Sunday, May 2, 2010
Racism leads to inter-racial unions
Racism is a social construction. All the evidence we have about the behavior of historically racist societies (South Africa, the Americas----Mexico, Brazil, the United States, Canada, Australia, the Caribbean----shows that racial discrimination is exploitation based on ancestry and appearance. (See The White Slave of Nootka, an account of a white man enslaved by Natives living in what is now British Columbia.) Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson in his monumental study of racism found it to have a vulgar, haphazard form and a systematic institutional form. In South Africa and the post-Civil Rights protests the racism was systemic/institutional, as well as cultural, against black Americans. In Mexico and Brazil, it was haphazardly cultural and the racial barriers to black social advancement were porous. If racism were simply speciation, it ought to have led to separate lives of the 2 species. But in the modern era, racism collapses into a society of racially exogamous relationships (See the works of anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran of the creation of the so-called "Mexican" race (La Raza) from the violent destruction of the endogamous tribal consanguinity of African slaves, Indian natives, and Spanish Conquistadors. The process of exogamy has been going on since at least the time of the Pharoahs. (See reflections of endogamy in the world of the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus with his cycle of plays about Greek women and "black" Egyptian princes): The Suppliants in 463 BC (Hiketides): "In the play, the Danaids, the fifty daughters of Danaus, founder of Argos, flee a forced marriage to their cousins in Egypt. They turn to King Pelasgus of Argos for protection, but Pelasgus refuses until the people of Argos weigh in on the decision, a distinctly democratic move on the part of the king. The people decide that the Danaids deserve protection, and they are allowed within the walls of Argos despite Egyptian protests. The 1952 publication of Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2256 fr. 3 confirmed a long-assumed (because of The Suppliants' cliffhanger ending) Danaid trilogy, whose constituent plays are generally agreed to be The Suppliants, The Aegyptids and The Danaids. A plausible reconstruction of the trilogy's last two-thirds runs thus: In The Aegyptids, the Argive-Egyptian war threatened in the first play has transpired. During the course of the war, King Pelasgus has been killed, and Danaus comes to rule Argos. He negotiates a peace settlement with Aegyptus, as a condition of which, his fifty daughters will marry the fifty sons of Aegyptus. Danaus secretly informs his daughters of an oracle predicting that one of his sons-in-law would kill him; he therefore orders the Danaids to murder the Aegyptids on their wedding night. His daughters agree. The Danaids would open the day after the wedding. In short order, it is revealed that forty-nine of the Danaids killed their husbands as ordered; Hypermnestra, however, loved her husband Lynceus, and thus spared his life and helped him to escape. Angered by his daughter's disobedience, Danaus orders her imprisonment and, possibly, her execution. In the trilogy's climax and dénouement, Lynceus reveals himself to Danaus, and kills him (thus fulfilling the oracle). He and Hypermnestra will establish a ruling dynasty in Argos. The other forty-nine Danaids are absolved of their murderous crime, and married off to unspecified Argive men. The satyr play following this trilogy was titled Amymone, after one of the Danaids." It's no accident that when Obama visited the Great Pyramid he turned around inside the tomb and found a stone image strikingly resembling him (including his pronounced ears). But the image of his face and head was created at least 3-5 millennia ago. The Greeks were the first Westerners to record racist views about non-Greeks. If the Danaids cycle of plays are any indication, particularly the Suppliants and Aegyptids, the "black" Egyptians must have embittered the Greeks for centuries.
The failure of atheism
We need models to guide us in just about every social encounter. A problem with atheism starts in the atheist denial of the historical impulse of all peoples to trust one another, trust based on the imagination of social models of trusting. We need laws. We need a reference to an authority. Where are they to be found if not first in someone's imagination? The authors of the code of Hammurabi, the Mosaic Commandments, the Greek Polis, the Roman Senate, the Qu'ran, the Bhagavad Gita, Divine Monarchy, Papal Bulls, Luther's Theses, the Magna Carta, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence,first imagine the language that appeals to them. They and others apply the terms to real observations, real needs. Societies are based on trust in the meaning of the terms of communication between its members.
Trust is the basis of faith, and we cannot find another source of organized society based in anything but faith in a Surpreme Authority, the dimensions and qualities of which are imaginary. So this is a problem for "militant atheists" like Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion, 2009). There is no escaping either faith or the imagination for the rational materialist exponent, the atheist.
Dawkins rails against religion because all religions promote their beliefs, some of them violently, as his publisher explains in " the irrationallity of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society from the Crusades to 9/11. He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.
"Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of "intelligent design," or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East-- or Middle America.-- From publisher description of The God Delusion."
But Dawkins plays an intellectual shell game with his readers. Attacking religious institutions and beliefs, he artfully deflects us from the ubiquity of the irrational beliefs underlying other human organizations besides religion: he claims, for instance, to oppose class distinctions and the monarchy under which he professes to be a loyal subject. The contradiction between his life and his politics, in his professed antipathy to anything unscientific in human culture, appears to escape him. Laws, ethical concepts, financial instruments of exchange in trade, artistic innovations, specific cultural ideas applied to social organizations such as the family----all have an irrational unscientific material basis. We can neither prove or disprove in any laboratory experiment that monogamy historically trumps polygamy. Marriage institutions express a culturally arbitrary choice, irrational,an imaginative creation, much like religions.
The question that Dawkins and other atheists need to ask: Why must we arbitrarily create social institutions based on trust among people, a trust that cannot either be proved or disproved until the trust is broken?
We all were once children with a delighted belief in fictions, such as Santa Claus, the Devil, and the Easter Bunny. Children seem to need irrational beliefs. And people who revere their childhood, who delight in children, promote that irrational belief because of the marketing rule that the best sales persons are those who believe in their products.
Dawkins believes in atheism in the same way that a spirtualist believes in spirits. Neither he nor the spiritualist can escape an arbitrary point of origin in history. Each starts somewhere that no one can replicate in history. Dawkins may well be able to prove when he stopped attending a church. But when did Dawkins first doubt the existence or the meaning of God? Is he sure? Can he prove when? Whatever he claims is arbitrary, the zero point which he can count years and day to the present. And what is zero but an imaginary start anywhere. We accept the starting point as real, for practical purposes of measuring everything. But all zero points are based in faith that it actually means what it means: where nothing comes before it.
The other problem of atheists arises from the fact that most people are much like Dawkins, living in hypocrisy. For most people ignore most of the tenets of religious injunctions when it suits them to do so. In that respect, they resemble Dawkins who have only faith to guide him when he makes a purchase for an automobile using a plastic card, or a briefcase full of pounds or euros. Faith makes possible all civilizations. The source of faith that we apply to financial transactions, treaties, communication of any kind to others, law, marriage and politics originates in historical expressions of religious institutions. Destroy those institutions and we have no yardstick by which to measure the quality of our social behavior, or the direction of our lives. Religions, like the very intelligence we have that separates us from other animals, like atheism, can be a tool or a weapon used for good or wrong. And we are bound to believe in something based on faith that others understand us in the same way that we understand ourselves.
Trust is the basis of faith, and we cannot find another source of organized society based in anything but faith in a Surpreme Authority, the dimensions and qualities of which are imaginary. So this is a problem for "militant atheists" like Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion, 2009). There is no escaping either faith or the imagination for the rational materialist exponent, the atheist.
Dawkins rails against religion because all religions promote their beliefs, some of them violently, as his publisher explains in " the irrationallity of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society from the Crusades to 9/11. He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.
"Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of "intelligent design," or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East-- or Middle America.-- From publisher description of The God Delusion."
But Dawkins plays an intellectual shell game with his readers. Attacking religious institutions and beliefs, he artfully deflects us from the ubiquity of the irrational beliefs underlying other human organizations besides religion: he claims, for instance, to oppose class distinctions and the monarchy under which he professes to be a loyal subject. The contradiction between his life and his politics, in his professed antipathy to anything unscientific in human culture, appears to escape him. Laws, ethical concepts, financial instruments of exchange in trade, artistic innovations, specific cultural ideas applied to social organizations such as the family----all have an irrational unscientific material basis. We can neither prove or disprove in any laboratory experiment that monogamy historically trumps polygamy. Marriage institutions express a culturally arbitrary choice, irrational,an imaginative creation, much like religions.
The question that Dawkins and other atheists need to ask: Why must we arbitrarily create social institutions based on trust among people, a trust that cannot either be proved or disproved until the trust is broken?
We all were once children with a delighted belief in fictions, such as Santa Claus, the Devil, and the Easter Bunny. Children seem to need irrational beliefs. And people who revere their childhood, who delight in children, promote that irrational belief because of the marketing rule that the best sales persons are those who believe in their products.
Dawkins believes in atheism in the same way that a spirtualist believes in spirits. Neither he nor the spiritualist can escape an arbitrary point of origin in history. Each starts somewhere that no one can replicate in history. Dawkins may well be able to prove when he stopped attending a church. But when did Dawkins first doubt the existence or the meaning of God? Is he sure? Can he prove when? Whatever he claims is arbitrary, the zero point which he can count years and day to the present. And what is zero but an imaginary start anywhere. We accept the starting point as real, for practical purposes of measuring everything. But all zero points are based in faith that it actually means what it means: where nothing comes before it.
The other problem of atheists arises from the fact that most people are much like Dawkins, living in hypocrisy. For most people ignore most of the tenets of religious injunctions when it suits them to do so. In that respect, they resemble Dawkins who have only faith to guide him when he makes a purchase for an automobile using a plastic card, or a briefcase full of pounds or euros. Faith makes possible all civilizations. The source of faith that we apply to financial transactions, treaties, communication of any kind to others, law, marriage and politics originates in historical expressions of religious institutions. Destroy those institutions and we have no yardstick by which to measure the quality of our social behavior, or the direction of our lives. Religions, like the very intelligence we have that separates us from other animals, like atheism, can be a tool or a weapon used for good or wrong. And we are bound to believe in something based on faith that others understand us in the same way that we understand ourselves.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Treating symptoms of illegal immigration will not work
Illegal immigration
The immigrants flocking to our shores are looking to establish themselves here because American citizenship offers the best opportunity and best life positions compared to where they were born. But that is the problem. We cannot afford to let everyone into our country from other parts of the world whenever they choose to migrate here. Solving the problem of our immigration entrance queue requires an imaginative approach; clearly our traditional solutions no longer work; and open borders are not fair to many Americans.
For instance, too many Mexicans here would threaten the hard-won economic and political gains of other minorities who have finally moved up our social hierarchy by defeating discrimination, daunting political odds, and class prejudices. Many African Americans, Native Americans, assimilated Chicanos and Asians, and young whites at any time are trying to establish themselves in the workplace. Although it's not the fault of many immigrants, legal or illegal, too often they come here with a clannish aversion to our values of social tolerance and political fairness. Every poll of first-generation Mexicans and Cubans indicates the general presence of widespread racial prejudices among them(against African Americans, Chinese, Arabs, and, of course, "gringos"). In time those prejudices will surely vanish, as the immigrants embrace established American values. But the first and second generation, led by a Roman Catholic Church which seldom challenged the immigrant racial prejudices of earlier Catholic immigrants, will follow rather than diverge from the pattern of racial preferences of past immigrants. And that is what bothers many Americans, particularly minorities.
Although Mexico is not altogether a failed country, in the way that Kosovo was during the Clinton administration, its northern border governments are failed states without effective justice systems to protect its citizens. By now it should be clear that it is in Mexico that we must address the problem of illegal immigration to the US.
The American government ought to cut a deal with Mexico to let the US administer its justice, police, and military. We ought to establish business and employment opportunities that attract Mexicans to remain in Mexico. For measures applied only in the United States to stem the tide of illegal Mexican immigration will leave the source of the problem untouched.
Mexico's illegal aliens do not originate in the U.S. They come from Mexico. And the presence of millions of illegal Mexicans here is merely a symptom of the failure of Mexico's state governments.
Turning to either amnesty or massive deportation in the U.S. alone will only deal with the symptom. Neither measure will deter future economic needs for illegal migration from Mexico. For a permanent deterrence we must use our hemispheric influence to reform the Mexican government (with the advice and consent, of course, of the Mexican government). But we may have our hands full persuading the Mexican government to relinquish some of its sovereignty so that it appears as our colony, temporary as that role may be. Failure of the US to intervene directly in Mexico will leave the source of illegal Mexican immigration to the US as a challenge for future administrations.
The immigrants flocking to our shores are looking to establish themselves here because American citizenship offers the best opportunity and best life positions compared to where they were born. But that is the problem. We cannot afford to let everyone into our country from other parts of the world whenever they choose to migrate here. Solving the problem of our immigration entrance queue requires an imaginative approach; clearly our traditional solutions no longer work; and open borders are not fair to many Americans.
For instance, too many Mexicans here would threaten the hard-won economic and political gains of other minorities who have finally moved up our social hierarchy by defeating discrimination, daunting political odds, and class prejudices. Many African Americans, Native Americans, assimilated Chicanos and Asians, and young whites at any time are trying to establish themselves in the workplace. Although it's not the fault of many immigrants, legal or illegal, too often they come here with a clannish aversion to our values of social tolerance and political fairness. Every poll of first-generation Mexicans and Cubans indicates the general presence of widespread racial prejudices among them(against African Americans, Chinese, Arabs, and, of course, "gringos"). In time those prejudices will surely vanish, as the immigrants embrace established American values. But the first and second generation, led by a Roman Catholic Church which seldom challenged the immigrant racial prejudices of earlier Catholic immigrants, will follow rather than diverge from the pattern of racial preferences of past immigrants. And that is what bothers many Americans, particularly minorities.
Although Mexico is not altogether a failed country, in the way that Kosovo was during the Clinton administration, its northern border governments are failed states without effective justice systems to protect its citizens. By now it should be clear that it is in Mexico that we must address the problem of illegal immigration to the US.
The American government ought to cut a deal with Mexico to let the US administer its justice, police, and military. We ought to establish business and employment opportunities that attract Mexicans to remain in Mexico. For measures applied only in the United States to stem the tide of illegal Mexican immigration will leave the source of the problem untouched.
Mexico's illegal aliens do not originate in the U.S. They come from Mexico. And the presence of millions of illegal Mexicans here is merely a symptom of the failure of Mexico's state governments.
Turning to either amnesty or massive deportation in the U.S. alone will only deal with the symptom. Neither measure will deter future economic needs for illegal migration from Mexico. For a permanent deterrence we must use our hemispheric influence to reform the Mexican government (with the advice and consent, of course, of the Mexican government). But we may have our hands full persuading the Mexican government to relinquish some of its sovereignty so that it appears as our colony, temporary as that role may be. Failure of the US to intervene directly in Mexico will leave the source of illegal Mexican immigration to the US as a challenge for future administrations.
In the queue of life
Saturday, May 1, 2010
In the queue of life
An affinity for human kind explains for me how the phrase "Conservative Arts" has seldom appeared in arguments for progress. The phrase "Liberal Arts," in contrast, reflects a truth easily understood about human history. We progress through the Liberal Arts, we learn through liberal attitudes. As conservative arts spurn innovation as too risky to tradition, it and progress have conflicting goals. Is that risk because our historical progress has been unpredictable? Each generation's progress involves unknown risks, trials and errors, gains and losses. We progress abruptly, not through an orderly process. Revolutions alone free us from the tyranny of waiting in the queue of life for our time and place in history.
The idea of having order in progress in waiting for poverty and exploitation to end can easily be an illusion. The peasant or the slave waiting to be free of exploitation will die waiting. Conservatives, of course, argue for the orderly progress of organic decay. Conservatives, however, are seldom among the ones at the back of any queue. For instance, you may have heard of Brazilian Gilberto Freye, a brilliant conservative scholar. But Freye offers us a cultural and anthropological apology for racial exploitation by the Portuguese in Brazil: (The Masters and the Slaves: a study in the development of Brazilian civilization; Order and Progress: Brazil from monarchy to republic). And he deflects the truth of some terribly cruel practices in the genocide of American natives, slavery and racism in both South and North America. A bedtime story conservative history like Freye's enables us to sleep undisturbed by the actions of our terrible ancestors.
All great discoveries that have brought us the modern world, including the European discovery of the American hemisphere, have been the products of a liberal imagination, a break with the traditional way of seeing the world. A rebel or innovator nearly always risks life and reputation in selfless actions. Conservative attitudes however tend to be selfish; few right wingers are not cynical about innovations and new ideas. And the conservative viewpoint is most succinctly expressed in the saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. It is true, of course, but only for someone else, somewhere else.
In the queue of life
An affinity for human kind explains for me how the phrase "Conservative Arts" has seldom appeared in arguments for progress. The phrase "Liberal Arts," in contrast, reflects a truth easily understood about human history. We progress through the Liberal Arts, we learn through liberal attitudes. As conservative arts spurn innovation as too risky to tradition, it and progress have conflicting goals. Is that risk because our historical progress has been unpredictable? Each generation's progress involves unknown risks, trials and errors, gains and losses. We progress abruptly, not through an orderly process. Revolutions alone free us from the tyranny of waiting in the queue of life for our time and place in history.
The idea of having order in progress in waiting for poverty and exploitation to end can easily be an illusion. The peasant or the slave waiting to be free of exploitation will die waiting. Conservatives, of course, argue for the orderly progress of organic decay. Conservatives, however, are seldom among the ones at the back of any queue. For instance, you may have heard of Brazilian Gilberto Freye, a brilliant conservative scholar. But Freye offers us a cultural and anthropological apology for racial exploitation by the Portuguese in Brazil: (The Masters and the Slaves: a study in the development of Brazilian civilization; Order and Progress: Brazil from monarchy to republic). And he deflects the truth of some terribly cruel practices in the genocide of American natives, slavery and racism in both South and North America. A bedtime story conservative history like Freye's enables us to sleep undisturbed by the actions of our terrible ancestors.
All great discoveries that have brought us the modern world, including the European discovery of the American hemisphere, have been the products of a liberal imagination, a break with the traditional way of seeing the world. A rebel or innovator nearly always risks life and reputation in selfless actions. Conservative attitudes however tend to be selfish; few right wingers are not cynical about innovations and new ideas. And the conservative viewpoint is most succinctly expressed in the saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. It is true, of course, but only for someone else, somewhere else.
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