Notes from Underground

Archives for November 6, 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.