LanDroid wrote:

...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.

There was Northern slavery during much of the period known as the antebellum. Would the random commenter still say that factory workers had it much worse? Somehow I don't think so. The northern "industrial slavery" trope was an apologetic device that I thought had expired.

DWill wrote: Would the random commenter still say that factory workers had it much worse? Somehow I don't think so. The northern "industrial slavery" trope was an apologetic device that I thought had expired.

Well, yes and no. The best-off slave may have had a life better than the worst-off laborer in the North, and especially compared to the most abused peasants of Europe or Russia. The destruction of family relations was surely the sharpest distinction, since chattel slavery permitted, and seemingly encouraged, the heartless practices that sold family members and undermined generational ties. But we should also remember that often a "house slave" was the son or daughter, unacknowledged, of the master, and so could be relatively privileged. Not that this justifies the rape or other inequality behind that truth.

Since we know that it was not rare for wage workers to be beaten by the "straw boss" to encourage the others, and that starvation was a threat in the background that rarely faced slaves, we can conclude that the accusations about Northern wage slavery were not totally imaginary.

Still, the numbers don't come close to justifying a claim that slaves were as well off on average. Shorter lifespans, denial of education and the opportunities that went with it, very limited food, housing, clothing, medical care and recreation added up to a pretty grim life for the slaves. I think the best that can be said for the notion of worse conditions in the North is that it reminds us we may have idealized pictures of White Northern life that leave out a lot of the actual trouble in their lives.

Harry Marks wrote:. . . 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.

Sorry it has taken so long to respond to this post.

Evolutionary science does rely on assumptions about our ancestral environment and it’s important to understand its limitations. But it doesn’t really take a leap of faith to understand that we evolved under very different conditions than exist today. We can make inferences about the past, such as that our ancestral environment lacked agriculture, technology, medicine, media, mass-produced goods, money, police, armies, and communities of strangers. As Stephen Pinker said way back in 1997 (in a rebuttal to Stephen Jay Gould), these absences have “profound implications for the minds that evolved in such an environment.”

Many universal human traits: our tribalism, our need for acceptance (approval) and belonging, which leads to forming cliques and in-groups (and out-groups), were forged in the distant past and make sense only in that context. I’ll say again that something seems to be missing in this discussion of castes, though I really should finish the book before commenting further.

Harry Marks wrote: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.

I’m not quite sure I’m following your train of thought here. The reason I think human psychology is so important to this discussion is not to make excuses for our incomprehensible brutality—in both the past and present. For me, a better understanding of how the mind works—as limited as that knowledge may be—makes it possible to make conscious choices to rise above our primitive hardwiring. My point is anything but nihilistic. I’d argue that our chances to become better people (through commitments and values) are only helped by understanding the science behind our thoughts and deeds. I think it helps to talk about the universality of many of our behaviors. It’s usually not enough to simply call someone a racist. It’s better I think to acknowledge that we are all racist to some degree. And that we can acknowledge that and do something about it!

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/1 ... -exchange/

LanDroid wrote: 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."

This is difficult material to be sure. I for one greatly appreciate your leadership in this discussion.

I'm reminded of a remarkable essay by Native American writer Sherman Alexie: What Sacagawea Means to Me. Alexie, too, is struck by America's contradictions and the clash of civilizations that got us here. I started to quote a few passages, but instead I'll just post the entire essay here.

What Sacagawea Means to Me by Sherman Alexie

In the future, every U.S. citizen will get to be Sacagawea for fifteen minutes. For the low price of admission, every American, regardless of race, religion, gender, and age, will climb through the portal into Sacagawea’s Shoshone Indian brain. In the multicultural theme park called Sacagawea Land, you will be kidnapped as a child by the Hidatsa tribe and sold to Toussaint Charbonneau, the French‐ Canadian trader who will take you as one of his wives and father two of your children. Your first child, Jean‐Baptiste, will be only a few months old as you carry him during your long journey with Lewis and Clark. The two captains will lead the adventure, fighting rivers, animals, weather, and diseases for thousands of miles, and you will march right beside them. But you, the aboriginal multitasker, will also breast‐feed. And at the end of your Sacagawea journey, you will be shown the exit and given a souvenir T‐shirt that reads IF THE U.S. IS EDEN, THEN SACAGAWEA IS EVE.

Sacagawea is our mother. She is the first gene pair of the American DNA. In the beginning, she was the word, and the word was possibility. I revel in the wondrous possibilities of Sacagawea. It is good to be joyous in the presence of her spirit, because I hope she had moments of joy in what must have been a grueling life. This much is true: Sacagawea died of some mysterious illness when she was only in her twenties. Most illnesses were mysterious in the nineteenth‐century, but I suspect that Sacagawea’s indigenous immune system was defenseless against an immigrant virus. Perhaps Lewis and Clark infected Sacagawea. If this is true, then certain postcolonial historians would argue that she was murdered not by germs but by colonists who carried those germs. I don’t know much about the science of disease and immunities, but I know enough poetry to recognize that individual human beings are invaded and colonized by foreign bodies, just as individual civilizations are invaded and colonized by foreign bodies. In that sense, colonization might be a natural process, tragic and violent to be sure, but predictable and ordinary as well, and possibly necessary for the advance, however constructive and destructive, of all civilizations.

After all, Lewis and Clark’s story has never been just the triumphant tale of two white men, no matter what the white historians might need to believe. Sacagawea was not the primary hero of this story either, no matter what the Native American historians and I might want to believer. The story of Lewis and Clark is also the story of the approximately forty‐five nameless and faceless first‐ and second‐ generation European Americans who joined the journey, then left or completed it, often without monetary or historical compensation. Considering the time and place, I imagine those forty‐five were illiterate, low‐skilled laborers subject to managerial whims and nineteenth‐ century downsizing. And it is most certainly the story of the black slave York, who also cast votes during this allegedly democratic adventure. It’s even the story of Seaman, the domesticated Newfoundland dog who must have been a welcome and friendly presence and who survived the risk of becoming supper during one lean time or another. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was exactly the kind of multicultural, trigenerational, bigendered, animal‐friendly, government‐supported, partly French‐Canadian project that should rightly be celebrated by liberals and castigated by conservatives.

In the end, I wonder if colonization might somehow be magical. After all, Miles Davis is the direct descendant of slaves and slave owners. Hank Williams is the direct descendant of poor whites and poorer Indians. In 1876, Emily Dickinson was writing her poems in an Amherst attic while Crazy Horse was killing Custer on the banks of the Little Big Horn. I remain stunned by this contradiction, but the successive generations of social, political, and artistic mutations that can be so beautiful and painful. How did we get from there to here? This country somehow gave life to Maria Tallchief and Ted Bundy, to Geronimo and Joe McCarthy, the Nathan Bedford Forrest and Toni Morrison, to the Declaration of Independence and Executive Order No 1066, to Cesar Chavez and Richard Nixon, to theme parks and national parks, to smallpox and to vaccine for small pox.

As a Native American, I want to hate this country and its contradictions. I want to believe that Sacagawea hated this country and its contradiction. But this country exists, in whole and in part, because Sacagawea helped Lewis and Clark. In the land that came to be called Idaho, she acted as diplomat between her long‐lost brother and the Lewis and Clark party. Why wouldn’t she ask her brother and her tribe to take revenge against the men who had enslaved her? Sacagawea is a contradiction. Her in Seattle, I exist, in whole and in part, because a half‐white man named James Dox fell in love with a Spokane Indian woman named Eta Adams and gave birth to my mother. I am a contradiction; I am Sacagawea.

Alexie, Sherman, “What Sacagawea Means to Me.” Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction. Ed. Judith Kitchen. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. 133‐136. Print.

geo wrote:Evolutionary science does rely on assumptions about our ancestral environment and it’s important to understand its limitations. But it doesn’t really take a leap of faith to understand that we evolved under very different conditions than exist today. We can make inferences about the past, such as that our ancestral environment lacked agriculture, technology, medicine, media, mass-produced goods, money, police, armies, and communities of strangers. As Stephen Pinker said way back in 1997 (in a rebuttal to Stephen Jay Gould), these absences have “profound implications for the minds that evolved in such an environment.”

Sure. And I agree with you that those things are interesting to learn about, and can influence the way we make choices that seem sensible and promising. I also agree that we should think about such influences on, for example, the development of caste systems or imperialism. But I also see such investigations as potentially toxic, so that they should be handled with care.

I spent considerable time, when reading through "The Righteous Mind" by J. Haidt, trying to distinguish between his actual findings and the implications he drew from those findings. Sometimes it was a matter of much subtlety and serious effort. I was led to that effort partly by a rather strong disagreement with him about what was driving his results. He consistently interpreted the differences between conservatives, with their variety of "fundamental" dimensions of morality, and liberals, with their constricted set of dimensions, as an inevitable result of innate personality differences. Even when he explicitly recognized that culture shapes our perceptions about what makes sense morally, he made no effort whatsoever (that he mentions in the book, anyway,) to sort out whether those cultural influences might be shaping the number of different dimensions perceived in moral justifications. His book begins with the more-or-less unconscious elephant determining the reasoning process, and never considers whether feedback loops from reasoning, or the lack thereof, might shape the elephant's inclinations. That's fine - his business is to sell his books, not to question them. But it's important for me to question them as closely as possible.

In the same way, I am very interested in what drives the tendency to sort societies into castes and enforce boundaries and hierarchies within them. I want to be skeptical of all explanations, and I freely admit that my effort at such skepticism is determined heavily by my priors. Because of those priors, I am deeply skeptical of anything that rings of "people just be like that." I am much more likely to credit the economic opportunities and military imbalances that may have shaped them, in other words the cultural factors, than any tendencies within human nature.

geo wrote:Many universal human traits: our tribalism, our need for acceptance (approval) and belonging, which leads to forming cliques and in-groups (and out-groups), were forged in the distant past and make sense only in that context. I’ll say again that something seems to be missing in this discussion of castes, though I really should finish the book before commenting further.

Probably there is something, or maybe multiple factors, that are missing. If we take economic and military pressures as the fundamental shaping forces, it still may be true that there are aspects of "universal" human nature that push people to respond to these in ways that re-appear across many different environments. So I hope you don't take my skepticism as hostility - I am interested in what you arrive at in the way of conclusions, or hypotheses.

I do think, though, that Wilkerson is much more interested in getting Whites to see, and query, the practices of caste than she is in explaining them. We, the privileged, are much less likely to be aware of stuff we don't want to think about. Does that mean we should not try to understand? No indeed. I just finished teaching about housing segregation and White Flight to the suburbs. Even after explaining how we can tell there was racism at work, I went on to tell about the desire to consume more space, which is cheaper when you get farther from the city center. As incomes rose, people who could afford it (so, almost all White,) moved out to newer, more spread out communities outside the central city. I want my students to see that impersonal forces can be part of a process which also has racist dimensions. I fear that a fair share of the current "Anti-Racism" movement does not take such forces into account, or expects society to steadfastly oppose such forces just because they reinforce racism. I'm still looking for processes of mutuality and don't necessarily accept an obligation to confront impersonal forces for the sake of rectifying structures that persist from the past.

geo wrote:

Harry Marks wrote: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.

I’m not quite sure I’m following your train of thought here. The reason I think human psychology is so important to this discussion is not to make excuses for our incomprehensible brutality—in both the past and present. For me, a better understanding of how the mind works—as limited as that knowledge may be—makes it possible to make conscious choices to rise above our primitive hardwiring. My point is anything but nihilistic. I’d argue that our chances to become better people (through commitments and values) are only helped by understanding the science behind our thoughts and deeds. I think it helps to talk about the universality of many of our behaviors. It’s usually not enough to simply call someone a racist. It’s better I think to acknowledge that we are all racist to some degree. And that we can acknowledge that and do something about it!

I think we see pretty much eye to eye on this. I was more interested in exploring the philosophical point about the difference between explaining things and deciding what to do about them (descriptive vs. prescriptive understanding, basically) than in raising some kind of fierce objection to studying for the sake of explanation.

I would raise a small objection about "we are all racist to some degree." There are two distinct processes going on at the level of people's subconscious judgment. One judges anyone who is "other" (i.e. not "us") as more likely to be threatening. That one finds White people to be more suspicious of people of color than of other white people. And Asians to be more suspicious of non-Asians, etc. The other embodies the particular judgments people make about particular races in America, with the result that African-Americans are, like White people, more likely to be suspicious of Black people. The second is what should be properly considered racism, since the oppressive structure is much more of an issue than people's tendency to be suspicious across groups. Until there is a better term for the structures that hold people of color down, I reserve "racist" for such structures. And that means that I don't agree that "we are all racist to some degree." That is much more true of the first, weaker, tendency to be suspicious across perceived groups.

In fact, I have a feeling that if we didn't have the structures of caste we would not have much of the first tendencies at all. I am quite serious about that. I can remember a time when Southern Europeans tended to be labeled with terms like "hairy" and "swarthy" that no one even notices anymore. They used to be "othered" and for the most part they no longer are. Why? Intermarriage, positive role models on television, breaking down of caste barriers. All the usual suspects.

Harry Marks wrote:I do think, though, that Wilkerson is much more interested in getting Whites to see, and query, the practices of caste than she is in explaining them. We, the privileged, are much less likely to be aware of stuff we don't want to think about.

That is a gigantic step! Remember MLK did not consider himself a member of a lower caste until he went to India in 1959. I admit I had not considered the concept of a caste system in America until I encountered this book.

Consider: It is now illegal to provide water or food to voters standing in long lines in Georgia. Which level in the caste system are these Georgia voters likely to be from? I'm thinking of contemporary SNCC bus riders heading down there with overwhelmingly massive aquatic and caloric relief in non-violent protest. #vote2022

In fact, I have a feeling that if we didn't have the structures of caste we would not have much of the first tendencies at all.

Yes, my understanding is the underlying philosophy of the caste system is what racism, anti-Semitism, and nazism are attached to.