My Qualms with the Politically Correct Movement.
I usually do not venture into politics, preferring to focus
on philosophy, dream interpretation, mysticism, mythology, and, of late,
science. As usual, though, I affirm the fringe, so here are my views.
1.
Socio-economic Disparity.
The argument is age-old. Are people victims
or are they responsible?
It’s quite clear that there have been
statistical studies showing that white people (like myself) tend to excel
economically moreso than other groups.
Wait a moment. I just said white people
like myself. There is a fallacy therein. But I will address that later.
Unless I am mistaken, and correct me if I
am wrong, the nation was established essentially by fairly well-off people who
moved to the America under the auspices of religious persecution – NOT so much
hope of economic gain. These people would, in the words of George Carlin, “happen
to be white.”
A good deal of the racial minority
population would go on to move here, but under entirely different auspices.
That the majority tends to be the most
successful by the standards of the culture comes as no surprise. This is a
general rule in societies. This is all so why fringe beliefs are often marginalized
or fit into existing stringent categories by members of any largely organized movement.
But I digress.
African Americans came as slaves and
struggled economically for a considerable time because of lingering racism and
the strangeness with which people who were not African American met their
liberation, to speak nothing of political motives. Many other minorities came
from impoverished countries. They formed small communities that we have come to
call ghettos.
If one is born into wealth, if one is
educated in how to appear classy, and if one adopts the value systems of the dominator
culture, it comes as no surprise that one succeeds. One would think that, over
time, however, our great nation’s free enterprise system would be able to more
or less equalize success amongst all racial groups, regardless even of cultural
differences, leaving things like inter-racial marriage to even out the kinks.
Unfortunately, this is the most naive and idealized
view of the American economic system that I can think of.
I have noticed a tendency for people who
are very passionate but all so very biased to commit the fallacy of the
excluded middle. This means: “If you do not believe in a systematic oppression
as the cause for these statistics, then you MUST believe that people who are
white and male just HAPPEN to be better, more skilled, or harder workers.”
Woah, there.
First of all: There is no direct
correlation between one’s work ethic and skills and one’s economic success in
our capitalist society. Education does not bring us up to think critically but
to parrot information without questioning its meaning. Teachers, under
protection of their rights, may feel no obligation to explain a difficult
concept to a student outside of class hours. Within class hours, they may
silence a student for interrupting the class with “time-wasting” questions. Few
teachers I have known do more than anticipate that the student essentially
learn how to parrot an ambiguous text in a text-book without paying heed to
what it means. Tests are so formatted as to draw upon this reserve knowledge,
and students may feel at liberty to forget what they had learned and any
intellectual cognitive dissonance that might result once they had gotten the
grade.
If I work as a cashier for eight months,
essentially as a nameless middle-man between a group of consumers and a
corporation whose chief product is valued for its uselessness (luxuries), I
make more money than a struggling free-lance writer trying to publish a novel.
This I can say from experience.
To exclude the middle is to forget that
there are HISTORICAL reasons for socio-economic disparity. The perpetuators of
this disparity in the present are the media and the political movements.
Capitalism depends upon the creation of illusory class division which in turn
becomes actual class division. Yet even this is in fact a naive oversimplification,
because in the grand scheme of things there are only two classes: The American
class and the Wealthy elite.
The media is saturated with racial
stereotypes, romanticized depictions of ghettos, et cetera because it can
market its products by appealing to a certain group. Group identification is
all ways arbitrary. As the philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed out, there is no
definite black person or definite white person. If anything, everyone is a part
of the same spectrum, with no dividing lines in nature between one race and
another. And his argument seems even more convincing when one meets the
offspring of inter-racial couples. This is not a joke; it is actually the
single most convincing argument I have heard against racism, because all though
any one can makes a pathos appeal against the evils of racism, Derrida’s
argument actually uses logos to explain the absurdity of NOT being racially
colour-blind.
Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, said
that you can treat people as either belonging to the I-It category or the
I-Thou category. True racial color blindness is not color blindness at all but
rather a focus of attention on something that is not an arbitrary imposition of
characteristics upon the object of one’s consciousness. This is absolutely
nothing short of the basic decency with which one ought to treat not only all
other people but the natural world as such. One can reduce the problem of
racism to this: One reduces the other to an abstraction, a member of an
arbitrary group. TO pay no attention to another’s It characteristics in this
way, to regard the Other as a Thou, is, according to Buber, to see the face of
God (in the words of Hugo).
2.
All of this would be very well if the Politically
Correct movement KNEW what to do about it. But instead they perpetuate the
problem. More than once I have noticed that society is a projection of the
individual. No two people inhabit the same society, because everyone is in
contact with different people. Jung, Sartre, Krishnamurti, and a number of
other thinkers have pointed out this fact: You are society. Yet society is all
so an illusory abstraction, and you are much more than that.
What the “guilty liberal” does is that he
or she creates a kind of separation between the “problems of society” and his
or her own involvement in it. This is the mentality: There IS racism in
society, I am not responsible for it, but I must take action against it.
The pathos seems moving. In fact, it is
self-defeating.
Anyone can speak of “oppression” as a vague
political term, like “Terrorism”. Yet this is Orwellian language. The word “oppression”
is meaningless outside of a context, and that context is all ways provided by
the individual. The reason that there is so much anxiety and depression amongst
members of a youth culture is this problem of communication and
miscommunication, because they are unified in belief in an idea but
fundamentally separated in its context.
Remarkably, the dominator culture that they
rebel against suffers the same ill.
If society is a projection of one’s self,
then any actual oppression that one can be aware of is either oppression that
one is perceived to be a victim of or oppression that one oneself does to other
people. Given this, if no oppression seems to exist in society, this indicates
that the individual is probably in a state of relative harmony with others. It
would suggest that one’s relationships are genuine, non-discriminating, and in
the Thou mode as much as possible (though obviously, as Buber pointed out, one
cannot be in that mode all the time. We oscillate between modes, but one all so
participates through one’s decisions in the up-swings.).
Yet this is not what the Politically
Correct movement wants you to think. Instead, they assert that, if you are a
part of a privileged group, then you should note that “racial colour blindness”
is simply a form of naive projection upon people who are in much worse
conditions than one’s self of one’s own conditions. Meanwhile, if one is part
of an “oppressed group” and one does not become “aware [of the ‘Truth’]” that
one is being oppressed, then one is not only doing a disservice to one’s self
but to all others in one’s group, even if one had not hitherto identified with
the group as strongly as with members outside of it.
This is bad. Because all that it does is
perpetuate the sense of division in the system created by monetary-ism.
What to do.
The economic system is collapsing, and with
it will go many of our problems. We are on the verge of some transformation
that will be truly extraordinary. I do not promise that it will be entirely “positive”
by any existing definition. Yet I have faith in that Humanity will make the
transition to a Resource-based Economy and use its scientific knowledge,
technological skill, creative brilliance (in all disciplines, save for the most
banal) and existing abundance to create a radically new human community. Most
of the perceived “racial and gender oppression” in the United States comes to
us in the form of economic statistics. I have met people who refuse to seek
courses of action because of the “statistical odds against their success”. Yet
this is madness. You are not a number. You are a person, and if you hate he
statistics then don’t listen to them, for defining yourself as a member of a
group according to an abstract number will in turn perpetuate the problem you
perceive by worsening morale.
We cannot control individual choice when
people are in any sort of bureaucratic power. But a resource-based economy, as
distinct from a Capitalistic, Marxist, or any other hitherto seen society,
would rid us of bureaucracies and power structures in general.
In the mean time, it is important to note
the difference between abstraction and reality. The word “oppression” only has
meaning in an individual case history. Yet no one can pass judgment upon your
ethical behavior other than yourself, at least according to De Beavoir’s Ethic
of Ambiguity. This is because any outsider could easily judge you to be
unethical according to his or her own agenda. This in turn is a form of oppression.
Ad hominem attacks upon individuals who are “privileged” won’t help. Rugged
individualism never helps. We must get out of the habit of seeing ourselves and
others as objects and respect the power of human subjectivity. Fanaticism will
only create Fascism.
3.
I do not identify myself as white. When I came
to the United States, I had only lived in apartments. The first time my family
lived in a house was when I was in the fifth grade.
Personally, it was totally overrated. I
liked to keep the company of my fellow young people. We would play games in the
winding snake-like labyrinths of the apartment complex. We would not notice
each other’s differences, and the words of adults meant little to us. That was
until for about the fifth year in a row we had had to learn about the history
of American slavery.
When I was in Elementary school, a girl
asked me what my religion was. I asked what religion was. Someone else asked if
I celebrated Christmas or Channukah. I said Christmas. In truth, my family had
traditionally celebrated the New Year in place of Christmas. But since my
parents did not want to explain to me what the word “Christmas” meant and why
people would put circular, doughnut-shaped bushes on their doors six days prior
to the New Year, we adopted the American capitalist habit.
For a short while, I thought I was Christian,
because that was what I was told. I all so was told that I was white. Had I not
been born in the European part of Russia, maybe I would have insisted that I
was Asian America. But my parents had more of a say in this matter than I did,
and a child does not see fit to complain except in personal emergencies. So I
went through middle school as a “want-to-be Asian” because of my attraction to
Asian women in my honors classes.
It took me a long time to identify myself
as Russian. That was because the system of political correctness in the
Educational system and Mass Media on television nearly squashed the Russian pride
out of me. Yet that was with my consent. It was very well, though. I kept a
diverse group of friends. It was not until I saw how much my ethnic background
affected my views, customs, and even speech that I embraced it again. Yet I
have met a young man of Mayan descent who did not want to talk about it, a
young man who was Native American but only mentioned it in his poetry, and even
one of my best friends from high school, living in San Francisco, who got upset
when I pointed out that I thought that she had a markedly Confucianist
influence in her approach to things. Mind you: She actively practiced
traditional Asian medicine, and I had been around her parents.
The PoC kids would say that it serves me
right. But the matter is not one of individual guilt. I recall acting as a
judge at a Speech and Debate tournament and listening to a moving speech made
by a young Asian girl who talked about how Americanisation tempted her to
forget her culture and to stop using her home language. She pointed out with
the breath-stopping brilliance that I have come to expect of everyone but can
really only find in Speech and Debate that the death of a language is the death
of a culture.
And yet, all though I understand that it’s
your individual choice whether or not to identify with your heritage, I am vilified
for raising questions about people’s cultural back-grounds. And this is said
with good intentions!
When I visited China Town in San Francisco
years ago, simply being in the presence of a Chinese restaurant entirely
transformed my thinking and brought me closer to my core. This “core” is not a
Taoist or Buddhist idea; it is universal. Yet the latent Fascism of political
correctness would efface this core by claiming equality. Yet this is NOT the
equality of the I-Thou relationship.
I still visit China Town, I have just realized,
in my dreams time and time again.
Dm.A.A.
