Both Ways

For all that I like to think of myself as an observer of the world around me, and at least somewhat attentive to it, I am left with the realization that because I can't ever genuinely know what other people are thinking, I won't ever actually understand the world. And that's something of a frustration, I think, because I have difficulty letting go of the idea that the world is an understandable place. At least in part.

I am, more or less, at peace with the idea that the world around me will often present as "random." The myriad interactions of people and organizations that shape the world occur mostly out of my sight, and so when their impacts reach me, I understand that I am seeing the effects of hidden causes. But it's more difficult than it should be, I think, to shake the idea that the effects link strongly enough to the causes that I should be able to work backwards and paint the picture.

It's strange, to understand that one both believes something and understands it to be false at the same time. I realize that one of those impulses is fictitious, but I can never seem to settle on which one. I suppose it's because I've never really needed to. It's a hedged bet where I've never actually been forced to commit one way or the other. And I think that a lot of things in life work this way. On theory, they don't make any sense, but in practice, it doesn't really matter.

The Shame Game

Racist: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.
Antiracist: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.

This popped up at work and promptly started a "debate," which I declined to have any part in. Dropping decontextualized Ibram Kendi quotes on people isn't generally an invitation to a calm discussion. The above are from Mr. Kendi's book: How To Be An AntiRacist, and, I will admit the sort of thing that I find more about virtue signalling than honestly helping people change.

Part of the problem is the nature of the discussion of the topic itself. "Racist" carries some very nasty overtones in everyday American discourse, and, contrary to what it appears that some people like to think, hasn't really been rehabilitated into a neutral term (regardless of how useful such rehabilitation would generally be). And so it doesn't strike me that people are drawn to such works because they feel a need to change who they are for the better. Rather, they're looking for what other people should be doing. Which is fair enough, I suppose. For many people, being the change they want to see in the world isn't an active enough viewpoint.

While I'm not sure that I'm 100% on board with, say, Mr. Kendi's definition of a "racist policy," namely "any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups....By policy I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people," what bugs me about the definitions of "racist" and "antiracist" is that only the "racist" definition includes inaction.

I've never been a fan of "you're either with us or your against us" formulations, for the simple fact that it encourages seeing everyone who has things that are more important to them than some set of personal interests as living in the "against" column. Which is a terrible way to see the world. As far as I'm concerned, it's not terribly far off from a persecution complex. And from everything I know about those, they suck out loud, and I'm glad that I don't have one. But the other downside of an "us versus the world" mentality, is that if everyone is the enemy, then a lot of things can be seen as self-defense. And constant fighting doesn't really make the world a better place in my estimation.

In my old age, I've come to the conclusion that Mark Twain was right when he opined: "The world owes you nothing. It was here first." I also tend to extend that to people, and for the same reason. And casting inaction as opposition flies in the face of that, implying that people do owe something, simply because someone exists and believes they need something from them. I've never been one for the "attitude of gratitude" and the like, because it often comes across to me as fawning. But I'm a big believing in being appreciative of what other do for me. So long as they have a choice. Thanking someone for something that they had no choice but to do has always struck me as unpleasantly dishonest. And if "antirtacism" is really going to mean something, it has to be engaged in freely, rather than under the threat of a one-sided shaming.

Hey, Slick

I was listening to Stevie Wonder's Living For The City today. It's a song that I've heard a thousand times. It received fairly regular airplay when I was growing up, and I have it on CD. The song itself has a narrative arc, with an interlude in which an unnamed protagonist (whose voice reminds me of one of my uncles) arrives in New York City. Things start going sideways the moment he disembarks from the bus, and he winds up being sentenced to prison for ten years.

While the main thrust of the song is about the difficulties of being Black in the United States of the late 1960s into the early 1970s (the song was released in 1973), one part of it stood out for me today after listening to parts of a recent episode of the NPR podcast It's Been A Minute. Sam Sanders was talking about the tendency, in Black art, to avoid negative portrayals of Black characters, hoping to avoid giving racist critics ammunition for attacks on the broader community.

In Living For The City, someone offers the protagonist $5 to "run this down the street for me." That someone, judging from their voice, is also Black, and since the sirens can be heard closing in even as the person presses the unspecified package on the protagonist, it's a safe bet that it was understood that being caught with the goods would mean going to jail. Paying closer attention to the song today than I had in the past, I realized that Stevie Wonder was also pointing out another pitfall for Black people in the United States; the willingness of other Black people to use them as fall guys and patsies.

Sure, this habit can also be laid at the feet of American racism, but I think to do so absolves people of the responsibility that is required to actually take advantage of how far they've come. It's an interesting tightrope that I sometimes observe people walking, attempting to retain a sense of Black agency while avoiding a general sense of blameworthiness. I once read an article about some research into how reading about White Privilege lessened sympathy among social liberals for poor white people. It takes a careful reading of the piece, but I think it's valid to guess that the effect that the researchers were seeing comes from the idea that a perception of agency lessens sympathy. In this case, it would make sense for people to seek to limit the perception of the agency that certain groups possess. Yet casting them too much as victims runs the risk of portraying them as unable to make use of any tools that might be given them.

But I think I'm getting away from the point. Once I was paying attention, I found Stevie Wonder's inclusion of this bit to be a subtle, but incisive commentary, given that it wasn't strictly necessary for the whole narrative to work. The protagonist could have simply run afoul of racist police officers and courts, and the story would have still come together and made the broader point.

I Think, Therefore...

One day, I was perusing an atlas (one of my favorite sorts of book) and it occurred to me that I didn't know if any of the places I was looking at actually existed. Although I suppose it's more accurate to say that I realized that I had no good way of knowing, in the moment, if any of the maps I was looking at were genuine. Not in the sense of the paper towns that mapmakers add to maps to catch out plagiarists, but in the sense that the whole exercise could have been an elaborate fake. After all, it's not like I've ever been to Karagandy, or am likely to ever go in my lifetime. Or Paris, for that matter. The realization that much of what I believed about the world came from lacking reasons to disbelieve, rather than reasons to believe, was striking. Of course, it's possible, at least in day-to-day life, to be too skeptical; and I, for my part have to be careful of that. Still, it's oddly freeing to understand how much one understands of the world is second-hand, if not even more distantly-sourced.
 

No Difference

It's no wonder about the timing – tragic events, such as pandemics, often cause us to question the existence of God: if there is a merciful God, why is a catastrophe like this happening?
Monica Grady "Can physics prove if God exists?" BBC Future. Tuesday, 1 March 2021

Perhaps, as someone who does not themself believe in deities, the point should be utterly irrelevant to me, but I've come to find it strange when people question the existence of their god because of an alleged failure to hold so some or other single characteristic. As a parallel, take me. While I like to drive, I have never done so competitively, and have no plans to start any time soon. But if someone were to describe me as a race car driver, it would seem strange to declare that on the basis of that fact being in error, that I didn't exist.

And so once I started thinking about it, I realized that I didn't really understand why, or how, people would become so attached to the idea that the Abrahamic god as "merciful" that calling that mercy into question would be a reason to discard the whole entity. It's an odd non-severability clause, of a sort.

Of course, as an atheist, I have a simple answer that I can fall back on; the idea that people create their deities with a certain set of characteristics, and once that set of attributes becomes the accepted form of the deity, the thought of removing one or more of them is simply anathema. But that's pat, and frankly, unsatisfying for that. As people are complex and their religions are complex, the reasoning that creates and sustains those religions is also complex. Presumably, there are thousands of years of religious evolutionary pressure that has gone into people's thinking about their gods. (And note that this holds even if the gods are real. I have yet to find a religion {as opposed to a sect or a denomination} of any size that boasts nothing in the way of splits and differences of opinion. So it stands to reason that even real deities wouldn't necessarily appear the same to all of their many adherents. But still, the ideas that managed to survive the constant competition for followers would be the ones that survived and continued.)

In the end, I don't have any answers to the question of what can a deity be and what can't one be. To me, a deity could be anything; I don't really understand why, conceptually, the concept would have specific limitations. And as a deity often characterized as omnipotent, the Abrahamic god would have no specific limits, either. If, as Professor Grady says, "God can do everything, even travel faster than light," then it stands to reason that it could also be merciless on occasion.

In the end, I suppose, deities are containers, and they hold things that people wish to be true about the world, or the universe, around them. A merciful deity, therefore, is a stand-in for the idea that, somehow, the Universe itself cars for human life, and if that idea of mercy or caring is jettisoned, then perhaps there's no real need of a deity to contain that idea.