The Novel Crime of being “Overwhelmingly White”

Insty notes the increasingly blatant racist narrative in the mainstream media.

UPDATE: More of the “If you don’t agree with me and you have white skin you’re a racist” narrative from the NYT.

Why Defend Andrew Breitbart?

Because of the reason his enemies are attacking him.

They are not attacking him because they believe he unfairly accused Shirley Sherrod of racism. They are attacking him because his opinions challenge leftist orthodoxy. The left has embraced demonization of those who disagree with them as a tactic for promoting their world view. In addition to this real reason for demonization, there is always a “good reason” offered to rationalize it, usually based on the claim that their opponent has violated some moral rule.

The specious nature of these “good reasons” is always obvious because of the double standard with which they are applied. More egregious violations of the same rules by those not perceived as enemies are ignored. For example, as noted above, Breitbart is being demonized for “race-baiting.” If the left held its own to a similar standard, few would be found in its ranks less guilty than Breitbart. In his case, it is not clear that he was deliberately making a false accusation of racism, or that Sherrod was even the main target of his attack. Whatever her intent when she made her remarks about discriminating against a white farmer because of the color of his skin, the approving reaction of the NAACP audience, which didn’t know at the time where she was going with her remarks, can certainly be plausibly described as racist. Regardless, the furious attacks on Breitbart continue, with all the usual faux virtuous indignation.

By way of contrast, consider the left’s response to a far more reprehensible justification of deliberate race baiting by one of its own. In an e-mail to his Journolist cohorts, Spencer Ackerman, who currently writes for Wired magazine and the Washington Independent, openly promoted false charges of racism as a political tactic. As noted by the Daily Caller,

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Needless to say, this blatant advocacy of racism, providing only that it be exploited to promote a “good cause,” has not provoked the same contrived outrage on the left. The “good reason” for the attacks on Breitbart doesn’t apply to Ackerman, or anyone else the left considers one of its own.

All this is easily understandable in terms of human nature. We are wired to apply different standards to “us” than we apply to “them.”  The left’s attempts to demonize the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, and the rest of its pantheon of evil are perfectly natural. They are also irrational and self-destructive.

UPDATE: Who do you think David Letterman is picking on?

a.  Spencer Ackerman

b.  Andrew Breitbart

“Right Wing Terror” vs. the Real Thing

Remember the recent hysteria on the left about imminent right wing terror and insurrection promoted by subversive institutions such as freedom of speech?  Here’s what the real thing looks like, but I doubt that the “right wing” was involved in an attack on an oil company executive.  It doesn’t fit the narrative.

Human Morality and the Sport of Mutual Villification

Virtuous indignation is in high fashion as I write this. To hear them tell it, those who take any interest in politics at all go about in a state of permanent outrage. The stalwarts of both the left and the right are adept at demonstrating that their opponents are not merely wrong, but must necessarily be evil as well. A time-honored way of “proving” this is to first identify a villain whose villainy is beyond question. Then, to demonstrate that ones political opponent is a villain, too, it is merely necessary to come up with some more or less flimsy way to connect him with the arch-villain.

The Stalinists were masters of the art. Their arch-villain was Trotsky, who appears in Orwell’s novels, Animal Farm and 1984 as Snowball and Emanuel Goldstein, respectively. He figured largely in the Great Purge Trials of the 1930’s. For example, from the Indictment of the trial of the “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” that doomed Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and many other once powerful Bolsheviks in 1938, the arch-villain is identified:

This (the crimes attributed to the bloc) applies first of all to one of the inspirers of the conspiracy, enemy of the people TROTSKY. His connection with the Gestapo was exhaustively proved at the trials of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center in August 1936, and of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre in January 1937.

The investigation has definitely established that TROTSKY has been connected with the German intelligence service since 1921, and with the British Intelligence Service since 1926.

and then the sub-demons are associated with him:

Thus, the accused N. N. Krestinsky, on the direct instruction of enemy of the people TROTSKY, entered into treasonable connections with the German intelligence service in 1921.

The accused K. G. Rakovsky, one of L. TROTSKY’s most intimate and particularly trusted men, has been an agent of the British Intelligence Service since 1924, and of the Japanese intelligence service since 1934.

and so on, and so on. Today, the “progressive” Left, is playing the same game with their foes in the Tea Party movement. In this case, the arch-villain is the John Birch Society. They would have us believe that there are more Birchers behind every Tea Party Bush than there were Reds infesting the halls of government in Joe McCarthy’s most fevered imagination. Examples of the ploy abound. For example, from OpEdNews.com’s “Tea Party Reminiscent of John Birch Society,”

The surge of the Tea Party as a potential shaker and mover of the American political system is reminiscent of a movement from the sixties that became particularly popular in the bellwether state of California. The John Birch Society became active and many grassroots members attached themselves strongly to the national political figure they saw as an agent for change, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

From E.J. Dionne’s “Birch and Barry,”

The reaction to Obama has also radicalized parts of the conservative movement, giving life to conspiracy theories long buried and strains of thinking similar to those espoused by the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups in the 1950s and ’60s.

From the Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia’s “Ohio: Birch Society, Racism, More Tea Party Ugliness,”

CityBeat first wrote about the Springboro Tea Party last month, detailing the agenda for a rally planned Saturday that’s heavy with speakers from the John Birch Society and movies about far-right conspiracy theories.

and so on. Google the connection, and you’ll find the meme repeated like a mantra on the websites of the left. Of course, the Right does exactly the same thing, with such worthies as Marx and Lenin in the leading role as Über-villain. The goal is the same in either case. To arouse the emotions associated with human morality by attempting to connect ones political opponents with some indubitable evil, and then use those emotions as weapons against them.  Of course, many other morally loaded tactics are employed for the same purpose. It’s interesting to consider the matter from first principles.

To begin, what is morality? The answer is that it is a term used to describe innate human behavioral traits that evolved at a time when the relations between human groups bore little or no resemblance to those between the massive political parties, nation states, and other social groups of our own time. “Good” and “evil” are constructs that exist in our imaginations for the sole reason that they promoted our survival in times now long forgotten. They have no other mode of existence, and cannot possibly be “legitimate” as objects in themselves, by virtue of the subjective nature of their existence. However, the modes of political conflict described above positively require them to be legitimate and real, else the arguments predicated on the reality of one’s own good, and one’s opponents evil, evaporate into the mist. In other words, the powerful emotions evoked in this process of mutual villification are fundamentally irrational.  Seen in this light, they emerge as what they really are; manifestations of human behavioral traits that are irrelevant to the goals pursued in terms of the reasons they exist to begin with. By evoking them in modern political struggles, one is not serving a holy cause. Rather, one is manipulating the human emotions associated with morality as political weapons.

To the extent that we consider survival an attractive goal, it would be well for us to finally climb off of this treadmill of morality. In our daily interactions with other human beings, that goal is impossible. We lack the intelligence to routinely substitute rational analysis for emotional response, or for behavior according to “human nature” at that level. However, it is to be hoped that the same is not true of political decisions involving the fate of thousands or millions of people. The history of the last hundred years has provided ample justification for this hope. Time after time, the identification of whole racial, social, or religious groups as “evil” has resulted in mass slaughter. The mayhem is still with us today, and can be expected to continue into the future. It is not to be expected that we will invariably be fortunate enough to be among “the good.” We could just as easily find ourselves among “the evil,” and share the fate suffered by millions of others in recent history. The idea that what happened so recently in such advanced countries as Germany and Russia “can’t happen here” is an illusion.

Under the circumstances, we would be wise to keep the genie of good and evil in its bottle. We should at least make an effort to substitute reason for emotion. In practice, this would imply a conscious decision to limit our judgment of the opinions of others to the categories “true” and “false,” and dispense with “good” and “evil.” As weapons, “good” and “evil” can be highly effective. If we routinely use them against political opponents, we are, in a very real sense, threatening them. They may quite reasonably conclude that they have no alternative but to wield the same weapons as the only effective way of fighting back. It would be better to refrain from using the weapons to begin with. The history of the last hundred years has amply demonstrated what is sure to follow if we don’t.

On the Legitimacy of Virtuous Indignation

As noted in an earlier post, Mark Shapiro has informed us that he is “outraged” about the publication of the Journolist e-mails. Of course, as I write this, virtuous indignation is as common as dirt on both sides of the political spectrum, but the incident illustrates something I’ve occasionally referred to before; the disconnect between what morality is and how it is perceived.

Morality is a term used to describe certain manifestations of human behavioral predispositions hard-wired in the brain as we evolved. As such, it does not and cannot have any legitimacy in itself. However, when Shapiro tells us that he is outraged, he is not merely describing his emotional response to a given external stimulus. His statement also implies the claim that his outrage is actually legitimate and justified. Rationally, however, this is nonsense.

Since time immemorial, philosophers have been seeking a logical basis for the legitimacy of morality. None of them has ever succeeded in finding one, for the very good reason that the existence of such a basis is impossible. Good and evil are not real objects, things in themselves independent of human emotional traits. Rather, they are the outcome of subjective processes that cause us to perceive them as real objects and things in themselves. We all share this illusion, presumably because the perception of good and evil as real things is effective in promoting our survival, or at least was effective in times very unlike the present. As a result, when Shapiro says he is outraged, we immediately understand what he is talking about. He is referring to moral good and evil, things that we also experience as real, independent objects, and that most of us actually believe are real, independent objects in spite of the fact that they cannot actually exist outside of our imaginations. As a result, our response is not simply to reply “So what? What difference does your current emotional state make to me?” Rather, we wrack our brains for arguments to demonstrate that Shapiro is mistaken in his belief that he has correctly identified the “real” moral good, and to substitute a different, more legitimate version of our own.

In fact, one person’s emotional response can be no more “objectively legitimate” than another’s. As one of the quatrains of the “The Rubaiyat” puts it;

The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d
Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn’d
Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d

The “ethics experts” of our own day are just the modern versions of the people the poet Omar was talking about. They are no closer to the truth than the Persian sages and prophets of long ago. In spite of the increasingly common acceptance of recent scientific revelations about what morality actually is, they continue as before, chasing the illusion. Before one announces one’s outrage to the world, it is well to consider the fact that one is declaring allegiance to just such an illusion.

Tony Hayward sans Sackcloth and Ashes

The media in the U.S. have been making a big fuss about a sighting of BP CEO Tony Hayward at a yacht race. Apparently he’s supposed to be walking around in a circle hitting himself on the forehead with a board like the monks in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.” I don’t blame him. He seemed to take the self-righteous hazing he endured at the hands of our grandstanding politicians with a good grace. Rep. Joe Barton, who apparently hasn’t learned that it’s a breach of protocall to refer to McCarthyism by its proper name if it’s for a good cause, actually dared to apologize for the public flogging. However, he quickly got back into line after a judicious jerk on his choke chain. As for Hayward, it seems to me that watching a yacht race is not really a mortal sin. He deserves a break, and hitting himself on the forehead with a board probably won’t significantly slow the flow of oil into the Gulf.

The LGF Pot Calls the Geller Kettle Black

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs adds his two cents worth to the Pam Geller/PayPal kerfluffle:

The fact is that there are plenty of good reasons to make the judgment that Pamela Geller promotes crazy hate speech, racist groups, and conspiracy theories; her main targets are Muslims, but many of these reasons have nothing to do with Islam, radical or otherwise.

Far be it for him to promote “crazy hate speech” on his own blog. Some recent examples of his philosophical detachment and spirit of moderation:

Congratulations, Glenn (Beck). You’ve now succeeded in being even more of a gratuitous race-baiter than Rush Limbaugh.

Some days it seems as if the right wing blogosphere has become possessed by the Demons of Utter Stupidity.

In his feverish rush to smear LGF by any means possible, wingnut hateblogger Ace of Spades makes an accusation. (Amid a whole bunch of outright lies.)

This is the kind of person who represents the right wing blogosphere: a rank hypocrite, who accuses others of the unethical acts he performs himself.

World Net Daily’s source for their latest insane Birther article is James Edwards — an open white supremacist who runs the vile “Political Cesspool” radio show in Tennessee: Hawaii elections clerk: Obama not born here.

I haven’t been paying much attention to raving Birther kook Orly Taitz’s campaign for the GOP nomination for secretary of state, but amazingly, there’s actually a chance she might win today

Fox News Hitler pimp Glenn Beck has a new favorite author:

Nothing new about any of this, Blair, you freaking brain-dead right wing moron. Try harder next time.

Today’s disgusting right wing racist is South Carolina Republican Senator Jake Knotts.

It’s a good thing he doesn’t, you know, hate anybody. That could really get ugly.

The Amity/Enmity Complex: Another Data Point in Kyrgyzstan

I’ve written about the Amity/Enmity Complex in earlier posts.  The term describes the dual nature of the innate human behavioral traits generally associated with morality.  Simply put, it describes our tendency to associate other human beings with “in-groups,” which are associated with good, and “out-groups,” which are associated with evil.  The moral rules one is expected to observe in interactions with members of ones in-group are generally those we associate with moral good.  Completely different rules apply to the out-group, whose members are generally viewed with hostility and can be treated accordingly.  Occasionally this takes such extreme forms as mass murder and genocide, as, for example, in the case of the Jews during the Holocaust, or the “bourgeoisie” under Communism.  In America, the phenomenon commonly manifests itself as irrational hatred of those with opposing political beliefs, as the “liberals,” or the “tea-baggers.”

For those still having trouble seeing the obvious, the “enmity” side of the Complex is once again on display in Kyrgyzstan, where, at last report, 75,000 members of the Uzbek minority were fleeing their homes, and scores were killed and hundreds injured.  It is another data point to add to the many thousands of others that have occurred throughout recorded human history.  One would think it had happened enough by now to convince even the most obtuse among us that human morality is a dangerous nostrum to apply in dealing with the relations between nation states, ethnic groups, political parties, and the other types of social groups of unprecedented size that have emerged very recently in human history. 

Morality is, inevitably, a two edged sword.  For every “good” defended, an “evil” must be identified and defeated.  The identification of those who are “evil” is typically arbitrary, and can quickly change to include those who were previously seen as “good.”  Consider, for example, the Jews in Israel, who were the darlings of the left, and “good” at the time the movie “Exodus” was made, but have now become “evil” for those of the same political persuasion because they are no longer well suited to play the role of “victims” to be “saved.”  Similarly, those who were only considered different a few years ago can quickly be perceived as the evil enemy in response to any number of stimuli in the form of social or political change, heightened competition for resources, ideological and religious propaganda, etc., and, literally overnight, become the victims of bloody witchhunts. 

This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, and is becoming increasingly murderous and destructive.  Is it not high time for us to finally learn to know ourselves and climb off the treadmill?

Rogue State Arizona

Like most major news organizations, CNN occasionally throws out some red meat to what remains of its base of readers and viewers in the form of propaganda that hits the right ideological cords.  Apparently they wanted to give particularly prominent billing to one such piece today, as it popped up on their iGoogle widget.  According to the title of the article, written by Ruben Navarrette, Arizona is a “rogue state at war.” 

As his hyperbolic title implies, Navarrette shares the pervasive heartburn on the left over the Arizona immigration law.  In his words,

(Arizona Governor Jan) Brewer just signed SB 1070, a disgraceful anti-immigration and pro-racial-profiling law, to give local and state cops throughout the state the chance to suit up and play border patrol agent. Why shouldn’t she get the chance to suit up and play general?”

In accordance with established precedent, he never bothers to actually quote the sections of the law he finds “anti-immigration” and “pro-racial-profiling.”  There’s good reason for that.  There aren’t any.  In fact, the law specifically prohibits racial profiling.  For example, according to Section 2B,

A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not consider race, color, or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution.

and similar wording appears in Sections 3C and 5D.  One could, of course, claim that the “real” intent of the law is to condone racial profiling in spite of its repeated and explicit rejection thereof if it were impossible for law enforcement officers to reasonably form the suspicion that someone was in the country illegally for any other reason.  However, that claim is nonsense, based as it is on the supposition that nothing in the dress, manner, or behavior of an individual could possibly lead an experienced law enforcement officer to suspect such a thing.

In fact, the idea that SB1070 condones racial profiling is so absurd that no one who has actually read the short, ten page law could rationally make such a claim.  I suspect that’s the reason for the now familiar claim we’ve heard from the likes of Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano that they haven’t actually read the bill.  It gives them an out.

In fact, the Arizona law is pretty lame stuff, and it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss is about unless one realizes that ones opinion concerning it happens to be a litmus test that distinguishes those who live in the ideological box on the left from those who live in the ideological box on the right in this country.  In other words, its something like the Three Chapters controversy, which raised furious passions in the days of the Emperor Justinian, even though no one outside of a seminary could distinguish what it was the two sides were actually fighting about today, or the controversy over whether Communion in both kinds was permissible or not, a question over which a long series of wars were fought, even though not one person in a thousand could explain the difference between the two sides today.  It serves as a similar red flag in our own day, inflaming the passions of the partisans of the two sides, although it is otherwise unlikely to have a significant effect on the inhabitants of Arizona, whether there legally or not.  Hence Mr. Navarrette’s furious pronunciamiento against the “rogue state.”

Once he has put the oppressive tyrants of Arizona in their place with sufficient contempt, Navarrette regales us with accounts of all the wonderful things the Administration is doing to prevent illegal immigration.  For example,

So I can tell you what the border patrol agents on the ground would tell you: The U.S.-Mexico border has never been more fortified. There are now more than 20,000 border patrol agents on the federal payroll. That’s more agents than any other federal enforcement agency, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Those agents apprehend people and deport them at a feverish clip. In fact, it was recently announced that the Obama administration deported more people last year than the Bush administration during its final year in office.

Of course, what all these wonderful and praiseworthy efforts have in common is that they are completely ineffective.  Those who are deported “at a feverish clip” merely suffer the inconvenience of having to re-cross the border, taking better care not to get caught the second time around.  Navarrette continues,

If the federal government does take border enforcement seriously, critics might ask: Why are there still people trying to enter the United States illegally? Simple. We can dig a moat, deploy an army, build walls or call in an airstrike, but desperate people will always find a way to go around, under or over any impediment in their path to a better life.

In fact, history provides ample proof of the fact that moats, walls, and airstrikes are not necessary to stop the illegal crossing of borders.  What is required is the political will to stop it, and that will is lacking.  It is cold comfort that the Republicans also lacked that will.  Why compare failures?  Navarrette aims another slap at the Republicans in his closing paragraph:

There’s only one of those (magic bullets for stopping illegal immigration). It involves fining, arresting and prosecuting the employers of illegal immigrants, including people who are, this election year, streaming into fundraisers for McCain, Brewer and other tough-talking Republicans vowing to solve a problem that many of their backers helped create.

I’m on board with that, but it’s all one, really.  We’re only arguing about how to shut the barn door now that the horses have already escaped.  The chances are slim that we’ll even bother.  After all, Navarrette is right about the Republicans.  They’re all talk.  They had eight years to do something about illegal immigration during the Bush administration and accomplished nothing.  As long as the people who keep their campaign coffers full continue to require cheap labor, we can safely assume they will continue to accomplish nothing if they regain power, all their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding.  There’s nothing for it, really, but to grin and bear it.

The Role of Morality

In the previous post, I pointed out that morality is a blunt and dubious tool for achieving the “well-being” of mankind, even assuming it is possible to achieve general agreement on what the well-being of mankind really is.  It would seem this should be obvious.  Morality is an evolved behavioral trait that maximized the chances of genetic survival in conditions that, for all practical purposes no longer exist.  It is irrational to assume that some plausible variation of emotional behavioral traits that evolved in times utterly different from the present are somehow likely to be effective tools in achieving goals, such as the well-being of mankind in general, that are completely different from the biological function they performed when they came into existence.  We can no more dispense with morality in the everyday interactions of individuals than we can jump out of our own skins.  The hard-wired emotional behavioral traits we associate with morality are a part of us, and we are far from being intelligent enough to simply shut them off by an act of will.  However, when it comes to public policy, we are more likely to achieve common goals by applying our powers of reason, weak as they are, then by seeking to find and apply some Platonic form of the “perfect morality.”

These assertions do not mean I am in favor of allowing mankind to sink into a swamp of amoral behavior, where dog eats dog, and the powers of darkness prevail.  On the contrary, I maintain that, if our goal is to avoid such a world, we are more likely to achieve that goal by applying our weak powers of reason, such as they are, than by relying on the innate behavioral traits of our species associated with morality, which evolved because they performed a function utterly different from maximizing collective well-being in a world anything like the present, and which are, in any case, still poorly understood. 

Consider what has happened when modern human societies have attempted to maximize collective well-being by applying moral rules in the past.  In addition to identifying the “good,” whose well-being is to be maximized, they have invariably identified the “evil,” as well, those “immoral” ones who are seeking to harm the “good,” and must be defeated and, if possible destroyed.  In applying morality to achieve social goals it is not possible to nicely separate “good” and “evil.”  The innate behavioral traits associated with morality must inevitably and invariably include identification of the evil “out-group,” as well as the good “in-group.”  Don’t look believe me?  Just look at the facts; as reflected in the entire recorded history of humanity.  Consider, for example, the Nazis.  Can anyone be naive enough to believe that they were all deliberately attempting to do evil?  On the contrary, they sought to maximize the well-being of the “good,” in this case, the German people, who were believed to be closely related to each other genetically.  We know what happened to their out-group, the Jews.  Another familiar recent example is the Communists.  They sought to maximize the well-being of the proletariat, who, according to theory, would inevitably become a majority in modern societies.  In order for them to achieve the “good,” it was necessary for them to eliminate the “evil,” in the person of the bourgeoisie.  The result was 100 million innocent dead. 

Are things any different at the present time?  Consider the most self-consciously pious ideological type in modern society, the “progressive” liberal.  Think the identification of “evil” out-groups is absent from their world view?  Guess again.  Visit any of their websites and you’ll find furious rants against greedy corporations, members of the tea party movement, Republicans, global warming deniers, etc., etc. 

If we would maximize human well-being, lets attempt to apply reason instead of morality for a change.  I make this suggestion, not because I consider myself more moral or just than others, but because I would prefer to avoid the inconvencience of neighbors who are trying to kill me.  As many who experienced the attentions of  Communists in the Soviet Union, or Nazis in Germany, or were tortured and killed as “heretics” in an earlier day might have testified, that’s an all too frequent negative character trait of the “morally good.”  Turning around and declaring them “morally evil” after the fact is small comfort to the victims.  This is getting old.  It’s time we tried something different.