Next book: Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell

I've decided to read The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell. It proposes to explain (from a decidedly right-wing viewpoint) America's current divisions in terms of what happened in the 60's. I have enjoyed Rick Perlstein's hefty journalistic history of the emergence of America's current right-wing coalition in terms of the 1960's, so I suppose it's only fair to look at a view from the other side.  (Though Caldwell's take is decidedly polemical rather than documentary.)

I'm two chapters in, and one point leaps out: Caldwell forcefully asserts (while skimping on citations) that desegregation required bad legal work (particularly Brown vs. Board of Education) and violated freedom of association. To the second point, well, from some viewpoint that is definitionally correct: Business owners were not allowed to refuse to associate with people on the basis of race. On the first point, though, I will say that to whatever extent he's right (and he provides relatively little evidence for his assertions) it increases my sympathy for the guilty liberal stance.

The version of US history that I was taught emphasized that the Civil Rights Movement was about making America live up to its promise, striking down laws that were inconsistent with America's most deeply-rooted principles.  Seen in that light, the court rulings that had buttressed segregation (e.g. Plessy vs. Ferguson) were violations (at least in spirit, if not in letter) of the post-Civil War amendments.  However, if Caldwell is correct, and if a smart lawyer would have to concede the permissibility (and perhaps even appropriateness) of segregation law under our Constitutional arrangements, then our system is much harder to celebrate.  Yes, every system of laws is ultimately built upon enforcement by violence, and hence lends itself to terrible things, but in the best case that violence is undertaken to fend off something worse. The argument here is that something worse is enshrined in the system, and not just in the Constitutional provisions rendered null after the end of slavery.

In that case, a smart lawyer might feel a deep sense of shame, as Shelby Steele discussed, and out of that shame feel conflicted about the system that they are supposed to work within. It makes sense that upper-class liberals (a social segment where lawyers are abundant) might be overcome by guilt. Yes, they can deny it, singing the praises of Brown vs. Board of Education (and similar rulings) as consistent with the spirit of our Constitutional system, but if Caldwell is correct, then deep down they must believe it to be a lie.

To whatever extent Caldwell is correct, conflicted emotions are the only appropriate emotions for a well-educated liberal who is immersed in the system. The restlessness of our elites makes sense.

Mind you, I'm far from convinced that Caldwell (and by extension a guilt-ridden elite class) is correct. Too many people (of all skin tones) have worked too hard to extend the promises of American ideals to all Americans. In the greatest tests of federal authority (the Civil War and Southern defiance of desegregation rulings a century later) the federal government was on the side of African Americans and the rebels were on the side of racists. At a minimum, the Confederates believed that their cause had no sure footing in the American system; that's why they left.  The Union cause was hardly staffed with people whose racial opinions would pass any of today's standards, but it was still the less racist of the two sides, and it accomplished things that made America better. That has to mean something.

Of course, the greatest betrayal of African Americans was arguably the end of the military occupation of the South under Rutherford B. Hayes. I will not defend the abandonment of African Americans, but I will say that I can forgive fallible humans who decided to end a military occupation after more than a decade. Military occupations are terrible things, and while the social situation that came afterward was even worse, as a citizen of a country currently involved in military occupations, I get it. Also, it is telling that what ultimately brought down that system of segregation was not a second military occupation (though federal troops did enforce a few court orders) but the mobilization of Christians for the greatest display of non-violence in American history.  It is terrible that America waited so long to end this, but it is telling that it took something far more radical and Christian than a military intervention to do it, and the magnitude of the task is revealed by the fact that it took the most gifted orator and most profound Christian thinker in American history to lead that effort.

Then again, the fact that the magnitude of the task required our greatest orator and Christian thinker perhaps points to the severity of the rot in our culture.

Anyway, Caldwell is not necessarily making the point that he intended.  Let's see how this unfolds.

Latest book: 'A Dream Deferred' by Shelby Steele

I recently read A Dream Deferred by Shelby Steele, a book which argues that post-60's liberalism has focused on social policy as a means of redemption from shame. His basic thesis is that once white Americans fully came to grips with the enormity of America's racial crimes, they sought redemption and hence lowered standards for African-Americans.  He critiques welfare and affirmative action, both of which have changed between 1998 (the publication date of his book) and 2020. Welfare is no longer the open-ended subsistence bestowed in the 1990's (Clinton and Gingrich passed welfare reform), and while diversity programs run as strong as ever, explicit quotas and set-asides are mostly gone. Implicit, hidden quotas, fudged evaluations, etc., all of these things still exist, more than ever. But good luck getting somebody to lay it out in a document that could be subpoenaed.

Steele says that this is all about white people seeking redemption from shame. He says that this is why educators lurch from one fad to another, because they desperately need to be seen doing something. It is less important that African Americans improve than that white people be seen trying. As a black conservative, he despises this, both for what it does to black people (it forces them into dependent roles so that white liberals can feel better) and for what it doesn't do (it doesn't actually raise performance).  I think he over-simplifies somewhat, but that's inevitable in a book that's 180 pages.  Either you should state your thesis in a more succinct essay, or write a tome of nuance and documentation.  He's an excellent writer, and packs in as much nuance as 180 pages will allow (his prose is magnificent, and I doubt I could ever write an essay as good as his), but it's still light on documentation.  (Then again, he came up as a literary scholar, not a social scientist.)

Lest you think he's too harsh on his own people, he has no shortage of praise for his culture. He praises areas of African-American endeavor, and argues that they have been most successful in areas (art, literature, music, entertainment, sports) where competition cannot be easily manipulated by do-gooders. Of course, reality is more complex than that, but he brings an important consideration to the table.

He keeps revisiting the point about unbearable shame, and I think that does explain the restlessness I see among educators. We have been told that we are THE solution to the unbearable shame, and when it doesn't puff us up with pride it fills us with desperation to fix something that we cannot fix on our own, neither for the benefit of the intended recipients (an underclass) nor the desperately guilty upper class. We can only do our part, but we need to be seen doing as much as possible, lest we be called to account by either the underclass (who will tell us we did too little) or the upper class (who will tell us that we failed to discharge the guilt that they transferred to us).

One thing I wonder about is why Germany doesn't display the same restlessness, despite having a terrible crime on their record.  I suspect it's 4 things:
1) I'm too far removed to see it clearly.
2) The descendants of their victims mostly live elsewhere, so they don't need to discharge their debt via domestic social policy.
3) Their crime, as terrible as it was, was one episode in a much longer history, so it doesn't stain every single thing in the way that racism stains our entire history. (Indeed, their neighbors have plenty of pogroms on their own ledgers.)
4) After WWII they immediately confronted a new problem (division between two outside powers, and the oppression of half of their people by one of those powers) so they had a different set of considerations.

Anyway, I'm off to read some books that I'm currently not motivated to blog.  Maybe that will change.

The conservative nature of progress

There's a common genre of articles and presentations proclaiming that everything we think we know is wrong. They often focus on our cognitive biases.  There are, of course, valid points in such articles. Human fallibility is real, and old knowledge often has to be replaced. At the same time, if everything we think we know is wrong, then what does progress mean? If we are not just fallible but incompetent then how can we make progress? If our minds are too limited to have learned anything correctly before, how are we going to learn anything correctly now.

Conservatism at its best is about the notion that we can actually have at least some degree of confidence in time-tested insights. For all its skepticism of new ideas, there's also the possibility that when genuine progress is made it can be preserved and serve as a foundation for the next advance. That is a far more progressive ideology than the premise that the next breathless enthusiast in a conference room can overturn everything (for a fee).

Thoughts on MLK thus far

I'm a few chapters into the MLK book. I don't have many specific points to highlight (aside from one, below), but I will note that his thought was far more complex than that one line from that one speech that everyone quotes as an argument for color-blindness.  There's no denying that he wanted to work toward color-blindness, or work alongside people of all races in the present. At the same time, he never acted as though history could just be hand-waved away. He was quite adamant about the burden that history had imposed specifically upon African Americans, and how it made their advancement much harder than the advancement of Irish, Italian, Polish, or even Jewish Americans in the face of discrimination.

But he was also not an apologist for pathologies of crime, broken families, etc. in African American communities. He would argue adamantly that these things were rooted in history, argue adamantly that the government must remedy this, but also argue adamantly that while pushing for the government to remedy this the African American community must also work on it themselves.  In short, he went easy on nobody. A liberal could point to where he argued for white people to recognize their responsibilities and the role of history. A conservative could point to where he argued for African Americans to do everything possible for themselves. A relativist could point to where he recognized unique historical circumstances. An absolutist could note his firm adherence to Christian morality and personal responsibility. It was a far more complex take than anybody looking for a simple partisan box to slot him into. What else would you expect from one of the sharpest minds and best Christian teachers of the 20th century?

One specific point that I found interesting was where he noted that the challenges of automation pointed to the need for workers of all races to cooperate politically. It is a point that has been salient for centuries (water and wind power were automating tasks long before "machine learning" became a buzzword) but has certainly not become less salient. I don't claim to know what he and Andrew Yang would say to each other if they met, but I would love to overhear that conversation.  I suspect that there would be many areas of distinction and differences of emphasis, but both of them would recognize the significance of some key questions.

Also, he repeatedly condemns the Vietnam war, and the way that the government spends far more money producing a Vietnamese corpse than it spends uplifting a poor American. A Christian indeed.

Next book: Where do we go from here--chaos or community?

I gave up on Rene Girard. I'm reading Martin Luther King's final book, titled Where Do We Go From Here--Chaos or Community? The first chapter was a recounting of the state of black America in 1967, focusing on the stark economic and educational inequalities remaining after the lifting of formal legal inequality. He knew that fixing those problems, involving stubborn facts on the ground, and threats to economic interests, would take far more work than fixing the formal legal inequalities.

The second chapter, which I'm partway through, discusses the challenges of keeping people focused on non-violent resistance in the 1960's. This passage is striking:

Over the last decade they have seen America applauding non-violence whenever the Negroes have practiced it. They have watched it being praised in the sit-in movements of 1960, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, in the Albany movement of 1962, in the Birmingham movement of 1963 and in the Selma movement of 1965. But then these same black young men and women have watched as America sends black young men to burn Vietnamese with napalm, to slaughter men, women and children; and they wonder what kind of nation it is that applauds nonviolence whenever Negroes face white people in the streets of the United States but then applauds violence and burning and death when these same Negroes are sent to the field of Vietnam.

All of this represents disappointment lifted to astronomical proportions.  It is disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the Negro's freedom. It is disappointment with a federal administration that seems more concerned about winning an ill-considered war in Vietnam than about winning the war against poverty here at home.

Yep, he was definitely a follower of the Carpenter from Nazareth. And that last sentence (highlighted here, but not in the original) could be written about almost any era of US history, if the word "Vietnam" were replaced with some other country.

Girard, continued

Right now Girard is talking about the concept of victims and sacrifices, and kings sometimes functioning as sacrificial victims. It's short on specific examples from larger societies, and seems to be mostly focused on small tribal groups with simpler technology. However, I am reminded of the fact that the word "leader" is derived from an ancient Indo-European root word meaning "To go forth and die." I interpreted it less as a sacrificial function than as reflecting the burden of leadership in a warrior society, i.e. the leader has to march into battle and assume risk in order to earn respect. But perhaps I should reconsider.

I'm eager to get to the part where Girard analyzes Christianity. I'll have more context.

Next book: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

My next book blogging will be about Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard. I came across a reference to this book, while reading something about political correctness. I can no longer find the essay that I read, but the title of this book stuck with me. The reference said that this book discusses the roots of religion, and since the social concerns at the root of political correctness also sit at the root of much that maddens me in modern education, it's worth studying.

The book seems to be very focused on the theme of mimicry as the root of social strife. It's dangerous to try to fit all of human society into one single social theme, but my impression of 20th century French intellectuals is that they engaged in these over-simplifications for playful reasons. They felt that if you want to understand an idea you must take it as far as it can go and then some, and try to fit absolutely everything into it. Even if the fit is awkward, you must keep trying. They never say explicitly that the awkwardness of the fit might be telling in its own way, but instead expected you to figure that out for yourself.  So I'm reading him forgivingly. Also, his ideas about mimicry, and how it can lead to rivalry and contests, while repeated on every page, also seem to be more of an invitation to bigger questions, rather than something that he seriously intends you to fit everything into.

Mostly it has me thinking about religion in general. Abrahamic faiths seem to be particularly versatile religions, in that they provide at least 4 things:

1. A cosmology: God made the world, and that explains it.
2. Morality: You must do good when possible, and atone and repent by the rules of the faith when you fall short, and God will reward you.
3. Ritual: The year is organized by a religious calendar, with rituals for different facets of life at different times of the year. This focuses our time and endeavors, provides cohesion and outlets for our communities, and provides, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a season for all things.
4. Community: The community of believers is distinct from other tribes.

When I contrast with older polytheistic faiths, one omission that I see is morality. One reason is that in ancient mythology it isn't clear which god you should look to for morality. The universe has no undisputed moral leader, but rather a strife between deities with conflicting agendas. And many of those deities are deeply flawed (the Greek gods being particularly flawed, but not unique in having flaws). Are we to look to these murderous adulterers for morality? At least the Old Testament God, when He smites the wicked, has an uncontested claim to moral arbiter status.

Instead, polytheists appeal to different deities for different purposes.  Want victory in war? Sacrifice to the god of war. Want a bountiful harvest? Sacrifice to a harvest deity, or maybe a weather deity. And so forth. Also, while ancient polytheists were deeply concerned with tribal identity, alien tribes have deities whom some societies considered real rivals to their deities, rather than figments of alien imagination.

(Hinduism has morality, but there's also an idea that the multitude of gods reflect some deeper, higher order behind the world, something that might not be a single God like the God of Abraham, but at least brings unity.)

Political correctness offers morality and community, and increasingly ritual (e.g. land acknowledgments), but not (yet) a cosmology. I suspect that as they edge toward "noble savage" tropes we'll see a re-emergence of religious cosmology, particularly as the astronomy community struggles to reconcile their need for mountaintop observatories with traditional religious beliefs about sacred mountains, but we're not yet at the point of a PC cosmology. Maybe we'll eventually get myths about certain groups having not just more sustainable lifestyles but supernatural connections to the land, but we're not quite there (as far as I know).

Or maybe not. Ancient religions didn't check all of the boxes that Abrahamic faiths check, and much of the world gets by without all of those boxes being checked in their belief systems. Still, since PC seems to be quite Christian in its roots, being so focused on guilt and redemption, I am open to the possibility that eventually a full-scale recreation of Christianity will emerge.