They Don't Even Know That They Don't Know 4 страница
How do you sort the guilt at this point? If Israel is committing crimes against the Palestinians, does that justify the Holocaust? I suppose some unreconstructed Nazi could say, look at what those guys do as soon as you let them go. Just means we didn't do anything. It's all their fault.
DB: To continue with India: talk about the divide-and-rule policy of the British Raj, playing Hindus off against Muslims. You see the results of that today.
Which is not to say that it was pretty before, because it wasn't. The Marathi invasions were ugly and brutal. But the fact is that the level of brutality introduced by the Europeans was novel almost everywhere in the world. Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another. In India, for example, I think about ninety percent of the forces that the British used to control India were Indians.
DB: There's that astonishing statistic that at the height of British power in India, they never had more than 150,000 people there.
That was true everywhere. It was true when the American forces conquered the Philippines, killing a couple hundred thousand people. They were helped by Philippine tribes. They exploited conflicts among local groups. There are always plenty who will side with the conquerors. Just take a look at the Nazi conquest of Europe. Take Western Europe; let's forget the Third World. Nice, civilized Western Europe. Places like Belgium and Holland and France. Who was rounding up the Jews? The local people. In fact, in France they turned them over faster than the Nazis could handle them. If the United States was conquered by the Russians, George Bush, Elliott Abrams, and the rest of them would all be working for the invaders and sending people off to concentration camps. Ronald Reagan would be reading their ads on TV. That's the traditional pattern. Invaders very naturally play upon any kind of rivalries and hostilities that they find to get one group to work for them against others.
You can see it right now with the Kurds. The West is trying to mobilize Iraqi Kurds to destroy Turkish Kurds. Turkish Kurds are by far the largest number, and historically, they were the ones who were the most repressed. It's not covered much in the West because Turkey is an ally, so you don't cover the atrocities they carry out. But right into the Gulf War they were bombing in Kurdish areas. Tens of thousands of people were driven out. But now the western goal is to use the Iraqi Kurds as a weapon to try to restore what they call "stability" in Iraq, meaning their own kind of system.
Last October there was a very ugly incident in which there was a kind of pincer movement between the Turkish army and Iraqi Kurdish forces to expel and destroy Kurdish guerrillas from Turkey. Independently of what we might think of those guerrillas, there's no doubt that they had substantial popular support in southeastern Turkey. But the Iraqi Kurdish leaders and some sectors of Kurdish population were going to cooperate because they thought they could gain something by it. You could understand their position. Not necessarily approve of it -- that's another question. These are people who are being crushed and destroyed from every direction. If they grasp at some straw for survival, it's not surprising, even if grasping at that straw means helping to kill their cousins across the border. That's the way conquerors work. They've always worked that way. They worked that way in India.
India wasn't a peaceful place before the British, no, nor was the western hemisphere a pacifist utopia. But that aside, everywhere the Europeans went they raised the level of violence to an extraordinary degree. On that serious military historians have no doubts. As the most recent historian of the East India Company puts it, "warfare in India was still a sport, in Europe it had become a science."
Europe had been fighting vicious, murderous wars internally and it had developed a culture of violence, as well as the means of violence, which were unsurpassed. The culture of violence was extraordinary. European wars were wars of extermination. Everywhere the Europeans went, whether it was the Portuguese or the Spanish or the English or the Dutch, they fought with a level of violence which appalled the natives. They had never seen anything like it. That was true virtually over the entire world, with very few exceptions. In fact, from Europe's viewpoint, these colonial wars were what we call today small wars. It didn't take very many forces to destroy huge numbers of natives, not so much because the technology was better, but because the Europeans fought differently. If we were to be honest about the history, we would describe European colonialism simply as a barbarian invasion.
The British and Dutch merchants who moved into Asia broke into relatively free trading areas which had been functioning for long, long periods with pretty well established rules. More or less free, fairly pacific. Sort of like free trade areas. The description of what they did is just monstrous. They introduced a level of violence which had never been felt before. They destroyed what was in their way.
The only ones who were able to fend it off for a while were Japan and China. Japan did manage to fend it off almost entirely. That's why Japan is the one area of the Third World that developed. That's striking. The one part of the Third World that wasn't colonized is the one part that's part of the industrial world. That's not by accident. To strengthen the point, you need only look at the parts of Europe that were colonized. Parts of western Europe were colonized, like Ireland, which is very much like the Third World, for similar reasons. The patterns are striking. China sort of made the rules and had the technology and was powerful, so they were able to fend off Western intervention for a long time. But when its defense finally broke down in the nineteenth century, the country collapsed.
So it's completely correct that the post-colonial period had seen many brutal monsters develop. But when people in the Third World blame the history of imperialism for their plight, they have a very strong case to make. It's interesting to see how this is treated in the West these days. On January 7, 1993 there was an amazing article in the Wall Street Journal by Angelo Codevilla, a so-called scholar at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, criticizing the intervention in Somalia. He says, Look, the problem in the world is that Western intellectuals hate their culture and therefore they terminated colonialism. Only civilizations of great generosity can undertake tasks as noble as colonialism to try to rescue these barbarians all over the world from their miserable fate. The Europeans did it and of course gave them enormous gifts and benefits. But then these western intellectuals who hate their own cultures forced them to withdraw. The result is what you now see. You really have to go to the Nazi archives to find anything comparable to that. Apart from the stupendous ignorance that is so colossal that it can only appear among respected intellectuals, the moral level is -- you have to go back to the Nazi archives. But it's an op ed in the Wall Street Journal. It probably won't get much criticism.
There are counterparts in England, the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Telegraph. It's interesting to read the right-wing British press after Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Prize. They were infuriated, especially their Central America correspondent. Their view is, true, there were atrocities in Guatemala. But either they were carried out by the left wing guerrillas or they were an understandable response on the part of the respectable sectors of the society to the violence and atrocities of these Marxist priests. So to give a Nobel Prize to the person who's been torturing the Indians all these years, Rigoberta Menchu ... it's hard for me to reproduce this. You have to read the original. Again, at it's worst, it's straight out of the Stalinist and Nazi archives. It's very typical of British and American culture.
DB: That brings in the whole question of race and racism and how that factored into the relationship between what I'll call the "North" and the "South."
There has always been racism. But it developed as a leading principle of thought and perception very much in the context of colonialism. It's not that it wasn't there before. It obviously was. But it gained entirely new dimensions and new significance in the imperialist context. That's understandable. When you have your boot on someone's neck, you have to have a justification for it. The justification has to be their depravity. If you can find anything to hang their depravity on, like the color of their eyes, it's that. It's very striking to see this in the case of people who are not very different from one another. Take a look at the British conquest of Ireland, which was the earliest of the western colonial conquests. It was described in the same kind of terms as the conquest of Africa. The Irish were a different race. They weren't human. They were a depraved race of people who had to be crushed and destroyed.
DB: Some Marxists connect racism as a product of the economic system, of capitalism. Would you accept that?
No. It has to do with conquest. It's oppression. If you're oppressing somebody, maybe you're robbing them, it doesn't have to be torture. If you're robbing somebody, oppressing them, controlling them, dictating their lives, it's a very rare person who can say, Look, I'm a monster. I'm doing this for my own good. Even Himmler didn't say that. There's a standard technique of belief formation that goes along with oppression, whether it's throwing them in the gas chambers or charging them too much at a corner store or anything between those. There's a standard mode of reaction, and that is to say that it's their depravity. That's why I'm doing it. Maybe I'm even doing them good. If it's their depravity, there's got to be something about them that makes them different from me. What's different about them will be whatever you can find.
DB: And that's the justification.
Then it becomes racism. You can always find something, like a different color hair or eyes, they're too fat, they're gay. Whatever it might be. You find something that's different enough. Of course you lie about it, so it's easier to find more.
DB: Do you know the scorpion and camel story? There's a scorpion who wants to cross the river. He needs the camel to help him across. He asks the camel, "Hey, come on. Give me a lift." The camel says, "What are you, crazy? I know who you are. You're going to sting me." The scorpion says, "No, no, no. I'm a reformed scorpion. I'm a good guy. I wouldn't do something like that." So after much persuasion the camel finally relents and says, "OK. Hop on." So the scorpion gets on the camel's back. In the middle of the river, the camel feels a sting in his back and realizes that the scorpion has just stung him. He starts howling and cursing and says, "You promised me you wouldn't do this! We're both going to die now. We're going to drown. You're insane." The scorpion says, "Well, it's in my nature." This leads to human nature. Is racism something that's acquired or learned, or is it innately endowed?
I don't think either of those is the right answer. There's no doubt that there's a rich human nature. We're not rocks. Anybody sane knows that an awful lot about us is genetically determined, in our behavior, our attitudes. That's not even a question among sane people. When you go beyond that and ask what it is, you're entering into near-total ignorance. We know there's something about human nature that forces you to grow arms, not wings, and to undergo puberty at roughly a certain age. And by now we know that things like acquisition of language are part of human nature even in its very specific forms, things about the visual system and so on. When you get to cultural patterns, belief systems, etc., the guess of the next guy you meet at the bus stop is as good as the best scientist. People can rant about it if they like, but they basically know virtually nothing.
In this particular area we can make some kind of reasonable speculation. I think most reasonable is the one I've just outlined. It's not so much that racism is in our genes. What is in our genes is the need for improving your own self-image.
DB: For domination.
No. For justifying what you do. I can't believe that everybody doesn't know this from their own lives. If any person thinks about their own life honestly for a minute, they'll think of plenty of things that they did that they shouldn't have done. Maybe they stole something from their brother when they were ten. If you look back honestly and ask yourself, Did I say to myself at the time, I'm a rotten bastard but I'm going to do this because I want it? Or did you say, Look, I'm right to do this for this and that reason? The answer almost invariably is the second. It doesn't matter whether it was a minor or major thing. That's probably in our nature. It's probably in our nature to find a way to recast anything that we do in some way that makes it possible for us to live with it.
If we move into the social sphere, the sphere of human interactions, where there are institutions and systems of oppression and domination, people who are in those positions of authority and domination, who are in control, who are doing things to others, who are harming them, are going to pursue this course of constructing justifications for themselves. They may do it in sophisticated ways or non-sophisticated ways, but they're going to do it. That much is in human nature. One of the consequences of that can turn out to be racism. It can turn out to be other things, too.
Take the sophisticated ones. One of the intellectual gurus of the modern period in the United States is Reinhold Niebuhr, who was called the "theologian of the establishment." He was revered by the Kennedy liberal types, by people like George Kennan. He was considered a moral teacher of the contemporary generation. It's interesting to look at why he was so revered. I actually went through his writings once. The intellectual level is depressingly low. But there's something in there that made him appealing. It was what he called the "paradox of grace." What it comes down to is, no matter how much you try to do good, you're always going to do harm. Of course, he's an intellectual, so they have to dress it up with big words and big volumes. But that's what it comes down to.
That's very appealing advice for people who are planning to enter into a life of crime. To say, no matter how much I try to do good I'm always going to harm people. That's the paradox of grace. You can't get out of it. A wonderful idea for a Mafia don. Then he can go ahead and do whatever he feels like, and if he harms people, Oh my God, the paradox of grace. That, I think, explains why he was so appealing to American intellectuals in the post-World War II period. They were preparing to enter into a life of major crime, major criminal actions. They were going to be either the managers or else the commissars for a period of global conquest, running the world, which is obviously going to entail enormous crimes. Isn't it nice to have this doctrine before us? Of course we're superbenevolent and humane, but the paradox of grace! Again, if you're an intellectual you dress it up and write articles about it.
The mechanisms, however, are quite simple and elementary. I think all of that is, if you like, part of our nature, but in such a transparent way that you don't even call it a theory. Everybody knows this from their own experience, if they stop to think about it. Like just about everything that's understood about human beings, everybody knows it if they stop to think about it. It's not quantum physics. Mostly what's known is on the surface. Think about yourself and you can see it right there. Forget the big words and the polysyllables and the intellectual apparatus and just think about it. It's easy to see how that transmutes itself into racism.
Take the Serbs and the Croats. All they want to do right now is murder each other. They're indistinguishable. They use a different alphabet, but they speak the same language. They belong to different branches of the Catholic Church. That's about it. But they're perfectly ready to murder and destroy each other. They can imagine no higher task in life.
DB: What about the so-called "competitive ethic" of competition? Is there any evidence that we are naturally competitive? Proponents of the free market theory and the advocates of market capitalism say that you've got to give people the ability to compete -- it's a natural thing.
There are certainly conditions under which people will compete. There are conditions under which people will cooperate. For example, take a family. Suppose that whoever is providing the money for the family loses his or her job, so they don't have enough food to eat. The father is probably the strongest one in the family. Does he steal all the food and eat it, so all the kids starve? I guess there are people who do that, but then you lock them up. They're pathological. There's a defect there somewhere. No, what you do is share. Does that mean they're not competitive? No. It means that in that circumstance you share. Those circumstances can extend quite broadly. For example, they can extend to the whole working class. When you have periods of working class solidarity, people struggling together to create unions and decent working conditions, a republic of labor in which people would control their work and not have to suffer wage slavery. That's the United States, after all. Take a look at the Homestead lockout a century ago, when Andrew Carnegie established the world's first billion-dollar corporation by destroying the biggest union in the country.
He destroyed it right in Homestead, which was a working-class town with working-class solidarity. That was a period of enormous ethnic hatred and rivalry and racism, at that time directed mostly against the Eastern European immigrants, the Huns and the Slovaks. But during that conflict they worked together. It's one of the few periods of real ethnic harmony. They worked with Anglo-Saxon Americans and Germans and the rest of them. There are circumstances in which competition shows up and in which cooperation does. Again, I doubt that any person can fail to see this in their own life.
Let me tell you a personal story. I'm not particularly violent. But when I was in college, I had to take boxing. The way you did it was to spar with a friend, but we all found, and we were amazed, that pretty soon we wanted to kill each other. After doing this pushing around for a while, you really wanted to hurt that guy, your best friend. You could feel it coming out. It's horrifying to look at, and again I doubt that people have failed to see this in themselves and something about their lives. Does that mean that the desire to hurt people is innate? In certain circumstances, this aspect of our personality will dominate. There are other circumstances in which other aspects will dominate. You want to create a humane world, you change the circumstances.
DB: How crucial is social conditioning in all of this? Let's say you're a child growing up in Somalia today.
How about a child growing up in Boston, just down the street? Or even here, in Cambridge. Just last summer a foreign student at MIT was killed, knifed, just a few blocks from here, by a couple of teenagers from the local high school. They were engaged in a sport that works like this: high-school kids are supposed to walk around and find somebody walking the street. One of the kids is picked, and he's supposed to knock the person down with one blow. If he fails to do it, the other kids beat up the kid who failed. So that's the sport. So they were walking along and saw this MIT kid. One of them was chosen and knocked him down with one blow. For unexplained reasons they also knifed him and killed him. They didn't see anything especially wrong with it. They walked off and went to a bar somewhere. Somebody had seen them, and they were later picked up by the police. They hadn't even tried to get away. They didn't see anything wrong with it. They're growing up in Cambridge, not on Brattle Street, but probably in the slums, which are not Somali slums by any means, not even Dorchester slums. But surely kids in the western suburbs wouldn't act like that. Are they different genetically? No. There's something about the social conditions in which they grew up that makes this an acceptable form of behavior, even a natural form of behavior. Anyone who has grown up in an urban area must be aware of this. I can remember from childhood, there were neighborhoods where if you went in you'd be beaten up. You were not supposed to be there. The people who were doing it, kids, felt justified and righteous about it. They were defending their turf. What else do they have to defend?
DB: Speaking of Brattle Street, just last night I was there. Panhandlers, people asking for money, people sleeping in the doorways of buildings. This morning at Harvard Square in the T station it was more of the same. The spectre of poverty and despair has increasingly come into the vision or the sightlines of the middle- and upper-class. You just can't avoid it as you could years ago when it was limited to a certain section of town. This has a lot to do with the pauperization, the internal Third Worldization, I think you call it, of the United States.
There are several factors, which we've discussed before. In part it's an immediate corollary to what's called the globalization of the economy. Furthermore, there is a tremendous expansion of unregulated capital in the world seeking stable currencies and low growth. These factors have immediate, obvious consequences, namely extension of the Third World model to industrial countries. The Third World model is a sector of extreme wealth and privilege amidst huge misery and despair among useless, superfluous people. The model is extending to the entire world.
Take a look at the NAFTA discussions. The argument for NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, is that it's not going to hurt many American workers, just unskilled workers, defined to mean about seventy percent of the work force. That's one of the things you're seeing.
Look at South Central Los Angeles. That's an area where there were factories, but not any more. They moved to Eastern Europe, Mexico, and Indonesia, where you can get peasant women off the land. That's the part of free trade the elites advocate. They don't advocate the other parts of it. But the parts they can benefit from they advocate. That internationalization of production will have the effect, over the long term, of giving the industrial countries a sort of Third World aspect themselves.
There are other things happening everywhere in the industrial world, but most strikingly in four major English speaking countries -- England, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. I think the reason for that is pretty obvious. These are the countries that in the 1980s took at least minimally seriously some of the rhetoric that they preached. In most of the world, the free market rhetoric is not taken seriously. But England under Thatcher and the United States under the Reaganites and Australia and New Zealand under Labor governments to a limited extent adopted some of the doctrines they preached for the Third World. Naturally, the population suffered for it.
DB: Deregulation?
Deregulation, something a little bit like structural adjustment, which in the Third World means eliminate welfare, eliminate subsidies, stop building roads, give everything to the investors and something will trickle down by some magic, some time after the Messiah comes. The western countries of course would never really play this game completely. It would be too harmful to the rich. But they flirted with it in these English-speaking countries. And they suffered. When you say "they" suffered, you've got to be careful. The population suffered. The rich did fine, just as they do in the Third World. When I say there's a catastrophe of capitalism in the Third World, that doesn't mean for the rich people. They're doing just great.
DB: That's the paradox of 1992.
The New York Times did have a headline in the business pages: "Paradox of 92: Weak Economy, Strong Profits." Big paradox. That's the story of the Third World. It's the story now of Eastern Europe. And it's also the story in Thatcherite England, Reaganite America, and Labor party Australia and New Zealand. Most of the population suffered as the societies moved more towards the Third World pattern than is the case, say, in continental Europe or Japan. In the periphery of Japan what you're getting is a move out of the Third World pattern into an industrial pattern, as in South Korea and Taiwan, who dismiss neoliberal economics as a joke, are able to develop internally.
DB: Thank you.
Class
January 21, 1993
DB: It's a given that ideology and propaganda are phenomena of other cultures. They don't exist in the United States. Class is in the same category. You've called it the "unmentionable five-letter word."
It's kind of interesting the way it works. For example, there was quite an interesting study done by Vicente Navarro, a professor at Johns Hopkins, who works on public health issues. There are lots of statistics about things like quality of life, infant mortality, life expectancy, etc., usually broken down by race. It always turns out that blacks have horrible statistics as compared with whites; there's a huge gap. He decided to reanalyze the statistics, separating out the factors of race and class. So, let's look at white workers and black workers versus white executives and black executives. He discovered that a considerable part of the distinction between blacks and whites was actually a class difference. That's natural because there's a correlation between race and class. If you look at poor white people, white workers, and white executives, the gap between them is enormous. He did the study, obviously of relevance to epidemiology and public health. He submitted it to the major American medical journals. They all rejected it. He then sent it to the world's leading medical journal, Lancet, in Britain. They accepted it right away.
In the United States you're not allowed to talk about class differences. In fact, only two groups are allowed to be class conscious in the United States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class conscious. When you read their literature, it's all full of the danger of the masses and their rising power and how we have to defeat them. It's kind of vulgar Marxist, except inverted. The other is the high planning sector of the government. So they're full of it, too. How we have to worry about the rising aspirations of the common man and the impoverished masses who are seeking to improve standards and harming the business climate. So they can be class conscious. They have a job to do. But it's extremely important to make other people, the rest of the population, believe that there is no such thing as class. We're all just equal. We're all Americans. We live in harmony. We all work together. Everything is great.
There's a book, Mandate for Change, put out by the Progressive Policy Institute, the Clinton think tank. It's a description of the program for the Clinton administration. It was part of the campaign literature, a book you can buy at an airport newsstand. It has a section on "entrepreneurial economics," which is going to avoid the pitfalls of the right and the left. It gives up these old fashioned liberal ideas about entitlement, welfare mothers have a right to feed their children, that's all passé. We're not going to have any more of that stuff. We now have "enterprise economics," in which we improve investment and growth. The only people we want to help are workers and the firms in which they work. There are workers, there are the enterprises in which they work, and that's who we're interested in benefitting. We're going to help them.
There's somebody missing from this story. There are no managers, no bosses, no investors. They don't exist. It's just workers and the firms in which they work. We're going to help them. The word "entrepreneurs" shows up. Entrepreneurs are people who assist the workers and the firms in which they work. The word "profits" appears once. I don't know how that sneaked in, that's another dirty word, like "class." But the picture is, all of us are workers. There are firms in which we work. We would like to improve the firms in which we work, like you'd like to improve your kitchen. Get a new refrigerator. Improve the firm in which you work. That's all they're interested in, just helping us folks out there.
Another mechanism used to achieve the same result is a kind of interesting innovation in the language in the last couple of years. That's the word "jobs." It's now used to mean "profits." So when, say, George Bush took off to Japan with Lee Iacocca and the rest of the auto executives, you remember his slogan was "Jobs, jobs, jobs." That's what he was going for. We know exactly how much George Bush cares about jobs. All you have to do is look at what happened during his tenure in office, when the number of unemployed and underemployed has now reached about seventeen million or so officially. I don't know what is unofficially, about another eight million, a million of them during his term. He was trying to create conditions for exporting jobs overseas. He continued to help out with the undermining of unions and the lowering of real wages. So what does he mean when he says and the media shout, "Jobs, jobs, jobs"? It's obvious: "Profits, profits, profits." Figure out a way to increase profits. So it goes down the line.