The Baptism of America

Free Post - Loose Threads in My Head

Race is one of those weird constructions of the mind that we rarely discuss but is almost constantly on our minds. Third wave feminism has made it clear that what the women's rights movement stands for is not biological equality but simply gender equality. Gender is a social convention, a set of expectations we place upon a certain group of people. It's ideology or hegemony or what have you. Just as you act a certain way around a cop, a man acts a certain way around a woman and vice versa. So calling for gender equality is asking a male-driven society to accept and not malign women based solely on their gender. Biological equality isn't going to happen and we can live with that. What we can't live with is repressing women because they have periods, birth babies, have different emotional outlooks (partly due to our expectations of gender) and generally act differently than men. It's not an attack on masculinity (although many men have taken it as such). It is just asking for men not to denigrate women because they are women.
Race, on the other hand, has been handled in a far different way, even though it is, for the most part, a social construction as well. Race is more about culture than it is about skin color but it so happens that skin color plays a vital role in the social construct. Black culture is different than white culture and white culture is different than latino culture. To say so is completely obvious but misses the point, I think. White culture has this habit, just as white male culture does, of expecting different cultures to either act like them or act in a way that somehow threatens white male culture. The same goes for black culture as well.
The issue of race in America has often been packed away, hidden from public view, but arising in strange and sometimes destructive ways. The events of the 1950s and 60s are examples of how racial issues could find no other outlet other than protest, sometimes violent protest. And through speeches, through sit-ins, through water hoses and dogs and tear gas America moved beyond Jim Crow and his separate but equal ways. We were no longer separate but the equal part we're still having problems with. And it's a problem for both blacks and whites.
When white culture put away their debate on race before they got to the equal part America was left with an open wound, a wound that was previously scabbed over and unhealed. And we have let it scab over again. Black anger at whites isn't surprising in this light. Nor is the white anger at blacks who insist on continuing the debate. We must have this debate though. Sen. Obama has given America an opening, a chance to start this debate again on even ground. We cannot simply air our grievances and expect that to be enough. We must arrive at new solutions and a new dialogue, one that whites can't simply put away again. In this world of changing identities and centuries old questions of person, existence and consciousness, we must deal with the issues of race quickly.
One way to confront race in America is to treat it much like we have with gender constructions. If we accept that race is in part a social construct then we can deal with how race is something that is culturally ingrained. Once we accept that then we can begin the work of shifting the culture towards one of race equality in the same sense of gender equality. It's one path we can take to deal with the difficulties of race, of resentment and hatred. It's a way we can craft new identities that are beyond the simple white/black dichotomies of the past. What's more, it's a way that we can deal with even the issues of brown/black/white differences, religious differences and nationality differences. It's a new dialogue and its final shape is no where close to complete.

Moderation in Everything, Including Moderation

Addiction to the InterWeb is a Mental Illness - L'Inq

Coming on the heels of my jumbled thoughts on the virtual/physical barriers of human identity is another study claiming that using the internet too much is classifiable as a mental illness. I think this is one illness we will simply have to deal with. The desire to stay connected, to stay online is a new one. In the short history of human civilization the time span for rapid communication is even shorter. Part of the reason I think the end of the 19th century was such a strange time for thought was the dramatic increase in communication and mass organization. The people of the West felt more connected than any previous time in the past. But their response to it was violent nationalism, violent socialism and ultimately fascism. No one knew quite how to deal with such connectedness. Mass mental illness perhaps, but the internet is bringing the same rapid increase of communication but in a different form. What that will entail is something I can't predict. Should be fun though.

Hyperrealism after the Singularity

Humanity's Identity Crisis - Kevin Kelly @ Technium

Via Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing is this article that asks some of the basic questions of metaphysics and their relation to the world we are living and will live in. The salient point I pulled from the article was the issue of the supermodern/hyperreal in how we identify ourselves and the relation of that identity to the world. Whether that world is a physical one made up of atoms and cells or one made of images and mental spaces is the essence of such questions now. The divisions people place between the public and the private sphere are disintegrating while new divisions between who we are in the physical world and who we are online are growing rapidly. And yet those same divisions are becoming blurred as well as cosplay, Second Life, multi-communication devices and a myriad of other advances bring the virtual directly into the physical.
Identity plays a key role in the debate of the hyperreal versus the real. What is Reality, Person, Time, Place and Space when fakes, avatars and split timelines are here and ready for use? If the supermodern is more about the spaces we move through, the decontextualization of the physical world and hyperreality about the simulated lives we mentally create for ourselves, the bringing forth of a reality more real than Reality, then how does that change the sum in our lives (sum by the way is Latin for I am)? Memories become nothing but a matter of storage space, yet we have still to create the first truly artificial brain. We still haven't fully figured out the plasticity of a single neuron yet. But science cannot provide the entire answer to the questions of identity when identity can change with memories, place and time. How whole networks of neurons interact tell us only part of the story, the basic outlines of a narrative of humanity.
History is not a matter of science per se. History is the true story of human existence. It is a story with a narrative so even though we might get the outline we haven't understood the plot quite yet. The cogito ergo sum of Descartes was overturned by Wittgenstein when he explained how language was entirely a public act and thus the sum or the I we think ourselves of doesn't create identity. It is public and relies on the interactions of humans. We are not an I until there is Other. And when the barriers between what makes the I and the Other begins to dissolve as it has in the last two decades it become an urgency of philosophy to return to metaphysics and wrestle with those woolly questions.
Humanity is on the precipice of something entirely new, a cultural singularity of sorts, or mass psychological freak out. Where does the I go and what was it really in the first place? If we can fake reality, or make it more real than Real then can we fake identity or make an identity more real than Identity? Moreover, have we simply faked identity all along? Is that possible as well? When the God of the Universe said I am and became afraid because he recognized the Otherness of everything else, was that the birth of identity? Are we subsuming consciousness into subconsciousness/unconsciousness into a super-consciousness? How much understanding of reality do we really have and how much more can we bear? To me, these are the questions of the next decades. Whether we fall apart in that psychological freak out or finally move beyond the childhood of the mind depends on the answers we arrive at.