The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the privileges of the underprivileged. – H.L. Mencken
I finally figured out exactly what it is about the word “privilege” that annoys me so much. It isn’t just that it’s thrown about so often these days that its place in an identity politics or “feminist” drinking game or bingo-card parody would be a given; nor that it’s often used (generally in the phrase “check your privilege”) to shut down discourse; nor that it’s increasingly employed by statists to subvert the concept of individual liberties; though of course all those things are part of it. Over a year ago I wrote that…
…I tend to tune out when sex worker activists start blathering about “privilege” as though it were some specific quality like height, skin color, IQ or income. There is no single quality in the modern world which confers “privilege” as birth once could, not even money or education. I’m not denying that some people are underprivileged and others start out with greater advantages, but this is inevitable in a world where everyone is different; even in a hypothetical post-scarcity economy of the future where teaching machines gave everyone a university degree at the age of five, there would still be a plethora of areas in which some had advantages over others. Furthermore, early advantages no more ensure success than early disadvantages guarantee failure, and in fact a growing number of psychologists point out that too much privilege often makes a child (and the adult he becomes) fragile, maladjusted and less likely to succeed than one who has to struggle to achieve his goals. It is as pointless to feel guilty about one’s natural advantages as it is to resent those with other advantages one lacks…
At the time, I knew that overuse of the word irritated me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on the exact reason. But now I realize what it is, and it’s twofold. Firstly, a privilege is something that is conferred upon a person by others; we don’t speak of a dog’s “superhuman hearing privilege” or a bird’s “flight privilege” because we all understand that these things are innate in the animal. Yet similar natural characteristics in humans are often referred to as “privileges”, despite the fact that they cannot be considered such by any normal understanding of the word; no conscious entity “grants” a human a good brain, a healthy body or a stable neurochemistry, therefore these things can only be advantages, not “privileges”. And that brings us to the second part of the problem: the word “privilege” implies an advantage which is undeserved and unearned, and thus something for which the individual so “gifted” supposedly owes some debt or obligation to someone else (generally God, country or “society”). The replacement of semantically-neutral words like “characteristic” with the semantically-loaded “privilege” is an overt attempt at emotional manipulation, an effort to make the fortunate feel guilty for characteristics over which they had no more control than their eye color or height.
Government’s conversion of natural rights into granted “privileges” is a similar cognitive game; if civil liberties are unearned “privileges” magnanimously granted by beneficent governments, “authorities” arguably have the power to take them away again under certain conditions just as a landlord has the right to evict a tenant who has violated his lease. But when we recognize that self-ownership and personal agency are the birthrights of every single sentient being, governmental abrogation of those rights is seen for what it truly is: Violation. Usurpation. Theft. Rape. For example, using the phrase “white privilege” pardons the government for its systematic violations of the rights of minorities; if the way white people are preferentially treated in Western societies is a “privilege”, an “extra” thing conferred upon some but not others, the onus of guilt seems to fall upon those who are fortunate enough to have received this (undeserved) gift. But if we recognize the truth, that such treatment is the birthright of everyone, then the onus falls where it belongs: on those government actors who act independently or collectively to rob minorities of what is rightfully theirs by virtue of their humanity. Being harassed relatively less by cops, being treated more leniently by the courts and the like are not “privileges” conferred upon white people who otherwise would be treated as poorly as minorities; rather, minorities are cheated and robbed of their inalienable right to be treated in the same way as white people. To refer to decent, respectful treatment as a “privilege” is to imply that nobody actually deserves it, when in reality everybody does. And nothing that rightfully belongs to everyone alike can reasonably be called a “privilege”.
You have quite encapsulated the annoyance I feel whenever I hear or read someone talk about “my Constitutional right to free speech”, or religion, etc. My rights are inherent and inalienable. I was born with them and I will die with them. The Constitution doesn’t give me those rights, it simply says that the government may not take those away from me.
You are born with no intrinsic rights. Not even the right to life.
Every right you have has been fought for by someone and must be fought for over and over again.
Yes, you libertarians, some of your more trivial rights have actually been won by you as an individual. But the vast majority have fought for by others and you are simply freeloading.
Yes, our rights have been fought for, because others have tried to take them away from us at threat to our lives. That is my point exactly.
You are born with no intrinsic rights. Not even the right to life.
It’s a tough call but I believe this might be the single most nonsensical statement I have read on the Internet. This week, anyway.
So who or what exactly grants you all those birthrights Sasha?
God?
Your genes?
Your white skin?
You can’t even feed yourself at birth for chrissake.
NOBODY grants them to me. They are mine by virtue of my membership in the human race. That’s what “inalienable” means. Some might call it God-given but it amounts to the same thing.
I am curious though: if you don’t believe that humans are born with the right to life, then when exactly does their right to life kick in? Be specific, please.
The right to life kicks in when you’re able to stand up and defend it.
In most Western communities that’s pretty young, but that’s only because others have fought for the right to keep kids safe.
Let me put it the other way around.
In the time since my last comment around 800 kids have died worldwide because they lack the right to clean water, adequate nutrition, competent obstetrics or midwifery, etc, etc.
Were they born with all that stuff?
Did someone steal it from them?
If so, who?
You’re arguing a different platform. You seem to lack the philosophical background to understand and differentiate between natural rights and entitlements. The reason that clean water, adequate nutrition etc are not natural and inalienable rights is because those things must be provided by other people. Competent obstetrics will never be a right so long as it is provided by a doctor and not a machine
I have enough philosophical background to know that ‘natural rights’ are a fantasy of the religiously minded.
Even straitlaced religious Kant had a lot of trouble coming up with moral absolutes – the only one he found was ‘truthfulness’ and there’s a hell of a lot of people who contest that.
And I am not arguing that clean water etc are rights.
Only that it follows that if you believe life is an intrinsic right, they must be.
I don’t believe life is an intrinsic right. Or liberty.
The pursuit of happiness may be, but only if you get up off your arse and start pursuing it.
Rights have nothing to do with what we can expect from the universe, they are what we demand from ourselves. True, there is no right to life, but there is a right not to be murdered. Sure it seems easy to violate, especially when it seems like government does everything for us, but the violation is actually quite perilous.
The right to life kicks in when you’re able to stand up and defend it.
*thud* *jaw hitting floor*
So before you are able to defend yourself, you have no right to live? I can kill an infant with impunity, then?
I don’t think this is what you mean (I really, really hope it isn’t), but it’s hard to interpret any other way.
Peter Singer would say you do – as long as you designate it ‘defective’ first.
Singer, of course, is a psychopath and utilitarianism is philosophically incoherent, but the fact that you can get such obvious nonsense taken seriously as moral philosophy is because in three millenia no-one has been able to come up with a firm principlist basis for public morality.
Not the Golden Rule.
Not absolute honesty.
And certainly not ‘natural laws/rights’.
You can demand from yourself that you don’t murder but how on earth can you demand not to be murdered? And who from?
Seems to me there’s a bit of confusion on this thread between internal morality and social morality.
When you try to impose your internal morality on society as a whole you have become an oppressor.
If your internal morality deplores oppression you have also become a hypocrite.
If you start believing your internal morality is a reflection of external ‘laws’ you have become delusional.
You are confusing rights, needs and privileges; they’re not the same things. “Rights” aren’t “granted” by anyone; privileges are. Rights are things that all moral sentient beings agree are due to other sentient beings, but which have no basis in physical law; needs are things that the physical body will not function properly without.
Looks to me you’ve got yourself a self-referential definition there Maggie.
Folks are moral and sentient if they agree with you about rights.
But I don’t have a compliance plate stuck to my bum listing the rights I was born with as a human, so what basis would I have for agreeing with you?
Hell, I don’t even have a certificate saying I’m human. So when some white dude comes along saying I’m not I’d better be ready to fight for any rights I want. Saying “You aren’t complying with the morality of Maggie McNeill” may not convince him.
If some ‘immoral’ bugger with a meataxe comes along your ‘rights’ are going to look pretty pale, weedy and academic unless you’ve got something to back them up with a bit stronger than moralising.
And if you don’t have the right to your needs you don’t have the right to life.
So by your definition (assuming you accept Sasha’s paradigm) provision of needs are a subset of rights.
They lack clean water, not the right to it, mate. There’s a difference.
So who confers the right to clean water upon them?
A bunch of comfie middle-classers sitting in front of their TVs, Budweiser in hand?
And who is enforcing their rights?
Maybe someone should sue someone on behalf of their dessicated corpses.
You don’t build rights out of hot air and paperwork.
Right’s are no more ‘natural’ than a Pontiac Firebird.
But death is.
“They are mine by virtue of my membership in the human race.”
No. Not because you are human. Because you are alive. Whether you believe in the Christian God or random chance, everything that lives is DESIGNED (by God or the immutable laws of the universe) to resist death, pursue happiness (in the form of a full belly and a chance to reproduce), and own property (territory, or whatever). Naturally, these rights are impacted by the rights of others living beings.
Every attempt by the State to claim that these rights are in its gift is an attempt by humans to claim to be superior to a) God our B) the natural laws of the universe. This is pretty much a textbook definition of Hubris.
Unlike Sasha and Maggie (as I read them) your philosophical logic is impeccable.
If I believed in a benevolent, omniscient creator we would be on the same wavelength.
But I don’t.
“everything that lives is DESIGNED”
Perhaps. But some of us think it’s all random, chance, no more than that. So that “rights” etc are all products of the human imagination as a way of explaining and simplifying our existence. Bleak, I know.
Evolution is natural selection acting on mutation. Mutation is random, but natural selection is not. Evolution is creative, so “designed” isn’t a bad word, as long as we keep in mind what sort of “designer” we’re talking about.
An inalienable right is one that cannot be alienated, i.e. transferred to another (from Latin aliēnum ‘of another‘). You can take my chattels and enjoy them essentially as I did, but you cannot enjoy my right to life as I do; you cannot add it to your own. The adjective describes the nature of the right, not its origin.
I’ve always thought that the distinction is fairly simple-
Assuming you are an independent adult (as in, not dependent on a caretaker to remain alive), anything you can do without the aid of someone else is a right. If you need someone else help, it is a business transaction predicated on the need for mutual benefit.
Yep, that’s pretty simple.
But if you reflect for a moment on how much you can really do without outside assistance (whether now or in your past) you’ll realise that your ‘natural rights’ amount to very little indeed.
No no no, you misunderstand- you don’t need permission from someone to stay alive, so it is a right. If someone tried to kill you, they are violating your right.
You might not need ‘permission’ to eat but if no-one is prepared to give or sell you food you will die, regardless of your ‘rights’.
What about growing or foraging for food, so you don’t need someone to give or sell it to you?
Absolutely. People who go around accusing others of “privilege” are more often than not seeking to take something away, to steal.
Equality of outcome is impossible except when everyone has nothing.
You put to written words what I’ve been thinking for a while. Then, you took it to the conclusion I hadn’t considered.
I’ve never seen a post from you I disagreed with so much Maggie.
If you are a white person living in a white dominated society you simply don’t know what it is to be reminded of your colour with just about every interaction you have – especially with authorities.
That is a privilege your fellow whites bestow upon you.
The fact you seem oblivious to it is strong evidence to me you need to ‘check it’.
Some of us don’t get such a privilege.
So the government gets a pass for how it acts and it’s all my fault because I’m white?
It’s far from just the government.
Check the guy behind the counter who won’t serve you until no-one else is waiting.
Check the woman in the street late at night who starts calling for help just because you walk past her.
Check the group of strangers in the pub who turn towards you as soon as you walk in and steadily increase their hostility until you walk out.
Check the idiots in the media who characterise ever guy of your race as a potential child abuser despite no statistical evidence that Aborigines abuse kids at a greater rate than white Australians.
If you act that way too, it is your fault, not because you’re white but because you’re a racist like so many other whites.
The ‘privilege’ is not that whites are racist, it’s because they pretty much hold the whip hand in every transaction thanks to the racist solidarity of so many other whites.
And before anyone says it, yes I suspect it would work exactly the opposite way in a black dominated society.
But I don’t enjoy the privilege of living in one.
You mean like how it works in Africa right now?
Dunno, never been to Africa.
Seems to work that way in Zimbabwe at least.
But during my time in India I was treated with privilege simply for being a Westerner. I’d guess some African countries are the same.
You didn’t get treated that way because you were a “Westerner” – you got treated that way because they believed you had money and, perhaps – status.
Yep, they thought I had money because I’m a Westerner.
And they granted me status because I’m a Westerner.
And that included Indians who had no reason to think they would get money from me and those from every class and caste from penniless sadhus who won’t touch money to residents of Malabar Hill who would have known at a glance that they spend more in a day than I spend in a month.
I don’t think anyone has travelled overseas more than I have and, I know exactly the kind of treatment you’re talking about.
There’s a couple things at play …
– There’s an incentive for them to be kind to you because they believe that, as a travelling Westerner – you have money and perhaps status. It does not matter if you’re interfacing with someone who doesn’t want to sell you anything – it’s a normal human tendency to try to be nice to people who have money and status because … you never know what good rewards that might result in. When the owner of a major local hotel comes into the bar – I treat him like gold – who knows? I might want to work for him someday.
– It’s not so much that you are a “Westerner”. It’s more due to the fact that you’re an “English Speaking” one. French guys rarely get the treatment you’re talking about – once people realize they are French – because the French tend to be rather abrupt and hateful to everyone. Americans, on the other hand (and this might apply to Ozzies too) – are thought of as being nice and affable. We generally don’t give a shit about “class” and tend to treat everyone as equals and a lot of folks overseas consider that to be a nice breath of fresh air because there are places – like India – where class rules everything.
Believe me, the people you’re meeting aren’t treating you nice because they believe you are superior to them because you are a Westerner. There’s nothing “racial” at play here.
I know a lot of people bitch about Americans – but let me tell you – everywhere I go overseas I get great treatment (Spain being a minor exception – and who knows why). I even get treated pretty decent in France. I’m pretty proud, overall, in Americans in this regard. I work a “service job” as a bouncer two nights a week and I couldn’t be happier with the way my fellow Americans treat me. That’s a $12 an hour job – pretty menial, let’s face it – you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to be a bouncer (although Christopher Langan, one of the smartest people in the world – was a New York Bouncer and worked mostly labor intensive jobs). So these people that come into the bar don’t know me – don’t know my history – and yet they are extremely respectful to me even though I could be someone well below their “station”.
I think Americans should be proud of that.
Thanks for going to the trouble of pouring the insights of your experiences into the comment field, krulac. There is food for thought in it.
But I never thought I was treated well in India for racist reasons. In fact I was simply using that experience to suggest to Nick that he may not be treated badly in Africa for racist reasons.
I’ve spent nearly five years in India all up and I think the main reason they treat me the way they do is because they need to fit everyone into the caste system. To a Hindu everyone is a Hindu whether they know it or not. Indians of other religions have internalised the caste system too.
Because they were once conquered by English speaking foreigners my default caste becomes kshatriya (warrior/noble). If I do something that obviously breaches the mores and attitudes of that caste (with some leeway for foreign differences) they may revise it. (I’m mixed race and am no darker than most Indian kshatriyas, but if I was as dark as my grandfather I’d probably be allocated to a lower caste in some parts of India – mostly Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat).
Often when they find out why I’m there I get ‘upgraded’ to ‘brahmin’ or ‘sunyassin’ (beyond caste) but I’m actually more comfortable as a kshatriya. I’m from an army family and that’s pretty much how I see myself.
While I doubt other countries have caste systems as formalised as India they all still do. Some (e.g. English speaking countries) have caste systems closely aligned to skin colour, others do not.
I’ve never been to Africa but I imagine it would be the same there. In some places my skin colour would be a big deal, whether negative or positive. In others it wouldn’t be such a big deal. I doubt there is anywhere it would be entirely irrelevant.
as a bouncer, you might be lower status but you are the gatekeeper and presumably a big guy. They don’t want to get their asses kicked and it’s probably a good idea to make nice with the bouncers. I think I read a PUA blog where the guy would buy the bouncers a drink and tip very well on a slow night, then come back on a busy night and they’d all remember him, thus making him look higher status…
And that’s a form of oppression as well. What, you think a government has to be elected to be a government? ANY collective that thinks it has the right to use force against an individual is a government in all but name. White racism isn’t decreased by accusations of “privilege”; it is increased because the word automatically implies that the “authority” granting the “privilege” – in this case, racial solidarity – is legitimate. And the only way to break that perception is to insist on rights being INALIENABLE for everyone of every race, class and profession, not merely “privileges” doled out as the collective sees fit. And NOT subject to revocation just because someone is accused of something, either.
Who said privilege is legitimate?
If you’ve got to insist on your rights, how can they be inalienable?
And who is going to stand up and enforce them for you if not some variation of ‘the collective’?
Is this an American thing?
You’ve got a piece of paper covered in John Hancocks and claims about inalienable rights and you believe it?
The only rights it gives you is the right to a piece of paper covered in scribble.
You still have a right, even is some a** uses force or coercion to take the right away from you.
Like the bird analogy- birds can fly. It is not a privilege, it is an advantage of their nature- and inalienable right, if you will. No one needs to give a bird permission to fly. However, someone can rip off their wings, thus denying the bird the ability to fly.
Inalienable human rights are the same.
That’s an excellent analogy! 🙂
If you can find my physical correlates of ‘life, liberty, property, etc’ somewhere on my newborn body I’d be more likely to accept that metaphor.
As long as you also recognise that birds need to be taught to fly, so by saying they have a right to do so you are also saying they have a right to demand or coerce another bird into teaching them.
Last time I checked, fully grown adults don’t burst forth from the womb of any mammal (or bird). Rights, in case you are not aware, are generally considered things adults worry about, since children are not actually grown yet. Claiming that because a bird needs to be taught to fly means its a privilege is ridiculous.
As an aside, generally speaking children have the right, which they exercise, to “coerce” adults into taking care of them. Its hard wired into the parents brain. Adults, if they wish to avoid this coercion, have the right to not have children.
However, we are not discussing the rights of children, we are discussing rights of adult humans. As proof of your rights, you have a body which only you can control, a mind which only you can know, and that in and of itself should be sufficient to prove that you have the right to life and liberty.
As for property, that is a much more complicated dynamic of human society, but it basically boils down to- we can conceive of possession, and it is a practical extension of the other two rights (it violates neither while preserving both), therefore we have the right to it.
So you say that children do not have a ‘natural right’ to life because they aren’t grown yet?
Even Peter Singer only denied the right to life to newborn infants.
However you are closer to another famous utilitarian moral philosopher, Alfred Hoche, who claimed that ‘life unworthy of life’ applied to essentially anyone who was incapable of understanding and exercising their right to life – though I’m not sure at what age he would have considered a healthy child to have met the prerequisites.
Obviously I do not have a body only I can control. Others are capable of exercising control over my body through forcible sedation, violence, incarceration and execution. They can even wire me up and make me move my arms and legs against my will should I not have the capacity to prevent them.
If you are so certain the right to property does not contradict your other two natural rights you have clearly not read my link to the Wikipedia entry “What is property?”. Please do so before expecting me to engage with claims like that.
Of course not- I’m saying that the rights of children are substantially different from the rights of adults. For example, a child does not actually gain responsibility for their actions until they reach maturity (I am specifically not defining when maturity is). Sheesh, if you can’t argue the point, at least be mature enough not to use the “So your a Nazi!?!” fallacy (although you get points for using someone other than Hitler)
And no, no one else can actually take control of your body, you are confusing injure and coerce with control. Unless you happen to be enthralled by a vampire, I guess.
I have read it, and I maintain my position- the right to own that which you create is a self evident right of the ability to create. The only messy part is dealing with multiple claims to the same “raw materials”, or materials that do not need to be made, extracted or cultured into usability and therefor actually cannot be owned. (Which are much rarer than you think. Wild bunnies and wild berries and unplanted trees are examples of things that require no human effort to obtain from the wild (other than the act of gathering/hunting them, which gives the hunter/gatherer ownership of whatever they gather) But things like metal ore, usable lumber (as in, processed into planks, anyone can cut down a tree), even farmland (which has through the labor of someone been turned from wilderness to something that makes lots of food), are all owned by the person who put in the effort to gather/extract/culture.
Again, I fully acknowledge that deciding who gets to claim these “raw materials” is not handled particularly well, but that does not change that people have the right to own what they create
You can stand on the corner, fists on hips, demanding what you think are your rights until the cows come home and shit on your shoes – because they respect your rights about as much as anyone else does.
You want rights, you’ve got to take them.
Unless you’re privileged enough to have had others take them and hand them to you.
And if you don’t believe you have a RIGHT to take them in the first place, you’re no better than those who denied them to you in the first place. Sorry, no sale.
What good is a right without means?
How is it any different to a schoolgirl fantasy of getting it on with Justin Beiber?
Basically, treat it like a floor not a ceiling. People can’t decently treat you worse than the floor amount of niceness. But they can decide not to hit the ceiling for any reason.
“Check the idiots in the media who characterise ever guy of your race as a potential child abuser despite no statistical evidence that Aborigines abuse kids at a greater rate than white Australians.”
You don’t need to add “of your race”, all men are considered suspect around children, for sexual misdeeds. Because penis itself. Not race. Race might make it worse, but the pedophilia hysteria is very much against men as a whole.
Yeah, but the media moral panic about Aboriginal child abuse, the resultant Northern Territory Intervention and the suspension of the Australian Racial Discrimination Act necessary to implement it was directed against one specific race.
Mine.
Try to convince someone to hire a male babysitter, a male daycare worker or a male kindergarten teacher. Doesn’t have to be institutionalized. It’s just incredibly widespread and considered totally normal.
I’m not saying that all guys don’t get it.
Just that right now in Australia, if you’re an Aborigine you get it ten times worse. It’s not just sexist here, it’s racist too.
Aboriginal women are also accused of being negligent mothers, usually because they don’t do enough to force their kids to attend institutionally racist schools that won’t provide them with decent jobs in an institutionally racist employment market.
For seventy years Australian authorities took kids away from their parents just because they were Aborigines. That’s started happening again over the past five years because the media keeps claiming we abuse and neglect them.
A lot of Australians think we used to eat our kids until the whitefella showed up to stop us (I’m not kidding).
Read it again; it’s NOT A PRIVILEGE. Privileges are extra. Nonwhite people who call that “privilege” are buying into the idea that all humans “deserve” is abuse and maltreatment until a beneficent government “privileges” them with more, like a parent “privileging” a favored child. No, no, no and never.
What exactly are the ‘extras’ Maggie?
Are fries with that a privilege?
I don’t think I deserve to be abused.
But I live in a world full of abusive people (and their victims), so I don’t deserve to be free of abuse either.
Unless I can stand up and prevent it.
The thing is I don’t imagine there’s some kind of sky fairy or constitution or arbiter of who or what is human or anything else that can grant me rights.
My rights are what I can take, by force, guile, labour or sacrifice.
And that includes what I can take in concert with ‘a collective’ – though I’d better be ready to defend them against that as well.
And if your life hasn’t taught you that in spades Maggie, all I can say is that you must be very privileged.
No. Those are NOT rights. If “rights” are whatever you can take by force, then white Westerners have the “right” to rule the world and morality is nonsense. “Might makes right” is not morality; it’s bestial behavior.
Whites do rule the world with might.
It may not be right according to your morality but there’s plenty of internally consistent moral systems in which it is – and if you’re looking for external justifications for morality you’re appealing to a sky fairy again.
I’m not appealing to morality or need or privilege but reality.
I look at how it is and try to respond accordingly.
If you can change the world to comply with your morality it might very well be a better world and I might thank you – though the history of people trying to do that does not give me much confidence.
What’s the point of insisting on rights that only exist in the minds of people raised to have a certain view of humanity? (i.e. Privileged enough to have the luxury of such views).
I thought it was us anarchists who were meant to be the pie-in-the-sky utopians.
So you are saying you subscribe to the morality of “might makes right”- basically, rights to literally everything do not exist unless you or someone you likes you can defend them via force.
That is not the morality Maggie is basing her post, nay, her entire blog, on. The idea that there are Rights that Exist regardless of whether or not a person has those rights, and that they are Entitled to those rights, no matter who, where and when they are.
To sum it up, this blog is based in the idea that Might does not make Right.
A privilege is not a right, and should not be confused with one, because it is morally acceptable to take away a privilege, whereas it is not morally acceptable to take away a right.
You are, in essence, arguing that you have no right to complain about your lot in life because you don’t have the right to be free or whatever, its just a privilege The Man has denied you, and since The Man has the power, they have the moral right to dictate what privileges are and are not bequeathed to people.
Personally, I find that way of thinking abhorrent. I have the right to Life, Liberty, Property, ect, and no one is morally justified in taking those things away. I am, quite literally and thoroughly entitled to those rights. If someone takes away my rights, or your rights, or the rights of some random stranger, that someone is Evil. If someone is claiming my rights are actually privileges, I will tell them off, because taking away someone’s privileges is fine, if a bit rude. QED.
My personal morality has nothing to do with it.
I can personally believe everyone should have the right to live in a penthouse and bathe in champagne and deplore the fact that so many people are denied that ‘natural right’ and it won’t mean squat outside my own head.
Just like all those white folk saying I should have the right to live free of racial harassment doesn’t mean squat to me.
Their ‘natural rights’ aren’t going to earn me anything.
My own right arm might though.
Your personal morality has everything to do with it! That’s what we’re discussing here, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.
You have literally just stated that you believe might makes right is the correct morality.
Also, I fear you have a basic misunderstanding of what causes racism, and how it is overcome. It is overcome by a shift in the cultural morality of a society. A shift where people go from believing that might makes right, so whoever is in power is entitled to do literally whatever they feel like, to a morality where there are basic freedoms that everyone has, and it is evil to deny someone those rights, no matter what.
You are arguing a defeatist philosophy.
It might not mean squat to you now, but a hundred years from now, if people keep saying that racism is wrong, your descendents might have something else to say.
A hundred years ago white middle class liberals said racism was wrong so they needed to ‘smooth our dying pillow’ so we wouldn’t suffer too much as they wiped us out.
A hundred years ago white middle class liberals said racism was wrong so they should take all our children off us and raise them as whites to give them better opportunities.
A hundred years later white middle class liberals are still telling us they know what’s good for us better than we do.
Maybe it’s time white middle class liberals who actually want to help start looking for the problem in the mirror.
Maybe a hundred years from now they’ll actually get it.
I’m not sure, but I think you missed a hundred years in there somewhere.
White middle class liberals in the US are not, by and large, telling people of color in the US they know what’s good for them. There are enough socially conscious people here that anyone who tries that (on the American left) gets corrected rather quickly (for the most part).
I don’t know what the situation is like for aboriginal folks in .au but I am curious.
What’s it like?
Well half of all Aboriginal men will be dead by 45.
White Australians can expect to live several years longer than white Americans.
Racism was written into the Australian constitution 114 years ago (the Race Powers Act) and it’s still there.
However we have abandoned the ‘White Australia Policy’ and since 1969 Aborigines are no longer classified under the Flora and Fauna Act and are now counted as human beings on the census. So I suppose there has been some progress.
There has never been a treaty offered by White Australia. Technically we are still at war.
About a decade and a half ago, after a century of fighting, Aborigines were offered conditional land rights over some of their lands if they could meet a whole bunch of onerous conditions that reflect a racist, patronising notion of what it is to be an Aborigine. If white Australians had already made a claim to that land all such rights were extinguished – only Crown land can be claimed. Needless to say that doesn’t help my tribe – our land is under the cement of Western Sydney.
Most white Australians were horrified when the High Court granted extremely limited land rights and many still carry on as if we were granted the right to camp in their garden.
About seven years ago then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, got together with sycophantic ABC reporter Suzanne Smith to concoct a series of false stories suggesting that child sex abuse was endemic in Aboriginal communities. It’s not, though most Australians remain oblivious to the fact that the claims have been thoroughly refuted. Suzanne Smith was awarded a Walkley (the Australian Pulitzer) for it.
The subsequent moral panic allowed the government to suspend its own Racial Discrimination Act and use the racist powers of the Constitution to implement the ‘Northern Territory Emergency Response’ whereby the Army was sent into communities and the majority of Aborigines who had been able to claim land back were forced to sign it back over to the government on 99 year leases. The government promptly allowed the mining companies in and several sacred sites have been desecrated as a result.
Not a single arrest for child abuse has been made in any of the communities subject to the intervention.
I could go on and on about the political parties with explicitly anti-Aboriginal platforms, the casual anti-Aboriginal racism endemic in the media (the liberal media being the worst), the imprisonment and death in custody rate of Aborigines, the denial by a faction of Australian historians that massacres of Aborigines ever took place or that smallpox was introduced by Europeans …
But I think maybe you get the picture.
In international conferences of First Peoples, Maoris and Native Americans often express shock and horror at how Australian Aborigines are treated.
That is fucking horrifying, and I am frankly embarrassed that my own country (the US) has not called Australia out on it from a human rights perspective.
Hey, we’re America’s deputy sheriff in the Pacific (according to both George W Bush and former Prime Minister John Howard).
We’re strategically important to the US. (Like a certain other human rights abuser established on stolen Palestinian land).
We vote the way the US tells us in the UN, even when it’s against our interests.
We send our sons to die in US initiated wars.
We sign FTAs that screw over our own economy to the benefit of big US corporations.
We’ve earned certain privileges you know.
Man, my sister spent a semester in Australia, and she said they were racist, but that is just awful!
“I don’t think I deserve to be abused.
But I live in a world full of abusive people (and their victims), so I don’t deserve to be free of abuse either.”
can you not unequivocally state “I don’t deserve to be abused”? the first statement could imply that your opinion might not be valid in the face of some Ultimate Truth. i sympathize with the desire to avoid externalizing the arbitration of [insert word of choice for things that no known entire global population has ever realized] but what’s keeping you from making an absolute statement about your own best interests?
most of your earlier points seem to conflate “Rights” (as conceived by people who appear to believe that Everyone Deserves [insert baseline here]) with “Realizing One’s Rights”.
…surely you don’t expect anyone to break down and confess that they honestly believe that nothing more than shouting “i have rights!” in the face of the proverbial homicidal maniac/faceless machine/et al. will confer anything of any sort?
but perhaps you’re only posing certain juxtapositions to jolt people you suspect of having that tendency in an un- or under-examined personal belief system.
“…so I don’t deserve to be free of abuse either.”
not sure what that’s in aid of, other than some kind of ham-handed ‘duality of deserving’. the only people i can think of who might claim that they “deserve to be free of [anyone affected by] abuse” are already judgmental and disdainful and generally can’t get past the thought of “i shouldn’t have to worry about other people’s problems” (let alone unpack that thought).
I think Maggie is arguing against the connotation that a privilege is undeserved. Thus, your statement argues that the ability for a white person to walk around without enduring racist slurs is and undeserved, unearned advantage.
Obviously, that is nonsense. What is actually happening is a black person being reminded they are black because of racism is having their rights violated, not a privilege taken away.
>psychologists point out that too much privilege often makes a child (and the adult he becomes) fragile, maladjusted and less likely to succeed than one who has to struggle to achieve his goals.
Yet those with privilege often succeed even if they lack any qualities that should make them do so, a case in point is George W. Bush. Without his family’s money and influence, he likely would have been a failed businessman, and small town drunk. Instead, the nation was cursed with him for eight years.
You could say that about every President – including Obama.
Yes, it cuts both ways. Privilege usually either makes or breaks the one so endowed. And the fact that this is so is another reason for despising the word; it allows naysayers to pretend that any achievement of a supposedly (but not actually) “privileged” person is due solely to his “privilege”.
And that’s where you libertarians get it 100% wrong again.
No-one achieves anything by themselves.
You relied on two other people just for your genes.
Do you feed yourself or do hundreds of farmers, wholesalers, distributors and retailers help you?
Did you educate yourself, or did you freeload on the schools, libraries, literacy and knowledge achievements of millenias of others.
Not everyone has access to those sorts of support networks.
Only the privileged.
It’s hard to overstate this. The libertarian belief that we are all little independent islands rather than overwhelmingly interconnected and interdependent has always mystified me. It is also not backed up by a shred of social science, whereas there is endless evidence for the interdependence of society.
Few, if any, libertarians believe such a thing, though soi-disant “progressives” are fond of claiming that we do. If you don’t believe humans have the fundamental right of self-ownership and self-determination, I honestly see no point in discussing anything with you since, by your own standards, your individual opinion doesn’t matter.
I absolutely do. I simply don’t think those rights extend to “prove” that “government coercion” (i.e. someone spending my tax dollars on something I don’t necessarily agree with) is necessarily wrong, in a world in which we *have* to act collectively in order to make lots of different kinds of progress.
Oops, Jarett, I misread your name.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure if ‘Jarett’ is a specifically gendered name.
Here in Aus it would usually be a guy’s name though.
Hope you don’t mind telling me so I know which pronoun to use.
The world is not Manichean; things are not all right or all wrong. Coercion is coercion, and the fact that some small amount may be necessary does not magically change it into non-coercion. I’ve written on this before.
That’s certainly true if you don’t want to grant her those rights Maggie.
Do you see her as non-human then?
She’s passed my Turing test.
But tell me Maggie, if libertarians recognise interdependence, why are they all so keen to hang onto every cent they think they’ve earned?
Surely they recognise that they are only a tiny cog in the machine that delivers their goods and services and that the hard-working Latina who cleans their toilet has pretty much the same right to their stuff as they do.
They’re not keen to “hang on to every cent”. They’re simply not keen on government – the worst, most inefficient means of getting things done – choosing what is done with their money, rather than voluntary associations.
The problem when people like you attack libertarians, is that you lack the nuanced mental capacity to understand that there is a difference between wanting to help your fellow man, and wanting government to force people to help your fellow man.
So tell me Dan, how much have you, Ron Paul and Alan Greenspan combined given to ‘voluntary associations’ to, say, uphold the ‘natural rights’ of African and Native Americans this year.
Or are AIM and the Southern Poverty Law Center a couple of those ‘Marxist collectives’ you’re always railing against.
And being a fine upstanding libertarian and never, ever a freeloader I’m sure you don’t use the roads, libraries, schools, etc that your illegitimate government provides.
Just like Ayn Rand would never, ever have freeloaded on Medicare after not contracting lung cancer from cigarette smoking that only anti-corporate ideologues would ever claim causes it.
Libertarians have given and often do give to associations that uphold the rights of all people, regardless of their hereditary descent, including charities that support people who have very little material means to carry on their life. But I would find it odd from a political standpoint to support people’s rights in a selective manner, as you propose, e.g. supporting only African, Latino or Native Americans.
However for personal and a-political reasons I, and probably other libertarians, do act selectively in supporting friends, family, neighbours, or other groups with which I feel a personal association. However here we are speaking politically and this type of support is irrelevant. What is rellevant in this discussion is the support we give to the organizations which we believe are doing the best work in upholding our political principles, whichever those principles might be. For libertarians this means supporting the struggle against governments who wish to abridge our rights, in order to further their goals.
We do not examine in particular whether these goals are also our own goals or not. They may be my goals but not your goals, or vice-versa. I may believe cars are the best way to get around and appreciate the existence of roads (whether payed for voluntarily or via taxation), you may believe that high-speed rail is better and lament it’s inexistence (because no one payed for it voluntarily nor via taxation), and some other person might prefer a return to horse and carriage. In Libertarianism, the only thing that these hypothetical situations have in common is a dillema between voluntarism and coercion, and we consistently choose the first.
To return to our original discussion, it is exactly this dillema that defines what privilege is. An advantage that is conferred upon in a voluntary manner is no privilege, regardless if it is sourced from many people and not simply one person. Assuming all parties in the relevant exchanges were satisfied with the conditions, an advantage such as for example third-party knowledge is to be considered a right, unencumbered from any further obligation towards these third-parties. E.g. if I pay a tutor to teach me something, for example to play a violin, then in the future I am free to play the violin without having any obligation towards him.
I may of course feel gratitude towards those people through which I gained something of advantage, things that fell outside our mutual, strictly speaking, contractual obligations. But the crucial matter is that I am not actually obliged to feel gratitude of any level, it is only a personal ethical matter. E.g. there would be nothing wrong if I felt differently about two violin instructors who each received from me a fee and taught me a certain piece. Nor would there be something wrong if a child felt more gratitude towards his nanny than to his parents who are paying for this nanny, even if the nanny is being payed to work for the child while the parents are doing it without any compensation.
To conclude with an example: If there was no road in an area of interest to me I would voluntarily contribute my money to a road-building endeavour, to the benefit of all who might have use for it. However I feel no gratitude whatsoever towards those politicians who, pretending to be motivated by my wellbeing, built the roads on which I travel everyday, nor do I accept that I have any sort of obligation towards them after doing so, since you cannot forcefully provide a service and then expect to be rewarded for it.
So I take it you are not one of the many vocal libertarians who refer to welfare recipients and government employees as ‘moochers’ and ‘parasites’ then.
Well it certainly is possible that in dollar terms the bulk of mooching can be attributed to rich and well-connected individuals. It is however by no means “a safe bet”, we would have to look at the specific numbers to make the argument. Note that I did not argue that the majority of welfare recipients or the majority of government employees are moochers. That would be something that would need concrete evidence to substantiate, just like your claim that the bulk of mooching happens by rich people. That there is mooching going on however, at all income levels is something that I think we can agree on. And I should add that all the libertarians that I have heard arguing against welfare are also expressly aware that government welfare also goes to people who are well above the middle class. Additionally it seems to me that libertarians, like all regular people I might add, tend to view the rich recipients of government welfare in a significantly more negative light than those less affluent.
cabrogal, in reply to your post of Aug 25, 10:26 am
Here’s an excerpt from von Mises’ “Human Action” where explicitly addresses the question of externalites, both positive and negative and the interaction of individual choice with law and the question of such issues in regard to private property and “public” property.
http://mises.org/humanaction/chap23sec6.asp
While it is true that von Hayek did not directly address the question of externalities per se he did brush up against the issue in various areas in regard to his points about distribution of information and how that impacts economic choice. As an example of his information theory, he would hold that a less intelligent individual has a better grasp of his situation – because of its immediacy to his own position – than a more intelligent individual would have at several removes. This does influence the question of externalities – the property owner whose property is polluted by a 3rd party has a far more immediate knowledge of that fact and, depending on the case, an incentive to rectify it, than does some government functionary at several removes.
Below are some truncated links (to save Maggie the trouble of vetting them) to other Austrian’s commenting on the issue of externalities, both positive and negative.
ttp://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=367
ttp://mises.org/daily/1360
ttp://www.quora.com/How-does-Austrian-Economics-approach-negative-externalities
ttp://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/welfare-economics-and-externalities-in-an-open-ended-universe-a-modern-austrian-perspective#axzz2czokNrzr
ttp://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091116085935AAHTAsl
I was generally aware of the Austrian school’s attitude to externalities – though I appreciate your references and anticipate increasing my understanding of them.
It was von Mises’ rejection of basic income I was referring to in my previous comment.
Hayek actually addressed externalities more completely than you indicate – and gets a huge fail for it. He concedes that regulation is needed to prevent their economically catastrophic exploitation but comes up with no mechanism whereby sufficient regulation could be enforced under the minimalist state system he proposes.
He asks the question but skips the answer.
True, von Hayek did that in his “Constitution of Liberty” in regard to externalities. But in “Law, Legislation, and Liberty” he did address your question of a universal basic income. See here for excerpts and commentary.
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/05/hayek-enemy-of-social-justice-and-friend-of-a-universal-basic-income/
And some commentary from the Mises community;
Again I appreciate your detailed answer, but can you not see that to anyone who does not share your faith in free markets this is an illustration of the fact that those of the Austrian school do not support minimum income?
Essentially they are saying ‘take your hands off the steering wheel, close your eyes and the markets will provide’. OTOH in other places the Austrians say that wages must be allowed to fall as far as the market dictates in order to ensure labour supply and competitiveness. Unless you believe there is some sort of magical floor under a falling free market this will clearly result in an effective minimum wage of $0.
Can you not see that the arguments you quote are exactly the same as saying ‘bring about the Kingdom of God on earth and the minimum wage is ensured’ or ‘all we need is proper Marxism and all workers will live in Utopia’?
If you believe that faith in your system, rather than specifically targeted interventions, will always provide everything you want you can ‘prove’ that your system provides anything you care to imagine if your faith and practice is strong enough.
In reply to your comment on August 25, 2013 at 3:51 am: Mooching, or living at the expense of others, is definitely reprehensible if done deliberately and without consent. However a) I think everyone can agree that the threat of abject poverty is an extenuating circumstance and b) I believe that working for the government is insufficient to characterise someone as a moocher, given that there is no clear line at which the state interfaces with the market. However given the size of the government and it’s welfare programs it is safe to say that a lot of mooching is going on, both via welfare privileges and via privileged government positions (to use the concept which we are originally discussing).
And given the number of insanely wealthy (by world standards) people there are in America I think its pretty safe to say there’s a hell of a lot of unearned wealth in the hands of individuals that country.
And given the ridiculous amount of corporate welfare handed out by the US government I think its pretty safe to say that the single biggest sector of moochers (in $ terms) is not people at all, but companies.
Funny the libertarians never seem to whinge about any of that.
Total bullshit; every libertarian I read is far more concerned with corporate welfare (crony capitalism, licensing cartels, etc) than with so-called “mooching” by the poor; in fact most support a basic income plan. You need to start reading what actual libertarians say rather than believing the idiotic strawmen set up by statists, especially those in the mass media.
Ayn Rand was a statist?
Come to think of it I can’t remember a single word von Mises or Hayek had to say in favour of basic income either – quite the contrary for the Austrians.
Hayek recognised that the tendency of corporations to externalise costs onto the general public was a problem that required regulation but seemed unable to come up with a minarchy answer to it or concede that it undermined his entire argument. In fact the only answers are either authoritarianism or non-propertarianism.
If you have examples/references for ‘every libertarian you’ve read’ – or at least a couple of them – I would be more than happy to try to fill this hole in my education.
Ayn Rand was not a libertarian.
They’re all over the internet; I link several quite often. And the basic income idea is associated most strongly with Friedman.
Must admit that Friedman is one economist I know only from a handful of aphorisms and from his critics.
I will attempt to rectify that.
Thanks for the tip.
After a ten minute search I certainly don’t claim to be an expert but it looks very much to me that Friedman supported not basic income but negative income tax (NIT).
Given Friedman’s famous renunciation of Keynesian fiscal deficits in favour of pure monetarism the problem with NIT is that it is counter-cyclical.
The slower the economy gets the more employers cut wages (he opposes minimum wages) so the more the government must make up the difference by increasing taxes on the decreasing number of people still earning above the NIT cut in level – thereby slowing the economy even more.
I will read further, but I think I see why old Milt attracted criticism from both the left and right of the economic spectrum.
He had a great talent for economic aphorisms though.
Oops.
My previous comment should have read ‘pro-‘ not ‘counter-‘cyclical.
Stayed up way too late last night.
see my comment on August 25, 2013 at 9:56 am.
cabrogal, in regard to your post of 10:12 August 25.
you wrote; Ayn Rand was a statist?
The arch-villains in her last novel were exactly the kind of corporate mooches and looters that you have a problem with. Nowhere in Rand’s writing do you find support for corporations using the power of gov’t to secure monopolies, subsidies, barriers to entry, etc. You find plenty of instances where she denounces them as immoral.
I’ve read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and the only character I recall that vaguely fits your description was that steel company owner who cracks up and gets sent to a loony bin after his attempt to monopolise the industry fails.
Hardly an ‘arch-villian’ – or someone as worthy of punishment as a ‘mooching’ school teacher on a train.
If I missed something, please enlighten me. It is very easy to get copies of Atlas Shrugged so I can quickly educate myself with your assistance.
Or was there a later Rand novel that has completely escaped my attention?
Keep in mind that limited liability companies can only exist at all by government charter. They are all influence peddlers.
So the law in Atlas Shrugged attempting to limit the number of companies any one person can own was really an attempt to limit state-CEO cronyism (not that I’m claiming that was the stated motive of Rand’s cardboard cutout characters).
cabrogal,
Here are three named corporate looters in descending order of influence. Rand uses these to establish the archetype and then proceeds with other iterations of the type making what are essentially cameo appearances throughout the book.
These are only the corporate looters. There are others types; politicans, lobbyists, intellectuals, authors, movie stars, activists and so forth that would also fit Rand’s definition of looters – going to the gov’t for influence or money or limiting their competition.
The one hyperlink is for character development of James Taggart, the arch-villain. Other characters are summarized at the same website. The character analysis excerpts for Boyle and Larkin are from the same site.
James Taggart
The President of Taggart Transcontinental and the book’s most important antagonist. Taggart is an expert influence peddler who is, however, incapable of making operational decisions on his own. He relies on his sister, Dagny Taggart, to actually run the railroad, but nonetheless opposes her in almost every endeavor. In a sense, he is the antithesis of Dagny.
As the novel progresses, the moral philosophy of the looters is revealed: it is a code of stagnation. The goal of this code is to not exist, to not move forward, to become a zero. Taggart struggles to remain unaware that this is his goal. He maintains his pretense that he wants to live, and becomes horrified whenever his mind starts to grasp the truth about himself. This contradiction leads to the recurring absurdity of his life: the desire to destroy those on whom his life depends, and the horror that he will succeed at this. In the final chapters of the novel, he suffers a complete mental breakdown upon realizing that he can no longer deceive himself in this respect.
http://www.shmoop.com/atlas-shrugged/james-taggart.html
Orren Boyle is the head of Associated Steel, antithesis of Hank Rearden and a friend of James Taggart. He is an investor in the San Sebastián Mines. He disappears from the story after having a nervous breakdown following the failed ‘unification’ of the steel industry.
Character Analysis
Just as Wesley Mouch epitomizes the villainous politician in the book, Orren Boyle represents the bad businessman. We start getting hints at how corrupt Orren is from the very start. He badly mismanages his business, as we learn from some of his victims:
“I think there’s something phony about the way Mr. Boyle runs his business. I can’t understand what he’s after. They’ve got half their furnaces idle, but last month there were all those big stories about Associated Steel in the newspapers. About their output? Why, no – about the wonderful housing project that Mr. Boyle’s just built for his workers.” (1.7.9.74)
What is Orren after? Well, like most looters he wants to reap the benefits of doing nothing. His idea of good business is shady backdoor deals and get-rich-quick schemes on the stock market. His press coverage is just that: coverage. It conceals his corruption and inaction.
Most of Orren’s scenes occur with his frenemy James. They complain about each other, take joy in one-upping each another, and show that the “morals” of the looters are basically a load of garbage. Here’s a sampling of their friendship. Orren starts us off after James calls him his “boy”:
“I don’t mind the age classifications, I know I look young for my years, but I’m just allergic to pronouns.”
“That’s very smart, but you’re going to get too smart one of these days.”
“If I do, you just go ahead and make the most of it, Jimmy. If.”
“The trouble with people who overreach themselves is that they have short memories.”
[This goes on for a while. Then they start with the accusations and the sniping:]
Because you spent ten thousand dollars pouring liquor into people you hoped would prevent the directive about the bond moratorium!…But what the hell! – it’s all right with me, that’s the way to share things around, only don’t you try to fool me, Jimmy. Save the act for the suckers. (2.2.4.14-20)
Classic. These two are snippy enough to have their own sitcom. We later learn that Orren has fallen out of favor, and it seems by the end of the book that James has ascended to the position of chief industrial dude. This is fitting, given how cutthroat and corrupt the looters’ world is.
Paul Larkin is an unsuccessful, middle-aged businessman, a friend of the Rearden family. He meets with the other Looters to work out a plan to bring Rearden down. James Taggart knows he is friends with Hank Rearden and challenges his loyalty, and Larkin assures Taggart that he will go along with them.
Character Analysis
Though he plays a fairly sizable role at the beginning of the novel, Paul Larkin disappears around halfway through. In a way, his absence from the action does more to characterize him than his presence.
First off, Paul is a rather ineffectual businessman who took over Hank’s ore mines after the Equalization of Opportunity Bill passed. So Paul was never really a big presence in the Washington Looter Club. He’s similar to Philip Rearden in that he wasn’t really involved in politics. Both sort of hung on the fringes of things and were used by other looters because of their ties to Hank Rearden.
This lack of a presence in Washington is likely the reason for Paul’s absence later on in the novel. He got squeezed out of the increasingly cutthroat Washington circles. Paul seemed like a nice enough guy, but he was very weak:
“I wish we didn’t have to hurt anybody.”
“That is an anti-social attitude,” drawled Taggart. . . .
“But I understand historical necessity,” said Larkin, hastily.
“I’m a student of history.”
“Good,” said Taggart.
“I can’t be expected to buck the trend of the whole world, can I?” Larkin seemed to plead, but the plea was not addressed to anyone”. (1.3.1.59-63)
Paul’s wishy-washy behavior, and the fact that he let Washington dictate his business for him, eventually helped run Rearden ore and the entire Great Lakes shipping industry into the ground. Paul demonstrates the frighteningly vast consequences that can result from a weak-minded person content to follow.
The Looters
Character Analysis
We have a lot of people who fit into this category in the book. Many of them are only featured in one scene, while others keep popping up like bad pennies. The vast majority of these men, and a few women, are scarcely characterized at all. But this revolving door of looters is doing more than just mimic a few seasons of Law and Order. The sheer number of looters shows the instability of the government’s system. When corruption and backstabbing are the norm, it stands to reason that there will be lots of power shifts. People rise onto the scene and disappear; others hang in there till the bitter end. The types of looters we get from the beginning till the end of the novel also differ as well, demonstrating the way the government grows worse and moves closer toward outright criminal activity.
Thanks for your detailed answers, c andrew, but it seems I didn’t make my question clear enough.
What I was talking about was Rand CEOs who influence or exploit government spending towards themselves. I think we all recognise that Rand – as with all libertarians – wanted the market to be ‘free’ in the sense of preventing external regulation of competition between those who participate in it.
Orren Boyle is the character I referred to in my earlier comment. It has been decades since I read AS but from memory he uses influence to gain government contracts for his second rate steel plants. That is the sort of ‘corporate welfare’ I was speaking of. The US arms export industry relies on this almost to the exclusion of anything else.
It seems to me that, unlike Taggart, Boyle is a feeble side-kick who goes crazy and disappears from the action well before the novel’s climax. Hardly an arch-villain.
I can’t speak for Maggie and since I’m not a libertarian – I’m a liberal this may not be “responsive.”
I agree that the Latina has the same right to her stuff as I do to mine. I can’t even figure out how she should have to forfeit the right to her stuff.
In regard to interdependence and money, it comes down to this. As a liberal, I’d prefer to choose those with whom I interact with and on a voluntary basis. And I’d have to recognize their similar right.
But if you are jumping from the voluntary approach to the coercive one in regard to “hang[ing] onto every cent they think they’ve earned” by giving the fiat coercive expropriations of government the same moral status as voluntary interactions, then I have to disagree with you. I’m going to treat the current gov’t depredations in the same fashion as I would treat a mugger on the street; I’m not going to tell them about the 10 dollars I have in my sock and I’m going to do my best to hang onto every cent [I] think [I]’ve earned.
Are you aware of the strong correlation between Libertarianism and advocacy of a market-based economy, one of it’s foundational principles being what’s called the division of labour, where people trade different goods and services in an global, intricate, interconnected and interdependent economy, and typically don’t advocate going off living in the woods by themselves surviving solely on their own skills, that Libertarians like everybody else have enjoy having and being a friend, and of being a part of a family?
I ask this because (and it’s hard to overstate this) the often repeated belief that the Libertarian belief is “we are all little independent islands rather than overwhelmingly interconnected and interdependent” has always mystified me. It is not backed up by anything, whereas there is endless evidence, as indicated above, to the contrary.
If that’s true – wouldn’t it also mean that no one “fails” by themselves?
So I can blame my “DNA” from my parents whenever I screw up?
Did George Bush fuck up the WMD message by himself or did he have help?
Really though – it’s kind of self-evident that most things that are achieved, are achieved with the assistance of others. I used to tell my Sailors that I was a Master Chief only because of the stellar performance of the people who worked for me – which made me look like Superman as a supervisor and someone the Navy wanted to promote.
However, you could also argue that I’m just a really nice guy who inspired people to work doubly hard for him.
Then there was old “Chief Mace” – my first Chief on submarines. That guy was an asshole of the first degree and treated all of us like shit. The thing that angers me is his belittling behavior actually inspired me to work like a hell hound to get promoted out from under his charge. Whatever, I fucked his daughter so I got him back! 😛 Well not really – it turns out she hated the dude as much as all of us on the boat did.
Someone asked Colin Powell once … “Hey you’re such a great leader – you must have worked for some great ones, huh?” And Powell said he did work for a few “great ones” but he worked for a lot of assholes too who taught him how NOT to do things. So Powell achieved his greatness due to the help of more than a few asses.
Then there’s the fact that I can’t achieve shit without an atmosphere with O2 in it. And gravity? Well gravity is a big part of my success too – it keeps me firmly grounded otherwise it would be tough typing on this keyboard floating around in space … where there is no O2!
Yep, I reckon there’s no tighter collective than a band of brothers in war (even if its not a shooting one right now).
It’s pretty hard to avoid learning you can’t do it on your own.
If you don’t learn you might still earn yourself a Medal of Honour or Victoria Cross, but its gonna be posthumous.
I don’t think it has anything to do with the military – I just related it to that because I relate to that.
I think what you’re saying is true – that everyone requires some sort of “assistance” from someone else to accomplish things. It’s also true that we get assistance from certain natural laws of physics – and the fact that we were born on a planet with water and an atmosphere containing oxygen.
This is where religionists get off easy by not having to deal with the headache of arguing about this – they simply attribute all success to God and all failures and falls from grace to the individual.
The rest of us have to deal with the headache of figuring this out – and my head hurts like hell right now thinking about this.
I think that – when we talk about success – we need to remember that, in cases of individual success – the individual is the main ingredient to it. I think Jobs and Wozniak were the main ingredients to the success of the early Apple corporation. I think, certainly, that J.D. Rockefeller was the main ingredient to the success of Standard Oil. Now – this is where the Marxists will disagree with me – they’ll tell you that the success of Standard Oil was due more to the people who worked for the company – than it did to Rockefeller – who treated them like shit and forced them to work for low wages and demanded they do impossible things. But, men like Rockefeller are a rare breed – and this success would not have happened without a man like him. Blue collar workers do the work – but there are millions of them and there is nothing special about them. Include ME in the category of a blue collar worker with nothing special about him.
Gotta disagree with some of that.
Even if you accept that Rockefeller was special – as opposed to just privileged and ruthless – was he really several tens of thousands of times as special as the riggers he exploited?
As for Jobs and Wozniak – your case is stronger for the latter than the former but really he was like Kary Mullis (the Nobel winning inventor of PCR). He was at the right place at the right time to put together a whole load of components that other people had only just made available. If he hadn’t been there some other geek (of whom there were many thousands) would have done it and maybe done it better.
In fact the history of IT is full of people who did do it better, technically, but due to market dominance of some other player or just because they were too far ahead of the curve and couldn’t find backers they disappeared into obscurity.
Ever hear of the Xerox Star?
I was working on those in 1982 and they already used WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mice and Pull-down menus).
Most folk think Bill Gates had something to do with inventing Windows because he made a bomb from it. He didn’t even invent MS-DOS – he bought out the rights to what was then called QE-DOS from the clever geeks who couldn’t find a backer.
The free market just doesn’t reward people proportionately to their contribution, smarts or effort. Ruthlessness sure helps, as does being born into a family with capital and connections.
Yeah – he was. Just as Caesar and Napoleon were special and great men. Great men aren’t necessarily GOOD men. They aren’t necessarily physically hard working men. See – that’s what the Marxists miss – they believe something has to be “tangible” in order to contribute to the work. A worker builds a chair – he’s doing something – but the guy who’s paying the worker – the guy who’s telling him how to build it – the guy who’s taking all the risk – that guy, in the Marxist world – is a non-contributor to the work.
Marxists have a really infantile view of the “big picture” on most things. They are very “two-dimensional” people but I’m glad they’re around because – otherwise I’d be one of the stupider humans on the planet.
By the way – did you know that when Napoleon escaped his incarceration at Elba – the French Fifth Division was sent to recapture him. When they caught up with him – Napoleon approached them by himself and said … “Here I am – Kill your Emperor!” To which the French troops responded with “Vive L’Empereur!” THAT is a GREAT man. Napolean was a short little shit – and he never won a single battle on the merits of his own physical combat skill – he won those battles on the backs of a lot of dead French soldiers. Yet, without him – none of it would have happened.
Then they didn’t “do it” better. Doing it “better” means also taking toll of the landscape and matching one’s actions to the reality of it. The object is not to produce a “better mousetrap” … it’s to get that “mouse trap” into everybody’s home. That’s what Jobs and Wozniac did. That’s what Bill Gates did too.
I guess we agree on broad principles but disagree on details – especially matters of scale.
I don’t believe anyone is worth multiple times someone else and one of the reasons is because by facilitating that sort of social inequality you are creating more problems than you’ll ever solve with a better mousetrap, oil rig or personal computer.
I also think that a lot of what you call “taking toll of the landscape and matching one’s actions to the reality of it” is really dumb luck. Like at Midway.
Nimitz didn’t plan to have the torpedo bombers reach the IJN fleet a few minutes before the dive bombers, it just turned out that way. So four Jap carriers go to the bottom and Nimitz gets a carrier named after him.
Ditto with Gates and Jobs.
Casinos are for people who hope to win big for doing the same thing everyone else in there is doing.
Economies shouldn’t be set up that way.
And how should the economy be set up? There’s a reason no one has every been able to successfully set up a communist economy- because it doesn’t work. I’m not saying the current system is great and shouldn’t be improved, but I am saying that saying we should drop it in favor of… feudalism? is ridiculous. (feudalism being the economic predecessor to capitalism).
Also, you missed the point. First, wealth is not the same as someones value as a person! Second, Rockefeller, Gates, Jobs, whoever, obviously did not do the same thing everyone else did, because they did not win a lottery, they build a business, and insisting that business is literally the same as gambling is nonsense. You don’t say that the winner of a foot race is the exact same as a person who won a game of roulette, and you don’t say a person who owns a successful business is the same as a person who won the lottery.
I had a ‘tweet-up’ with an alarmingly intelligent and well-informed woman a few months ago; somehow we got to talking about George W. I wondered how someone who was such a thicko had managed to get an MBA from Harvard. She agreed that he was indeed a thicko, that he only scraped through the course….but that $$$ almost certainly played a part.
BRAVO!
Yeah … I was watching some news broadcast about the new English Prince, George. They had some of his brand new baby portraits and that is one cute kid. Looks like any other kid in the world, prolly thinks he’s just like any other kid in the world – right now anyway. Boy, if he only knew.
At some point he will have an “epiphany” that he’s actually living in a prison. Yeah, sure – he’s the most “privileged” kid in the world and he’ll have plenty of cash – he can travel all over the world. But every thing he says will be “anal-ized” by the press. He can’t just pick up a girl in an a bar and heaven forbid if he were to pay one – the world would come crashing down!
“Privilege” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I like Prince Harry – he seems to have said “Fuck it” … I like how he put himself on the line in Afghanistan – well, as much as he could anyway. He even makes jokes about Islamo-fascists that piss people off! I’m sure he’s had more women than I have, even though he’s always under scrutiny – he’s a bit like “Honey Badger” – “Honey Badger don’t give a shit”. He’s only the Royal with balls and he’s probably not “legit” if you believe the rumors about his Mom.
Where the word “privilege” really pissed me off is when I was working at the White House from 92 – 95. I was just a backwoods country boy submariner when I reported to that job – and I was sickened at the culture of privilege I saw in Washington, DC. It’s been a long road for me, politically – from Socialist to Conservative to … whatever the hell I am now. But it was that job that robbed me of every ounce of faith I had in government.
Anyone who saw what I did – wouldn’t support sending another goddamn dollar to Washington, DC – not for healthcare, not for education – not for shit.
When the NorK’s started testing their nukes and long range missiles … “Dear Leader” bragged about being able to hit the U.S. with them. Intelligence sources in the U.S. say … “Nay – he could only hit like Hawaii”. This might be an evil though – but it crossed my mind – if he launched a nuke at us and it could hit ANY city – I thought … “Please God, let it be Washington, DC.”
Is that a bad thought? 🙁
I don’t know. How do you feel about wiping out a city that is majority people of color and has 600,000 residents?
Heh, you’re right there – most of the people who are squandering our money live in the VA and MD suburbs. 🙁
Boy, I feel like I’ve just walked into a room full of private schoolkids simultaneously whining about the privileges of prefects and adults while complaining that ‘the plebs’ complain about how privileged private schoolkids are.
Then you aren’t getting it. I’m not denying there are such things as privileges; what I’m saying is that what many oppressed people wrongfully refer to as “privileges” are in fact inalienable rights. They are not extra goodies, but the birthrights such people have been denied by evil oppression and bigotry.
Wealth and royal rank are privileges; the right to be treated like a human being and to be free from oppression are as intrinsic as the right to breathe.
I don’t understand why you think this is a useful distinction.
Does your argument come down to tone? Perhaps others would discount an objection to the tone of privilege discussion, but I am not one of them; I would admit readily that tone can make a difference in how we discuss things. It is not, however, more important than breaking down the actual privilege/abrogation of rights/racial-gender-ability etc injustice/whatever you want to call it. Not by a long shot.
I think its the idea that a “privilege” is on lone- the person who grants the privilege has the right to take it away at any time. If you have a friend with a pool and they let you use it whenever, that is a privilege.
When you confuse privileges and rights, there is a huge problem. Imagine you own a pool, and you let a friend use it. If you then decide you don’t want your friend using it, your friend does not have the moral right to insist that you let them continue to use it.
Now imagine that your friend gets a whole bunch of other people to insist that owning the pool is actually a privilege, not a right, and so they all have the right to take it away. Its morally wrong, because its your pool and you have a right to say who can and cannot use your pool, but by defining it as a privilege they have obfuscated the truth and justified their hostile takeover of your pool to a casual observer.
You need to ask yourself why you consider it your pool.
Because you bought it with money earned in a workplace that privileges you above your friend?
Because you inherited it from your privileged parents?
Because you or your ancestors took it from your friend or her ancestors by force?
So… you to not believe in the right to own property. That’s… terrifying.
I’m not surprised the fact that other people don’t necessarily share your fundamental values frightens you.
I bet it never occurred to you before.
Maybe you should destroy me to save me.
That’s the American Way isn’t it?
Um… no. Not quite. I actually am quite familiar with the concept of ownership as a fiction. What it means is that you believe theft is not a crime. By saying you don’t believe in owning property, you are literally saying that you think you can steal from me with impunity. You are threatening me, thus, scary.
I certainly don’t think destroying you saves you. That is insane. It does save me, though, if you are planning on or attempting to violate my rights. Are you?
Don’t be so pedantic. Either admit you think it is okay to steal things, or rescind your position that ownership is a lie.
I cannot steal from you with impunity.
If a white woman points at me and starts screaming ‘thief’ I will be lucky to get away with a bashing and a year or two in prison – whether I intended to steal anything or not.
That’s got nothing to do with rights.
It’s got a lot to do with white privilege.
I don’t think its OK to steal things because I don’t recognise private property (beyond personal property) so it can’t be stolen.
Ownership is the theft.
I also don’ t think it’s OK for me to steal things from most people because upsetting them that much breaches my personal morality, but not knowing the personal situation of others means I will not rush to condemn them if they steal things (including from me). And I would never call the cops on a thief.
But as I once told Sasha, if I had a dying kid and couldn’t get access to healthcare for her without stealing Sasha’s stuff, her stuff is gone.
And if I get a good chance to steal from a corporation – especially a bank – without causing undue distress to staff or customers or putting myself at undue risk I will do so. Problem is that corporations hold hostages. They will usually pass the costs of whatever I steal – and then some – onto staff and customers.
The Australian National hero was a bloke named Ned Kelly. He’s famous for robbing banks and killing police.
Not everyone thinks like a middle class American.
Its not about whether or not you can steal with impunity, but if you should be able too.
I… still don’t really understand where you come off claiming that owning stuff is stealing. Stealing from who? You can’t steal something if there is no ownership! And if there is no ownership (like, say, if you make a cupcake, you are able to decide who gets to eat it) then why on earth would anyone make anything? You’d have to live in a secret tunnel and never let anyone know what you have, so they won’t come and take it.
There is a reason technology started advancing at a ridiculous rate as soon as patents started existing- its because now people were able to share their hard work and also benefit from it. Before the concept of ownership of ideas, if a master smith invented a superior skill, he didn’t tell anyone how to make it, and if he died before managing to train an apprentice, it was gone from the earth forever. Thus, no progress.
Also, you cannot argue that ownership is an abstract invention of the greedy bourgeoisie (your middle class Americans). Fighting over territory and resources is fighting over who gets to own something, and that is something cats (and most other animals) do.
You… shouldn’t suggest that people need to fight over the right to keep their stuff. That would mean returning to feudalism, where highly skilled warriors literally get to steal whatever they want.
You can complain that laws governing ownership are not fair, or inheritance laws are unfair, or whatever, but that just means the laws are imperfect, not the original rational behind their existence. If you presume to argue people shouldn’t own things, you most definitely need to justify why you think the alternative is more fair.
As a final not, to say that people have the right to own stuff is actually self evident. What is says is, that if someone does steal your stuff, you are justified in using force to get your stuff back.
If you steal stuff to save your kid, fine, you’ve chosen to violate someone’s rights. That’s what it means to have free will. But you cannot expect that there won’t be repercussions for your actions, nor that you have wronged the person you stole from.
As it happens, I don’t much care for the American justice system. Incarceration is idiotic, and its the solution for every crime that’s not payable with a fine. However, that is irrelevant to the fact that a crime committed is still a crime, even if the punishment for said crime is stupid.
To explain that I suspect I would need a week just to strip away some of your misconceptions, presuming you would be willing to try.
But here’s the short answer.
Oh, pride of craftsmanship. The warm feeling of contributing. The notion that they have a responsibility to others simply because they are human, not because you want to show preference, curry favour or profit from them.
You know, all of those worthless silly things that have nothing to do with greed.
IP laws were developed to deal with the problems the notion of property creates. If a master smith knew he could give away all his secrets and still rely on material support from his broader community he would not have to hide them.
Instead we have IP laws preventing third world AIDS sufferers getting access to anti-retrovirals and an entire profit driven drug industry flat out trying to get worried well Westerners to take potentially dangerous pills while pretty much ignoring issues such as malaria, river blindness, bilharzia, etc because, hey, the people who get those can’t pay so who gives a fuck?
Yep, cats fight over territory, so its natural for us to do it.
Lions kill the offspring of the former alpha male so it’s natural for us to do that too.
Rabbits are vegetarians but under stress its natural for a rabbit mother to eat its newborns – so I hope they’re choosing the right mood music in maternity wards.
Some of us think ‘civilisation’ is something that should enable us to stop acting like animals.
This country was founded as a penal colony. Most of the female convicts in the early fleets were sent out here either for prostitution or stealing to feed their kids. The only reason they needed to do that is because the British ruling classes decided that they owned pretty much everything in that country – and because they had enough force to back their ‘natural rights’ to property.
Equating the desire to maintain ownership of something you’ve created is evil “greed” is the dumbest argument you can use. Pride of accomplishment is an extension of ownership- you feel pride that you made something, not because something sprang into existence in your presence. It was your work effort, and your time, and so the results are also yours.
You presume there is something negotiable about human nature- that if only everyone could be convinced to be “properly good”, everything would be perfect. But that is not the case- we are self contained individuals, we do not have a hive brain, and so we cannot have the morality of an entity that does. As soon as you have self awareness, the idea of I, you have the idea of possession, because, fundamentally, you own yourself.
I’m all for civilization shaping and crafting humans into a more evolved creature, but you cannot deny the basic facts of our biology. You cannot “civilize” away the need to pee anymore than you can “civilize” away the fact that we are self contained individuals. If we were to physically modify out brains so they we exist as a hive mind, private ownership would not only become a bad idea, it would literally be wrong. However, the hive would still own things, because the hive is the entity now, not the individual.
I will again ask you not to conflate poor laws protecting (or not protecting) individual rights with a wrongness of the concept. Land ownership is one of the more complicated concepts, and it is irrelevant to the idea that you have a right to maintain ownership of something you own. There actually is wiggle room about what can and cannot be owned (for example, you cannot own another person because it inherently violates their rights)
A complete non sequitur.
Among the absurd claims you are making here is that it is not possible to feel pride for work you have done for an employer.
Not at all.
It is you, not I, who is claiming the existence of ‘natural rights’ that everyone must subscribe to.
I am making the opposite argument.
Nor do I claim that everyone could or should subscribe to my morality. I am the relativist in this discussion, remember?
The fact that my view of property is logically coherent, consistent with practices in the hunter-gatherer communities that our ancestors evolved in and in line with recommendations by several prominent economic and moral philosophers for the development of more egalitarian and less coercive societies is no reason whatsoever everyone would adopt it.
Not many people are actually interested in more egalitarian and less coercive societies, so why should they?
Many people believe themselves to be actually superior to others (anti-egalitarians) and that it is only oppressive organisations like the state that prevents them from greedily gathering more property to themselves and thereby ‘proving’ it.
Of course people like that are easily manipulated by the privileged into supporting social structures that maintain that privilege. Unfettered free markets for instance.
There are actually people who believe that property is not just a conceit, but fetters that interfere with the pursuit of true happiness. They are called Buddhists, Jains, renunciates, sunnyassins, ascetics, etc. I don’t believe they have a hive mind.
But doubtless they are deluded and it is perfectly acceptable to force them to accept your notion of ‘natural rights’ to property.
Of course the proponents of ‘natural rights’ a few centuries ago knew it was perfectly acceptable to own people. It says so in the Bible.
I wonder what your notions of property will look like to people a few centuries hence.
Wrong again! I have in no way claimed that you cannot feel pride in something created for an employer- you do own the work, you have simply sold the work in advance for compensation in advance.
You, by claiming that people do not have inalienable rights, you are claiming that people do not have unalterable traits like self awareness and the isolation of the self indie their head, and the ability to create things. Last I checked, these things are no negotiable, and so neither are the rights implied by their existence.
The fact is that your view, which you claim is logically presented, is based on incomplete or false assumptions.
And frankly, your arguments have been getting more and for fallacious. You cannot use the argument “Other people believe 0 is an odd number” or “A thousand years ago, people didn’t believe 0 existed” to prove that zero is not an even number, and nor can you use the argument “other people have different ideas about morality” or “people who said those things before were hypocrites” to argue against the conclusion that self awareness and intelligence has the inevitable consequence of natural rights. And you still cannot use the argument that “because I can choose to give up a right that means it doesn’t exist”. That’s as idiotic as a child believing that when the toy is out of sight, it also ceases to exist.
Sigh.
To summarise your arguments.
You are claiming that absolute moral values such as ‘natural rights’ exist despite the fact many generations of moral philosophers who have dedicated their lives and often considerable intellects to the question have been unable to prove them through logic or demonstration.
That is hubristic.
You insist that as a white middle class 21st Century American, your fundamental values should be applied to all people and in all times.
That is supremely arrogant.
You imagine that by claiming I have rights that I will never be able to enforce you are not in a privileged position compared to me despite the fact that you can expect the same rights to be enforced on your behalf for your entire life with little or no effort from yourself.
That is sophistry.
There are many other holes in your less central arguments as evidenced by the fact that you have contradicted yourself numerous times – at least once from one sentence to the next. But I really can’t be bothered going through them again.
Of course I claim that people have no such unalterable traits.
I did not have those traits at birth.
If I live long enough to go senile I will not have those traits.
When I am asleep or unconscious I do not have those traits.
Are you suggesting that under your universalist moral system it is therefore OK to steal from or kill babies, the demented, the unconscious or the sleeping?
There is a fundamental attribute of existence the Buddha called ‘anicca’ that states nothing is unalterable or eternal.
But I will leave you with another statement that over 1.2 billion people in the world believe to be fundamental wisdom that has sustained them for almost two millenia. Unlike imaginary rights that cannot be enforced, it is something that can be seen in reality in the world almost anywhere you look. It comes from Krishna’s soliloquy to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, but as it does not comply with the beliefs of a middle class American white woman who can prove the validity of her unsupported ideas by the simple expedient of repeating them over and over again it must be rather silly.
Really? Your denying the existence of inalienable rights as a valid philosophical fact? I will remind you (Just kidding, I know you don’t know this) that the idea was first published in a serious literary work in 1651 by Thomas Hobbs. There were no “white middle class Americans” is 1650! I’m not a philosophy expert and so I do not have a list of works on the self evident nature of human rights, but I can assure you that the literary support for it exists.
Actually, I have said nothing about who I am and where I live, and I intend to keep it that way because it is not relevant. You are free to presume,but do not act as though it has any bearing on the discussion. Its does not.
I have also never stated whether or not I have privileges, or what my economic state is, or anything at all of that nature, because again, it is irrelevant to the argument!
You are free to ignore my arguments if you wish, but do not attempt to invalidate them through dishonest demagoguery. I have honestly attempted to engage in a reasonable argument with you, and I have gained from the experience. I wish you had, but I fear not.
Re-read your Leviathan.
Hobbes’ final conclusion was there was no compelling reason to believe in God, natural law etc but that nonetheless we should all act as if it were true in order to create the necessary conditions for the authoritarian society he favoured. He was terrified by the French Revolution.
Your social status etc may be irrelevant to the argument but is manifest in your arguments. A black American would know better.
Previous comment should have read “English Civil War” not “French Revolution”.
A rather strange assumption.
OK, I didn’t complete my Masters degree in moral philosophy but I certainly read Hobbes (though I had to hold my nose at times).
Correct.
But there were still sheltered blinkered people with little knowledge beyond their own limited experience who assumed their own belief systems should be universally applied to the entire world regardless of what the people having them thus imposed might say.
In that sense there have always been ‘white middle class Americans’.
Even JS Mill thought it appropriate that everyone should follow a system of hedonistic utilitarianism that prioritised the enjoyment of educated, cultured people such as himself above the ‘base pleasures’ of the lower classes.
In the case of Hobbes, he supported a system with almost all power invested in a near absolute sovereign who somehow would not be corrupted by being born into such power and would in fact rule with an iron hand ‘with the consent of the masses’.
Why not?
Such a system worked for privileged upper class people like him.
And enough with the baby murderer accusations! They didn’t prove your point before, they don’t now!
I wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing with Hobbs, only pointing out that the concept of universal rights is older than the united states.
And… that’s actually a rather racist assumption of you.
Really though, you have defeated yourself. Yo have argued that one of the most oppressed peasant classes in all of history follows your proposed doctrine “you have the right to toil…” and yet, they are literally the opposite of free, and they have one of the most oppressive and inflexible social hierarchies ever conceived.
And again, I will point out- Just because natural rights exist does not mean they must be acted upon. But they still ****ing exist!
I bet most of those bigoted and oppressive people think its their birthright to act that way.
You know what?
They’re wrong too.
They can only treat me like that because they’ve formed a collective that can overpower me.
You going to join with me in a collective to oppress their birthrights, Maggie?
Tell me who’s fucking with you, bro – I’m on a plane to Oz in five minutes.
I’m here to help! 😀
It actually makes me feel good to think you’ve got my back, krulac, no matter how divorced from reality that feeling might be.
I figure its a kshatriya thing, bro. 🙂
Hare Krishna! 😉
Sometimes, it’s helpful to know what’s being discussed.
“a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.”
That is the definition of privilege. Now, do white people in a Western-dominated world enjoy advantages not available to non-whites? I think it’s obvious the answer is yes. All other things being equal, a white person is better off than a black man.
Should it be this way? No, of course not. And every extension of rights, every time an advantage becomes available to all (such as mixed-race marriages) is a step forward.
Oh yeah, Maggie, you are not supposed to feel guilty about your privileges, but you are supposed to be aware of the fact that not everyone else has them.
And you sure aren’t supposed to feel entitled to them when its bloody obvious that lots of other folk just as human as you are deprived of them.
That’s what ‘checking your privilege’ means. (Though I’m sure there’s plenty of passive aggressive PC control freaks out there abusing the term).
Except that I am entitled to them, and so are you. And so is every black man sitting in prison after being railroaded there by assholes who refuse to respect his fundamental rights in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY a rapist or robber refuses to. EXACTLY the same way; no moral difference whatsoever.
What on earth makes me entitled to them?
Wishing really hard?
That Maggie McNeill thinks it should be so?
I think I should be entitled to be as happy and healthy as I want to be for as long as I want to be – but there ain’t no world that’s going to happen in.
Although there is no reason to suppose that any rights pre-exist human society or are handed down to it from somewhere else, it just so happens that as humans we know of a few rules that *can* be applied universally, due to the relation of their nature to our nature, and that *can* predictably satisfy our moral intuitions. This is knowledge which leads us to the conclusion that these rules *ought* to be applied universally. Of course, in the face of other moral obligations that might clash with our universal rights, such as for example an obligation towards one’s nation, we feel the need to find the right balance. It is very hard for there to be a conclusive answer to this question, due perhaps to the incongruent nature of different moral concepts. However in discussing rights there is one issue which can always be examined, specifically whether a set of rights is compossible, e.g. if the sum of rights can be simultaneously upheld for everyone at all times. Obviously universal rights can and should be applied universally. Other competing or parallel systems of rights are not, as far as I know, so lucky.
You absolutely do not know of rights that can be applied universally, unless you have cracked the problem that has plagued moral philosophers since the time of Plato.
You may very well know of rights that can predictably satisfy your moral intuitions but that is because your moral intuitions are known to you.
Mine are not.
You are not a mind-reader and if you think your capacity for empathy extends to a significant fraction of the human race I would suggest you are kidding yourself.
It’s the limits of human empathy that makes it necessary for us to ‘Check our privileges’ and not run around imagining we know what’s best for people whose life experience is completely alien to us.
cabrogal,
Doesn’t the practice of “check your privileges” fall under exactly the same kind of universality problem that you use to invalidate Konstantino’s point?
The need to ‘check your privilege’ arises from the presumption that you wish to fight the oppression of others, yet cannot truly understand the nature of the oppression of anyone but yourself. It is a mechanistic, not moralistic answer.
Suggesting that oppression of others should be fought is moralistic and is therefore subject to that critique – if you extend the suggestion to say it is appropriate for all people to fight the oppression of others. But I am taking it as a given that everyone here thinks that is appropriate – not that everyone in the world should do so.
If you do not feel the need to assist others (or claim to do so) you do not need to check your privilege.
But such an activity still requires an evaluative answer – the process may be mechanistic, but the content of the process is not. So you’re back to a problem of universality.
This leaves aside the question of what assistance is. This also requires an evaluative response. For example – and I’m deliberately invoking both ends of the spectrum to establish that there is a continuum – one could say that “What that person really needs is a good swift kick in the ass.(metaphorically speaking)” As compared to, “What that person needs is a shoulder to cry on.” Both could be valid in appropriate circumstances. But both require an evaluative – ie., a moralistic response. So I think the objection of questionable universality continues to be a problem for “check your privilege.”
Again I must have been unclear.
I am speaking of universalist morality only, not universal agreement on means.
So, for example, two different moral philosophers may agree that reducing infant mortality is a good thing (while a third who thinks overpopulation is the most pressing problem in the world may not).
The two who agree may however disagree about the effectiveness of different means to bring about such a reduction.
‘Checking your privilege’ is promoted as a means to achieve the ends of effectively working to reduce the oppression of others. It is a suggestion that activists must remove their blindfolds before getting to work (or at least acknowledge that they still have blindfolds at least partially in place).
No one is suggesting it is of any use to people who aren’t interested in reducing the oppression of others so it would be silly (or oppressive) to claim it should be applied universally.
I have little doubt there are moralising people who now think that ‘checking your privilege’ is a moral imperative of itself – just as there are people who have lost sight of the fact that markets are a means to an end and believe that interference in them is a moral wrong of itself.
Note that I am not rejecting the possibility that there are people who honestly believe that reducing the oppression of others is also exclusively a means to an end – such as getting a pass to heaven or helping to reduce their own oppression. For these people the question of reducing the oppression of others is also one of mechanism rather than morality.
There totally are, indeed many feminists don’t understand the terms themselves.
For evidence of this I would like to present the Tumblr in action subreddit.
http://www.reddit.com/r/TumblrInAction/
Behold, thin privilege, Ableism and all the other stuff Maggie was talking. about?
I don’t have time to check all the stuff on TumblrInAction but if you’re saying terms like Ableism are abused, you’re right.
If you’re saying there’s no such thing as Ableism, you’re dead wrong.
If you ever enjoy the wonderful privilege of major depression you will hear advice from all sorts of helpful people to ‘stop moping’ and ‘pull your socks up’.
Clearly they don’t have a clue what major depression is and are offering advice from their extremely limited capacity to understand it.
Ditto for people who fail to recognise the privilege (or ‘advantage’ if you like Maggie) of their own skin colour.
Yeah, my bad. Ableism is a real issue, one people do abuse it.
Being otherkin, transethnic, transabled or having headmates, not so much.
The fantasy bullshit that Tumblr attempts to make reality is great to mock, but it is also on occasion really fucking offensive when they try to appropriate social justice language for their own vanity.
Whoa, no. I am most definitely entitled to basic freedoms. As is everyone. Just because no one has violated my rights does not mean I don’t deserve them!
I would suggest that simply mouthing the notion that others should have the same rights/entitlements/privileges as you via some sort of ‘natural right’ that can neither be measured nor enforced does not make you any more entitled to what you have than the many others who don’t have it.
If you really believe in the rights of others to, say, not be harassed by police for no good reason, how about you get out there on the street and risk your right in order to defend theirs?
‘Let them eat cake (like me)’ just doesn’t wash.
You are intentionally missing the point. What you are saying is that you do not subscribe to a morality that grants people rights. If I am not entitled to basic freedoms, then I am not morally justified in defending them.
Perhaps it is you who are missing something SD.
As it happens I do have a personal morality that grants people rights.
Not that it’s any of your business.
And I just admitted in Maggie’s following post that I am a narcissist.
But I am not so narcissistic as to elevate my personal morality to the status of public prescription. I’m not a moralist.
And I’m nowhere near narcissistic enough to believe it is inscribed on stone somewhere as ‘natural rights’.
You cannot believe that people have rights and also believe they don’t. Its a contradiction.
What is means to be entitled to something is that you are morally justified in insisting you get it. That’s it. You still might have to insist you get it, but you are in the right and everyone who is a good person should support your claim.
However, if you do not belong to a culture that supports that morality, you have a problem. The solution is not to change your morality, but to insist that the oppressors morality is wrong. If they claim to have the same morality, insist they are hypocritical bastards.
You have the right to basic freedoms, as do I, as does everyone. If someone is stupid enough to disagree with that to my face, I will gladly go to war.
Seriously, point me at an abusive racist, and I will name them an evil monster and do my best to get them to back the hell off.
You are still confusing personal morality with reality SD.
My morality grants people rights so I try to behave in a way that does not infringe upon them.
I’ve also spent a fair proportion of my life fighting for the rights I think people should have and which those people say they want too.
And by fighting I don’t mean typing bullshit into a keyboard. I mean the sort of fighting that gives me the privilege of showing off my physical and emotional scars, if very little else.
Are ‘good’ people the ones who agree on my idea of what my rights should be, or yours?
Maybe ‘good’ people fight for their own idea of rights and to those with very different ideas (e.g. the right to wear a burqa) they don’t seem very good at all.
Let’s start with the Australian government and the 50%+ of the Australian public who support the Northern Territory Intervention (which required the suspension of the Australian Racial Discrimination Act to be implemented).
When your done with them you can try the majority of Australians who support the racist provisions written into the Australian constitution (this is an overlapping but different set of racists, most of the former are liberals, the latter mostly conservatives).
Or how about the racist cops, black and white, who are far more likely to stop you, frisk you, arrest you or kill you if you’re black? You don’t even need to leave your own country to start on that one.
Look, you can ask for help, and you can point to the villain, but don’t be an ass about it. You know perfectly well that the chances of my having the resources to go to war with Australia over anything are literally not worth mentioning, even if going to war would help.
However, next time I talk to an Australian, I will gladly tell them their country is frighteningly racist. Because that will help, whether you believe it or not.
Are you suggesting I go around like a crazy vigilante and smack anyone who is racist with a bat? The world is far too complicated for that to do anything other than get myself arrested or shot.
Words actually do things. When I say that I call people out for being racist, I do, because that is the best way to change things. Slowly, and insistently.
This blog is proof of that. With nothing but words, I’ve been able to change the minds of many people who have written and told me so, and probably others through my lectures, panel appearances, private discussions with lawyers, etc. It’s slow, but in the long run minds have to change for conditions to change.
Ah yes, words.
Words can do something.
As I type this the ‘White Empire’ group are having a meeting at a pub barely 100 metres from my home. In recent weeks an ‘Aboriginal Walk’ in the local park has been vandalised to the point of destruction and the name of the local Awabakal tribe has been obliterated from signs on several public buildings.
I suspect these guys might know something about that.
I could have ‘words’ with the local police or media and they would do nothing. I would be unsurprised if some of the guys in the pub are off duty cops.
I could go down to the pub and have ‘words’ with them directly. I might even get two or three out before I start spitting teeth.
A couple of decades ago I would have called up a dozen mates – black and white – and we would have gone down and had more than ‘words’ with them. I would not have converted any racists but they probably wouldn’t have come back to that pub in a hurry. Skinheads tend to be pretty fucking gutless so they might even have had the good sense to not show their faces in this suburb again.
But I’m old, I had surgery barely a week ago and I’ve become a slacktivist like you. So I’ll content myself with typing a few useless words into the computer and saying a few useless words at a community meeting.
Maybe I’ll tell them all I have it on good authority they have the right to not be racially abused.
Should be good for a laugh.
Since my recent comment I’ve discovered that those living in the nearby Aboriginal housing co-op have also had their letter boxes bombed in recent days.
My white flatmate went down to the pub where the meeting had already broken up. The barmaid denied they had even been there. Less than an hour earlier I had seen them sitting and drinking at the sidewalk tables proudly displaying their black hoodies with “White Empire” in huge white letters across the front.
My flatmate asked a white neighbour who lives closer to the pub if he had seen anything and he replied that ‘some of the boys had been playing dress-up’ down there and then launched into an anti-Aboriginal tirade. My flatmate had been emotionally supporting him as his wife is dying in hospital – they hugged only a day ago – and she had never suspected that of him.
I’d assumed he never returned my smiles and ‘hellos’ in the street because he was depressed about his wife.
Not realising my blond, blue-eyed flatmate was not a sympathiser the neighbour told her that ‘some of the boys’ would soon be burning a garage a local Aboriginal artist uses to store his work in.
The appropriate people have been warned and will be ready.
The appropriate people are not the police.
I think Maggie is saying that there is a difference between:
1. A group having undeserved benefits (privileges)
2. One group of people having their natural rights respected and another being deprived of them
To call #2 privilege is dangerous because it confuses natural rights with privileges. Because, as privileges are unjust, then the confusion leads us to conclude that natural rights are unjust. In the case of #2, the moral solution is to respect the natural rights of both groups.
That said, I must respectfully disagree with Maggie that natural rights are real. Rights can not be sense perceived or measured, so calling them real is a hard sell. I don’t think calling them morals is going to work either, because morals also can’t be sense perceived or measured. I’m not saying a conscience is not in some way natural, but I think conscience is really empathy + social conditioning, and empathy is what separates psychopaths from normal human beings.
Although I think natural rights are a fiction, I see them as part of a social contract essential to everyone’s happiness. The alternative is to live by the sword, and that is a zero-sum game because it means dying by the sword too. Moreover, I think recent events have shown that our government is deathly afraid of the people figuring out that their government lives by the sword, because that would break down their pretensions of legitimacy, wouldn’t it?
I like your logic but I’d take it a few steps further.
Natural rights are not real but based on empathy and social conditioning.
I don’t think it’s safe to assume empathy is universal – even exempting psychopaths – because it is limited by imagination and experience. It’s the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and none of us are mindreaders. You could say that the rapist who thinks ‘she was asking for it’ was only following the Golden Rule.
People who believe in universal human empathy are prone to deny the humanity of those who don’t share theirs. Like we do to psychopaths for instance.
It’s certainly unsafe to say that social conditioning is universal and an American Libertarian’s idea of fundamental rights would be quite different to that of someone from a more communal society.
Given those two facts there is nothing at all ‘natural’ about natural rights. They are not only imaginary, they are almost arbitrary.
So how to distinguish them objectively from privilege? Without objective valuation you have no basis for a social contract.
Are privileges inherently unjust?
In the eyes of someone socially conditioned into them they could be natural rights.
I see no way to distinguish objectively between privileges and natural rights.
They are both just assertions made by individuals based on morality, empathy, conditioning, whatever.
You would need something like a Kantian Absolute on which to build natural rights and I would argue that only people of shared ideology or religion could agree about such a thing. Most of the world is now multicultural.
Reality on the ground is an absolute though – unless we descend into solipsism.
If you’ve got rights its because you’ve got them, not because you think you should have them. Rights denied are rights extinguished.
If you’re living within a social contract which you do not subscribe to and which denies you some of the rights/needs/privileges/whatever afforded others you might as well live by the sword.
And that’s why guns and gated communities are so popular in the US.
Those have always been popular in America.
And, let’s not forget – in America, we have a Constitutional RIGHT to own firearms – of many varied types.
In Australia – you’re not allowed to own guns – well, nothing “interesting” or “effective” anyway. This is why they aren’t very popular in your country – you’re breaking the law and risk prison just for owning them.
You government has disarmed you. Now the only defense you have to government excess is the back of your skull – and I’m afraid it’s not thick enough to stop a bullet when the government puts you on your knees.
It might surprise you to know I’m a lifelong gun nut.
Automatics and handguns don’t do it for me. I’m a rifleman. I want something flat shooting and well bedded so that if I can aim within MoA I can hit within MoA.
So the changes to the gun laws hit me pretty hard. I was able to transfer my collection to family members who could meet the new licencing requirements but they live a long way away so basically I could kiss my pig hunting days goodbye. In the end I lost all but one of my rifles and that is now with my sister in Darwin. I live in Newcastle.
But you know something?
I fully support the laws that cost me my beloved rifles.
Up until that little creep Howard did the one decent thing he’s ever done and introduced those laws we were getting a couple of mass shootings a year in Australia.
In over fifteen years since we have had exactly none.
Maybe you yanks should sit up and pay a bit of attention to that.
I just don’t get this Montana militia fantasy so many Americans have that they’re going to hold off the National Guard with their small arms collection.
Didn’t work for David Koresh and he had machine guns.
If they come for you krulac, you can forget your MAC-10 and AK-47.
You’d better send away to North Korea for your next weapon purchase if you want a chance of holding them off.
Slight quibble on Koresh. He didn’t have machine guns. The BATF made the assertion that he had machine guns and then denied the defense access to the guns in question to disprove the prosecution’s assertion.
Arguably, the reason that it didn’t work for Koresh is that he didn’t fight back. There is no information available about the wounds that killed the 4 BATF agents in the initial assault but I’d lay odds that they were friendly fire casualties.
The BATF also asserted in their warrant that Koresh had “destructive devices” which would include grenades and firearms with a bore size greater than .52 caliber. There were inert grenade shells, but they had been attaching them to boards with the label, “Complaint Department, Please Take A Number” with the number tag in question affixed to the grenade pin.
If Koresh really had the weapons and the will to use them that the BATF asserted, he could have killed every last one of them in the cattle trailers that brought them while firing from cover. Arguably, if he had done so, he might have gotten some respect from the Feds. After all, look at how carefully the Fibbies handled Whitey Bulger – a man known to have killed 11 people. Hint; they didn’t knock his door down and run in with a SWAT team.
If you have the time and interest about Koresh and Waco, the best book I’ve read on the subject is No More Wacos: What is wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix it by Kopel and Blackman. It is even-handed and points up the problems with both sides of the confrontation. But the bulk of the guilt for that atrocity lies with the Feds; both the LEOs and the Politicos.
Very few of the gun rights’ activists think they’re going to hold off any particular assault by gov’t forces. But by making the cost of such actions higher, they make raise the bar for such actions on the part of gov’t thugs. At any rate, going out on your feet is surely a better option than going out on your knees at the hands of some brutal psychopath with a badge.
You may notice that the FBI handled the Church Universal and Triumphant issue in Montana a lot more carefully than they handled the Branch Davidians and it was the same administration and AG running the show. Which proves that even a Federal LEO can come to Jesus if he realizes he may risk his life otherwise.
True, I don’t think empathy is universal either, because not everyone has like experiences. However, my point was not that empathy is a basis for natural rights or a social contract, but admittedly I was not clear about that. Actually, I don’t think empathy can be a basis for a robust moral theory.
Although, I think some (many) “natural rights” are essential for a desirable society to function, and the reason for respecting other people’s fictitious rights is contractrarian in nature. If we want to avoid the “strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” world, then it requires individuals to respect everyone’s rights as though they were true. Unfortunately, there is an incentive for cheating, and some people will cheat, which is why a legal system is needed to deter it and punish those who do. If too many people cheat, like when a government rewards it to finance a system that privileges politicians and their cronies, then society suffers from systemic dysfunction.
But you have a point, how to distinguish “rights,” be they called natural or not, from privilege needs an answer. My basis for rights is reason. I think John Rawls provided an excellent answer, which is to compel people to negotiate from a veil of ignorance. So we can ask people to negotiate what their rights and laws will be assuming they did not know what family, race, sex, or disabilities etc. they would be born with. What rights people would negotiate from that position (I admit there are practical problems), is how we distinguish between rights and privileges.
I think you (or Rawls) are very close but still don’t address the problem of real difference in value systems.
You can simulate a ‘level playing field’ for consensual morality by checking everyone’s privileges regarding family, race, sex, disabilities etc but its still not going to work if different groups are playing different ball games.
IMHO you also need to approach negotiations from a position of zero values (i.e. nihilism) and not by erecting a whole bunch of ‘natural rights/laws’ (that just happen to correspond with your values and morality) before the haggling even starts.
Of course they’re a fiction, but so are language, laws, etc. That doesn’t make those concepts any less useful or necessary to building a moral society which treats every individual fairly.
Fair enough, I can go with that
I look around myself and I ask when these ‘natural laws’ are going to get up off their arses and start building then.
At least the believers in sky fairies have a few nice cathedrals to show for their efforts.
Hey, Americans have a lot to show for their own efforts! In a single generation we’ve gone from segregated schools to a black president! Just because racism is still a thing, doesn’t mean its not under attack.
I’m sorry I don’t see how selecting uncle toms to be part of the machinery of racist oppression is progress.
Aren’t US schools still pretty much segregated, just economically rather than legally?
And the proportion of African-Americans in US prisons is higher now than it was when MLK marched on Washington.
Equal opportunism is not the same as anti-racism.
Calling Barack Obama “part of the machinery of racist oppression” is a rather tough argument to make.
US schools are partially segregated economically, yes, due to the way they’re funded (which might be *the* most unjust thing we do, if you tally up all the consequences).
The Prison-Industrial Complex is tied in with the injustice of schools, but thankfully we’re starting to see a little bit of movement on that now.
You kidding?
He sits at the top of one of its major components.
Just the fact that he’s put a black face in the White House yet does nothing that might substantially help black Americans – not even speaking out against the racism of police and the PIC – makes him worse than merely a collaborator.
And by promoting racism and Islamophobia abroad he is deepening its roots in American soil too.
He didn’t put a black face in the white house. He was elected, remember?
His competence or lack there of as a president is irrelevant to what his election actually represents, which is that a majority of Americans voted for him. If they were racist, they would have not voted for him. He could not have even run for president thirty years ago. That is the definition of progress.
You basically waving your arms around screaming “look look, those American’s aren’t done being racist!” and to that I say, correct. But that doesn’t mean nothing is being done about it, and the evidence says that things are actually changing for the better.
Oh, I’ve been misinformed about how presidential mandates work in the US then. I was told that around 25% of eligible voters was all you needed to select the corporate stooge who sits in the White House, depending on the turnout. I guess those companies were ready for a black servant.
Don’t sweat the turnout issue though. Voting is compulsory here and we get over 90% turnout of registered voters at every election (never me though), so we’ve implemented a preferential ballot distribution system that pretty much guarantees your vote will eventually end up in the hands of either the ALP or the Liberal/National coalition.
Australian governments routinely claim mandates with barely 30% of the primary vote.
Pleh, the terrible mechanics of the American voting system is irrelevant to the fact that he did get elected (and with roughly 40%, not your misinformed 25%, which still would have been an improvement over 50 years ago), and that would not have been possible any time in the past. “Majority” here is referring to the legal definition, not the actual one.
Although, the fact that you are nitpicking on irrelevant details proves that you have ceded the point.
Isn’t it pretty racist to automatically denigrate any black man who achieves something as an “Uncle Tom?” It is however a convenient way to ‘never be wrong,’ in the sense that you can claim that there has been no progress, and when shown progress just dismiss it as something which doesn’t count.
I only call black men who ‘achieve’ status within the very power structure that oppresses black people ‘Uncle Toms’, especially if they show no inclination to confront the racism in that structure.
Malcolm X and MLK achieved something without becoming Uncle Toms.
I’ll start informing black Americans that they need to check with you to see if their achievements were accomplished in the right way.
The fact is, twenty years ago no black man, Uncle Tom or not, could have been elected president in this country. This has, and question is no longer “can a black man be the president” but rather “what kind of black man can be the president?” Which is pretty much the question in general: what kind of person can be the president.
Hm, now there’s a question: Do you believe that a black man could be POTUS and not be an Uncle Tom? I don’t mean would white folks vote for him; I mean would the fact that he’s POTUS be, in and of itself, proof that he’s an Uncle Tom?
I don’t share the mindset that says being president is a worthwhile achievement for anyone – black or white. You might as well ask what kind of person can be a banker or a bank robber.
In theory yes. If he used the job to set about dismantling (or at least undermining) the various power structures that oppress Americans in general and black Americans in particular rather than reinforcing the sort of divisions that keep them all under the foot of big business, unaccountable government, etc.
In practice almost certainly not. Apart from votes from whites he would have had to have risen up through one of the major parties so he would almost certainly be morally compromised long before he ran for the primaries. Then when he did get the job he would have to be prepared to run very high risk of assassination if he really tried to change anything.
The reason a black man can become POTUS in the 21st Century is because (a) the selection process ensures it will only ever be a compliant black man and (b) POTUS isn’t really a very powerful position anyway. It’s no more significant than having a black man win a ‘Big Brother’ style reality TV program.
The most ‘radical’ thing he has attempted so far is to give the US a half-arsed version of the same sort of universal healthcare every other developed country has had for generations instead of the hyper-expensive, inefficient and elitist one it has now. So far he’s not doing so good on that front.
His foreign policy is, if anything, even more reactionary than that of his predecessor and simply reinforces the dysfunctional power structures that create racialised permanent underclasses. His policies regarding the financial industry are more of the same.
Western politics was captured by big business a long time ago. All politicians either are sell-outs, become sell-outs, are totally ineffective or are quickly ejected from the system – horizontally if need be.
We could argue all day about whether or not Obama is an effective president, whether or not he’s even trying to be effective at the right things, etc. And I might even agree with you more often than might be expected (there are reasons I didn’t vote for him in 2012).
But the fact remains: the fact that a nation which would not have elected ANY black man to its highest office two decades ago has done it now is an accomplishment. We can all wish he were this that or the other thing, but the USA has made a big step forward in getting past race.
And please don’t give me any “Oh so the USA is all past race now, are they? Well how about…” because I’m not making any such claim.
I would concede that his election shows some progress since the days of Jim Crow but still disagree as to how ‘big’ the step is. It probably represents a bigger step for the Democrats in nominating him than for the public in selecting him over the alternative. Demographics are shifting faster than public opinion I reckon.
Where I suspect we would still disagree is whether painting blackface on POTUS represents a change to anything but marketing. As far as the direction of the country goes it is no more significant than having African American sitcoms on television.
Would agree that Obama has not swung the country around the way I would like. Then again, none of the guys running, including Greens, Libertarians, and the various Republicans and Democrats who got washed out in the primaries would have done it either. As you have pointed out, the president is only so powerful. What we really need are shifts in public opinion.
I think black sitcoms are a bigger deal than you seem to think they are. When you have millions of white folks seeing black folks on TV, and liking them, that’s significant. Enough to transform society all by themselves? No, but then no one thing can do that.
It’s also particularly aggravating when we’re supposed to feel responsible for inequalities that might have existed in the distant past, like slavery. It’s amazing how such an absurd concept is given widespread legitimacy, especially by academics. It’s basically a reincarnation of “original sin”, another clump of scum that feminism has churned up from the superstitious primitive mind.
Agreed. I should only be encouraged to feel like an ass if I actually act like one.
Interestingly enough, the who reason I am an atheist is because I was so insulted by the idea of original sin (not to mention that whole rib thing) that I concluded religion was made up by a bunch of bigoted idiots. I mean, really, I’m supposed to believe that you could fit two of all the animals in the world on one ship? And that two could repopulate the world without inbreeding into oblivion?
Gotta call it quits for today.
But here’s one post about my incredible level of privilege.
And here’s another.
Interesting conversation.
I don’t have a lot of time, although I would like to expand my thinking in this direction. I’m just going to throw out a few items and then if I have time and can expand on it in a timely manner I might post accordingly. If it takes too long, I’ll just do it for my own entertainment.
I think that some of this turns on the question of “real” for varying values of “real.” For instance, is the “Law of Gravity” real? Can you measure the “Law of Gravity?” No. However, the existence of gravity is a fact. One that is easily tested. Just jump out the nearest window without the means of counteracting its effect.
The “Law of Gravity” is our conceptual construct whereby we understand the Fact of Gravity. (I’m leaving out issues of derivation, Newton’s “Laws” of motion, etc., for simplicity’s sake.) That conceptual understanding is not subject to measurement except by comparing its content to what we can observe that the Fact of Gravity does in the real world. For instance, I can’t say that the “Law of Gravity” weighs 10 kilos. I can observe that an object in a particular gravity field “weighs 10 kilos.”
But our conceptualization of gravity as the “Law of Gravity” and the mathematical representations that go with it allow us to understand the fact of gravity (and measure the same) and what can be done within its influence. Is the “Law of Gravity” real in the same sense that the “Fact of Gravity” is real? No, for they are two different things – One is an attribute of physical objects, the other is a conceptual explication of the same. But it is real in the sense that it does exist – elsewise we couldn’t be referencing it – and it can be evaluated by how closely it conforms to the facts of gravity as we observe them.
A similar situation arises in the case of rights. And yes I know that there is a difference between physics and socio-politics and I refuse to suffer from physics-envy as von Mises phrased it. And in fact, my expansion on this topic would be in this area of equivalence – whether it is justified or even useful. But I digress.
We can observe, generally speaking, that societies that protect the individual rights of their members (and for the nonce, I’m going with the Lockean version of Life, Liberty, Property) are generally more peaceful and prosperous than those who do not. I am abstracting at a very high level here and am ignoring instances where subgroups in those societies are not so treated – blacks and Jews in the Jim Crow era (and not just in the American South) – or where foreign adventures may have resulted in the same disparity of treatment. Some of the more peaceful empiric here comes from Stephen Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature” and the prosperous empiric comes from the rise in Western standards of living during and after the Industrial revolution as evidenced by population growth where in previous epochs, such populations were not sustainable.
I think that The Enlightenment set the stage for the Industrial Revolution philosophically and that it is no accident that it really got underway in Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Bill of Rights that accompanied it, and the sea change it represented by subordinating the monarch (how ever imperfectly) to the people as represented by the Parliament (how ever imperfectly).
Natural Rights is the conceptual attempt to subsume all of these historical happenings into a comprehensive whole that one can grasp so that, like the “Law of Gravity” to aerospace technology, one can apply it to practical questions of governance. Should minorities members of a society be denied protections of their Life, Liberty and Property? Well, we can run through an historical survey and point out the individually deleterious outcomes of NOT so doing and which is a useful exercise, or we can adhere to the conceptual shorthand that (hopefully) arises from an examination of that same history and say, “Absent very compelling evidence otherwise, people, whatever their physical characteristics may be, should be treated as equal under the law. Therefore, the answer regarding denying their Individual Rights can be met with a resounding NO!”
Is this the same as the historical happenings in the concrete? No more than the “Law of Gravity” is the same as the “Fact of Gravity.” Does this mean that “Natural Rights” are not real? Only in the same sense that the “Law of Gravity” is not real. Neither one are physical objects that can be measured and weighed. But just because they are not physical objects doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. They exist as conceptual understandings in the minds of any who can grasp them. And they can both be evaluated by referring to the physical facts that gave rise to them.
I am in sympathy with some of the modern Tea Party types, but I have one quibble – Natural Rights do not arise from some divine grant – and if one understands the Deist approach of the American Founders one would understand that such Rights arise from Nature – That is, that they inhere in the nature of the organism as an individual thinking entity. So the proper formulation probably should be, “If you want a peaceful, prosperous society, then respect the Natural Rights of the individuals within it.” Because the Tea Party types try to play the God card – instead of recognizing natural origins – the temptation is to assume that violating people’s rights will lead to a crash analogous to the effect of violating the law of gravity by jumping, unsupported from a high window. It’s almost like they’re looking for some big cosmic SPLAT! to occur when the government violates rights.
Now there will be a crash if a government does consistently violate rights. But the causal mechanism is more complex than the bad outcome of a “Gravity Law Violation” and is much more protracted. Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” gives a template as to how such a crash occurs and his subsequent work shows that the economic chaos of such violations is the driving force toward catastrophe.
I would add that I think that there is a moral component to the crash in addition to the informational one; a free-market society requires consensual trade – mutual consent to mutual benefit among consenting adults – and government violation of rights destroys all three. It abrogates consent, it transfers benefits by fiat, and, ultimately, begins to treat its subjects as children requiring a paternalistic coercion as the theories and actions of various progressives from Krugman, Sunstein, and Bloomburg illustrate. And once the leading power in a society is acting in such a fashion, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to extend such benevolence to other individuals – for even in the best of circumstances, all might be obviated by government fiat.
As a result, the division of labor and specialization and comparative advantage that makes trade and prosperity possible breaks down and economic interactions withdraw into smaller and smaller circles until essentially you end up with a clan-based economy. And that is the death knell peace and prosperity – peace because anyone outside the family is suspect and prosperity because that society has undercut all of the requirements for it.
So, in the final analysis, “Natural Rights” is as real as the “Law of Gravity” if substantially more complex. And therefore, evaluating whether we’ve done it correctly is substantially more difficult.
An interesting, well argued exposition but I think both the metaphor and argument fail in that the laws of gravity are not consensual. They exist whether we agree or not.
Western liberals have a hard time imagining that Lockean values aren’t universal and basic to humanity but the fact is they’re not. Many societies (and individuals) place honour above life or liberty and the fetishisation of private property (as opposed to personal property) is a pretty recent and localised historical phenomena.
Cultural blindness to that fact is how you can get the likes of Hayek finding excuses for the ‘tragedy of the commons’ without getting laughed out of the room when the real tragedy is the rise of economic individualism that leads to their abuse and ultimate enclosure.
I’d prefer a society like that of Aborigines or the people in Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’ where those who accumulate excess property to themselves are condemned, not admired, emulated and protected. It’s not unheard of even now and seems to have been the norm throughout the evolution of the human race.
It’s people what make you happy, not stuff.
Its not a lack of imagination- its that we think the idea that rights must be earned is wrong, and that there are inalienable rights that everyone is entitled to. That’s the only reason, really, why the American constitution was so revolutionary- because it stated that there ARE inalienable rights.
You clearly do not believe this is true. Fine. You can follow whatever religion/philosophy you want, but then don’t complain about your lack of whatever, because you don’t believe you deserve it unless you go take it from The Man, or The Government, or White People or whatever.
Why would you imagine that others want the same rights you do?
And how is imposing your idea of rights on me respecting mine?
And the idea that something a bunch of freshly minted Americans who fought to liberate themselves from Mad King George scribbled on a piece of paper almost 240 years ago has anything to do with my rights is preposterous.
My people will gain their rights by fighting and winning.
Just like your people did.
Hopefully we won’t be so keen to then hand them over to corporations though.
Why wouldn’t I think everyone wants the right to live, and make their own depositions about themselves, and not have to worry about people randomly stealing their stuff and getting away with it? I happen to think that all humans want something alone those lines.
Sheesh. The American revolutions was not about basic human rights. If it was, we would have abolished slavery then and there! I was about American (colonials) rich people not wanted to pay taxes!
You do not gain rights from fighting an winning, you defend them! You already have the rights, and by going to war with someone so they must respect those rights, you are forcing your morality on them, assuming they weren’t just evil hypocrites, in which case you are forcing them to stop behaving like evil hypocrites.
If you believe you have basic rights, you have them, and its just a matter of getting everyone to agree with that belief.
Why wouldn’t anyone want the right to live?
Maybe you should ask Philip Nitschke or Jack Kevorkian about that.
Maybe you should look up ‘Sallekhana‘ in Wikipedia.
I guess you can’t ask the Buddhist monk who incinerated himself in Saigon in 1968, or kamikaze pilots, or the guys who took box cutters onto the planes on 9/11.
Not everyone is an American middle class, healthy, white, recovering Christian.
Not everyone wants the same thing.
Even Peter Singer recognises that in his moralising.
And he’s a psychopathic idiot.
The right to live does not mean you can’t commit suicide, it means no one can murder you with impunity! Just like the right to freedom means no one can enslave you with impunity, and the right to property means no one can steal your stuff with impunity!
Arguing that those are not things everyone generally likes having is like arguing that not everyone likes having breathable air. Sure, someone might hate air, but that person is almost certainly not in their right mind (Like your suicide murder bomber people). Or they are a fish.
And honestly? If someone hates life and liberty and stuff so much, they are perfectly justified in giving it all way and killing themselves or, enslaving themselves to… someone. They are not, however, justified in doing any of those things to me.
On the contrary, if someone refuses to accept they have the right to life, liberty, freedom from abuse or freedom from violence – because the facts on the grounds show they don’t – they are perfectly justified in denying those rights to the people who have denied them the same.
It’s called war.
There is no treaty between black and white Australia.
We are still at war – and it shows.
As far as property rights goes – presumably you are perfectly secure and content in the right to own the land your ancestors stole from Native Americans, no?
Funny how might means right until you get the upper hand then we have to implement laws to entrench it and start talking about natural rights as if your stolen property always belonged to you.
Wrong-o! There are not facts that prove you do not have rights, only facts that prove your rights are being violated. War is an exercise in one party (lets say the rights violator) engaging with another (the violated). The violated side is morally justified in the actions of war because they have been violated, the violator side is not. However, one the violated have had their rights restored, they become the villains if they then continue to violate the rights of the other side (a real world example- when the allies defeated Germany, American forces occupying Germany did not violate the Germans rights, whereas the Russians did.)
I said this in an above comment, but I’ll repeat it here- defining what can and cannot be owned is irrelevant to the concept of ownership as inalienable. If you can own it, you have the right to own it. Whether or not land is own able is a tricky thing. Certainly owning a bunch of land that you have done nothing to improve is wrong, however, once you have significantly modified the land (for example, turning it into farmland) that changes things.
The tragedy of European settlement of America is rife with (often intentional) misunderstandings on both sides mostly stemming from Europeans having an agricultural culture, an Native Americans having a migratory one, and neither side taking the time to fully understand the mechanics of the other.
(and don’t worry, I fully acknowledge that Europeans did more evil than the natives- I’m just pointing out that both sides were composed of humans, with all the respective human flaws and merits)
Actually, that’s one of the reasons why I find land taxation to be one of the only (somewhat) reasonable taxes- what your doing is paying the collective (represented by the government, unfortunately) for the right to remove land from the collective pool and modify it into your own. What you actually own is the modifications, not the untamed wilderness that preceded it.
Sophistry.
If my ‘right’ to be free of racial abuse is one that I will never be able to exercise and only exists in the minds of white middle class people who have no clue of my lived experience then ‘rights’ amount to pretty much nothing at all in the real world, do they? Pie in the sky aspirations at best. Unless you’re privileged of course.
You might as well join the People’s Front of Judea and argue that Stan/Loretta has the right to bear children in spite of having no womb because he was born a man and march against the oppressive Y-chromosome that denies him that right.
But even if I were to concede your point that I have rights that I cannot exercise and you cannot enable for me that would not change the fact that you are privileged to be able to freely exercise rights that I cannot – whether or not I actually have them.
How about turning it into a dustbowl?
Because that’s how it works over here.
Ah yes, Georgism.
The problem with that is that it presumes zero public value in the ‘wilderness’ or whatever that preceded you taking possession of the land. So if you farm incompetently or pave the whole lot over for a parking lot no-one wants to use, then go bankrupt and so are unable to keep paying tax, you have successfully externalised the cost of your incompetence onto the collective.
Even if you make good use of it that ‘wilderness’ ain’t coming back in a hurry so when the land passes to another owner or back to the collective you have still externalised a cost and ripped others off.
1) Once again, I repeat- claiming that because you don’t have something it doesn’t exist does not fly. It is just as stupid as a child thinking that a toy they cannot see no longer exists.
And, you know, you could move, you know. Or just live with the fact that change takes more than a single, or even a few, lifetimes.
2) Destroying land means you own it, because responsibility and ownership do not have a fair weather only clause. So yeah, creating a dust bowl (which they cannot do without some help from uncontrollable natural forces) constitutes as attaining ownership.
3) Hey, I didn’t say that private land delineation its the only way to manage raw materials, just that it is a valid way. “Raw materials” are owned by both everyone and no one at the same time- it is in a state of super position. Laws regarding who gets to claim raw materials are irrelevant to the concept of ownership in principle.
And then we’re back to the idea of responsibility. I know this is tough for you to process (for whatever reason) but having a right also implies a responsibility to the consequences of exercise that right. When you create something, you are responsible for the consequences of that creation, and if its awesome, great, you reap the benefits, but if you make a mess, then it is your responsibility to either clean it up or pay someone else to. If you can’t do that, then you forfeit your right to own, just like murdering someone (as in, unjustified killing) forfeits your right to live (unless society is nice and decides to simply remove your freedom instead)
And there is a reason people have recently started worrying about the environment (recently being a relative term here, we are talking the last 50 years or so)- its because people (as a collective, worldwide collective) are finally beginning to notice the mistake they are making with the management of raw, also known as natural, resources. It doesn’t necessarily mean the system is flayed (though it might) but it does mean they need to come up with a solution for the problem either way.
All of this still does not negate the existence of natural rights. Human beings have natural rights by virtue of being human. They are there now, they always have been there, and they always will be there, whether or not society is responsible/evolved enough to acknowledge and protect them, universally or otherwise.
I here you on the problems with confounding rights with privileges. Spot on.
But, I don’t like the implication that having access to “privileges” is something to be ashamed of. Its like saying that being lucky is something to be ashamed of- yeah, it sucks to be unlucky, but that’s no reason to hate lucky people! If you buy a raffle ticket, its perfectly absurd to hate the winner of the lottery. What a terrible way to be, always angry and full of resentment or whatever. You might as well hate the universe for not being born a god.
But I’ll reiterate; It is equally absurd to think that, as a human, you do not deserve to be treated like a human by other humans. So, natural rights are basically the right to be treated like a human, which is to say, a thinking, rational, self evident, and valuable fellow of humanity.
But that’s not the way people have ever acted. People regard members of their ‘tribe’ (a very flexible term) as humans, even if they don’t like them. But if you’re not part of the ‘tribe’, then you’re either Other or Enemy. Others’, if useful, will be treated as if they are Human, ignored if they don’t interfere or assist the Tribe, and quickly relegated to Enemy if they start being a problem. As for Enemy; I don’t think I need to belabor the obvious that the Enemy is never Human, and only entitled to whatever the Tribe chooses to dish out.
The whole advance of civilization required a framework where people would treats ‘Others’ as fellow humans, even if they didn’t really believe that. And expanding that framework (treating additional Others as Human) takes a lot of work and effort.
I think that your point is encapsulated by Claude Levi-Strauss’ quip that “The question isn’t why is there racism. The question is why there isn’t more of it.” Because breaking out of the tribal mindset is very hard to do and falling back into it is very easy. I think that’s explains why people in the Balkans who had lived as neighbors for decades could suddenly turn on each other with murderous violence. Because, after all, they’re a Serb, or a Croat, or Orthodox, or Catholic, or Muslim.
The whole idea of a world where everyone has the same rights is that everyone is, essentially, the same “tribe”. That’s the goal, not the status quo, obviously, so complaining that that’s not how it is is ridiculous. You can’t have a “global” tribe unless you insist there is one.
I don’t think that Levi-Strauss would disagree with you on that. I think that he is pointing out that, given our tribal origins, it is easier to fall back into that primitive collectivism than it is to go forward to a civilization of independent individuals. That building a civilization takes a great deal of thought and effort and that civilizations are subject to retrogression because of that fact.
Eh, fair enough, but I still don’t think that its a valid argument against the concept of universal rights.
[…] ← The Privilege Paradigm […]
Seems to me she’s arguing the opposite.
That ‘privilege’ automatically carries the connotation of unearned therefore it shouldn’t be used in terms like ‘check your privilege’ because she perceives it as an attempt to make her feel guilty.
I, on the contrary, maintain it is precisely the unearned privileges – such as the right of whites to walk around relatively free of racial abuse because their ancestors fought their way to the top of a racist heap they helped to create – that people take for their ‘natural rights’ and therefore suffer a failure of empathy when dealing with someone who has lived their life without such a privilege.
Even if Maggie was able to abolish racism tomorrow there would still be generations of people walking around with its scars, so those who have not had to fight every day of their lives for the rights they consider ‘natural’ would still have to check their privilege.
If she would prefer to call it ‘checking your advantage’ because the word ‘privilege’ makes her feel guilty I don’t really give a damn, as long as she recognises and respects the process itself.
You insist that the fact that a white person can walk around unconcerned with racism is an unearned advantage, privilege, whatever. The key is that you insist it is “Unearned”. Wrong. You do not need to earn a natural right anymore than a bird needs to “earn” their wings. They are born with them, they are entitled to them because its what makes a bird a bird, and to deny that a person is entitled to rights is to deny they are a person.
Racism (an all of its horrible relatives) is wrong not because it is mean (even though it is), but because it dehumanizes its victims.
Well it seems to me that if you think you don’t need to earn it we agree its unearned.
Or did you earn it even though you didn’t have to?
And yes, racism is all of those nasty things you say it is.
But it is also a fact that you can see in action every day if you care to look.
I look really, really hard and I don’t see rights anywhere – just a whole bunch of people demanding them or claiming I’ve got them.
What I see are a whole bunch of overlapping and interacting power structures.
In some places and in some ways we are free to act, some of us more so than others.
If those power structures shift, so does our relative freedom.
Rights don’t come into it.
Anyone who says I have rights that I plainly can’t exercise is just spouting hot air to me.
And if they say I should be able to because they’re my inalienable rights, I say ‘Well if you’re so sure I should have those rights how about you help me fight for them because sure as fuck that’s the only way I’m ever going to see them’.
But if you are sitting on your own comfortable pile of rights insisting that I too am living in that kind of luxury I say “But I don’t have any cake to eat you aristocratic twit. How about you check your ‘advantage’?”
Wrong, not needing to earn something does not make it unearned, it makes it owned.
Its not about your ability to act on your rights, its about the very idea that you have them so begin with. Like I said, you have rights, and so you are justified in insisting upon them. If you don’t have rights, you are not justified in asking for them.
Rights aren’t a thing you can see, they’re an idea (duh 🙂 ). You need to insist they exist as an idea before you can do anything else about ensuring they are respected. You need to insist a god exists before you can get someone to go to for it, and you need to insist that inalienable rights exist before you can defend them.
You have them, you are entitled to them. If you’re rights are being violated, you are perfectly justified in saying so, and in taking actions to rectify the situation, and even in asking for help doing it. However, you are not, in any way, justified in saying that because you don’t have them, I don’t deserve them either.
I think you hit the nail right on the head there.
I’m just drawing up specs for the sort of god I will be insisting is every bit as real as my right to not be racially abused in white Australia.
What do you think? Male, female or androgynous?
No one says you don’t deserve rights.
I say that you must acknowledge that in having them (and actually being able to exercise them) you are more privileged (or advantaged) than those who don’t.
And that you take that into account before you act.
By imposing your idea of universal rights on others for example.
Actually, you literally said I don’t deserve rights. Entitled to and deserve are synonyms.
And by saying it is a privilege to have rights, you are saying I don’t deserve them.
The fact that some parts of the world are not as good as others had no bearing on whether or not rights exist. They do, because abstract concepts exist so long as someone believes they do.
Last, I don’t really understand your continued repetition about how I am “imposing my idea o universal rights on others” like its a bad thing. Yeah, I am claiming everyone has these rights. That’s the point, that’s what I’m trying to do, and what you should be doing to if you really want to have them.
Also, I like fairies better than gods. Unless I get to be a god. I vote I get to be a god 🙂
No, its Maggie who said privilege is unearned not me.
Most of my privileges are unearned (by me at least) but some have been earned at great effort and cost.
That doesn’t make them entitlements though.
There are many people who would never have been able to earn them regardless of their sacrifice.
So I check my privilege.
And I definitely don’t want you or white society trying to impose their notion of property rights on me.
I am an Aborigine.
I depend on the Land, the Land depends on me.
To talk of ownership is ridiculous, hubristic and sacrilegious.
The Land is shared by all and owned by none.
Those who enclose it are thieves.
Its not Maggie that said privilege is unearned, its convention.
The whole idea is that a “right” is earned, and a “self evident” right is something earned simply by being human (therefor, you don’t need to do anything to earn them). You are entitled to rights (because you earn them).
Back to the land argument, I said it all in an above comment, but basically when you own is not the land itself, but modification to the land. Taxes on that land represent your continued “purchase” of the raw land from the collective. Hence why the government is (surprisingly) justified in reclaiming land form someone who has not payed their taxes.
The real problem is that, as a collective, natives owned the land, and Europeans did not fully (or, in some cases, at all) compensate that culture for the seizure of the land. At the very least, they should have incorporated the native into their society (fully, not the half assed horrors they actually did). And, it should have been voluntary (as in, no force used).
So… again, in the case of Australia, Aborigines are definitely having their rights violated, and have had them violated continuously for centuries. None of that changes that they have rights, and they are inalienable, and that they are the same rights as everyone else’s.
It may be a convention among those who are incredibly defensive about their own privilege and would seek to redefine the word almost out of existence but to us speakers of standard English that is simply one rather marginal and heavily loaded usage of the word. A usage which, BTW, were it to be accepted would make a ‘privilege’ indistinguishable from a ‘natural’ (though perhaps not universal) right.
Do you believe, for example, that the privilege of lawyer/client confidentiality was never earned nor that it doesn’t have to constantly be re-earned against assault by authority?
Err, do you actually think that paragraph is logically coherent?
How about you reread it, paying attention to what you have places in brackets?
I can’t speak for the concept of land ownership in colonial America, but here in Australia the situation was/is as follows.
Aborigines did not own the land because of the beliefs I explained in an earlier comment. They did believe they had communal claims to certain things on the land, but never the land itself.
Europeans did not believe Australia was owned because it was ‘terra nullius’ (not occupied by humans) and did not respect Aboriginal rights to things on the land either, such as food resources or sacred sites. So they put a rag on a stick, stuck it in the ground and viola, the whole place was owned by some dude on a throne on the other side of the world who would never even see it.
‘Terra nullius’ would be explicitly reaffirmed in Australian law several times over the subsequent two centuries – even after the 1969 law change that officially recognised us as human (according to the 1971 Milirrpum v Nabalco decision the 1969 changes were not retrospective – we were now human but our ancestors were not. I spent the first eight years of my life as a non-human).
The legal concept of ‘terra nullius’ was only overturned by the Mabo decision of the High Court in 1992, thereby making it possible for some Aboriginal tribes under certain very restricted conditions to make claims of white fella style ownership – not their own – over land still claimed by the Crown (from that rag and stick ritual in 1770). Anything that had passed into private or corporate ownership since that time was not liable to land claim, nor was any Crown land currently subject to lease until that leasehold had expired.
I can’t see why Native Americans would have consented to be voluntarily incorporated into a smallpox ridden, whiskey drinking society that did not respect their culture. And if it was done with any form of coercion, whether forcible or not, it would also have breached the current UN convention on genocide (as did the historical ‘solution’).
We do not want the ‘rights’ middle class white Americans choose to impose upon us no matter how fond of them you are nor whether you have a piece of paper over there claiming they are ‘self evident’. Nor, I suspect, do the majority of peoples and cultures around the world.
However America definitely holds the whip hand in the world right now (or should I say the whip button?) so I guess we will have to wear your rights until we have the strength to fight them off.
No matter, if there’s one thing my people know it is how to wait.
I will repeat, again, that the definitions used here, on this blog, in this argument, and in this dialect of English, are quite clear- a privilege is something that is given to you by someone else, as a gift, and so it is by definition unearned. A right is something you have either earned by doing something of equal value (you earn a cupcake that you bake yourself, so you have a right to it), or are entitled to by virtue of nature.
That paragraph is fine, even if its not super well written. I can trim it up for you if you really find it that hard to understand- “Rights” are earned, either by action, or by virtue of nature. Those rights earned by virtue of nature are “natural” rights. When you earn something, you are, by definition, entitled to it.
*Sigh*. I’m not going to debate the details of the evils done in the world during European colonization. Its irrelevant to the truth of the statement that “land is a raw material, and cannot be owned outright, but the results of labor on that land is owned”. If neither party contesting the use of the land is mature enough to come to a peaceable agreement, well, that is very sad. And uncivilized.
Whether you believe it or not, in the early days of American colonialism there were some european settlers who manged to get along peaceably with native peoples, and who worded together and created an almost entirely new culture that was pretty neat. Unfortunately the majority of people didn’t manage to do it that way, and that way of colonizing died out.
Rights are not an idea dreamed up by middle class Americans! They have been thrown around in philosophy for ages. I do not claim that they exist because a piece of paper says so, I say they exist as an extension of being human. You have yet to actually argue how the right to life liberty and property are not natural extensions of being alive, having a self aware, independent mind, possessing the faculties to create things.
You have rights, and you want them. Unless you are going to honestly tell me you do not like living, and freedom, and having the ability to control those things which you create and are responsible for. You are deliberately misunderstanding the concept of a natural right, and the only reason you would do it is so that you don’t have any moral compunctions about violating the rights of others when the opportunity presents itself.
I think that whoever decided to use the word “privilege” in this sense chose really badly, and in that sense I agree with you, Maggie; it conflates together things that are unfairly denied to some to varying degrees that everyone should have, things that are granted to some that shouldn’t be, and a bunch of other things besides.
Now, there’s some value in having a word for an axis of variation in a population, and that’s fundamentally what the social justice people have redefined “privilege” to mean, but the problem is that that word has an existing and widely known meaning that’s being ignored here.
I suspect the word choice was deliberate, though. The conflation was intentional. It is intentionally divisive; it is intentionally loaded with connotations.
On the off chance anyone really wants to know what ‘privilege’ and ‘checking your privilege’ actually means in the context of anti-oppression activism (and I mean all oppression, not just the bits you feel) I would recommend this post.
FWIW, I found the article interesting and informative, even though I disagreed wtih several points; frankly it seemd to be more an exercise in forced idealism than for practical advancement of the ideas.
You will find many historical philosophers going back at least to Plato who claim some sort of ‘natural order’ of rights or laws that somehow exists outside the specific experience of the individual that it would be appropriate to universalise and impose on all. Most, but not all, were theists and most reached conclusions that would horrify contemporary liberals. Marx was an excellent example of an atheistic philosopher in this mould.
You also find a smaller number of mostly post-Enlightenment philosophers (in the West at least – the tradition is longer in India and China) who insist on using skeptical, evidence-based rationalism to approach the problem (Hume, Kant, Adam Smith etc) and either rejected absolutism or stuck with an extreme minimalist version (Kant, for example, found that the only universal moral value was honesty). These too have been strongly contested and some of their conclusions have been shown to be wrong in the light of later evidence.
Today there is still no broad consensus among moral philosophers that there are natural laws or, if so, what they should be.
What you will definitely see throughout history are followers of absolutist, universalist moral systems attempting to impose their views on others with invariably oppressive and sometimes horrendous results.
That is why I’m a relativist.
Not because I know there are no natural laws – I know no such thing.
But because I know there has never been agreement on what they might be outside of small, homogenous cultural groups with either no knowledge or no respect for traditions other than their own. And in the interconnected, multicultural 21st Century world such ignorance and arrogance is potentially destructive of not just a few Native American tribes or Afghan villages, but the entirety of civilisation.
That said, it is necessary to find some ethical basis for interacting with others. In my view the best most of us can manage is our human empathy, but that is limited by our experience and imagination (also, apparently, by the functionality of our ventromedial prefrontal cortex – poor, disabled Peter Singer).
Privilege checking is a mechanism (not a morality) for recognising the limits of our empathy and trying to avoid acting in abusive ways due to an inability to perceive such limits. It works (somewhat) for me but I have no opinion on how well it works for others. Even if I did I would not try to impose it upon them, but I would resist any absolutist who claims it is a useless exercise because I know from my own personal experience that is not true.
Maggie seems to make a case that calling it ‘privilege checking’ is unhelpful because of the defensive reaction privileged people have on being called out. I can see her point – very clearly indeed.
However calling it ‘advantage checking’ seems less honest to me because in most cases I do not see privilege as an advantage. It is something that blinds people, isolates them from the broader community, makes them very defensive and paranoid about their privileges and creates all sorts of cognitive dissonance as they try to rationalise their privilege away by, for example, claiming that everyone else has the same privilege whether they are capable of exercising it or not.
I am now through with cluttering up Maggie’s blog with my own limited, subjective views on this issue but will probably expand on the above comment and turn it into a post on my own blog over the next few days.
[…] The Privilege Paradigm […]
An interesting and not particularly long post on your blog, Maggie. And an EXTREMELY long collection of comments and replies!
One of the disadvantages of letting myself fall so far behind is that I really can’t participate in this conversation, but then, perhaps nobody would have been interested in my observations or questions. And perhaps they would have been right not to be.
Or it may have been otherwise. Ah well.
“…perhaps nobody would have been interested in my observations or questions. And perhaps they would have been right not to be.”-it’ll never be that way for me as far as reading your comments goes…kisses.
I hope that my comments can be of some value even to those who are not in love with me, but yeah, it’s nice knowing that there is somebody out there who values something from me because it’s from ME. IOW, that I am valuable to somebody.
Especially when that somebody is valuable to me.
It’s just inverted snobbery really. The Four Yorkshiremen sketch but for real.
It is also a denial of the differences between ideological and institutional oppression.
Most totalitarian regimes are racist and sexist but not to the same degrees.
We are all prone to mistake political slogs for logical statements
4 legs good 2 legs bad
http://www.pearshapedcomedy.com/Philp_Corner.html
4 legs good 2 legs better