An Example of Class Warfare Lit. Crit.

In Not Out of Africa, Mary Lefkowitz wrote, "Academic freedom is the right to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline." 

Below, Monika Kothari discusses the Harry Potter heptalogy as if it were the author's responsibility to advance a social objective of hers; namely, providing laudable representations of members of a "class" for political reasons:

Most of us assume that Hermione is white because she is never presented as a racial other.*

This practice of calling for didactic art has an ancient pedigree, as when Plato carped at the world's greatest drama for portraying the amorous shenanigans of the gods, and depicted a utopia which censored the arts in the name of "the right ordering of cities and households."

This sort of motivated criticism is one of the social harms wrought by the undemocratic class warfare paradigm, which is in the business of classifying an "enemy" and roping bystanders into a "struggle." A crabbed and narrow philistine outlook.

Artistic freedom is the right to create a work according to its own shape and vision, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that vision.


(*) A larger excerpt from Hermione Granger in Harry Potter: Is she white?

Most of us assume that Hermione is white because she is never presented as a racial other. In Western culture, white is the “neutral” race. Rowling is silent about Hermione's race, and we interpret that silence as default whiteness. Of course, by that logic, Rowling's magical society is blindingly white. Harry is white, Tom Riddle is white, Ron and the rest of the Weasley clan are white, Dumbledore and Snape and pretty much all of the Hogwarts professors are white, Sirius and Lupin are white, Neville and Luna are white. There is a handful of Hogwarts students that we generally accept as nonwhite: Cho Chang, Lee Jordan, Angelina Johnson, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, and Parvati and Padma Patil. All of these characters were either explicitly described as nonwhite, or they have “foreign” names that mark them as nonwhite. For example, Cho's race and ethnicity are never mentioned, yet we don't assume that she's white. Why do you suppose that might be? (Note that Lavender Brown's race is a point of confusion. Rowling was similarly silent about her race. She was portrayed by a black actor for the first few films—until she had a major speaking role, and was recast as white. This recasting only further underscores how unreliable the films are as evidence for a character's race.)

The only other explicitly nonwhite character is Kingsley Shacklebolt, the eventual minister of magic. (To me, this is the equivalent of stuffing a legal drama with white characters and casting the trial judge as black. He's an underdeveloped black authority figure, not uncommon in popular culture.) Thus, the wizarding world appears to be a post-racial and colorblind society, one that welcomes people of all racial backgrounds. But it's also conveniently a system in which nonwhite characters are relegated to interchangeable and replaceable background roles, with minimal development and no individual character arcs.

Liberalism and a Culture of Dignity

In The Rise of Victimhood Culture, Conor Friedersdorf notes that sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, analyzing an incident at Oberlin, relate that there are cultures of honor, cultures of dignity, and currently, cultures of victimhood. 

The age of duels, for example, disappeared when a culture of honor was superseded by a modern culture of dignity. Campbell and Manning describe culture of honor as a context:

“Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response,” they write. “But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor.”

Honor is a matter of how one is viewed by others. In a traditional, conservative society one's characteristics are often arrived at by ascription—one's "place," as ascribed by society or tradition. Who one is comes, in effect, from outside. A threat to that assigned or inherited identity can cause one to publicly demand "satisfaction," as in a duel.

The context of dignity culture can be described in terms of a modern, liberal view of the self as an achievement of one's efforts to become what one wants to be. Who one is depends, not on social or other external standards, but on an ethical vision toward which one aspires.* The resolute inner direction of the liberal personality is relatively immune to offense. Thus Campbell and Manning observe:

“Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.”

In the liberal Founding, the young nation left behind what Lincoln described when he said that the United States had advanced beyond the Old World order of "classification, caste, and legitimacy."


(*) Hawthorne's The Great Stone Face portrays the effect of a life devoted to an ethical quest.

Your Erroneous Zones

Our national law begins: "We the People." Explain: Which part of the People is the oppressor, and which the oppressed? What rules of evidence, and what due process, were followed to justify this conclusion? 

Class-warfare leftism cannot be fit into a moral order which operates under the Constitution, for the simple reason that class warfare thinking rests on foregone conclusions which preclude the working of justice. (This is the reason class warfare regimes such as the late Soviet Union and present-day North Korea fail at that aspect of justice which we call civil rights.)
 
In the September 2015 issue of The Atlantic Greg Lukianoff writes:

At the University of Delaware, as part of a diversity-focused orientation program, students reported being made to “take a stance” on one side of a room or another, displaying their personal views on polarizing topics such as affirmative action and gay marriage—even if they didn’t yet know where they stood. Such an activity is not only reductive and unscholarly, it is a classic demonstration of the all-or-nothing thinking I had struggled with.

In the name of diversity, the students' instructors engaged in advocacy:

The resident assistants who implemented the program had been given training materials that sought to define racism, and included statements such as “the term [racist] applies to all white people” living in the United States” and “people of color cannot be racists.” While such claims may be good topics for debate, they seem on their face to be examples of several classic cognitive distortions—overgeneralizing, dichotomous thinking, and an inability to disconfirm. Campus leaders seemed to be telling students that they should overgeneralize, personalize, and magnify problems.

The hidden variable here is class-warfare logic. The oppressor, by undiscussed foregone conclusion, is “all white people living in the United States,” and the oppressed is “people of color.” Proceed to deploy sweeping generalizations.

As noted in these pages a year ago, the employment of class-warfare jargon and logic reduces intellectual analysis to identity posturing and partisan rhetoric. It lowers the level of the debate:

These articles in The Atlantic are being given a lot of slack because they play the race card. Part of our bargain with ourselves as citizens of a society which supports equality and tolerance is to subject criticism of certain subjects to heightened scrutiny. But doing so can impede reasonable debate, as in the related case:

American Jewish liberals have been intimidated or censored themselves into silence, which has only made matters worse. The reason is the need to somehow credentialize yourself as “pro-Israel”, and any criticism is immediately interpreted as being “anti-Israel”. That’s essentially a loyalty test that impedes reasonable debate – and is designed to.

The same failure of thought is appearing in the discourse of many prominent figures of the national press (as the previous article in this weblog argued). Helen Andrews, an American writer living in Australia, contends that the Fourth Estate is more or less unconsciously parroting "the most destructive ideology of the twentieth century. ... a fashionable pundit is being praised out of proportion to his talent":

[Substituting] race for class ... [is] ... [Ta-Nehisi] Coates’s ... game. Like the Fanonists of his father’s generation, who cast the Third World in the role of the proletariat, there is something distinctly Marxist about Ta-Nehisi Coates. You can hear it in his harping on “plunder” and exploitation, in his hard-nosed rejection of bourgeois sentimentality, in his conviction that all suffering is the product of some elite class’s self-serving design, and more recently in his aggressive atheism.

If you ever want to send a chill up your own spine, replace “black people” with “the working class” in one of Coates’s angrier effusions. “The Dream rests on the worker’s back, the bedding made from our bodies … The Dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business, accept the bodies of the working class as currency … The worker is naked before the elements of the world, and this nakedness is not an error but the correct and intended result of policy.” It is no coincidence, comrade! This is why the adulation Coates receives from the mainstream press is so disturbing: not because a fashionable pundit is being praised out of proportion to his talent—that happens all the time—but because it proves we have lost our collective antibodies to the most destructive ideology of the twentieth century. Have the Atlantic readers who find “plunder” such an interesting concept never heard the lyrics to “Solidarity Forever”? (“They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn …”) Do they not remember how that story ends? (Emphasis added)

"The Newsroom" has argued that clarity and accuracy are critical in the media of a democracy, in order for the people to understand the issues before them. Rhetoric which manufactures distrust and hatred confuses the public's understanding of democratic policy. It impairs people's ability to act justly. It may incite those whose mental health is marginal.

Recently this weblog noted Ta-Nehisi's own words:

Terry Gross, continued:

Ta-Nehisi Coates (On the unjustified shooting of Prince Jones by police): Oh, it was devastating. It totally devastated me. A year later 9/11 happened and I just - I had no compassion. I had none. I was cold. I was absolutely, absolutely cold because they killed him. They killed him, and no one was held accountable. (Emphasis added)

Rich Lowry on the same incident:

His monstrous passage about 9/11 is a good summation of where he’s coming from. He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” (Emphasis added)

Really? Firefighters go about shattering the bodies of black people without justification? One doesn’t read about, say, Anthony Rodriguez, 36, father of six, whose last child was born days after he died in the attack, who joined the Navy before becoming a firefighter, who coached youth basketball, and naturally think of the depredations of white America.

Coates does. This isn’t an act of moral discernment on his part, but a willful effacement of the individuality of Rodriguez and anyone Coates deems part of the impersonal apparatus determined to dispossess blacks.

Under the principles of justice—“By the known rules of ancient liberty,” as John Milton wrote—all are human. We should condemn extreme rhetoric which suggests otherwise as forcefully as we condemn racism or any other crime against humanity. That an outlook which unashamedly proclaims, “They were not human to me” continues to be praised by "progressive" journalists is unacceptable.

To declare that it is open season to discriminate against any group is a reprehensible act of prejudice.

Concerning the Ta-Nehisi-ist Protest of the Bernie Sanders Rally in Seattle

Charles Mudede, a native of Africa who works for The Stranger in Seattle, has an evenhanded, judicious evaluation of a Black Lives Matter protest which prevented Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders from being heard, in his own rally, in Seattle. What happened at the rally, as reported by Jim Brunner of The Seattle Times:

At Westlake, Sanders was just starting to address the crowd, thanking Seattle for being “one of the most progressive cities in the United States of America.”

That’s as far as he got before two women walked onstage and grabbed the microphone.

“If you do not listen … your event will be shut down,” one of the protesters told organizers, who offered to let them speak after Sanders. After a back and forth with the screaming protesters, organizers relented and said the demonstrators could go first.

Some in the largely white audience booed and chanted for protesters to let the senator talk. A few yelled for police to make arrests.

Marissa Johnson, one of the protesters, shot back, “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its progressives, but you did it for me,” accusing the audience of “white supremacist liberalism.” (Empasis added)

Mudede's response:

[Concerning] the August 8 disruption of the Social Security and Medicare rally in Westlake Park by Black Lives Matter activists Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford. ...

I was unnerved by the manner in which Johnson and Willaford took command of the mic during the rally. The screaming was so heated, so shrill, that I found it to be more abusive than productive. I have to  be honest about this. I do not believe such extreme expressions have any place in a democratic event.  ...

I disagree with the BLM action not because Bernie Sanders marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and  therefore clearly paid his not-a-racist dues and should be left alone by black activists. ... My  point is simply that, as imperfect as Sanders is, and as imperfect as white progressives are in this city, it still makes more political sense to form alliances with them rather than risk isolation. As  much as I may agree with the content of Johnson and Willaford's disruption, its context (an event that was not for Sanders but for a very important issue that affects millions of black Americans) and  its brazen disrespect clearly closed rather than opened a lot of people to the BLM cause.

True, some of the people who booed Johnson and Willaford were likely racist, but many were simply  upset by what they perceived, with good reason, as arrogant behavior. The event had been happening for hours, and it had taken months to organize and promote. Speakers knew well in advance the amount of time they were allotted to express their concerns. Then, suddenly, two people break out of nowhere, take the mic, and appear by their actions to claim that their cause is far more important, more pressing than the one many had come to support. This, I'm sorry, is going to rub a lot of people  the wrong way—and not because they are racist but because they are human. Rudely jumping the line rarely excites cheers and applause in any of the colors of our kind.

To censor your opponent tends to legitimize the censorship of your own attempts to be heard; and this was de facto censorship of Senator Sanders and the cause for which he speaks. It deprived the people who attended the rally of information they had every right to hear.

This raises the question, Is liberal political democracy itself "white supremacy," a "white supremacist system that we will tear down," according to BLM-Seattle? What is the limit to what the protesters want? What is the limit to what they would do? Is there an agenda that any sane person could support?

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the loudest voice behind "white supremacy" ideology, has said:

[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said. (Emphasis added)

 Ta-Nehisi has never bothered to define "white supremacy"—it appears to be an all-purpose condemnation of everybody, and everything which is done in his country that isn't black—but he has said that it includes "plunder," and "plunder" includes, as this passage from Between the World and Me states:

But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.

Do you realize what Ta-Nehisi has just said? Mining for minerals and drilling for gas and oil are characteristic of the white lust for plunder. The claim is so absurd as to be incomprehensible. Every nation on earth which can do so, does these things. And the majority of them are not white.

It isn't Ta-Nehisi and his shrieking followers who are inexcusable. It is those members of the Fourth Estate whose fawning abject praise collaborates with evil.

In The Radical Chic of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Carlos Lozada writes:

In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom so many of us turn to affirm, challenge or, more often, to mold our views from the clay. Among public intellectuals in the U.S., writes media critic Jay Rosen, he’s the man now. When the Confederate battle flag on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., seemed the only thing the news media could discuss, my Washington Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor put it simply: Just shut up and read @tanehisicoates. These days, you hear many variations on that advice.

Coates is more than the writer whose thinking and focus best match the moment. With his 2014 Atlantic cover essay on The Case for Reparations, which explores the brutal U.S. history of redlining and housing discrimination, and now with the critical rapture surrounding his new book, Between the World and Me, he has become liberal America’s conscience on race. Did you read the latest Ta-Nehisi Coates piece? is shorthand for Have you absorbed and shared the latest and best and correct thinking on racism, white privilege, institutional violence and structural inequality? If you don’t have the time or inclination or experience to figure it out yourself, you outsource it to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Lozada names names:

“Between the World and Me is, in important ways, a book written toward white Americans, and I say this as one of them,” writes Slate critic Jack Hamilton. “White Americans may need to read this book more urgently and carefully than anyone, and their own sons and daughters need to read it as well.”

In one of the earliest assessments, New Yorker editor David Remnick described “Between the World and Me” as an“extraordinary” book and likened Coates to James Baldwin. (Actually, everyone else has, too.) Reviewers have hailed it as “a classic of our time” (Publishers Weekly), “something to behold” (The Washington Post), “a love letter written in a moral emergency” (Slate) and “precisely the document this country needs right now” (the New Republic). This is more than admiration. It is an affirmation of enlightenment. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott went as far as one could go, calling Coates’s writing  “essential, like water or air.” Yes, we cannot live without Ta-Nehisi Coates.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Ted Tonks tells the credulous, "[if you believe that] you deserve to be lied to."

Lozada suggests that Ta-Nehisi's feckless admirers praise Ta-Nehisi and his viciously morally-righteous absurdities precisely because they are so off-the-wall that there is no danger of their coming to pass. As we suggested in our own comparison of the Ta-Nehisi fad to "radical chic" three months ago, the phenomenon is largely the plaything of elites, quoting Wikipedia, "who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions."

Lozada asks,

What does such veneration—especially from a news media that Coates has attacked as indifferent to black America or inclined to view black America as a criminal justice problem—mean for Coates's arguments about the enduring influence of white supremacy? Does the praise disprove him, or to the contrary, does it only suggest that, in an age when liberal elites line up to lament their white privilege, the structures of inequality are resilient enough to accommodate, even glorify, this most radical critic?

But as the Seattle incident above shows, this trashing by a privileged elite of our deepest values and our most fundamental beliefs influences a lot of people who aren't in on the joke. "[It] is toxic. It poisons the national conversation and culture," as Aaron Sorkin has argued. "Fie on virtue" is a call that many are always ready to answer. It has already turned a Seattle event, which should have exemplified democracy in action, into a riot.

Since We Agree Neither Upon Principles Nor Upon Demonstrations There is No Place for Argument

From Season Three, Episode Four of The Newsroom: [It] is toxic. It poisons the national conversation and culture.

Not committed to having a coherent view about things like that - Michael Walzer: Can There be a Decent Left?

(The post title is from Francis Bacon, Novum Organum.)


Ta-Nehisi Coates in his own words:

1.
Sean Illing quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates:

“You write to your son, ‘Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.’ The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below. If there were no black bodies to oppress, the affluent Dreamers ‘would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.”

2.
Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

[Jeffrey] Goldberg asked what [Ta-Nehisi Coates] would do if he were in [Mitch] Landrieu’s position — surely there was something, “I don’t know what I’d do if I were mayor, but I could tell you what I’d do if I was king.” [Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison, he said. “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too,” Coates said. (Emphasis added)

3.
Manuel Roig-Franzia:

But what also has been notable is the reaction of like-minded readers to the piece, which took two years to complete. Everywhere he goes, Coates hears versions of the same plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants? What about me?

“You get here and people say, ‘Why can’t you do that for our community?’ ” Coates says one morning at a Capitol Hill coffee shop. He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.

4.
Terry Gross, Fresh Air:

Ta-Nehisi Coates: There was definitely another part of me that basically recognized them [the police] as another element within the society, within the community, with no real moral difference from the crews and the gangs and the, you know, packs of folks who dispensed violence throughout the neighborhood. ...

5.
Terry Gross, continued:

Ta-Nehisi Coates (On the unjustified shooting of Prince Jones by police): Oh, it was devastating. It totally devastated me. A year later 9/11 happened and I just - I had no compassion. I had none. I was cold. I was absolutely, absolutely cold because they killed him. They killed him, and no one was held accountable. (Emphasis added)

These statements by Ta-Nehisi Coates reveal that he does not agree at all with fundamental and indispensable principles of our liberal, public-spirited, egalitarian democracy. They also show that his "demonstrations" (his rhetoric, his "arguments") are indifferent to the criterion of evidence and reason, to the standard of good faith,* and to the principle that fallacy discredits.

As far back as 2002, Communitarian Michael Walzer refuted those who, like Ta-Nehisi Coates in (5.) above, acted as if the murder of three thousand of their fellow citizens was justified:

Michael Walzer:

Those emotions [festering resentment, ingrown anger,] were plain to see in the left's reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. ...

Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens, refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect. That’s why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of September 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed. Equally important, that’s why their participation in the policy debate after the attacks was so odd; their proposals (turn to the UN, collect evidence against bin Laden, and so on) seem to have been developed with no concern for effectiveness and no sense of urgency. They talked and wrote as if they could not imagine themselves responsible for the lives of their fellow-citizens. That was someone else’s business; the business of the left was...what? To oppose the authorities, whatever they did. The good result of this opposition was a spirited defense of civil liberties. But even this defense displayed a certain willful irresponsibility and ineffectiveness, because so many leftists rushed to the defense of civil liberties while refusing to acknowledge that the country faced real dangers--as if there was no need at all to balance security and freedom. Maybe the right balance will emerge spontaneously from the clash of rightwing authoritarianism and leftwing absolutism, but it would be better practice for the left to figure out the right balance for itself, on its own; the effort would suggest a responsible politics and a real desire to exercise power, some day.

But what really marks the left, or a large part of it, is the bitterness that comes with abandoning any such desire. The alienation is radical. How else can one understand the unwillingness of people who, after all, live here, and whose children and grandchildren live here, to join in a serious debate about how to protect the country against future terrorist attacks? There is a pathology in this unwillingness, and it has already done us great damage. (Emphasis added)

In thirteen years, Ta-Nehisi Coates has not "recovered [his] moral balance."

(1.) repeats Ta-Nehisi Coates' assertion, a year ago, that "Slavery Made America":  [He tells his son in his latest book] “The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below. If there were no black bodies to oppress, the affluent Dreamers ‘would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.”

This is economics as magical thinking. If there had never been a slave in North America the United States would be more prosperous than it is now. Slaves are less productive than free men for many reasons, among which are greater motivation and better education on the part of the free. Coates has inadvertently implied that, except for its moral problem, slavery is good economics and good utilization of human resources.

That is utter lunacy. (For that matter, "cannibalism?") 

(2.) [If he was king Ta-Nehisi Coates would] let criminals out of prison. ... “And, by the way, I include violent criminals in that.” Goldberg asked what he meant by “violent.” “Gun crime, too.”

It should be clear, even to Ta-Nehisi Coates' progressive sympathizers among national journalists, that rejecting the rule of law ought to disqualify anyone who poses as a political columnist. His assertion, in (4.) that public law enforcement officials are not morally different in principle from members of criminal gangs would make the law of the jungle the law of the land. (In this he echoes Michel Foucault's assertion that all power is the same: there is no moral difference between "power" in the hands of criminal justice system civil servants and "power" in the hands of violent felons.)

It may be relevant that seldom, if ever, has a journalist in a democracy expressed even an implied wish to be a totalitarian ruler. 

(3.) In a free society, in which the citizens constitute the government, "we are all in this together," as President Barack Obama has noted. Two of the first three words of the Constitution are "the People." When he was President George Washington spoke repeatedly of "the public good."

But just as Ta-Nehisi Coates was "cold"-hearted toward the slaughter of three thousand of his innocent fellow citizens on September 11, he is mean-spirited toward the "plea: What about my group? What about Native Americans? What about Latino immigrants?":

He calls the reaction “disrespectful” ... Disrespectful because he believes the experience of blacks in America deserves its own, focused examination.

This the same person who in The Case for Reparations called for his fellow citizens, in the name of shared moral obligation, to voluntarily assume a financial burden of hundreds of billions of dollars. (It reminds one of the piece, "Fie on Goodness" in the musical "Camelot": "If charity means giving, I give it to you.")


--*-

(*) One of the great passages concerning specious argument:

However, the greatest problem with historical revisionism is not its lack of objectivity but its lack of integrity. History is always being revised as new data come to light and new generations ask new questions. But ''revisionism'' has a characteristic trait: it is typically in the business of denying the obvious and uncovering conspiracies. [...]

The bad faith of all such ultra-revisionist undertakings lies in a sustained preference for a priori reasoning over human testimony. [...] Nothing can ever count as evidence against such assertions, because they do not rest on evidence in the first place. - Tony Judt, Writing History, Facts Optional, April 13, 2000

Beware the Recasting of Racial Issues in Terms of Academic Assertions Concerning "Culture"

Professor Stacey Patton recently declared, Black America Should Stop Forgiving White Racists. "The almost reflective [sic] demand of forgiveness, especially for those dealing with death by racism, is about protecting whiteness, and America as a whole," she wrote concerning the recent murder of black parishioners in Emmanuel AME Church. 

The first false equivalency here arises from the misreading of the private exercise of Christian forgiveness (Mat 5:44 "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you . . .") as incompatible with vigorous action in the political sphere. Ms. Patton missed a unique chance to contrast the authentic Christianity of black worshipers with the faux-religious posturing of the religious right.

It gets worse. Dr. Patton adds:

Matthew P. Guteral, an historian of race at Brown University, says: “For all the public talk about supposedly absent black fathers and derelict black culture, the extraordinary act of forgiveness might remind us that the nation’s most historically oppressed group does a better job of doing what we all say we want most: being decent and human. Even when it seems impossible. We cannot say the same thing about whiteness or what we should call white culture, which insists it is superior, ... (Emphasis added)

Our first black President doesn't think "absent black fathers" is fictitious:

It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that. And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that. And I also know that I have the capacity to break that cycle, and as a consequence, I think my daughters are better off.

I once worked for a supervisor of Asian extraction, who told me, "individualism is a white idea." (Given that civil rights are the rights of the individual, this, if true, would have been a matter of praise.) So let's say this right now: Ideas don't have a color. Culture does not have a color. It is dismaying that creatures of the university such as Professors Patton and Guteral have not internalized this concept.

Sir V.S. Naipaul has said, of Our Universal Civilization, "it fits all men."* That is the cosmopolitan outlook, the outlook which those deserving of the university manifest. Before mentioning other passages in which Sir Vidya describes the way this supposedly "white" culture benefits all races, let's look at Professors Patton and Guteral's other remark, about "supposedly . . . derelict black culture."

We once had a brilliant black writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates I, who gave a matchless description of the benefit of moving from a subculture to modern, first-world, culture—and of the wrenching personal change entailed:

When we talk "culture," as it relates to African-Americans, we assume a kind of exclusivity and suspension of logic. Stats are whipped out (70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock) and then claims are tossed around cavalierly, (black culture doesn't value marriage.) The problem isn't that "culture" doesn't exist, nor is it that elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility.

It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position. African-Americans, themselves, from poor to bourgeois, are the harshest critics of the street mentality. ...

To the young people in my neighborhood, friendship was defined by having each other's back. And in that way, the personal shields, the personal willingness to meet violence with violence, combined and became a collective, neighborhood shield--a neighborhood rep. ...

I think one can safely call that an element of a kind of street culture. It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment. "I ain't no punk" may shield you from neighborhood violence. But it can not shield you from algebra, when your teacher tries to correct you. It can not shield you from losing hours, when your supervisor corrects your work. And it would not have shielded me from unemployment, after I cold-cocked a guy over a blog post.

I suspect that a large part of the problem, when we talk about culture, is an inability to code-switch, to understand that the language of Rohan is not the language of Mordor. I don't say this to minimize culture, to the contrary, I say it to point how difficult it is to get people to discard practices which were essential to them in one world, but hinder their advancement into another. And then there's the fear of that other world, that sense that if you discard those practices, you have discarded some of yourself, and done it in pursuit of a world, that you may not master.

'Elements of that "culture" might impair upward mobility,' Coates said back then. "It's also an element which--once one leaves the streets--is a great impediment," he added.**

Professors Patton and Guteral also allege that "white culture . . . insists it is superior." Naipaul, who also moved from a third world culture, by contrast describes modernity as (to borrow Lincoln's words) "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times":

It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism.

How crabbed and narrow and bitter, by contrast, is the outlook of Patton, Guteral, and (unfortunately) the later, ideological Ta-Nehisi Coates, who politicize culture as propaganda, in the process fanatically denying the "immense human idea" of the "awakened spirit." “The central conservative truth,” observed Pat Moynihan, “is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

Many previous posts in this blog address the charge that "white supremacy" founded America, as if the development of a dynamic democracy with a liberal founding was the effect of a monstrous racism embedded in the soul, and not the well-grounded prospering of a great culture with an awakened spirit. 


(*) Our Universal Civilization:
The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn’t always universal; it wasn’t always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. ... A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. ... I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

(**) Ta-Nehisi Coates II, by contrast, says:

The notion that black irresponsibility is at least part of the "race problem" is widely shared among black America's most prominent figures, beginning—but not ending—with the president of the United States. ...

Respectability politics is, at its root, the inability to look into the cold dark void of history. For if black people are—as I maintain—no part of the problem, if the problem truly is 100 percent explained by white supremacy, then we are presented with a set of unfortunate facts about our home.

I Refuse to be Spoken to in That Tone of Voice

So said Christopher Hitchens about an ideology that "makes very large claims for itself," and lectures those who do not share that ideology concerning what they are allowed to do.

In The Case for Reparations a once-respected national magazine, purporting to advance civil rights, adopts in disguised form the dysfunctional foregone conclusions and disproved socio-political theories of a radical failed ideology (see Hollander's Political Will and Personal Belief, which depicts the utter loss of faith of the radical left's most passionate supporters). It postures morally over the results. It sneers not only at our ways ("scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July "), but at our virtues ("the great democratizer," "And that is us as the uncomplicated, the unvarnished, the un-nuanced champion of liberty the world over. And what the question of reparations ultimately raises, is that this land of liberty, this land of freedom, was made possible by slavery, was made possible by plunder.").

We are told that Slavery Made America. We are told, illogically, that the magnitude of the Civil War represents, not a great moral commitment to ending slavery, but a demonstration of the wickedness of white folks' lust for supremacy:

I roughly understood then that the Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy.* What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count.

The Liberal Founding announced the central proposition of A Dissenter's Notes: that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are representative Enlightenment documents; and that Enlightenment liberalism was and continues to be the underlying rationale of our country. It quoted eminent German-American historian Fritz Stern:

Liberalism—one of “America's noblest traditions,” I insisted, often defined as a state of mind—had “transformed the world . . . [I]ts greatest victory has been the American Revolution; its greatest pronouncement, the Declaration of Independence; its greatest bulwark, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.” It had “stood for freedom against tyranny. At its best . . . a force for change and progress, seeking the institutional defense of decency.” [...] In America's liberal premises the world had seen “the best promise of the West.”

A left critique of liberalism by professor Charles K. Rowley reads:

In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. - What Is Living and What Is Dead in Classical Liberalism

In a minute I'll talk about the profound differences between liberal and left in these matters, but first, it should be noted the Democratic Party is not a left party, despite the slovenliness of our language. A left party would not have not bailed out those monster capitalist corporations, Chrysler Corp. and General Motors, or spent much of the last presidential campaign lauding the middle class. For a surprisingly doctrinaire left perspective, look not at the Democratic party but at the academic humanities professoriate. (Books (none by conservatives) about academic radicalism: Follies of the Wise; Fashionable Nonsense**; The Reckless Mind; Literature Lost)

Universalism is illustrated in the Declaration, and in American Revolution writer Thomas Paine. The Declaration: "Having a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; "let facts be submitted to a candid world." Paine: "I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness." A universalist worldview underlies the words which begin the Constitution: "We the People."

The left by contrast is particularist, from the ending of the Communist Manifesto ("Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.") to Seattle's Kshama Sawant ("Environmentalists and Workers Must Link Up to Stop Global Warming and Fight"). There is always a radical binary, Oppressed and Oppressor, the latter consigned to outer darkness. In the words of Romer v. Evans, "A State cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws. Amendment 2 violates the Equal Protection Clause." (This is why The Atlantic's crusade is so jarring. It is such a crude violation of our inclusive values.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates' crusade in The Atlantic is not about any sort of rainbow coalition (contrast M. L. King's "God is ... interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men ... He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race."). It's strictly about what professor Randall Kennedy called a "self-aggrandizing" group—Coates' own. For public-spirited citizens, Native Americans have an argument which is strongly-related to that of African-Americans, but what Coates had to say about their cause, in a video, was "if they can make the case."

Individualism: The romantic tenor inherited from the counterculture may cause us to think of individualism in terms of egotism. However, in the context of liberalism the emphasis on the individual means that civil rights are the rights of the single person: the citizen.

This may be contrasted with the tendency to think of the group as everything, a context which may demote the concerns of the person to mere selfishness. Mill's On Liberty mentions, about page 3, "social tyranny," a pressure for groupthink and conformity resulting from (in left jargon) "solidarity," "group rights," "collectivism," and "communitarianism." (Kennedy, above critiques "the notion that blackness gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society." Emphasis added.) Justice operates at the level of the person; by working toward the civil rights of each individual it militates for the civil rights of all, and serves as a defense against social tyranny.

Egalitarianism: Neither the left nor the right supports that foundational American principle, "all men are created equal." (See The Condition of Equality Today.) To say "white supremacy" and "white guilt," as The Atlantic's crusade does, imputes unique evil to white folks. This parallels the Manifesto's belief in the wickedness of the bourgeoisie. As for the right, Russell Kirk included in his Ten Conservative Principles:

For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

Meliorism: Steven Den Beste spoke of the optimistic spirit of liberal democracy: "dedication to achieving ideal outcomes." It appears in the Christian scriptures as the parable about experiencing more joy over the one sheep that had been lost, but was found, than over the ninety-nine that were never lost. Meliorism is the constructive aspect of liberalism.

I will close by quoting an earlier post, Reparations: The Worst Fallacies are Those that Trash Liberal Principles:

In his essay "Dragon Slayers,"* Jerald Walker recounts a conversation with "a man who wanted me to hate him. I should hate all whites, he felt. ... 'How about slavery,' he asked. I explained, as politely as I could, that I had not been a slave. 'But you feel its effects,' he snapped. 'Racism, discrimination, and prejudice will always be a problem for you in this country. White people,' he insisted, 'are your oppressors.' ... 'After all,' I continued, 'slaves and their immediate descendants were by and large heroic, not pathetic, or I wouldn't be standing here.'The man was outraged. 'You're absolving them of responsibility, of the obligation to atone for past and present wrongs.'"

When I saw this passage yesterday, I realized that Ta-Nehisi Coates is presenting a concealed demand for atonement in The Case for Reparations:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

 I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice. And so should you.


-*--

(*) The growth of the United States should not be pychologized as "white supremacy." David Auerbach suggested (as did our previous post), that it was an effect of the processes of modernity:

From the moment the Industrial Revolution triggered the massive 200-year explosion in growth, we made a Faustian bargain. From that point on, it was pretty much a given that the motor of technological progress and economic growth would lead us to where we are today. Henry Adams called this the dynamo, embodying the dominant force and technological motor of modern human history.

(**) For an extensive background on Fashionable Nonsense, see co-author Alan Sokal's page:

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/
 
In particular, see Linda Seebach's "Scientist takes academia for a ride with parody"

Excerpt:

Physicist Alan Sokal of New York University meticulously observed all the rules of the academic game when he constructed his article on postmodern physics and submitted it to a prestigious journal of cultural studies called Social Text.

The people he cites as authorities in cultural studies are the superluminaries of the field, the quotations he uses to illustrate his argument are strictly accurate and the text is bristling with footnotes.

All the rules but one, that is: Sokal's article is a parody. Under the grandiloquent title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," it appeared in the Spring/Summer 1996 special issue of the magazine, one entirely devoted to "the science wars," as the editors term the tension between people who actually do science and the critics who merely theorize about it.

Many scientists believe that the emperors of cultural studies have no clothes. But Sokal captured the whole royal court parading around in naked ignorance and persuaded the palace chroniclers to publish the portrait as a centerfold.

Once the article was safely in print, Sokal revealed his modest experiment. "Would a leading journal of cultural studies," he wrote in the May/June issue of Lingua Franca, "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?"

Unfortunately yes, and Sokal's deliberate nonsense is anything but subtle. Translated into plain English from the high-flown language he borrowed for the occasion, his first paragraph says that scientists "cling to the dogma" that the external world exists and its properties are independent of what human beings think.

But nobody believes that old stuff any more, right? Now we all know that physical reality is "at bottom a social and linguistic construct."

Is there a sound when a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it? Under the theory of social construction, there's not even a tree.

There are so many red flags planted throughout the paper that even non-scientists should have spotted at least one and started laughing, Sokal said Thursday (May 9). "Either this is a parody or the author is off his rocker."