“No. Light and Dark. Day and Night. Yin and Yang. Good and Evil. Order and Chaos. Rich and Poor. Republican and Democrat. Predator and Prey. War and Peace.
What do these all have in common? Dichotomy. A dichotomy has always existed between concepts in the world, creating some sort of conflict for much of history. Why?
Because it is a normal part of human culture. Conflict of some sort is almost always the driving force in the human experience. We use it to push ourselves forward through life. War is simply another one of the many dichotomies we all experience in our lives. It has always been a part of us, and likely always will. However, unlike many others in the dichotomy relationships, it has the capability to end us all. War will forever haunt humanity. The trick for us all is to not allow it to end us all.”
“What causes racism is actually greed… Any argument that claims racism is an innate ‘tribalism’ or fear response in human nature is simply wrong; as easily proven by observing babies. Babies have no concept of race or aversion to other races. They only show innate fear, disgust or aversion to a few things: for example, crawling insects, snakes, some male humans, and any sudden change, like a loud noise or quick movement. Saying racism is natural is like saying we have a natural fear of vampires, zombies, or mummies.
Because like these monsters, racial types are invented and given meaning by cultures; they are not biological categories, but social groups. Until the 17th century race was defined by language – a race was a group who spoke the same tongue. Speaking differently was what people noticed about strangers. Greeks called other people barbarians because all other languages sounded like noise to them: ba ba ba. There is no consistent definition of race across generations – so it is not just improbable, but impossible to have an innate fear of other races. Skin colour just isn’t very scary; very few horror films are set in tanning salons. And if we did fear difference it would be people who speak differently. Well, my British accent doesn’t seem to scare people.
Racism is learned behaviour. This process can, and has been, empirically observed. So why do some – many – cultures teach their children racism? Historically, the most common cause, by far, has been greed.
Let’s take the racism of Europeans towards Africans as a classic example.
This racism simply did not exist at first. Prior to the slave trade, the division of society was not race but class. Upper class people were viewed unquestioningly as superior to lower class. Africans were not described or viewed as inferior to Europeans – class was the deciding factor. So high status Africans (princes etc) were welcomed in European high society, African nobles were portrayed in literature and art as respected men of honour and virtue, and in fact African servants were – probably due to rarity – the highest status of all servants. They would be proudly displayed by the upper classes as a sign of wealth and prestige, like an export car today.
This practice now seems very dehumanising; African servants were like pampered pets, not equals. But compare it with white servants of the time; they were not treated as pets, but simply as working animals to be hidden away. The cruelty of this was not racially determined; if anything black skin was valued more highly, for two people of the same class.
This was the ad hoc servant trade, which preceded the slave trade. Europeans took Africans in battle, or via kidnap – or also via a much smaller direct trade with upper class Africans . (NB – this secondary trade is seized on by some American conservatives as a key fact, although as a non-partisan non-American I can’t pretend to understand this argument or have any interest in it, since it bizarrely assumes that defending a race’s record is more key to understanding the slave trade than either slavery or trade.)
But as theft and trade developed, and Africa was recognised as a rich resource, traders began to recognise the market value of people as a luxury good – much more valuable by weight than other goods. If the traders could stop people automatically seeing a person with black skin as a person – then they could buy and sell them like any other commodity.
So it was nothing to do with fear, or a desire to feel superior, that led to this racism. In fact, snobbery had led to valuing black people more highly – as being more exotic. This is still racism, but of a very different, non-ideological kind and still based on a hunger for status and prestige – i.e. greed.
Racism was not the cause of the slave trade; the slave trade was the cause of racism.
Fear does not cause racism – racism causes fear. It is designed for this purpose.
What led to the ideology of racism, the unspeakably cruel denigration of Africans by Europeans, was greed. Pure greed. And greed is still what causes the racial divide today.
In fact, slavery is still very operant in America. To an economist, the data is not debatable. But now slaves are a domestic production, not an international trade. In fact, slavery has increased dramatically over the last 50 years. But now it is called the penal system.
Africans are farmed domestically in ghettos, then herded like livestock by armed rangers (police) and contracted into slavery (sentenced) for being of low economic status (financial offences e.g. being in debt, or owning ten dollars of crack in an area with no ATMs where crack functions as untaxed currency, and dealers earn less than McDonalds staff).
Then the African livestock are transferred to cages – prisons – where they are put to work for a subsistence wage (cigarette money, bed, food) as nearly free labour for private companies. This vast slave labour force underpins the competitiveness of American companies; domestic production depends on them, like the cotton trade once did. The most productive are transported around the country and sold on an open market to different contractors.
I promise this is a true account – all the data is public domain and freely available. In fact, they created many of the laws that still imprison Africans today in the years immediately after the slave trade act abolished slavery. It was a direct swap of one legal contract with another.
So racism is still caused by greed.
This is not liberal propaganda. It’s not a political argument at all, since I am not partisan or even American. It’s empirically observable economic data, widely available – but not publicised for obvious reasons.
I can happily provide data, sources and references on request.
Historical side-note:
African servants are no longer displayed proudly. Donald Trump barred black staff from serving a high-ranking mafia don who lived in his hotel, at the murderer’s personal request; this is extensively documented, and I can provide links to these public domain records.
We all become history one day.
One day it will be a matter of historical record that this is the man you supported, if today you choose to support Trump. A man who has never once denied or hidden either his greed (cause of racism), or even his prioritisation of race and country-of-origin as the fundamental way to categorise the population.
As regards greed, he has in fact proudly boasted about it, to wild applause from poor white people unhappy with the increase in social value of poor Africans (Black Lives Matter) and other races in recent years.
This small increase in social value is among the ruling class to which Trump belongs.
I’m European. We’ve been where you are going: but with us, it was a while back. Before America and the slave trade. It’s what produced both of them, in fact.
But please don’t trust me. Check for yourself. Ask him. Use your constitutional right to ask him directly. Ask Trump if he believes in greed.
“Racism is based in Xenophobia. The fear of anything different. This is at the root of almost all forms of racism. We, as humans, have learned to gather ourselves into tribes as a means of protecting ourselves. Tribes lead, eventually, to countries and other forms of large groups of people.
This is the best example I could find, but there needs to be more circles. Right after “you” should be “family/intimate”, the next two are right, but “people you just met” should basically be under acquaintances. And then you get various circles like “local groups, city groups, state groups, country groups”. The further out from the circle you go, the less trust you’ll have for the other person.
When people are divided into groups we instinctively protect and promote our own group, sometimes even at the expense of other groups. So while races are largely an arbitrary definition, it is one that we as a society have accepted. Which makes it so much easier to develop an “us vs them” mindset. Every time you talk about black people do this or white people are that, you are contributing to this mindset and advancing the racist narrative.
So my second reasoning for why there is racism is a lack of knowledge. The more you know about the differences and similarities between the races the more you’ll realize that physically speaking there isn’t that much difference between all of us. The majority of differences will be societal ones. I.e. learned behavior instead of instinctive behavior.
For example, something like “ebonics” has absolutely nothing to do with black genetics, but is instead a completely societal thing. A white person raised by a poor black family is more likely to speak that way than a black person raised by a rich white family.
The secondary reason is why I haven’t really ever been a racist. At first it was because I didn’t really interact with anyone outside of white people enough to be familiar with racism. Eventually though, I moved from New Hampshire to Saint Louis and had to come face to face with all the ugly realities of racism. At which point it didn’t take me long to realize that assholes comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Being black doesn’t make you an asshole and being white doesn’t prevent it. Nor is the reverse true.
However, we can’t solve racism just by pointing out the faults of the majority race. We need to treat all races equally. Which means no quotas, no specific laws mentioning specific races or sexes. They should all be banned and done away with. If a company has to have 20% of it’s workforce be black because that’s the local percentage, than that company should also be forced to have 75% of it’s workforce be white (if that’s also the percentage). In other words, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander. We need equality of possibility, not equality of results.”
“Our actions are guided by moral values. However, monetary incentives can get in the way of our good intentions. Neuroeconomists at the University of Zurich have now investigated in which area of the brain conflicts between moral and material motives are resolved. Their findings reveal that our actions are more social when these deliberations are inhibited. When donating money to a charity or doing volunteer work, we put someone else’s needs before our own and forgo our own material interests in favor of moral values. Studies have described this behavior as reflecting either a personal predisposition for altruism, an instrument for personal reputation management, or a mental trade-off of the pros and cons associated with different actions.
Impact of electromagnetic stimulation on donating behavior
A research team led by UZH professor Christian Ruff from the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics has now investigated the neurobiological origins of unselfish behavior. The researchers focused on the right Temporal Parietal Junction (rTPJ) — an area of the brain that is believed to play a crucial role in social decision-making processes. To understand the exact function of the rTPJ, they engineered an experimental set-up in which participants had to decide whether and how much they wanted to donate to various organizations. Through electromagnetic stimulation of the rTPJ, the researchers were then able to determine which of the three types of considerations — predisposed altruism, reputation management, or trading off moral and material values — are processed in this area of the brain.
Moral by default, money by deliberation
The researchers found that people have a moral preference for supporting good causes and not wanting to support harmful or bad causes. However, depending on the strength of the monetary incentive, people will at one point switch to selfish behavior. When the authors reduced the excitability of the rTPJ using electromagnetic stimulation, the participants’ moral behavior remained more stable.
“If we don’t let the brain deliberate on conflicting moral and monetary values, people are more likely to stick to their moral convictions and aren’t swayed, even by high financial incentives,” explains Christian Ruff. According to the neuroeconomist, this is a remarkable finding, since: “In principle, it’s also conceivable that people are intuitively guided by financial interests and only take the altruistic path as a result of their deliberations.”
Brain region mediates conflicts
Although people’s decisions were more social when they thought that their actions were being watched, this behavior was not affected by electromagnetic stimulation of the rTPJ. This means that considerations regarding one’s reputation are processed in a different area of the brain. In addition, the electromagnetic stimulation led to no difference in the general motivation to help. Therefore, the authors concluded that the rTPJ is not home to altruistic motives per se, but rather to the ability to trade off moral and material values.
Experimental set-up
In the experimental set-up, the participants received money and were then presented with the opportunity to donate a varying sum to a charitable cause, at a cost to themselves, or donate a sum to an organization that supports the use of firearms, in which case they were rewarded. Some of these decisions were taken while other participants were watching, whereas others were taken in secret.
The researchers then analyzed the decisions the participants took, determining the monetary thresholds at which the participants switched from altruistic to selfish behavior. They compared these findings in settings with and without magnetic stimulation of the rTPJ area.
Ignacio Obeso, Marius Moisa, Christian C Ruff, Jean-Claude Dreher. A causal role for right temporo-parietal junction in signaling moral conflict. eLife, 2018; 7 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.40671
“All money tends to corrupt, and absolute money corrupts absolutely. This is an ancient message. You can find it in the Bible (“the love of money is the root of all evil”), in the writings of ancient Greek philosophers and Renaissance moralists, and more recently in the Occupy movement that set up camp last year outside St Paul’s Cathedral. This Wednesday, the cathedral was packed for a rather more sedate explanation of the same ideas featuring the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel.
Sandel, currently plugging his new book What Money Can’t Buy, has been difficult to avoid in recent days. His central thesis is twofold. Firstly, when you put a price on something you alter its intrinsic properties, and this can be morally corrosive. Secondly, the past few decades have seen a market economy replaced by a “market society” in which “everything is up for sale”. Markets, he says, “are not neutral instruments, they crowd out values worth caring about” – values like altruism, human dignity and the common good. As a result we have seen a great hollowing-out of communality and public political discourse.
He asks such questions as: is it right to create a market in blood, rather than rely on altruistic donors? Should unhealthy people be given financial incentives to adopt healthier lifestyles? Should school pupils be “bribed” to read books or achieve higher marks? To all these questions Wednesday’s audience answered an emphatic “no”, which suggests that Sandel is, at least in terms of public opinion, pushing at an open door.
This may explain the tremendous popularity he now enjoys. (The Guardian described him the other day as “currently the most effective communicator of ideas in English” and suggested that his latest book “should be the bedside companion of every Miliband aide”.) The free market “experiment” of the past few decades has led to rising inequality and an economic disaster, the only beneficiaries of which would seem to be a handful of already wealthy bankers. We should not be surprised if Sandel’s deeply traditional complaints about the corrosive effect of money on the human soul find a ready echo, especially when voiced in a cathedral whose history and location give it a somewhat ambiguous relationship with wealth.
The idea that money has destroyed all vestige of civic virtue was hackneyed already in Roman times. For all Sandel’s current vogue on the progressive Left, his message is inherently a conservative one, in that it implicitly looks back to a Golden Age before money ruined everything. Another way of saying this is that there’s nothing new about the “market society”.
One of Sandel’s examples relates to privately-run prisons in California in which convicts with sufficient means can upgrade to a better cell. This was standard practice in 18th century London. Also popular in the 18th century was the “tontine”, a form of gambling in which a group of people pooled their resources and the last one left alive collected the jackpot: not too dissimilar, in essence, from the market in third-party life insurance that Sandel criticises today.
But then to talk about the 18th century is to realise just how much more thoroughgoing the marketisation of society used to be. From the horrors of the slave-trade and the near-slavery of indentured labour, to the open purchase of Parliamentary seats through “rotten boroughs”, almost everything was up for sale. Commissions in the British army and civil service appointments were bought, rather than given on merit, well into the 19th century. What we think of as basic public services such as policing and the upkeep of roads were wholly private or at best put out to tender. And it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that prostitution in the 18th century was vastly more extensive and exploitative than anything seen today.
The present-day “market society”, for all its deficiencies, is a pale shadow of the ruthless and money-driven world of two or three centuries ago. Sandel is squeamish about students hiring out their foreheads to advertisers or paying homeless people to stand all day in queues so that a richer and busier person can get into Congressional hearings. There used to be an actual trade in human beings. Things aren’t likely to get that bad again, however badly things go in Greece.
At least when something has a price it shows that someone puts a value on it. Not charging for goods or services can lead to problems of a different order. The BBC’s Stephanie Flanders, taking part in the debate at St Paul’s, pointed out that in the age of the internet, many goods and services which would in the past have been paid for are available for free. The thought struck me that perhaps not charging for a service, or expecting things to be free, can be at least as morally corrupting of basic goods as Sandel believes money is.
If people expect to, and can, receive their news and entertainment for free, why should they pay for it? And how can the producers make an honest living? The Bank of England’s Andrew Bailey contends that free banking distorts the market, is less transparent and leads to poorer service to consumers. It is at least an arguable case. And as regards to “free” internet services like Google and Facebook, it has well been said that the non-paying users are not the customers, but are themselves the product.
Is money the source of the problems Sandel identifies, or rather a convenient scapegoat for human beings who can’t bear too much reality? You can’t buy a friend, he points out, because if you know you’ve paid someone to be nice to you it ceases to be a “real” friendship. Has he never noticed that rich people tend to have more “friends” than poor ones? Sandel also raised the example of a professionally written wedding speech. Would the bride and groom feel quite the same way, he wondered, if they knew that the best man had spent $150 dollars on buying a speech rather than investing his heart and soul by writing it personally? Perhaps not, but it’s not obvious to me why the payment of money in itself is corrupting.
The problem, surely – if there is a problem – is that the speech is not the best man’s own; not that he has paid for it. I rather doubt that the newlyweds would be happier to learn that the best man had found the speech on a website and simply downloaded it for free.
“Irvin Yalom (1980) “freedom: the responsibility and freedom to make our lives as we will, to be the sole authors of our lives, thus leaving us groundless with no one to determine our destiny but ourselves”
I believe the framework of “Freedom” being one of the four existential concerns of human existence is a good place to start.
Freedom in the context of Yalom’s definition may ultimately drive an individual toward existential isolation. Overall freedom is having the ability to be the director of our own lives and not be burdened by responsibilities, which dictate the actions we take in life. Typically people may have freedom from various aspects of their life. For example a lottery winner who quits their job may have financial freedom, but family responsibilities remain and as such they lack freedom from family. I don’t know if total freedom ever exists. With freedom from most conceivable factors in life we are, as Yalom states, left with ‘no one to determine or destiny but ourselves.’ I actually don’t know if the average person could handle being truly responsible for and therefore held accountable for each and every decision / action in their life. Which makes me think that perhaps a form of freedom is taking responsibility for your actions and holding yourself accountable, regardless of the outcome. This approach would allow you to still live a grounded, socially connected life (free from isolation) while having a sense of freedom. Knowing that your choices and the outcome were ultimately under your control. As Viktor E. Frankl says: ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Recent Comments