WILD SURMISE

AUGUST 1992 #25

AN ALMOST ANONYMOUS INFORMAL NOTE

MESS IN THE U.S

This summer there has been rioting in Los Angeles and rioting in New York, and somehow it is supposed to be the fault of the South. Lets look at that again.

Four white policemen were videotaped beating up one Black motorist in Los Angeles. A mostly white jury acquitted the police, and thousands of Black and Hispanic people rioted, in the process conspicuously looting thousands of Korean stores. Something similar if less extreme happened in New York. The melting pot theory of history, that good things happen when you mix a bunch of people of different race, culture, language (this isn't very specific; the melting pot theory has never been well thought out) has a serious problem. Although we cannot solve the problem, we ought at least to dust off the tools with which we think about such things.

The commentators who are paid to write commonplaces have generally indicated that the problem is racism. It was racism in the police force that caused the policemen to beat up the Black Than. It was racism on the part of the jury that produced the acquittal. It was a reaction of against racism that caused the Blacks to riot. And the Hispanics got swept up in it, forgetting the excitement that they were not Blacks.

Since racism is not a religion or a political party, I suppose it is a mental set that characterizes people we should call-racists. And "racist" is a word that is very easy to understand. It is a hate word. Once you have called a person a "racist," you have said all manner of evil against him, but you have not actually said what you think he thinks.

That's a problem with hate words. They don't really mean much. They only tell you how the person using the word feels. If you are taking the trouble of reading what a person has written, you should expect him to take the trouble of having some ideas and expressing them. Do not accept hate words.

Most of the writers you will run across think of themselves as liberals or conservatives and at all events as humanists; they think they are taking the side of all humans and that were their own philosophy to be adopted, all humans would benefit. "Liberals" in this country seem to trust big government. "Conservatives" trust big business. Each side envisions a uniform world order.

The liberals would have us forget our differences and establish a world government which would take wealth from those who have too much and give it to those who have too little. The conservatives would have us forget or differences and establish a world market in which international speculators would get rich by seeing that any work was done by the cheapest laborer and any product was sold to the highest bidder.

Ideally, the end result is much the same and humanity is the final winner in either case.

But let me tell you something about humanity. Humanity is not all the same. People really are different; different genetically and different culturally. And people like those differences. Nay, people need those things that are different about them.

The English language has probably more and better poetry than any other. There is a large body of English poetry that is concerned with death; such poetry is said to "speak to the human condition." But death is not a particularly human characteristic. All living things die. The difference is that when human dies it is recognized that a personality has been lost. The sheer fact that there are lots of other humans alive does not make up for the fact that a person has died. It is the loss of differentness that matters.

Death, hunger, sexual appetite. These are conditions most people know, but they are not unique to humans. Some, not all, animals experience them, too. Therefore they are not human conditions. They are merely laws of nature.

There are other things we humans share with animals. Anyone who has been around a dog knows that humans have no monopoly on affection, joy, fear, pain, shame, loyalty, or anger. A man flexing his muscles in front of a mirror is indulging in physical vanity; I have seen a lizard do the same in front of a reflective mirror. Once while standing in the driveway doing nothing I saw a lizard stroll out onto the concrete and stand for a while doing nothing I understood; but then the lizard turned and looked up at me. For some seconds you could see the realization dawning on the little beast, "It's alive." At the same time the realization dawned on me, "It is capable of awe."

I hear from a reliable friend who once took a drawing class that a classmate brought a dog to the lesson. The dog was quite friendly and everyone, including the model and the instructor petted the dog. When it was time to start, the model, who was a man, took off his robe. The dog started barking. Even a sense of propriety is a natural phenomenon, not something limited to humans.

So when a writer takes the position that any pride or interest in identity other than identity as a human, when a writer takes the posture that nationalism among these people or religion among those people is a divisive force and therefore inherently evil, think that this writer hates the differences in people. And since it is precisely those differences that make us different from animals, it is really the humanness of people that he hates. Trust no such writer. In his heart he hates you for being human.

Rodney King, the Black motorist, was beaten. I did not see the tape, as I do not watch television. But by all reports, he really was beaten. And the Blacks in his city proceeded to riot. Now I do not presume to understand how they felt, for I have never been a poor Black person in the center of a big rich city. But they acted as if their sense of community had been offended.

After all, King was not the first poor person to get beaten In fact, I shouldn't be surprised most of those people have worse things happen to them. But it was white police that did it, and that produced unhappiness.

Now there are some things that will make people riot. In New York during the War Between the States there were draft riots. I am sure that behind those riots was in part the sentiment that people did not want to go fight when suddenly there were lucrative jobs to be done at home. But I think also there was the feeling that war was just not a good idea.

People riot in protest against wars, which is to say in demand for peace. And there are good careful people whose business is to keep nations at peace.

People riot when they are starving. And again it is thought proper that people eat. Society goes to great lengths to be sure that neither this group nor that starves. Oh, there are failures, tragic ones. But it is well accepted that people should not be left to starve.

People riot if they think their rights have been taken away. And again there is general agreement that people do have rights.

People riot when their sense of community has been offended. And the response seems to be a hiss of "racism" and then silence.

I tell you, people have a right to community just as they have a right to peace, freedom and animal survival.

Given Black police, Black store owners and no Hispanic neighbors, the episode would never have happened. Or if it had, would have been understood as a simple misfortune. It would not have put the nation in fear of a civil war.

First let us dust off a couple definitions. If you are a student of American history, you have probably been exposed to the notion that there was an American Revolution and American Civil War. A moment of thought will persuade you that neither of these calamities ever befell us.

Consider the minimal civility that is expected between people. Suppose I am a guest in your home and I start to leave. If there is some grave danger outside, you may attempt to detain me. Say there is a blizzard and I am not warmly dressed and for some reason incapable of making rational decisions. If my departure will cause you great harm, you may attempt to detain me. Say I am warmly dressed but you are not and the house stays warm enough for you to survive only if two of us are in it. Or perhaps you think I have committed a crime; you might detain me until the police come. But by and large if I want to go I can go, and if you try by main force to detain me you are committing a serious crime.

The same principle holds if there are two of you and two of me. Or a million of you and a million of me. If a group of people wish to leave any company whatsoever, it is their right. And if it is a large group, they may take with them the land on which they live.

This is a basic human right. (That's right. There are also certain animals that you are not allowed to capture.)

In 1776, thirteen English colonies in America left the British Empire. This was their right. There followed a war of conquest in which Britain tried to conquer her old colonies.

A revolution, of course, is something entirely different. A revolution is an attempt to overthrow the government. In 1776 no American so much as lifted a finger to overthrow King George of England. There wasn't even much talk about it. This was no revolution. This was a war of conquest. And of course the conquest failed.

In 1861 thirteen states, some of them some of the original thirteen colonies, again decided to leave. There followed a war of conquest, in which the remainder of the Union sought to, and indeed did, conquer, subdue and annex the confederacy. This was no civil war. This was a war between two nations. I know the Confederacy was a nation. I have read its constitution.

It is a little different from the U.S. Constitution. Civil rights, which are included as amendments to the U.S. Constitution, are integral to the Confederate one and take precedence over the details of power structure. Free trade for the Confederacy was a constitutional right, not a political pawn. Importation of slaves was forbidden, which has never been forbidden by the U.S. constitution, although forbidden by law and rendered at all events impractical by emancipation.

A Civil war is one in which one group of people within a nation fights another group without either group forming an independent nation. That did not happen in 1861.

But it was beginning to look like it in Los Angeles. In fact, for the near future a civil war based on racial unrest is not likely. The identifiable minorities in this country are of course outnumbered and by and large poorer and less likely to be able to arm themselves. But most importantly, as far as the Blacks go, this really is their country.

Most white people in this country arrived or are descended from people who arrived after 1865. Most Africans are descended from people who arrived before. To a first approximation, it is the Africans who are the old families, and if you exclude the Scotch Irish, Africans are the bulk of the old families to a second approximation as well.

Every now and then someone expresses surprise that there is tension between African Americans and more recent immigrants. Well of course. They have every reason to regard this land as their birthright, and to feel they should be consulted if it is to be given away.

They deserve more. They deserve to have their existence as community affirmed. Here the federal government has not done good job.

Following the War Between the States, there was a concerted effort under a policy called "reconstruction" to render the South poor and disadvantaged. Since the bulk of African Americans were or had been Southern, they suffered. There was a gesture under reconstruction to incorporate Africans into the political life of the country, but in the absence of an attempt to restore the prosperity of the part of the country most Africans called home, that gesture cannot be accepted as having been made in good faith. What is worse, there was not even a gesture made by the federal government to grant rights and privileges to the African community, pressing though those needs were after a sudden and violent emancipation.

But a community did evolve, complete with schools, churches, banks, theaters, an artistic tradition, athletic teams and community leaders. Then in the 1950's the destroyer struck.

Under color of a renewed emancipation, and incorporating the thoroughly laudable principle that African people ought to vote, the federal government with the enthusiastic support of northern white people rendered those schools illegal, along with theaters and athletic teams. It rendered those banks unprofitable (Of perhaps twenty Black-owned banks in Florida in 1950, the last closed only a year or so ago.) and drew the community leaders away by endorsing a propaganda campaign that carried the message that a truly successful African was one who abandoned his own people and blended into the community at large.

According to the July 18 issue of ECONOMIST magazine standardized testing indicates that educational accomplishments of African Americans have improved since the time of integration. They do concede that the improvement has been more dramatic in predominately Black schools than in integrated ones. At the same time the scores of white students preparing for college (who one should guess go to more prestigious schools, ones that non-white students might take the trouble of getting into, ones that may make a deliberate attempt to "broaden" their appeal and their student body), the scores of such white students are actually worse than they were.

At the same time, the United states, alone in its program of bussing students to the place they are least likely to feel at ease, releases young people ever less well equipped to compete with their European and Japanese agemates.

Yet there has been no turning back from Federal agenda. The government's chief concern clearly is not educating Black citizens but depriving them of community. But aggrieved though the African nation among us has been, I have never sensed resentment pressing toward rebellion or civil war.

It should go without saying that building a community for a group of people, any group, should be done without undercutting them economically. A nation of free and equal people must be more or less economically equal as well as free to associate with whom they choose.

The obvious way to affirm the identity of a group is to give them political identity. Simply make the political boundaries conform to the cultural boundaries and a step will have been taken in the right direction.

Unfortunately things generally don't work out that way. Boundaries tend to be changed either by war or by vote. Wars over borders may start because of concern for the people who live at such borders, but the result generally depends on how the war itself goes. The way current democracies are arranged also introduces problems. Suppose you have a state of ten million people and you want to elect a senate of ten. One common way to do it is to divide the state into ten districts of a million each and have each district elect its senator.

Suppose there are two political parties in the state, Whigs and Tories. There are about five million in each party, and people of the same party tend to live next each other. You would suppose there would be ten Whig districts and ten Tory districts.

But if you are the Tory party, and it is up to you to decide on the districts, you are very likely to try to make it so that there is one district that is pure Whig and nine that are almost equal but with a few more Tories. Then you will have nine votes in the senate and can continue to control how the districts are set up. If you are Whig and are in power, you can use the same process to keep yourself in power.

In other words, there is a strong tenancy for parties to create districts that are anything but reflections of the underlying demographics.

There are ways around this, of course. One way would be to say that each senator had not one vote but voted for all the people who had voted for him. The senator that had won twice as many votes at the poles would have twice the voting power on the senate floor.

But the fact remains that deciding how to draw national boundaries and how to divide nations up is difficult. If you believe in democracy, you believe in the will of the people. The past few years have proved beyond doubt that what people want is their identity. It is as vital as food as should be provided with the same care and constancy.

That may seem like an overstatement. But consider how the mind works. The mind is a function of the brain, much as digestion is a function of the stomach. The brain is a social organ.

Deprive a person of normal social intercourse and his mind will behave differently. People who are isolated begin to hallucinate. Round the world sailors commonly describe visionary companions. There is nothing wrong with the brains of these sailors. And indeed they seem to manage the situation well. But their minds for the time being act in a way that would not be acceptable in normal life.

Show me a person who has been abducted by a flying saucer and I should first ask the person if he or she had been alone for a long time or whether there was something like a mixed marriage in the picture that would alter the usual social context.

The July 4th ECONOMIST (yes, I read it pretty regularly) reports work done at a number of places that supports the notion that the mind responds to social context rather than to logic. It seems it is possible to ask people two questions which are logically identical but only one question fits into an obvious social context. Given the right context, the logic falls into place. Their most telling example is of a question that starts "You are an employee in a certain plant ...", and a question that starts "You are the employer at a certain plant ..." Thenceforth the questions are identical. And whether you are an employer or employee has nothing to do with the final answer, which of course is the same for both. In this particular case, those asked to imagine they were employers had far less trouble with the question than those who imagined they were employees.

The article goes on to suggest that the mind is not a computer but a set of rules applied by the brain, and that those rules were established in a way that permitted survival in a preindustrial society.

Implicit in this is the notion that the rules, or at least the brain structure that predisposes one to grasp such rules, must be genetically determined. What is probable if not actually implied is that different cultures of different races have different sets of rules.

What is indisputable is that for many people the notion that somebody bosses somebody else around is as firmly embedded in how they think as logic itself.

NATURE magazine (no, it is not a nudist publication) on July 16 took time to comment on work done by a Canadian who looked at measurements of head sizes done by the U.S. military with a view to making helmets of the right sizes. It turns out that in the Army, different racial groups have different size heads.

I shouldn't be surprised. They probably have different length ears, too. But the issue is a charged one because there are those who infer from a different head size a different brain size and from a different brain size a different brainpower. There are those who hold that the difference between humans and animals is our bigger brains. So that those with bigger brains are, somehow, more human.

Peace.

It is the things that make us different from each other that make us human. It is not our brains which distinguish us but our minds. And our minds are sets of rules. If one set of rules can be packed more efficiently than another, so be it. There is no race, no culture, that does not have its own special miracle with which to enrich the earth. But unpack the rules and scatter them about and you have the opportunity for a great deal of unhappiness.

The human mind can function only in a society and a society can function only where there is a mutually agreeable set of rules. So it is not just a whim that makes people seek out the society of their own. It is what makes it possible to be human.

Some day we will be ready to grant to each other what each of us wants selfishly so very much. We shall then guard each culture as jealously as ever we defended an animal species.

Even we Americans.

But just now we have a crisis, the depth of which is hard to guess. For many years there has been developing a sense that the government does not really represent the people. There has been a widespread impulse to send the bulk of incumbent politicians home and elect all new ones.

Ross Perot offered to run as an independent. His popularity was enormous. More people were ready to vote for him than for any other candidate. Then he quit.

In doing so, spectacularly, he not only betrayed the people who had been working hard to get him elected, he undercut the whole idea of an independent candidate being a substantial alternative. One day he was the most popular man in the country. The next day he was possibly the most hated.

Personally he will probably be all right. He has his billions of dollars with which to buy congenial company. But what about the rest of us?

As we mentioned, social rules are more basic to the human mind than logic itself. Among those rules are, for a vast number of people, rules that apply to the behavior of bosses and chiefs. We have just had a chief-like person behave in a way that was not in the rulebook.

It frightens me a little bit. I wonder whether there will be some reaction, some illogical and unpredictable reaction.

Had Perot stayed true to his course and had the election been split three ways, with no majority, the selection of the president would, of course, gone to the House of Representatives. Whomever they chose would have made somebody unhappy.

It only takes a certain number of states to call for a new constitutional convention. It think there is a petition already out that is only a couple states shy. That might have pushed a couple states over the edge.

With a new convention, of course, the question of joining comes up. Those states that declined to sign would obviously choose not to accept any of the debt of the defunct union. The debt would then be more than any union could support. The financial results of shutting down the union would be hard to predict, but one thing to be expected would be that present enormous concentrations of wealth would be dispersed.

In other words, billionaires would stand to loose more than those of us whose major resource is our own work.

Perhaps it was considerations like this that prompted Ross Perot to quit rather than risk dumping an apple cart in which he owned so many of the apples.

Perhaps his departure will prompt the very disunion that he feared.

Worse things could happen.

Booty

Editor's note:

M came in the other day and announced, "Every now and then it's nice to think that I work with an outfit that at least tries to tell the truth. Look at that." It was a copy of Weekly World NEWS. On the front page was a picture that purported to show presidential hopeless Ross Perot in conversation with an extraterrestrial. The strange looking creature was standing behind Perot with one hand on the man's shoulder, a finger hooked in the collar.

"You don't believe this picture, do you?" I asked.

"Of course not," said M. "It says the two are having a meeting. But it's obvious, the alien is taking his Ross Perot suit down to the dry cleaner's."

I pondered. "I don't think that's possible, M. Dry cleaners are highly ethical businesses. It would be hard to find one that would stoop to hoodwinking the whole of the American people."

A few days later Perot had quit the race. We were all surprised except M, who said, "Of course. He knew we were onto his disguise."

About then Booty came in and said, "Hey M. What do you call it when there is uncontrolled spasmodic movement of the arms and legs and shouted obscene words."

"I know that. It's Turret's syndrome."

"No. It's your tennis serve."

MILD SURPRISE

"Nnyenhhh! I don't like grapefruit."

My whine struck a discordant not at the supper table. I looked down forlornly at the sour hemisphere of fruit on my plate, glistening cut surface waiting for the spoon. Older brother and younger brother waited in silence to see how much trouble I had got myself into. Father looked stern, ready to pronounce the family law as soon as it was a little clearer just what the law was in this case.

Mother spoke first.

"It's a gift from our dear friends in south Florida River. You should be happy they are kind enough to send up the whole basket."

'But it always tastes so bad."

"If you don't like it, just sprinkle some sugar on it."

I pulled the sugar bowel over, and the tension at the dining room table eased as I began to sprinkle white crystals on the fruit. Standard practice called for one gently rounded spoonful. I piled the sugar high on the spoon the first time, dumped it and gouged up spoonful. My brothers stopped breathing as I amassed a dune, a drift of sugar, burying the citrus.

I was really pushing it this time. The atmosphere was electric.

Younger Brother took a spoonful. Suddenly his faced looked as if you were pulling it through a knothole by the lips. The pent up tension of both parents came down on him with stupendous ponderosity.

"Don't make faces at the table." But...but…"

"It's not polite."

"But.."

At this critical moment Older Brother took a spoonful, dramatizing slightly the sweet and reasonable way to dispose of a spoonful of grapefruit. His face suddenly went ashen. The pupils of his eyes went to pinpoints. He could not control his color, but manfully beyond his years he controlled the muscles of his face. Then he said, "I think it's spoiled. All eyes turned toward Father. He took a spoonful and looked thoughtful, no flicker of distress ruffling his iron poise.

Older brother said, "Look. M's eating his.'

"Is it all right?" Mother wanted to know.

I was spooning mine down along with great quantities of sugar. "I never did much like grapefruit."

Father now announced the law. "You don't have to eat it if you don't want to, N."

I pushed back the plate and sighed. Suddenly we were all friends again. But the fact remained that we had seldom eaten anything much worse.

After a family conference involving much sniffing, sticking fingers into mouths and gazing at the color of the skin of the fruit, we reached the consensus that we were not trying to eat grapefruit at all, but strong lemons of enormous size.

When occasion arose, we confronted our diabolical friend, who confessed that he had inserted the lemons well knowing that they would pass for grapefruit.