Arcane Racism

on south africa: the ANC concilliates this stuff, but as far as I know the left wing of the tripartate has come out against this. Cf. also the race-exclusive black-consciousness unions, many of which transformed on the introduction of a colored and slightly white workforce into the factories.

Well, have you? (What I don't understand is why Graveland sings in English.)

(Another way of putting this is that Mike Tyson's wanting to beat the crap out of me would be a lot more disconcerting of an event than my wanting to beat the crap out of him.)

As to the original question, I think it's a bit like the language thing: people don't have viscerally-negative reactions to racism when it's racism that, to them, seems largely theoretical, faraway matters concerning groups of people they're unfamiliar with or have never bothered to distinguish between. And this last point I think is key: often westerners don't even view this sort of thing as relating to race, insofar as our mental categories of race-differences sometimes don't even include such differences. Witness the ways a lot of Americans reacted to learning, last fall, that (a) Afghans are not Arabs, and (b) there are in fact many ethnic groups within the country, with historically complex systems of alliance and animosity - - even with those who register on an intellectual level that a song called "Die Pashtuns Die" is about racism, it certainly wouldn't carry the visceral impact of closer-to-home racism.

however i still do not really follow it whichever "and" you pick as the differentiating "and": if [y] is an "almost certain consequence" of [x], then you are surely just restating SH's position, not challenging it?

is there a way of defining the human group to be all-inclusive — eg getting beyond our prehistoric divisions — w/o declaring war on some (non-human) Other? And what shd this other be?

I saw Armageddon w/o my revolutionary marxist friend [k] and he wept during the President's speech!! Ans = declare war on giant asteroids!!

Nabisco's post reminds me of one of Steve Bell's 'If..' cartoons from a few years back, in the series "Old Right/New Right", so under the old right caption you'd have a picture of three guys saying stuff like "don't give the poor money-- it only encourages them", or "We are the master race", "[Blacks'] cover everything with filth", then you'd have the same three guys under the new right caption saying stuff like "poverty? there is no poverty", "if you're poor these days, you're poor by choice", "there is no such thing as racism."

And this doesn't just apply to white america's relationship to black america, but america's relation to the world. I think it's useful to see the past hundred or so years as the era of US-imperialism, colonisation, and from this point of view  look at perceptions of events in world affairs from a US perspective and a non-US/Western perspective. Maybe it's wrong and stupid to use this perspective, but strangely, it does explain a hell of a lot.

Being a colonial power, how does the US justify its often murderous, most always exploitative behaviour at home and abroad?
The best way is to appropriate the language that is used, control the discourse. And also to control the media, by having a few large corporations with interests abroad owning the media, a fair media being essential for even a pretense of having a democracy or a fair capitalist system (i.e., one that isn't distorted in favour of the producers/owners/managers, although perhaps a "far capitalist system" is impossible in practice).

So , for example, the meanings of words are altered until they fit into a certain picture of the scheme of things, obviously this has always happened and always will, but the extent to which it happens in US media is interesting. Words like "free trade", "globalisation", "free markets", even "capitalism" and "socialism" lose thier meaning. In reality, operationally, these mean definite things usually  referring  to a certain neo-liberal structure where capital is able to flow freely, but labour isn't, free trade for the poor but state welfare for the rich; and which basically amounts to rich countries exploiting and draining poor countries of resources, but we have this ideological filter, this justification. But somewhere along the way, we get reports back, pictures, of sweatshops, perhaps this "drip down economy" doesn't really drip down, how did that happen? Maybe, if we just tweak it a bit here and a bit there, minor adjustments it'll be ok, within this structure it is perhaps unconceivable to even contemplate that the whole systems is designed  essentially to exploit the poor.

The process of indoctrination is also very interesting, people view world events, as I say, through a ideological, conceptual filter, a system that contains certain truths, axioms, that allow them to view events in a way that avoids them having suffer any dissonance. So these truths, in the case of US media seem to be "arabs/muslims are angry at us because they are jealous of our democracy", "Palestinians have been completely uncooperative in every part of the peace process", "The US is the world's policeman", etc, etc.

As dave q pointed out, it's this process of first abstraction over reality, then dropping significant aspects, variables, of  and so distorting this model until it bears very little relation to "reality"; this is  basically what's going on in mainstream economics, and political science.  People working within this system, using the language, the terminology, add creedence, academic respectability.

So, you are told, or at least the "elites" feed this to themselves, free markets are basically the best deal for everyone, everything is OK, we are doing the best we can, look all the injustices of the past, no more. You get Political correctness; people are going out of their way to lose any sexist, racist, homophobic attitudes here. But the process of self-justification, self-deception if you like has become much more sophisticated, better inculcated. It has to be with the problem of potentially less and less control over information sources such as the internet, and more "dissonant" information being accessible (unfortunately, it's not a dictatorship yet).

Heh, well most of that is ripped off from Chomsky, but I think it is relevant after the discussion of  historical racism. Possibly not.

The hidden assumption in the "they feed us disinformation" theory too often tends to be that "they" have have the true information to hand and merely are endlessly and brilliantly cleverly dissembling. viz "they" have a fine grasp of "their own interests" and work ceaselessly to realise them; "we" are blind to ours and pawns in their game... But what if "they" actually have a very shallow/narrow grasp of "their own interests"...? Cui bono is not really as all-conqueringly smart a question as it sometimes thinks it is. (I was sat by a man two weeks ago who seriously argued that World War Two was a World Govt set-up, 20 years in the preparation...)

This "ruling class transparency" theory is certainly not stated overtly, cz i don't think Chommo has ever been challenged on it, or forced to think abt it: if it had been, he maybe wd have been pushed a bit harder. I wonder whether he wd recognise it was a problem or worry abt it: it doesn't in fact much undercut his *analysis* — but it makes a HUGE difference to resistance strategy (also to the question of how inclusive "us" is). The downside of being as clever and as argumentatively effective as he has been down the years, is that he is merely revered, very rarely countered, BY HIS OWN SIDE. He is treated as a guru (or a demon). He's a self-proclaimed Cartesian, very suspicious of/critical of eg Hegelians. In the short term, so what so what obv — but his pre-eminence is now impacting on the third generation of the anti-imperial left. < / pet topic >

This sort of makes me point. I don't know if Chomsky shares the assumption you make or not, but his failure to address this issue clearly — and generally his evasion of the problems of advancing "theory-free" analysis, if you like — allows Chomskians to make it, a lot too comfortably. It's a sociological theory pretending to be objective absence of same.

"It's all pretty self-evident." But the paragraph that follows this is adduced WITHOUT evidence. It's mythology ,and it's BAD mythology. Clarity of information cannot survive in the system you're describing: if "we" are all being lied to, "they" have no (non-magical) means to gathering it accurately.

I'm not saying "They're good people, leave them alone". I'm saying, stop assuming they have all the cards. They don't. One of the key cards they DO have is the pessimism that Chomskian theory spreads throughout the left, about our weakness and stupidity compared to their all-knowing power. It's tiresome and it's self-defeating and for some reason — the above is my reason — it's become pervasive.

We're all children of the enlightenment. Heh I am now imagining what Noam has to say about Gurdjieff.

we shd get them to post here!!

To which, I'm sure, same liberals would fire back by saying that engaging in the "elite"'s ideas and their institutions would only morally compromise them -- and that it stinks too much of the flabby and self-deluding (and decidedly un-purist) post-sixties idea of "working within the system."

Pah. We should get them in some kinda enclosed steel cage match thingy. Two intellectuals enter...but only one leaves.

Searle's a schmuck, too.

Pinker would probably reply -- if you seem to speak chinese, you do speak chinese because actual understanding is not emperically verifiable.

Searle would reply -- talk to me in chinese and see if it is.

Pinker would reply -- b-but the distinction between you and the program doesn't exist in reality, only in the simulation.

I agree with searle in the fundamental -- that language is inseperable from cognition (i.e. there is no "language organ") but disagree in that he always stops short of positing the actual mechanisms at work. I'd like to hear him on the Lakhoff-Feldman model, for example.

(ok that may not be true, i just wanted to say it...) (my prob was always, yes, yes, but this is a PERSON doing this, and they will develop economies of behaviour, because that is what ppl do, and over time these adaptations of the simulation will turn into LEARNING CHINESE => tho the time may be LONG becuz it is a rubbish way to learn chinese obv)

in other words if you POSIT that the feller inside the room is a non-learning machine, it remains a non-learning machine, of course, but if you make it an actual live human, then the severe clarity breaks down, and the example doesn't properly exemplify

it always feels like i'm being asked to assume the result that's supposedly being proved

Well, yeah, exactly. They're compromised because they can't bear to follow through the logical consquences of their stances because...I dunno, they can't bear the responsibility, or the weight of history oppresses them so, or because they choose to be mere reporters at the scene of the crime. (Paging Tom Frank.) Or maybe they just don't know yet.

Oh yeah, and what Sterl said about the Chinese Room.

it's just the more i think about it the less it seems to illuminate: ie it is a rotten thought experiment not a good one

there was an article in the new scientist last year that said a. that our bodyfat is our biggest organ, and b. it transmits information and functions as a memory => i don't in fact think the meat assemblages we know ourselves to be are replicable by a turing diagram, however complex, but i don't think the chinese room helps me think about this AT ALL

Chomsky's *them* is a tight-knit but small group, while the typical liberal *them* is more atomized and diffuse -- Chomsky sees 1984, but most liberals see Lem's Building.

It's a sociological theory pretending to be objective absence of same.

I don't see how, unless any political commentary that strays from a mainstream version of events, or indeed any political commentary is a sociological theory. Maybe his work is more favourable to one sociological theory over another?

But the paragraph that follows this is adduced WITHOUT evidence

because I felt it was self-evident, I felt it  followed from the type of  hierarchically structured society we live in. well it seemed self-evident to me, so much for self-evidence

I'm saying, stop assuming they have all the cards. They don't. One of the key cards they DO have is the pessimism that Chomskian theory spreads throughout the left, about our weakness and stupidity compared to their all-knowing power

Again, what is Chomskyian theory? It really depends how you define "theory", whether you think as Chomsky does, that the term is misused in the social sciences, whether there is a theory and it's trivial and really irrelvant to dealing with his work.
As I say I prefer to engage with this in terms of a model, rather than a theory, even if they come to the same thing in your head.

As for pessimism, no, reading Chomsky for me, and for many others I believe, was the most liberating experience ever, because for a while the view of reality presented to me by the media just seemed completey wrong and inconsistent with the things I had experienced, I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people. Chomsky is all about knowledge being power, he always ends his interviews saying he has hope, because things have changed because there has been more awareness. I think this is what you get most from his work, rationality, argument, being a tool that anyone can wield.
 

Mark that this goes double for the vague world- defining "elite" -- and that there's something massively self-defeating and sour-grapesy about imagining that they've been mysteriously drawn within a malicious circle of social control to which the rest of us are denied access

Well, I think the idea of there being an elite section of society that wield enormous power, hugely disporportionate to their size, that therefore most of us don't belong to, is very much self-evident, I don't think it's self-defeating, nor sour-grapesy, I just think it's realistic. There's no mystery about it. If you had any model of society that didn't model an elite at the top wielding enormous power then I don't think your model would be useful for much. People who have common interest and so work in tandem to keep their power, again, this is an extremely rational thing to do for those with the most resources.

It's also riddled with holes: it assumes it to be oh-so-self- evident that We Are Right that the elites couldn't possibly believe any of their own rhetoric, and it assumes this We Are Right part despite having just argued that the Vague Elite know everything about the world whereas we know only the lies they've told us.

You're confusing this with a model/situation  where there the control over information by the elites is total, but, IMHO, claiming this holds in the US for example would be ridiculous, as indeed it would be in most every societ.  I would characterise the elites as the few percentage of the world's population that own most of the resources. This includes the media, so, I'm saying, it is difficult to find evidence that hasn't been filtered through ideological filters, in the media anyway.

Everyone is so intent on personalizing and homogenizing their enemies that they forget they are arguing against a composite, a general theme drawn from a massive disparate group of often opposed interests

Again, I haven't seen this much in Chomsky's work. He argues against basing analysis on the behaviour of certain people, rather it is much useful to examine the institutions through which actions are carried out. As I say before, it seems pretty obvious that the group can't be that "disparate", and it can't really be that massive either, I'm sure, you're aware that it's difficult to separate buisness interests from govt. interests in the US alone, this is true all over the world, and IMHO it is inevitable from the structures of these institutions, also, I'm sure you're also aware of the US influence over the whole of the world. In the end, yes, this is a simpligication, an abstraction, but, how useful is this abstraction, this is what we should be asking. IMHO, it is very good for explaining world events.

. But no, the Vague Elite serves basically as an excuse for liberals to not bother learning about anything, to not bother engaging with the arguments of their opponents, to not bother involving themselves in influential institutions and evening out the political stances of the workers within.

Whereas, I don't think this follows at all. I think this will be borne out if you actually read Chomsky's extremely detailed analyses of say the US government, he is often criticised for being over-detailed. He is extremely willing to engage in  the arguments of his opponents, it's strange that mainstream media never lets him (see Manufacturing Consent).

Not involving yourself in these organisations (e.g, government) , that's another argument, but perhaps you think that the structure of the institution makes it impossible to make any significant/useful reforms, so it's better to attack from without?

the premise is that the flaw is in the functioning of an abstract system rather than examining the system as it REALLY
 
Nah, Chomsky's the man, build a model, then see if it lets you make correct predictions. That's how we got quantum theory and shit.

Exactly. Think about that point carefully. People who are supposedly running the world don't have TIME to read all this shit. I doubt they think that deeply about what they do on a day-to-day basis - nor does anyone, really, except for armchair diplomats

OK, so my, the elites have more resources argument was over-simple. But, grant me this, they to a large extent control  access to the information that most people in society access (corporations own the media right? it seems pretty plausible to me that they will then have a significant influence on the content). I think they do think very deeply about what they do on a day-to-day basis, because time is money. So, they have certain means of collating complex information, IMHO. I think the govt. and buisness spend a lot of time and money on gathering information, intelligence. So, those that make the decisions have access to data on trends, secret documents, reports that many of us plebs can't dream of. This doesn't seem too outlandish. DON'T ALL REPLY AT ONCE!