Do you have any documentation of these averaged american beliefs of yours, that you want people to denounce before they are permitted to discuss whether AIDS is an attempt at genocide, if they are not to be not exactly racist?

Hitchens case isn’t exactly against religions, it’s against the benefit of doubt we all grant religious organizations and allegedly religious motivations. This safe space allows all sorts of detestable criminals,con-men, and, to be fair, some madmen, to flourish, who would last nearly so long outside that zone, whether it’s Cardinal Law getting kicked upstairs, Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, Pat Robertson or Prosperity Theology. We have a moral loophole when it comes to people claiming divine guidence. Like all loopholes, there’s a good reason it’s there: it’s part of what has made the american secular yet religious society possible. But some sort of reform is needed. I don’t think I mean legal reform, I just mean that we need to do a better job looking after each other, that the taboo about discussing religious beliefs is too strong.

That, anyway, is what I got of use out of Hitchen’s book. The trouble is that he’s professionally angry, and not actually interested in solving anything.

The other reason he’s easy to dismiss from a religious prespective is that his attempts at scriptural criticism are eye-rollingly bad. Christians have millenia of practice answering those attacks. He’s on much firmer ground when he sticks to the practical consequences.

i think people dismiss hitchens because, increacingly these days, the man is incoherent. often in his arguments, sometimes in his actual speech, when he’s appearing live. alcoholism is a miserable thing.

I have absolutely no documentation for my asserted average American belief; I intend it to be convincing if you, like me, have encountered it with depressing regularity in your experience. If not, you are welcome to deny the claim.

I must admit that I haven’t read Hitchens’s book; it didn’t strike me as particularly incisive stuff, and no one I knew was talking about it much. But I’ve seen Hitchens’s participation in a number of debates and conversations online, and am reacting to that. Your take on his agenda certainly seems interesting, if somewhat different from what I take him to have been saying publicly.

My remark about racism seems to have bridled you a bit; let me try to explain. My claim is that the belief I described about AIDS and drugs being a problem of poor individual choices is a white myth; a story created by myopic struggles with a different set (if ultimately similar) of problems. Their story—by and large, the 19th-century immigrant story—leads them to one kind of error. One that I assert has, in practical matters, done far more harm than Wright’s, if simply by virtue of its popularity.

That’s why I appreciated what I infer to be one of the main subtexts of Obama’s speech: sorry, folks, but you don’t realize how understandable this error is, this error of black paranoia. You don’t realize how similar it is to error from your own culture. We have to move past both of these.

Could you try to state the myth at greater length? Or, better, point to a mainstream expression of it? Is, say, Obama’s riff on parenting an example of it? I don’t see how a belief in ultimate personal responsibility is inconsistant with a realistic vision of the causes of poverty, unless it’s combined with some other assumptions.

I think my objection is to the form of argument you made. Why does X care about Y, when Z is far more important? They must not care about Z! It’s like blog commenters who want to get everyone screaming in unison about whatever the outrage of the day has been.

Sure: “Black people earned their freedom at the end of the Civil War. There were lingering forms of racism and so forth, but those were fully ended in the Civil Rights movement. As such, lingering issues with drug culture, crime, AIDS, out-of-wedlock children, and so forth really aren’t race issues. If there are more black people in prison (proportionally) than white people, that’s because more black people chose to commit crimes. Again, it’s not a racial issue. If you commit a crime, you go to jail.

“Solutions” like affirmative action are reprehensible because they’re discriminatory institutions just like the ones they’re supposedly against. They discriminate based on race and give one group an advantage over another.

People rise and fall based on their own decisions. We’ve removed the obstacles of racism; the lingering focus on it may be due, frankly, to a sense of entitlement or even laziness.”

How’s that? I worry about getting into too many specifics: that makes it, naturally, less generic. I don’t deny that there is an ultimate reality to individual responsibility: it’s impossible to describe individual experience without it. But I’m pretty uncertain about the usefulness of ever using it to describe groups.

Tim: In response to your second comment, I think that’s certainly a fair general criticism. I hope I wasn’t falling into that in this case, if only because it seems to me that there is a significant difference between the screaming outrage over Wright and the steady debate that goes on over comparable beliefs.

Wright is a demagogue, plain and simple. And I don’t think you’ve phrased the ‘white’ mythology fairly. It goes more like this:

“Hi. My name is Bob Jackson. I’m your typical, 25-year-old, white male living in suburban America. I was raised by parents who told me racism was bad. I went to a public school, where every week (or day) I was told racism was bad. In high school, I was taught at length about the terrible things white men did to black men. At church, I was told that Jesus preached tolerance and that the men who used the Bible to justify slavery/racism were wrong to do so. In college, I was taught more extensively, and with greater subtlety, how to detect racism, which was, as I knew quite well at this point, bad.

Then I went out into the work force, where there were government posters on the walls telling me that not only was racism ‘bad’, but actually illegal. I was forced, as a condition of employment, to attend regular ‘sensitivity’ classes that told me that racism was bad. The one guy in the class last year who asked a question challenging the assumptions of the class teachings was repremanded and made to suffer a period of social stigma in the workplace afterwards. It seems that he is not well viewed by his superiors since the incident, though I could be mistaken about the cause.

I try in my personal and social life to be as circumspect and considerate as possible, especially when in the presence of African Americans. Sometimes I find myself thinking racist thoughts, but I quickly feel guilty and usually repremand myself. In short, I feel like herculean efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to stamp out lingering racism in my own life and in the culture I have lived in.

Then I see a man on TV telling me that the reason black people practice unsafe sex, sell and use drugs, and commit acts of violence is that there is not only white-on-black racism running rampant throughout our country, but also a mad plot at the highest levels of goverment to commit genocide against blacks through some rather dramatic, if bizarre, means. I am insulted by this, not only because it minimizes the effort I have personally made to be better than my desires, but because it minimizes the huge sacrifices made on the part of my family, church, local community, and federal government to eradicate such racism.”

A shorter version might be this:

We are willing to grant that if a black man plays by all the rules and still fails, and furthermore that this is not exceptional but in fact the general rule, then we must admit that the issue goes beyond personal responsibility and that there may in fact be real, widespread racism at work.

But, then you must grant us the following: That if a black man plays by the rules and usually finds a measure of success, then perhaps the issue is not primarily one of racism.

When one compares the success of black parts of Atlanta to the rampant failure of most black parts of Los Angeles, are we seriously to entertain the notion that ‘white Georgia’ is less racist than ‘white California’? Or that the long arm of the genocidal Fed reaches to Compton, but not Atlanta? Or would it be manifestly more reasonable to assume that there exists a difference in attitude toward individual responsibility in these two regions?

dan:

there also exists, in your particular example, a considerable difference between the two locations, including the quality of the local police departments. the LAPD is notorious for corruption and racism, and has been for years, and still is.

Here’s this too: http://casje.muxtape.com.

For what it’s worth, though it may have more black millionaires than other American cities, Atlanta continues to find itself on “most dangerous cities” lists and by most reckonings has a high rate of poverty. (It’s also several times smaller than Los Angeles and is something like 60% black compared to L.A.’s something like 8%. This is all to say I’m not sure of the force of the comparison being made in Dan’s post.)

Also, I want to urge Dan’s hypothetical Bob Jackson to listen for Obama’s understanding and treatment of both black anger and white resentment. I want to acknowledge that he’s probably right about pervasive and overt white racism not being a problem in his community anymore, that a black family that has largely adopted the aesthetic and cultural and linguistic norms of the (mostly) white middle-class could very well settle in his neighborhood and face no racism at all; but I also want to urge him to understand that there are entire parallel communities that have little or — more often — no overlap with his own, and that face enormous and pervasive challenges, and against which the odds are heavily stacked. These communities may often be defined in rhetoric that is too heavily racialized since their position is more complex than a simple racial designation, but they nevertheless are profoundly racially homogeneous and they exist at the nexus of race and class and culture.

I’ll give an example of a single manifestation of a rigged game:
As a public school teacher in an “inner-city” school, I am often struck by how familiarly teenage many of my students are in their inclinations, and yet how differently they express them than I or most of my friends did at their age. For even working-class kids in the mostly white suburbs, the language most often used to express defiant independence and rebellious angst involves listening to angry music, doing funny things to your hair, and maybe experimenting with soft drugs. (Eight or ten years later, how many are having successful careers in graduate or professional schools?) You see basically the same kids in the ghetto, but they do it with criminal posturing and gun-play.

As Bob Jackson is surely aware, none of this follows from the actions of white racists in his community. But it does follow from a heavily racialized societal legacy, and though most of us alive today may be this legacy’s inheritors rather than its perpetrators, surely our society as a whole bears some moral accountability for its present stratification.

Muxtape, what a good idea. I’m quite taken with it. There’s lots of good stuff in these examples I would probably never get to hear if it weren’t for something like this. I’ve put up a random selection too if anyone’s interested.

http://kdd23.muxtape.com.

Kevin

Corrected URL.

http://kdd23.muxtape.com/

I posted a new mix at the posted link. I’ll do that steadily. I suppose the fanatics among us have the RSS feeds, so I won’t bump the thread but just this once just in case.

I made another one as well. Unfortunately, there aren’t any quick knacks for converting my cassette recordings of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton to include them in the poetry mix.

I clearly need to make a combined RSS feed of monadological mixes.

Also: Kevin, I can’t find that damn Michael Nyman tune on Amazon! And it’s been bloody stuck in my head for three days.

Try this

http://www.amazon.com/Zed-Two-Noughts-Original-Greenaway/dp/B000000I0B/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1208418602&sr=8-3

It’s part of the soundtrack CD for A Zed And Two Noughts, one of his sectional grid works. Great soundtrack, poor film. That and the soundtrack for Drowning by Numbers are essential Nyman.

An RSS feed would be something close to super.

Damn those long Amazon url’s. Sorry to muck up your webpage. I thought it would wrap. :{

Is there a feed of recent comments?

For you, Robbie, I have happily built one:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MonadologyCommentsFeed