Lives that Matter

 

SLOGANS on my mind, and policy:

"A bumper sticker is not a philosophy, Charlie Brown," and a policy statement makes a poor bumper sticker. So let's try thinking of slogans like the 2x4 in the old story from across the political spectrum of the two farmers and the Missouri mule, with the farmer arguing for reasoning with a mule trying his way, after hitting the mule upside the head with the 2x4. Punchline: "Well, first you gotta get his attention."

Don't try this at home. Don't hit helpless animals. Get the joke: Even the best of causes might require some ... non-discursive attention-getting before we can have a useful argument about policy.

ALL LIVES MATTER: As with "All life is sacred," don't tell me this while you're eating a bacon-burger, or a carrot, or using a hand sanitizer. Actually, don't tell me any of these variations since in my brief time in microbiology I destroyed life by the billions and hundred of billions and feel no guilt. I do feel guilty for other lab work, where I killed a lot of rats, a cat, a rabbit or two, and helped kill a number of dogs: it's one of the reasons I avoid eating mammal meat.

What people are talking about is human life and our belief that human life is special. Indeed part of the central myth of American culture is the one early in the US Declaration of Independence where Thomas Jefferson et al. tell us about a creator god making us all equal and endowing us with "certain unalienable rights," including life and liberty. That's a belief, a leap of faith, and either a self-evident "truth," or stupid-human, arrogant b.s.

BLACK LIVES MATTER is centrally about White people's and various political and other systems' recognizing and realizing — as in "making real" — that Black people are people: full human beings, with whatever rights White's legitimately claim for them/ourselves. (People seriously serious about Whiteness don't accept me as White.)

BLACK LIVES MATTER (also) helps provide the Race part of a set of interlocking and overlapping sets of issues on policing in the USA, including the militarization of the police. We need to look at this super-set of issues, and I hope those working for BLM will allow that they've "got our attention" (see mule story above), and that we can move on to policy and wider politics.

And I think moving on a good idea in large part because I'm a Jew who specifies which holocaust I'm talking about and who uses the 11 million figure of total deaths in the Hitlerian Holocaust and not the 6 million figure for Jews: If "the Holocaust" were literally unique to Jews, it would have no usable lessons for anyone else, and only ethics and decency would motivate non-Jews to care. And if you know about the Hitlerian Holocaust, you know the limits of ethics and decency: far better the formula "First they came for" and get others to recognize that they have some potential-lamp-shade skin in the game.

Even so with the militarization of US police, thoroughly documented in Radley Balko's Rise of the Warritor Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (2013). Blacks are far more likely than Whites to get beaten, maimed, or killed by American cops. "First they came for the Blacks" in using "the Justice System" for social control. But The War on Crime and especially The War on Drugs have had their White victims. Which is a good thing for BLM since they don't have to limit their appeal to the often-limited ethics and decency of non-Black people.

So: BLACK LIVES MATTER, HUMAN LIVES MATTER, The Rights of Americans Matter — and let's talk policy (and by, say, Fall of 2021 get around to restitution, reparations, and reconciliation: a policy slogan I definitely like is "Guilt isn't inherited, but the loot is.")

Again, Which Victims Count, Which Count Less

The occasion here is the 14 July 2017 edition of the WBUR-Radio show On Point, "Debate Over the Media’s Duty to Vulnerable Viewers," itself occasioned by the debate over the Netflix movie TO THE BONE (2017). I had several comments as someone who taught many years, including controversial films, and who has an associate producers credit on a film where the male lead lost and gained 40 pounds for his role as a drug addict (MOST HIGH, 2004).

I missed hearing the phrase in the discussion, "per 100,000" and some statistics on just how serious a public health problem eating disorders are, among various populations. And how eating disorders are perceived. Other numbers that are important respond to the challenge, "Well you can't measure the value of a human life!" You can come up with numbers for insurance issues and tort cases at law, and "you" can get approximations as to how much various lives are valued by measuring newspaper column-inches, minutes of TV and other electronic media coverage, and other coverage devoted to various deaths, kidnappings, disappearances etc. There isn't a competition going for what the comedian Mort Sahl called "The Grimmy Award" for Worst. Problem. Ever. — but, per 100,000 relevant populations, we should hear the stats on "morbidity and mortality" for various eating disorders. Also: what kind of coverage across a number of media do you get for, say, anorexia among young white women and older girls compared with that of obesity among Black or Hispanic women and girls? 

For the actress losing weight for TO THE BONE: There's also a bit of actorly macho/macha in the background here. Real men and Real women working as actors are (in the macho/a theory) willing to lose and gain a lot of weight, and the more weight gained and/or lost the more impressive for their dedication to really get into a role. The value system here can get a little silly and sometimes dangerous.

In movies, we can look at how the camera (so to speak) treats death and pain of various victims, and we can get ideas about how audiences react. Feminists were correct to stress how "the male gaze" sometimes luxuriates in the suffering and death of women. The flip side of that is what we called "The Law of Todd," named for a Miami University film student, on the casualness of the handling of the deaths of healthy young men — and the rule with no exceptions I can think of that The Camera never handles casually the deaths of children. It's a sight gag in HOT SHOTS PART DEUX (1993) when Iraqi soldiers are artfully mowed down with a running total at the bottom of the screen, and the final announcement (quoting from memory), BLOODIEST MOVIE EVER! There's a serious point here: If some "red-shirt/Corporal Deadmeat" unnamed character has a gun *he* (almost always until recently) can be shot down casually. Indeed, violence against nasty young men — Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) is the example I studied — will not be recalled strongly, nor, often, will it be seen as violence. And memory can get interesting even with more neutral characters. "The Rape Scene" in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is called "The Rape Scene," and a number of my students only vaguely recalled that the scene also shows, graphically, the beating and as it turns out crippling of an older man. 

So "Attention must be paid" to the suffering of victims perceived in mass culture as generally young, thin, and mostly pretty White girls. If the statistics indicate there are larger health issues elsewhere, it would also be nice to get coverage and works of art on the issues confronting older and/or fat and/or average-looking and/or non-White people.   

Lives Mattering (Again)

It's a useful exercise to get overly precise and note that "All lives matter" but for most of us many don't matter much. My summer jobs in college were mostly lab work, and in microbiology labs I routinely autoclaved bacteria and killed organisms by the billions — and in the case of the TB bacilli took some grim satisfaction doing it. Working in a classic physiology lab in gastroenterology, I killed many rats, for which I feel vaguely guilty, and also dogs, one cat, and a rabbit or two — which contributed a bit to my later decision to do without eating mammal meat.

So don't tall me "All life is sacred" if you're eating a hamburger or, for that matter, a carrot. People who talk that way either don't consider cows or carrots *really* alive or are arrogantly using a "clipped form" where "life" and "lives" is limited to humans — which is another way of denying real life to organisms we significantly call "sub-human."

So obviously just about anyone but a fanatical Vegan or — and more so — a devout Jain makes distinctions about which lives matter enough to seriously influence their behavior toward them, most especially which lives can be taken casually, with, as we say, "no more concern than you would swat a fly," and which deaths can be ignored or mildly enjoyed: as in most eating and sanitizing and a lot of hunting and fishing.

What's at stake is our "circle of concern": how far out we care about living beings from self to family and friends and pets to tribe and fellow citizens ... and whether or not the circle of at least abstract, intellectual concern includes big parts of the human species.

The sentence "All Lives Matter" should be rejected out of hand because most of us just don't mean it. Certainly not for bacteria nor insects that bother us nor rats nor lambs nor steers; for many, the lives of men convicted of murder don't matter much, and many can rejoice in the deaths of enemy combatants. So we can reject the formulation "All Lives Matter" on the great principle of argument, "Cut the shit."

If you want to revise that to "All Human Lives Matter," you need to admit that some matter to you a whole lot more than others, and that that's okay. And then we get to just who(m) we see as fully human and whom we see as really important — and that is where "Black Lives Matter" becomes a very important assertion.

Lives Matter (But Most, Individually, Not Much)

"A bumper sticker is not a philosophy, Charlie Brown."

But, then, a carefully worked out philosophical

statement would make a lousy bumper sticker.

         

Before we get too deeply into "Black Lives Matter" or "Police Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter," we might ask "To whom?" If you mean in some absolute sense that such lives goddamn bloody-well matter, a realistic response would have to be, "Do you mean they matter to God?" 'Cause if not, no, in absolute terms, in terms of The Big Picture — that universe of Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson's "billions and billions of stars" — all life on Earth may matter, but not much. And in the multiverse of any number of universes, possibly an infinite number of universes, our mattering approaches zero.

         So let's ratchet down meaning to just our little planet and human scale. In that case ,"All Lives Matter" can be like "All life is sacred": two statements you shouldn't pronounce while eating a hamburger or even carrots (especially not baby carrots) — or in my presence. That's "not in my presence" because I used to do lab work for summer jobs and in that line of employment killed a significant number of rats, a few dogs, one cat, a rabbit or two, and, in two microbiology labs, bacteria by at least the billions. I feel guilty about the mammals and now decline to eat mammal meat (or octopuses since I encountered one very smart one), but I don't regret the bacteria and to this day still feel some smug satisfaction at having steamed to death any odd billions of Mycobacterium tuberculosis I autoclaved in used sputum samples from TB patients.

         So come on! The vast majority of people who say "All Lives Matter" don't give a rat's ass about bacterial life or, for that matter rats, or for the vast majority of living things on the planet. In context, all but the Jains and most rigorous eco-freaks mean that all human lives matter, and that's a statement of faith. As the Good Book saith, or at least Koheleth (Ecclesiastes, "The Preacher"), "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man hath no pre-eminence above a beast […]" (3.19).

         For excellent practical reasons, we humans arrogantly see ourselves as special and insist that (at least generally and in theory) "All Human Lives Matter" a whole lot more than the lives of such old and successful fellow critters as bacteria, jelly fish, round worms, social insects, and even sharks or such relatively close relatives as sheep.

         And then the question becomes how serious we really are about "All Human Lives Matter" and/or just whom we see as fully human.

         And that can get complicated.

         Racism is a relatively recent invention, and it is an invention. Bigotry and xenophobia are widespread and part of the figurative DNA of the human species; racism is an ideology, with a history very much in relatively recent historical times. In the ancient world most places most of the time, most people were willing to treat some other people as things to be bought and sold — slaves — without racial theories to deny humanity to slaves. Indeed, the Spartans kept Helots, publicly-owned slaves who were fellow Greeks, and the Romans were cheerfully equal-opportunity enslavers of prisoners of war and the children of slaves and of the desperately poor.

         For understandable reasons, we accept as fully human and proper recipients of our care and regard, to start with, ourselves and then working out to immediate family, extended family, village … and then further out until we get into increasingly abstract social structures of clan, tribe, and country. Perhaps God and a few saints manage to truly love all of humanity, but for most of us the circle of concern is small, and we really do care about only a few people because that's all we really can care about.

         Look: If God loves us and says we're important, then we're important because God loves us and says we're important, not for any reason intrinsic to us. If there is no God, or if God has better things to do than concern Him/Her/Itself with recent species on minor planets, then we're not important and don't matter. That's the one hand. The "on the other hand" is the practical necessity to affirm human value precisely because in a merely material(ist) universe there's no good reason to believe in human value but strong reason to accept an absurd belief in it so we feel justified to forbid unnecessarily killing or otherwise harming one another.

         In the US of A, we need assertions of "All (Human) Lives Matter" and stronger assertions that "X", "Y", and "Z" lives matter when X, Y, and Z are subgroups whose full humanity has been seriously questioned in American history, e.g., by dispossessing and massacring people, such as Indians, or buying and selling them, such as Blacks.

         The United States has not been a melting pot, reducing Native Americans and then the later immigrants to "atomized" individuals: and our not being a melting pot — a terrifying image — is a good thing. In fortunate times, we're more like a mosaic or stew or that all-American dish, chop suey. When things aren't so good by us in America, we're a race war waiting to happen, a potential chaos of ethnicities, regions, and tribal enclaves that could make the Middle East or the Balkans look like Denmark.

         So let us assert strongly that "BLACK LIVES MATTER" and recognize simultaneously the humanity of all police and the necessity for policing, and let us insist on the decency and loyal service of most police officers most of the time. If you're an American of mature years, you're familiar with Rodney King's rhetorical question, "Can we all get along?"; there's an answer to it, and it's that we Americans had damn well better get along better, or we're going to be in big trouble.

         We are in for a literal "long, hot summer" in 2016, and for a number of years to come as Earth goes through another warm spell and this time around humans add significantly to it. We're also in for another period of large-scale migrations and more and less fanatical and massive mass movements, with ISIS as the harbinger. We in America can't afford another figurative "long, hot summer" of racial violence.

         So, yeah, "BLACK LIVES MATTER," and, indeed, be nice to nice cops. And "If you see something, say something" about terrorist preparations, crime, and/or about any criminal cops.

         And finally, please recognize that for the sort of people who read blogs, the USA is a safe place, where you can (usually) leave your guns at the shooting range or in a locked locker at home.  

"Henry V," "Merchant of Venice," Caste and Class — and Respect and Black Lives Matter

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother. Be he n'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition […].

— King Henry to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt

Henry V 4.3.61-64

Now by my hood, a gentle and no Jew!
— Gratiano, more or less to Lorenzo, on the Jewess Jessica

The Merchant of Venice 2.6.50

            The lines of King Henry V that I quote above need to be glossed nowadays — have the terms defined — and really should be modernized in performance. Henry is offering (figurative) brotherhood to everyone who fights alongside him in what looks like a hopeless battle, and he's making that offer even to the most vile in his army. That is — Henry kind of promises — even the most low-born will become a figurative brother to a king — himself, Henry — and, Henry implies, will rise to, or at least toward, the status of gentleman ("This day shall gentle his condition"). It is significant, and not just for understanding Shakespeare, that a word for "low-born" was negative in Shakespeare's day and has become far worse since then: vile is not a compliment. Neither is "varlet," "churl," "boor," or even "peasant," the last two or three of which once just meant "farm laborer" or "farmer." There were those who were gentle in their birth, and above them, and by Shakespeare's time included in the term, there were and are those who are noble and (above them) royal. And then there were the rest.

            Got it?

            Now Gratiano is a wiseass young man in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (1596/97), the side-kick to the second-banana hero in the subplot: Lorenzo, the lover of Jessica, a Jewess (sic) with whom he, Lorenzo, is eloping and who (Jessica) has just gone off to steal more money from her father: the villain of the piece, Shylock. In the line I quote as a headnote, "by my hood" really doesn't mean anything, and "a gentle and no Jew" is complicated. "Gentle" puns on "gentile" and means "gentle" in our sense, plus something similar to "genteel": being a gentlewoman or having the qualities associated with a lady or gentleman — as opposed to us non-gentle (lowborn, vile) others, and, clearly, as opposed to Jews.

            "Jewish gentlewoman" or "Jewish lady" would be a contradiction in terms.

            Insofar as The Merchant of Venice is a romantic comedy in a romantic-comic world, Jessica can convert to Christianity (precisely what variety of Christianity Shakespeare won't get into) — Jessica can convert, marry a gentleman like Lorenzo, and become a lady. And the followers of a victorious king or duke or other warlord really might accumulate enough in loot and/or ransoms to move up the social ladder, or at least start their families up the scale.

            Not so with any non-converted Jews, and, in the real world of Shakespeare's day and long after, not so with Jews generally. In many mouths, "Jewish gentleman" was a kind of sick joke or condescending slight. It was like the folk etymology of "wog" as an acronym for "Worthy Oriental Gentleman": a put-down.

            Shylock in Merchant and far more so the earlier Jewish villain Barabas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1592) could buy and sell, fairly literally, almost all the Christians in the play, and for the most part were smarter and better educated. No matter. There had been a long-running argument De vera nobilitate, "concerning true nobility," and one could argue that "true nobility" came from cultural "breeding," virtue, and leading a virtuous life, not from biological breeding, one's birth.  By Shakespeare's time, the boundary for respectability had moved down enough that the argument was on gentility, not nobility, and one could argue, "Gentle is as gentle does." Still, there are limits!

            In the late 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries, those limits were expressed in racial or racialist or downright racist terms: modern anti-Semitism is part of racism — as an ideology, an Early Modern invention — as well as traditional anti-Jewish prejudice and doctrine. And that's how I encountered it at Cornell University in 1965 when I asked what people were talking about when they mentioned "the White houses" on the Ithaca, NY, campus. The African-American fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha was founded at Cornell (1906), and the fraternity chapter I advised had two or three Black pledges that year, but from my rather out-of-it, new-graduate-student view, the Cornell fraternity system looked pretty much incandescent, albino-lily White. So what would the meaning be for "White houses"?

            Well, as you've probably inferred, "the White houses" didn't admit Jews, and had been open about it (and may've been leery of Catholics): "White" pretty much meant WASP or at least the generalized "the white man" as used by an old Jew in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (set ca. 1950, novel published: 1959, film: 1974).

            Which gets me to the time I write, moving into the latter part of November 2015, a time of the Black Lives Matter movement the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, and campus protests against insults and threats to Blacks and debates on "microaggressions."

*

            Ordinarily, I press the point that "Guilt isn't inherited, but the loot is" and say that discussions of race in America should start with the issue of reparations and move on from there. And I am grateful to Bernie Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren and the persistent old New Left) for reintroducing issues of class into upper-end American political debate. And, indeed, I used to say, and will say again, that the crucial color in American conflicts on race is green: acceptance into bourgeois society will come when many more Blacks have wealth enough to make them bourgeois or richer.

            But —

            But one of the things I know I want money for is for status and respect, and for good and for ill — and it's the "for ill" aspects I'm concerned about here — even in militantly capitalist America not even old money can inevitably or maybe even reliably outweigh issues of caste and a pretty inflexible de facto hierarchy.

            In an earlier blog (31 Oct. 2015), I passed along a 1960s racist/anti-racist joke about a prominent American with an earned doctorate and a résumé that included serving as a university department chair, service in the OSS (the precursor of the CIA — although that could only be rumor until 2008), and the winning of a Nobel prize for work done with the status in protocol of a senior ambassador. The punch line was on correct forms of address for someone with so much high status and how was referred to in a recent visit to Mississippi or other deep-South state. The answer is that in Mississippi (or whatever) he was called "Nigger," which to a devout racist is simply a statement of who the man — Ralph Bunch — essentially is or was (Bunch died in 1971), and to a non-racist bitterly funny as a reduction to the absurd of racist "essentialism."

            We have such racial and racialist, and often racist essentialism as part of the cultural DNA of the United States, intimately combined with highly persistent Old World ideas of hierarchy and castes other than race: gender as a higher or lower caste for one thing, plus more amorphous and interconnected quasi-castes involving religions, ethnicities, sexuality, and even geographical culture. (How much anti-Semitism remains with us [and what happens when American bigots remember that Arabs are Semites], how much tolerance Christian America has for secularism: such matter will become clearer the longer Bernie Sanders runs for President.)

*

            It was a cliché when I was in college that the two great systems for political analysis of the 19^th and much of the 20^th centuries were class and race, and the Left mostly went with race — which is why part of split on the American Left after the 1960s had much to do with race, and still more to do with gender and sex.  As a man of the Left, I'll again offer the unsolicited (and therefore necessarily arrogant) advice that Blacks and other marginalized groups should keep their eyes on the prize of economic equality and ensure that calls for reparations in some sense help start the conversation on race.

            "Justice, justice you shall pursue!" (Deuteronomy 16:20), and economic justice is a central issue. But there are the standard "But's" that made "Class, Race, and Gender" a kind of mantra of the last part of the 20^th century, and to which we need additions, including in the US age and generation.

            Like the Jews and Catholics before them, Black Americans on mostly-White college campuses are both privileged — Hey, you're in college! — and still subject to the snubs and disrespect that do not make life significantly unsafe but can make one's life-experience unpleasant and bit-by-bit can wear a person out. And there are real threats. A noose on a tree on campus isn't a lynching even as the march of neo-Nazis through a heavily Jewish suburb isn't a pogrom; but a swastika made of feces on a dorm wall adds injury to insult, and needs serious investigation and prosecution.

            I had my life threatened once by some laughable fascists while a graduate student peace activist and risked a couple times getting clubbed by cops; and I tried to respond by sucking it up and following the mock-Latin motto, "Illegitimi non carborundum": Don't let the bastards grind you down. Still, the threats to me stemmed from what I did, not who I was or what I am.

            That may change for me if substantial human groups move into another period of full-scale religious warfare, but probably not. For American Blacks — centrally Blacks still, although Latinos and American Muslims are catching up — for American Blacks the challenges will include dealing with a declining but still important caste system in the tradition that had "Colored lady" and "Colored gentleman" ironic denials of status, and where one was color-coded into a caste that was in varying degrees, but constantly, in danger.

*

            During the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the radical English Lollard priest John Ball incited a group more "vile" than Henry V's common soldiers with the subversive rhetorical question, "When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?" If we can't "get ourselves back to the garden" of Eden, we can at least get ourselves back — figuratively — to the "beginning" of human culture when Adam farmed and Eve worked at her spinning, and "all men by nature were created alike, and" only later "our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men," where "naughty" means evil. Ultimately, the goal for an enlightened and redeemed humanity would be the destruction of systems of caste and hierarchy root and branch, and on the way destruction of systems of inherited caste and hierarchy. Moving toward those goals we do indeed need to do more to equalize wealth and income and opportunity, and simultaneously we need to pursue justice and decency in more everyday things so that "Black Lives Matter," as well as Black deaths, as do the oppression, deaths, and quality of everyday life of all those dismissed as innately incapable of being a "gentle," all of us seen as innately "vile."