Notes from Underground

Archives for November 2015

Magic Nativism

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10/22/09

From an undisclosed location in the southern tropics, I received the following communication, most likely composed on an ancient PC encrusted with fish entrails:

How do you argue with this kind of person?

I feel like she just wants to hate something and doesn’t want to know how to solve it?

Am I wrong?

Seriously, what is the solution?

My correspondent included a conversation with someone regarding “All of the people who came to this country illegally, use up all our resources, don’t pay income tax and refuse to learn the English language.”

I replied that I think it’s a case of being uncomfortable with other cultures plus blaming the wrong people.

The fact that some or all of them are illegal is irrelevant to the discomfort level. That’s just a socially acceptable excuse for disliking them. There are plenty of legal immigrants, naturalized citizens, and natural-born citizens who would probably be just as annoying to this person. I remember my own relatives going on about blacks and Hispanics in Chicago, not to mention welfare queens in Michigan, and probably none of them were illegal immigrants. If only we could all live in little enclaves of like-minded people, separated by mountains from anyone who makes us uncomfortable.

In my own experience, I’ve worked in a laundry room with a dozen Spanish-speaking workers and managers. They could all speak English, but they didn’t, because it was more fun to talk in Spanish so that the gringos couldn’t tell what they were saying. Sometimes they would tease me in Spanish, and that was really no different from being teased in English by some small-town punk in Michigan. I’ve also worked with jerkoffs in California who would talk about Hispanic workers in English, expecting them to not understand that they were being cheated or insulted. Living in the same place where you were born is only a guarantee that you can be arrogant toward visitors and get away with it; it doesn’t make someone deserving of any special regard.

My other experience is from having a car accident involving some illegal immigrants. I know they were uninsured and probably illegal because they begged me not to call the police, and they phoned a friend to negotiate with me in English. I accepted a really small amount of money for the damage they did, and that car was never fixed, since I found out it would cost five times as much to fix it. I should have filed a police report so that I could have filed an insurance claim with my own company. I don’t blame them for being uninsured; I blame myself for feeling sorry for them, when I should have let them deal with the consequences of being reported to the police and my insurance company.

We could blame the illegal immigrants for not getting their paperwork straight if they wanted to work here, but I think if I was desperate enough I would probably take the same risks. We could also blame the federal government for not being tough enough, but the feds are doing exactly what they are told to do by the business interests.*

If there was no demand for cheap labor in agricultural, construction, custodial, retail, factory, warehouse, and restaurant work, there would be a lot fewer illegal immigrants. I worked for a painting contractor who said he hired lots of illegals because they were willing to work for $9.00 an hour and they usually showed up for work, unlike most of the soft, arrogant, pampered, overfed, whiny little white boys in the wealthiest county in Indiana. I’ve also worked as a day laborer for temporary services that could not get unemployed white guys to come out of the welfare office and load freezer trucks for $8.00 an hour.

With all that said, I agreed that the bottom line was that the other person just wanted to hate something, and you can’t solve that by arguing.

* “All You Americans Are Fired.” Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, and Jeremy Singer-Vine. Buzzfeed.com (1 December 2015). http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/all-you-americans-are-fired.

Some Cutting Remarks

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3/25/15

From an undisclosed location in the northern tropics, I received this message, most likely typed on an iPad encrusted with fish entrails:

    What do you think of this essay? I’m curious of your opinion.

My correspondent included a link to an old essay, “Trying Out One’s New Sword,” written by British philosopher Mary Midgley.

Midgley is a philosopher known for criticizing scientific reductionism and encouraging the use of moral philosophy to define ethical purposes, rather than merely to justify ethical means. She believes that religious sentiment is intrinsic to humanity. She has promoted and rationalized the Gaia Hypothesis.

This version of her essay is from a textbook edited by Christina Hoff Sommers, which coincidentally I read in an ethics class I took in 1987. The electronic file linked to was hosted on the site of Iranian transhumanist and human rights activist Sam Ghandchi, linked from a list of human rights articles written by others. Midgley first published the essay in her book, “Heart and Mind” (1981).

The essay criticizes the “moral isolationist” who refuses to exercise moral judgment against others. This is a reference to the isolationist stance before WWII, which was official US policy up until 1941. Isolationism as foreign policy was associated with conservative Republicans and southern Democrats in the US, based on a tradition of non-interventionism in foreign conflicts.

Midgley described her critique in more detail in the introduction to “Heart and Mind” and in the 1987 essay, “The Flight from Blame.” She attacked analytical philosophers for promoting a cowardly approach to ethics that led to a kind of post-modern refusal to judge anything  as “wrong,” that is, moral relativism.

Midgley’s example (the inspiration for the title) is taken from an obscure and perhaps apocryphal Japanese custom of justifying the random street killing of a commoner by a samurai, by claiming that the samurai was merely testing his new sword. The Japanese term is tsujigiri, which literally means “crossroads killing” and may denote merely a street assault or a person committing such an attack. The practice was said to have been banned under the Edo regime in 1602. In practice, although the samurai had a formal right to kill a member of the common (or “non-human”) class of people for any discourteous conduct, most officials would probably have discouraged it. Even if the samurai was punished, the punishment depended upon the relative social standing of the attacker and the victim, although a victim was technically allowed to defend himself.

Most new samurai swords were actually tested on the corpses of executed criminals. So, really, my mysterious correspondent wanted me to comment on an ethical speculation about a foreign culture, where the main question is whether we have a right to judge the mythical practices of that culture.

It seems to me that the more interesting question is whether we have the right to moralize about other people based on mythology, speculation, and ignorant generalizations about them. I say, of course we do, since our ignorant opinion about them is also meaningless if we do not actually hold any power over them. We are free to pointlessly moralize about other countries and cultures, just as we are free to pointlessly moralize about national politics, sports, magical crystals, and the cosmic interrelatedness of ravioli and dung beetles. And everyone who doesn’t want to join us in our outrage has the right to ignore our ignorant generalizations.

So, on that issue, I suggest that we are free to moralize about anything at all, as long as there is no consequence. If an issue is consequential, that is, if our opinion will lead to an action that will affect others, then we are obligated to moralize about it.

Another interesting question is whether it is better to justify killing someone because they are lower status and personally offensive (a social reason), or because the weapon’s effectiveness needs to be proven (a pragmatic reason).

The obvious answer for a sociopath, such as a serial killer, is that the pragmatic justification of testing weapons or methods is preferable. Quality assurance, efficiency, and practical effectiveness are the hallmarks of the sociopath. Anyone with experience in the military, retail, industrial, or corporate world can verify this.

Normal, well-socialized people prefer to justify killing based on the low social status of the victim, along with pointing out any of their behaviors that might have provoked an attack. My research suggests that this was true most of the time in traditional Japanese society, as well as in traditional European society, and is still true today everywhere, including in the US.

Anecdotally, I’ve been physically attacked only by higher status males who thought they were enforcing some perverse social order, but not by any lower status people. (No, I’m not counting my brother and sisters.)

In conclusion, I suspect that samurai felt free to punish any commoner for any reason so as to maintain social order, even if it included killing them. Among themselves, they probably snickered about how they were just testing their swords. I don’t have any problem denouncing both practices.

The War Against Errors

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9/15/05

On a hot, humid July day, I discovered the park squeezed in between Washington Street and the IUPUI campus near downtown Indianapolis. I had driven down University Boulevard hundreds of times without trying to find out where those joggers were going, the ones who occasionally drifted by on the south side of the campus. That day, though, my daughter and I ventured boldly across the lawn alongside the National Institute for Fitness and Sport. All of a sudden, the river appeared across my view, stretching west along an undeveloped south bank. Then, to the east, I had an uncharacteristically stunning view of downtown at the end of a broad cobblestone walkway. Dropping away from the walkway was a baffling maze of concrete steps, manicured grass, huge stone blocks, and rectangular pools and waterways. A set of stone benches terraced six high in a quarter circle simulated the ruins of a Roman amphitheater, like those at Ephesus in Turkey. Far off to the southeast was the marshmallow-topped building formerly known as the Hoosier Dome.

It was 86 degrees and I was sweating as we walked faster down the cobblestone walkway. Walking parallel to us in the grass were several people carrying clipboards. We passed them as we went toward downtown, with the RCA Tennis Championships on the north side. Before reaching the oversized green plastic frog sitting on a bench facing the NCAA Hall of Champions, we turned in to the park. A set of red pawprints made a trail on the concrete, leading from a rectangular pool over to the NCAA. This was supposed to be the trail left by the Indians’ mascot, Rowdie, after he fell in the water when a stray baseball hit him on the nose.

Defying the civil engineers who laid out the park’s sidewalks east-to-west, we cut south across the lawn to the Dr. Frank P. Lloyd Visitor Center. Once around the building, we saw the west entrance to Victory Field framed by the overarching exit sign for the park. After crossing the street toward the stadium, we passed a man and a woman just standing on the street corner. The man was talking into a cellphone, saying, “Yeah, we’re here on the corner of Maryland. Are you in the parking garage?”

At first I was intimidated by the throngs of people headed for the stadium and the long line at the ticket window. Then I found out that our online tickets enabled us to walk right up to the gate, where no one was waiting. An attendant scanned the barcodes printed on the tickets and we passed through the turnstiles. Our seats were right across from the gate, in the “party terrace.” Behind us, a British man explained baseball rules to his wife.

The date was July 19th, two days before the near-bombing of London on “7/21,” which was two weeks after the notorious “7/7.”

The concession ring wasn’t too crowded, so I went to stand in line for popcorn, wavering between the $1.50 box and the giant $3.50 tub. An older man in front of me turned and said, “I always pick the slowest line.” Then a younger man, carrying a clipboard, walked up and offered him money; the older man refused, and the younger man left. I bought a box of popcorn, then went over to the lemonade vendor, who was crushing beer cans and saving them. I bought a lemonade for only $2.75.

The white-uniformed Indians were in the second game of a four-game series against the black-uniformed Syracuse Skychiefs. The Skychiefs were unable to mount any kind of defense that day, usually striking out quickly. The frustration of their batters was reflected in the time one accidentally splintered his bat, sending a piece flying down the third base line.

The Indians started out scoring in the second inning with a home run by Brad Eldred that went flying over the left field picnic area. As the Indians kept scoring with increasing frequency, the Skychiefs called several timeouts to discuss strategy. Their befuddlement was mocked by a sardonic announcer who played an old Buffalo Springfield tune: “Something’s happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear / There’s a man with a gun over there…” Well, I don’t think he intended to play that last line, unless he was also trying to make a political comment.

Eldred ended up being walked twice, then he scored another home run, clinching his eventual callup to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Ty Wigginton also got a home run, but not before “missing” a homer early on. Wigginton had struck out in the first inning, then in a fit of rage tossed his helmet and bat onto the field, where a batboy dutifully retrieved them.

The serenity of the baseball field had been accented an hour into the game by a subtle moonrise, framed between the second and third smokestacks of the massive Citizens Thermal Energy plant to the south.

Afterwards, we walked back through White River State Park along the wide cobblestone walkway. It was nearly 10:00 and the temperature had dropped to about 76 degrees, just enough so that a slight breeze made the humid air drift away for a moment. In the dark, the trees alongside the path framed a line of antique-style streetlamps, and then we came up over the rise to find the river stretched out in front of us again.

Suddenly I was struck by the thought that this was like being in London, looking over the Thames River. In the spring of 1978 my family had visited an extravagant theatre in London that had been converted into a cinema, where we saw Star Wars, that operatic paean to Taoist philosophy and two-handed swordfighting. Around the same time, I bought a record album that included the Star Wars musical score, along with theme songs from British science fiction shows I had never seen, such as The Quatermass Experiment. This was during a time when IRA bombers and Palestinian terrorists were much in the news, and the line between good and evil seemed pretty clear to any comic-book reader. Every time I listened to that soaring, martial music from Star Wars, I knew which side I wanted to be on.

Coming shortly after the revival of The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars story tapped into a deep longing in the general public for Manichean fantasies, in which the forces of absolute moral good face off against the forces of absolute moral evil. What made both sets of stories interesting is that you couldn’t objectively tell who would win, because the evil forces seemed so much more powerful. You had to believe that the good guys would win purely because of their intrinsic moral superiority. Both series eventually gave strangely introspective warnings about the error of trying to power up meek good guys enough to defeat impossibly powerful bad guys, but they started out with the assumption that the universal principles of good and evil were roughly equal in scope. Manicheanism depends on the fallacy that the creator of the universe is not the master of it, but merely a spectator who is betting on the guy in the white hat. That’s why it used to be called “heresy,” although later it was called “moral clarity.”

I left the riverside to drive back through the protective ring of working-class neighborhoods, past the men hanging out by the liquor store at 22nd and Illinois, to the sterility and tedium of the suburban fiefdoms. The Indians had decisively shut out the Skychiefs (13-0) not because of their intrinsic goodness, but because they played a better game.