David -
I think that is a good example... at least for me.
I have struggled with this duality all of my life... having a natural
curiosity about other places/things/people and that innate "fear of
difference or unknown", I have had an almost morbid fascination with
playing up against "the Other". And I admit to avoiding clicques
(mostly in High School) and groups (professional and recreational
organizations) because while I might distrust or even fear some of the
things the groups do, I always felt the "magnification" of those
feelings that they offered.
Similar to Marx's (Groucho) idea that "I would belong any club that
would admit the likes of me", I felt that I didn't NEED or want to have
those feelings reinforced by being amongst others who felt too much like
me and I *really* didn't trust the near-codification of some of those
feelings that seemed to come with "groupness".
I'm looking forward to Glen's elaboration but I think you hit at least
one aspect of it on the head here!
- Steve
On 11/14/16 1:50 PM, Prof David West wrote:
perhaps an example, perhaps not:
all humans, probably all animals, are innately xenophobic, we are all
afraid of the "other." This is nature. But, fear of the black man, or
the woman, or whatever, comes about only when our context, the
collective / the culture gives definition to the xenophobic "other."
absent the collective, no individual would be racist or misogynist,
but they would be afraid.
davew
On Mon, Nov 14, 2016, at 01:20 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
Glen -
Not to be argumentative, but:
/Yes, the racist attributes of the system map to the individual's
myopia, their inability to extrapolate to the consequences of
their own actions. But at the system layer, the attribute is
racism. At the individual layer, the attributes are not racism.
Myopia (and other types of ignorance) at the individual layer can
generate all sorts of systemic effects. If such gen-phen mappings
were always bijections, then there would be no "complex systems". /
It sounds as if you are entirely dissociating individual racist (or
misogynist or... ) bigotry from the collective?
I know you to have some fairly eclectic ideas about individual and
collective human behaviour/motivation/self-awareness, so I'm trying
to wrap my head around what you are trying to say here rather than
deny or discount or disagree with it.
Perhaps one could postulate that many if not all human "sins" are
emergent properties of collectives and that individuals, raised out
of the context of an already corrupted group would not have those
properties. Adam and Eve before expulsion from the garden of Eden?
It is as if you are suggesting that many (or all?) individuals remain
in some kind of state of Grace, marred only by their myopic (and
other types of) ignorance, magnified quantitatively or transformed
qualitatively into the kind "sinful" behaviour we see in group
activities? I can buy SOME of that, but have a hard time not
believing that there *are* truly bad actors, individuals who have,
through whatever process of arriving (nature or nurture,
genetic/disease/trauma-induced insanity), exhibit truly, deeply madly
abhorrent if not actually evil (how do you measure that?) behaviour?
Again, not to belabor it, I know you to have some very *useful* (to
me) alternative perspectives on things, I'm hoping my questions here
provoke you to illuminate me more.
- Steve
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