With Chinese thought and ethics, we covered the Confucians Mencius and Xunzi, with Mencius arguing human nature is good, and Xunzi arguing that human nature is evil. Confucius argued that compassion (literally, humaneness) is the central value and message of his teachings, and that through compassion for others we grow to become better, more virtuous people with the right guidance, traditions and education. Mencius argued that no one is completely devoid of compassion for others, and if someone sees a child at the edge of a well, that person would be moved to help the child, unless something terrible was blocking or redirecting the motives of that person.

Xunzi argued that Mencius was wrong, and that we do not start out with any compassion or goodness in us, but rather learn compassion by way of the example of others outside of us, as well as the order of the Cosmos. Both Mencius and Xunzi believe that they correctly understand Confucius’ teachings, and both of them argue we should grow by way of a good upbringing, examples, and environment. Many who have studied this debate between the second and third major Confucians have noted parallels between the positions of Mencius and Xunzi and the positions of the later European political philosophers Hobbes and Rousseau, as Hobbes argued much like Xunzi, and Rousseau much like Mencius.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he argues that the people agree to transfer their rights to a sovereign by social contract, and that this agreement justly allows the sovereign to do whatever is necessary to protect the people including use of brute force and deception. Note that this would make Hobbes much like Plato, who argued in the Republic that we can use a noble lie to rule others in a class system, and unlike Kant who argues that we should never lie for any purpose. Why does the sovereign get to do whatever they want as justice itself? Hobbes argued, much like Xunzi, that in the state of nature, when humanity is tribal and uncivilized, life is, “poor, nasty, brutish and short,” with nothing illegal and everyone fighting for themselves against all others, a “war of all versus all”. It is only when, fearing death, individuals agree to submit to a leader that we gain law, order and security. Hobbes argued that the examples of tribal Africans and Native Americans show us anarchy and savagery that plague humanity when we do not set a proper sovereign as authority above us.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) argued, much like Mencius, that human nature is good. Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau argued that tribal peoples such as Africans and Americans show us our original nature as the “noble savage,” who shares all in common with others. Where Hobbes saw tribal people as brutal savages, Rousseau saw them instead as noble. However, unlike Mencius, and much more like the Daoists of China, Rousseau argued that society is evil, and corrupts our original, noble human nature with social roles. Rousseau was influenced by Chinese thought, Confucianism, and Daoism, as well as Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and Greek thought. Like Nietzsche, Rousseau was particularly concerned with being on the side of individual liberty.  Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau argued that the state of nature was innocent and pure and that it was society that corrupted the purity of the individual.  This is more like Mencius than Xunzi, but both Confucians would praise society rather than see it as a source of corruption.  Rousseau was a major influence on the American as well as French revolutions, and while Nietzsche admired his romanticism, but disliked his politics, Rousseau was a major influence on later French thought, and on French Nietzscheans such as Sartre, Fanon and Baudrillard.

Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland which, like Machiavelli’s Florence, was governed as a democracy, with a minority of the male property owning class having voting power.  He wandered Italy and France for a time as a secretary and tutor to aristocrats.  In 1749 he saw an advertisement by the Academy of Dijon in a newspaper which asked for essay submissions in response to the question, “Has the rebirth of the sciences and arts contributed to the improvement or the corruption of manners?”.  Rousseau experienced an awakening, and decided that original human nature is innocent and pure and that society has brought about corruption and ignorance.

This was in complete disagreement with many of his contemporaries, including his close friend Diderot and Voltaire, who were passionate champions of the Enlightenment and science and believed that the human mind was being freed from primitive superstitions by the progress of society.  Diderot read Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and wrote to Rousseau, “never was so much intelligence used to make us stupid…while reading it, one longs to go on all fours”.  Rousseau argued that society would ultimately destroy all that was good about humanity. Society makes us artificial, corrupt, hypocritical and teaches us to wear masks, much like those worn to aristocratic parties at the time.  Nietzsche said that masks will inevitably grow on you and the others around you, and we must somehow learn to live with them.  When we study colonialism and racism, we will look at Fanon and his book Black Skin, White Masks, one of the first books to deal directly with racism and what it means for black individuals trying to fit into white society.

Rousseau argued that property and the excesses of luxury are evil and destructive to our natural being.  Rousseau believed that human individuals are equal in the state of nature, but argued that the social contract harms rather than enriches our original equality.  While Hobbes believed that the state of nature was brutal, Rousseau saw the state of nature as a peaceful and simple time.  Society came about through domination and inequality, not as a social agreement of equals.  Some came to have more than others, and the social contract legitimated these differences.  Thus, property is the root cause of social problems because it disrupts the natural equality of humanity.  Later Foucault, influenced by Rousseau, Nietzsche and Marx, argued that institutions use binary terms such as master/servant, civilized/savage, and sane/insane to maintain divisions of power and inequality through privilege and marginalization.

Rousseau argues that while we live in society and enjoy its conveniences, we must resist the urge to give up our freedom, our most basic human nature.  Because human nature is free and changeable, society can turn us into machines and slaves.  To resist this slavery, we must be able to overthrow unjust governments and break social contracts, as Confucius argued.  We must also have checks on the power of the sovereign and society such that society preserves the natural freedom of humanity and does not replace it with restrictions and repression.  Rousseau turns Hobbes’ sovereign on his head: Because the government is, in fact, the will and hand of the people, it must be subject to the participation of the people to be authentic.  The social contract is founded on mutual agreement, and so it must be maintained by mutual agreement.

Unfortunately this does not solve all of the problems of inequality in Rousseau’s thought.  Rousseau replaces the sovereign with the general will, which is indeed more democratic, but what about the individual or minority group that disagrees with the general will?  Both Hobbes and Rousseau argue that those who disagree must be made to agree or they are outside society.  Both argue that the individual must be subordinate to the collective for the good of everyone.  Rousseau argues that the expression of the general will is a check that overrides the individual or minority who disagree with the majority.  Rousseau does not precisely specify how the general will or government will refrain from dominating the dissenting individual. This is why Nietzsche, a staunch individualist, disliked Rousseau as he disliked Mill and Marx, as they would force the individual to conform to the collective, even as they liberate the collective from domination by the sovereign. Rousseau, unlike Marx, was afraid of revolutions because he saw them as domination of the powerless by the powerful and pointed out that they often have terrible consequences.  Nevertheless, his ideas were important for both the American and French revolutions.  Robespierre referred repeatedly to Rousseau while using the idea of general will to brutally eliminate his opposition during the aftermath of the French Revolution.

In The Social Contract, Rousseau begins famously by writing, “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains”.  He goes on to consider the birth of the social contract and how it can be, if balanced properly, an aid to freedom as much as a restriction on it.  He argues, like the Confucians, that the birth of society is in the family.  The major difference is that the father dominates the children but loves the children while the state dominates the individual but does not love the individual.  Thus, the father encourages the freedom and life of the children out of love while the later relation of the social-contract state does not necessarily encourage the freedom of the individual. If Hobbes is right, we are mere herds of cattle to be controlled by the state.  If Aristotle is right, some are born superior to others and they should control the subordinates.  Rousseau argues that society, like slavery, is not natural and came about by the force of the stronger.  If we obey society because of force, then there is no reason for duty.  He uses the example of a robber with a gun and argues that one is not bound by duty to tell the robber about hidden valuables.  If the sovereign/state is given power by protecting the people, why should the people stand with the state when it persecutes them or needlessly seeks war?

To renounce one’s liberty is to renounce one’s humanity.  Any social contract which makes one side the absolute authority and the other the absolutely obedient contradicts itself such that it is meaningless.  In so far as the master gives the slave no power, the slave has no duty to follow the master and follows the master merely by force.  If it is not unjust for the master to chain or kill the slave, then it is not unjust for the slave to escape or kill the master when they can grab the gun or the whip.  Rousseau mentions Balboa taking possession of the Pacific Ocean and South America from the natives for Spain.  Rousseau does believe that the minority is subject to the majority, but this is only justified when the state protects individual freedoms.  Otherwise, without such protections, there is no injustice when the minority refuses to participate in the state.

In The Creation of Inequality (2012), Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus argue that Rousseau was essentially right about the origins of inequality in society according to current Anthropology studies, and that this is surprising given that Rousseau could not have known about tribal peoples to the extent that anthropologists do today. We can build on what Rousseau knew using archives of information on ancient and recent human groups.  We know that humanity, as we physically and mentally exist today, has existed for at least a hundred thousand years, long before the Ice Age over fifteen thousand years ago.  By the end of the Ice Age, humanity had driven its closest competitors to extinction and spread to every continent on Earth.  Our ancestors lived in small hunter-gatherer societies that valued generosity, sharing and altruism, and discouraged emerging inequality.

Slowly, however, some tribes began to grow into larger societies with greater levels of social inequality between smaller groups within the larger group, and by 2500 BCE, around the time of Ptahhotep in Egypt, four and a half thousand years ago, every form of inequality known today had been created, and smaller, egalitarian tribes had been driven from the most desirable places where humanity thrived.  There were no monarchies at the end of the Ice Age, but several had arisen by Ptahhotep’s time, including in Egypt, in similar ways but in various locations.  Unfortunately, inequality rose along with innovation.  Tribal tools for hunting, gathering, digging, chopping, and all the essentials of life changed little or slowly for almost half a million years, tools used by early humanity as well as its competitors.  There is also little evidence that tribal people wore complex clothing or ornaments, nor that they developed art, music or cosmology before the end of the Ice Age.  All of that changed with larger and larger societies, before the development of agriculture, in the competition between clans, competing tribes within the tribe.

As the Ice Age receded, humanity began discovering new practices of foraging plants and hunting animals that included delayed-return strategies, burning fields and culling herds such that immediate gains were extended to greater returns in the future, not in the current season or year but in the next.  Eventually this developed into farming crops and raising livestock, and living in more permanent settlements rather than migrating continuously to new lands with untapped resources.  Techniques for drying, smoking, grinding, roasting and storing resources were developed, which allowed settlements on the Nile and other places to hoard months and then years of food.  Originally, everything would have to be eaten immediately, and so was shared with the tribe to increase social bonding and further survival.  Hoarding food, resources and wealth, impossible before, emerged as a new way of building power and clout.

Consider the Eskimo, also known as the Inuit, who lived in the harsh northern cold climates, and who perform songs and dances that mock greedy and stingy individuals who are reluctant to share everything with others.  We noted previously that these tribes do not get angry with children, but do actively lie to children using horrifying myths to bring them in line.  Many anthropologists have noted similar behaviors in other tribes who live in very different environments, such that those who cannot be corrected by mockery and humor are then excluded and given the silent treatment, or even abandoned when the tribe moves camp.  Violence exists, within the tribe and between tribes, but is not necessary and is discouraged in small groups struggling for continuous survival, as every member is helpful.

Skilled hunters are prized for their abilities, but hoarding and pride are discouraged in the interests of the whole.  When a seal is killed it is divided into parts, and while the hunter gets the best, prime piece, the other pieces are shared with other hunting partners, such that any hunter making a kill brings resources and survival to the group as a whole, using overlapping sharing networks that can spread out widely between interrelated tribes. The !Kung of Southern Africa mark the arrows they make so they can tell whose arrow made the kill, but hunters also trade arrows between themselves, such that the arrow-maker (or fletcher) gets the best piece from the kill, not the hunter who shot the arrow and got the kill. The !Kung also mock those who make impressive kills to keep them from being too proud, sometimes asking, “Do you think that bag of bones is worth dragging back to the camp?”, laughing with others as they do so. Heraclitus said, “Pride is the human disease,” and the !Kung and Eskimo would likely agree. Consider that both sides of the political isle, left and right, are defined largely in terms of who they think is cheating others and hoarding more for themselves, and humor, ancient and modern, usually aims at taking the proud down a peg.

Tribes have elders who are respected and who sometimes get to make important decisions, but elders do not have permanent positions of power or distinction over others in smaller egalitarian tribes, but rather have knowledge and wisdom of experience that is recognized as useful.  Gifts are exchanged between tribespeople, with elders getting a greater share who can no longer hunt or gather, but this is not passed down from parent to child, such that the child of a revered ancestor would still have to prove themselves worthy of respect as an individual.  In the Republic, Plato argued, like Confucius, that powerful fathers often have spoiled sons, and so power and authority should be earned, not handed down the hereditary line, as had become traditional in larger societies that had split into rival clans within.

In societies with rival clans, groups began competing for honor and position with other groups, and could claim superiority that outlived individuals.  An offense against an individual could easily become an offense against the group as a whole, leading to blood-feuds and long, protracted wars, such as the infamous decades-long dispute between the Hatfields and McCoys in West Virginia between 1863 and 1891.  However, in early clan rivalries, periods of fighting were often followed by periods of peace-making and gift exchanging to ensure greater survival before agriculture and more permanent settlements.  As humanity began settling down, and storing greater and greater resources, held by particular clans, larger and larger gifts and feasts were exchanged to ensure greater and greater clout and position along with peace.  Small tribes exchange gifts such as seal parts continuously, but gifts that are so large that they cannot be repaid in kind are discouraged.  Eventually, anthropologists tell us that some clans and clan-leaders were able to give gifts, hold feasts, and provide for others in large houses in ways that the receivers could not possibly pay back, resulting in servitude and class systems.

In California, where we both live and learn, there was a great diversity of hunter-gatherers, including small clanless tribes and larger societies that developed clans and lineages.  In the late 1700s, the Spanish at the Mission of Santa Barbara noted that the Chumash had several clan lineages, and that each village had several leaders, including a supreme leader who acted as head chief, a role which passed from father to son, pending clan approval.  Recall that Ptahhotep in Egypt was giving advice to his son when he wrote his Instructions, and likely hoped that his son would follow him in his own position of authority.  Among the Chumash, the sister or daughter of a chief could also be passed the position of authority.  Chumash chiefs wore special bearskin cape with a longer skirt covering their legs, unlike the rest of the tribe.  Chiefs owned long canoes, controlled hunting and gathering, as well as war and raids on rival tribes.  They also collected tribute from their followers.  All of this was prohibited in smaller, clanless tribes, and yet the position of authority of a chief was not absolute and unquestionable.  Rather, they commanded greater stores of resources that were very useful to others.   Chumash chiefs began cornering the market on beads which were exchanged with other tribes and used as money in trade.  This became so profitable that poorer members would accept servant positions in the houses of chiefs. Chiefs would often throw lavish feasts which no one could top, but they could not pass the gained status on to their children the way that hoarded wealth could.

Sartre & Existentialism

Jean Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980), pronounced, ‘Sart’, though the British pronounce it ‘Sar-truh’, was a philosopher, writer, activist and critic who is known as the founder of Existentialism, as well as the winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sartre is often known better as an author of novels and plays than as a philosopher in Britain and America.  This is in part political.  With Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in Russia, many European intellectuals had to choose whether to continue to be Marxists or to abandon Communism all together, often remaining socialists, but identifying as ‘post-Marxists’ who no longer have faith in the entirely planned economy of Communism.

Albert Camus (1913 – 1960), a friend of Sartre, author of The Strangerand The Rebel, chose to abandon Marxism, while Sartre decided to continue to identify with Marxism and Communism, continuing to believe that violent revolution was unfortunately necessary and in the interests of the common people.  Camus was often called an Existentialist, but he rejected the label and called himself an absurdist, like the Dada and Surrealist artists.  In his novel The Stranger, his most famous work, a man is put on trial for killing an Arab teenager who tried to stab him.  The judge and jury are not vindictive, as the Arab is a stranger to their culture, but then when it is revealed that the man never truly loved his mother, who was distant and cold to him, and that he did not really feel anything when she died, they turn against him and give him a harsh sentence, as he is now the stranger. 

Sartre saw his own philosophy as an extension of the work of Heidegger.  In response to Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre wrote his Being and Nothingness.  In it, he argues like Heidegger that the basic condition of humanity is anxiety, inauthentically interpreted as fear of particulars in the face of the indefinite unknown, and that much of the time we avoid this deeper fear by trying to keep what we like and avoid what we hate.  In the process, we become ignorant of ourselves, of the world, and of our relationships with our fellow human beings.  However, while Heidegger stressed our involvement and entanglement with the world, Sartre, following Kierkegaard, stressed our alienation and isolation in a world that offers no solid answers, leading many to consider Existentialism equivalent to nihilism.

Sartre, as a Heideggerian, argues that there is a consistent way that we inauthentically try to avoid the dynamic life of our relationships with others, both those with whom we are intimate (family, friends, partners) and those whom we pass on the street or encounter in a shop.  Sartre uses his famous example of the cafe waiter to illustrate.  Sartre did much of his writing in the cafes of Paris, and he describes the scene as if he is witnessing it firsthand.  The waiter in a cafe plays his role, over-emphasizing the rigidity and seriousness of the gestures, the bows, the distribution and collecting of menus, the seriousness with which orders are taken, to define himself as a waiter, filling his role.  We and he come to see him as a waiter and not as a human being.

The waiter becomes a robot, and his individuality disappears, both for our and his comfort.  We find it easier to interact with a role than with the actor as a person, and the actor finds it easier to lose themselves in the role than to try to retain individuality while serving in their position.  While it would be tiresome to say, “Excuse me, authentic human individual playing the temporary role of a waiter, can I have another espresso?”, our substitution of the word ‘waiter’ for the individual affects our awareness of the situation.

Sartre then applied this thinking to his anti-racist work Antisemitism and Jew in 1944, published just as, and not before, Paris was liberated from the Nazis.  Like Nietzsche, Sartre argues that racism, that which the Nazis had for Jews as well as that which the French had and have for Africans and Arabs, is a similar ignorant effort to box up the other rather than deal with the complexity of ourselves and our fellow human beings.  Camus, Sartre’s former friend, was white and French but raised in Algiers, North Africa, and witnessed this racism firsthand, which is why it is central to the Stranger.

In his play No Exit, Sartre’s main character famously says, “Hell is other people”.  We are constantly faced with others who do and do not know themselves as we do and do not know ourselves.  Like the horizon of time for Heidegger, the ‘Other’ threatens to give us new strange meaning while taking our meaning away.  To face this authentically is to have a good and positive faith in life and the creation of meaning.  To have what Sartre calls  “bad faith” is to trust that meanings are closed and dead, that the waiter is nothing more to oneself than a waiter, that the Jew, Arab or African is nothing more to oneself or one’s nation than simply ‘Other’ with no relation.

Sartre’s circle of fellow Existentialists included Simone De Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon.  De Beauvoir (1908 – 1986) was a novelist and philosopher who had a central impact on the second wave of feminism that rose in the 50s and 60s.  Some have argued that Sartre took many of his best ideas from discussions with her, presenting them as his own.  Today, the two are buried next to each other.  De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1949, arguing that women had been marginalized as the mysterious yet inferior Hegelian Other, and that, just like in marginalization of ethnic groups and the poor, women were cast as irrational and so their voices and problems went unheard and disregarded.  Famously arguing that one is not born a woman but becomes one, she argued as an Existentialist that women must recreate their identity, choosing themselves as individuals.

Colonialism & Postcolonialism

Before Europe rose and dominated the world by the mid-1700s, China and Islam were vast empires that developed technology, science, law and culture.  Islam was in fact the last great contiguous land empire, stretching from Spain to China.  Ironically, Chinese achievements such as ships, gunpowder and magnetic compasses, developed further by Muslims with algebra employed in such fields as cartography (mapping the world), enabled Europe to sail to Africa and the Americas, and to set up colonial empires that could be controlled in spite of separation by great distances.  America became the largest slave colony in all of history, and just as Britain ruled the sea less than a century ago America now rules the skies as well as corporate economics.  We can now dominate independent others.  Chomsky and Zinn are two critics of American empire and its brutality, as well as the fact that “the West” is still hailed as the authoritative voice, the voice of authority and objectivity above and beyond all other cultures.

Islamic civilization was the world’s largest civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture before Europe, and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of culture, technology and science.  In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant of Islamic achievements as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society.  There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth.  Here are some awesome Ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammad, the second source of Islam after the Koran:

Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.

It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.

A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.

The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.

Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over.  A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income.  Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society.  It would be centuries before Europe passed them.

1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians.  Thus there is no reason to celebrate the rationality or freedom of the West over and above the rest of human history.  Postcolonialism is a movement in scholarship that argues the effects of colonialism persist in spite of decolonization.  As Fanon and Said argue, the West and the white is privileged and pronounced the true humanity which knows itself while all others are marginalized and denounced as savage and ignorant.

Fanon & Dual Consciousness

Franz Fanon (1925 – 1961) was a philosopher, existentialist, Freudian and Marxist who began his career in psychiatry and became a revolutionary whose writings are one of the central sources of the Postcolonial school of thought along with Edward Said.  Fanon’s two most famous works are the Wretched of the Earth (or Damned of the Earth, as an alternative translation of the French title) and Black Skin, White Masks.  His writings have been an inspiration to many anti-racist and anti-establishment groups including the Black Panthers and Black Consciousness movements.  Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony as it remains today similar to US control of Puerto Rico.  Though middle class, he witnessed the racist brutality of the French military toward the African population who were descended from slaves brought by the French to Martinique to work on plantations, as Africans had been brought to Haiti by the French and to Jamaica by the British.  Nevertheless, Fanon joined the French military fighting Germany and Italy in Algeria.  When Germany was defeated, the white soldiers were featured in parades while the black soldiers were removed from sight.

Because Fanon was a Marxist, Freudian, Lacanian psychiatrist, it is useful to mention a few thinkers from Marx and Nietzsche onward that Fanon developed into his anti-racist and anti-colonialist philosophy.  Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) and Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) the founders of Marxism and Psychoanalysis, both still huge influences in French thought, argue that individual life is largely determined by underlying forces and systems.  Marx argued that history is the process of class conflict, of the dialectic between the rich owners and the poor laborers.  Society is largely concerned with protecting the property of the owners and maintaining it through control of the laborers by the middle class.  Freud argued that behavior is the process of subconscious conflict, of the dialectic between satisfaction and repression.  The ego, or self, is the result of the conflict between the id, which seeks gratification, and the superego, which seeks to put the id in check and delay gratification.

Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981) studied Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger while studying medicine to be a Freudian psychiatrist in the 1920s.  His thesis, Paranoid Psychosis and its Relations to the Personality, was an influence on many Surrealists, such as Dali and Breton, both personal friends of Lacan.  He was also a contributor to Surrealist journals and Picasso’s personal physician.  Lacan is most famous for his theory of the mirror stage, when as toddlers we form a stable image and conception of ourselves by looking at others and our own reflection, then cling to it in the attempt to resolve the flux and contradictions of our thoughts and feelings, and then repress or redirect whatever does not conform to this image.

Lacan’s work centers on narcissism, not merely self-love, as it is often described, but self-obsession.  After the young child forms an image of self and begins to cling to it, the child forms narcissistic complexes, forms of excluding self from other that attempt to establish stability in an inevitably insecure situation.  The ego is an “inauthentic agency”, concealing its own unstable lack of unity.  Freud had wondered why narcissism develops early in children but is not present from the beginning, and Lacan believed he had solved this problem with his mirror stage and the formation of self-image.

Narcissism fragments the world in attempting to cling to a coherent self, and anxiety becomes paranoia.  Disunity and contradiction are projected onto the world and others, away from the self and social selves with which the self identifies.  The self establishes its place relative to others as “the Real“, not the whole of reality, but merely a preferred image which is insecure, just like the self-image situated in the Real.  To use the Nazis as an example, we could suppose that an SS officer is insecure in his ever-changing individual identity, and so he chooses to subscribe to Nazi ideology and racism in an attempt to secure his own self and its place in the world.  Lacan believed that making this situation transparent to the self is therapeutic, dissolving paranoid narcissistic delusions and obsessions that entrap the static images of self, other and Real, which Heidegger said of thinking.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961 CE) who recognized Fanon as his student and brought him into Sartre’s existential circle, argued that the body is the neglected site of our subjective human experience, the body-subject, rather than locate experience purely in the mind, even as all phenomena are known to us through our bodily senses, particularly vision, sound and touch.  We commune with our senses, and through our senses with others.  Our subjectivity is corporeal, as our world is framed by our body.  Our world, and the things that inhabit it, are open ended.  The world does not have definite boundaries, nor is there a closed set of things.  This does not make the world or the things in it meaningless, but it does leave their meanings open-ended, as Nietzsche, Lacan and Sartre say about our social selves.

After fighting in WWII and seeing the white-washing of victory parades firsthand, Fanon went to France and studied psychology and medicine, attending lectures by Merleau-Ponty.  Later, he ran a hospital in Algiers, applied experimental methods in anti-racist psychiatry, and supported the Algerian rebels against French colonialism.  Eventually this was discovered, Fanon was sent back to France and the entire hospital was dismantled.  In Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, which was published in 1961 just before his death, Fanon argued that colonialism taught oppressed people to interiorize racism such that they considered themselves bad and ugly and thus became self-destructive and violent against their fellow oppressed people.  The black body and mind is devalued to affirm and celebrate the West, white culture and achievements including colonial control of the globe.  This creates a destructive form of dual consciousness, in which the marginalized cast themselves against the dominant in their minds and social lives.

While Marx argues that class is the central struggle, the rich oppressing the poor and the poor rising up in revolution, Fanon argues that racial inequality is the key to class oppression.  Rather than merely “celebrate diversity”, all the while supporting the idea that Western culture is rational and other cultures are less rational, we must accept not only the rationality of all people but our own irrationality as human beings.  Thus, we accept the rationality and irrationality of white, black and all people, getting beyond the Manichean categorical dualistic thinking that separates both black from white and rational from irrational.  However, going beyond the simple universal humanism of Sartre, Fanon argued that black culture asserting itself as an “other” to white culture is valuable in the struggle, so we should celebrate black culture as an independent and separate voice while celebrating human equality and unity.  Rather than impose capitalism or communism, we should allow economies and nations to develop individually and see what works for each local group.

Fanon argued that in some cases, such as the American Revolution, the Algerian Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, violence can be an appropriate means for resistance to oppression and brutality.  Fanon remained a revolutionary for the rest of his life, writing on tactics and support structures to aid African rebels and third world people attempting to gain independence from European colonial powers.  For this, there were numerous assassination attempts made on his life.  It is rumored that the CIA prevented Fanon from receiving treatment for leukemia just before his death in America.  In 1965, four years after Fanon’s death, Time Magazine wrote that he was “an apostle of violence” and “a prisoner of hate” after the assassination of Malcolm X.  Fanon likely would have replied, “You and I both, Time Magazine”.

Said & Orientalism

Edward Said (1935 – 2003), one of the central sources of Postcolonialism like Fanon, was a Palestinian American and professor at Columbia University who grew up Palestinian Christian during the founding of Israel and the wars that followed.  Like Chomsky, he first got tenure in another subject (Comparative Literature) before he became a famous cultural critic and hip within left leaning academia like Marcuse and Foucault.  He is most famous for his book Orientalism (1978), which argues that “the Occident” an old term that has been replaced since the 1950s by “the West”, views “the Orient” as other through a Manichean lens much like Fanon describes that Said labels “Orientalism”.

European people, including European scholars, identify reason and freedom with the West, as Western virtues, while marginalizing other large cultural groups such as African, Chinese, Indian and Islamic as ignorant, authoritarian, emotional, and unselfconscious.  Said is particularly focused on Eurocentric prejudice against Islamic cultures and populations, criticizing the romantic portrayal of the wonders of the East by Renaissance painters as well as modern day scholarship.  The East, the Orient, is presented as an alien place full of wondrous splendor but also authoritarian despots and pre-scientific irrationality.

Today, we see much of the same in pundits labeling Muslims as a violent and unreasonable people.  George W. Bush saying “They hate our freedom” rather than looking to economic oppression originally structured through colonialism and still alive in spite of decolonization is a perfect example.  Rather than understand September 11th as a result of colonialism, it is presented as a “clash of civilizations” between the reasonable and free West and the ignorant and authoritarian Islamic Middle East.  Asia and China, as Russia was, is seen in a similar light.  Russia was the East, vs. America and Britain as the West openly in the rhetoric.

My professor Ken Jowitt, a specialist in Eastern Europe during and after the fall of the Soviet Union, told a full auditorium, his political science classroom, that after the fall of the Soviet Union America needed a new enemy, and that it was either going to be Islamic terrorism or communist China.  This was less than a year before September 11th.  He had argued this since 1990 in a piece included in his book, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, published in Berkeley.  This was 10 years before September 11th, and we are still involved in multiple wars in the Middle East 10 years after.  You can watch Said speak on YouTube:

What can we do about racism?  While few of us may be capable of rearranging the features of global politics, we can each take steps in our own lives to understand, identify and think beyond racist categorizations of human individuals. The interactions we have with others create categories and frames in our heads that mislead us into thinking that certain types of people are smart or unkind and mislead us into treating them as separate types of people.

Neuroscientists have shown that within milliseconds we identify others by ethnicity, gender and age, before we have a chance to think or speak.  This can negatively frame our thinking, communication, and interactions.  We naturally show frustration and negative emotions when we consider someone a threat, and this reinforces these reactions in ourselves and in others, including children, whether or not we’re aware of it.  Psychologists have shown that we are all somewhat racist, the privileged and disadvantaged, some of us more so, and some less so.  We are all imprinted with negative attitudes towards others who share our common culture, even if we actively ignore it in ourselves or live where racism is far more covert than overt, more thought to oneself than spoken out loud.

In our diverse society, it is mentally and physically healthier to talk about our problems rather than ignore them and to discourage the idea that we are on opposing teams.  When we focus on not making mistakes, this has a negative impact on our thinking and the perceptions of others, but when we focus on having a positive and open interaction, this is good for thinking and communication.  Positivity helps us see each other as individuals and not as categories.  Understanding that our thinking and personalities are not fixed, but can be enriched and developed, helps us to identify with each other and thrive.

Confucius said that if you put yourself with any two people at random, you can take their strengths as a model to follow and their faults as a warning.  This is wise advice, as we all share similar strengths and faults.  Intelligence and compassion are human virtues.  Ignorance and brutality are human problems.  We can see these are valued and useful yet difficult to develop in all human cultures, ancient and modern.  Just as genetics shows we are actually one race with a variety of interrelated ethnicities, we share one culture with many cross-pollinating branches of subculture.  We can draw on excellent and terrible examples from all of humanity to become better people.  While this may seem obvious, it is easily forgotten.

bell hooks, Feminism & Womanism

In apes and the most ancient nomadic and tribal societies, there is evidence that women often had status and leadership positions.  Women were shamans, leaders, and there were often central female mother gods.  As people began to collect into city states, we can see patriarchy increase.  Why did this happen?  The best explanation so far, one that does not rely on any inability of women, is the increased size of the community.  When people lived in small communities, women could raise children at the center of the village, as the political center.  As city states increased in size, it made it increasingly difficult to raise one’s children at the public center.  Thus, women retreated into the home, and men, who had to be the go-for before now were the ones who could venture out of the home and into the centers of political activity.  Today, devices allow women and men to raise children while fully participating in public life, but women are still more confined to the home in balancing life between home and career.

When we look at the cultures of the world and their historical development, we can see that all cultures have taken part in a similar oppression of women, but at the same time women have had increasing power in society and new cultural movements have to appeal to women to be successful.  Consider that Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, the three largest cultures so far, all had to offer women better status and rights than they had previously. However, all three often confined women to teaching and leading children, but not adult men, which is why Buddhist as well as Catholic nuns are often employed as school teachers. Modern society has continued the trend, such that today women have equal legal status in many nations but covert sexism and a lack of women owning the property persists.  A United Nations 2004 report claims that women work 20% more a day on job and home together than men do (10 ½ hours to men 8 ¾ hours).  Worldwide, women are 51% of the population (technically the MAJORITY of the population), do 66% of the work, get 10% of the income, and own 1% of the property.  Thus sexism, overt and covert, is quite alive in spite of counter claims.

Feminism is the movement in reaction to sexism and prejudice against women.  The basic idea is that women should have the same status as men in society, or “women are people too”.  At my high school assembly years ago, the student who served as the head of the NOW chapter for the school asked the assembly ‘Who thinks women are equal to men?”, and when most everyone raised their hands, she replied, “Then you are all feminists!”, which impressed me much.  It is a shame that people, men but also women, are afraid of calling themselves feminists, largely from the backlash of the 80s between the second wave and third wave of feminism which said that militant feminists simply hate men and that feminism is more about anger and revenge than it is about love and equality.

Historically, many consider Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to be the first major feminist work, arguing that women and men should have equal rights, and that women are not rationally inferior to men, but appear so because they were not educated to the degree that men were.  Two years before (1790), Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797) had written Vindication of the Rights of Men, a justification of the French Revolution and progressive values such as equality that were being attacked by conservatives and traditionalists.  In writing the influential work, arguing that doing away with nobles and slavery benefits society as a whole, she began to conceive of her second Vindication, a work centered on progress towards women’s equality.

Like bell hooks would much later, in the 1980s, Wollstonecraft argued that improving the lives of women such that they are regarded as equals will make them better wives, better mothers, and benefit everyone socially.  Women are perceived, genuinely or falsely, to be superficial only because they are denied equal education.  Women are taught that it is beauty, not intelligence, that counts, and so many are left no option other than “to adorn its prison”.  Because women are the early educators of both daughters and sons, they should be educated such that they can be better educators and parents.  Both boys and girls should be given the same public education to help society progress as a whole.

In America there were three waves of feminism, each building on and addressing new issues from the previous wave.  The first wave was the women’s suffrage movement of the early 1900s in America and Britain.  The most famous figure is Susan B. Anthony.  She argued that the abortion issue should be set aside to concentrate on women’s right to vote as an adult citizen and women’s right to refuse sex to their husbands.  Note that Mohammed said this over a thousand years ago, recorded in the Ahadith in 600 CE, and yet there are still problems today in Islamic culture as well as our own.  The first wave, not of course known as that till the second wave, culminated in 1919 with 19th amendment to the US Constitution.

The second wave was the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s and early 70s which is also called the Women’s Liberation Movement or Women’s Lib.  Defined by Carol Hanisch’s phrase “The personal is political”, it took off in early 60s and culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1966, backed by both NOW and the NAACP, the biggest American anti-sexism and anti-racism groups working together.  While the first wave said ‘this is America so we deserve to vote’, the second wave was part of anti-establishment left movement that said that America was a corrupted institution that needed to be changed. Simone De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1953, arguing that women had been marginalized as ‘The OTHER’ by men using Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic (my German Hegel professor ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ speaking of feminists using Hegel).  The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan was another major feminist work of the time, much more published in America than Marxist De Beauvoir’s, arguing that women were not feeling fulfilled as homemakers and mothers and they needed an identity for themselves as individuals beyond the identity of the family.  Women who went to psychologists

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks (1952 – present) (yes, spelled lower case on purpose) is a feminist and social philosopher who argues that class, gender and race are complexly connected.  Critical of second wave 60s feminism focusing on sexism to the neglect of racism and the gap between the rich and the poor, she labeled herself a womanist (not in spell check, but now added to my dictionary) and argued much like Foucault did with Chomsky that power, even resistance movements, reinscribes itself and thus feminism can itself be a marginalizing force.  This is also similar to Judith Butler, who views culture and feminism as a complex and not as a simple struggle between the forces of good and evil.  While feminism made gains in the 60s and continues to do so today, bell hooks was critical of the movement as it was populated mostly by white college women who are upper and middle class, live in first world countries such as the US and UK, and disconnected from the lives of many women who are impoverished, are unable to attend college or a good career, and who are overwhelmingly of European descent.

One of the most frequently cited sources of the third wave of feminism, bell hooks argues that feminism is for everyone, not just middle and upper class college girls and career minded women.  Growing up first in segregated schools and then in predominantly white schools, she saw firsthand that progressives and educators can support prejudice while fighting for change.  She studied at UC Santa Cruz and began teaching in 1976 at USC, then later at Santa Cruz, Yale and SF State.  She first wrote poetry under her grandmother’s name, Bell Hooks, later keeping the name as she wrote essays and books.  One of her early and most famous books is Ain’t I A Woman?  Black Women and Feminism (1981), which examines the dual marginalization of black women in a patriarchal and racist society.  The title is inspired by Sojourner Truth, a black abolitionist and feminist living in the late 1800s whose speech Ain’t I a Woman is a celebrated work of women’s rights.  She is critical of black men’s sexism towards black women, the marginalization of the poor by the powerful, and white racism and white supremacism in culture and media.

Like Foucault she is suspicious of any side that calls itself the true and the objective, including feminist and black consciousness movements.  For this, many call her, as they do Foucault and Butler, a post-modernist, a skeptic of conceptions of absolute truth and a believer in perspectivism and historicism, that truth is always in a particular perspective situated in a particular time and place.  A movement such as feminism must thus be continuously critical of itself and understand itself as a diverse group of various strategies and perspectives.  She argues that schools can operate as mind control centers that breed conformity and complacency with injustice such as institutional racism and sexism, but they should operate as open spaces where individuals are invited to question their culture, assumptions and ideas.