Year: 2019

The Internet contained a flaw. It allowed unfettered access to information and the opportunity for people to make up their own minds about things. Unlike network TV. Unlike cable TV. The Internet’s promise/poison was unfiltered.

Now that flaw is being fixed. And with it how we understand free thought. It is no longer about reason and debate. Out with the dialectic. In with emotion and identity. The people cannot be trusted. Feelings is the new truth. Unreflective, personal feelings. Were you offended by that thing you didn’t have to watch? Did a voice transgress (acceptable) dogma? Does it bother you that people are somewhere talking about things that hurt your feelings? Destroy the heretic. Smash his blasphemy. Cut the feed.

Too many Americans are frighteningly eager to relinquish their liberty by claiming for corporate power autonomy and rights it should never have. “But it’s their companies!” Yeah, that’s what the white supremacists said before the Civil Rights Act stopped businesses from banning black people from places of accommodation.

When everything is in the Cloud, will the companies that own the Cloud decide what content people store there? Why not? Why can’t Gmail determine the content of the emails that are transmitted using its service? Imagine if AT&T censored your phone calls because it objected to the content of your conversations. Why not? They’re a private company. Want to talk about whatever that was you were talking about? Form your own phone company, then.

There is no end to thought control once the people accept the premise that corporations can determine for the public what ideas can and cannot be transmitted. It is a call for cerebral hygiene.

Those advocating corporate tyranny cite the First Amendment and then dismiss it. Go home, Freedom. You’re drunk. But the First Amendment—even if irrelevant, which I do not concede—is not the final word on free speech. Personal liberty to express and receive information and opinion is a human right. That cannot be justifiably limited by corporate power. “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” (Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

Even by its own lights, human beings retain rights not enumerated in the US Constitution. “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” (Amendment 9 of the US Bill of Rights). We retain the right to freely transmit and receive information and opinion. Where in the US Bill of Rights does it say we have no right to this? Doesn’t the Constitution establish a free republic? “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people” (Amendment 10 of the US Bill of Rights). We retain the power to determine what information and opinion we have a right to freely transmit and receive. Where in the US Bill of Rights does it give corporations carte blanche the power to control the transmission of ideas and opinions?

The Internet is a public utility. It is a gift to the world from the people. It is ours, and corporations use it with our consent, with our permission, tacit as it may seem. Corporations pay us a fee to use it and are accountable for misusing it. Violating our civil rights by censoring ideas is a misuse of a public utility. That’s why it is wrong to keep blacks or Muslims or MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters out of restaurants. A free society doesn’t put property used for public means over the civil rights of human persons.

People have rights whether recognized or not. And the people should have the recognized power to announce and protect their rights. When in justice.  Which we’re not. We’re in the clutches of corporate despotism. As long as this remains the situation, this situation will dictate the truth—or, more accurately, “truths.”

Corporations are state-sanctioned entities. That’s why they they’re chartered. They’re extensions of government power. But the government has become an extension of corporate power! Money-power has corrupted our democratic republic.

And people are down with this. Citizens are asserting the power of corporations over their government—over their sovereignty. They’re pining for unaccountable private tyranny. They desire to be subjects not citizens.

They think they’re telling other people what to think and celebrating the quashing of objectionable speech. They got this or that person censored or fired or beat up. They’re winners. But really, they want to be told what to think. They’re losers. This is masochism.

Kenan Malik’s book, The Meaning of Race (1996), left quite an impression on me when it came out. I was a graduate student at the University of Tennessee studying the intersections of class, race, and punishment, and my professor Asafa Jalata assigned the book, hot off the press, in his seminar on the political economy of racism. Upon my initial reading of The Meaning of Race, enveloped in the postmodern culture of the late-1990s university, and laboring under the spell of critical race theory, yet still viewing myself as a humanist and a Marxist, I was simultaneously suspicious of and intrigued by Malik’s universalist and individualist assumptions, which one could easily see informed his analysis. Returning to the book after leaving graduate school, I realized what had so intrigued me: Malik was calling on readers to shift their suspicion from the rightness of reason to a recognition of postmodernism as an anti-humanist assault on modernity, a reaction to the Enlightenment. I came to see identity politics as the atavistic product of the postmodernist call to seek refuge in faith-belief, to recultivate the relativistic and antagonistic sensibilities of religious-style cognition and division – to, in other words, embrace group-based truths (fictions/antagonisms) at the expense of materialism and human rights.

Malik has a more recent book, Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate, published in 2008. I was unaware of this book before only yesterday as I had not explored the body of Malik’s work, having felt that the value of The Meaning of Race was made sufficiently obvious to me in the context of my new-found antitheism in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

However, trying to understand the recent controversy over transgenderism led me down a string of YouTube videos to an interview Malik did in 2008 with Kerry Howley, then editor at Reason magazine. The interview was published on April 5, 2018, by Bloggingheads (it is posted at the end of this essay) and its relationship to the initial interest is (over quite a temporal and relational distance) is thanks to libertarian Marxist thinking that informs intellectuals associated with the British publication Spiked, which grew out of Living Marxism, which has in back of it the long shadow of the Revolutionary Communist Party and the personality of Frank Furedi (whom I will blog about in the near future). I digress.

Malik’s frame in Strange Fruit is, as with his The Meaning of Race, pro-Enlightenment: universalist, individualist, pro-free speech, and secularist. He usefully distinguishes for Howley and listeners the mainstream enlightenment (Kant, Locke, Hume) from the radical enlightenment (Leibnitz, Condorcet), while at the same time emphasizing that liberalism and Marxist have in common a universalist outlook and a commitment to equality (albeit, I should add, differently articulated in history and thought). Against these commitments, conservatism, which is anti-universalist, and seeking a return to faith, stands as the counter-enlightenment, an antithesis expressed as the romantic.

But things have become inverted, Malik argues. At the start, the left was universalist and materialist, celebrating the emancipation of the individual from the parochial, while the right was particularist and collectivistic, obsessed with the transcendent. Today’s left has abandoned universalism for ethnic particularism and multiculturalism, while the right has embraced a distorted universalism expressed in faith of the free market, manifest in doctrine of neoclassical economics. This is not exactly correct. As I have blogged about, the left has embraced this distorted universalism, as well. Multiculturalism is an expression of the neoliberal logic of global capitalism, where the culture industry divides and subdivides the population and celebrates diversity for the purposes of niche market creation and atomizing the population while manufacturing a commitment to equality. But Malik is right that the consciousness expressed by the modern left is very much a religious-like consciousness, where Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities are assumed to be the reality in which individuals are necessarily disappeared. And, overall, Malik’s understanding of racism and race is the state-of-the-art, recognizing human variation and its association with ancestry without reifying the social construct of race as a biological reality.

In her interview of Malik, Howley (currently professor at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program), asks a fine question about the history of nation-states, about how, before the great wars, the empires were polyglots, but then, after the wars, broke up into ethnonationalist units that constructed their own histories (various national myths) to justify their political-juridical integrity. Malik responds that nationalism is about overcoming the parochial aspects of any territory by instilling the universalist impulse. Malik contrasts this with the problem of the imposition of one particularism on other particularisms. However, he doesn’t formulate this argument very well, and pivots off of a cliché. I have blogged about this extensively (you can read for example here: Secularism, Nationalism, and Nativism). My argument about the modern nation-states emancipating the individual from religion and tribal identity operates with a firm distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism. But Malik buys into Howley’s frame (and I suspect I know from where it came, which I will discuss in a moment) and turns to third world nationalist movements for a contrast, explaining that many of these were progressive. This assumption is a holdover from the sentiment that resistance to western imperialism was generally progressive (Malik is a former Trotskyist), a claim disproved by evidence, which is not to say that imperialism was desirable, just that third world nationalists movements weren’t, either.

What Malik appears to be doing here is pitching a cultural-historical political movement that contrasts with European nationalism. I am not impressed with this argument, either, and it is probably the reason why his views on immigration – he is a supporter of open borders or free migration – clash with his argument against multiculturalism. Presumably he is not open borders in the same way that economic libertarians are. The paradox tripping him up, I think, is that balkanization is occurring amid globalization and cosmopolitanism, something Jalata pointed out in his seminar, while the interstate system in the interregnum between mass migration periods was far more universalist in outlook – and the incubator for socialist transformation. This is the Marxist outlook and, although Malik remains something of a Marxist, I don’t believe he has considered deeply enough the arguments Marx makes in “On the Jewish Question” and (with Engels) The Communist Manifesto. Thus anti-imperialist nationalist movements are excused for their ethnic commitments, while the civil nationalism of Europe is conflated with the ethnonationalist tendency Malik rightly abhors. This rather simplistic view of the nation-states, however, does help us understand Malik’s support for open borders.

At the time of the release of Strange Fruit, John Gray, political philosopher and former School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science, went after Malik in an essay simply titled “Strange Fruit, by Kenan Malik,” published in The Independent. The essay appears roughly four months before Malik’s discussion with Howley and it appears to provide the inspiration for her question (she had prepared her interview well). Gray begins his review by noting novelist Joseph Roth’s lament in one of his stories of the spread of nationalism across the European continent, a movement Roth sees as a degradation of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Never mind that multinational presupposes the nation in the ethnic sense that horrifies Roth and that the genocide of the Armenian people – Christians exterminated at the hands of Muslims – occurs in the context of the Ottoman Empire. Or that it was that particular genocide that formed the basis of Raphael Lemkin’s definition.) “If the ramshackle Habsburg monarchy collapsed,” writes Gray, Roth “feared the result would be xenophobia and ethnic mass murder.” Gray notes that, by the time Roth’s story appeared in the mid-1930s, this had happened and it was only to get worse. Gray then wonders: “Was this just a detour in the onward march to a brave new world where everyone will be treated equally? Or did it – as Roth suspected – reveal a darker side of modernity?” Gray then turns to Malik, describing him as a “pious disciple of the Enlightenment” who “cannot tolerate the thought that some of the last century’s worst atrocities were by-products of modern Enlightenment thinking.”

Gray notes, as do I, that “[n]ationalism is a modern doctrine linked with liberal ideas of self-government.” However, Gray uses this association to argue that liberalism is responsible for the horrors of ethnonationalism in Europe during World War II. Despite its counter-Enlightenment sensibilities and mobilization of Christian anti-Semitism, Gray argues, Nazism “was able to make use of a tradition of ‘scientific racism’ that belongs squarely within the Enlightenment.” Gray must be careful here since he knows that counter-Enlightenment work and Christian anti-Semitism suggest a deviation from the the liberalism that Malik defends. But he wants to make Hitler’s racial theories appear as a result of the Enlightenment (this is Malik’s focus in The Meaning of Race), thus conflating liberalism and illiberalism. The argument aligns with Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, a work financed by The Discovery Institute and supplemented with the webpage, DarwinToHitler.com. What is missing in Gray’s argument is that racial science was a perversion of evolutionary science by reactionaries who sought to use naturalistic arguments to rationalize and justify political ideology, something that Gray himself does in his indictment of humanity as inherently limited by its own nature (more on that in a moment).

Gray defends his thesis by noting that “belief in science and progress is part of the Enlightenment creed.” Indeed. “So why does Malik resist the conclusion that these racists were, despite the ersatz character of their so-called science, Enlightenment thinkers?” he wonders. Doesn’t the use of the adjective “ersatz” answer Gray’s own question? Scientific racism is neither scientific nor progressive (although it is part of progressivism, which isn’t very progressive). Gray’s own answer – “Malik is not greatly interested in the history of ideas” – is not a very good or useful one (it doesn’t help that it’s incorrect). Nor does noting Malik’s “overriding concern . . . with current controversies about multiculturalism and relativism” help. To be sure, “Malik is horrified by the way liberal opinion has embraced cultural difference.” And Gray agrees: “He has a point. Multiculturalism – the notion that society and public policies should be organized around cultural groups with different histories and identities – was a thoroughly silly idea.” Moreover, Gray notes but does not take on Malik’s contention “that liberal anti-racists are as guilty of elevating race into the center of politics as reactionary racial scientists.” To quote Malik: “Out of the withered seeds of racial science have flowered the politics of identity.” Gray gives Malik half-credit for this observation before asserting: “Racism and the political assertion of cultural differences are features of the modern era.” True, but that doesn’t establish the validity of Gray argument. Gray is an obscurantist in the style of David Berlinski.

I did not want this entry to be about Gray primarily, but his pessimism provides a nice contrast to Malik’s optimism. It also demonstrates how important it is to take a historical view of things. So let’s continue. “In earlier times wars were fought over religion and resources, as they are today,” Gray writes. “With the rise of doctrines of national self-determination, they began to be fought on culture and identity.” But from where then do doctrines of national self-determination come?

I have written quite a bit on this and I have an essay under construction that explores the matter even further, but it will suffice to say here that, for a philosopher interested in the history of ideas, Gray is surprisingly ignorant of the origins of liberalism (yes, I know that in 1986 he wrote a book called Liberalism). Here’s my take: Liberalism is a view that emerges from the context generated by capitalism, a dynamic system that creates a secular space for its own operation that displaces religion by commoditizing that space. The outlines of capitalism are emergent around 800 years ago (see the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and Janet Abu-Lugod, among others). By the long century (1450-1620) the system had consolidated in Europe sparking by a string of bourgeois revolutions out of which emerged the modern nation-state (which became the norm worldwide in the post-war period).

As I have already noted, it is in the context of the nation-state that the individual is emancipated from the parochial, moving from subject (under absolutism) to citizen (in the republic). The modern concept of individualism, which liberalism philosophically captures, is thus a result of an emergent universalist outlook over against particularism, which does owe something to rational Protestantism, but also to the Enlightenment, and to science, which challenges faith-belief. However, Protestantism is itself a result of capitalist progress, as Catholicism proved to be fetters on the system’s further development, as well as a barrier to secularism. And science adjusts consciousness to the reality of the material world in which it emerges, all the more clearly when dialectical. The nation-state enables this by protecting secular spaces, even while maintaining a state church, and this is thanks to the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. Michael Tigar 1978 Law and the Rise of Capitalism explores an interesting detail in this development. At first, the bourgeoisie attempted to renovate the law in order to include themselves among the privileged classes (the nobility), but, as the feudal juridical-legal structure proved to be fetters on further development of the system, the bourgeoisie became a revolutionary force. The law began to express the notion of the individual as it was adapted to enable the commodity market, a mentality that progressively colonized the spaces of human experience.

In light of this history, Gray conclusion to his review seems faulty: “When Roth mourned the demise of the Habsburgs, communists and liberals ridiculed his attachment to a pre-modern imperial structure. Yet it was Roth, not the progressive thinkers of the day, who foresaw the horrors that would come from its collapse. There is a lesson here, but it is not one that Malik – for whom progress and modernity are articles of secular faith – can be expected to learn.” Then what does explain the twentieth century? The crisis of world capitalism and the failure of socialism in the West, but that is a subject for another essay.

To understand why Gray thinks these things, it is useful to understand what Gray thinks about things generally. Unlike Malik, who has been consistent in his arguments since the start, Gray’s political journey took him from the Labour left in the 1960s-70s to the New Right in the latter 1970s to New Labour by the 1990s. Today, he is a deep green, anti-humanist, and a professional pessimist. He blames capitalist globalization on the Enlightenment (see his 1998 False Dawn), dismisses humanism and morality as so much religious illusion, and depicts humanity as a plague (see his 2007 Straw Dogs). He is particularly harsh on the meliorist tendency of liberal thought, condemning the liberal notion that humans are unlimited by nature (a straw man) and can improve their situation through the application of science and technology (which they do continually). Gray dismisses the ethic of progress as a secular teleology derived from (a project or sublimation of, if you will) Christian eschatology and the Christian view of human beings as autonomous and separate from the natural world. The liberal impulse is more than utopian, in Gray’s estimation; it is destructive. Gray work is in some respects similar, albeit in a much less sophisticated form, to Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis that genocidal racism – not just the technological ability to carry out large-scale genocide – is the result of tendencies that inhere in modernity (Bauman’s work is derived from Theodor Adorno’s administered society concept and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil argument, both of which are indebted to Max Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). Here scientific racism emerges from the rationalist operation of bureaucratic classification.

Let me conclude this entry by bringing it back to the immigration question, since that matter is raised in Malik’s interview with Howley and the tension between immigration and multiculturalism is its stickiest point. Malik claims he is an assimilationist, but assimilate to what? He is not clear at all on this point. Malik says he is a supporter of the French republican assimilationist tradition, but this doesn’t address the question. And in any case, it would seem that this tradition has proven woefully inadequate in protecting French society from the degradation of Islam, which Malik, as a secularist, must also abhor (you would think). He juxtaposes the fear of culture change among the British, American, and French for their resistance to open borders – which assumes a desire for an unchanging culture – to the change immigrants bring as part of the normal way cultures evolve. He reveals his disregard for the integrity of cultural tradition by failing to lament, much to Howley’s distress, the loss of languages. You can see why some have accused the RCP crowd of smuggling rightwing libertarian notions into leftwing discourse. I think the charge is a bit overblown, but there is something there that doesn’t quite sit right with me. I suppose that’s why I am drawn a bit more to the arguments of Douglas Murray and Bruce Bauer on this matter.

We don’t want any part of assimilating Islam to the West. Rather we would like to assimilate individuals to western secularism. But how do you resist the Islamization of societies with governments promoting multiculturalism without controlling immigration? Ideologies come in the bodies of people, some of whom don’t want to assimilate but wish live their lives apart from the decadent relations of their hosts. If liberty means allowing people to hold ideologies destructive to liberal secular societies, which in principle it must, then those whose ideologies are openly antagonistic to liberty should be allowed in only at a pace conducive to assimilation and the progressive elimination of those ideas. Kenan Malik, if his arguments are to be consistent with his stated commitment to modernity, should reconsider his commitment to free migration. He should ponder the cultural and institutional framework for the preservation of the liberal and secular way of life. That means appreciating modernity as the ideational and practical expression of European civilization.

Here is the video of the Howley-Malik conversation:

ICD-11 (IDC stands for the International Classification of Diseases) for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics (version 04/2019) now includes section 6C51 Gaming Disorder:

My initial response upon learning this news today was to ask whether this definition could include gymnastics and basketball? What about music? Is a person addicted to music, say, if they prefer playing the guitar over other activities?

I am among those who believe that addiction occurs not in the substance being used, or in this case the activity enjoyed, but in the brain. An addict is a person who finds some thing that stimulates brain circuits chronically under stimulated or insufficient to assuage unpleasant feelings because of trauma or some other biographical or environmental cause. A person seek stimulants, for example, because her norepinephrine levels are poor, and the stimulants provide the level of brain activity that she needs to feel normal.

Leading addiction expert Canadian physician Gabor Maté has found that addiction is, for the most part, the result of trauma and neglect. Consider opiate addition. We’re told that heroin is one of the most addictive substances on earth, yet most people who use heroin (over 90%, in fact) never become addicted to it. They use it recreationally without any lasting negative impacts. Heroin becomes habitual in persons who are addicts, but not in persons who are not addicts. It’s trauma, not heroin, that produces the addict.

One might suspect the same for video games. Most people who play video games never become addicted to them. It’s not video games that are addictive. Rather, persons with addictive disorder risk being consumed by video games.

I am sure that most readers of this blog are familiar with the famous case of the Romanian orphans who were neglected in orphanages. The neglect altered the structure of the brains of these children. Additional research confirmed these findings. When the powerful effects of neglect were recognized, caretakers started picking up the children and holding them. The results, which we now know are biochemical, at the same social, interpersonal, were dramatic.

Human contact produces a hormone in the brain called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the “love chemical.” Without it, the brain does not develop normally. But, like the immune system, the brain circuits that rely on oxytocin to work must be primed by and developed through experience. The experience that triggers the production of oxytocin is social interaction. This is the same mechanism at work in addiction. The heroin addict suffers from low levels of oxytocin, as well as an endogenous opiate endorphin. These deficiencies are caused by insufficient bonding with other persons; it is the result of a failure to sufficiently attach to other human beings. When the addict uses an opiate he feels the warmth and comfort he was denied in earlier experiences. It’s not just the relationship with parents, but the greater social environment that structures the brain. A harsh and individualistic experience alienates a person. The effects of this isolation — or atomization — manifest themselves as addiction and other psychiatric disorders.

Maté is not the only researcher to show this effect. Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander (a researcher at Simon Fraser) documented this in the 1970s in his Rat Park studies. He found that rats, which are, like many mammal species, highly social animals, placed in cages or Skinner Boxes and addicted to morphine, preferred morphine over anything else (this worked for heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs). These experiments garnered considerable media attention as they played into sensationalist drug war ambitions. However, in his experiment, when rats were allowed to reside in open spaces with other rats, the drugs were not attractive to them even though they were abundant in their free environments. Alexander determined that it was not the morphine that was irresistible to rats. Rather is was the isolation of the Skinner Box that produced conditions conducive to addiction to morphine. He concluded that rats in cages were significantly more like to self-medicate. Combined with considerable historical and anthropological data, he concluded that it was same for people (see his The Globalisation of Addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit, Oxford University Press, 2008.)^[1]

What is the mechanism behind this? When wolves, bears, rats, and other animals are caged or constantly stressed their cortisol levels (stress hormones) rise. This makes them unhappy, sick, anxious, and depressed (it is also a cause of obesity, in that excessive cortisol production alters the insulin cycle). Caged, mammals pace and sway, what is called stereotypic behavior. Their coats become dull and patchy. These conditions of unfreedom set them up for addictive behavior. For animals in the wild, running, leaping, and bounding about with their comrades, stereotypic behaviors are absent. The animals are healthy and happy. There is in mammals a drive or need to be free — they are, we can say, determined to be free. If you deprive mammals of stimulation, their brains atrophy and they can lose critical brain functions. They will sit in a cage and feed their brain the stimulation lacking in their lives.

Of course, the brain circuits themselves do not determine the sociocultural systems human produce and live in. Neurotransmitters don’t explain the range of sociocultural variability. The tragedy is that we are not fated to be moral creatures; nature has prepared us to be moral creatures, but segmented systems interfere with the development of our sympathetic (or empathetic) self. And the degree to which the prevailing social order does not allow the organism to accomplish its optimal development — social orders that are authoritarian, disorganized, restrictive, toxic — signals the inadequacy of that social system.

The German idealist philosopher Georg Hegel points out that the standard liberal conception of freedom is superficial — it does not ask why individuals make the choices they make. He theorizes that our choices are conditioned by external and internal forces, so the source of freedom is to be found there, not in the metaphysics of occult forces. The view of the individual agent, authoring its own actions, independent of social, cultural, and historical forces that surround it, mystifies the origins of thought and actions. For Hegel, this condition means that freedom is not judged by degree of separation from society, but rather by degrees of participation and inclusion in society — in collective efforts to shape history for the well being of all the individuals involved. Freedom is not an essential characteristic of unhampered individual activity, but rather results from rational control of individual activity in social contexts. Freedom is present when people able to exert meaningful control over their lives as political and social beings.

The conclusion Marx derived from Hegel’s line of thinking is that democratic control over society’s productive forces and the direction of history lays the basis for human freedom. Or, as C. Wright Mills puts it in The Sociological Imagination: “Democracy means the power and the freedom of those controlled by the law to change the law, according to agreed-upon rules — and even to change those rules; but more than that, it means some kind of collective self-control over the structural mechanics of history itself.” In other words, there is a materialist foundation to freedom, one that touches fundamentally on morality.

There is a real problem in popular science. We hear it in the arguments of Sam Harris and, most polemically in Noam Chomsky, that the remarkable human being — cognitive behavior, moral behavior — is either a miracle or the result of natural selection, i.e. evolved characteristics. But they are not evolved. They are learned. To be sure, the capacity to learn is evolved, but the content is learned. And it is in this process that our brain circuitry is prime and developed. The sociocultural system is variable — it varies over time and across space. Yet humans have eternal needs: creativity, leisure, happiness. Indeed, our neurotransmitters make these possible. The needs are innate. The same needs exist in other animal species. The need for free creative activity and play. The organism depends on a stimulating environment to fully develop. But segmented social systems fail these needs. And, as a result, they damage the person. These deeply alienating conditions create social cages. Addiction is the result.  

Let me take one more example, namely attention deficit disorder (ADD). Everybody can be distracted. Most everybody daydreams. Here we are talking about distraction to the point of dysfunction. Moreover, there are other symptoms associated with this disorder: hyper-vigilance, impulsivity. There is variability in ADD. What explains that? We know it runs in families. Children with ADD are more likely to have parents with ADD. But this is not evidence of a genetic component. Things other than genes run in families. A recent study conducted at Cardiff University in England, published in The Lancet, found no genetic differences in 85% of ADD cases compared with individuals without ADD. What ADD children do have in common is a stressed environment. 

What is the character of environmental systems where ADD becomes a problem? It occurs in families with high levels of stress and the associated release of stress hormones. When an animal is stressed, it produces cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. These hormones activate the fight or flight response. This is a good thing if the animal is trying to get away from a predator. As long as the sympathetic nervous system is activated for a short period of time, then is allowed to return to normal, it is not a particular problem. But when an animal is trapped, caged, then the constant production of stress hormones makes the animal sick. The body cannot tell the difference between different types of stress. ADD is one of the effects. Constant cortisol releases lead to adrenal fatigue, which interferes with the brain’s ability to focus (medications, such as amphetamines, work because they wake up the brain). We can say that cortisol production is, in a very real sense, contagious; a stressed parent stresses other members of the family. When physicians prescribe amphetamines to children to help them focus in school, the physicians are feeding an addiction.

The good news is that the brain is plastic and improving social conditions can reverse cognitive and emotional problems. The bad news is that it is hard to change the social conditions when so many people refuse to believe that these problems are caused by social conditions in the first place — and when others in a position of wealth and power benefit from the status quo.

Society has a choice: it can treat the psychiatric symptoms, for example, using SSRIs for depression, or it can change the social conditions that cause depression. It can treat the addict (what Maté does at his Vancouver clinics is provide pharmaceutical grade heroin, clean needles, and a safe injection site) or it can change the circumstances that give rise to addiction. Crucially, then, understanding the effect of social relations on psychological health can help us understand psychological maladies — as well as understand the situations of people. This is why empathy is such a big deal.

So the way to deal with the problem of video game obsession is to change the structure of society such that people experience a variety of circumstances that produce the chemicals that put them in a good state mentally. This way they will not seek them in virtual experiences that become habitual, stereotypic. At the same time, one may argue that video games are a reasonable intervention to promote to these ends. What does it hurt? It’s certainly not the cause. And it comes with a positive side benefit: kids are not out in the world finding optimum hormonal levels by getting their kicks with vandalism and violence; rather they are in their rooms getting their kicks virtually. And they’re having less sex, which is manifest in a falling fertility rate. This is good news for the planet. Of course, none of this obviates the root source of the phenomenon: the alienating conditions of corporate capitalism.

Note:

^[1] Two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander’s first paper. It finally appeared in Psychopharmacology in 1978, a major journal in the field. However, the paper attracted no attention. Simon Fraser University soon withdrew Rat Park’s funding. Several later studies confirm Alexander’s findings — see, for example, Bozarth, Murray, and Wise 1989 work, published in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior. Alexander’s The Globalization of Addiction argues that cultural dislocation of human beings instigates addictions of all sorts, including addictions that do not involve drugs.

My opposition to identity politics is rooted in deep democratic sympathies. To illustrate, let me take the paradigm of identity politics: race. There is nothing more undemocratic.

In racialized systems, individuals are compelled to belong to a race and expected to behave in a manner consistent with whatever doctrine can be made to appear to be associated with or “normal” to that racial designation. Richard Ford puts this well in Racial Culture: A Critique (2005) when he notes that, although “there is no necessary correspondence between the ascribed identity of race and one’s culture or personal sense of self,” identity politics produces “compulsory” enactment of “prewritten racial scripts.” Ford argues that “group difference is not intrinsic to members of social groups,” thus rejecting the notion that identity can be essentialized. Instead, he contents, it is contingent upon “the social practices of group identification.”  

Despite it being a demographic category, incapable of agency (which sociologists conceptualize as a telic ability/capacity unique to individuals), self-appointed (i.e., unelected) spokespersons tell those they claim as their own how to think and behave at the risk suffering ill-repute or some negative sanction. If a black person deviates from the hegemonic doctrine of blackness, then he risks a derogatory epithet. A white person, on the other hand, is expected to deviate from the doctrine of whiteness lest she risk s being labeled a racist. To claim virtue, a white woman must admit her white privilege and declare herself an ally or even a race traitor (which is not to say she can ever escape her whiteness, which she wears like an invisible knapsack).

Again, demographic categories have no collective agency. Race is a designation based on who you (allegedly) are, not on what you actually think or do. There is no deliberative decision-making process in a racial group. Race is not a democratic institution. It’s not a voluntary associational group to which one can consent or from which one can withdraw. (If anything, as a structure, race limits the ability/capacity of agents.) David Duke doesn’t represent me by virtue of sharing my skin color. Neither does Bernie Sanders. My race tells you nothing about my politics, my religion, my taste in food or music, or my sexuality. If you think you can tell me who I am on the basis of my skin color, then you are stereotyping on the basis of race—and guess what that makes you? Well, that depends, since only some people can be a racist by virtue of their skin color (I know the drill).

The assumption that race represent collective agency is the trick that allows people to tie culture to race. That way, when one criticizes culture (which human beings should do since culture is a mixed bag of enabling and disabling thoughts and actions), you can be accused of racism—or antiracism if the culture you criticize is attributed to the right demographic. But the very notion that culture is an expression of race—that is, that values, thoughts, behaviors, tendencies, etc., things that can validly differentiated by skin color and other superficial phenotypic features – is the essence of racism. Racism roots the mind in two false biological propositions: (1) the mind flows from the genes and (2) humans can be meaningfully racially differentiated on the basis of genetics. The first proposition is found in the claim that whites are more intelligent than blacks. The second is found in the claim that whites really are different from blacks. Both claims find no purchase in anthropology. So the answer to this question: “Why do people over there act like that?” can never be “Because they’re black.” The scientific explanation would be something like this: The people over there act like that because they are socialized in a culture that provides the myths and rituals that guide their behavior. And that has nothing to do with race.  

Critical race theory (CRT) and its variant critical race feminism (CRF) constitute an enterprise based on this error. CRT/CRF manufacture a system of concepts—not a theory, but an ideology – that permits the reification of abstractions by disappearing concrete indidivudals into demographic categories, hypostatizing them, substituting identity for human agency. CRT/CRF then “theorize” that colorblindness—defined as the act of rejecting the practice of determining the fate of an individual based on her skin color—is racist in-itself. This is indeed a strange alchemy: the man becomes most racist when he chooses colorblindness. CRT/CRF identifies advocacy of colorblindness as a feature of what it calls the “perpetrator’s perspective.” White people who are not allies prefer this standpoint because it systematically benefits them. The antithesis of the perpetrator’s perspective is the “victim’s perspective,” which assumes that every person in a minority group is a victim. This victimhood can lie outside of consciousness, hence the need for race consciousness (except if you’re white).

Richard Thompson Ford provides one of the more lucid explanations for how material inequality is reproduced without laws requiring inequality in his 1994 article “The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis,” in Harvard Law Review. Ford contends that public and private actors cooperate to construct “racially identified spaces.” Such spaces define political boundaries that determine and condition the distribution of individuals, economic resources, and political power. These spaces are externally imposed or emerge from divisive structural forces. A myth has grown up around this that the surrounding racialized spaces are “quasi-natural,” “prepolitical,” or primordial associations of individuals. In fact, these spaces are political creations that accumulate—after they are formed—a “natural” history, developing an “organic” social organization. Scholars must, therefore, to take care to avoid mistaking effect for cause.

Central to Ford’s argument is the promotion of race-neutral policy that has become the main component in a strategy to create and maintain racialized spaces: “racially identified space interacts with facially race-neutral legal doctrine and public policy to reinforce racial segregation rather than to eliminate it gradually.” Understanding how race-neutral policy perpetuates and even intensifies racial segregation is a key to understanding the situation the United States faces today. Indeed, it has been the exploitation of the ignorance of the public and most experts about the reality of race as structural power, and the relationship of the law to this reality, that lies at the heart of the assault on affirmative action, and the prevailing legal thinking that puts substantive civil rights goals virtually out of reach.

Like many CRT scholars, Ford advances his argument with a thought experiment. He asks us to imagine a society with two groups—one black and one white—that are differentiated only by visible physical variation.  Because of a history of racial discrimination in Ford’s invented society, blacks earn significantly less income and own substantially less wealth in comparison to whites. Over the past thirty years or so, whites have come to understand the sin of racial discrimination and have abolished the legal structure that had formally maintained the system of discrimination. Moreover, the society installed a regime of public education on the subject of race and succeeded in eliminating race prejudice. This society, Ford asks us to accept, is color-blind. Ford’s exercise desires to prove fallacious the argument that, with de jure discrimination and race prejudice eliminated, the racial divide should, with time, disappear.

Before reform, Ford’s society had in place a system of racial segregation in which each of these municipalities consisted of two enclaves, black and white, or municipalities incorporated as white or black. These municipalities, decentralized and geographically defined governments, are political units that tax their citizens and use the revenues to provide public services, education, utilities, and infrastructure. “Thus,” Ford notes, “the now color-blind society confronts a situation of almost complete segregation of the races—a segregation that also fairly neatly tracks a class segregation.”  

In those municipalities that are “racially mixed,” even though public services are equally distributed among the neighborhood, whites have, because of their higher incomes, amassed more wealth, as larger homes, larger bank accounts, etc. The black-white cities would therefore have substantially inferior public services compared to exclusively white cities who would enjoy a higher average tax base (or would at least enjoy a lesser tax burden given same level of services). Exclusively black cities would be in the worst position of the three types of municipalities, with considerably inferior public services and/or higher relative taxes. 

Under such circumstances, whites in “mixed” cities would have an economic incentive to leave or secede from the city; and unincorporated white areas would also have a reason to resist being incorporated in the mixed cities. However, it seems a reasonable assumption that blacks would favor the superior public services (or lower tax burden) of white neighborhoods and would, if they had the means, move there. If this occurred, it might be assumed further that over time economic segregation would replace racial segregation. 

This outcome depends on a false assumption, namely that residential segregation has not economically hamstrung blacks. Residential segregation affects employment opportunities and economic status for three reasons. First, since education is financed by local taxes, there would be different levels of educational opportunity and outcome. Those who enjoyed superior educational facilities would be better trained for the higher income jobs. Second, informal social networks would be racially differentiated, and these would act as barriers against outsiders entering the privileged jobs sectors. Third, the market value of homes would present with marked inequity depriving black families of the collateral necessary to buy homes in white neighborhoods.

The history of residential segregation would have created (and would continue to generate) deficits in what some have imagined as “social capital.” As a result, blacks would have substantially lower incomes, earning lower wages and probably suffering higher levels of unemployment (given what would surely be an undercapitalized neighborhood). Given these disadvantages, poor blacks would be unable to move into privileged neighborhoods. On the other end, whites would understandably be reluctant to give up their privileges to relocate to black neighborhoods (for they would suffer inferior public services and higher taxes). The outcome would be, absent intervention, the reproduction across generations of economic inequity. “At some point an equilibrium might be achieved: generally better-connected and better-educated whites would secure the better, higher-income jobs and disadvantaged blacks would occupy the lower-status and lower-wage jobs.” 

One of the important features of Ford’s imaginary society is that these outcomes occur without the presence of racial prejudice or a racial ideology. “There is no racist actor or racist policy in this model, and yet a racially stratified society is the inevitable result.” On purely economic grounds, that is, those of rational self-interest, the structure of racial segregation perpetuates itself. This is what I refer to elsewhere as objective racism. It is objective because its existence does not depend on the consciousness of actors. It is a species of racism because the effect is to privilege one group of people over another, a group identifiable only by their previously racialized physical features. “Even in the absence of racism, then, race-neutral policy could be expected to entrench segregation and socioeconomic stratification in a society with a history of racism,” Ford writes. “Political space plays a central role in this process. Spatially and racially defined communities perform the ‘work’ of segregation silently.” 

Identity politics contents that blacks exist in a world that has all the features and dynamics of Ford’s model and more: the conscious struggle by whites to secure racial privilege by actively denying blacks the opportunity to achieve substantial racial equality by taking off the table the right to secure redress for racially differentiated outcomes. These outcomes are said by those who oppose substantive racial equality to either be the result of historical inequities or the fault of the disadvantaged. Those who advance the former believe that over time racial equality will be achieved. But, as Ford demonstrates, even under the most ideal circumstances, this is impossible and so this viewpoint effectively advocates the status quo. Those who advance the latter—that the fate blacks suffer is of their own doing—explicitly advocate the status quo while at the same time express a desire to absolve whites of any responsibility for the fate of their black brothers and sisters.

However, since this reframing means one no longer has to identify a specific perpetrator upon whom to lay guilt and responsibility (the old discrimination test), that is, since perpetration is an automatic collective action by virtue of being born into the perpetrator group, this formulation convicts everybody with a particular skin color of a crime. Individuals of a certain race are all guilty (or all victims) by definition. No specific facts need be shown, no individual need be tried, only statistical abstractions represented as prima facia evidence of some thing need to be provided (if any facts need providing at all). How can such a conclusion/verdict ever be falsified? It assumes as proven that which should require proof but is never proven nor provable. This is not rational. It’s a theological argument. And like theology, it alienates us from our species being. What do we call presuming the guilt of all those with a particular skin color?

Did you ever wonder why it seems that we can’t have a broad democratic community where individual interests are represented in deliberative decision-making processes? The answer is, in part, because racial consciousness, with offensive or defensive, doesn’t see individuals. Instead of our species ties, race consciousness sees the world as made up of antagonistic groups—not material class relations, I hasten to stress, but imagined communities based on ideology—that are intrinsically oppositional. Unlike class antagonism, which are resolved by transcending class-based system through socialist revolution, the problem of race does not have a material solution. At least not one any moral person would advocate. The only way to transcend race is to give it up. Like religion. You have to stop practicing it.

“Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband’s) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all).” (Translation: Abdullah Yusuf Ali)

In this passage, Allah, through the angel Gabriel, instructs Muhammad to tell the people that beating women is appropriate if they are disloyal or behave badly, and if they they do not respond to admonishment or withholding of affection. If they continue to be disobedient then they are to be beaten until they become obedient again. Because the Qur’an is eternal and infallible, delivered to mankind by an angel to a perfect man (Muhammad), and because a good Muslim submits to Allah, then women of this faith accept this preachment. Because sura 256 of Al-Baqara of the Qur’an, in the most charitable reading, says that “there is no compulsion in religion,” that under no condition should an individual be forced to accept a religion against her will, women who submit to their husbands in this way have chosen to do so.

Now consider the argument by some feminists and women identified as Muslim that women who wear the hijab do so by their own volition and that it is therefore a feminist symbol of empowerment. Here’s the passage sura 24:31:

Again, using the Abdullah Yusuf Ali translation: “And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers, their husband’s fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers or their brothers’ sons, or their sisters’ sons, or their women, or the slaves whom their right hands possess, or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex; and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments. And O ye Believers! turn ye all together towards Allah, that ye may attain Bliss.”

Those who criticize the hijab point out that it is the Arabic word for “cover” derived from hajaba which means barrier, to partition, to screen, to shelter, to veil. It refers not merely to garments covering the body and head, but to religious-based norms of modesty and morality. Thus women, to be moral, must be modest, and this means covering the body and head. In some interpretations this means covering the face also. The hijab also suggests gender segregation, which we see in mosques and other public spaces. There is an attempt to blunt this criticism by claiming that women are not forced to don the hijab but do so to please Allah. But the same can be said for sura 4:34. Women are not forced to be beaten by their husbands, but submit themselves to beating out of deference to the Qur’an.

How could this be a feminist argument? It’s not. It’s patriarchal propaganda.

Reflecting on a lifetime of confrontation with religion, I find that I am incapable of accepting the normalization of religious faith. No apologies. It’s not a flaw. I accept that religion is normal from a statistical standpoint. But that doesn’t make it true. Or harmless. There are societies in which sexism is normative. Does that make justifications for sexism true or good?

As for its truth value, religion is a type of ideology. According to Ted Honderich (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy), an ideology is a collection or system of normative beliefs and values possessed by persons beyond purely epistemic reasons. Epistemic refers to knowledge, which is confirmed or verified belief. In other words, ideology relies on assumptions and beliefs about the world that have no factually demonstrable or logically necessary basis. Moreover, the claims of religion are plainly false. They systematically confuse predicate and subject. In truth, nature exists independent of the philosophies the mind has developed to understand it. Minds are the products of brains, which result from the evolutionary dynamic of natural history. Social relations as well have truths independent of the justifications for them. Indeed, human beings invented religion and the things belonging to it in order to justify oppressive social relations.

Religion is not good because it has made life difficult for people I love. Including me. But it has also made life difficult for hundreds of millions – billions – I could never know. (One cannot say this about nature as natural forces carry no intent.) Consider these three passages from the religious texts of the two most popular religions, Christianity and Islam.

The first two come from the Pentateuch, which is the scriptural foundation of the Abrahamic traditions (using the New English Translation). Leviticus 18:22 states: “You must not have sexual intercourse with a male as one has sexual intercourse with a woman; it is a detestable act.” Two chapters later this prohibition is repeated with the punishment prescribed. Leviticus 20:13 states: “If a man has sexual intercourse with a male as one has sexual intercourse with a woman, the two of them have committed an abomination. They must be put to death; their blood guilt is on themselves.”

Those of the Christian faith who wish to keep their religion going but find these verses objectionable instruct us to read the scriptures from the standpoint of contemporary moral understanding. This admits that God is not a being that exists beyond history but a human construction. Given this, what makes God necessary? What is its authoritative value if we may disregard those bits that offend us? And what stops others from faithfully adhering the demands of the text? It is important to keep in mind that Islam takes over the biblical story of Lot (Lut) to condemn homosexuality, which in many Muslim-majority countries is punishable by death. For a lot of religious people cherry picking is not an option.

The third passage is found in the Qur’an sura 4:34 (Abdullah Yusuf Ali translation): “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband’s) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all).” The Qur’an instructs men to beat their wives which presupposes the right of men to control women, the foundation of the patriarchy. The refusal of even some women who identify as Muslim to reject the inerrancy of the Qur’an – see my blog entry Qur’an Verse 4:34 – is a stark reminder of the danger of failing to delegitimize scripture.

Admittedly, I have trouble suffering zealots. But I tolerate people who believe in gods. I even count them among my friends. What I endeavor to stress is that if I am to be confident in my criticisms of Christian belief, I must also judge Islam by the same standard. To make an exception for Muslims that I do not make for Christians is also a failure of courage.

These anti-abortion bills are horrific. But I don’t understand the argument for exempting pregnancies on the grounds of rape. If abortion is wrong because it unjustly takes the life of a person, then why would the fact that the fetus’s father is a rapist – or anything else – change anything? We are not punished for the crimes of our fathers. We don’t kill the children of rapists. The rape is not their fault. 

The bills are horrific because they violate the personal sovereignty and bodily integrity of women. The parentage of the fetus is irrelevant. The life and liberty of the mother are the only relevant factors.

For more in-depth argumentation around this issue see my July 2, 2008 essay The Fetus is a Person. Now what? There I argue that “[t]he demand for the state to control the reproduction of women is an authoritarian one, one that is entirely incompatible with the principles of liberty underlying the legal and moral order necessary for a free society.” I reference Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous analogy in that essay, so readers will want to check that out if they are not familiar with Thompson’s argument.

See also my April 2, 2013 piece Abortion is Really About Freedom. In that essay I write, “The question of the permissibility of abortion is not about the status fetus but the right of a woman (or any person) to determine what purposes her body is used for, presuming she is not a slave (and if she it, she must be liberated).” And this: “Personal autonomy is the first right – every person must be free from oppression. Life can be and often is sacrificed to preserve this right. If a woman cannot determine how her body is used, she is not free.”

In their 2009 article, “Refutations of racism in the ‘Muslim question’,” published in Patterns of Prejudice (43 [3-4]: 335–54), Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood “identify a variety of reasons why the notion that Muslim minorities could be subject to racism by virtue of their real or perceived ‘Muslimness’ is met with much less sympathy than the widely accepted notion that other religious minorities in Europe, particularly Jewish groups.” However, Jews are not merely a religious group, but are an ethnicity in the way Arabs are, whereas the Muslim identity spans many ethnicities (and races). Nobody would suggest that anti-Arab sentiment, to the extent that phenotypic features associated with that ancestry are racialized, is not analogous to racism (albeit the term of “ethnicism,” that is prejudice based on ethnic origin, would be more usefully applied). At the same time, criticisms of Judaism, if by this we mean Jewish religious thought and practice, is not anti-Semitic; it is a critique of ideology, not of race or ethnicity.

A year earlier, Nasar Meer, this time with Tehseen Noorani, published a sociological comparison of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain in The Sociological Review (56 [2]: 195–219). They write, “Across Europe activists and certain academics are struggling to get across an understanding in their governments and their countries at large that anti-Muslim racism/Islamophobia is now one of the most pernicious forms of contemporary racism and that steps should be taken to combat it.” This assumes as proven a claim for which Meer and Noorani could provide no evidence. It is simply a conflation of opposition to an ideology and those who advocate that ideology – in the same way one might oppose Fascism and Fascists – with the practice of racism. Similarly, R.D. Johnson, Haluk Soydan, and Charlotte Williams, writing in Social Work and Minorities: European Perspectives (1998), describe Islamophobia as the new form of racism in Europe, asserting that “Islamophobia is as much a form of racism as anti-Semitism, a term more commonly encountered in Europe as a sibling of racism, xenophobia and intolerance.” But anti-Semitism is a form of prejudice against Jews on the basis of their ethnicity. Muslim is not an ethnicity.

In a 2007 article in Journal of Sociology (43 [1]: 61–86), “The resistible rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001,” Scott Poynting and Victoria Mason define “Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism and a continuation of anti-Asian and anti-Arab racism.” By assertion a propaganda term that attempts to pathologize opposition to Islam is also said to indicate racism, this despite the obvious fact that Islam is not a race but a religious faith. It moreover conflates a religious faith with a particular racial group that includes many religious faiths (Asian) and with an ethnic category that presents with many religious faiths (Arab). There are in fact millions of Asians and Arabs who are Christian. Imagine an article arguing the following definition of a concept published in the Journal of Sociology: “Christophobia is anti-Christian racism and a continuation of anti-Europe and anti-North American racism.” It sounds no less ludicrous in its original formulation. Presumably, this article enjoyed peer-review.

In 2011, Sabine Schiffer and Constantin Wagner, in “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia – New Enemies, Old Patterns,” published in Race and Class (52 [3]: 77-84), disclaim “that to compare Islamophobia with anti-Semitism is not to equate them. But finding some parallels might help German society to combat a growing and dangerous anti-Muslim racism.” Here’s that construction again: “anti-Muslim racism.” In what way is a religious faith analogous to race? Every time you hear this construction substitute for it in your mind this construction: “anti-Christian racism.” Does it still make sense? If it doesn’t, then it “anti-Muslim racism” doesn’t make sense because they are not merely analogous but are species of the same genre. Yet Schiffer and Wagner continue as if they have something profound to say. They do this by leaning on the Jewish experience: “The achievement in the study of anti-Semitism of examining Jewry and anti-Semitism separately must also be transferred to other racisms, such as Islamophobia. We do not need more information about Islam, but more information about the making of racist stereotypes in general.” In other words, you don’t need to know that Islam is a patriarchal heterosexist ideology that seeks to put all human thought and endeavor under divine command interpreted by male clerics. You only need to focus on the fact that some persons don’t like Islam and thus must be because of racist stereotyping. What they actually mean, then, is that we need to make up shit about racist stereotyping by expanding the concept of racism to cover things that are not only not the stuff of racism but aren’t even analogous to the stuff of racism.

That same year, in “The Idea of ‘Islamophobia’,” published in World Affairs, Alan Johnson argues that “Islamophobia” can sometimes be nothing more than xenophobia or racism “wrapped in religious terms.” Note how this flips things. It would be accurate to say that the charge of Islamophobia is a way of reacting to criticisms and concerns about a political and religious ideology that wraps them in the language of racism in order to delegitimize them. Of course, before one could wrap her racism in religious terms, there would actually have to be racism, and since a Islam is not a race, there is nothing there to wrap. Thus, despite his hedging, his claim means to confuse the reader about concepts derived uncontroversially from observations of the real world. Johnson’s argument is ideological.

It is curious to scholars and politicians pretend as if Muslims have no ideology, no belief system, but rather should be treated the same as a black person or a homosexual, especially when this collapsing of concepts would be obviously unwarranted for such ideological groups as Fascists and Christians. How is criticism of Muslims for their beliefs concerning homosexuals any different than criticism of Christians for their homophobic beliefs? Why should criticisms of the treatment of women under Islam be any different than criticisms of Christians for their patriarchal and misogynistic beliefs? Why is it bigotry for homosexuals and women – and free thinkers such as myself – to worry about the influence of Islamic doctrine on law, government, and social relations generally in spaces which decades, indeed centuries of struggle have marginalized the oppressive characteristics of religion? Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown in 2003 write that “Islamophobia is usually based upon negative stereotypes about Islam which are then translated into attacks on Muslims.” But the same can be said for negative stereotypes of Fascism which are then translated into attacks on Fascists, attacked that are cheered by the same persons who condemn such attacks on Muslims. 

Kevin Dunn, Natascha Klocker, and Tanya Salably, in a 2007 article “Contemporary racism and Islamophobia in Australia – Racializing Religion,” published in Ethnicities (7 [4]: 564–589), contend that contemporary anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia is reproduced through racialization. “These are not old or color-based racisms,” they write, “but they do manifest certain characteristics that allow us to conceive a racialization process in relation to Muslims.” They ask us to consider “the racialized pathologies of Muslims and their spaces.” But what we are actually talking about is criticism of an ideology and concern about those who practice this ideology. Again, substitute some words and see if it still makes sense. What would it mean to talk about “the racialized pathologies of Christians and their spaces”?

According to Gabrielle Morainic, the increasing “Islamophobia” in the West is related to a rising repudiation of multiculturalism. She concludes that “Islamophobia is a ‘phobia’ of multiculturalism and the transruptive effect that Islam can have in Europe and the West through transcultural processes.” See her 2004 “Multiculturalism, Islam and the clash of civilizations theory: rethinking Islamophobia,” in Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal (5 [1]: 105–17), for more. This term “transruptive” is obviously an Orwellian linguistic maneuver to avoid the actual word “disruptive” because the latter might indicate an empirical truth about multiculturalism, namely its culturally disorganizing impact on communities that depend on shared value systems upon which to build political and social solidarity.

Consider Erik Love’s 2013 review of Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and Junaid Rana’s Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora in Contexts (12 [1]: 70–72): “Taking these two works together, Kumar and Rana put forth a strong argument that while Islam is certainly a religion, and not a race, and Muslims (like all religious communities) are a highly diverse group in terms of ethnicity, nationality, and even racial backgrounds, Islamophobia is in fact a form of racism.” We are asked to accept as true that which is admitted to be false. It’s as if O’Brien’s demand of Winton in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to see something plainly false before him as true has become an academic standard. “Both books,” Love writes, “effectively provide historical accounts showing the parallel development of Islamophobic discourses alongside other forms of racial bigotry and discrimination.” This is a typical argument running through the literature and journalism on this subject, that while Islam is “certainly” a religion and not a race, Islamophobia is “in fact” a form of racism. It asks us to jettison concerns for validity in concepts and precision in language for a propaganda campaign.

Journalists are eager to get in on obscuring the character of anti-Islamic sentiment. Writing in The Guardian, Nesrine Malik has a “Message to Richard Dawkins: ‘Islam is not a race’ is a cop out.” Malik admits that “technically” “Islam is not a race,” but then states that there is a “strong racial dimension to Islamophobia” noting that Muslims in the UK are mostly African, Asian or Arab. (That Arabs are considered white in the UK seems to have completely escaped Malik.) Disentangling the intersection of race and religion is, of course, an analytical exercise, which would depend on uncovering the motive for the action. Malik does none of this yet concludes that saying that Islam is not a race is a “cop out,” because although “Islam might not be a race…using that as a fig leaf for your unthinking prejudice is almost certainly racist.” This is a fallacious argument, since criticism of Islam and its devotees is no more a form of prejudice than are criticisms of Fascism and its devotees. Criticizing somebody for being black, on the other hand, is racist. Malik continues, “A focus on the academic distinction between religion and race is often used as a fig leaf for prejudice and outright bigotry.” Again, rational norms are problematic. In point of fact, the distinction between religion and race is rapidly disappearing in the academy – but only with respect to Islam. For Christianity, the distinction is maintained and no academic discourse on the problems of Christianity is smeared by accusations of bigotry. 

Tom Chivers, who blogs for The Telegraph, also goes after Richard Dawkins for his criticisms of Islam because he doesn’t distinguish between ideology and adherents to ideology. Even notable critics of Islam, such as Ayaan Hirshi Ali make this distinction. But criticizing people for holding an ideology is a distinction without a real difference. If there were no Fascists, discussions of Fascism would be about history. Ideologies affect other people when they are realized through human actors and their actions. Chivers also takes Dawkins to task for pointing out that the Muslim world has not produced very many Nobel laureates, an argument that Dawkins borrows from Neil DeGrasse Tyson (a man who nobody to my knowledge accuses of Islamophobia or racism). Chivers claims that Dawkins implies that this is “because [Muslims are] stupid, or brainwashed…by their religion.” (Chivers puts it in a self-sealing manner. It is accurate to say that Muslims are persons brainwashed by religion. This is true of all believers.) Chivers expects a scientist should also examine “other institutional or non-institutional dimensions on the lack of progress in Muslim societies, such as poverty and the scarcity of other resources” (as if that work is never done). “In other words,” he writes, “claiming that Muslims are exceptionally backward and attributing this to Islam is tantamount to racism and Islamophobia.” Why is it racist to attribute poverty to a backwards ideology that puts faith and superstitution ahead of scientific reason and fact?  It’s not. Indeed, it seems Chivers is quite interested in seeing those whose brains are chained to irrational ideology remain that way by branding criticisms of their backwards beliefs “racist.”

Malik, who adores the word “technically,” has a go at Dawkins on this score, as well (see her “Richard Dawkins’ tweets on Islam are as rational as the rants of an extremist Muslim cleric”): “After I wrote about Richard Dawkins’s snide attack on the supposed dearth of Muslim scientific and cultural achievement, some critics hit back along these lines. It is acceptable to criticize and belittle Islam because it is a religion, not an ethnic grouping – and therefore fair game.” Note what she says here. She is not complaining about the denial of educational or occupational opportunities on the grounds of religious opinions or identity, but the idea that it is acceptable to criticize and belittle religious opinions or identity. Yet the latter is completely acceptable in Western society, as is evidenced by the Monty Python comedy, The Life of Brian. The idea that one should be accused of bigotry for religious mockery is an extremist position. Religion is fair game. It has to be. Our freedom and future depends on it being fair game.

Islam in practice affects human beings in a manner analogous to Fascism in action: violent jihad, patriarchy and misogyny, persecution of homosexuals, intolerance of blasphemy and apostasy, loss of bodily autonomy, and so on. Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology that seeks to put everything under the command of sharia (Islamic law) and clerical rule. To be sure, not all Muslims actively pursue this goal, but it follows from the ideology they embrace. The grim truth is that the terrorist organization ISIS is not a deviation from or a perversion of Islam but a valid interpretation of it. In form and content, a clean separation between Islam and Muslims is no more valid a distinction to make as that separating Fascists from Fascism. The ideological work of making criticisms of Islam and Muslims appear to be a form of racism is a program to obscure this truth of Islam in order to mainstream its doctrine and practices in world. The left could hardly be expected to do the same for Christianity and Christians. So a deeper question is the genesis of the leftwing Islamophile. Why are the mainstream Islam by smearing its critics as “racist”? This is an urgent question.

Those who argue for the restricting the speech of Fascists, for preventing them from publicly expressing their opinion, including those who advocate the use of violence against Fascists on the grounds that Fascism represents a threat to freedom and democracy, but who at the same time accuse those who criticize Islam and Muslims as “bigots” and “Islamophobes,” who protest anti-Islamic sentiment, contradict themselves in a fundamental way: condemning one form of oppressive totalitarian ideology and practice while, not only defending, but embracing another form of oppressive totalitarian ideology and practice that more closely parallels fascism than any other currently being articulated. There is nothing special about religion that makes criticism of it and its adherents any different than criticism of any ideology and its devotees. The claim that religion is analogous to race and sex – and not analogous to racism and sexism – is perpetuated by a need (conscious or not) to keep the masses in thrall of myth and ritual.

For the record, as a civil libertarian, I defend the right of people to believe and express crazy ideas. My arguments about this problem do not suggest an official antitheism or the persecution of individuals based on their beliefs. I am committed to a free society in which ideas are freely held and shared and it is by virtue of this commitment that I am compelled to criticize those beliefs and expressions that prefer a different world, a world in which I am censored or punished for antitheist blog entries. Where I draw the line is at action. If it is not enough for a Muslim to hold a personal belief in Islam and that Muslim seeks to compel others to participate in the practices that belief demand, that’s when we have a problem. And that is just as true for Christians, as well.

As Christopher Hitchens put it May 7, 2007, “I’m perfectly happy for people to have these toys, and to play with them at home, and hug them to themselves and so on, and to share them with other people who come around and play with the toys.  So that’s absolutely fine.  They are not to make me play with these toys.  I will not play with the toys.  Don’t bring the toys to my house, don’t say my children must play with these toys, don’t say my toys might be a condom – here we go again – are not allowed by their toys.  I’m not going to have any of that. Enough with clerical and religious bullying and intimidation.  Is that finally clear?  Have I got that across?”

I would like to transcend the framing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response to The Economist’s story No Sex Please, We’re Millennials — that the magazine is feeding Incel arguments — and point out the potential benefit of one-quarter of young adults not having sex, namely the promise of low fertility rates. 

As Karl Marx observed, the imperative of capitalism drives demography, its scope and its segmentation (for a length discussion of this see The Urgency of Population Control and Appreciating the Accomplishments of the Developed World). Capitalists seek more workers in order to increase the size and depth of the industrial reserve and drive down wages.

But the empowerment of women has put in capitalism’s way a barrier: stable or lower rates of fertility. Lower fertility rates have thrown a monkey wrench into the capitalist machinery. This is why capitalists are so hot for open borders. In the 1960s they threw open the nation-state to large-scale immigration and offshoring in order to weaken the power of labor. Globalism is a strategy to raise the level of profit over against the standard of living of workers in the developed world. Following the 1960s, wages and compensation where decoupled from productivity. With fertility rates in the developed world plummeting, the globalists have become ever more aggressive in marginalizing populist democratic politics that resists the denationalizing forces threatening the affluent world labor built.

Resisting neoliberalism and globalism have never been more important. The debate over populist versus progressive politics is the pivot. If populism wins, it means a better life for the generations that follow. Lower fertility rates mean slower population growth or, even more desirably, a smaller population – as long as we restrict the number of people coming into our countries. In other words, we have to avoid spoiling zero growth by allowing ourselves to become the pressure value for unsustainable population growth in the developing world. We must lead by example and help the developing work lower its fertility rates. 

Falling rates of fertility mean a potentially smaller ecological footprint while at the same time allowing for a greater standard of living. Fewer workers makes the labor commodity more valuable and this imposes upward wage pressure by raising the value of the labor commodity over against the demand for labor. In other words: a more democratic future means lower unemployment rates, more people gainfully employed (think about, for example, the surplus population capitalists ghettoized during the twentieth century — they’re still there suffering), with higher incomes, as well as greater tax revenues and lower rates of welfare utilization. Put yet another way, in plain Marxist language: flat-growth or smaller population means greater individual and family shares of the social surplus. Rising relative prosperity, if more equitably distributed, would come without raising consumption levels, as shares consumed by future individuals in a growing population become available for concrete individuals in a stable or smaller population. All this is good for our Mother Earth.

All this jazz about the “demographic crisis,” about how the West needs foreign workers to come toil for us and pay taxes to support our aging populations (thus reducing human beings to instruments for Western purposes) is propaganda calculated to trick people into accepting the economic needs of the capitalist elite. Guess what? Foreign workers grow old, too. But before the do, they also have children. And more children enlarge and speed up the treadmill of production destroying the biosphere in which we all must live. We have to jettison this nonsense that population control is eugenicist or racist. Population matters. Ecosystems have carrying capacities. We are exceeding ours.

The United Kingdom-United States participation in the 1953 overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and their support for the king Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, is something I would have, had I been alive and aware of at the time, opposed and protested. With rare exception, I am a non-interventionist. The intervention, orchestrated by the MI6 and the Central Intelligence Agency was driven by Western imperialist desire, which I oppose on principle. Mossadegh was a social democrat whose reforms threatened foreign capitalist interests, in particular the British claim on the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

However, the negation of Persia that came with the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran on April 1, 1979 does not follow from the imperialist behavior of the capitalist Anglosphere in 1953, but rather represents the work of an authoritarian movement determined to Islamize Iran and drive from Asia western notions of individual liberty, human rights, and democracy and the failure of leftwing forces to grasp the significance of this movement.

Indeed, after 1962, the Shah’s progressive White Revolution threatened the traditional Islamic structures that had long stifled that country’s development by enfranchising women, nationalizing resources, and profit sharing in industry. Rapid industrialization and cultural modernization resulted from the Shah’s project. It was to this progress that Shia Islamists reacted. Moreover, rising expectations alongside growing prosperity brought new political demands. 

Marxists need to tell a more nuanced story of the rise of the Islamic republic, and this story should be informed by irreligious criticism. Contemporary Marxist thought seems to have forgotten its roots in antitheism, and as a result downplays or misses entirely the role religious ideology plays in world history relatively independently of material forces. It even confuses religious ideology with race and ethnic categories. These failures are largely the failure of Marxists to immunize the left from the corrupting perversions of postmodernist ideas.

The standard leftwing account of the Islamic Revolution attempts to compress more than a quarter century of history between the 1953 intervention and the 1979 overthrow of the 2,500-year-old monarchy founded by Cyrus the Great. According to this interpretation, the Iranian republic was a boomerang effect, a case of chickens coming home to roost.

A lot occurred during this 26 year period. The events of 1953 were immediately preceded by a split between Mossadegh and Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani. Mossadegh understood that Shia Islam had deep roots in Iranian society and cultivated a working relationship with the clerical community. Kashani had been a valuable ally in the effort to emancipate the energy sector from foreign control. However, Kashani sought more influence in governmental affairs. When Mossadegh, a staunch secularist, rebuffed him, Kashani joined pro-monarchy Ayatollah Behbehani alongside the Shah and participated in the British-American plot to overthrow the prime minister. Thus Islamists betrayed the prime minister.

There were other Islamists who helped undermine Mossadegh, as well, for example the terrorist Feda’ian-e Islam (Self-Sacrificers of Islam), who demanded compulsory public prayer, Islamic dress code, the expulsion of women from government service, and the prohibition of alcohol. Crucially, the Islamists supported the Shah, also a secularist, because they wanted to rid themselves of a secularist they believed was undermining their authority in Iranian society. However, the Shah’s White Revolution caused a rift between the Shah and the clerics who had supported him. Islamists support secular politicians and regimes only when they believe it advances their goals of spreading and entrenching Islam.

It was amid the White Revolution that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the future Supreme Leader of a theocratic Iran, rose to power. He aimed to thwart the Shah’s progressive agenda and establish sharia (Islamic law and government) over against the people. Khomeini was arrested and detained and eventually was forced into exile for more than a decade, first in Turkey, next in Iraq (he was expelled by Saddam Hussein in 1978), and then in France.

In exile, Khomeini wrote his Hokumat-e Islami: Velayat-e faqih (Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist). From there, he instigated uprisings in Iran, drawing government action to suppress rebellion. Taking advantage of the Shah’s political liberalization (under pressure from the Carter Administration), the Iranian left helped widen the path for Islamist success by expanding and amplifying popular protests. The Tudeh Party, Organization of Iranian People’s Fedai Guerrillas, and People’s Mujaheddin, while opposed to clericalism, contributed to the disorder that advanced Khomeini’s goal of establishing an Islamic government. Khomeini’s movement, velayat-e faqih, or Guardianship of the Jurist, spread propaganda exaggerating the extent of government repression. Anti-western leftists disseminated the misinformation in the West (French postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault perhaps most famously).

For his part, the Shah made errors in the 1970s that helped strengthen the Islamists over against the people’s interests. The presence of tens of thousands of foreign workers drew the ire of Iranian nationalists. Austerity measures worsened conditions coinciding with the migration of unskilled workers from the countryside into the cities. The Shah’s decision in 1976 to change the Iranian calendar to the ascension of Cyrus from the Islamic Hijra (the year Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina) triggered Islamists always on the lookout for grievances with which to agitate for their cause.

The Shah was sent into exile in January 1979. Khomeini returned from exile the following month to millions of adoring fans. Khomeini’s movement ideology became the basis of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Grand Ayatollah became the Supreme Leader. This is how secular law and government were smashed.

It was not a response to UK-US intervention or the Shah’s authoritarianism that this happened, but rather Islamist reaction to progressive reforms and to western cultural influences and political and economic freedoms drove the turmoil. It was a negation of the Enlightenment, to the progress brought about by science and liberal ideas, such as the emancipation of women, which, while preferably unfolding in the context of a democratic system, can and does develop within monarchies.

It is paradoxical to celebrate the Islamic Revolution on the grounds that it overthrew an authoritarian secular regime since the Islamic Revolution established an authoritarian theocratic state, one in which women were returned to the previous status as patriarchal subjects. The ideology that fueled the countermovement against these values explicitly advanced the view that western cultural influences had to be eradicated as they corrupted Iranian society. The Revolution was simultaneously authoritarian, patriarchal, illiberal, and anticommunist, thus finding its analog in fascism.

The Marxist and quasi-Marxist groups that helped destabilize the Shah’s government found their movements hoisted upon their own petards. Perhaps it is out of embarrassment that so many Marxists rationalize the Islamic Revolution as a substitute for the failure of their political strategies and tactics in Iran.

In the end, it was a tragic thing that happened to one of the great civilizations in world history. That Iran was modernizing and its citizens were enjoying widespread freedom and prosperity makes its regression into theocracy all the more tragic.

Too often, a reflex follows the principled position against US clandestine interference in the internal affairs of foreign nations, one that blames subsequent events on the initial clandestine action. In the case of Iran, the Revolution was not a delayed reaction to UK-US action, but the work of a reactionary project to withdraw Iran from world progress. I would have opposed military intervention under Carter for the same reason I would have opposed Eisenhower’s 1953 action (also because it might have been counterproductive, undermining the Shah’s authority by even more closely linking it to Western influence). But had the Carter administration intervened and prevented the Islamic Revolution, the people of Iran would likely be better off today. Indeed, the region would likely be a lot better off than it is today.

Update (June 18, 2019): Given the saber-rattling of late with respect to Iran, I think it is helpful to recall this talk given by Bernard Lewis in 2009: