The web of human influence -- ignorance and acceptance

Recently in an argument, I brought up (in a discussion about capitalism vs. socialism) the idea that there are many things that are accepted as necessary evils, or simply go ignored, even though real people suffer.  The reason why, is that others benefit from them, and this is merely accepted as a necessary evil, or something better not thought about.  To keep things cheap, for instance, we will benefit off the labor of child slaves in other countries, or sweatshop labor (outsourced to other countries), or any number of things that are simply accepted as a necessary evil by large corporations.  Now, I'm not a communist myself, and in fact consider it an extreme predictive philosophy that I don't think the world is "ready" to adopt (I think Star Trek tech is necessary to get to that point), but I do think that these are things that it's best not to put a complete blinder to, either.


As Thomas Paine said, "The long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it the superficial appearance of being right."  We should call out wrongs for being wrong, instead of finding some justification for it.


The idea generally is, if it's out of sight and doesn't affect you, why should you get involved in any meaningful way?  Many, if not most people, feel helpless in the world; politics, economy, ethnic strife, all are a much larger force than they could possibly influence, and indeed involve "necessary evils".  This mentality cannot be said to be completely wrong-headed, as it's a way to keep sane; you aren't going to be able to influence everyone, and you aren't going to be able to make huge changes without huge investments and huge risks.  But at the same time, if enough people put real suffering out of mind, they might as well be allowing that suffering.


As I once heard (paraphrased as I can't find the quote), "To keep neutral never helps the oppressed, it only helps the oppressor."  The oppressed are the ones that cannot defend themselves, so the oppressor is able to do as they will unless acted upon by another party, even if that party is simply majority opinion.


The world is a complex web that's weaved with many strands that go unseen or unlearned.  These strands come together to what we see, and cannot be unwoven without effort.  But, the first step is understanding and tracing their origins.  No one has an idea or a feeling for completely no reason.  Everything has a history, whether oppressed or oppressing or neutral.


If politics is kept as politics, then the only ones to influence it will be politicians.  If war is viewed as politics, then the only ones to influence it will be politicians.  If far-off oppression is viewed as "not my problem", it will only go to those that will view it as their problem... which generally won't be the politicians.


Now, why SHOULD you consider it as your problem?  The sad fact is, it is almost impossible to live in this world without influencing other people.  Even if all you do is eat and sleep, using no electronics or modern technology whatsoever, that food comes from somewhere, and if you like your pick of food, it generally isn't local.  You need space to sleep.  Even these two fundamental requirements for living have an affect -- and with our globalized society, any effect will go along the "web" of human interaction, and influence someone else.


Just sticking with food products, do you like chocolate?  Have you purchased chocolate?  The thing is, cocoa beans have a long investment time in their production, that is not offset by the current cost of chocolate... so to keep your chocolate affordable, child slavery and similar exploitation is required.  If the freedom of the cocoa farmers is respected, either they would stop growing cocoa altogether, or the price of cocoa would go up more than others would be willing to pay.  But child labor, sweatshop factories, and similar forms of labor that go to benefit those in developed countries, will go ignored, because it's a good thing to keep prices low, and many won't ask what goes into making them low in the first place.  Many point to the modern system as what makes people happy, but they will necessarily ignore whoever might be unhappy involved in the process, since they don't live next door.


Anyway you look at it, you have influence over others, and the ability to own and use certain items will not appear out of nowhere.  Someone makes the iphone you use.  Someone makes your computer.  Someone does maintenance on the ISP that keeps you connected to the internet.  Someone builds your car.  With globalization, a far-off event could influence prices on items you would otherwise consider innocuous; chocolate, bananas, diamonds, oil, all are influenced thanks to international politics and interplay.


In this complex web of human interactions, all of this lies, as well as more -- history, race relations, cultural ideas that existed or were thrust on others.  Exploitation, slavery, genocide, all of which happen for various reasons, ideologies, ethnic tensions, etc.  All of this combine together to make a world in which one group of people will be willing to kill another group of people -- Nazis killing Jews, Japanese killing Chinese, Hutu killing Tutsi, etc.  The problem is, dealing with these major influences by major nations has always been erratic and unpredictable.  It's widely considered a good thing that the Nazis were opposed and the remaining Jews freed from genocide.  At the same time, few were punished for the Rape of Nanking, even though that was a case of genocide, torture, and medical experimentation that went beyond inhumane.  As for the Rwandan genocide, a handful of Belgians are killed, and then there's immediate extraction, and 800,000 Rwandans get murdered horribly.  In Somalia, a handful of U.S. soldiers die, and the rest get extracted.  Why are these cases taken so differently?  The answer is complex, naturally, but ultimately it comes down to politics and economics.  Rwanda is not "interesting" politically or economically.  Somalia is not "interesting" politically or economically.  Thus, the slaughter of 800,000 people is not seen as important as the deaths of 10 men, because 10 happen to come from one particular culture and political border (European).


This kind of mindset is baffling if one looks at the world as one where we should work for justice for all, or to see others as people.  It isn't baffling if one is looking at the world as a politician that must consider his own nation first and foremost.


Thus, the politicization of morality and moral actions MUST be questioned.  Ignorance and acceptance of this form of thought must eventually die away.  Nations should not be considered more important than people, and suffering should never lie in the shadows, but be brought to light.


If your happiness is bought at the cost of another, and if that happiness would fade when you realize where it comes from, then you should question whether that happiness is a good thing.  If others suffer because you want to be neutral, then you have to ask why you say you're against suffering in other cases.

"A lie is a lie. Just because they dress it up and call it history doesn't make it the truth."

The title of this post is a very very good example of poor thinking -- in this case, the person in question was either denying the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the Colfax Massacre, United States v. Cruikshank, as well as the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, or he was simply denying that they had any historical validity, especially in the question of government power.

The person in question was an anarcho-capitalist sort of Libertarian, one that believes that there should be very little to no government power -- which I've always had as a problem with this sort of thinking.  To get this out of the way, one of my biggest problems with anarcho-capitalist grade Libertarianism is that they suggest that a body of people making a government is innately more evil and harmful than a body of people making a corporation -- and they suggest that self interest and greed, in the true Ayn Randian way, does far more good than a social construct that supports its own citizens. Oh, they also promote "freedom", but want to strip any ability to enforce that freedom.

But getting past all that, the categorical rejection of history that does not support your idea is naturally something to be worried about.  However, it's also a common meme -- "History is written by the winners, not the losers"... hence, History is always subject to propaganda, which is true.

However, you have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There's good history, and there's bad history.

Generally, historians have a few things to work on. Unlike archaeologists, who work almost entirely on artifacts, images, architecture, and (if they're lucky) inscriptions they can read, a historian has a vast amount more documents, recorded speeches, as well as all the rest -- inscriptions, architecture, images, art style (art history plays a big part in historical understanding, etc.). Linguistics and language are also tools, just as good as tracking the movements of people as material possessions. Now, both Archaeology and History need some interpretation; but the problem is, with the history of archaeology, it's more about analyzing the items and *then* coming to a conclusion (and then constantly adding to it as new data and artifacts become uncovered, so in, say, Mesoamerica, it's a constantly changing field), and History has an unfortunate history (heh) of being used for propaganda and to push ideals.


There's a big difference between going off these sources, and being told what to believe about these sources. This is why history generally is vastly dumbed down in high school, especially as they remove all the nasty parts of history that you'll have to learn in college.


In this way, there's a big problem with many history *teachers*, as they basically teach a dumbed-down version. The worst of it is history that's meant to make you feel patriotic -- that teaches you, for instance, that America won WWII entirely (and fails to mention its many allies), as a very basic example. I've heard the case in some Slavic countries where they teach that their own cultural group (Czech, Polish, Russian, whatever) were the "leading figures" of their time period that outshone all the other groups near them... while not understanding, for instance, that their cultural groups inter-mixed ideas and culture quite a bit (The Polish Hussar, for instance, was actually from Hungarian influence originally).


You can generally tell a good source vs. a bad source by how they cite their sources, as well as going to the original sources they're using and deciding based on that.


A big example here, actually, is how the Nazi party took a document called "Germania", by Tacitus. Now, the proper way to view such a document is by putting it in its historical context. It was a document written about the "German" peoples in the second century AD by a Roman that never even lived near it, who was using the "Germans" as a way to explore what it meant to be Roman.


Medieval historians picked up on this, and later the people that would make up the Nazi party. Both of these read into the source what they wanted to -- they didn't put the writer in the context of his time, and they used it to justify their own ideas of what "Germania" was all about -- medieval scholars in wanting to define the Holy Roman Empire (whose many fractured states stand, more or less, where Germany and some outlying countries stand today), and by the Nazis to justify a racial ideal, of the "brave, honest, noble" German. Both of these groups read what they want into the source, and when you understand more about Tacitus and the state of the Roman Empire at the time, you start to understand why and where the problems occur.


A good historian would take Tacitus, medieval historians, and the Nazi party in their own time periods, and analyze them in their own framework. To teach bad history, you ignore all that and basically teach a hashed down pseudo-analysis that takes your own assumptions, promotes a personal viewpoint, and then moves on.


(I just want to add that the previous example is actually given because I'm currently reading "A Most Dangerous Book", exploring this very issue -- http://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Tacituss-Germania/dp/0393062651)


Overall, what I'm saying here, is that you can tell the good from the bad in those who can SHOW you where they got their information. A scientist can have you run an experiment yourself, or at least show you the data and how they came about it, whereas a historian can show you the first-hand sources, or let you analyze the first-hand and second-hand sources... but they often give you the "big picture" for levity, but can come up with examples with original sources as examples, or when asked where they got their data.


This is why, say, holocaust deniers are so ludicrous. There's few other conflicts with so many documents from so many sources than in WWII. There's no way you can legitimately deny the holocaust happened -- we have the documents from almost any faction involved, we have the concentration camps, we have images of the bodies, we can trace who a lot of those killed are. Holocaust deniers will assert you something and then show you a very very limited view of the data -- but very quick searches in very public archives (easily found on google, no less) can paint a very different picture.

Ultimately, you can't avoid having multiple people with multiple interpretations using more or less the same data... but generally, good historians will agree on many of the basics and disagree on more of the fiddly bits than have entirely radically different ideas of the past.  Exceptions generally involve what sources they're using, or how much they dug through said sources... or if they're pushing a particular propaganda.

Moral Relativism vs. Israel

So, I've seen lots of accusations of moral relativism lately. The latest I wandered onto was a years-old blog post here: http://haemtza.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-npr-anti-semitic.html


I don't support Israel because I'm "misguided", I don't see the morally objective viewpoint, I'm blinded by moral relativism and can't see "the light", is what this blog post is saying.


Well, you know what? My moral compass DOES lead me to support an oppressed people, no matter who is doing the oppression, and no matter what god they subscribe to.


Really, this is so much evidence for what Carl Sagan said... my problem with this idea of God is that it's such a small-minded god, such a jealous god -- a ruler that rules by bullying, that plays favorites with his own "chosen people", and sets them out to kill, burn, and massacre all they can to gain land for themselves. This is the god that promotes stoning, killing, and division in his own name -- that can only compete with other religions by burning alive their worshippers, or otherwise killing them in some gruesome way.


Is this is the god of our universe? Its creator, its founder? The creator of billions of galaxies, wherein Earth is but a single mote in a sunbeam? How can such a powerful, creative force that has put into place all the laws that would lead into the orbiting of planets, the creation of stars, the many beautiful and elegant pieces of the universe, be only focused on a small group, of a small planet, in a small galaxy? How does this fall in line with how much of the universe lies outside of our grasp without technical aid -- a whole spectra of light, only a small portion of which we can see? Sound, of which only a certain amount we can hear? Chemicals, of which we need complex understanding and instrumentation to dissect?


Why create all this wonder, if he's just going to act like a petty dictator that cares about your personal life -- that cares about the threads in your clothing, what food you eat, who you have sex with in your own spare time? Why analyze the thread of every single person's life on this blue ball, punishing some in horrendous ways?


Even if this small-minded god could exist, never could I see him as the Creator of the universe, the Prime Mover, the First Cause. I don't even think there has to be such a thing in the first place, but if there was, this small-minded god couldn't even come close.


You know the problem with the idea of the Bible being the objective morality that we all should follow? It's that it doesn't stand up to reality. It doesn't even come close. It's a book written by a people that put in the morality and understandings of the universe at their time... and how small, how pathetic it compares to what we actually observe. How small it seems, how narrow-minded, how bigoted... and how arrogant.


How arrogant that some think that the universe watches them, cares about them, moves itself for them, and devotes itself to them -- or punishes them, dictates to them, cares about their little lives on their little planet.


Imagine, in your mind's eye, the vast cosmos. Here, let me help you:http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/NatSci102/images/hdfwf3.gif


Imagine all of this, and then imagine that you zoom in on any one of those galaxies, zoom in on any one of its solar systems, zoom in on one of its tiny planets -- would you consider them the all-important race of the cosmos? Much less a small smidgeon of that race, selected for their ethnicity?


This post might be considered anti-semitic. I prefer to think of it as pro-reality. I think it was great that we spent money, resources, and even human lives protecting the Jews and other ethnicities (gypsies, polish, etc.) from the Nazis -- said without sarcasm. That was a terrible time, and the US eventually did the right thing. But that doesn't mean that I should support the subjugation of another culture because of that horror.


Anyways, rant over. I had to get that out of my system.