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cordeliaflyte · 4 years ago

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Would love to know your thoughts on the rutger bregman book when you finish it!!!

dearest merle! it took me months to answer this ask - something i'm ashamed of - but i finally got around to finishing the book today.

the below is a condensed version of the ten pages of notes i took while reading it, which are rather chaotic and repetitive at points - but in my defence, bregman repeated his own arguments too.

one of the main arguments that bregman makes is that "evil" or "immorality" - which we'll define as causing unnecessary harm - are rarely caused by the individual, but rather the society they live in. i agree - nothing exists in a vacuum. however, society, as a nebulous concept, isn't imposed on us by some imperceptible power - it is crafted by people. people in society have different levels of power, and the harm they can cause to others is directly proportional to said power - but be it on a micro or macro scale, our actions have an impact on others and while they are influenced by the society we live in, we must nonetheless strive to minimise the harm we cause - and few of us do.

bregman illustrates many of his arguments with heartwarming stories about people coming together in times of crisis - take, for example, natural disasters - and overcoming adversity, selflessly looking out for their neighbours. but crisis very often leads to the creation of divisions, an us vs them mentality, and a complete disregard for the safety of others. the current pandemic is a prime example - see the widening of class differences, the rise in racist hate crimes, and people refusing to take safety precautions because they are inconvenient to them.

another argument repeated quite often throughout the book is the fact that media cherry-picks the most sensationalistic and senseless acts of death and despair, because human suffering is simply more interesting that the mundane - people talking to friends, creating art, laughing and learning. again, i agree with him - many of the more tabloid-adjacent news outlets would have you believe that the everyday norm is dismembered heiresses being found on riverbeds and charming, precocious children being held for ransom in tiny basements. the news doesn't often focus on the mundane - but the mundane isn't just love and work and friendship and boredom and chores, it is also, for billions of people around the world, sexual violence, familial abuse, workplace and housing discrimination, etc. these things aren't sensationalistic either - they're frightfully common, frightfully boring, and thus, they're rarely reported on.

throughout his book, bregman mentions that when he told people what he was working on, they approached the idea that humans are good with a large dose of cynicism, simply because we are raised to believe humans are selfish (which isn't the case worldwide, not all cultures are individualistic). they pick the easier choice - accepting the image of the world and their fellow humans that they are presented with at face value. i'd argue that it is the tendency of humans to pick the easier choice, to obey, to avoid challenging their worldview that leads to - for a lack of better term - immorality (see definition in point 1).

often, when bregman presents his feel good stories about people cooperating in adversity, he also mentions troubling details that, again, show undue harm being done. one of the examples he used were six boys from tonga, aged 13 to 16, who were shipwrecked on an island, and instead of descending into a "lord of the flies" style madness, they built their small community on the basis of communication and cooperation, never resorting to violence, and acting mature beyond their years. after a year spent on the island, they were rescued - and promptly arrested, an event which was probably racially motivated. and the reason they were shipwrecked in the first place was attempting to flee their school, where, according to their reports, they were neglected.

bregman contrasted the example of the boys forming a peaceful society on a small island with the chaos that always ensues when adults in reality shows are put in similar situations. the contestants are pitted against each other by the show runners, who seek to frustrate them and make them lose control for the amusement of the audience. whenever contestants try to cooperate, form a mutually beneficial society for a short while - a radical idea - they are punished. "goodness" - i.e. harm reduction - and radical thought being punished just don't seem like particularly helpful examples for the "humans are inherently good" thesis

bregman seems to be a big fan of primitivism, constantly citing civilisation as a source of harm - a position i'm always sceptical about, because personally i love vaccines and dental care, but i know this is a knee-jerk reaction and bregman isn't plotting a return to a land without dentists. but what i do take ire at is the idea that humans are somehow "corrupt" versions of their natural selves and that our lives have grown too complicated, and only a return to "primitive" society can return us to the aforementioned natural selves.

tied to the previous point - his arguments remind me of the "noble savage"'... archetype? he seems to paint a picture of "primitive" indigenous people as role models for those "corrupted" by civilisation, who in turn must be saved by a return to their "purer" selves, instead of individuals with flaws and agency.

speaking on indigenous populations - bregman also invokes the inhabitants of the easter islands. for a long time, the world at large believed that a hundred years or so before colonization, the islanders effectively perpetrated a genocide, killing off a large proportion of their population - a claim which was later disproven. yay! humans can live in peaceful societies without committing genocide, and thus, are not inherently evil! disregarding the fact that european colonists later massacred a large part of the islands population, and sold most of the survivors into slavery?

i was very excited for one of the chapters, entitled "after auchschwitz". i was interested how bregman would reconcile his argument with the tragedies of the twentieth century - the holocaust, but also genocide, and to a lesser extent war in general.

(this chapter, i might add, was preceded by a quote by anne frank - you know the one, about the inherent goodness of people. i was hoping that bregman would comment on the fact that anne wrote the quote before she and her family were sent to a concentration camp)

so you can imagine my surprise when the chapter was not, in fact, about concentration camps or genocide. but rather about. unethical 70s sociological experiments.

no really! a chapter titled "after auchschwitz" was, in fact, primarily about the stanford prison experiment. an experiment that was, granted, inspired by concentration camps, but still. it's misleading to invoke "real", large scale violence, and focus instead on "simulated", small scale violence.

we all know that the stanford prison experiment was, as far as experiments go, rubbish to legendary degrees. it doesn't prove anything - but it does, perhaps, show that people under large psychological duress are capable of evil, even when they themselves are not "evil".

it is, i'd argue, the human tendency to obey authority and especially to conform to societies standards that poses the largest danger. disobedience is man's original virtue and whatnot.

and when he does briefly refer to concentration camps, bregman treats them like a very 1940s phenomenon, disregarding the fact that they have been around for much longer and still exist today.

in cases like that one experiment with electric shocks. you know the one. do not, perhaps, show an innate tendency to violence, but rather people succumbing to pressure. but history is full of unprovoked instances of violence, of pogroms and lynchings. there is usually an instigator, yes, but judging from reports, people in the right mindset don't need much persuading to butcher other people.

also re: electric shock experiment - those who thought they gave the assistant lethal shocks showed extreme guilt and some even cried but like... so what? what use is a conscience if it doesn't stop you from, to your knowledge, killing someone? are your feelings really more important than your actions?

he doesn't say this, but a lot of the arguments he presents do seem to boil down to "people aren't evil, they're just stupid!" which doesn't sound more encouraging, i'm afraid.

an alternative takeaway would be "people are good, unless they have power" - which isn't exactly a radical, revolutionary idea. most people have heard the maxim "power corrupts". but the thing is that almost everyone holds some amount power over others - the oppressed factory worker in a poor nation who works 12 hours a day for pittance might still execute power over his wife, who relies on him for money, and she in turn might hold power over her children, and so forth. and that power is often used to cause undue harm and exercise control.

he criticises machiavellianism, saying it doesn't reflect how society works, and one of his proofs is that his philosophies were espoused by bismarck, churchill, and stalin - hardly admirable figures in terms of (you guessed it!) causing harm. but i don't see how that discredits machiavelli? like all of the above were very succesful

and he keeps repeating the primitivism argument throughout the book which gets tiring. like i'm truly sorry you were born in the last 5% of human existence thus far when, in your opinion, humanity started going to the shits, but it's getting a bit tiring

he cites money and nations as concepts as harbingers of the current (negative) state of humanity, saying they're very recent concepts and have no basis in reality. they're artificial concepts, sure, but their effect is very much real, and while achieving a nation-less, money-less society is possible on a small scale, i think that at this point they are such large aspects of life that reigning them in seems impossible.

and invokes the noble savage again and again, showing himself in favour of tribal societies, depicting them as egalitarian - i'm sure many of them are, but many also have a strict hierarchy or like. practice fgm. once more he seems to treat tribal people as a monolith of goodness as opposed to... people.

he also cites prehistoric people, their egalitarianism and low rates of violence but. forgive me for my ignorance because i did not research this. how do people know. doesn't the definition of prehistory include a lack of records??

he also mentions that in small, tribal societies, conformism can be a good thing, as it makes people act for the communal good. this is another knee-jerk reaction of mine but i think of conformism as society's most significant vice, so this strikes very much against my beliefs

later on, he also says reproduction is another proof of humanities goodness. perhaps it's a controversial opinion, but i disagree. i find it hard to find reasons for reproduction that aren't egoistic. it's survival instinct, sure, but it's not an "inherently noble pursuit".

later yet, he brings up schools which grant large degrees of freedom to students and shows how they're good for developing their minds. this might be a me thing but i know from experience that when i'm granted freedom without structure, i do nothing - though perhaps that speaks ill of me, and not humanity.

there have, in fact, been many studies on schools like this being helpful to student development and i certainly won't argue with them - but let me nit-pick. bregman says that fewer students have adhd in these schools, as it is a condition caused by being locked inside a room all day which is not only offensive, but also just plain wrong

and also while showing how granting children freedom lets them develop (which i naturally agree with) he brings up that "dangerous playground" study. you know the one. this isn't a coherent argument, this is just my bias speaking , but as a child, i promise i had no desire to play with rusty nails in abandoned warehouses. i liked my boring playgrounds with wooden swings.

then there is a chapter on communism and how it could be a remedy to societies ailments. but bregman and i seem to operate on very different definitions of communism. he naturally starts with saying maoist china and stalinist russia and cambodia under pol pot weren't really communist which... sure, if you want to argue semantics, i'm all for it, but it's an old and essentially useless argument. if "real communism" has never been tried (as the author claims) - why?

and then we pass to perhaps the most bizarre fragment of the book. paraphrasing only slightly: "but why are we now so opposed to the word communism? when we pass each other salt at the dinner table, is that not communism? when we selflessly hold a door open for someone, is that not communism?" i.... no?? no it's not. that's not what communism is girl stop

he then also says facebook is actually communist in many ways since a lot of its value comes from photos people willingly share for free. i could not make this up if i tried.

i think that in most terms i agree with bregman on policy - direct democracy, school and prison systems, changes to the criminal justice system - and our reasoning is partially similar, but i don't think the information we both have access to proves that humans are inherently good.

and then come perhaps my least favourite arguments because i for one am a spiteful bitch but yes. it is time for christian ethics 101 and turning the other cheek.

he cites ghandi and mlk as examples of turning the other cheek working. i think ghandi went too far with his policy, what with saying "jews ought to have marched silently to their deaths or committed mass suicide to make nazis feel ashamed" and like. we do remember they killed mlk, right?

as an example of turning the other cheek, he cites humane prisons in norway, where prisoners are granted much larger freedoms than usual and are on equal footing with the guards, who aren't armed and act more as councillors. i don't really see how this is an example of turning the other cheek, though - the guards are not the victims of the inmates (it was a prison for violent offenders - many of them murderers). i agree with him that prisons, if they must exist, should treat inmates humanely and with respect, but i don't see how this relates to the turning of the cheek. statistically, many of these men probably murdered their mates in a drunken dispute, or killed their wives - and i don't think turning the other cheek would have helped their victims.

he also cites south africa in the sixties as an example of turning the other cheek, when anti-apartheid activists would meet up with pro-apartheid activists and talk - this included nelson mandela who had frequent talks with the leader of a white supremacist paramilitary organisation of afrikaners staunchly opposed to black south africans getting the vote. and it worked - the man, whose aim was starting a civil war, relented. but racism isn't a simple matter that can simply be solved by talking. and it is often a pragmatic policy which i don't disparage, but turning the other cheek and having to treat someone who refuses to acknowledge your humanity with an exorbitantly disproportionate amount of respect is inherently degrading.

skipping ahead, in the epilogue bregman lists ten rules he tries to live by, and one of them is, i shit you not, "don't punch nazis". and punching nazis doesn't stop them from being nazis, but turning the other cheek gets people killed

the rise of fascism is perhaps one the largest threats we are dealing with and fascists are not just isolated and misinformed (and in this day and age, ignorance is a choice). they are dangerous.

this is by no means an essay or an exhaustive list, just a slightly chaotic and much overdue collection of opinions which i don't know how to put under a read more. take care <3

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mitigatedchaos · 2 years ago

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Morlock, well, two things about your sarcastic post.

First, the original abolitionists could be much more racist than contemporary Americans, but they still abolished slavery and even set a war on the tracks over it. Sure, the North was fighting secession, but the South was seceding because slavery.

There is not actually a requirement to believe everyone is identical to be against slavery, unless you believe someone other than Western European Christians wouldn't be for some reason given the same set of facts, so Western European Christians have to hold the line.

Such a belief is highly compatible with cis hetero patriarchal white supremacy, as that system treats elite Western European Christian men as effectively the father towards the entire human population of the planet, responsible for guiding and developing humanity in line with Christian principles.

Perhaps you believe it's Christianity, not Europeans? But I haven't seen you so enthusiastic about Christianity.

Second?

"Any difference in outcomes is proof of discrimination, even if we can't identify any underlying mechanism, and we're allowed to hold your race collectively responsible and issue individual harms to whomever of your race we decide to harm. We are not required to show this will actually close race gaps, because you are metaphysically tainted and are not allowed to object."

...is a fair description of the position held by a big chunk of the left today - certainly the influential post-liberal progressives at the very least. They hide it by slathering it in jargon, but it's very obvious that e.g. "it's impossible to be racist to white people" actually means "it's not racism if I do it to white people" and wouldn't mean anything else.

There is simply no reason to change the definition of racism like that unless you're planning to do open racial discrimination and want to create legal and philosophical cover to do so.

Do you know what the win condition to beat that ideology is? There are two.

The first option is that such people are systematically removed from power for violating the racial peace. The level of force required increases the more entrenched they are, so it's better to remove them as soon as possible, so as to use the weakest feasible means with the least collateral damage.

The second option is inconvertible evidence that differences in group outcomes are primarily genetic in origin - that would blow the whole thing out of the water.

Do you get that?

Many of the Rationalists, as well as myself, take race seriously as an actually-radioactive issue. Post-liberal progressives do not.

Liberals set up a system to suppress white identity politics called "colorblind racial liberalism," and part of that included suppressing potential demographically unflattering information about minorities.

Post-liberal progressives figured out a loophole in that the system suppressed conventional race science (limiting it to obscure journals full of technical jargon), but not social race science, so they were able to turn the left's own 50-year failure to close racial outcome gaps into an indefinite amount of leverage.

Any time someone says "...maybe it's not cheating? Maybe you shouldn't discriminate against me?" you slam them against the wall and go, "Oh, so you think it's genetic then? So you want to do slavery again? So you want to genocide all the 'lesser' peoples? Is that it?"

It has nothing to do with justice - letting random lunatics push women in front of trains is not "justice." It has nothing to do with helping people - much of this shit isn't based on science and doesn't work.

But it's very effective at abusing racially-scientific assumptions about group outcomes that have been baked into civil rights law in order to gain power in institutions, and it's very emotionally appealing to the kind of person who looks at a Chinese man doing better than themself and feels, on an emotional level, that that can't be right, that he must be cheating - and such people can come from all races.

Radicalizing someone into an actual white nationalist is a benefit to such people, because they can leverage that to "prove" that their job of saying things that radicalize people is "necessary."

If you don't agree that these people need to be thrown out, then your worry that "but what if a discovery of genetic differences results in slavery coming back" is fake.

It doesn't mean that you can't do any social programs, it just means throwing away the standard "you're privileged and in infinite racial debt, so we don't have to prove this social program actually works."

Either a social program works and is cost-effective, and is thus worth it on its own merits, or it doesn't work in which case it doesn't clear the racial debt, and there's no reason to do it. The entire racial debt framework is superfluous, needlessly threatening, and diverts energy and resources from working programs to non-working programs.

Something I've thought for a long time is that there's a significant missing mood in "race realist" belief systems, and it's not one I've heard anyone else talk about. Namely, that race realism should make you feel lonely. It's always struck me that, humans being the only species we know of with human-level intelligence (however you define that), we are terribly alone in the world. There's no one else to talk to besides us. There's no other perspective we have access to besides the human perspective. This is, to me, a deeply scary thought, and it's why I hope we'll encounter intelligent alien life within my lifetime. Race realism posits an even smaller social world, a world in which only certain subsets of humanity are really on par with one another, and in which everyone else might as well be ignored. Implicit in "white people (and Asians, or whatever) are genetically superior in all the ways that count" is something like "why be friends with anyone else? why talk to anyone else? what could they possibly offer you?" and to me this would be a seriously troubling thought.

I feel similarly about "Western chauvinism" and related ideologies. The idea that Western culture is superior to all the others, the origin of all worthwhile morals and all modern technology and so on and so forth. Isn't that distressing? That all there is that's worth knowing and doing comes from this one tiny subset of culture-space and of humanity? Doesn't that make you feel lonely, boxed in, uh, existentially bored? I think it would make me feel that way.

And I know that many race realists and Western chauvinists and so on would say that they don't hold these beliefs in the absolute: there are still some worthwhile contributions of non-Western cultures to the world, there are still some valid reasons to be friends with someone of a less intelligent race, whatever. And, ok, but this only changes the degree of the missing mood, it doesn't eliminate it entirely. And based on the rhetoric of most of these people, I don't think it changes the degree of the missing mood by very much.

There's a saying, "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room". These ideologies seem to consistently posit that their adherents are not just the smartest people in the room, but the smartest people in every room, that they're the very top of the pyramid and that's that. And I get that that would be an ego boost, but like, do you really want that? Doesn't it feel lonely up there? Don't you yearn for an equal to talk to? On an individual level and on a societal level? I think I would.

#racepol

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