A Uniquely American Fallacy?

I wonder if this is a uniquely American fallacy--the assumption that great wealth equals great intelligence. Of course some smart people make lots of money because of their smarts, but certainly not nearly always. In fact, 80% of new business startups fail. Yet the great deference shown to business people in the US is striking, and not just in matters of commerce. And out of this fawning deference comes a sense of entitlement. And from that: oligarchy.

On Well-Fortified Silos

To be accused of "silo-thinking" among academicians is to be accused of closed mindedness. The thought behind the accusation goes this way: the various disciplines are like towering pillars of knowledge that have been erected alongside each other. Each tower is isolated from the next. There is no communication, community, or intercourse between the inhabitants of each tower. This fosters an unhealthy insularity that fragments the whole of human knowledge and distorts our perceptions. It is said that we must "get beyond" these silos in the name of a more healthy "interdisciplinarity" that will restore the wholeness of the world.

Who could object to this worthy goal? It's completely unobjectionable, and in fact desirable. Except some of the more extremist holders of this view go so far as to say we should tear down the silos! Raze them to the ground! We must do this, we are told, because disciplinary "expertise" makes us myopic, if it doesn't blind us altogether. Down with the towers of established knowledge, and off with the heads of anyone who defends them!

But the extremists can't really mean this. To destroy the silos altogether would be to say they've not helped us to see farther into the domains they tower over, and to drill down more deeply into their respective areas of knowledge. Are the silo-destroyers really saying we should forgo the accumulated insights generated by each? After all, whether we call it interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity or what have you, note that disciplinarity remains intact. Isn't the call for interdisciplinarity really a call for a great conversation among the various tower-dwellers in the name of a more cohesive community of knowledge? Isn't it a call for us to venture outside our towers to communicate with other knowledge-seekers as informed by our various disciplines? Wouldn't such a conversation have the potential to set off sparks that could better illuminate the shadows between the silos? But to destroy the silos altogether? Wouldn't that be to reduce all of human human knowledge to a dark and barren valley of Babel?

An extremist view hardly to be taken seriously--so enough. However, the more subtle, the more insidious way the accusation of "silo-thinking" is expressed takes the following form, and is predicated on the idea that not all silos are equal. 

Let us imagine some historians knocking on the door of the mathematics silo:

"Who is it?" ask the barricaded mathematicians.

"We're historians. We'd like to come in and do some interdisciplinary work."

"None of you are mathematicians and we have the integrity of our discipline to think of. No thank you! Run along now!"

Now imagine mathematicians knocking on the door of the history silo:

"Hello! Historians! It is us, the mathematicians! We have an idea for developing a course on the history of mathematics, and we'd like to teach it. What do you think?"

"Well, you know, knowing the history of your own discipline is one thing, but understanding what history itself is and how history is made . . ."

"What? Oh--you historians and your close minded silo-thinking! You unilateralist cabal!"

One thing I've noticed is that those protesting the loudest about "silo-thinking" do so from the tallest and most well-fortified silos. And those shouting are in essence telling those down below in the shorter silos that they really don't deserve to have a silo at all.

In sum, the accusation of "silo-thinking" is often deployed as a Trojan horse against the humanities.

The Last White Male Privilege?

Some announced the arrival of a "post-racial" society after the election of Barack Obama. Clearly these voices were mistaken. I strongly suspect we'll be much closer to that day when armed white men are violently dispatched by the law with as much ruthless efficiency as are unarmed black males.

Since the advent of miniaturized video technology decent people have looked on with horror at a seemingly unending stream of digitized recordings of white lawmen gunning down black men, teenagers, and even children with extreme prejudice. The victims have been shot while surrendering or otherwise complying with police instructions, while walking away or retreating from police, while sitting in a car or laying on the ground in submission, and so on. In many instances the victims are either unarmed or armed with far less lethal weapons (a knife, a toy gun, etc.), and oftentimes they had been identified to police beforehand as being drunk or mentally disturbed.

No matter. Being black-when-crazy, black-when-driving, black-when-walking, black-when-complying, black-when-a-child, black-when-breathing: all are apparently seen by many officers as sufficient grounds for the immediate and overwhelming application of lethal force. No one knows how bad this problem is, because there is no reliable national database of how many citizens are shot by police each year. So we are forced to speculate. One oft-cited study claims that young black men are more than 21 times more likely to be shot by police.*

By way of contrast, the very same video technology records the extreme deference with which officers approach white men with guns, up to and including assault rifles. In tape after tape, police approach with extreme courtesy, weapons holstered, hands contritely folded, and politely inquire as to why the white man is carrying a long gun in public. Almost invariably, the reason given, clumsily delivered in the argot of a street corner lawyer, boils down to this: "Second Amendment." After a few more desultory questions the officers then typically withdraw quietly, usually wishing the citizen a "nice day."

It almost doesn't bear mentioning that such an exchange is literally impossible to picture if we imagine the citizen a black male identically armed. Anything less than almost impossibly instantaneous compliance with the hoarsely shouted orders of the lawmen would quickly result in his death or grave injury. Black males, it seems, don't have the same recourse to the Second Amendment; in fact, one could be forgiven if it is not mistaken as a license for white men to shoot unarmed black men for sport.

Even in instances when an armed white citizen is manifestly menacing the public with his constitutionally-protected weapon in an unquestionably illegal fashion, the police response is, shall we say, restrained. The armed white man, sometimes drunk or otherwise mentally incapacitated, is surrounded, but instead of force patient negotiation is applied. Officers try to "establish a dialogue" with the man; he is cajoled and gently persuaded to lay down his weapon; it's stressed how important it is to "avoid bloodshed" and work towards a "reasonable and peaceful" way out of the crisis. Again, it almost doesn't bear mentioning that such a circumstance would be lethal for a black man. To state the fact bluntly: it's pretty damn hard for an armed white man to get shot by the law in this country.

Bring in Exhibit A--the Bundy "militia." The background is well known to those paying attention. In April 2014 the Nevadan Cliven Bundy faced down the federal government in a dispute over grazing rights with the assistance of several armed white men aiming sniper rifles directly at federal employees until they withdrew; to date, none of the participants have been charged with a crime, much less seen the inside of a courtroom or a jail cell. Now, almost two years later, Bundy's son Ammon, along with a group of armed white men preaching violent insurrection, has illegally occupied a patch of federal land in Oregon since the beginning of last month. For almost a month the occupiers were allowed to travel freely through the loose perimeter law enforcement had set up around their encampment. They were allowed to go into town to purchase needed supplies, to attend meetings to rally support for their cause, and to run other errands. For almost a month, the law indulged the occupiers imagined grievances and repeatedly attempted to negotiate a peaceful surrender--to no avail.

Finally, last week several of the occupiers were arrested during one of their periodic outings. However, one vehicle fled the scene with police in hot pursuit. After their truck tried to run a roadblock of state troopers, one of the occupiers, one Robert "LaVoy" Finicum, exited the vehicle. On my viewing of the FBI's video, Finicum initially raises his hands in surrender but by my count his hands appear to move toward his waistband three times, where he kept his trusty Colt .45. Only then was he shot dead by officers.

I want to repeat that for affect: Finicum appeared to reach for his gun three times before lethal force was applied.

Compare this to the many black men who often never even got one chance at their empty waistbands, if their hands even moved in that direction at all.

Again: it's pretty damn hard for armed white men to get shot by the law in this country, but frightfully easy for unarmed black men.

Also of note is the restrained response of law enforcement to a clearly illegal armed takeover of federal land, as compared to the highly militarized and aggressive response to unarmed citizens protesting the suspicious deaths of black men at the hands of police in places like Baltimore and Ferguson, MO.

Apparently, white men with guns have serious grievances that must be taken seriously; protesting black people without guns are an intolerable threat to public order, regardless of their claimed grievances.

And did I mention that as of this writing the land in Oregon is still being illegally occupied?

Extreme prejudice versus extreme deference.

Of course the point of all this is not that police should treat white men as violently as they do black men. The point is that they should treat black men with as much deference as they do white men, all other things being equal. This would be more in keeping with the idea that the law should be enforced with as much consistency as possible, and with their traditional role as peace officers--as opposed to escalating violence and arbitrarily dealing death.

This would be the reasonable response to the situation. But as I suggested at the start, perhaps the best we can hope for, given the vicious vortex that forms where violence, racism, and the unholy cult of the gun meet in American culture, is that a day will come when white men will be summarily executed as frequently and with as much regularity as black men. The wanton slaughter of black men might be the last white male privilege, and once it is gone we'll have achieved a perverse sort of parity. This would count as progress in race relations in this demented nation of ours.

________________________
*However, there is no doubt that most grand juries refuse to indict officers who have shot black males in questionable circumstances.

The Flint Crisis and the Neoliberal Model

What to do with the extraneous population of the dispossessed once the sources of its livelihood have been systematically plundered, de-skilled, downsized, outsourced? 

In the neoliberal model there are two steps. 

First, the criminalization of what remains of the lives of those within this population and then the consignment of as many as possible to a burgeoning for-profit incarceration system so another layer of profit can be scraped off it. 

Secondly, those who remain are condemned to a--quite literal--slow death by depriving it of the infrastructure necessary to its health and longevity. 

Death by economic deprivation, ethnic cleansing by another means. Capital tidying up its "externalities" in the wake of its "creative destruction." Utterly disposable cities inhabited by dark-skinned people slowly ablated from the map.

On Trump and Fascism

I recently read somewhere that Donald Trump keeps a volume of Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand. If true I find this amusing, because it shows that Trump is not a very quick study. By all accounts Hitler was an electrifying speaker; there exist, for those who care to look for them, pictures of him rehearsing his speeches, and they show he was a master of the dramatic, messianic gesture. Though his trail through history was evil and blood-soaked, as a political orator Hitler was hard to match.

Trump, by way of contrast, comes off as nothing so much as a poor man’s Shecky Greene; there are the wild, spasmodic gesticulations, the repetitive “what gives?” shrugs, the constant shooting of the sleeves. Trump thinks he’s smart because he’s surrounded by people who tell him so, and watching him speak is like watching a drunken man performing at an open mike night at a strip mall sports bar, cheered on by his friends who’ve told him how funny he is when in fact he’s not clever at all. He’s not witty; he has no insight into the human condition that might prompt introspection or amusement; as a nominally “political” figure he was no vision beyond his vacuous platitudes about “greatness.” He’s all flash and no fire, and the impression he leaves behind him has all the permanence of the hoarse shouts of a corpulent carnival barker at a county fair. A more unlikely leader of a political movement is hard to imagine. Trump’s “substance” is only at the level of surface appearances, a kind of empty “bigness” of presence with no heft at all. He’s a vehicle for superficiality.

In short, to compare Trump to Hitler actually manages to do a disservice to Hitler, and not only at the rhetorical level. Hitler had a kind of demonic intelligence behind his eyes; he was quite adept at Machiavellian maneuvering; he had a worldview, detestable though that view was; and he had a program. Mein Kampf was an evil book by any measure, but despite history’s righteous judgment of it Hitler actually wrote it. The book represents his ideas and the lines of thought that lead to them, no matter how vile and twisted and obscene they were. In other words, Hitler was “thoughtful” in his own way, as evil as these thoughts were. 

Try to imagine Trump writing a book (by himself!) about his political philosophy. It’s truly impossible, because it’s clear he’s never spent a moment thinking about politics. He has no political values or allegiances or ideology, no policies, no theory of governance, no proposed legislative priorities—nothing, nothing at all. This is not to say that the rest of the GOP field is comprised of people of big ideas, but at least they occasionally talk in some detail about this policy or that, wrongheaded though they usually are. Jeb Bush’s eyes reflect his haughty sense of entitlement, Ted Cruz’s betray his utter cynicism, Carly Fiorina’s are alight with the gleam of opportunism, and so on down the line. Even Ben Carson has thoughts, bizarre though they are, struggling to free themselves from something like a thorazine haze. The eyes of the stricken George W. Bush often had the cast of the wares of a fishmonger at the end of the day, but one could sense that neurons were firing somewhere in there, out of sequence perhaps, but firing nonetheless.

Now look into the dull pig-eyes of Trump. There’s no light back there at all. One imagines a skull full of dead, rotting, ground beef, incapable of generating any performance of cognition. On this reckoning Trump is a kind of mutant political creature. I’ve come to think of him as a walking, gesturing, animated mouth that constantly moves and makes sounds without the benefit of thought, but which somehow senses the resentments of its audience and then gives amplified and unapologetic voice to them. In this, the candidate Trump is the logical outcome of decades of overt and covert GOP pandering to racists and xenophobes; he’s the once barely suppressed id of the party base, finally burst forth and unleashed at a time of acute economic crisis and significant demographic shifts within our body politic. He’s quite happy to stir up the roughly 30% of the electorate which basically came unhinged after the election of a non-Caucasian president, and which are yearning for a return to “golden age” of unchallenged white, male, Christian privilege. 

Yet Trump is no member of the Lumpenproletariat; the resentments he channels are not his own. It’s important to remember that he’s a creature of television, the medium of surfaces and superficiality. His oxygen is attention; he needs it to survive; it’s the only thing he craves. And if that means he has to demean women, or call all Mexicans rapists, or demonize BLM activists, or call for a pogrom on all Muslims, that’s what he’ll do. It’s just his nature, given the kind of creature he is. I’ve often wondered who was more morally despicable, racists and xenophobes who at least have the courage of their twisted convictions, or politicians who pander to these convictions out of political expedience. With Trump we have a third option: someone who will pander to such base emotions for the sake of ratings and clicks on social media—making him an especially execrable sort of creature.

I learned long ago not to make predictions when it comes to US politics; for the last thirty-some odd years it has only grown increasingly unpredictable. I can’t say for sure that Trump will not win the nomination or the presidency, though even at this stage I doubt it. I will say, though, that he’s no Hitler, nor a fascist, nor an ideologue. He is, however, a demagogue of a most peculiar kind, though a demagogue we in the US deserve: stupid, moronic, unapologetic. This is not to say Trump is not dangerous. Whether his is a serious bid for office or not, real, live people will suffer as a consequence of his repulsive antics; in fact, the suffering has already begun. Thus we must loudly repudiate him at every opportunity, and steadfastly stand with his victims no matter the cost.

On the Death of Michael Brown

The only way to think of Michael Brown’s death as a tragedy is to studiously ignore the tragedy of the American present and the American past.  

The killing of a young black man in a small city in middle America rarely makes national headlines, and I suspect that the only reason we know Michael Brown’s name is because of social media and the loud protests following his shooting. But it is a tragic fact that young black men in this nation are routinely detained by police at the slightest pretext (or no pretext at all), far more likely to be killed by police, and even more likely to be incarcerated in our massive prison system that is mostly populated by non-Caucasians. These facts represent but a few symptoms of our peculiar culture, where every problem foreign or domestic is almost always addressed though coercion and violence. Witness a near constant state of warfare lasting six decades, a bizarre idolatry of firearms that costs 30,000 lives a year, and an increasingly aggressive style of highly militarized law enforcement that when given a choice between the safety of officers and the safety of the public they are supposed to protect and serve almost always chooses the former. Needless to say, it is predominantly communities of color that bear the brunt of this more bellicose policing. Add to all this the effects of the social violence generated by persistently segregated communities, schools, and opportunities, and witness a body politic torn asunder. We can see these effects most acutely in the very city that surrounds us, which was turned over to a racial minority historically barred from political power to govern in the midst of its era of economic decline. Anyone aware of this country’s long, tragic history of race relations—the genocide of whole peoples, the coerced “immigration” of slaves, a civil war fought over slavery, the terror of the Klan, Jim Crow, etc.—cannot possibly be surprised at the cheapness of non-Caucasian lives and livelihoods on our streets and in our cities. In an age of a superfluity of information, ignorance is no excuse.  In fact, it is unforgivable.

But all of these tragedies are compounded a thousand fold by the persistent denial of racism’s persistence, and racism persists because we hide it out of sight both geographically and psychologically. Historically, the term “ghetto” denoted the place where a society’s majority consigned those arbitrarily prejudged to be inferior, undesirable, unwanted, inconvenient. So segregated from our modern ghettos of inner cities, rural cell blocks, and distant reservations, the majority far more easily forgets the burden that race places on some while remaining blithely unaware of the ways in which their own race privileges them. For example, I’m a white man who lives in a majority black city, but despite my minority status I’m far less likely to be subject to state violence or coercion—the statistics prove it. The different hues of different skins plays favorites, colors lives, and shapes destinies.

Of course on the long perspective race relations in this country have improved, but no one can deny that racism still exists. Congratulate yourselves on electing a black man as president, but never forget the hysterical vitriol he has faced as a consequence of his race. Praise your generation for being far more tolerant than my own, but recall that we still live in a nation where football fans privilege the plainly racist mascot of their team over the sensibilities of the peoples practically extinguished by our ancestors. Treasure your friends of color, but ask yourself perhaps the most pertinent question on this topic: why don’t they live near you, or you near them?  And always bear in mind the sobering thought that in the world they live in they could well be the next Michael Brown.  

Academe Contra Logic

Every professor decries the lack of "critical thinking" skills in their students yet collectively they cannot settle on a rigorous definition of what the term means. Therefore they continue to complain and very few of them teach these purportedly essential skills. And for good reason! Classrooms of students schooled in elementary logic would routinely embarrass their professors!