Was Dark Helmet right about good and evil?

Americans are perpetually caught between their two selves. One is a happy-go-lucky bon vivant whose motto is, "Why worry?" This American is a ceaseless optimist. He's the reason stock markets continue to soar in expectation of more and more good bon temps ahead even when there are good reasons to worry. He's used to things working out for him, and he doesn't see any reason why that shouldn't continue. Even problems like global warming don't bother this guy. He figures scientists always figure problems out, and they'll eventually lick this one, too. 

The other American is an alarmist, willing to see even the smallest change from the world he's used to as the first step in a slippery slope to Armageddon. Especially if it's something he sees as cooked up by the other political camp from his own. News media, with its bad news bias, tends to feed this side of the American split personality. 

One side of the American personality wants to chug a beer and grill hot dogs on his lawn even while a nuclear missile is clearly raining down; the other wants to build a bunker and stockpile guns and ammunition when someone mentions changing rules about public bathrooms. 

Both sides reside in most Americans, and both have been evident in the past few weeks as we've watched events unfold in Ukraine. The optimistic American thinks that Putin has overplayed his hand, that all he's done is hurt Russia, reinvigorate a once-flaccid NATO, and even make America stronger. It's an incredibly sanguine way of looking at events when Ukraine's oil fields are being blown up, its dams destroyed, and civilians dying in a conflict that utterly flouts every norm we've come to expect. 

On the other hand, there's also been a lot of hand-wringing that this is the moment the whole liberal world order comes crashing down. It is proof that a particular view of the world has failed, and that we are now in an era of stark, power-based politics in which the loser will cease to exist. 

President Biden has mostly sided with the former version of events. That's probably the right thing for a commander-in-chief to do. Nobody wants a leader who will tell us we're all about to die in times of crisis. Even if Biden really, secretly feels like this is the beginning of the end, he ought to be telling us that everything is going to be alright. There's also a politically self-serving reason to frame the invasion in this way. While former President Trump is out saying...whatever it is he's saying about all of this...Biden needs to make it look like his policies have been good for American interests. So optimism is his best bet. 

I don't claim to know how this will end. It's certainly one of the most alarming events I have witnessed in my lifetime. I'm frustrated by how impotent my own country seems, how the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons is making us react very differently to this kind of naked aggression than we did in 1990 to an invasion of another country. The lesson to me seems to be that every country should have nuclear weapons or risk being invaded. 

But setting aside the specifics of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the more important general point is that US policy choices of the last 25 years do not seem to have helped promote a US world view. They do not seem to have increased the level of democracy in the world, nor helped secure peace. We have not turned from a Cold War world to a new world in which humanity, freed from focusing on war, solves the perennial evils that have plagued us as long as we've been a species. Geopolitics haven't improved anymore than anything else in the world has in my lifetime. 

I can't claim to be an expert on many things, but I am an expert on the Korean Peninsula. Would anyone say that the Korean Peninsula is in a better, safer place now than it was in 1994 when Kim Il Sung died? A series of US presidents have employed differing rhetoric, but basically the same, underlying policy: seek to isolate North Korea diplomatically and economically, then use the strength that isolation gives us to force them into concessions on nuclear issues. That plan can only be described as a spectacular failure. It has caused suffering for the already-suffering people of North Korea, and it has not, in return, brought them one step closer to freedom. 

I honestly believe that, in a choice between a flawed democracy like ours and a flawed enlightened dictatorship like Russia's or even a halfway decent enlightened dictatorship like China's, the United States is easily the best choice. It's the one that provides for the greatest level of human happiness. (Perhaps, in some ways, because human happiness isn't logical and neither is democracy.) So let's, for a moment, accept a very simplistic, George W. Bush "axis of evil" view of the world, and call us "good." 

Why has good been so bad at making the world a better place? Is it because, as Dark Helmet put it in Spaceballs, good is dumb?

The most unsettling thing in my life

I've been through four events in my life that have shaken my faith that I understood the world. The first was 9/11, the second was the election of Donald Trump, the third was the outbreak of COVID-19, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fourth. All of these events have undermined the self-certainty of my inner optimistic American. All have made me question whether a good life in a time of peace and plenty was really my birthright as an American of my era. 

None, though, have probably shaken me as much as an article by an American philosopher a friend sent me over a year ago. The philosopher is Adrian Vermeule, and the article is about skepticism in the effectiveness of free markets. That doesn't sound frightening, I know, but the article is about more than just economic markets. It's about how the entire liberal world order has been built on a faith in free markets of various types, including the economic ones, but also the much bigger "marketplace of ideas." 

Vermeule argues, very effectively from my point of view, that the marketplace of ideas does not seem to lead to the best possible idea very often. This is because idea marketplaces suffer from the same weaknesses economic ones do: they are never really as free as we'd like them to be, and they require all kinds of intervention to work as intended. Markets as described by liberal apologists are always ideal markets, Vermeule posits, and no market is ever anything like ideal. 

Perhaps his most damning argument is when he draws on the idea of free competition in courts. We believe not in a judge trying to be impartial and come to the best decision, but in lawyers slugging it out in an anything-goes-if-it's-for-the-good-of-their-client competition. A defense lawyer doesn't care if her client is guilty. She cares what the prosecution can prove. She doesn't care if the sentence for her client is best for society. That's up to society to argue for, in the form of the attorney for the state. 

Some people really believe this is the best system, but it's hard to call our system of justice highly fair or equitable or, well, just. Rich people get better lawyers with more resources, and that helps them get better outcomes. 

What reading Vermeule made me think about wasn't so much that our system of justice is unfair, but that we have extrapolated the system of everyone advocating with maximum effort for their own position to nearly everything in the rest of society. Our political system is an extension of our justice system. Nobody is capable of giving an inch of their own personal interests for the good of majority. That's not our job. It's society's job to make us give an inch. It's why every interview is so partisan. We no longer expect our politicians to demonstrate broad-mindedness. We want them to "fight for us."

It's evident now in the middle of the kind of foreign crisis that ought to make our country come together. Even Republicans who are supporting the effort to put pressure on Putin are still using the opportunity to point out that Biden is terrible at everything. Either sanctions aren't hard enough or Putin is only there because Biden isn't a macho man like Trump was. Then there's the whole insane faction that thinks whatever it is Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene believe. 

This isn't new. Almost as soon as World War II ended, the consensus in Washington broke down. James Brady explains in The Coldest War how Korea became an opportunity for Republicans to hit Democrats for being weak, a strategy it hasn't let up on since. David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest examines how Democrats were so sensitive to appearing weak they violated their own sense of what was right to carry out war in Vietnam. Our own fractiousness, a product of our free market system of ideas, has led us to carry out bad foreign policy decisions in order to satisfy domestic political demands. It's why we came in with such half-hearted sanctions. Biden can't open himself up to more criticism if gas prices go much higher. 

If our system really is good, shouldn't that give it an advantage in world competition? Shouldn't leaders in the rest of the world be able to see that our way of life is, if not the best, at least the least bad, and want to make theirs more like it? But the last 25 years have been the story of the West, led by the United States, making decisions that have tended to make our way of life less prevalent rather than more. Depending on your political perspective, there are reasons to think that democracy is even under assault within the United States, let alone abroad. 

There are really only two choices here. First is that we are mistaken and our way of life really isn't the "good" one. The other is that we are good, but good is dumb. 

I think it's the second, but as for recommendations for how to make good smarten up, that's a little difficult. As much as I agree with Vermeule's diagnosis of the maladies of liberal democracy, I don't believe I can get on board as much with his recommended cures. As one Catholic friend of mine put it, "Vermeule would be fine with a dictator as long as the dictator was Catholic." I don't think the solution is to try to force some kind of idealistic consensus to once-more-prevalent ideals that many (including me) now find themselves not only unwilling but unable to believe. 

America has gotten far by figuring it out as we go along. We didn't need some hard set of idealistic principles. We're pragmatic. We're rough-and-ready. Or at least that's sort of how events have transpired to make us see ourselves. But perhaps we really do need some core set of principles we can mostly all agree on. Perhaps we do need some shared sense of identity. These are oft-quoted conservative principles, and I agree with them, although I disagree with almost every actual principle conservatives float as one we should all agree on. But it does seem that for good to survive, good is going to have to be able to at least understand what it is that makes it good. 

To do this, we need the input of both our pessimistic and our optimistic halves. We need the buzz-kill to come ruin the party for us by reminding us of the peril we are in while questions of who we are remain unanswered. We also need the optimist who believes, maybe against reason, that it can be done. As the better writer in my family, tired of hearing the military maxim that "hope is not a strategy" put it, hope is not only a strategy, it is, in fact, the only strategy. 

Whoopi Goldberg and fractured feelings about Black History Month

I swear I have never watched even ten seconds of The View on purpose. I've been exposed to it now and again in situations where I couldn't control my environment, like waiting for my car to be fixed while a TV is blaring in the waiting room. The general tone of the show falls about eleven levels below what my snobbery will allow. I'd have been totally unaware Whoopie Goldberg ever said anything about the Holocaust if Adam Serwer hadn't written about it in The Atlantic. (The Atlantic passes my snobbery test.)   

Serwer's basic argument matches the view of race I thought was the consensus among intellectuals at one point: that race isn't real, but rather a social construct people in power have invented for their own purposes, with different versions of what race means depending on the needs of people in power. 

Serwer makes his point by showing how racial stereotypes we now associate with Black people were once applied to Jews. He shows that although "Jew" doesn't make sense as a "race" according to how Americans now think of it, past dogmas of the powerful treated it and other distinctions between groups of mostly white people as real and important. We Americans tend to think of our notions of race as realer, perhaps, because they are based on visible characteristics. Yet the borders of those characteristics are not fixed, and the fact that "blackness" is so difficult to define is a good indication that it's probably not a real thing:

Black Americans are not really a “race” either, and the borders of Black American identity can also be difficult to define or agree upon. To some extent, shared history, culture, and ancestry exist, but as the scholars Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft, the very concept of race implies a material reality where none exists. Most American descendants of the emancipated have white ancestry, and millions of white Americans with African ancestry have no knowledge of it. “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons,” the Fieldses write, “and is subject to change for similar reasons.”

Serwer alluded to an old article from CNN about President Obama that discussed disagreement about whether Obama was "black" or "biracial." 

Serwer might have simplified the differences between American ideas about race and past ideas, such as anti-Semitism. While "black" doesn't have defined edges, that doesn't mean the term means nothing. Africa is a huge continent, and a Dinka might not have much in common physically with an Amhara or a Yoruba, to say nothing of their distant diaspora descendants, but the term "black" at least refers to some characteristics with a scientific basis, some "material reality," like relatively more abundant melanin. There are other material traits that, at least on average, are more true about Black people than White people, such as greater bone density among Black people. While "black" and "white" are mutable terms, there is more difference physically between them than there is between Jews and "Aryans" or whatever it was the Nazis would have been comparing them to. So while the term "black" isn't perhaps a useful term, it's not quite meaningless. It bears a casual relationship to DNA.  

Nonetheless, I take Serwer's point for the most part. Race is a social construct more than it is a biological reality, and to the extent it is a biological reality, our current human social constructs bear little resemblance to that reality.  

What, then, is Black History Month about? 

Once upon a time, say, circa 1998, I felt relatively safe and secure with the understanding that race was made-up. I knew that because it had been treated as a real thing for so long, there was work to do do fix the world for people who had been harmed by old racial ideas, but I expected that one day, perhaps in my lifetime, we'd be done talking about race except as an idea people used to believe in. 

Right about the same time I had achieved this certainty was the first time I became aware of Black History Month. Although it has been celebrated since 1976, apparently, I am pretty sure the first time I took notice of it was when I was an undergrad at Walsh University in the late 90s. There was a reading at one point in the student center of great Black American writers. All the woke, liberal students were going, and since I was a woke, liberal student (although the term "woke" was still almost two decades in the future), I went, too. I remember walking away thinking that I had enjoyed hearing the words of writers like Langston Hughes, Frederick Douglass, and Maya Angelou read out loud, but I also wondered if that was the main goal of Black History Month. Is it primarily an "appreciation" month, and does "appreciate" in that sense mean the same thing when we talk about "appreciating" art in a gallery? Is February about admiring people who fall into the (arbitrary and made-up) category of Black person? And how does that lead to improving the lives of the people whom society (wrongly) assigns to a (made-up) racial category? 

I've learned a great deal in more than twenty years of Black History Months since then that I've found enlightening, enriching, profitable or transformative to my thinking. I've read writers I hadn't known existed, learned of historical events I'd never read about, and been challenged in the way I think about America's past. If every White American has done the same with their Februaries, then the month has doubtlessly done some good, intangible and unmeasurable though it may be, for people America still assigns to an outdated system of racial division. As a time to re-inscribe upon history the accomplishments of people who were erased from history because of fallible racial logic, it has great value. 

Nonetheless, I can't help wondering every February if the month itself contributes to perpetuating the certainty that race exists. Because Black History isn't just about rediscovering lost black contributions to history. It's a full-scale celebration of blackness, or at least a favored definition of blackness. It seeks to shine a spotlight on Black culture. But in doing so, it (and by "it," I mean the disjointed and non-coordinated efforts of media, Black empowerment groups, corporate diversity officers, social media influencers, as well as corporations looking to monetize all of this) favors some forms of Black culture and ignores others. It changes the meaning of Blackness while seeking to celebrate it. Most significantly, it demonstrates an unmistakable certainty that blackness is a real thing, not something we should put in tenuous brackets and recognize with only a healthy amount of explanation. 

One consequence of this is that Black people who don't generally live within the confines of accepted Black culture (which is now defined partly by Black people, but also by corporate America that sells Black culture) find themselves feeling like outsiders within their own racial identity. I have a black poet friend who loves anime and comic books. He teaches a college course on Batman. There aren't many people who know Black history and literature as well as he does, but he also is sometimes challenged by other Black people for not being authentically black. That is, he's being accused of not "really" being something that isn't real. One of the more prominent threads in Black American culture is anxiety among Black people about whether they are authentically and truly black enough. There's a whole TV show whose very name--Blackish--refers in part to this anxiety. Celebrating is meant to improve the self-image of the people being celebrated, but when the celebration is about a made-up thing, it can't help but cause angst for some of those the celebration is meant to uplift. 

I hate sounding like a conservative

I realize everything I'm saying is pretty close to a conservative position. Maybe I'm saying it somewhat more circumspectly than a true conservative would, but it's still pretty close to what many conservatives would express. They believe that the focus on racial inequity itself is stoking racial division in America. At least some of them hope for a post-racial America (which is exactly what I was hoping for in 1998, and this very hope made me, I thought, very woke on the subject of race). I'm not claiming they are right or wrong, but that maybe they have a point. 

On the one hand, there's a practical issue of how to effectively fight racism. There's something about bringing up racism that activates self-defense mechanisms in people. That's why the prosecution in the Ahmaud Arbery case mostly avoided it, to great effect. So one has to acknowledge at least that confrontation isn't always the best strategy. 

Beyond the pragmatic issue of how to present the ruling class with the case for racism, though, there's the issue that efforts to eradicate racism often conflate (real) racism with (made-up) race. It's not just Black History Month. It's census data asking me my race, as though this was a question with an objective answer. It's my own woke use of capital-letter "B" in "Black people," which I follow because it's what the cool kids are doing, but have reservations about. 

A lot of ways to abuse race for power

As I write in this particular February, storm clouds of war are brewing on the border of Ukraine. The West, of which The United States is still somehow the distracted leader, has been pulled into a Second Cold War with a group of autocratic states. One of those autocratic nations feels confident enough for military adventurism in part because it knows the United States is too fractious and divided internally to long hold oppose it with unity. Corporate media interests on the right are already making inroads into turning support for Ukraine into just another partisan issue. 

Those corporate interests love to keep the idea of race alive, because it gives them something to make their audiences angry about. It's not just them, though. America's foreign enemies have been making use of racial inequality in America for decades to try to weaken the country. Russian information, influence and psychological operations campaigns have been using race as perhaps their easiest ingress into American discourse. 

I don't believe anyone thinks Russia is doing this because it genuinely cares about the souls of Black folk. Moreover, I don't believe the true interests of Black Americans are advanced when Russia makes America weaker. Yes, White America needs to get its act together in a hurry, in part for its own internal security, because racial inequality is a weapon in the hands of the enemy. But Black America--and the much larger group of people who identify as "allies"-- should also recognize that even if White America did get its act together, it would likely result in political action that was compromised and full of unintended consequences that might lead to new problems. Solving problems isn't easy even when we agree they're problems. They're much more difficult when we can't agree, and the conflation of racism with race is a small contributor to our inability to agree. It's also a weapon in the hands of the enemy. 

The point, finally

I've worked most of my life in environments that mandate putting the "bottom line up front" (BLUF). I hate writing like that. I think writing should at least occasionally be a process of discovering the bottom line, and it's okay for the final product to reflect that struggle. So I'm only now getting to my point. If I were to write an LSAT-type comprehension question based on this post, one that asks, "What is the author's main point," the answer would be this: Nothing comes without costs, even Black History Month. 

Society has to make positive efforts to undo the legacy of racism, even if race isn't real. As Serwer put it: "It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false—even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false." We cannot simply end racist laws and hope that in time things will work themselves out. We have to take action. But every action has unintended consequences. If race becomes a factor in hiring or school admission, it will lead to hurt feelings from those who feel that the made-up construct of race is now working against them--whether they are right or wrong to feel that way. The downsides are not enough of a reason not to try, but we do have to realize that downsides exist.

With Black History Month, we have to be aware of how our efforts to remove the effects of racism--which is real--unintentionally extend the lifespan of the belief in race--which is not. (There's your BLUF, you bureaucratic lumpen.) The upsides are absolutely worth the downsides, but only if we are aware of the downsides and work to mitigate them. Instead, I think the current politico-cultural divide in America demands that we either accept it as an unqualified good or a damned nuisance, depending on which tribe we belong to. Unless there are other options to quasi-religious wokeness and "How come there's no White History Month?" I think I know where I'll lay odds in the coming geopolitical conflict.