The Weekly Sift making sense of the news one week at a time

A Short History of White Racism in the Two-Party System
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If you’ve seen the Lincoln movie, maybe you’re still walking around with this bit of cognitive dissonance[….]

The story is doubly worth telling because Republicans like Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg have been misrepresenting it so grossly.

A good place to start is the presidential election of 1860, which brings Lincoln to power and convinces Southern whites (the only people who can vote in the South in 1860) that secession is their best chance to maintain slavery*.

Lincoln gets only 40% of the vote, but in a four-way race (the Democratic Convention split over whether the platform should endorse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision) that’s enough to win. In terms of the popular vote, his closest competition is Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas (30%), but in electoral votes another Democrat, sitting Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky, finishes second with 72 EVs to Lincoln’s 180.

Douglas fails because he is a national candidate representing continued compromise over slavery, while Breckenridge and Lincoln are sectional candidates with clear pro- and anti-slavery positions. So Douglas gets 15% in Alabama (to Lincoln’s 0%) and 43% in Wisconsin (to Breckenridge’s 0.5%), but only manages to carry Missouri and New Jersey, giving him 12 EVs and fourth place behind John Bell’s 39.

During Reconstruction, Southern whites still blame Lincoln’s party for their humiliation in “the War of Northern Aggression“, but the new black vote makes Southern Republicans competitive — particularly in South Carolina, where blacks have long outnumbered whites. So the 1876 map looks like this:

But by 1896 the Jim Crow laws have disenfranchised Southern blacks, and Southern whites still remember how Lincoln destroyed their society, so Southern Republicans go extinct. Mississippi, for example, gives Democrat William Jennings Bryan a 91% majority. The 1896 map is almost a negative of the 2012 map — Democratic in the South and Mountain West, Republican in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West.

The “solid South” stays Democratic through 1944, when FDR carries Mississippi with 94% of the vote.

So until 1944, there is no doubt that the Democrats are the party of Jim Crow. National figures like FDR may not be actively racist — and blacks benefit from the general anti-poverty provisions of the New Deal — but Democrats are not going to rock the boat of Southern white supremacy. Republicans, on the other hand, have nothing to defend in the old Confederacy, so it costs them nothing to champion civil rights. Their 1944 platform does them credit:

Racial and Religious Intolerance

We unreservedly condemn the injection into American life of appeals to racial or religious prejudice.

We pledge an immediate Congressional inquiry to ascertain the extent to which mistreatment, segregation and discrimination against Negroes who are in our armed forces are impairing morale and efficiency, and the adoption of corrective legislation.

We pledge the establishment by Federal legislation of a permanent Fair Employment Practice Commission.

Anti-Poll Tax

The payment of any poll tax should not be a condition of voting in Federal elections and we favor immediate submission of a Constitutional amendment for its abolition.

Anti-Lynching

We favor legislation against lynching and pledge our sincere efforts in behalf of its early enactment.

But outside the South, Democrats are also changing. In 1941 Roosevelt bans racial discrimination in defense industries.

At the 1948 Democratic Convention, a young Hubert Humphrey leads a Northern liberal bloc that adds this Civil Rights plank to the platform:

We again state our belief that racial and religious minorities must have the right to live, the right to work, the right to vote, the full and equal protection of the laws, on a basis of equality with all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution.

We highly commend President Harry S. Truman for his courageous stand on the issue of civil rights.

We call upon the Congress to support our President in guaranteeing these basic and fundamental American Principles:

(1) the right of full and equal political participation;
(2) the right to equal opportunity of employment;
(3) the right of security of person;
(4) and the right of equal treatment in the service and defense of our nation.

Southern delegates respond by walking out of the convention and establishing the States’ Rights Democratic Party, a.k.a. the Dixiecrats, who nominate South Carolina’s Democratic Governor Strom Thurmond for president and endorse “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race”. In spite of later efforts to sugarcoat his memory, Thurmond is a racist running an openly racist campaign. He tells one rally:

There’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger** race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

After the Dixiecrat walkout, President Truman decides the die is cast and desegregates the military.

The 1948 electoral map looks like this:

So Democrats and Dixiecrats split the South, with still no Southern Republicans worth mentioning. Tom Dewey gets only 3% of the vote in Mississippi and 4% in South Carolina.

1948-1980 is a transitional period. On the state level, the South is still solidly Democratic. Republicans often don’t even bother to field candidates, as in Alabama in 1962, where George Wallace wins the governor’s race with 96% of the vote. (Wallace previously ran in 1958 with the endorsement of the NAACP and without support from the KKK. After losing the Democratic primary to a more openly racist candidate, he said, “I was out-niggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be out-niggered again.”)

The great civil rights face-offs of the 50s and 60s are between Southern Democratic governors and presidents of either party. In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sends troops to Little Rock when Democratic Governor Orval Faubus refuses to integrate Central High School. But Democratic President John Kennedy does exactly the same thing in 1962 when Democratic Governor Ross Barnett refuses to integrate the University of Mississippi, and in 1963 when Governor Wallace refuses to integrate the University of Alabama.

With Eisenhower’s invasion of Little Rock still rankling, 1960 is the second-to-last hurrah of the Democratic South. Putting Texan Lyndon Johnson on the ticket holds most of the South for Kennedy, but the Democrats’ hold is slipping: 15 Southern electoral votes go to Virginia Senator Harry Byrd, and Nixon is competitive in places Republicans never were before; he gets 49% in South Carolina, far more than Dewey’s 4% just three elections ago.

After JFK’s assassination, Johnson pushes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress with bipartisan support. 18 Southern Democrats and one Republican filibuster in the Senate — a rare occurrence in those days — but the bill ultimately passes with 46 Democratic votes and 27 Republicans. As he signs the bill, Johnson comments, “We have lost the South for a generation.“

But will the Republicans pick the South up, or will spurned Dixiecrats be a regional party whose support no one wants? Through the 60s, moderate Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney push to uphold the Lincoln-Dewey-Eisenhower civil-rights tradition and compete for black votes. But they lose. The 1964 Republican nominee against Johnson is Barry Goldwater, one of the few non-Southern senators who voted against the Civil Right Act.

Goldwater marks the beginning of I’m-not-a-racist-but Republicanism. His stated reasons for opposing the Civil Right bill have nothing to do with race. (He thought it was unconstitutional.) And the 1964 Republican platform stands by the Party’s pro-civil-rights record:

[W]e pledge: …

—full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen;

—improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times;

—such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote;

—immigration legislation seeking to re-unite families and continuation of the “Fair Share” Refugee Program;

—continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.

But it also gives white racists reason to hope.

[The Johnson] Administration has failed to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens. It has preferred, instead, divisive political proposals.

i.e. the Civil Rights Act and what becomes the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The platform also denounces ”inverse discrimination” and “the abandonment of neighborhood schools, for reasons of race”. So Goldwater is against a public school saying “no niggers”, but if a neighborhood (just by pure chance, of course) happens to be all-white, its all-white school is just fine. His party also pledges

to open avenues of peaceful progress in solving racial controversies while discouraging lawlessness and violence.

Note the change: Dewey was worried about lynchings — white-on-black violence. In 1964 lynching are still happening, the Watts riots are still in the future, and Martin Luther King’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience is being met with murders like the infamous Mississippi Burning case. But Goldwater’s platform lumps civil disobedience (“lawlessness”) together with “violence”, and pledges to “discourage” it.

So if you’re a Southern white supremacist who worries about civil rights agitators stirring up trouble in your town, Goldwater is your guy, just like he’s Strom Thurmond’s guy. Goldwater carries the South (and his home state of Arizona) as the rest of the country soundly rejects him.

Re-elected, LBJ passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, also with bipartisan support. LBJ addresses a joint session of Congress, in a speech that still makes me misty-eyed:

It is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Thurmond the Dixiecrat-turned-Republican is the only Republican senator who votes No. Republicans field a candidate for governor in South Carolina in 1966 for the first time since Reconstruction. He loses 58%-42%, but erosion of support for the national Democratic Party is reaching the state level.

Goldwater’s landslide loss hardly establishes a new normal for Republicans, who still flirt with Rockefeller and Romney before settling on Nixon, whose civil-rights position is fuzzy. While few Dixiecrats are ready to follow Thurmond into the new tribe of Southern Republicans, they also can’t vote for the hated Hubert Humphrey. So in 1968 they give the regional-party thing another try with George Wallace.

But Nixon understands that Republicans have to pick up what the Democrats have dropped. His “Southern Strategy” (with Thurmond’s endorsement) captures the upper South in 1968, which is his victory margin in a close election. His long-term vision is for Republicans to absorb the Wallace vote into an unbeatable conservative coalition that Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips calls The Emerging Republican Majority.

Phillips writes:

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

The Nixon re-election landslide of 1972 sweeps the South, but it’s hard to read much into that, since he takes every state but Massachusetts, and Georgia’s Jimmy Carter manages to pull the Democratic South together one last time in 1976.

But 1980 is the re-alignment election that has been brewing since 1964.

Ronald Reagan’s first speech as the Republican nominee is in the symbolic location of Neshoba County, Mississippi, site of the Mississippi Burning murders of 1964. So: symbolic time, symbolic place — what’s he say? Nothing about race at all. Just this:

I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

States rights, local control — just what Orval Faubus and Ross Barnett and George Wallace wanted when they refused to enforce federal court orders to integrate their schools. Just what Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t allow when they sent federal troops.

It’s the beginning of the dog-whistle era. After the election, Reagan strategist Lee Atwater lays it out:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, “forced busing”, “states’ rights”, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

So Reagan isn’t trying to “out-nigger” anybody, because people up North will hear him and think he’s evil. He’ll just say “states rights” — like Strom Thurmond and Jefferson Davis before him — and hope “Negrophobe whites” get the message that they are welcome in his coalition.

They get the message.

They get it not just nationally, but on the state level. Alabama and Georgia elect Republican senators for the first time since Reconstruction.

In case anybody has forgotten that message by 1988, George H. W. Bush reminds them: If you vote for Democrats, Willie Horton will rape your wife.

Locally, the transition from the “old comfortable arrangement” is gradual. Most Dixiecrat/Democrat politicians don’t follow Strom Thurmond’s path to the Republican Party, though during the 70s and 80s they often combine with Republicans in Congress to form the conservative majority Phillips predicted. But as they retire, they are replaced by Republicans like Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich. (Lott, interestingly, was endorsed for Congress by his retiring Democratic predecessor.)

The chart on the right shows a generational turnover, not a walk-out. Southern Democrats in Congress today tend to be blacks representing majority-black districts, like South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn.

Today, the old white Confederacy is solidly Republican. Nationally, Romney had a clear majority of white voters: 59%. But in Mississippi, a whopping 89% of whites voted for Romney.

How did he lock up the Mississippi white vote? Not by saying “nigger, nigger”. Republicans never did that, because they didn’t exist in Mississippi when that was a winning strategy. Instead, they are the party of traditional values in a state where “tradition” means the stars-and-bars and Colonel Reb. They are the party of property rights and business in a state where property and business overwhelmingly belong to whites. They are the party of small government in a state where only massive federal intervention gave blacks the right to vote or to attend the state university.

Republicans don’t have to say “nigger, nigger”. Everybody gets it. They aren’t the Racist Party, but they are the party where white racists are welcome, where “Barack the Magic Negro” is funny, and people email each other photos of Obama with a bone through his nose or put his image on fantasy food stamps with ribs and watermelon. Just as Republicans aren’t anti-Hispanic, they just think police should stop people who look like they might be illegal immigrants. They aren’t even anti-Muslim, they just don’t think freedom of religion includes the right to build a mosque.

That’s the Party of Lincoln today. And now you know how they got here.

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*A longstanding argument claims that secession was about “state’s rights” and not about slavery. Mostly you’ll hear this from people who have affection for the Confederacy but find slavery embarrassing. Actual Confederates did not suffer this embarrassment, and were very open about why they were seceding. South Carolina’s declaration of secession is clear:

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. … On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved.

** When this recording came up in a different context a few months ago, I gave Thurmond the benefit of the doubt, that he might have said “negro” very fast and slurred. You can listen and judge for yourself.

I have meant, for a while now, to get around to writing a post regarding my own political stances (in regards to government, it's place, political efficacy, etc. I think all here are well aware of my political stances in most social issues). I'm not certain it's solidified into anything new (hence requiring an entry of its own rather than simply providing other sources) but I may discover that more clearly by at least starting to write such a post.

In the meanwhile, here's an article. It takes a position a bit more Left than my own politics (hence I'm not providing it with the affirmation of agreement) but it's interesting for the way it fleshes out more aspects of the past (particularly American history) that aren't often covered in mainstream circles.

I actually find it far more lengthy than it had to be and a bit repetitive (though that might be because I was reading it for the sake of a tid-bit rather than rigorous academic proof…). Consider it a the-more-you-know-the-better-always-so-read-it-just-so-you-know-even-if-you-never-use-it-again moment of mine.

The magazine itself is interesting, though – once again – I find it more Left than my own politics. While that doesn't necessarily negate use – for anything (I am, after all, still subscribed to Red State though I often find myself screaming at my computer screen in anger while reading it) –, I find that it takes certain ideas for granted and works from them while I might question those very ideas. Still, it often falls into the category of analysis (rather than simple critic) so I come across interesting articles (like the below) more often than not.

 

Wage-Slavery and Republican Liberty

Generations of workers critiqued wage-labor in the name of republican liberty.

In a recent interview, historian Quentin Skinner had the following to say about Karl Marx and the republican theory of liberty. The republican or ‘neo-Roman’ theory says that we are unfree when we are subject to another person’s will:

I am very struck by the extent to which Marx deploys, in his own way, a neo-Roman political vocabulary. He talks about wage slaves, and he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat. He insists that, if you are free only to sell your labour, then you are not free at all. He stigmatises capitalism as a form of servitude. These are all recognizably neo-Roman moral commitments.

Skinner also says that “this is a question which would bear a great deal more investigation than it has received.”

I have been engaging in some of this investigation. It is not just Marx or even primarily Marx who believed that the neo-roman theory of freedom leads directly to a critique of wage-slavery. As early as the late 1820s, urban workers seized on the inherited republicanism of the American Revolution and applied it to the wage-labor relationship. They organized themselves city-by-city into the first self-conscious political parties of labor and their main campaign was against ‘wage-slavery.’

They argued that the wealthy “keep us in a state of humble dependence” through their monopoly control of the means of production. As Thomas Skidmore, founder of the Workingmen’s Party of New York, put it:

thousands of our people of the present day in deep distress and poverty, dependent for their daily subsistence upon a few among us whom the unnatural operation of our own free and republican institutions, as we are pleased to call them, has thus arbitrarily and barbarously made enormously rich.

Their “humble dependence” meant that they had no choice but to sell their labor to some employer or another. Their only chance of leading a decent life was if some employer would give them a job. Though formally free, these workers were nonetheless economically dependent and thus unfree. That is why they saw themselves as denied their rightful republican liberty, and why wage-labor merited the name slavery. Skidmore made the comparison with classical slavery the most explicit:

For he, in all countries is a slave, who must work more for another than that other must work for him. It does not matter how this state of things is brought about; whether the sword of victory hew down the liberty of the captive, and thus compel him to labor for his conqueror, or whether the sword of want extort our consent, as it were, to a voluntary slavery, through a denial to us of the materials of nature…

The critique of wage-slavery in the name of republican liberty could hardly be clearer.

Given their analysis of wage-labor, these artisan republicans were inexorably led to radical conclusions about the conditions that could restore workers their full independence. Every leading figure of these early workingmen’s parties made some form of the argument that “the principles of equal distribution [of property be] everywhere adopted” or that it was necessary to “equalize property.” Here, the “property” to be equally distributed was clearly means of production. And it was to be distributed not just in the form of land, but cooperative control over factories and other implements.

For instance, the major report articulating the principles of the Workingmen’s Party of New York included the demand for “AN EQUAL AMOUNT OF PROPERTY ON ARRIVING AT THE AGE OF MATURITY.” Only with control over this kind of property could workers’ structural dependence on owners be eliminated. For these ‘Workies’ following out the logic of the republican theory led not to a nostalgic, agrarian idealism, but to the view that each person’s independence depended upon everyone possessing equal and collective control of productive resources. Even more striking, they argued that the only way to achieve this condition of independence was through the joint political efforts of the dependent or ‘enslaved’ class.

As Langdon Byllesby, one of the earliest of these worker republicans, wrote, “history does not furnish an instance wherein the depository of power voluntarily abrogated its prerogative, or the oppressor relinquished his advantages in favour of the oppressed.” It was up to the dependent classes, through the agency of their workingmen’s parties, to realize a cooperative commonwealth.

There is an important historical connection between these radical artisans and Marx. As Maximilen Rubel and Lewis Feuer have shown, just at the time that Marx turned from Hegelian philosophy to political economy, in 1841-2, he began to read comparative political history. He was particularly interested in the American republic, and read three main sources: Beaumont, Tocqueville, and a less well-known Englishman, Thomas Hamilton. Hamilton was a former colonel who wrote his own, very popular observation of his time traveling in the United States called Men and Manners in America, published in 1833. For Marx, Hamilton was the best source of the three because Hamilton, unlike the Frenchmen, actually met with and spoke to leaders of the Workingman’s Party of New York. That section of Hamilton’s travelogue includes ominous references to the “Extreme Gauche” of the “Workies” who wish to introduce an “AGRARIAN LAW, and a periodical division of property,” and includes gloomy reflections on the coming “anarchy and despoliation.” It is these very sections of Hamilton that Marx copied into his notebooks during this period of preparatory study.

Unbeknown to Marx, he was copying a copy. In those sections of Men and Manners Hamilton had essentially transcribed parts of Thomas Skidmore’s report to the Workingmen’s Party of New York, which were a distillation of the ideas that could be found in Skidmore’s lengthy The Rights of Man to Property! Skidmore’s book included the argument that property rights were invalid if they were used to make the poor economically dependent, allowing owners “to live in idleness, partial or total, thus supporting himself, more or less, on the labors of others.”

If property rights were illegitimate the minute they were used to make some dependent on others then it was clear all freedom-loving citizens were justified in transforming property relations in the name of republican liberty. This was why Skidmore proposed the radical demand that the workers “APPROPRIATE ALSO, in the same way, THE COTTON FACTORIES, THE WOOLEN FACTORIES, THE IRON FOUNDERIES, THE ROLLING MILLS, HOUSES, CHURCHES, SHIPS, GOODS, STEAM-BOATS, FIELDS OF AGRICULTURE, &c. &c. &c. in manner as proposed in this work, AND AS IS THEIR RIGHT.” The manner proposed for this expropriation of the expropriators was not violent revolution but a state constitutional convention in which all property would be nationalized and then redistributed in shares of equal value to be used to form cooperatives or buy land.

Marx never knew these labor republicans by name, nor any of their primary writings, but it is clear from his notebooks that their ideas and political self-organization contributed to his early thinking, especially at the moment at which he was formulating his view of workers as the universal class. Indeed, in On the Jewish Question, Beaumont, Tocqueville and “the Englishman Hamilton’s” accounts of the United States feature heavily in Marx’s discussion of America. It is there that Marx makes the famous distinction between political and human emancipation, arguing that the American republic shows us most clearly the distinction between the two. This was almost exactly the same distinction that the Workies made when saying, as Philadelphian Samuel Simpson did, “the consequence now is, that while the government is republican, society in its general features, is as regal as it is in England.” A republican theory of wage-slavery was developed well before Marx (see here for evidence of similar developments in France that were also very likely to have influenced Marx).

In the United States, the republican critique of wage-labor went into abeyance for a time after the 1840s, or more appropriately, it was absorbed into the agrarian socialism of the National Reform Association – a tale masterfully told by the historian Mark Lause in Young America: Land, Labor and Republican Community.But ‘labor republicanism’ exploded back onto the political scene in the United States after the Civil War, especially with leading figures around the Knights of Labor and the eight-hour movement. The Knights were for a time one of the most powerful organizations in the country, organized skilled and unskilled labor together, and at their peak included more than 700,000 official members, probably representing more than 1 million participating workers. The Knights used the republican concept of liberty to assert the universal interests of labor and to argue for the transformation of American society. George McNeill, a leading Knight, wrote that “There is an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage-system of labor and the republican system of government.” Ira Steward, most famous as an eight-hour campaigner, demanded a “a republicanization of labor, as well as a republicanization of government.”

These turns of phrase were more than rhetorical gestures. They were self-conscious appeals to the republican theory. Indeed the Journal of United Labor even reproduced a famous passage on slavery from Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government in order to articulate why wage-labor was a form of servitude. The passage goes:

Slavery.—The weight of chains, number of stripes, hardness of labor, and other effects of a master’s cruelty, may make one servitude more miserable than another; but he is a slave who serves the gentlest man in the world, as well as he who serves the worst; and he does serve him if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will.

This passage, and Sidney’s writings, have played a major role in contemporary scholarship on early modern republicanism, and here it is deployed to critique not the political enslavement to a monarch but wage-slavery.

In fact, the labor republicans not only drew on the republican theory but further developed it in light of the new dynamics of industrial capitalism. They noted that there were two interconnected forms of dependence. One was the general or structural dependence of the wage-laborer on employers, defined by the fact that the monopoly of control over productive property by some left the rest dependent upon those owners for their livelihoods. This, as George McNeil put it, meant that workers “assent but they do not consent, they submit but do not agree.”

The voluntaristic language here was meant to capture how, thought the workers were not literally slaves, they were nonetheless compelled to work for others. As Skinner has shown in his book on Hobbes, it is precisely this conflation of voluntaristic action and freedom that modern republicans have always rejected, and which their enemies, like Hobbes, have regularly defended. Though here, the worker’s dependence was not a feature so much of being the legal property of another as it was being forced, by economic need, to sell his labor:

when a man is placed in a position where he is compelled to give the benefit of his labor to another, he is in a condition of slavery, whether the slave is held in chattel bondage or in wages bondage, he is equally a slave.

Emancipation may have eliminated chattel slavery, but, as eight-hour campaigner Ira Steward once put it, the creation of this new form of economic dependence meant “something of slavery still remains…something of freedom is yet to come.”

According to labor republicans, the structural dependence of the wage-laborer was translated, through the labor contract, to a more personal form of servitude to the employer. After all, the contract was an agreement of obedience in exchange for wages. It was an agreement to alienate control over one’s own activity in exchange for the privilege of having enough money to buy necessities, and perhaps a few luxuries. Indeed, even if the wages were fairly high, the point of the contract was to become subject to the will of a specific owner or his manager. As one anonymous author put it, in the Journal of United Labor, “Is there a workshop where obedience is not demanded – not to the difficulties or qualities of the labor to be performed – but to the caprice of he who pays the wages of his servants?” As nearly every scholar of republican thought has noted, the language of being subject to the caprice of another is one of the most enduring rhetorical tropes of the neo-Roman theory of freedom. It is no accident that it would feature so heavily in labor republican arguments about domination in the workplace.

It was for this reason that the Knights of Labor believed that the only way to ‘republicanize labor’ was “to abolish as rapidly as possible, the wage system, substituting co-operation therefore.” The point about a cooperative system was that property was collectively owned and work cooperatively managed. Only when the class differences between owners and workers were removed could republican liberty be truly universalized. It would, at once, remove the structural and personal dependence of workers.

As William H. Silvis, one of the earliest of these figures, argued, cooperation “renders the workman independent of necessities which often compel him to submit to hectoring, domineering, and insults of every kind.” What clearer statement could there be of the connection between the republican theory of liberty, economic dependence, and the modern wage-system? Here was a series of arguments that flowed naturally from the principles of the American Revolution.

To demand that “there is to be a people in industry, as in government” was simply to argue that the cooperative commonwealth was nothing more than the culmination and completion of the American Revolution’s republican aspirations.

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We have just lost the South for a generation.
     –Lyndon B. Johnson [apocrypha]

 

The Weekly Sift making sense of the news one week at a time

The Distress of the Privileged
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In a memorable scene from the 1998 film Pleasantville (in which two 1998 teen-agers are transported into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV show), the father of the TV-perfect Parker family returns from work and says the magic words “Honey, I’m home!”, expecting them to conjure up a smiling wife, adorable children, and dinner on the table.

This time, though, it doesn’t work. No wife, no kids, no food. Confused, he repeats the invocation, as if he must have said it wrong. After searching the house, he wanders out into the rain and plaintively questions this strangely malfunctioning Universe: “Where’s my dinner?”

Privileged distress. I’m not bringing this up just to discuss old movies. As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.

If you are one of the newly-visible others, this all sounds whiny compared to the problems you face every day. It’s tempting to blast through such privileged resistance with anger and insult.

Tempting, but also, I think, a mistake. The privileged are still privileged enough to foment a counter-revolution, if their frustrated sense of entitlement hardens.

So I think it’s worthwhile to spend a minute or two looking at the world from George Parker’s point of view: He’s a good 1950s TV father. He never set out to be the bad guy. He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was.

George never demanded a privileged role, he just uncritically accepted the role society assigned him and played it to the best of his ability. And now suddenly that society isn’t working for the people he loves, and they’re blaming him.

It seems so unfair. He doesn’t want anybody to be unhappy. He just wants dinner.

Levels of distress. But even as we accept the reality of George’s privileged-white-male distress, we need to hold on to the understanding that the less privileged citizens of Pleasantville are distressed in an entirely different way. (Margaret Atwood is supposed to have summed up the gender power-differential like this: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”)

George deserves compassion, but his until-recently-ideal housewife Betty Parker (and the other characters assigned subservient roles) deserves justice. George and Betty’s claims are not equivalent, and if we treat them the same way, we do Betty an injustice.

Tolerating Dan Cathy. Now let’s look at a more recent case from real life.

One of the best things to come out of July’s Chick-fil-A brouhaha was a series of posts on the Owldolatrous blog, in which a gay man (Wayne Self) did his best to wrangle the distress of the privileged.

The privileged in this case are represented by Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy, who stirred up a hornet’s nest when he denounced the “prideful, arrogant attitude” of those who support same-sex marriage, saying that they “are inviting God’s judgment on our nation”.

His comments drew attention to the millions that Chick-fil-A’s founding family has contributed to anti-gay organizations, and led to calls for a boycott of their restaurants.

To which his defenders responded: Is tolerance a one-way street? Cathy was just expressing the genuine beliefs of his faith. As an American, he has freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Why can’t gays and their supporters respect that?

“Nothing mutual about it.” Self starts his post by acknowledging Cathy’s distress, but refusing to accept it as equivalent to his own. Cathy is suffering because people are saying bad things about him and refusing to buy his sandwiches. Meanwhile, 29 states (including Self’s home state of Louisiana) let employers fire gays for being gay. There are 75 countries Self and his partner can’t safely visit, because homosexuality is illegal and (in some of them) punishable by death.

The Cathy family has given $5 million to organizations that work to maintain this state of oppression. Self comments:

This isn’t about mutual tolerance because there’s nothing mutual about it. If we agree to disagree on this issue, you walk away a full member of this society and I don’t. There is no “live and let live” on this issue because Dan Cathy is spending millions to very specifically NOT let me live. I’m not trying to do that to him.

Christian push-back. That post got over a million page views and (at last count) 1595 comments, including some push-back from conservative Christians. Self’s follow-up responded to one commenter who wrote that he supported Chick-fil-A as

[a] company with a founder who speaks for what seems to be the minority these days.

In other words, I specifically feel BASHED by the general media and liberal establishment and gay activists for simply being a Bible-believing Christian. From TV shows, movies, mainstream news and music, so much is Intolerance of my conservative beliefs. I am labeled a HOMOPHOBIC and a HATER. … I neither fear nor hate homosexuals.

Self brings in a blog post by Bristol Palin, in which she scoffs at an interviewer’s implication that she might refuse to have a gay partner on “Dancing With the Stars”.

In their simplistic minds, the fact that I’m a Christian, that I believe in God’s plan for marriage, means that I must hate gays and must hate to even be in their presence. Well, they were right about one thing: there was hate in that media room, but the hate was theirs, not mine.

… To the Left, “tolerance” means agreeing with them on, well, everything. To me, tolerance means learning to live and work with each other when we don’t agree – and won’t ever agree.

Like Bristol Palin, Self’s commenter sees himself as the victim of bigotry. He isn’t aware of hating anybody. He just wants to preserve the world he grew up in, and can’t be bothered to picture how others suffer in that world.

He wants dinner.

Aesop II. Self answers with a story: a sequel to the Aesop fable of the mouse who saves a lion.

[A story is] the only way I know to address some of these things without resorting to words that hurt or offend, or shut down discussion.

Aesop’s tale ends with the mouse and the lion as friends, but Self notes that they are still not equal: The Lion is King of the Jungle and the Mouse … is a mouse.

In Self’s sequel, the Lion hosts the Kingdom Ball, to which mice are never invited, because they disgust many of the larger animals. Nothing personal, the Lion explains to his friend, it’s just the way things are.

At this point, Self breaks out of the story to explain why (in spite of the fact that his commenter feels “BASHED by the general media and liberal establishment”) he is casting conservative Christians as the Lion and gays as the Mouse: It is not illegal to be a Christian in any state. You can’t be fired for Christianity. Christians may feel bashed by criticism, but gays get literally bashed by hate crimes. Christians may feel like people are trying to silence them, but the Tennessee legislature debated a bill making it illegal to say the word gay in public schools. (The senate passed it.)

There is a vast difference between being told you’re superstitious or old-fashioned and being told you’re an abomination that doesn’t deserve to live. There’s a vast difference between being told you’re acting hateful and being told God hates you.

I’ve been gay and Christian all my life. Trust me: Christian is easier. It’s not even close.

Leonine distress. But does the Lion have reason to be annoyed with the Mouse? Of course. The Mouse is making trouble by asking to go where he’s not wanted. The Mouse is “prideful” for expecting the rules to change to suit him. However, Self admits that the Lion probably doesn’t hate or fear the Mouse.

I don’t think you hate me. I certainly don’t think you’re afraid of me. Neither is Bristol Palin. She probably even has LGBT people she calls friends. She just disagrees with them about whether they should be invited to the party (the party, in this case, being marriage).

But here’s the problem: the basis of that disagreement is her belief that her relationships are intrinsically better than ours.

There’s a word for this type of statement: supremacist.

Ah, now we get to “words that hurt or offend”. Here’s what he means by it:

Supremacy is the habit of believing or acting as if your life, your love, your culture, your self has more intrinsic worth than those of people who differ from you.

Self sees a supremacist attitude in the commenter’s

sense of comfort with yourself as an appropriate judge of my choices, ideas, or behaviors, … unwillingness to appreciate the inherent inequality in a debate where I have to ask you for equality … [and] unwillingness to acknowledge the stake that you have have in your feeling of superiority rather than blame it on God.

[…]Now let’s finish the fable: Uninvited, the Mouse crashes the party. The shocked guests go silent, the Lion is furious, and the ensuing argument leads to violence: The Lion chucks the Mouse out the window, ending both the party and the friendship.

The lesson: Supremacy itself isn’t hate. You may even have affection for the person you feel superior to. But supremacy contains the seeds of hate.

Supremacy turns to hate when the feeling of innate superiority is openly challenged. … Supremacy is why you and Bristol Palin have more outrage at your own inconvenience than at the legitimate oppression of others.

We can talk about the subjugation of women later, honey. Where’s my dinner?

George Parker’s choices. All his life, George has tried to be a good guy by the lights of his society. But society has changed and he hasn’t, so he isn’t seen as a good guy any more. He feels terrible about that, but what can he do?

One possibility: Maybe he could learn to be a good guy by the lights of this new society. It would be hard. He’d have to give up some of his privileges. He’d have to examine his habits to see which ones embody assumptions of supremacy. He’d have to learn how to see the world through the eyes of others, rather than just assume that they will play their designated social roles. Early on, he would probably make a lot of mistakes and his former inferiors would correct him. It would be embarrassing.

But there is an alternative: counter-revolution. George could decide that his habits, his expectations, and the society they fit are RIGHT, and this new society is WRONG. If he joined with the other fathers (and right-thinking mothers like the one in the poster) of Pleasantville, maybe they could force everyone else back into their traditional roles.

Which choice he makes will depend largely on the other characters. If they aren’t firm in their convictions, the counter-revolution may seem easy. (“There, there, honey. I know you’re upset. But be reasonable.”) But if their resentment is implacable, becoming a good guy in the new world may seem impossible.

[…]Confronting this distress is tricky, because neither acceptance nor rejection is quite right. The distress is usually very real, so rejecting it outright just marks you as closed-minded and unsympathetic. It never works to ask others for empathy without offering it back to them.

At the same time, my straight-white-male sunburn can’t be allowed to compete on equal terms with your heart attack. To me, it may seem fair to flip a coin for the first available ambulance, but it really isn’t. Don’t try to tell me my burn doesn’t hurt, but don’t consent to the coin-flip.

Your political compass

Economic Left/Right: -6.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.87

This is actually not mine. 'Tis my sister's. I had posted my results, last I took a political test, here: http://thirst2.xanga.com/756767336/item/.

Using the same test for comparison, my sister basically doubles both scores that I got for each respective measurement. That's interesting to me because I always had the impression that my sister was more conservative than I (though I had a hunch she would become more liberal as she got older). While I've certainly never shied away from giving a political opinion, I wouldn't ever say we're politically analogous (actually, that's blatantly obvious seeing as I now have two different test results here), and I've been very certain to allow her to form her own political opinions (or any opinions in general).

I suppose the confusion comes from the fact that, while I tend to lean to an environmentalist side (I go about recycling with the same boy scout sense of duty that I do safe sex information, for those who know me or have read my few posts regarding contraception; insist on CFLs; back advancements towards alternative energy; etc.), my sister has always been exceedingly more vocal and forceful about that than I ever am (I'm pretty certain the way most people notice for me is my insistence on recycling or by assumption with my association as a liberal; while I have plenty of friends vocal about the environment, I'll usually do no more than vote about it in regards to other environmental issues).

Part of this has to do with the simple fact that I consider the protection of human life to be the more pressing issue, most generally; once that is resolved, we can then move towards focusing our attention more fully to animal abuses and the like (though I consider the position that both are of equal importance to be a perfectly acceptable morality, occasionally wavering towards that one from time to time). My sister, on the other hand, tends to lean more towards the environment and animal life, from what I've gathered. She's routinely said that she is adverse to humanity (though, putting aside that I find nothing which humanity has done to be any worse than what I see in the wild by animal life, I have a hard time understanding where this adversity comes from; while I often chaffed from my parents saying offhandedly a racist/sexualist/occasionally-sexist comment (interestingly, my sister responds with the same agitation more from other people saying such things than from her parents making the same remarks, on average), I never saw this as an indication of the whole of humanity being awful); she's said she's unsure about bringing more children into a world as bad as it currently is (for some reason, I remember this comment indicating that the world was heading towards an end, based off of my reaction being that I don't see that as remotely happening soon or that the world is as bad as that, though I remember the exact wording as I've put it). She's against zoos, though I partially think that's because she's applying the same notion of freedom that humans enjoy to animals, an understandable idea which completely – regardless – misunderstands the instinct of survival that fuels evolution and, thus, makes zoos a haven for animals; I mean to get her to read The Life of Pi to help her understand that.

The significance of all of that is that I expected her to be not as concerned with things regarding human governance. And, since we do live in a center-right culture (or maybe that's just because I'm from the Midwest), I expected her to take more conservative positions unthinkingly (because she's young, just as I was once) because that's what she's been raised in.

I'm pleased to see otherwise.

There is a phenomenon that I feel I occasionally hint at or passingly refer to from time to time on here in my life, where I find an aspect of myself which I recognize now but would seem to have roots that trace back to some point that fades into the past, and I can no longer discern it distinctly. My liberalism (and the creeping feeling that this was retrieved and enforced by my surrounding culture throughout the entirety – just about – of my childhood) is one of them.

And, it would seem, my Catholicism is one as well (which is particularly bizarre to me), because I really never identified strongly with my Catholicism until college. I don't believe I ever have mentioned this here (though I started to actually notice, and mention, it for the first time after discussing religion in college, first in Williams Secular Community, then with Arantza, Andrew, and Kahn, and then in InterFaith) but, in spite of attending Sunday School (on and off) and stepping foot into a church at least half of the year (Catholic, naturally), I didn't really have a particularly Catholic identity. Sure, I identified as Catholic, but my religious affiliation could really have been better described as a Christian identity than a Catholic one.

America is a Christian nation – insofar that "Christian nation" means one based upon a premise of generic Protestant Christianity largely due to a bizarre necessity, by a decent amount of people, for evangelism (including tacit evangelism like politicians feeling it's necessary to say God bless at the end of every speaking engagement, regardless of zir own religious identifications or those whom ze is addressing) and a held belief that, so long as we all believe in JESUS, everything else will turn out fine (seriously, though, we need to all agree on that one fact – we do, right? Right?).

The downfall of this approach (other than the glaring fact of expected cultural religious conformity) is that a lot of the cool denominational diversity that exists is passed over. However, from a personal perspective, it robbed me of the diversity within my denomination by making me think that Christianity meant X (and, since Catholicism is a form of Christianity, Catholicism must mean X). This provided me with thoughts like Catholicism believed in sola scriptura (Latin for "by scripture alone"). Or, as I've complained irately a multitude of times here, sola fide (Latin for "[salvation] by faith alone").

This, in turn, had me stating that there was no real Christian denomination that I agreed with (how could I, when, in my ignorance, they all required faith for salvation?); I identified as Catholic, because that's what I grew up in and, therefore, was the place of my attendance (it surely had nothing to do with me agreeing with the theology).

This, I think, is why discovery of my Catholicism was this very cool experience (and welcome relief) in college. However, it was also a somewhat bizarre experience, as I realized that a lot of my religion fit me so well. This was bizarre because I had not sought out Catholicism for its stances (indeed, I was so utterly clueless the whole of my childhood as to what Catholicism stood for that I actually rejected it (as I did all Christian denominations) as an imperfect expression of my own beliefs; I had no issue with being Christian: I just didn't agree with the conclusions most Christian religions extrapolated from that). And yet Catholicism seemed to verify so much of what I did agree with:

We employ incense and cross ourselves, because worship should involve all the senses?
Cool; I never thought of theology in that light before.

Our liturgy, like aspects of our scripture and Jewish liturgy, ought to be symbolic and metaphorical?
Cool; as an English major, I can completely get that.

Our Mass should include beautiful music and incense and pretty stained-glass windows, because it ought to be art, because art is a means of connecting with the divine and Truth?
What a beautiful idea.

Reason and logic are tools given to Human-kind, and we ought to use them and, indeed, can (and ought to) use them to perceive and understand God?
How very Enlightenment like.

In lieu of the last point, there ought to be a respect for science as an explainer of our current universe? So much so that St. Augustine said that scripture should possibly be regarded as metaphorical if science contradicts it. On top of that, there's a very rich history of priests as scientists, as well as the church being a patron of the sciences; lest we forget, it was a priest that helped formulate the concept of the Big Bang.
Wonderful.

Of course, some of why I like those things (stuff like the use of reason and the importance of beauty/art) are because they tie us very close to a celebration to the human/earthly form (which, in turn, is why more on the Protestant side dislike Catholicism and just see it as an extension of paganism. All that incense, candles, and stained-glass windows? Just distractions taking your mind away from focusing on God during the service). Admittedly, my favorite priests were the ones who'd sit down with you around at a pub with a beer (or mix drinks) or join you to hang out somewhere or had experience at college campuses – imagine the somewhat portly priest so ridiculed during the middle ages, the priest perceived to be too much of this Earth, too down-to-Earth. Of course, theology was always so much more strongly about morality rather than how wicked the Earth itself is, so I've never been too afraid of celebrating and enjoying our Earthly humanity.

An orthodox Catholic would probably find a middle ground, of sorts. Certainly our humanity isn't to be wholly repudiated. After all, Christ became man, and what was his first miracle? Making water into wine.

But I think this highlights the final conclusion I came to: while Catholicism, I discovered, was the religion that fit me the closest (sans Judaism), I still wound up disagreeing with aspects of it. I graduated with a degree in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a concentration in Queer Studies, after all. I would not be surprised to learn that the pope and I have some differing ideas. Despite the absolute unlikelihood of it, I want women ordained; I understand all reasons the why the church refuses on that point, but I can't – in good conscience – agree. And you know, really, my differences are small in number. But they all focus around things which are pretty much dogma by now. For all the changes the church can make (and they can be awesome; how the Mass is viewed after Vatican II is an awesome understanding and approach to our liturgy), they won't be any that address the bulk of my issues with Catholicism.

However, unless I decide to convert to Judaism, this is what I have. The time I became an atheist taught me (ironically) that I am a religious person; my understanding of the world involves religion. Honestly, I think it's inseparable from who I am (there's a reason I was co-president of InterFaith for two years).

However, this isn't a complete impediment. After all, I spent most of the entirety of my life in a religion that I disagreed with; I now agree with it so much more so, so it's even better than it was before, right?

And, really, I don't think I'm really making how clear I like a lot of Catholicism right now. I forget if I mentioned it on here or had only thought to, but it's very difficult to describe the feeling I got when hearing an organ playing from out of a cathedral while at Princeton for the interfaith summit. Or the sounds of, really, any form of chanting of psalms and hymns (though, naturally, Gregorian has a special place in my heart). And, of course, the celebration of the Mass.

But there's also another one of those phenomena I mentioned at the beginning of this post that makes my Catholicism so cozy. Again, for the life of me, I'm not sure where I get this feeling (in particular since I only really started understanding Catholicism in college), but there is a history of liberal Catholics throughout history, a group of liberal intellectuals who, in spite of their differences with Catholicism due to their liberalism, are fully Catholic (and are, in fact, liberal fully due to being Catholic). Yet, if you were to ask me for examples, I would come up short, which isn't to say that the idea is far-fetched. As I've already said, there is an emphasis and respect for intellectualism within Catholicism, particularly in the area of philosophy. And, while part of the reason you can consider the Catholic voting bloc Democratic for the most part (even to this day) is because most Catholic immigrants were Irish (and thus Catholic) while also being working class and, thus, labor (as well as Kennedy, obviously), I think it's telling, when Catholic no longer means Irish here in America, at least 50-some percent of Catholics are still voting Democrat. The only time I've actually really witnessed this was during my Senior year of college with Andrew. We were both pretty hard-leaning liberals, though of different stripes in the end, and yet entirely Catholic.

Both of us could back up why we do what we do during Mass and in most of our theology. Andrew was more versed in the philosophy used by Catholicism to justify itself. I'm pretty concerned regarding liturgy (including that outside of Mass). And, while I was always happy to find myself in a fully-Catholic room from time to time (due to, for nine elevenths of my life, not fully identifying as Catholic), Andrew and I would often laugh about what we disagreed with and perceived as ridiculous about our church (at one point, he mentioned that he thought he had heard that the papacy had released an official apology for what had happened with Galileo; we marveled how, in comparison to other Christian denominations, ours could get so many things right and yet others still so utterly wrong. Then we laughed as we noted the church had no problem with evolution (unlike other denominations) but still hadn't apologized for when it denied that the sun revolved around the Earth).

Side note: come to think of it, Kaz and I probably fall into that same place together, but I feel him and I haven't discussed politics enough for such a dynamic to unfold.

And this is my longwinded way of eventually reaching the point of this post.

I like my religion; I do. Actually, it's (admittedly) more torn than that, with high extremes of each end. While I often don't put anything in the collection plate each Sunday (in part because I don't really have any money, though more these days because I can't justify supporting financially an institution that I disagree so extremely on in some cases), I still vouch for the religion. But the point is, I'm trying to find my place in it. Based on the merits that Catholicism does have, I think we ought to root ourselves in that. In other words, Catholic culture. But what is that, exactly? Good question.

And these thoughts which are usually lurking around my head came to the forefront, when I came across this article: http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2009/05/abortion-and-catholic-culture.html.

At first, I thought the article was going to make the argument that abortion and pro-life culture dominated Catholic culture at the moment (which, really, you can't create a culture around a singular idea), and it was because of this that people were leaving the church in droves (particularly young people). To quote two sentences from the article: "In my view, the singular focus upon abortion as THE issue over which conservative Catholics will brook no divergence and around which we are called to rally reveals, to my mind, not evidence of robust Catholic culture as much as its absence.[…]The ferocity over this issue – and this issue almost to the exclusion of nearly every other issue that might be part of a rich fabric of Catholic culture – suggests to me that Catholic culture, where it existed, has been largely routed."

Instead, the article is about how we live in American society's culture and not in a purely Catholic one, and this is why some Catholics feel okay not centralizing their Catholicism around abortion (after all, abortion is not at the center of Catholic spirituality or theology).

***Note: I'm not interested in contemplating the morality of abortion; that's not the point of this post. Everything written here will be sans my own opinions on abortion, if I even have any***

And this is somewhat central to my search for a Catholic culture or, really, namely a Catholicism I feel comfortable in.

As I noted to my dad a few days ago, I'm extremely conservative when it comes to liturgy (possibly a small part of why I'm so interested in Judaism – our liturgy came out of that, so, if you want to go back to the source…). On the other hand, as I've noted (and demonstrated) a multitude of times here, I'm extremely liberal (no surprise anymore). So, when I find someplace I really like worshiping, I will probably not be liked by most of the people there.

On the other hand, I agree entirely with the concepts of Vatican II regarding changes to the Mass. The difficulty comes with the part that calls for more local aspects brought in (which, ultimately, I do agree). A Mass is a Mass is a Mass. And while I recognize it as valid, it's not my ideal way of celebrating it (a valid opinion, I would argue, seeing that the very construction of the Mass was as an art to be enjoyed and admired). The part of the article that talks about how we are members of parishes (where we live) rather than shopping around for the right place and, thus, we have a culture of acceptance rather than transformation struck me as funny, largely because I've been going to different parishes to see the differing Masses because the one in my parish is far too liberal in its liturgy for my taste (and it's not even that liberal, by today's standards; it's actually rather common place – hence why I haven't settled for a particular parish yet).

Yet there's the rub. I agree with Vatican II (I know, technically I'm not supposed to even have the choice of disagreeing if I'm a part of this church, but clearly I'm not a fully orthodox Catholic). I don't disagree with these Masses; I simply dislike them (stylistically). There's an important difference in that.

So, in the grand question of what is Catholic culture, how do we decide in such diversity? Well, the first problem, I would guess, would be that you can't define culture around the Mass (though there are some interesting questions that arise from such an idea and I'm certain there have been Catholic philosophers (and I would probably agree) that there are ways to do so partially). Sure, liturgy can be important to culture, but, as I've said several times, Mass is not the only part of the liturgy. Did you know that it is practically literally impossible (I don't know if I've checked all the possibilities yet) to find a parish that celebrates Vespers within a 45 minute drive from my house?

Perhaps it's more linked to the problem that I tend to find in my own spiritual life. If it isn't obvious yet, I prefer liturgical religions. There are some liberal reasons for this involving analysis of systems and how it affects the adherents, etc. but I think this post is getting long enough as it is. Yet if I wanted to find other means of discovering the wealth of diverse and beautiful liturgy we have? It literally took me a year to fully understand what the Divine Office was, let alone how to practice it. And, if it weren't for the particular people in my life during that time, I don't know I would have discovered it so quickly; yes, you can always ask your priest, but doesn't it make more sense to have that information readily available somewhere in easy-to-digest form rather than putting it through a bottleneck of one person?

So where was I supposed to discover the wealth of my Catholic faith? Arguably, Sunday School (and, God knows, those poor teachers did their best) but you can't expect children from such a young age to truly value the information their receiving (at one point, one of the kids just played his Gameboy under the table while claiming he was meditating; I'm pretty sure my teacher just gave up).

But after that? Sure, my brother and I were made altar servers (from which I learned a great deal), but there really isn't any other means other than lector or Eucharistic minister – all of which doesn't really teach you or envelop you in the liturgy (particularly outside of the Mass). It envelopes you scripture, sure, but – you know – we're heretics and scripture alone isn't enough for us.

And this is why I got so excited about that article. I thought it was going to repudiate abortion (or same-sex marriage or contraceptives) as the pillar in which to encircle our culture around. Because you can't create a Catholic culture around an external cause. It has to involve more (and I do defend this point, even to the issue of poverty, an issue which has been a Catholic cause for ages and strikes directly to Catholicism).

You want to know why people are leaving the church? The first is that you're zeroing in on divisive issues (homosexuals and Transsexuals and condoms in Africa) and, like good Catholics, the laity is using their God-given reason to see that the church's position just doesn't make that much sense (plus, it hurts people). At least, that's my pet theory.

However, more so, you're not giving these people any alternative. A religion focused around fighting abortion is not going to keep people; people want a little bit more.

Give them something which makes them feel Catholic. Because, right now, there isn't really much. I was stuck in rapt horror during the Mass before the March for Life as it was built up to with generic worship music (which, naturally, all sounded the same and could think of remotely creative lyrics even though they're supposedly written for a higher power). I might as well have been attending any evangelical group back at home because there was hardly any difference other than there were a bunch of priests and seminarians walking around. The only point that an actual difference started to emerge was during the introduction of the bishops present and a reference to the relic being used on the altar (and, of course, the Mass itself).

Now, there's a long and personal history as to why I'm so bitter against such worship, but the point still remains: why am I bothering to stick with Catholicism when evangelicalism is offering pretty much the same thing? Evangelicalism is able to keep its adherents, because it operates on a system of fearing about your own salvation and the salvation of everyone you care about with a constant threat of going to Hell and an expectation to be continually perfect to the point that it becomes an informal (not always realized) game of bragging rights. This is not Catholicism (though, of course, with some of the laity (and apparently some of the clergy) seeing no difference between evangelical culture and Catholic culture, who knows anymore).

Setting up places to more easily understand and learn about liturgy would be a start, as well as the ability to learn about Catholic philosophy would be good.

Of course, they may end up tacitly (and then un-tacitly) agreeing with opposition to same-sex marriage, contraceptives, and the like. I need more liberal Catholics; where do I find them?

 

***Note: I think it's obvious, but better safe than sorry – when I refer to evangelicalism here, it's a rather large umbrella term and is referring to those groups I have personal experience with, rather than everyone. Further, it's more often in reference to evangelical culture than necessarily theology***

Full interview between Ayn Rand and Playboy can be found here: http://ellensplace.net/ar_pboy.html.

PLAYBOY: Couldn't the attempt to rule whim out of life, to act in a totally rational fashion, be viewed as conducive to a juiceless, joyless kind of existence?

RAND: I truly must say that I don't know what you are talking about. Let's define our terms. Reason is [a person]'s tool of knowledge, the faculty that enables [zem] to perceive the facts of reality. To act rationally means to act in accordance with the facts of reality. Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts; it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. Emotions are the result of your value judgments; they are caused by your basic premises, which you may hold consciously or subconsciously, which may be right or wrong. A whim is an emotion whose cause you neither know nor care to discover. Now what does it mean, to act on whim? It means that a [person] acts like a zombi, without any knowledge of what [ze] deals with, what [ze] wants to accomplish, or what motivates [zem]. It means that a [person] acts in a state of temporary insanity. Is this what you call juicy or colorful? I think the only juice that can come out of such a situation is blood. To act against the facts of reality can result only in destruction.

PLAYBOY: Should one ignore emotions altogether, rule them out of one's life entirely?

RAND: Of course not. One should merely keep them in their place. An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of [a person]'s value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between [a person]'s reason and [zir] emotions -- provided [ze] observes their proper relationship. A rational [person] knows -- or makes it a point to discover -- the source of [zir] emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if [zir] premises are wrong, [ze] corrects them. [Ze] never acts on emotions for which [ze] cannot account, the meaning of which [ze] does not understand. In appraising a situation, [ze] knows why [ze] reacts as [ze] does and whether [ze] is right. [Ze] has no inner conflicts, [zir] mind and [zir] emotions are integrated, [zir] consciousness is in perfect harmony. [Zir] emotions are not [zir] enemies, they are [zir] means of enjoying life. But they are not [zir] guide; the guide is [zir] mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a [person] takes [zir] emotions as the cause and [zir] mind as their passive effect, if [ze] is guided by [zir] emotions and uses [zir] mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow -- then [ze] is acting immorally, [ze] is condemning [zem]self to misery, failure, defeat, and [ze] will achieve nothing but destruction -- [zir] own and that of others.

This is probably the only position that I agree in entirety with Ayn Rand on.

My brother had found the above interview and, upon reading it, handed it off to me (it's nice, in part, to have a sibling still in college, because then the rigorous consumption of intellectualism doesn't have to end just because I'm out of college, though I think it has more to do with his own obsessive intelligence).

And it's a fascinating read; Ayn Rand certainly is very intelligent (or, at the very least, has a masterful command of communication). And yet (as I expected I would), I find myself disagreeing – in at least complete terms – with most of her.

The obvious point of contention I'm going to have is with her assessment of literature (which, if I'm to be fully frank, I find rubbish), though I think the reason for this lies in that, while I believe I've said before – and do partially agree with her – that literature ought to (namely, in this case, regarding morality) make an arguable point, I don't think the writer (or the reader) has to necessarily agree with it. I do fall into the camp that believes that, the more ideas we're exposed to, the better we are off and that all thoughts and concepts should be examined in full. And, in particular when it comes to literature, there is importance in the craft of making you feel for, and to understand the motives of, characters you don't agree with.

But this is mostly an aside, since, at the end of the day, I certainly have no interest in drawing sides based around personal tastes in literature. I disagree with Ayn Rand but would feel no compulsion to dissway her of her opinions, if she had no interest of changing them (and it's completely fair that she would likely find my own thoughts on literature to be rubbish as well).

 

Rather, the larger points of contention that I have is Rand's conception of the proper use of government:

PLAYBOY: What, in your view, is the proper function of a government?

RAND: Basically, there is really only one proper function: the protection of individual rights. Since rights can be violated only by physical force, and by certain derivatives of physical force, the proper function of government is to protect [people] from those who initiate the use of physical force: from those who are criminals. Force, in a free society, may be used only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. This is the proper task of government: to serve as a policeman who protects [people] from the use of force.

To my knowledge, Rand never states the reason for avoiding the use of force against other citizens, but I'm going to make an assumption and assume that it's because the use of force to overpower another is a negation of their freedom.

The point where we severe agreement is that I would argue that force is not the only power that may negate another's freedom. I'd first bring up (which Rand may or may not agree with me on) that people require, at least from the start, proper education in order to properly assess the world (using her own conceptualization of the world: a person is not born understanding the world; thus, they are emotional. As such, they blunder through the world incapable of learning from it, possibly to never reach the understanding that they must use reason to comprehend it. As such, an education that makes clear to a person the use of reason and logic is necessary to make sane and safe people).

It is a lack of this necessary education that allows for people to become (and remain mired in) racism. And it is this racism, on a large-scale, that enabled Jim Crow. Of course, one might respond back that this is why we need limited government. To which then I would appeal to the housing crisis during and following the African American Great Migration for the south to the north, during which real estate sellers would purposefully over price tenement- and slum-like conditions to African Americans and ensure that the African Americans could not receive housing in any white neighborhood. This wasn't an instance of legalized racism (which is why the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s failed in their attempt to combat racism in the north); this was individuals making racist choices (so much for "[...]there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women[...].").

And those individuals tried to do something about it (again, civil rights movement); the top five most segregated cities in America all maintain a dissimilarity index in the high 70s to this day.

So, to recap, the fundamental difference I have with Rand on this point is that physical force is not the only force capable of being wielded against individuals. And, as such, I fully and fundamentally believe the government should protect against this.

But perhaps another flaw is that Rand believes that laissez-faire capitalism works, whereas I (again fundamentally) do not.

And I think these two points can be, once again, summed up in a fundamental difference in view that I have with Rand: she (as well as libertarians and anarchists), to some degree, believes people can be trusted (this is applicable with the phrase "to some degree" because, even if you think complete freedom enables a constantly vigilant and self-sufficient person to resist those who might attack him, this trusts that those who might find more advantage in overpowering you will be unable to (or that you can outwit them); and, for those who would appeal to others out of those others fearing for their own rights at the hand of the amassing mob, you are trusting that those individuals will be intelligent enough to understand that concept – Nazi Germany would seem to disagree with you).

 

This was more or less the point that I came to with my cousin when discussing whether she felt the FDA ought to be struck down. She felt it ought to be and that there were alternatives to it through privatized means. Incredulous, I asked how she could trust what was to go into her stomach with privatized forces, to which she pointed out, "There's our difference; I don't distrust people." Does anyone know why your health listing of food says Dietary Fiber rather than just Fiber?

Because that's the base of it: the market will not respond in what's best for people; the market responds with what's best for the market. If someone can make a profit selling bread with sawdust in it rather than simply selling a quality product, they often will do it. If dolls of Stalin as an adorable humanitarian become popular, the market will mass-produce them in full-force.  Forget the fact that it's glorifying a mass-murder.

And while there may be an outcry against sawdust bread, there is the requirement that every individual remain vigilant against such things so that they don't happen once again, which may be difficult if you live in a tenement in Chicago and can't leave because people 6 decades ago constructed it as an economic trap to make sure you could never enter their neighborhood.

The very reason the American government is a republic instead of a democracy was out of distrust of people as a mass-group, to allow representation of minority opinions instead of mob-rule by the majority.

And, for all the obsession with freedom and liberty, there can be neither freedom nor liberty in any system which allows the control (either through physical force or psychological force of society) of others by others.

 

And I think, ultimately, this is why I must part with Rand: her societal ideas are, ultimately, based in ideal rather than what is practically realistic, much like communism.

I'd always heard the Benjamin Franklin quote as, "He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither," to which my response was always, "What liberty is there without safety?"

The actual quote I find far more advisable: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

My Facebook currently says I'm in a relationship. This is, to the best of my knowledge, false. At first, I was busy with finishing off finals, let alone getting sleep again. As I was reaching the end of that, I figured she was busy (just getting home and all) and, I reasoned as a side thought, probably best to let her end it, so she could hide anyone else from seeing it (she's not a fan of attention); if I do it, it changes to simply listing her in a relationship without listing with who, which is bound to be noted. She might hide FB from listing being single but that already identifies a change.

However, it has now been five days since we've supposedly broke up. We both agreed going in that the best course of action would be not continuing the relationship, seeing as I'm graduating and she's only a Freshman. It's not the…ideal scenario, but both of us know a long-distance relationship isn't the best course. Neither of us are good at keeping up communication over anything further than a driving distance (i.e. in person). Had it been more than a mere three months, I might've considered it; but not over so short a time period.

There was this moment, two or three days after I was finally finished and attempting to get my energy back, where I, through the sleep, was duly aware that, when I woke up, there wouldn't really be anyone I could go to as a means to talk to or lean on so wonderfully as she had allowed; don't get me wrong, Holly, Allan, Maia, Margaret (both), and Antal are all wonderful, but there isn't something quite the same, for reasons I can't articulate in words yet. And, well, that was a little upsetting.

Every relationship since Allison has been this bizarre question of, "What will happen?" Because, as much as I thought I understood what I wanted, it didn't quite go as planned. Neither did curly. I forget if I mentioned here, but, at least at the beginning (first month or so), there was always that question with Emma; not enough to worry me but just under the surface. I don't like unpredictability, but it's there just the same, for whatever reason.

I haven't actually had a relationship with an expectation to end, truly. Emma did end, for very much the same reasons, but I hadn't seen it coming (should have, mind you, graduating and all, but it was the first time having to even think about that question). Yet, perhaps because I was used to relationships ending and because I had been contemplating the question of the uses of having short relationships (there is, if my memory serves me, a post a short while back on here where I resolve to get to know people, because time is short and people are fascinating and hardly deserve to remain undiscovered; I'm certain, tied to that, I must have said that meant also getting into another relationship, even if unlikely to succeed, even if certain – from the outset – to end), I was fine with the idea that this would, at the end of the school year, end (only other word coming to mind at the moment to diversify that sentence is terminate and that one's just depressing).

I mean, I had been waiting on someone to fascinate me, and then Arantza comes along and – good fuck, fascinating barely covers it. Funny as all Hell, smart and perceptive, interested in politics (and dye-in-the-wool liberal, hard Left as far as average Americans go), fascination with the past, conscious of race, etc. etc. And I meet her in the second half of my senior year of college. But, Hell, she said yes (February 20^th). There was no way I was going to say no.

So it seemed logical – neither of us wanted to enter into a long-distance relationship; come the end of the year, we would split. It seemed reasonable, couldn't be helped; it'd be bittersweet come the end, but one would hope so if it was remotely a good relationship.

But something happened a little sooner than the end of the year. We were listening to records when suddenly – I've always hated the explanation "I just feel it". It's a cop out, something personal which detracts the information from everyone else. Yet those types of instances seem to be cropping up more and more these days. I still think any feeling can be explained in the end, made sense of. However, until that point, all I can say is that something felt different, leaving that room that time. A longing for her not to go so quickly. Before then, it had mostly been like any other friend, other than the fact that I was kissing her; it was very much still like since I had met her. And then it changed.

Maybe because I had been getting to know her better. As I've said here and to several times, to be open at all is to be vulnerable. And it's in that vulnerability that our relationships have any meaning – because a person has the choice to hurt you but does not; yet, more than that, it would hurt them to do so. Of course, everything, it's seeming, these days boils down to depression and my crappy childhood for me, so maybe the willingness to protect, to not hurt, and to care emanate from those personal experiences. But I hesitate to say that definitively yet.

Whatever the reason, there was that change. Which I feel is necessary to say that it's different than you feel for a friend. In that, I mean, I care very deeply for my friends. You don't want your friends hurt nor do you not miss them (something just about everyone already knows). Yet you might want to spend time with a significant other over friends at times. What is that distinction? I don't know how to put it to words. Yet that was part of the feeling. That desire to spend time with someone who has become more than a friend. That's the best I can do to detail it.

So here I am. About to make it "Facebook official". Everything has an end, even if I don't like it.

And, should you find this, Arantza, the Bessie Smith record sounds positively amazing; I'm playing it now, and it's a shame we never gave it a spin earlier.

Because I find it useful to keep track of my progression over the years:

 

For a different one that I took as well:

Compass: You are a left social libertarian. Left: 6.12, Libertarian: 3.54
Foreign Policy: On the left side are pacifists and anti-war activists. On the right side are those who want a strong military that intervenes around the world. You scored: 0.54	Culture: Where are you in the culture war? On the liberal side, or the conservative side? This scale may apply more to the US than other countries. You scored: -5.48

 This one in particular is interesting because I took it back in 2009 (http://thirst2.xanga.com/714123084/item/). I've gone a lot further to the liberal in those two years, it seems: from center-left moderate to flat out left (which, while it makes sense, I would never have admitted back then; like I've said, I liked to think I was more liberal that I honestly was back then).

 

Aaaand another:

Quiz Results