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Speaking Out

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[Good news! I will philosophize less often for the rest of the year. So when I miss a Thursday post, you will have more time to think and act on your own.]

Moral thinking, unlike philosophy, demands action. Figuring out the right thing to do and why, has no purpose if nothing is actually done. While in some cases doing nothing is the best course, moral thinkers benefit from a bias to act. Our focus on solving a moral issue builds a moral case which most frequently contains a moral imperative that compels people to effect change.

Sometimes it is too late to prevent a tragedy, but moral thinking then demands that we learn from what happened, that we speak for the dead and that we act both to prevent any recurrence and to hold those responsible to account. In 1889, the Johnstown Flood killed 2,208 people. For their own convenience, a small group of extremely wealthy industrialists modified a private dam unsafely, without paying to reinstall pressure relief valves & pipes or reconfigure spillways. Due to weak liability laws on negligence, none of the members were ever held accountable. But liability laws were changed after the tragedy, due to public pressure, and they are now more strict. We all benefit when we learn from our mistakes.

There is a new, dangerously foolish and ignorant policy now being applied to our national parks, that asks citizens to report any national park unit that provides information that is “negative about either past or living Americans”. Apparently, those in power view the purpose of national park units to be solely positive propaganda outlets designed to boost patriotic fervor.

If you go to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, you will learn about two Americans, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who committed a heinous act of domestic terror. Must the affiliate park unit now cease saying anything negative about them? Should the 168 bombing victims—including 19 children—memorialized there now be forgotten, because leadership in DC will no longer allow the story of the bombing to be told fully? Must future students lose the opportunity to learn about this tragedy and the anti-Semitic, white supremacist ideology behind it?

On “December 7th, 1941–a date that shall live in infamy—”, 2,403 Americans were killed in a sneak attack on Oahu by the Imperial Japanese Navy. 21 US ships were sunk or damaged in the devastating battle at Pearl Harbor. Are we no longer allowed to remember that critical loss? Is it verboten to study the mistakes made in lining up 8 battleships in a small harbor on the eve of war? If you go to Hawaii and visit the USS Arizona are we no longer permitted to recognize the sacrifice of the 900+ crew members still entombed on the ship underwater? Are they now to be considered “suckers” and “losers”?

On July 17th, 1944, 320 people were killed in a munitions accident at Port Chicago in California. Rather than learn from their mistakes, the US Navy protected the white officers in charge and imprisoned the African American workers. Less than 4 months later, almost 1,000 were killed in an extremely similar accident at a US Navy base in New Guinea. More people die when the lessons of history are ignored.

The US Army lost twice at Manassas during the Civil War, and the first loss could only be described as grossly incompetent. Are the park rangers no longer permitted to criticize the poor military tactics of the Union Army leaders there?

For that matter, are they still allowed to discuss the cause of the Civil War, slavery? Perhaps all the Civil War battlefields and military cemeteries should be paved over and signs put up saying, “nothing bad involving Americans ever happened here”? If current leadership insists that there were “fine people on both sides”, perhaps the Civil War should be renamed the Civil Conversation?

And are Civil Rights and race riot memorials to close? What about the history of equal education? If no Americans ever did anything negative, what was Brown v. Board about? Why did Eisenhower have to send in the 101st Airborne to integrate Little Rock Central High? Why did so many people walk from Selma to Montgomery? Why were four little girls bombed at a church in Birmingham? Who was MLK? The refusal to make any moral judgement against any Americans, past or present, means that we must accept murderers, terrorists, insurrectionists, and racists and not criticize them, even if they are the most evil of criminals. Must the KKK’s violent history be respected, while massacres of Native Americans must be erased?

What greater affront to moral thinking can there be than to deliberately erase our history?

Authoritarian Kings once demanded that they be portrayed in the most flattering light. Then King Charles I of England was executed by a Parliamentarian revolutionary named Oliver Cromwell. A famous portrait artist had drawn a flattering portrait of Cromwell, before inviting him to sit for a more complete portrait. Cromwell saw the other picture and famously demanded that the artist paint him as he really was, “warts and all”.

Whitewashed history is a lie, which is designed to mislead us. Real events must be studied as accurately as possible in order to inform us. Every generation must go back to history to gather the lessons they need to inform their moral thinking for the decisions that must be made tomorrow.

”The past is never dead.
It’s not even past.”

William Faulkner

The Instinctual Mistake of Racism

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Our history is replete with racism, and many of my posts are devoted to its tragic examples: US War on Native America, Road to Abolition, Equal Education, Black History and American Concentration Camps. Since genetically all humans are the same species, there is no scientific basis for racism. We are all on the same side. But in my travels, I have found both overt racism and subtler ethnocentrism everywhere. I have heard Swedes make fun of Norwegians, British belittle the Irish, Italians disparage Romani, Turks and Greeks complaining about each other, Russians being anti-Semitic, Japanese discriminating against Koreans, Chinese distrusting Japanese, Malaysians criticizing Chinese, Israelis insulting Palestinians, Tanzanians maligning Arabs, Dominicans faulting Haitians, etc. I’m sure many of the same folks also made negative comments about Americans, behind my back or even calling me a ‘big nose’ or ‘foreign devil’ to my face.

Basically, racism is a damaging and potentially deadly way of thinking about others. Racism divides society, treats people unfairly and often results in violence against innocent people. Academics argue about whether prejudice is an evolved human trait or whether racism is learned. I doubt anyone learns to be racist by reading 19th century books on Phrenology or old Nazi propaganda. People who look up old racist literature have already formed their views. Children acquire racial biases as toddlers and pre-schoolers, often unconsciously by observing adults. Some tribal mistake in our instinctual thinking makes us vulnerable to distrust others, unknown to us, and wish them harm. Tribal unity on superficial facial characteristics may have once been useful in outwitting Neanderthals, but in the modern, interconnected global community, it is not just obsolete, it is a deadly plague, pitting billions against billions, all the same species.

Some academics stress the importance of systemic racism, the structures that sustain it, and the leaders who promote racist ideology. But this logical approach has a human weakness, so a systemic solution is asymmetrical to the problem. Most racist adults deny that they are racist. Relatively few risk public shame with overt racism. Racism lurks in the shadows, until it explodes. Some deplorable adults promote racism consciously, but it is hardly an intellectually rigorous movement. While diversity, equity and inclusion are taught formally, racism spreads informally. In my experience, I’ve heard more racist comments from illiterates and drunks than sober academics. Racism spreads quickly among less educated people who lack access to the benefits of vibrant, integrated multiracial communities. W.E.B. Du Bois exposed the real, blunt view of racists behind their fragile intellectual facade of superiority: “they do not like them”. Racism may be an ideology to a few, but it is an instinctual flaw in many.

While racism is still obviously employed consciously as an instrument of political power, its mass effectiveness lies in its unconscious appeal. If folks already have deeply rooted prejudices, it is easier to convince them to act cruelly, even without evidence. Missionaries believed they were doing God’s work to take Native American children away from their parents and put them in boarding schools. Soldiers believed false and grossly exaggerated claims that Native Americans had committed blood-thirsty atrocities, before they machine-gunned women, children and the elderly as they slept, before taking fingers as souvenirs. Slave owners believed their superiority gave them the right to use whips and chains for generations. School boards believed that money was better spent on white children. Mobs believed that an unproven allegation of sexual assault justified days of death and destruction. And many believed that Americans of Japanese descent could not remain free, while Americans of German descent could. The cruelest acts were committed by people motivated to act without evidence.

Any system can become an instrument of racial injustice, if it is filled with enough people with deep-seated racist views. A racist jury will rule unjustly, no matter how the law is written. Political leaders do not adopt racist policies because they were proposed by Ivy League think tanks, they adopt them because they are expedient and popular among ignorant people who support them. Columbus did not wait for the King or the Pope to issue racist proclamations before enslaving the first Native Americans he met, because he brought base racism with him and his crew. And they immediately decided to apply it to the Taíno, because they were different. The root cause of centuries of tragic American history is the false, racist assumption that there was something wrong with the other group of humans. Racism is the instinctual mistake within us that causes us to break the Golden Rule.

So, since racism is fundamentally a problem of instinctual thinking, the first step in solving it is to reveal it within ourselves. We all act instinctually, or we would forget to eat and die. We are all emotional, with a million likes and dislikes, preferences and aversions. We mimic, extrapolate and project. We have a physiological and evolved social need to group together, find similar soul mates, and to feel good about ourselves at the expense of others. Our society enforces homogeneity from pre-school. Sesame Street taught us, “one of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong”. But when we defectively apply that instinctual thinking to groups of our fellow humans and feel that someone “just doesn’t belong” in our neighborhood, due to their race or ethnicity, then we are being racist. First, be aware.

Being anti-racist requires honest introspection. If you can find a racist attitude in yourself, understand where it came from, and judge it to be hurtful and wrong, then you can fight it. You can change your words and deeds. And then, you can apply that new skill to the world. Suddenly, you will recognize the next racist thing you hear as racist, and you will have the opportunity to object. You can make a little more effort to understand people who are different, and you might find that you like their food, their humor, music, literature, style, or even some of their religious beliefs. Ultimately, you must apply the same open-minded attitude to all groups of humans.

When I lived abroad, groups of schoolchildren would point at me, giggle and sometimes call me names, because I was foreign to them. Their school uniforms, group behaviors and appearance was equally strange to me, at first, but I was happy that the country stopped burning and beheading foreigners who looked like me some 150 years earlier. Culture shock has two sides, when you fall in love with a culture and when you hate it. Before you really get over culture shock, you need to go through both stages. Then you can stop seeing one group—a single culture—and start seeing the diversity within the group.

The simple truth is that there are good and bad people everywhere, in every group. It is neither accurate nor useful to judge whole groups as good or bad based on superficial characteristics. When groups of people share the same prejudice unconsciously, they begin applying their racism broadly. When groups share prejudice consciously, they organize that racism into a damaging and dangerous force, breaking down a peaceful, fair society, challenging laws and morals, and hurting innocents. Decades later, people may acknowledge that one case was wrong, without admitting that the same instinctual fault still persists.

Isn’t it time for us to admit the full extent of our racism, understand it, and stop it completely? Must we continue to repeat the worst of our history in new ways, for the same old reason? Can’t we finally decide that all humanity deserves to be treated as we believe we should be treated?

What’s the Point of History?

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What’s the point of history? Why bother learning all those boring facts and dates? Sure, there are some interesting characters and conflicts, but surely all that old stuff doesn’t have much relevance to today’s problems with AI, mass shootings, war in the Middle East and global warming. The world changes so quickly now, so what’s the point dwelling on the past, when we need to fix future problems? 

Glad you asked. 

There’s a common misconception that we have some sacred obligation not to judge the past and just to record it as it happened without questioning it. Out of vanity, many people like to study the history of their ancestors, believing that they were virtuous and victorious, in order to be inspired. We’re passive spectators, taking note of past events, and maybe defending the actions and beliefs of our own ancestors, as if we were cheering for our home team. If someone criticizes part of our history, then we say that nobody should judge what they did using hindsight. We read history in order to validate our beliefs that our origins were honorable, and by not questioning anything, we declare ourselves honorable historians. 

That is all lazy, narcissistic nonsense that wastes our time, misses the point entirely and prevents us from learning anything useful. We do not study history in some vain attempt to feel better about our selves due to something our ancestors did. We study history to make better choices now, so that we can rightfully feel proud that we are doing our best. The dead can suffer some honest criticism, and they do not enjoy being excuses for our mistakes. Rather than being forgotten, I’m sure they’d prefer being inspiration for our future successes. 

The point of studying history is to learn from the past—both admirable actions and atrocious mistakes—in order to make better decisions today. History didn’t have to happen the way it did. As today, people made mistakes, were driven by greed or hate, and acted out of ignorance. They could and often should have made better decisions, but, no matter how flawed they were, we should not simply dismiss and forget them. We must learn from their mistakes. We must constantly apply our highest moral judgements, use our imagination creatively, and draw the most logical conclusions possible, whenever we study history. That way we will learn as much as we can, so that we can apply the lessons of history to our future decisions. 

Above is a Ghost Dance Shirt from 1890, decorated with eagle and owl feathers, worn by a Lakota (Sioux) warrior who hoped that it would protect him from bullets. That December 29th, at Wounded Knee, under a flag of truce, the US Cavalry, driven by settlers’ often imaginary racist fears, machine gunned 250 to 300 men women and children to death. The point of history is neither to let such facts sit dryly without emotion or judgement in a book, nor to toss it in the dustbin, nor to argue that the massacre was inevitable, nor to compare whether your ancestors were more mistaken than mine or anyone else’s. The point of history is to learn from past mistakes in order to avoid the doom of repeating them. 

620,000 men, roughly 2% of the population died in the line of duty during the Civil War. If we apply no judgement as to why they died, then we learn nothing useful. If we are dishonest or allow ourselves to be confused by old misinformation, then we will draw the wrong conclusions. If we understand the plain truth—that the war was fought over slavery—, study its racist roots, and apply our best judgement, then we can fight racism better and perhaps avoid a future war. Learning to be better must be our main goal, after considering the consequences. 

Some lessons can be applied immediately, and others are evergreen. For example, if the safety lessons of Port Chicago had been learned immediately, another similar disaster could have been prevented. The deeper lesson, that bias kills and that diversity can save lives, is one many of us are still struggling to learn. If you can’t learn anything useful from history, you’re not trying hard enough. 

Today’s problem of AI replacing skilled labor can be better understood by studying labor history. The most intractable conflicts today can be understood better by studying hatred and injustice from our past. The climate crisis can be better understood by studying evolution, archaeology, and our few remaining intact ecosystems. History is the reservoir of our past experiences and knowledge, and we must draw on that as thoughtfully as possible, always driven by the need to improve ourselves. That’s the point.