Provocations

Things to stir the grey cells a bit, or maybe just to stir, and all from things the internet delivered this morning.

First via Arts & Letters Daily comes Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek by Corey Robin, who teaches at Brooklyn College, is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea, and The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.

In the last half-century of American politics, conservatism has hardened around the defense of economic privilege and rule. Whether it’s the libertarianism of the GOP or the neoliberalism of the Democrats, that defense has enabled an upward redistribution of rights and a downward redistribution of duties. The 1 percent possesses more than wealth and political influence; it wields direct and personal power over men and women. Capital governs labor, telling workers what to say, how to vote and when to pee. It has all the substance of noblesse and none of the style of oblige. That many of its most vocal defenders believe Barack Obama to be their mortal enemy—a socialist, no less—is a testament less to the reality about which they speak than to the resonance of the vocabulary they deploy.

The Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek is the leading theoretician of this movement, formulating the most genuinely political theory of capitalism on the right we’ve ever seen. The theory does not imagine a shift from government to the individual, as is often claimed by conservatives; nor does it imagine a simple shift from the state to the market or from society to the atomized self, as is sometimes claimed by the left. Rather, it recasts our understanding of politics and where it might be found. This may explain why the University of Chicago chose to reissue Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty two years ago after the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. Like The Road to Serfdom (1944), which a swooning Glenn Beck catapulted to the bestseller list in 2010, The Constitution of Liberty is a text, as its publisher says, of “our present moment.”

But to understand that text and its influence, it’s necessary to turn away from contemporary America to fin de siècle Vienna. The seedbed of Hayek’s arguments is the half-century between the “marginal revolution,” which changed the field of economics in the late nineteenth century, and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918. It is by now a commonplace of European cultural history that a dying Austro-Hungarian Empire gave birth to modernism, psychoanalysis and fascism. Yet from the vortex of Vienna came not only Wittgenstein, Freud and Hitler but also Hayek, who was born and educated in the city, and the Austrian school of economics. 

Friedrich Nietzsche figures critically in this story, less as an influence than a diagnostician. This will strike some as an improbable claim…

I am sure it will, but I do commend this quite lengthy essay for contextualising and debunking what many seem to take far too seriously – in my very inexpert opinion.

Second, via my WordPress Reader (formerly my Google Reader) comes Candida Moss Debunks the ‘Myth’ of Christian Persecution, from the interesting US Evangelical site Sojourners.

One of those semi-pornographic historical paintings of the 19th century, —  Konstantin Flavitsky in this case — 
so popular in their day and often huge,
this one showing Christians in the Colosseum.

Growing up Catholic in England, Candida Moss  felt secure in life, yet was told in church that Christians have been persecuted since the dawn of Christianity. Now, as an adult and a theologian, she wants to set the record straight.

Too many modern Christians invoke, to lamentable effect, an ancient history of persecution that didn’t exist, Moss argues in her newly published book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom.

Although anti-Christian prejudice was fairly widespread in the church’s first 300 years, she writes, “the prosecution of Christians was rare, and the persecution of Christians was limited to no more than a handful of years.”

We asked Moss, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame, to talk about the travails of early Christians, and how they are misappropriated in the public sphere today. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You argue that modern myths of Christian persecution are rooted in an ancient myth, and you focus on Pliny, a first- and second-century Roman who governed what is now Turkey. Why should we know about him?

A: He’s the first Roman official to actually talk about Christians. He writes to the Emperor Trajan and says, “What am I supposed to do about them? They’re not doing anything wrong, but when they’re in the courtroom they’re very stubborn.” Those charges could get you killed in the Roman world. And Pliny has other concerns: Christians were not purchasing the meat associated with the Roman temples. And he thinks of Christians not as a religious group, but prone to superstition, which the Romans considered a kind of madness that could spread like a disease.

Pliny and Trajan agree that there will be no seeking out of Christians, but if they do end up in courtrooms and are stubborn, he will give them three chances to curse Christ and make a sacrifice in the Roman temple. If they don’t, they will be killed. I’m not saying what Pliny did was right, but it’s very far from the story I grew up with, about Christians being hunted down…

Q: Who is capitalizing on the myth of Christian persecution?

A: When people talk about being persecuted in modern America, I think it’s dangerous. I’m talking about everyone from Rick Santorum to Mitt Romney to Catholic bishops, and Bill O’Reilly talking about a war on Easter. The problem with this is that it destroys dialogue. Persecutors don’t have legitimate complaints so you can’t really have productive discussions.

But you can disagree with someone sharply on the basis of your religious beliefs without accusing them of persecution. When you say they’re persecuting you, you’re basically accusing them of acting with Satan.

Q: So how are you going to convince someone like Bill O’Reilly to quit claiming that American Christians are persecuted?

A: What I try to do in the book is to not talk about the issues but to talk about the rhetoric. So I give examples of people from the religious left who are doing it. I’m critical of them, too.

We’ve all got to take a look at our own causes and say, “I’m not going to use this language. I’m going to see that other people have good intentions.” That’s how you really have productive discussions with people….

Third, What We Mean When We Say ‘Race Is a Social Construct’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic Monthly leads via hyperlinks to Race And IQ. Again. by Andrew Sullivan and precisely how not to argue about race and iq by Freddie Deboer. From the latter:

…There is no more sense in denying perceived differences in IQ (not intelligence) between white Americans and Hispanic Americans than there is in denying a difference in high school drop out rates. The question at hand is the credibility of IQ itself.

My response is not to deny that these perceived differences are being accurately reported by the people who report them, but to say that the tests themselves are flawed and are not an accurate instrument for understanding real-world intelligence. I argue that the tests have a validity problem in that they don’t correspond well to what we typically mean when we discuss “intelligence” in a lived sense, and a reliability problem in that the consistently perceived racial differences are not reflections of actual differences in intelligence but of systemic biases that render the metrics flawed. I also don’t agree with the many ugly responses race realists have to the differences in IQ. But to say “there are perceivable differences in the results of IQ tests?” That’s true, and it is treated as straightforwardly the case in peer reviewed literature in credible journals by responsible, non-racist researchers. Across a long time frame, between many different tests and many different administrations, those differences are perceived. What matters is that they aren’t an accurate reflection of what human beings mean when they talk about real-world intelligence.

Racism thrives on conspiratorial thinking and the self-definition of racists as an oppressed group. When you say things that are true aren’t, and especially when you do so in a way that treats the other point of view as forbidden, you play directly into their hands. I cannot imagine an easier way to give them fuel for their argument than to say that certain test results don’t exist when they do. Perhaps it’s easier to argue that way, and perhaps it’s more emotionally satisfying, but it hurts the antiracist effort in the long run. More to the point: what are you so scared of? It amazes me how often I interact with white liberals who, despite being perfectly correct on the merits, talk about race in a state of absolute panic. I hate to cast aspersions but I sometimes suspect people I know secretly find the case against racism to be weak, and are afraid that if they have to argue, somehow, the racists will win.

Bullshit. The case against inherent racial inferiority is correct. The moral and analytic argument is on our side. You have to have the guts to confront the facts and make the case. Just as no one supposes that the racial achievement gap in grades, graduation rate, and college are somehow proof of racial inferiority, no one should mistake the perceived IQ gap as meaning something when it doesn’t. Don’t be afraid, and don’t play their game. Stop getting panicky about race talk and engage. It’s your moral responsibility.

I have in recent years become impatient with the willingness with which terms like “racist” are flung like weapons or argument-stoppers – I have been guilty myself. Not that I am condoning racism. I think we just need to be more careful in our use of the term.