Through the Prism: Gradations of Brown and Beige and Ivory

Recently our first-grader was assigned the creation of an acrostic poem using his name. I helped him find options for a couple of the letters, but the choices were all his.

It's an interesting mix of descriptions. I think he could have come up with many others options for each letter that would have been equally true. It's fun considering the complex mix of all of our different dimensions.

You Are a Network

You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. An emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity

On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend. . . .

Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). . . . The network self view . . . says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.

How do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics. You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity. . . .

Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network identity. Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job because of her gender. Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as reduced or objectified. It is the inappropriate, arbitrary or unfair salience of a trait in a context.

Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities. She might not want to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity. She might feel the need to dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity, as well as associated feelings and beliefs. She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is. But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which Lindsey is.

Figures 1 and 2 above represent the network self, Lindsey, at a cross-section of time, say at early to mid-adulthood. What about the changeableness and fluidity of the self? What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at-age-five is not a spouse or a mother, and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity transformation. The network self is also a process. . . .

Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity. . . .

The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.

This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity.

The self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. Who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Or, as Walt Whitman famously put it in his poem "Song of Myself":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I contain multitudes.

Including my flaws and failures. A meme that has been making the rounds:

What if we were transparent about our own failures, not as some kind of performative vulnerability, but as an invitation to collectively de-stigmatize the messy process of lifelong learning?

I'm pretty sure this thought was influenced by Brene Brown's work on the power of vulnerability.

I love this poem that Rattle just shared on Facebook.

Richard Shelton

IN SEARCH OF HISTORY

We go in search of history and find
a guillotine at a garage sale where the lady
of the house in curlers and stretch pants
sits in a lawn chair knitting, knitting.

The guillotine is ugly but has historic
value, we say, and take it home
to replace the wagon wheel in the yard,
but we can’t get the damned thing to work.

Nobody told us the lubricant of history
is blood. We thought it was money.
Is Grandma’s pickle crock historical?
How much is it worth? Could we convert

the rusted old tricycle into a fountain?
But history sings like a chain saw
in the woods, a freight train
in the night. History is the grizzled

Viet Nam veteran with his dog and sign,
begging at the intersection. History
is the yellow detritus of used condoms
at the edge of Lovers’ Lane.

History is a lottery ticket, a truck full
of cocaine approaching the border crossing,
a drunk on the wrong side of the highway.
History is hallucination, fantasy, a mirage

in the desert, as blind as justice.
Historians suffer from the fever of time
but never know what time it is.
They are mad poets making up stories.

The history of war passes a hat and we
put our children in it. Then somebody
gives us stars to put in our windows,
one star for each child.

On the streets of history there are more
guns than lovers, but who could stay

indoors on such a day when the chestnuts
have leafed out at last and lilacs
fill the air with the heartbreak of history.

—from Rattle #20, Winter 2003

It humanizes events.

This is an older meme that just made the rounds again. The thought it shares is essential. From Louis C.K.

"Why does she get one, and not me? It's not fair."

"You're never gonna get the same things as other people. It's never gonna be equal. It's not gonna happen ever in your life, so you must learn that now, okay?

"Listen, the only time you should look in your neighbor's bowl is to make sure that they have enough. You don't look in your neighbor's bowl to see if you have as much as them."

Life is never going to be fair, but still have a responsibility to make sure our neighbors have enough.

I just found out about the existence of this book. A counterargument to one of the champions of American selfishness.

ATLAS HUGGED
The Autobiography of John Galt III
A Novel by David Sloan Wilson

“Call me anything but John Galt. That is my name, but it is also the name of my father and grandfather. I am not like them and the world they created is not the one I desire. The III after my name does not sufficiently set me apart.”

With these words, famed scientist and nonfiction writer David Sloan Wilson launches a devastating critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and its impact on the world. Just as Rand advanced her ideas through fiction in addition to nonfiction, including her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, Wilson pursues his quarry into the fictional realm with the story of John Galt III, the grandson of the main protagonist of Rand’s novel, and his quest to defeat the Evil Empire constructed by his father, grandfather, and grandmother—Ayn Rant.

It's fiction meant to convey the ideas revealed in David Sloan Wilson's professional work and nonfiction writing as a biologist and social scientist. I haven't read anything by him and plan to rectify that soon. His books look both fascinating and agreeable.

I came across him--and his title above--by way of his Nautilus article I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand. Briefly, his biological conclusions that have led to everything else he does: The idea that individuals are highly cooperative groups of lower-level agents is a game changer. . . . Nearly everything distinctive about our species can be seen as a form of cooperation. Definitely at odds with individualism.

I really like this meme that just came across my feed.

I'm fascinated by how the behavior of the people who took 3 pieces of pizza at the party because they thought it would run out and the people who took 1 piece for the exact same reason is such a perfect encapsulation of American beliefs about community.

Yes, yes it is.

Parts of another good reflection from Heather Cox Richardson about those who want 3 pieces of pizza.

May 14, 2021

What Republicans mean when they say “socialism” is not the political system most countries recognize when they use that word: one in which the people, through their government, own the means of production. What Republicans mean comes from America’s peculiar history after the Civil War, when new national taxation coincided with the expansion of voting to include Black men. . . .

In 1871 . . . they said, their objection was that Black people were poor and uneducated and would elect lawmakers who promised to give them things-hospitals, and roads, and schools that could be paid for only through tax levies on people with property: white men. In this formulation, voting was not a means to ensuring equality; it was a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to African Americans who wanted a handout. Black voting meant "socialism, and it would destroy America. . . .

With the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that argument increasingly fed the idea that Black and Brown people were lazy and wanted to receive government handouts rather than work. Businessmen and social traditionalists eager to get rid of the popular New Deal government told voters that government programs to help ordinary Americans were "socialism, redistributing money from hardworking white people to lazy people of color. They talked of "makers" and "takers." . . .

Just as white southerners argued after the Civil War, Republican leaders claim to be acting in the best interests of the nation. They are standing firm against "the radical Socialist Democrat agenda," making sure that no wealthy person's tax dollars go to schools or roads or social programs.

They are "saving" America, just as white supremacists "saved" the Jim Crow South.

It's not just that they don't want to share, it's that they don't want to share with Black people. Because they want to reinforce our caste divisions.

I just finished reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. How I reviewed it:

Wilkerson describes an important, innovative way for thinking about race in the U.S. She compares specifically to the caste systems of Hindu India and Nazi Germany, similarities that have been apparent to those from those countries but seem novel to most of us in America. She supports her assertions with a constant, continuous quilt of examples, historical and current, radical and subtle, violent and structural, obvious and surprising, showing the countless dimensions to the system that is in place. She is a gifted writer who is easy to read. Because she is pulling together so many diverse pieces the course of the book is not entirely linear; that and the emotionally taxing subject matter make it the kind of book to nibble and digest slowly, but it is always engaging and illuminating. An essential book.

And the description from Goodreads:

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Some quotes that I want to highlight:

In the same way that black and white were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes, and to the gradations in between, and reinforces those meanings, replicates them in the roles each caste was and is assigned and permitted or required to perform.

I pulled that one mainly for the phrase that is the title of this post. I like it even better than shades of gray as an alternative to black and white. It's much more human.

This is such a simple truth that is so hard for so many people to grasp.

When others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.

Or, as I've put it before, cooperation is self interest.

Because they are so intertwined, it is difficult to see the difference between race and caste in the U.S.

What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

I have trouble holding onto the distinction when I'm not actively reading something like this description.

This is just one of the plethora of illustrations in the book, but it stood out to me for its poignancy.

America was fighting in World War II, and the public school district in Columbus, Ohio, decided to hold an essay contest, challenging students to consider the question "What to do with Hitler after the War?"

It was the spring of 1944, the same year that a black boy was forced to jump to his death, in front of his stricken father, over the Christmas card the boy had sent to a white girl at work. In that atmosphere, a sixteen-year-old African-American girl thought about what should befall Hitler. She won the student essay contest with a single sentence: "Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America."

It was the worst fate she could imagine for someone, and the judges agreed.

There needs not be any guilt about circumstances; there should be responsibility.

A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist--in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of the meaning attached to people's physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be.

Deny the lie.

One of the things Wilkerson mentions near the end of the book is, "It's all about 2042." That is the year experts predict those of us considered white will no longer be more than 50% of the population. She sees much of the current casteism and racism being a response to that prediction. A preemptive struggle to preserve their power. It makes sense to me.

This, I think, near the conclusion, is the most important message from the book for those like me, white men with all the privilege.

When an accident of birth aligns with what is most valued in a given caste system, whether being able-bodied, male, white, or other traits in which we had no say, it gives that lottery winner a moral duty to develop empathy for those who must endure the indignities they themselves have been spared. It calls for a radical kind of empathy.

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is looking across at someone and feeling sorrow, often in times of loss. Empathy is not pity. Pity is looking down from above and feeling a distant sadness for another in their misfortune. Empathy is commonly viewed as putting yourself in someone else's shoes and imagining how you would feel. That could be seen as a start, but that is little more than role-playing, and it is not enough in the ruptured world we live in.

Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.

Empathy is no substitute for experience itself. We don't get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are or are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.

If each of us could truly see and connect with the humanity of the person in front of us, search for that key that opens the door to whatever we may have in common, whether cosplay or Star Trek or the loss of a parent, it could begin to affect how we see the world and others in it, perhaps change the way we hire or even vote. Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean.

With our current ruptures, it is not enough to not be racist or sexist. Our times call for being pro-African-American, pro-woman, pro-Latino, pro-Asian, pro-indigenous, pro-humanity in all its manifestations. In our era, it is not enough to be tolerant. You tolerate mosquitoes in the summer, a rattle in an engine, the gray collects at the crosswalk in winter. You tolerate what slush that you would rather not have to deal with and wish would go away. It is no honor to be tolerated. Every spiritual tradition says love your neighbor as yourself, not tolerate them.

The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly.

I feel that duty and try as I can. Radical empathy.

Which is why I was really pleased with my results from this new meme:

Can help right I should

That's what my name is according to this completely random process. I embrace it, as it describes what I see as a central dimension of my complex network self.

Speaking of, in my previous post The Self Is a Society I shared an article that was a precursor to the one I opened this post with from a biological perspective. That article is David George Haskell sharing the core ideas in his then-new book The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors:

Life Is The Network, Not The Self

By eavesdropping on chemical conversations within the leaf, biologists have learned that the life processes of a plant — growing, moving nutrients, fighting disease, and coping with drought — are all networked tasks, emerging from physical and chemical connections among diverse cells. These leaf networks are dynamic. In some species, the network changes through the seasons, starting in spring with bacteria that resemble those of the soil, then shifting through the growing season to bacteria that can process the complex mix of nutrients inside a leaf. Fungi inside the leaf protect against herbivorous animals, encourage growth, and confer drought resistance to the plant. Bacteria also promote growth by processing nutrients, cleaning wastes, signaling to plant cells, producing growth hormones, and combatting pathogens.

The leaf network is also a place of tension, its members caught in the evolutionary struggle between cooperation and conflict. Pathogenic bacteria and fungi continually threaten to overwhelm and destroy the leaf, a tendency held in check by a combination of plant defensive chemicals and competition from other microbes. The leaf community contains the seeds (or fungal hyphae) of its own mortality: When leaves weaken, fungi engulf the leaf and start the process of decomposition. This rot isn't always a disadvantage for the rest of the plant. Death can prune shaded leaves, stopping them from draining the plant community's energy. . . .

Living networks are ancient, perhaps as old as life itself. Models and lab experiments on the chemical origin of life show that interacting networks of molecules beat self-replicating molecules in a Darwinian struggle. . . .

The fundamental unit of biology is therefore not the "self," but the network. A maple tree is a plurality, its individuality a temporary manifestation of relationship. . . .

When we gaze at a maple leaf, we now see not an individual made of plant cells, but a thrumming conversation, an embodied network. The "self" is a society.

I want to repeat that because I love the language: The fundamental unit of biology is the network, a plurality.

I still haven't read that book (I plan to), though one of his other books is the focus of Our Biggest Failing Is Lack of Compassion for the World, Including Ourselves. from a couple of years ago.

I'll finish off with a little Shel Silverstein from Where the Sidewalk Ends.