As I've observed politics and social discourse over the past 25 years or so, the thing that I think unsettles me most is the increasing prevalence of alignment shift. I'm not talking about a mechanical problem in the front end of your car, nor about changing alliances. I'm talking about "alignment" as the word is used in Dungeons & Dragons.
For those unfamiliar with the game, Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game where players assume the role of a character which they guide through an adventure of fighting monsters and searching for treasure, guided by a "dungeon master" who serves as part story-teller, part referee. Each player has a paper called a "character sheet" that lists their character's skills, equipment, and basic characteristics. Among these characteristics is one called "alignment" that describes the guiding values by which a character tells the difference between right and wrong. There are nine possible alignments, plotted along two axes. One axis is good-evil, and the other is lawful-chaotic. This means a character may be one of the following: lawful-good, lawful-neutral, lawful-evil, neutral-good, true neutral, neutral-evil, chaotic-good, chaotic-neutral, or chaotic-evil.
This acknowledgement of a difference between conformity and morality was one of the novel features that set the game apart from others that simply cast players as either heroes or villains. Robin Hood, who broke the law to commit acts of justice and mercy, would be a well-known example of the chaotic-good alignment, while a government official who strictly enforces the letter of the law to cause pain and suffering would be an example of lawful-evil.
In politics, people's worldviews are often described by a similar, two-axes method, with one axis being left-right, and the other being authoritarian-libertarian. In my youth, leftist authoritarians were practically non-existent in this country. From what I could see at the time, the leftists were hippies. They wanted to exist outside of systems of authority, in egalitarian communes where everyone could "do their own thing." They saw themselves as rebels against "the Establishment" or "the System" or "the Man," because at that time, the centers of power were all controlled by people acting on conservative, right-wing values. The people trying to hang onto old, traditional views and the people using violence, poverty, and prison to oppress minorities were one and the same. It went without saying at the time that if someone believed in empowering minorities, they also took a casual or even oppositional approach to rules and mores. The idea of a leftist being a totalitarian was alien, something that existed only in other countries or before my time. If we were taught about them at all, it was only to tell us that they were bad and scary.
As the Boomers grew older and took control of those centers of power, things started to change. The same hippy-leftist vs. totalitarian-right narrative was still dominant, because that's how the people controlling the message saw the world. But at the same time, these hippies-cum-power-brokers started to edify their worldview through force of law. Laws were passed to punish those who made life hard for anyone the left saw as an underdog. Feminism and political correctness became the official orthodoxy on college campuses. The environment was protected, not just by protests and boycotts anymore, but by government agencies wielding power.
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And that's where I abandoned this post over nine months ago, for whatever reason. Anyway, in Dungeons & Dragons, there's a little-known monster called an aleax that a character's god can send to punish the character for straying off alignment. Say an evil character had started being much too kind, helpful, heroic, and self-sacrificing for good causes. The evil deity that character worships would send this "angel of punishment" called an aleax to attack the character. It looks exactly like the character, and only the character can see or touch it. The aleax would fight the character to the death, as I remember. If the aleax killed the character, that was that. They were dead and presumably punished in the afterlife. If the character prevailed, though, and killed the aleax, they'd be given a second chance. I think the lore was that the character would be taken into the realm of their god to serve them for a year or something like that. Then they'd return to the mortal realm supposedly reformed and ready to play in a manner consistent with the alignment listed on their character sheet.
What I was getting at here was the idea that these hippies-turned-tyrants need the hippie god to send some aleaxes down to smite their asses and put them back on the love, peace, and do-your-own-thing path.
Monday, July 19, 2021
Umberto Eco's 14 Points of Fascism, and How They Describe the American "Left"
Before we begin, I'd like to clarify something. The title of this post refers to "the American Left," but that's a really poor descriptor for a group with no accurate name, a group I have dubbed "the Wokesters." It is not a reference to the Democratic Party, though the party often (insincerely) uses language that appeals to Wokesters in order to solicit their support. Nor am I referring to actual economic leftists, who favor some kind of egalitarian politics somewhere along the axis between Marxism and capitalism tempered by strong unions and an effective, compassionate social safety net. Most Wokesters would say they subscribe to such views, but plenty of other people who also do aren't Wokesters.
"Wokesterism" isn't about economic policy so much as it's about using stereotypes to split the population into The Oppressors and The Opressed, and taking a militant position against the Oppressors. Some have called this "Cultural Marxism" because of its emphasis on the downtrodden overthrowing the powerful, but Marx saw revolution as cyclical. The victims overthrow the tyrants, and eventually become tyrants themselves, only to then be overthrown by the people they oppressed. But in the worldview of Wokesters, the first tyrants are forever tryants, even if they're eventually enslaved, and the original victims are forever victims, forever incapable of evil. (If you think about it for a moment, you can see how this is probably the thinking that leads the victorious victims to become tyrants in the first place.)
"Wokesterism" isn't about economic policy so much as it's about using stereotypes to split the population into The Oppressors and The Opressed, and taking a militant position against the Oppressors. Some have called this "Cultural Marxism" because of its emphasis on the downtrodden overthrowing the powerful, but Marx saw revolution as cyclical. The victims overthrow the tyrants, and eventually become tyrants themselves, only to then be overthrown by the people they oppressed. But in the worldview of Wokesters, the first tyrants are forever tryants, even if they're eventually enslaved, and the original victims are forever victims, forever incapable of evil. (If you think about it for a moment, you can see how this is probably the thinking that leads the victorious victims to become tyrants in the first place.)
Though this school of thought appears to have had its origins in third-wave (or "intersectional") and radical feminism, I believe it is more properly described as a postmodernist, second wave of anti-racism. To perhaps oversimplify it a bit, but in the interest of brevity, we can describe the thesis of Wokesterism as basically being, "Straight, white men are the root cause of all evils in the world. Even when people of color or LGBTQ+ people victimize each other, it's because of conditions created by straight, white men. The proof of this is that some individuals who see themselves as victims feel like it's so. Not only is that all the proof that's required, anyone who questions the veracity or objectivity of subjective, anecdotal evidence is committing further acts of aggression against the victims. Anyone who disagrees is a Nazi who must be silenced, shunned, and destroyed."
The first wave of anti-racism is the colorblind sort that prevailed in the Civil Rights era and persisted through the 1980s. It is perhaps best typified in the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote,
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Gen-Xers were raised on this idea, with everyone from our teachers to the characters of Sesame Street indoctrinating us to accept that a person's race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or disability is completely irrelevant to their value as a human being. We were taught to accept that the "wrapper" a person came in didn't determine what kind of person they were, and that it was evil to think otherwise. We saw the attempts by previous generations to grant or deny privileges based on these superficial characteristics as being both evil and absurd.
But this second wave, Wokesterism, defies and criticizes that idea. They say that in order for justice to be done, the injured parties and the perpetrators must be identified. That sounds reasonable on its face, but through the lens of postmodernist subjectivity, the injured parties and perpetrators are whomever the Wokesters feel like naming. They assign both blame and martyr status, not according to the objectively identifiable, documentable acts of individuals, but rather by prejudiced feelings about entire races, ethnic groups, etc. Wokesters claim that colorblindness perpetuates racism, while the first-wave anti-racists see Wokesterism as blatantly racist.
Now that that's out of the way, let's dig into Eco's 14 points*, and how the Wokesters are rushing to embody them.
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1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
To Wokesters, "Whitey" was the bad guy in the 1400s, he's still the bad guy now, and he always will be the bad guy, no matter what he might do to atone. One often hears opinions on reparations prefaced by, "While, of course, no amount of money could ever possibly be enough make up for the horrors of slavery...". If amends can never be made, why try? What good does it do? What's the point, other than to punish one class of people for things they never did while feeding the sadism and sense of entitlement of people who see themselves as victims for sins that were committed decades before they were born? True progressivism would seek forward movement--"We correct this injustice, and then we move on to the better reality we've created." But Wokesterism doesn't actually want progress. They just want power to switch from one group of bullies to another, and for the new regime to be the status quo forever more. They wish to create a new tradition of straight, white, male submission.
2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
Umberto Eco, as a 20th century professor and novelist, was understandably focused on the fascism of 20th-century Europe when he wrote these points. Modernism was avant garde during the reigns of Hitler and Mussolini. The Nazis rejected Modernism because it attacked the romantic visions of the past that the Nazis found inspirational. But Postmodernism also rejects Modernism. Postmodernism elevates the subjective and outright denies the objective. Ironically, though, Wokesters accept certain subjective perceptions as Absolute Truth, while opposing views are condemned as heresy. The determining variable at first appears to be the identity of the person expressing their perception. But it's not even really about that. It's about adherence to Woke dogma. The moment a woman criticizes feminism, or a black person says they don't feel oppressed, the Wokesters turn on them. Suddenly, that individual's "truth" is invalid. This adherence to their own orthodoxy is the establishment of a new tradition, one vigorously defended as the only morally acceptable one.
3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.
On May 25th, 2020, Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd for no apparent reason other than to callously defy the crowd of onlookers who were pleading with him to stop strangling Floyd. The rational, modernist view would say that this was a crime committed by one man against another man. Chauvin is the guilty party, and Chauvin should be punished for what Chauvin did. It might further allow that Chauvin had supervisors in the Minneapolis Police Department who also bore some responsibility for having allowed this to happen. Fair enough. The top of that chain of command is the Mayor of Minneapolis, or perhaps even the Governor of Minnesota.
But that summer, we saw riots nationwide. Wokesters attacked police and smashed the windows of homes and businesses that had no connection to Chauvin whatsoever. Banging a hammer against a piece of metal here in Columbus, Ohio, is not going to fix a malfunctioning engine in China, and throwing bricks at police officers here isn't going to do a blessed thing to cause Minneapolis to change its police policies and practices. But that's logic, and postmodernists abhor logic. Their thinking was, "We're mad, we deserve to lash out, and you have no business criticizing how we choose to express ourselves."
Wokesters use this same rationale to justify their seemingly aimless (but always authoritarian) actions regarding gun control, environmentalism, diversity, and the suppression of iconography that they find offensive.
4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism.
Put more plainly, Eco said that fascists regard disagreement as treason. We see this every time a feminist Wokester attempts to silence disagreement with her flimsily supported rants by accusing critics of "mansplaining." The mere fact that words are spoken by men is regarded as evidence that the words are wrong and invalid.
5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.
This is a funny one, because Wokesters believe that they hold diversity to be the highest virtue. But as I pointed out earlier, they only tolerate diversity within the confines of their orthodoxy. In fact, the diversity they tolerate is only aesthetic. They don't tolerate any true difference in opinion. They regard "whiteness" as a sin. The mere existence of families formed around cisgendered, heterosexual couples is seen as deeply harmful. They're very clear about which people they find acceptable and which ones they don't.
6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.
Read any fascist, anti-semitic propaganda and simply replace the word "Jews" with "billionaires," "corporations," "the One Percent," "Trumpers," "white men," "cops," or "Christians," and you'll find it's indistinguishable from the rhetoric of Wokesters.
Wokesters have practically built a religion out of claiming that they have no privilege at all, and out of accusing others of having unearned privilege. Among Wokesters (such as white ones) who are accused by other Wokesters of having privilege, it is considered a pious act to admit to it with deep remorse and to make ostentatious efforts at renouncing their privilege or using it to help the underprivileged. They would all agree that being born in the United States (or Canada, or any other wealthy, industrialized nation) is a privilege they all have, even if it's the only one.
Wokesterism, though, really doesn't acknowledge people who don't have a clear social identity. It's all about dividing people up according to social identity. If you don't have one, they'll assign you one and let you know if you're one of the good guys or one of the bad guys. The silver lining is that if you don't like the identity you've been assigned, you can simply identify with another one...unless you're white, in which case that would be "appropriation" or "Blackfishing" or any other number of silly terms that mean "Stay in the Bad Guy lane and quit trying to fit a cultural stereotype we'll accept."
8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
See point #6. Beyond that, Wokesters haven't yet fully embodied this one, as there's still some internal dissension over it. Many Wokesters actually have a considerable amount of wealth and power of their own, so they can only rail so hard against the privileged without looking like shallow hypocrites in the eyes of their poorer brethren.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.
Antifa exists solely to fight. They don't have any objective that, once it's achieved, they can dust off their hands and celebrate the end of their struggle. They live for conflict. There is no benchmark that feminists or second-wave anti-racists can point to where they can say, "Once we've achieved this, we'll be happy and settle into our place as equal members of society." Their shared identity is that they're the aggrieved. If they win, that identity would vanish. Keeping the fight going forever is thus of existential concern for Wokesters.
10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
Wokesterism isn't quite there yet, as it's finding its legs through this identity of being the weak and of being champions of the weak. I think, though, that this is less indicative of any harmlessness on the part of Wokesters than it is of the way that conflict and dominance have fundamentally changed since World War II. Today, we have a victim culture, and the person who is seen as having moral authority (and thus popular support) is the one who can best portray himself as the innocent victim of his enemies.
That said, Wokesters nonetheless have a tendency to ditch their own professed ethos of acceptance in favor of emasculating, infantilizing, and body shaming their enemies.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.
The latest one I've heard is "birthing person" to replace the word "mother." "Male" is "Person Assigned Male at Birth." The only way to say these things with a straight face is to have no sense of humor.
The right wing in America has tried dipping a toe in the waters of Newspeak now and again, insisting that suicide bombers be called "homicide bombers" and calling clumps of cells "babies" and so on, but they're mostly not very good at it. The Wokesters own Newspeak.
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* When I was just about all the way though that list, I looked at a few different articles all claiming to list Umberto's 14 points, and none of them matched exactly. Apparently, each list consisted of excerpts taken from Umberto's writing, and each person relating this second-hand decided to emphasize different concepts in each point. Well, I'm not going back and revising this to address all those missing points. I think I've made mine.
Thursday, August 27, 2020
+ Evolution of Conflict
Back in the Dark Ages, when people had a disagreement they couldn't settle, they'd physically attack each other. Their belief was that their deity would grant victory to the person who was right. Interestingly, God tended to favor the view of the large and well armed back in those days.
At some point after that, we decided violence was bad. A couple clever men whose names you would recognize learned to weaponize this idea around the middle of the 20th century. Instead of hitting their opponents, they would just stand there letting their opponents hit them. Then they'd say to the world, "Ow, ow! What a meanie! Look what he did to me!"
The onlookers would gasp and cluck their tongues and wag their fingers disapprovingly at the assailant, ruling that the he was disqualified, and that the person he had hit was the winner of the argument by default.
Thus, victim culture was born.
As this new tactic was widely adopted, combatants would square off and try to goad each other into throwing the first punch. The person who swung first was guilty, and therefore, wrong. We became a culture of whiners, competing to see who could tell the most pitiful sob story.
There were a couple problems with this approach, though. For one thing, your victory depended entirely on your opponent slipping up and losing his temper. If he was able to tune you out, you never got the opportunity to get hit and win the victim contest.
The other problem was that you needed to have witnesses to officiate. This was often inconvenient and led to people slipping back into physical dominance when witnesses were unavailable.
To address both of these problems, a new tactic was devised. If there were no witnesses around, you'd attack your opponent. But you didn't need to have the physical prowess to actually defeat him in an old-fashioned fight. You just needed to provoke a counter-attack. If you hit somebody enough, you either beat them up (old-school victory) or they try to make you stop. When they try to make you stop, that's when you introduce the jury. You can do this by running towards an audience with your opponent in pursuit. Or, these days, you start recording video when the counter-attack begins, and not a moment before. To the audience's eyes, the counter-attack is the first attack, and you win!
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Door Number Three
I had an "Aha!" moment yesterday, and I'm feeling unsettled by it. It may be something that seems both obvious and not at all unsettling for many reading this, but understand--until this realization, I had always felt that the political left and right in the United States took precisely the opposite positions on gun control from what they should have taken, if they were being intellectually consistent. It seemed obvious to me that the "do your own thing," revolutionaries committed to equality and empowering the downtrodden should be arming minorities, women, the elderly, the disabled, and so on. And it seemed just as obvious to me that the folks who practiced the civic religion of worshiping the flag, the military, and the police, and who were always calling for harsher punishments of criminals and crueler treatment of the poor would be the ones wanting to strip the weapons away from the populace to make it easier for the government to maintain order and compliance.
It truly baffled me why this was not the case. I chalked it up to being some combination of the Left's embrace of pacifism in the latter half of the 20th century, and the media playing the two sides against each other. Plenty of people disagreed with me, but none bothered to educate me. Those on the Left simply ran away and stuck their heads in the sand when they saw the word "gun." The Right verbally abused me for being stupid and unpatriotic, but couldn't provide an explanation that made any sense, because most of what the Right believes about the Left is wrong*.
I get it now, though. The key for me was looking at some of the arguments on the Left about other issues--arguments I myself have made on unrelated topics, like universal healthcare.
"It is scandalous that on the richest nation on Earth, we have people dying of treatable diseases."
"Why is there hunger in a country that throws away millions of pounds of food every day?"
They see resources as being something we all own (or should own) collectively. They feel that these resources are being misallocated, and that this is why some people don't have enough. The thinking is, "There's plenty to go around. The government should take some away from people who have too much, and give it to the people who don't have enough."
The conservatives respond, "I don't need the government to give me anything. I could take care of myself just fine if only the government would keep its mitts off my money and leave me alone."
They take the same approach to public safety. The conservative says he can defend himself just fine if only we'd let him arm himself as he pleases. The liberal wants the government to provide protection services. She wants to ride a public bus or train so she doesn't have to own a car, and she wants the police to be her bodyguards so she doesn't have to fight for her own survival.
I get it now, but I'm not entirely comfortable with either of these views. The conservative view is sensible, within the tiny bubble of concerns it considers, but it is myopic. Yes, maybe your business pays you enough to buy what you need for a comfortable life. But how comfortable will you be in a world full of thieves and beggars because the masses are left poor for the benefit of a handful of billionaires? There's a certain amount of psychopathy inherent in conservatism--an attitude of, "Screw you, I got mine," as though your neighbor starving or being victimized has no affect on your own life.
Liberals, though, are naive. I've heard them say things like, "I shouldn't have to take precautions against getting raped, because it's the rapists' responsibility not to rape me." Also, "If a robber threatens you, just give him what he wants. You don't have to fight," as though criminals haven't killed people just for thrills, from today's gang initiations back to Vikings killing unarmed monks. Tell Emmit Till that he should have just given his attackers what they wanted.
I don't like either of these views. We shouldn't have to choose between being an antisocial island or being dependent infants with no autonomy. I'm not comfortable with the dystopia that either of them presents as their utopia. Instead, I'd like to do what may sound impossible: marry these two views into a single vision that should appeal to both sides. To me, that would look something like this:
It is your civic duty to be as useful as possible. You can be a hero to your community by having skills and resources to share with them. Take pride in empowering others. "Teach a man to fish," if you can. If you can't, then share your fish with him so he can be free to do other things for you and your community.
And it's not all about guns. I want as many of you as possible to know as much as possible about how to do everything necessary for survival. I want you to know how to grow food and how to process, preserve, and cook it. I want you to know how to fix each other's homes and furnaces and pipes and cars. I want you to know how to rig up a water purification system and electricity generation, whether it's your family, your neighbor, or your whole town who needs it. I want you to respond to tariffs on imports by saying, "So what? We can make that here." And I want the most celebrated people to be the ones who can help the most people in the biggest ways.
I want liberals to be more independent, and conservatives to be more empathetic. I don't think that puts me in the middle or makes me a watered-down thing we call a centrist because of its fear of choosing sides. This is option "C," where people show their love for their community by strengthening all individuals.
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*I was going to insert a link here, but I can't find it now. Cards Against Humanity did a poll to find out what Democrats and Republicans believe about each other. Both sides had many errors, like Republicans overestimating the percentage of Democrats who were gay, or Democrats overestimating the percentage of Republicans who were white supremacists, but the Republicans polled were generally more wrong than the Democrats were. That is to say, while both sides believe inaccurate stereotypes, the Republicans were more likely to have a view of their opponents that bore no actual resemblance to reality.
It truly baffled me why this was not the case. I chalked it up to being some combination of the Left's embrace of pacifism in the latter half of the 20th century, and the media playing the two sides against each other. Plenty of people disagreed with me, but none bothered to educate me. Those on the Left simply ran away and stuck their heads in the sand when they saw the word "gun." The Right verbally abused me for being stupid and unpatriotic, but couldn't provide an explanation that made any sense, because most of what the Right believes about the Left is wrong*.
I get it now, though. The key for me was looking at some of the arguments on the Left about other issues--arguments I myself have made on unrelated topics, like universal healthcare.
"It is scandalous that on the richest nation on Earth, we have people dying of treatable diseases."
"Why is there hunger in a country that throws away millions of pounds of food every day?"
They see resources as being something we all own (or should own) collectively. They feel that these resources are being misallocated, and that this is why some people don't have enough. The thinking is, "There's plenty to go around. The government should take some away from people who have too much, and give it to the people who don't have enough."
The conservatives respond, "I don't need the government to give me anything. I could take care of myself just fine if only the government would keep its mitts off my money and leave me alone."
They take the same approach to public safety. The conservative says he can defend himself just fine if only we'd let him arm himself as he pleases. The liberal wants the government to provide protection services. She wants to ride a public bus or train so she doesn't have to own a car, and she wants the police to be her bodyguards so she doesn't have to fight for her own survival.
I get it now, but I'm not entirely comfortable with either of these views. The conservative view is sensible, within the tiny bubble of concerns it considers, but it is myopic. Yes, maybe your business pays you enough to buy what you need for a comfortable life. But how comfortable will you be in a world full of thieves and beggars because the masses are left poor for the benefit of a handful of billionaires? There's a certain amount of psychopathy inherent in conservatism--an attitude of, "Screw you, I got mine," as though your neighbor starving or being victimized has no affect on your own life.
Liberals, though, are naive. I've heard them say things like, "I shouldn't have to take precautions against getting raped, because it's the rapists' responsibility not to rape me." Also, "If a robber threatens you, just give him what he wants. You don't have to fight," as though criminals haven't killed people just for thrills, from today's gang initiations back to Vikings killing unarmed monks. Tell Emmit Till that he should have just given his attackers what they wanted.
I don't like either of these views. We shouldn't have to choose between being an antisocial island or being dependent infants with no autonomy. I'm not comfortable with the dystopia that either of them presents as their utopia. Instead, I'd like to do what may sound impossible: marry these two views into a single vision that should appeal to both sides. To me, that would look something like this:
It is your civic duty to be as useful as possible. You can be a hero to your community by having skills and resources to share with them. Take pride in empowering others. "Teach a man to fish," if you can. If you can't, then share your fish with him so he can be free to do other things for you and your community.
I want you to learn to safely handle guns and keep one in your home, not because I want my neighbors to shoot each other or so you can wreck our society by overthrowing the government. Rather, I think the day may come when our government needs your help defending us all. Our military could be crippled and our leadership compromised. If we get to that point, I don't want it to be every-gunman-for-himself, with the gentle people left to perish. I want people of conscience, who care about their communities, to be available to grab their personally owned weapons and assemble into an ad hoc defense force to repel invaders. I want neighbors to take care of each other such that the police can just come when called instead of patrolling our streets like an occupying army. That's my vision for America--a nation of Minutemen Hoplites, not survivalist hermits or cities of sheep.
I want liberals to be more independent, and conservatives to be more empathetic. I don't think that puts me in the middle or makes me a watered-down thing we call a centrist because of its fear of choosing sides. This is option "C," where people show their love for their community by strengthening all individuals.
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*I was going to insert a link here, but I can't find it now. Cards Against Humanity did a poll to find out what Democrats and Republicans believe about each other. Both sides had many errors, like Republicans overestimating the percentage of Democrats who were gay, or Democrats overestimating the percentage of Republicans who were white supremacists, but the Republicans polled were generally more wrong than the Democrats were. That is to say, while both sides believe inaccurate stereotypes, the Republicans were more likely to have a view of their opponents that bore no actual resemblance to reality.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Mother of Exiles
714,984
That was the population of Columbus, Ohio, when I moved here in 2000. In 2018, the population was estimated at 879,170. That means that in just 18 years, this city has grown by 164,186 people. It wasn't because the birth rate exceeded the death rate by that much. It's because people came here from other places...people like me.
I'm an immigrant. I'm not what you probably think of when you hear that word. I was born in the United States. I'm a citizen. I'm white (with some Seminole and very distant African ancestry). English is my first language. The language spoken by the largest non-English speaking minority in my birthplace was German (Deitsch, specifically). But I'm not from here. I wasn't born in Columbus, not even in Ohio. I didn't need a passport or a visa to come here. No guards stopped me at the edge of the city. Nobody in the government of Ohio or Columbus or Franklin County gave me permission to come here, and I didn't have to risk my life swimming across a river to sneak in.
Like most immigrants to Columbus, I came here looking for a better life. My mother, widowed at the age of 22, brought me to Ohio from our hometown in Pennsylvania as she pursued an education in Cincinnati. Like so many immigrants, she found a new spouse in this new place and started a business--multiple businesses, actually. After moving around to a couple different places in the eastern and northeastern parts of the state, we finally settled in a deeply impoverished part of southern Ohio, a former boom town that fell into ruin when the steel mill and shoe factory both closed. The Appalachian accent was so alien to my ears that I struggled in school my first year there because I couldn't understand the teacher. I was mocked by other students for "talking funny."
I found myself ostracized not just because of my accent, but also because of my parents being "rich" (ie., not on welfare), and for being Catholic in an area dominated so heavily by a handful of Protestant denominations that it was a commonly held belief there that Catholics are no more Christian than Buddhists or Hindus are. Like many immigrants who "refuse to integrate," my mother moved me to a Catholic school and indoctrinated me in the belief that we were culturally and intellectually superior to the natives.
Twenty years later, after being immersed in Appalachian culture, marrying one of the natives, spending my twenties either unemployed or underemployed, and finally watching my marriage end, I fled to Columbus for a better life. I'd made new friends who offered me a place to stay and referred me to a job opening. I went from making $6.35/hr at a Wal-Mart in southern Ohio after having worked there for a year and a half to making $9.50/hr on my very first day as a maintenance mechanic in a distribution warehouse in Columbus, and got a one-dollar-an-hour raise after just a month.
Let me repeat that: For my own selfish financial advancement, I immigrated to Columbus without permission and deprived a Columbus native of a job that paid 65% more than I could earn back home. Like so many immigrants, I sent much of the money I earned back home to support my children, while I slept on the floor of an overcrowded apartment I shared with three other people. A few years later, I married another immigrant and we had a couple "anchor babies" born in a Columbus hospital.
Over a period of 18 years, 164,186 of us did this. Some of us came from poorer parts of Ohio, some of us from poorer states outside Ohio, and some of us from Mexico, India, Somalia, Nepal, and many other countries, all for the same general reason: to flee a bad situation and take part in the prosperity of Columbus. This city has not suffered for it. Rather, we have fueled its economy, labored in its businesses or started new businesses of our own, and helped the city to prosper and grow.
When people immigrate to the United States from other countries, they don't come to settle in some stateless, city-less area belonging solely to the federal government. They come to cities in states, cities they aren't from, just like I did. I didn't have to ask the federal government for permission, even though I crossed state lines to come here, and nobody else should have to, either. Even if my mother had had a criminal record, we wouldn't have been denied entry to Ohio. Nobody even checked. She didn't have to show proof of income or have an Ohio employer jump through any hoops to get us here. Had she been convicted of a crime in Ohio, she would not have been deported back to Pennsylvania. It should be no different for anyone moving to Ohio from Sonora or Ontario.
My point here, in case it's not yet crystal clear, is that if a new neighbor moves in next door to me, the effect on me, on the rest of the neighborhood, on the rest of the city, and on the rest of the state, is no different at all whether that person comes from California or Honduras. The only difference is a legal fiction, a difference that can vanish with the stroke of a pen. People favoring strong immigration enforcement will talk about the sanctity of "the rule of law." This argument reminds me of a scene in the movie "Labyrinth." The protagonist is stopped on her journey by a guard who says, "None may pass without my permission!" She simply asks the guard's permission, and he, somewhat confused, grants it. If the gravest offense of illegal immigration is simply that it's a violation of the law, all we have to do is repeal that law. Voila! It's no longer illegal! Think of how much money we could save by eliminating the Border Patrol, most of ICE, and that ridiculous wall project!
Culturally, economically, environmentally--in every way you might name, immigrants from California or Honduras impact us the same. It's one more person, taking up one more person's worth of space, eating one more person's worth of food, generating one more person's worth of garbage. Domestic immigrants, be they from Pennsylvania or Portsmouth, are every bit as much a burden as are immigrants from other nations, yet we don't restrict, regulate, or even monitor their immigration at all. Coastal flooding or some other disaster could cause a couple million displaced American citizens to suddenly seek asylum in Columbus, and we could not and would not do anything to stop them. In fact, the U.S. Constitution prohibits it. Rather, we might ask the federal government for help providing accommodations for the newcomers. More likely, we would just have a boom of new construction and businesses coming to the area to take advantage of the increased labor pool. Remember, in 1800, the population of New York City was just 60,000. In 2018, it was estimated to be close to 4.8 million. Did such growth bankrupt and destroy that city? Quite the opposite!
We let American outsiders move into our cities without raising an eyebrow. There is no moral or practical reason for it to be any different with newcomers from different countries.
- Emma Lazarus, 1883The New ColossusNot like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows worldwide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Saturday, April 21, 2018
More Alike Than We Realize
In a comment thread on Facebook, I saw a commenter named Craig say, "Anti second amendment people simply aren’t very bright, just look at the nonsense they believe." That prompted me to reply with the following:
Craig, that's simply not true. I know several very intelligent, highly educated people who favor some degree of gun control. What they all have in common, besides being compassionate people who frown on any sort of violence, is that they've never had to rely on weapons to defend themselves or anyone else. In every instance they've personally experienced, when weapons were used against a human being by someone other than the police, they were generally being used to CAUSE trouble, not resolve it.
There's an old saying that a conservative is just a liberal who's been robbed. I think that's what's going on here. These people have been safe. Or if they have encountered danger, they felt helpless to do anything to counter it. They're not trained gunfighters, and they believe an untrained person trying to use a gun for self-defense is about as safe and effective as an untrained person performing brain surgery. (And when it comes to a firefight against skilled tactical shooters, they're absolutely right, like it or not.) What they don't understand--from lack of exposure--is that a civilian CAN become a competent gunfighter without joining the police or military, just as surely as one can become proficient in martial arts without becoming a Shaolin monk.
But let's be honest--most of us cling to that "shall not be infringed" like it cancels out the "well-regulated" part. And yes, I know what that term means and how the Founders used it. They made it crystal clear in the Militia Acts of 1792. So how many overweight armchair warriors would be comfortable with their right to bear arms being contingent on turning out for drill and doing PT on the courthouse parking lot once a month? How many of us would be comfortable with "big government" REQUIRING us to buy an M-4, grenades, Kevlar, night vision, and all the other kit commonly used by infantry troops today? How many would like to be fined for failing inspection? Or jailed for missing drill or failing to report to muster when summoned? Imagine having no police patrol, and instead, whenever your sheriff needs help serving a warrant, he'd draft random gun owners into helping him, and they'd get in trouble for ducking out of it the same as if they failed to report for jury duty. (I can already hear the Libertarians whining, "But that's SLAVERY!") This is what it means to have a well-regulated militia. I wish we still had one (instead of the standing army we ended up with), but I'm guessing the vast majority of pro-2A people don't agree with me on that.
The problem isn't that the anti-gun people are unintelligent. It's that, like everyone else, they suffer from normalcy bias. They want to think of themselves as reasonable and rational. They don't want people to see them as wild-eyed lunatics ranting about paranoid delusions, so they automatically dismiss possibilities so far outside their day-to-day experience that it sounds like science fiction. Some people react that way to warnings of environmental harm, while others react that way to warnings of civil unrest, robbery, or military invasion. They dismiss it as fantasy until it happens to them or someone close to them, and by then, it's too late to prepare.
How do you feel when you're aware of grave danger and others dismiss your concerns as ridiculous "conspiracy theories" or pointless worrying? You might get quite emotional pleading with them to see reason, right? That's how the gun-control folks see us when we react to their proposals to limit gun rights: "gun nuts," mentally unhinged, paranoid freaks who probably shouldn't be trusted with a gun. And of course, that just amplifies our fear that we're about to be disarmed, so we get even more emotional and even belligerent. They do the same thing when we respond to their fear of getting shot by suggesting that the answer is to have even more bullets flying around from more directions. Calling each other stupid isn't going to get us anywhere. It just shuts down conversation.
Craig, that's simply not true. I know several very intelligent, highly educated people who favor some degree of gun control. What they all have in common, besides being compassionate people who frown on any sort of violence, is that they've never had to rely on weapons to defend themselves or anyone else. In every instance they've personally experienced, when weapons were used against a human being by someone other than the police, they were generally being used to CAUSE trouble, not resolve it.
There's an old saying that a conservative is just a liberal who's been robbed. I think that's what's going on here. These people have been safe. Or if they have encountered danger, they felt helpless to do anything to counter it. They're not trained gunfighters, and they believe an untrained person trying to use a gun for self-defense is about as safe and effective as an untrained person performing brain surgery. (And when it comes to a firefight against skilled tactical shooters, they're absolutely right, like it or not.) What they don't understand--from lack of exposure--is that a civilian CAN become a competent gunfighter without joining the police or military, just as surely as one can become proficient in martial arts without becoming a Shaolin monk.
But let's be honest--most of us cling to that "shall not be infringed" like it cancels out the "well-regulated" part. And yes, I know what that term means and how the Founders used it. They made it crystal clear in the Militia Acts of 1792. So how many overweight armchair warriors would be comfortable with their right to bear arms being contingent on turning out for drill and doing PT on the courthouse parking lot once a month? How many of us would be comfortable with "big government" REQUIRING us to buy an M-4, grenades, Kevlar, night vision, and all the other kit commonly used by infantry troops today? How many would like to be fined for failing inspection? Or jailed for missing drill or failing to report to muster when summoned? Imagine having no police patrol, and instead, whenever your sheriff needs help serving a warrant, he'd draft random gun owners into helping him, and they'd get in trouble for ducking out of it the same as if they failed to report for jury duty. (I can already hear the Libertarians whining, "But that's SLAVERY!") This is what it means to have a well-regulated militia. I wish we still had one (instead of the standing army we ended up with), but I'm guessing the vast majority of pro-2A people don't agree with me on that.
The problem isn't that the anti-gun people are unintelligent. It's that, like everyone else, they suffer from normalcy bias. They want to think of themselves as reasonable and rational. They don't want people to see them as wild-eyed lunatics ranting about paranoid delusions, so they automatically dismiss possibilities so far outside their day-to-day experience that it sounds like science fiction. Some people react that way to warnings of environmental harm, while others react that way to warnings of civil unrest, robbery, or military invasion. They dismiss it as fantasy until it happens to them or someone close to them, and by then, it's too late to prepare.
How do you feel when you're aware of grave danger and others dismiss your concerns as ridiculous "conspiracy theories" or pointless worrying? You might get quite emotional pleading with them to see reason, right? That's how the gun-control folks see us when we react to their proposals to limit gun rights: "gun nuts," mentally unhinged, paranoid freaks who probably shouldn't be trusted with a gun. And of course, that just amplifies our fear that we're about to be disarmed, so we get even more emotional and even belligerent. They do the same thing when we respond to their fear of getting shot by suggesting that the answer is to have even more bullets flying around from more directions. Calling each other stupid isn't going to get us anywhere. It just shuts down conversation.
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Failure to Persuade
All these racists suddenly emerging out of nowhere reminds me of the George R.R. Martin quote:
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
At some point between the 1970s and now, the left moved from being a bunch of pacifist flower children spreading a message of colorblind love, to being a bunch of authoritarian post-modernists closely policing what people say and who's allowed to say it, and ostensibly eschewing labels while at the same time continually issuing brand new ones.
I can see how that happened, if not precisely when. The roots, I believe, lie in pacifism, and specifically in non-violent resistance. If your strategy for gaining power rests entirely on casting your enemy as a bully so the rest of the world will feel sorry for you, it leads to embracing hypoagency as being a moral good. This ethic gives rise to victim culture, or as I used to call it, "dueling dysfunctionals." Whomever can prove that s/he had the most tortured, most persecuted existence wins, and the winner gets to define reality, unchallenged, for everyone else. If Jenny wins the prize for being the most victimized, and she says that the biggest problem facing the world today is alien space lizards bent on world domination and disguising themselves as spiders, then we are all commanded by the gods of academe to believe, repeat, and act on that very idea...which is bound to really, really suck for the spiders. If anyone dissents, they're accused of hating Jenny and being in league with the spiders.
But what did that shift from lovers to despots accomplish? Did it make the world more loving and inclusive? Apparently, it just cowed the racists into silence without actually winning their hearts or changing their minds. Do you know why that is? It's because screaming accusations at somebody doesn't tend to be an effective method of persuasion.
To persuade someone, you first have to get them to stop actively resisting having their mind changed. You need to make them feel comfortable enough to let their guard down so, rather than clinging to their position like a drowning person clinging to a bit of flotsam, they're comfortable stepping back with you to look at their position and yours with a more objective eye. To accomplish this, you first have to stop attacking them and make it clear that you're not waiting for just the right moment to pounce and start attacking them again. Then, you have to acknowledge their lived reality. They might be dead wrong about the state of affairs, but even if they perceive things differently than they actually are, that doesn't completely negate the value of their perception. They simply have an incomplete or skewed picture. It's not wrong so much as only right within a very narrow frame of viewing. Stand with them in that place, looking out at the world from their little arrow loop of a window, and show them how to push the boundaries to allow for a wider, more complete view.
This, I feel, is why the left has failed to convert more people away from racism--it never dared to listen to the racists' concerns. It never bothered to acknowledge the racists' anxieties. It just pointed fingers and screamed, "Racist! Nazi! Sub-human filth!" browbeating them into silence. So when the racists, for example, look at the national crime statistics and see that blacks commit about half the murders in America despite being only about 13% of the population, and they fallaciously infer that black people are therefore more inherently violent, the left doesn't acknowledge the statistic and explain why things are that way. They just scream, "You can't say that! That's racist!" The racist shuts up if enough people ostracize him intensely enough, but he remembers that he read the facts and that the leftist failed to refute them or offer any explanation that would negate the racist's (incorrect) conclusion. In his mind, his perception is the truth, backed up by hard, scientific numbers, and the leftist simply says that you're not allowed to speak the truth because it might hurt someone's feelings, and victims' feelings trump facts. Instead of slowly coming around to at least partially accepting the leftist's point of view, he instead decides that leftists are unreasonable and duplicitous, and he withdraws from contact with them, instead seeking the company of others who will echo and validate his racist views.
A friend of mine recently said that Americans need to start taking responsibility for their opinions. That's clearly true among the racists who have been committing random acts of violence against minorities (or encouraging others to do so), but I think it's also true of leftists who can't wrap their minds around the idea of someone daring to do something so heretical as having a different opinion than theirs.
To persuade someone, you first have to get them to stop actively resisting having their mind changed. You need to make them feel comfortable enough to let their guard down so, rather than clinging to their position like a drowning person clinging to a bit of flotsam, they're comfortable stepping back with you to look at their position and yours with a more objective eye. To accomplish this, you first have to stop attacking them and make it clear that you're not waiting for just the right moment to pounce and start attacking them again. Then, you have to acknowledge their lived reality. They might be dead wrong about the state of affairs, but even if they perceive things differently than they actually are, that doesn't completely negate the value of their perception. They simply have an incomplete or skewed picture. It's not wrong so much as only right within a very narrow frame of viewing. Stand with them in that place, looking out at the world from their little arrow loop of a window, and show them how to push the boundaries to allow for a wider, more complete view.
This, I feel, is why the left has failed to convert more people away from racism--it never dared to listen to the racists' concerns. It never bothered to acknowledge the racists' anxieties. It just pointed fingers and screamed, "Racist! Nazi! Sub-human filth!" browbeating them into silence. So when the racists, for example, look at the national crime statistics and see that blacks commit about half the murders in America despite being only about 13% of the population, and they fallaciously infer that black people are therefore more inherently violent, the left doesn't acknowledge the statistic and explain why things are that way. They just scream, "You can't say that! That's racist!" The racist shuts up if enough people ostracize him intensely enough, but he remembers that he read the facts and that the leftist failed to refute them or offer any explanation that would negate the racist's (incorrect) conclusion. In his mind, his perception is the truth, backed up by hard, scientific numbers, and the leftist simply says that you're not allowed to speak the truth because it might hurt someone's feelings, and victims' feelings trump facts. Instead of slowly coming around to at least partially accepting the leftist's point of view, he instead decides that leftists are unreasonable and duplicitous, and he withdraws from contact with them, instead seeking the company of others who will echo and validate his racist views.
A friend of mine recently said that Americans need to start taking responsibility for their opinions. That's clearly true among the racists who have been committing random acts of violence against minorities (or encouraging others to do so), but I think it's also true of leftists who can't wrap their minds around the idea of someone daring to do something so heretical as having a different opinion than theirs.
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