Forever Seeking

According to Andrew Sullivan, I have a religion.

By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).

I have to admit that I find this interesting. After all, I don't really understand what it means for life to have "meaning," unless we're talking about the entry for "life" in the dictionary.

In the very beginning of his piece, Mr. Sullivan says: "It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being." Later, he notes "We are a meaning-seeking species."

Perhaps, if I sat down with Mr. Sullivan, which is unlikely ever to happen, we would come to a shared understanding, some sort of accommodation that would reveal his understanding that I am seeking meaning, and my understanding that I am not, to be merely a difference in how we define certain activities. But there are other possibilities. One is that I am seeking meaning in the way that he defines it, and thus, I would fit his definition of religious. The other is that I am not, and I would then fall into his definition of non-religious. (I suspect what would actually happen is that I would find that he has simply decreed that everyone is seeking meaning by defining something basic, such as the very state of being a living human being, into meaning-seeking; rendering it a tautology. And that he, on the other hand, would decide that I desperately want to find meaning, but am in denial.)

But if I did fall into his understanding of not seeking meaning, would I then cease, in his eyes, to be human? Does the fact that we are a meaning-seeking species, to use his formulation mean that each of us must necessarily and recognizably seek meaning?

Because how does an infant seek meaning? How does a person who has other, more pressing day-to-day concerns that the alleged meaning of life seek that meaning?

I am always dubious of people stating that "to be human is to do [X]," because it seems unwise to assert that one knows the minds for billions of other people. And it leads to a point where one is trapped into either insisting that other people don't know themselves or seeking to deny their humanity. Now, Mr. Sullivan gets around this somewhat by positing that this "search for meaning" is encoded into our genome.

Which is not unreasonable. But in order for that to hold, it would have to be encoded into something that makes life itself viable. They would have to be attached in a very deep biological level. Otherwise, a simple mutation could remove it. And unless that mutation triggered something so catastrophic that it rendered the person sterile (or effectively so) it would be passed on to their offspring. You could make the point that a person who carried the gene to search for meaning would be more successful in one of Darwin's three conflicts (intraspecies, interspecies and versus environment) than not. And some people would say that the rise of religious observance and its high rate of uptake proves that it does. But you could also make the point that it's an artifact of culture; I, of course, suspect the latter, but I'm not a geneticist.

In the end, Mr. Sullivan's point seems to be that Christianity Good, Lacking Christianity Bad. I can understand the idea that what the Cult of Trump and Social Justice Warriors have in common is a lack of the "wisdom and culture and restraint" that Mr. Sullivan finds in Christianity. (But surely not only Christianity exhibits these traits?) There is the common refrain that to not have religion, to not have a "place of refuge, no spiritual safe space from which to gain perspective, no God to turn to" in a time of crisis is to be adrift in a crisis, "coasting along on materialism." I call B.S. Human beings can be strong without recourse to an invisible, and often disapproving deity. They prove it every day.

Part-Time Monster

Typically, if I'm out walking, and I find myself walking behind a lone woman, I slow down, so that she starts to pull away from me, and I maintain that pace until a path presents itself that allows me to return to my normal cadence without overtaking her.

But this morning, I was in a hurry. And the woman walking in front of me was busily doing something with her cell phone. So I glued myself to the far side of the sidewalk, focused straight ahead, and walked. For a moment I thought that I was going to make it, and that I'd be able to simply stride past her without incident. No such luck. Her spider-sense went off when I was about five feet behind her, and she whirled around in obvious alarm.

Rather than acknowledge her, I simply pushed on to my destination.

I was suddenly tired. And annoyed.

I understand that I'm not the one who suddenly had a looming dark shape appear not much more than arm's length away. I understand that if I don't like dealing with people's fear responses, then I have to take the responsibility to do things that don't trigger that response. I understand that being reminded of why I often try to avoid suddenly coming up on people like that is miles better than suddenly realizing that a potential threat is just off your flank.

But sometimes, all of the energy that goes into trying to seem non-threatening just seems to be wasted. I don't get anything out of it but delays and frustration. And it never ends. For any of us.

Whatfishing?

So, there's the phenomenon of "catfishing," which is when someone creates a false identity online for the purpose of luring someone into an online romantic relationship. I don't really understand the purpose of it, but hey, to each their own.

Then there is my personal favorite, "hatfishing," in which guys wear hats in their dating profile pictures, so that the women they hope to meet won't realize that they're balding. I don't have an online dating profile, but I am balding, and do like to wear a hat in the cooler months of the year. So this tends to get my vote for best word ever. But, hey guys, just in case you haven't figured it out, you have to take the hat off sometime. Sooner or later the woman of your dreams, or just Miss Right Now, whichever she turns out to be, is going to realize you're losing your hair. You're better off just rolling with that.

And today, I was introduced to the concept of "blackfishing." This is a criticism leveled at people for allegedly pretending to be Black or mixed-race online when they're "really" White. I have to admit that I treat the idea as being a joke. But it really isn't particularly funny. It's fairly sad, honestly. Now, I've written before about how I think that other people wanting to access Blackness isn't the end of the world. After all, it was only a couple of generations back when that would likely have been considered a sign of serious mental illness. The advantages of being seen as White were so clear and present that expending effort to be seen as Black (outside of show business blackface) would have simply been unfathomable.

[Dara Thurmond, a nurse from New York] says women accused of blackfishing are being "unfair" to black women who are trying to make it as influencers and get product endorsements of their own.

"You take away from them," Dara says.

This, for me anyway, gets to the heart of what fears of "blackfishing" and cultural appropriation are about. The sinking feeling that we're expendable. Who needs real Black people if they can have fake "Black" people instead? They get all of the all of the lips, braids and big booties that they can handle (not to mention Hip-Hop and "gangsta" fashion), and don't have to deal with people whose ancestors lived in sub-Saharan Africa up until the year 1500 or so.

Well, I kind of hate to break it to "us," but Black people are expendable. If every "genuinely" Black person on Earth were to drop dead tonight, there'd be a heck of a clean-up job in the coming few weeks, but the Sun would still rise in the morning, the trains would still run and the Internet would still be stuffed to the rafters with cat videos. There'd be a heck of a scientific puzzle to figure out, and American major-league sports (outside of hockey and soccer) would suck for a few years, but the world would go on as if "we" were never here. Black people don't bring anything inherently indispensable to the table. There's nothing particularly valuable or important that comes along simply with having dark skin and hair that can double as a scrub brush.

If Black people want to be seen as valuable to other people, then "we" have to offer them something that they can't otherwise get. Something other than wearing braids in Instagram photos. And if "we" want to be seen as valuable to ourselves as a community, well that's "our" problem, not that of some lady looks Black enough to pass, but happens to be Polish.

If Black women in business can't wear an afro, braids or locks, because it's seen as unclean, untidy or unprofessional, then the Black community needs more companies run by Black people who can then set the tone for what's appropriate.

Beggars can't be choosers, and if "we're" always approaching people, especially White people, as demanding supplicants, then yeah, their attitude is likely to be "get lost." I have no time for people coming to me with demands of what I'm going to do for them when they have nothing to offer in return. Other people might be more accepting of that, and bravo for them, but I certainly don't hold a negative response against them.

If "we" as Black people continue to abdicate power over "our" feelings of worth to people who aren't themselves Black, there is every chance that feelings of worthlessness will result. Because everyone else has their own problems to worry about. White people don't "need" Black people. That's just the way the world works.

No Rush

Last Friday, on his way out, one of the Business Program Managers stopped by my desk and told me to not stay too late into the evening. I chuckled. I don't work late as often as I used to, I've become somewhat protective of my "free" time.

But I'm a single guy. I don't have a significant other, children or pets to demand my time. And so I don't need to be anywhere in my evenings. Sure, I like to make it home before too late in the day; after all, I have this blog to post to, and other hobbies, but I don't have any obligations that require me to leave by a certain time. And so it doesn't really matter what time I arrive home in the evening. The main benefit of this, is that I can carefully segment my work and personal time. I can stay in the office as late as I need to, and then be done with it. And so when I leave, work stays at the office. I think it works better that way.

The Nostalgia Trap

Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse. When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.

That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment. Needless to say, black Americans and other minority groups aren’t as keen on returning to the past.
Adam Harris. "America Is Divided by Education" The Atlantic. Wednesday, 7 November, 2018.

There is a question here, and it's one that I'm surprised isn't really spoken of. Was the lack of civil rights, racist violence and racial resentment that characterized the the time around 1950 a cause of this supposed golden age for less-educated Whites, or was it merely an unfortunate side effect of an overall lower level of enlightenment?

Or, perhaps more simply, can you have one without the other? I suspect that many non-White people in America believe that the two go hand in hand. There were many well-paying low or unskilled labor positions for White Americans because other people were locked out of them; and the resulting labor shortage, artificial though it may have been allowed White workers to command higher wages. And the truly dirty, low-paying jobs fell to the people who were locked out of the more lucrative sectors of the economy. While people who evince the nostalgia Mr. Harris chronicles, on the other hand, tend to be convinced that the new version of the past will lack all of the bad features of the original, and that there will be more than enough blue-collar jobs to go around, so that everyone who wants to work will be able to find a family-wage job will nothing more than a high-school education. Or at least the ones that I have spoken to seem to think so.

To a certain degree, it's an academic debate. The chances of the American economy going back to the state it was in 70 years ago in within, well, the next 70 years, seems slim. The world is a different, and smaller, place now. While it's possible that the poorer nations of the world who have been using newfound positions in global supply chains to better their standard of living could be forced back into abject poverty while their first and second-world counterparts reclaim those jobs (and pay higher price for goods and services in the bargain), it's unlikely that they would go without a fight. And it's equally unlikely that the rest of the developed world would decide that paying the higher wages of American workers for goods that they could buy more cheaply from poorer nations would be a good idea, blunting the impact of American economic isolationism and protecting the markets of poorer nations.

At the same time, closer to home, it's unlikely that without some sort of concrete evidence that a return to the economy of the pre-civil rights era wouldn't bring Jim Crow employment policies back with it, that many Americans would go along with the scheme. People would be unlikely to simply take it on faith that they'd be allowed a greater share of the prosperity in a scheme that strikes many as a reaction to the idea that they're now doing better than they were before.

To make the point that the economy of 1950 is a better choice for all and sundry than that of 2020 requires an understanding that everyone is worse off now than they were then, regardless of race, creed or ethnicity. And while that may seem self-evidently true to a "White working-class" that thinks back on a time when a high-school education meant a solidly middle-class life with a house, a family, a dog and a white picket fence, for many other people what happened was, at worst, a transfer of wealth and income to a broader swath of the public than had been allowed to hold it before.

The world of 1950 is before my time. Even my parents would only have been young children. But my father used to deploy tales of his childhood in the decade that followed as cautionary tales for me; stories of hardship and deprivation to illustrate what might await me if I didn't do well in school. He wouldn't have been convinced that he, and people like him, would have been better off returning to that time. I don't think that many other people would be any easier to sway.