The last two posts here on The Archdruid Report, with their focus on America’s class system and the dysfunctional narratives that support it, fielded an intriguing response from readers. I expected a fair number to be uncomfortable with the subject I was discussing; I didn’t expect them to post comments and emails asking me, in so many words, to please talk about something else instead.
Straight talk about uncomfortable subjects has been this blog’s bread and butter since I first started posting just shy of ten years ago, so I’ve had some experience with the way that blog readers squirm. Normally, when I touch on a hot-button issue, readers who find that subject too uncomfortable go out of their way to act as though I haven’t mentioned it at all. I’m thinking here especially, but not only, of the times I’ve noted that
the future of the internet depends on whether it can pay for itself, not on whether it’s technically feasible.
Whenever I’ve done this, I’ve gotten comments that rabbited on endlessly about technical feasibility as a way to avoid talking about the economic reasons why the internet won’t be able to cover its own operating costs in the future of resource depletion and environmental blowback we’re busy making for ourselves.
It’s not just hard questions about the future of the internet that attracts that strategy of avoidance, mind you. I’ve learned to expect it whenever some post of mine touches on any topic that contradicts the conventional wisdom of our time. That’s why the different response I got to the last two posts was so fascinating. The fact that people who were made uncomfortable by a frank discussion of class privilege actually admitted that, rather than trying to pretend that no subject so shocking had been mentioned at all, says to me that we may be approaching a historical inflection point of some importance.
Mind you, frank discussion of class privilege still gets plenty of avoidance maneuvers outside the fringe territory where archdruids lurk. I’m thinking here, of course, of the way that affluent liberals right now are responding to Donald Trump’s straightforward talk about class issues by yelling that he and his followers must be motivated by racism and nothing else. That’s partly a standard bit of liberal rhetoric—I’ve discussed the way that the word “racist,” when uttered by the privileged, normally functions as a dog whistle for “wage class”—but it’s also an attempt to drag the conversation away from what policies that benefit the affluent have done to everyone else in this country.
In some parts of the current Neopagan community, that evasive maneuver has acquired a helpful moniker: “Starhawking.” With apologies to those of my readers who may find the behavior of one of America’s smaller minority religious communities uninteresting, I’d like to recount the story behind the label. Here as so often, a small example helps clarify things; the reduced scale of a social microcosm makes it easier to observe patterns that can be harder to see at a glance on the macrocosmic scale.
Those who haven’t had any contact with the Neopagan scene may not know that it isn’t one religion, or even a group of closely related religions; rather, it’s a grab-bag of profoundly diverse faiths, some of which have less in common with one another than Christianity has with Shinto. Their association in a common subculture comes not from shared beliefs or practices, but solely from a shared history of exclusion from the religious and cultural mainstream of American society. These days, something like half of American Neopagans participate in some flavor of eclectic Paganism, which emerged out of the older British traditional witchcraft in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the rest fall into two broad categories: one consists of older initiatiory traditions such as the British traditional witchcraft just named, while the other consists of recently revived polytheist faiths worshipping the gods and goddesses of various historic pantheons—Norse, Greek, Egyptian, and so on.
There’s a great deal of talk about inclusiveness in the Neopagan scene, but those of my readers who know their way around small American subcultures will have no trouble figuring out that what this means is that eclectic Paganism is the default option almost everywhere, and people from other traditions are welcome to show up and participate, on terms defined by eclectic Paganism, so long as they don’t offend the sensibilities of the eclectic Pagan majority. For a variety of reasons, most of which are more relevant to my other blog than this one, those sensibilities seem to be getting more easily offended of late, and people from the minority traditions have responded in a variety of ways. Some have simply walked away from the Neopagan scene, while others have tried, in an assortment of forums, to start a conversation about what has been awkwardly termed “Wiccanate privilege.”
One such discussion was under way at a large San Francisco-area Neopagan event in 2014 when Starhawk put in a belated appearance. For those who aren’t familiar with her, she’s one of the few genuine celebrities to come out of the US Neopagan scene, the author of The Spiral Dance, one of the two books that basically launched eclectic Paganism—the other is Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon—and a notable political figure over on the leftward end of the spectrum. According to people I know who were there, she proceeded to insist that the conversation should not even be happening, because all Pagans need to unite to save the Earth.
Mind you, there were plenty of other conversations going on at that event that had nothing to do with saving the Earth, and neither she nor anyone else seemed to feel any need to try to silence those conversations—just the conversation about privilege. That’s Starhawking: the rhetorical tactic of insisting that some other issue is so important that the privilege of the speaker must not be discussed. To be fair to Starhawk, she didn’t invent it; it’s all over contemporary discourse in America, quite often in contexts where the stakes are considerably higher than they will ever be in the Neopagan scene.
Madeleine Albright’s recent insistence that every woman in America should vote for Hillary Clinton or fry in hell comes out of exactly the same logic. Issue A in this case is the so-called “glass ceiling,” the habit of excluding women of the privileged classes from the upper reaches of power and wealth. Issue B in this case is the fact that putting Hillary Clinton into the White House will only benefit those women who belong to the top end of America’s class structure, since the policies Clinton has supported throughout her political life have brought impoverishment and immiseration to the vast majority of American women, i.e., those who belong to the wage class and the lower half or so of the salary class.
When Starhawking comes from the leftward end of the affluent class, it’s almost always framed in terms of another kind of bias—racism, sexism, or what have you—which can be used, along the lines detailed last week, to blame the sufferings of one underprivileged group on another underprivileged group. When it takes place on the other end of the political spectrum, as of course it does all the time, other issues are used to drown out any discussion of privilege; among the favorites are crime, Christian moral theology, and the alleged laziness and greed of people on public assistance. The excuse differs but the rhetorical gimmick is the same.
One of the things that makes that gimmick viable is the ambiguous nature of the language that’s used to talk about the various candidates for Issue A. “Crime,” for example, is a nice vague abstraction that everyone can agree to oppose. Once that agreement has been obtained, on the other hand, it descends from the airy realm of abstraction into some very questionable specifics—to note a relevant example, none of the politicians who boast about being “tough on crime” have shown any interest in locking up the kleptomaniacs of Wall Street, whose billion-dollar swindles have done far more damage to the nation than any number of muggings on the mean streets of our inner cities.
In the same way, words like “racism” and “sexism” are abstractions with a great deal of ambiguity built into them. There are at least three things conflated in labels of this kind. I’d like to unpack those for a moment, in the hope of getting a clearer view of the convoluted landscape of American inequality.
The things I want to pull out of these portmanteau words, and others like them, are privilege, prejudice, and acts of injustice. Let’s start with the last. Police officers in America, for example, routinely gun down black teenagers in response to actions that do not get white teenagers shot; a woman who gets hired for a job in the US today can expect to get, on average, roughly three-quarters the pay that a man can expect to get for doing exactly the same job; two people who love each other and want to get married have to run a gauntlet of difficulties if they happen to be the same gender that they would not face if they were different genders. Those are acts of injustice.
Prejudice is a matter of attitudes rather than actions. The word literally means pre-judgments, the judgments we all make about people and situations before we encounter them. Everybody has them, every culture teaches them, but some people are more prejudiced—more committed to their pre-judgments, and less willing to reassess them in the face of disconfirming evidence—and some are less so. Acts of injustice are usually motivated by prejudice, and prejudice very often results in acts of injustice, but neither of these equations are exact. I’ve known people who were profoundly prejudiced but refused to act on their prejudices because some other belief or commitment forbade that; I’ve also known people who participated repeatedly in acts of injustice, who were just following orders or going along with friends, and didn’t care in the least one way or the other.
Then there’s privilege. Where prejudice and acts of injustice are individual, privilege is collective; you have privilege, or don’t have it, because of the categories you belong to, not because of what you do or don’t do. I’ll use myself as a source of examples here. I can walk through the well-to-do neighborhoods of the town where I live, for instance, without being hassled by the police; black people don’t have that privilege. I can publish controversial essays like this one without being bombarded with rape and death threats by trolls; women don’t have that privilege. I can kiss my spouse in public without having some moron yell insults at me out of the window of a passing car; gay people don’t have that privilege.
I could fill the next ten posts on this blog with a listing of similar privileges I have, and not even come close to running out of examples. It’s important, though, to recognize that my condition of privilege isn’t assigned to me for any one reason. It’s not just that I’m white, or male, or heterosexual, or grew up in a family on the lower end of the salary class, or was born able-bodied, or what have you; it’s all of these things and a great many more, taken together, that assign me my place in the hierarchy of privilege. This is equally true of you, dear reader, and of everyone else. What differentiates my position from yours, and yours from everyone else’s, is that every station on the ladder has a different proportion between the number of people above it and the number of people below.
There are, for example, plenty of people in today’s America who have more privilege than I do, but there are vastly more people who have much, much less.
Note also that I don’t have to do anything to get the privileges I have, nor can I get rid of them.
As a white heterosexual man from a salary class background, and the rest of it, I got assigned nearly all of my privileges the moment I was born, and no matter what I do or don’t do, I’ll keep the vast majority of them until I die. Ths is also true of you, dear reader, and of everyone else: the vast majority of what places you on whatever rung you occupy in the long ladder of privilege is yours simply for being born. Thus you’re not responsible for the fact that you have whatever level of privilege you do—though you are responsible, of course, for what you choose to do with it.
You can, after all, convince yourself that you deserve your privilege, and the people who don’t share your privilege deserve their inferior status—that is to say, you can choose to be prejudiced. You can exploit your privilege to benefit yourself at the expense of the less privileged—that is to say, you can engage in acts of injustice. The more privilege you have, the more your prejudices affect other people’s lives and the more powerful your acts of injustice become. Thus advocates for the less privileged are quite correct to point out that the prejudices and injustices of the privileged matter more than those of the unprivileged.
On the other hand, privilege does not automatically equate to prejudice, or to acts of injustice. It’s entirely possible for the privileged—who, as already noted, did not choose their privilege and can’t get rid of it—to refuse to exploit their privilege in this way. It’s even possible, crashingly unfashionable as the concept is these days, for them to take up the old principle of noblesse oblige: the concept, widely accepted (though not always acted on) in eras where privilege was more openly recognized, that those who are born to privilege also inherit definite responsibilities toward the less privileged. I suppose it’s even possible that they might do this and not expect lavish praise for it, though that’s kind of a stretch, American culture today being what it is.
These days, though, most white heterosexual men from salary class backgrounds don’t think of themselves as privileged, and don’t see the things I enumerated earlier as privileges. This is one of the most crucial points about privilege in today’s America: to the privileged, privilege is invisible. That’s not just a matter of personal cluelessness, or of personal isolation from the less privileged, though these can of course be involved. It’s a matter of enculturation. The mass media and every other aspect of mainstream American culture constantly present the experience of privileged people as normal, and just as constantly feed any departure from that experience through an utterly predictable set of filters.
First, of course, the experience of the unprivileged is erased—“That sort of thing doesn’t actually happen.” When that fails, it’s dismissed as unimportant—”Well, maybe it does happen, but it’s no big deal.” When it becomes clear that it is a big deal to those who have to cope with it, it’s treated as an occasional anomaly—“You can’t generalize from one or two bad examples.” When that breaks down, finally, the experience of the unprivileged is blamed on the unprivileged—“It’s their own fault that they get treated like that.” If you know your way around America’s collective nonconversation about privilege, in the mass media or in everyday conversation, you’ve seen each one of these filters deployed a thousand times or more.
What makes this interesting is that the invisibility of privilege in modern America isn’t shared by that many other human societies. There are plenty of cultures, past and present, in which privilege is right out there in the open, written into laws, and openly discussed by the privileged as well as the unprivileged. The United States used to be like that as recently as the 1950s. It wasn’t just that there were Jim Crow laws in those days formally assigning black Americans the status of second-class citizens, and laws in many states that gave women second-class status when it came to a galaxy of legal and financial rights; it was all over the media and popular culture, too. Open any daily newspaper, and the society pages splashed around the difference in privilege between those people who belonged to the elite and those who didn’t.
For a complex series of reasons rooted in the cultural convulsions of the Sixties, though, frank talk about privilege stopped being socially acceptable in America over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. That didn’t make privilege go away, of course. It did mean that certain formal expressions of privilege, such as the Jim Crow laws just mentioned, had to be scrapped, and in that process, some real injustices did get fixed. The downside was the rise of a culture of doubletalk in which the very real disparities in privilege in American society got fed repeatedly through the filters described above, and one of the most important sources of those disparities—class differences—were shoved completely out of the collective conversation of our time.
The habit of Starhawking is one of the major rhetorical tools by which open discussion of privilege, and above all of class privilege, got thrust out of sight. It’s been used with equal verve at all points along the political spectrum from the far left straight across to the far right. Whether it’s affluent liberals insisting that everyone else has to ignore their privilege in order to get on with the task of saving the Earth, affluent conservatives insisting that everyone else has to ignore their privilege in order to get on with the task of returning America to its Christian roots, or—and this is increasingly the standard line—affluent people on both sides insisting that everyone else has to ignore their privilege because fighting those horrible people on the other side of the political spectrum is the only thing that matters, what all these utterances mean in practice is “don’t talk about my privilege.”
That sort of evasion is what I expected to field from readers when I started talking about issues surrounding class privilege earlier this year. I got a certain amount of it, to be sure, but as already mentioned, I also got comments by people who acknowledged that they were uncomfortable with the discussion and wanted me to stop. What this says to me is that the wall of denial and doubletalk that has closed down open discussion of privilege in today’s America—and especially of class privilege—may be cracking at last. Granted, The Archdruid Report is well out there on the cultural fringes of American society, but it’s very often the fringes that show signs of major social changes well before the mainstream ever hears about them.
If it’s true that the suppression of talk about privilege in general, and class privilege in particular, is in the process of breaking down, it’s not a minute too soon. The United States just now stands in the path of a tidal wave of drastic change, and current patterns of privilege are among the many things that bid fair to be upended once it hits. We’ll talk about that next week.
305 comments:
4/20/16, 4:23 PM
Justin said...
I don't like the "white men are the least privileged of all" tools, but at the same time I refuse to respect those who insist I (white, heterosexual, upper salary class parents, male) simply remain silent while they deliver their 'remedies' for fixing the issue of privilege. I don't really think any progress will occur until all sides are willing to sit down and talk and the privileged willingly surrender some of what they have.
I find the current atmosphere here in Canada to be fairly toxic, where openly racist, violent members of minority communities are given a voice to spew what would be called hate speech if I said it. It cannot possibly lead to any sort of reconciliation or progress when a despicable minority of the oppressed manages to sour things for everyone, usually for personal gain.
Ultimately, I think the ball is in the court of the privileged, but it is critical that a middle path between bigotry or acquiescence is found. It's somewhat telling that the only voices that get much media time are those of bigots or sycophants - the majority of us, I hope are willing to make some fairly modest sacrifices to live in a better country but refuse to accept culpability for injustices that in many cases, happened before our ancestors even lived in the country.
4/20/16, 4:29 PM
pygmycory said...
A lot depends on how events falls out, and that will be different in different countries. I'd imagine it is stochastic too - if one could run events a second time like in computer modelling, you might get a different result.
It's going to be an interesting next few years, I think.
4/20/16, 4:42 PM
pygmycory said...
They still have the accent, the education and the social background, but everything else has drifted out of reach. It's quite a strange situation, really. They don't fit fully anywhere, and it is kind of as if they aren't fully real somehow.
4/20/16, 4:51 PM
Marcu said...
Please RSVP, or send queries and comments to limitstogrowth1972[at]gmail.com.
Just look for the green wizard's hat.
4/20/16, 5:04 PM
look sie said...
4/20/16, 5:04 PM
Leif Christensen said...
1. People with positions of power no longer see any need to maintain that power by being just, or at least seen as just. Those elites who would otherwise be just for justice's' sake are seen as competent handlers of power by the other elites.
2. The lower classes will shift from attacking abuses of powerful social positions to attacking the existence of the powerful social positions themselves, and by necessity the occupants of powerful positions. Abuses will be seen not as failures of duty but as signs that privileged positions are inherently unjust.
3. If the old privileged positions are stripped of their power, the new occupants of privileged positions will be turned upon as the new target. Their rhetoric of overthrowing or eliminating privileged positions because of the inherent injustice of inequality will paint the former liberators as the new oppressors. The cycle continues.
The solution to the cycle, it would seem, would be the public promotion of duty according to one's state in life, not the revilement of inequality. Don't ignore privilege, but make those with it understand their duty to use it prudently.
Keep up the good work, no matter what the naysayers grumble about.
4/20/16, 5:10 PM
David said...
I'd like to start by thanking you for this line of discussion. I will admit, quite openly, to my discomfort as I become aware of my level of privilege, particularly that due to class. As an analytical, data-focused type, I have run my numbers and have a good sense of where I lie in the economic distribution. (In regard to some of the other dimensions, I am fortunate to have a very mature teenage daughter who has been able to walk me through the spectrum of gender identities and sexualities, otherwise I'd be rather lost. We do not have conversations that mainstream society would deem "normal," I'd expect.)
I am encouraged by your interpretation of the data you're getting in the feedback. We, as a society, desperately need to begin making very different choices from those we've made this far. I have seen little evidence elsewhere, but you have a good track record in my experience, so I am hoping that proves true here as well.
Side note: I finally located the bubble quiz and took it. In my case, I think it was fairly accurate. I scored a 38, which was interpreted as a first generation upper middle class person of middle parents. My mom was a public schoolteacher and my dad was career Navy (entered enlisted, retired commissioned), and I am a technical professional in the utility industry.
Side side note: I don't have the link, but apparently Piers Morgan wrote a piece in the Daily Mail that essentially agreed with your assessment of a Clinton-Trump general. You are more powerful than you know!
4/20/16, 5:14 PM
Dudley Dawson said...
Keep it up!
4/20/16, 5:20 PM
aiastelamonides said...
I don't think anyone could accuse the Neopagan scene's behavior of being uninteresting....
The main thing I'd add to your article (besides at least one more division of racism – "scientific" racism or sexism I mentioned last week, and the institutional systems that perpetuate racism and sexism also seem distinct from your three as you describe them) is that injustice often exists without prejudice because the privileged are simply unconscious of the needs of the unprivileged. For example, at one time in my area people in wheelchairs and mothers pushing strollers couldn't use public transportation because none of the able-bodied men who ran the service thought to put ramps on trains and busses. They weren't callous and uncaring so much as unaware.
Also, I think the image of clearly ordered ladder, with privilege being abstracted to a quantity, is flawed. In some cases people in opposite categories have significant privileges over one another, and so the balance is best described not by asking how much privilege, but rather what kind. The young and the old come to mind, and much more controversially, men and women. (There are a few consolation prize privileges for black people, poor people, gay people, and disabled people, but the difference of degree between the case of race and that of age is so great as to effectively be a difference in kind – which of these the case of gender is more similar to probably varies from place to place within the USA.)
4/20/16, 5:30 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
It occurs to me that privileges are effectively a form of unearned wealth. Blind Freddy tells me that unearned wealth is granted because it is useful for the system to do so. And that privilege is only granted in order to maintain the system as it stands.
Please do continue with this topic! Festering boils often need a good lancing before they can begin to heal.
This is kind of weird, but I more or less wrote about this very topic this week. You see, I get people visiting here (and I'm at about the point of stopping farm visits) and nearly all - with a few notable exceptions - say to me dolefully: "It's a lot of hard work". The subtext behind that comment is that hard work is for people of low social status and it is intended as a flat out insult because basically they are displaying their higher social status by saying that they reject my view on the world and future and don't see the need to do physical labour themselves. Blind Freddy reckons that they're in for a shock one day! ;-)!
The thing is that as a "service economy" with "knowledge workers" where we have deliberately pursued policies that have walked away from actually producing products that are useful - merely to keep prices low for the salaried class - we become very vulnerable and this is a total disaster for strategic reasons - if for no other reason. I thought that we were better than that, but we're clearly not.
Grumble, grumble, and further grumble! I'm ranting again. Hehe!
A fine essay today too, the concepts were very clear (well at least to me).
Cheers
Chris
4/20/16, 5:40 PM
Wizard of Tas said...
Of course, those detours are legitimate.
Then I think about detours in movies, and they are rarely legitimate. In movies, detours are usually used by criminals to secure an area for themselves and deflect the general public and hopefully law enforcement.
That's what comes to mind when I read this article about Starhawking. Affluent, privileged, politicians, etc, putting up detour signs, either to deflect people from focussing on their own privilege, or to deflect voters from thinking favorably about the opposition. 'racist' and the traffic goes around.
Sign, signs, everywhere a sign. Blocking out the scenery...
4/20/16, 5:41 PM
Repent said...
Do you think you could visit other taboo topics that people won't talk about? The process of money creation for instance is one such taboo topic that can't be publicly discussed EVER. That money is loaned into existence, and then has to be paid back with interest is in my opinion the greatest single problem of the human economic experience right now. This social arrangement requires the economy to grow every year just to keep up with the interest on the old money that was created in the past which needs to be paid back in the now with interest.
This issue is often regarded as one of the primary causes of the Lincoln and JFK assassinations; both of them tried to introduce interest free money. The 'deep state', the 'establishment', the 'fill in the blank', has made this issue so socially taboo that even as our society worships money, the creation of new money is not ever allowed to be discussed. What's at work here?
https://youtu.be/qIxhsF6JLEA?t=1s
4/20/16, 5:45 PM
Amy Olles said...
I would say thank you for the frank talk. I feel I am a privileged person and in more ways than birthright. I think. Here's why: I was born into a white, protestant, middle class family. Even though my family has it's societal quirks (homeschooling, pretty strict religious upbringing, etc) I never knew what 'poor' or 'underprivileged' was even after an event occurred that left my family most lower middle class with significant medical debt. I thought we were poor at that time, but in comparison to truly poverty line people...no.
When I went to college I was suddenly a minority, even though my skin isn't. I was a female attempting to get an engineering degree in a time when female participation in said degree was less than 10% at my chosen school. They couldn't welcome me and my tuition money in eagerly enough. In my case my status played to my favor I think. Strictly from an educational point of view, anyone who was MORE of a minority than me (males and females of minority race) benefited when trying to pursue an engineering degree via scholarships and a school that was highly motivated to raise its diversity percentages for the glossy pamphlet. But of course first any minority applicant to the school have to overcome whatever obstacles they were born into that prevented them from being the typical candidate that applied to that school in the first place. I noticed that some of that welcome changed after school. For example, I was hired into a company along with some of my classmates. Their race suddenly affected them negatively and in some cases prevented them from getting special clearances for things they actually desired to do career wise. To this day they think they walk around with a target on their back because of their background, whereas I don't. And I think it's kind of true - even if we are on the same economic scale wage wise, they aren't exactly on the same social scale...that's a rudimentary way of describing differences and it might not be exactly what you're talking about, but it is what i have observed.
Thank you for mentioning this "affluent conservatives insisting that everyone else has to ignore their privilege in order to get on with the task of returning America to its Christian roots". That is something I've been talking about with my still conservative family values voting republican friends AND my more leftist friends. I will let you guess which group I get more traction with. I say it troubles me greatly that 'Christians/Conservatives' are trying to enforce laws that (ex:defund planned parenthood) that make THEM more comfortable and establish rules about how others have to live their life without any thought to how much harm it might be doing the people they are putting these rules on. Denying all the people in any lower socio-economic scale than you access to affordable, preventative health care is insane. These people don't inherently have the same way of living that you do NOR THE OPTIONS that you do. So cutting away at the few options they do have, in the name of your beliefs is destroying the societal fabric that you rest your privileges on,and frankly, just asking for those people to rise up against you.
All that to say, I am quite thankful that you're bringing up the topics of class, privilege and what's going on political wise across America right now. I find it fascinating, albeit sometimes a little hard to swallow, but ultimately I think I appreciate your insight. Please keep up the good work!
4/20/16, 5:52 PM
Kutamun said...
Been doing an arts degree of late and found myself thinking " thank goodness i have had five years of reading the archdruid report" under my belt as they repeatedly and persistently attempt to shove leftist meme after meme down my gaping and gagging gullett ! So thanks for the education and the tools to help deal with it.
Cheers
Kuta'
4/20/16, 5:53 PM
Alex said...
I think the average white American would have to live for some years in an area where being white is a disadvantage to understand it at the gut level. I grew up in Hawaii and frankly, living on the Mainland as I do now, still blows my mind. I can walk into a bank, walk into a store, walk into the DMV, etc without having to think about my race and how the service I get will be worse. I can hang out at the beach. I can walk down the street just about anywhere - and do, as I find the Hispanic neighborhoods my fellow whites think are so scary, are really not bad at all. In fact, I'd be in more danger in a neighborhood populated by whites of similar socioeconomic status - they tend to be very angry people. I can register my car and not have the process take 2 months because of the WASPy last name Dad passed down to me. I can get a PO box and not be told there are none available. I can actually shop as opposed to dash in and out, at a store and not get followed around.
For those not in the ruling group, it's just constant hassles, not a few isolated cases. It's as bad or worse than I'd experience if I moved back to Hawaii. All the things I cite are things that happened to me, and that's just the shallow end of the pool.
Being in the privilaged group means not having to think about one's privilage any more than a fish thinks about the water it swims in.
BTW I prefer to think of what you describe as "Albrighting", the center-left version of "Trumping" which in both cases mean, "Vote my way because I look like you and make noises that give the illusion I have your needs in mind - ignore the fact that I'm filthy rich".
4/20/16, 5:55 PM
JimK said...
Racism is really tricky. Is it an accurate picture of reality to see people as divided crisply into genetic buckets like "white", "black", etc.? We are all kin, of course, and a lot more connected ancestrally than we often acknowledge.
Is it an accurate picture of reality to see that a large fraction of Americans see the people they encounter through an interpretive lens that assigns those people to one or another of some number of genetic-ish buckets like "white", "black", etc. I know that most anyone will quickly label me "white"... maybe I am 10% Native American ancestrally, but the cultural links are mighty tenuous... so I know that I am "white", even if I think the whole concept of "white" is an illusion. It's a bit like knowing that unicorns have one horn, even though there is no such thing as a unicorn.
4/20/16, 5:57 PM
Candace said...
I feel like the labels and rhetoric from the cold war are deeply ingrained and that makes it even more difficult to talk about these issues.
4/20/16, 6:02 PM
peakfuture said...
That, for me, is the thing that gets me the most. Discussing a topic that is uncomfortable isn't fun, but sometimes those are the things that absolutely need discussing! A while ago, you wrote this:
"By some blend of dumb luck and happenstance, though, I missed out on the sense of entitlement so pervasive among those born when the United States was at the zenith of its prosperity and power."
(My followup on that was here; https://peakfuture.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/the-fascinating-question/)
This seems to be in the same vein; you missed out on entitlement, and certainly are not uncomfortable with the discussion of such topics. Is this behavior/attitude just another bit of cognitive dissonance kicking in?
Again, understanding the "why" is relatively easy, but how is it that some people fight that urge, and are willing to face these issues, and some are not?
4/20/16, 6:17 PM
rcg1950 said...
4/20/16, 6:18 PM
Ray Wharton said...
Maybe I am, I know I have prejudice, even a few racial ones, I won't be over specific, but there are at least two ethnicity which I have an emotional reaction to. I don't get hung up on these reactions, and as they are prejudices in my self which I am aware of I am glad on each occasions which they can be over come in person. Though I seek the exceptions to them, I don't deny the feeling that exists before the choice to overcome the feeling. I also have big class prejudices which can be nasty toward each of the four main classes which exist in your schema. The most dominant prejudices I have, the ones I choose to put the most stock in, are about a person's tastes and values; there are certain dispositions which I am much more predisposed to than others. Though I resist thinking 'better' or 'worse' and 'higher' or 'lower', trying to limit my prejudice to compatibility with myself. For example I have little use spending time with people who speak in sit com quotes, though once I was one of those dweebs.
Still, back to my first line of thought, in the contexts where I have been accused of privilege and an accompanying prejudice yet my prejudices scarcely lined up with the accusations. Not knowing how to identify the tangle of the three made such situations very very upsetting. Because I knew I had privilege, but I knew I didn't have the prejudices I was being accused of having, but I didn't know how to sort them from each other.
Though in the context of privilege I think of Blake "One law for the lion and ox is oppression." And from that I think that a privilege for an lion could be an injustice for a ox. The privileges we have then have a further layer of how each individual values or resents them. I mean just that a hierarchy of more and less privileged can conflate as much as it clarifies. Take my white privilege, for instance. Many of the doors my whiteness opens to me are repugnant, though they still may be counted a privilege in so far as I remain free to not walk through the doors that are open to me. I haven't found a door locked by my whiteness, though in aiming to be downward mobile, I have found some doors jammed, but not so much a bit of stubbornness wouldn't open it. Being male is certainly more complicated, it gives me several advantages, but also comes with many expectations which are objectionable: truly I think gender is in an era of crisis and that for all it is used to define which groups we can belong to. There are many kinds of masculinity, and the mask must be updated to fit the expectations of the circle is among, the other genders face this as well, in different ways.
I think the point I am making is more of a web of privilege than a chain, to evoke images from ecology. That every group we each take part in come with many privileges and injustices, but their importance is then dependent on our intents and what circles we are it. For the lower class whites they enjoy privilege with many institutions, but harsh judgement from others. For the most privileged they are dog meat in some of the circles I know.
I am especially fortunate, I don't know if this counts as a privilege or something else, in my chameleon voice, I can blend in many many circles, often with folks who could not follow me as I go from one group to another. So of that is from my race and gender, must of it is from how I talk, how my accents flow with those around me, and how I can speak with people from many circles. In short from my education, which I was privileged to have access to, but unlike most other privileges it can be thrown away, I have seen it happen.
4/20/16, 6:43 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Oh, I thought that it might be worth mentioning that if one gives up some privileges then that allows breathing space for others - and not just humans. We do live on a finite planet after all and our constant exercising of those privileges is leading to some very nasty consequences for the biosphere - which kind of does keep us all alive. Just sayin...
Cheers
Chris
4/20/16, 6:46 PM
Mister Roboto said...
I have to admit that I am now waiting for next week's post with baited breath!
4/20/16, 6:48 PM
Stacy said...
4/20/16, 6:50 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Justin, that's what I was trying to address in talking last week about the Rescue Game. A great deal of what's made the whole subject of privilege so toxic is the way that every attempt to talk about it becomes an excuse for Pin the Tail on the Persecutor.
Pygmycory, a very interesting few years. The huge and unmentioned reality of downward mobility is one of the signs that crisis is very, very close; more about this as we proceed.
Look Sie, I didn't claim that there aren't plenty of facets and nuances about the issue of privilege. That said, if you really think that white guys like you and me have less privilege than the various other groups you've mentioned, you need to get out more. As I noted, privilege is invisible to the privileged, and I promise you that women, people of color, etc. are far more often disadvantaged by our privilege than we are by theirs.
Leif, excellent! Exactly -- that's another way of talking about noblesse oblige, the recognition that every privilege imposes a corresponding duty to use that privilege for the common good. You're right that that awareness has been almost entirely erased from contemporary discourse, with disastrous consequences.
David, glad to hear it -- and you're fortunate to have such a daughter. Thanks for the heads up about the Daily Mail article!
Dudley, I plan on getting back to it in due time, but I have a couple of other things to write about first.
Aias, oh, granted, there's actually a lot more that can be extracted from the portmanteau in question, and the ladder image is a very rough simplification of a complex reality. It's helpful, though, because there really are sharp quantitative differences between, say, the number of people over whom a middle-aged white guy from a salary class background like me can expect to exert privilege, and the corresponding number for, say, an African-American or Latina woman from a poor family, and that's a point that to my mind very much needs making.
Cherokee, I'll definitely have to schedule time for a talk with Blind Freddy if I ever have the chance to visit Australia. He's obviously very much on top of things. ;-) The idea of privilege as unearned wealth...that's good. That could be a very useful analytical tool. Hmm...
Wizard, a nice crisp metaphor. Many thanks!
Repent, I see discussions of money creation all over the place on the internet, so I have a hard time thinking of it as anything like the kind of taboo you've suggested. As for interest free money, have you noticed that the world's central banks seem to be heading that way right now, with zero or negative interest rates rapidly spreading through the world economies? A post on money, perhaps as a followup to my discussion of the topic in The Wealth of Nature, might be a useful post here, but I'm not sure you'll be pleased with the angle I take.
4/20/16, 7:13 PM
Autumn Crow said...
Privilege is about unearned power. As you rightly point out, all of us are born into a particular set of privileges and they aren't something we can alter through our actions. 'Wiccanate privilege' in this case was actually earned power -- Wiccans put in the time at interfaith events and showed up to co-create inclusive Pagan events. They earned that power earned through participation in the larger religious discussions taking place in and outside Paganism. A lot of sweat equity goes into creating a conference or getting wider recognition of a religious group.
What makes "Wiccanate privilege" a dog whistle is that the individuals bringing this 'privilege' up were identified as trying to push aside those who had created something interesting and take it over in the name of inclusivity. That's the downfall of many activist and anarchist groups, of course, because the desire and mission around inclusivity makes this a particularly exploitable avenue. I can only speculate as to Starhawk's motives for saying what she said, but my guess would be as an experienced activist, she can tell when people are going down that road and has no problem with speaking out to stop that in its tracks.
4/20/16, 7:32 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
So while it's easy to assign the relative places of a disabled transgender woman of color who practices Santeria and lives on welfare and an able-bodied white male cisgender heterosexual Christian who is an executive in a successful corporation, it can become quite murky in other cases.
One aspect of this is that privilege can manifest differently in different situations to the same person. A man who is doing well in life can generally expect to do better than a woman in the same position.
But let both of them be the victim or sexual violence or domestic abuse, and the situation changes drastically: the woman will face some horrendous treatment by people accusing her of lying or asking her what she did to cause it, but she has a much better chance than the man of finding support from friends, family, or at least public shelters.
The man will likely be simply ignored, or even assumed to be the perpetrator, because in our society the mentality is that it just can't happen to men, and almost no resources are allocated to help men who experience those sorts of crime.
There seems to be a larger pattern of "women aren't allowed to reach as high, but men fall harder," which itself seems to unfold from the old patriarchal scheme of female hypoagency and male hyperagency: men are the doers, women are the done-to. A man who falls is suffering the consequences of his own actions, but women need to be protected from those consequences (since either (a) a man must have done something to hurt her or (b) anyway, she's only a woman and can't be expected to have done any better).
I'm lead to conclude that the issue of privilege is much more convoluted than we're normally allowed to talk about.
4/20/16, 7:42 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Kutamun, yes, it's a specialized form of the red herring fallacy.
Alex, that's a useful perspective, precisely because most white Americans have never lived in any place where their skin color wasn't a source of privilege, and I suspect very few can imagine how that would work.
JimK, oh, granted, race is a social construct. It's a social construct with immense impact, but its connection with biology is complex and somewhat distant. One of the reasons most Americans learn precisely nothing about the 200 years or so of North American history between Columbus and the late Colonial period is that that's when the modern American concept of race was constructed, largely as a way to drive a wedge between indentured servants of European origin and slaves from Africa. A lot happened here between Columbus and Ben Franklin that nobody wants to talk about -- I've been researching some of the details for the third Weird of Hali novel, and it's been really eye-opening.
Candace, oh, granted. The funny thing is that there really is a class war going on, but it's the upper half or so of the salary class that's declared war on the wage class, and so far, they've been winning.
Peakfuture, heck of a good question, to which I have no ready answers.
rcg1950, acquiring class privilege is a complicated thing, because those who are already members of a given class will routinely use any available tool to exclude those of lower classes -- think of the way that nouveau-riche social climbers have always been treated by old-money families! I tend to think of social climbing as the equivalent of "passing" -- the way that light-skinned African-Americans in the Jim Crow era used to pass for white when they could, as in the jazz standard "Sunny Side of the Street."
Ray, I've had the same experience. It was as a result of such things that I launched into the reading, research, and conversations that led to the unpacking in question.
Cherokee, a very good point! It's not just other humans that are unprivileged...
Mister R., for what it's worth, my guess is that the shift now under way is a lasting one. A great deal of the old system of privilege was founded squarely on certain very popular modes of Christian morality -- not, I should stress, the morality that Jesus himself taught, but a set of opinions he had foisted off on him by later theologians (and which, to judge by his reactions to corresponding notions in his own time, he would have rejected with quite some force.) Christianity is rapidly becoming a minority religion in North America, and the moral consensus that once derived from Christianity's majority status is crumbling even faster than that majority status. I probably need to do a post on this sometime soon.
4/20/16, 7:44 PM
siliconguy said...
One case where the situation is reversed for men with respect to women is in family court. Washington State's ratio is that women get custody five times in six. Some social stereotypes are still firmly in place.
4/20/16, 7:49 PM
Alex said...
But back to those land-owning, early-in whites. The ones who still have money, land, and power are those who have kept their lineage pure, and if you ever got to meet them (I knew an old Wilder spinster as a kid, very nice lady, imagine "Lacy Davenport" out of Doonesbury) you'd never suspect they were of stock that had been in the islands for many generations. They are also members of the elite, and to find them you have to go to Punahou, a whites-only school for most of its existence, or the Pacific Club, Rotary, etc.
Being Hawaiian isn't a very good thing in Hawaii unless you're a member of the ali'i, the nobility, and you'd go to Punahou, or Kamehameha School, which is Hawaiians-only and by that is meant the right kind of Hawaiians. Your pidgin-speaking Hawaiian kid who grew up in Kalihi is going to be lucky to get a job at the docks. But if you're the right kind of Hawaiian, with the right kind of educated English you learned at Punahou or at a Mainland prep school, the world is your oyster.
The third power group is the Chinese but again, the right kind of Chinese. The ones who own buildings and land and so on. Ideally they will have none of the local tinge to their English, and they try to stay out of the spotlight but they are movers and shakers.
Everyone else just kinds of scrabbles along. Different categories tend to be done by different races, with a lot of the better-paying work out of limits for whites. Of course you can be white or anything and just start a business, although how difficult and time-consuming and expensive the paperwork is may differ, along with how often you get inspected and fined. A little old Japanese guy who sets up a car-repair shop, even if he's working-class as hell, is going to have no problems. A white SAE engineer who wants to start up a car repair is gonna have problems, maybe a fire because "he left oily rags around".
4/20/16, 8:00 PM
Alex said...
People just seem to be tribal as hell. On the Mainland it seems to come down to sheer skin color, and accent. While I had a black friend who was the "right" kind of black with perfect English and from a solid upper middle-class family, and who got handed money in buckets for doing the same as I did in college, same classes and everything, got handed great jobs while I had to work hosing down dog kennels and mopping floors - all this while carrying a class load - statistically almost all blacks in the US are really getting the short end. Indians are tolerated, the darker kind of Middle Easterner really gets the stink-eye and worse, and Asians are liked/disliked depending on their paleness. The US has a major case of Japanophilia because they're nice and pale, and we think Koreans are pretty great too. As you go darker on the scale, Viets and Cambodians, the hassles go up. Accent and properness of English matters a lot too. Essentially if you are light-skinned and your English is good, you're gonna be OK.
And the vast majority pretend this isn't going on.
Because my dad was an English major at an Ivy and I grew up reading a ton of books, it seems it's impossible for me to fall to the utter bottom. Goodness knows, I've tried, and there's always been some middle-class or upper-middle-class friend who's scooped me up. If I talked like an Okie, I'm sure I'd be sleeping under a bridge now. As Orwell observed, accent really matters. I'm fairly light-skinned, and that plus my accent seem to be a sort of safety net a lot of perfectly smart and capable people don't have. And it's *not* something I can just step away from - the other evening, my boss's wife, who's from a working-class background, said something in a way I could not conceive of. I really wish I'd written it down. I would have to study working-class English to be able to speak it.
4/20/16, 8:07 PM
onething said...
4/20/16, 8:11 PM
Alex said...
An interesting case study of how these things work is the trajectory of Jewish people in the US. When they first came, they were very low on the class ladder, would take just about any work, like meatpacking, street cleaning, you name it. Like I experienced growing up and living in Hawaii, lots of places would not rent to them, lots of places would not hire them, they were "fair game" for abuse, etc. But over time, they rose up by working hard and getting educated. It helped that most Jews in the US came over from Europe so they were light-skinned, and a few generations took care of the English. But up until very recently, the post-WWII era, Jews almost never intermarried, and up until I was born, I think even later than that, it was perfectly acceptable and legal to exclude Jews from housing, house purchase, jobs, etc. It was not cool to be Jewish.
So when Mom and Dad married, Mom, who was quite tan, passed herself off at Navajo Indian! And we were raised believing we were olive-skinned because we're part Navajo Indian. Mom tried her best, trying recipes out of Sunset Magazine... She even did fry bread once and it wasn't the most horrible thing she made.
I have since looked into my ancestry which until very recently was only cool if you were Scottish (or wanted to be) in the US, and it seems I am in all probability Jewish. The "protective lie" Mom taught us made me a damn liar. That's how weird and hypocritical and passive-aggressive the race/class system is in the US.
I am in the process of tracking down verifiable information on this because if it's true I'm seriously considering moving to Israel where at least they're honest about these things.
4/20/16, 8:24 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Thanks, Leif Christensen (posting timestamped, with reference to USA Pacific coast, by blogger.com software as "4/20/16, 5:10 PM") and JMG (posting timestamped, in that same Pacific-USA formalism, as"4/20/16, 7:13 PM"). Both of you draw attention to the connection between privilege and duty. One is reminded here of the arresting title of a work, which admittedly I have not read, by Victorian British philosopher F.H. Bradley - "My Station and Its Duties".
Toomas (Tom) Karmo
[email protected]
member of Estonian diaspora, currently in Richmond Hill (Ontario), in Canada,
currently residing in my poverty on a street called "Gentry Crescent"
(no, I am not making that street name up, LOL :-) )
PS: I might as well also quickly remark (1) that I have launched a blog at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com (with a couple of substantive postings so far, on the emerging "green Catholic hermit" movement, inter alia highlighting the work of the Firenze-based Catholic hermit Julia Bolton Holloway), and (2) that last week's discussion here on ADR, by JMG, of the Rescue Game was thought-provoking.
Even the green Catholic hermit movement risks falling into the Rescue Game, with the hermit of course starring in the pleasant role of "Rescuer".
A salient feature of "Dame Julia", as I like informally to think of her, is that she does not come across in her tone and manner as a Rescuer, even though she spends much time working with the underprivileged of Firenze, and additionally comes from a British family some branch of which has in past decades known some level of (duly self-conscious, duly self-aware?) social privilege.
PPS: Robert Mathiesen: Thanks for your remark here on JMG's ADR, around 2016-02-03, that you have known Dame Julia. I should here say, for the possible benefit of you or others, that Dame Julia has a Facebook page Google-retrievable via the string julia holloway italy facebook (or point your browser directly to https://www.facebook.com/juliaboltonholloway); that her current e-mail address, publicly disseminated by her, is [email protected]; and that she is the subject of a pleasant video clip retrievable via YouTube search string catholic hermits (or point your browser directly to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLkryRaFfQ).
4/20/16, 9:02 PM
Roger Leybourne said...
I live and work in Asia and I'm married to a local. I'm often privy to some interesting conversations from Asians (both here and with Asians I know in the West). On the whole, people in the country in which I live generally don't have any problem at all with being very clannish or having a circle of trust, quite often based upon what would horrify people in the West as being based upon all sorts of privileges. They're very hierarchical. Privilege is not a bad word for them.
Where I find this very interesting is in the transformations currently taking place in my home town. Essentially, a new cognitive and financial elite is being imported, and they have no qualms about using talk of privilege against those already there without accepting any criticism of themselves. For instance, an enormous property bubble, in large part propped up by the intersection of policies that privilege Baby Boomer investors and a massive amount of money flowing out of Asia (China in particular) is creating real social tension. Recently, there were complaints about locals not being able to afford houses. Suggestions that the second half of the equation mentioned above (Chinese money) be addressed were immediately shut down as racist. The Chinese have figured out how to play that game perfectly, despite having no qualms about being very insular and engaging in their own privilege. White liberals have absolutely no response to this so far.
It's going to be interesting to see a couple of developments from here. The first is how downwardly mobile white people born into the (upper) middle class (many of whom are extremely liberal) are going to react when they are continually displaced in their own positions of privilege by Asians who don't regard privilege as bad. People on the left are going to end up hoist by their own petard in a very big way in coming decades. This is fundamentally because of the irony that although the thing they fear most in the world is being labelled a racist, they can't imagine that anyone else in the world isn't secretly a white liberal; at some level, that is a fundamentally racist belief, yet they are completely unaware of it, which suggests that it's a very privileged belief. The cognitive dissonance when this is pointed out to them is quite interesting to observe.
The other issue is that because white liberals so often frame everything in terms of race, Aborigines are likely to end up getting a pretty raw deal. Asians will (and do, though not openly so much yet) shrug their shoulders and say that it was white people who wronged Aborigines, not them.
4/20/16, 9:08 PM
John Michael Greer said...
James, the texture of privilege in any complex society is extraordinarily complex; an entire book, a thick one, could be written just giving a basic overview. This one post can only present the most basic elements.
Siliconguy, yes, it's always possible to find one or another place where, yes, some privileges have been given to the otherwise unprivileged. So?
Alex, my stepmother was born in Japan to a mother who was sent back from Oahu for an arranged marriage, and I have step-relatives all over Oahu to this day, so yes, I know a little bit about that situation! I'm intrigued to hear about your Jewish faux-Navajo mother, not least because my wife's family has an oddly similar situation. One of her great-grandmothers is the subject of competing stories in the family; one set of relatives was convinced that she was Jewish, the other claims with equal certainty that she was Native American. Race in this country really is much more complex thing than it's been made out to be.
Onething, and what exactly is IQ? Your score on a multiple choice test which has been written and devised by members of the salary class...
4/20/16, 9:11 PM
Alex said...
JimK - You and I both know that almost every conceivable piece of paper in the US will have the "race box". Renting, car insurance, surveys, it's not on the front of my driver's license but I'm certain it's encoded in the barcode-y thing on the back. For those folks overseas, everyone wants to know your race here, but noooo, we're not racist.
Mr. Roboto - Please, please, learn the difference between baited and bated, just as a favor to me? There are actually a lot of things in English that are like that, and I'm considering doing a book about it.
Onething - Saying IQ is what matters is the "party line". IQ is a rounding error compared to how much class matters.
4/20/16, 9:15 PM
Alex said...
I just sent off my 23andme test a couple of days ago, and I'm going to go with what that determines first. Fortunately, for the purpose of testing, if I'm Jewish I'm Ashkenazi and they were genetically isolated for a long time so there's a very distinctive genetic "signal" so I'm gonna know if it's yay or nay. Likewise, I believe the Navajo are of a distinct type that's probably pretty easy to determine.
In the 1920s and 1930s, when my mother was growing up, it was really cool to be Navajo - they were hugely romanticized. My mother was more olive-skinned than I am and she had to say she's *something* and Navajo may have been easiest to pull off - say she's Armenian and someone's gonna say "Oh, what town, I've got relatives there all over" etc. Lots of books and magazine articles romanticizing the noble Navajo would have given her plenty of material, and there were not a lot of Navajos around Los Angeles.
However, her maiden name, and tracing back, are all probable Jewish names, she used Jewish expressions a lot, there were a lot of Jewish ways of thinking - again unquestioned by me until I started researching, like an utter reverence for books, you feed your animals before you feed yourself, bunch of stuff like that. And there was halvah. I was recently astounded to learn the folks I work for have never had it. In fact it seems almost no one's had it, and to me that's like never having tasted chocolate. I grew up with it as a treat. Of course I hunted down the one health food store within 30 miles where I could get it, and got some and brought it over. They found it quite interesting. (Joyvah marble w/o the dumb chocolate coating or go home.)
4/20/16, 9:28 PM
Alex said...
You see, 23andme is all about paying through the nose to hand over all the information you literally physically can, but they also have nice nosy surveys!
So needless to say I did those, and the long one had many versions of the same question, whether I am using 23andme to find out "if my children will have curly hair".
There was not a single question about finding out if I'm part black, because that would be very un-PC and probably get them in a lot of trouble. At least a big flap in the news.
So instead, "curly hair" appears to be the magic code-word.
4/20/16, 9:44 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
"Siliconguy, yes, it's always possible to find one or another place where, yes, some privileges have been given to the otherwise unprivileged. So?"
If I may, I think part of siliconguy is alluding to is something that's become very common online of late: the insistence that since women are on the whole underprivileged compared to men, they must have no privileges at all.
The most blatant and offensive example of this is probably the occasional photo of a white probably-salary-class woman holding up a sign saying "Woman is the n***** of the world" - without the asterisks, of course.
I've seen many people online insist that women literally cannot be sexist toward men, since sexism is "prejudice plus power," and women have no power. That this is not what the vast majority of people mean by the word "sexist" just flies past them when pointed out.
I think all of this is ultimately part of a Rescue Game, trying to bait wage-class men into accepting the role of Persecutor with the promise of a chance to convince the jury that they're actually Victims. Overall, that strategy seems to be working spectacularly right now.
4/20/16, 9:50 PM
Candace said...
The book "Outliers" by Malcom Gladwell might give you a different perspective. The short version, success in a given field requires a base of sufficient intellegence, hand/eye coordination etc, depending on the field you are talking about. after that it requires opportunity, and opportunity is positively correlated with privilege. Many other details, time and place you are born also fall into the opportunity bucket. IQi is just one aspect and not really the most important one.
4/20/16, 10:12 PM
Nancy Sutton said...
Born in 1946 and raised by a single mother, without a high school diploma, who's health issues limited her employment, (and who never went on welfare, to the detriment of her two kids), I can attest to the fact that the privileged are blowing smoke when they 'understand'. They can't, nor can the colorblind 'see' certain colors .. not possible. But perfectly clear to me, when looking 'upward' most of my life ;)
But, boy is it hard to get anyone to understand this... thanks for this essay, John.
4/20/16, 10:12 PM
jbucks said...
On the right: It's like winning the lottery and then blaming others for being poor.
On the left: It's like winning the lottery and then telling others how to spend their money without giving away any of your own.
Maybe if people decided to clearly see their own privilege and soberly think about its implications, it would actually help to shrink the distance between the left and the right to a great degree.
4/20/16, 10:35 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thank you, and Blind Freddy would enjoy sharing a quiet ale and chat with you too! :-)!
Feel free to use that concept. It is good isn't it? You started me thinking about the subject from that perspective when I heard you speaking in a podcast (I forget with whom) about the misuse of the concept of social station as a social control mechanism. And I reckon that you are correct in that assertion, however my gut feel - after much consideration - was that the concept of station originated as a meme to assist with the control of individuals consumption and that would have arisen in a society with very limited resources (i.e. Earlier times). It would have been of some benefit as someone’s gain is someone else’s loss in that sort of society.
However, by the time that the meme of station was being used to control classes of people (by then individual local relationships have been replaced with geographically wide and impersonal abstractions – like today) the level of wealth inequality was obscene and no one thought to question who defined what constituted the perquisites of a station and was that a reasonable expectation.
Dunno. Anyway - You started it!!! Hehe! ;-)! Oh, I do so amuse myself!
Oh yeah, whilst we are conversing about ideas from the very fringe (an nice place to be): I rarely watch television (less than half an hour a week - if even that) but the other day I did watch a program which is way out there on the zeitgeist (it is nice to know what is going on). The show was based in New York, and I've noted that many shows originating from that city have characters and storylines that exhibit mental health issues (just as an interesting observation) and particularly so for comedies. Anyway, a few of the characters were displaying signs of obsessive compulsive behaviour and it got me wondering about that behaviour and the relationship to ritual.
You see, I was sort of left with the impression (and I'm not 100% sure of my thoughts in relation to the insight) that the sort of obsession being displayed by the characters in the story was a form of learned ritual that had either gone wrong or was rendered inappropriate due to a change in circumstances but was unable to be stopped or altered to reflect the new circumstances. Dunno, but there felt like something deeper in that. What do you reckon?
The Aboriginals believe that if the correct rituals are not performed (and most of their activities are steeped in ritual) then their very souls and the landscape were at peril. It seems like a rather astute thing to realise, because as a species we really do love our patterns and if they go wrong... Again dunno.
Cheers
Chris
4/20/16, 10:50 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Roger, the global decline of white privilege is one of the things we're going to be talking about next week. You're right that a lot of people on the leftward end of things are going to be left flailing at empty air as that happens. Their unwillingness to deal with issues of privilege is based on an extreme case of the invisibility of their own privilege, and it has quite literally never occurred to them -- and can't be gotten into their heads with dynamite; I know, I've tried -- that they really are hugely privileged, and the end of the system they claim to hate will be the end of their privilege and the cozy lifestyles and abundant options that come with that. That's one of the reasons that some clarity on the subject of privilege is so useful just now.
Alex, that's fascinating. There seems to have been a lot of open space between "white" and "black" at various points in American history, and those people who could fit into that wiggle room via olive or light brown skin, etc., tended to shift identities remarkably often and remarkably well. Are you at all familiar with the history of the Melungeons and other so-called "triracial isolates"? (The term's of dubious value, because race is a social construct and they weren't particularly isolated, but a lot of them have some mix of European, African, and Native American ancestry.) There was a lot going on between the lines and outside the mainstream categories in American history.
James, yes, that's a good example of Starhawking in action. Privileged white women like to insist that sexism is the only form of oppression that matters, because that allows them to divert attention from their own privilege. What does the sign you mention say, after all, if not "The oppression I suffer is much more real and importantthan the oppression African-Americans suffer"? The logic of the Rescue Game is all over that sort of thing. At the same time, as I noted, the fact that the narratives are dysfunctional and toxic doesn't mean that the phenomenon the narrative (mis)describes is unreal.
Nancy, most feudal societies have a custom of fostering the children of the aristocracy out to other families, where they function as unpaid servants -- think of the pages and handmaidens of the Middle Ages, who did a lot of day in, day out scut-work, from tending horses and cleaning armor to the endless round of spinning and sewing that kept a household in those days supplied with clothing, linen et al. It was a good custom, as it kept the offspring of the privileged classes from developing the sense of entitlement, the lack of meaningful skills, and the general fecklessness that so many of their equivalents have today.
Jbucks, maybe so. The problem is that so many people will have to give up on the fantasy that they are entirely responsible for their own good fortune!
4/20/16, 11:10 PM
Alex said...
As an example, you can teach a classroom class on sailing, but until you get people out on a boat and they have to do it (with all the delights of capsizing, being "in irons" and the ever popular "ready about - hard a'lee!") almost no one is going to get it.
I get treated weirdly in this area because it seems there's a sort of low-level stereotype that because I'm ostensibly white, and not a bum, I must know lots about computers. So far I have never failed to disappoint.
4/20/16, 11:11 PM
Alex said...
Sub-Saharan Africans apparently are what could be called pure Homo sapiens sapiens. Those of European descent are part Neanderthal, and Asians are part Denisovan. Europe and the Middle East are an amazing patchwork of different appearances.
This is probably very politically incorrect but the way I look at it is, we're a worldwide species. Of course there are going to be local variants. It's like cat breeds, you've got your mellow but a bit dour old Persians, your easygoing domestic shorthairs, your borderline psycho tortoiseshells, your wiseguy Siamese etc. But they're all cats.
4/20/16, 11:21 PM
patriciaormsby said...
I'm not certain when Japan's explicit hierarchy came to an end, but I think it was the beginning of the Meiji Era, when Japan abandoned feudalism and took up industrial capitalism. There was some recognition then that people in rural areas would end up at the bottom of the totem pole if they didn't get with it and urbanize themselves quickly. At that point in time, by law all the former privileged samurai lost their status and the protections it afforded them, and my impression is that it was extremely common for each former samurai family to have one drunken Uncle Joe who piddled away the entire family fortune, because one of the perqs of that class had been pride in ignorance of basic accounting. There was a strong sense that everyone was equal now--well, except for the Koreans and burakumin, and that it would be individual strengths that would make the difference between success and failure. But it was the end of World War II when the American ideal of complete equality was adopted (while ignoring the usual outcast groups), and the myth is much much stronger here now than in America. And I think they really tried to make "equality" happen here. Recently there has been an effort to include women too in the hopes that it would stimulate the moribund economy.
Thank you for bringing up "noblesse oblige." In the contexts where I've heard the term, its meaning was unclear to me, seeming simply to be "privilege." I didn't realize we actually had a term for what is one of the central concepts of Confucianism, which embraces hierarchical society as a necessity for stability, but demands magnaminity from the privileged, inviting condemnation where that does not occur. This was so strongly ingrained that it survives so-called "equality." Roles in society are currently interchangeable to a large degree, with anyone qualified being given a leadership role on occasion for practice, and then assigned that with increasing frequency as they move up the age/experience hierarchy (which is still observed and acknowledged, but I've seen it under assault too). When I led ecotours to Siberia, the Japanese made it clear to me that as leader, I was to accept no privileges at all beyond the prestige of the position. It wasn't that I was a "worker" for them (though some may have seen it that way--a few were quite abusive), because I was volunteering. It was explained to me that as "leader" I had to put my followers' needs and sentiments ahead of my own.
The abolition of inequality has been a noble undertaking despite the impossibility of the goal. I think there are a number of factors involved in the total denial of the new reality of destitution amid affluence, though. Shame at not making it is the biggest, and sheer terror among the better off at their own helpless vulnerability must come second.
And now, completely off-topic:
4/20/16, 11:25 PM
patriciaormsby said...
I've seen ant mimics before, but they are usually obvious from the way they move. They are adapted jumping spiders, but this one moved like an ant. It tapped along with its two front feet looking like antennae and wandered about aimlessly. The only time it gave itself away was when it encountered a dead aphid and went circling around it sideways as if to calculate how to attack until it decided it wasn't worth it. Also, every few seconds it would drop its pedipalps to the ground. These were quite large, so I speculate it was a male, and when they were held close to the head, they strongly resembled an ant's jaws. It was the most brilliant mimic I've ever seen.
At harrowing times like these, the garden is just such an immense source of joy.
4/20/16, 11:26 PM
Purple Tortoise said...
4/20/16, 11:28 PM
Swift developer said...
However I am somewhat confused: how do you see the difference between privileges and culture? Or is one the result of the other? Is there perhaps no difference?
And how does "multiculturalism" relate to the topic of privileges?
4/21/16, 12:06 AM
Κασσάνδρα said...
http://tinyurl.com/zhh2nqm
http://tinyurl.com/zu6z8mn
These articles have all the hype (Li as the new gasoline and “White Petroleum”), cheerleading and money pouring that similar fracking articles had when the fracking bubble started inflating. Just search the web for “TESLA” and you will see the same tone. I said that Li battery is a close relative of PV because it covers the serious disadvantages of PV, their intermittency (via battery storage) and their inability to provide liquid fuels for transportation (via batteries for electric cars). So, it may be a combination of a PV and Li batteries bubble but I am pretty sure that it will have Li as a basic bubble raising agent.
The main reason I believe that Li will be another energy bubble is the same as for oil: depletion.
Physics Professor Tom Murphy calculated the needs for a USA battery at 335 billion KWh (2 TW total US electr. consumption to replace fossil fuels and go all electric, 7 days backup power) in one of his excellent Do-the-Math articles:
http://tinyurl.com/os8ngya
He concluded that the total known Lead resources are not enough for a USA Lead battery alone (and he didn’t calculate the Battery Depth Of Discharge factor which doubles or triples the needs).
What about Li? I searched a little (the engineer in me couldn’t resist) and found a similar answer:
Theoretical weight of Li per KWh = 0.1 kg / KWh which derives from 10 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of Li (http://tinyurl.com/k2x83ev). For 336 billion kWh we need 33.6 billion kg = 33.6 Mt (million metric tons) of Li. Practical weight of Li per KWh (http://tinyurl.com/p6sgocq) = 0.376 to 0.564 kg/kWh calculated using the 5.323 weight relation of LCE (Lithium Carbonate Equivalent) to Li (from page 9 of http://tinyurl.com/zb5zfce). So, we need 126.4 to 189.5 Mt of Li.
From USGS (http://tinyurl.com/hc2ha6t) world total estimated reserves: 13.5 Mt. Identified Li resources in the United States total 5.5 Mt and approximately 34 Mt in other countries.
Therefore, all the world Li reserves (economically extractable resources at present prices) are not enough to build a US Li battery. Not even all the world resources cover the needs of USA alone. I am sure new Li resources will be discovered as the price of Li is quickly rising because of new demand. But the new resources will need more energy to be extracted like… Déjà vu! Fracking!
We are trying to solve a material depletion problem by substituting the material to be depleted with another that we know is not enough and will soon have the same depletion problem. And don’t forget that Li extraction is done by machines that use oil, which is depleting. I know that in cornucopian theories when we convert all our transportation infrastructure to electric we can bypass this little problem but as a landing-to-real-earth exercise try to convert this 360 metric ton 4000 hp haul truck (http://tinyurl.com/gupjf5f) to electric.
For PV and battery storage you can find more information in the excellent articles-papers of Kris De Decker’s Low-Tech-Magazine:
http://tinyurl.com/naputjh
http://tinyurl.com/njzrh24
Quick lessons from them: The location of PV construction and installation is very important, Lead batteries is a no-go and Li batteries have the potential (but we don’t have enough Li as we saw, at least for an industrial civilization as we know it).
Kosta.
4/21/16, 1:31 AM
Maxime Richard said...
A phenomenon somehow similar to that Occupy Wall Street is shaping up here in France. Forums and action plannings are taking place at night downtown of many cities.
The trigger is a law bill targeting both salary-class and wage-class (the latter more than the former of course). Flexibility of the workforce and no-accountability of the company is a very short summary of the spirit of that bill.
So what we see at night in those forums :
- students, low salary class people. Unemployed. Overall People with a fairly high cultural capital or/and a political sensitivity. Most don't vote anymore.
- little working class people.
- mostly white. Very litte people coming from a immigrated background.
One of the focus of the movement is to converge and fuse with demographics outside of that core. Difficult task.
@JMG The privilege talk you present in your post, is part of the self-conscious talks within the movement. I mean, Attendees knowing they're more privileged than others.
A political dead-end ?? maybe.
A resfreshing event in era void of political and social future ? I feel so
4/21/16, 1:33 AM
YCS said...
From an easterner's perspective, the western view on status in society is truly bizarre. In India the very first conversation any two people have is used to determine what societal position both people inhabit and what behaviour is required by either party. The manifestation of this 'caste' and more and more 'class' privilege is crude, but at least nobody is lying to themselves.
The other thing is that all leftists totally reject the simple reality that cooperation of the privileged is essential to reforming structures of privilege. Most of them insist on demolishing all structures of human relationships in some radical frenzy, to be replaced with what, exactly? The pigs taking over from the previous human owner (in Animal Farm), of course.
There are many examples of noblesse-oblige or a moral exhortation to mitigate injustices on the part of the privileged. The decades preceding independence, where Gandhi used his privilege to reinstate the concept of upper-caste duty was far more successful in removing caste prejudice than the period after. Now, the traditionally privileged are resentful of the barriers placed on them because of reservation, are not willing to engage with their prejudices or the manifestation of priviledge, are cast as 'persecutor' by the leftist ends of the media, and subsequently used by the other side for votes. Has caste prejudice improved since the 50s? Very little, because killing the concept of moral duty through reservation set up the conditions for extreme cultural resentment that we have now.
YCS
4/21/16, 1:43 AM
Mat F said...
4/21/16, 4:02 AM
Greg Belvedere said...
I think another reason many can't see their privilege is that while the word has a connotation that suggests some extra benefit, it usually means the lack of having to experience some injustice. It is not the presence of a positive, but the lack of having to experience certain negatives. I think the media and culture amplify this. For instance, as a white man I have a lot less to fear to fear from law enforcement than people of color. But I don't think anybody should have to experience that level of fear around the police, so my experience seems like the one everyone should have. I just realize that is not the case.
4/21/16, 4:12 AM
MigrantWorker said...
The invisibility of privilege also has another effect on the privileged: it turns it into something akin to addiction. Much like an alcoholic is an alcoholic even when he does not acknowledge it, and even when his habit does not interfere much with other aspects of his life. And as with any addiction, it comes with its own set of powerful mechanisms which steer the addicted to continue engaging in it.
One major difference is that privilege happens to be an addiction which is beneficial to the addicted, but I suspect that the material rewards are not the primary reinforcer. It is more a question of identity, which provides social rewards - such as rank, prestige, respect - which in turn tend to result in material gains by giving one a shot at tweaking the rules of the game in his own favor.
MigrantWorker
4/21/16, 4:34 AM
Yeast in a Bottle said...
Some nation act with almost complete impunity, as some individuals act with almost complete impunity.
The United States (cough, cough, not) as got to be one of the only examples in history of an empire that insists publicly to the world, for sheer propaganda reasons, that it is Not an empire.
The Romans would have been amazed at our reticence in boldly shouting this fact to all with ears to hear.
Granted, an 'Empire' only 75 years old like the U.S. would be laughable to them, theirs having spanned centuries, but to have such hypocrisy as the U.S. does with it's blatant blanket domestic denial that it is in fact an Imperial Hegemon is historically breath taking. Pretty much all previous Empires in human history have trumpeted their Imperial status as an obvious 'in your face' fact to the rest of the world.
This core hypocrisy lies at the center of the privilege discussion.
The U.S. and all it's grab bag of privilege levels is in fact one big privileged player on the world stage.
It can't honestly discuss this within it's own borders, how pray tell can a discussion of 'privilege' ever be revalent between salary/wage factions, or between races or between sexes, etc…?
And while we're at it, what of species privilege humans are more important than any other living beings on the planet.
If you simply weighed all humans and there domestic livestock and then weighed all remaining creatures in the biomass of the planet, humans now make up 98+ percent of all planetery biomass. Twenty thousand years ago it was reversed.
That is privilege on a Star Trek scale.
4/21/16, 5:02 AM
Cathy from Winston Salem said...
I have been thinking a lot about how habit and ritual could help protect us from actions whose results come home to roost far in the future. If only we could choose the right ones! For this, in theory, our culture could help, but it seems any appropriate habits and rituals in the United States have gone through some sort of cheap energy shredder, and we are left defenseless against the results of our (possibly inappropriate) actions. We could bond together with some group (some nice neopagans, for example), but it seems that could just lead us to some other bad result, just faster. How, then, to proceed? Perhaps, Mr. Greer, you could give us a hand in another post.
Thank you for your work, a fan. -Cathy
4/21/16, 5:16 AM
Dagnarus said...
Ah, .... No. If you take the average earnings of all women in the US, and compare it to the average earnings of all men in the US, you find that women earn 77 percent of men. This does not take into account hours worked, it does not taken into account field, it does not taken into account education, and it certainly doesn't taken into account job safety (93% of workplace fatalities are men), nor anything else. I think that the studies which look at equal pay for equal work find that women earn between 93.4% to 100% of there male colleagues, I think this probably depends on the person doing the studies ideological bent.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-gap_b_2073804.html
4/21/16, 5:20 AM
davidchuter said...
4/21/16, 5:28 AM
Robert Carran said...
I played a major leadership role OA - facilitating, strategic planning, and introducing dynamic governance, which is a form of consensus we adopted. I was elected (to my surprise, as I wasn't even seeking the position) as the delegate from the general assembly to the council. I was honored, but what I didn't realize is that I was becoming a target as a person of authority and privilege. Of course the image stuck quite well for a few people because I am a white male from upper middle class.
A certain activist in the movement started disrupting Councils and belligerently speaking out of turn and ignoring/defying our consensed upon process, and vehemently accused us of hierarchy and oppression. I spoke for having him removed from Councils or at least holding to our agreement that he be a silent observer as he was not a delegate. I was attacked by a few members as being a privileged dominating white male. The whole experience became so disruptive that I soon left the movement as I recognized that we were going nowhere.
What is interesting about this to me is that the Occupy movement was based on fighting the privileged dominating white male influence. But I think what happened is that so many people feel ultimately powerless over the true dominators that they end up picking a target who is closer and more vulnerable. It just seems that people want to keep playing out the roles of oppressor/oppressed in what ever situation there is.
I think another important aspect of this is the concrete action vs. protest debate. For example, there was a group organizing a protest to the Duke nuclear power plant construction. My take was that we would be better off spending our time and energy organizing a solar panel collective to stop paying electric bills to Duke, than to carry signs and shout at buildings. To me, this sidesteps the oppressor/oppressed dynamic and focuses on working together for something positive. That way you're less likely to get caught up in roles and the kind of games you describe in your previous post.
4/21/16, 5:47 AM
Rita Narayanan said...
4/21/16, 6:07 AM
Jay Moses said...
with respect to class, elites have long been the masters of divide and control. they are brilliant at identifying the fault lines in any society and exploiting those divisions to preserve their status. the problem in the u.s. today i think is that the promise of social mobility, ever a longshot at best, has become chimerical. i do believe that elites, not only in the u.s. but all over the world, recognize that their privileges will be difficult to sustain as people recognize that neither they, nor their children, nor their grandchildren for that matter will ever have the opportunity to share the bounty.
4/21/16, 6:33 AM
RPC said...
4/21/16, 6:54 AM
Avery said...
4/21/16, 7:03 AM
Soccer13 said...
I’ve been a regular lurker on your blog for about 3 years and although I don’t always agree with you I appreciate your perspectives. I have a friend who talks about the need to “complexify the seemingly simple” and I want to try to do so in this conversation. I’ve tried to have some of these discussions with BLM students at the University I work at with limited success so far. They mostly just avoid me these days because I make them “uncomfortable.”
So here are a few ideas that I want to throw out in the discussion for consideration:
1. I think some types of privilege can be earned. I’d say class privilege for sure can change as a person’s financial means change over time. My grandparents were barely educated. My folks were 1st generation college students from seriously poor rural backgrounds. They grew up hungry. They moved into white collar careers, successfully invested and now have very privileged upper middle class lives. When I was young we were still poor renters and homeowners in very poor urban neighborhoods. By the time I was in high school we were pretty affluent and were able to move to an affluent urban oasis. Now I am a college professor. As our class position changed over time so did our privilege. Things are very different for me socially now than when I was poor white trash. However, there still are some things from my background that still stick to me. Maybe it’s the way I move or the way I talk but I’m often mistaken as someone from a different social group. I remember in grad school walking into a conference with about 100 other people and being asked by the speaker if I was there to work the projector. LOL!
2. I was a systems ecologist for a time and I’d like to make a second point based of ecological principles. Just like adaptations are specific for certain environments I think certain kinds of privilege don’t translate well to other environments. For example, I was a white kid who went to predominantly black schools where being white was a big disadvantage. White kids were verbally harassed on a daily basis. Physical abuse was really common and generally a white kid could expect to get slapped around, punched, or beat up on a weekly basis. You couldn’t tell anyone because stabbings occurred even at the middle school level. You also needed to run to and from sporting events to keep from being mugged if you were white. In addition, white kids were often excluded from certain programs in the name of diversity. It didn’t matter that the president of the US was white to my daily life just like it doesn’t matter that the president of the US today is black to many minority students today.
Well, these ideas didn’t go over well with folks on my campus. I’d be interested in feedback here. Comments?
4/21/16, 7:11 AM
. said...
The claim in Europe is that all Muslims are low on the privilege scale because they’re a minority religion, often non-white and experience prejudice. Since jihadists come from that religious group, their privilege status, prejudices and injustices are relevant. But that doesn’t quite fit the situation of Muslims (as a cultural/ religious identity) globally in areas where they form a majority – as in, for example, Egypt, where as a majority religious group they’re the beneficiaries of privilege above, say, Coptic Christians.
Since many European-born Muslims identify themselves with a global religious community rather than, or more than, a European nation or culture, the question of what scale at which to look at privilege is tricky when it comes to religious privilege or lack thereof.
In the process of decline warbands can and do overthrow the older order of privilege. So their particular prejudices and injustices do matter a lot to those of us who’d end up at pretty low down their alternative order of privilege (as women, non-muslims etc.). That seems sensible to me but it conflicts with what you said. It’s not only a current but a future threat that is likely to seriously affect our lives – yet it comes from an apparently less privileged group and at present its scale is far less than, say, those killed by western bombs in Muslim countries. That’s making it almost impossible to talk about since people will say, as you have, that the prejudices and injustices of more privileged groups matter more because they affect more lives.
But I know you’ve said elsewhere that an alternative to collapse due to warband incursions is a declining civilization being subsumed by another. A revived Islamic caliphate seems the most likely contender over here by far. And I think the jihadists aren’t ‘barbarians’ in the sense you discussed in the posts about civilization and barbarism. They just represent a different culture. So are they really warbands or are they part of the process of one civilization subsuming another? Or somehow both?
And if Muslims are a less privileged religious group in Europe, how do we deal justly with the fact that some of them would like to replace our current order of privilege with another – one which most of us would object to for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth? It seems to me that even if they are less privileged at present, their prejudices and injustices, as with those of warbands, does matter more to some Europeans than many of the prejudices and injustices carried out by apparently more privileged groups. Nothing to do with the relative ethics of one killing innocent people here and the other killing them ‘over there’ - purely from the point of view of self-preservation – literally and culturally.
The peasants of the Roman countryside probably suffered more from warbands after Adrianople than many of the wealthy living in cities did. And most of the refugee Goths probably never attacked anyone - they were genuinely fleeing the Huns and included whole populations– yet the warbands came from their group.
Your future utopia fiction was very helpful in that respect, but for Europeans the whole question of religious privilege takes on a broader significance as part of the mechanism of our decline. My thoughts are a bit muddled on this sorry!
Mallow.
4/21/16, 7:25 AM
GHung said...
It's clear that the entitled class in our area has no concept of how they've driven up property values and land taxes for all of us, or that the mostly working class land-owners in our county may merely be trying to hang onto land that has been in their family for generations. These thoughts simply have no place in their narrative. One "opinion" actually called out these land owners for not selling out to developers before land values crashed, @2008, never considering that it was over-development that helped crash over-inflated property values in the first place.
I won't get into the benefits, or liabilities, of connecting these solar arrays to our local grid; it's a different discussion, but it's clear to me that whatever inevitable clash of classes was previously masked by better economic times is surfacing in our area. This should be interesting to watch going forward, this dance of musical chairs, as a full spectrum of citizens try to hold onto what they perceive as their wealth and privilege while their comfortable narratives become challenged in many ways.
Anyway, many thanks for the weekly doses of clarity. At least some of us get it.
4/21/16, 8:01 AM
August Johnson said...
I advance ordered THE WEIRD OF HALI: INNSMOUTH and am looking forward to the shipping. I've already done a pre-order on DARK AGE AMERICA. Guess it's time to get After Oil 4 also.
4/21/16, 8:17 AM
Unknown said...
Great post, JMG. I'm 67 years old, and I've said since I was 5 or so that a discussion and recognition of class issues was sorely needed. I'm from an OLD southern white family (1624 Jamestown, moved south to coastal NC) and my stepfather was a Burr (as in related to Aaron). We had all the right class markers for an older version of class, along with an earlier noblesse oblige sense of duty.
However, my of my brothers, two of us were on the Autism Spectrum (not identified) and were unwilling and in some sense unable to play the social games needed to remain "in class." None of us cared to deal with the whole debutante thing, for instance. All of us were to varying degrees downwardly mobile, as the new salaried classes took pre-eminence.
Not fitting one's familial class can be deeply disturbing both for one's family but for one's course in life. Privilege for me manifested in my only being homeless twice! (true, but intended as a joke as well since I have lived undeservedly well otherwise) I've lived among various "underclass" whites and native americans and I can tell you that prejudice certainly can be found anywhere.
One thing you don't seem to mention (I may have missed it) is the priority certain kinds of social skills take even over "born" class issues. Example: I went on a job interview where I was grilled about my social connections. When it was determined that while I had the right name and background otherwise, I wasn't able to identify now was I willing to exploit my supposed class connections, I was dropped even before the interview ended. Remarkable feeling. So, yes, it's a very complex and painful conversation.
I seem to recall that Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted to have a conversation about class (however defined), back in the '60s, to move beyond the use of race and address deeper (!) issues. Shortly after that became common knowledge (or so it seemed to me at the time) he was assassinated. Maybe the ice is breaking.
4/21/16, 8:18 AM
Peter VE said...
On second reading, I realized that you really meant to point out the stupidity of the salary class. Only those in privilege would infer that "higher" IQ referred to them.
4/21/16, 8:29 AM
Eric S. said...
Part 1
Wow, you touched the Wiccanate Privilege debate on the Archdruid Report! What's next? The soft/hard debate? The F/U debate? Whether or not working with spirit guides is cultural misappropriation? Be careful, you might just turn into a Pagan blogger ;-).
More seriously though, one of the more interesting things relating to the concept of privilege, that may very well relate to the push-back you've been getting, is the fact that over the last 3-5 years, privilege has become an extremely popular part of the collective conversation. Nearly everyone discusses it, training courses for volunteer nonprofits, teaching certification, or for work in social services usually start out by having students read the original Peggy McIntosh essay from the '90s that started bringing the concept back into public discourse in academia and sociology, and then using that essay to examine privilege in their lives and how they can use that knowledge in their work. And then, within the last 3-5 years, as social media and the thoughtless sharing of memes and online op-ed pieces began taking over as the primary way Americans talk about the issues, the entire concept of privilege began to descend into a way of playing the game you addressed last week, and possibly of playing a few other games as well, one of which, is of course starhawking. Someone talks about a systemic social disadvantage they face, and the usual response is a mass wave of "but check your privilege!" and the whole conversation shuts down.
Privilege is beginning to be extremely awkwardly discussed, and widely, for the first time in a very long time right now, but what's emerging out of the debate, is a situation in which privilege is an accusation to toss around in order to say "hey, get in line and behave!" (http://qz.com/644985/privilege-is-what-allows-sanders-supporters-to-say-theyll-never-vote-for-clinton/ ), or, when the conversation has actually managed to get pushed in a useful direction, not daring to step beyond "awareness" as the sole acceptable solution: (http://occupywallstreet.net/story/explaining-white-privilege-broke-white-person )
I think that's part of the source of the pushback you're getting here, usually you say the things everyone things or fears, but nobody actually talks about in public... and people are caught like deer in the headlights, ready to either nod and say "yeah, I always suspected as much," or panic and stick their heads in the sand. With Privilege, it’s a topic that has spent a few years now being discussed to death, turned into various political battering rams, or into circular loops with no real ending. So people are thinking “oh no, someone’s talking about privilege again?” And they’re already clenching down for fear that you’ll either be shouting “check your privilege” to people as code for “get in line and stop thinking about your own problems,” go into a “privilege exists” PSA that offers “acknowledging privilege exists” as the end solution, or will go with the right-wing version and start shouting about how privilege doesn’t exist at all and is just an excuse used by moochers who can’t get by in life. You’re taking the most uncomfortable road, and saying “yes, if you’re literate enough to read and understand this essay and have access to a computer screen and internet connection to read it from, you’ve got privileges, and that’s not something to apologize for, but with privilege comes responsibility.”
4/21/16, 8:30 AM
Eric S. said...
With the pushback on class, I think part of the reason class is so taboo in America relates to the core narrative of American Capitalism, as addressed in Wright’s “Short History of Progress,” the whole “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” perspective on how the wage class self-identifies. Part of the narrative in America seems to be that class inequality exists, class identity doesn’t, and therefore class falls in a different category from the social identities acceptable within the spheres of American identity politics where privilege is an accepted conversation. On the affluent right, wage class jobs are treated as first steps to gain a footing in the process of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps (“I worked in a factory all through my 20s, it gave me character, and I invested my money, now I’m a CEO!”), anyone over 30 in a wage class job is viewed as failures or underachievers (“see the garbage man son? Study hard, or you’ll turn out just like him!” “that slacker can’t get anything better than burger flipper? He doesn’t deserve higher pay, I bet the joke will be on him when they replace him with an electronic kiosk and force him to get a real job.”). On the left the bootstraps narrative still prevails, but it’s society’s duty to do the bootstrap pulling: “we need better funding for education and more affordable college education to give young people opportunities to advance in cutting edge 21st century careers (i.e. desk jobs)” “we need a higher minimum wage so that low wage employees can support themselves and lift themselves up into ‘better’ jobs.” And by and large, for much of America’s recent history, the two narratives seem to have run in tandem with each other, the wage class consuming media that normalizes the middle class lifestyle and working to either attain it themselves, or ensure that their children achieve it (even back in 1960, when there was a huge working class movement, Steinbeck made the observation that America didn’t really have a self-identified proletariat, and that most of the self-identified working class revolutionaries were actually of the salary class intelligentsia). What you’re saying that’s so challenging is that the American Working Class has stopped seeing itself as elites facing momentary setbacks, but has in fact developed a class identity all its own, and begun advocating for itself for the first time in nearly a century. The narrative of the working class has changed, abandoning the usual bootstraps narratives of the mainstream but simultaneously running right on past all the various forms working class revolutions are –supposed- to take towards policies completely counterintuitive to those expectations and carrying various values self-proclaimed class advocates out there will inevitably find quite unsavory. I’m reminded in a way, of the discomfort among some of the people I knew in the activist community who were doing work with the African American community here in Baltimore around the time of the protests last year and the year before, as they were forced to learn that many of the people in the communities they were working alongside were in fact, extremely religiously conservative, and that their usual “religion is the root of all evil” mindset was not a way to win allies, and that just because these communities were working towards a common goal on this issue, they didn’t necessarily share the same values regarding the various other goals of the activists (LGBT rights, feminism, environmental justice, etcetera). It was an interesting culture clash to watch.
4/21/16, 8:30 AM
tokyo damage said...
To which I'll add one more item which clouds our thinking on privilege and inequality: there's actually TWO ways to fix any given social inequality: 'leveling up' (taking the marginalized groups UP to the level of the privileged classes) vs. 'leveling down' (making the privileged do LESS of the thing in question, so everyone does that thing at the low rate of the marginalized groups).
The right tends to love hierarchy for its own sake, so they don't get caught up on this, but in my experience, lefties will spend hours arguing about an inequality-type issue, without even giving a cursory thought to "do I want to fix the inequality by leveling up or down?"
If you want to see this confusion in action, ask your friends, "In a sexually equal society, would women burp and fart publicly as much as men, or would men suppress their various gasses as much as women do today?"
4/21/16, 8:38 AM
David said...
Hmmm.
I did respond (as again, I haven't learned) with two main points. One re HRC's 45-minute income exceeding Sander's 2014 annual income (doesn't that make her privileged?) and another pointing out that a certain Eugene Debs was a white male who rather forcefully discussed class.
I really need to learn to not engage in the first place. Still trying to save the system from itself, I suppose.
4/21/16, 8:48 AM
redscott said...
4/21/16, 8:57 AM
234567 said...
Both China and America are insular, rather than expositive (coining word to mean 'exposed to a thing'). There exists books of rhetoric and even laws passed, but the cultures remain insular. I saw this traveling, where Americans and Chinese that travel are shown and allowed access to only certain aspects of any given culture.
Example: In Malaysia, most people eat with their fingers, and that is the way it is. Yet on my first few trips there, I was never once put in a position to be exposed to this. Likewise for my Chinese traveling partners. We were simply not allowed to know this, being only met at restaurants where utensils were the norm or else at hotels where they were the norm. It was only when we went on a plant tour (larger concern trying to buy a small company) and there was no other place to eat that we found out how the Malay do it. None of the 4 of us balked - we just washed our hands, went through the serving line and sat down and ate with out hands.
There were Malays staring at us the entire time, and being nudged not to stare frequently. Our thoughts were, "their culture, their country, their ways" and we forged on. Of interest to us all was the effect this had on our return to the plant, where the locals suddenly wanted to talk to us and show us why they did things in a certain way, and asked if we knew a better way or wanted to know how we did it in America and China. The locals were suddenly less conscious of the whole class thing, simply because we bowed to local custom. It made the entire trip amazingly enjoyable and enlightening.
One example of many, but I still insist that the lack of going 'walkabout' in other cultures and classes is a big problem in solving this dilemma, and the reason for this is, IMHO, the pace of life required to be 'efficient' and 'profitable'. And the culture of instant gratification promoted by consumption economics.
In our modern world, only us old guys finally understand that the notions of efficiency and profit are hobbled by the privilege and class issues - breaking them down and exposing people to these is the only way to get the point home. Exchange of trust and ideas is what makes for a better world and better working relationships. Privilege is not going away, but noblesse oblige needs to make a comeback. Noblesse oblige imparts a respect that has gone missing in the world for a few centuries, IMO.
That was the purpose of fosterings and apprenticeships - and we have done away with both in the modern world. The only way to resolve this is to acknowledge it and accept that there will always be privilege, but it does no need to mean disrespect or lessening of what others do or bring to the table. Maybe it is time to hold on to parts of what we have made and reach back to revive some things we tossed into the dustbin of history?
4/21/16, 9:02 AM
The other Tom said...
I think it is possible to fall out of one's class even if it is working class. By wandering along the periphery of other classes and cultures you can become adept at tweaking your speech, body language, and which parts of your composite whole you share to get along with most people, but not enough to ever fit in. You can reach a point where you don't belong to any class because your perceptions are such a unique jumble of experience that trying to explain one's culture would be futile.
If people are honest with themselves, we are all to some degree in this condition, so that the only way to get to something truly interesting in people is to keep listening and withold judgement as long as possible.
In the nineties I was a truck driver for awhile and my helper was a guy who had a background and temperament and interests remarkably similar to mine, except that he was a black guy and I am white. We both came from working class towns and we were both avid readers, so we had great conversations. It was almost like a controlled experiment to see how a black guy and a white guy, with everything else the same, would have to navigate the world. He had to be hyperaware of the impression he made, to avoid being seen as a thug. He was more neatly dressed than the job required, and the tone of his voice and his vocabulary shifted much more than mine, in response to new people.
I think it's interesting that although in public we are class oriented, in the privacy of our own skulls we may be in another class altogether.
This all seems very relevant to the theme of this blog because as resources tighten up the social mores may tighten up as well, so that resisting stereotypes will be even more of a survival skill than it is now.
4/21/16, 9:15 AM
Matt said...
I suspect that this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Certainly in the UK, it's not many decades since fathers were almost invariably given custody. As to whether this is a source of privilege for women, you would have to unpick whether or not this was just a matter of judging the most suitable arrangement in each case.
4/21/16, 9:18 AM
Mark Mitchell said...
The "privilege" debate only works to transfer status within groups who agree they share a national character. Once you disavow a shared identity and go to a civic nationalism, the discussion makes no sense, because you are discussing redistribution between groups who have different inheritances.
In fact, those of us who keep an eye on Gramsci's children wonder if that is the whole point of replacing a "rights" model with a "privilege" model.
4/21/16, 9:31 AM
HalFiore said...
Off-topic, but I wanted to draw your attention, if you hadn't seen it, to this well-written article touching on the myth of progress: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/disaster/anomaly-barbarism
Nothing new to readers of The Archdruid Report, but good to see.
4/21/16, 9:47 AM
HalFiore said...
4/21/16, 9:53 AM
Clay Dennis said...
My son is an interesting laboratory of how race and class privilege intersect and diverge. He was raised in the salary class but is of mixed race as my wife is from Alex's Sugercane Plantation Japanese ancestory. He grew up and went to highschool in Oregon as one of a handfull of Asians ( he seemed to self identify with his asian heritage at the time) . Then he went to college in New York City and ended up as only one of a handfull of non African Americans at BET (black entertainment television) as his skills at shooting and editing video got him past the gates. He lives in a majority Dominican neighborhood and between that and his job, all of his friends are either Dominican or African American. As part of his job he has been dispatched to cover the events in Ferguson, Baltimore and Staton Island and has more and more self identified with African Americans and taken on some of the clothing and mannerisms of the Hip Hop Culture.
But recently, a couple of incidents made him realize that he was still had an inner sense of salary class privlege. He was working a second job editing video at a large web site that caters to 18-30 year old white women with a content of fashion etc. He had several instances of middle aged white women at this new work site disrespecting him ,as he would say. In reality he found himself pushed aside in a hall or to board an elevator without the slightest recognition or applogy. He finds the insulting both because of his inner sense of class privilege ,even though he has taken on the trappings of another class and race, and because in the world he mostly inhabits bumping in to someone without an apology may get you a knife in the back.We have had good discussions on how both race and class privlege work in the world and I thank you for your frank discussion of the matter
4/21/16, 10:00 AM
pygmycory said...
This is starting to break down due to public outcry and prices that continue rising.
Oh, and the premier's take on things is that if you don't like the cost of housing in Vancouver, you should move. Never mind the question of who's going to work in the shops, the restaurants, the docks, or do the cleaning or all the other poorly-paid work if all the people who can't no longer afford to live in Vancouver leave.
4/21/16, 10:00 AM
Sven Eriksen said...
Oh man... I've been waiting to hear you nail that one... ;-)
4/21/16, 10:01 AM
pygmycory said...
IQ tests are not a useful measure of one class being on average smarter than another or not.
4/21/16, 10:03 AM
aiastelamonides said...
Certainly agreed. I think the ladder image encourages harmful and divisive squabbling about who is more oppressed than whom, but it's better than nothing or a vague sense that everyone's sort of oppressed so it's all the same really. I don't have a good image for the real system of privilege besides its own microcosms, such as schools. Oh well.
Speaking of Latina women from poor families, I have a novel about one to recommend to you. Aside from our unprivileged heroine trying to make it in a middle class white town, it is about incomprehensible but lovable Lovecraftian horrors, the charm and folly of the American lifestyle, and the importance of family. It's titled American Elsewhere and I think it's up your alley.
4/21/16, 10:43 AM
pygmycory said...
One step-parent finished highschool late, and the other not at all. One of the two was proudly working-class Canadian, the other was another English immigrant with a banker father. Things varied quite a bit between my two families over time, depending on how people's health was doing, who was working and so on. One half was a gay couple, one of whom was trans. The other half was conservative Anglican. This was in the 1990s. It was confusing, and as I was an only child, I got a lot of attention from my four parents, all of whom seemed to want different things from and for me.
I went to university and came out with a degree. I was lucky enough not to have debt, due more to parental help than to anything else. But my health was falling apart and I developed a work injury that worker's comp refused to admit was work-related. I quickly ended up unable to work a significant amount, with no/ludicrously low and patchy income and the great recession incoming. I moved back home to save money/try to recover, then away again to try to find adequate work, since there wasn't much in the small town my mom lived in. That didn't work out. Over all, it was a nightmare 5 years before I ended up on disability. Things are much more stable now I have a reliable income source.
As for accent, I'm canadian-born with an english accent. I tend to get reactions along the lines of 'when did you come over','wow you sound smart','I don't understand your accent', or 'I love your accent','where in England are you from', or 'your accent is so cute'. Overall, it is probably a source of privilege as an adult where it was a minor source of harassment as a kid.
I'm very obviously white, and am physically small.
4/21/16, 10:43 AM
Shane W said...
Regarding class, the South had a wonderfully explicit feudal class system that was slowly and systematically destroyed from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights movement, that contrasted well with Yankee America's class and race hypocrisy. As an internal colony, that class system has been replaced over the last 40 years with mainstream Yankee class and race hypocrisy. When I see Southern politicians "dog whistling", unlike others, I see that as adopting Yankee norms--the North perfected the art of racial "dog whistling" while the South was much more explicit. It would have been nice had race been settled in the South via an explosive, settling conflict like it did in other feudal, slave-based plantation societies in the new world, rather then the slow-burn, nothing fixed, internal colony, cultural destruction, reality of the post Civil War South, but that goes in the bin of "might have beens"...
4/21/16, 10:49 AM
LewisLucanBooks said...
I've watched a few of those shows, that I got from the library, that explores the backgrounds of B and C list celebrities (with a few A's thrown in, to draw a crowd.) Always interesting to hear the family legends, that don't pan out. Claiming Native American roots seems the most popular. Cherokee seems to be the default "tribe of choice." I suppose there's some kind of romanticized cachet, to that. Though, i doubt any of them would care to march off to the Pine Ridge Reservation. (Which is not a Cherokee reservation, before someone calls me out, on that.) Those never seem to pan out, but usually, something equally interesting pops up. Of course, the holy grail for genealogists is a connection to royalty. Or, at least a rock star or super model. :-). Which, I suppose, is all about status and class.
I'm pretty sure I come from a long line (and, long lived) collection of farmers, carpenters and miners. Given the way the world is going, I find that very comforting. Lew
4/21/16, 11:10 AM
onething said...
"The book "Outliers" by Malcom Gladwell might give you a different perspective. The short version, success in a given field requires a base of sufficient intellegence, hand/eye coordination etc, depending on the field you are talking about. after that it requires opportunity, and opportunity is positively correlated with privilege. Many other details, time and place you are born also fall into the opportunity bucket. IQ is just one aspect and not really the most important one."
I think I have read another of his books...I looked up Outliers and got a feel for what it's saying. I wouldn't disagree with anything in your above paragraph, though, and it is interesting that he says hand/eye coordination. This is an indication of a healthy neurological system. But I'm not just talking about success. What struck me about the bubble test we did last week was how many questions dealt with things like attitudes and tastes and preferences in entertainment. I guess if you're born into privilege and a salary class family then you're expected to do likewise. Yet many people for various reasons do not. Sometimes they are emotionally impaired. Sometimes they just march to a different drummer. Probably the smartest person I know, with a perfect 1600 on his SATs, dropped out of UCLA and became a plumber, because he's just not interested in the white collar game. And of course if you are a member of an underprivileged minority that is a strike against you unconnected to intelligence.
4/21/16, 11:11 AM
Tag Murphy said...
Bravo!
Tag Murphy
4/21/16, 11:35 AM
Chris Smith said...
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism
And here I thought Vox was the paragon of liberal smugness (was that smug of me?)! Good to see some self awareness on Vox's part.
4/21/16, 11:41 AM
asr said...
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism
4/21/16, 11:45 AM
Bruce E said...
This in particular from your first of these three posts hit home: "fat, pink-faced, gap-toothed Southern good ol’ boy in jeans and a greasy T-shirt, watching a NASCAR race on television from a broken-down sofa, with one hand stuffed elbow deep into a bag of Cheez Doodles, the other fondling a shotgun, a Confederate flag patch on his baseball cap and a Klan outfit in the bedroom closet." To anybody who may not be as close to this as I am, this would probably seem to be exaggerated for rhetorical flourish, but let me say it's not at all exaggerated. Had you thrown in something disparaging of how we (atheists, of course) view their approach to Christianity, you could have been quoting almost verbatim more than a few Facebook posts I've seen...
I'm not pointing fingers at anybody but myself and people I know, so hopefully nobody else takes this as an indication of how I think of them. I think, however, what separates me from most of the people I know like this is that I was raised the son of a lower middle-class wage earner and spent a solid chunk of a decade 16-25 years old working for (near minimum) hourly wages before the next 20 years brought me to my status today as part of that upper half of salaried people you speak of. While my memories fade, I haven't lost enough of that to time in order to disassociate myself from the hourly workers entirely, and somehow I maintain enough self-awareness to catch myself in the middle of the narratives you have so deftly described here.
By all means, JMG, please keep 'em coming. Please keep 'em uncomfortably spot-on. I'm looking forward to seeing where you go with this from here.
Something occurred to me as I read this today, regarding your contention that we can't get rid of our privilege. While I agree we can't get rid of it, we can perhaps reject it. I was comparing your "Collapse now and avoid the rush!" as a rejection of the way things are to The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. In a way I see this passion for Trump and Sanders not as an embrace of any specific set of policies either endorses, but two sides of the same coin of a collective rejection of, a collective walking-away from, the status quo. I wonder how that thought might strike you.
4/21/16, 11:54 AM
Matt said...
One question worth exploring is whether there are instances where we can benefit from losing our privileges.
For instance, men have long had the privilege of choosing how much to be involved in child care. Social pressures and womens' assertiveness in recent decades have induced many men to be more actively involved, although of course this isn't complete or universal. I can't help thinking that the men who have done this have benefitted from the change, through more rewarding relationships with their families.
The examples uppermost in my mind, though, are cases of divide-and-rule, where the marginal privileges of one group over another cement an overall structure that exploits and oppresses both groups. I'm thinking poor whites and blacks in Jim Crow-era US, or working-class Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland - "tuppence-ha'penny looking down on tuppence". There's a lot of power to the old lefty idea that unity across these divisions could bring benefits overall. How generalisable this is in an unsustainable world, though? I'm pondering that one.
4/21/16, 12:32 PM
Renaissance Man said...
And confused.
As usual.
I haven't read anything here, in the past while, that wasn't painfully self-evident, at least to me, except the future-fantasy writing, which is highly entertaining, but obviously not factual. So self-evident, in fact, that I thought it would be much of a waste of time discussing it, since the solution to various social and economic aliments is also glaringly obvious -- at least to me.
Apparently I'm wrong: it desperately needs discussing.
Everything you've written recently about the economic landscape are points I used to make (albeit not as clearly as you put it) during political discussions 10 to 15 years ago. Hell, I made exactly these predictions while discussing NAFTA and the opening of Chinese markets back in the 1980s when it was first being implemented. I was 6 when I figured out that countries that make things are wealthy while countries that only provide raw materials are poor (it took a lot of learning to discover why, of course), but I never read anything to alter my original conclusion that it was dumb to send our manufacturing overseas. It still is.
So I'm puzzled and confused as to why so many cannot grasp obvious economic reality, and why so many are so adamant about voting for the same Parties and people that created their problems in the first place and why so many choose the most inapt locus for their discomfiture about their sinking standard of living?
I don't get it.
4/21/16, 1:47 PM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
We are all born with an infinite debt to the society that raised, nurtured, fed and clothed us, to those long dead who invented our language and traditions, to all those who made it possible for us to exist. In ancient times we thought we owed this to the gods (it was repaid in sacrifice — or, sacrifice was really just the payment of interest — ultimately, it was repaid by death). Later the debt was adopted by the state — itself a divine institution — with taxes substituted for sacrifice, and military service for one’s debt of life. Money is simply the concrete form of this social debt, the way that it is managed. Keynesians like this sort of logic. So do various strains of socialist, social democrats, even crypto-fascists like Auguste Comte (the first, as far as I am aware, to actually coin the phrase ‘social debt’). But the logic also runs through much of our common sense: consider for instance, the phrase, ‘to pay one’s debt to society’, or, ‘I felt I owed something to my country’, or, ‘I wanted to give something back.’ Always, in such cases, mutual rights and obligations, mutual commitments — the kind of relations that genuinely free people could make with one another — tend to be subsumed into a conception of ‘society’ where we are all equal only as absolute debtors before the (now invisible) figure of the King, who stands in for your mother, and by extension, humanity.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-debt-the-first-five-thousand-years
4/21/16, 2:50 PM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhh-2WxzCxw
4/21/16, 2:56 PM
Unknown said...
This will post as Unknown Deborah, but is from Rita Rippetoe
My ex had a friend raised in a upper class family--they owned a local newspaper in a large California city. This friend had become a lawyer and was once complaining to my ex that he was broke. Ex said, "Richard, when you say you are broke you mean you need to call your broker to sell some bonds. When I say I'm broke I mean the electric and the gas bills are both due and I have to decide which to pay and which to try to put off." This friend had learned a little about the differences between himself and the truly poor during a short stint as a social worker. He noticed a tendency on the part of his clients to avoid opening mail--they did not expect an envelope to contain good news--just a bill or a denial of benefits, or a summons or other bad news.
My ex himself is an interesting example of intersection of classes. His father had been the illegitimate son of a female concert pianist. He was adopted by his stepfather and educated as an engineer. At one point he was in charge of the WPA in a rural part of Arizona. (My ex is proud of the fact that his dad refused to segregate his work crews by race as demanded by some of the participants. If they were all out of work he figured no one could claim to be better than the man next to him based on color.) My ex's mother was the daughter of a German merchant family who fled Russia after the Revolution. She was a school teacher and later administrator. However my ex didn't go to college because his father was disabled by a heart attack back before health insurance, etc. Instead he trained as a surveyor and was a construction company supervisor when we met. Good pay, but not the same class as teacher and engineer. At one point he was a partner in a small construction company which played "the skin game" for government contracts. He had a contractor's license and his partner was African American, so the company qualified for contracts set aside for minority owned firms. Later he managed to drop into the underclass by developing drug problems and doing prison time. Roller coaster.
4/21/16, 3:05 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
"I suspect that this is a relatively recent phenomenon. Certainly in the UK, it's not many decades since fathers were almost invariably given custody. As to whether this is a source of privilege for women, you would have to unpick whether or not this was just a matter of judging the most suitable arrangement in each case."
It is pretty recent, and you're right, the old standard was to give the child to the father. After a successful campaign by Caroline Norton in the UK, the Custody of Infants Act of 1839 allowed the mother to petition for custody of young children and access to older children.
Somewhere along the way, that mutated into the "tender years doctrine" which basically assumed that young children need their mothers more than their fathers.
Officially, the tender years doctrine has been banned in most of Europe and the US in favor of the "best interest of the child doctrine," but many fathers have claimed that the assumption that the mother is the real parent and more important to the child's well-being is still influential.
One of the reasons I think they probably have a point is that when anyone tries to talk about this assumption, they're invariably Starhawked: the prejudice is obviously a result of patriarchal expectations of women to be mothers, so it's no fair for men to complain since it's their own fault. I've seen this happen many times online.
A friend of mine went through a long custody battle with his ex recently and won mainly because of an obscure Alabama law that gave preference to the parent living in Alabama and because everything suddenly went wrong for her all at once. He said he found in his research that while fathers win custody at least half the time when they contest, lawyers typically advise them not to bother unless the case is especially strong.
It's a mess.
4/21/16, 3:34 PM
Matt said...
when will you just STOP?
Now you are suggesting that drawing a salary is the grounds for " rightly deserved consequences with the pitchfork and the guillotine." Give it a rest won't you?
4/21/16, 3:54 PM
Atilio Baroni Filho said...
I see a lot of correlation between the history of privilege there as well as here in Brazil. People here go to a lot of effort to naturalize, make invisible or justify privilege in a number of creative ways without naming it. This links well with the history of race and privilege that was constructed in a similar fashion in both the US and Brazil, beginning with slavery of native peoples, slavery of african peoples and then the european immigrants, and all the effort put in to keep these groups from having a common cause.
As someone with a background close to yours regarding white salary-class privilege, but who lives in the countryside of an historically impoverished region, I'd like to ask if you have any advice, sources or other guidance in bridging this class gap, from the starting point brought here in the comments of accepting your privilege and duty and making a sincere effort to meaningfully communicate and contribute to the community you live in.
Thank you in advance :)
Atilio
4/21/16, 4:04 PM
Mister Roboto said...
According to the PC SJWs, the existence of the privileges you outlined in this post means that if you are white in this society, you personally are racist because you benefit from white privilege; if you are a man, you personally are sexist because you benefit from male privilege; and if you are heterosexual, you personally are heterosexist because you benefit from straight privilege. While these forms of privilege certainly exist and awareness of the fact that they exist should inform one's conduct in terms of avoidance of racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes and behaviors, I don't think I agree with those PC statements anymore.
For one thing, these statements imply that the individual is irrelevant and the only thing that matters are groups or collectives. If find this idea as absolutist and nonsensical as the counter-notion promoted by Ayn Rand that groups and collectives don't matter at all and there is only the individual. In this crucial regard, PC has its roots in the New Left thinking of college campuses of the late sixties and early seventies, which openly admired and imitated the ideology of Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution. I really do think you can see those totalitarian roots in the social attitude of those who cleave to SJW orthodoxy.
And while these forms of privilege still exist, they are on their way out, however frustratingly slowly. A good way to bring about the retrenchment of the prejudiced attitudes that go along with these unjust privileges is to prescribe a cure that is as bad in its own way as the disease. That is the main reason I ultimately decided to reject PC thinking. There is really too much to describe about what makes PC ultimately stand for Poor Cure, but I will say the mindset has become so rigid, intolerant, absolutist, and victimhood-fixated that it has become entirely contrary to human nature and as such will likely fade away the way fundamentalist Christian dominionism is starting to do.
Though I suppose a Randite or a neo-reactionary (AKA alt-right) person reading my posts on Tumblr would accuse me of being a "light-beer" version of PC because I probably do have somewhat more in common in my overall mentality with the PC people than I do with those Randites or neo-reactionaries. I would certainly appreciate hearing your thoughts on the matter as you probably have more influence on my evolving attitudes than any other thinker on "teh Internetz"!
4/21/16, 4:12 PM
Alex said...
Eating with fingers - you probably got stares just for being foreigners, but you were probably not eating with your fingers "correctly". The equivalent of eating with a fork but holding it upside down. (We'll leave that weird way in which some people somehow pick the food up correctly with their fork but then somehow stuff the food into their mouth with the fork upside down - I don't even understand how that works.) For one thing, if you're eating with your hands, always use your right hand.
Body size - At least in the US, the people doing the hard work tend to be small. 5'4" is probably the median, and a lot are smaller. It seems the taller the person, the easier their occupation. It seems from what I've read of Orwell, it was the same in England too. It's an odd sight to me, seeing a bunch of big tall people standing around while these little Hispanic guys are hustling around busting their butts, like at a construction site.
Bated/baited - I'm afraid people are using "baited" because they've seen others use it that way, or because they're thinking in terms of their breath literally being baited, like they just ate some sardines, or maybe some kim chee. But "bated" is much more interesting to know about as it's an English word that comes from falconry. A falcon is trained to stand on our glove, and is secured by a couple of soft leather strips around its legs called jesses. You hold the jesses in your gloved hand. Well-trained falcons may not need such carefulness, but younger ones and ones in training, can be skittish. So sometimes they'll try to fly off, and are restrained by the jesses, and this is called bating, or you'd say the falcon is bated. It wants to fly off, but is halted. Now imagine your breath that falcon - isn't that nicer than sardines?
4/21/16, 4:23 PM
donalfagan said...
JMG, this post reminded me of Travels With Charley, in which Steinbeck talked about having a hired man at one time. They got dirty working outside, but needed supplies. Steinbeck wanted to just go to the store, but his worker said, Oh No, we're not rich enough to go out all dirty like this.
It also reminded me of Split Infinity, in which the serf Stile was able to increase his privilege with time and good performance.
4/21/16, 4:30 PM
Alex said...
As for getting into disability, congratulations. Getting on disability is the new American dream for the 90%. The reason for this is, if you know you have steady money coming in, you can go live anywhere. You can literally buy some junk land and build a cabin, or just move to some underpopulated city like Saratoga Springs, NY, and you know you'll be able to live. Moving to such an area without a financial safety net is NOT advised. I've been out in Arizona (lived with a friend who I paid "rent" to with half my food stamps) and in a good month, made $100 or so, in a bad one, $5. It's that bad out there. Food stamps are a way of life in flyover country. This is why the advice everyone spews to leave California is stupid - there are no jobs out there. At least I have work and a place to live there. Going to Minnesota and living in a hole in the ground would be much much worse. If I were able to get disability that would be a real game-changer though.
4/21/16, 4:33 PM
rapier said...
This is a profoundly conservative idea, with a catch. You see the very best definition of Conservative is the belief that society and for that matter government should be lead by an elite class, an aristocracy. However no American conservative can acknowledge that. While America totally avoided a formal heredity based aristocracy in every place locally and then nationally the upper class became composed of the wealthy. Government was not taken over directly by the wealthy but rather those eager so serve them. With the stipulation those serving usually never acknowledged even to themselves that they were serving the rich, those who owned the bulk or assets. At first that was land and real estate and then financial assets.
It's true that Americas so called left and its liberals have a schizophrenic association with privilege but Americas conservatives have an equally strong schizophrenic association with class. They simply deny that class exists, all the while working to insure the current monied elites gain more wealth and power.
Even in the old slave South it is mandatory to deny that class has any bearing on their 'conservatism' despite the regions former embrace of Americas only pure class system, and nostalgia for large aspects of that system that exists to this day, or it’s bastard child Jim Crow. Conservative take umbrage at nothing as much as the charge that they are acting out of class driven motivations. In fact as stated above conservatives deny the very existence of class either as a former or current reality or even a theoretical one they seek too advance.
This opposite pole of liberalism is I think more to blame for "..frank talk about privilege stopped being socially acceptable in America over the course of the second half of the twentieth century". I mean an ancient if not the most ancient of political ideas, that society should be ruled by a tiny elite, is denied by the very people dedicated to that self same idea.
If liberals had then or now admitted they are privileged they would have instantly been subject to withering attack by conservatives who would have successfully brand them as inauthentic Americans, or some such, and worse, I am sure you can fill in the blanks.
Admittedly there are other branches of Conservatism and Liberalism but I believe the root of America's isms dating from its early days is that conservatives have denied the very existence of the thing they believe in most. That the country should be ruled by an elite and a class system is best.
4/21/16, 4:41 PM
Alex said...
4/21/16, 4:42 PM
pygmycory said...
It sounds like you've been having a really hard time. I get the impression the situation in the USA is much worse than in Canada so far.
4/21/16, 5:01 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Of course there are a few exceptions. I'd like to thank the several white straight salary-class guys -- i.e., people like me -- who took it on themselves to demonstrate my point that privilege is invisible to the privileged, by going on at length about the occasional situations in which they get treated like, oh, women, or people of color, or gay people, or wage class people: that is, when their feelings aren't respected, their explanations aren't wanted, and their interests aren't considered. Yes, that does happen. I'd encourage you to imagine getting that sort of treatment 24/7, which is what people less privileged than we are generally have to deal with.
I'd also like to thank the various people who took it on themselves to demonstrate last week's points about the Rescue Game, by trying to use this post as an opportunity to talk about how everything wrong with the world is the fault of some group of people they don't like, such as Jewish people. I don't think any of my other readers need more examples of how to play that dysfunctional game, though.
With that, let's go on to comments.
Cherokee, not sure if you've read this, but New York City has a stunningly high rate of mental illness -- it's been a while, but I seem to recall that something like 40% of the population is basically nuts. Having been there, that makes perfect sense to me. ;-)
Alex, the thing I'd point out is that human beings are also xenophiles -- attracted to people who are different than they are -- and so the tendency to form local varieties has been powerfully shaped by an opposite (and at least equally strong) tendency to mate with people from elsewhere. One of the things that's coming out with the recent spread of DNA testing is just how much of a melange we all are. Race is a social construct, not a biological reality, and certain historical forces -- which I'll be discussing in an upcoming post -- gave that social construct a brief and inglorious heyday. Those historical forces have nearly had their day, and I expect the entire concept of race as a source of privilege to sunset out in the couple of centuries ahead of us. (This is why, for example, in my deindustrial-SF novel Star's Reach, pretty much everyone in 25th-century Meriga has light brown skin, and stories about the old days when there were "white people" and "black people" make schoolchildren scratch their heads.)
Patricia, as far as I know, every feudal society in history had the concept that the privileges of the aristocracy were balanced by duties and responsibilities to those lower down. Human beings being what they are, that concept was as often as not honored in the breach, but the idea was there. Confucian thinking comes out of China's first feudal age, the Warring States period, and enshrines a great deal of thoughtful reflection on the values of what, in the time of Confucius, was already a waning era; it's not hard to see why it became so popular in feudal Japan, which had the same traditions!
I agree, for what it's worth, that the dream of equality was a noble one. Like so many abstract ideals, though, it worked out very poorly, producing societies that are just as caste-ridden as before -- it's just that the caste system is covert, and so no longer induces any sense of responsibility in the privileged. Mind you, as industrial civilization winds down, that'll take care of itself -- I'll have more to say about that next week.
4/21/16, 5:03 PM
Danogenes said...
Thanks for persisting with this line of thought. I couldn't agree more that as the oil economy implodes we will be finding a lot of us experiencing shrinking privilege on a grand scale.
I thought you might find the new book by Thomas Frank of interest. He is working in another realm of the same topic. In his case its how the white liberals mover their expectation of their personal good up the income scale while actually making the lives of what you call the "wage class" more miserable.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176121/
Please keep firing away with this and wrap it around your erudition in history and politics. It is a viewpoint that is most often ignored for its depth and tediousness in our compressed ADD present. Thanks.
4/21/16, 5:05 PM
TomK said...
4/21/16, 5:30 PM
fudoshindotcom said...
Is this because the privileged were, from birth, intentionally blinded to the advantages they had? Perhaps under the guise of being taught that what they had was available to everyone and not limited to themselves? From that viewpoint it's easy to see how the privileged could come to believe that the unprivileged had failed in some way and caused their own difficulties.
If you take that narrow-mindedness and combine it with Greed's insatiable appetite for material gain..............well, you've conjured up quite an unpleasant beast haven't you?
4/21/16, 5:54 PM
a d said...
4/21/16, 6:27 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Swift developer, you might want to start by looking up the meaning of the words "privilege" and culture in your favorite dictionary, online or otherwise. No, privilege is not the same thing as "culture;" culture is one of the features that is used in some societies to assign differences in privilege.
Cassandra, yes, I've been tracking the lithium boondoggle for a while now -- thanks for the convenient set of links! We'll be talking about green energy in more detail in a later post.
Maxime, that's good to hear. Once the concept of privilege gets pried loose from the Rescue Game and recognized as a simple fact in human social life, which has to be counterbalanced in order to manage some kind of equity in human affairs, there's much that can be done.
TCS, I'm sure it does look weird to Asian eyes! The problem with the Left -- as Edmund Burke pointed out trenchantly more than two centuries ago -- is that it tries to make human social life conform to an assortment of abstract notions that have no grounding in history or actual experience, and trying to force a society to conform to arbitrary human concepts is as reliably disastrous as trying to make an ecosystem do the same thing. I really should do a post one of these days about Burkean conservatism as political ecology...
Mat, of course it's a distribution fight. The bitter reality is that there aren't enough resources on the planet to give everyone a comfortable developed-world lifestyle, and so distribution fights are going to be the shape of the future as we proceed. That's another reason why frank talk about privilege is needed now!
Greg, excellent! Yes, exactly -- privilege is invisible because being privileged mostly means that you're spared a galaxy of inconveniences and insults, and since you don't encounter those, you don't realize that other people do encounter them. Thus the outrage of straight white salary-class guys like me when, on occasion, they get treated like people lower down the ladder of privilege: it never occurs to them that this is how others are treated every single day of their lives.
MigrantWorker, that's a useful analysis. I'd go even further and identify the primary payoff of privilege as a matter of identity -- the privileged person builds his or her identity around being privileged and being able to expect the various perks and benefits of privilege, just as the unprivileged person very often builds his or her identity around not being privileged and having to bear the burdens and insults of that lack of privilege. One's sense of one's identity is an extraordinarily powerful thing, and when a wide enough gap opens up between someone's actual experience and what their sense of their identity leads them to expect, various kinds of craziness often ensue.
Yeast, yes, and I've discussed that at great length in an entire series of posts here already -- you'll find them summed up and rewritten at length in my book Decline and Fall.
Cathy, the starting point here as elsewhere is a piece of advice I've given many times already: "Collapse now and avoid the rush." I'll expand on that further as we proceed.
4/21/16, 6:29 PM
Blueback said...
4/21/16, 6:33 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
4/21/16, 6:34 PM
Alex said...
Seeing in the news a few years ago, the aftermath of some horrible tornado in one of the southern states, and people were digging out their stuff, and you could tell they were neighbors and friends, but what struck me was they were either quite black or quite white. There was no cafe-au-lait in sight. There are probably strong cultural taboos there.
There are insular groups like the Ainu in Japan, perfectly free to mix with the Japanese and they have apparently, a bit, but they remain distinct. Distinct groups like this are all over the world.
Even within one "race" if there are societies that are stratified, the nobles end up looking very different from the commoners because - I can't think of one that isn't - traditional cultures like the Hawaiians are obsessed with genealogy, at least among their ruling class.
I agree that race is a social construct, although animal breeders talk about "landraces" and that's really what races are. But it comes down to genes, and certain people who have a history of living in a certain area and intermarrying within that group will have genetic markers that indicate they're related to people in that group.
Science/medicine have had to face the uncomfortable fact that there are some "racial" realities. Pima Indians have to watch their diet because they evolved to be very "thrifty" and on the standard American diet they get *very* overweight. Most of the best sprinters come from one area, marathoners another. It's made the news lately that certain heart medications that work pretty well for Caucasians, don't work nearly so well for those of African descent. If you're trying to help your patient, you have to know this.
I do not believe in superior or inferior. I might be an astronaut but is a bushman living in Africa any less happy than me? He's probably happier.
4/21/16, 6:36 PM
Alex said...
I'm not having an especially hard time as Americans go. It's just that things are that bad here. I'm in the middle of the fabled "silicon valley" and companies are being caught right and left smuggling in foreign-trained tech people and paying them what they'd get at home plus a free place to sleep in a dorm and free food. So, if I'm Joe Blow from India and I can get my same $2-something an hour plus free rooming and free rice and lentils, plus get to see America, I'm gonna go for it. But not only is this illegal but it forces everyone else's wages down. We have an utter ton of homeless people and most seem to come from a tech background. There are big homeless encampments all around here and the gov't will come through and clean 'em out, including people's personal papers, medicines, etc and they just pop back up somewhere else.
Mental health care is, for the poor, back to pre-Bedlam times. If you're mentally ill you just live in the streets, a target for anyone who feels like attacking you.
Medical care is hard to get. Theoretically I have it since I have an Obamacare card. In reality I have to make an appointment months ahead to see my regular doctor then, since it's very far away, I have to have the money to take the bus out there the day before and stay in a hotel room, then walk to the Dr's office. So I suppose things will just hang until they're an emergency - preventive care is only for the rich here.
There is public transportation here and it's OK, it's a mile walk to it though.
People are very standoffish. They're a bit nicer than they are in Southern California but that's not saying much. The only way to get acknowledged as a human being is to be a member of a "tribe" such as ham radio (although I like to say there's not much community in the ham radio community at least not here) or some hobby, sport, church, something like that.
But those really aren't tribes; there's a saying that goes, "Home is where when you show up, they have to take you in". Regular Americans don't do things that way. If you're a relative and you show up at their door because you've lost everything, they'll tell you to get lost. A real tribe, you're in it, thick or thin - and in return, the members of the tribe who are doing well have an obligation to help those members who are not doing well. That's in direct opposition to everything our society stands for.
4/21/16, 6:54 PM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
HEAR THAT.
I don't know why the very phrase "Starhawking" fills me with such inappropriate glee. But having grown up as a mixed person in the NYC region, I've ABSOLUTELY fared better when *PERCEIVED* as part of the White Majority. What they used to call in the Black Community as "passing", along with the connotation of falsely partaking of privilege you were not entitled to.
But I got a particularly rude lesson in the reality of privilege being a spectator to one of the few howling screaming fights my parents ever had in my presence. My father, who is of French/German/Anglo ancestry commented once to my mother that as a former Communist in the early 1950s, he could identify with the Black Experience of institutional persecution.
She read him the RIOT ACT.
My father, of course did experience persecution, but he could, if he so chose, cut his hair, shave his beard, put on a tie, tidy up his language... and he was good to go as a fully-vested member of society. My Mother, mixed Native American/Black/ and a bit some of the finest families of Virginia, or Mississippi... No matter how elegant and eloquent she was, and she was surely elegant and eloquent - could never, EVER shed her dark skin. She would always be first perceived, and often solely as a Black Woman. Most White people never even noticed her Native blood, or saw anything beyond a Black Woman, permanently part of second-class America.
That scene has stayed with me ever since. But still, they had the courage ... and love, to be, and stay together. And the good sense to ditch Chicago for the more enlightened New York City. I'm glad I grew up in a swirling working-class melting pot instead of a segregated checkerboard. Black Square. White Square. NO brown squares.
4/21/16, 6:55 PM
Candace said...
It seems our remnant of this etiquette went out of fashion around the same time that the illusion of a classless/privilege-less society took hold in our popular (mis-) conception of our society.
@ Onething - if you enjoyed any of his other books, I think you will enjoy this one. Of course the discussion involves accepting the upper salary class concept of success.
4/21/16, 6:57 PM
Alex said...
It describes the San Jose I live in to a T. Lots of empty buildings, not just older empty buildings but brand new ones, or newly renovated ones, sitting empty. That town, Falls River? Those stats sound like here - 23% real unemployment, an average income of $33k and so on. We've got the pawn shop downtown, the "we buy gold" places, the places you sell your blood to.
And it describes the thinking of the "haves" around here to a T also. Somehow, those who call themselves liberal are actually libertarians and don't seem to realize it.
I grew up with school teachers telling me that it's because of Unions that we have the 8-hour day, and weekends off, and so on. I grew up with my mom telling me you NEVER cross a picket line.
4/21/16, 7:11 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Davidchuter, exactly. When affluent white people wax rhapsodic about all the awful things white people have done, you can bet that they're trying to divert attention from their own privilege and covertly (or not so covertly) redirect the hostility of people of color onto other disadvantaged people who have light-colored skin. That's Starhawking of the classic sort.
Robert, I wasn't there, of course, but that sounds to me like a perfect example of what I described last week as the Circular Firing Squad end of the Rescue Game. Since nobody wanted to take on the real problems, and no Persecutors were showing up to give the game an impetus, the other players identified you as a Persecutor on the basis of your gender, skin color, and class status, and bullied you until you left. No doubt they turned on someone else next. That's the way the game is played, and until that stops being the heart of contemporary activism on the left, it's going to prevent any actual change from happening.
Rita, of course it's okay -- the article says much of what I've been trying to say about the covert role of privilege in liberalism, from a different and useful angle. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Jay, I haven't read Ignatiev -- I'll have to remedy that. As for your second point, I'd take it even further: in the future ahead of us, not even those who are currently on top of the privilege ladder will be able to have the things they think of as essential to their lifestyles. More on this next week!
RPC, not a bit. There's a savage irony in watching "Christian" politicians today espousing exactly the attitudes and behaviors for which Jesus condemned the Pharisees of his day to eternal damnation. I gather their Bible study somehow never got to Matthew 7:21 -- "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."
Avery, very nicely phrased. Yes, indeed, we'll get into that in due time.
Soccer13, those are both valid points, of course. Class in America is somewhat flexible on the basis of income, though "somewhat" is the operative word here -- as you've noted, there are class markers that stay with you, and you can only rise so many steps on the ladder before those further up begin to make an effort to exclude you. As for the second, privilege is always contextual, and in a sufficiently complex society there are always subcultures inside which the ladder of privilege runs differently. White kids in mostly black schools are in one of those subcultures; so are Neopagans, of course -- the ladder of privilege there has a fair amount in common with that outside the Neopagan scene, of course, but there are additional divisions based on religious affiliation and the like.
.Mallow, that's a huge and complex question, not least because a given system of privilege functions within a single culture, and when you've got a bunch of competing cultures cheek by jowl, you've got a very different situation. The western end of Eurasia and the Mediterranean basin are both well into the process of warband formation, which complicates the matter even further, but here again, this is something that'll take at least a post of its own. (Which I was already planning to write, if that's any consolation.)
Ghung, that's a great example -- many thanks.
4/21/16, 7:24 PM
Alex said...
Now if there's any group who has a million rules, it's the Jews and they have all kinds of customs like that. It's very very different from the Calvinist society the US essentially is.
But feudalism was also tribal in that, you had chunks of land, you had serfs, who had more holidays than just about anyone does now (certainly more than Americans) and your land did well if your serfs did well. You were all in it together. And if you were a bad manager, well, the Church would lean on you, and belief in hell was a real thing.
I guess what it comes down to is, the social system of the US values money. Money is the ultimate measure of good. Not only that, but the US is doing its best to get the rest of the world to think that way. Other societies valued wealth too, from the Maasai to the Navajo, but they didn't let anyone go hungry - feeding the poor was the best way to show off. Jewish society values learning, and being ethical. Some societies like the Inuit and the Tlingit, actually valued giving stuff away. The poorer you made yourself, the richer you were!
I guess the difference is, the US type society is the only one I can think of that blames the poor for their circumstances out of hand, and considers it a positive thing to make them poorer.
4/21/16, 7:24 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
I feel now that what I've been talking about have simply been the most perverse cases (men being punished for their privilege) of what happens - only in Western countries, only in recent decades, and only due to a long struggle on women's part - to be one the forms of privilege with the most exceptions (male privilege). That detracts not at all from your points.
I also realized that my concern about these cases is in some ways a rationalization of my cognitive dissonance stemming from the conflicting moralisms that are bandied around the issue of gender. I honestly have no idea what it means to be a good man qua man. I don't think it's possible just now, at least not on the leftward end of our culture. The right, at least, seems to have such a role, though it's not a very desirable one from my perspective. Perhaps there are alternatives, but I'm not sure what they are.
4/21/16, 7:57 PM
patriciaormsby said...
Putting a child through that might be a way to toughen him up for a life of taking moral stances against mistaken majorities. Or it might be a way of vicariously relieving one own's sense of guilt over various injustices by having someone close to you undergo some sort of penance. Or it might be simple lack of empathy, or a fear of facing conflicts, driving a person to ignore real problems. Or was this the government making you do that?
Your experience will distinguish you for life, conferring certain real advantages and some other disadvantages. Minimizing the latter is the key to a truly meaningful life.
4/21/16, 8:16 PM
Robert Carran said...
Another related topic I am supremely interested in is what I consider - in homesteading, intentional community and permaculture circles - throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The baby is leadership with integrity and service, (and in my experience, healthy yin masculine expression) the bathwater is rampant male dominance and aggression - perverted yang masculine, no yin in sight. And by yin I mean a container for collective needs and feelings and human potential. I am convinced issues of perverted masculine/feminine and yin/yang energies are at the core of our modern dilemma, along side the commodification and abstraction of value of everything.
4/21/16, 8:52 PM
Anthony Romano said...
I'd posit that you could replace the word "left" with "right" in that quote and retain its validity. Not only can rich people be both liberal or conservative in disposition, but you can also be poor and retain more privilege than someone of greater economic status by virtue of biological markers.
I'm not sure if I'm alone in this, but I feel like there has been a larger partisan slant to the recent posts on this blog or perhaps its the comment section that is coloring my perspective, either way, things feel less neutral around these parts of late. It's interesting because the Rescue Game and other past posts were largely devoid of this sort of left/right blame game. I'd prefer my real talk to be spread evenly. Then again, who knows..maybe I'm just being defensive.
4/21/16, 8:58 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown Clark, that's an important point. Privilege, again, isn't just a matter of class -- it's class plus race plus gender plus a galaxy of other things, including neurotypicality or the lack of it. (I have Aspergers syndrome, so have run up against that one a few times myself.) That is, privilege is always individual, contextual, and intersectional.
Eric, exactly. Tolerably often, the people who shout "Check your privilege!" the loudest are the ones who should be paying attention to their own (ab)use of privilege; the invisibility of privilege doesn't just affect straight white guys, after all! It may be the most difficult route, but it seems to me that it's only when we get past the distortions of the concept of privilege on both sides of the political spectrum that we can deal with privilege as it actually exists, and take steps toward building features into our society that will ameliorate its negative impacts on the less privileged.
As for your second point, yes, and that's just it. Both the left and the right abandoned the wage class and then tried to pretend that they were still speaking for those lower down the ladder of privilege. Now the wage class, with its back to the wall, is finally waking up to the necessity to speak for itself and define its own agenda, and both ends of the affluent elite are flailing wildly, trying to cope. I'm glad to see this happening now, via the electoral system, because it's precisely when the bulk of society has been disenfranchised by a corrupt political system that demagogues flourish and autocracy becomes likely.
Tokyo, good. The wild card in play this time around, of course, is that the resources needed to "level up" the rest of society don't exist, and so "leveling down" is the only available option -- and yet it's the option that terrifies the affluent classes the most. My slogan "Collapse now and avoid the rush!" is relevant here as well!
David, oh, granted. There'd be a reason to raise an eyebrow if Sanders were proposing a discussion of class that was limited to rich white guys, but of course he's not -- it's just a central theme of the Clinton campaign to parade Hillary's gender as a way to deflect attention from her exceedingly high place on the ladder of privilege. If you want to engage -- and there are good reasons to engage, when you're not just getting sucked into the Rescue Game -- challenge the characterizations. Pointing out Clinton's privilege is a good move, but so is challenging the Clintonistas' facile dishonesty about who supports Sanders. Oh, and since they always use the same thoughtstoppers, learn to anticipate those and knock them down in advance. That's how the game is played!
Redscott, thank you! Yes, exactly.
234567, why, yes -- when "progress" has made things worse, it's a perfectly valid move to bring back something that was discarded and put it back to use in place of some newer and shoddier replacement. That's one of the core concepts of this blog's project, after all... ;-)
Other Tom, true enough. Class is a complex thing, and there's wiggle room available for those who are able and willing to use it -- not everyone can, of course. In the same way, all the other markers that are used to assign privilege can sometimes be finessed.
4/21/16, 11:01 PM
John Michael Greer said...
I suppose you could claim that your ancestors' acts of violence and chicanery against other groups in society are to be credited to you as their heir -- but once you admit that, haven't you just provided ample justification for the claims of those further down the ladder of privilege that you should be held personally responsible for the abuses their ancestors suffered at the hands of yours? You can't have it both ways; either your privilege is unearned by you and therefore you're not responsible for the acts that brought it into being, or you deserve your privileges and therefore you also deserve to be held accountable for the acts that created it in the past.
Hal, thanks for the link! I hadn't seen the article yet.
Clay, I'm delighted to hear it. I get the impression, from comments like this, that a lot of younger people are much more attuned to the realities of privilege than most of their elders are. As time goes on, that could have some very positive results.
Sven, I score extremely high on IQ tests. That's partly because I'm good at aping the proper salary class modes of thinking, and partly because back in elementary school, I began to work out a set of algorithms for getting good scores on multiple choice tests, and as a result I reliably score far higher on multiple choice tests of all kinds than my actual knowledge and skills would otherwise justify. The conclusions I draw from this are, first, that IQ tests determine how well you conform to the salary class stereotype of what intelligence is, and second, that multiple choice tests are very easy to fake out and do not provide a valid measure of anything.
Aias, thank you! I'll put it on the get-to list.
Shane, I didn't mean my reference to the cluelessness of the salary class to apply only to liberals, you know. It applies across the board -- and it's a reflection of a very ancient and widely applicable principle: the unprivileged tell the privileged what they think the privileged want to hear. Plenty of Southern plantation owners, for example, seem to have honestly believed that their slaves were happy with their lot, since it was easier for the slaves to play along with that fantasy and reap the benefits of relatively lax oversight than it was to 'fess up to the reality. In the same way, I'd encourage you to reconsider your apparent notion that the blindness of privilege only applies to the people you don't like...
Lew, I've been thinking of the same thing. My family has its share of legends, too, including a Lakota farmhand and the farmer's daughter, which isn't quite as common as the Cherokee princess great-grandmother; I have a lot of curiosity about just how tangled and murky my family's ancestry actually is (I suspect quite a bit).
Tag, I haven't read it -- I'm embarrassingly behind on my English classics. I'll add it to my get-to list, though.
Chris and Asr, thank you both! I admit seeing that in Vox was a bit of a shocker, as Vox always struck me as the epitome of smug liberal glibness.
4/21/16, 11:21 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Matt, here again, the men who do that aren't getting rid of their privilege -- they're the ones who make the choice, after all. What they're doing is refusing to exploit their privilege, and to me, at least, that seems to be at least a very good start. Yes, there are benefits; exploitation of privileges builds walls between people, which a refusal to exploit can begin to tear down. There's a long discussion here of I-It and I-Thou relationships, but that will have to wait for some other time. (As for your offlist comment: in my view, that's not a word that should ever appear in polite discourse. If you'll resubmit with appropriate edits, I'll gladly put your comment through.)
Renaissance, it seems obvious to me, too -- but to most people in the industrial world, it's anything but obvious. For that matter, peak oil seems like the simplest sort of common sense to me -- you can't take an infinite amount of oil out of a finite planet, duh -- but an astonishing number of seemingly intelligent people don't seem to be able to grasp it at all. So the work continues...
Gottfried (etc.), I haven't read Graeber, though he's been on my get-to list for a while.
Unknown Rita, thank you for the illustrative examples! All good points.
Atilio, I wish I had easy answers. It's taken me quite a few years to begin to become just one of the local eccentrics, and I had the advantage of membership in Freemasonry, which is very large and active here in Cumberland. Still, I'll see if I can come up with anything to suggest.
Mister R., my take is that the social justice movement has become locked into the Rescue Game so deeply that it can't extract itself, and will continue the game until the last round of Circular Firing Squad is over. The notion that every white person is racist because they benefit from white privilege, for example, is a classic bit of game logic -- remember that in the game, once the role of Persecutor is assigned to a group of people, everything they have ever done and will ever do becomes a deliberate act of persecution, for which they can be bullied by the Rescuers and Victims. Of course the difficulty here is that if every white person is a racist, and will always be a racist, why should any white person bother to make the attempt not to be racist, when by definition they must always fail? That's where you see into the heart of the Rescue Game, with its covert rule: the game must go on forever, and nothing -- especially not any actual improvement in the conditions under which the Victims live, or any actual change in the behavior of the Persecutors -- must be allowed to get in the way of its continuation.
4/21/16, 11:42 PM
nuku said...
It seems to me that, within any particular culture, when strangers meet there is a mutual assessment of privilage/status going on right away. It involves visual clues like dress, appearance, posture, age, and verbal clues like accent, vocabulary, sentence structure, etc.
In some human cultures the language itself has built-in forms of address (even a whole set of words or special dialect) that persons use when speaking to someone of higher or lower status. So even before speaking, there must be a non-verbal assessment of relative status. This would seem to show that staus/privilege is built-in at a very basic level in probably all human societies.
4/21/16, 11:43 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Rapier, but that's not the very best definition of "conservative," not by a long shot. The very best definition of "conservative" is someone who wants to conserve what already exists. A penchant for elitism is common to some versions of conservatism, especially those with continental European roots, but by no means to all -- and a great many ideologies going from liberalism to the far left explicitly seek elite rule of one kind or another. I really do need to do a post sometime soon about Burkean conservatism, don't I?
Danogenes, I'll definitely want to take a look at Frank's new book. Thanks for the heads up!
TomK, I said repeatedly through my discussion that I was talking about the United States. If you live somewhere else, you've got a different set of privileges, and a different way of assigning who gets how much privilege.
Fudoshindotcom, exactly. Since the condition of the privileged is presented as normal, those with privilege assume without thinking of it that everyone else has the same privileges they do, and it can be very hard for them to grasp the fact that this just isn't so. Yes, combine that with greed and you get a really ugly mess.
A D, exactly. "Meritocracy" sounds so good on paper! It's like assigning rank based on who can run a race fastest, when everyone ignores the fact that some people have lead weights shackled to their feet.
Blueback, thanks for the link.
Alex, ordinary genetic drift and a bit of natural selection, perhaps with occasional interbreeding with closely related species, accounts for all the genetic variability among human beings quite nicely, yes. Of course there are some societies where interbreeding is relatively discouraged; there are plenty of others where it's not, and even where it is, the amount of genetic exchange can be pretty spectacular -- there are very few white Southerners, according to data-backed accounts I've read, who don't have some African ancestry in the last 300 years or so. Then you place the complex social construct we call "race" over the top of this, and the fit just isn't very good.
Samurai, that's a story worth pondering. Thank you.
James, I don't mind at all. Yes, it's a very challenging time to be male, and the use of absolute moralisms by various interested parties to promote an assortment of Rescue Games and grubby political maneuverings doesn't help at all. The process by which established patterns of privilege break down is always a mess!
Robert, thanks for the clarification! One of the reasons I've decided to talk about the Rescue Game explicitly, and get that concept into circulation, is that I hope it'll help counter the maneuvers of the bullies who like to use it. As for the tangled mess around the masculine and feminine principles, no argument there at all -- in the Western world, certainly, it's right down at the core of the mess we're in, and I suspect it'll take a long age of struggle and suffering to get that finally straightened out.
Anthony, so noted! It's been my experience that people on the right tend to admit their privilege and then claim that it's justified, while people on the left deny that it's there. Neither position is defensible, and both are in for a world of hurt as the basis for American global privilege and the perks and benefits thereof go away -- but I suspect the impact will be different in the two cases. Still, I'll try to be more evenhanded as we proceed; the gods know there's no shortage of good hard knocks to be handed out to either side.
4/22/16, 12:06 AM
Alex said...
Obviously, it's the reductio ad absurdum of Utilitarianism, no society would be that insane. BUT ... here we are using smartphones and computers and many of us wearing diamonds although by now we know it's child slaves digging up the diamonds and the coltan.
We all know solar ovens would help people in Africa who have to walk miles to get a bundle of glorified twigs to make a smokey fire to cook over but how many of us have donated money to send some of those stoves over? I have not.
Look at me, I ride a bike or take the bus and use not much more than a gallon of water a day - hello, this isn't being saintly, it's the fact that my building has no running water so I filch a gallon at a time from the building next door (they're nice Chinese people and don't mind a bit) and on my income a car is unthinkable.
There was a book out some years ago by a guy who was concerned primarily about not feeding the military-industrial complex, and social justice in general. I wish I could remember the title but it's got a feather on the cover. He concluded that the only ethical thing is to make little enough to not pay taxes. Kind of like how I live, where I pay all right, but I'm not sure much at all is actual income tax; my payment is going into social security and medicare. He concluded that the only ethical thing to do is to make the world average income which at the time he wrote was about $6k. Very few people are willing to do that - tell a yuppie they have to give up their SUV, and watch 'em turn green.
And ultimately that's what makes the story fiction: That that many people were willing to walk away.
4/22/16, 12:11 AM
Alex said...
Then I'd get to prepare to learn a language which although I think it has a really cool alphabet, and probably live like a college student, very modestly, but at least in a place that actually reminds me of the Honolulu that existed when I was little (Tel Aviv).
Everyone thinks it's a sand pit over there but it's like Hawaii. And not today's Hawaii, it's like the Hawaii I was a little kid in. Green places, dry places, clean ocean water... And they're doing amazing permaculture there.
4/22/16, 12:27 AM
davidchuter said...
The alternative is to say what you mean, which people often dislike doing . This debate is really about power, who has it and who doesn't, and whilst power brings privileges, the allegedly "privileged," according to the modern discourse, often have little or no real power.
Power has its own conceptual problems (see Lukes etc) but it's a relatively objective way to analyse society, which is why it worries people, and makes them want to hide behind a smokescreen of vague and unprovable clichés.
4/22/16, 1:06 AM
. said...
Someone mentioned how the left emphasizes overcoming divide and rule tactics by trying to show both sides the interests that they have in common. They would say that differences need not become divisions.
Europe generally doesn’t share the US denial of class. We don’t have a native equivalent of the American Dream meritocracy thing. But that means we can demonstrate the danger of going too far in the other direction – of obsessing about class as a source of privilege at the expense of all others.
One problem that arises is that people begin to insist that differences should not become sources of division. This is partly a strategic concern because divisions weaken the working class.
It’s also partly an ethical one but that aspect comes from half-understood, subconscious Christianity I think so it’s a total mess. It’s an insistence that division among humans is bad per se and that unity is good. One of the worst accusations to be thrown at someone is ‘causing division’ while ‘uniting communities’ is a good thing. No one questions the logic of this.
It’s actually quite narcissistic. They’re lacking in healthy personal or group boundaries. In theory they recognize the idea – as in the dreaded Safe Spaces. But in practice it’s the opposite. You can see it at the micro level where they find it extremely difficult to exclude people who are obviously disruptive and damaging and instead they’ll endlessly appease them. They do exactly the same at the societal level.
The quest for unity means that the left condemns any attempts by one part of the working class to point to differences it has with another part and to seek to remain divided on that basis. This is explained away as failure to understand their true, objective interests. Those interests of course can only be materialist – economic and political – because socialism is basically materialist. The idea that other forms of privilege, other identities, other interests (like religious ones) can be more important to people and can actually motivate people’s actions, just doesn’t really register. ‘False consciousness’ they’d call it.
Money and power (in the form of class) is assumed to be the real motivation for anything. Beliefs, worldviews, religions, are viewed as merely rationalizations/justifications for the pursuit of materialist ends. The reality that people will in fact sacrifice power and wealth for what they believe does not compute.
So, for example, in northern Ireland it’s quite true that working class Protestants and Catholics had common interests economically as a class. But there were other aspects of privilege at work there that mattered to people more than that: imperialism and sectarian privilege. Working class Protestants and Catholics had very different positions on those aspects of privilege and that affected their lives hugely.
In Europe, the left spends much of its time complaining that the working class refuses to ignore other divisions in favour of class. So, for example, at every terrorist attack they’ll helpfully remind everyone that more people die from poverty or something. Jihadists are then force-fitted into a class analysis where their motivations must relate to money and power.
Mallow
4/22/16, 2:41 AM
. said...
Likewise with religiously-motivated violence against Sikhs, Christians, Ahmadis, apostates, Muslims who drink and sell alcohol, women not veiling etc. Some readers may not be familiar with what’s happening in Europe these days. An Ahmadi was recently killed by a Sunni muslim in Scotland for claiming he was a prophet (and doing so as an Ahmadi). Leaflets urging the killing of Ahmadis are distributed in London, including in a mosque, by a sectarian genocidal group affiliated with the mainstream Muslim Council of Britain. A Sikh temple was bombed by Salafists in Germany. A man was murdered for being an apostate. A Kurdish kiosk selling alcohol and two trans women were stoned and muslims drinking in public have been attacked. As have unveiled Muslim women. All in Germany.
Jews are leaving France in unprecedented numbers for Israel as a result of rising antisemitism – no one is allowed to say so but the increase is coming from the Muslim community (of course it has also always existed in Europe). No one really cares about that because it’s viewed as just misdirected political opposition to Zionism which can be resolved with a little education or something.
Christians are attacked in refugee centres and LGBT people have had to be provided with separate accommodation because of the level of persecution against them. No one wants to do that for Christians because that would be all Crusadery or something. That’s seen as misdirected political anger at Syrian Christian support for Assad.
The fact that religion can and does divide the working class is simply denied. Everything is blamed on class and race even within subcultures with completely different ways of assigning privilege. Intersectionality in practice is limited on the left to basically class, race and gender issues. No other forms of privilege are acceptable topics of conversation. If other parts of the world can avoid following our example please do so!!
Mallow
4/22/16, 2:41 AM
. said...
Have you any suggestions for how one would go about applying that to migration policies?
Western Europe is completely mired in the Rescue narrative on the asylum/refugee system which is now colliding with the reality of mass migration.
At present, migrants pay €10k to fly directly to Europe with false papers from, say, Afghanistan – a sum that most Afghans will never see. In other words, it disproportionately benefits the more privileged globally, rather than those it was intended to help back in 1950’s Europe.
I’ve started a campaign trying to put forward a compromise position that could be politically acceptable. It starts from the premise that the needs of current residents of a country should form the basis for setting and implementing limits on migration. If taken seriously, that ‘should’ create political space for an open discussion of who benefits and who loses, and in what way, from various forms of migration.
It would include, for example, people’s need for decent pay and safety from terrorist attacks to be taken into account in migration policy. That would of course breach EU laws but the EU’s existence and membership are moving targets and such international law is far more a matter of politics than law. I’d expect those trends to continue.
Then, subject to those limits, I’m saying that refuge should be offered directly first to those most in need of it around the world, not those most able to physically reach a European border – which is the current limit in practice.
That would cut out the people smugglers, drownings etc. In theory it should also hugely reduce the security risks – because it would focus on people whose real identities and ages can be established (most now destroy their documentation because the system incentivises that) and because, contrary to the Rescue narrative, terrorists are far less likely to be found among that group. I think that flows from the nature of oppression and persecution.
This element does involve playing the Oppression Olympics. But it seems to me that there are contexts where it’s appropriate to do that. Providing refuge is more a form of charity for those who can’t really help themselves than it is (or should be) a form of solidarity with people who are better able to take care of themselves.
Engaging in it is also almost politically necessary because a majority of people from all classes do want to help those fleeing war and persecution so the retention of the spirit of the asylum system is necessary.
I’m trying to redress the balance for wage class people in a way that can be accepted by enough of the political class to be implemented. From what I hear from wage class people, most want to help genuine refugees but, rightly, don’t trust the current system to do that, and they don’t want to be disproportionately burdened with the costs as they presently are. Some seek a shutdown of the whole rotten system, some a total ban on Muslim immigration etc.
Whatever about the ethics of those positions, I just don’t think they’re remotely achievable in the present political climate here. I’m uncomfortable about putting forward a position which won’t simply amplify those kinds of demands but which I think has far more chance of succeeding in achieving the outcome they’re looking for, because I know how the political classes work. What do you think? Anyone have thoughts on it?
Mallow.
4/22/16, 2:47 AM
TomK said...
the pauperized Trump voter can be compared to Central and Eastern European (CEE)voter who, post 1989, expected to gradually achieve western European worker standard, but never made it and never will. The US salary class can be compared to the new middle and upper middle classes in CEE, they are our post-1989 globalization winners, along with the oligarchs. The new middle and upper middle class tend to hold views similar to US liberals, but numerically, they are a minority. The current migrant crisis only exposed this. From the EU-elites (academia, media, mainstream politicians) point of view, who look down on CEE countries, kind of like the US liberal elites at the 'red' states, we are now xenophobes who refuse to accept our share of MENA migrants and refugees. These elites want to impose their views on heterosexual white male privilege and guilt on us. (Never mind the migrants themselves refuse to be distributed to CEE anyway...) The ratio of globalization losers to winners within our societies is, thanks to the wealth pump directed from the east to the west, simply different from western Europe. That is why local Trumps already are in power, to a different exent in the various countries. That is why I expect a profound change towards disintegration of the EU. And as for economic future of (north-)western European countries, they should look at us or to the European South. Not, as the religion-of-progress-believers would have it, at the CEE and the South becoming like (north-)western Europe in the future.
4/22/16, 3:08 AM
Phil Knight said...
4/22/16, 4:10 AM
Shane W said...
Ginger or not, as a white person from the South, I'd be highly disappointed if testing didn't show that I have my "one drop" in there somewhere. I'm pretty hopeful that there's at least some "miscegenation" in my ancestry. Odd how it isn't "miscegenation" when whites & natives mixed...
Regarding the election and elite cluelessness, I've noticed a number of articles in the MSM sneering about how Trump just "doesn't get" the whole party delegate selection process. I'm thinking that they just don't get that Trump is deliberately crashing their party and intentionally transforming things. It'll be interesting, in the Chinese curse sense, as this plays out...
Regarding Malaysia and "walkabouts" with the locals, I've had the exact same experience here in the U.S. w/migrants. It really amazes me how invisible migrants are in our society--if you have bronze skin and speak Spanish, you simply don't exist except as an invisible hired hand here. It reminds me of stories I've heard where the part of the reason the South lost the Civil War was because they spoke freely around their slaves, treating them as nonexistent, not even considering that they could spy for the North. I've had amazing responses in the migrant community by violating this "white invisibility" rule, by speaking Spanish, knowing rudimentary Mexican & Central American geography--Mexican states and their locations/climates. Even remembering people's names and their children's names. All basic stuff English speaking people expect, but Spanish speaking migrants are normally (not always) literally floored when you break the "invisibility rule" and treat them as individual, real human beings. And BTW, I've been using Spanish with native speakers since high school--you CAN get enough out of basic schooling, but you have the supposition that you CAN speak and understand people, and, even more importantly, that the people you are talking to have something important to say--which is why most Americans get so little from language classes in school...
4/22/16, 4:29 AM
Leo Knight said...
4/22/16, 4:56 AM
Phil Harris said...
I like that word – and this is the first time I ever met it I think! It reminds me of the first time in Britland (well … actually mostly in the London area in the early days) when the reality of noticeable immigration from the British Caribbean as well as being reported in newspapers, got debated at the level of family and with school friends. The debate was triggered by mooted political decisions about legislation restricting immigration. Before that we had rather liked the fiction of Pax Britannica with allusions to Roman citizenship – but the supposed attractions of empire if belatedly were retracting fast. People decided they had to take sides, even in more privileged suburbs and within professions that were scarcely affected.
I body-swerved the very early ‘60s family internal argument by saying: “The sooner we are all khaki the better.” (Btw, when I read your Star’s Reach I picked-up on the Meriga universal brown skin.)
I remember also a couple of years on from school, four friends in a pub, and two of us could not see what the skin colour / racial divide was about emotionally, while the other two declared themselves ‘racist’. (I think they actually used that term.) It helped me at the time I think to be working on a construction site with West Indians who were electricians and carpenters, but working like me as labourers in their case because they were barred by our Union rules disqualifying their trade qualifications.
That last point needs a whole essay I guess, because of its explanatory value for a complex industrial society now largely disappeared. Old Factory Britland had multiple seemingly minute differentials at every work place that were typically fiercely defended despite most workers earning within very narrow absolute bands. Unions could only work as part of such a system in my experience if they could also appeal to larger solidarities, which in their case was the Labour Movement and public goods like the universal ‘free’ NHS, within a broadly politically acceptable social settlement served by a ‘permanent’ civil service accountable to a ‘public service ethos’. Things have changed of course.
I will follow your discussion of privilege with great interest. Could be at the heart of the matter. Change seems the order of the day.
best
Phil
4/22/16, 5:20 AM
Matt and Jess said...
I'd just like to recommend a book: Grace Matters, by Chris Rice. It's about a white and black community in the south working towards racial reconciliation, I believe in the 1980s-90s. Lots of frank and open discussion, including the white guy (Chris) having to overcome his instincts that he was there to rescue the black folks. It's been quite a long time since I've read it, but I remember it being really good and right on target with what you've been saying.
4/22/16, 6:31 AM
onething said...
Not even close. Ants are generally considered to have the most biomass. Arctic krill also have a lot. Even with our domestic livestock it is unlikely that we constitute as much as 2%, and that is without considering the really big amount which is bacteria and, of course, plants.
4/22/16, 6:54 AM
David said...
Thank you for the advice. I realize that I am, unconsciously perhaps, still approaching these engagements as honest debates, and seeing the game often occurs after the fact. Eventually, I'll be able to react more adroitly in real-time -- with practice!
4/22/16, 6:56 AM
onething said...
"Well, these ideas didn’t go over well with folks on my campus. I’d be interested in feedback here. Comments?"
4/21/16, 7:11 A
As a reader and thinker of a certain amount of history and general observer of human nature, I've long thought that a certain tinge of the white guilt spectrum is simply false: That there is something inherently bad about white Europeans (with white Americans being the same stock). That if they could be solved, the world would no longer suffer from aggression of one group upon another. But this is of course not so at all. It's just a matter of who is up to bat.
I can also say that in the schools my kids attended in one of the more affluent and salary class enclaves in the US, the white kids were afraid of the black kids as well. Probably because there was no will to impartial discipline on the part of the guilty white administration. I would say that the kids themselves took it somewhat philosophically.
4/22/16, 7:11 AM
Nestorian said...
I am interested in learning what your algorithms for gaming multiple choice tests are. Would you care to share them?
Also, I think there is some validity to the point that being able to game tests is itself a sign of the kind of aptitudes that these tests are testing for.
4/22/16, 7:20 AM
Soccer13 said...
4/22/16, 7:28 AM
Helen Highwater said...
4/22/16, 8:43 AM
John Roth said...
Regardless of all the posturing, Clinton vs Trump has been the odds-on favorite for some time. The fact that the Democratic hierarchy were preparing for a coronation of the Crown Princess while the Republican pooh-bahs would have liked nothing better than to attend a (political) funeral for Trump has nothing to do with it.
Admitting that, of course, wouldn’t have given them anything to sell papers and keep up their reputation as pundits.
@Dagnarus
Correct. You saved me from having to say it. One thing you didn’t mention, though, is that fields that are traditionally female are paid less than those that are traditionally male, even if the work is pretty similar (although not the same, of course).
@RPC
A side note: the “Actual teachings” of Jesus the Nazarine may well be lost to history. Rene Salm, for example, makes the startling claim that Nazareth didn’t exist at the time Jesus supposedly lived. He backs this up with a detailed examination of the archeology around “Nazareth,” and finds it shoddy. “Early Christianity,” in the sense of the Gospels and Paul, is a construct of the second or third generation, and possibly later. It’s theology, not history. Actual biographies of that era look nothing like the Gospels.
@JMG, pigmycory, etc.
You might want to learn something about IQ testing, and the effort that goes into making sure it’s as culture and value neutral as possible. Multiple-choice tests aren’t usually part of the repetoire of actual IQ tests. And yes, I’m also one of those people who usually hits well above my weight class on those things.
@Alex
Height is a well-known factor in dominance. I’m substantially taller than average, and it does work that way.
@Rapier
It’s easy to get confused by American attitudes about class until you look closely at the British invasion of the East coast. There are three major roots: the New England Puritans, the Jamestown planters and the Scots-Irish. The Puritans were mildly anti-aristocracy for socio-religious reasons - it was the British aristocracy that was trying to stamp them out. The Jamestown planters were pro-aristocracy, while the Scots-Irish were fanatically anti-aristocracy and anti-large-government. It’s easy to see why - they lived on the border between England and Scotland, and had a history of being trampled underfoot by English armies heading North to beat up on the Scots, and Scottish armies heading South to return the favor.
The mix looks incoherent because it is incoherent.
@JMG
About “everyone in Meringa had light brown skin.” That’s not the way the genetics of skin color works. Every once in a while the tabloid press goes ape over “black and white twins.” It actually makes a decent classroom genetics exercise, because the vast majority of the difference in skin color comes down to variation in exactly four genes, each of which is classically dominant/recessive. The only way you’re going to have an even skin tone through a population is if one version of each of those four genes becomes fixed through some mysterious process. In the time frame in the story, that’s unlikely to happen.
4/22/16, 9:02 AM
pygmycory said...
4/22/16, 10:49 AM
Shane W said...
So, JMG, according to the "one drop" rule, we're all "colored", but some of us can "pass" while others can't? What a relief--makes total sense to me, coming from the South--explains a lot, culturally. :)
4/22/16, 11:09 AM
Nancy Sutton said...
4/22/16, 11:23 AM
234567 said...
I AM one of those southerners you refer to. And it isn't just in the south - the west is replete with this as well. Few will acknowledge that before, during and after the Civil War sex between races, while publicly anathema, was privately very common. In the southern tier, those with darker skin tones would posit their heritage as "Mexican", "Cherokee" or "Choctaw" to avoid being on the slave rung, although Indian was little better (no - don't come after me about Native American as I am just using terminology of the time).
This was extremely common, and is easily researched photographically on Ancestry-type sites. My family is very southern, but there are "Indian" members from the 1800's marrying into a Germanic heritage...hmmmm LOL! If only people would truly understand that none of us control our birth, but we can control what we do with the heritage (privilege level) we are born into.
No - the entire 'Race' thing is just a flashy red cape for angry bulls that do not wish to see or change their basic thinking. Humans, in a very few generations, could breed themselves into many types of variants - witness the plethora of dog breeds all carrying one heritage.
4/22/16, 11:52 AM
Roger said...
My home town had a thriving industrial economy (now rust belt), where people like my parents, who had little education, could get decent paying jobs so that, for all intents and purposes, hourly wage earners were middle class in material terms.
Though there were a few higher income enclaves, mostly the managerial class lived next door and across the street from their hourly wage employees. Not a lot of class stratification in that particular sense.
We lived in a tidy, well kept neighbourhood. Across from us lived an older couple that owned a prosperous retail store. They were old-stock Canadian, more English than the Queen.
One day, when I was about twelve years old, the Missus came over for some reason that I cannot recall. And during the conversation with my mother she said what a lovely girl my younger sister was, how smart and talented and how they would love to adopt her to give her the greater opportunities they could afford.
I heard it with my own ears. Can you bloody imagine? Apparently this nut thought that my parents middle-class lifestyle wasn't good enough, their cultural background and social contacts weren't up to snuff, and that my mother would actually consider giving up custody.
So there you go, there's class privilege, in this case, old-stock English that think they're entitled to make outlandish propositions to the under-class.
As a post script, my mother shooed the woman away, my sister went to a top-notch university and is employed in a medical field. So there.
4/22/16, 12:31 PM
jeffinwa said...
Thanks so much for the hearty meals of food for thought. I always look forward to my next visit to your table. (and thanks to the guests who round out the feast)
Twice in your comments this week you've made reference to doing a post on Berkean conservatism:
"I really should do a post one of these days about Burkean conservatism as political ecology..." and "I really do need to do a post sometime soon about Burkean conservatism, don't I?"
I for one have been wishing for that for quite a while now; you do have a well crafted talent for distilling the essentials.
4/22/16, 12:49 PM
avalterra said...
Thanks for taking this on. It is a subject I have been thinking about a great deal and I appreciate having your perspective.
You responded to a Julius Evola quote by saying that you did not agree with him but acknowledged his intellect. You have in other posts stated that you thought that in the very long term a form of Feudalism might re-emerge. Do you think the neo-reactionary movement (who are quite taken with Evola) might be the very early attempts at a justification for Feudalism?
Or are they a dying gasp of privileged mind set?
AV
4/22/16, 1:03 PM
V. Else said...
4/22/16, 1:16 PM
Urban Harvester said...
4/22/16, 1:47 PM
LewisLucanBooks said...
4/22/16, 1:54 PM
Shane W said...
4/22/16, 2:10 PM
Shane W said...
4/22/16, 2:22 PM
Alex said...
Shane W. - Where I am, English is for the ruling class and Spanish is for the workers. In fact there's even a monument, a sort of table thing, on Paseo de San Antonio, a car-excluded walkway, with that written on it and it's also actually embedded, in brass, on the walkway, a quote by Cesar Chavez about how he spoke English to the bosses and Spanish to his fellow workers. The English/Spanish divide is entrenched, and yes, I think the average English-speaking employer would no more ask his Spanish-speaking workers about their families than he'd ask his forklift about it's.
Leo Knight - That's the book all right.
Phil Harris - The amount of "race-mixing" that happens now is a function of industrialization, cheap air tickets, TV/radio/internet, etc. If we're de-industrializing, and I think we are, it's going to go back to distinctive "looks" in different areas even if there was a lot of prior mixing in the old "golden age when men could fly".
Matt & Jess - I was pointedly followed once here on the Mainland, by a tall black security guy in the Safeway here. I think he was just following the rules in the manual. I was wearing a messenger bag, and was wandering around aimlessly. I personally found it hilarious. But all the time, it would get old.
4/22/16, 2:39 PM
Clay Dennis said...
I have been trying to wrap my head around why Hillary has been vacuuming up the Black and Hispanic vote for this entire primary cycle. To my mindset, it seems so counterintuitive. But this post has made me realize that my Salary Class (perhaps even egghead intelectual class) mindset has made me blind to the realities of the minority classes (not necessary wage class). The liberal salary class has made honesty, and transparency in political dealings something of a mantra because we can afford it. But members of more disadvantaged groups don't have this luxury. They have to gravitate towards political figures that they believe will protect them regardless of how squeky clean that person is. With the spectre of Trump or Cruz on the horizon it is only more reason to support any powerful figure that might be on your side. While from my view, Hillary is corrupt, a warmongering neocon, and defender of the worst of establishment abuses, to the democratic who is disadvantaged by race , class or circumstances she is an O.G.* ( as my son from my earlier post would say). Like the neighborhood crime boss, she represents benevolent power ( to some) and a consistancy they can trust. * Original Gangster in rap parlance.
4/22/16, 3:28 PM
Calm Center of Tranquility said...
Mister Roboto - when you talk about being anti-PC... I think that's because the PC response you mention is a surface response to this recognition, one that wants to assign blame. But as Scalzi points out, privilege isn't what you've earned - it's what you are born with. You didn't ask for it, and it can't be taken away from you. Your only choice is how you respond to it.
I would make that same point to Shane's comments about how the "liberal salary class" somehow "deserves" what might be coming. Well, Shane, only if you can "deserve" a consequence for an action you did not actively participate in. I tend to believe that responsibility and authority go hand-in-hand.
As a woman, I am not as high on the privilege scale as some (though just one level down), but if we broaden the boarders beyond our own culture, as an American I'm about as high as they come. So I try to keep my own focus on what I can do to erase those barriers that privilege creates. Admittedly, it doesn't seem like much, but recognizing the issue is an important part of it. I like Chris' point about stepping away from privilege - though here, it's hard to do. No matter what, I'm still white, and still straight and, at this point in time, still receive benefits from that.
Trish
4/22/16, 3:55 PM
Caryn said...
One's own privilege is indeed invisible to one, kind of like smelling your own morning breath - everyone else can smell it, but hard as you try, you can't. (ha, ha, lovely analogy eh? Sorry - it just came to me, er, this morning.)
I know I have it, although almost all of the time, I can't see it. OTOH, I've experienced too many glimpses, glitches in the matrix to disregard it or convince myself it's not there. As fellow commenters have said, the one or 2 times as a white person, you're followed around in a store like a presumed thief, or denied service even though you're the next in the queue, cash up front instead of credit or good faith….small slights that you know less privileged people experience consistently. I find myself latching onto those, fascinated, as they draw back that veil of my own privilege, what would it feel like to go through life with those every single day? It's hard to grasp through, as I know I'd be infuriated - but that in itself is also due to my expectations - based on my privilege! AARGH!
At the same time, we can see clearly the privilege of others, that they themselves cannot or will not see. I think the cloak of invisibility is partially due to the nature of the thing, it is truly hard to see your own - you can only know intellectually it is there, you can't FEEL it. It's often the lack of abuse, not anything tangible. I think the other part, however, is a willful ignorance of it. Who WANTS to smell their own morning breath!? Who WANTS to feel their unearned, undeserved elevation? Some of us do because we are obsessives for truth and reality, but IMHO, most people just don't want to know. Their lives are fine, why look for what could be trouble?
Personally, I am born a Libra, gifted or cursed to see both sides, and seem to have somehow straddled two or more 'worlds' my whole life, (too long and boring to explain in full.) I understand exactly what you are saying. I get it. I also understand why my (very) privileged acquaintances and fellow white expats don't see it at all.
Honestly, I'm terrified of the future. Collapse is going to be brutal. What I don't see is how anyone can say "Time to grab the popcorn!" like it's going to be fun watching other people getting torn down and destroyed, while 'we' sit on the sidelines, perfectly untouched by the earthquake and tsunami. I don't see anyone getting out of this unscathed.
Not sure, but this may be my last comment for awhile. Boxes filling my flat. We are moving today. Probably moving again in 2 months, (home to the States? don't know.) The ground is already rumbling under my feet. For my family, I THINK that earthquake is already here.
4/22/16, 4:17 PM
Dagnarus said...
I'll just point out that the stat is questionable on its face. Knowing what we know about corporate America, when confronted with a brand new workforce, equal in size and training to there current one, which was willing to work for a quarter less pay than there original, do you think they would a) Give thanks to the patriarchy, and praise his mighty schlong, or b) Ruthlessly exploit this in order to crush male wages, thus destroying the gap? Personally I have to go with b) or at a stretch c) both.
That of course probably wouldn't apply to the highest end jobs which are acquired by personal connections, but I personally don't really care whether the parasitic class possessed of penis unfairly earn more than the parasitic class without.
4/22/16, 4:26 PM
Justin said...
And I guess I really did talk about how pin-the-tail-on the persecutor makes the concept of privilege toxic and impossible to discuss in most settings, which was last weeks topic?
Mallow, it seems to me like the refugee dilemma presents many examples of what I could call 'tactical starhawking' - using an exceptional case as an attempt to shut down any kind of reasoned discussion of the issue. For example, a PEGIDA type will use true stories of atrocities committed against refugee center volunteers, and an Antifa type will use different true stories in exactly the same way, with the same intentions.
4/22/16, 5:36 PM
nuku said...
Re white privilaged people having great difficulty understanding the daily experiences of the less privilaged, in this case dark-skinned people:
I can recommend the book “Black Like Me”
From Wikiapedia,
“Black Like Me is a nonfiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin first published in 1961. Griffin was a white native of Dallas, Texas, and the book describes his six-week experience travelling on Greyhound buses (occasionally hitchhiking) throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia passing as a black man. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles.
Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book.
At the time of the book's writing in 1959, race relations in America were particularly strained and Griffin aimed to explain the difficulties that black people faced in certain areas. Under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.
4/22/16, 5:43 PM
Kevin Warner said...
In my salad years I once went to apartheid-era South Africa and was traveling to Natal by train. Sharing my compartment were a couple of young blond-haired young men - Boer descendants almost certainly going by speech and manners. A Japanese guy entered our compartment (with the obligatory camera paraphernalia), smiled, and took his seat.
It was my understanding at the time that Japanese were, for reasons of their history, regarded as honorary whites so took their seats with the whites. Remember, this was at a time when the blacks had their own central train station separate from the whites in Johannesburg (guess who went to the wrong train station to pick up his train not realizing, or willing to believe, that there were actually two main train station?).
You could see the glances that these boys gave the Japanese guy that there was a bit of cognitive dissonance going on but these were good boys and were not going to make anything of it. Still, they looked as flummoxed as if they had opened a door only to find a blank wall there.
Upon reflection, I suppose that claiming privilege, even subconsciously, will always be with us as people are in the end tribal by nature. I wonder if the only way it can be made acceptable is to tie it directly in with competency. That is, you could claim the privileges that go along with being a leader but only if you have a proven track record of leadership. Being made leader because of race, religion political beliefs, etc would simply not hack it. You would have to earn your privileges. Just a thought.
4/22/16, 6:37 PM
Shane W said...
4/22/16, 7:40 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Alex, oh, I know. I've had a lot of fun at peak oil gatherings, when one of the participants (almost always a white guy from the middle to upper salary class) starts rhapsodizing about how wonderful it will be when we're all living simple lives in sustainable ecovillages without modern media, etc. I wait for a lull, and then point out that he could have exactly that lifestyle today if he wanted it. The usual result is backpedaling on a heroic scale.
Davidchuter, I think the term "privilege" is useful enough that it's worth trying to rehabilitate. It's not the same thing as power, though of course there are overlaps -- and if we had to stop using any word that's been exploited and debased for political advantage from time to time, we'd have a hard time talking about most things!
.Mallow, your comment about boundaries seems very perceptive to me. I hope the European left manages to shake itself out of its current trance, or Europe's probably going to have to make an unwelcome choice between Shari'a and a resurgence of fascism. If I were a fascist demagogue, I'd be rubbing my hands together with glee at the current situation -- the political leadership of most European countries is allowing the emergence of a situation that the vast majority of people in Europe will find intolerable, while blocking any attempt to resolve that situation from within the system. That's a situation tailor-made for a putsch.
With regard to your broader question, hmm. I don't know that I have anything to offer; so much would depend on the details of opinion, and on who's getting hurt how badly and in what way by the current fiasco. Anyone have a suggestion?
TomK, it wasn't a dismissal, it's a statement of my own limits; I've never lived in central or eastern Europe, or anywhere else outside the US, and the last thing the rest of the world needs is one more clueless American telling other people what's what! From what you've described, you've got several different levels of privilege overlying each other -- there's one hierarchy within your own country, and over that the broader hierarchy of the EU, in which some countries (or the privileged classes thereof) are decidedly more equal than others. That's a situation most countries get to experience, and the US will be doing so in the years ahead. More on this next week!
Phil K., that's exquisite, and earns you tonight's gold star.
Shane, interesting. Out West, marriages between white people and Native Americans were definitely considered miscegenation back in the day. Are you familiar with the role of the villainous half-breed in Western literature? It's a relic of that.
Phil H., thank you. I ran across it years ago -- I think it was in a James Tiptree Jr. story -- and it explains a lot about human mating habits!
Matt and Jess, many thanks for the story, and the book recommendation. It's good to hear from so many people who get it.
4/22/16, 7:49 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Nestorian, that'd be fodder for an entire post. The very short form is that you need to know the scoring system first off -- is your score the number of right answers you give, the number of right minus the number of wrong, the number of right minus one-quarter the number of wrong, or what? You choose a different strategy depending on how much a wrong guess will cost you. I scored absurdly high on a national math test in high school, which was right minus wrong, by refusing to guess; if I didn't actually know the answer, I left it blank. Most of my classmates didn't do so, and got clobbered by their missed guesses.
Next, you always work backwards from the proposed answers, not forward from the question -- it's often easy to figure out that several of the possible answers can't be right, exclude those, and go on, and it's also very often easy to figure out what you need to know to decide which of two or three answers is the right one, and focus your calculations on figuring out that one detail. There are a lot of other angles -- for example, most teachers don't actually randomize the letter of number assigned to the right answer, and when you've taken a few tests they've written, you can usually figure out the unconscious pattern they tend to use; different teachers tend to focus on specific kinds of questions, and you can figure out what you need to cherrypick out of their lectures and the textbook, etc. It sounds complex, but once you learn how to do it, you can get through the public schools with a reasonably high GPA even though you spend every class session ignoring the teacher and writing bad fantasy fiction -- glance up every so often with an intent look on your face, and they'll think you're taking notes.
4/22/16, 8:01 PM
Hubertus Hauger said...
Not so much consciously, but driven by that resentment against the un-fulfilment of my entitlement. It’s true to me; The system inherits in itself the spark for its own destruction - when unable to supply the 2nd grade privileged, to stabilise the system. We are sliding down in a great wave. Slowly but unavoidably.
4/22/16, 9:52 PM
Alex said...
Caryn - when I was growing up in Hawaii, if you were white and ONE PENNY short, you had to walk home and get that penny. The "penny dish" was a pleasant shock to me and I put pennies in all the time.
Nuku - I place little faith in that book given that the pills the guy took actually turn you orange - I know, I considered taking them myself. They are or were popular with bodybuilders. However, yes, having limited places to use the bathroom etc., are certainly a thing for the out-group. What I found more in keeping with my experiences was the accounts by Jews pre-WWII, how they were assumed to be faking about being poor, there were parks they could not go (not by official law but unofficial law which is more binding and can be fatal) places would not hire you etc. And the eternal urge to get out, to find a home where you can live and breathe and walk down the street.
4/22/16, 10:54 PM
John Michael Greer said...
John, my dad has a master's degree in educational psychology, and we've discussed the matter at length, so yes, as it happens, I know some of what goes into IQ tests. Your comment about the tests being culture and value neutral show that you've missed my point completely. What is this thing called "intelligence," after all? Psychologists can't define it in any objective way. As a result, the tacit working definition, the one that underlies IQ tests and a great deal more, is that "intelligence" equals "that particular set of thinking skills that the salary class values." It doesn't matter how much neutrality you try to put into the test if the thing for which you're testing is a selectively chosen set of human mental skills.
It so happens that I've had the chance to meet a lot of people who aren't good at the kinds of mental skills that people in the contemporary American salary class value. Some of them have been really, really limited where those skills are concerned. What I've noticed consistently is that the great majority of them had different mental skills -- skills that today's salary class-centric culture doesn't happen to value, but that have plenty to offer on their own terms -- and many of these people had those other skills to an extent I never will. The current model of intelligence, as embodied in IQ tests, misses that completely, and the discourse that treats "intelligence" as an objectively defined, value-free label covers over that missed understanding with a thick larding of intellectual arrogance.
I'll have to look into the situation with skin color; all I can say is that I meet a lot of mixed-race kids where I live, and a very, very large majority of them are the same cafe-au-lait color I imagined for the people of Meriga.
Pygmycory, by all means adopt a pirate into the family, then! Every family needs a pirate ancestor.
Shane, got it in one. I read a while back that the reason Louisiana dropped the "one drop" rule is that activists did some digging, and found out that a very large number of the state's richest and most nose-in-the-air white families had at least one drop, and very often quite a bit more than one drop, of African ancestry tucked away there in the family tree. They went public with this, and called on the state to reclassify all the families in question as black. The legislature immediately changed the laws in question.
Nancy, every society has some justification for its system of privilege, and when one justification gets shot down, another quickly gets cobbled together. Social Darwinism was popular for a while, and in mutated form, still gets the more than occasional airing in the form of claims that our society is really a meritocracy in which the rich and influential have risen to the top by their own ability. (As exhibit A for the other side of that argument, I present George W. Bush.) The Calvinist theory is actually a religious (or pseudoreligious) version of that: the rich are rich because God has rewarded them for their virtue. Back in the days when money wasn't the be-call and end-all of privilege, there were other excuses, and no doubt once money stops being as influential as it now is, the excuses will change again.
234567, I suspect, rather, that you're simply one of the Southerners who's honest about his ancestry, which I applaud. I have my suspicions about my own ancestry, which is more or less mostly Scots on one side and Heinz 57 on the other, and well down in the wage class until my parents' generation (my dad's dad worked in a pulp mill after twenty years as a small town firefighter, my mom's dad worked in the Oakland shipyards).
4/22/16, 10:56 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Jeffinwa, so noted! Yes, I'm already starting to rough it out mentally. As per my usual habit, it's going to offend all sides of the political debate equally. Do you know, for example, that a very strong argument for the right to same-sex marriage can be made on Burkean conservative grounds? Stay tuned...
Avalterra, I think it's partly the dying gasp of an outworn condition of privilege, and partly the normal adolescent habit of looking for something to do or say that will really, really shock your Mom. Feudalism is on its way -- as noted in previous posts, it's the normal state of affairs after the collapse of a civilization -- but it won't be put in place because disaffected intellectual argued for it on the internet. It'll be put into place because public order has gone missing in action in a time of social chaos and pandemic violence, and personal loyalty to a competent leader is the one glue that succeeds in uniting a force large enough to stop the killing and plundering and allow some semblance of settled life to continue. Read the history of any Dark Age you fancy -- there have been a lot of them -- and you'll find that old story repeated.
V. Else, you're most welcome. I'm sorry to hear you had to do that, but glad to hear that it worked!
Harvester, excellent. Yes, those are highly relevant questions.
Lew, well, yes; I make a point of mentioning my wife in certain contexts, to ward off certain offers before it's necessary to make anybody feel unwelcome.
Shane, I'd love to see that meme get more traction. The whole race thing, to my mind, is one of the least productive notions in the history of human thought, and the sooner it goes the way of phlogiston, the better.
Clay, don't discount the very strong element of machine politics that still exists in both parties. My guess is that the graveyards are turning out to vote at much more than the usual rate this year!
Center/Trish, fascinating. It may be a difference in audience, but you're right, he got much more pushback than I have.
Caryn, best of luck with the move! I can't speak for others, but when I make comments about popcorn, it's gallows humor. I think there's very good reason to expect this next downward lurch in the process of decline and fall to be even more brutal than usual.
4/22/16, 11:12 PM
Alex said...
I suspect my DAR-member dad's side of the family are probably all proud of who were probably a bunch of horse thieves or something.
I believe social darwinism is probably stronger now than it ever was.
As for cafe-au-lait/cafe-con-leche, the way I like to say it is, "I like my coffee the color of the back'a my hand".
4/22/16, 11:16 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Justin, thank you for this! It's a very easy trap to fall into, and you're encouraged to fall into that trap by the media and every other source of mainstream culture. The key is to figure out that that's what happened, and adjust your sense of what's normal accordingly.
Nuku, a first-rate recommendation! Many thanks.
Kevin, that's a good story. I'll have to look up the details, but there's a great story about the African-American guy in the early 20th who decided that he wanted to get better treatment on a train trip across some large chunk of the US, and so dressed up as a Hindu, assumed an accent good enough to fool white folk, and claimed to be some kind of minor raja from India. His skin color didn't change a bit, but everyone treated him as though he was a slightly exotic kind of white.
Shane, stay tuned. I weave the concepts together in a slightly different way.
Hubertus, that's a point of immense importance, and we'll be talking about it more as this conversation proceeds.
4/22/16, 11:24 PM
John Michael Greer said...
4/22/16, 11:25 PM
Dagnarus said...
But I was more referring to the fact that US corporate culture has been making a concerted effort to drive down labor costs by replacing it with cheaper labor for the last few decades, going so far as actually getting people to train their own replacements http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-at-disney-train-foreign-replacements.html. Now it could be that HR departments (which are roughly 70% women now I believe), have so far been blind to the fact that the nation is sitting on a treasure trove of scab workers willing to work for 3/4s the pay. But I think my argument still stands that it is the sort of statistic which one should not accept uncritically.
4/22/16, 11:58 PM
nuku said...
I very much agree with you that because it is a “fact of life“ in all human societies, in the interests of justice and fairness, the less privileged need to be protected from abuse by the more privileged. In the long run, it is quite obviously in the interests of the more privileged to not systematically abuse the less privileged lest they find themselves hanging from lamp posts.
4/23/16, 12:01 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I wasn't aware of that statistic but it does make sense given the lack of contact with the natural world that those people would experience. I have a dark suspicion that people living there may believe that what they see is the whole world - and that is not good.
Anyway, I mentioned your reply to my wife who pointed me to a recent and thoughtful article which discusses this very issue: The trouble with millennial sitcoms.
The problem is that whilst I understood that the show was meant to be funny, to me it wasn't. To my mind, it comes across as a drama based on the possible lived experiences of young people in that city. It touches on class issues because, people in the characters race and social class are not meant to be having those sorts of issues. And I deeply suspect that the mental health issues on display in the show have arisen due to the cognitive dissonance between life expectations for that class of person and the characters lived reality - and that is apparently funny to some people. As someone who experienced a "recession that we had to have" as a very young adult, I don't find that the show is particularly funny. It is an interesting show, although it would be nice if they somehow remembered to tell a coherent story, but one cannot ask for everything.
The article touches on the very subject of class and expectations - which is relevant to this blogs essay - and links to another article which was basically summarised into the concept that: "conversations about millennials that claim to reflect the plight of an entire generation are actually code for the failure of a middle-class ideal." Fascinating stuff and I respect the fact that it is being discussed elsewhere. What do you reckon about that?
Hi Cathy from Winston Salem,
I realise that you were replying to JMG, but I thought that you may appreciate a little bit of additional info on ritual.
You see from my perspective we employ ritual every single day, although we may not realise it. For example, getting up and going to work every week day is a ritual which many of us undertake in order to ensure that tomorrow is much like today. Interesting stuff, huh?
Anyway, overtime some rituals descend into what we understand today to be superstitions. For example, I'm currently reading a lovely story about northern Italian peasant olive farmers written by an English Lady (Annie Hawes - Extra Virgin) who was actually there. In an amusing side story she talks about the difficulty of convincing the local cafe owner to provide her and her sister with a second espresso coffee (a worthy task!). The café owner, in addition to the various locals, are very reluctant to provide her with that second coffee and they explain to her that a second coffee would close her stomach, which would be a bad thing. Everyone knows that a second coffee will do no such thing and so we treat that belief as a superstition. However, in a land where coffee may be expensive and in short supply, that belief is a good thing as it acts to curb peoples natural bent to over consumption.
Your task is really to think about what rituals work and what don't given your circumstances and then act accordingly. ;-)! And remember to change those rituals if circumstances change. That is not as easy to do as you would believe!
Hi Calm Center of Tranquility,
;-)! It's not easy to do is it and of course we have to ask ourselves the awful question: What is in it for us to continue as things are?
Cheers
Chris
4/23/16, 2:59 AM
davidchuter said...
4/23/16, 3:33 AM
Fred said...
Don't want to make a 2 year commitment to poverty? Then talk with a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer! In the thirty years since I returned not one person has asked me about what it was like, how my views changed, and what I learned. Americans are deeply uncomfortable to really know what it is like for poor people in the world to deal with the US, our privelage and policies.
I have no data to prove this, but I believe the only reason many countries don't hate the US more is the people fondly remember a young Americans dropped in their villages who befriended them, lived with them and helped them in every way they could.
4/23/16, 4:25 AM
Fred said...
4/23/16, 5:09 AM
Fred said...
Europe doesn't have a refugee crisis using that definition of temporary because I don't see the intention of any of the people coming as returning to their home country in a year or two. The countries in Europe are integrating people into their societies as much as possible, or at least attempting to. So you have a mass invasion going on, a mostly peaceful one without weapons which is going to change the culture of Europe.
4/23/16, 5:25 AM
PRiZM said...
Thanks for helping me appreciate how I was "starhawking" the issue last week when I redirected the issue to American foreign policy instead of talking about domestic politics. I know many people are flat out afraid to discuss the issues of race, and other prejudices, and privilege. It's a touch subject. A subject easier ignored. But it is obvious that it needs addressed. Just the same as we try to avoid the issues of racism and privilege in our society, we use those same tactics to skirt issues dealing with the environment, economy, and frankly any other ideas which are not business as usual. It's unrealistic to expect these issues to be solved if not confronted. Perhaps I missed it, but have you any suggestions for making this discussion discuss-able? Or for convincing others to admit the issues even exist?
I can't help but think that these problems exist because Western society, and America in particular, has lost touch with the feminine. Many of these issues are so difficult to discuss because of all the emotion tied into the topic, and people's unwillingness to understand others emotions, simply dismissing them as illogical (the foundation of the Rescue Game?).
4/23/16, 6:55 AM
Ray Wharton said...
@mallow
"I’ve started a campaign trying to put forward a compromise position that could be politically acceptable. It starts from the premise that the needs of current residents of a country should form the basis for setting and implementing limits on migration. If taken seriously, that ‘should’ create political space for an open discussion of who benefits and who loses, and in what way, from various forms of migration. "
From the sounds of it you are very thoughtful about these things, I can only encourage you to work to make the conversation more intelligent in Europe. These situations push for stupidity, and you pushing back with all strength would be noble. Your strength is too little. But if you push hard others might too. But you mush put your shoulder to the work before others can join. If you give it your all I think that you could help much!
@ JMG & Phil K
"Decadence is privilege without a corresponding sense of duty."
I put this variation on the internets. Very little response. To my left the word duty is repugnant. To my right the word privilege. I also posted a question.
"______ is a sense of duty beyond ones privileges?"
'Austerity' is the only guess so far received, but I didn't see how it related to duty.
4/23/16, 7:08 AM
RCW - said...
After processing this post through my WASP (mid-salary class) prism, it seems to my simple mind, that this topic & debate boil down to the most recent meme of micro aggressions, which leads us further down the slippery slope of thought crimes. And I find that idea/practice quite ghastly & despicable. Are not free people, enlightened or not, at least entitled to their thoughts without fear of persecution?
4/23/16, 7:17 AM
Lynnet said...
4/23/16, 9:30 AM
Urban Harvester said...
4/23/16, 10:32 AM
Urban Harvester said...
While I talk about my experience as a mormon missionary to Brazil with some chagrin, my experience bears your point out. Though I spent the majority of my two years there “na roça” of Minas Gerais, in mostly rural, some semi-urban, but all impoverished areas, I spent the last part of it in Belo Horizonte. My initial experience of race related issues was “Wow racism kind of doesn’t exist here, people talk so freely about color and they have so many words to describe every shade of coloring”. But then I was sent to work in a very wealthy suburb followed by a very wealthy part of B.H. and the white/colored divide was palpable. This was further impressed on me when my Mother and brother came to pick me up at the end of my stint and we stayed with a well off family in B.H. who by coincidence we had met in Utah because they were our neighbors at the University family housing where my Dad went to school when I was young. They had a ranch in the mountains that we visited and when I pointed out areas in which I had worked and lived as we passed them, the family was shocked because they were areas in which they wouldn’t even tolerate the thought of stopping the car. At home they had colored maids/help etc, but none of the class/race differences were discussable.
I don’t know that I’m qualified to comment on your situation really, but I am at least aware of an example that is inspiring to me. The story of a german immigrant in the 70’s who bought a property in the mountains of Minas and started what became a Waldorf school for the locals and improving housing. You can find the story here. So much depends on specific circumstances though… Boa sorte, um abraço!
4/23/16, 11:22 AM
Rita said...
1) have you or a family member ever been evicted for non-payment of rent? or foreclosed?
2) have you or a family member ever had an automobile repossessed?
3) have you or a family member ever had a utility (electric, gas, water or telephone) shut off for non-payment?
4/23/16, 12:22 PM
Mark Mikituk said...
One of your best John, thanks!... although now that I think of it, my impression is that quite a few balls have been knocked out of the ballpark these past few months.
4/23/16, 1:23 PM
Unknown said...
@Alex--Thanks for the clear and detailed description of the class and ethnic structure of the Hawaiian Islands.
If you have a spare $150 or someone wants to give you a nice present, you can find out whether you have Jewish ancestry by buying the Nat Geo deep ancestry test kit and mailing in the swabs for analysis.
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/
I bought this for my birthday and it confirmed the family stories. 89% of my genome has the pattern Jewish Diaspora. The other 11% hails from Scandinavia, Asia Minor and Central Asia. That makes sense because one side of the family emigrated to the US from Hungary and the other from the Ukraine.
It's at least possible that you are both Jewish and Navajo. When Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all the Jews from their kingdom, a lot of Jews converted to Catholicism and then emigrated to various parts of the Spanish Empire. There are a good number of Catholic families in Arizona, New Mexico and the rest of the Southwest who have Jewish ancestry, and some of them know it. Over the course of five centuries,
one or more of them might have made whoopee with a Navajo.
4/23/16, 1:47 PM
donalfagan said...
In an Age of Privilege, Not Everyone Is in the Same Boat
“For a long time there was an acceptance that outside the door of your room, you were on an equal footing,” he said. “We didn’t attempt to have any differentiation in how services were delivered.”
Since the late 1990s, however, “there has been a huge evolution, maybe a revolution in attitudes,” Mr. Goldstein said. In addition to larger rooms or softer sheets, big spenders want to be coddled nowadays. “They are looking for constant validation that they are a higher-value customer,” he said. For example, room service requests from Royal Suite occupants are automatically routed to a number different from the one used by regular passengers, who get slower, less personalized service.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/business/economy/velvet-rope-economy.html?_r=0
4/23/16, 1:53 PM
latheChuck said...
When the genocide gets rolling, physical appearance is the quickest way to separate the "us" from the "them". If skin colors differ, that'll do, but if skin color isn't enough to discriminate, then other features can be found.
Jared Diamond's writing on the Rwandan genocide (in "Collapse" as I remember it) says that tribal affiliation (Hutu vs Tutsi) was a way to define Us vs Them, but only after the ecosystem had failed to support the population (due to drought) was it necessary to define Us and Them.
Gene Logsdon wrote on his blog (some months ago) that Germans between WW-1 and WW-2 came to believe that they were threatening to exceed the carrying capacity of their environment. Their "solution" to reduce the population has been so abhorrent that we dare not discuss the problem, even as it approaches once again.
4/23/16, 3:21 PM
steve pearson said...
One example sticks in my mind; when the caretaker at our property in rural New Jersey came to the house on a Friday afternoon for his pay and a beer and a discussion of future tasks, it was always Bill & Mr. Pearson, not Bill & Walter or Mr. Oraschin & Mr. Pearson. I suppose, at least, my father did have a beer with him.
I grew up liking Bill & his family much better than my own.
We moved when I was 9, after my parents divorced and sold the property. I ended up in the public high school after being thrown out of prep school.I went in the army as a private right after high school, partly to spite my parents. It didn't take long in the army to realize that I didn't like the working class any better than I liked the upper middle class, nor the army itself for that matter.
Though I did go to college afterwards, I have lived a rather bohemian life and have managed to collapse well ahead of the curve.
I digress, but I clean up well and have all my life managed to use my class background to my advantage when I wanted or needed to for jobs, social connections, etc: the point of this being that class distinctions and privilege have always been very obvious to me.
cheers, Steve
4/23/16, 3:30 PM
Caryn said...
As an artist, having worked in Theatre and other visual arts most of my life, I can attest, there is actually a very fine line between 'Starving Artist' and 'Hobo', and the reception and reaction of different classes of people, depending on where/ in what context they meet you is astoundingly sharp and different. It's definitely not the full picture, but still, a very good education how the other half live and get treated, no matter which half you came from.
I can remember in my 20's/theatre days being feted lavishly by elites -patrons of the arts in a few US cities with opening night parties and balls in which we were indulged and encouraged to fill our tummies, mouths, pockets and handbags with as many hors-de-ouvres as we could carry home, These patrons funded the theatre. Why they wouldn't just allocate those monies to our paltry salaries instead, I don't know. They wanted to meet and mingle with the artists, actors and designers, the tech crews were not invited. They thought it was hilarious that we really did pinch as many petit-fors as we could. The late great comedian, Jerry Stiller used to steal muffins for me from craft services. I also remember for, well, all of my adult life, until we moved away from the US, living in the 'unsafe', dodgy neighborhoods. Dodgy for an outsider, not too bad if you're an insider, really. I also remember thinking, "It's a good thing our phone got turned off, now the bill collectors can't call us, Ha!!" Top-Ramen for .25 cents per meal, boiled with discount, day-old veggies!; clothes, blankets, even news papers on top of me to sleep in the freezing cold, (inside - no heat.) (Newspapers are utterly worthless as blankets, BTW.) Tons of other examples and anecdotes. Living in those dodgy, (non-white) neighborhoods, I think it was impossible not to feel a part of it. As I said, I know I have certain privileges, but as an earnest Social Justice Warrior, I never thought I was fighting for "them", I was fighting for "us". I think that has become ingrained in me now. I don't support Black Lives Matter because I want to save some others, I support it because I'm a mother of 2 teen boys. It makes me viscerally terrified to think of it. Although mine are white and less LIKELY to be shot by some trigger happy yahoo who shouldn't be wearing a badge; I'm not convinced. There is really nothing solid to stop them shooting mine as well if they run out of targets, if mine present themselves as 'the wrong kind of white' on that given day.
So, thanks, Lynnett. That kind of clarifies for me why I feel so schizophrenic about my own station or class in life. I've spent my lifetime putting the camera on and taking it off. Maybe that makes seeing my own privilege even harder?
4/23/16, 4:05 PM
Golocyte Golo said...
As conformed by the mostly dismissive if not derisive comments above, many think IQ isn't real. But to say that, it seems to me you have to contend with three things: First is factor analysis, which is uncontroversial in almost every other science, second is its stability of measurement, and third is correlation with more directly measurable factors, such as high school graduation rates.
You have to explain why factor analysis is perfectly uncontroversial in fields from sociology to metallurgy to quantum mechanics to climatology, but why the same methods of factor analysis are invalid in psychometrics. For example the recent discoveries of the Higgs boson and of gravitational waves are entirely factor analysis---- the amount of data collected at the LHC is on the order of zettabyte/day (a million million gigabytes per day). The "discovery" of the Higgs boson was not an observation, but a profoundly intricate exercise in data analysis--- so yes the Higgs boson is a "factor": a statistical abstraction which simplifies multiple observed correlations in data aggregates. Correlation of measured IQ is tight with many other measures: if your IQ is under 80, there is virtually no chance you'll finish high school. If your IQ is under 95, there is virtually no chance you'll get a degree at any university. If your IQ is under 115, there is virtually no chance you'll earn a medical degree or a Ph.D. Your IQ at age 20, even accounting for wealth and ethnicity, is a good predictor at age 40 of many aspects of privilege we're discussing. The point is that IQ measurements are both stable and predictive. To me, that makes IQ real enough to at least be an issue to consider.
The reason I'm jumping in to this particular ring is that it seems to me that intelligence is an immense source of privilege, particularly in our current cultural configuration, and is something beyond simply class (if you're born wealthy but your IQ is 85, there is still almost no change you can get a college degree, and you're even unlikely to finish high school).
In a discussion of privilege, dismissing IQ out of hand seems to be a mistake, particularly in a technological society which immensely privileges the ability to manipulate abstraction.
4/23/16, 4:22 PM
steve pearson said...
A couple of friends & I went to the pub, as one does,where we met a Norwegian biology grad student who was sailing his sloop single handed up around Iceland and Greenland:a very nice guy and quite an accomplishment. He mentioned that he had been on the Norwegian sealing fleet as a biologist observer the preceding summer and that he was so horrified that he would like to help Greenpeace in any way he could. As this was one of their main campaigns and he had inside information, we were quite excited about it. When we went back to the boat, we quite excitedly told the commissar ( I'm sorry, but I can't think of another name for his position) about our meeting. He looked at us in disgust and said" I wouldn't even speak to anyone who had been on the sealing fleet" So, once one had been designated a persecutor, one remained a persecutor. The attitude would have seemed to fit quite well in the inquisition or the soviet purges. I'm afraid my career in the environmental movement didn't last much beyond that point. The commissar's position might have been toward the extreme end of the spectrum, but it was not untypical.
cheers, Steve
4/23/16, 4:29 PM
Caryn said...
Obstinate old Prole that I am, We really shocked the neighbors and bucked the system by only hiring a local truck and driver and we loaded schlepped the furniture ourselves. The looks and comments of horror we got from neighbors were unbelievable. The acceptable status quo here in expat-land is to HIRE manual labor. Unthinkable to pick up your own stuff and move it yourself. I was determined that my boys learn to do this for themselves, Gosh-Darnit!! (in full disclosure, in grad school at Yale, I was derided by classmates as a 'Poverty-Snob' for disrespecting people who did not earn their own wealth or who could not do anything for themselves.)
We did it, beat the clock, didn't have to pay extra, so we could tip the driver. Then on the way home to the old apt. our 25 year old car flat out died in the middle of a busy road. Teens got out to push, Hubby has found a new calling as one of those flamboyant dancing traffic cops, directing cars to stop or go. A very adventurous day.
@Alex; Exactly! Going back for that last penny, I had always thought was the norm. I was very shocked to learn it's only the norm for folks who appear poor or working class. I've known people going 6-7 months late on their bills who get a pass simply because the seem to be 'good for it', (have enough to pay it when they can be bothered to get around to it.) Others who get service turned off or accounts deactivated for 2 days late payment, because they were earnestly trying to pay, but juggling debts with pay-days.
4/23/16, 4:36 PM
donalfagan said...
A letter to my fellow white people
"White privilege" is the p.c. slogan for these unacknowledged advantages and entitlement — the freedom to drive around without being pulled out of the car and beaten up, to walk to the store unmurdered, and, mostly, to never have to think about being white. It's a little unreasonable to condemn White People for what's basically human nature; pretty much everyone takes for granted whatever advantages they happen to have (being white, male, rich, thin, attractive, American, healthy, alive) and complains about their problems instead. It only starts to seem a little obnoxious when you point this out to White People and they get defensive and angry and adamantly deny having any such thing, insisting that they've got it just as hard as anyone else and some people are just whiners.
http://theweek.com/articles/619242/letter-fellow-white-people
4/23/16, 4:40 PM
Mister Roboto said...
4/23/16, 5:51 PM
Justin said...
I have to think though, despite the fact that the GBR is legitimately ecologically important, concern over the health of coral reefs is kind of an interesting poltical issue. In general, the sort of person who cares about the state of coral reefs on the opposite side of the world is nearly always the sort of person who either could afford to fly there to go SCUBA diving or the person who expects that the high-paying job they will surely get sooner or later with their university degree would enable them to do so. For quite a lot of people, on the other hand, the Great Barrier Reef might as well be located on Yavin IV. Of course, there are exceptions, but the trend is hard to ignore.
4/23/16, 5:57 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Nuku, gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.
Cherokee, I'm the worst possible judge of whether sitcoms are funny, partly because I haven't seen one in my adult life, but also because I found them utterly unfunny back when I did watch TV. The humor in them, if that's what it was, escaped me utterly. You may have put a finger on why that was.
Davidchuter, you have to remember that the US is a third world country that pretends to be part of the developed world. The rules that apply in Europe don't necessarily apply here.
Fred, that makes sense to me. I'm not at all surprised that so few people want to ask you about your experiences; you probably won't be surprised how few people ever ask me about what it's like to get by without a car.
Prizm, thank you for your response! I wish I knew how to start conversations about the unmentionable -- all I've been able to figure out is to post essays on taboo subjects here, and see what happens.
Ray, good. Very good. There are quite a few words that fill in the blank you've left. "Magnanimity" comes to mind, and so does "nobility;" I suppose you could simply say "greatness" as well, as the willingness to extend the reach of duty beyond the limits of one's privilege used to be considered the essential step toward moral greatness.
RCW, no, it doesn't. Trying to squash a discussion of the reality of privilege by insisting that it's actually all about "microagression" is a pretty good example of Starhawking, all things considered.
Hsrvester, I've been wrestling with that theme since it first got suggested, and I don't yet know if I can say anything useful about it.
Rita, those are good additions, no question.
Mark, thank you. Current US politics are tossing me some very easy pitches.
4/23/16, 6:04 PM
Hubertus Hauger said...
4/23/16, 6:19 PM
John Michael Greer said...
LatheChuck, it wasn't just Gene Logsdon who mentioned that latter point. William Catton of blessed memory talked about that at some length in Overshoot.
Steve, fascinating. Though I started out quite a bit further down the curve -- prep school was never an option -- I had a similar trajectory after high school, going straight down into low-paying wage jobs -- and have also been able to use the learned habits of a salary class upbringing from time to time.
Golocyte, I'm not suggesting that IQ doesn't exist. I'm suggesting that it's been selected out of a much broader range of human mental abilities and given its current status as a marker of privilege because, as I've said repeatedly, it represents the current salary class notion of what high mental functioning happens to be. IQ is not an independent variable, after all, and the correlation between IQ and the various markers of privilege is a complex phenomenon heavily skewed by the environmental and cultural impacts of privilege and its absence on IQ and mental function generally.
Steve, that's fascinating, and absolutely typical of Greenpeace -- I lived in Seattle when their phone workers tried to unionize, due to crappy pay and worse working conditions, and the Greenpeace management simply fired them all.
Caryn, glad to hear it all worked out! As for being a "poverty snob," wear the title proudly. You'll be fine when a lot of your classmates are sleeping in shelters.
Donalfagan, thanks for the link.
4/23/16, 6:19 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Hubertus, exactly. "Meritocracy" always begs the question of who decides what merit is and how it's measured...
4/23/16, 6:22 PM
donalfagan said...
I went to the Sanders rally in Charm City today. He, Ben Jealous, Danny Glover and local activists were hoping to address black Baltimore, but 90% of the crowd were very young, enthusiastic, white people. No love lost for Clinton or Trump in that crowd.
4/23/16, 7:01 PM
Alex said...
4/23/16, 8:13 PM
Alex said...
Urban Harvester - I remember my mom wanted to go door to door for the March Of Dimes and they didn't want her because she was too dark.
Rita - in my case I answered yes to all three of those questions.
Unknown (Debora Bender) - Yes, I may in fact be both.
4/23/16, 8:22 PM
Alex said...
I wear my 162 proudly and have not thrown my MENSA acceptance form, but I must say this: I barely exist, at the US poverty rate and with no running water. I know and have known a lot of people like me, high-IQ but either born into the wrong class, family fortunes gone the way my family plummeted into poverty, or just plain can't stand the bullshit.
However, if your IQ is 85 or 90 and you are rich, you'll get tutors, private schooling, and they'll teach you to row or play field hockey. In fact, at a gym I used to go to in Costa Mesa, California, I befriended a big and muscular, dull, but pleasant fellow, who I later recognized in a book as a noted rower. You'll do just fine.
4/23/16, 8:33 PM
Alex said...
JMG - good point, Hillary pretty much has to hire friends, doesn't she?
4/23/16, 8:41 PM
Unknown said...
Oh dear, Clay Dennis, it appears that you have never heard the phrase "Ladies first," or at least that you and your son don't know what it means.
I'm a middle-aged white woman. I was born after WWII but well before the great shift in manners that began in the 1960s. In those days women were regarded as the weaker sex, which barred them from taking certain jobs or riding on the outside of cable cars, but as compensation, men were expected to extend certain courtesies to them. If a man had been taught proper manners when he was young, he would automatically:
1. Stand up and offer his seat on the bus to any woman who boarded.
2. Open a door and hold it open for any woman who was approaching it, whether he knew her or not.
3. When entering an elevator, stand aside until all the women and children had entered; the same on exiting.
4. If traveling by automobile, the man would open the passenger door, wait for the woman to seat herself, shut the door, walk around to the driver's side and get in, because a woman never drove herself if a man was available.
5. When walking with a woman on a sidewalk, take the position nearest the street. Hold his umbrella over her if it rains.
6. When sharing a meal at a restaurant, help the woman off with her coat, hang it up on a hook or the back of her chair, pull the chair out, wait for her to sit, ease the chair back in, and then seat himself.
7. Remove his hat when entering a dwelling where women are present (because the home is the female domain).
Some of these courtesies were and still are extended to the elderly of both sexes, and to people with a cane or crutch or carrying packages. The basis being the same, that in a civilized society, the weak and elderly receive protection from the young and strong.
For the most part these courtesies were due to all women. OTOH, some men made a distinction between "ladies" who should be treated chivalrously and "women" who didn't deserve courteous treatment. For men who made that distinction, the manners, dress or skin tone of the gal in question might decide the matter.
4/23/16, 9:58 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
The fancy name for their narratives is "Juxtaposition" (a term over used in the real estate industry). The narrative tries to dump characters in unlikely scenarios for a laugh. The problem is - as you replied - sometimes it is just not funny. In fact, you're not alone because I actually feel a little bit sad for people experiencing the sort of day to day problems that are narrated in that show. The writer (and originator) of the show has been touted as the voice of her generation - and that may well be the case, certainly she is very switched on. The show from my perspective is documenting a decline in the perquisites of her generation and I haven't found that story to be at all funny. To me it is like watching a car crash, but then I don't believe that I'm the intended audience of that show. I dunno, but it isn't good.
Apologies, I now feel inspired to rant about IQ... Really, I am sorry... Maybe! Hehe
Cheers
Chris
4/24/16, 3:48 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
I'm uncomfortable with people's display of status in the comments section which may somehow have been derived from their individual IQ statistic. I’m very uncomfortable with that.
A mate of mine is actually a reasonably smart bloke. He earned "Dux" of the high school which means that he earned the very highest score. A tidy bit of work that. He also holds a PhD in science and I have no idea what his PhD was all about. None. It did involve a lot of rats and that seemed to be a good thing to me as rats can be a serious nuisance, but on reflection it was possibly not good for the rats themselves.
One day many years ago, he was standing in front of a lemon tree here which had a huge number of bright yellow fruit hanging off it and he said to me that: "Australia has to import oranges because we just can't grow citrus here." Now I like the guy, but he was way serious in that assertion and I was so gobsmacked by his assertion that I was left utterly speechless and without an appropriate response. I mean what do you say to that?
Look, all I'm saying to the commenters here is that if it makes your phallus feel big that you have personally scored a high IQ in an otherwise arbitrary test, then good for you. To my mind it's an arbitrary test and I don't believe that the many real problems that we are facing as a society can be addressed by sitting on ones laurels and day dreaming about a high IQ score.
I wouldn't join a group like Mensa even if they offered me free membership. It is a truly revolting and repugnant concept. Just sayin...
Cheers
Chris
4/24/16, 4:10 AM
Nancy Sutton said...
"According to the report mentioned at the end of the last
chapter, the WHO expects that by 2020 mental illness will be the
second most important cause of disability and mortality worldwide.
Surveys conducted in Europe and the United States show that more than
a quarter of the population in any given year had symptoms that would
be diagnosed as mental illness (most are never diagnosed, however),
with the most common being anxiety disorder."
NYC may not be that exceptional... travelers have been surprised to see psychiatrists' shingles 'hung' on what seems like every other corner in Paris.
4/24/16, 6:43 AM
DaShui said...
Hey ADJMG, you just keep on doing what you are doing!
this professor has the same ideas roughly as you. I hope he is not stealing from you like Joseph Campbell stole from Manley Hall! Hahaha
4/24/16, 7:07 AM
Philip Hardy said...
I would like to tell a story. I have a friend who trained to be an account in the 1970s. He went straight from school at age 16 to a local accountancy firm and was fully qualified by the age of 22. He related to me that over the years since he noticed that qualification entry levels to accountancy training programs kept getting higher and higher. In his time it was ‘O’ levels, then to ‘A’ levels (taken at age 18) and then to a degree (age 21). This was confirmed to me by a client in 2000. His son was trying to get on to a graduate accountancy program with the big London firms, but was not getting even an introductory interview. The father was very wealthy, his son had gone to a top private school, achieved very good grades, then when to Cambridge and achieved a 1st in a BSc. Apparently you now require a degree in accountancy to even get a look in the door. The son did eventually get his graduate training position but only because his father had contacts with the firms due to his business interests. The point of the story is that competition at the top end of the salary class has become very intense since the 1970s, and the belief among them that they have earned their position by merit and hard work has a basis in reality for them, and conversely they do not see the privileges they have that they can at least play the game to which most are excluded. Only the big accountancy firm’s offer training today, the smaller local firms will only employ qualified accountants.
JMG you have pointed out in the comments that race is a social construct. I would like to give you a prime example. In the UK many official documents require a form answered stating your ethnic group for purposes of monitoring diversity issues. My father is Irish, born in Northern Ireland. Does he tic the White-British box or the White Irish box? Further my father’s older sisters and his parents were born in the Irish Republic so would count as White-Irish. He could claim an Irish passport as his father was born in what became the Irish Republic and could therefore claim White-Irish status. One family, two ethnic labels, nonsense!
Further I see the White-British tic box disappearing soonish. I work in a 16-18 age sixth form college in a prosperous town, nearly all white and heavily salary class. In enrolment week my job is to photocopy the Learner Agreements. As it is a boring job I took to sampling the nationality entries on the forms. Ten years ago there were some stating ‘British’ rather than English, five years ago few stated British, and last year I did not come across one stating British. This included those whose names were of East Asian, South Asian, or African origin. They had also all put down English rather ‘British’. It used to be that when the political and chattering classes talked about the British they really meant the English, which riled the other nations in the UK. Not anymore. Even PM David Cameroon in his address alongside President Obama referred to himself as European, as British, and as ‘English’! I am seeing more separating out of the English and British identities, with the self-declared British being a small minority from private schools, elite universities, the upper salary class, the military and older age groups. I see the British identity either fading away, or suddenly dropped because it has become the defining word for a very unpopular class!
Keep on writing JMG
Regards Philip
4/24/16, 7:19 AM
Alexes Green said...
It's up to the privileged who better understand these things because we were raised with a better sense of empowerment to do what we can to empower the underprivileged communities. It's obviously not a path for everyone and with the current economical structures failing us, time is an issue to take to contribute. But just having the mind clear of judgments and understanding why minority communities are the way they are, opens up a channel and ripple of understanding and compassion that may touch someone who will find their path to be the dedication of empowering those communities.
4/24/16, 9:27 AM
Donald Hargraves said...
I've long believed that, barring mental disability, intelligence is equal across racial, gender and class lines. The difference, to me, is what form the intelligence takes. If one has to learn how to make it home safely at 8pm one will become an expert in reading urban landscapes and threatening situations at the cost of a number of IQ points. Conversely, someone with the leisure and encouragement to read and chase (or at least indulge) one's dreams will do well on multiple guess questions.
4/24/16, 10:18 AM
Alex Blaidd said...
4/24/16, 11:38 AM
Shane W said...
I've always thought that the South was more "colored" in culture than the rest of North America, and that the South's sharp distinction in culture came from its African influences. There's just no way that the South resembles Northwestern Europe, despite its claims of English/Scottish heritage--it is not industrious, it is not reserved/standoffish/cold, it is not disciplined--it's laid back, hospitable, easy going way of life is more in keeping with the global South than with Northwestern Europe. It's interesting to me that the stereotypes placed on the South (lazy, corrupt, tribal, traditional, slow, backwards) are the same stereotypes placed on countries of color in the global South.
4/24/16, 1:37 PM
Blueback said...
4/24/16, 2:47 PM
Fred said...
Amerika - where we can take a great idea, like the rule of law, and ruin it with our pride.
4/24/16, 3:02 PM
pygmycory said...
As for me, I took it once as a kid. I hadn't seen algebra at that point in my life, mistook the letters in what were probably geometry questions for algebra, and left every single math question containing a letter blank without even trying to do them.
I can't help but think that wasn't a very good assessment of my ablity or lack of it.
4/24/16, 3:26 PM
Alex said...
I agree with you on MENSA. I've been to the meetings. I was just barely 18 when I took the test and as mentioned, I thought it would help me get a job somehow. It's a real bunch'a nerds though and not necessarily in a cool way. The last time I went, in the late 90s, it was because a chess nut friend of mine was a member and I decided, why not? The people (mostly) weren't a bunch of unemployed misfits but had solid jobs like programmer, nurse, etc. But several were in awe of me because I bought and sold stuff on Ebay and made my living that way. Hellooooo, you don't need a fancy college degree to do that or even be a HS grad* you just have to know a lot about electronics junk and be willing to learn more. Or about Barbie dolls, anything, just some body of knowledge so you know what things sell for.
I believe you about the rocks etc because that's a large part of how I grew up. I'd watch tide pools, spend an hour watching an ant nest, and so on. I was very big on bugs and leaves and types of rocks and was a shell-collecting fanatic. My favorite toy was my pocket knife because it's the meta-toy, in that I made other toys with it. I really had the most fun with the toys I made myself. I was lucky enough to have been born early enough that it was still cool for kids to run around outside all day, get hurt, collect pocketfuls of seashells or nuts and bolts, have "wars" throwing stuff at each other, etc.
*I did not in fact graduate HS, I had to get out and work. There's a way to "test out" in the US and that enabled me to go to college which I could likewise not afford to finish - trade school would have been a much better fit for me.
4/24/16, 4:03 PM
Alex said...
Another example is something I was reading, not sure if it was Noam Chomsky or one of his "fellow travelers" but they were going around with some activist from S. America, here in the states. The S. American guy was dismayed at how he was being treated, as he was, while fairly light, brown skinned. It was explained to him that it's because he's not a white guy, and the guy said, "But back home, I *am* the white guy".
I've related how being white in Hawaii is not a bowl of cherries, and I've always thought of myself as white, but - and this is the funniest thing - it's taken me a long time to realize I'm "white" rather than white. It started with my learning to be careful taking photos of electronic surplus for Ebay listing, in that, if I had to hold something up, I had to take great pains to keep my hands out of the picture because somehow, in the viewfinder, my hands look very brown, and the guy I work for is not that brown. OK, I figured, that's just "tan". Then, I was in a cafeteria where it's often crowded and you sit with strangers at the table, and I ended up eating and talking with this Chinese guy, and the subject of ethnicity came up and he told me, "You're not white", and so I said, "Well, then, what am I?" and he kind of peered at me and said, "Italian?". The final straw has been that we've had something like a real winter here and between that and getting essentially no sun for months on end now, I'm still brown. So, in a place like Hawaii, I'm white, and in places like the Mainland sun belt I'm "white enough", and I suspect that in the pale North, I'd be "ethnic".
BTW getting back to the old-stock ruling families of Hawaii, I was trying to look up dear old Miss Wilder, my childhood friend who lived around the corner, with her Steinway grand and membership in the Pacific Club, where we went to lunch once. Miss Wilder was elderly, and was a member of the Wilder family, one of these ruling families. I could not find her; being an old spinster they may not have been proud of her but if you look up the Wilder family you'll find pictures of 'em all at the beach etc and they have kept their family lineage "pure". They've been in Hawaii since the mid-1800s and there's been no acquisition of melanin.
4/24/16, 4:27 PM
Justin said...
I'm a fourth generation white European symbolic manipulation professional. I would certainly hope and expect that I'm better at it than a tribesperson from Papua New Guinea, but trying to extract some sort of "my gray matter is better than yours" superiority from it is pathetic - I might as well tell the tribesperson that my car is stronger than him.
4/24/16, 5:29 PM
patriciaormsby said...
My husband, Shinobu, has long felt closer to my relatives in the American South than those from the North, despite a continuing underlying reality of racism (which we never personally encountered, but heard about second hand). He reacts viscerally to the hypocrisy of the northern half, who pretend to do good, all the while scheming. Japan is nearly identical in climate to the American South, so i wonder if that has a lot to do with "sensibilities." I began thinking that in a colder climate, you might need to scheme to survive, but OTOH, Shinobu loves our Siberian friends, where it appears that nine-tenths of the people do not "scheme," which frankly surprised him. So, yes, I am just speculating, but if we look far enough north, it may be that the climate is so harsh that trust and cooperation become essential again, whereas in northwestern Europe, where the cold is ameliorated by the Gulf Stream and they have had the resources to develop a long-term civilization, scheming skills became and remain critical to survival.
I suppose the good news is that if the Gulf Stream ever shuts down, as they say it might, Europe will quit being such a menace.
4/24/16, 5:32 PM
patriciaormsby said...
I never wanted to know my IQ, but one day I sort of got it handed to me. I would be too embarrassed to relay it here: I fear for what it means for my future as a farmer!
4/24/16, 5:50 PM
Alex said...
4/24/16, 8:34 PM
Alex said...
Again on IQ tests: I was barely 18, my life was collapsing around me - even faster than it had been - and I think I'd heard of MENSA trough OMNI Magazine, a geeky periodical of which I was fond because I didn't know any better. Yep, I'm the idiot who, when they described this new thing called a "Rubik's Cube", thought it was a contest to figure out how it worked, freehanded a rather nice exploded diagram of the unseen device's guts, and actually got it right. They sent me a nice letter on silver(!) paper telling me it was not a contest but the drawing was very nice and thanks for being a reader etc. etc. I had no idea of eugenics, social Darwinism, or the kind of negative-sum society we'd devolve into. I just thought somehow it might help me get a job. I was not going to have a place to live shortly, and jobs were exceedingly rare. I worked at the Baskin-Robbins and at the gas station.
From what little experience I have at farming, it just takes being organized, doing at least a little bit every day, knowing how to observe things like bugs and plants and what the birds are doing, take care of your animals, etc. I lived on a "permaculture" place for a while and I learned a lot, but more and more people moved there and we "farmed" more drama than anything else. Someone told me about this phenomena once, the analogy being the volunteer fire department. You start a volunteer fire department, and all kinds of capable, gung-ho people join, and things are great, but of course you're going to get some troublemakers and all-around sourballs too. So, some of the more capable people get tired of the drama and leave. And as people get "filtered" through the volunteer fire department, it fills with more drama and the people who are on the ball get tired of the drama and leave, and pretty soon you have a bunch of drama-mamas who don't have much else to do, and it's just No Fun. That's why I'm very wary of places like Dancing Rabbit and so on.
4/24/16, 8:53 PM
BoysMom said...
Little bit of background: my folks are professors, which has status but not a lot of pay in the rural Western USA. I grew up at that border between farm and town, kept chickens and rabbits, had a garden, hunted and fished with my dad. My husband's folks are teachers, high school and kindergarten. He grew up near the line between urban and village, kept chickens, had a garden, hunted and fished with his dad. He immigrated to the USA from Western Africa as an adult. We had pretty similar childhoods in many ways: same social class.
So, we'd been married a couple years, and we were renting a place with a little spot we could have a garden, and we had the usual vegetables. He was juggling our toddler and our infant, and I was canning tomatoes in a boiling water bath, as I'd learned from my mother as a kid. Sauce, I think. He watched me, for a while. And then he said, "Why the (profanity) did the Peace Corps volunteers never teach us to do that?"
His people had to buy canned tomatoes imported from Europe. In spite of growing excellent tomatoes, no one ever offered instruction on how to preserve them. Now boiling water bath canning is pretty easy to do safely: it can be done in any pot big enough over any heat source that gets it hot enough. There's absolutely no reason to not teach it, except that there's no profit in teaching it. And probably, nowadays, there are precious few Peace Corps volunteers who ever learned.
4/24/16, 10:28 PM
nuku said...
“Nuku, status and privilege are found among all social primates, so yes, those things are very likely hardwired into our behavior. That's all the more reason to find ways to ameliorate the negative effects of privilege on the less privileged, of course -- it's the same logic by which we look for treatments for hereditary diseases.“
I’m thinking of ways that a culture and society can ameliorate the negative effects of privilege on the less privileged.
One obvious way is through the “rule of law”. Laws limiting working hours of children during the industrial revolution, laws prohibiting slavery, the Miranda warning given to suspects by police, etc. Of course the downside is that the privileged tend to write and enforce the laws, but even so, the process does work at least some of the time in societies that are not completely corrupt.
Another way is through the less privileged organizing themselves into groups that can push back against abuse of power by the more privileged. Unions are a prime example. Temporary groups can be formed to boycott businesses whose owners exploit customers and workers.
And another already mentioned is “Noblesse Oblige, the French phrase literally meaning "nobility obliges". It denotes the concept that nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person who holds such status to fulfill social responsibilities, particularly in leadership roles.“ This depends on an inter-generational tradition, training, and expectation of certain kinds of behaviours of the part of the more privileged. In the past, I believe this was part of the concept of a personal “code of honor”. In turn, the idea of honor is connected with the idea of shaming. If one did the dishonorable thing, one was publicly shamed by one’s peers. This can be a powerful force if used correctly.
Does anyone have anything to add to this thread?
4/24/16, 10:31 PM
Ahavah said...
There are so many good comments in the thread today that I don't know where to start. First, I am living proof that being a member of Mensa can be a fluke and in no way guarantees you're going to be successful or wealthy. I got in by virtue of taking the Duke TIP program SAT when I was 12 and got a score that got me into college twice (I never took it again) but that didn't stop me from getting pregnant at 16 and pretty nearly ruining my life completely. This leads to the class issue. Neither of my parents finished college, and we were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. In Jr High I figured out that being smart wasn't particularly helpful when having money was what really counts. I realized I was not part of the "in" crowd and was never going to be, nor did I particularly want to be. For the heinous crime of having no interest whatsoever in fashion or gaming of any other acceptable topic, I was and still am a social outcast because if you're wealthy, you can get away with it. If you're not, you can't.
Someone mentioned how the Jewish community invites people over for Friday night dinner. Here in Lexington, where I have lived since 1989, I and my husband, who has also never graduated college, have never been invited to the homes of the wealthy elites here. And it's not because they're afraid we're not kosher enough - as the mashgiach at our shul, I can assure you in this liberal community, most of the wealthy families don't keep kosher and don't know how. No, it is strictly a society (not just the Jewish community but all of Lexington) that is heavily stratified by class.
We are not wealthy primarily because once I did get my feet under me again, I quickly got sick of playing the status game. My first degree is in architecture, but back in the day that was a big old boys network and though they were happy to hire me to do doc prep, secretarial work & bookkeeping, nobody would hire me as a draftsperson or designer. Disillusioned, I became a stay at home mom for several years. We had one car and no frills. When the kids were all school age, I decided to go back to college and try something different. This was in 2003, and I got a degree in Philosophy with minors in linguistics and religious studies, planning to teach humanities. Well, I graduated in 2007, right as the financial crisis was starting in earnest here and schools cut humanities teachers almost completely out of their programs. Strike two.
So now I decided the world sucks and I need to help make it better, so I became a SJW in my own way, by doing bookkeeping and admin services for small nonprofits and local NGOs. Many of my clients can only pay $10 or $12 an hour, and I wasn't interested in money grubbing anyway. (I was never interested in keeping up with the Goldsteins, another crime.)
So my work brings us to race. I wanted to help with the black lives matter movement. Although I can easily pass for white (my dad was a scot irish non jew) my maternal lines DNA test showed me to be 92% MENA and 8% sub-saharan African, as my grandmother's maternal line came originally from Morocco, apparently. She, my mother and my oldest son am have beautiful olive Mediterranean complexions. My sister and I look like death warmed over, though, and it quickly became obvious that BLM didn't want my help because I was not black enough. (It seems to me they have arrived already at the circular firing squad stage, they are quite willing to shoot down help.)
4/24/16, 10:43 PM
Ahavah said...
On a side note, we live about three blocks from the city homeless shelter, and I often wonder where are the parents, siblings or children? (I doubt seriously all of the homeless are violent drug users...) But someone mentioned most Americans would slam the door and I think they are correct. Americans no longer believe they have any obligations even to their own family if it would inconvenience then in any way.
Anyway, guess which two of my clients completely disrespected my boundaries set forth in the email about not contacting me unless it was an emergency (which in the bookkeeping work would be a nasty-gram from the IRS or the FBI kicking in your door)? 1) the wealthy white lesbian business owner who is also president of a local nonprofit, and 2) the wealthy white male gay judge who likewise is a nonprofit org pres. They are both high up on the local SJW scene.
The lady's org serves in part the undocumented immigrant community, and of course hired a girl who speaks Spanish but is now leaving the org. The girl said to me recently: who decided to do this program? Did anybody ask the Latino community if this is something we want? And thinking of JMG's words I have realized I was caught up in the rescue game. This org needs to raise $150,000 a year min to operate. When I ask myself if that's the best use of that much money for the local community, the answer is definitely no. But the wealthy SJW wants to do it, and she got all her wealthy friends to donate. Some of which I know from shul, people who would hardly give me the time of day, much less invite us to their home. Their concern for the less well to do is an abstract thing to them, that gets their names in newsletters.
So Saturday night we hosted what my friend and I called the Seder of Outcasts, people who regularly attend services but are not invited by the elites. It was partially pot luck, and we all had a good time anyway with Haggadot I borrowed from shul so we could all be on the same page, 16 of us. And I thought to myself: here are the people who really understand and who can adapt to what's coming, even if they can't believe it just yet. The big donors will be paralyzed and perplexed. I have decided to try and disengage from several of my clients and focus on getting my home and garden up to snuff. I can't save the world. It doesn't want to be saved. I may not even be able to save myself.
4/24/16, 10:44 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Alex, yes, just as Ted Cruz has to hire dates.
Cherokee, your friend standing there in front of the lemon tree is, I think, the best single metaphor for today's educated cluelessness I've yet encountered. Thank you.
Nancy, as I argued in a post here a while back, one of the things that sets modern urban life apart from any previous mode of human existence is the nearly complete exclusion of the feedback from nature with which our species evolved. It wouldn't surprise me at all if one result of this is that a very large number of people exposed to that setting simply went gaga.
DaShui, I hope he is. I chose a position on the fringes of contemporary society because that allows me to say absolutely anything I want, but the downside of that is that more respectable voices have to give what I say a signal boost if it's going to have any kind of large scale effect. This last month or so, it does seem as though I'm getting that signal boost!
Philip, thank you for the heads up! When national identities begin to reshape like that, it's a useful warning sign that the nations themselves will follow in due time.
Alexes, granted, but there's another issue that needs to be kept in mind -- the tendency of the privileged to think that they know what the unprivileged need better than the unprivileged do. That way lies a dozen different brands of failure. From my point of view, the privileged need to learn to listen to the unprivileged -- it's something that, by and large, we're not very good at -- and work with them rather than for them. Oh, and remember that not all unprivileged groups are segregated in urban settings; many are segregated in rural ones...
Donald, that seems like a useful first approximation.
Alex Blaidd, hah! Nicely put.
Shane, the South also shared the same economic role as the rest of the global South, as a plantation-economy source of raw materials for factories elsewhere. Knowing that your role in the global economy consists entirely of being exploited for the benefit of rich people in a distant country does tend to encourage a laid-back attitude toward work.
Blueback, did you expect anything else? The US occupied Britain in the early 1940s -- yes, there was a war going on, and the British by and large accepted our overlordship in place of the imminent alternative -- and it's been one of our imperial possessions ever since. Of course the US is going to clear his throat and tell the natives what they can and can't do; the British did exactly the same thing with their overseas possessions back in the day, after all.
4/24/16, 11:24 PM
steve pearson said...
@ Chris, Many years ago I spent quite a bit of time in an isolated cottage in rural Wales. There was a very nice small castle nearby. I became friends with the custodian, who had a very low opinion of academics. The castle was open, but had a covered walkway around the upper story where the arrow slits were. He described two professors from London standing bone dry on the walkway in the pouring rain discussing whether the roof was for aesthetic reasons or to deflect incoming arrows.
As another small contribution to the IQ debate, I had a friend who thought his IQ might be sufficient for Mensa membership and inquired of a member. However, he mistakenly referred to it as menses and, shall we say, did not receive a call back.
4/24/16, 11:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...
respect may no longer be doing anything to earn it...
Pygmycory, I ain't arguing. I know that I don't have the real-world smarts to match my official IQ number.
Nuku, exactly. The rule of law, mutual support among the less privileged, an ethic of responsibility on the part of the more privileged -- those are three immunizations that come to mind. A fourth is transparency, the rule that public issues should be decided in public, not behind closed doors, so that any abuse of privilege is immediately apparent. I'll try to think of others!
Ahavah, thank you for sharing your story! All this corresponds exactly with much that I've seen out here in the goyische world, right up to the rich liberal social justice crusaders who routinely treat their supposed inferiors like crap. These are stories that need to be told. Do I recall correctly, by the way, that a chair is left empty at the Passover seder for Elijah, should he happen to come by? If so, I suspect he's a lot more likely to show up at your Seder for Outcasts than at the posh Seders in the rich part of town.
4/24/16, 11:35 PM
Alex said...
Seder Of Outcasts, I love it. There was a Saturday Seder at the local Reform shul that I considered going to, but I was not feeling well, and frankly, I'd like to wait until the DNA test thingie is done, because I was told *so* many stories... Maybe I'm Armenian by way of Germany? Or ... Italian? I want to think I have a leg to stand on if I show up. The local Reform place is probably pretty much OK, having been founded in 1860 or so and most people are pretty down to earth here in this area. There's always Chabad, too, as we all know.
Home is where when you show up at the door, they have to take you in. I have tons of WASP relatives no doubt, but they'd not lift a finger to help me if I were homeless. On my mom's side, the possibly Jewish side, there was just her and her sister, both gone now. I suspect families dying out is going to be a real thing like in Orlov's collapse-Russia. Well, in Israel, if you are family, they have to take you in. If I were Irish (you can move there if you can prove you are) I'd be skedaddling for there.
In the US, people are kind of disposable. You can be a war hero, an outstanding athlete, any number of things and if you hit hard times, you'll end up homeless. Normal societies don't work this way. In normal societies, families tend to work together and in mine we'd all be doing exceedingly well if we had. But all our socialization was to be against each other, as well as against everyone else. We are becoming the Iks.
4/24/16, 11:55 PM
Shade said...
Why can't we talk about it?
4/24/16, 11:55 PM
Alex said...
4/25/16, 12:09 AM
ed boyle said...
4/25/16, 1:25 AM
Phil Harris said...
Yes. I don't actually know what my IQ was back in the day ;-) but my real education came with my puzzlement on finding people who I had learned to think of as not as 'bright', 'quick', who knew more and were quicker than I was. Cherokee's friend in front of the lemon tree including his faulty book-learning and memory exemplifies perhaps a common talking-head approach to the 'real-world'.
(A certain kind of southern English in my day identified IQ by Class; maybe still does - i.e. they liked to think of IQ as a heritable biological reality and assumed it had been bred for, thus giving a justification for inherited privilege. Some liked to relate it to 'finer' sensibilities and aristocratic inheritance. Bonkers biology: for example, such broad spectrum traits mostly revert toward the mean across generations - see domestic crops and animals - unless there is very heavy & continuous trait-directed selection pressure over many generations, and then there are usually severe penalties to be paid for in other traits . Humans more generally show little if any 'breeding effect' except in the face of malaria and such - though there are lots of known effects on an individual cognition down to early trauma, malnutrition and care-deprivation and so on.)
Is it sensible btw to compare human society with forests? We can love trees and all that, but human oligarchies are something else with their recurrent cultural incidence prevailing very differently under different conditions: granted it is hard to keep them springing up. In our civilisation and similar, they are a dead cert at both micro and macro levels!
I learned recently by co-incidence that large forest trees distribute a few percent of their incremental fixed carbon to nearby trees root systems via those necessary beneficial mycorrhizal networks. Whole systems … eh?
best
Phil H
4/25/16, 4:40 AM
donalfagan said...
https://donalfagan.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/chernobyl-after-thirty-years/
4/25/16, 7:02 AM
James Fauxnom said...
4/25/16, 7:27 AM
David said...
Re the Brexit issue. I used that item as an example just recently. How and where is it our business, I asked, before suggesting that the other person consider how the US public would react if, say, the German Chancellor dropped by to provide us her opinion on how we ought to vote on a national referendum. I find it interesting that people seem quite blind to the double-standard the US sets for its own behavior in the world, but I suppose it is not unexpected for those aspects of empire to be invisible to the core inhabitants of said empire. The invisibility of privilege, again.
4/25/16, 8:17 AM
donalfagan said...
"This dismissive characterization of one of our great presidents is not occurring in a vacuum. Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and undeserved privilege. Meanwhile, race relations are at their worst point in decades."
"Far too many of our most important discussions are being debated emotionally, without full regard for historical facts. The myth of universal white privilege and universal disadvantage among racial minorities has become a mantra, even though white and minority cultures alike vary greatly in their ethnic and geographic origins, in their experiences in the United States and in their educational and financial well-being."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-can-celebrate-harriet-tubman-without-disparaging-andrew-jackson/2016/04/24/2f766160-0894-11e6-a12f-ea5aed7958dc_story.html
There are 1200 comments at the Wash Post. I haven't read them.
4/25/16, 11:05 AM
Erik Buitenhuis said...
4/25/16, 11:35 AM
pygmycory said...
I really like it there, and I've gotten more involved than I was at my previous church. I've made some good friends, and consider myself blessed to go there.
There's a mildly amusing story about how I started going there. I'd just moved cities, and had been thinking that I'd like to get involved in community gardening, and also that I hadn't been happy at my previous Anglican church. There was this church just down the street, and one day I was walking past when I noticed someone building what looked like boxes for raised beds. So I asked him 'is that a raised bed?', and he said that yes, it was.
The next sunday was Easter, and I didn't have a church yet, so I just turned up. I started talking to the pastor, and by the end of the conversation I'd volunteered to run the garden that was being built, since they didn't have anyone and I had some skill with food gardening and the interest. Five years later, I'm still point person for the garden, although this year it looks like there will be more help, which is great.
4/25/16, 12:18 PM
Fred said...
Now all that said, volunteers often create extra projects to do with the people they live with. Those projects rely on the volunteer getting funding on their own and providing all their own man power and materials, but they do happen. This is how villages get water, schools get libraries, and many many children get shoes and tuition paid for school (school isn't free in the third world).
With the Peace Corps each volunteer in each country has a very individual experiences and it is common that volunteers are frustrated by what they can do or accomplish, or the thing they are supposed to be doing seems so worthless in relation to what the people actually need. I would still rank it as a fantastic experience and recommend it to everyone who asks me about it.
4/25/16, 12:31 PM
Fred said...
4/25/16, 12:35 PM
Matt said...
you mentioned in one of your comments the binary possibilities of Sharia and fascism in Europe.
I could imagine how fascism could get a hold, since we have seen it before and have had numerous recent 'scares' where fascists - or at least very right wing populists - seem on the verge of some kind of electoral or popular breakthrough. It only seems to be a matter of time before it happens somewhere.
But I just don't see how the Sharia scenario could come about. What would have to happen for any European country to abandon generations of European law in favour of a legal system associated with a minority of the population, in the face of massive opposition?
It may be that you are talking about a scenario someway down the slope of collapse, where European states cease to function and we see real 'wanderings' on the historic scale. But when I hear this being implied in the short-term, it just seems to be at best ill-informed, at worst inflammatory - see the comments on Snafu-solomon for some good examples. I could even imagine the polarity you express being used to promote fascism as our only balwark against Sharia.
I'm pretty sure you're a million miles away from SNAFU on this, but I'm really puzzled as to how Sharia can look like a real threat from over there.
Cheers,
Matt
4/25/16, 1:51 PM
Mark Gilbert said...
Thank you for an interesting and thought provoking article. It recalled for me a recent diversity training that I attended where we spent a good bit of time looking at the issue of privilege which was quite eye opening. It made many in the group feel like fish raising themselves out of the water and seeing the water for the first time. We might catch glimpses of privilege every once in a while, but we tend to move on and not think about it.
The other thought that I had related to Graves' Spiral Dynamics and the rise of the green "cultural creative" meme which first became prominent late in the 20th century and some say is now a third of western society (or more). This worldview sees a world where everyone is valued, all needs must be considered and anything that smacks of hierarchy is looked on with disdain (even though such a viewpoint is hierarchical in the roots of its thinking). In other words, such individuals tend to think "my (better) viewpoint says that everyone is equal and anything that operates in the world towards inequality is to be fought and destroyed so as to ensure the equality". Such individuals have worked towards civil rights and bend over backwards to ensure they are seen as someone seeking equality and justice and wants to distance themselves as much as possible from being called "racist". These are the people that Bill Maher went on about at the end of his show the other night. Yet, most of these people are able to evolve to such a level of thinking because of this system that created their privilege and advantages in life. If they think too much about privilege, it brings up the system's inherent hierarchy that they run from....only this time, they have no power to change it (if they wanted to).
Thank you for raising the issue. Yes, it is the fringes where real change starts, keep up the good work.
Mark Gilbert
4/25/16, 2:24 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Thanks! It was pretty staggering wasn't it? Feel free to use that example too. Even today, I still have no idea how to respond to such an outrageous claim. I've been wondering for a while now whether people have lost the ability to observe things outside of our urban environments. To have lost that ability is a bit 1984 really as the world becomes much smaller and at the same time exceptionally mediated. Few people seem to seriously wonder why urban environments look like they do for example and are just so repetitive. It can't be a good thing.
Glad I entertained you too! I was feeling a bit cheeky that evening! I reckon it was a worthy tea spit moment. Hehe!!!
Hi Patriciaormsby,
Hehe!!! It was a tea spitter wasn't it? As I was typing it out, I kept thinking to myself: Do I dare type this? And then quickly said to myself: Why not? Ah yes, why not indeed!!! ;-)!
Cheers
Chris
4/25/16, 3:14 PM
Alex said...
Keeping the customs means keeping in the tribe. I have no doubt that if I kept the customs and were in a hard place, if I showed up at my local Chabad house they'd find a place for me - not let me sleep in the street. I might be given a job like doing everyone's laundry, but I'd have a place. And that's the difference between how people traditionally live and our atomized society. If I move to Israel as a Jew, they provide months of Hebrew school, a place to live, job help, all sorts of stuff because that's what you do for a member of your tribe. It's not all milk and honey there but it appears to be a hell of a lot less harsh than life in the US.
The reason I've become so active on here is I'm not sure how much longer I'll be around.
4/25/16, 3:53 PM
Ahavah said...
Yes, we were members of the Reform Temple here in town for a few years, but later switched to the Conservative Synagogue. One big difference is at the Synagogue, you either learn the Hebrew liturgy very quickly or you will have no idea what's going on during the prayers. The Temple services have far more English. But apparently in Lexington, that is not the real reason for the two separate congregations in what is actually a town with a fairly low Jewish population. You see, the immigrants who founded the Temple were German-Western European, and the immigrants who founded the Synagogue were Russian-Eastern European, and they didn't get along.
I often wondered since the early days how the European Union could last, since the two sides are so culturally different. People seemed to think everyone in Eastern Europe just wanted to be Western, when that was never really the case. They wanted western style economic control of their fate, but didn't want the full package of Western culture. It's very much like the strange idea that Middle Eastern people are chomping at the bit to ditch their family and tribal obligations and adopt "democracy" (not real democracy, but the oligarchy backed version of American politics), and Western cultural values (like throwing unwanted relatives even in your immediate family to the wolves, so to speak), and to expose children to a sexualized and violent atmosphere. Ummm, no.
In the last few years I wonder how much longer the United States can last for much the same reasons. Those of us who recognize the lack of value in materialization, the unsustainability of the American standard of living, and the myth of progress are simply worlds apart from those who don't, and I don't think the gap can be bridged by "education." Learning the hard way is now inevitable, because Americans simply * do. not. care. * about others if it means leveling down, as someone above put it. They won't do it.
I refuse to believe people are disposable, so I will always at least be an Economic Justice Warrior, even if the whole PC thing runs completely amok. But there's really not much we can do now. Climate change is honestly past the tipping point. My plan now is to be an island of stability that my friends and family can come to if they want, not to try and educate everyone into sensibility and get them to change. It just doesn't work.
4/25/16, 4:33 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
Honestly, the bashing of Andrew Jackson every time the change comes up strikes me as far too self-congratulatory. It's salary class whites pretending we're doing something to overcome our racist past while doing nothing of any real significance. I can't see how Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill -- however deserving she may be -- is going to help minority Americans who can't find steady work or a decent place to live.
It's the Rescue Game at work, again.
4/25/16, 4:52 PM
YCS said...
I thought this video recently put up by a bunch of Australian comedians perfectly sums up the situation.
Neel Kolhatkar has been really at the narrative recently, and has done quite a good job of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOMpxsiUg2Q
YCS
4/25/16, 11:31 PM
Alex said...
Ahavah - Yes, if I am Jewish in fact, I'll work on learning Hebrew. I always thought the letters looked cool since I was little, and I know it's a very different language than English. But I think I could hack it OK. My understanding is that Reform was a pretty radical thing, in fact if one documentary I watched is correct, some Reform temples were even taking their Shabbat on Sunday. The idea was to blend in better in the new country. But there's always that not-so-fine line, in that when you blend in too well, you lose your identity.
James M. Jensen II - Frankly I'd rather see scientists and mathematicians and intellectuals on our money, as apparently Austria and perhaps some other places have. Seeing Leonhard Euler on a bill was pretty amazing. I don't mind seeing Franklin on our money as he *was* a scientist, engineer, statesman, humanist, etc.
4/26/16, 12:40 AM
. said...
The advocates of sharia law on the other hand suffer from no such disconnection from reality because they don’t seek to separate politics from law in the first place. That gap in understanding is part of the reason why Europeans are facing fascism or sharia. Those two are the only ideologies at present whose advocates are unified by the fundamentals underlying any rule of law – and in particular the willingness to enforce at any cost. It’s not that Europeans will choose to abandon one system and adopt another (although mass migration and demographics in, say, France, will ensure there’s an element of that – see the demographics of the under-5’s there). It’s that they will continue as they are now to remain passive and treat any talk of a threat as racist scaremongering or a potential future problem that they can put off thinking about.
A motivated minority that is unified and understands power is all it ever takes to transform a society – this is as true for fascists (who are a minority and always were) as it is for sharia supporters (who are also a minority). The only reason a double standard is applied where fascism is seen as a legitimate danger while sharia is not is that one is the preserve of a religious minority. That’s not rational and is a kind of racism of lower expectations.
It only takes one extremist who kills an Ahmadi for claiming to be a prophet to have a chilling effect on the next would-be self-proclaimed prophet – particularly from that religion. Muslims beaten on the street for drinking will think twice before drinking in public again. The liberal Muslim who’s been campaigning against the extremists in Glasgow mosque has received death threats for that. That will very effectively silence others who might speak out. Women in Germany, Sweden and Austria are already changing their behaviour ‘voluntarily’, just as, say, Egyptian women do, by covering up, segregating and avoiding public spaces – in accordance with sharia-related norms. It's already happening.
Mallow
4/26/16, 3:22 AM
. said...
Vigilante enforcement will be quite sufficient to impose a theocracy as long as that attitude persists among the majority of the population. That’s how the revolution in Iran happened, it’s how it happens everywhere. Although civil war in Europe is the most likely option to start with.
Most news from Germany and Austria is not being translated into English so English speakers have little idea of the reality there. Wealthier people are also insulated because they can generally avoid having refugee centres placed in their neighbourhoods, they use private schools and don’t rely on public transport etc. Observing the success of the AfD and FPO is a fair indication of what’s happening – bearing in mind that these are two countries that have long resisted being sucked back towards fascism. They didn’t all turn racist/fascist overnight. People who formerly voted left are now voting for the only parties that are willing to face reality.
This is the response I got from (I think) a dutch guy when I said the success of the FPO was related to the problems with immigration and the response to them:
“there are no real problems related to immigration in Austria, there are real problems related to racism and capitalism in Austria. and if you claim otherwise, yes you are a racist. no tears for volkisch krauts. been there, done that, seen the deathcamps.”
That comment is pretty much the standard centre and left position – and it’s why the fascist will win.
Mallow. (sorry have gotten long-winded on this topic!)
4/26/16, 3:22 AM
Shane W said...
I pretty much wanted to second what Ahavah was saying (odd that we have similar experiences coming from the same city) regarding liberal activism & burnout/disillusion. I may have some to add later...
4/26/16, 4:07 AM
donalfagan said...
I posted that Webb opinion because he was denying the existence of white privilege, not to pile on Old Hickory.
As another example of lack of self awareness, some facebooker claimed that who is pictured on paper bills doesn't matter because we all use debit cards now. I'm betting that a lot of people still use cash, especially those in the gray markets.
4/26/16, 5:13 AM
Justin Patrick Moore said...
"Between 1970 and 1974 ten million Americans abandoned the city, the commercialism, and all the inauthentic bourgeois comforts of the Eisenhower-era America of their parents. Instead, they went back to the land. It was the only time in modern history that urbanization has gone into reverse. Kate Daloz follows the dreams and ideals of a small group of back-to-the-landers to tell the story of a nationwide movement and moment. She shows how the faltering, hopeful, but impractical impulses of that first generation sowed the seeds for the organic farming movement and the transformation of American agriculture and food tastes. In the Myrtle Hill commune and neighboring Entropy Acres, high-minded ideas of communal living and shared decision-making crash headlong into the realities of brutal Northern weather and the colossal inconvenience of having no plumbing or electricity. Nature, it turns out, is not always a generous or provident host--frosts are hard, snowfalls smother roads, and small wood fires do not heat imperfectly insulated geodesic domes. Group living turns out to be harder than expected, too. Being free to do what you want and set your own rules leads to some unexpected limitations: once the group starts growing a little marijuana they can no longer call on the protection of the law, especially against a rogue member of a nearby community. For some of the group, the lifestyle is truly a saving grace; they credit it with their survival. For others, it is a prison sentence"
4/26/16, 6:01 AM
Ahavah said...
You are not wrong. Assimilation is the triumph of corrupt and selfish Western values over traditional values, and it affects all sorts of people, not just Jews. The younger generations growing up in America really don't see that there's anything wrong with Western culture because they've never really known anything else. It doesn't even occur to them that other people are amazed and even a bit horrified at the callousness of society in the West. It's not just a lack of noblesse oblige, but in fact NO level of society now has any idea that they have our should have responsibilities and obligations for anyone but themselves. Even the SJWs of America are for the most part not willing to do what it takes to really change things, which is one point of this week's ADR post. And if the wealthy will not lead by example, why should anyone's else makes any changes to their lifestyle? At that point it becomes obvious that austerity is only for the poorer classes, not the wealthy. Resentment keeps anything from really changing.
It's the same with assimilation. They ask: Why shouldn't we go shopping on Shabbat? They don't believe in a personal version of YHVH or El Shaddai who pays attention to what they do or don't do, much less who may call them to account for it someday. And in the age of multiculturalism they don't see that the old cultural Jewish way has any more value than any other way. Judaism had become a glorified social club, yes even the ultra Orthodox.
Did you know is that the Federation used to supply a local doctor for the community, and a lawyer? Give pensions to widows and orphans? Provide a library, hook up young people with apprenticeships, help with the costs of weddings, arrange burials... Jews used to look after our own, but now we don't. Federations all over the country are basically a joke now. Even the "old guard," boomers, never consider that the Federations should still be doing these things or will ever need to do so in the future. The Western fend-for-yourself culture (and, ironically, the govt will take care of the poor and elderly mindset) is so taken for granted nobody questions it. Our Federation actually refers people to Catholic social services if their situation is dire. It's shameful. American Jewish communities can't survive for the same reason American communities can't survive - by the time they realize the errors or their ways it will be too little too late. If they realize it at all. I'm not holding my breath on that. American culture in every form is a monstrosity that needs to die: materialism, consumerism, selfishness, arrogance, exploitation of others... And almost no redeeming qualities. But from the inside, everybody thinks it's normal and ok.
4/26/16, 6:11 AM
Sylvia Rissell said...
If i recall correctly, Australia has its own native citrus... "Finger limes", which are small, oblong and purple.
I dont doubt that the round grocery store orange gets imported, but there are so many citrus varieties that dont make it to the supermarket.
4/26/16, 6:24 AM
Mister Roboto said...
4/26/16, 6:55 AM
Juhana said...
I have to interact with huge immigrant population from this latest, ongoing Völkerwanderung (comparatively huge, when compared to size of local, borough-level infrastructure) from Middle East almost every day, and Sharia future does not look so far-fetched from my point of view. And I mean they live 200 meters away from my workplace, and inside familiar hood around that workplace. Let's just say that peaceful coexistence is not going so well. There are individual and noble exceptions, but when you look population level not individuals, this is just not going to work. That's just fact, there is no hatred or prejudice in work here. When observing reality, true reality around me, I see it JUST DOES NOT WORK.
It is always delightful to hear denouncements of "islamophobia" from touchy suburbs of salary class, where almost claustrophobically homogenous population of whitey white liberals preaches Diversity (tm), ideology imported from US and installed no matter what, for unwashed proles living in truly diverse hoods. So called "far right" in Europe is just perfectly healthy expression of will to survive from native blue-collar populations, nothing more. Any amount of word-bending from touchy liberal point of view does not change that. Self protection against violent invasion is no extremism.
There is little video clip for you, readers of AR. Situation in my part of Scandinavia is not this bad, but it still is quite bad.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-25/look-inside-europes-largest-foreigner-ghetto
4/26/16, 11:44 AM
Juhana said...
For these new, Mohammedan newcomers only conjunctive is football, and most fundamentalist disciples of faith try to forbid even that. There was one football match between natives and Mohammedans last summer, and some tentative connections made through that hobby afterwards, but they are too fragile to truly integrate two antagonistic populations into one whole.
4/26/16, 12:23 PM
Emmanuel Goldstein said...
4/26/16, 2:00 PM
Nancy Sutton said...
4/26/16, 2:07 PM
Ahavah said...
Don't worry, it IS a confusing labyrinth of competing interests, and very hard to navigate.
Here's a thing that might help: "Causes" with a capital C rise and wane - there is a hierarchy of causes, some on the way up, some on the way down. Society gets burned out on various causes eventually, and they start to lose status in the hierarchy even if they have great merit. It's called donor fatigue, among other things. Problems that seem unsolvable eventually aren't just because people get tired of them, not because they were never unsolvable in the first place.
For a while now, the LGBT community has been "on top," that is, their cause has attracted more support, power and money than some other social justice causes. Now that gay marriage is the law of the land, though, other causes are vying for the top position. The pushback against private businesses having to accept serving gays is not going to get as much support because deep down, it's an uncomfortable concept. Think about it: I do bookkeeping and annual filings for nonprofits. What if the KKK wanted me to work for them? What if a group that opposed women's rights, or rights for religious minorities, wanted to hire me? Am I obligated to work for them? Even die hard progressives realize the knife cuts both ways, and when push comes to shove, a business that doesn't have government contracts should be free to choose their own clients. So that "cause" is not going to make it, frankly. There is a looming power and money void as the LGBT community loses their "top dog" position. The vultures are starting to circle.
At one point, civil rights for people of color was at the top, and is now fighting to be back there again. So they, not necessarily consciously mind you, are framing the conversation that way - that Black Lives Matter is *more important* than other causes and fairnesses. And events like Ferguson give credence to this view, because while some people are ambivalent about the idea of being forced to do business with people working actively against their ideals, nobody want to be oppressed and exploited by the police for fun and profit, or stripped of their right to peaceable assembly and protest, or shot in the back for no apparent reason. And as more and more of the middle class sinks to near poverty, they start to experience the police not as friendly helpers but as a bloody nuisance. The BLM leaders sense this, that their Cause-wth-a-capital-C can rise to the top, but whether they can pull it off remains to be seen.
It will depend in part on whether or not other Causes can game their way to the top, which in turn depends on a lot of things nobody has real control over, like burnings of mosques or bombings of abortion clinics, etc. It's all media driven. Right now there's a good chance voter disenfranchisement may be the next hot thing, given all the super-delegates and irregularities in the state primaries. Let the games begin. At least it's new and different.
Yes, folks, this is a horribly cynical view - sorry about that, but money and power are big motivators even if a cause is in fact good and just. And it takes, regrettably, savvy SJWs to get enough of either for their cause to make progress.
As for the ordinary person trying to navitage these waters, it seems as if political correctness has already run amok, and maybe it has. If so, it's the end of the SJW industry, so expect them to get even more shrill as the shrinking pie and resource depletion makes the pot smaller and smaller. Everybody will insist their cause is the most just and the most worthy.
Hope this helps a bit.
4/26/16, 2:18 PM
Wendy said...
I know you're busy, but you've indicated in the past that such a header will prevent posts from inadvertent publication. Is this still true?
4/26/16, 2:48 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
"I posted that Webb opinion because he was denying the existence of white privilege, not to pile on Old Hickory."
Fair enough! I've go no principled objection to Harriet Tubman, and feel no real need to defend Jackson from criticism. What irks me is simply the self-congratulation.
I have to wonder how much of the objection to Harriet Tubman is actually aesthetic: the existing images of her are frankly pretty ugly by modern standards, and for a woman that's going to be a bigger deal than for a man. Perhaps people are simply too ashamed to acknowledge that they don't want her face on the $20 because they don't like looking at it?
If we had a time-machine, it'd be interesting to go back and see what would happen if Frederick Douglass or a more conventionally-attractive woman had been suggested.
Alex,
"Frankly I'd rather see scientists and mathematicians and intellectuals on our money, as apparently Austria and perhaps some other places have."
I think that'd be great, too. George Washington Carver jumps immediately to mind as a great candidate.
4/26/16, 3:00 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
The subtext behind the assertion was ignorance and marketing - pure and simple. Back in those days, Californian oranges were being dumped on the Australian market at what appeared to be below cost. And I recall that the local citrus growers (and they produce huge volumes of fruit) had to end up feeding their crops to cows. The photos of that stuck in my mind as they left quite the impression. It was very wrong.
Anyway, here is an article from way back in 2005 about the unfolding disaster for local citrus growers (and it mentions the cows): Orange growers summon emergency talks.
Oranges aren't the only thing that gets dumped on the markets down here. Cars, other manufactured goods, ultra cheap services. You name it. The one that worries me the most is the US dollars being dumped here in a game that looks an awful lot like economic warfare to me. The empire appears to me to be attacked from the allies / periphery and we are getting weaker with each year that we avoid making the hard choices that have to be made.
Hi Alex,
I need a bit of time to consider your many questions.
Cheers
Chris
4/26/16, 3:17 PM
Alex said...
I had a friend who's Catholic and when he moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles his new parish priest told him something like "try not to be surprised but this is the coldest-hearted place you'll ever see". He founded, or helped found, the "Single Ski Club" to try to find a partner; you had to be single to be a full member, once you paired up you couldn't be a full member any more LOL.
As mentioned, have a downturn in life and your own family will slam the door in your face, it's the American way.
You know, maybe this is what's attractive about radical Islam to young people, the idea that you've now got a real family, who've got your back no matter what?
4/26/16, 3:47 PM
Alex said...
This guy is probably the most American American in America. Meanwhile we have enough empty houses to give 4 to each homeless person.
4/26/16, 4:08 PM
Matt said...
you don't know the first thing about me or where I live, but are happy to make assumptions and cast aspersions. You also don't appear to have read my comments with any care. Nothing you have said shows a plausible mechanism by which a European nation adopts Sharia law. Are you seriously suggesting that it wouldn't generate massive opposition? I would suggest that the reason you are not seeing such opposition is that most people know it isn't a serious prospect, however troubling individual incidents or "ghettos" might be.
Mallow,
"The only reason a double standard is applied where fascism is seen as a legitimate danger while sharia is not is that one is the preserve of a religious minority."
I don't think this is a double standard, but clearly people do assess the possibilities differently. And why not? Surely the fact that Sharia is associated with a religious minority is an important factor. What is the historical precedent for the legal system of a low-status and relatively small minority in a nation state becoming the prevailing framework of law, in the face of the opposition of the majority?
Matt
4/26/16, 5:28 PM
. said...
Your question presupposes many things which are or soon will be simply incorrect.
Sharia is not merely a legal system but a political system also. Law follows power, not the other way around. It’s not what’s written in some book, it’s what’s actually enforced.
States are not the only entities which can enforce legal systems.
Whether Muslims are low status or not depends on which system of privilege you’re standing in.
After the demographic change and mass migrations that are already baked in the cake they will not be a small minority.
Nation states may be the incorrect scale at which to view the issue since many are already fracturing.
The majority is not opposing the process at its current relatively small scale. There are no grounds to presume that it will do so when it increases in scale and therefore becomes even more risky to oppose it.
Finally, how troubling individual incidents are right now depends on your own privilege status – they’re not minor for Ahmadis in the UK, apostates, the Hindus of Germany, outspoken liberal Muslims or the Jews of France. They’re literally lethally troubling for many of them. Those of us less personally threatened by it have a responsibility to recognize that and as a society to do something constructive about it.
German speakers have turned the term ‘Einzelfall’ (one off) into a standard sarcastic response as every incident is reported as such by their media. Black humour. They’re well aware that such ‘individual incidents’ are linked but the link is taboo.
Mallow.
4/26/16, 9:15 PM
Juhana said...
Answer to this is so obvious I did not see any reason to stress it in my previous comment. Violence. That's the mechanism. Use of it and threat of it. United, militant minority can take and has taken power from passive majority, even if they are looked down by establishment as inferiors. One could say that they can take power especially as they are seen as "low-status minority", as they are not taken seriously enough soon enough. Examples?
Roman empire after winter of 406-7 AD, when Germanic tribes poured over frozen Rhine, as story goes. Germanic people were low status, used mainly as mercenaries in auxiliary forces or slaves after "peace keeping campaigns" beyond empire's borders. Vast military machine of Rome was very slow to react to this invasion, because it was seen more as massive cattle raid than serious invasion. Top brass continued to fight among themselves for positions in court of Ravenna, as the provinces were slowly lost. Future belonged to Germanic warbands, definitely small minority, definitely low status, among heavily Romanized natives.
Spain after 709 AD, when church opposed new king Womba for throne of Visigothic Spain. Clergy backed more obedient lord Roderick. Roderick's army defeated Womba, creating king Rod in post-Roman, Catholic Andalusia. Womba's friends looked desperately for someone to help them. The Muslims were just wrapping up their conquest of (Christian) North Africa, only a few miles away from Andalusia. They were small warbands among massive majority population of Christians. Romanized Visigoths saw them as illiterate unwashed nomads. Nothing to fear there, right? A few goths slipped across the straits and invited the Arabs to Spain, even arranging the ships for them. They were viewed as small, low-status minority of mercenaries, who would help with dirty work and be paid off. In 711, an Arab and Berber force, led by Tariq Ibn Ziyad, crossed to Spain's great rock that now bears his name, Gibraltar (Jebel al Tariq, rock of Tariq). After they had destroyed king Rod's army in battle of Lagunas de Janda, they went after the friendly Goths too, those using them as "low status minority doing dirty work for them". In 756 AD, Abdar Rahman, last of Umayyads, became emir (commander) of all Spain. Low status minority had taken massive majority of Christians and subjugated them, molding form of government into theocracy ruled by tiny minority, in span of one lifetime.
History belong to those who have strength and will to use it, not to the majorities. As species we have not evolved a bit from those incidents I described. Technology is different, all the rest has remained same. There is nothing new under the sun. It can and will happen again.
4/26/16, 10:25 PM
flute said...
http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/nensmeng/enviro-compute/posts/2014/10/20/enviro-compute/
"Dirty Bits: An Environmental History of Computing"
4/27/16, 1:15 AM
Shane W said...
4/27/16, 4:40 AM
Jay Moses said...
this is an inquiry off topic, but responsive to a comment of yours. you described yourself as a "burkean conservative" which, following professor stanlis (Edmund burke and the natural law), i take to mean a conservatism grounded in the religious conviction that human institutions should be based on natural law as understood in the christian tradition. i am curious as to how this approach to social governance arises from a pagan tradition. i do not, as isaiah berlin did, accuse paganism of undermining all moral absolutes and opening a path for totalitarian regimes. however, i am unclear what neo-paganism has that is comparable to the certain, if flawed, moral guidance of christianity. this is particularly the case since, as your essay above points out, there exists such a diversity of views among pagan groups today.
4/27/16, 1:10 PM
Matt said...
in my original comment I made it clear, I think, that all sorts of things are possible as we get further down the slope of decline, and certainly I think that makes more of analogy with 5th century Rome.
What I am questioning is the meme that a muslim takeover is somehow imminent, and that the movements of refugees and migrants we are currently experiencing is an 'invasion' of the sort you (Juhana) are describing in your historical scenarios.
I am not claiming to have the answers, and I admit I am struggling to understand how things are going to pan out in the near to medium future in Europe and the UK. But I am wary of seeing a slow collapse narrative bolstering the hostilities of the unsavoury characters who wish nothing but harm to the migrants and refugees who live among us.
Matt
4/27/16, 1:48 PM
sgage said...
"FWIW, I remember seeing Australian oranges in the supermarket in Calif. a few years back"
You must be mis-remembering, because everyone knows that citrus can't grow in Australia. Right Chris? :-)
4/27/16, 1:50 PM
Vicky K said...
My daughter had no African heritage on her test. So she is of the generation where the signal has been lost. Statistically it is likely an indication of the degree of separation from her ancestor.
Some of the people that have taken the tests include a photo with their test. People who are most likely related to me (it is statistically derived) are generally recognizable as European, but a number of the photos show persons that are generally recognized as having African heritage. Most of them show mixed heritage in their DNA profiles. These people are as closely related to me as any other 4th or 5th cousin. It is also likely that we do not necessarily share my African ancestor as our common ancestor/s.
So the family story about Native American heritage may have been a ruse to cover that embarrassing fact of a "bit" of Negro in our background. I am rather sure that my grandmother was completely unaware of the subterfuge and was just repeating the family tale. The question is, why even talk about heritage that is an underclass that you are distancing yourself from? I am guessing that Native American was less undesirable than Black when the cover-up was started.
4/27/16, 3:25 PM
latheChuck said...
Sometimes what looks like foolishness is just missunderstanding the context of the fool.
4/27/16, 4:21 PM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Dear JMG, Ahavah, and others discussing Judaism last week:
Thanks so much for illuminating in your several ways the Jewish theology of concern-for-the-weak (concern for the anawim), partly in the context of a Seder for the poor.
I keep trying to learn more about Judaica, while recognizing that I am unlikely to convert away from Catholicism.
To facilitate my various studies in various fields, I construct various imaginary schools.
When pondering the Home of the Brave, I make occasional inner reference to the "three-year Master's program at the Tallahassee Swampwater Junior Training College".
I also quite often picture to myself, in my inner world, those twin institutions far to the east of Estonia, indeed on the scarier side of the Urals - I will name them here in Estonian and English, without trying to write out their names po-Russki - on the one hand the grubby, impoverished Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut (the "Alexander Stepanovich Popov Institute for Heroic Radio"; this is useful when I try to make progress in ham radio and physics-of-radio); and on the other hand the equally grubby, equally impoverished Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsialistliku matemaatika instituut (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute for Socialist Mathematics").
The latter school has an anthem on YouTube, by Tom Lehrer, locatable in a YouTube search under "Tom Lehrer Lobachevsky song". Or, alternatively, the browser can be pointed directly to, say, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXlfXirQF3A.
Today I seek a bit of help.
Since I am learning Biblical Hebrew, and since I am trying also in other ways to get informed about Judaica, and since I have to face the reality that I am unlikely to convert to Judaism, I need a very particular kind of help. I need a specialized facility. What I need is, concretely, The ****BLANK**** Institution for the Incurably Goyische.
The term "goyische" I picked up, identifying it as a Winner, from a JMG ADR posting timestamped "4/24/16, 11:35 PM".
But what, now, has to replace "****BLANK****"? "The Mel Brooks Institution for the Incurably Goyische" is not quite right; "The Golda Meir Institution for the Incurably Goyische" is not quite right; I'm stuck.
Anyone who can solve this problem will be publicly thanked on here on ADR with a public conferral of that deep virtual Socialist honour, the virtual tööpunalipp (the Red Banner of Labour), in a brief but decorous virtual ceremony in the virtual foyer of the Alexander Stepanovich Popov Institute of Heroic Radio.
I will check this blog until just after UTC=20160501T235959Z (that's Sunday May 1, International Workers' Day), and will some minutes or hours after that post to ADR, either announcing that no properly worthy winner has emerged or awarding the tööpunalipp.
Tom
(in Estonian diaspora, Canada)
4/27/16, 9:22 PM
Chris Travers said...
One of the difficulties in talking about privilege is it is not all or nothing. It isn't about a seat at the table of decision making. It is a question of which seat at which table. Here's an example I like to bring up: Can we talk about female privilege? After all if privilege is invisible to the privileged, can it go the other way?
Now that seems like heresy but in fact we can. Women have, as far as I can tell, always enjoyed something of a privileged role in relation to family and culture. In a pre-industrial economy, where most economic production occurred at home, that privilege was probably more developed than it is today (and usually it is hidden but see Chris Faraone's "Ancient Greek Love Magic" for a discussion of hidden aspects of gender in ancient Greece). With the rise of industrialization and the fall of the house and home as the seat of economic production, however, this has been eroded and in fact one could argue (quite successfully) that large portions of male privilege follow rather directly from female privilege. In a corporate economy, the reproductive privileges of women are liabilities for employers, for example.
I am, btw, not the only one who has noticed this. Volumes have been written by feminists who see women's privileged place in the family as a source of hindrance in the economy and this gets to one of the problems with the modern economy, namely that there are structural imbalances and a deep opportunity gap for women (something equal pay for equal work laws will never solve). But we aren't allowed to talk about female privilege because, as much as it might allow a larger, frank discussion over economic justice for women, it also comes across as denying many women what they want. After all, if we were to judge courts by whether they awarded custody to the father 50% of the time when the parents had never been married, women would be up in arms. But this has real economic implications that we can therefore never talk about. Men's Rights movements are one extremely simplistic response, but they fail to note that the implications of their agenda are not ones most men or most women should want.
This is actually one reason why I dislike the way privilege is usually talked about. The division isn't just qualitative but also quantitative and understanding how they fit together is often more important than who has more. I.e. the qualitative divisions are often more important than the quantitative ones.
A better framing is that there are social divisions and that people live in bubbles and cannot usually see over social walls. Over time, if we take on liminal experiences, we can learn to see over them incompletely. But we can never really see over them completely. For example, a transgender woman (born male) never gets rid of all aspects of "male privilege" and therefore never has to worry that an ill-timed pregnancy will destroy her career.
4/28/16, 2:40 AM
Chris Travers said...
In particular, it has been many centuries since there was a central authority of Islam that all Muslims accepted, and Sharia law is a decentralized, poly-state system. This means it has more in common with medieval Icelandic law in application than it does with popular notions of it.
For this reason what Sharia law means, and the relationship between Sharia institutions and civil institutions varies greatly from one place to another. I see no reason to expect that Sharia will be adopted as a state-backed legal system in Europe (as an arbitration/contract system among Muslims, that is a very different matter however).
4/28/16, 5:31 AM
Chris Travers said...
I see three aspects to the problem that are not well discussed generally. The first of course is the extent to which we really should blame US policies for the crisis.
The second however is that the immigrants bring with them a view of a less industrial, more family-oriented economy. Failure to appreciate this however means that this great gift is squandered and Europe doesn't break its dependency on outsourcing childbirth and childrearing (via immigration).
The third is that this area is fraught with moral hazards. Europeans don't want to hold the US responsible. But similarly there are huge structural problems being exposed in the EU, where Greece is not given a bailout but instead told they must effectively become Europe's refugee camp and self-financed border guard. This sort of arrangement could be made to sort of work while the economies were lifting everyone up, but now that is no longer the case and I think the EU is starting to tear itself apart.
I am sure we will see more of this as the long decline progresses.
4/28/16, 5:45 AM
. said...
Look at Rome at the time when the Goths were given permission to cross the Danube and translate it into modern terms (e.g. recruits for army = cheap labour):
“In the summer of 376, a massive number of Goths arrived on the Danube River, the border of the Roman Empire, requesting asylum from the Huns.[3] They came in two distinct groups: the Thervings led by Fritigernand Alavivus, and the Greuthungi led by Alatheus and Saphrax.[4] Eunapius states their number as 200,000 including civilians, but Peter Heather estimates that the Thervings may have had only 10,000 warriors and 50,000 people in total, with the Greuthungi about the same size.
Ancient sources are unanimous that Valens was pleased at the appearance of the Goths, as it offered the opportunity of new soldiers at low cost…This was not the first time barbarian tribes had been settled within the Roman Empire. The usual course was that some would be recruited into the army and the rest would be broken up into small groups and resettled across the Empire at the Emperor's discretion. This would keep them from posing a unified threat and assimilate into the greater Roman population. The agreement differed with the Thervings by allowing them to choose the place of their settlement, Thrace, and allowed them to remain as one large group. During the negotiations, the Thervings also expressed a willingness to convert to Christianity. As for the Greuthungi, Roman army and naval forces blocked the river and denied them entry.[11]
The Thervings were probably allowed to cross at or near the fortress of Durostorum.[12] They were ferried by the Romans in boats, rafts, and in hollowed tree-trunks, and "diligent care was taken that no future destroyer of the Roman state should be left behind, even if he were smitten by a fatal disease," according to Ammianus Marcellinus. Even so, the river swelled with rain and a good many drowned.[13] It is usually supposed that the Goths were to have their weapons confiscated, but the Romans in charge accepted bribes to allow the Goths to retain their weapons, or perhaps due to there being so many Goths and so few Roman soldiers, not all of them could be adequately checked.[n 1][14][15] The Romans placed the Thervings along southern bank of the Danube in Lower Moesia as they waited for the land allocations to begin.[16] In the interim, the Roman state was to provide them food.”
Mallow
4/28/16, 12:45 PM
. said...
“I am wary of seeing a slow collapse narrative bolstering the hostilities of the unsavoury characters who wish nothing but harm to the migrants and refugees who live among us.”
You don’t have to see it that way and you don’t need to see it as an ‘invasion’. The Goths were not ‘bad people’ or evil invaders or somehow inferior to the Romans. They simply had interests that conflicted with those of the local Roman peasants. It happens. And you don’t have to see it as a takeover – it’s a process of cultural change which you can either support or oppose. It’s not imminent in the sense of apocalyptic collapse and nor is it something that may happen in some vague future time. It’s just a trend that’s happening now and is likely to continue. Like most other processes in decline.
Many of those opposing the current migration don’t actually simply wish harm to refugees. There are very few who are motivated by pure racism and xenophobia. You’re creating a caricature of evilly evilness for its own sake.
It’s perfectly possible to recognize the parallels here and make some difficult decisions without wishing harm to anyone. And indeed to actively try to minimize any harm in dealing with it. But that must include recognizing that the interests of Roman peasants on the far side of the Danube conflicted with those of the Goths seeking to cross.
You’re engaging in a kind of motivated reasoning if you don’t mind my saying so. It’s very common at the moment. It’s a kind of consequentialist ethic along the lines of ‘If this were true and said openly, it could be used by bad people to do bad things, so I’m going to find reasons for it to not be true or at least avoid expressing it openly.’ The accuracy or otherwise of a risk assessment – facts, truth – needs to come first. Then you look at the potential consequences of who might use it for what and deal with that.
None of us can control what unsavoury characters will or won’t do. But if you’re going to control you, and thereby be able to contribute constructively, you need to establish truth for yourself first and independently of how others might react to it. What I’m saying is don’t choose your memes based on opposition to what, say, Juhana says, or what some unknown unsavoury characters might say. There are more than two narratives to choose from.
Mallow
4/28/16, 12:45 PM
. said...
“The second however is that the immigrants bring with them a view of a less industrial, more family-oriented economy. Failure to appreciate this however means that this great gift is squandered and Europe doesn't break its dependency on outsourcing childbirth and childrearing (via immigration).”
Whether this is a gift, or a great one, is very much a matter of values. It’s not failure to appreciate it as an objective good that’s the problem. It’s that most Europeans don’t consider that to be an objective good. Because what you call a family-oriented economy is, in this case, inextricably linked to a position for women that most of us do not wish to adopt.
On sharia, that’s just not very accurate. There is no one central authority, yes. But there are only a few main schools of jurisprudence to which most Muslims subscribe. And polls show that most Muslims in fact believe that there is only one valid interpretation of sharia (that interpretation of course varies).
The lack of a single authority doesn’t necessarily imply anything about the relationship between sharia systems and civil law systems. Why that varies from place to place has rather more to do with the politics of each area.
At present in the UK sharia courts don’t simply deal with contract/arbitration matters among Muslims. They deal with family law and inheritance rights to a large extent. They discriminate massively against women, the ‘voluntariness’ of whose participation is doubtful. It deals with divorce, domestic violence, custody etc. In a manner that breaches human rights, as determined by the European Court of Justice which has found that sharia law (they clearly were able to define it) is incompatible with democracy and human rights.
As for it becoming a state-backed system – we really need to get past the idea that a ‘state’ is the thing that enforces law and that societies ‘adopt’ laws as some kind of active, deliberate decision. It can work that way but it’s by no means inevitable. As Juhana pretty much said, ultimately power comes from the barrel of a gun. That’s the world we’re moving into, but it’s a world that was never far below the surface to begin with.
What no one seems to want to hear is that the process is already happening. Jews are refraining from wearing their religious symbols (the prayer cap thing) in public in certain areas for fear of attack – this reflects an interpretation of sharia under which dhimmis may not display their religious symbols.
Women in some parts are covering up more and avoiding travelling alone for fear of harassment – this reflects the sharia-related view of women being required to cover their skin to protect their ‘honour’.
That is how cultural change happens, how politics changes, and how law changes. It makes absolutely no difference to those people that the ‘state-backed law’ theoretically remains the same. When the facts on the ground change, the law has changed.
Mallow.
4/28/16, 1:11 PM
Bill Man said...
I don't buy into the argument made by some that I deserve not to be gunned down by police because I am white, but black males do deserved to be gunned down because they are black. To me privilege is shown by how the extremely wealthy get away with committing billions to trillions of dollars of economic damages or how the government agents and leaders get away with kidnapping, torturing and even murdering innocent civilians with no accountability. Being treated innocent before guilty is I thought supposed to a right for all, not a privilege. The privilege argument lets those most guilty of injustice off the hook by suggesting that the maltreatment of minorities is supposed to be the natural state of affairs for the majority. If fairness and justice are in fact only privileges, then inflicting greater injustice and inequality on a larger proportion of the masses is the easiest cure.
5/2/16, 8:03 AM
thymia10 said...
5/16/16, 9:59 AM
Multi-Mode said...
They speak of privilege as it relates to equality, but the opposite of privilege is not equality; its oppression and subjugation. Are we really fighting for a world where we're all equally oppressed? Increasingly it seems that we appeal to Central authority to control and subjugate our fellow man, but isn't the subjugation and disempowerment of the individuals the very root of this debate?
You speak of Starhawking, but let us remember privilege is also a go to ad hominem attack used today. "Of course that's what a white male would think". These personal attacks lead to many reasonable individuals avoiding debate. When the middle ground argument loses its voice; We're left with polarized extremists who care more about winning then seeing the right thing done.
I think that by and large individuals generally have the moral capacity that they can afford to have. (Even a raw vegan can't afford to be compassionate to the lettuce patch). Trying to suppress the privilege of a downwardly mobile working class may work for awhile but eventually it becomes a stranglehold and they become dis-empowered themselves. This is only going to multiply racial tensions, segregate/tribalize our communities and will likely undo years of social progress in the other direction.
In short we can't smash the faces of pretty people to ensure they don't do better in sales negotiations.
5/20/16, 5:05 PM