Class as a Metaphor for Race

I have just begun reading Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel. I didn’t know what it was about particularly only that several people have recommended it to me including my favorite graduate school professor. I thought it was a book about the players of western imperialism. It isn’t.

Diamond’s main argument is in contrast to the conclusion some have drawn that progress, by that I think he means technology and “civilization,” and in conjunction with that, wealth, has been duly distributed in the course of human history because some races (whites for the most part) are more capable or intelligent. Diamond believes that instead progress or lack of progress is determined not by the intellectual or physical makeup of race but by geographical differences in space, continental logistics (i.e. the landmass being north/south as opposed to east/west), and the availability of crops and livestock.

I am very, very late to the punch here as this book was published some time ago but so far, after reading the introduction and a chapter on Africa, I think it is articulate, astute and plausible. Yet, even haven read so little, I am bothered by a few gaps in the line of reasoning of this argument.

Don’t get me wrong, I fundamentally believe there is equal possibility of intelligence and capability in all human races and this is a rational assumption. I am sure there is a lot of truth to Diamond’s conjecture. However, I am not sure that we can assume that differences in the ways civilization is developed or not developed can be solely rooted in geography.

I should also mention that the difficulty in postulating theories within social science is that it’s hard to prove them with the evidence available, the evidence being generally archeological – bones, DNA studies, artifacts- but also perhaps including sociological/psychological research based in trial studies and interviews and written and oral history. A theory of social science really has to be strung together with all these elements and that is what Diamond has done. But it’s not like proving theories in physical science where you can have concrete mathematical equations and chemical reactions.

One particular metaphor came to mind when I was trying to figure out in my own mind reasons why I am not completely copasetic with Diamond’s argument. Within my own race, that is the WASP, but also including other groups of Europeans deemed white, we have further divisions within the class structure. I am white, but I am positioned within a certain class, middle class, defined mainly by my family of origin but also by my level of education and my function in society, namely that I am a white-collar worker.

Class has become a bit muddled of late, the last three or four decades I’d say. For instance, the benefits belonging to middle class in particular, the outcome of post-WWII wealth and abundance in the West and creation of public institutions among other things, are now widely available to members of all classes deemed “beneath” middle-class. Post-secondary education is possible to a person of any class as long as they have the grades and motivation. I suppose you could argue that class level in this case does limit the number of those enrolling in college; elementary and secondary education may have been unexceptional, leading to poor grades and test scores. But admittedly, this is America, and even with a GED, a person can enroll in community college. Furthermore, many people are able to climb up the class ladder without a four year college education and become white-collar and/or middle-class and upper-class. I have a friend with an AA degree in court reporting, whose roots are blue-collar, who makes more money than any woman I know with college degrees and is now solidly middle class. How many major league sportsmen, models, rock stars, actor can you think of that lack education yet make an infinitisimal amount of money?

Material goods see no class barriers and neither do the consumer loans that support some of the more expensive items like cars and homes. Often times, blue collar workers, the “working” class, have higher annual salaries than do white-collar workers. It is no longer outlandish to say that a unioned fork-lift operator can make as much a psychologist, training for that particular job costing exponentially less.

In defining differences between class in this country, we can’t so much look to education or wealth, but we can look to class culture and the values belonging to each class, or at least the stereotypes widely associated with each class. For example, I live in a neighborhood mixed in race and class. I would define my husband and I as middle class, in the fashion of the WASP: we have a neat and orderly lawn, i.e. no abandoned cars, tires or junk, that surrounds a home we have a mortgage on. We are quiet and keep to ourselves, no blasting music or boisterous family gatherings. We are reserved in the way we dress, no multiple gold chains and tattoos. (as an aside, there does exist an artist/bohemian subclass). We are college educated and our speech leans towards the grammatically correct, no “ain’t”, no substitution of the word anything with the word “nothin.’” We both work or have worked in white-collar fields. Our lesbian neighbors across the way are like us and I can determine that they also are WASPs and middle class by observing the way they dress, their cars, their lifestyle, their visitors.

So if I apply this example as a metaphor to race and how race is connected to wealth and progress, i.e., then I have to conclude that a race that is considered to be less sophisticated (white trash), less articulate, less aware and dependent on social decorum and rules, is not excluded from abundance. Therefore, if they are prohibited from acquiring the means by which to accrue wealth, it is not because they are not able. It is due to means out of their control, like climate and location. This is pretty much in line with Jared Diamond’s theory about race and wealth differentials.

However, this does not speak to what we define in human beings as intelligence and intellectual capacity and we are certainly not considering definitions of success and the influence of how we perceive the development of civilization. This is another can of worms entirely. For while my friend the court reporter is wealthier than me, I am more intellectual, and arguably, smarter. I require more in terms of intellectual stimulation in a job and in terms of what I do in my free time. I grasp concepts and ideas more readily than she does. So if we further apply my class metaphor, we could say that one race have the capacity to be wealthier than another race, but they may not be smarter. Their capacity for technology may not be as great.

Crazy is the new normal

I just don't know how poetic I can be about this, but it's just seems that as of late - i.e. the past few years - crazy, or for that matter underage and pregnant, among celebrities is tenderly overlooked, smoothed out onto the palate of reality like peanut butter on toast.

Michael Jackon. I am very sorry to see anyone die prematurely, make no mistake. But honestly, the guy was freak-kay. Who looks like that, the monstrous white flesh, the carved away face. Yet, millions of fans mourn and I guess they've found his so-called killer (Does the fact that he was a full blown drug addict mean anything to anyone? I guess from now on, we can blame the dealer, very conveinent, maybe I should start smoking crack). He may never have molested children but it seems more than coincidential that he was tried twice for this crime.

The truth was that Jackson had ceased to be a functioning rational adult a long time ago, or may actually never have acheived that. For one reason or the other, he was mentally messed up, addicted, crazy. But instead of pulling for tough love and being honest about his behavior, the world at large, the masses, the media, refuse to see him in that light, refuse to hold him accountable.

There are others: Britney Spears, Whitney Houston - all but forgiven for crazy, Liz Taylor, and the most henious of course is OJ Simpson. He's in jail now, so that's good, I guess.

I think we can blame to some extent the whole celebrity culture; we put them on pedastals, draining them of talent and privacy, pumping them with adoration and cash which their acutely narcissitic personalities subsist on. On some basic level they themselves are banal, and they know it, but the clothes, shoes, glitter, bling, clout disguise this.

It's tragic really. Our country was created out of a desperate need to throw of the cloak of monarchy and its oppression and disregard for individual rights, the ideas of enlightment a triumph over medieval monotony. Yet, over two hundred years after the Declaration of Independence is written, we find that the body of banality rejected so long ago is recreated in the form of celebrity. Maybe human beings need that vehicle of metaphor, that is celebrity.

The Reitterative Flesh

My husband, the scientist, does not believe in reincarnation, you know, the believe that our souls inhabit other bodies before and after (or either/or) our existances in our present mortal forms. I can't say I believe in it per say, can't say I don't either, but I have always thought the idea intriging and have imagined what my own past lives might have been like even if it is all total fancy which it probably is.

I need to pause and say this: My husband, the non-believer, does vehemently defend the existance of Bigfoot or Saskwatch, Chupacabra and the Lockness Monster. But mostly Bigfoot. I do not dare interupt him when he's watching a show on the History channel or Discovery about the lastest cryptozoological findings on the man-ape.

The belief in and study of reincarnation is ages old. The Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, and other variations thereof - including Scientologists and Theosophists - all support the notion of reincarnation. So do a whole heck of a lot of New Age thinking type of folk. While the belief in reincarnation spreads wide, other world religions reject the idea. You might, if you look hard enough, interpret small portions of Islamic or Christain scripture of making mere refrences to such a concept. But for the most part, they are absent of such thought. However, extra-Talmudic Kabbalists and some orthodox Jews support the notion of reincarnation, calling it the gilgul. Some Islamic Sufi groups claim to find reference for reincarnation in the Quran.

From the movie, Kundun

I have friends that support a belief in reincarnation. They are not alone. Movies have been made (Dead Again with Kenneth Branagh, Birth with Nicole Kidman), songs written, books published, centered around the concept of reincarnation. Some people believe whole heartedly, while others flirt with the idea, fun but nothing to take seriously. Herman Hesse, 20th century German writer, said that reincarnation was "a mode of expression for stability in the midst of flux." I guess I rather side with him on this, besides being he is one of my favorite writers, it makes sense. Maybe it puts people at ease to consider reicarnation. After all, who doesn't want a second chance at life. Who doesn't want to have answers to the questions they have about themselves, their situation in life and of birth, their relationships and relations. And ultimately, we all retain questions about our own existence and experience that cannot be concretely explained. Why? Why? Why?

I read the book Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss. Weiss is a disguished psychiatrist who is now a popular writer and speaker on the subject of reicarnation. In his books, he details pyschotherapy sessions, mostly involving hypnosis, in which patients describe past lives. In Many Lives, Many Masters, he discusses the initial experience he has with a female patient that spurred his deep conviction that past lives are real. This patient named Catherine had reoccuring nightmares and anxiety attacks. Through hypnosis, after describing all her childhood experiences that she could remember to age three, she began recounting memories that occured before her birth; in other words, her other lives. The book, and its stories, are compelling.

Weiss isn't the only so-called social scientist to research and elucidate on reincarnation. Professor Ian Stephenson, author of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, spent decades researching subjects, documenting children's memories that corresponded with the actual details of the lives of persons already deceased.

What do I believe? Like I said I don't not believe in reincarnation, but I don't exactly believe in it. For now, I think it's fun. Given I have an active and colorful imagination, it's hard for me to give my ideas of what my past lives might have been much credence. I have imagined myself - these ideas derived mostly from dreams I've had - to have been a nomad boy in the Sinai Peninsula, a wife and mother in India with a sari and bangles, a banker in Colonial New York City, a captain in the British Navy. It's all good fun.

I did have a thought though. What if reincarnation wasn't reincarnation at all? Here's a theory: Our DNA carries memories, is imprinted with memories of our forefathers. Some of the life experience of others, others from possibly very long ago, are still caught somewhere in our genetic material. My decendents for the past few centuries were all Western and Central Europeans. But it's likely my decendents are decendents from elsewhere - the Middle East, the Asian Steppe, who knows - given transcontinental migration over the ages. Maybe some of the memories of human beings that came before me are immemorial, destined to wind themselves into my flesh by way of those tiny strands that make up my genetic substance.

Dispossession

I can't think of a clever title for this topic. Yet, I can say, my writing on this topic is prompted by the fact that I just finished the book "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert, a wildly popular book which I imagine is read heavily by women. Women my age probably (that's 26, if you have forgotten or thought it was older). Well, Gilbert spends a year traveling to Italy, India and then Bali after a painful, bitter divorce. In Italy she takes language classes and eats a lot, in India she goes to an Ashram, and in Bali she spends time with a medicine man and has an affair with a Brazilian expatriate.

The book's somewhat interesting but Gilbert comes off, in my eyes, as a flake. In fact, she pisses me off a bit because what she and the majority of us first-world liberal types usually do - albeit I've tried to be a little more conscientious - is blah blah blah about meditation and enlightenment and yoga, our connection to god and how we need to follow the example of those wonderfully devout Hindus and Zen Buddhists and all that. Meanwhile, all the meanwhile, forgotting that this line of thinking is a privilege of our origin of wealth, that it is a product of wealth, and that in India, China, Nepal, Burma, the "enlightened" Buddha/Upanishads led crowd subscribe to cruel caste systems, and often their people are deluged by poverty and violence, a direct result of our 20th century colonization and 21st century globalization that inform this system.


I am a believer, by all means, but the dispossession and displacement of self, of individual, group and national selves, simply relinquishes ownership in what is simultaneously beautiful and flawed: our skin, our culture, our past, our values, our religious and spiritual traditions. This is not to say we can not swim in other waters, so to speak, or even adopt them. But, be true.

How much does the past matter?

Being a perfectionist, I want everything as squared away as possible - bed made, bills paid, teeth brushed - even my past. Well, I wish I could square it away. The blunt truth is, as it is for everyone else on the planet, as interesting as I would like to think my past is - you know, travel, friends, adventures - it is marked by misteps, ackward pauses, and a few tumbles. I've also had plenty of good times, good memories and successes too, thankfully.

The past manifests in different forms and on different levels of course. First, there is our ancestoral past - our hopefully proud heritage. I am descended mostly from German and Irish immigrants with a tiny dash of Dutch, French, English, and Scottish. Pretty much sterotypical anglo-saxon. Literally: my grandfather is a quarter Saxon, being his great-grandfather was from the Harz Mountains in what is known as the state of Saxon-Anhalt in Germany.

My great-grandmother in wedding gown

Inside the context of graduate studies, the ancestoral/historical past is part of what is sometimes called "memory" studies. People are obviously attached to their own social history because it forms part of their personal idenity, it provides safety in its abilty to define oneself. It is useful.

But the past that presents more of a problem for me is that of my personal history. I tend to cling to memories especially the negative ones. It's like a mini Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome except that many of the events or experiences I remember, the one coupled with negative emotions like anger, sadness, embarrassment aren't really that traumatic in their true context. This leads me to believe that clinging to these memories represent more of a need of mine to "clean up" because I love to do so reather than the intrinstic pertinence, big picture speaking, of the memory.

It doesn't help that western culture, and really most cultures, documents its past so throroughly and revisits it so often and with such vigor. Mostly, in the context of the arts (i.e. movies, visual art, literature, theatre, etc...), the past is more than naught an apparatus for framing a more contemporary issue. A good example is the book "Atonement" by Ian McKewen. The book/movie takes place in the 1930s both before and during WW II with the last chapter taken place in the 90s or thereabouts. But the book isn't about WW II. It's about finding redemption, but also poses grand questions about the substance of children, the role of social dictates. In other contexts, the fixation on history present in Western Culture in its social sciences, in journalism, and in the arts, really is a reguritation of events that were pivotal, profoundly meanful, that need to be revisited in order for our collective psyches to deal with what had happened once ago, to prevent it from happening again.

Atonement, wartime scene

But the societal past, or the ancestoral past, perhaps has a different signigicance to individuals than does an individual's own past. I think our personal memories manifest in as many occassions or in as many ways as are fit with our individual characters, i.e, a happy-go-lucky person touches on sad memories very rarely whereas a melancholy person touches on them quite a bit; this is because a melancholy person needs melancholy substance on which to subsist. Sometimes, I recall a bittersweet memory because something I have seen has triggered the memory, and being sensitive, I may remember the emotional context of the memory more acutely. Other times, I think that more negative events in my past have just forged a deeper groove than then more postive ones, but I also recognize that I have a compulsion to tidy every thing up, even my past, and that I am often too hard on myself, even in terms of the past. It's only now, that I've gotten older, do I more clearly recognize that no one is immune from an imperfect past. No one.

Its Me or The Dog: Anarchism versus civilization

The liberty of man consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of nature because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.- Mikail Bakunin, anarchist

I like to compare things. So I have decided that every week, at least once, I shall contemplate and compare two things: two concepts, issues, places, persons, whatever.This exercise I will call “Its me or the dog.”

Lets start with something serious, a perplexing comparison based on notions that I bounced around my mind from time to time, in part, thanks to Powell M Trusler, hubby extraordinaire. That is, anarchism versus civilization, or nation state society.

Look around you. The world, apparently, is going to hell in a hand basket. The World Wildlife Fund announced recently that wildlife has decreased 27% since 1970. Whatever that means. The icebergs are melting. Gas costs close to $4.00 a gallon. Earthquakes in china, you get the picture. If government is so great, if the collective of nation-states if something desired, if necessary, then how is it that the condition of our planet and everything in it seems to be decaying? Is it the natural consequence of human existence? Are we like the dinosaurs, a mortal experiment destined to fail, and leave in our wake a liberated planet naturally replenished via our demise?


It is possible, that in creating an economic system and collective of nation-states, we have built a macro-structure of society that in all its intended good, simply diverts us from natural design (assuming there is one using evolutionist or creationist theory). In fact, we tend to divorce ourselves from a design that limits population growth and depend on development and existence of artificial substances or use of natural substances in an unnatural way, a design that protects the delicate balance of beings on the planet. It is possible that our society has done as much damage as it has done good.

I am assuming that the flaws inherent in society have a direct correlation to the consequences of human society, its civilizations. I am also assuming that an absence of human society would occlude certain present problems mentioned above. But I say this theoretically. Theoretically, anarchism would most likely mean the development of communes, or communal society, small bands of like people who live together and create micro-societies, the assumption being that a greater government would not exist. It would also mean, that like students in a classroom, some communes would progress more quickly and function more effectively than other. Some communes would have certain collective and inherent talents that others would lack. Inevitably, acute disparities would arise between communes in terms of quality of life, medical care, education, and subsistence (one could argue this already exists in such places as South Africa or Brazil). Those in need would either depend solely on the structure of their own group or on the charity of another (again, not so much different than it is now). But, it is possible that through the omission of macro-societies and the creation of communes or mini-societies, we as human beings might parallel a natural design, a far superior administrator of the planet and all its elements. See Mikhail Bakunin


However, this is all theory. I am a privileged person. I live in a first world country, a civilization/society, in which I am able to sustain myself well, and so far, I am able to take care of all my needs, despite any bumps in the road. I would hesitate to so quickly dismiss my circumstances that were had through such a country and its government. My ancestors fled corrupt systems, imprisoning systems, that prevented them from pursuing life, liberty and happiness. This a good thing despite everyone’s incessant complaining, America, a country of whiners. I rather enjoy paved roads and stop lights and laws regarding personal property and protection from crime. I take for granted the freedom I have had so far in expressing myself, in pursuing my goals, in getting an education. In fact, despite the existence of western civilization all of these centuries, it wasn’t until recently that women were able to have lives outside of marriage and family. They weren’t allowed to own property, to inherit money, go to school, etc… I’m not one to complain. However…well, let me use a reference from those great America icons from Star Trek:

Spock: The needs of the many... outweigh -
Kirk: The needs of the few.
Spock: Or the one.
The Wrath of Khan

The thing is, despite all these privileges that I myself have enjoyed via civilization, isn’t it better that the planet survive despite human beings? Again, assuming civilization has, depite its intented good and its good products, introduced the aforesaid modern problems and crises. Are these socities such a good thing, on the whole? Well, its food for thought. Anarchy or civilization.

Long time no talky

Hi everyone, well more like no one since I am pretty sure no one reads this blog but who cares! Anyway, just today, I am blogging because I want to keep in my heart and mind some peeps and some issues that seem to hang on me today:

I really pray for all the people in Sichuan China who have lost people in the Earthquake or who are still in danger. I can't imagine all the pain and suffering some of those people are going through. I also pray for the people in Myanmar who are struggling to survive.

Primary school students hold a candlelight vigil for the earthquake victims in southwest China.








This might be kinda of random, but I always think about Americans abroad who are in trouble. Like the soldiers in Iraq but also Americans in trouble, like Amanda Knox, who is an Italian jail for murder that she most likely didn't commit. I can't imagine being in that situation. Or Americans in foreign prisons anywhere. Or Lori Berenson who is in prison in Peru. I can't imagine that sort of life.

Anyway, as for myself, I pray I just learn to chill out and take life one day at a time, to count my blessings and be grateful for what I have, my wonderful family, and my friends, my health, and the fact that I've never gone hungry, not a day in my life, and that I have always had good medical care. :)H

Here a link for info about Lori Berenson. She may well be a terrorist for the Shining Path but the point is, no due process:

Free Lori