Most of the old divisions of the human species have long been rejected anyhow. Noah’s sons, the four parts of the world, the four colours, white, black, yellow, copper red – who still thinks of these outdated fashions today? – Georg Forster, Guiding-Thread to a Future History of Humankind (1789)
Quoted by P Kleingeld, 2007
This general conversation has been going on for millennia without resolution. Culture is now rapidly evolving and one would expect, given the extraordinary level of global communications, that the problem will not go away till there is a global resolution. This is an extremely complex culture wide problem. Platitudes and simplistic solutions will not suffice.
Nowadays, talking and thinking about race and racism probably consumes more emotional and intellectual energy than any other politico-philosophical issue, especially in the US. The direct human costs in pain and suffering are also great. Many believe that things are not improving despite the prolonged efforts of many to address our undeniable unhappiness. We apparently have not yet figured out a cure. Perhaps that is because the cultural diagnosis has been wrong. To make sense of the problem would be extremely helpful. Let me try.
One common definition of a racist is someone that explicitly believes in racism, the belief that distant, broad ancestral origin identifies biologically distinct races which are highly predictive of values, abilities and behaviors of individuals. Many appear to practice racism even while apparently not having such an ideology. These biased persons are then said to suffer from implicit racism due to ignorance or lack of self awareness – a pervasive condition. A society thus populated or created by mostly implicit racists would also be expected to exhibit institutional or structural racism, which ours did and likely still does. All of this would suggest that a solution would be practically impossible – it would just never happen for all implicit racists to suddenly wake up and abandon their unconscious oblivions. However, society nevertheless seems to have evolved for the better despite the ever-present flaws in all of its members, but it has been slow, painful and bloody. A basic question for us then is how does ’progress’ occur and how do we promote it without causing more harm? (That things are ‘simple’ or ‘obvious’ is one of the many ‘delusions’ or ‘lies’ that get in the way, even making things worse – see below.)
Beyond this, and multiplying the difficulties, there is no agreed upon definition of the concept of race – an obvious obstacle to a meaningful conversation. A first step thus would be a better understanding of race – both the word and the reality. We all are aware that there is such a concept but few see the need to define it accurately, even as they express strong sentiments about it. For many it is central to their self-identity. Even philosophers are now paying more attention to these issues and attempt to classify the ways we think about race, e.g. racialist, minimalist, populationist and ‘social’. (Philosophers have this penchant for always making things more complicated.)
Nowadays it is typically emphasized that race is a cultural construct, i.e. it is mostly an abstract concept, residing in the recesses of our minds: race does not connote significant physical, biological or functional differences. This means, therefore, that all this talk about race and racism proceeds without any underlying verifiable objective evidence. However, anyone with eyes, ears or tastebuds perceives obvious differences between many groups of human beings, both in behavior and appearance. Still, bodily features or epidermal melanin tells us virtually nothing ‘in real life’ about a person, their intelligence, talents or character – no one, neither psychopath nor saint comes with an identification tag. (Melanin is actually found in many parts of the body where it performs different vital biologic functions.) So, while there are some genetic underpinnings for the concept of race, these do not correlate with significant functional differences. Hence, race is almost completely a social or cultural construct which leads most people to harbor certain prejudicial ideas about the nature of the other in society. The scientific explanation for this discrepancy is quite straightforward: striking differences in appearance, even if inherited, signifies almost nothing useful or reliable about the character and objective abilities of a specific individual. Population studies have also shown that the variability of individuals within a group is far greater than the small average differences between different groups.
Thus, anyone that explicitly believes in the existence of different human races is a racist by definition. Their mostly ignorant and false concepts may be either benign or malignant, or somewhere in between. Explicit racists are now a diminishing minority. That is because distinct populations can not be rigorously defined, we have become a global community and empirical evidence continues to accumulate indicating that there are no significant differences at a deeper biological level anyway. By contrast, implicit racists are everywhere because most of us unconsciously accept what ‘common sense’ and popular attitudes seem to say. It is therefore easy to see how identity differences can be exploited. Adolf Hitler and George Wallace were explicit racists and once ‘successful’ political leaders that failed horribly as human beings. One cannot know what motivated them, or whether they suffered from some sort of disorder, but they promoted ignorant and delusional ideas about themselves and others that wreaked havoc. They, and millions like them, were the products of their particular social and cultural backgrounds. There are practically none like them today.
Specifically, it is therefore important to keep in mind that there are huge difficulties when attempting to first segregate a cultural group and then to ascribe historical, behavioral and/or characterological features to such a group. Humans are far too complicated to be pigeonholed. It is essentially a meaningless exercise, but one that humankind is still engaged in – we all suffer from group-centricity. At its worst it occurs when a dominant in-group seeks to increase its advantages over others for the purpose of exploitation or elimination. History has been a long rolling holocaust. That most continue to be engaged in this kind of faulty division of the world around them points to a fundamental problem: we justly call ourselves H sapiens and we are biological geniuses indeed. The problem is that we are born cognitively naive and socially dependent, and we appear to learn very slowly, as individuals and as a culture from the mistakes of the past. Social learning is extremely difficult, leaving us largely ignorant and confused, or worse.
The world now seems to be emerging from an approximately 400 year period in which so-called ‘scientific racism’ was the predominant assumption. It was never universal and was recognized by some for what it was right from the beginning: an excuse for the political, economic and social exploitation of the vulnerable. In reality, a model of economic exploitation and subjugation has always lurked in the background of all social arrangements, whether it be patriarchy, slavery, serfdom, aristocracy, apartheid, caste, nationalism, communism, capitalism, or democratic socialism. There seems to be no other way because humans constantly seek to exploit each other. Happiness, freedom, justice and opportunity have never been equally available to all members of any political community, anywhere, but we are making progress, hard as that may be to believe. The key to a perfect union, however, still escapes us, if it exists at all. I suspect it is something that will surprise us and appear shockingly obvious in hindsight.
In 1619 about twenty enslaved Africans arrived in the North American colonies and soon after physical markers of ancestral origin became perhaps the most important aspect of a person. Also at about that time European natural philosophers came up with universal subdivisions of humanity. The newly discovered diverse global population was empirically to be grouped into a small handful of races in a manner similar to the classifications of all living things then being developed by botanists and zoologists – a huge error in retrospect. Each division, based on physical features, implied categorical differences in ability, function and human worth. Much scientific and pseudo-scientific work was done in support of this project, but ‘scientific racism’ was discarded only after the Second World War! Perhaps now humanity realizes that narratives about group identities and the other often reflect exploitative or self-serving political agendas. Hopefully now we are beginning to definitively deal with the implications of our past delusional social beliefs in which self styled groups tried to establish genetic and/or cultural supremacy. Different traditional groups (‘cultures’) may indeed appear to be superior by some measures of outcome and inferior by others, but individuals are essentially the same across groups. Inevitable clashes driven by narrow chauvinistic impulses follow – politics and ignorance again.
Ancient views of race by contrast were casual and ad hoc, but still harsh and probably worse than now. The basic social unit then was the extended family bound together by the very strict religious dictates of ancestor worship. There was little tolerance of diversity. Large numbers of gens, clans, tribes and races, loosely defined, were everywhere. People had to attach to these communities in order to survive and find security, because most of the world was not ‘civilized’ then, and presumably very dangerous. (1) This ancient view was almost the complete opposite of the recent rigid approach of post-enlightenment ‘scientific racism’ which sought to establish Europeans above all others. Our cosmopolitan values of universal individual human rights and equal justice did not matter to the ancients either because they did not exist, also very unlike today.
Plato, born circa 428 BC, applied the concept of race to slaves and kings purely in terms of heredity. “Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors.” (Quoted by Seneca) Race simply signified common ancestry at a time when family bonds and loyalties were paramount. Citizenship was a privileged position that had to be earned. Innate racial superiority or inferiority appears to have been a non-issue for Plato. Non-citizens, i.e. women, slaves and strangers had little to no protection under the law. Any distinguishable, cohesive group with a recognizable common ancestry thus could be referred to as a race; even a large family might qualify. These ‘genetic’ social attachments for the sake of survival are almost certainly biologically facilitated. The bonds of kith and kin.
A few years later Aristotle, born circa 384 BC and Plato’s longtime student, spoke of the desirable traits of citizens, i.e. those men chosen to participate in the government of the city-state or polis, and so confronted the unavoidable issues of superior/better and inferior/worse with a geographical approach: “This is a subject which can be easily understood by any one who casts his eye on the more celebrated states of Hellas, and generally on the distribution of races in the habitable world. Those who live in a cold climate and in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in (knowledge) and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are (educated) and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues free, and is the best-governed of any nation, and, if it could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world. There are also similar differences in the different tribes of Hellas; for some of them are of a one-sided nature, and are intelligent or courageous only, while in others there is a happy combination of both qualities.”
Note: brilliant but ‘racist’ Aristotle identifies different tribes and states within the overall superior Greek race or nation. Race or ancestry, again, by itself does not seem to be a predictor of other features, very unlike scientific racism, but rather appears to be secondary to the local environment and perhaps the good fortune of a “happy” social organization or tradition. A superior race, as defined by skill, social organization, temperament and size, should end up ruling the world. Thus the competitive race for supremacy and survival has been apparent from the beginning and it’s also probably baked into our genetic code. Rather than Aristotle being a proto-racist, human beings appear to be naturally ‘racist’: that is, we naturally seek to belong to or distinguish ourselves from groups, all in the apparent pursuit of competitive social goals and survival. We readily create such groups when possible or as required by the circumstances, survival being priority number one.
The Language Problem
Language captures only part of what we mean, it is an often thin, very incomplete and somewhat imprecise representation of our mental states. Your state of mind cannot be reduced to a linguistic narrative with sufficient richness to give the listener a full and accurate description of ‘what you mean’. Arguably, this is because you couldn’t even describe your state of mind satisfactorily to yourself. Language thus fails both the speaker and the listener.
Thus, the word race labels a subjective and fluid concept – how could it be otherwise when there are no reliable underlying physical or biological correlates? It is what you think it is based on your experiences of your world and your cultural background. It variably has fallen somewhere on the spectrum of family, clan, tribe, nation, state or region. Race, after all, is a cultural construct, and every cultural theorist (all several million or billion of them) is likely to also have a different construction of race based on their perceptions in their own particular reference community. Since culture continuously changes, and race is not a fixed biological reality, our evolving concept of race resists rigorous definition and will remain very vulnerable to political powerplays. Depending on one’s perspective, interests or state of knowledge there could be hundreds or millions of different identity groupings, many loosely referred to as races.
However, many still seem to think the concept is real. For example, the very prevalent idea that skin color somehow identifies a broad common ancestry with shared histories, aptitudes and interests, is mostly unsupported fiction. Yet references to people and communities ‘of color’ as distinct social and political groups are commonplace. (If you don’t vote for me you ain’t black!) It is a powerful narrative with political implications, hence its popularity. Presumably a group distinction from ‘white supremacists’ is being implied. There are, however, multiple theoretical justifications for this particular identity-seeking attitude. It is partly explained by a painful historical narrative: for the past four centuries a dominant but false concept of race was used as political justification for exploitation, abuse and murder. The linguistic and social remains of this false construction now work both ways and causes widespread pain and harm: skin tone is still used to identify both victims and abusers. Many feel a fierce loyalty to their perceived group. Skin color was thus imbued with much power and so has acquired a cultural and political life of its own. The truth is that the roots of bigotry and oppression lie much deeper than a superficial subdivision of humanity. That we are all capable of such ignorance and callousness is demonstrated by both ancient and modern history. A plausible explanation could be our common evolutionary origins, going back millions of years of struggle for survival and fitness. Projection of blame onto others misidentifies the problem. The problem is within all of us, not just them. Now, as we seem to be emerging from our delusions of race, our ‘cultural consciousness’ regarding identity is changing, and our language is changing with it, and it seems pretty chaotic. Everyone should pay close attention to these evolutionary changes because there is a real opportunity for progress.
Cultural change is not always for the good, so we all need to be engaged.
Race and racism are now heavily laden words after centuries of oppressive discrimination and exploitation. Continuing use of old, discredited conceptions of race to describe the many different associations of humans now in front of us is backward in multiple senses of the word. It brings forth strong emotions on all sides because of its historical associations with exploitation, slavery and murder. Furthermore, implicit biases are universal and the free use of the inflammatory racist label for human ignorance and lack of awareness in fact illustrates the ignorance and lack of awareness all around. We need a more nuanced and evolved language that could facilitate a greater and more respectful awareness of identities in the super-complexities of our social interactions. It certainly seems that we need better approaches in education and public discourse. Again, the problem is us, not those fundamentalist conservatives or those elitist academics, or some other deficient group in society. Scapegoating, in fact, is a lost learning opportunity.
For example I have my self identity, my theory of self, but everyone else that knows me has their own, but different, idea of what I am (and vice versa). No one can know my history by just looking at me, and neither can I theirs. Social interactions are very, very complicated and, therefore, greater awareness is necessary in order to avoid getting people riled up when labels are inappropriately applied to populations and to each other. Be fearless, but also be diligent, honest and fair. Observe the Golden Rule, or something like it. (See the video of a very personal discussion of identity by Appiah and Williams.)
The hidden fault with language, our most powerful cultural tool, as I see it, is that it is both a biological and cultural construct, a situation that creates many opportunities for misunderstanding. The same words in a similar or related context can have widely divergent meanings for different people. This is because we all use similar logic, the mostly biological part of language, but we just cannot get our ontologies right – the meaning of abstract ideas acquired through social learning is mostly a guessing game. The questions of what there is and what it is, are a lot more complicated than what it would seem at first glance. Trees and birds are fairly uncontroversial external objects, but everyone has their own understanding of the meaning of internal objects or abstract nouns. To seek truth and justice, or to find beauty is different for everyone. Race, we now recognize, clearly falls mostly in the abstract category, hence all the inevitable mistakes, confusions and conflicts. It is a major social challenge that we will have to face and overcome. Remember, language is public but meaning is private.
Language is thus part of a bigger problem:
The Culture Problem
Global culture far exceeds the cognitive ability of anyone to apprehend or comprehend, thus exacerbating the descriptive limitations of language: it is the web of all people, things, ideas and narratives.
Outrage against perceived ‘racism’ reflects the all-encompassing cultural moment, a powerful, inebriating but mostly abstract cocktail of history, politics, pleasure, power and money, all shaped by prevailing ignorance and undiagnosed cultural misconceptions:
““There’s no dispensing with identities, but we need to understand them better if we can hope to reconfigure them, and free ourselves from mistakes about them that are often a couple of hundred years old,” Appiah writes. “We are living,” he notes, “with the legacies of ways of thinking that took their modern shape in the nineteenth century, and . . . it is high time to subject them to the best thinking of the twenty-first.” He insists it’s time for such an examination because we now live “with 7 billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet,” and “the cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity.”” Review of LIES THAT BIND Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture. Kwame Anthony Appiah.
Again: “Appiah believes we’re in wars of identity because we keep making the same mistake: exaggerating our differences with others and our similarities with our own kind. We think of ourselves as part of monolithic tribes up against other tribes, whereas we each contain multitudes. Fukuyama, less a cosmopolitan and more a nation-state guy, has greater sympathy for people clinging to differences. He thinks it a natural response to our age — but also seems to believe that if we don’t find a way to subsume narrow identities into national ones, we’re all going to die.” Review of above and of IDENTITY The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. Francis Fukuyama.
I sympathize with these sentiments, but there is much that one could disagree with, that is the nature of any complex abstract issue. Group identification, positive or negative, is partly an innate, instinctual or biological process; and we routinely fall prey to group dynamics. Simply stated, the problem is us, we exist in an ineffably diverse, supercomplex culture in which each one of us is presented with an infinite, but different, set of life-long influences, experiences, questions, choices and decisions, inevitably preventing us from finding a common solution – the truth could set us free, but we will never get there. A new or different key might be what we really need.
There is no right way yet identified for everyone to navigate this multi-dimensional cultural maze, therefore we need to be more practical and humble. There is no cultural narrative, grand or otherwise, that could fully satisfy any group, large or small. Therefore, as I see it, we all could still be justified in our diversity of views, even when we deeply disagree. We are all right in some things, wrong in other things and ignorant of much. And so, when many steadfastly agree that their narrative identifies what is true and false, be very wary of false groupthink. It also means that we can have ‘conversations’ about race and not realize that we do not really know what the others are saying. A cultural construct is not a real thing, just as culture is not a real thing. These are abstract concepts generated in our ineffable minds and therefore cannot be objectively verified or falsified by direct comparison with the ‘real’ world. Your and my personal awarenesses of the behavior of myriads of mysterious others and the varying conclusions about them that we each come to, are real but different. Each one of us samples a small but different slice of the whole and comes to a unique but real representation of it in our heads – hence our divergent perspectives on good, bad, truth, culture, race, love, beauty, evil, etc.
All that one can do is to conscientiously rise to the challenge and happily be the best that one can be. There are no guarantees in culture; society is unpredictable, and we know from history that corruption and exploitation are pervasive. One can only trust that given a public choice, humans will opt for what is in the community interest: to promote diligence, responsibility, fairness accountability and transparency throughout society. The list is long, but the bottom line is doing the right thing.
Is it realistic then to hope that someone, or some group of humans, will provide me or you with the key by which to unlock this most difficult of challenges?
The Human Problem
Life, as it is subjectively experienced by every human, is an exquisite interplay of mind, culture and physical reality in all their mysterious super-complexities. Are we here by miraculous accident or magnificent design? Of course… We are just now beginning to understand how amazing it all is. It is ineffable.
And this life is a short, intense race against time – so much to know, so much to do, so little time. We live in the moment and must often act with incomplete and unreliable information – there is an “urgency of now”. But we are not alone. As we sally forth we find ourselves in the company of many others and so immediately realize that some share like goals or use similar strategies and techniques. We naturally tend to band together and thus find needed supports in our various existential struggles. We also find ourselves, however, in competition against other groups who might see the challenges differently, or might have different histories, styles and purposes. And then there are the many artful tricksters that appear to profit through misdirection, deception and corruption. The race against time, the business of life, thus involuntarily divides us into many different groups whether by identity, interests or types of activity and various combinations thereof. There is some reassurance in numbers but we often embark on misguided quests nevertheless.
Each and every one thus plays an essential part in the maintenance of our one human culture, whether by raising children, providing services to others, or planning for the future. Our quintessential human problem therefore is that the depth and breadth of culture far exceeds our stupendous individual faculties of awareness and understanding. It’s like being on a ship, setting forth at night in the midst of a dense fog, fleeing a dark past, knowing neither the destination nor what will be encountered along the way, yet filled with energy and hope. Therefore, culture is always a biased, incomplete and flawed guide. Yet, here we are, against all the odds, preparing to confront an uncertain future.
What propels us is powerful indeed. However, at this juncture what actually makes us do what we do is still a mystery, especially the understanding of how we interact with each other on a personal and global level. Though consciousness has been intensively studied, we cannot explain much of what goes on inside of us. It is super-complex: individual human beings copy and learn from each other but also innovate and create, all at prodigious rates, yet we remain largely ignorant of the totality of human ability, knowledge and experience. We thus depend on each other and an imaginary ‘culture’ for answers to most of our questions, but that is also a difficult strategy with severe limitations and is prone to perpetuating both errors and ignorance.
So, I think I have generally figured out what the problem is: the problem is too complex for any Homo sapiens to figure out by logical analysis. Too complex for anyone and everyone, individually and collectively. Shakespeare was onto something. What a piece of work is man!
Recap
We all belong to a very diverse species with many geographical and traditional variations often called races or cultures in a non-rigorous, colloquial sense. The once widely accepted idea that there are basic differences between any of these putative groups appears to be false. It is not possible to subdivide humanity up into distinct groups that show consistent functional differences. There are no boundaries, no definable races, just superficially identifiable groups that appeal to our intuitions. As far as we know, humanity has always subdivided populations in this casual way, apparently for political reasons and survival purposes while justice and individual rights were often ignored in the process. Thus, whenever anyone uses the word race, they are referring to a vague but complex concept in a personal, unverifiable way that should not be accepted at face value. The first question must be: what do you mean? Genotypic differences between identifiable groups are negligible. Phenotypic (physical) differences can be striking, apparently reflecting our genetic ability to rapidly respond through evolution to changing environments and culture.
Interestingly, in a parallel way, it has now become clear that there is only one global culture with an undeterminable number of group identities. Human beings have always exchanged information through intermixture, trade, migration and war, but that is now dwarfed by the extent of digital communications. Concerns about cultural appropriation nowadays seem to be a desperate attempt at conserving traditions against irresistible forces of change. Life-styles have always evolved, but today global communications are massive and homogenization of our traditions is rapid. No traditional group can insulate itself from the disruptive effects of evolving technology. So, whenever anyone talks about their or our culture, the first question must be: What do you mean?
We are one species with one culture in constant flux. What makes things so interesting are all the multilevel, interlocking variations extending far beyond our individual imaginations. No one could ever come close to a point where they could say that they have seen or heard it all. There is no reason, ever, to be bored.
The social construct of race can now be seen to be rapidly evolving and everyone’s personal theories inevitably will adapt accordingly. This is as expected a disruptive process, but that does not mean that we will jettison heritage from our personal stories – history will remain important as well as interesting and inspirational. Efforts to maintain cultural traditions may even be accompanied by social and adaptive advantages. Competition between groups is likely to continue and it seems certain that some groups will be better equipped than others to deal with the vicissitudes of time.
We are all ‘racists’ to the extent that we naturally identify with preferred groups and reject others. Factionalism is an instinct. This by itself does not say much about ‘us’ or ‘them’. The urge to belong to multiple groups is a biological reality that humans have taken far beyond what is found in other animals. The ability to think logically and express it in language utilizing a large number of abstract categories is a recently acquired, quintessentially human function. Therefore each one of us, by using this faculty of symbolic thinking, has the ability to imagine a new group with desirable features, and might then set forth to see if such an entity actually exists or could be created. The rigid approaches of the past have become obsolete; human culture is now quite desirous of change. Many believe change is urgently needed in order for humanity to save itself and its planet; many disagree. An open, informed, evidence based consideration of our challenges would be an improvement.
Humans by thus exercising their infamous ‘free will’ continuously change the world. This is yet another function, apparently, for which our brains are structured: personal interaction with ‘culture’ through creation, learning, maintenance and destruction. Improving the quality of our participation seems key.
The power of our imaginations requires that we exercise more caution. False belief systems can have harsh real world consequences: about 400 years ago, i.e. very recently, an erroneous cultural construction of race became a fundamental organizing principle in society, especially in the USA. An abstract definition of race was socialized and normalized with codification in law. After the Civil War and abolition of slavery, exploitative racist laws were re-instituted by flawed democratic and judicial means in order to preserve much of the prior system of oppression. A race-based social arrangement based on loss of freedom and exploitation was to the economic and political advantage of the powerful. Universal libertarian individualism of some sort would seem to have been very likely to minimize this kind of problem rather than the ‘race’ based collectivist socialism which did end up with terrible injustice. Libertarian malfeasance would be much easier to correct than rigid misguided collectivist rule, recognizing that all forms of government are collective to a degree. Libertarianism fundamentally posits individual empowerment and responsibility, collectivist socialism the empowerment of controlling elite groups with an implicit weakening of individual responsibility. Such top down systems probably have the additional adverse effect of discouraging individuals from trying to solve wider socio-cultural problems themselves. As ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ battle out their agendas on the mass public stage, the populace at large is expected to cast the deciding vote. A centralized collectivist system with less accountability would render the populace as a whole less likely to be prepared to make decisions on very complex issues.
Legacies of the now discredited historical racialist narrative are still with us today, demonstrating how long false memes can persist culturally. After the shock of the Jewish holocaust in Europe, and the successes of the civil rights movement in the nineteen fifties and sixties, the political tides changed and laws supporting Jim Crow were removed. Yet, there are still many surviving remnants in our society of this false reality, affecting all citizens, consciously and unconsciously, even those that are committed to repairing the damage. ‘Racist’ language and narratives are still being used by many on all sides. Group identities and cultural traditions are often described in hyperbolic racialist terms, especially through partisan political speech. It seems that people have accepted this ‘reality’ for so long that they do not want to let go of it, and so we are trapped by our narratives. The intensity of emotions generated does indeed focus attention on the problem, but it also may be counter-productive. Nothing about culture is straightforward.
Language is a major part of the cultural equation. Both culture and language improve as individuals, no matter what their background, improve their own selves through a greater appreciation and awareness of their personal role in the creation and maintenance of culture. Each one of us is a necessary conduit for passing culture on to others, most importantly to our children, family, friends, and through work. An intricate set of feedback loops exist between society and the individual through language, other forms of communication, cooperation and innovation. So again, top down, pseudo-meritocratic ‘socialist’ approaches to improving culture are intuitively appealing because of their relative simplicity and naive logic, but have a poor track record because, as we have indicated, they tend to impose controlling or oppressive collectivist structures rather than fostering the creative genius of every individual within their communities. A governing elite can issue commands, but successful implementation always depends on the judgements of large numbers of individual citizens – hence the more skilled a community of citizens, the better their individual and corporate behavior and the greater their social happiness. Also, the more skilled the citizenry, the more sophisticated would be their expectations of leadership and the better would the performance of such leadership likely be. Wide dissemination of power amongst all the citizens should be more just, efficient, interesting and stable compared to a system heavily concentrated at the top.
Beware of one-sided dominant narratives. As society changes so does culture, and so do our individual cultural assumptions. Society changes as the hearts and minds and deeds of individuals change. These intricate conscious and unconscious processes in which all of us, including victim and oppressor, participate do not follow any single narrative – they are ineffable. There is no collective narrative, just the illusion of one. (Not all illusions are necessarily bad, but the racist one certainly was.) This again demonstrates the importance of the individual, the only entity that creates narrative, ‘knows’ what it means and lives by it.
There is thus no definitive coherent collective narrative of what we are and how we got here. There is no such history, but we have made it this far. Where we are headed is an even more impossible question – everyone is left with their own best educated guess. It does not make any sense, therefore, to blame ancestors for our difficulties since they probably knew less about what they were doing then when compared to us today. We are the only ones that decide what we will do tomorrow. Vilifying or glorifying ancestors is a popular historicist tale. All political groups, patriarchal, aristocratic, socialist, communist, fascist, ’racist’, religious, capitalist, tend to create self-justifying renditions of the past. It’s all about blaming the other. Having a better grasp of history would certainly be very helpful. This information is out there, but one just has to be careful when acquiring it.
Again, ‘idiocentric’ libertarians are more likely to commit to looking for what they can personally learn from culture – even as it is an ineffable mix of past and present – and then virtuously acting accordingly. ‘Allocentric’ collectivists are more likely to uncritically accept commonly held dominant narratives. But as stressed above, all humans ultimately create their own individual narratives through conscious and unconscious processes and try to live by these representations. Human culture is thus continuously created and recreated, moment by moment by all members of a global species.
Things are indeed what they are because they got that way. It is the ultimate history, but one that can not be told, except through fanciful myths or selective stories. But now, given enormous strides in science and technology, it seems possible that our foundational stories might come a little bit closer to resembling reality – a Theory of Everything and Everyone.
Solutions
We can deracinate racism by becoming less ignorant of the tricks that reality plays on us. An over-reliance on the outside appearance of people and things has been one of those tricks. Humility is in order, above all, since nobody has sufficient processing power to evaluate the whole of culture. We are all deficient in reason, knowledge, memory and awareness of self and other. Even the best among us can run into trouble: Albert Einstein in 1949 recommended socialism as a necessary cure for the evils of capitalism! (2)
In what might seem to be a contradiction to some, science and technology will increasingly drive the evolution of human progress. As we become less ignorant about ourselves, others and the world we should discover better ways of harnessing our wild animal spirits: improving oneself is not a zero-sum game, we can all do it and the benefits multiply. A more precise conversation on race will then naturally be subsumed into a discussion of all the great challenges we face: how to direct our future and survive as a holistic species without having to resort to pointless and deadly competition.
Our best hope appears to lie in striving for a less rigid factionalist (‘racist’), more individualist libertarian eutopia rather than a collectivist fascistic utopia. At its core it is about having more options, more inspiration, better social organization and greater happiness due to the contributions of every single one – more freedom. We are all created equal and different: the ‘kingdom of god is within each of us’, not within some enclave of experts or a dedicated global bureaucracy.
The Constitution of the United States with its Bill of Rights appears to have been the most successful template for a union of large numbers of creative citizens so far. The framers, an elite group of men, were trying to implement the best formulation of individual and social interests available in 1789. Their basic understandings of human social interactions still seem highly relevant today, even as our understanding of human and social diversity and complexity has undergone a revolution.
Society nevertheless operates on the basis of a social contract as envisaged in the broadest terms. The specific components of such a collective cultural construct would be crucial, even if somewhat fluid and ill-defined and thus extremely difficult to formalize. The key appears to be a system that is inclusive, flexible, adaptable and harnesses the genius of individual freedom as the engine of social progress. How could anyone disagree with this? Some have, (2) and despite the many failures of Marxian inspired authoritarian government, many still prefer a centralized, communistic approach. (3)
(1) Siedentop, Larry. 2014: Inventing the Individual The Origins of Western Liberalism
(2) In 1949 with the world still in shambles, Einstein made the case for “Why Socialism” would be the balm for future eudaemonia. His main beef with his co-members of society was that they were selfish and egotistical. He believed this was due to the underlying “evil” of economic anarchy (capitalistic freedom) with which everyone is indoctrinated. Had Einstein lived 50 more years he would have witnessed the greatest global economic expansion and reduction of poverty in history. He also would have seen the repeated horrible failures of Marxist attempts at improving the world. The one exception perhaps is China, but only after it had opted for economic freedom while maintaining central control. I am skeptical but we shall see. In fairness, there are immense social problems still facing us, as Einstein himself clearly recognized: “.. it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic or republican counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?” If the solutions to these problems were not clear to Einstein, why should they be to anyone else? Trying to improve the Bill of Rights would be an obvious answer. “God does not play dice” and so it would presumably prefer to communicate directly with each and every person rather than through the Office of the Central Committee.
(3) See Critical Race Theory: alternative Marx inspired approaches emanating from Academia in an attempt to remake the social economy. One can legitimately worry whether the main goal is to rectify injustice or to install Socialism. Both objectives are presumably not mutually exclusive.
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(https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/rethinking-race-the-case-for-deflationary-realism/)
(https://www.history.com/.amp/this-day-in-history/first-african-slave-ship-arrives-jamestown-colony)
(https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_44)
(https://classicalwisdom.com/greek_books/politics-by-aristotle-book-vii/3/)
(https://fee.org/articles/5-psychological-forces-that-turn-people-into-political-hacks/
( https://www.c-span.org/video/?465720-1/after-words-thomas-chatterton-williams&start=0)
(http://alexpeak.com/twr/racism/)
(https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/counseling-psychology/multicultural-counseling/idiocentrism/)
(https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/counseling-psychology/multicultural-counseling/allocentrism/)
Johannes Lubbe 