The Incredible Burden of White Guilt

Every human being who has ever lived (except, Christians claim, Jesus) has sinned. We all know this is true, even though we cannot easily define sin. Every culture group, race, and country consists of people all of whom have sinned, many of them in a spectacularly evil fashion. There is no group from which we cannot find a long list of atrocities, from prehistory to the present.

But whites have committed atrocities way out of proportion to their numerical importance in human history, and in human culture today. The example I will examine now is slavery. Every cultural group has had slaves, primarily from among captives from other social groups. But whites have had more slaves, treated them worse, and continue to honor the tradition of slavery, more than any other group.

Take, for example, black slavery in the southern colonies, later the southern states. (These thoughts have been inspired by reading Geraldine Brooks’s novel Horse.) The main reason that southern whites started buying black slaves was that they had killed most of the Native American slaves. Native slaves were cheaper, but they were mostly dead by about the year 1600. So the whites bought slaves from Africa who were captured from their tribes and transported as cheaply as possible (tied up in their own filth in slave ships) to the South. The shrewd slave traders took into their calculations that many of their captives would die while on board.

The Southerners treated their slaves much more cruelly than was necessary or even profitable. The slaveowner men would force not just work but also sex on their slaves. I remember an exhibit of slave artifacts in a museum in Tulsa (which is the reddest red state, but museums everywhere tend to be progressive) that showed a bill of sale for slaves. A 45-year-old man went for about $50, while a seventeen-year-old girl went for $600. What did the girl have that made her twelve times as valuable? Sexuality, that’s what. Not only was it legal rape, but it was the way that plantation owners could keep up their slave populations without having to import more of them, which was theoretically illegal after 1808.

The owners would force the slaves to do whatever they chose, regardless of the strengths and talents of the slaves. In Brooks’s novel, a very skillful slave horse trainer was forced to work in the fields while inept white trainers allowed a champion racehorse to be injured. If slaves were an investment, southern white enjoyed abusing their investments in a stupid fashion. Few slave owners would permit slaves to learn to read and write; illiterate whites would look down upon even the free blacks who could read.

Not only that, but the white slave owners would take credit for any innovations or improvements in land and property that the slaves came up with.

In some cases, southern whites were nearly crazy with their lust for cruelty. A prime example was the Confederate terrorist William Quantrill, who exulted in cruelty not only against blacks but against any whites he suspected of not being racist enough. He is one of the characters in Brooks’s novel.

Whites would find or create opportunities to insult and injure even free blacks, that is, the few that were allowed to purchase their freedom. Any black person could be arrested and detained until their status as a free black could be established. This may sound uncomfortably like ICE detaining anyone they suspect of being in America illegally, but at least ICE once in a while allows claims of legitimate presence in America to be investigated.

Slaves were considered property of their white owners, but they treated their slaves worse than they would have treated any of their other property, whether mules or saddles. In some cases, they enjoyed torturing their slaves.

White racists try to use the imperfection of blacks as an excuse for past slavery and ongoing cruelty. A vendor of Confederate flags, at a roadside market in Oklahoma, told me that it was the blacks who began enslaving other blacks, that’s how the slave trade got started. But who was the market? When I told him that what he was doing was offensive, he called the sheriff, but I got away before being arrested. No, this was not back in the 1960s. This was about 2015.

I am Cherokee. Some of my ancestors owned slaves. But our collective Native guilt is far less than that of southern whites.

What about northern whites in America? Some northern whites, and some Europeans, profited from black slavery, but the entire southern American culture was based upon it.

I did not contribute to any of this. I am not responsible for the sins of my ancestors. But part of my white privilege has resulted from the oppressions of the past. Maybe nothing can be done about it now, but when I look a person of color in the eye I feel a level of guilt that goes beyond the calculus of legal liability. I cannot simply pretend that it is not there.

White guilt is a heavy burden, but the only people who feel it are those who, like myself, are trying very hard to live in a redemptive fashion and contribute to a fair and just society. I love people of color (with a few individual exceptions) even if they do not, and cannot, know it. In contrast, racists do not feel any guilt.

The burden of white guilt continues today. In Brooks’s novel, the twenty-first-century black protagonist gets shot by police who assumed, at a glance, that he was a criminal. His white friend was very upset by this, but his black friends said he should have expected it. If a black man sees police, he should just assume that he is likely to be shot. I hate to admit that this is true.

The black protagonist from the nineteenth century in Brooks’s novel chose to live in Canada, and explained why: even after emancipation, he could feel white hatred all around him.

I live in France. I am embarrassed to be an American right now, with unabashed racists in charge of the country of which I am a citizen. I am always instantly ready with an apology on behalf of my country. What can I say to the Lebanese woman in my French language class, whose cousin was just killed by an Israeli, or American, bomb? I can see in her eyes that she does not blame me, but I have to go further and assure her of my sympathy, and that I do not support Trump’s war, nor was I or American citizens in general consulted before He chose to start it as if He is God who can decide everyone’s fate.

The Teachable Moment: A Feather

When I retired from college science teaching, I thought I would continue teaching in an informal capacity. I have continued to write books and blog essays (you are reading one). I also have two grandchildren who are at the discover-the-wonder-of-the-world stage of childhood. I thought that I would impart to them fragments of my vast knowledge about the world.

Of course that is not exactly how it worked. They (ages 7 and 5) have a nearly unlimited capacity to ignore whatever anyone is saying to them, even mid-sentence. What I had to do instead was to wait for a teachable moment, when they showed spontaneous interest in something, or could be led into it.

They were playing with their nature treasure boxes, which included pigeon feathers. (Pigeons make up most of the bird biomass of Alsace.) These particular feathers were fine and delicate. I said I had a story about feathers that my mother (their great-grandmother) told me. Lena immediately said that people used to dip quills in ink to write. But, I said, they had pens by the time my mother was a little girl. Instead, I told them about how my grandfather, their great-great-grandfather, used a turkey feather to put medicine on my Mom’s face. This is not what they were expecting.

My mother, as a little girl, got into the natural world in Oklahoma by brushing poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) against her face. Of course, her face swelled up dangerously. Her father went to town in his wagon (other people had cars, but not him) to get medicine, which was probably some ointment with mercury or something in it. He used a turkey feather to gently apply it to my mother’s face. It was important to not break the skin, which would leave a scar, and also allow bacteria to infect the skin. The in my granddaughter’s box opened up a discussion of infection.

And of allergies. Poison ivy is not poison. Urushiol, found also in poison oak (T. diversilobum) and poison sumac (T. vernix) is not poisonous. It just provokes a massive allergic reaction in most people. But not in everyone. Some people do not react to urushiol at all. One of the main characteristics of allergies is that they differ from one person to the next. I told them the story of the girl with a peanut allergy who died after her boyfriend ate a candy bar and kissed her. (I heard this on the news, but have been unable to trace a source for it.) Most of us do not have peanut allergies. But Lena knew a distant cousin, on the French side of the family, who did.

Urushiol does not cause allergic reactions in all mammals. Deer eat the leaves, and squirrels eat the berries. Horses can eat the leaves. The urushiol comes out in their sweat and you can get it on your legs from riding the horse. I do not know if dogs and cats can get poison ivy, since they are primarily carnivores; but if your dog runs around in poison ivy and then runs up to you, beware of giving the dog a hug.

But it was not just science education; it was also cultural education. An Asian species, T. vernicifluum, produces sap that is used in the production of Chinese and Japanese lacquerware.

All this biology education, just from a feather in my granddaughter’s nature box. She showed genuine interest and surprise. I could easily have missed this teachable moment, had I not been watching for it.

Connections? Real and Imagined

James Burke’s Connections  and its many spinoffs were very popular on British television and American educational channels a couple of decades ago. They were certainly entertaining and thought-provoking in the way they drew connections between events of past centuries and things that have happened in the modern world. The implication is of cause and effect. But is this an illusion?

 

To quote Wikipedia: “Connections explores an “Alternative View of Change” (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g., profit, curiosity, religion) with no concept of the final, modern result to which the actions of either them or their contemporaries would lead. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.”

To this point, Burke’s view can hardly be questioned. One cannot presume or even imagine that people in past centuries could predict the consequences of their discoveries.

Wikipedia continues, “To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past and traces the path from that event through a series of seemingly unrelated connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world.”

To me, the key point is seemingly unconnected. Many of the purported connections are not real—not just that there is no direct, but not even any indirect, connection. The purported connections were most likely neither functional nor phylogenetic. That is, they were not processes that worked the same way, nor was one descended from the other the way amphibians were the descendants of fish. It may just be a similarity of form that Burke noticed, and nobody else could see until Burke, with his inimitable style, reified them. I had the intuition, when I watched the series (which my intelligent daughter loved), that it was all imaginary. And perhaps, I now realize, I might have been right.

Burke’s contribution was in getting his viewers excited and to use their imaginations; to ask, “I wonder if…” But this is not the end of investigation; it is merely the beginning. Not less important for it, of course.

Sexual Selection and Music: Nannerl's Story

 

Something to think about (music and sex) as spring arrives.

Back when I was taking music courses as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone was wondering why the great musicians were male. Not all of them, of course; two female composers, Thea Musgrave and Emma Lou Diemer, were on our faculty. Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, was an example from the nineteenth century. More recently, there was Dawn Upshaw. But this list is very short, compared to the list of famous male composers.

It is easy to attribute this solely to male oppression of females. Male domination in music is just another example of male domination of society in general.

But there is another factor at work. Males often show off to other males, and to potential female mates, in the hopes of increasing their mating opportunities, within or outside of a pair-bond, in humans as in many other animal species. While this often takes destructive forms, such as war and abuse, it can also take creative forms, especially in big-brained humans. Artistic or intellectual creativity is often a way in which males can show off. We all know of the spectacular paintings on European cave walls. But those same caves echoed the music of bone flutes and drums by which musicians (perhaps mostly male) enthralled their congregations.

This happens more often males than females because evolutionary fitness in males often results largely from the number of mates, while this is not true so much in females. For a man, reproduction can consist of a single sex act, while for a woman the whole process of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children may be her burden alone. Thankfully, there are many of us men who are nurturing and faithful rather than rapacious. But a male can have hundreds of offspring (or thousands, for Genghis Khan) while no woman can have that many. The inevitable result of sexual competition is that some men have lots of offspring, while most of the others compete with one another for whatever women are left.

Women also compete with one another to have the best males as the fathers of their children. Also, women need to have musical ability in order to recognize it in men. Alma Schindler, herself only a passable musician, nevertheless recognized the genius of Gustav Mahler and maneuvered herself into being his wife. Nevertheless, sexual competition is stronger in men than in women.

Sexual selection must have chosen whatever genetic basis there is for musical ability, in men more than in women. But that genetic basis cannot be found only in men. Men have a Y chromosome, which is largely a lump of useless DNA. The genetic basis of musical proficiency must be found on either the X chromosome or the non-sexual chromosomes, and this means that it shows up perhaps just as frequently in girls as in boys. In the absence of ongoing sexual election, musical ability, even if it began as a male characteristic, would soon equalize itself between the sexes.

And this is why even spectacular musical ability shows up in females even if it started in males thousands of years ago.

Everyone has heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was clearly a musical genius. But did you know he had a sister who was perhaps just as gifted as he was? She was a superb keyboardist, and her father Leopold took her on concert tours throughout Europe at the same time as he took young Wolfgang. Audiences were perhaps even more impressed with the beautiful Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl) than with her little brother who could do musical tricks. But her father convinced her that her only chance for success was as a performer and teacher, and as a wife. While she continued teaching and performing until her own death, decades later than Wolfgang’s, none of her compositions survive. One movie I saw (of several that have been made) showed her, at about fifteen years old, sadly burning her compositions in the family fireplace. It turns out Wolfgang was a genius; but perhaps Nannerl was also. We will never know.

 

 

Natural and sexual selection, drivers of human evolution, are not destiny. The adaptations they provide must be continually maintained by culture, as I explained above. As culture evolves, the forces of selection can change. Thankfully they are already doing so. When I was in high school, most brass players in school bands were boys, except the very competent Linda. The girls chose flute and clarinet. When I was in California State Honor Band in 1974, I was the last chair baritone horn player. The first chair player (in the concert band) was a black girl. She was really good. I admired her for her pioneering spirit on her instrument and for the way she represented her ethnicity. This was an important part of my development, coming as I did from a racist family.

There are forces that try to suppress opportunities for women. A few years ago, there was a scandal among the Southern Baptists because male leaders often seduced females without serious punishment. The church’s response? There were a few women in positions of Southern Baptist leadership. The church removed them and forbade women to be in such positions at all.

But even religion cannot completely hide female talent. Probably every church choir director has heard of composer Natalie Sleeth. Things look pretty grim for women in conservative religion, but I suspect things will never get as bad as a Margaret Atwood novel.

Department of War

Most of us have grown up hearing about DOD (Department of Defense), and this is still how it is universally known. However, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has decided to rename it the Department of War, and that is how you will find it on the official federal website (www.war.gov). The index of departments and agencies still lists it as Defense, but its leaders consider it the Department of War.

 

 

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this change, to America, and in the eyes of the world.

Consider how one would evaluate the effectiveness of a federal agency. If it is the Department of Defense, the question we need to answer is, Is America being adequately defended? I am not including those tasks that have been assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. Since most Americans do not live in fear of foreign aggression, we could conclude that DOD is doing its job and the Secretary of Defense is doing his.

But if we call it Department of War, then this department has to be fighting a war somewhere, or else it is not doing its job. If America is not fighting a war, then the War Department is effectively inoperative. This is why Pete Hegseth believes that, at any given time, America must be fighting at least one war. Otherwise, Hegseth is not doing his job.

People often ask if there is an Iran exit strategy. If not, what is it that we are trying to accomplish? But that is not the right question. We need to have at least one war, and from this war we must not have an exit strategy. We must be permanently at war.

This is what our supposed allies think when they see us. We are a nation that must be permanently at war. And we must find someone to conduct war against. Right now it is Iran. Who will it be next? Will it still be Iran five years from now? Or will we find another target? But we must have one or more targets or else we, as a nation, are failures.

That, at least, must be the view of Trump and Hegseth.

The Evolution of Weirdness

Weirdness cannot be defined, but whatever it is, it evolved, which means it provided an evolutionary advantage at many times during human evolution.

One reason it cannot be defined is that what one culture, in space or time, considers weird, another culture may not. One example is psychopaths. In most cultures, most people dislike psychopaths. They are very, very smart, and almost always use their intelligence and their charisma to advance their own interests. We tend to think of the psychopathic mass murderers and other criminals, but many psychopaths (who constitute about one percent of the population) pass as ordinary people and may be surprised by their own (often genetically-based) diagnosis. A lot of politicians and preachers are psychopaths, who cultivate the goodwill of others for their own financial or sexual benefits. And they also like to shame you for suspecting that they are committing acts of evil. It takes highly-developed social intelligence to recognize a psychopath. See the book by Kevin Dutton: The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success. New York: FSG, 2012.

The success of psychopaths depends on the social situation. Adolf Hitler was a psychopath, and he got millions of people to follow him. After Germany lost World War Two, many Germans felt mentally liberated, and wondered, What were we thinking, to follow this jerk? Germany was not a nation of psychopaths, but maybe the Nazis were a party of psychopaths.

But there are many other ways of being weird. Most of us are a little weird in a few ways. But I mean clinical weirdness. One example is Williams Syndrome [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome]. People with Williams Syndrome have distinctive facial characteristics, and medical problems such as heart conditions. They have diminished intelligence, overall. They are extremely talkative, and effusively express their emotions. They are almost always cheerful. I have never knowingly met one but I get the impression that it would be really hard to not like them.

One word you would not associate with Williams Syndrome is suspicious. In order to become socially powerful, within your society, you have to be suspicious of the motives of other people in your society, and certainly of people in other societies. People with Williams Syndrome will walk right up to you and trust you. This is socially awkward. But openness and the willingness to trust is an essential component of altruism, of social bonding. It’s just that these people have too much of a good thing.

Another reason weirdness cannot be defined is that each kind of weirdness has its own social and genetic basis. Williams Syndrome is associated with a specific genetic deletion that affects a specific part of the brain. There is no set of terms in any language that exactly matches the symptoms of this deletion. And, in fact, characteristics resulting from mutations can be highly modified by upbringing and social circumstances. I am thinking of a person who acts as if she has Williams Syndrome, but who looks normal, and is brilliant.

Throughout human evolution, behavior patterns have sometimes been useful and sometimes not. Since each behavior has a different set of causes, human behavior has proven to be immensely variable. This has happened not because natural selection has done a bad job on human behavior, but because both the source and the target of human behavior is constantly shifting.

 

We can be glad we have empathy and altruism in the human species. And maybe Williams Syndrome is the price we pay for it.

 

Next, I will write about the evolution of nerds. Or not. Maybe I am a bit too close to the subject to be objective.

Floaters: An American Health Care Horror Story

Actually, it is not a horror story, but a story of dysfunction. It is one more reason why American health care is so expensive.

Ocular floaters are caused by clumps of collagen that form in the vitreous humor of the eyes. They cast shadows on the retina. This usually happens in older people, but I had a lot of floaters when I was a kid. I looked up into the clear California skies and wondered what those gelatinous blobs were. I spent most of my life ignoring them.

But since they become more common with age, they began to bother me. When I retired and started Medicare, I decided to do something about them. A local ophthalmology office advertised that they could eliminate floaters from your eyes. So I decided to do it. Laser was used to disperse the clumps of collagen.

It took five sessions. I do not recall paying anything for them, but Medicare paid a lot, I am sure, though of course I never saw these bills.

To begin with, five sessions were not necessary.

• In the first session, my eyes were examined by the ophthalmologist who advertised that he could treat floaters. But after he examined my eyes, he said that it was actually another ophthalmologist at his clinic who did it. Nobody told me this when I made the appointment.
• In the second session, another ophthalmologist looked for floaters and found them.
• In the third session, all I did was sign up for the use of the laser machine.
• In the fourth session, the ophthalmologist shot lasers at the floaters as he yelped like a cowboy on a bronco. (This was in Oklahoma.) In the few weeks afterwards, I could still see the floaters.
• In the fifth session, the ophthalmologist examined my eyes and old me the floaters were gone. I said I could still see them, but he told me I was wrong.

This brings me to the second point. The treatment, as far as I can tell, does not work. When I moved to France, I decided to not think about it anymore. But I developed diabetes, which requires annual retinal exams. During one of these exams, I asked the ophthalmologist about laser treatment of floaters. He said that they don’t do this in France, because it doesn’t work. I have since found that laser treatment is used only in rare and severe cases.

The worthless floater treatments I had in America took a lot of my time, but not money. But it cost the American taxpayers plenty. This is money that Europeans can spend on better health care than in America. I wonder how much American health care is weighed down by unnecessary and ineffective treatments.