Maverick Philosopher

The Insanity of the Left: Reparations

For California 'residents.' Given that California is a sanctuary state, those 'residents' will include 'black' illegal aliens. There is a bit of a problem with that.

Should those who reside illegally in the U. S. pay reparations to blacks?  Why not? Don't the illegals benefit from the putative legacy of slavery like everyone else?  On the  other hand, if you think that only the  descendants of slave holders should pay reparations, then we citizens who are are not descended from slave holders are off the hook. None of my ancestors held slaves. Hell, some of them probably were slaves themselves, members of the Spartacus rebellion who ended up crucified along the Via Appia.  

And what about the blacks who are descended from blacks who held slaves? Do they get reparations too? And who is black anyway? Rachel Dolezal?  If race is just a social construct, can I re-identify as black and get in on the goodies? If I can identify as a girl and then compete in an all-female athletic event, why can't I identify as black?

There will never be black reparations for slavery. The idea is just too incoherent for implementation. And it perpetuates the victim mentality that keeps blacks on the bottom. Nor should there be reparations for slavery. See the following. Trigger warning! They are exercises in reasoned discourse.

David Horowitz on Black Reparations

On Black Reparations

Reckless Reparations Reckoning

Another episode in Victor Davis Hanson's chronicling of our wanky descent into unhinged Unsinn.  Here is a choice morsel:

Current racial tribalization obsessions have descended into a nadir that makes Al Sharpton’s 1990s Tawana Brawley/Crown-Heights career start (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”/ “We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”) look amateurish in comparison. In this context, new calls arise for ludicrous reparations simply because we have become a ludicrous society.

Half-Way Cultural Appropriation

You appropriate our science and technology, why not then appropriate the values, virtues, attitudes, and behaviors that led to the science and technology? Here are some of them: hard work, self-control, self-knowledge, deferral of gratification, focus, protracted study, objectivity, rational thinking, coherent speech, respect for legitimate authorities, respect for elders, and punctuality.

 

Why the half-way cultural appropriation? Go all the way, and you will benefit yourself enormously.

 

There is nothing 'white' about the above values and virtues, attitudes and behaviors. After all, Asians implement them as well as Caucasians, if not better. The values and virtues, attitudes and behaviors, are normatively universal and good for everyone. No race or ethnicity owns them. They are common goods. 

Is 'Monkey Pox' Racist?

Substack latest.

Short, sweet, and lethal. Match grade argumentative ammo for your encounters with your leftist pals.

Identity Politics: Is it Possible to Remain Classically Liberal?

There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right. The second kind became obvious to me when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.'

 

While I reject the destructive falsehoods of left-wing tribalists, and understand the urge of 'alties' to oppose them with vigor, I don't want to go into reactionary mode if I can avoid it. The reactionary is defined by what he reacts against. I want to move in a positive direction. I want to reject identity politics of both the Left and the Right by transcending them both. To be identity-political is to take one's primary self-identification to be a tribal or group identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.

 

That is not how I self-identify, and I believe that no one should self-identify in that way. I identify as a person, as a rational being, as a free agent, as a truth-seeker, as a lover of the good and the beautiful, as a conscious and self-conscious subject. I do not primarily self-identify as an object in nature, a two-legged land mammal, or in any such way. Of course, I am an animal, a genetically human animal, essentially (not accidentally) Caucasian, and essentially (not accidentally) male, whence it follows, contrary to current leftist lore, that I cannot change my race or my sex. But while I am an animal, I am also a person, a spirit.

 

Here is one problem we face. Our enemies on the 'woke' and thus tribalist Left reject this scheme which ultimately rests on a personalist and theistic foundation. They are an existential threat to us, where an existential threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence, but also, and more importantly, a threat to one's way of life as a spiritual, cultural, and historical being as opposed to a mere biological system for whom biological survival is the only value. There is no reaching these 'woke' folk  with talk of persons and rights and the equality of persons and of rights. That is to them just bourgeois ideology that serves only to legitimate the extant social order. They are tribalists who refuse to transcend their tribal identifications and see themselves as persons, as rational beings, as autonomous agents. But not only that, they are also race realists despite their obfuscatory and logically inconsistent talk of race as a social construct. The inconsistency doesn't bother them because truth is not a leftist value, and logical consistency can count as a value only to those for whom truth is a value. This is because truth enters into the definition of logical consistency. 

 

The problem, then, is that it is probably not possible to defeat our enemies -- who, nota bene, do not want peaceful coexistence -- except by going tribal ourselves, and engaging them in the way they apparently want to be engaged, with blood and iron. Either that, or we accept political dhimmitude. And so a certain amount of pro tempore white tribalism may be needed to counteract the tribalists 'of color.' 

 

I would like it not to be true, but I fear that it is. 

Contraindicated: Resisting Arrest

It may be harmful to your health.

The meme below makes a very important point. Everyone, but blacks in particular, need to learn that the police have legitimate authority and that their commands must be obeyed. Not to do so is not only illegal but highly imprudent. Michael Brown, Daunte Wright, and Adam Toledo all brought about their own deaths by their foolish  behavior. Similarly with Jacob Blake. He didn't die, but was severely injured. A cop is under no moral or legal obligation to wait for you to shoot at him before he shoots at you. 

 

Racism was not involved in these shootings. A cop will use deadly force against ANYONE who threatens him with deadly force. Race doesn't come into it, except insofar as blacks as a group are more criminally prone than other groups. To put the point as clearly as possible: while there are racist cops, and there are cops who commit murder under color of law, the vast majority of police shootings of blacks are not racist acts. Proportionally more blacks get shot because their criminality  is higher than that of Asians, whites, and other groups.  This is a well-known  fact. Bear in mind that  while there are racial facts, facts about race, there are no racist facts. This is a very simple distinction: even a 'liberal' is able to make it. Question is, will he?

 

 

 

Counterexamples and Outliers

An exception to a universal generalization is a counterexample that refutes the generalization. All you need is one. Generic statements cannot, however, be similarly refuted. 'Nuns don't smoke cigars' is a generic statement. If you turn up a nun who smokes cigars I won't take you to have refuted the generic statement. I'll dismiss the exception as an 'outlier.' 

Memo to self: develop this line of thinking and then apply it to 'hot button' issues such as race. Is Candace Owens representative of black females or is she an 'outlier'? And to which generic statements is she an outlier?  You won't touch this question, will you? Not with an eleven-foot pole, which is the pole you use to touch questions you won't touch  with a ten-foot pole. 

See my aptly appellated entry, Generic Statements, for more on generic statements.

What Is Critical Race Theory?

An explanation by James Lindsay that goes to the heart of the matter in less than three and one half minutes.

I add the following which is an excerpt from my Substack article, Critical Race Theory Attracts the Uncritical.

A key word in the CRT arsenal is 'equity.'

'Equity' sounds good and so people are thoughtlessly for it. It is like 'social justice' in this respect. They don't realize that leftists, semantic distortionists nonpareil,  have hijacked a legitimate word so as to make it  refer to equality of outcome. Being uncritical, people don't appreciate that there is an important  difference between equality in its formal senses -- equality before the law, equality of opportunity, equality in respect of political/civil rights, etc. -- and equality of outcome or result. Formal equality is an attainable good. Material equality is unattainable because of group differences.  To achieve material or non-formal equality, equality of outcome, the means employed would be worse than the supposed cure.

Given undeniable group differences, 'equity' does not naturally arise; hence the only way to achieve 'equity' is by unjustly taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive.  The levelers would divest the makers of what is rightfully theirs to benefit the undeserving takers. 'Equity' is unjust!  It is unjust to deny a super-smart Asian or Jew a place in an MIT engineering program because of a racial/ethnic quota.  Judging candidates by merit and achievement, however, naturally leads to the disproportional representation of Asians and Jews in such programs. That is a consequence that must be accepted. Candidates must be judged as individuals and not as members of groups.  Indeed, the superior black must take precedence over the inferior Asian or white, but not because he is black, but because he is superior. 

Polylogism and Leftist Racism

Anthony Flood sends us to Charles Burris, Polylogism -- The Root of America's Divisiveness, Decline and Destruction.

History is repeating itself before our eyes. The widespread controversy surrounding President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson as a “black woman” recalls the editorial in The Washington Times, “A Judge Too Far,” concerning President Obama’s earlier nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.  The editorial perceptively observed:

“Judge Sotomayor seems to think that inherent racial and sexual differences are not simply quirks of genetics, but make some better than others. Consider her 2002 speech at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” she said. “I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

“She also accepted as potentially valid the idea that the “different perspectives” of “men and women of color” are due to “basic differences in logic in reasoning” due to “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”

The brilliant Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, regarded as the greatest economist of the 20th Century, discussed this Marxist nonsense in his magnum opus, Human Action, under the category of polylogism. 

This is the bogus idea that the logical structure of the mind is different based on one’s class, race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual preference, etc.

This skewed Marxist concept lies at the root of all “politically correct” notions of cultural relativism and multiculturalism fashionable in academia, the elite media, and critical race and legal theory circles today.

And if President Biden has his way, upon the highest court in the land.

This is more than the widely-accepted idea that our various life experiences shape our world view, or influence our value judgments in making ethical and moral decisions.

Again, polylogism specifically holds that the logical structure of the mind is different based on one’s class, race, nationality, gender, sexual preference, etc. There is no objective reality independent from these fixed determinative factors of causality.

The notion of a Constitutionally-driven independent judicial temperament or impartiality becomes impossible.

The rest is below the fold. 

Did you catch the exchange between Senator Ted Cruz and nominee Jackson? 

"For example, I'm a Hispanic man. Could I decide I was an Asian man — would I have the ability to be an Asian man and challenge Harvard's discrimination because I made that decision?" Cruz added.

Jackson replied that she could not respond to questions based on hypotheticals.

Lord help us.  Yet another indication that leftists are mendacious to the core. 

Almost Mugged in the Big Easy

I came close to being mugged in New Orleans' French Quarter in '90 or '91. I was there to read  a paper at an American Philosophical Association meeting.  Early one morning I left the hotel to sample the local color and grab some breakfast. Striding along Bourbon street, I noticed a couple of black dudes on the other side of the street.  I was wearing a beret, which may have suggested to the loiterers that I was a foreigner and an easy mark. One dude approached and commented on my shoes in an obvious attempt to distract me and throw me off my guard. My situational awareness saved me. That, together with my stern mien, height, leather jacket and purposeful stride.  I gave the punk a hard look, increased my pace, and blew him off.

Profiling is part of situational awareness. Profiling is just common sense, which is why 'progressive' fools oppose it. A couple of black youths loitering in a touristy area are probably up to no good. It is a well-known fact that blacks as a group and more criminally prone than whites as a group. There is nothing racist about pointing that out because a fact about race is not a racist fact.  It cannot be racist to speak the truth in situations where it is important that the truth be spoken. But if common sense and truth-telling make me a racist, then we should all be racists, including decent black folk. 

For the Kerouac File

Black Like Kerouac

I was awfully naïve once, but never so naïve as Kerouac/Paradise, who understands so little about the lives of black Americans that he wishes he “were a Negro [because] the best the white world could offer was not enough ecstasy, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” It is passages like that—about, for instance, the “happy, true-heart ecstatic Negroes of America”—that inspired me to pull from the shelf another book that expresses much the same desire. It did so, however, with greater honesty and courage than On the Road. It also conveys more pleasure, in large part because it makes far fewer claims for itself.

This was Really the Blues, the autobiography of an endearing oddball named Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow. Born in Chicago in 1899 to Russian Jewish parents, Mezzrow fell under the spell of Bix Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, and other early jazz musicians. He learned to play the clarinet, recorded with many of these better known musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and—here’s where things get fun—decided he too wanted to be black. Mezzrow determined that he “was going to be a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can.”

Andrew Sullivan on Critical Race Theory

Sullivan writes,

Here is how critical theory defines itself in one of its central documents. It questions the very foundations of “Enlightenment rationality, legal equality and Constitutional neutrality.” It begins with the assertion that these are not ways to further knowledge and enlarge human freedom. They are rather manifestations of white power over non-white bodies. Formal legal equality, they argue, the promise of the American experiment, has never been actual equality, even as, over the centuries, it has been extended to everyone. It is, rather, a system to perpetuate inequality forever, which is the single and only reason racial inequality is still here.

This is pernicious nonsense. Why has "formal legal equality" never led to "actual equality"? Why hasn't equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and the like led to equality of outcome or result? Because, as a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically.  By no empirical measure are people equal either as individuals or as groups.   We are naturally unequal.    And because there is no natural equality, it is no surprise that there is no racial equality of outcome.  Since there is no "white power over non-white bodies," this nonexistent factor cannot be used to explain racially inequality of outcome or result.  Sullivan continues his description of CRT:

Critical Race Theory Attracts the Uncritical

People are suckers for Critical Race Theory (CRT) because they cannot think critically.

A key word in the CRT arsenal is 'equity.'  ('Arsenal' is the right word given the Left's weaponization of language.) It is an Unbegriff, an unconcept. It combines something good with something unattainable except by the toleration of grave evils. Let me explain.

'Equity' sounds good and so people are thoughtlessly for it. It is like 'social justice' in this respect. They don't realize that leftists, semantic distortionists nonpareil,  have hijacked a legitimate word so as to make it  refer to equality of outcome. Being uncritical, people don't appreciate that there is an important  difference between equality in its formal senses -- equality before the law, equality of opportunity, equality in respect of political/civil rights, etc. -- and equality of outcome or result. Formal equality is an attainable good. Material equality is unattainable because of group differences.  To achieve material or non-formal equality, equality of outcome, the means employed would be worse than the supposed cure.

Given undeniable group differences, 'equity' does not naturally arise; hence the only way to achieve 'equity' is by unjustly taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive.  The levellers would divest the makers of what is rightfully theirs to benefit the undeserving takers. 'Equity' is unjust!  It is unjust to deny a super-smart Asian or Jew a place in an MIT engineering program because of a racial/ethnic quota.  Judging candidates by merit and achievement, however, naturally leads to the disproportional representation of Asians and Jews in such programs. That is a consequence that must be accepted. Candidates must be judged as individuals and not as members of groups.  Indeed, the superior black must take precedence over the inferior Asian or white, but not because he is black, but because he is superior. 

Suppose you disagree. Then I argue as follows.

The state apparatus needed to bring about this 'equitization' or equalization of outcomes is vastly larger than the one permitted by our founding documents.  The attempt to achieve it brings us closer and closer to an omni-invasive totalitarian police state.  That would be worse than a situation in which natural hierarchies are respected.

In any case, natural hierarchies always have the last word. If the USA weakens itself by going 'woke,' it will become easy prey for its foreign enemies.  Their dictators are salivating as we speak. Never forget that states are in the state of nature with respect to one another, and that nature is red in tooth and claw. A 'woke' military is a weak military. 

The paradox should not be missed: the equalization project requires agencies of equalization vastly more powerful that the groups they seek to equalize.  The upshot, then, is not equality of power and position but a situation of material inequality in which the governors oppress the governed.

Is CRT a theory?  A commenter on my Facebook page correctly notes that

The advocates of the current re-education program are not presenting a theory but rather requiring their victims to signal their uncritical, obsequious acceptance of a canon of dogmas. Calling a dogma or set of dogmas a theory is a rhetorical ruse used to disguise their insidious indoctrination with the a veneer of real educational activity.

My commenter is right. CRT is not a theory to be discussed and tested but a set of dogmas to be imposed on children of all ages whose critical faculties are no match for the indoctrination.

Charles Murray, Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America, Introduction and Chapter One

Herewith, some notes and commentary. Double quotation marks are used for quoting, single for sneering, mentioning, etc.

The first truth is that "cognitive ability" is differently distributed among the groups under examination: American whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians. The second is that these groups "have different rates of violent crime." (ix)  These propositions are indeed truths. But why discuss these incendiary matters?  Because "We are engaged in a struggle for America's soul." (x)  We are indeed, and the stakes are high. 

The first chapter  is entitled "The American Creed Imperiled" and covers pp. 1-8.  

America's soul is her founding ideals, the American creed, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.  Among the ideals: liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property.  I would add limited government to the list and insist that private property is the foundation and sine qua non of individual liberty, which of course entails opposition to totalitarian schemes such as socialism and communism.

But the founding ideals were a long time in achieving.  On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous 'I have a dream' speech that "evoked the American creed from start to finish." (2) The next year brought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson.  "The act had to be a good and necessary thing. As a college junior at the time, I certainly thought so." (3)

But the 1964 Act drove a "philosophical wedge . . . between those who wanted strict adherence to the ideal of treating people as individuals, equal before the law, and those who advocated group-based policies as a way to achieve social justice." (3-4)  But what's with the "social"?  What's wrong with plain old 'justice'? How could justice not be social?  Could old man Murray be unaware that 'social justice' is a leftist code-phrase?

The wedge was driven deeper.

Group-based policies proliferated and by the end of the 20th century 'American creed' had fallen into desuetude and the thing itself had been repudiated altogether to be replaced by intersectionality, critical race theory, and a "bastardized vision of socialism." (4)  The new ideology came to dominate "the left wing of the Democratic Party."   Question for  Murray: Is there a right wing? Who belongs to it?

The label that sums up all the newfangled Unsinn is 'identity politics.'  "The core premise of identity politics is that individuals are inescapably defined by the groups into which they were born -- principally (but not exclusively) by race and sex -- and that this understanding must shape our politics." (5, emphasis in original)   The American creed is thereby "turned on its head."  Treating people as individuals becomes immoral because it ignores racism and sexism. Racism is systemic and white privilege omnipresent. The power of the state not only may be used, but must be used to treat people of color preferentially.

It took him a while, but Murray came to see that left-wing identity politics is "toxic."  (6) I would add that the same goes for the identity politics of the alternative right.  Be that as it may. The topic is Murray. He finds identity politics "toxic" because "It is based on the premise that all groups are equal in the ways that shape economic, social, and political outcomes for groups and that therefore all differences in group outcomes are artificial and indefensible." (6) Murray goes on to say that the premise is "factually wrong." "Hence this book about cognitive ability and criminal behavior."

Here is the way I would present the fundamentally fallacious  leftist identity-political reasoning:

1) We are all equal in the ways Murray mentions.  We are equal in interests, aptitudes, intelligence, work habits, criminality, etc. But

2) There is no equality of outcome.

3) The only possible explanation of this is systemic racism and sexism and unearned white privilege. Therefore

4) It is morally acceptable to use the power of the state to equalize the inequalities. And individual liberties be damned.

The main problem with the argument, of course, is that (1) is provably false.  

Unfortunately, Murray backpedals out of fear of being misunderstood and, I would guess, fear of being labelled a nasty racist and white supremacist. He assures us:

I am not talking about racial superiority or inferiority, but about differences in group averages and overlapping distributions. Differences in averages do not affect the abilities of any individual. They should not affect our approach, positively or negatively, to any person we meet. (6)

No? Take the third sentence. If Murray is convinced that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than whites as a group, and he encounters a black person whom he does not know, then it would be highly irrational of him NOT to allow that conviction of his to affect his approach to the black person.  Suppose Murray is walking down a street and a number of black youths are approaching him, while on the other side of the street coming in his direction are a number of white Mormon youths. Would it not be highly irrational of Murray to remain on the black side of the street?

Now look at the first sentence. Obviously Murray is talking about racial superiority/inferiority if he argues that Asians as a group are better at math that blacks as a group.  "Come on, man!" as Joey B. would say.

To Murray I say: you will be called a racist and a white supremacist no matter what you say. So man up and don't try to curry favor with our political enemies.

...............................

A reader comments:

I was reading your post about Murray and thinking over your example toward the end about the group of black youths on the street.  Years back I read an example almost exactly like this in a philosophy paper, except that the author was careful not to include any racial description of the "teenagers" in the story.  (Maybe in the same way that newspapers like to call a black criminal an "area man" or "local youth".)  

 

According to the author, he couldn't help but cross the street on the basis of his "prejudiced" belief that a group of "scowling" teenagers dressed like gangbangers represents some kind of danger.  He later feels ashamed​ of his belief that they "pose a danger" because, after all, "I do not know them" and "they could be harmless".  The belief was "epistemically ungrounded".

 

Isn't that amazing?  You'd think anyone would have to agree that in this situation it's obviously rational​ to believe that a bunch of young men "pose a danger" and rational​ to act on your assessment of danger by simply crossing the street.  But NO.  Here we have a senior distinguished philosopher just asserting for no particular reason that his belief and behavior was not rational​.  And he even thinks it was immoral​ or something.  Anyway, he claims to be ashamed.

 

So there may be no getting through to these people.  Or maybe they know what they're saying is ridiculous but they're so desperate to appear "good" that you can't have an honest conversation with them about even the blindingly obvious.

The prospects for fruitful conversation do indeed seem dim. We are living through a period of race madness which addles the brains of many including the distinguished philosopher you mention.  White liberal guilt is probably a factor, as well as a desire to be liked and accepted, fit in, keep drawing his salary, and seem 'good' and bien-pensant. I suspect that the belief that we are all equal, not just formally, but materially and behaviorally, and in a way that would make it reasonable not to cross the street in my example, is a perverse secularization of the Christian notion that we are all equal in the eyes of God, just as the notion that we are collectively guilty for the sins of slavery is a perverse secularization of the Christian notion of original sin.

 

On top of that there is the widespread false belief that the only motive a Charles Murray could have for his researches is bigotry and hatred of the Other, never a genuine scientific interest. This comports well with the current assault by 'wokesters' on the concept and value of objectivity which is denigrated -- if that is an acceptable word these days -- as a 'white supremacist' concept and value.

Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

Nietzsche's conflation of truth with power is one source of Critical Race Theory.

Substack latest.

 

Dreher contra Buchanan on "All men are created equal."

Rod Dreher quotes Patrick J. Buchanan:

“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?

Dreher responds:

With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core teaching of the Christian faith, which holds that all men are created in the image of God. 

I am with Dreher on this without sharing quite the level of high dudgeon that he expresses in his piece. 

I am always surprised when people do not grasp the plain sense of the "that all Men are created equal" clause embedded in the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence. It cannot be charitably interpreted as a statement of empirical fact. If it were so interpreted, it would be false. For we all know, and certainly the Founders knew, that human beings are NOT equal as a matter of empirical fact either as individuals or as groups.

Suppose a statement can be interpreted in two ways. One way it comes out plainly false; the other way it comes out either true or plausible or not obviously untrue. Then what I understand the Principle of Charity to require is that we go the second way. 

For Buchanan to demand "scientific or historic proof" shows deep misunderstanding. For again, the claim is not empirical. Is it then a normative claim as Mona Charen (quoted by Dreher) seems to suggest? It implies normative propositions, but it is not itself a normative proposition. It is a metaphysical statement. It is like the statement that God exists or that the physical universe is a divine creation. Both of the latter statements are non-empirical. No natural science can either prove them or disprove them. But neither of them are normative.  They are factual statements, though not empirically factual.  (Observe also that a factual statement need not be true. 'BV has three cats' is a factual statement, indeed it is empirically factual. It is not a normative statement, and it is a statement that can be empirically confirmed or disconfirmed. But it is false.)

Note that the Declaration's claim is not that all men are equal but that all men are created equal. In such a carefully crafted document, the word 'created' must be doing some work. What might that be?

There cannot be creatures (created items) without a Creator. That's a conceptual truth, what Kant calls an analytic proposition. So if man is created equal, then he is created by a Creator. The Creator the founders had in mind was the Christian God, and these gentlemen had, of course, read the Book of Genesis wherein we read that God made man in his image and likeness. That implies that man is not a mere animal in nature, but a spiritual being, a god-like being, possessing free will and an eternal destiny. Essential to the Judeo-Christian worldview is the notion that man is toto caelo different from the rest of the animals. He is an animal all right, but a very special one. This idea is preserved even in Heidegger who speaks of an Abgrund zwischen Mensch und Tier. The difference between man and animal is abysmal or, if you prefer, abyssal. Man alone is Da-Sein, the 'There' of Being; man alone is endowed with Seinsverstaendnis, an understanding (of) Being.  But I digress onto a Black Forest path.  

Now if all men, whether male or female, black or white, are created equal by God, and this equality is a metaphysical determination (Bestimmung in the sense of both a distinctive determination and a vocation) then we have here the metaphysical basis for the normative claim that all men ought to be treated equally, that all men ought to enjoy equally the same  unalienable rights, among them, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  (We note en passant that these are negative rights!)

All men are normatively equal because they are metaphysically equal. They are the latter because they are spiritual beings deriving from one and the same spiritual source.  Each one of us is a person just as God is a person. We are equal as persons even though we are highly unequal as animals.

Without this theological basis it is difficult to see how there could be any serious talk of equality of persons. As the alt-righties and the neo-reactionaries like to say, we are not (empirically) equal either as individuals or as groups. They are absolutely right about that.   

Dreher is also right that the theologically-grounded equality of persons is "the founding principle of our Constitutional order," and thus of our political order.  Repudiate it, as Buchanan seems to be doing, and you undermine our political order.

What then does our political order rest on if the equality of persons is denied? 

Related: Sullivan is Right: Universalism Hasn't Been Debunked

Can One Change One's Race?

No more than one can change one's species, with apologies to the late David Avner, the Cat Man.  Substack latest.

On the Academentia Front: You Have to Read This

Bari Weiss:

If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)

Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:

On Prejudice

Hector writes,

It seems he [John McWhorter] is not aware that 'prejudice' does not necessarily require a negative attitude towards that concerning which one is prejudiced and is therefore actually not an ideal replacement for 'racist'. Surely, 'bigoted' would be better.

I agree. 'Prejudice' admits of pejorative but also non-pejorative uses.  'Bigot' does not. Note also that racial prejudice is not the only kind.  That is why a careful writer and speaker does not use 'prejudiced' sans phrase, but always adds the appropriate qualifier unless the context makes the addition unnecessary.

As for 'prejudice,' it could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or to an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  ("My country right or wrong.") We should all condemn blind prejudice.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people in fact do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior. 

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past experience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.  They know what is good for them and what isn't.

My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean.  Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not  a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.  The old man was justified in his prejudgment.

For the Left, the Subject is not the Subject: Why Math is 'Racist'

It has often been noted that for the Left, the issue is not the issue.  David Horowitz:

As President Obama’s political mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it in Rules for Radicals: “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all of the angels are on one side and the devils are on the other.” Here is another statement from Rules for Radicals: “We are always moral and our enemies always immoral.” The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the immorality of the opposition, of conservatives and Republicans. If they are perceived as immoral and indecent, their policies and arguments can be dismissed, and even those constituencies that are non-political or “low-information” can be mobilized to do battle against an evil party. (emphasis added)

"The issue is never the issue." The issue is the gaining and maintaining of power so as to "fundamentally transform America."  For example, if leftists (Democrats in U. S. politics) were really concerned about the spread of COVID-19, they would not open the borders to illegal aliens as the Biden administration has now done. Whatever concern they have about the spread of disease is trumped by considerations of how the problem can be exploited to enhance their power.  Power first, public health second, if that. Never let a crisis go to waste; that is, never let it go unexploited for ideological leverage.  And now a further step left: never let a crisis end.  

It occurred to me the other day that something structurally similar explains the absurd claim that mathematics is racist.  No one believes this, not even the most febrile of leftists, just as no one believes that a serious health crisis will be unaffected by allowing disease-carrying illegal aliens to flow into the country in great numbers unchecked and unvetted. 

So why do so many on the Left  say that math is racist? Because the subject is not the subject. The subject is not mathematics, a discipline about as far removed from ideological taint as can be imagined, but the supposed 'systemic racism' of American society.  There is no such thing, of course, but no matter: invocation of this nonexistent state of affairs is useful for the promotion of the leftist agenda just as he inefficacy of masks and the uselessness and outright deleteriousness of lock-downs is no reason not to make use of masks and lock-downs and draconian rules to further the destruction of the American republic as she was founded to be.

Dennis Prager on Liberalism, Leftism, and Race

Here at Substack.  

IS IT REASONABLE TO BE A SEX REALIST BUT A RACE IRREALIST LIKE PRAGER?

If not, should one affirm the biological reality of both, deny the biological reality of both, or affirm race realism and sex irrealism?

I Didn't Start Out Conservative

Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one.  My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41.  I came of age in the '60s.  One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a school essay written in the fifth grade.  I was all for the Civil Rights movement.    Musically my heroes were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.  I thrilled to his Blowin' in the Wind  and his other civil rights anthems. 

As I see it, those civil rights battles were fought and they were won.  But then the rot set in as the  party of JFK liberals became the extremists and the destructive leftists that they are today. For example, Affirmative Action in its original sense gave way to reverse discrimination, race-norming, minority set-asides, identity politics and the betrayal of Martin Luther King Jr.'s  dream that people be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." To judge people by the content of their character is to judge them as individuals which is precisely the opposite of what tribalists and identity politicians do.

As liberals have become extremists, people with moderate views such as myself have become conservatives.  

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a good day to read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and reflect on how the race-delusional totalitarians who now infest the Democrat Party have strayed from King's ideas and vision.

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bi-cultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages.  My mother was both bilingual and bi-cultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not to me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a  difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive.  Suppose you come from Croatia.  Is that something to be proud of?  You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents.  It wasn't your doing.  It is an element of your facticity.  Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe.  Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.'    The Left in its perversity has it backwards.  They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind.  They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values.  Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African?  Does he enjoy dual citizenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead.  There is no 'institutional racism.'  There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals.  Man up and move forward.  Don't blame others for your problems.  That's the mark of a loser.  Take responsibility.  We honkies want you to do well.  The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

It must also be said that the alt-Right identity-political counter to POC tribalism is just as bad, although it may be excusable as a pro tem tactic on some occasions.

Who Am I? Personal Identity versus Political Identity

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me.  If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything.  I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind.  Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'? 

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood.  I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics.  Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics.  And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor.  I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous  sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry.  He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all.  And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number?   Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing  in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT  I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber)  I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race.  This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification.  A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is.  After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being. 

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes.  It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.   

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type.  The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.  

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics?  Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it.  An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did.  Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black.  Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties.  No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism  is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism.  (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages,  I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.')  You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on.  You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach.  Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political. 

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist.  One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics.  And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes, 

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. 

Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

I wrote:

. . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

This is puzzling to me.  If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything.  I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind.  Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'? 

Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood.  I am inclined to disagree.

No Escaping Metaphysics

As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics.  Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics.  And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

Concessions

But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor.  I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous  sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry.  He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all.  And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number?   Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing  in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

Personalism and False Self-Identification

But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT  I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber)  I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race.  This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification.  A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is.  After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being. 

Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes.  It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.   

Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type.  The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.  

Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

Connection with Identity Politics

First of all, what is identity politics?  Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it.  An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did.  Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black.  Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties.  No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

But tribalism  is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism.  (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages,  I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.')  You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on.  You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

Common Human Good?

I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach.  Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political. 

If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist.  One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics.  And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes, 

. . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

Rod Dreher:

So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

[. . .]

Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. 

This Man is a Racist?

Two-minute video. Judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their hair.

Politeness and the Belief in Objectivity Really Do Have to Go

And you wonder why blacks are on the bottom?

BLM is Playing by the Book. Alinsky's Book

Michael Brown:

In his insightful, 2009 mini-book, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, David Horowitz quoted an SDS radical who wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

As Horowitz explained, “In other words the cause — whether inner city blacks or women — is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution. That was the all-consuming focus of Alinsky and his radicals.”

When it comes to BLM, the purported issue, namely, that Black Lives Matter, is not the ultimate issue. Instead, a larger cultural revolution is the ultimate issue. (As many have noted, the founders of BLM are both Marxists and radical feminists, with two of the three women identifying as queer activists.)

And so, the mantra that “Black Lives Matter” specifically means blacks who are victims of white police brutality. Black lives in the womb do not matter. Blacks getting gunned down in gang violence do not matter. Black toddlers killed in random shootings do not matter. Not even blacks killed by black police officers matter — at least not nearly as much as blacks killed by white officers.

Those white officers, in turn, represent the larger system, which, we are told, is fundamentally racist. And it is that system that needs to be overthrown.

Thus, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

Read it all, comrades.

Grammar is Propadeutic to Logic

So if grammar is 'racist,' then so is logic.

What is the criterion whereby a subject or activity is deemed 'racist' by leftists?  It appears to be this:  Whatever blacks and other 'people of color' are poor at is 'racist.' 

And what is at the back of that criterion?  It appears to be the assumption that we are all inherently equal, both as individuals and as groups, in all respects, and not just in respect of political rights.  Now we all believe in equality of rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; those among us with experience of life and good sense, however, know that there are all sorts of empirically measurable respects in which individuals and groups are not equal.  To take one of many examples, Asian students are superior to black students in point of knowledge of, and aptitude for, mathematics. 

Do I need to belabor this point among my astute readers? (Full disclosure: I am not now, and never have been Asian, and it is biologically impossible that I should ever become Asian.)

But if you foolishly believe that we are all inherently equal in every respect, with the same abilities and interests, then you may be tempted to embrace the following unsound argument:

A. We are all inherently equal in every respect. But:

B. This equality does not manifest itself as equality of outcome or result. Therefore:

C. There has to be a factor that prevents equality of outcome or result. And:

D. That factor is racism, both individual and 'systemic.'

This argument is multiply-flawed. But if you read this weblog, that very fact is evidence that you have the mental equipment to determine on your own where the flaws lie.  Why do I have to do all the work?

Is 'Looters' Racist?

But of course!

Blacks are 'over-represented' among looters. It would be racist to hold blacks to civilized standards of behavior because such behavior is not 'who they are.' Therefore, any use of 'looters' is racist.

Is that the 'reasoning'? I'm just asking.  See here:

At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word “looters,” which has been used many times in the paper, now has “a pejorative and racist connotation” and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should “talk to your immediate supervisor.” Translation: Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed. So what to call looters? Non-paying shoppers? That doesn’t quite tell the story: Ordinary shoplifters don’t usually bust up all the windows. How about self-appointed retail-justice-commandos? Revolutionary mass goods-redistribution agents?

'Liberals' can't think, but they are really good at associational slides. Their thinking is slurry and surreal and 'morphy' and muddled. One thing reminds them of another and morphs into it.   Their 'thinking' is feculent, a byproduct -- of con-fusion.  An intercranial crapstorm. Foolish and flushable.

'Blacklist' is another word the Pee-Cee Brigade wants to ban.  But then what about 'white out' and 'red line' and 'brown nose' and 'Code Yellow'?

'Liberals' need re-education. We'll begin building the camps at the start of Trump's third term.  He will no doubt get a third term by simply refusing to leave. Ask Nancy Pelosi. 

Is Grammar Racist?

It has to be. Whatever blacks and other 'people of color' are not good at is racist; blacks and other 'people of color' are not good at grammar; ergo, etc.  This also explains why logic, mathematics, natural science, chess, self-control, self-reliance, deferral of gratification, pulling up your pants, etc. are all racist.

It is also clear that in this Age of Pan-Racism, when everything is racist, grammar, etc. is racist. Racism is itself racist!

Seriously, the Rutgers English Department is in dire need of 'cancellation' or at least fumigation. Here:

In short, the Rutgers English Department wants to make sure that students who come to Rutgers with a poor grasp of standard written English not only remain in that state, but come to believe that learning standard English is a concession to racism. I remember when keeping "people of color" ignorant was considered part of white supremacy.

Half-Way Cultural Appropriation

You appropriate our science and technology, why not then appropriate the values, virtues, attitudes, and behaviors that led to the science and technology?  Here are some of them: hard work, self-control, self-knowledge, deferral of gratification, focus, protracted study, objectivity, rational thinking, coherent speech, respect for legitimate authorities, and so on.

Why the half-way cultural appropriation? Go all the way, and you will benefit yourself enormously.

There is nothing 'white' about the above values and virtues, attitudes and behaviors. After all, Asians implement them as well as Caucasians, if not better.   They are normatively universal and good for everyone.

What We are Up Against

It helps to know the enemy and not be as naive as a Mona Charen. Despite her manifold lovelinesses and virtues, Charen is a useful idiot for the Left and a useless idiot for us. (She is what I call a 'topical idiot'; she is obviously not a total idiot. And while I am abusing her to some extent, my abuse is for her own good, grounded as it is in fact and in a concern for her mental clarity.)

Never-Trumpers, who are mostly journalists and lawyers, and have never built anything, allow themselves to become unhinged and distracted by Trump the inarticulate builder and political interloper, by his foibles and fatuities, his ungrammatical tweets, his exaggerations, sexual peccadillos, and what all else. And so they cannot see who the real enemy is.  They cannot see the threat to their own way of life and to the set of values which they espouse but are impotent to conserve.

At the same time, these yap-and-scribble quislings and quibblers, these cruise-ship 'conservatives' who succeed in conserving nothing except their status and salaries, propose no candidate who could do better than Trump.  They are impotent nay-sayers and obstructionists. A pox be upon them, and their dwellings and cruise ships and seminar rooms and all their works and days, and their progeny, intellectual and loin-driven, unto the seventh generation.

Please study the following from Powerline.

 

Racial Skepticism or rather Denialism Refuted

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Race entry:

Racial skepticism holds that because racial naturalism is false, races of any type do not exist. Racial skeptics, such as Anthony Appiah (1995, 1996) and Naomi Zack (1993, 2002) contend that the term race cannot refer to anything real in the world, since the one thing in the world to which the term could uniquely refer—discrete, essentialist, biological races—have been proven not to exist.

This is the most radical theory of the ontological status of races: there are none! There are no races, not even as social constructs. But this leads to absurdity.

For if there are no races, then it is not possible that any race suppress or enslave another. But surely that is possible. Ergo, it is false that there are no races.

'Some blacks enslaved other blacks' and 'Some humans enslaved other humans' differ in their truth conditions. But there cannot be any such difference in truth conditions if there are no races. Ergo, etc.

Whether or not it is true, it makes sense to say that whites owe blacks reparations for slavery. But this would make no sense if there were no races. Ergo, etc.

The expressions 'racial integration' and 'racial segregation' have meaning and differ in meaning. But how could they if there are no races?

And how could Obama be a mulatto if there are no races, or only one race, the human race? Did he not bring whites and blacks together and heal racial divisions? How could have done that marvellous thing if there were no races?

The Greatest Libel Since the Blood Libel

It comes from the Left. (Does anything good come from the Left?)  Required reading.

More on Tribalism and the Identity-Political Right

A re-post from 2 November 2017 emended and supplemented.

...................................

This entry continues a discussion with a Right-identitarian interlocutor.  My current position is one of rejection of both Left- and Right-identitarianism. I am open, however,  to a change of position. That is part of what makes me a philosopher as opposed to an ideologue. I wrote in my critique of Dennis Prager:

"The correct view is that racial differences are real and significant just as sexual and age differences are real and significant, but  for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity." My correspondent responds:

I agree with your criticisms of Prager.  In a normal society men don't pretend that they're just human beings rather than men (who are also human beings) and women don't pretend that they're just human beings rather than women.  Rather, in a normal society the distinctive male and female abilities and interests and ways of being are accepted, and society adapts itself to these differences--these male and female 'identities'  in other words.  But then, if race is similar to sex and age in this respect, why would it be bad for people to 'identify' in terms of race along with attributes like sex and age?  Shouldn't we say instead that this is also reasonable and healthy?

In discussions like these it is always a good idea to seek (and rejoice over) points of agreement. Points of disagreement will emerge soon enough.

One thing we can agree on is that no human being can be just a human being if that implies having no sex or no race or no age or no height, etc. And so if I pretended to be a human being indeterminate with respect to one or more of the above-listed attributes, then my pretense would empty and absurd. My talk of treating people as individuals rather than as tokens of ethnic or racial types does not imply that they are bare individuals bereft of all attributes.

But there is nothing empty or absurd about prescinding from this or that characteristic in certain contexts.  Characteristics prescinded from don't matter for the purpose at hand, but they are still there. For example, age and citizenship matter when it comes to voting, but race and sex by  current law do not and ought not.  But if we don't take into consideration a person's sex when it comes to the right to vote, it does not follow that the person is sexless.  In general, if attribute A is instantiated by the members of a given population of individuals, and abstraction is made from A, it does not follow that the members of the population are indeterminate with respect to A.

So far, near-platitudes, unless my opponent questions my voting example which I fear he might. (If he does, then that discussion belongs in a separate thread.) We have yet to locate the bone of contention.

Are there "distinctive male and female abilities and interests"? I would say so, and I would add that they are not merely socially constituted.  The biology of the female plays a role in the explanation of why women are more nurturing than men, more cooperative and conciliatory, make better real estate agents, but also why they are more emotional than men and why their political judgment is not as good. (I would argue, however, that the last two points are not reasons to withhold from women full voting rights.) So far, then, no disagreement. No disagreement with my conservative interlocutor, that is. I have already said enough to elicit howls of rage from the lunatic Left. Their howling, however, is music to my ears. Their destructive extremism only galvanizes the resoluteness of my opposition to them.

Does it follow that there are male and female 'identities'?  Here is where it gets tricky and sticky. 'Identity' can be used in different ways. What is meant by 'identity 'here ? A stereotype?  That is apparently what my sparring partner has in mind. I will assume that he agrees with me that stereotypes, most of them, or at least many of them, have a fundamentum in re and are true in the way that generic statements can be true.  (It is surely true, for example, that Germans are more rule-bound and respectful of authority than Italians. See this list of generic statements.) Stereotypes are not, most of them, expressions of mindless bigotry or irrational hatred of the Other. What are truly mindless and irrational are 'liberal' denials of this plain truth.

My opponent is going to agree with me that women as a group are more nurturing, caring, cooperative, conciliatory, averse to heated disagreement, better with children, etc., than men as a group.  But that is a positive, accurate stereotype which not all women fit. Women are nurturing and Sally is a woman; it does not follow, however, that Sally is nurturing.  'Women are nurturing' is a generic statement: it cannot be replaced by a universal generalization such as 'Every woman is nurturing.' Sally is a chess-playing, nerdy engineer who works for Google, worships Ayn Rand, enjoys heated debate, and has no interest in children or in taking care of anybody. And all of this without prejudice to her being, and being essentially (as opposed to accidentally), a full-fledged biological female with the 'plumbing' and chromosomal make-up to prove it.

It may be that my opponent is conflating stereotype with identity. In one sense  of 'identity,' the identity of a thing is what it is by nature, what it is essentially. Since Sally does not fit the gender stereotype, and yet is essentially biologically female, we ought not conflate identity with stereotype. (I am assuming a distinction between sex, which is a biological reality, and gender which, while it reflects sex, is in part socially determined. Anyone who elides the distinction I would have to consider very foolish indeed.)

My claim is that there are no "male and female 'identities'."   There are male and female stereotypes and gender roles but no male and female identities. If there were a female identity or nature that included such stereotypical features as being nurturing, being conciliatory, shying away from heated argument, then every female would fit that identity; Sally does not fit the female identity; ergo, there is no female identity.

And because there is no female identity, if Sally so self-identifies, then her self-identification is a false self-identification. She falsely self-identifies if she so apperceives herself as to be nothing but an instance of that identity.  And if we deny Sally her right to be a nerdy, chess-playing, Rand-reading, non-nurturing engineer, then we reduce her to a gender stereotype in violation of her true identity as a free, self-determining person.  As an animal, Sally's biological identity or nature is essential to her; as a person, however, she is free to pursue engineering in defiance of the stereotype.

And the same goes for race. There are different races as a matter of biological-anthropological fact. (Race is not a mere social construct.) And there are different racial and ethnic stereotypes, accurate stereotypes, i.e., stereotypes with a basis in reality, some negative, some positive. But there is no white identity or black identity or Italian identity or Polish identity.  Granted, I am essentially Caucasian and essentially of Italian ancestry; no change is possible in these respects. But there is no white identity that includes stereotypical features since there is no such identity had essentially by every biological white.  Bear in mind that 'white' in this context does not refer to skin color but to race. It is a mistake to confuse race with skin color. 

So I continue to maintain my thesis that, "for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity." The opponent hasn't given me any good reason to abandon this thesis. 

Is a reversion to tribalism, even if inevitable, something to be regretted, or is it healthy?

But then, in my critique of Prager, after listing some candidate attributes, I waxed pessimistic. For example, can we Americans identify for political purposes as Americans, as people  committed to the values and principles enshrined in our founding documents? Obviously not. Too many of our fellow 'citizens' have no respect for these documents. The universities of the land are lousy with such people. There are leftists who speak of a 'living constitution,' which, of course, is no constitution at all. And in what sense are these fellow 'citizens' fellow citizens if they don't accept our great Constitution? Think of the liberal-left liberty-haters who call for the elimination of the Second Amendment and equate dissent from leftist nostrums as 'hate speech.'

"So I end with a dark thought: in the end tribalism wins."

Again I wonder why this is a dark thought.  You seem to be considering the possibility that identities like 'citizen' or 'American' are too weak to form the basis for a healthy society.  But suppose that's true.  Then it's _good_ that people will eventually reject these identities in favor of some 'tribal' identity which could serve as a better basis for society -- something that is more "conducive to comity".  Suppose it's not true, and identities like 'citizen' are enough.  Then it seems to me that people should be able to get along and share a society simply on the basis of being 'citizens' or 'Americans' while at the same time having distinct racial or tribal identities, just as they can share a society and get along despite having distinct identities based on sex and age.

Amazingly, my opponent thinks that tribalism is good and that tribal identification can unify us. I can't see that this makes any sense at all. So here we find a bone of serious contention!  If we can no longer identify as citizens or Americans, it does not follow that tribal self-identification with the resultant Balkanization would be good.  And this for the simple reason that we are not all members of the same tribe. 

I am saying that we conservatives, through inattention and inaction, have allowed things to get to the point where identities like 'citizen' and 'American' can no longer form the basis of a healthy society and polity.   We are now in a very bad state of affairs, caused, part, by bad immigration policy. But tribalism makes things worse.  The reversion to tribalism may be inevitable, but as I see it, it can't be good.  Tribalism can't be the basis of comity or social harmony precisely because different tribes with different values and interests oppose one another. 

Furthermore, when we think and act tribally we fail to see important individual differences.  Clearly, there are important differences between Clarence Thomas and Trayvon Martin, Jason Riley and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter E. Williams and Michael Brown. Coates is a despicable racist fool and an enemy, but I would love to have Riley and Williams and Thomas as next-door neighbors.  And let's include Candace Owens so that the distaff contingent is represented. No social harmony is likely to ensue if we lump all these blacks together as members of the opposing tribe.  It is of course different in war. But we want to avoid war. Don't we?

I am saying that, as a matter of contingent fact, we are no longer united under an umbrella of shared values and principles, and that tribal identification will only make it worse.  If, on the other hand, we were united under that 'umbrella,' then of course there would be no problem.  We would be united publicly, and privately people could do their tribal thing.

Of course, there is a crucial disanalogy:  Human nature is such that differences of sex and age occur naturally and inevitably within a given human community, since these are part of the basic structure of the extended family.  By contrast, differences of race and ethnicity do not occur within the natural human community.  On the contrary, since the natural community is based on the family and extended family, that kind of community eliminates racial or ethnic differences--any natural community ends up being a single racial-ethnic community. 

So it's doubtful that racial difference and racial identity can be accepted as part of the normal structure of society in the way that these others already are.  To the extent that racial and ethnic differences exist within a society, that society must be somewhat artificial; it must be made up of sub-cultures that have a stronger claim on the natural loyalties and identities of its members.  Racial-ethnic differences are a primordial sign of Otherness, of Not Belonging--of potential danger and competition rather than safety and co-operation.  We can try to pretend otherwise, but this is contrary to our own instincts, and it probably won't work in the long run.  But, again, is this dark?   

Well, intermarriage among different European ethnicities has worked hasn't it?  

My opponent seems to be suggesting that racial/ethnic uniformity is essential for a well-functioning society.  I am not convinced that it is essential, though I agree that it would help well-functioning.  Suppose blacks had never been brought as slaves to North America. Then we wouldn't be in quite the mess we are in now. But blacks are here and they are not going away.  We need  assimilation and commitment to a set of values and principles that transcend blood.  Unfortunately, the Melting Pot is a thing of the past never to return. Leftists have destroyed it by exploiting racial tensions to forward their agenda.  And of course we no longer agree on values and principles.  So I see no reason to be sanguine.

Horribile dictu, leftist filth are now attacking free speech!

Is invocation of Blut und Boden dark? I would say so.  For one thing, blood ties and racial purity do not insure comity. I have more in common with some Korean and Turkish philosophers than with anyone in my family. Consanguinity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity, and  spiritual affinity can exist without consanguinity.  We are told that "To the extent that racial and ethnic differences exist within a society, that society must be somewhat artificial; it must be made up of sub-cultures that have a stronger claim on the natural loyalties and identities of its members."

As I see it, the emphasis on narrow racially- and ethnically-based loyalties works against social harmony. That's the mentality of mafiosi. Social harmony requires a commitment to higher loyalties.  John Gotti's children should have 'ratted out' their father.  The Unabomber's brother was right to turn him in. He was acting under the inspiration of a higher loyalty.

Multi-culturalists and Leftists would say it's 'dark' to imagine shutting down mass immigration of Muslims into Europe--because for them, the attempt to force incompatible cultures together into some kind of incoherent mess seems good!  But a conservative doesn't want to force people to live in weird new ways that (we think) go against human nature, so a conservative doesn't think it's 'dark' to imagine Muslims in Muslim lands, Christians in Christian lands, etc.  Feminists think it's 'dark' to imagine a world where most women are focused on having kids and staying home to care for them, because they think the ideal is to have women be just like men in all respects; but a conservative thinks it's better to let the sexes live in ways they find natural,  and so doesn't think this scenario is 'dark'.  Of course, excessive tribalism is possible (and 'dark') but why not allow for some degree of tribalism?  A sound conservative position, I think, is that society must provide people with healthy ways of expressing their instincts rather than forcing us to suppress them.  Telling people they have to think of themselves as just 'citizens' or 'humans' is telling them to suppress some very powerful instincts.  So (I think) conservatives should regard this as an oppressive and unhealthy policy.

We agree that allowing mass immigration of Muslims into Western lands is suicidal.  This is because they don't, as a group, share our superior Western values and because they want to replace them with unenlightened Sharia-type values. It is not because of their being Turks or Arabs or whatever. (The few that do share our values can be allowed to immigrate.) And of course there is nothing 'dark' about traditional Muslims staying in their lands.

Nor is there anything 'dark' about women devoting themselves to the noble and difficult task of being good mothers and homemakers.  The feminists who attack motherhood have a lot to answer for.

What I see as 'dark' is the racial self-identification on the identitarian Right. It amounts the deliberate erasure of one's unique personhood in favor of being an interchangeable token of an ethnic or racial type. How can my identity reside in an attribute shared with billions of others?

My identity is what make me be me and no one else. It is therefore impossible to locate one's identity in being an interchangeable token of a  racial type. For every token of a type, qua token of a type, is the same as every other one.  

There is also a slippery slope consideration. If you identify as white, then why not as Southern white, and if Southern white, why not rural Southern white, and so on until you identify as a Hatfield or a McCoy?  

Furthermore, race is part of my animality. So if I identity racially, then I identify myself as a particular instance of a particular race of animals. But I am more than an animal, and my true self cannot be located in my animality.

But now we move into metaphysics. This is unavoidable in a thorough discussion. But this entry is already too long. Tomorrow's another day.

On Transcending Tribalism

Jonathan Haidt:

Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings.

The key, as Cicero observed, is proximity, and a great deal of modern research backs him up. Students are more likely to become friends with the student whose dorm room is one door away than with the student whose room is four doors away. People who have at least one friend from the other political party are less likely to hate the supporters of that party.

But tragically, Americans are losing their proximity to those on the other side and are spending more time in politically purified settings. [. . .]

Haidt is right that tribalism can be transcended, at least to some extent, and that proximity and interaction can facilitate the transcending.  But he is far more optimistic that I am.

What Haidt ignores is that there is no comity without commonality, as I like to put it.  You and I can live and work together in harmony only within a common space of shared values and assumptions and recognized facts.  But that common space is shrinking.

Take any 'hot button' issue, Second Amendment rights, for example.  What do I have in common with the anti-gunner who favors confiscation of all civilian firearms, or only slightly less radically, wants to ban all hand guns or semi-automatic weapons?  To me it is evident that my right to life grounds a right to self-defense, and with it a right to acquire the appropriate means of self-defense.  If you deny this, then we have no common ground, at least not on this topic.  On this topic, we would then be at loggerheads.  If you then work politically or extra-politically  to violate what here in the States are called Second Amendment rights, then you become my enemy.  And the consequences of enmity can become unpleasant in the extreme. Push can come to shove, and shove to shoot.

In a situation like this, proximity and interaction only exacerbate the problem.  Even the calm interaction of scholarly argument and counter-argument does no good.  No matter how carefully and rigorously I argue my position, I will not succeed in convincing the opponent, with only a few exceptions.  This is a fact of experience over a wide range of controversial topics, and not just in politics.  The only good thing that comes of the dialectical interaction is a clarification and deeper understanding of one's position and what it entails.  If you think, say, that semi-automatic weapons ought to be banned for civilian use, then you and I will never find common ground.  But I will perfect my understanding of my position and its presuppositions and better understand what I reject in yours.

After we have clarified, but not resolved, our differences, anger at the intransigence of the other is the likely upshot if we continue to interact in close proximity whether in the same academic department, the same church, the same club, the same neighborhood, the same family . . . .  This is why there are schisms and splits and factions and wars and all manner of contention.

Anger at the intransigence of the other can then lead on to the thought that  there must be something morally defective, and perhaps also intellectually defective, about the opponent if he holds, say, that a pre-natal human is just a clump of cells.  One advances -- if that is the word -- to the view that the opponent is morally censurable for holding the position he holds, that he is being willfully morally obtuse and deserves moral condemnation.  And then the word 'evil' may slip in and the word 'lie': "The bastard is not just wrong; he is an evil son-of-a-bitch for promoting the lie that an unborn child is just a clump of cells, or a disposable part of woman's body like a wart." The arguably false statements of the other get treated as lies and therefore as statements at the back of which in an intent to deceive. And from there it ramps up to 'Hillary is Satan' and 'Trump is Hitler.'

One possible cure for  this unproductive warfare is mutual, voluntary, segregation via a return to federalism.   I develop the thought in A Case for Voluntary Segregation.  I say 'possible' because I am not sure the federalist route is sufficient.  Secession and partition are other options, not to mention the one no sane person could want: full-on hot civil war.  We are already beyond cold civil war, what with the Left's violent Stalinist erasure of monuments and memorials (and not just that).

So while Haidt is right that proximity and interaction can promote mutual understanding and mitigate hostility, that is true only up to a point and works only within a common space of shared assumptions, values, and recognized facts.  (His examples, by the way, were poorly chosen: Romeo and Juliet were young Italians; the French, German, and British soldiers were Europeans.)  Absent the common space, the opposite is true: proximity and interaction are precisely what must be avoided to preserve peace.  

The Problem and Three Main Solutions

The problem is how to transcend tribalism.  I count three main solutions, the Liberal, the Alt Right, and the Sane (which is of course my view!)

There is first what I take to be Haidt's rather silly liberal solution, namely, that what will bring us together is proximity and interaction. He assumes that if we all come together and get to know each other  we will overcome tribalism.  This borders on utopian nonsense.  It is precisely because of proximity and interaction that many decide to self-segregate.  The more I know about certain individuals and groups the less I want to have to do with them.  The Marxist thugs of Black Lives Matter, for example.  By the way, 'thug' is not code for 'nigger.'  'Thug' means thug.  Look it up.  The Antifa fascists are another example. The anti-white White Fragility racists. I could go on.

At the other extreme we find the 'alties' and neo-reactionaries.  They have a sound insight, namely, that there are unassimilable elements and that they must be kept out.  For example, Sharia-supporting Muslims are unassimilable into the U. S. because their values are antithetical to ours, perhaps not all of their values, but enough to make for huge problems.   

The success of e pluribus unum depends on the nature of the pluribus.  A viable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many.  (Cute formulation, eh?) The members of the manifold must be unifiable under some umbrella of common values, assumptions, and recognized facts.  One proposition nation cannot be made out of many tribes of immigrants unless the many tribes of immigrants accept OUR values, American values, and our propositions.  The tribalism is overcome or at least mitigated by acceptance of a unifying set of American values and ideas.

The alt-rightists, however, do not really offer a solution to the problem of transcending tribalism since their 'solution' is to embrace an opposing tribalism. They are right about the reality of race, as against the foolish notion that race is a social construct, but they push this realism in an ugly and extreme direction when they construe American identity as white identity, where this excludes Jews. American identity is rooted in a set of ideas and values.  It must be granted, however, that not all racial and ethnic groups are equally able to assimilate and implement these ideas and values.  Immigration policy must favor those that are.  

The sane way is the middle way.  To liberals we ought to concede that diversity is a value, but at the same time insist that it is a value that has to be kept in check by the opposing value of unity.   Muslims who refuse to accept our values must not be allowed to immigrate.  They have no right to immigrate, but we have every right to select those who will benefit us.  That is just common sense.  The good sort of diversity is not enhanced by the presence of terror-prone fanatics. Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. 

What we need, then, to mitigate tribal hostility is not more proximity and interaction, but less; fewer 'conversations' not more; less government, more toleration, voluntary segregation, a return to federalism, a total stoppage of illegal immigration, and a reform of current immigration law.

Will any of this happen?  Trump has taken steps in the right direction.  Flawed as he is, he is all we have, and best we have who is ready, willing, able, and electable. You know what you have to do come November.

Chess is Racist!

Not only is chess racist, it is also sexist and patriarchal. The fact that the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board proves nothing to the contrary. The powers allowed to the Queen are in truth nothing more than so many sops thrown to the feminists to keep them quiet.

The sexism and patriarchalism of chess is proven by the dignity afforded to the King. 

Wherein resides the dignity of the King?  At every time in every possible game, the King is on the board. He cannot be captured: he never leaves the board while the game is on.  He may be checked and checkmated; he is never captured. His royal consort, however, must submit to sacrifice, and is sacrificed gladly in the most beautiful of games. She has no dignity unto herself; she is but a means, nothing more than an overgrown pawn, and in some cases an ambitious upstart who has clawed her way to the eighth rank with the determination of a Hillary. She must die, when called upon, for the glory of His Majesty.

Another proof that chess is racist and oppressive and ought to be banned is that blacks are woefully under-represented among its players. This evil can have only one explanation: racist suppression of black players. For everyone knows that blacks as a group are the equals of whites as a group in respect of intelligence, interest in chess, and the sorts of virtues needed to play the undemocratic and reactionary 'Royal Game.' Among these are the ability to study hard, defer gratification, and keep calm in trying situations.

For these and many other reasons, we must DEMAND that chess be banned.

We must manifest solidarity with our oppressed Taliban brothers who have maintained, truly, that chess is an evil game of chance.

It is therefore most heartening to read that chess has been banned in some places in America. May this trend continue as we march forward, ever stronger, together to the land of social justice where there are no winners and no losers. 

RELATED: 'Cancel culture' out to cancel chess!

Yet another proof that there is nothing so stupid and destructive that a 'liberal' won't support it.

What's That Again?

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Andrew [Sullivan] writes that liberals should stop saying "truly stupid things like race has no biological element." I agree. Race clearly has a biological element -- because we have awarded it one.

That is quite a clever self-contradiction, and undoubtedly a delight to the bien-pensant readers of The Atlantic.  Race has a biological element and yet it doesn't because race is merely socially construed to have a biological element.

Socially construed by whom? 

"Race," writes the great historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact." Indeed. Race does not need biology. Race only requires some good guys with big guns looking for a reason.

Got that?

Identity Politics: Is it Possible to Remain Classically Liberal?

Cross-posted at my FB page. Good discussion there.

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There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right. The second kind became obvious to me when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial or ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists or neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.'

While I reject the literally insane claims of left-wing tribalists, and understand the urge of 'alties' to oppose them with vigor, I don't want to go into reactionary mode if I can avoid it. The reactionary is defined by what he reacts against. I want to move in a positive direction. I want to reject identity politics of both the Left and the Right by transcending them both. To be identity-political is to take one's PRIMARY self-identification to be a tribal or group identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.

That is not how I self-identify, and I believe that no one should self-identify in that way. I identify as a person, as a rational being, as a free agent, as a conscious and self-conscious SUBJECT. I do not primarily self-identify as an OBJECT in nature, a two-legged land mammal. Of course, I am an animal, a genetically human animal, essentially (not accidentally) Caucasian, and essentially (not accidentally) male, whence it follows, contrary to current leftist lore, that I cannot change my race or my sex. But while I am an animal, I am also a person, a spirit.

How personality and animality cohere in one unitary individual  is a problem that has never been solved, a problem reasonably viewed as insoluble; but this is no reason to reject either personality or animality.  My present topic, however,  is not the metaphysics of  the person, but a rather more practical political question.

Here is one problem I face. Our enemies on the Left reject this scheme which ultimately rests on a personalist and theist foundation. They are an existential threat to us, where an existential threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence, but also, and more importantly, a threat to one's way of life as a spiritual, cultural, and historical being as opposed to a mere biological system for whom biological survival is the only value. There is no reaching these people with talk of persons and rights and the equality of persons and rights. That is to them just bourgeois ideology that serves only to legitimate the extant social order. They are tribalists who refuse to transcend their tribal identifications and see themselves as persons, as rational beings, as autonomous agents. But not only that, they are also race realists despite their obfuscatory talk of race as a social construct.

The problem, then, is that it is probably not possible to defeat our enemies -- who do not want coexistence -- except by going tribal ourselves, and race-realist, and engaging them in the way they apparently want to be engaged, with blood and iron. Either that, or we accept political dhimmitude.

'Systemic Racism' is a Vicious, Hate-America, Leftist Myth

The Democrat Party is a party of race-hustlers. Clear proof of this is their endlessly repeated lie about 'systemic' or 'structural' or 'institutional' racism. David Horowitz, Big Agenda (Humanix, 2017), p. 51:

While institutional or systemic racism has been illegal in America for 50 years, the 2016 Democratic Party platform promises that "Democrats will fight to end institutional and systemic racism in our society." There is no evidence that such racism actually exists. It is asserted in a sleight of hand that attributes every statistical disparity affecting allegedly "oppressed" groups to prejudice against them because of their identity. This "prejudice," however, is a progressive myth. This is not to say that there aren't individuals who are prejudiced. But there is no systemic racism in America's institutions, and if there is, it is already illegal and easily remedied.

The Dem's race-obsession is an amazing thing to behold. With every passing day it becomes more insane.  An Asian man becomes the focus of a controversy because his surname 'Lee,' which is a mere sound-preserving transliteration of some Asian characters, reminds some idiots of Robert E. Lee. Soon thereafter, a banana peel ignites a controversy at Ole Miss. One can only hope that the Dems keep it up and destroy themselves.  They have found that playing the race card has gotten them what they want in many cases. But they need to think twice about transforming every card in the deck into a race card.  For while the leaders of the party are extremists, many of the rank and file retain a modicum of common sense.

A Comment Thread on Tribalism and Identity Politics from December, 2015

Part of an uncommonly good thread. Here is the entry to which the thread attaches.

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Anon,

My point was that many short comments are better than one long one.

One problem here is that I tossed out a word, 'tribalism,' but did not define it. What's worse is that I used it very loosely. Mea culpa. It is a stretch to think of women as a 'tribe.'

Perhaps we have a 'family' of tribalisms: racial, sexual, etc.

Now I'll take a stab at a definition:

A person P is a racial tribalist =df P defines himself and values himself first and foremost in terms of his being a member of the race of which he happens to be a member.

I'm Caucasian as you may have guessed. But when I get up in the morning I don't look into the mirror and affirm: I am a white man! This is who I am most fundamentally. This is what makes me be ME. This fact is what constitutes my innermost identity and is that attribute upon which my value as a person primarily supervenes.

I am therefore not a racial tribalist by my definition. This is not to say that I am not white or that being white is not a part of WHAT I am, namely an animal, a bit of the world's fauna. Indeed, insofar as I am an animal, it is arguable that I am essentially (as opposed to accidentally) white if we grant Kripke's point about the essentiality of origin: if I could not have had parents other than the parents I in fact have, then, given that both are white, I could not have failed to be white. So I am essentially white.

But is it essential to WHO I am that I be white? (Related question: Are persons reducible to objects in the natural world?)

Now in my definition above there is the phrase "member of the race of which he happens to be a member" which suggests that it is a contingent fact about me that I am white. There is the animal that bears my name, an animal that is essentially white. But there is a sense, brought out by Thomas  Nagel in various writings, in which I am contingently the animal I am. I am contingently an animal that is essentially white.

But now we are drifting towards some very deep waters.

Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 11:12 AM

I’m not sure we need to even address the question of whether our race is essential to our personal identity or not. Isn’t it enough that it is a feature of us that is deeply important to our functioning in the world and part of the natural categories into which we separate ourselves?

As you define it, I doubt anyone here is a racial tribalist, because saying that you are “first and foremost” part of a race makes it sound as though the interests of that group or yourself as a member of that group trump everything else. I take it that the position that Jacques and I are defending is just that racial groups are morally legitimate and one’s racial affiliation provides genuine moral grounds for certain prioritizations of members of that race.

Posted by: Anonymous | Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 11:43 AM

Anon. writes,

>>it is obvious that it is morally permissible to prioritize one’s family, one’s country, one’s species, etc. in various ways. So, it’s already obvious that “tribalism” is morally permissible. Why arbitrarily think that racial tribalism is illegitimate given that tribalism in generally is clearly morally permissible?<<

I take it that what you mean by tribalism in general is favoring or "prioritizing" one's X over another person's X, if they are different. So racial tribalism is favoring or "prioritizing" one's race over another's assuming they are different.

Whether or not this is morally permissible in a given case will depend on the nature of the favoring. In the O. J. Simpson case, the black jurors voted to acquit despite a mountain of evidence showing that he had murdered two white people. They favored Simpson over his victims because he is black.  I would say that their favoring was morally impermissible.

We have to agree upon a definition of 'tribalism,' however, if we are to move forward.

Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 12:08 PM

Grievance is a Growth Industry

Leftists cling to their grievances despite progress made and remedies applied. And then they invent new ones. For they must remain permanently aggrieved. That is who they are: permanently adolescent in a state of permanent rebellion.  That they have less and less to be angry about means nothing. The merest microaggression suffices to 'trigger' them. 'Racism,' for example,  is everywhere. 

Did you know that hiking and running are racist?

There is nothing so mind-numbingly knuckleheaded that some 'liberal' won't maintain it.

Why Do Leftists Call Good People Racists?

Dennis Prager:

First, truth is not a left-wing value. As I have said and written ever since studying communism and the left in graduate school at the Columbia University Russian Institute, truth is a [classically] liberal value and a conservative value, but it is not a left-wing value. However, destroying opponents by destroying their reputations is a left-wing value -- whether it's charging Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with multiple rapes, preoccupying the country with the fake charge that Donald Trump's presidential campaign colluded with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election, or the charges such as those made against me.

Second, smearing opponents is not only a left-wing value; it is the left's modus operandi. And the reason for that is: The left does not win through argument. It wins through smear. If you differ with the left, you are, by definition, sexist, racist, bigoted, intolerant, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, fascist and/or a hater. The proof? You cannot name a single opponent of the left who has not been so labeled.

True, but we need to go deeper. Why don't leftists value truth, and why do they smear their opponents? The most obvious answer is that leftists are just not good people. Prager has said in the past that leftism turns good people bad. I see it the other way around: some if not most of the people who embrace leftism in the first place do so because they are morally defective specimens of humanity blind to their defects because of their absurd conceit that people are basically good.  It's paradoxical: believing humanity to be good at bottom and held back  by contingent socio-economic arrangements, leftists see their way clear to the commission of the most horrendous crimes. Communists, using the power of the state, murdered some 100 million in the 20th century alone.

They broke a lot of eggs, but where's the omelet?

Did Sexism Bring Elizabeth Warren Down?

That's what she thinks, but she is fooling herself. Her extremism brought her down. 'Progressive' politics is like a progressive disease: it just gets worse and worse as leftists compete to see who can go farthest Left.  But while the leaders of the Democrat Party are sick with the disease and barking mad, most rank-and-file Dems retain their grip on common sense. And so they gave Warren the boot.  This despite the great support she received from the distaff contingent.

The over-ambitious 'Cherokee'  committed suicide by political correctness. Good riddance!  The hyperactive little hustler was a fraud on the personal level who gamed the Affirmative Action system to promote herself, and her ideas were insane: 'free' health care for illegal aliens; inventing new forms of  'racism' including health-care 'racism,' environmental 'racism,' and a couple of others; choosing a trans-gendered child to advise on selection of a Secretary of Education.  The last bit of lunacy amounted to political suicide by intersectionality, as Tucker Carlson remarked. If she had exercised some restraint, she, and not the senile Biden, would be going up against Trump, and the Dems would have a shot at beating him.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that funds being used to construct the president’s border wall with Mexico should be redirected to help contain coronavirus, a quickly spreading epidemic with origins in China.

“I’m going to be introducing a plan tomorrow to take every dime that the president is now taking to spend on his racist wall at the southern border and divert it to the coronavirus,” the candidate said during a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening. (Rolling Stone, 27 February 2020)

Leftists have painted themselves into a corner. They think, absurdly, that borders are 'racist.' But even they realize, despite their willful self-enstupidation, that borders are needed for disease control.  The solution, however, escapes them: jettison the absurd belief that borders are 'racist.'

They can't see their way out because the race card is all they've got and because of their blind hatred for Donald Trump. What a pathetic bunch of losers!

Is 'Wuhan Virus' Racist?

I'll grant you that it is if you grant me that leftism is a deadly virus and that leftists, 'liberals,' 'progressives,' and members of the Democrat Party in the USA knowingly and willingly carry and transmit it.

Do we have a deal?  But if 'Wuhan Virus' is racist, then then so are the following:

• West Nile
• Lyme (named after a town in Connecticut)
• Spanish flu
• German measles
• Norovirus (named after Norwalk, Ohio)
• Middle East Respiratory Syndrome
• St. Louis encephalitis
• Lassa fever (named after a town in Nigeria)
• Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
• Ebola (named after a river in Africa)
• Legionnaires' disease (named after the American Legion)

If the bulleted entries are not racist expressions, then neither is 'Wuhan Virus.'

Class dismissed. Above list found here.

The Wages of Frugality

Some of us from modest origins will end up with more money than we will ever need or be able to spend. The wages of our frugality will not be spent by us but passed on to benefit others. We credit our success to the old-time virtues.  We understand that poverty is more a lack of virtue than a lack of money.

But to suggest that blacks could profit from these old-school virtues will get us branded as 'racists.' Apparently, to the mind of  a leftist, a black who can defer gratification is like a black conservative, a 'traitor' to his race, as if race is a political construct. 

Such is the real racism of low expectations fueled by 'progressive' reality denial according to which race is a socio-political construct.

Stand Up for Innumeracy and Vote Democratic!

If Michael Bloomberg had given the 500 million dollars he threw away on a quixotic bid for the Dem nod to the American people, then each of us 327 million would have received one million, and 173 million would be left over to be given as reparations to the 'victims' of "Stop and Frisk." Right?

Math is hard for liberals.  That must be because math is 'racist.'

Which is Worse? Crime or 'Racism'?

'Racism' obviously. Take a stand against 'racism' and vote Democratic!  

This short video demonstrates that crime is no big deal.

Is There Such a Thing as Racial Profiling?

A re-post from 5 December 2014

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One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes.  Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Islamophobe' is an example of the former, 'disenfranchise' an example of the latter.    'Racial profiling' is a second example of the former.  It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon.  Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile.  A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic.  I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you.  Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile.  I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.

Let's think about this.

I profile you if I subsume you under a profile.  A profile is a list of several descriptors.  You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors.  Here is an example of a profile:

1. Race:  black
2. Age: 16-21 years
3. Sex: male
4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head
5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated
6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.'
7. Physical condition: robust, muscular
8. Location:  place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black
9. Resident status: not a resident.

Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile.  Would I have reason to be suspicious of him?  Of course.  As suspicious as if the fellow were of Italian extraction but fit the profile mutatis mutandis.  But that's not my point.  My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.

Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.*  But that fact means little by itself.  It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics.  An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone.  But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.

There is no such thing as racial profiling.  The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to  forward their destructive agenda.  The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything.  Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.'  If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.'  Social justice is not justice.  But that's a separate post. 

Addendum.  There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers.  Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean.    So one can expect the following to happen.  'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing. 

___________________

* See here:

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

Some Questions about White Privilege

There is a lot of talk these days about white privilege.  The notion cries out for some squinty-eyed scrutiny.

1. White privilege is presumably a type of privilege.  What is a privilege?  This is the logically prior question. To know what white privilege is we must first know what privilege is.  Let's consider some definitions.

D1.  A privilege is a special  entitlement or immunity granted to a particular person or group of persons by the government or some other corporate entity such as a university or a church on a conditional basis.

Driving on public roads is a privilege by this definition.  It is not a right one has  just in virtue of being a human being or a citizen.  It is a privilege the state grants on condition that one satisfy and continue to satisfy certain requirements pertaining to age, eyesight, driving skill, etc.  Being a privilege, the license to drive can be revoked.  By contrast, the right to life and the right to free speech are neither conditional nor granted by the government.  They can't be revoked.  Please don't confuse a constitutionally protected right such as the right to free speech with a right granted by the government. 

Faculty members have various privileges, a franking privilege, a library privilege, along with such perquisites as an office, a carrel, secretarial help, access to an an exclusive dining facility, etc.  Immunities are also privileges, e.g., the immunity to prosecution granted  to a miscreant who agrees to inform on his cohorts.

Now if (D1) captures what we mean by 'privilege,' then it it is hard to see how there could be white privilege.    Are there certain special entitlements and immunities that all and only whites have in virtue of being white, entitlements and immunities granted on a conditional basis by the government and revocable by said government?  No.  But there is black privilege by (D1).  It is called affirmative action. 

So if we adopt (D1) we get the curious result that there is no white privilege, but there is black privilege!  Those who speak of white privilege as of something real and something to be aware of and opposed must therefore have a different definition of privilege in mind, perhaps the following:

D2. A privilege is any unearned benefit or advantage that only some people have in virtue of their identity.  It needn't be granted by any corporate entity, nor need it be conditional.  Aspects of identity that can afford privilege in this sense include race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, wealth, ability, or citizenship status.

People who speak of white privilege probably have something like (D2) in mind.  The idea is that there are certain unearned advantages that accrue to whites just in virtue of their race, advantages that do not accrue to members of other races.

One question arises right here.  What justifies the broadening of the term 'privilege' to cover any unearned benefit?  If the term is used strictly, there is no white privilege.  To speak of white privilege one has to engage in a semantic stretch.  What justifies this stretch?  Is it a legitimate stretch or a example of linguistic distortion?  And what is the agenda behind it? 

One thing to note about (D2) is that it leads to a proliferation of privileges. There will be as many privileges as there are unearned benefits possessed by some but not all.  For example, there will be the 'privilege' of being right-handed since this is a minor  advantage -- better to be right-handed than either left-handed or ambisinistrous -- and it is unearned and not possessed by everyone.  And the same goes for being ambidexterous.  I lack the  'privilege' of ambidexterity, being right-handed only,  and so I am disadvantaged relative to the ambidexterous.  But I am not as disadvantaged relative to the ambidexterous as the ambisinistrous.  They are the worst off when it comes to handedness.  Should they receive something like reparations for nature's niggardliness?

Now clearly all of us enjoy all sorts of unearned benefits. Tall men, of whatever race, have an unearned advantage over short men, as long as they are not too tall.  In the USA at least it is better to be 6'1" rather than 4'11".  (D2) therefore implies that there is a tallness privilege in some cultures.  Is this a problem?  Does justice demand that heights be equalized?  And who will appoint and equalize the Procrustean equalizers?  Or are the equalizers exempt from equalization?  If so, this would be an immunity, hence a  'privilege,' a leftist privilege.

Blacks born in the post-war USA have an unearned advantage over both whites and blacks born in some other parts of the world.  Blacks born into two-parent homes in the USA have an unearned advantage over blacks born into single-parent homes in the USA.  Blacks born without birth defects have an unearned advantage over blacks born with birth defects.  Many blacks born without birth defects have an unearned advantage over some whites born with birth defects.  And so on.

If there is an advantage to being white, is this an advantage enjoyed by all whites?  And if it is not shared by all whites, why should this advantage be called white privilege?  Do 'poor white trash' share in white privilege?  Wouldn't it be better to be born into a solid, middle-class two-parent black or Hispanic family than to be born into a 'poor white trash' family?  Do rednecks and Southerners generally share in white privilege?  It didn't seem to help Paula Deen very much.

What is the relation between white privilege and majority privilege?  I grant that, ceteris paribus, it is better to be white than black in the USA at the present time.  But how much of this advantage is due to whites' being a majority?  When Hispanics become a majority in California, say, will there be talk of Hispanic privilege?  Should Hispanics then start feeling guilty about their unearned advantage?

Here is an important question.  Am I not entitled to my unearned benefits despite the fact that I have done nothing to earn them?  My being tall is not my own doing, and I don't do much of anything besides staying alive to keep myself tall.  I don't work at it in the way I work at improving my mind and work at maintaining my physical and fiscal fitness. 

Suppose you are a black male born in the post-war USA into a middle-class, two-parent, loving home.  You have all sorts of unearned benefits.  Do you feel guilty because you have  unearned benefits that a lot of 'poor white trash' lack?  Should you feel guilty?  Change the example slightly: you were born in London and have the unearned benefit of a British accent.  You come to the States and are hired by CNN or FOX News, beating out white competitors, in large part because of that beautiful and charming accent.  Do you 'check' your privilege or feel guilty about it?  Does it bother you that a Southern accent is a definite disadvantage?

So those are some questions that come to mind when I think about white privilege.  I'll end with a bit of analysis of an interesting quotation from this article:

Those of us who are white and male in the U.S. were born with significantly more chips [with which] to play the poker game of life than were people of color or women. Although our white, male status is a biological reality, the unearned benefits that our race and gender identity provides us are a social construction, that is—they are special perks granted by a white patriarchal society.

The second sentence is gibberish.  Males are on average taller than females.  Being tall is an unearned benefit, but surely it is no social construction.  The very notion of social construction is dubious by itself.  What does the phrase mean? Care to define it?  It smacks of the fallacy of hypostatization.  There is this entity called 'society' that constructs things?  I am not saying the phrase 'social construction' cannot be given a coherent meaning; I'm just saying that I would like to know what that meaning is.  Define it or drop it. 

Perk? Isn't that what the coffee does -- or used to do back in the day?  The word our 'professor' wants is 'perquisite.'  As I suggested above, perquisites are privileges.  So what the 'professor' is doing is conflating privileges with unearned benefits.  That conflation needs to be either justified or dropped. We are told that these 'perks' are granted by a white patriarchal society?  Smells like the fallacy of hypostatization again.  Where can I find the group of people who collectively decide to grant these special 'perks' to white people? 

I could go on, but this is enough 'shoveling' for one day.