“Check Your Privilege” is a White Supremacist Statement

              “Check your privilege”  is a phrase parts of the left use to point out that someone is being arrogant or making assumptions about a minority issue or a minority person’s situation without having considered it fully or without knowing all the details. It is also used object to any white person disagreeing with leftist orthodoxy and disqualify their right to have an opinion. Or in an attempt to silence any white person complaining about their problems in a way that competes with minorities telling their sob story.

           The idea is that a white person will not have scars on their psyche from having experienced discrimination or fear of discriminate at an early age. A white person will develop confidence and resilience from knowing that they fit in and that they will be likely to be given the benefit of the doubt in dicey situations. You can sort of see how a specific background experience applied to a specific situation could give someone an advantage you could call “privilege”

           But the way this “privilege” concept is used it applies globally to the person. In an essay foundational to the topic Peggy McIntosh says “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.” … “such privilege simply converse dominance because of one’s race or sex” ... “unearned power conferred systematically.”When the concept is applied in actual conversation, it is even treated as attaching to the fact of a racial makeup rather than specific life experiences. It is treated as incommensurate with any other sort of advantage or power so that a minority person could never have something to match that “privilege” no matter how hard they tried. It is treated as ineradicable, as inalienable, so that the white person always automatically has this extra power that gives them an advantage in any project they undertake.

           This usage of “privilege” is often seen in academia and similar areas where the main goal is to evaluate fairly. But they seem to being failing to correctly evaluate how this translates into an arena where what is most important goal is getting things done, including things that may be very hard. In many cases narrative about how hard the department tried is going to be totally ignored in favor of asking “Did you get results or not?” In those cases the doctrine of “privilege” would mean the only rational choice for manager would be to hire white people for all the critical positions while disguising the non-critical responsibilities of minority hires with deceptive job titles and descriptions so they don’t get caught and punished. After all, if their livelihood is on the line, wouldn’t they choose to play on the easy setting as much as possible?

           “Check your privilege” proclaims that if you are white you are elevated by your very birth. It lets a white man show magnanimous humility and willingness to sympathize with the less fortunate while slipping in the assumption that, if results Really matter in situation, then you should put him in charge. It’s basic assumption is that the most fundamental and far reaching thing about someone is the broad racial category into which that were born. It declares that white people will always be better able to handle things, just all around better at getting things accomplished, just based on their race. An this in plain not true. So I reject “check your privilege” utterly.

Fruits of Postmodernism

Take a look at this blog post I just saw on facebook. It’s a professor who has served on a jury and seen a poor black couple who don’t have a mental framework that allows them to interact successfully with the court system.

This is what post modernism does to it’s weakest. It degrades and humiliates those who can’t defend themselves against it.

This is the attitude I see demonstrated in this article:

    I have this system of civilization that uses knowable truth, and the justice of equality before the law, and respect for authority. I don’t believe in truth, or blind justice, or authority. Or at least I don’t think they are worth defending as true virtues. But the system works well enough, and we don’t have anything that might be better. So by pragmatism we keep using this system.

    I keep pushing buttons and pulling levers in this system even though they don’t have any real meaning for me. This works for me because my cultural programming tells me what buttons to push and what levers to pull, but I don’t believe in any overriding principle that distinguishes moves with an abstract value from the ones that are purely cultural. In fact it makes me feel uncomfortable and like I have to defend myself against a charge of insensitivity to even glancing mention the pattern behind which behaviors that are practically useful.

    So I’ll retreat from that uncomfortable feeling. I’ll keep promoting nihilistic epistemology and moral relativism in the name social justice and multiculturalism. I’ll let it flow down hill until it arrives, striped edifying allusions and cushioning academic detachment, among the poor and the socially disconnected.

    bounty from your champions on high: the process of taking the identity “helpless victim” labeled as empowerment; substituting faceless and undefeatable enemies for practical problems labeled as constructive action. pounding on the table without reference to either facts or law labeled as meaningful communication.

And when I see the poisoned lives and blighted hopes. I’ll recognize that all post modernism has to say is tut-tut, so sad, not my job. And I’ll recognize the inadequacy, but I won't have anything else to offer.

Pounding on the table from Hucksters

I don’t know if the professor that wrote this particular blog post is personally postmodernist or just subconsciously infected by its meme floating around academia. And yes, I’ve pounded on that table a little myself here. But I do think there is a real fact at issue here. A philosophy that denies any legitimate judgment between different “ways of knowing” or different “ways of experiencing reality” is helpless to explain, and therefore can teach, why some stories must be both internally consistent and externally congruent with reality. When someone is caught by a fact check in a legal or professional situation, all postmodernists can do is shudder as the social solecism and turn their backs on the unfortunate faux pas. They can’t put up warning signs ahead of time. So to the extent postmodernism has infected our education system under the guise of cultural sensitivity, it is making social mobility very hard and causing the currently excluded a lot of pain.     

A can’t do much by myself but I can tell friends the truth rather than the common lies that make that make them feel good so that we can all feel good about each other. And I can recommend other to do the same, because a little honesty now could save a friend a lot of pain later.

Warm Fuzzies

When I was a girl I remember a Pioneer Girl lesson. First there was a  craft where we  were given some yarn. Some we turned into little pom-pom puffs called “warm fuzzies” and some we wrapped around sweetgum seed pods to make “cold pricklies” We all agreed that “warm fuzzies” were nicer to feel than “cold pricklies.” and were were told this was a demonstration of why it was better to love than hate.

Cold Pricklies

    I think I remember this because something always struck me as slightly off about this lesson, even beyond, whether human touch preference proves anything. It’s certainly not that I disagree that it is better to love than to hate. Nor do I quarrel with the need to teach little kids to be nice to each other. It’s that I don’t think you can equate the two lessons.

    The two types of balls are good examples of positive and negative social interactions. A social interaction where you feel accepted and connected, where you experience care you are looking for or the possibility of such care in the future, feels emotionally like a warm fuzzie feels to your fingers. And an interaction where you feel rejected, held apart, or have your ideas and identity poked at does have the same affect as a cold prickly.

    Love does often manifest in the type of affection warm fuzzies indicate, softness and comfort and making the other person feel good. We all want and need that manifestation of love. But we can get in trouble if we mistake that for all of love or even the central essence of love. Even a loving critique can feel more like a cold prickly if it pops a bubble of unjustified self-satisfaction. A child may experience being taken to the doctor’s for a shot as painful even as it is in fact very loving.

    You have an emotional need to be loved. The care you get from loved ones meets physical needs. But love is much more than the emotional high you get from cuddling. It is the knowledge of the intrinsic value of the beloved in the intellect of the lover. It is the settled expectation of abstractly good results in and from the beloved. It is a committed attitude by the lover to pursue the best interest of the beloved.  When you think of love as just the warm fuzzies not only are you missing the depth and richness of love but it can lead you to pursuing love in the wrong places and by the wrong means.

Warm Fuzzies

    It gets even more problematic when we get to the idea of unconditional love. This is often held up not just a theoretical ideal but as a real expectation in a family, a church or a community. It is often unacknowledged that unconditional love is a perfection and therefore no natural human is going to practice it completely or all the time. This issue is magnified when you start equating the subjective experience of warm fuzzies with receiving love. When I have a toothache or even when I’m just having a very bad day  the nicest expressions of care can irritate me and feel like poking. In times uncertainty and doubt we’re going to want a warm fuzzy and want one “now!” to prove that we’re loved. And we usually won’t get that feeling of soft emotional glow we think means love. And that in itself will be an additional hurt and disappointment.

    If we’re thinking of love as a good feeling available on demand we won’t ever know a permanent and reliable “love.” Love is such basic need in our lives, that we are cheating ourselves of something vital if we are only chasing warm fuzzies.

Whom are we Arguing with?

The one response I got to last week’s post included regretful note that these basics are seldom followed in our public discourse. So this week I want to look at some things that might push us away from good enthymemes and picking the correct stasis

So why do we so often use bad enthymeme? I think in our heart of hearts we are not really focused on the audience we claim to be addressing.

image by Adrian Jack Busby via Flicker

I first thought about this in the context of presidential debates. There it is very clear that it is not the point to try to change the minds of your opponents in the debate. (In fact it might be counter productive as one of the things you want is to show the difference between you and other candidates to the audience.) So while you may be responding to another candidate you are are obviously trying to persuade, not them, but the audience.

Even in this context, where I can see intellectually that it makes sense, the pseudo direction of the comments makes me cringe. And the same thing happens in any context where a discussion is taking place in public. The greater numbers entice you to move your persuasive skills away from the nominal interlocutor and onto the general audience that may be overhearing this.

Now the general audience actually contains many different kinds of people. Of course it contains people who have considered the issue and disagree with you. You might think these would be the people you would automatically focus on. But converting these people will be long, hard work.

Confirmation Bias and Enthymeme Mistakes

Confirmation bias is the human tendency to notice evidence that confirms what we already believe and to not pay attention to data that doesn’t fit into our preconceived notions. I’ve seen mention of this and accounts of research showing it often. But I haven’t noticed any research that address distinguishing between distaste for a contrary view per se, and distaste for arguments that had a bad enthymeme or a bad stasis.  

Image by Derrick Tyson

The assumption seems to be that any tuning out of contrary arguments is purely the result of natural resistance to the idea that you are wrong, ignoring the fact that some contrary arguments might be might be dismissed as irrelevant not because of their content but because of their framing. But it is important to consider there are two types of framing problems that could contribute to argument being tuned out: arguing about the wrong thing,wrong stasis, or starting the argument at the wrong entry point, wrong enthymeme.

    First let’s take stasis, which exact facet of the issue in question you address your argument to, usually divided into 4 possibilities. Stasis can be in fact “I didn’t steal your car, I never touched your car”, in definition “I didn’t steal your car, I borrowed it”, in quality, “I had to use your car to take grandma to the emergency room, she might have died.” or in procedure “car theft is a matter for the courts, you shouldn’t be pursuing this argument yourself but should leave it to the proper authorities..” A 5 minute harang focused on the physical evidence of my having taken to car is going to turn me off if my difference of belief is actually a statis in definition or quality, Likewise it would be offensive to hear a well reasoned argument about how what I did was wrong if I know you have the fact of what I did wrong.

Second let’s look at where you start your argument, the enthymeme. Enthymemes are the unstated parts of an argument, in a specific sense they are unstated constituents of syllogisms. In the broadest sense they are propositions commonly agreed on by everyone involved before the argument starts. They seem so obvious that they don’t need to be stated. In fact not stating them produces a sense of community and encourages people to engage in the conversation. But in any case you have to pick some point to start your argument at and whatever logically proceeds that point is your enthymeme.

Here’s a very simplified example of enthymemes and how they can go wrong:

Low interest rates always have a potential to produce high inflation. Therefore, the Federal Reserve must always reserve the option of raising interest rates if high inflation seem imminent.

If you look at this as a syllogism you will see it is missing a premise. What premise is need to make this a valid argument? “High inflation must be avoided.” So that is the enthymeme. If that statement seems obvious and certain to you then the argument will seem cogent to you, even if you disagree with the conclusion. But if the enthymeme seems wrong or even just highly doubtful, the argument will seem to be missing the point, to be at least be not considering the situation fully.

I’m not saying that confirmation bias doesn’t exist or is not a major factor. But if you want to convince people to change deeply held beliefs all you can do about confirmation bias is rail impotently about it. But you can do something about choosing a good enthymeme and the correct stasis. And especially if already facing confirmation bias, neglecting to do so can doom your argument to failure. Blaming polarization and lack of consensus on confirmation bias put all the burden on people who are wrong. Which is a group people seldom identify themselves with. If there is something that people who are right should be doing we need to recognize that too.

So we need to ask ourselves: How much of our tuning out arguments we disagree with is simple confirmation bias and how much is arguments being irrelevant due to a badly chosen enthymeme or the wrong stasis being addressed?

The enemy of human

This line caught my eye in a blog I follow: “the “perfect” is the enemy of the good – it is the ENEMY of HUMAN” The point of the post, which I TOTALLY agree with, is that if you wait to share your writing, or other work, until it is perfect you will never get anywhere, so you have to find a reasonable standard of good enough for the purpose and except that.
    But the phrase quoted above resonated for me in a different way; it resonated with a conversation that has stuck in my mind from a dinner party. One of the guests was expressing his surprise when he had encountered the idea that actually seeing the face of God could be a deadly danger. I was surprised at his surprise. To me the intrinsic danger of the Almighty was a familiar bit of common knowledge as well as being straight forwardly logical.
    God is holy and righteous, the very essence of purity and truth. Humans are soo different from that. They aren’t just like oil to water, they are like metallic sodium to a limitless sea.

 

I guess some people’s intuition is that, since God is love, then being in contact with him couldn’t be harmful to us. Maybe they are anthropomorphizing God too much, thinking that He is  just like us but with neater toys.God is more like us then like anything else we have an experience of. But that reflects the limits of our experience and does not limit God.

But I also think there is also a misunderstanding of our state as humans at work here. The statements “I’m only human.” everybody makes mistakes.” and “Nobody is perfect.” are all well known and firmly established as truth. But have we really thought about what these really mean? and do we really believe it? Of course no human knows everything or able to do everything. But how much imperfection. I wouldn’t say that a cat’s inability to do long division was any bar to being a perfect example of a cat, nor would the the inability to fly faster than sound be a barrier to a hummingbird being a perfect hummingbird. So can those inabilities which are normal and even universal in our experience of humans prevent us from being perfect examples of what humans are supposed to be?

Maybe not our inability to break the sound barrier by flapping our arms, maybe not even the fact that we occasionally make a mistake when doing long division, those faults might be things that humans don’t need in order to be good humans. But what about being good itself? That seems to me to be a minimum precondition to being a good human. And we seem to have a much more intractable problem with being good then we do with long division.

This intractability is so uncomfortable that we modify our definition of good to get away from it. And when that doesn’t work we modify our definition of human, saying that the perfect human condition includes not being good. Then every once and awhile something comes along that reminds us how diametrically opposed to perfection the one type of humans we have ever encountered is. 
This huge gulf between us and perfection, this dreadful imbalance between us and what our own nature should be, might be depressing. But I find it a joy. It’s a relief to know that a wish for something better is not an insanity. There is a an alternative answer to “What are we?” that in much better. It is not only conceivable, it is correct, even if we haven’t experienced it yet.