Yes, Richard, they should
Speaking of grumpy dudes tweeting their quarrels with lefty ideas…
Should modern members of a PAST-wronged GROUP claim redress from modern members of same GROUP as the wrongers? #Vendetta #AffirmativeAction
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 8, 2017
That’s no good, because it misstates the whole issue. The group isn’t merely PAST-wronged i.e. wronged by something that happened far in the past and is long over. The group has been held back and slowed down by ongoing wrongs many of which continue to this day. The group has been systematically prevented from accruing wealth for generations by deliberate government actions. The wrongs have not ended, and the damage they’ve done continues.
The rest of us have profited from the wrongs whether we wanted to or not, and whether we were aware of it or not. We’re richer because they’re poorer.
So yes, members of the group have every right to ask to be paid what was deliberately kept from them. It’s nothing to do with a “Vendetta” and that’s an ugly and uninformed thing to say.
Can he really not learn from his mistakes? And what is it about this persona that’s so appealing to him?
He seems determined to become the Left’s very own Trump!
The thing with institutionalized isms is that institutions persist along with their debts. The thing with debts, formal or otherwise, is that they don’t go away by magic. The US Govt. for example, isn’t going to clear its fiscal debts by virtue of a new senate or congress representative of a new America. A lot of institutions have their own debts to pay – moral and otherwise – due to past acts of racism, sexism, etc, while other institutions have inherited these debts through acquisition and whatnot. Framing this issue as some kind of zero sum game between restitution and alleviating White Man’s Burden is infantile.
Dawkins probably has his own personal take on this owing to some vexatious speculation about his own debts a number of years ago (i.e. that the Dawkins family had a particular debt, which for some reason RD in particular was the most culpable). But he’s launching this line of inquiry in general terms, likely with a number of undeclared assumptions, and into a broader context where the terms of his own personal interests aren’t nearly the most relevant or important. If he’s tried generalizing from the individual level, he’s gone about it all wrong.
Here’s another way to think about it. If the members of the group (what an awkward way to word things!) in the past had been paid for their labors, they could have used that money to buy property or invest, and they could have risen to a higher standard of living. Some of them would have spent their money and ended up as poor as they are now. But some of them would have used that money to invest, to save, etc, so that their children and their children’s children could have a better life than they had. Some of them would have sent their children to college, and started a new future for the family as a whole. Some of them might have even become slumlords and be grotesquely wealthy now. In short, the opportunities would have been there.
But that didn’t happen. The slaves built a large part of this country for others to enjoy, and received nothing. Then when they were freed, the laws were written in such a way that they were still paid little or nothing for their work, while they had to live in fear for their very lives if they complained or refused to do what they were told. It is impossible to know what this group of people could have achieved if they had simply been treated like human beings.
Dawkins needs to believe that he has not benefited, because he needs to believe that he earned his place in the sun. And, to some extent, he did. To say that other people are not getting as much opportunity as you are is not to say you did no work to earn your degree, that you are not intelligent and capable, it’s just to say that you had less work to do than someone else. Because Dawkins is white and male, he has no concept of what struggles those who are not white or male have to encounter. He has no idea that the barriers even remain. He looks around him, sees that there are people of color in high places, and thinks that means that racism has ended (after all, if the world was still racist, would Neil DeGrasse Tyson be head of the Hayden Planetarium? I have no doubt his thinking goes that way; I’ve heard many white men say similar things). In his view, these people of color (and women) being in these positions means that all barriers have dropped. The fact that there are so few is now just an indication that few are capable or willing to do as much hard work as he (and other white males) have done.
I think we should not only pay reparations, but with interest. Yes, some of the slaves would not have saved, would not have invested, would not have purchased property. Their descendants would not likely be wealthy property owners now (just like whites – some saved, some didn’t, and many had few opportunities and very low pay, but they were not snatched from their homeland and treated like animals while working for free).
Should the current population of serfs seek redress from the descendants of their ancestor’s owners?
The groups may not line up all that neatly. But past injustices shape the present, and basic civilization involves the amelioration of injustices and artificial inequalities.
I guess Dawkins would rather remain a Thought Leader than be classed as a Wronger, though he’s managed to add mightily to his Wronger pile by dint of his own efforts.
What’s wrong with Dawkins? Ego. His is the size of several gas giants, and plenty of people feed it because they want access to his (a) prestige and (b) money.
iknklast: And even after the laws themselves were changed, there was a massive effort to deny that group any access to equity–which is the foundation of inter-generational wealth. First through red-lining, then through casual steering to ensure that successful middle-class black Americans can’t just buy their way out of low-value communities (ie, places where property values are stagnant, or even receding when compared to inflation) without paying an outrageous premium. Thus, equity continues to be denied to them to this very day.
I came across this in J.M. Coetzee’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Robert Musil’s ‘The Confusions of Young Törless. I think it is pertinent, or at least not impertinent: ‘To Musil, the most stubbornly retrogressive feature of German culture… was its tendency to compartmentalise intellect from feeling, to favour an unreflective stupidity of the emotions. He saw this split most clearly among the scientists with whom he worked, men of intellect living coarse emotional lives.’ (Musil was trained as an engineer, and even invented and patented some sort of optical device.) What has come across to me, again and again, in the writings of certain natural scientists is what amounts to a refusal to recognise that the past is not something over and done with, but is working in and through the present, and an unrecognised assumption that if human societies are not simple and as amenable to scientific explanation as the physical and natural world is supposed to be, they bloody well should be. This of course goes with a lack of interest or a contempt for disciplines like history that address the human world, and for the long tradition of political philosophy in East and West. (The philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg puts forward the view that a knowledge and understanding of history is waste of time very explicitly.) I came across somewhere some remarks by an American scientist, who was of Indian extraction, I think, and who took a serious interest in political matters and regarded himself as a conservative politically; he spoke rightly of the mixture of naivety, ignorance and arrogance that characterised the pronouncements of many scientists (certainly not all) when they talked about political matters.
#9
One would think evolutionary biologists would be primed to notice present manifestations of past processes?
The question isn’t, or certainly shouldn’t be, a matter of tracking down the descendants of slave-owners or property grifters and handing them a bill. A civilized society addresses current problems, whether or not they are rooted in the past. The failure of Reconstruction is our biggest and oldest national catastrophe. The failure of will around really wrapping up and discarding the horror of the Confederacy affects the whole nation.
Our economic, religious, cultural, and yes, racial disasters are entwined with this. And we are all affected every day.
Exactly. Well said.
If people run a marathon in which a subset of the competitors have been hobbled, is the race fair? Obviously not. If the race starts, and those people are only unshackled half an hour or so in, is the race now fair? I think it is still obvious that it is not, yet the Dawkins’ of the world are saying that simply ending the early unfair conditions is enough and that we can now declare the race level. (And this is not even touching on the fact that many government hobbling both subtle and blatant continued well after abolition.)
The repurcussions of those initial conditions remain a present problem, and the liberal position could broadly be stated as giving those recently freed runners a tailwind.
Holmes, quite.
I like this recent quote from Ken ‘popehat’ White – it makes the point nicely