Musings Of An Indie WriterSaturday, October 13, 2007
Some Spicy Sociology For A Sunny Saturday
It's a beautiful day here on Long Island: sunny, cool and dry, gently breezy, with portents of a most pleasant autumn to come. Of course, in New York this sort of weather is usually followed by plagues of boils, hordes of locusts, and the rivers turning to blood, but one must try one's best to be optimistic. Anyway, what else is an aging Curmudgeon Emeritus to do with such a day but strive with all his might and main to avoid addressing the yard work or his unfinished novel? So he decided to tour a few controversial websites in search of the stimulus for a fresh essay.
And guess what? He found one.
StormFront has been around for a number of years. In the mid and late-1990s, it was pretty much just a "white pride" site; that is, one would have regarded it as run of the mill if every occurrence of "white" were changed to "black." That's no longer the case. It's mutated into a neo-Nazi / anyone not Caucasian is an inferior / any Caucasian who associates voluntarily with non-Caucasians is a race-traitor / "let's finish off the Jews, too" cesspool. In all probability, it didn't make that transition instantaneously. Rather, the inherent dynamic of the thing -- a haven for persons with "unacceptable" views, where they could express those views without fear of expulsion -- steadily pulled in ever more virulent persons and ideas, while persons who merely wanted a place where one could admit to being guilt-free about being Caucasian found their new neighbors intolerable and hauled ass for less poisonous climes. At this point, no one with a shred of decency would allow himself to be associated with it -- yet it boasts quite a substantial membership.
Sociodynamics are like that. Virtually everyone understands, albeit inarticulately, that a voluntarily assembled group is characterized by its lowest elements. Smart, kindly folks won't willingly hang out with ignorant brutes. In the great majority of cases, it's the good guys who abandon the clubhouse; their aversion for confrontation exceeds their displeasure at the pollution of their domain. Clearly, it's important not to admit riffraff in the first place.
As with a social group, so also with a nation.
Sadly, America has tolerated an awful lot of riffraff in recent years. "Riffraff," in this connection, should be understood behaviorally: as a verdict on the morals, work ethics, and propensity for violence and squalor of the persons under discussion. It has nothing to do with race, creed, or national origin...unless it actually does.
Ultimately, race, creed, and national origin don't matter. What matters is behavior. Is your neighbor a law-abiding person? Does he keep out of your private business? Is his word good? Does he meet his obligations from his own pocket? Does he conform to the norms of good public conduct, and does he insist upon such conformance from the other members of his family? If the answers to these questions are satisfactory, the color of his skin, the shape of his sacred symbols, and the language his forebears spoke are utterly irrelevant.
You couldn't find one American in ten thousand who'd dissent from that credo. So why is America suffering a resurgence of the racial, religious, and ethnic animosities we thought we'd conquered long ago?
Partly, it's because of the rise of politically-powered victimism: the use of deliberately cultivated grudges and hypersensitivities, nearly always "justified" by unjust conditions now far behind us, to win legal privileges for particular groups. Demonstrably, gaining the political prizes sought does nothing to dissipate the grudges, for obvious reasons: "there's gold in them thar hills." Your Curmudgeon has written about this before. The enabling conditions are about four decades old, and show no indications of being ready to lapse.
But that's only half of the picture. The other half is backlash: a delayed but potent reaction from objectively blameless persons, angered by the insistence that they must expiate the sins of others. In our current circumstances, wherein three-quarters of the country confronts ever-escalating emotional ransom demands from the remaining quarter, those backlash emotions are becoming very strong.
This is the sort of pressure that causes a nation to retreat from its ideals: public amity; color-and-ethnicity blindness; residential and commercial integration; a political discourse of ideas about liberty and justice rather than an ideologically negative struggle among contending special interests. It's the sociodynamic of segregation, risen from its grave after forty years' slumber, and it's beginning to have observable consequences.
Let it be said, plainly and at once: there's no way to prevent persons from segregating themselves on whatever basis appeals to them, nor would it be acceptable for the State to attempt it. But segregation as a symptom is another matter entirely; the degree to which we pull away from others not like us is an inverse measure of our social stability and political robustness. When the only non-white faces in an area are there to clean the houses and mow the lawns -- when the local gendarmes are under social pressure to keep tabs on any non-white traveling through the area -- when the appearance of a "For Sale" sign on a front lawn leads to sotto voce expressions of hope from one's neighbors that "you'll sell to someone who'll fit in here" -- something has gone sour in the neighborhood stomach.
When significant numbers of persons gravitate toward communities of thought such as StormFront, that condemn "inferiors," abjure freedom as an obstacle to "purity," and advocate violence, or preparation for violence, with the aim of cleansing the community of its "undesirables," things are trending toward an explosion.
There are societies that have rigidly prevented the infusion of racially, religiously, and culturally alien elements; Japan comes to mind at once. One cannot say that Japan's experience has been negative on net balance, though the legendary Japanese resistance to innovation and individuality is worth pondering in this light. However, America uncorked that bottle long ago; whether or not the Japanese way, restricting immigration severely to prevent multiracial, multiethnic, multicreedal mongrelization, would have suited us better, it's a path forever closed to us now. We have to cope with who we are and what we've become.
Clarence Carson, in his landmark book The American Tradition, emphasized the importance of never allowing a group, however constituted, any degree of legal or political recognition. Groups, he argued, must be broken up into individuals when they come before the law, whether as petitioners or defendants. The reverse is more common today. That's the obstacle we must overcome to reverse the rising tide of interracial, interreligious, and interethnic hostility before it erupts into street warfare. Unfortunately, the great success of the victimists to this point suggests that the tactic will be perpetuated for a long while yet. People naturally emulate success; therefore, there will be more, more vociferous, and more demanding victimist groups for us to deal with before there are fewer.
