Despite sharing the values of the social justice community, I often
feel a bit at odds with it, and I think I figured out why. For me,
societal problems are not only a matter of conflicting values but also
of how we respond to the people who hold those values that differ or
even oppose ours. That things like consciously tolerating an increase in
diversity (even of conflicting values and even while challenging them
when harmful) inevitably leads towards more acceptance and progressive
values.
That may be wrong. I need to think about this more, but I
think right now my feeling is that our collective responses across
society and generations haven’t really changed even while our values
have progressed, or at least, increased in nuance and understanding, and
that worries me for the future, that we’ll just be repeating different
iterations of the same social cycles of conflict, because we keep
responding the same ways to each other when hurt. But then, of course we
do, human nature is human nature, and while we can change ourselves and
consciously modify our responses to things, what I’m imagining requires
a large-scale shift in the average self awareness and social awareness
of others.
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
To the South:
Some background: A few days ago, I came across a comment from a Southerner
lamenting how non-Southerners move to the south, hate southern culture, and try
to change it, expressing how there’s no other possible reason we would move
there except to ruin their way of life.
I was shocked to see that self-centered perspective finally said directly.
I’ve encountered this interpretation before, just never stated explicitly. I didn’t want to reply publicly under my real name, but I’ll reply here, because this has gone on long enough.
So to the South, I say:
I am an American like you, not some foreign invader trying to dominate and ruin your way of life. We move to the south because we are all Americans and don’t know you hate us, don’t know you think your culture is under attack for having to coexist with us, don’t know we’re your enemy in your version of American history, don’t know some distorted version of a 150 year old war is still so salient, don’t know you see your culture as fundamentally at odds with the rest of us. We are Americans like you, and we thought you saw us the same.
You talk about how great your region is, how relaxed and friendly your lifestyles are, how pretty your landscape is, how mild your winters are, how important your history is to the story of America, and we think, “oh, that does sound nice, I would like to live there too.” But that’s not the reaction you wanted, was it? We misunderstood. You wanted your greatness to be acknowledged and celebrated by others, to be evangelized and exported, to bring in tourism money but for us leave and spread the gospel of the great South when we return home. You wanted to influence the rest of the country, the world, but you didn’t want to be influenced yourself. We misunderstood terribly.
But how could we have known? At first you were nice. Some cultural differences need to be navigated, some problems are observed, some culture shock existed on our end, but that’s to be expected, right? No one’s perfect. We know diversity means some inevitable misunderstandings and minor conflicts, but it can be worked out, we’ve done this before, with wave after wave of immigrants, so surely we can do the same between people already American. Sharing the best of us helps each of us improve our weaknesses, right? We’re all still one country, right? We have stereotypes about each other, but we have stereotypes about everyone, it’s not some personal thing with us “northerners” specifically, right? Right…?
It’s only after we make a life there for ourselves that your “Southern Hospitality” falls, that the full brunt of your true feelings about us, your true perspective of your relation to the rest of us becomes clear and we see the cracks in your claims of a pleasant lifestyle, the lies, the self-delusions. Maybe we were deluding ourselves, us, the supposedly rude “Yankees” trying not to be too judgmental. But you know your culture’s better, more moral, from more respectable heritage, having been here so long you forgot who you once were, only “American” remains in your ancestral memory. You are pure. So of course you think we, with our derived accents and our hyphenated-American ethnic qualifies, are less than you. Who’d have thought a white American could be a victim of xenophobia in the epicenter of white America?
And yet here we are, disoriented and alienated, simultaneously privy to the racism and xenophobia we as white people all try to keep hidden, while also being treated as one of those unwelcome foreigners to your perfect white culture. You don’t know what to do with us and we don’t really know what to do with you. We weren’t expecting this and you don’t seem to realize it. But we’re not the same, and in your hierarchical system that means we can’t be your equal. You can’t fathom that our lives are motivated by our own self interest to make our lives better, that our culture’s not just a twisted version of your own ideal one. No, you and your culture, the shining beacon in the world, must be our motivation, everyone’s motivation, and lack of immediate assimilation to your superior way of doing things is proof that we hate you, that we came to destroy that beacon. Everything we do is motivated by you, everything revolves around you. Change and difference is bad, cultural exchange is evil because you are already perfect. We see it in you choice of leadership: a narcissist in chief for a narcissist culture.
Many resent you now, hate you now, I resent you and hate you now, those feeling themselves you take as proof you were right all along. But that’s also what you wanted; you set us up to fail so you had more evidence of our hateful, inferior nature. We should have known since you’ve been doing the same to your African-American population from the beginning, but unfortunately, racism isn’t unique to you, so we didn’t see it in time.
But this is our home now too, and we work to fix it. You blame us for pushing unwanted social change, but we see plenty who were already here who want to fix it too. We see anti-black racism’s presence ever more strongly now, we see the other native Southerners, like your own LGBT community, First Nations people, non-Christians, people and their families who have also lived here their whole lives like you, but who have not benefited from your “generations of doing things this way.” They have as much if not more of a say in this than we do. Some of us leave, but this is the place they know.
Any hostility I have towards you now is not preconceived prejudice that I brought with me from the evil north – despite what you think, I had no animosity going in. I was too young to know any better. My feelings now are entirely a reaction to how you’ve treated me, a reaction to your assertions of your cultural superiority and my cultural inferiority, your inability to recognize you are capable of having flaws like the rest of us, your resistance to exchange, to learning how other cultures, other Americans, have adapted to things that are new to you. I can leave, but we’re connected, we share this country, this continent, this planet, and that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? For everyone to be connected to and influenced by you? You now need to learn you have no right to a top position, no right to harm others. You have to learn that receiving cultural elements from others is not domination, its growth. You have to accept that you are not perfect and have things to learn.
As much as you forget, we are all Americans.
I was shocked to see that self-centered perspective finally said directly.
I’ve encountered this interpretation before, just never stated explicitly. I didn’t want to reply publicly under my real name, but I’ll reply here, because this has gone on long enough.
So to the South, I say:
I am an American like you, not some foreign invader trying to dominate and ruin your way of life. We move to the south because we are all Americans and don’t know you hate us, don’t know you think your culture is under attack for having to coexist with us, don’t know we’re your enemy in your version of American history, don’t know some distorted version of a 150 year old war is still so salient, don’t know you see your culture as fundamentally at odds with the rest of us. We are Americans like you, and we thought you saw us the same.
You talk about how great your region is, how relaxed and friendly your lifestyles are, how pretty your landscape is, how mild your winters are, how important your history is to the story of America, and we think, “oh, that does sound nice, I would like to live there too.” But that’s not the reaction you wanted, was it? We misunderstood. You wanted your greatness to be acknowledged and celebrated by others, to be evangelized and exported, to bring in tourism money but for us leave and spread the gospel of the great South when we return home. You wanted to influence the rest of the country, the world, but you didn’t want to be influenced yourself. We misunderstood terribly.
But how could we have known? At first you were nice. Some cultural differences need to be navigated, some problems are observed, some culture shock existed on our end, but that’s to be expected, right? No one’s perfect. We know diversity means some inevitable misunderstandings and minor conflicts, but it can be worked out, we’ve done this before, with wave after wave of immigrants, so surely we can do the same between people already American. Sharing the best of us helps each of us improve our weaknesses, right? We’re all still one country, right? We have stereotypes about each other, but we have stereotypes about everyone, it’s not some personal thing with us “northerners” specifically, right? Right…?
It’s only after we make a life there for ourselves that your “Southern Hospitality” falls, that the full brunt of your true feelings about us, your true perspective of your relation to the rest of us becomes clear and we see the cracks in your claims of a pleasant lifestyle, the lies, the self-delusions. Maybe we were deluding ourselves, us, the supposedly rude “Yankees” trying not to be too judgmental. But you know your culture’s better, more moral, from more respectable heritage, having been here so long you forgot who you once were, only “American” remains in your ancestral memory. You are pure. So of course you think we, with our derived accents and our hyphenated-American ethnic qualifies, are less than you. Who’d have thought a white American could be a victim of xenophobia in the epicenter of white America?
And yet here we are, disoriented and alienated, simultaneously privy to the racism and xenophobia we as white people all try to keep hidden, while also being treated as one of those unwelcome foreigners to your perfect white culture. You don’t know what to do with us and we don’t really know what to do with you. We weren’t expecting this and you don’t seem to realize it. But we’re not the same, and in your hierarchical system that means we can’t be your equal. You can’t fathom that our lives are motivated by our own self interest to make our lives better, that our culture’s not just a twisted version of your own ideal one. No, you and your culture, the shining beacon in the world, must be our motivation, everyone’s motivation, and lack of immediate assimilation to your superior way of doing things is proof that we hate you, that we came to destroy that beacon. Everything we do is motivated by you, everything revolves around you. Change and difference is bad, cultural exchange is evil because you are already perfect. We see it in you choice of leadership: a narcissist in chief for a narcissist culture.
Many resent you now, hate you now, I resent you and hate you now, those feeling themselves you take as proof you were right all along. But that’s also what you wanted; you set us up to fail so you had more evidence of our hateful, inferior nature. We should have known since you’ve been doing the same to your African-American population from the beginning, but unfortunately, racism isn’t unique to you, so we didn’t see it in time.
But this is our home now too, and we work to fix it. You blame us for pushing unwanted social change, but we see plenty who were already here who want to fix it too. We see anti-black racism’s presence ever more strongly now, we see the other native Southerners, like your own LGBT community, First Nations people, non-Christians, people and their families who have also lived here their whole lives like you, but who have not benefited from your “generations of doing things this way.” They have as much if not more of a say in this than we do. Some of us leave, but this is the place they know.
Any hostility I have towards you now is not preconceived prejudice that I brought with me from the evil north – despite what you think, I had no animosity going in. I was too young to know any better. My feelings now are entirely a reaction to how you’ve treated me, a reaction to your assertions of your cultural superiority and my cultural inferiority, your inability to recognize you are capable of having flaws like the rest of us, your resistance to exchange, to learning how other cultures, other Americans, have adapted to things that are new to you. I can leave, but we’re connected, we share this country, this continent, this planet, and that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? For everyone to be connected to and influenced by you? You now need to learn you have no right to a top position, no right to harm others. You have to learn that receiving cultural elements from others is not domination, its growth. You have to accept that you are not perfect and have things to learn.
As much as you forget, we are all Americans.
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
The road to destruction
Many people believe the way to safety is to put on dominance
displays, expecting others to recognize who is stronger and act
accordingly. Through threats of violence, or actual violence, we show
off our strength, our power, attempt to intimidate the threat.
Many animals do this, and humans are no exception. It’s in our
instincts.
On a broad social scale, we make public displays of power, use our
numbers to show not unity and shared values, but the potential to
overpower others, to harm them. We talk about how much we love and
respect our military, how ours is the greatest, sometimes going so far
as to reject diplomacy all together because that can require putting
aside our need to feel more powerful than our opponent - to pull back on
all that goes against our instincts when we’re afraid of what the other
might do if we give them a chance, afraid of being overpowered
ourselves.
But we are not like other animals because we can communicate complex ideas and values with words and empathy, and large-scale existential threats posed by dangerous ideas are not the same as one-on-one confrontations. Our fight-flight-or-freeze response didn’t evolve to help us navigate such complex social structures where threats can now come from a continent away without ever directly confronting us, where the danger we face from others isn’t dependent on us having things they want, but from those very group/self-preservation power-based instincts themselves.
Supremacy of any kind is a product of our own minds, of our own innate bias that comes from the simple reality that we know, understand, and therefore value ourselves and those like us best, and from our own innate, subconscious need to protect ourselves and the things and people we know from those less-understood others who would cause what we know to become different, to be overpowered. Harmful ideas that depend on believing in a potential threat of others - memes like white supremacy - can’t be intimidated out of existence and will always return, escalate, if we don’t understand it’s roots in all of our unavoidable but overcome-able cognitive biases.
It’s hard, I’m having a hard time, but even still, I can’t give in to that instinct to overpower, to violence, if I want progress, if I believe in the human capacity to work out our fears and differences and needs and find a way for everyone to live. If the only way to make progress is through violence, then we haven’t really made progress at all.
But then, maybe it’s all too late for this now anyway. Maybe hope of progress is gone and survival is really all that’s left. Maybe if we as a society had learned this sooner, better inoculated ourselves and each other against white supremacist ideas and learned to recognize the appeal of power within each of us, there would have been hope. But now…we’re running out of time. The planet’s very ability to support our life is dying, with some doing everything in their power to hurry that along, and we’re still repeating the same cycles of violence and hate and ultimately war like we always do, still believe this time we’re justified and will be the last to have to do this. The beautiful future we were promised…was it really nothing but a dream?
But we are not like other animals because we can communicate complex ideas and values with words and empathy, and large-scale existential threats posed by dangerous ideas are not the same as one-on-one confrontations. Our fight-flight-or-freeze response didn’t evolve to help us navigate such complex social structures where threats can now come from a continent away without ever directly confronting us, where the danger we face from others isn’t dependent on us having things they want, but from those very group/self-preservation power-based instincts themselves.
Supremacy of any kind is a product of our own minds, of our own innate bias that comes from the simple reality that we know, understand, and therefore value ourselves and those like us best, and from our own innate, subconscious need to protect ourselves and the things and people we know from those less-understood others who would cause what we know to become different, to be overpowered. Harmful ideas that depend on believing in a potential threat of others - memes like white supremacy - can’t be intimidated out of existence and will always return, escalate, if we don’t understand it’s roots in all of our unavoidable but overcome-able cognitive biases.
It’s hard, I’m having a hard time, but even still, I can’t give in to that instinct to overpower, to violence, if I want progress, if I believe in the human capacity to work out our fears and differences and needs and find a way for everyone to live. If the only way to make progress is through violence, then we haven’t really made progress at all.
But then, maybe it’s all too late for this now anyway. Maybe hope of progress is gone and survival is really all that’s left. Maybe if we as a society had learned this sooner, better inoculated ourselves and each other against white supremacist ideas and learned to recognize the appeal of power within each of us, there would have been hope. But now…we’re running out of time. The planet’s very ability to support our life is dying, with some doing everything in their power to hurry that along, and we’re still repeating the same cycles of violence and hate and ultimately war like we always do, still believe this time we’re justified and will be the last to have to do this. The beautiful future we were promised…was it really nothing but a dream?
Monday, January 9, 2017
Preservation, Conservation; Antiques and Environmental Ethics
Preserving antiques isn’t just a personal preference for me but an
ethical action, tied so much to my environmentalism. So much of our
planet has been unsustainably used for resources, mountains dug up
completely for minerals and fuels, forests destroyed for their wood…
I have 1920s photos of the Great Smoky Mountains, mountaintops to the horizon and not a tree in sight. The forests regrew, but how much diversity was lost? How much never came back? The American Chestnut is gone to an introduced fungus, the hemlock is following, heart of pine no longer exists because trees can never reach the size they were before. The whole makeup of the ecosystem forever different because life reappeared in a different order than it originally populated an area. In other parts of world, you can find species so specialized they’re only found on a single mountain top…did we have and lose that here when we stripped mountains bare? How many species of plants and insects and amphibians and more did we destroy without ever even knowing they existed?
And it hurt us too. Hardwoods like walnut, used whole for load-bearing columns, replaced today in construction by cheap, soft, easily-warped pine that has to be glued together to get a wide enough piece because we’ve squandered what was available until now it’s no longer feasible to use. Craftsmanship and durability unappreciated when everything’s disposable, our ability to discern material quality, our history of developing different uses for different natural materials lost. How many potential future resources, plant based medicines, biologic-inspired materials, just…simple knowledge of the world, is gone because of our opposition to limiting our consumption, to rationing what we take so it lasts into the future, rather than exploiting it all at once?
When we paint finished woodwork and furniture rather than repair the old finish, when we rip out or “modernize” historic architecture and structures, when we leave old stone to erode away as if it’s worthless…to not respect the products we made from that destruction, to cover up the natural beauty that lead it to be used and exploited in the first place, to throw away and replace the irreplaceable with more destructively-gained and increasingly-inferior materials…painting over old mahogany as if it’s existence and use is no different from today’s laminated particle board and water-logged pine… it’s disrespectful to what was lost, it’s disrespectful to the lifeforms that died to make that piece, it’s disrespectful to the planet itself.
I have 1920s photos of the Great Smoky Mountains, mountaintops to the horizon and not a tree in sight. The forests regrew, but how much diversity was lost? How much never came back? The American Chestnut is gone to an introduced fungus, the hemlock is following, heart of pine no longer exists because trees can never reach the size they were before. The whole makeup of the ecosystem forever different because life reappeared in a different order than it originally populated an area. In other parts of world, you can find species so specialized they’re only found on a single mountain top…did we have and lose that here when we stripped mountains bare? How many species of plants and insects and amphibians and more did we destroy without ever even knowing they existed?
And it hurt us too. Hardwoods like walnut, used whole for load-bearing columns, replaced today in construction by cheap, soft, easily-warped pine that has to be glued together to get a wide enough piece because we’ve squandered what was available until now it’s no longer feasible to use. Craftsmanship and durability unappreciated when everything’s disposable, our ability to discern material quality, our history of developing different uses for different natural materials lost. How many potential future resources, plant based medicines, biologic-inspired materials, just…simple knowledge of the world, is gone because of our opposition to limiting our consumption, to rationing what we take so it lasts into the future, rather than exploiting it all at once?
When we paint finished woodwork and furniture rather than repair the old finish, when we rip out or “modernize” historic architecture and structures, when we leave old stone to erode away as if it’s worthless…to not respect the products we made from that destruction, to cover up the natural beauty that lead it to be used and exploited in the first place, to throw away and replace the irreplaceable with more destructively-gained and increasingly-inferior materials…painting over old mahogany as if it’s existence and use is no different from today’s laminated particle board and water-logged pine… it’s disrespectful to what was lost, it’s disrespectful to the lifeforms that died to make that piece, it’s disrespectful to the planet itself.
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