"Why Hell?": The Collected Wisdom of Jean-Luc Picard

I'm back in the US, trying to adjust again to a fourteen-hour time difference.  Which may be why memes like the above, posted on Facebook the other day, leave me feeling punch-drunk and combative.

My first reaction, predictably enough, was "What do you mean 'we', bald man?"  I didn't land on a goddamn comet, though I do find the achievement interesting and worthwhile.  Nor have I clicked through the many links to Kim Kardashian's nekkid picture that have been thrown my way, nor until the Picard meme erupted into my feed like an infected zit have I talked or written about it.  I could add that talking about one doesn't necessarily preclude talking about the other, which a lot of elitist-wannabes tend to forget.

I commented to that effect, and my Liberal Artist Friend replied:

Duncan, it has to do with the natural human tendency to identify with the group(s) one is part of (e.g., humans, Americans, educated people, Internet users). Or even a group one feels some connection to (e.g., scientists) – as with sports fans who refer to a team with the word "we," even though they aren't on the team.

To which I replied:

Yes, LAF, that is known as "tribalism." (All kinds of problems with that word, of course.)

Because I'm still getting my jet-lagged brain in gear, it didn't occur to me right away that LAF's comment had also, inadvertently, answered the Picard meme.  Talking about Kardashian's power glutes has to do with the natural human tendency to cluster together and gawk, especially when (supposedly) erotic stimuli are put on display. More people, evidently, are interested in a nekkid picture of Kim Kardashian than with some quite unsexy pictures of a piece of dirty rocky ice in space.  Like it or not, that's a normal human tendency. (The stereotypical male fascination with machinery, which leads little boys to gawk at construction sites and sometimes at pictures of a machine landing on a piece of dirty rocky ice in space, is also a normal human tendency, but not a sign of greater rationality than the mindless herd; it's just a compulsion found in a smaller mindless herd.)  It also explains why people vote Republican or Democratic despite the failure of either party to give them what they want or need: the natural human tendency to identify with the group(s) one is part of, or even feels some connection with. Hence the tendency of devotees to identify with Barack Obama (for example), when he definitely does not identify with them. Just about everything LAF (or I, to be fair) dislikes in humanity has to do with natural human tendencies.  Natural human tendencies are not necessarily benign.

It happened that the Onion A.V. Club posted a negative review of the latest Dumb and Dumber movie yesterday, and the comments there contained some interesting digressions.  Someone remarked that Jim Carrey had apparently recanted his earlier anti-vaccination views, which led to a thread on that subject.  One person wrote:

Insisting that you know better than doctors, when you have no medical training whatsoever - even though it's clear children are dying because of your advice - cannot be written off as her being tragically misinformed and uneducated.

Here we have an example of what might be called science tribalism.  I haven't looked into the anti-vaxxer controversies and don't much care about them.  What I want to address is the weird notion that doctors know best, especially when they are united in their stance.  It was doctors and biologists -- and politically Progressive doctors and biologists at that -- who pushed through the American eugenic laws that imposed involuntary sterilization on thousands of "defectives", laws which provided a starting point for Nazi Germany's eugenic laws.  These laws were upheld by an 8-1 majority of the US Supreme Court in 1927.  Although a few scientists criticized these laws on scientific grounds, they were outliers.  Most opposition came from churches and from social scientists, who were derided for their superstition and hostility to science and reason, and their disregard of the human suffering that results from unregulated human breeding.

I have my disagreements with Michael Berube, but his book Life As We Know It (Pantheon, 1996), about being the parent of a son with Down Syndrome, contains some useful information about what doctors know and what they don't.

Right through the 1970s, "mongoloid idiot" wasn't an epithet, it was a diagnosis.  It wasn't uttered by callow, ignorant persons fearful of "difference" and Central Asian eyes; it was pronounced by the best-trained medical practitioners in the world, who told families of kids with Down's that their children would never be able to walk, talk, dress themselves, or recognize their parents.  Best to have the child institutionalized and tell one's friends that the baby died at birth.  Only the most stubborn, intransigent, or inspired parents resisted such advice from their trusted experts.  Who could reasonably expect otherwise?  [27]

The Berubes were given a lot of bad medical advice when their son Jamie was born in 1991, but it helped that Janet Berube was a nurse.  "Most doctors are relieved that they can talk details with Janet, but a few can get weird" (36f).  Still,

At one point a staff nurse was sent in to check on our mental health, and she found us babbling about meiosis and monoploids, wondering anew that Jamie had "gotten" Down syndrome the second he became a zygote.  When the nurse inadvertently left behind her notes, Janet sneaked a peek:  "Parents seem to be intellectualizing."  "Well," Janet shrugged, "that seems accurate enough" (14).

Berube notes that

Sometimes these parents [who rejected the 'best' medical advice and refused to institutionalize their children] acted out of religious conviction, believing they should play the hand God dealt them, whatever His plan might be.  Sometimes they acted pragmatically: one family decided not to institutionalize their baby when one doctor informed them that, at a state hospital, "perhaps the care would be so minimal that he would not survive past the first year of life." That one piece of advice wound up offsetting the counsel of every other physician they heard from.  Another family drove across two Midwestern states, on the advice of doctors, to speak to the headmaster of the nearest institution.  The father told me the story some thirty years after it happened.  After hours on the road, they met the headmaster, who appeared to have stepped out of a famous Grant Wood painting.  But despite his dour appearance, he wound up being the first person who'd given them any hope for their child, advising them to keep the baby home at first and see whether they'd be interested in bringing him in anytime in the first year -- but there was no rush.  The parents thanked the headmaster, left the institution, and never made the return trip.  As the father put it, they had finally been given permission to try to love and care for their child themselves, and that turned out to be all they needed [27-8].

Parents aren't always right either, and I think it's fair to be skeptical about the motives of parents who supposedly decided not to warehouse their children because of religion.  I think they rationalized their decision by selecting a dogma that supported it.  But these stories -- and more; I recommend Life As We Know It to anyone who might be interested -- are a reminder that neither religion nor science can be a substitute for judgment.  Obedience to the best medical or scientific knowledge will produce bad, inhumane decisions as reliably as obedience to religious teaching.  And these parents' refusal to accept the best medical advice wasn't based on medical or scientific knowledge, though medicine eventually caught up with them; they refused on purely emotional grounds.  But then that medical advice wasn't rational either.

The Repressed Never Really Went Away

I really hadn't meant to write more about Jeremy Lin, but some of the noise has been hard for even me to ignore.

The two incidents involving racial stereotyping, for example. First there was this image of Lin's head emerging from a broken fortune cookie, aired on MSG Network. (And what's up with his tongue hanging out like that? I've seen what I'd call a disproportionate number of news photos of Lin that show him yelling, face distended, as if he was a coach. But I admit, the ways of fans and sports media are not my ways.) Second, somebody on ESPN decided to put a headline (via) on their site about a "Chink in the Armor" after Lin's gameplay faltered. The headline was quickly taken down, an apology was issued, the writer responsible was fired, and the anchor who read it was suspended. (Some reasonably intelligent discussion of "chink in the armor" can be found here.)

Maybe I should add Floyd Mayweather's deprecation of Lin's success, claiming that he only got attention because he was Asian. Rush Limbaugh couldn't have said it better. Mayweather responded to criticism like a white person, claiming that "Other countries get to support/cheer their athletes and everything is fine. As soon as I support Black American athletes, I get criticized ... Wow what a country." He later added, "I'm speaking my mind on behalf of other NBA players. They are programmed to be politically correct and will be penalized if they speak up." Right out of the Limbaugh playbook! I guess it's a sign of African-American progress that their pundits now borrow from the most characteristic right-wing talking points on race.

Saturday Night Live did a funny sketch about all this:



(Just a thought: Could it be an unconscious, tacit admission of the fundamental triviality and boringness of sports that sportswriters need to put so much energy into drivel like "Linsanity"?)

Then Gawker put up a story headed "What if Kim and Lin Started Dating?" Yes, Kim Kardashian.

According to one of Kim Kardashian's friends, Kim's publicist has arranged for her to go on a date with Knicks demigod, Jeremy Lin. And while it's probable that there's no truth in this, it's kind of fun to imagine. Think of the Kimsane headlines.

My ever-vigilant Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked to it, gabbling "Wow I bet she would totally fuck that dude's head up if she managed to get that close to him. lol" and "I'd be retarded putty in that woman's presence for a while...unless she managed to offend me sufficiently enough, which then kinda gets the blood flowing to the proper head, so to speak. lol" Racist ("she only like men with big dicks") and misogynist ("she's only after the money, afterall knicks offered lin billions") comment ensued, to say nothing of the comments at Gawker itself. I commented that TF was scraping the bottom of the barrel for material to link to. I did not add, though maybe I should have, that none of us even know that Lin is heterosexual. (He's an evangelical Protestant who wants to become a pastor -- two of the early warning signs of the closet.)

This stuff really makes me feel weary, because I hate being reminded how racist this country still is. Like most Americans, the people I referred to above would indignantly deny that they're racist. But if they're right, why does racism keep leaking out around the edges when they talk? And these are just the leaks; sometimes it's blatant, as shown in this story (via) from Lin's college days:

Some people still can't look past his ethnicity. Everywhere he plays, Lin is the target of cruel taunts. "It's everything you can imagine," he says. "Racial slurs, racial jokes, all having to do with being Asian." Even at the Ivy League gyms? "I've heard it at most of the Ivies if not all of them," he says. Lin is reluctant to mention the specific nature of such insults, but according to Harvard teammate Oliver McNally, another Ivy League player called him a C word that rhymes with ink during a game last season. On Dec. 23, during Harvard's 86-70 loss to Georgetown in Washington, McNally says, one spectator yelled "Sweet-and-sour pork!" from the stands.

Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, I recognize that some "racial jokes" are not meant as slurs. I eventually came to realize that when some of my blue-collar Hoosier co-workers greeted foreigners of any background with clumsy stereotyping jokes, they were just being awkward, and meant well. They were being friendly, as best they knew how, as taught by their culture; it's just that their best was pretty poor stuff. (And of course their culture, like most, is racist. We're in Klan country down here.)

But what Jeremy Lin has had to deal with can't be excused that way. It was another Ivy League player who called him a chink during a game, and it seems fairly certain that he was passed over for the NBA draft because he is Asian, not because of any lack in his game. Of course racism is as Ivy League as Harvard and Yale, and I'm not at all surprised to find racism and overt stupidity in the upper classes. (An older professor once confessed to sports sociologist Michael A. Messner as they watched a women's baseball game, "You know, it amazes me to see a woman throw like that. I always thought that there was something about the female arm that made it impossible to throw like a man."* This wasn't a personal blip but a commonplace medical myth of the good old pre-Title IX days.) It looks to me like elite sports is one of the areas where even the pretense of eliminating bigotry doesn't apply, once you get below the surface protestations. But that, I think, is because it's so representative of American life. (For once I'm not going to say "white American," because as Floyd Mayweather demonstrates, the bigotry is not limited to whites.)

In her review of The Bell Curve back in the 90s, Ellen Willis wrote:

The idea that black brains are genetically inferior to white brains did not fade from public view simply because white people were convinced by Stephen Jay Gould's eloquent arguments. Rather, the gap between Americans' conscious moral consensus for racial equality and the tenacious social and psychic structures of racism was papered over with guilt and taboo. Many opponents of racism thought they were doing their political duty by shouting down the Jensens and Herrnsteins driving them underground. But this literal enforcement of taboo was only a crude reflection of a much more widespread process of self-censorship.

I don't mean that the moral consensus of the post-civil rights era wasn't genuine. I mean that morality isn't enough, that it can't forever keep the lid on contrary feelings rooted in real social relationships that have not been understood, confronted, or transformed. Commenting on The Bell Curve in The New Republic, John B. Judis indignantly points out that the taboo Murray and Herrnstein are so proud of violating was a reaction to Nazism: "It's not a taboo against unflinching scientific inquiry, but against pseudo-scientific racism. Of all the world's taboos, it is the most deserving of retention." The problem, though, is that taboos can never truly vanquish the powerful desires that provoke them. For some decades after the Holocaust, there was a moratorium on open anti-Semitism in Europe and America; it didn't last. So long as hierarchy is a ruling principle of our culture, the idea of black inferiority cannot be transcended, only repressed. And in an era when an ascendant global capitalism is creating a new, worldwide class structure -- when the language of social Darwinism is increasingly regarded as a simple description of reality -- genetic determination of social status is an idea whose time has come back.

While I agree with her main argument here about the limitations of taboo, I disagree with Willis on several points. The main one is that racism (and other bad -isms) never really went away. Racism didn't so much go underground as become more genteel, and mainstream American racism had always been genteel: Saying the N-word is tacky, nice people don't do it, but really, Those People would really be happier sticking to their Own Kind. White people created good jobs for ourselves, and while we'll be happy to let Those People have whatever jobs or positions at Harvard are left over when we've taken our share, they should be modest and polite and not become importunate. That Martin Luther King is just a Communist troublemaker, stirring up unrest; the Colored would be perfectly content if he and all the other outside agitators would mind their own business. The adaptation of this approach to other disenfranchised groups can be left as an exercise for the reader.

Aside from this, the problem I see is that most white Americans weren't interested in, or even aware of "the eloquent arguments of Stephen Jay Gould." And as Willis suggests, they were beside the point anyway. Racism was never based on believing that "black brains are genetically inferior to white brains"; the scientific arguments, worthless as they were, always floated atop the gut conviction of difference and inferiority. Willis even recognizes this: elsewhere in the same review she wrote that "If I bought the authors' thesis, I would still be allergic to their politics. I don't advocate equality because I think everyone is the same; I believe that difference, real or imagined, is no excuse for subordinating some people to others. Equality is a principle of human relations, not Procrustes' bed" (40).

Many people believe (or act as though they believe) that simply reciting a list of fine principles -- equality, justice, can't we all just get along? -- should be enough to absolve them of racism, sexism, etc., when they get caught saying something vicious and stupid. There's a great Feiffer cartoon from the late sixties depicting a male and female hippie facing off. The woman listens blankly as the man declares for several panels that they're in the same struggle, the same fight; her face only closes down when he asks, "So why is it that every day after slaving away on the barricades, I come home to a dirty commune?"

But back to the way racism leaks out of the celebration of Jeremy Lin. I can't understand why his success is so threatening to white sports commentators; for that matter, it says a lot about the culture of elite sport in the early 21st century that he was passed over for the NBA draft and then spent so much time on the bench. The people in charge -- presumably white males, again -- couldn't see past his Chineseness to the talent he had. It took a couple of accidents to give him a chance to play; otherwise, who knows how long he'd have languished without a chance to prove himself? As Andrew Ti wrote at deadspin,

NBA fans have almost no vocabulary with which to talk about him. As with any Asian person in popular culture, people's first resort is a torrent of pan-Asian racist gibberish: If it has anything to do with any country, food, product, concept, or stereotype involving Asia, the rule is basically, "Make any association or equivalence you want, whatever." ... There isn't much to say other than that this is racist as fuck.

He's right, but really? In 2012, white (and also, judging from the examples Ti gives, black) Americans still have almost no vocabulary with which to talk about a talented basketball player who happens to be Asian? And lacking such vocabulary, they aren't smart enough to shut up totally about it and just talk about his playing? And they are so obsessed with his Asianness that if they try to shut up about it, it keeps leaking out? And somebody at ESPN thought he could sneak it in with "Chink in his armor"? And probably thought he was terrifically clever?

Which is one more reason why I stopped worrying about being normal decades ago. I looked at the conduct of the people who were normal, and realized I wasn't missing a thing.

*"Ah, Ya Throw Like a Girl!" by Mike Messner, in New Men, New Minds, Breaking Male Tradition, edited by Franklin Abbott (The Crossing Press, 1987), p. 40.
** In Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Beacon, 1999), p. 40-41.

Look at You, Miss Information!

Here's another story that people should be aware of, but I can link to it. Briefly, John Caruso at The Distant Ocean saw a story from Ha'aretz claiming that another blockade-busting aid ship, the Rachel Corrie, had been negotiating with the Israeli government and would land quietly in Ashdod and allow its cargo to be shipped to Gaza from there. "The most recent messages from Halliday were said to be particularly encouraging," Ha'aretz reported.

But then, another story, from CNN this time, reported:

"We have not stopped and have no intention of stopping," said former Assistant U.N. Secretary-General Denis Halliday from aboard the vessel. "We will only stop when Israelis force us to do so." [...]

But [Adam] Shapiro said people on the ship deny that report and believe it is part of a misinformation campaign by the Israeli government.

So, be wary what you believe from the Israeli and US governments. The other day an article at the Korea Times described what is known as the "Sleeper Effect," complaining that "many South Koreans remained doubtful" about about the report, the work of "a multinational investigation team ... [which] concluded late last month that the Navy frigate Cheonan sank on March 26 due to a North Korean torpedo attack."

A vast majority of countries accepted the explanation backed by convincing evidence but many South Koreans seemingly remained doubtful. Rather, they turned to online posts, which alleged the Seoul administration fabricated evidence.

Domestic observers point out that the phenomenon is caused by the "sleeper effect," under which people tend to trust a message from low-credibility sources some time after they learned of it.

"Most people do not advocate even a persuasive message if it comes together with a discounting cue, or incredible sources, such as rumors on the Web," said a professor at a Seoul-based university.

"After some time passes, however, people forget about the source and remember just the persuasiveness of the message. Then, they believe in it and this is called the sleeper effect. I think the effect is behind the distrust on the Cheonan case."

This story appeared in the Biz/Finance section, under News rather than Opinion. But notice the sourcing. Why wasn't the professor or his university named?

Media Research, a local public opinion pollster, commissioned a survey in late May on the announcement of the sunken navy ship. To the surprise of the government, 24 percent of respondents said that they did not trust the official report.

This means that more than 10 million of the country's 48 million population are suspicious about the in-depth investigation by a multinational team, comprising both private experts and government officials.

North Korea reportedly used identity theft of South Korean people to upload a flurry of posts to contend that the South manipulated the evidence and the North had nothing to do with the case. The anonymous professor said that such a maneuver would have also played a role in creating the sleeper effect.

"Reportedly"? According to whom? And once again, why is that professor anonymous?

Now, there's very good reason to disbelieve anything worked on by low-credibility sources like the US government, or the South Korean government, or the Israeli government -- particularly when official enemies like North Korea or Iran or Hamas are involved. And while "online posts" are not necessarily reliable, sometimes they are, much to the fury of governments. Staff Reporter Kim Tae-gyu is carefully vague as to which "online posts" people were going to. And at the very end of the article, he tells us this:

Ever since the idea of the sleeper effect appeared around 60 years ago, debate has continued as to whether the phenomena take place often or is observed under only very unusual circumstances.

So, we have an anonymous professor pulling an unproved "effect" and North Korean computer hacking out of his fundament to explain away people's distrust of their untrustworthy government. That's serious journalism!

Staying with responsible and thoughtful newspaper work, longtime Korea Times pundit Michael Breen argues that South Korea should change its name so people won't confuse it with North Korea. Oh, and Kim Kardashian wants a bigger ass.