Battles with Integrity

First, I need to make some space, so that the bullets don't get eaten by my icon.

I think it's a failing of this particular theme.

Mayhaps I shall have to change the theme sometime. Here goes....

Hegel says these three things in order (paraphrased):

• In order to study world history philosophically, we must first ensure that we avoid any a priori assumptions about the nature of the world, or the nature of history, as historians are wont to do.
  
  
• There is a singular spirit that guides and shapes the history of the world that can be rationally understood through studious applications.
  
  
• This singular spirit is guided by divine providence, because the Bible tells us so.

Wait Georg, you had me with the first one, but then I lost you when you drove off the rails.

Note: I had originally intended this for the [acad] filter, but it seems to have grown a life of it's own, refusing to fit within the filter, or within any filter. Oh well, so it goes.

The following quote comes from The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue edited by Rebecca Saunders. This comes from Saunders' introduction.

"However widespread and consequential, the concept of the foreign is perversely difficult to define. There are, as we shall see, reasons for this: its relativity, its equivocal valuation, the heterogeneity of the terms that constitute it, its recidivistic metaphoricity. Derived from a Latin term meaning "outside" (foras), the word foreign designates a quality or an entity conceived relatively: the foreign is always relative to the inside, the domestic, the familiar, a boundary. No entity is inherently foreign; s/he who is a foreigner in one place is at home in another; as the familiar is altered or a boundary redrawn¹, so to is the character of the foreign: it is a linguistic and conceptual container with infinitely variable contents. Symptomatic of the relative nature of the foreign is the necessity of defining foreign negatively, a symptom exhibited by virtually any dictionary: to be foreign is not belonging to a group, not speaking a given language, not having the same customs; it is to be unfamiliar, uncanny, unnatural, unauthorized, incomprehensible, inappropriate, improper. As much the detritus of conceptualizing as a concept proper, foreignness must thus at times be approached à rebours (indeed one may be called on to comprendre à rebours: to misunderstand, engage in an anti-understanding.

Not only can foreignness not exist in a vacuum, it can't exist without something to compare it against. Actually it's the necessity of comparison that makes foreignness so powerful. Just as nationalism requires an outsider² (I'm tempted to throw in the word utlänning just to sound pretentious), so does the definition of outsider require something considered to be 'in'. This allows one to be foreign not only in another country, or even in one's own country, but amongst one's own peers, if one is somehow now on the outside looking in.

As someone who was raised Seventh-Day Adventist, I am foreign to people outside that particular branch of Christianity. I'm foreign to that church, as my beliefs do not coincide with any generally accepted Christian dogma. I am foreign to the nation because of my homeland in California, and to California because of my experience growing up in small-town Humboldt County. I'm foreign to the hippies in Southern Humboldt because I don't smoke weed, and because my family is from logger stock. I'm foreign to working-class Humboldt County because, well because I am. Partly, because of my welfare upbringing, and partly because I try to eschew provincialism which often, but not always marks much working-class thought, at least to my limited experience, at least in Humboldt County. I am foreign to the city because of my rural roots, and I'm no longer rural enough to fit in up north anymore either.

Foreignness isn't just about locality, but also about belonging, about class, race, food hangups (at least in my case), and about finding oneself in a place where one does not quite fit. Fortunately, I have largely been able to find a sort of fitting place amongst other folk, who for one reason or another, also don't quite fit. My people are foreigners, freaks, geeks, queers, and oddballs. We band together for mutual protection perhaps, but also because we see in each other, and in ourselves, that at heart, we share more important things than similar experience, similar tastes, and similar backgrounds. We're square pegs in round holes. We're monkeys in the wrench. We're strangers, as it were, in a strange land.

But it's not such a bad thing, really. I would not want it any other way.

¹cf. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
² Something Gelvin talks about in Modern Middle East: A History when discussing Egyption, Algerian and Balkan (various) nationalism movements in the Ottoman empire.

Marx's communism is dead. Nobody has been advocating equality of outcome for years. Too many folk have been beating that dead horse for far too long.

One of the questions I have about the whole Milton Friedman debating point of equality of outcome vs. equality of opportunity is this, if one believes that we now have equal opportunities, how does one explain that women/the poor/minorities don't routinely find themselves at the same level of advancement/wealth/societal success as men/middle-to-upper-classers/white? Is it possible to reconcile income and social disparity with equal opportunity without saying that some folk (namely rich white men) are simply better than other people?

It seems logically that either the playing field is level, and I'm suceeding and you're not just because I'm better than you, or the playing field isn't level. Just my thought.

[n.b. This is a slight re-write of a response from comments in a prior journal entry.]

What are we supposed to do? How can we possibly fix America's race problem? Perhaps trying to meddle with a bad situation could lead to unintended consequences that would spell ruin for the nation. How can it be moral to take something from someone who earned it, and give it to someone who didn't? Wouldn't it be best to just be good to people individually? We can't be responsible for the horrible actions of bigots and detestable people? They're valid questions.

I'm not certain what should be done. I've not yet studied the problem enough to have a strong opinion, but here are some ideas. You can feel free to shoot them down, but I'd prefer to challenge you to suggest something that you think might work better.

• Perhaps a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a la South Africa. I don't know if it would help to open up the subject of race in America to wide examination, but the standard White reaction of pretending the problem is only a problem when African-Americans and others bring it up fails as a solution. To paraphrase vito_excalibur, as long as persons of color keep quiet about race, there is no race problem...for whites.
• I have no problem opening a discussion about reparations. I was raised in an almost exclusively white county, by northern Europeans of peasant stock who all came to the US after 1870. Nobody in my direct line lived in the South before Brown v Board and the Civil Rights era, but I recognize that I am privileged as a result of my birth as a white male in California. If we as a society claim to preserve life, liberty and property, then we as a society might justly ought to see compensation justly due when someone is improperly deprived of one or more of those. The country has failed to uphold the Constitution, a contract made by the people of the United States with the people of the United States. When the government unjustly mistreated--at Manzanar, for example--American citizens of Japanese descent, it (eventually) admitted its liability, and sought to pay reparations. Those reparations were paid with the taxes of all Americans (including those who came to the US after 1945). If we didn't exempt my high-school Civics teacher from paying his taxes toward reparations (who arrived from Hungary in 1951), why should it exempt me from paying reparations to African-Americans (or their issue) whose lives, liberty and property were unjustly deprived.
  
  Failing that, who should pay? Well, I suppose we might also look at those 'people' still extant who directly profited from slavery, for example. If a corporation is a person, and a person must be responsible for actions he/she takes, or actions taken under the authority of that person, then we perhaps might undertake a strict accounting of Chase, or Bank of America, who bought, sold, lent money for, and insured slaves.

Hell, I don't know. But I do know that what has happened, and is happening today is criminal. When we shrug our shoulders and say, "Sucks to be them," and not do anything about it, we're accessories after the fact.

And I don't mean such to say that you aren't doing anything. I recognize that treating people individually with respect is far from nothing. Individual action is important. Still, this as with so many other things, is bigger than any person can do singly. Isn't that what we have government for? I can't singly protect my family from the depredations of North Korea¹, but I pay my taxes so that my government can use my resources and others together to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

¹ Ok, not the best example.

There's a lot written this week about gay rights, human rights, the oppression of blacks, hispanics, queers, women, feminists, and more. There have been smart people speaking up about it, there have been smart people speaking up about people who speak up, and there are always trolls. ( Read more... )