caste system | The Casual Blog

December 20, 2022

Some local birds, visiting Old Salem, off-roading in Uwharrie, and a few thoughts on biodiversity

I’ve been getting up early to photograph the birds at local lakes in Raleigh. The Canada Geese start flying right after sunrise, and most have gone elsewhere or settled back down for breakfast within 45 minutes. It’s fun to hear their discussions and to see them gathering and taking off.

After the birds have flown, I take a run around the lake, which is about 2 miles. Later I check the photos to see if any seem to say something non-obvious about the birds, and experiment with processing to see if that unusual element can speak any clearer. Here are a few that I liked.

Last weekend, Sally and I took a short holiday trip to Winston-Salem to see old friends and have a look through Old Salem, the restored Moravian town founded in the 17th century. We enjoyed seeing the town and learning a bit about colonial life there. A brass band played traditional carols in the square.

Although the dominant narrative of Old Salem depicts a harmonious and innovative religious community, I figured there must be some dissonant notes that were worth hearing about. We had a chats with a couple of the docents about difficult subjects, including slavery and subjugation of women. They were friendly and knowledgeable, and readily acknowledged that not everything was sweetness and light in the early days.

We were fortunate to get into the Candle Tea at the Single Brothers House without a reservation. There we had a nice time singing some Christmas carols, which were a happy part of our childhood, and hearing once again the Biblical account of Jesus’ birth. I’m not a believer any more, but I like that part of the Bible, in which all agree that a new baby is a miracle.

On a different note, a couple of days later I did an adventure driving trip to Uwharrie National Forest. It’s a large (50 thousand acre), mountainous (well, small mountains), green place in piedmont North Carolina. The Forest Service maintains trails there for hiking, horseback riding, and off-road driving. I wanted to test out my new Subaru Forester Wilderness, which claimed to be able to run off road with rugged 4X4s, at least to a certain point.

I stuck to the trails marked easy or moderate, which were a lot more challenging than I expected. There were various spots where big rocks, mud, and trees had to be negotiated while moving forward, sideways, and up or down, sometimes all at once. It reminded me of skiing black diamond trails — a lot slower, but similarly demanding and absorbing.

I used my Subaru’s special off-road gearing system, called X Drive, and made it back to the paved road with no substantial damage. I was proud of my Wilderness! The Uwharrie trails were closed for the winter on December 15, but we’re looking forward to more adventures in the spring.

It was good to see the NY Times prominently featuring a piece on biodiversity. As you may know, but many don’t, human civilization has caused enormous damage to other species. Per the Times, “a million species are threatened with extinction, many within decades.” Biodiversity is declining at the fastest rate in human history.

The Times piece made the case that humans should be concerned about the loss of other species, because it is likely to harm humans, including affecting food and water supplies. While that’s true, there’s more to it than that. Ruthlessly exploiting and destroying the non-human world is horrific and wrong under any definition of morality.

The threats to many species are caused by loss of habitat. This problem is separate from, but in places connected to, climate change. Humans have been gradually taking over huge areas where animals and plants once lived. One of the big problems is destruction of forests to create more areas of agriculture, with much of that agriculture related to feeding farm animals that are then slaughtered for food.

The Times piece noted that 200 nations have been holding a large meeting in Montreal with a view to addressing the biodiversity crisis. Just this past weekend, the gathering (uncharmingly nicknamed COP15) came to an agreement on the 30 by 30 solution: saving 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. This sounds like progress, certainly, though it doesn’t seem quite fair that one species (us) among millions would consider itself entitled to 70 percent of the planet.

Almost all of us have been taught that humans are a unique species that is superior to all others, and that we’re entitled to dominate and exploit other species in whatever way we like. This idea is so deeply embedded that it seems like part of nature, rather than just an idea. But some are starting to see that it’s a poisonous idea, almost impossible to defend in terms of reason or ethics.

Alternative conceptions of human life are possible. Life can be approached in terms of ecological systems, with the multitude of life forms having many interconnections with their environments and each other. Our human lives are connected in many ways to the lives of other species, and those connections are key to survival and happiness both for us and others.

For example, humans and other animals could not survive without plants that capture energy from the sun, and many plants could not survive without the insects and other creatures that pollinate them. The principle is simple, though the details are endless. The starting point is becoming aware of the diversity of life and the need for that diversity. That should make us less heedless. As we realize that our human wants and needs are not the only thing that matters, we become less miserable, and cause less misery.

Our current political problems, including extreme polarization, are closely related to our hierarchical view of the natural world. We put humans at the top of the pecking order, and rank animals and plants at the bottom. Most of us are taught that non-human life forms are worth thinking about only if they can be exploited or pose a danger to us. Thus we don’t know very much about the rest of nature, or even see the point of knowing more. This ignorance is part of the source of our biodiversity crisis.

This kind of hierarchical thinking also separates human groups, with the same result. That is, in our culture, we normally rank males over females, white over non-white, native over non-native, and so on, in an unwritten but intricate caste system, with privileges accruing in the top-most ranks and getting scarce in the bottom ones. The more privileged castes are taught to keep separate from those less privileged, and they come to fear those considered lower. The fear is understandable, as extreme inequality can make the less privileged angry and resentful.

Adopting an ecological approach to animals and plants could help us begin to overcome the worst of our human hierarchies. Under an ecological approach, we’d notice more of our interconnections, and the value of considering differing customs and viewpoints. Our polarized politics would be less polarized, because we wouldn’t be so fearful of our differences in appearance and culture. We’d likely find that, just as with the different ethnic foods we enjoy, our physical and cultural differences can be something to relish.

September 18, 2021

What animals say

I wasn’t planning on sharing any more of my Alaska brown bear pictures, but changed my mind. Processing the pictures took me to a happy place. I really enjoyed being with these animals (at a respectful distance, of course), and learning a little about their lives.

This has been a particularly sad week in animal news. There was a huge bloody slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands. The U.S. government has authorized hunters selected by lottery to kill some of the few remaining bison at the Grand Canyon. And as usual, with no headlines, hundreds of millions of farm animals were killed to provide human food.

The way we think about non-human animals obviously affects the degree of brutality we’re prepared to inflict on them, but it has less obvious effects on how we think about ourselves. We generally see them as distant and inferior, with no concerns as important as our own, and lacking in our intelligence and cultural achievements. We attach great significance to their lack of human language.

But animals teach us something about human language without needing that language. First, they get along without it just fine. That is, in the wild they manage to do the same things that are our highest priorities — get food, shelter, reproduction, friendship, community — without human language. Indeed, it is likely that homo sapiens got along well enough for many tens of thousands of years without the language abilities that we now think of as setting us apart.

So animals demonstrate that language is not really as fundamental to our lives as we tend to think. Of course, at times language is very useful, and also fun to play with. But while it helps us solve problems, it also creates them. One example is how easily it creates the illusion of a vast divide between humans and other animals, and how easily it justifies human domination of other groups and forms of life.

We often forget that words are only symbols, with no fully reliable connection to objects or actions. No matter how beautifully and elaborately they are grouped together, they can never completely and fully reflect reality. At their very best they are heuristics, practical shortcuts for thinking and getting things done.

This shortcutting utility also accounts for a lot of problems. Our word choices direct focus our attention in one direction, so that we have trouble seeing in another. Once we’ve got firmly in mind the definition of humans as superior creatures, it’s difficult for us to think about the significance of, say, bears to other bears, or chickens to other chickens.

A similar problem occurs with racial categories. Once we’ve concocted a definition of racial characteristics and decided which ones are desirable, we have a hard time not favoring the ones we initially desired. Language around race is part of how we built our racial caste system, and it also makes it very hard to dismantle it.

This is a problem inherent in the way we usually think. But it helps, I think, to recognize that language is flexible, not fixed, and our intuitions can help us modify or work around linguistic limitations. Some part of us already knows, despite the limits of our received language, that our cruelty to animals is wrong, and we have the capacity of finding new ways of communicating and acting on that.

June 21, 2021

Bears, happy Juneteenth, and a solution to poverty

On our way back from the Outer Banks, we took a detour through the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. We saw two mother bears, each with two cubs, a barred owl, a flock of white ibises, and various other interesting birds, reptiles, and plants. We were excited, and also worried, to see a rare, critically endangered red wolf standing beside Highway 64 and looking at the traffic. Hope he or she is OK.

I you, like me, have an affectionate interest in wild animals, I recommend Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald. It’s a collection of short personal essays about the natural world. Macdonald explores the thrill and peace that nature can bestow, and helps us appreciate its fragility. The NY Times review is here.

This week Juneteenth became a national holiday. Some Americans are just now learning about the original event, June 19, 1865, when African Americans in Texas first learned that slaves had been declared emancipated. The basic idea of the holiday is to celebrate the end of slavery and beginning of freedom.

Most of us surely agree that this is a good reason for celebration, though not all. As I was practicing my golf swing at the range, I overheard an older golfer speaking disparagingly of the new holiday, and adding that “they” were “taking over.” I wondered how he could have such an ignorant and poisonous idea, and then I remembered: “us” and “them” was the basic framework a lot of us were trained in from birth, and some still are. These ideas have long, hard-to-pull-out roots.

Also, racial segregation is still the rule in most American neighborhoods, schools, and churches. There’s room for discussion about the details of why this is true in 2021, but plainly a lot has to do with the legacy of slavery. One consequence is that it takes effort to get to know people of a different race, which increases the difficulty of dislodging our early training in the caste system.

But there are also other forces at work. This week Thomas Edsall’s NY Times column examined the causes of so-called populism of Trump and similar movements elsewhere. Edsall quoted various thinkers who identified economic forces, including artificial intelligence and other technology, robotics, and globalized outsourcing, that continue to cause job losses and threats to status for many, causing increasing insecurity and fear.

Demagogues whip up these fears and blame minorities and immigrants for these losses. Those with good reasons to feel economically insecure are often latch on to simple solutions to their problems, especially when they resonate with their early racial training.

Why don’t we just eliminate poverty? It sounds like something we could all agree is a good idea. But as Ezra Klein wrote last week, poverty is a well accepted part of our economic system, and eliminating it would threaten some valued privileges of the privileged.

As Klein explains, Americans rely on low wage workers in order to have cheap goods and services. In this light, it makes sense to resist raising the minimum wage above the poverty level, allowing workers freedom to organize, or extending jobless benefits. If low wage workers were less desperate, they might well not take jobs that are mind-numbing or dangerous and pay barely enough to survive. Employers would have to provide better working conditions, and better wages and benefits. They’d lose some profits, and all of us would have to pay higher prices.

This aspect of American-style capitalism is seldom discussed, but worth discussing now. We learned from the covid pandemic that our government can organize massive resources in a hurry to address economic distress. We may have assumed before that there’s nothing we can do to help the mass of people who work at or below the poverty level, but we now have good evidence that that’s just not true.

Klein’s piece discusses a recent study out of the New School proposing a promising approach to mitigating poverty: a guaranteed annual income of $12,500 plus an allowance for children. The payments would phase out for those with incomes above the poverty level. It would require a budget increase of about 20 percent, which could be paid with taxes at about the level of other wealthy nations.

It’s an interesting idea, though it obviously runs hard against the grain of neo-liberalism. Indeed, Republican leaders in several states are currently looking to cut emergency covid relief, including not only money but also food programs, on the theory that workers won’t work as required unless they’re truly desperate. We have here a very dark side of American capitalism. Just as was true before 1865, some are willing to watch people starve, if that’s what it takes to force them to work.

So old questions need to be asked again: how much do we value human life? How much suffering are we willing to inflict in the name of prosperity? What are we willing to sacrifice to move towards a more just society? I’m hopeful, though I wouldn’t say confident, that our better angels are ascendent.

On a completely different subject, I want to recommend a short essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem, One Art. The essay in the Times by Dwight Garner and Parul Seghal is beautifully presented, and gets straight to the point. Even if you aren’t much interested in poetry, you might find something of real value.

May 6, 2021

Flowers, and the latest culture war battlefield: stopping anti-racism

Raulston Arboretum is a quiet refuge for plants, birds, and people. Before the pandemic, I visited the big garden at N.C. State a few times each spring to see the new blooms, and I really missed it last year. Now it’s open again, and things are growing wonderfully. The daffodils have gone and the irises are waning, but the roses have arrived in force.

It’s really cheering to see our leaders working on some of our real problems, like climate change, infectious diseases, police violence, roads and bridges, jobs with fair wages, child care, health care, voting rights, and education.

Not so cheering is the latest culture war ploy to rouse the MAGA base: attacking critical race theory and education on the legacy of slavery. Outside of specialized scholars, few had heard of critical race theory until recently, and none had reason to worry about its undermining the social order. Now Republicans in several states are working to ban it from classrooms, and McConnell and most GOP senators are characterizing anti-racism as “divisive nonsense.”

Critical race theory raises problems concerning race and the legal system. McConnell, the Fox pundits, and their allies are promoting the view that this amounts to criticizing America as hopelessly evil. Their position is that talking about our race problems is essentially traitorous, and should be stopped.

This is bizarre, but also makes a kind of sense. For anyone just arriving from outer space: Americans have been thoroughly socialized in a caste system that distinguishes between people and allocates privileges based on skin color, with the lighter people generally privileged over the darker people. Understanding how this came to be, how it works now, and what can be done about it is complicated. The background includes hundreds of years of history, as well as laws, schools, and customs.

It hadn’t occurred to me until this week that a possible response from the right wing, or anyone, could be: the racial caste system doesn’t exist. That’s as delusional as saying the last election was stolen from Trump, or that we need to change our voting laws to prevent fraud by Democrats. But here we are.

Of course, some well meaning people believe that the best thing to do about our race problems is to try to treat all people the same and act like race does not exist. In fact, it’s true in one sense that race is a fiction. It’s a creation of culture, rather than of biology.

But a key part of our culture rests on what we’ve learned to think of as differences in races. We’ve been thoroughly schooled in those supposed differences, to the point that many of us mistakenly think they’re inherent in nature. Becoming conscious of our own understanding of race and getting rid of the myths and fears we carry around is a big educational project. It requires some long discussions, with good teachers and leaders.

We have some such leaders working to correct unfairness in our system, but unfortunately, there are others, like McConnell and the Disgraced Former President, now proposing to lead in the opposite direction.

On top of the spurious racial notions bequeathed to us by our forefathers, politicians have been using race as a political wedge issue for several generations. Cynical politicians periodically organize by stoking groundless fears of attacks by violent erratic dark-skinned people, or (with no regard for consistency) of overly diligent dark-skinned people taking our jobs. This lying strategy has often been successful in attracting votes, and has reinforced the caste system.

The right-wing attack on critical race theory is related to this, but with an interesting twist. Instead of directly targeting dark-skinned people, it targets those who want to discuss the systemic problems of the caste system. As part of this, in a classic Orwellian/Trumpian move, it tries to re-label anti-racism as racism.

The right-wing objective is to prevent discussions that challenge the advantages of the privileged caste. As a bonus, it provides a moral self-justification for silencing the discussion: the privileged silencers can think of themselves as good people who oppose racial distinctions.

As Americans, we’ve been taught to think of ourselves as on the whole good, well-meaning folks. We’ve been steered away from learning much about the immoral and tragic forces that helped build our country (like slavery and expulsion of indigenous peoples) and the continuing brutality of our caste system (like widespread police violence and mass imprisonment).

Our education system has been sadly deficient in equipping us to address such problems. For a long time, many of us in the privileged castes barely noticed how the caste system disadvantaged the low caste folks. With de facto segregation, we seldom saw them, except when they quietly worked for us. Many of us accepted the system as on balance a pretty good one.

But here we are. We’re learning more about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and the bloody resistance to the civil rights movement. We’re learning more about how we took the land of indigenous people through brutal violence and trickery. We’ve started the discussion about fixing our caste system, which will not be easy. Even ignoring the right wingers who view any such efforts as treason, there are still many who believe the stereotypes they were taught Unpacking such ideas will take a lot of work.

April 24, 2021

Earth Day in eastern NC, processing the Chauvin verdict, and catching up with The Handmaid’s Tale

Sally and I had a particularly good Earth Day this year visiting eastern North Carolina. The enormous wildlife refuges near the NC coast have large populations of black bears, and we were hoping to see some of their new cubs. We failed as to the cubs, but saw a group of six bears. We also found a lot of beautiful birds, including a large flock of glossy ibises, a new species for us. There were hardly any people, which was just fine.

The trial of Minneapolis police officer Eric Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd ended this week with a jury verdict of guilty on all counts. The evidence of guilt seemed overwhelming, but given our history, the outcome was far from certain. It is disturbingly common in the US for police to use extreme force on Black people, but extremely rare for a police officer to be charged and convicted for resulting injuries and deaths.

The Chauvin trial has inspired some useful discussion of why this is so, and what needs to change. Part of the story is the background rule of qualified immunity, a circular Supreme Court doctrine that usually protects police even in egregious cases. Another aspect is police union contracts that prevent firing of officers guilty of racist misconduct. There is the famous blue wall of silence, the unofficial rule that generally prevents officers from testifying against other officers. Less famous is the standard procedure among district attorneys of ignoring police crimes, with a view to maintaining good relations with them for reasons of DA career advancement.

Above all, there is our racist caste system. In our system, for a long time many of us were taught that Black men are more violent and dangerous than other people. Even now, after that lie has been thoroughly debunked, many ordinary potential jurors believe it. With such racist training still lodged in their minds, it isn’t hard to convince them that a police officer that killed a Black man had a reasonable fear for himself, no matter what the circumstances, other than that the man was Black.

My guess is that Chauvin and his lawyers were counting on there being at least one juror with this traditional mindset, since there normally is. For such a person, it would be possible to repeatedly watch the horrifying video and hear abundant supporting testimony without concluding that Chauvin committed murder. For a juror with a strong enough filter of racial bias, any police violence against Black people would seem reasonable and justified.

The good news is the Chauvin jurors managed to see past racial filters and look at the evidence. This suggests we’re making some progress in unwinding the caste system. But of course, there’s a lot more work to be done.

Here’s a new exhibit in that case: Black Lives Matter protests are now being targeted by Republican state legislators. According to the NY Times, this year there have been anti-protest bills in 34 states. Some proposed laws immunize drivers who drive into protestors, while others add prison terms and other harsh penalties for protesting. This is appalling, but also instructive.

The Times reported that almost all of the BLM protests were peaceful, with an estimate that only 4 percent involved some property damage or police injuries. Nevertheless, for many Republicans, influenced by right wing media, the false impression persists that the protests were instead mainly about violent Black people attacking the police.

Our long training in the caste system makes it possible for some of us to look at one thing (Black people systematically victimized by police violence) and see the exact opposite (police and white people being targeted by Black people). This fits into and reinforces a narrative of white victimhood, which works to conceal the much larger story of white privilege.

Wherever you look, you will likely find a strong remnant of this caste training that distorts reality. I doubt it will lose its hold in this generation, but it seems to be getting weaker.

Last week Sally and I have finally caught up with The Handmaid’s Tale, a television series that premiered in 2017, and which we began watching on Hulu a couple of months ago. When I first heard about THT, I thought it was probably not for us. We’re not especially keen on science fiction, particularly when it’s dark and violent. But so far (with the 4th season about to begin), we’ve found it absorbing, thought provoking, and even at times inspiring.

The set up for THT is this: in the near future, a fanatical religious group has seized power in the United States and imposed a police state they call Gilead which has a rigid caste system with women at the bottom. The permissible roles for women are limited (mostly cooking, cleaning, child-bearing), and they must wear uniforms that correspond to their roles.

Women married to higher caste men get to wear handsome teal capes, but like all women are not allowed to read or do work outside the home. Because of a fertility crisis, Gilead has created a ceremony to allow higher caste men to rape low caste women to impregnate them.

The idea sounds over the top, but it turns out that Gilead is a great laboratory for imaginative testing of some of our actual notions and values. Patriarchy, misogyny, and other expressions of hierarchy (such as racism) are so much a part of our own world that it’s easy to stop seeing them, or to assume that they’re natural and necessary. THT helps us to reconsider some of our underlying assumptions about gender roles, as well as other orthodoxies.

This experiment in imagination seems more urgent since the attack on the Capital of last January 6. According to recent polling, a majority of Republicans continue to believe the Disgraced Former President’s lies about his winning the last election, and very few have condemned his efforts to throw out the election results and take over the US government. Republicans in many states continue to work on changing their voting systems to increase their advantage by making it harder for people of color to vote. In addition, they’re now trying to throw out the Republican state election officials who helped save our democracy by following the law instead of the lying ex-pres.

It’s hard not to see a disturbingly large overlap between the traditionalist patriarchal authoritarian system of Gilead and the MAGA view of how America should be. At the same time, Gilead has one aspect of social justice that both the MAGA ideal and our actual present caste system does not: in Gilead, Black people are treated just like non-Black people. That is, there is no difference in the respect and opportunities people receive based on skin color. Gilead, along with horrifying systematic misogyny, also is a reminder that our racialized caste system is a cultural invention and can be reformed.

Gilead is a police state with armed soldiers watching at all times and preventing unapproved discussions by women. There are brutal public punishments, like mass hangings, stonings, and removal of limbs.

But interestingly, the Gilead surveillance methods are not nearly as advanced as those now being used in China, or even in the US. Gilead has few if any video cameras watching the streets, businesses, or living spaces, and apparently no supercomputers analyzing facial recognition and other data (as China and we do). A MAGA version of Gilead would almost certainly be more technologically adept at identifying and suppressing dissent.

So I’ve gone from thinking that the world of THT is an over-the-top fantasy to seeing it as something that almost just happened, and still could. Except the MAGA version might well be more efficient and cruel.

The good news is that even in Gilead, there is resistance by people with compassion and courage. It won’t spoil the story for me to say the women there turn out to be resourceful and strong. Their unflinching and mostly non-violent struggle against oppression is inspiring. Maybe it will inspire some of us to continue opposing our own moralizing oligarchs.

July 11, 2020

Visiting Oberlin Cemetery, and five lessons from Hurricane Trump

Oberlin Cemetery in Raleigh

This week I went over to the Oberlin Cemetery, off of Oberlin Road in Raleigh, and learned a little history. The cemetery served the Village of Oberlin, which was founded in 1865 by just freed formerly enslaved people. It was named after Oberlin, Ohio, an abolitionist stronghold on the underground railroad, and site of Oberlin College, my alma mater.

For a time, even as Reconstruction ended and the racist Jim Crow system started in the late 1870s, the little Village of Oberlin did just fine, gradually adding black owned businesses, schools, and churches. The Depression of the 30s dealt it a harsh blow as local jobs disappeared, and many young people went north in the Great Migration. In the 1950s, it was cut in two by an extension of Wade Avenue, and further disassembled by so-called urban renewal in the 1960s. How much of the destruction of the community was driven by racism and how much was due to ordinary merciless capitalism? Further study is needed.

Today Oberlin Avenue is largely a commercial strip, and hardly anything remains of the 19th century village. But there is an old cemetery that was started in the 1870s, which is worth visiting. As these pictures show, it has large oaks, pines, and magnolias, and some attractive monuments. Much of it isn’t carefully tended, but the fact that it is still there is a testimony to the strength of the black community there and its descendants.

Last week we celebrated the Fourth of July more quietly than usual, or at least, most of us did. President Trump had military jets fly over Mt. Rushmore, and before the fireworks, gave a speech in which he went all in on his trademarked fear mongering. He targeted “angry mobs” tearing down our statues, and “bad, evil people” intent on intimidating “[us].” You understand who he means by “us,” right?

At this point, it looks like more and more people are noticing that Trump is totally incompetent and corrupt, a person who manages to be at once ridiculous and alarmingly vicious, who’s putting our lives and our democratic institutions at risk. From recent polling, it looks reasonably likely that he’ll be defeated and gone in a few months. Then we’ll be faced with the large task of the post storm clean up and rebuilding. But in a way, I feel grateful that we’ve learned some things from Hurricane Trump.

For example, here are five lessons learned:

1. Old-style racism is far from dead in America. I’m talking about the people who still want to fly the Confederate flag and use the N word. They’re a minority, but Trump turned them from a barely visible minority to one that feels proud and empowered, marching in the streets with guns and shouting excitedly. The good thing is, we now understand that they are there and that we have to calm them down and address them.

2. Xenophobia, the close relative of racism, is far from dead in America. Lots of people who are uncomfortable with the N word are fearful of immigrants who look different and speak different languages. “Build the Wall” makes no sense as geopolitics, but it makes perfect sense as political theatre. Scapegoating foreigners has a long and ugly history in our country, and it has had another nasty revival as part of Trumpism. But as with the previous item, at least now we know, and can start to address it.

3. The American racial caste system is alive and well. I’m distinguishing here between the racist ideals of avowed white supremacists and the more widespread sentiment that it’s natural and normal that white people have better schools, better houses, more money, and so forth, because that’s just how things happened to work out.

The caste system ensures that we avoid inquiries that would undermine the system, like looking at our long and bloody history of oppression of minorities and the structural inequalities in jobs, housing, education, banking, and health care. The caste system is harder to grasp than full on racism, but probably more corrosive. Trump has done us the great service of bringing it more into view, and here again, he’s made it more possible to address.

4. We are sufficiently powerful to endanger a lot of the natural world, but not so powerful as to stop it from destroying us. Over the last few decades, the science of climate change has become harder and harder to deny, but the President is still a die hard denialist. Far from countering the looming catastrophe of climate change, he is working hard to bring it upon us as quickly as possible, through more fossil fuel mining and burning, less efficient cars, and opposition to every mitigation effort, including international climate cooperation and scientific research. He even has new regulations to encourage more killing of wild animals!

But we can be certain that Trump will not stop nature. It’s very strong. If we don’t change course, the atmosphere will continue to warm, with still more of our weather disasters like extreme hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, floods, and rising sea levels. We can look forward to more deadly pandemics related to climate change and expanding human populations. Here again, Trump has made our problems more visible and urgent.

5. People are more prone to manipulation and delusion than we thought. It’s easy to make fun of proponents of Pizzagate and QAnon, which are self-evident lunacy. And we might have thought that having a president that lies constantly and shamelessly would eventually cause some distress and consternation even among his strong supporters. But strangely, at least for many, it doesn’t.

It turns out that constant lies tend to make us exhausted, cynical and indifferent, not much interested in truth, or prone to exotic conspiracy delusions like the Deep State. With an efficient propaganda machine led by Fox News, facts are gradually replaced by alternative facts, and actual facts come to be viewed as fake news. Even Orwell never imagined a manipulation and delusion system as disturbing, and as effective, as the one created by Trumpism.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Thanks to Trump, we can now see that elements of our system that we took for granted as sound and workable were badly deteriorated and close to catastrophic failure. We thought we were living in a well constructed, comfortable house, and it turns out the foundations are rotten and the roof also needs to be replaced.

The repairs are going to be time consuming and expensive. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. We need to focus hard on getting him safely out of the house, and then we can get started on the crucial repairs.

On a cheerier note, I recommend Becoming, a documentary about Michelle Obama which we just saw on Netflix. I knew she was a gifted person, but I hadn’t known much about her story, or her remarkable ability to connect with people.

Tag: caste system