Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 01:44:43 -0400
Subject: Re: LEO ON MODERNISM/POST


Ralph has taken up the challenge of how to understand what he calls the
practical dimension of reason and unreason with regard to the political life
of the inner city. As seems to often be the case, I end up with a lot of
mixed feelings about Ralph's interventions. What especially troubles me is
that I find his conclusions to end up in a place defined by a kind of
impotent idealism which has no practical way of engaging these forces he
finds (correctly) to be so dangerous.

Leo's original:
----------------
But as I think about it, the ways in which I deal with the
obscurantism of the Nation of Islam, Five Percenters, Israelites
and a host of other similar sects that are found in the inner
city is remarkably consistent with the arguments I made here.
I don't find it particularly useful to treat these views, when
they appear in my classroom, as simply errors of logic or
reasoning.

Ralph:
----------
It is a social problem with much deeper roots, but errors of
reasoning are nonetheless involved.

Leo's response:
----------------------
There is no disagreement here; the question I took up was the strategic one
of how to respond effectively, and IMO, an approach which simply notes errors
of reasoning will not take you very far, precisely because they speak to a
great deal more than the need for logical coherence.

Leo's original:
-------------------
Take the conspiracy theories that surround AIDS. They are an amalgam of a lot
of different things, a lot of which fits this notion of backwardness and
superstition -- some of it is the most rank racial stereotypes (the worst
white racism, with just inverse valorization), some of it is the most silly
and unscientific theories, and some of it is the most bizarre caricatures of
how the mechanisms of power works.

Ralph:
---------
Well put: contemptible backwardness, superstition, and ignorance, also aided
and abetted by a religious culture which discourages critical thinking.

Leo's original:
-------------------
But there is something else also going on here: we live in a country where
less than a half-century ago secret medical experiments were still being
carried out on unknowing African-American subjects (the Tuskegee Syphilis
study). African-Americans, along with other people of color and gay men, are
disproportionately infected with HIV, and there is a definite relationship
between who is infected and how the disease has been approached.Like all
'myths', these conspiracy theories gather their power precisely because they
offer an explanation, however distorted and pernicious, for these realities.

Ralph:
---------
Note that your reasoning is entirely reasoning by analogy: it's
happened before, so it must be happening now, which is what all
these conspiracy theories are based on. Thanks for exposing how infantile
this mode of reasoning is.

Leo's response:
----------------------
This is a gross misrepresentation on a number of counts. First, 
given my entire discussion of these conspiracy theories, including the
sections Ralph previously agreed with, I don't see how anyone could
reasonably say I adopted the account of reality in them, or their peculiar
combinations of logic and illogic. What I did was describe why these
arguments had a certain power and plausibility -- in this case, they speak to
real social conditions and recall a real, not so distant history. There can
be no question that African-Americans have borne a disproportionately heavy
burden of AIDS, and conspiracy theories offer a warped explanation for why
that is a case; in the absence of other compelling accounts of the mechanisms
of power, that conspiracy theory will have an explanatory power. Likewise,
the relevance that something has happened in the relatively recent past, is
not, as Ralph would have it, that is happening now; rather, it is that
history _could_ well be repeating itself. In other words, this is not a
question of causality, but of plausibility. To capture the popular
imagination, conspiracy theories require a plausibility. The experience of
Watergate, to use a less-race specific example, created a certain
plausibility in the popular imagination for claims of government cover-ups
and conspiracies; often the claims are wacko, but sometimes, as in
Contragate, they were real. Watergate didn't prove that Contragate had taken
place, but it did make it more plausible.  Again, an explanation of the
mechanics of racism in medicine,  both a half-century ago and today, is
required to provide a reasonable explanation of what is happening at the
intersection of race and AIDS.

Leo's original:
-------------------
Unless a way is found to address these realities, both in action
and in alternative world views, all of the explanations of the
errors of logic and reasoning will go nowhere.

and

There is a very precise correlation in American history between
the decline of potential interracial political movements for
progressive change and the turn of significant numbers of
African-Americans to Farrakhans and their ilk.

Ralph:
---------
Alternative world views?  I know you don't mean the alternatives
provided by bow-tie zombies at subway entrances.

and 

In other words, the capacity to reason is not detached from life,
but is a direct product of social circumstances.  True enough, but does this
make irrationalism any less contemptible or childish? When I listen to the
crap that I hear around me in Washington, I can only think: "Inferior."

and

I hope your various techniques work for you. But if you are aware
of what you are really up against, all the mythology in the world
won't help you, because there is no substitute for cultivating
rational thinking, above al rational thinking about society and
its organization.

Leo's response:
----------------------
This is the part which really troubles me, for I don't see any political
strategy here other than wailing away at the "irrational" for being
"irrational". That strategy didn't do much but make us crazy on Marxism1, and
it doesn't offer much more of a prospect here.

Ralph makes a minimalist gesture in the way of a materialist analysis and
understanding of what is taking place in these "irrational" ideas, but then
in much more outspoken and pronounced fashion, starts hurling the rather
vivid and powerful images of contemptible, childish and inferior. The
rhetorical form and message of the argument is thus one of frustrated
idealism and powerlessness against this "irrationality."

Maybe it is because I work with teenagers, a group in which the expression of
some of these views is far from a hardened ideology, and a group in which one
is able to see the connection between the individual needs for
familial/communal support and the involvement in gangs and these sects, but I
believe that there is much more possibility for intervention. I certainly
would not waste any time with the street corner Israelite preachers, or the
"bow-tie" newspaper sellers.But that is hardly the only possible path of
entry. My emotions are also different than Ralph: the strongest words that
come to my mind are pitiful and sad.

At an analytical level, I find Ralph's position incomplete. It reminds of the
debates about Afro-centric versions of world history. If one approaches these
historical narratives only from the viewpoint of their quite real
distortions/misrepresentations of the historical record, a considerable
portion of what is going on has been missed. For the attraction of
Afro-centric versions of history lies in their affirmation, within a racist
world which denigrates black intelligence, black accomplishment, black
beauty, etc., of things Africans and African-Americans. In the absence of an
alternative set of historical narratives which affirms African and
African-American culture and history without resorting to the distortions of
Afro-centricity, critiques of Afro-centricity come across as one more
denigration of Africans and African-Americans. Indeed, IMO, the most powerful
argument against Afro-centric historical narratives is the way in which they
simply take over, with one minor addition, the Euro-centric, great man models
of history -- instead of all civilization beginning with the Greeks, as the
Eurocentric model had it, it goes back one step further and the Greeks are
found to have been indebted to the African Egyptians.

There is a great deal more going on with fundamentalism in the inner city
than simple "contemptible backwardness, superstition, and ignorance,"
although it does involve those elements. A functionalist analysis can be very
interesting here: in the context of the inner city and families with very few
resources, what might be a minor misstep in the context of a middle class,
suburban life can utterly ruin one's life here. Rigid and inflexible moral
codes become a clear, unambiguous guide for young people trying to navigate
some rather treacherous terrain. It is not accidental that it is only
fundamentalist faiths, be they Muslim or Christian, that have had any
significant success in helping folks escape from lives of crime, drugs and
prostitution. If we don't understand this function, we have missed an
absolutely major dimension of fundamentalism's attractiveness, and we won't
be able to address it. One of my moments of greatest anger at a fellow
teacher was with a so-called Marxist who told his students, in the midst of
the riots that followed the Rodney King verdicts, that the only effective way
to protest injustice was to riot. A year later, he was off to graduate school
for a Ph.D. in sociology, of course, and when he got into a tussle with the
New York City police over turnstile jumping (!) on the subways, he had a
civil liberties lawyer dad to bail him out. Who was going to rescue the young
people he was so cavalierly ready to put at risk?

One last point in this vein. For a while I subscribed to a Multi-Culturalism
list, moderated by none other than our Marxism1 hyper-Stalinist, Shawgi Tell.
Shawgi and his crew had taken up that bizarre little piece of political
correctness which asserts that only white people can be racists, since racism
requires the power to act on prejudice, and only white people have such
power. There are several ways to attack this little piece of sophistry,
although none were going to be successful with these hardcore ideologues. No
doubt, that as a collectivity, white people have much more power to act on
their prejudices, but the notion that people of color are completely
powerless is nonsensical. That argument must be made, but it ignores what is
the essential function of the claim -- to place the choices of the people of
color making the claim impervious to all moral challenge. IMO, the most
effective response, therefore, was to point that this claim denied moral
agency, the power to choose between right and wrong on matters of race, to
people of color, for they were, be defintion, intrinsically good. It was of
one and same species, therefore, as racist theories which treated people of
color as instrinsically evil. We are all moral agents, albeit moral agents
shaped and restrained by the conditions in which we find ourselves, and we
must bear the responsibility for our choices. On this last point, I think
Ralph and I would agree; the question is: How do we get to this point?




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