Uncle Racist
In fact, deep disagreements with close friends or co-workers go all the way back in the history of the United States—to the point of ending long time friendships and even leading to infamous duels (stage left enters Jefferson and Adams, stage right enters Hamilton and Burr). Joseph Ellis has poignantly written about such episodes in Founding Brothers. Ellis’s argument: the political figures of the Post-Revolutionary Era all disagreed, but not on the fundamentals of what was to become of the experimental Republic—with exception of Burr, who was a self-seeking traitor in Hamilton’s eye (Ellis, 2000).
However, the “brother vs. brother" examples in American Civil War history should still be important examples to consider, but probably remain outliers in the long view of the biological/social evolution of family/kin violence—mainly since the divisions causing the American Civil War were bound up politically, geographically, culturally, and ideologically. And yes, that was all caused by slavery.
If the "brother v. brother" examples were found in KY, TN, or places where the North/South line got fuzzy, then it is interesting that they would have knowingly and intentionally shot at and tried to kill each other during battle. Good friends Armistead and Hancock famously fought against each other during Pickett’s Charge, unknowingly; but let’s set aside issues of duty and why officers fought. The broader point or question is when and how could someone want to totally disassociate with a good friend or family member, and these extreme cases, fight and die against each other in a political or ideological battle? Again, the historical record shows that most soldiers fought for honor and for “country”—but what of the two brothers who came from the same household? Did they, then, fight for something more ideological, moral, or the like? (People have used this historical point about what most soldiers fought for as evidence that the Civil War was not “about” slavery; but why soldiers fight is not a good historical analysis of why a war, or any conflict of an established, professional army, started in the first place).
Research on honor and violence in the South is particularly bountiful. Sapolsky summarizes the research excellently in his opus, Behave: “When coupled with lesser mobility in the South, honor in need of defense readily extends to family, clan, and place” (Sapolsky, 2017, 284). Moreover, he explains, “[The violence in the South] is disproportionately rural, among people who know each other, and concerns slights to honor (that sleazebag cousin thought it was okay to flirt with your wife at the family reunion, so you shot him)” (Ibid, 286-7). So cultural, biological, and historical explanations do help to unpack the extreme polarization and violence of the Civil War and modern domestic violence in the South; but how are we to understand our current national political polarization and emerging violence across the US?
Obviously the racial-structural inequalities in the US are super-explanatory in causing current social justice movements (and rightly so), but my question is still more normative and epistemological: why are Americans so polarized in their moral and political beliefs and what can we do about that? We can’t just write off clashes between BLM and Trump White Nationalists as “Oh, WN are just southern or rural “pastorialists” who value honor, authority, and social hierarchy (a la J. Haight’s Moral Intuitions), and BLM activists are just fighting for equality and value fairness and respect.” Though that psychological explanation has validity, I am worried that this kind of deterministic explanation is halting—we need a practical understanding of how belief systems are formed and that perpetuate our clashing commitments and convictions. Moreover, the very representations of polarization and violence may even fuel our beliefs of the reality of that polarization.
This question seems cinematic: would you be willing to fight and even kill a person close to you, a family member, for some deep moral commitment? What kind of commitment would that be if any? This is not so far fetched. Again, just think back to the antebellum and Civil War conflicts (e.g. John Brown, Bleeding Kansas). Moral Theory has a long history of discourse over such questions. The Civil Rights Movements acutely struggled with those questions. The import of a historical and normative analysis of Just War Theory and Social Change Theory could be very consequential to our understanding of dealing with our proverbial Racist Uncles writ large; but, my focus is more local: how do we change the minds of the people close to us (they are the ones voting in a certain way)? The issue comes down to specific people's beliefs, attitudes, commitments, and convictions.*
Firstly: “why do you care?” That old high school friend is a racist and a fascist pig—fuck them! I don’t ever see my cousin anyway, I’m going to call her out on Facebook and tell her to take that “all lives matter” shit and shove it.
Should I care that my family members or close friends are racist, or have totally “backwards” views politically, socially, philosophically? As a history and philosophy educator, I am still kind of shocked that multiple people on social media (relatives and strangers on threads) have totally false views about the nature of history and historiography. Lots of these personal connections, like a surgeon I used to go see, worried that students and society at large are not learning "basic facts”—this doctor was worried kids don’t know the date the Civil War started. (Make an argument as to why that matters; likely, it will be because some other skill is developed that has educational value, which is the operative question here: why do we value history education?) OK: The bigger worry are statements/memes that replicate the idea that the past just exists—like it is floating around in the statues and monuments and there are invisible facts that we just have direct access to. Seriously, I don’t think anyone would subscribe to that kind of ontology (what actually exists) of the past or present. Removing pieces of stone does not erase history, it is a social activity to negotiate social norms that perhaps will be codified into law.+
Another worry now is if these historically bad arguments are masking broader racist/anti-black statements. For example, one “argument’ on a recent thread discussion on the T. Roosevelt monument in NY tried to “remind” people that “slavery has existed forever, and that Africans enslaved people too before handing them off to the slave traders” (both claims are semantically false in the designator of 'slavery'; and it's just bad history—using a reified, monolithic, non-racial version of “slavery” to justify American Slavery: basically, "everybody does it, its not our fault").+ + It seems clear, to me at least, that racist ideas/beliefs/worldview can cause someone to interpret history in a racist way; but also that historical knowledge (or lack of) causes and is used to affirm racist viewpoints.
Kendi has argued that we have to engage with people in our social circles: “Who else is going to usher our relatives out of the reality show and back into reality? Relatives are best positioned to be these ushers. All this avoiding and attacking our relatives, and self-censoring around our relatives, ensures that our families remain as divided as our society.” He goes on to argue that we should not attack them, but listen and engage with them at their level—to dialogue with them, which I agree, especially since my focus and practice is on dialogic eduction. However, it is a different question to suggest you should be more trying in bringing your family members “back to the light” instead of complete strangers. I think Kendi’s point is to suggest that if we don’t fight for our family members, then society at large is lost, since how are we going to really fight for strangers if we don’t even fight for our “DNA circle?”
The problem in the pandemic is the absence of presence with our extended family members. So during the crucial time of social and political turbulence, change and opportunity, many are out on the streets protesting using the force of numbers and other complex social strategies, but most of us when it comes to direct "contact" with others are just engaging on social media. Social media, though, creates the opposite of meaningful-Socratic dialogue that Kendi is perhaps hoping for. (Kendi's most recent cover story explains that we are in the midst of an ant-racist revolution. I am still thinking about the "hold-overs," how can we bring them into the "light" of anti-racism?)
These “arguments” on social media have not gone so well. This is my central worry. Political and historical misinformation, disinformation, Frankfurtian Bullshit, and just bad expressionism and arguments, do not create common understanding. Though I still think dialogue is critical. M.P. Lynch has recently stressed this point as well: “We can learn from talking with others even when we don’t end up agreeing with them…we might come to know at least what view not to hold…we often learn what we believe ourselves…but something else also happens: we sometimes don’t discover but create convictions with in conversations with others” (Lynch, 2020, 144-45).
Lynch also diagnoses, correctly, the problem with social media discourse: it is the “outrage factory... for digital platforms are intentionally designed to convey emotional sentiment—because the designers of those platforms know that such sentiment is what increases reshares and ups the amount of attention a particular post gets…whatever does that makes money” (Ibid, 45-6).
So the challenge: Can we engage with each other through real dialogue in our COVID-19, Election Year, Virtual world? How are we going to do this? Is it everyone's responsibility? (Again, I am not criticizing the need for activism, protesting, getting-out-the-vote, etc; I just want to know: where are we going to talk?)
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*An Outline of Lynch's (2020) argument from his new book is warranted here: Many of us, rightly, may feel uncomfortable about changing our minds about something that matters to us.
Wittgenstein (a very famous Philosopher who was the one who said language is a game), in his book/last notes On Certainty, says that there are always beliefs that eventually become groundless - but, at the same time become the bed-rock in which all other reasons for believing something Hinge on, like a door hinge (otherwise, what reasons would we have to believe anything if the beliefs don’t hinge on anything - there must be prior beliefs to believe in something else). For example, if I believe that the teacher smacked my hand with a ruler, I have to believe that I actually have hands!!
This leads to the classic problem in philosophy of what is called Skepticism: How do I really know that I have hands? I could be in the Matrix, or just a floating Brain in a Vat with electrodes attached to a computer giving me (my brain) all the right sensory input to make it seem like I see and feel my hands. But wait: we know that we are not just brains in a vat because we can verify in some way that we are not a brain in a vat? How? The very tools we have, sense perception, to check and verify the external world are the very things that are being tricked!
So Wittgenstein says that, really, our real beliefs about the world may remain logically and empirically “groundless”: there is never a kind of philosophical certainty that we have “real” hands. But we do it anyway, since we could not live our life without it. Most people who go around saying “It’s all a simulation!!!” and really believe it are “insane.” Many “common sense” philosophers would even argue that to claim “We don’t have hands because of a Simulation” would be the claim that, itself, needs justification: “How do you know we are in a Simulation?” (We can rule out "far away" possible worlds like these, it's the "close" ones like Dream Skepticism that worry some philosophers (See Sosa, 2017).
The problem of Skepticism is for us all to grapple with, we all have to at some point, right? The point Lynch wants to stress is that ordinary beliefs and commitments like we have hands usually don’t worry people in everyday life. The real beliefs and commitments we have that guide our life are the ones that we are certain about (that is, they feel certain), but we are aware that those convictions can be doubted and challenged by others.
However, like the mundane belief of having hands, our convictions about faith, morality, politics, and values are necessary for us to have a way of life: they guide our future beliefs and actions in the ways that really matter.
These Hinge Commitments, then, are necessary but problematic: they are tied to who we are, our Self-identity.
“This way of conceiving of self-identity helps us understand the nature of conviction. Convictions are those emotionally laden commitments that have become so woven into our self-narrative that they have become part of our self-identity” (Lynch, p, 59).
Thought Experiment: Would you take a million dollars or more for a “conviction transplant?” Three of your deepest convictions would be “implanted” with the opposite belief: e.g. if you are an anti-racist, you might be implanted with a racist conviction scheme.
You probably would not: this tells us that our convictions signify to ourselves what kind of person we aspire to be. (Ibid, 59)
But how do ordinary beliefs that could perhaps be easily corrected (like when I realize, I was totally wrong about who was the killer on Law and Order) turn into unquestionable convictions?
Convictions are commitments to what matters to us; they concern our values. So when matters of fact become morally entangled, they aren’t just true or false in whatever the evidence reveals, they MUST or SHOULD be true or false. This can help explain why people treat the very same evidence, as either “obviously” true or false. (Climate Change MUST be a hoax, Trump MUST have personally conspired with Putin, etc.)(Ibid, 69).
Therefore, this also explains why challenges to your beliefs (primary convictions) can seem like an affront: you take such challenges personally, and it is a challenge to who you are.
+Philosophy of History alert!: Can we say that the past does not exist? It did exist, but how do we meaningfully refer to historical events? Couldn't we say that in the larger temporal order of the universe that simultaneity and before/after locutions are meaningless anyway with Special Relativity? No: that refers to comparing objects/events in relative inertial frames of space-time: you can't say "oh, I picked up my pencil and then dropped it, sooo, I have to say they (picking and dropping) didn't causally happen before and after." Silly.
Also, Philosophy of Law alert!: Can the normativity of law be reduced to the social facts of human activities like playing with rocks?
+ +Revolutionary Era Americans would use this very notion of Whig history to defend slavery: “Hey, it’s not our fault, the British made us do it, now we would starve if we didn’t have slaves”—Jefferson in the original draft of the DOI even says roughly this, though that part was taken out by Congress.
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Ellis, J. (2000). Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. Vintage Books: New York.
Lynch, M.P. (2020) Know-It-All Society: Truth and Arrogance in Political Culture. Liverlight: New York.
Saplosky, R.M. (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst. Penguin: New York.
Sosa, E. (2017). Epistemology. Princeton University Press: Princeton.
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