Stardate 20020828.1341

(Captain's log): One of the most important events of my college education was when I took Political Science. Upon retrospect, much of what I was taught in that course made no sense to me, but I've come to understand a great deal of it since then. I'm afraid that the professor wasn't a very good teacher; her lessons were muddled. But she had the right idea and tried to teach us the right things, and some of the books we were assigned to read were important.

For me, personally, the most important book I read in that course, was The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. It was originally written in German, and as is so often the case with translations from German, the prose was thick and it was difficult to read. And then a klaxon went off in my head, because I suddenly realized that Weber was talking about me, myself, Steven, the red-haired kid sitting there. He was explaining the logic behind a lot of things that I had been raised with as dogma.

Dogma is wisdom without explanation: Accept these truths because we tell you so. The year before, in philosophy, I had read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, which may well be the single book which has most influenced my life. Mill taught me not what to think, but how to think, and with those tools everything else came. Mill explained dogma, and explained its danger, and explained how to avoid them, and how to revitalize dogma into belief. (Among many, many other things. The book is incredibly rich.)

Mill taught me to question my own dogmas. Weber explained to me where they came from.

Raised in the Methodist Church by two parents both from farmer stock, Dutch on one side and mixed German on the other, I was deep in the heart of the Protestant Ethic. And Weber was explaining it all to me!

Suddenly that book got extremely easy to read. I raced through the rest of it, and it helped kick off a process whereby I began to critically examine everything I thought I knew without knowing why (i.e. all the dogma I accepted).

By that point I had already largely abandoned Christianity, and of course as soon as I read about Calvinism (and it was the first time I'd ever even encountered the word "Calvinism") it became clear that the philosophical basis for much of the dogma I'd been taught was totally wrong. But I knew enough logic to know that it's possible to come up with a true conclusion from false premises and faulty logic, and that assuming that such a conclusion was false was itself a fallacy.

And when I started to examine much of what I'd been taught, critically, I found much there to value. Some of it I rejected (e.g. eternal damnation) but a lot of it I retained, although for entirely different reasons. I still believe in hard work and self sufficiency, but not because it's necessary in order to do God's Work on Earth. Hard work and self sufficiency are worthwhile for other reasons, even for an atheist.

Some of what I'd been given I kept largely unchanged. Some I modified. Some I rejected. And what I found was that my heritage was a mixed bag, some shameful but much that was praiseworthy. Though I'm now an atheist, I'm not ashamed of my religious background, for my people did many good things. In the 1960's, for instance, the church my family attended sent money to the South to help support Dr. King, and some of the young (white) men in that church went to the South to join the freedom marchers.

I inherited culture from my religious background, and I also inherited culture from growing up in Oregon. The ethic and sensibility of the pioneers still influences how Oregonians think, even though most Oregonians now have no ancestors who crossed the continent in covered wagons. (My ancestors all arrived by rail.)

As a whitebread American, I have a much less rich ethnic and cultural heritage than many, but what I have I value. Any person's cultural heritage is a gift, a treasure beyond price. To discard it, reject it, ignore it is to waste something important.

Part of why knowing about it is important is because when you know how you got where you are, it helps you to understand where you can go in future. Much of the value of such knowledge is precisely in how it gives you the ability to free yourself from your past. It would, I think, have been much harder for me to have become secure in my atheism and to form a consistent and comprehensive life philosophy based on a mechanistic view of the universe without having read Weber's book.

One's heritage is a great gift, but for many it is also a great straitjacket, a prison.

The essence of bigotry is that it assumes that from relatively trivial observations about the characteristics of a person it is possible to deduce a great deal of deep knowledge about them and to be totally certain that you're right. There's a tendency for many Americans to think that someone who speaks with a Brooklyn or Bronx accent must be unsophisticated, badly educated and rather stupid. (Like, say, Richard Feynman, who spoke like a truck driver his whole life, even as he was helping to unlock the secrets of the universe.)

On some level, that kind of thing is simply an aspect of inductive reasoning. Everything we do in life is based on probabilities and guesses because there isn't time to acquire sufficient knowledge for deduction. So we extrapolate and fill in, and as long as we are aware of the possibility that we might be wrong, and watch for hints of that in order to correct ourselves, then it's an honest mistake. We've found in the past that there are certain correlations between things we can observe and things we cannot, and assume that it's likely to continue in future. It's impossible, really, to operate any other way.

Where inductive shortcut becomes bigotry is when it becomes large, pervasive, and unshakeable. Many people know that Jews are money-grubbing, effete, overeducated and insular (and that they are all part of a secret conspiracy to rule the world). Many people know that someone with black skin is lazy, stupid, unmotivated and basically dishonest. And unlike the normal inductive shortcut, you won't convince them otherwise.

It's interesting that bigotry doesn't have to be negative. Some people know that rich people are wise, intelligent and perceptive. What makes bigotry isn't that the conclusion and behavior it inspires is malicious, but rather that it isn't based on a recognition of just how much people vary. It presumes far more uniformity than actually exists.

There are black people who are lazy, stupid, unmotivated and dishonest. There are also white people like that, and yellow people. You'll find people like that everywhere, as part of any nominal group you encounter. The danger here is not that black people like that exist, but that an anti-black bigot assumes that every black person he meets is like that. In reality, blacks can be smart or stupid, kind or cruel, wise or foolish, driven or unmotivated, honorable or treacherous.

Just like anyone else.

Bigotry is bad under all circumstances, but where it becomes truly dangerous is when it drives public or private social policy. If all blacks are lazy, stupid, unmotivated and dishonest then there's no point in educating them because they won't learn, and they should never be given any job which requires hard work or integrity, because they'll just screw it up. That's blatantly unfair, and it's also incorrect because many, perhaps even most, blacks are not at all like that. History of the last thirty years has shown that blacks are just as capable of holding responsible positions as anyone else, and performing just as well as anyone else does. Blacks are just as able to utilize education, if they choose to do so.

What many businesses are finding is that not only are those kinds of hiring policies unfair, incorrect, (and illegal!) but they're also unwise. Good people shouldn't be wasted; there are never enough of them. You can't fill every position of trust in your organization with white men, because to do so you'll end up having to use some white men who are lazy or stupid or unmotivated or dishonest, and who will as a result louse you up. More and more companies are discovering that race-blind (and gender-blind) hiring is good business. Those that have adopted it have done better commercially.

The greatest ally that the Civil Rights movement has had is human greed. That's even more powerful than clannishness or hatred. Inclusive social policies have turned out to be more profitable.

But while the majority of clearly-identified and well publicized bigotry in the recent past in the US has been by whites, directed against non-whites (or by WASPs, directed at the Irish and Poles and Eye-talians), that kind of bigotry is on the run today. It still exists, but it's marginalized and its influence continues to wane. Many young people scoff at such ideas, but to someone my age, who saw what things were like 40 years ago, it's undeniable. The struggle continues, but the amount of progress has been incredible. It's probably going to always exist, to some extent, but the process of eliminating its effects on our society is now unstoppable. It's acquired a momentum of its own.

The most dangerous form of bigotry now is that which is motivated by good wishes. As part of the process of fighting against negative racial stereotypes, some Civil Rights activists tried to use countering-propaganda. One of the problems in the bad old days is that the negative message from many (but not all!) in White America towards the non-whites actually convinced many of those non-whites. They came to believe what the white bigots did, and came to hate themselves and each other.

To counter that, some Civil Rights activists began to concentrate on trying to instill pride in the heritage and history of various racial minorities and other victim classes. This was strongest among white women and among blacks, though there were equivalent but less influential movements in the Hispanic community, and to an even lesser extent in other groups. (America's Jews, for instance, never really came to hate themselves and didn't need such a thing.)

But no matter how it is that this happened, what they ended up doing was to try to replace one form of bigotry with another, rather than trying to free people from bigotry. Instead of trying to eliminate stereotypes, they tried to replace a negative stereotype with a positive one. I suspect the reason was primarily practical: it was easier and more effective. You could see this happen in the Women's movement.

Instead of women belonging in the home to raise children, the new model for women was that they should have careers.

That part's fine, but it went further than that: every woman had to have a career. Any woman who stayed at home and did raise children was a victim, and if she indicated that she actually wanted it, then she was a brainwashed victim. She had been indoctrinated by the attitudes of male bigotry; she clearly needed to be deprogrammed so that she, too, could learn to hate men and work to get her own career. She was to be pitied for her decision, not supported in it.

Extreme elements of the women's liberation movement eventually created a stereotype for the successful Liberated Woman which was so weird, so extreme, that it actually began to inspire major backlash from women themselves. From the outside, one could come to the conclusion that to the most extreme elements of the movement the ideal woman was plain-to-ugly, childless, career-oriented, and lesbian. In reaction, a growing number of women moved one step further, and did exactly what I did with Christian dogma and the Protestant Ethic: instead of adopting the opposite stereotype, they tried to eliminate stereotypes entirely. Instead of replacing the old role of women with a new one, they eliminated roles.

The mere fact that male sexists told women that they should be a certain way didn't necessarily mean it was a bad thing to do. The important point was that women make decisions for themselves, in a thoughtful way, and to be happy with the results. If the result happened to coincide with what male sexists preached, it didn't matter.

Some extremists in the women's movement thought that "beauty" was a male chauvinist plot, and that as a reaction to it all women should try to make themselves look as plain and unattractive as possible. But a lot of women decided that they really liked being beautiful; it wasn't that they did it to please men, but rather because it pleased themselves, and just incidentally gave them power over men (who can then be led around by their hormones).

Some women decided they actually wanted to raise kids. Kids are fun. (Kids are a lot more than that.) Some women decided they didn't want careers. Many of them transcended the inverse bigotry of the Women's movement, and much of its influence has waned in the last twenty years, and its most extreme elements are now rotting in the "Women's Studies" groups in certain universities, grumbling in their beer about how it all went wrong. It served its purpose in helping women to free themselves from male chauvinism and male bigotry; and then America's women freed themselves from worst aspects of the Women's Movement.

Unfortunately, America's blacks haven't been so lucky. Just as with women, they were subject to severe bigotry and social policies based on unfair stereotypes. Just as with women, they struggled to change the laws and to change the attitudes of the white majority, and to free themselves from the effects of white bigotry. And just as with the women's movement, many black activists began to use propaganda and indoctrination on blacks themselves to try to eliminat