LanDroid wrote:...Drained-pool politics — if “they” can also have it, then no one can — helps explain why America still doesn’t have a truly universal health care system, a child care system, a decent social safety net.
Ezra Klein
It's a fascinating case. I think the "pollution" dynamics of caste are an example of the way symbolism works in practice. It is one of a number of psychological mechanisms that reinforce a caste system (Eight pillars? Okay) and, like some of the others, is based on what one might call motivated perception. What I mean by that is that there is no knowledge base behind it, but there is a vague sense that "disease" might be spread by contact. So when a person of the low castes is present to, or observable by, the dominant caste, any faults and dangers are likely to be noticed.
Having been set up by the "lore" of caste, these perceptions reinforce the sense of importance of avoidance. And so the most obnoxious and noticeable individuals tend to dominate the perceptions and interpretations of those benefiting from caste. So that means the privilege that goes with being in the dominant caste, the sense that what "we" have can be threatened, is an extra reinforcer, and a complex of dynamic systems converges.
Needless to say these may have had some relevance and reason in a world of poverty. It has been observed that the culture of the Greeks was built on slavery, and in a similar way the upper castes have, to some extent, preserved the values of "civilization" on the backs of the lower castes. Such values were self-reinforcing as a social order, but the need for them may have passed away without the perpetuaters of caste having taken notice, since much of the process was not linked through reason but blindly perpetuated because it seemed sensible.
I believe, as an economist, that we live in a positive-sum world ruled by zero-sum cultural constructions. The struggle for land and other key resources was the age-old determinant of power, and the importance of knowledge as a self-perpetuating generator of well-being went almost unnoticed until the 19th Century. So those who thought they understood the ways of power perpetuated ways of thinking that required contempt for outside groups in order to justify dominance over those groups.
And thus we have Archie Bunker and the Pool Drainers (probably will never catch on as the name for a rock band, but you never know). One question in my mind is what ways of thinking would pry this mindset away from its misguided attachment to privilege and help people learn to think win-win. In the Western states, where caste never had quite the hold on people that it does in the East and Midwest, those who didn't want to swim with people of color just didn't get to swim in public pools. And for those growing up with that mindset, their parents telling them that they couldn't swim in public pools would have seemed antiquated and bigoted, as they watched their friends invite people who were not so barbaric.
But if the culture is on the other side of the tipping point, is there a way to help Pool Drainers see that they are cutting off their nose to spite their face?