Israeli Racism

Israel's Arab problem hits home | Salon.com

Here's something, just fastfood for thought while to stall on writing the intro to my book. An Arab Israeli, with the best possible qualifications, was turned down from Israeli pilot training because he was an Arab.

Please tell me, someone out there, if you are out there, why Israel is able to get away with this blatent racism. I'm not even talking about any right of return for Palestineans who were displaced and are now living in refugee camps outside of Israeli territory. I'm talking about a million Arabs who are Israeli citizens.

Yes I know it isn't, as it were, racial racism because, yes I know the many Israelis are now Jews from the middle east who are brown, and that some are Jews from Ethiopia who are black. But racism in the relevant sense doesn't necessarily track skin color: it's a matter of discriminating against people on the basis of ancestry or assignment to some kinship group--not necessarily a "visible minority." You would think these Israelis would know about that--the Holocaust was, after all, strictly white on white genocide. "Aryans" had to do geneology to prove who they were and Jews had to wear yellow stars so that they could be identified. And, I'm sorry to be cynical here, but Americans and others were especially upset about this particular genocide because it was white people who were getting killed. In fact, it was in many cases white middle class people who were getting killed.

Maybe it bothers me because I'm just a crude Consequentialist. I don't care about backward-looking considerations or about compensation for past injustices. The Jews may have had a lousy deal since 70 AD culminating in the Holocaust but that doesn't buy a free pass for this kind of racism. BAD, BAD, BAD--as I tell my lab when he gets up on the couch. Not that he listens. He gets down as soon as he hears me coming down the stairs in the morning, rolls his eyes upward so you can see the whites at the bottom and puts back his floppy ears. I still know what he's up to.

One of the few passages I remember from the OT is Moses giving the Israelites a pep talk just after they get out of Egypt. Moses says, "Remember you were sojourners in the land of Egypt, and the Egyptians treated you harshly so..." So? There are two ways to go with this: (1) Turnabout is fair play--this is a fraternity ititiation. You got trashed so now you can trash them! or (2) You know what it felt like so don't do it to other people.

Moses went with (2).

The Multicultural Mystique

Well, I've just finished my book The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity. I would be most grateful for comments.

I've beat my May 1 deadline by 3 months, so that's probably good. I just hope that I can use that time to get comments so that I can respond and revise given all that time I've bought for myself. So if anyone out there is still reading my blog, please help me out!

I suppose I'm blowing my cover here because you can easily track back to find out who I am from the page I've linked. But I think most people know who I am anyway. I do want to note that the views I've expressed in my blog and in the book don't represent the views of my university and also that this blog resides at a remote location, not my university server.

There's been all sorts of crap coming down these days suggesting that we academics are running a racket--overpaid, underworked, secure in our jobs so that we aren't "accountable" and given to promoting politically correct nonsense. Let me tell you it ain't so. The book I have up at this link is inflamatory and very politically incorrect: if I didn't have tenure, there is no way I could have put this up without risking my job and probably losing it. If I didn't have an academic job I wouldn't have had the time or resources to write it. What I've written is, I believe, important--not only for me to say but for people to read. Without the academic system that gives me resources, time, and safety to do this I couldn't have done it, and neither could my brother and sister academics who write stuff like this have done what they do.

Views of America

BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | What do you think of US policy?: "US policy affects the rest of the world. Therefore the US should allow the rest of the world to vote for the US President."

What a good idea! The rest of the comments at this site, are good too--and not surprising.

More on our India simulation game

I've just gotten back from the second day of our historical simulation of India on the Eve of Independence.

At this point it's 1945. Hardline Muslims have walked out of our talks at Simla. We, Gandhi and Congress, demanded that the Brits quit India immediately and called a referendum. We won but Muslims and our two representatives from the princely states, from Hyderabad and Kasmir voted against us, and there is rioting in the streets. My aim is to avoid partition, but it doesn't look like we can achieve that unless we provide written assurances that Muslims will get, at the very least, proportional representation in the form of seats in the national assembly guaranteed to Muslims. Dr. Ambedkar, respresenting the majority of Untouchables also demands representation. We, Gandhi, can't give in on that one (but I H. E. think it would be a good idea).

For me, out of character, this has been a frustrating and enlightening experience, and one that's very important for me given both my current project on multiculturalism and my ongoing discussion with my best friend, who's been in Kenya for the past 14 years, about colonialism.

Off the cuff, it seems to me that it's a mistake to regard "colonialism" as single kind of phenomenon that can be forced into the same template wherever it occurs. In subsaharan Africa, nation states that were part of a technologically advanced, literate culture took over territories that were, for the most part, backward, tribal and illiterate. This was like the Roman conquest of Gaul and other barbarian kingdoms and chiefdoms in norther Europe. In India, two of the world's high civilizations duked it out. This was like the Moorish conquest of Spain. So in some respects it's harder to see what should have happened in India.

It's easy to see, for me at least, what should happen in Africa. The barbarians in Gaul were Romanized and became French. They didn't become Romans, or Italians, but like the barbarians in other parts of northern Europe they were grafted into the high civilization of the Mediterranean--first into the Roman Empire, then into Christendom--and eventually became equal partners, each nation playing variations on a common theme. It's not so clear what should have happened in Spain. This is all terribly big picture and naive, but why not have some fun?

It's almost disconcerting to get out of character after playing the Game for two days. But if I, H.E. were myself in India, I wouldn't have wanted the British out. I would have wanted further evolution toward dominion status. By the time of independence, India was already largely independent at the local and provincial level. I would simply have wanted more representation at every level of the Indian Civil Service, the obliteration of all color lines, and special rights and accommodations for religious minorities and Untouchables, guaranteed and enforced by the British. I would also have wanted the power to determine economic policies, tariffs and the like, to promote industrialization and see to it that the British couldn't keep India underdeveloped, as a source of raw materials. I would certainly have been utterly opposed to Gandhi's idiotic vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient rural villages maintained by agriculture and cottage industries.

I suppose I react violently and adversely to that vision because I grew up in the Counterculture and am reacting to the unimaginative, romantic take on 10,000 villages supported by organic farming and crafts. Unimaginative because very few people who enthused about this program could imagine what daily life in the long term was like in such villages or comparable communal arrangements. It's lots of fun to rough it for a week or two, camp out with your nice REI gear--with your cell phone, access to showers on the camp grounds and your camper for quick trips to town if you get the munchies or if you need tampax. It's fun to grow a garden and make salad from your own fresh veg, to do some basket-weaving, throw a pot or two and even get into spinning. That's as far as Romantics can see--they can't imagine what it would be like week after week, year after year, for your entire life to grow your own food, spin your own yarn, make your own baskets, without any means of communication with the world outside, without transportation, without doctors, dentists or Western medicine and without any chance of getting out.

Romantics are unimaginative: they effuse over the natural beauty of rural settings, the crafts, the coming of age ceremonies and potlatches, but can't imagine what it would be like to live your entire life without traveling more than 20 miles from your native village--if that--without having access to a virtually unlimited supply of books and paper, without meeting people you haven't known all your life, walking through a city, eating fruit out of season or listening to Bach

What me, Gandhi?

USD History News: Conference at USD: "Reacting to the Past: History as Hypothesis"

I'm just home from the first day of a history role playing game, India on the Eve of Independence. It's been terrific, but exhausting, experience and terrific pedagogy. I'd love to take a class like this--but I wouldn't have the guts to teach it!

When I got my assigned role a couple of weeks ago, half of Gandhi (2 of us are playing him) my heart sank, until I realized that by playing a role I found unsympathetic I might actually learn something. So I immersed myself in the literature and the more I read the more unsympathetic I became. His vision for India, the policies he promoted and, most deeply of all, his whole "philosophy of life" are utterly and diametrically opposed to everything I believe--and feel. It's been a very tough part, though I'm giving it everything I've got.

At the most fundamental level it's his picture of the world and our place in it that I find most alien. First, a moral universe in which the fundamental category is duty and wellbeing, insofar as it figures at all, is a byproduct of doing one's duty. To me, duty is just a means for distributing individual wellbeing. Secondly, the notion of individuals as parts of a grand scheme of things which which they are fundamentally in harmony if they play the game properly and do the duties that come with their particular place in the cosmos and social order.

To me, the grand scheme of things imposes constraints on individuals, who achieve wellbeing by fighting it, mastering it, subduing it. If I have a picture it's of individual agents as atoms, or maybe better, the nuclei of atoms, surrounded by a sphere of freedom, the little bit of the world within our power to dominate. These spheres press against one another, like bubbles in a foam. We each try to expand our sphere of freedom pressing against the spheres of others, and we all press against the constraints imposed by Nature, red in tooth an claw.

Now, there is no way of adjudicating between two pictures that are so fundamental level. My picture is indefensible, but so is Gandhi's. All we can do is work out the ramifications of these fundamental commitments and aim at consistency. That, in any case, is what I'm trying to do with Gandhi.

Given Gandhi's fundamental picture, his program is a consistent consequence--his repudiation of Western ways and opposition to industrialization, his vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient villages where people farm and do crafts, his education program for training children to play their roles within this scheme. Yet still it seems appalling, the narrow, constrained, dull lives he envisions for most of India's 400 million citizens--weaving the 1000th basket, and the 10,000th basket, and the 100,000th basket until they die--and, presumably, are reincarnated to weave even more baskets. Somehow "spirituality" is supposed to fill the void in these otherwise dull, empty lives, but I can't see how. I suppose it's consistent with the Hindu idea that our aim is to escape this treadmill--but why would anyone want to make life a treadmill, to relegate people to this emptiness and tedium, pain and drudgery, when other options are feasible?

The answer I suppose is that it's all tedium, pain and drudgery: we can decrease the pain but it's still there; we can decrease the reps, but we're still repeating the same tasks--it's just that the cycles are longer. The village craftsman throws 2 pots an hour--I teach two logic courses a year. Big difference. But it is a big difference because if the cycles are long enough we don't get bored, and if the tasks are complex enough we can change them and improve them--there's the possibility of achievement. In the grand scheme of things neither the pots nor the logic courses matter: the sun will explode into a red giant and all this will be wiped out and, beyond that, the material universe will expand, then contract and collapse. But who cares about the grand scheme of things. I will get personal gratification, I will feel a sense of achievement, I will enjoy myself.

What me, Gandhi?
USD History News: Conference at USD: "Reacting to the Past: History as Hypothesis"

I'm just home from the first day of a history role playing game, India on the Eve of Independence. It's been terrific, but exhausting, experience and terrific pedagogy. I'd love to take a class like this--but I wouldn't have the guts to teach it!

When I got my assigned role a couple of weeks ago, half of Gandhi (2 of us are playing him) my heart sank, until I realized that by playing a role I found unsympathetic I might actually learn something. So I immersed myself in the literature and the more I read the more unsympathetic I became. His vision for India, the policies he promoted and, most deeply of all, his whole "philosophy of life" are utterly and diametrically opposed to everything I believe--and feel. It's been a very tough part, though I'm giving it everything I've got.

At the most fundamental level it's his picture of the world and our place in it that I find most alien. First, a moral universe in which the fundamental category is duty and wellbeing, insofar as it figures at all, is a byproduct of doing one's duty. To me, duty is just a means for distributing individual wellbeing. Secondly, the notion of individuals as parts of a grand scheme of things which which they are fundamentally in harmony if they play the game properly and do the duties that come with their particular place in the cosmos and social order.

To me, the grand scheme of things imposes constraints on individuals, who achieve wellbeing by fighting it, mastering it, subduing it. If I have a picture it's of individual agents as atoms, or maybe better, the nuclei of atoms, surrounded by a sphere of freedom, the little bit of the world within our power to dominate. These spheres press against one another, like bubbles in a foam. We each try to expand our sphere of freedom pressing against the spheres of others, and we all press against the constraints imposed by Nature, red in tooth an claw.

Now, there is no way of adjudicating between two pictures that are so fundamental level. My picture is indefensible, but so is Gandhi's. All we can do is work out the ramifications of these fundamental commitments and aim at consistency. That, in any case, is what I'm trying to do with Gandhi.

Given Gandhi's fundamental picture, his program is a consistent consequence--his repudiation of Western ways and opposition to industrialization, his vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient villages where people farm and do crafts, his education program for training children to play their roles within this scheme. Yet still it seems appalling, the narrow, constrained, dull lives he envisions for most of India's 400 million citizens--weaving the 1000th basket, and the 10,000th basket, and the 100,000th basket until they die--and, presumably, are reincarnated to weave even more baskets. Somehow "spirituality" is supposed to fill the void in these otherwise dull, empty lives, but I can't see how. I suppose it's consistent with the Hindu idea that our aim is to escape this treadmill--but why would anyone want to make life a treadmill, to relegate people to this emptiness and tedium, pain and drudgery, when other options are feasible?

The answer I suppose is that it's all tedium, pain and drudgery: we can decrease the pain but it's still there; we can decrease the reps, but we're still repeating the same tasks--it's just that the cycles are longer. The village craftsman throws 2 pots an hour--I teach two logic courses a year. Big difference. But it is a big difference because if the cycles are long enough we don't get bored, and if the tasks are complex enough we can change them and improve them--there's the possibility of achievement. In the grand scheme of things neither the pots nor the logic courses matter: the sun will explode into a red giant and all this will be wiped out and, beyond that, the material universe will expand, then contract and collapse. But who cares about the grand scheme of things. I will get personal gratification, I will feel a sense of achievement, I will enjoy myself.

The Angels Weep

Online NewsHour: Report | Young People Speak Out on Faith | January 3, 2007 | PBS

Among young people in this most recent survey that we've done, we do see -- I'm hesitant to use the term "polarization," but clearly we see an over-representation of evangelicals among the young and a significant over-representation of the young in the unaffiliated category.

ADORA MORA: ...I believe in personal relationships with God; I don't really believe in church. My mom doesn't like me to say that, but it's the truth. I believe my church is sitting in my house, writing a letter to God about what he's done for me, or about good and bad things that have happened with my life and how we'll overcome them together.

JUDY WOODRUFF: As we traveled across the country, we often heard young people talk about their "personal relationship" with God, which was more important to them than congregational loyalty or the structure that it provides.

DAISY COOPER: I'm not into religion. I have a relationship. Religion is -- that's what's like -- that's what sparks confusion, and God is not the author of confusion. So a religion is what blocks people from getting the real.


Here's a Newshour segment that I didn't manage to catch...so, so, to me, depressing. Judy Woodruff, being upbeat, notes that these young evangelicals aren't necessary either politically or socially conservative. That's good. But what's depressing to me is that they're evangelicals, that they see religion personally rather than institutionally, without any connection to history, culture or art, and psychologically, as part of life experience hooked up with their various life problems and concerns.

I'm still skeptical as to whether the kids interviewed are really representative: the pitch is that this style of religiousity is the going thing so, as a journalist, you look for representatives.

Yet still, not a one, neither the evangelicals or the dropouts is anything remotely like was--their whole take just doesn't connect with anything I can understand. Those who claim that religion is very important in their lives don't seem to me in any way religious: they're absolutely remote from the impulse in myself that I understand as religious. I don't even understand the "relationship" business--I quite literally don't understand what they're talking about. No wonder there's "an over-representation of the young in the unaffiliated category." If this is religion, who wants it?

On the one hand, I'm happy that I've got so much more, that I can get so much more, and so much more intense pleasure (I'm listening to the new CD of the Bach B Minor Mass my son and daughter-in-law got me for Christmas--good, good performance!) But it's disconcerting that I'm so far out and maybe even more so that while I've always thought I was religious I can't even get what they're talking about, can't make any connection. (Ah, the Gloria...turn up the volume). Meanwhile Dawkins and Dennett are high on the charts and the militant atheists on the net are crusading and predicting the end of religion in 25 years.

It isn't even the end of religion as such but what seems to be the end of a whole grand cultural package and an attitude (very good Laudamus--creamy, not operatic, and very technically proficient on the ornaments). I've been soaking in books on my favorite time and place--Hellenistic through Late Antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean. I'm not sure whether the nomenclature is right--I mean Alexander to Julian the Apostate. Near the end, the men of letters watch the whole of high culture end--ossify, erode and then crumble--the gods, the art, the literature, the ethos, everything that matters, everything that touches the soul not, as it did in the West, with a bang but with a whimper and write things like, "even in these days Alexandria is still a center of learning." They knew it was happening, knew their world was dying. Why did it happen, and why is it happening now?

I suppose this sounds both pretentious and melodramatic. So be it. Technology at least is doing fine this time around. I can listen to Bach whenever I want and as often as I want, read reviews of books online and order them instantly from Amazon and worship my own gods.