Ice Floes

Today I was pointed towards this column on the effects of climate change in the San Diego Union-Tribune.  More specifically, the comments section, and how decisively conservative they were.

Interestingly, the comments vacillate between denial, and spiteful joy in the possibility that the sea might be rising - "what great fishing opportunities!"  I can't help but think that the former is the same old hand-waving-as-a-smokescreen-for-true-rightwing-perspective found in the latter.  You can't generally come right out and say you don't give a shit about the earth or most of its (brown) people, so you come up with one elaborate ideological scheme after another. 

This sort of callous "political incorrectness" is widespread on the right.  So much so that it seems to go to a more fundamental issue of temperament.  It's an attitude that takes an almost gratuitous pleasure in human frailty.  I work with a woman, for instance, who routinely jokes that the poor, emotionally-damaged children she teaches "ought to be rounded up and shot".  Understand, she has a dark sense of humor, and this is gallows humor at its finest.  But the attitude comes directly from a larger worldview that is often very conservative (she claims to be a moderate, despite her husband's devotion to Rush Limbaugh in the car).  And the right is filled with just this sort of quasi-humorous social-Darwinist commentary.  Tune in to AM radio for an instant and you're thrust right into a cauldron of anger, disgust and open hostility towards the "weak". 

To the extent that conservatives hate liberalism, it seems largely due to liberals' unending devotion to the plight of the "weak".  This is what they cannot stand.  Whether it is blacks, women, gays, Muslims, or owls - this "concern" continually expressed absolutely drives them mad.  Obviously, the implication is that they, due to a lack of expressed empathy, are callous, greedy bastards.  Yet maybe they are?

Of course, there are the polls that find conservatives give at least as much on average to charity as liberals.  And as generally very church-going folk, I have no doubt this is true.  But one cannot help but notice their general air of righteous individualism: "I got mine, get your own - dammit!"  The term "politically correct" itself seems to define a de facto stance of humility and charity in communication that conservatives would simply not abide - at least in all but the most racially offensive situations (a barrier straining at the edges after the Obama presidency).

This is all very ad hominem, I guess.  But it isn't something I take lightly.  I tend to think of myself as generally nauseatingly moderate and wiling to crawl inside the mind of my fellow man.  Yet at the end of the day, I keep returning to the question of liberalism and conservatism as fundamentally character and temperament-based (the former largely learned, the latter not).  Is my character attack on the right simply a principled reaction - that which I feel in my gut?  Why is my accusation of "greedy" or "callous" necessarily different than their principled position of "individualism" and "freedom"?  Conversely, is their accusation of my being a "bleeding heart" or "tree-hugger" necessarily different than my principled position of empathy or naturalism?

We can of course from here concoct elaborate ideological and philosophical arguments for our positions, underpinned with facts and evidence, reasoning and logic, yet how much of the cart is being pushed before the horse?  How much, in the end, are we all just hand-waving in front of deeply-felt and generally intransigent "emotions" (for lack of a better word). 

And maybe a good deal of the problem is just that - our lack of a vocabulary, our lack of a meaning for words to describe.  Neither by neuroscience, nor psychology alone do we have more than a very incomplete picture of what is driving these deep-seated responses to the world.  The tantalizing question remains: how much of our feeling is being driven by ideas, and how many of our ideas are being driven by emotion?  And what is it that we are really feeling?  Anger seems one of the most triumphant emotions in politics, yet does not anger always have a source in another emotion.  What are we afraid of?  What are we mournful of?  What has been offended in us?

Through understanding the roots of our own feelings, the original causes of why we feel the way we do about an aspect of the external world, hopefully we will come to know better why we hold the beliefs we do.  Because what are our beliefs, but the codification of how we have chosen to interpret our response to external events?  All of which is nothing less than humankind's eternal struggle to know itself.  And in this we continue forever onwards.

The New Racism

I'm troubled by where racism and the right is right now. Everyone knows racism is wrong. In theory. Certainly no one will admit to being racist. If accused, they always back way. Sometimes with legitimate excuses, yet sometimes not - their original conduct was clearly racist yet they still deny it.

This is very weird. I suppose many of them harbor these thoughts in private and just don't want to deal with the political/social/etc. fallout if they took public ownership. But then, many I suspect don't actually believe they are racist (they somehow know racism = bad) and thus genuinely back-peddle and make excuses for their behavior.

I imagine most modern racists fall into the latter category.
Even the white liberal friends of mine, who as liberals are more likely to have done the more complex listening & self-reflecting that begins the process of disentangling cultural prejudices and subconscious bias, still can't escape falling into crude stereotypes or the "other" mentality. I admit to a fair amount of it myself. In that sense we are all modern racists.

Although I think what is key is the continued acknowledgment of the problem - of how deeply embedded it is in our cultural frameworks. Fundamentally it is an admission that we are not perfect, that we are products of our environment, our natures. And our goal is to strive beyond.

Yet the anti-race racist, by reflexively denying his own human frailty (sin, as I think it has been correctly identified by mythological narrative) denies not only his own role, but fails to see it in others. This is a self-perpetuating cycle, as acknowledged evidence of racism in others implies it is still alive as a phenomenon, and thus possibly alive in oneself. Thus denying it in others helps to deny it in one's self.

Politically the right has all the reason in the world to downplay racism as a phenomenon. Every instance of it not only allows the possibility of their own racism, and their own frailty, but also discredits the purity of the American project, both evidenced in "direct" and "legacy" racism. Direct racism actively damages individual freedoms, while legacy racism builds disadvantage into entire communities through community dysfunction or inadequate resources.

As both are vehicles for social inequity, they present a niggling problem for the fundamental meritocratic assumptions of conservatism. Sure, minorities had a reason to be poor when discrimination was law. But now that it isn't, we can wash our hands of the whole problem and expect every man's success or failure to be his own. The existence of racism doesn't allow us to do this, as it is a social injustice that requires intervention. And how to better to do this than government decree.

Except you can't simply will racism out of existence. It requires social transformation, which takes time and effort - and most forcefully, government action. And until it is eradicated, you can't hold each man accountable for his lot in life. Those niggling demographic statistics on race and poverty, education, criminality, etc. are evidence of this.

This is the stuff of white privilege. And to a free market philosophy built on the assumption of every one starting with "their own bootstraps", privilege is really annoying! It throws the whole concept off. Free markets will always have winners and losers, which is a bitter pill to begin with. But it gets that much more bitter when most winners just happen to come from very different backgrounds than do the losers.

I'm still waiting for a conservative explanation for demographic success disparities. Appeals to free will would seem to predict relative random distribution of results year over year, yet there are an enormous number of very solid socioeconomic predictors.

Were I to be a conservative, I would be very concerned with making the playing field level so that my free market could run relatively equitably. How you do this without government intervention is beyond me. Their main line of argumentation right now seems to be that it has actually BEEN government intervention that has perpetuated inequity, via welfare, housing, education, etc. Which seems pretty ridiculous. Sure, these programs have their faults, but one wonders how the the alternative, a.k.a. doing nothing, amounts to anything more than wishful thinking.