even walk down
the street. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, separate but equal doctrine sanctioned
by the highest legal body of the nation, with emphasis on the separate and not
much equal. World War Two, framed as freedom against fascism and racism while
with glaring hypocrisy racism is a fact of life at home in the US. The US armed
forces remain segregated until 1948, the Red Cross separated blood from blacks
and whites. Black soldiers had to give up their seats on the bus to German
prisoners of war. Black soldiers return home unable to eat in a restaurant and
have to stand by the back door to be fed. A Cold War of communist oppression
and slavery versus US democratic freedom while blacks have to eat in separate
establishments, are refused jobs, housing and education. The indignities and
hypocrisy are astounding. Then, when blacks stand up to be counted they are set
upon with attack dogs, clubs and fire hoses. The federal government is shamed
into action and we get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, the 14th and 15th amendments to the US
Constitution (due process and equal protection of the law, and the right to
vote) finally enforced nearly a century later. LBJ says “I think the Democrats
just lost the South”. Politically, a barely submerged racism fuels a
conservative southern political strategy ostensibly for state’s rights but in
actuality using a calculated divisiveness to gain and hold power. Housing
patterns in the north, central and west constitute defacto segregation. Structural
prejudice is still prevalent. The southern reaction of massive resistance to
integration is mirrored through time, nationwide, in a red state snail’s pace
of resistance to civil rights that still has blacks and all other minorities as
second-class citizens.
Is this my country that wants to make the world safe
for freedom and democracy? The international rhetoric does not square with life
on the ground at home. I am led to question why such an animosity towards
blacks? Why such inhumanity to our fellow man? Can this be justified in any
reasonable way or are we looking at something fundamentally unjustifiable? How
can such inhumanity be explained? With Hitler we called it evil, here in the US
we call it the status quo. Something is not right.
For one thing, the very notion of freedom, something
so cherished, is a malleable and elusive concept able to be molded in ways that
deny it to some and have it as a birthright to others. Freedom can be
universal, as with Thomas Jefferson’s self evident truth that all men are
created equal, with certain inalienable Rights or freedom can be partial and
center on economic liberties only, to the exclusion of personal and political
freedoms. Freedom is a tool that serves the purposes of those who invoke it.
Underdogs want to gain more access to freedom and
top dogs want to limit that access. The invoking of freedom is ultimately based
on questions of power and control and here is one explanation of the roots of
prejudice and exclusion. Simply stated, people want control and alternative
expressions of humanity are contested, to the point of violence and war.
In human history there has been a constant tension
between methods of control and those seeking to overcome this control.
Typically, well-defined groups include their own members and seek to exclude
others. People struggle for legitimacy in a world full of difference. And
beyond mere legitimacy some have sought broader horizons of inclusivity, at an
idealistic level of equality, fraternity etc. Universally oriented advances
made by the race as a whole, towards pluralistic inclusiveness, civil behavior,
rights, proper relations and justice, this sphere of human experience gets
counteracted by a seeming innate clannishness which tends to circle the wagons
around identity condensation points, such as race, religion, politics, class,
ethnicity, gender orientation, kin etc. This is your basic in-group/ out-group
dynamic.
An example of the universal struggling with the
particular: Mohandas Gandhi is generally viewed as a top-level moral figure in
world history; someone who clearly stood for justice, for what is right, human
dignity, human rights, freedom, liberty, self-determination, non-violent
resistance, yet Gandhi was also seen as an impediment and sand in the shoe of British
colonial rule. Gandhi’s ideas were anathema to British power and control of
Indian labor and physical resources. India was a cash cow for Great Britain and
they didn’t want to give that up, no matter how lofty the ideal. Winston
Churchill sought to maintain this oppression while working to limit the
oppression of communism. Pick your poison. Martin Luther King can be seen in
the same way, clearly standing for what is right, the high road, the morals
that should be, yet he was called a nigger and had to fight the white
mainstream establishment for every inch of freedom in the Civil Rights Movement
of the 1950s and 60s. Segregation afforded white America a source of cheap
labor, a pool of people to do all the dirty work, another cash cow not wanting
to be relinquished. Two men who stood for universal morality and inclusiveness,
simply asking for equality and a level playing field, vilified and
assassinated. On what basis such
prejudice? That blacks and Indians do not have inherent Rights? That having any
Rights is a matter of who sets the alarm clock earliest and who works the
hardest to gain their advantage? That Rights are not given but must be taken?
It is obvious enough that those in power do not willingly give much to those
not in power. If is obvious that freedom and justice flow not from a fountain
of equality given gladly.
This tension between the impulse to hold to power at
all costs and the impulse to resist discrimination and exploitation is one that
will persist as long as such paradoxes and tendencies live in the human spirit
and in human society. Small-minded and parochial interests are exactly what
kicks everything off. Here is the struggle. Violence, revenge, hate, all run in
self-perpetuating cycles; that’s how things seem to end up. And to keep it all
going, those struggling to be included frequently resort to the tactics of the
oppressors, further perpetuating the cycle. Martin Luther King spoke of the
fruit of the tree of violence and oppression: a “corroding hatred”, “a long and
desolate night of bitterness”, a “violence of the spirit” and how the Code of
Hammurabi “ends up leaving everybody blind”.
The only way out is to break the chain. This is the
approach of forgiveness and nonviolence. It is a conscious decision to break
through to another level, to not continue the cycle of revenge, to not respond
with actions or words that goad the other party to continue in conflict. Nonviolence is the high road. It is not easy
nor does it lack in courage and principle. But how is violence and oppression
addressed when it is woven into the very fabric of the structure of the world
system and the world economy? This is such a huge inertia that it is almost
laughable to think of redirecting the train of Wall Street to make a stop on
Main Street. I asked a multi-millionaire client what he thought of green
investments and he said it was like pissing in the ocean.
I guess it can all be seen that way until one
decides they just aren’t going to sit in the back of the bus anymore. We end up
with an accretion of incremental gains that ebb and flow, underdogs struggling
for recognition, top dogs struggling to keep their power.
It all really depends on how you frame things up
from the start, what you see as valuable. The parochial, the smaller levels of
focus, seems to end up in conflict with universal, larger level of focus, the
particular sees injustice in the general and the general sees injustice in the
particular. It may not be a matter of justice at all but of a stubborn refusal
to see anything beyond one’s preferred horizon. It seems people just do not
like to be told or commanded anything. We get the blinders on and that is a
characteristic we all share, whoever may be ultimately right or wrong.
How unjustified it is to always set up one’s own mores as absolute. Herodotus
Qui respiciunt ad pauca de facili pronunciat.
They who take only few
points into account find it easy to pronounce judgment.
Every man’s way is right in
his own eyes. Proverbs 21:2
It is entirely reasonable to me that blacks would be
able to vote, have civil rights, be desegregated, have access to all liberties,
freedoms and opportunities granted to the mainstream. In Brown v. Board of
Education 1954, why should Brown’s daughter have to cross dangerous railroad
tracks to attend a segregated school farther away when there is a white school
right nearby? There is no compelling
counter argument to Thomas Jefferson’s “we hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness.” Nothing holds water compared to that. Parochialism
is revealed for what it is, a very small horizon. Small differences, small
horizons end up defining marked behavioral boundaries and allegiances between
groups. These boundaries become easily folded into projections of superiority
and inferiority. All these boundaries and struggles revolve around the basic
facets of our humanity, the constituent elements of our cultures.
Identity points of culture/ Condensation points of
conflict:
religion: Sunni/ Shiite, Hindu/
Muslim, Catholic/ Protestant, Lutheran/ Mennonite, religious/ secular humanist,
creationist/ evolutionist
ethnic: Serb/ Muslim, Lakota/
Crow, Israeli/ Palestinian,
class: First World/ Third World,
colonizer/ colonized, bosses/ workers, bourgeois/ proletariat
kin: Hatfields/ McCoys, New
Guinea highlanders
race: black/ white, aborigine/
white, Turkish/ Swedish, Indian/ white, Spanish/ Indian,
ideology:, US/ communist, liberal/
conservative, educated/ uneducated, free market/ activist government,
cooperation/ competition, science/ religion
politics: Democrat/ Republican, red
state/ blue state
state power
and authority: conquerors/ conquered, Aztec/ Chichimec
nativism: US working class whites
and ethnics/ Mexican immigrants, poor South African blacks/ black immigrants
nationalism: France/ Great Britain,
Vietnam/ USA, Iran/.USA, Mexican/ white US
gender: homosexual/ heterosexual
sex: male/ female, aggressive/
passive
family
& reproduction: Roe v. Wade, married/ unmarried
method of
inquiry:
science, logic, math, academic methods, philosophy, art, drama, poetry,
literature, spirit
demographics: rural/ urban
An impartial look at what is happening here shows
that we struggle based upon the very same ground of culture and meaning upon
which we must live and interpret the world. Each particular version of humanity
must, in some sense, rest on an assumption of validity and this is the seed of
trouble. That one little assumption of validity makes it impossible to
generalize out and see other validities.
When a code is familiar enough it ceases appearing like a code, one forgets
there is a decoding mechanism. The message is identified with it’s meaning.
Douglas
R. Hofstadter
It is the theory that decides what we can observe.
Albert
Einstein
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from it’s meaning but from
it’s certitude.
Eric
Hoffer, The True Beleiver
It seems like people gravitate to the dividing
points, as these are the same points that unite. The identity points, the
elements of culture, are the basis for unity of in-groups and also of conflict
between out-groups. Misunderstanding, oppression, and violence then, is the
mirror of love and compassion. Who is a threat and who is not boils down to
whether we say lavender or purple, whether symbols and meanings are shared or
not.
Meanings end up in contention and those who hold
alternate views become bogie men. Intimate enemies are made, disputing the fine
differences. It is easy to make the negative comparison. A symbolic bogie man
or bogie issue in the above condensation points of conflict is a necessary
catalyst for groups to unify around. With no struggle there is no condensation.
Even nonviolence must have a rally point that is fundamentally against.
See what mass movement succeeds by merely being for something. This
dynamic is part of the trouble; that on order to define a community or an
issue, people resort to a negative comparison with other communities and
issues.
I am led to consider the Tower of Babel metaphor. In
the Fertile Crescent, in a world of incipient civilizations each demanding
resources, each with different cultures and languages, just the mere fact of
difference, if one says lavender and the other purple, that sets the stage for
trouble. The world is full of particular groups whose differences become the
basis for conflict because of a refusal to accept that universal humanity has
alternate sets of terms.
“When I use a word”, Humpty
Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to
mean——neither more nor less.”
“The question is”, said
Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Experience is something man projects upon the outside world as he gains it
in its culturally determined form.
Edward
T. Hall
It is a meshing issue, on the big wheel that turns
the whole human race, all the identity points are of the same type, race is
race, and religion is religion. And while all these capacities and condensation
points are fundamentally the same for all people, serve the same purposes, at
ground level there is a struggle about who and what is more true. At the level
of the smaller gears, their immediacy creates the illusion that they are
immovably essential. This is true; this is the paradox of the whole situation,
essential small gears cannot see the big wheel yet they are part of the same
entity. In Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott, lines cannot comprehend
circles. Fish can’t see they are in a tank. There is conflict yet there is no
conflict. It’s like a bird fighting its
own reflection in a window; it is an illusion.
The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.
Logion 113, The Kingdom is within you.
Logion 3
Jesus,
translated from the Gnostic Gospels According to Saint Thomas
And in the end, what is the point of all the
clannishness and parochial tendencies? That daily life can be simple,
uncomplicated and congruent with certain assumptions about what is mainstream
and good? Mainstream to whom? Who defines an insider and an outsider and why?
Are alternative versions of being human just too much to stomach? You are with
us or against us? That control of jobs and resources be kept for the insiders?
That advantage of the upper hand is maintained? That one ultimate truth will
hold sway over other ultimate truths? Do we gravitate towards stasis and shrink
from dynamism? If our morals and ideals are really so high and mighty how can
we treat other humans like dirt? Are our Gods and our hearts really so petty?
Is the nature of man to attempt to dominate other men and the environment?
Could we be running on a survival automatic pilot that is set for another era,
when such aggression and inclusiveness really paid off? Why else such a competitive drives to be in
control and gain power? The answers to these questions seem to point at once to
our nature, to our biology and to an evolving set of cultures, societies and
economies that have become progressively more complex and stratified.
Stratified means that hierarchies are an end result.
This stratification is not a sacred order; it is an order that social animals
tend towards. A dominance hierarchy is not given by God; it is something individual
animals must struggle with on their own here on earth. This is a flat out
structural explanation for the inequality we find in our societies. Appealing
to God gets us nowhere in the practical projects we must surmount.
With the biological part of human behavior there is
no factually demonstrated superiority of any one group over any others. A
fundamental baseline inequality among humans cannot be proven. All people have
the same capacities and abilities; this is clear and unequivocal. The political,
economic, academic, cultural, philosophical, religious reasons and
justifications for inequality given by respective particular views, top dogs
and power players don’t hold water. These reasons are pure rationales for the
impulse to dominate that lies underneath, the impulse to see only that small
horizon prescribed by membership in parochial groups. What we have is a
tendency for struggle to be the lead dog. This is a Jack London law of club and
fang type principle. This is Thomas Hobbes war of all against all. Any social
contract applies only to immediate insiders, all the rest are reduced to
subhuman, deluded, infidels, heretics. We come this way from the womb, ready to
receive the cultural particulars, ready to plug in the script and react with our
underlying impulse drive, no matter if we are Christian, white, black, Muslim,
Serb, communist, clan member or whatever. And this all plays out in a Tower of
Babel context.
What I see is that our biological impulses are
clothed in culture. Parochial moralities are efforts at survival of an
in-group. The struggle of tooth and claw becomes transposed to a struggle of
ideas, symbols and meanings.
All the justifications boil down to trying to get
the upper hand and control the interpretation and the unfolding of events,
socially, spiritually, economically, biologically, technologically. Rationales
seem so self-evident as everybody finds what they are looking for. Every
constituency is a hammer and the whole world looks like their kind of nails.
Individuals must survive, find food and shelter, and this is done through a
social context of group and community membership. Every group needs to survive
and other groups seem to threaten that survival. So then the other groups are
bad, can be reduced to non-human etc.
Once underdogs become top dogs, they forget their
former gripes and become the new oppressors. Some examples: Christians as
underdogs to top dogs in the Roman periods and onward, US revolutionary
political principles of freedom and liberty giving way to economic
justifications for world domination and the ascendancy of greed masquerading as
democracy, Israeli mistreatment of a whole race and ethnic group, able to be
justified when their own race suffered the same, Yuppies sell out their 60s
ideals. The underdogs become just what they hated. Meet the new boss, same as
the old boss. It happens over and over again. This is what happens when getting
even is the underlying motive. This is what happens when gaining power and
control is the goal. It goes on endlessly that way.
Power and control for what? Does power mean
security? So you can walk down the street and not have to fight somebody? So
you can pursue happiness? So that you can say lavender and no one will ever say
purple?
My explanation here is twofold, biology and culture.
Biological drives are the basis for all behavior that then ramifies out through
culture and society. The same points that unify cultures become their dividing
points. For people, biology goes through a cultural, symbolic filter,
disguising the innate with words, symbols and cultural meanings. This is one
view. It is certainly possible to arrive at similar conclusions from other
places. Like fractals, a universal, perennial philosophy should be isomorphic
in the whole of human thought and able to be generated out of any area. I
arrive by reason others arrive by religion, others by literature. And since we
have the same issues world-wide, of violence, war, discrimination, prejudice,
inequality, any universal answers appear similar because it is the same
problem, just viewed from different angles.
From biology I have spoken much of what divides.
This impulse to divide, dispute etc is usually seen as the dark, evil, violent
and then contrasted with light, goodness, non-violence. This is yin/ yang,
subject/ object and on and on; this opens up the whole shoehorning of all
experience into a field of paired opposites. This may stem from a fundamental
impulse to break the world into insiders and outsiders. Even more basic it
could stem from male and female, a primary biological fact of sexual species.
People usually apply the good stuff to their insiders and save the bad stuff
for outsiders.
The project we now face is as Jose Ortega y Gassett
proposed: So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don’t find in us
enough surfaces on which to live and what we have to do then is to increase the
number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a
place in it at the same time. We
need to transpose this into opening up a tolerance for cultural differences,
beyond mere interests.
So sure, people do gravitate towards their own
self-interest and their own group interests and this is natural enough. What is
called for is to switch the size of the in-group to include all of
humanity.
Culture took us from pure animals to being human.
Culture took the instinct and wrapped it in particular meanings relative to
each group. Culture gives us a persistent uncertainty principle, as all our
explanations and justifications must filter through it. All explanation is
necessarily one step removed. Even with math and science, there is no access
except through language and culture; the objective method is not immune from
parochialism. This persistent uncertainty goes right back to the Tower of Babel
metaphor, you can never tell who has really got it. It becomes a struggle of volume and
repetition where “facts” don’t matter.
So, in addition to straight up biology and
underlying impulses, unequal socio-economic stratification derives from our
cultural evolution, which is not in any genes. I am talking about forms of
economy and society. Looking back over our cultural evolution, as egalitarians
there may have been less strife. All had
more or less equal access to the means of production. And there were less rats in the cage. That
was a baseline Jeffersonian freedom. With more complex systems of horticulture,
agriculture, pastoralism, chiefdoms, states and civilizations, there was progressively
more of an unequal socio-economic stratification, an unequal distribution of
wealth. There came a control of the means of production by the few, the rulers.
You get way more underdogs the more complex a society gets and concomitantly,
groups trying to hold onto whatever power and control they have. This seems like a reasonable enough
explanation for prejudice against minorities, strangers and outsiders, as
strangers are nothing more than competition in the way for you getting what is
yours. Strangers can be made into slaves. Strangers have false gods. Your
supposed superiority can start to seem real and not a construct of stratified
power relations.
Competition for scarce resources, this is the
cornerstone for capitalist market theory. Yet this competition seems to only
come into play when you get the differentiation and stratifications of more
complex economies. The people who introduced the competition metaphor, Darwin,
Adam Smith, they were in the thick of the Industrial Revolution and nascent
capitalism. This is what they saw. This competition may not be an innate,
underlying force but a function of the growing complexity of society and
economy. To see competition as a primary underpinning for human behavior is
really just a form of Social Darwinism. I propose that competition may be a
structural aspect deriving from social and economic behavior and not a
necessary, primary, defining innate characteristic.
Cooperation may be as viable and valid an impulse as
competition. We may compete, make bogie men, take advantage of others, and
discriminate against others because we are inextricably yoked to the structure
of our economic and societal relations and that inextricably pits some dogs
against others. The structure forces us
to behave that way, to see things that way, but this cultural structure is not
an unchangeable fact of life.
The whole survival thing is based just as much on
elements of cooperation and interrelations as it is with competition. We have
been co-opted into shoveling all interpretation into the competition model, as
that has been the going game, the dominant paradigm. Social Darwinism,
evolutionary psychology, selfish genes, these are paradigms and all information
is seemingly heading towards that vortex and style of puzzle solving; all is
shoehorned that way; all theories are made to fit that scheme. If there was a
paradigm shift and all theories started to be worked in terms of cooperation,
then that would maybe be a step towards peace, nonviolence and equality.
So what about this cultural structure that we may be
able to bring to a conscious level and change for our own betterment as a
species? With agricultural and industrial economies there is the ability to
generate surpluses so that there actually ARE enough resources to share out and
potentially redistribute. There could be
equality and fraternity but the trouble is that the surplus value gets hoarded
progressively by the few and you then get whole classes of exploited and
oppressed people. Foxes seem to always be putting pressure on the henhouse. And
then the foxes say, “well, you just have to be more aggressive”, “You need to
pull yourself up by your bootstraps and be successful on your own accord and
not blame things on the structure of the henhouse.”
Perhaps the going paradigm was not always the fox and
the henhouse. When we look back at the evolution of human economies, prestige
and the public perception of success has gone from an emphasis on
redistribution of wealth to gaining prestige for hoarding wealth as an
individual. Somewhere the emphasis changed from redistribution to hoarding,
from cooperation to competition. The goals changed, to the detriment of the
race as a whole. My point: economic and societal structure is evolved
and not innate and therefore it is not a fundamental, unchangeable characteristic.
The map is not
equal to the territory.
The further you go up the ladder of increasing
stratification, from horticulture, agriculture, pastoralism, states,
civilizations, the worse the competition and inequality get. We end up with
economic individuals divorced from meaningful community and social control. The
modern conspicuous consumer becomes possible when you get to the level of
civilizations and states. The evolution of this whole process is easy enough to
see, the Great Leap Forward 35,000 years ago, horticulture and agriculture 5000
years ago, metallurgy, animal domestication, civilizations, states, and 500
years ago the Ages of Discovery, Reason, science, expansion, wars, ocean
traveling technology, conquest, capital, the Industrial Revolution, world
economy, positions of power reinforced and consolidated. It is almost like
certain groups of people have evolved to be predators and others have become
prey.
So who has the Right to get more and why? Surely no
one group is innately better or purer or more right that any other. The current
world debacles of war, economic oppression and unequal distribution of wealth
must have come about by seizing Rights or privileges by force and holding them
by the same means, with legal systems and governmental instruments all designed
to allow their creators to stay in power. A poor Mexican exploited by the world
system becomes an outlaw when looking for gainful employment. A black man and a
convicted white felon are able to get the same sort of jobs. The forces of
competition and parochialism hold sway over the forces of cooperation and
inclusiveness. Advocates for inclusiveness and plurality hold no power of pure
force. Indignant voices are shot and killed when they threaten the power
players or they are simply ignored. In a world of suburban back yard barbeques,
what is out front in the larger world is out of sight and out of mind.
The Martin Luther Kings of the world can only appeal
to a more universal understanding, that these truths are self evident, that all
men are created equal. And if all men are created equal and deserving of
certain inalienable rights, then these must trump rationales having to do with
competition and the rights of top dogs to keep their position on the basis of
pure power alone. In the end it is power and asymmetry versus ideas of
equality, plurality and inclusiveness.
In the end, our survival will hinge on culture and education trumping
biology and socio-economic inertia.
Reason is part of our tool kit, not the only hammer,
but one of a variety of implements, of which an agape type of understanding can
provide an attitudinal basis for the work and emotional focus for the ideas.
The question is no longer Can civilized men believe?
rather Can unbelieving men be civilized?
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