Politics

The Caste of Our Insecurities

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Hard truths are best absorbed in small packets, at least when possible. Depending on the immediacy of their message, that luxury may be unwise or impossible. But confronting such truths and the facts supporting them may be the primary duty decency demands. Hence, the purpose of books like Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents. 

The thesis of the book is simply stated, that we here in America, the United States, whether we wish to see it or not, live in a caste structure that allocates hierarchies and exiles certain groups of people to inferior status for no reason other than the preservation of those hierarchies. She makes comparisons with India’s much older and in some ways more entrenched caste structure, and examines the history and modes of its instantiation here. She gives examples, some horrific in their violence, many baffling in their intractability. 

She makes the case.

And then she examines how it functions as a stealth program, unconsciously for most people, expressed by body language, word choice, social assumptions, and a kind of cognitive aphasia in which people simply do not see what they’re doing or who they’re doing it to. Difficult to get the why if the what can be so smoothly unrecognized.

It’s hard reading, and yet fills in blanks that other attempts at addressing racism and class bigotry fall short. For instance, we tend to default to the occurrence of racism based on appearance, and to a great degree that is a major aspect. But any look at the history of it in this country reveals certain baffling inconsistencies, as when Irish immigrants were seen as nonwhites in the mid-19th Century, and how Jews have long suffered a conditional status. Italians, East Europeans, and so forth, all passed through periods of being regarded as, functionally,  not White.

At times, the idea that class is at work more than race, but that will not answer the fact that “success” is no guarantee against automatic relegation to inferior status. Over the last century and a half that African Americans have been removed from enslavement, wealth has proved to be insufficient to overcome systemic biases, even as wealth makes certain interactions easier. 

In the afterwash of the Civil Rights era, many white people would like to believe that the issue has been settled, but we are constantly reminded that it is not. Partly, this has been a consequence of not identifying the problem correctly. The frustration of seeing our best intentions regularly thwarted by behaviors which seem to have no manageable foundation dogs us through history. The key factor in this persistent misidentification is the fact that all our public declarations, beginning in 1776, overwhelming stress our commitment to equality. This pledge masks intentions that run directly counter to the stated goals. It is more than special pleading, it is a refusal to adhere to principles that require us to stop being White.

By White I do not mean the surface markers of what we semi-scientifically term Caucasian. Because, as noted, many groups that have met those qualifications in the past were, at one time or another, regarded as Not White. White is a social and political designation. The term did not exist as a group marker until the 18th Century and was intended as a hierarchical label. It quickly established a kind of “natural” pecking order upon which the future designations of racial groups could be slotted into categories. This quickly became both political and economic fuel for purposes of group identity and justification for exploitation. In America it was used to legitimate not only slavery but miscegenation laws and later eugenics programs. But more consistently, it evolved a rigid caste system with which we live today, albeit diluted sufficiently most of do not recognize it.

Not recognizing, it becomes difficult if not impossible to deal with.

Wilkerson’s book is, as I say, hard reading. The savagery with which we have treated African Americans, even after the 13th and 14th Amendments ending slavery and establishing the principle of participatory equality, is made all the more terrible because of the ideas on which our country has been founded. To be sure, caste may not be the key to undoing the systemic disregard experienced by millions of people, but upon reading this book I have found some purchase on the problem that, while not rendering it sensible, at least suggests the degree to which the problem is rooted. 

It has also given some slightly more discernible explanation for what just happened in our recent election. And if true, it is a sad and pathetic reality. 

The apparent need sewn into the fabric of our being to somehow be Better Than is a double-edged blade. One can use that need for self-improvement without it becoming a toxic excuse to constantly keep someone else down, to perfect one’s gifts, to aspire to personal achievement. Or it becomes a need to just exercise a false sense of self-entitled privilege over others by virtue of the arbitrariness of birth or group affiliation. This can justify anything from cheating on exams to murder, depending on the pathology of the obsession to simply Be Better as opposed to Doing Better. And of course, if the latter is the path chosen, the goal is already lost. All that remains then is to do all one can to hide one’s inabilities, infelicities, and lack of empathy. 

Expunging this apparently integral notion of caste may be the only way to become the better angels of our stated aspirations. But how does one do something without first recognizing it?

Destroyer of Worlds

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Oppenheimer is powerful film. Perhaps it requires someone versed in science fiction to do something like this. The world changed when Trinity went off and the only art form that doggedly tackled the ramifications of that change was science fiction. Unleashing the power of the atom was transformative in ways most people at the time could not fathom. Since the introduction of that power was as a weapon, it is natural that people would be, at best, ambivalent about its potential. The way the country dealt with that over the next 15 years did little to ease people into this new reality. We were in the midst of the second Red Scare at the same time, so everyone’s nerve endings were constantly assaulted by things triggering panic.

What the film manages to do is convey that arc from the collapsing world order through the triumph of community action and the achievement of dedicated people to create something new down into the cesspool of post-war anxiety that poisoned everything. What begins as a youthful encounter with new physics on the cutting edge of revelation becomes the hardened pragmatism of survival (theory only takes you so far) and then disintegrates in the endemic distrust of men trying to contain something they categorically do not understand. The impossibility of isolating the discoveries of the American program becomes the paranoid insistence that no one can be trusted, turning the youthful dream into the nightmares of the guilty.

At the same time, we are treated to several well-placed mini-presentations of problem-solving and the nature of the subatomic realm as revealed by the drive to build The Bomb.

Cillian Murphy is amazing as Oppenheimer. We are treated to glimpses of many of the players involved, each distinct, and perhaps the fairest portrayal of General Groves in any dramatic presentation to date.

But the core of the film is that turn from one world—one kind of world—to another. The Trinity test is just past halfway in and much of the event occurs in eerie silence. Probably accurate, but as useful as that may be, it is the symbolism that strikes home. No word is spoken, no sound, either of bell or crying prophet, no whisper in the vacuum of transition. Nolan ties this together with an interaction at the beginning, a conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein by a lake that is unheard (though tragically misinterpreted by the uninvolved witness), and revelation of what was said at the end. Just as in particle physics, we observe small interactions that ramify into huge consequences.

The scientists who were trying to caution the politicians that this was something for which they were woefully unequipped all seem to underestimate the venality of those with whom they must deal. Most of them, anyway. A few understood quite well and acted on their knowledge for both good and ill. Multiple tragedies emerge.

The movie leaves us with much to ponder, but it is we who must do so and conclude what we will. To say they should not have done what they did is pointless. Many of these people were condemned later, for a variety of reasons, early victims in the emerging world of cynical power management that characterized the post-war years.

And for all its excesses and over-the-top drama, it seems that science fiction was always the best tool for trying to cope with what happened after the genie emerged. Mutability is at the core of SF, mutation both subject and theme, and as absurd as some of it may have appeared to the general public, especially through the radiation scares of the Fifties, it has turned out to be more or less on the nose with respect to the cultural reactions. Which, finally, may be why the best dramatization of all this has come from someone who is familiar and skillful with the tools of SF.