pinkfloydpsw's Blog

I see groups of people banding together because of their circumstances of birth, “I am a leftist Jew”, “I am a Christian Socialist or Conservative”, “I am a Muslim”, “I am a Christian” …. Therefore Insert perspective/opinion/political leanings here… Well this is silly, why not use reason? When we start a statement in this manner we grab at the authority for a position being derived from a higher source than your intellect or mine, we try to ensure that it has a gravity that it could not deserve through rationale alone, we act like the merits of the data are not in themselves enough to carry it. To my mind it is a disqualifying statement and should make others immediately fail to take the rest of what is being said seriously. The attempt is to establish a primary principle that the speaker has the right to speak on behalf of a group of people, and that the size of a group of people can render an argument sound. Maurine Lipman used this tactic when describing anti-Jewish sentiment as racism, the idea was that it must be that because she is Jewish. Richard Dawkins pointed out that a collective of persons who identify as members of a socially constructed group, one that is based on a religious ideology, is not a race. Race is a measurable quality, not a socially built group where one can leave or join based on belief or adherence to a book full of Bronze-age myths. I don’t get to speak for the entirety of the Unionist community of Northern Ireland simply by being assumed to be part of that social group by birth, I also don’t think that there is unity of perspective even in social groups, or in races, or in religions. To speak on behalf of a group of people one would have to know beforehand that that group of people are in majority agreement for you to do so. We might think that the only people who get to represent a group then would be the elected persons, but again we have a problem since persons elected are usually put forward from mechanisms that exist prior to their campaign.

If you happen to want to tell others what they can and cannot do, then just stop identifying with your religiously constructed identity group and simply admit that you are a thug. If the thuggery of your religion is something you conveniently hide behind, the main justifying force for your skewed perspective, then you are not just a thug, but a coward also. I am Northern Irish, born and raised in a Protestant community, but not of that community, and I could have been a thug also if not lucky enough to have a father that is a reasonable man (a rarity where I am from) who must have decided at some time in his youth to not become a cultural reflection of his formative circumstances. We can be other, we can dare to use our own reason, we can be more than our community and the limited perspective of our circumstances. In Rocky Balboa our hero says “if you live some place long enough, you are that place”, and that can happen. Harsh conditions can breed hard people. I would assume the folks that grow up in Siberia might be pretty hardy, and I know that people who have served in any military will be tougher than they were before they joined. So it is not entirely true that one can avoid being changed by what happens to one, all I am saying is it is not a necessity, and not an excuse that can be hidden behind. I’ll add a caveat to this, it is hard to imagine that those that grow up in poverty stricken parts of US cities, when faced with extremely limited opportunities, do not face a decision that is heavily encumbered. If not me then somebody else will deal the drugs and get the green stuff for it. The same is true in any liberal society for persons who have zero, or seriously limited, opportunities.

I would argue that when a society manifests problems we should immediately look to see where the background to that comes from, is poverty the main driving force behind crime? I know that I think so, but I have not measured it personally. Can the shrinking of the welfare state and the loss of services, especially those to do with mental health, be tied to social unrest and the more frequently encountered threats against the lives of political actors? Could that mental health crisis now be driving the sexual identity crisis we see in so many trivial arguments on daytime TV? Are we desensitised to the suffering of others because we are too focussed on keeping the lights on and food on the table? They say that when you’re doing well you look to help others, and when you’re doing badly you look to yourself and your family, I think that may be true. The saying “Blood is thicker than water” is almost universally misunderstood, the full quote is “the blood of the battlefield is thicker than the water of the womb”, meaning that the bonds we form in battle, or in harsh circumstances, are stronger than the bonds of family.

Paul S Wilson