Racism and Breedism

I'd like to say a little something about racism. As an educated, white male, this is a difficult issue to talk about, since I am "part of the problem." How can I discuss a subject which I am incapable of understanding in an experiential way? This is an interesting question, but I'm going to sidestep it, if I can. I will limit my discussion to the purely theoretical as much as possible, and my conclusions will be hardly revolutionary. I just want to bring up an interesting comparison which I don't recall having seen before.

First of all, there is no question that human beings of all races are the same species. For organisms that reproduce by sexual reproduction, a species is defined by being able to reproduce with other members. Now that miscegenation laws are no longer the norm, we have seen that inter-racial unions are just as capable of producing perfectly normal children, both biologically and socially, as any kind of union. The historical (and I'm sorry to say, still lingering) antipathy towards inter-racial pairings among certain groups has no biological foundation.

My goal here is to undermine the rationale for racism. Since race is a genetic trait, that rationale pretends at being scientific and biological. In fact, racial differences in human beings are minute compared to how significant they could be. Of course, there are cultural differences between groups from various geographic regions, economic classes, cultural backgrounds, but those are independent of racial determinants.

Since human beings are all the same species yet there are still recognizable morphological differences between certain strains, the concept of races is basically a human-specific type of a subspecies. I'm no biologist, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but another kind of subspecies that people - particularly pet owners - might be more familiar with is that of different breeds.

Before I go about the comparison of race to breed, I should point out that I am using this analogy purely as an intuition pump - that is, a way of encouraging a person's intuition towards a certain conclusion.

The domestic dog is a single species as well, which is how it is possible to have mixed-breeds and mutts that are still capable of reproducing. Think for a moment about the amount of variation between different breeds of dog. Humans are practically uniform across the board, by comparison.

For example, I don't have the statistics offhand, but I think it's fair to say that difference in average height between major races isn't anymore than 10%, at the maximum. Skin shades may vary significantly, but every race has a pigmentation that is some kind of brown or tan.

On the other hand, according to www.dogbreedinfo.com the chihuahua has an average height of 6-9 inches and weight of 2-6 pounds. Great Pyrenees average about 27-32 inches and 100 pounds. That's about four times (400%) as tall and twenty-five times (2500%) as heavy. That's not even taking into account the variations in fur thickness and patterns, face, ear, paw and tail structures, and so on and so forth.

Imagine the intensity of prejudice that would exist if human beings had this much physical variation from race to race. Even the relatively isignificant variations of eye and nose structures and skin tone have led to centuries of violence and hatred. I just want to suggest that we're really not that different from one another, and that the hurdles we have to overcome to see the different races as essentially the same are nowhere near as monumental as they could have been.

Happy Endings and Short Happy Lives

This post is hearkens back to an old post I did in an old blog of mine. I plan to update several old posts and flesh them out into full essays on this site. Some of them, if they're acceptable, will be transferred unaltered. Secret admission: this blog is designed to showcase my non-fiction, essay-length writing ability. It may feature some short fiction later, but that remains to be seen.
In any case, the phrase "'Happy ending' is a contradiction in terms" is one of my favorite little aphorisms that I have managed to come up. I thought of it without having heard it from someone else, even though I have no doubt that other people came up with it on their own. In fact, I have good evidence that at least a few others did. An essay about originality this is not, but I should approach that at some point in the future.

In any case, what do I mean when I say that? 'Happy ending' is a commonplace phrase, which does not generally carry any hint of paradox to it. What I mean is that in order for the ending of a story to be happy, it must imply a continuation beyond the scope of the particular telling. For example, the fairy tale tag line "happily ever after" implies a happy ending because it says explicitly that the ending of the story is not the ending of the relationship between the two main characters. In fact, they manage the impossible feat of living happily ever after. How they managed that, no one can be sure.

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night's Dream end happily because they both point towards the successful relationships of the protagonists, which it can be presumed last for some significant length of time after the action particular to the plays comes to a close. Similarly, it would be difficult to make an argument for the endings of Hamlet or Macbeth to be happy, because at the end, everyone dies. I can see how it is possible to take a reading of Macbeth which is somewhat happy, but only because Macduff wins and his kingship will continue past the events of the play.

This is a possible wrench to be thrown into the works: there are endings which are happy because they involve the destruction of some threat, generally the villain. Often, this ending also contains the sacrifice of the hero towards the end of vanquishing the threat that has been the focus of the story up to that point. In that case, the ending does not constitute a continuation of any sort, but it is still happy. To this, I say that there must have been a larger group or community which was being threatened by the villain (or natural disaster, or what have you) to merit the hero's sacrifice. In this case, it is their continued existence - in a much better set of circumstances, without the antagonist - which elicits a happy response in the reader or viewer.

The implied continuation can be of just about anything - a relationship between two people or even a person and a pet, a person's life, a community's coherence, and so on and so forth. Sad endings are when these things end definitively. Sometimes, the beginnings and endings do not quite go as one would expect - in Casablanca, the relationship between Rick and Ilsa ends, but Rick and Captain Renault find themselves at the beginning of a "beautiful friendship."

Now that I've established that interpretation, let me immediately undercut it. There is a type of story, relatively rare but popular enough to merit inclusion in this discussion, in which there is a definitive ending which is happy. I first encountered it in the Hemingway short story, "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Therefore, I've always called this convention "The Short, Happy Life."

In it, a character is living, but the manner of their existence is somehow unsatisfactory. During the course of the story, they come to realize what is missing, begin fulling their lives, and then promptly die. A more popular example might be American Beauty, in which Lestern Burnham discovers the key to happiness and then is killed. I contend that the movie is saying that it is better that he had realized that and died than had he never realized it at all.

If you accept them as valid readings, these exceptional cases are the only ones which I think can really be considered "happy endings." Without them, the term is unintentionally ironic. Delightfully so, as a matter of fact.

A rant on craziness

I'm going to muse for a while on the subject of mental disorders. Of course, the concept of insanity is an old one - and unfortunately, I don't think the popular image of it has grown much, even though it has become much better understood in the past century.

If I may grossly oversimplify the complicated and interesting history of insanity in society, I would say that - at least after the time when insanity was seen as demonic (or divine) possession - a person was insane if he was unable to function in society. In some way, that definition persists to this day. The ability to conform to the codes of behavior is a necessary component, if not the entirety, of being deemed sane. Of course, there is another way of breaking the rules of conduct which necessitates a removal from the society at large - but that is characterized as criminal behavior, and is considered willful.

There are, of course, examples of the two poles of sanity and insanity. There is practically an infinitude of examples, in fact. Take the model of neighborhood interaction, who takes an active role in establishing a community, working with the PTA, the neighborhood watch, and so on and so forth. Of course, one need not be a paragon of moral virtue to be perfectly sane (perhaps - that is an interesting question, in itself). The relatively lazy office worker who comes home and plays video games after work to relax is also normal. There is no model for sanity, per se.

Similarly, there is no model for insanity. Since there is not just one mental disorder but a veritable panoply of conditions that make for individuals that cannot fit into the molds of societal interaction. There can be people who respond to any stranger's approach with a ferocious physical assault, or there can be people who believe themselves to be Napoleon, to borrow a quaint popular stereotype.

One would hope that at least most of the time, those who end up institutionalized are people who have severe types of disorders which clearly prevent them from properly functioning in society. We recognize that there are traits in people - in all people, in fact - that are minor impediments to social interaction. Whether it be shyness, a quick temper, a tendency to lie, or what have you. If these characteristics were raised to a sufficiently significant level, they would be precisely the kinds of things that would merit removal in the past, or at least medication in recent years. That is, one can imagine (or you might even know) a person who has such a temper, or is so prone to telling lies, or is so debilitatingly shy that they cannot interact normally.

The problem, then, comes not necessarily from indentifying what is appropriate behavior and what is a mental disorder (at least, not the problem I'm looking at today), but where to draw the line between the two. This is another instance of a Sorites paradox.

I will change the topic somewhat to the drug industry now. No one would argue that in the past ten or fifteen years, the business of selling drugs which alter your state of mind has exploded. I refer, of course, to mood-altering drugs like Zoloft, Paxil, et al as well as drugs like Ritalin which encourages the ability to focus.

There are, I contend, people who are depressed in a way and to a level that necessitates medication. However, I think that there are also many, many people who are taking medication when it is not the best solution. Similarly, there are probably children who do not Ritalin who take it regularly. The reason is that the drug industry, as an abstract entity, has no economic interest in the proper identification of the people who should be taking their drugs. They have a vested interest in convincing as many people as they reasonably can that they are depressed, so that they can sell more antidepressents. Similarly, they have an interest in convincing parents that their children are out of control and need medication in order to be "normal."

Everyone's a little bit crazy, that's my theory. There is no normal. It's not a new conclusion, and when most people say it, I think they mean something different than I do. I'm not saying anything like "you're okay, I'm okay" and that there are not nor should there be normative behaviors. However, I do maintain a much more "variety is the spice of life"-type perspective, by which I mean that the range of behaviors which probably should fall under the umbrella term normal is larger than you might expect.

This is, I suppose, a statement that is akin to the fundamental tenet of my self-proclaimed philosophical standpoint: latitudinarianism. It's a word that means "Holding or expressing broad or tolerant views" but I like to use it as a philosophical perspective. It's different, fundamentally, from relativism. Rather than saying that nothing is objective, I like to say that people tend to define things too narrowly, and we should watch our for that. But that's an essay for a different day.

In summary, be wary of mental disorders and their treatment. I'm beginning to think that I have low-level Asperger's syndrome and might have a hyperactive thyroid gland. So when I say everyone's a little bit crazy, I mean it. There's an attempt in psychological studies to figure out and categorize all the different types of disorders that fall into the autistic spectrum. Let us assume for a moment that this is possible and that one day, psychologists manage to create a successful system for understanding all the various types of mental disorders, extending beyond the autistic spectrum.

Now then, it is possible that everybody has one or more of these disorders, at various levels of prevalance in their personalities. There are no longer angry people, shy people, or liars - but people who have low-level (or high-functioning, to borrow some terminology) manifestations of these heretofore unnamed disorders. If this is the case, is the proper response to allow these variances in personality that admittedly make life difficult, but may also make it interesting? Or do we medicate people towards a single ideal of human behavior?

I think it's clear where I come down on that question, but I don't know what society will eventually decide.

My first rant

First of all, damn bots. I will delete any comment made by a bot that asks me to check out their website on how to make money from blogging. I'm not averse to making money, but I'm not going to let somebody advertise on my blog unless I get a cut. That being said, I would like to go off on a polemic about some of America's most valued institutions: professional sports.

What function do pro sports serve in our society? I contend that they act as simulacra for combat, allowing the dormant masculine tendency (which is increasingly present in the fairer sex - I characterize it as masculine only in a traditionalist sense) to fight to be expressed vicariously. The underlying violence which usually remains just under the surface all too often rears its ugly head in the form of bench-clearing brawls, drunken fistfights in the stands, and confrontations between members of rival schools. Assume for a moment that there is only a limited amount of outrage which a person can feel - only so much vested interest is available to focus on the things that an individual cares about. What could this wasted effort be expended upon, if not for the ultimately meaningless contests in arbitrary physical abilities? It is interesting to consider this question, in light of the relative numbers of people who closely follow the World Series or the Superbowl as opposed to elections.

Even disregarding the admittedly subtle and perhaps questionable notion of the psychological distraction effect of professional sports, the issue of the diversion of otherwise useful funds is immediately apparent. Cities give tax breaks to sports teams and stadiums which could have instead gone to schools or public services. Recently, the NFL tentatively agreed to allow Kansas City to host a Superbowl, if they addeda 200 million dollar retractable roof to their stadium. Plans to put a tax increase on the ballot to finance just such an improvement were quickly being discussed. The rationale, supposedly, is that the local government gets more back in sales tax on tickets and memorabilia then they spend to keep a team in town. In some cities, this may in fact be the case. I believe that in the majority, it is not. In the example mentioned above, it is impossible to even consider that hosting one Superbowl will return 200 million dollars to the city's coffers.

Now then, I recognize that a similar argument could be made for the same status of the film industry: that they are bloated money vacuums which allow for the visceral pleasure of experiencing the titillation of base emotional impulses without having to undergo the requisite activities oneself. I contend that much film occupies a similar vein to the pointlessness of sports, but they are also partially redeemable for the sake of social reflection and message conveyance - that is, a movie has the capability to mean something while a particular sports game can never have any significance greater than the value of teamwork, practice, physical health, fair play, etc. It is also worth noting that the top movie producers are the recipients of significantly less taxpayer money than sports franchises.

I do not disagree that pro sports represent an important facet of U.S. ideology and modern culture, but I add that U.S. ideology consists of surreptitiously distracting people who are in a position to be taken advantage of, so that they don't notice their economical rape at the hands of the ruling classes. This is another example of the 'American nightmare' which is the inherent falsity of the American dream. For some people their only imaginable way to break into the upper classes is this type of physical performance. Imagine the number of kids in little league baseball or on high school teams that intend to go pro. Unfortunately for them, even if they should manage to be one of the very, very few to make it into the big leagues, there is less guarantee that a successful athlete will have the necessary financial cleverness, shrewdness, and savvy to be able to employ their wealth in such a way as to make their transition into the elite a permanent one. A person who makes his money on the stock market is more likely - just by the nature of what he had to do in order to obtain his money - to have the necessary knowledge to stay at a comparatively comfortable level of society and that his children will be able to share in his wealth.

What is to be done? I do not take a hard-line, moralist position that pro sports are necessarily bad. They are, however, contingently bad. To be more precise, the entities that many professional sports have become are contributing a net negative effect on the nation as a whole. Player, manager, owner salaries are all too high by at least a factor of ten. I attribute this tendency of higher and higher salaries to the free market, which in this case can be approximated by a goldfish analogy. Fans will continue to pay the exorbitant ticket prices until the goldfish becomes too big for the bowl. At this point, there is no indication that there is a limit that the average American will invest in being a sports spectator.

Inaugural post!

Like most late teen/early twenty-somethings who were raised on the internet, I am owner and operator of a number of various blogs, most of which are defunct or deleted. I have a journal which is for my eyes only and a journal which is my way of communicating with friends who don't live so near to me anymore. Neither of which are appropriate venues for the kind of random commentary that I would like to inflict upon the world on a regular basis. I censor myself when I'm writing for my friends, and who cares what I write when no one else can see it?

And so, where there was darkness, there will be light. I have molded from these clay bits and bytes of zeroes and ones a new entity, which will disseminate truth unto the masses.

Of course, I'm kidding. I will probably record my comments on books and movies that I like or don't like for an interesting reason, notes on my philosophy for various aspects of life, a high prbability of occassional political commentary, and whatever else I deem appropriate for inclusion.

And for my first entry, I will discuss the title and url of this blog, which I borrowed from a Warren Zevon off his album Mutineer. Expect to see him mentioned quite a bit in the future. The song itself is a good song, but the phrase is one of the Z-man's many touches of genius.

I am agnostic and vehemently so. From where I stand, there is a dearth of evidence that would be necessary to making an informed decision as to the existence of non-existence of god, much less to say anything about a fictional being's nature. You might as well speculate as to the political affiliation of a character in a story that has either yet to be written, or has been written and utterly lost - every copy of it destroyed. What can you say that's substantive on the subject of god? In my book, not a lot.

And so, the heavens are will-less, insofar as they even exist. The force which guides the events of the world is neither benevolent or malevolent. If you assume that you can even attribute any kind of characteristic to such a nebulous entity, it is indifferent. The things which matter so much to us in our day-to-day lives - and what is a blog but a magnificent celebration of the self and of the trivial? - the universe doesn't care a whit. All the news items that get circulated endlessly between an oroboros-like line of bloggers are meaningless, in the end. No one will remember 90% of them in a year. In ten years, probably 99%. In a thousand years, no one will care about any of them, if there's even anyone left to do the caring.

This is, I think, the essential first step to looking at the world as it really is. Things matter to you, but the quality of "mattering" or "deserving to matter" is by no means universal. Most people will not care about what I have to say, and I both respect and expect that. But I won't let that stop me. Because some of the things I have to say just might matter to some people, for a brief period of time.

And of course, it all matters to me. Otherwise, why would I bother to say it?