geo wrote: But we have never set out, per se, to create a caste system, correct? It was never the end goal. It just happened as an outcome of a multitude of factors.

I think this is right, but it is not wrong to talk about it as something that was created. I think there was unintentional cooperation between those who thought of themselves doing the right thing and those who simply took advantage of the opportunities created by human instincts.

But there is a distinction to be drawn between the feeling of "rightness" that goes with ruling over "others" and the feeling of rightness that goes with establishing justice. The former is an after-the-fact justification for the realities of power, and a response to the instinct of contempt for those who lose. It creates something like what the Marxists call "false consciousness" which in the extreme case looks like Stockholm Syndrome - a kind of avatar of the self that allies itself with power and so with violence, and in doing so knows itself to be betraying the inherent dignity of the self.

As such it almost forces the one who finds rightness in power to project their personal vulnerability onto the others degraded by lack of power. Slow-motion scapegoating ensues.

geo wrote:Perhaps it could be argued that slavery in the New World was an economic necessity and we have engaged in a lot of cognitive dissonance ever since to justify our actions.

I'm not comfortable with the word "necessity" here. Slavery was a common practice in the Old World and the ancient Americas, because forcing others into service was the primary mode of creating large-scale human institutions. Invasion and conquest of land was likewise the primary means of expanding one's tribe at the expense of the competition. But to label that "necessity" implies there was no serious alternative. I think it is fair to label both the Enlightenment and Christianity as projects to find alternatives. I would not want to repudiate those aspirations.

But the cognitive dissonance is exactly the point of the book. The Archie Bunkers of the world still find themselves unable to believe in anything except the rightness of their privilege created by violence. It easily finds justifications: the others are dirty, they are lazy, they are treacherous, they are duplicitous, they can't be trusted. Life is a struggle and a person's first duty is to win the struggle. But against this is a perception that to endorse such a principle is to betray one's own fundamental worth. The principle of universality of justice cannot be rejected without creating cognitive dissonance at a foundational level of relation to life. Other lies follow, and so this elaborate compulsion corrupts our relation to reality itself.

geo wrote:"All men are created equal" according to The Declaration of Independence. And, yet even through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, we seem to resist this notion or selectively apply it only to the upper caste (which in our case means white people). What makes us do that?

Isn't it interesting? People are quite capable of asserting the right to justice on their own behalf while refusing it to those they are not obligated to consider (as Jesus observed about mercy). The Stockholm Syndrome of buying into power penetrates into our ways of interpreting reality to the point at which our sense of "us" determines who is worthy of reciprocity of relationship.

To digest this properly we should consider a version that we may be on the wrong side of. Most of us are willing to exclude beef cattle, pets and other animals from our sense of reciprocity. But is there any more to that than a power relation? The Native American custom of giving thanks to the prey for its sacrifice is an attempt to heal that rip, and to reintegrate the self.

Isn't it interesting that from the beginning of the Enlightenment, as from its roots in Aristotle, equality was declared for men, not for persons? And it was not even worthy of mention that servants (i.e. slaves) were not in the created state of equality.

geo wrote: It just seems that we are missing something in this analysis of castes. I guess what I'm suggesting is that the social sciences only give us a partial answer. Perhaps the bigger picture can be provided through evolutionary psychology?

It tells us something interesting about the flexibility and adaptability of the structures in the human mind. One reason I am not very comfortable appealing to evolutionary psychology is that it often pretends to give determinative outcomes and implacable forces, when in fact all it can tell us about is pressures, tendencies, possibilities and probabilities.

As Kierkegaard said, life can only be lived forward, but can only be understood backward. In order for our life to be lived with meaning, we have to decide whether our understandings, including understanding of what is just and moral, are determinative. If not, then we have accepted a fundamental nihilism. But the choice between meaning and nihilism is a different way of relating to truth than understanding is.

Being able to explain the way people behave is a different process from deciding about commitments and values. Our understanding of why things go the way they do becomes part of the mental structures of our engagement, our living forward. But they cannot overcome the loss that we suffer if we choose nihilism, one species of which is to buy into the Stockholm Syndrome of supposedly determinative "scientific" principles which are not at all absolute.

Geo wrote:But we have never set out, per se, to create a caste system, correct? It was never the end goal. It just happened as an outcome of a multitude of factors. Perhaps it could be argued that slavery in the New World was an economic necessity and we have engaged in a lot of cognitive dissonance ever since to justify our actions.

My understanding is a different sequence. The caste system came first - the underlying philosophy that a few are in power, that some are not deserving and must be starved of resources, that separation is required to prevent contamination. Harry Marks mentioned this goes back at least to Aristotle, but even further with the bible. With those ancient cultural influences, it becomes easier to enslave or to exterminate. Think of it this way: Would you keep a person as a slave under your boot without such ideas in your head?

That's a good point on cognitive dissonance - there must have been an extraordinary amount of that going on. "Oh my, these slave babies cry just like mine do. Women scream under the whip just like I would. We don't give them enough food. Aren't we horrible people?" Then comes the resolution of this cognitive dissonance: "Oh wait, slaves are not human, they are beasts of burden created to serve me. Oh and listen to that (forced) singing and dancing! It's OK, whew!"

Geo wrote:"All men are created equal" according to The Declaration of Independence. And, yet even through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, we seem to resist this notion or selectively apply it only to the upper caste (which in our case means white people). What makes us do that?

I mentioned before that I think one key to this puzzle is that the word "ALL" is a Caucasian code word. When Jefferson penned those words he owned slaves. He did not need to specify that "all" did not refer to blacks. He also did not need to clarify that women are excluded. Or non-property owners. Those exemptions to the word "all" were internalized so deeply by Americans that it took at least three amendments to the constitution to begin to rectify it.

However I believe the code word "ALL" is still active, meaning it applies only to the upper caste. For example when some bigots scream "ALL Lives Matter!" at Black Lives Matter protestors, they know the explicit meaning (denotation) sounds like it applies to everyone. But the bigots also subconsciously know the implicit meaning (connotation), given our history, is more like "MY life matters, YOUR lives certainly do NOT!" The protestors understand both meanings of the Caucasian code word and get the message. But ironically I expect the bigots are conscious only of the explicit meaning and mistakenly believe they are being more inclusive than the protestors.

PILLAR NUMBER SEVEN
Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control

The only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to preempt resistance before it can be imagined. Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing. All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity in the evil committed on their behalf, though a caste system will protect, and perhaps even reward, those who deign to join in the terror. Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe, African-Americans in the antebellum and Jim Crow South, and Dalits in India were all at the mercy of people who had been fed a diet of contempt and hate for them, and had incentive to try to prove their superiority by joining in or acquiescing to cruelties against their fellow humans.
p. 150

In Germany, the Nazis forced and strapped Jews and political prisoners onto a wooden board to be flogged for minor infractions like rolling cigarettes from leaves they gathered or killing rats to augment their bare rations. The captives were forced to count out each lash as it was inflicted upon them. The Nazis claimed a limit of twenty-five lashes, but would play mind games by claiming that the victim had not counted correctly, then extend the torture even longer. The Americans went to as many as four hundred lashes, torture that amounted to murder, with several men, growing exhausted from the physical exertion it required, taking turns with the whip.

When I was about 10 years old, I found a five foot long whip on my uncle's farm in rural Ohio. I started swinging it around overhead, then reversing the spin to produce a gloriously loud crack. Somehow the last one of those whip cracks landed square in the middle of my back. All of my thoracic muscles and diaphragm completely locked up. I could not breathe in or out one thimble of air. I had to lay down immediately and stare up at the sky so I didn't pass out. My eyes bugged out. Finally after probably 90 seconds that felt like half an hour watching the sky darkening there was a huge inrush of air and everything was OK after 5 or 6 breaths.

Now obviously that sting from a self-inflicted lash from a toy whip was nothing compared to what was delivered by expert slave drivers from an 18 foot whip that cut clear to the bone. But I still remember it clearly over 50 years later. I can't imagine what it would be like to endure 25 professional lashes and having to count them out. Let alone 400. Oh Lordy... Shiver...

LanDroid wrote:

Geo wrote:But we have never set out, per se, to create a caste system, correct? It was never the end goal. It just happened as an outcome of a multitude of factors. Perhaps it could be argued that slavery in the New World was an economic necessity and we have engaged in a lot of cognitive dissonance ever since to justify our actions.

My understanding is a different sequence. The caste system came first - the underlying philosophy that a few are in power, that some are not deserving and must be starved of resources, that separation is required to prevent contamination. Harry Marks mentioned this goes back at least to Aristotle, but even further with the bible. With those ancient cultural influences, it becomes easier to enslave or to exterminate. Think of it this way: Would you keep a person as a slave under your boot without such ideas in your head?

That's a good point on cognitive dissonance - there must have been an extraordinary amount of that going on. "Oh my, these slave babies cry just like mine do. Women scream under the whip just like I would. We don't give them enough food. Aren't we horrible people?" Then comes the resolution of this cognitive dissonance: "Oh wait, slaves are not human, they are beasts of burden created to serve me. Oh and listen to that (forced) singing and dancing! It's OK, whew!"

In my mind, geo asks whether New World slavery came about organically, not as a premeditated system but as a response to circumstances, especially the need to make money off the colonies, whatever that took. Sure, powerful people were powerful exactly because of their total willingness to exploit labor to the highest degree, and things had run that way for centuries. It was considered perfectly OK to do that, which is about the only philosophy needed. But if we take "system" literally, then clearly the relatively rare and exceptionally brutal variation that was New World slavery developed over time.

Sometimes I find that talking about the possible historical reasons for bad things that happened isn't well received. There can be an impatience, at the very least, about such talk, because it seems to be getting into excuse-making, when the only thing seen as necessary is to condemn bad men. To be sure, history is often twisted in favor of the bad men, so we always need to be skeptical. But it's just that people who are interested in history can't help but try to trace what was happening, and often we're going to face moral ambiguities, unintended consequences, and gaps in what we'll ever know.

Still, some things resist understanding even when we've done our best to take the history into account. One of these is how American patriots could rattle on about liberty and their righteous cause against the British, all the while committing heinous crimes against black laborers. It seems too extreme an offense to impute to cognitive dissonance, but I see no other explanation.

LanDroid wrote:

Geo wrote:"All men are created equal" according to The Declaration of Independence. And, yet even through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, we seem to resist this notion or selectively apply it only to the upper caste (which in our case means white people). What makes us do that?

I mentioned before that I think one key to this puzzle is that the word "ALL" is a Caucasian code word. When Jefferson penned those words he owned slaves. He did not need to specify that "all" did not refer to blacks. He also did not need to clarify that women are excluded. Or non-property owners. Those exemptions to the word "all" were internalized so deeply by Americans that it took at least three amendments to the constitution to begin to rectify it.

However I believe the code word "ALL" is still active, meaning it applies only to the upper caste. For example when some bigots scream "ALL Lives Matter!" at Black Lives Matter protestors, they know the explicit meaning (denotation) sounds like it applies to everyone. But the bigots also subconsciously know the implicit meaning (connotation), given our history, is more like "MY life matters, YOUR lives certainly do NOT!" The protestors understand both meanings of the Caucasian code word and get the message. But ironically I expect the bigots are conscious only of the explicit meaning and mistakenly believe they are being more inclusive than the protestors.

I can see that Jefferson definitely meant to exclude women from his "all men" statement. It might be that "men" sometimes referred generically to both sexes, but in this time it was understood that women, as the weaker vessel, weren't equal to men. Jefferson needed his rhetoric to be soaring in order to meet the occasion: the delegates waiting for the statement that would announce to the world the colonies' independence. So he declares the general principle on which independence was based, that all men are created equal. An alternate view from yours is that Jefferson at this time, a 33-year-old who had inherited his father's slaves, a person deeply versed in the philosophy of John Locke, was anything but a public champion of slavery despite enjoying its benefits (and having one of his slaves attend him in Philadelphia). He could harbor in his mind the thought that he could escape his hypocrisy by advocating for the gradual manumission of slaves and their relocation to a homeland. A key piece of evidence in the Declaration is the extensive passage on the English King foisting slavery upon the colonies. That passage caused the biggest stir among the delegates, who deleted all of it.
Well, obviously, Jefferson never did absolve himself of hypocrisy, as his lavish lifestyle came to depend more and more on enslaved labor on his plantation. Publicly he condemned slavery (an "abominable crime," a "moral depravity"), and in 1824 proposed a plan to end it. But his personal involvement and freeing of only a very few of his 600 slaves, is damning.

White privilege (and screwed-up thinking) is evident in "ALL Lives Matter!" This is saying, how dare YOU protest against injustice! To be able to do so, you'd have to include US! You're telling us that OUR lives don't matter!

Human history is rife with examples of inconceivable violence, and as Americans, we like to think of our country as being far beyond the guillotines of medieval Europe or the reign of the Huns. And yet it was here that “Native Americans were occasionally skinned and made into bridle reins,” wrote the scholar Charles Mills. Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president who oversaw the forced removal of indigenous people from their ancestral homelands during that Trail of Tears, used bridle reins of indigenous flesh when he went horseback riding.

America looked down on Nazis for being so wicked as to make lampshades from human skin, and yet look at this behavior, not from just a prison guard, but from one of America's heroes. Up until very recently, I thought the Trail of Tears involved only the Cherokee, who could not be saved from this brutality even though they had set up a democratic government with a bicameral legislature. But I was wrong, it was a truly massive operation.



Sorry, but I gotta admit all this horror and genocide is really getting to me, but your comments are so good I resolve to see this through. I think it is critical that we get through the section titled "Backlash."

PILLAR NUMBER EIGHT
Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority

Beneath each pillar of caste was the presumption and continual reminder of the inborn superiority of the dominant caste and the inherent inferiority of the subordinate. It was not enough that the designated groups be separated for reasons of “pollution” or that they not intermarry or that the lowest people suffer due to some religious curse, but that it must be understood in every interaction that one group was superior and inherently deserving of the best in a given society and that those who were deemed lowest were deserving of their plight.

...At every turn, the caste system drilled into the people under its spell the deference due those born to the upper caste and the degradation befitting the subordinate caste. This required signs and symbols and customs to elevate the upper caste and to demean those assigned to the bottom, in small and large ways and in everyday encounters.

In India, the caste system dictated the length and folds of a Dalit woman’s saris. Dalits were not to wear the clothing or jewelry of upper-caste people but rather tattered, rougher clothing as the “marks of their inferiority.”

In America, the South Carolina Negro Code of 1735 went so far as to specify the fabrics enslaved black people were permitted to wear, forbidding any that might be seen as above their station. They were banned from wearing “any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes,” the cheapest, roughest fabrics available to the colony. Two hundred years later, the spirit of that law was still in force as African-American soldiers were set upon and killed for wearing their army uniforms.
p.160

...the life of a slave on an antebellum plantation was far superior to that of a factory worker in the enlightened North.
3/17/2021

Random comment regarding an article on the 1619 Project.