The Gordian Knot of Post-Racial Ideology and Reality

The Other Obama Legacy

By Charles Blow, Jan. 14, 2016 (LINK to article)

In this piece Charles Blow is clearly indulging - as most writers do on the subject of race - in Orwellian double think:

"I spoke to a room full of beaming high school and middle school boys, a vast majority of whom were black,” he writes, but then goes not to say that  “. . race is tangential to [Obama's] record."

Mr Blow's black identity is clearly and understandably of huge importance to him, but at the same time, in line with post-racial ideology, he is denying, or playing down, the importance of race.

We cannot have an honest discussion about race and ethnicity without facing up to their reality and importance, which post-racial multicultural ideology denies, or plays down, and suppresses. Thus the ease with which “progressives”, who embrace this ideology, exhort Europe to take in ever more refugees and immigrants irrespective of their different ethnic origins and identities.

The ideology of post-racial multiculturalism was, I believe, misconceived, in overreaction to European (white) imperialism, slavery, Jim Crow, Apartheid and, above all, Nazism and the Holocaust.

Interestingly, a recent NYT editorial, The Price of Fear (Nov. 20 2015), warns against just such an overreaction:  “In the reaction and overreaction to terrorism [evil] comes the risk that society will lose its way.”

Race and ethnicity are clearly not just the social construct we are taught they are (except when you try dividing closely related peoples from the same subcontinent into different races, as the Nazis insanely did), but real and important. Not in the way that racial supremacists believe they are, but because central to any deep and meaningful sense of both personal and group identity.

This, however, contradicts the “nation state’s" claim to represent a single nation, thus creating the demand for the Orwellian double think that has us tied up in a Gordian knot.

Notwithstanding our fears of the consequences, this Gordian knot urgently needs to be cut.

I elaborate on these ideas in THIS and appended blogs.

Thoroughly Deceived by Confirmation Bias

The Trap of Confirmation Bias

By Prof. Thomas Gilovich (LINK to article)

"The brain's job is to make sense of the world, and it does so — easily, rapidly and generally accurately . . "  

The brain's job is indeed to make sense of the world, but the author is being wildly overoptimistic about its accuracy, i.e. the extent to which it correlates with objective reality, which is why "We're Doomed", as Roy Scranton writes in a recent op-ed.

The sense our brain is capable of making of the world was good enough for facilitating our survival in the environment in which it evolved, long before the first states and civilisations emerged from it, thereby creating an artificial environment shaped over the centuries by society's ruling elites to their own personal advantage, at the expense of society at large.

The sense we make of this environment is largely determined by the personal self-interests of these ruling elites and the academics they employ to create a "national narrative. It is an environment, social order and narrative which serves them and their favoured (especially wealthy and academic) clients very well, and which they thus want to maintain, despite it being inherently unjust, inhumane and unsustainable on our finite, vulnerable and overpopulated planet, which their own self-interests blinds them to.

I elaborate on these ideas, which have the potential to provide the understanding that might yet save us from ourselves, in this and appended BLOGS.