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Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

#173: Jan. - March 2021 (Non-Fiction)
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Chris OConnor

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Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

Please use this thread for discussing Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost.
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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Caste
The Origins of Our Discontents

Mr. Tulip points out the subtitle echoes the book Civilization and It's Discontents by Sigmund Freud. Even in considering just the cover, we are already off to a good start.
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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Just talking about caste in an American context is provocative and difficult. People generally like to swim with the tide, not against it. But it seems the global tide is turning against caste-based politics.

Wilkerson opens with a mention of a famous photo of a German man among a sea of Nazis in 1936. He alone is refusing to give the Heil Hitler salute, and is thereby rejecting the mad and toxic theory of caste that Hitler was foisting upon an unwitting Germany, while all around him swim with this dangerous new tide. He alone had the courage to stand on the right side of history.

The photo and story are at https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2015/07 ... azi-salute
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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We would like to believe that we would have taken the more difficult path of standing up against injustice in defense of the outcaste. But unless people are willing to transcend their fears, endure discomfort and derision, suffer the scorn of loved ones and neighbors and co-workers and friends, fall into disfavor of perhaps everyone they know, face exclusion and even banishment, it would be numerically impossible, humanly impossible, for everyone to be that man. What would it take to be him in any era? What would it take to be him now?
Thanks for posting that photograph, it doesn't appear in my kindle version. The author asks the above painful questions about it.

I agree it's extremely rare for anyone to be that man. I recall photographs of crowds at lynchings. They called them mobs, but were they the KKK or neo-Nazis? No, if you were there they might have included your Aunt Millie, cousin Billy, and your Daddy - seeking entertainment, vigilante justice, and pornography. Tough to fight back against them, and so it continued...

Can you answer the questions highlighted above?
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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Chapter One
The Afterlife of Pathogens


This chapter begins by using permafrost as a metaphor for suppressed hatred. Permafrost is ground that has been frozen continuously for at least two years and as many as hundreds of thousands of years. A heat wave in Siberia started to thaw the permafrost in 2016. People began to get sick.
The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.
p. 3
Several questions:
  • Do you think permafrost as a metaphor works in this case? It could be only a few years old or primordial.
  • What time period would the permafrost cover as suppression of hate?
  • What is the timing of the thaw, when suppression is weakened and hatred increases?
  • This seems to work backwards from other figures of speech where we mention "a thawing in race or gender relations" which signals an improvement. In this case, as in nature, the thaw brings other problems.
A bit later the author uses another natural phenomenon as a metaphor for changing attitudes.
What scientists have only recently discovered is that the more familiar earthquakes, those that are easily measured while in progress and instantaneous in their destruction, are often preceded by longer, slow-moving, catastrophic disruptions rumbling twenty miles or more beneath us, too deep to be felt and too quiet to be measured for most of human history. They are as potent as those we can see and feel, but they have long gone undetected because they work in silence, unrecognized until a major quake announces itself on the surface. Only recently have geophysicists had technology sensitive enough to detect the unseen stirrings deeper in the earth’s core. They are called silent earthquakes. And only recently have circumstances forced us, in this current era of human rupture, to search for the unseen stirrings of the human heart, to discover the origins of our discontents.
p. 10
Discuss: Compare and contrast the use of permafrost and earthquakes. The subtitle of the book in context.
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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LanDroid wrote:Chapter One
The Afterlife of Pathogens

Discuss: Compare and contrast the use of permafrost and earthquakes. The subtitle of the book in context.
Nice set-up for this discussion, and I haven't got hold of a copy yet, but I get more of a sense of our situation from the earthquake metaphor. This is partly from what you indicated--a thaw sometimes signaling a positive movement. What is released through the heat of hate is toxic racism, as I would apply the metaphor. But we've also seen released, in reaction to hate, more recognition of the embeddedness of such racism, resulting in advances such as the majority of Americans favoring Black Lives Matter, the military acting to remove offensive names from bases, and removal of Confederate statues from Monument Row in the former capital of the Confederacy. As we know, having a black president for eight years didn't cure us of systemic racism, but Obama's terms can't be brushed aside, either, as having no bearing on our attitude toward race.

The deep rumbling of the earth, eventually gathering force to bring quaking to the surface, can represent shocks in both negative and positive terms. Neither simple metaphor can be precise, applied to the social complexity we're considering, but perhaps the slow beginnings of earthquakes does a better job.
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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DWill wrote:The deep rumbling of the earth, eventually gathering force to bring quaking to the surface, can represent shocks in both negative and positive terms. Neither simple metaphor can be precise, applied to the social complexity we're considering, but perhaps the slow beginnings of earthquakes does a better job.
Both metaphors serve to show that social unrest and tribalism can erupt without warning, caused by unseen and perhaps poorly understood mechanisms that lie beneath the surface. My use of "erupt" suggests a volcanic eruption, which would also serve as a useful—though perhaps more clichéd—metaphor, though all such metaphors can only go so far.

Mythological metaphors may be better suited to help us connect to these underlying sociological currents. I think Joseph Campbell might spring up during these discussions. And I was intrigued reading Robert Tulip mention of Carl Jung's Wotan essay to explain the irrationality of Trumpism and to the rise of Hitlerism as well. Some may think the comparison to Hitler is unfair, but I see obvious correlations. There are primitive emotions at play, what Jung calls a "rustling in the primeval forest of the unconsciousness." Tulip's comments include a link to Jung's essay.

https://www.booktalk.org/post175347.htm ... ng#p175347

There are indeed complex unconscious mechanisms gurgling beneath the surface, very much like the he anthrax released by the thawing of the permafrost. As shocked as many of us were when Trump was elected, really we should have expected it all along. As they say, history repeats itself.
-Geo
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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geo wrote:
DWill wrote:The deep rumbling of the earth, eventually gathering force to bring quaking to the surface, can represent shocks in both negative and positive terms. Neither simple metaphor can be precise, applied to the social complexity we're considering, but perhaps the slow beginnings of earthquakes does a better job.
Both metaphors serve to show that social unrest and tribalism can erupt without warning, caused by unseen and perhaps poorly understood mechanisms that lie beneath the surface. My use of "erupt" suggests a volcanic eruption, which would also serve as a useful—though perhaps more clichéd—metaphor, though all such metaphors can only go so far.
We can have both metaphors if we think of the plate movement that produces both earthquakes and volcanoes. And I like the tectonic plate metaphor anyway, in this case--plates shifting and grinding against each other. Only there's no political or moral significance to plate-shifting; we're adding that and deciding that it's bad in the context of this book's thesis (I'm assuming something here, since I haven't read a word). Others, say, Trump voters, would put their own spin on these earth-moving metaphors. What bubbles or erupts at the surface for them or puts big cracks in the crust? Maybe it's toxic socialism.

I agree the mechanisms are likely poorly understood. If psychological forces produce the change, what produces those forces? I don't have the perspective to know that, and perhaps no one really does. I was interested in an Atlantic article in which the theories of an academic, Peter Turchin, were presented as possibly explaining cycles of boom and bust in societies dating back 10,000 years. Turchin is one of those guys like Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari who applies a Big History approach from a non-history field. Turchin's field was population ecology before he decided to take on history through application of Big Data. He's claiming that it's oversupply of elites that causes societies to crack up, in roughly 50-year cycles. We're about due for a big explosion, he claims, and there isn't anything we can do that will prevent it. It could be something like the turmoil of the 60s, or a civil war. I just mention this not to claim there's something to it, though the article says Turchin is gaining advocates, but just to put it out there that we have many ideas about the proximate causes of "our discontents," but about the ultimate or broadest cause, well that's a much tougher one. If you're interested: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... re/616993/
Mythological metaphors may be better suited to help us connect to these underlying sociological currents. I think Joseph Campbell might spring up during these discussions. And I was intrigued reading Robert Tulip mention of Carl Jung's Wotan essay to explain the irrationality of Trumpism and to the rise of Hitlerism as well. Some may think the comparison to Hitler is unfair, but I see obvious correlations. There are primitive emotions at play, what Jung calls a "rustling in the primeval forest of the unconsciousness." Tulip's comments include a link to Jung's essay.
Is there something, though, that we can put our finger on as producing these currents? I think historians do have ideas about some structural social reasons for the rise of Nazism, and some of them could apply to our modern situation.
There are indeed complex unconscious mechanisms gurgling beneath the surface, very much like the he anthrax released by the thawing of the permafrost. As shocked as many of us were when Trump was elected, really we should have expected it all along. As they say, history repeats itself.
Yes, an expectancy for Trump's reign can be constructed from the 80s rise of the religious right, Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, and of course Trump's nomination for president. There must be developments pertaining more to the Democratic party or the left that also raised the possibility of Trump succeeding to a level high enough that simple chance could propel him to where no one had imagined he could reach. At that point, the fact of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server could become decisive in Trump's favor. Even an accident as minor as James Comey reopening the email investigation two weeks before the election could have been responsible for Trump's win and what we now see as the Trump irruption. None of those factors could have mattered unless the country had already reached a Trump threshold. Our peculiar electoral system of course also exerted its ancient pull to put a popular-vote loser in the WH. That must be what all the perfect storm talk was about.
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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geo wrote:Both metaphors [sudden melting of permafrost and earthquakes] serve to show that social unrest and tribalism can erupt without warning, caused by unseen and perhaps poorly understood mechanisms that lie beneath the surface.
Earthquakes well illustrate the ‘tipping point’ concept used in climate theory. Tectonic plates generate steadily increasing tension until they reach a sudden release with a major realignment. The San Andreas Fault has average movement between the Pacific and American tectonic plates of two inches per year, so if there is no surface movement for fifty years, the release of built-up tension will generate an earthquake with expected plate movement of eight feet. If the fault runs through your house that puts the kitchen where the bathroom was, but not as a neat renovation. The vast quantities of earth involved make the destructive energy of such a sudden massive movement immense.

Earthquakes are “without warning” in the sense that we can’t know which straw will break the camel’s back, but ‘with warning’ in the sense that engineers know that adding straw upon straw will eventually collapse a rigid structure, with probabilistic prediction equations.

Similarly with culture, a caste system can lock in a political model of ordinary social interaction that prevents reform of race relations. The constant additions of small humiliations create pressure for change, although a big issue with religious caste is how the cultural hierarchy makes these insults socially acceptable. If the system hypocritically pretends to be based on merit, it will generate tensions that remain largely unseen to the dominant caste, building up similar destructive potential as an earthquake. But if the system accepts it is not based on merit, it stands in conflict with fundamental ethical principles, such as claims in the US Declaration of Independence of self-evident truths.

Going back to how the climate change metaphor links to caste, it occurs to me that the Indian caste system was partly effective and sustainable in the past, in that family traditions of vocation enforced through religious expectation provided a stable and reliable way to maintain expertise. The metaphor with climate change comes from the fact that many people are excluded from these guild caste traditions, and this exclusion generates pressure to break down the rigid conventions. With climate change, our fossil fuel system looks sustainable and effective like a caste system when viewed from within, but when the larger views of its systemic effects is considered, the externality of global warming means that a system that looks good on the surface requires urgent reform.
geo wrote:Mythological metaphors may be better suited to help us connect to these underlying sociological currents. I think Joseph Campbell might spring up during these discussions. And I was intrigued reading Robert Tulip mention of Carl Jung's Wotan essay to explain the irrationality of Trumpism and to the rise of Hitlerism as well. Some may think the comparison to Hitler is unfair, but I see obvious correlations. There are primitive emotions at play, what Jung calls a "rustling in the primeval forest of the unconsciousness."
Thanks Geo, Jung interprets cultural and political trajectory by theorising an underlying direction. What you call ‘sociological currents’ relate to identity and values that have strong causal momentum that are not easily explained in terms of rational motive. I find the Indian concept of karma useful as a way of aggregating the hidden factors of social causality, not to suggest anything supernatural, but rather just to say that the karma of a person or a group is the integrated causal influence of all the known and unknown factors of their situation.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus expressed this karmic causal principle with the aphorism 'ethos anthropoi daimon', Ηθος Ανθρωπος Δαιμων, interpreted to mean our ethos is our guardian angel, or character is fate.

With Hitler, Germany’s catastrophic explosion that he instigated was in this sense a karmic result of the fate of national character, although we can’t tell if the accidents of history mean these explosive berserk energies could have been contained and channeled into constructive directions. The underlying theme was that overweening pride in cultural identity sought confrontation in war.

The USA did the same with the Vietnam and Iraq wars, which were both insane on any rational cost-benefit analysis, since vastly better outcomes could have been achieved at far lower cost through sensible dialogue and investment. But caste systems rest upon religious pride, and US pride about its secular religion of pioneer individualism failed to see how that anti-communist mentality has to be balanced against collective needs.
geo wrote: Tulip's comments include a link to Jung's essay. https://www.booktalk.org/post175347.htm ... ng#p175347
Wotan is one of Jung’s most important contributions, exploring how the spiritual roots of cultural identity generate rigid political blockages. Such blockages produce a public inability to analyse problems dispassionately, hence also the relevance to Caste of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.
geo wrote: There are indeed complex unconscious mechanisms gurgling beneath the surface, very much like the anthrax released by the thawing of the permafrost. As shocked as many of us were when Trump was elected, really we should have expected it all along. As they say, history repeats itself.
And as Mark Twain aphorised, history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.

The legacy of Nixon, Reagan and Bush has pushed the American right toward the polarising confrontation of emotional pride seen in Trump. If he hadn’t won in 2016, he probably would have in 2020, through his Hitlerite capacity to generate resonant myths of cultural fantasy, such as the Big Lie of the Lost Cause of electoral fraud.

The Trumpian boil of distorted belief in manifest destiny and exceptional providence summed up in the MAGA meme would only have festered and grown during a Hillary Clinton Presidency, which would have been the object of sustained massive cultural and political attack.

How well Biden manages to lance that boil through managing caste-based sentiments will be an interesting challenge. Biden now has the advantage of global experience showing that strong central states relying on scientific knowledge have been most effective in managing the pandemic, while the viral meme of liberty has brought capitulation to the real virus.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Thu Dec 31, 2020 7:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Caste: Part 1 - Toxins in the Permafrost

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What humanity learned, one would hope, was that an ancient and hardy virus required perhaps more than anything, knowledge of its ever-present danger, caution to protect against exposure, and alertness to the power of its longevity, its ability to mutate, survive and hibernate until reawakened. It seemed these contagions could not be destroyed, not yet anyway, only managed and anticipated, as with any virus, and that foresight and vigilance, the wisdom of never taking them for granted, never underestimating their persistence, was perhaps the most effective antidote, for now.
Chapter 1 ends with that quote plus another metaphor about summarizing your medical history for a doctor.
The Vitals of History
When we go to the doctor, he or she will not begin to treat us without taking our history—and not just our history but that of our parents and grandparents before us.
...Looking beneath the history of one’s country is like learning that alcoholism or depression runs in one’s family or that suicide has occurred more often than might be usual or, with the advances in medical genetics, discovering that one has inherited the markers of a BRCA mutation for breast cancer. You don’t ball up in a corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t, if you are wise, forbid any mention of them. In fact, you do the opposite. You educate yourself. You talk to people who have been through it and to specialists who have researched it. You learn the consequences and obstacles, the options and treatment. You may pray over it and meditate over it. Then you take precautions to protect yourself and succeeding generations and work to ensure that these things, whatever they are, don’t happen again.
Discuss: What do you think the capacity is for America to learn from twin pandemics and examining history?
  • The world has known for 100 years that another pandemic was coming.
  • There were several close calls with previous microscopic organisms that did not take over. Did we learn from that or deride scientists as over-reacting?
  • Is America able to examine history fearlessly? If not, what are we afraid of?
  • Consider the 1619 Project that sought to align the beginning of America with the arrival of the first slaves. Then the backlash* attempting to nullify and shut down that line of investigation.
  • Is America taking significant precautions to protect succeeding generations from a repeat of these pandemics?
*Much more on that later.
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