Letter from Birmingham Jail: Reading As a Remedy for Racial Bias

© Charles D. Hayes

Many years of voracious reading have taught me that reaching a truly objective level of understanding about reality is unlikely. Still, even though I think the chances for complete objectivity are slim, my enthusiasm for pursuing impartiality remains intact because the persistent searching prevents rigidity, complacency, and cynicism. Sometimes real progress is measurable, and the quest is exhilarating.

Elsewhere I have written that books are but perspectives—the more of them you read, the larger your own perspective becomes. I maintain that the very quality of the future depends upon our ability to achieve a perspective of maturity, and this is a fundamental requirement for getting beyond racism. First, let me provide some history.

I grew up in Texas and Oklahoma in the 1940s and ’50s. In those days, the cultural expectations of what a person was supposed to do in life were simple. They were immediately apparent when your behavior was in some way unacceptable, but vague when you considered all of the possible things you might do, given talent and opportunity. But bias and blatant racial and ethnic prejudice were so ubiquitous in the communities where I lived that a social climate existed analogous to a thick fog of contempt for differences or otherness, especially racial differences.

I use this analogy to make the point that a lifetime of reading can be, in essence, a lifting and thinning of cultural fog and a platform for inclusiveness. While we can never rid ourselves completely of our cultural upbringing, nor would we likely want to abandon everything about it, the perspective made possible by reading is such that civilization itself could be said to depend on the kind of thinking that reading accomplishes.

Cultural expectations in our youth are so pervasive that we remain unaware they even exist; they seem merely to reflect reality—the way things are. As we age, we are able to see farther, primarily from our depth of experience. The first dissonant clues about our cultural reality arise when we begin to realize that the grownups in our midst, namely our parents and grandparents, are mere mortals, subject to the same human frailties as the rest of humanity.

Then, in time, if we are truly observant and reflective, we begin to apply the same critical lens to the groups we belong to and to our respective political and geographical allegiances. Traveling the world is a big help to gaining perspective, but nothing serves us better than extensive reading and reflecting on what we’ve read because of the thoughtfulness involved in the process.

It’s far too easy to learn to inhabit a local worldview—a narrow outlook that is familiar, dependable, and comforting but ultimately destructive to the very idea of expanding human relations. Thus, for many fearful people it becomes necessary to maintain a restricted viewpoint that requires avoidance of outside opinion and a distrust of change and uncertainty. When the citizens of any culture become uneasy about gaining knowledge, new information is subject to being censored, ignored, or banished. That’s why anti-intellectualism is ubiquitous.

I grew up with a sheltered worldview much in agreement with the same politics and prejudices of my community. It was a world of black-and-white notions of morality, and it was a literal interpretation of racial superiority that white was right. I experienced my first serious dissonance to this rigid ultraconservative worldview when I joined the Marine Corps in 1960. It was a subtle unraveling over a four-year period of service in which I was witness to young men of all races and from all regions of the country and from all sorts of backgrounds, many of whom, in spite of conventional stereotypical assumptions of inferiority, proved to be natural-born leaders. Black, white, brown, red, or yellow—race just didn’t seem to matter. Individual character did.

After four years in the Marines, I joined the Dallas police department, a bit more open-minded about race than what I had grown up with, but still far from being free of racial bias. The next cultural dissonance I recall was the result of reading sociology texts in a college class on police science and administration. The fog was still thick, but beginning to lift as I entertained other viewpoints, many of which seemed superior to my own.

A few years later, I read The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant and The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler. I was so taken with these works that I read each one several times in quick succession. By then, the fog was really thinning. Durant’s book put my regional outlook into a global perspective with ideas so profound that they made the whole range of my prevailing cultural assumptions seem arbitrary and ill thought-out. For Toffler, it wasn’t the accuracy of his observations about what was going on in the world that I found compelling so much as his ambition to explain it in big-picture fashion.

It was about this time that I read Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, which I still view as one of the most dissonant and stunningly insightful moments of reading I have ever experienced. King’s letter, laying out the absurdity of the tired old argument that always claims it’s too early to push for desegregation, shattered the remains of my regional worldview and its justification for racial segregation. Since then, I have been a ravenous reader.

Ironically some of the writers I admire most warned obsessively about being overinfluenced by books, while being careful not to reveal that they were themselves voracious readers. In my view, the point of reading is to move beyond the works one is reading to an enriched perspective that will equal or surpass the author’s, and not to become so enamored with a work that it blots out the need for further inquiry. Frequently I encounter individuals who don’t read very much and thus become overly influenced by a particular book simply because they have too little to compare it to.

One of the important lessons I’ve learned about reading is the value of rereading. Every time I reread a book that I once felt was very important, the effect is startling. It happens without fail, and yet I always wonder why it took me so long to do it again. The books that are important to reread are the ones we thought were profound and that influenced us the first time we read them.

Rereading after some years have passed is doubly rewarding for reasons I’ve seldom heard discussed. But to me it seems evident when you consider that long after we have been moved by new ideas, our subconscious continues to kick them around and to ruminate on them for years as they become a part of our repertoire of comprehension. With regard to racial prejudice, in particular, the best part is that, if you have made genuine progress in learning about the absurdity of such behavior, the rereading will make you wonder how you were ever naïve enough to have held such views in the first place.

Reacquainting ourselves with the original presentation of an idea is an invitation to the subconscious to make our quiet deliberation become clear to us as never before. All we needed was the right kind of reminder, since the first time we encountered these ideas, we were barely ready for them. That’s why they impressed us in the beginning.

As we begin the new year this January, we can let Martin Luther King’s birthday on the 17^th be the day we resolve to rid ourselves of the reflexive bias that we unwittingly internalized growing up without realizing we have done so. A good place to start is with King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

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Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

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Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or Has It Just Begun?

Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt

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Why Political Dialog Is Disingenuous

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Meat: Politics and Perspective on Steroids

Human consumption of animals for food is an issue that seldom gets much media attention, except when it enters the political arena. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin recently accused Sarah Palin of killing animals for fun or political gain, and now the subject is hot.

First, let me be clear that as a resident of Wasilla, Alaska, I view Palin as a local and a national embarrassment unworthy of the relentless media attention she gets. I consider her a well-meaning but deeply ignorant human being who attended four colleges and obtained a degree but escaped without an education. I don’t, however, think she kills animals for fun. Hunting game animals in Alaska is a tradition more honorable by leaps and bounds, in my view, than factory farming. That said, Palin is enormously talented at turning tradition into ridicule and time-honored custom into propaganda. Seeing the flippant way she treats practically any subject she talks about, I can’t blame Sorkin for his assumption. I would also add that anyone who can’t shoot better than Palin should not hunt any animal, period.

The topic of killing animals for food can be likened to perspective on steroids. It’s a matter most people purposely avoid for purely selfish reasons: we don’t want to hear about things that make us uncomfortable, especially if it seems we are powerless to do anything about them. Now, before I go any further, let me clarify that I’m not a vegetarian, nor will I likely become one at this age. I’m not going to try to talk you into becoming one either. And for the record, I do hunt moose.

I’ve written before about the value of using dissonance as a guide for purposeful exploration in the pursuit of objectivity. When new information comes in that conflicts with what we perceive to be true, we’re forced to either deny the facts or adjust our thinking. One possible exception is the arena of politics, where factual information doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as association and whose side one is on politically. But if we can put politics aside, the discomfort of dissonant information has something to teach us, and this applies to all of the subjects we encounter in life, not just emotional affairs of state.

One of the easiest ways to kick up some dissonance about the fragile notion of objectivity is to examine the subject of our dietary habits. Few of us give much thought to what goes on behind the grocery store shelves, especially the meat market. But, to my mind, no other subject puts ideology and the desire to be protected from reality—or to choose one’s own reality—in clearer perspective than the treatment of animals bred for human consumption.

When we put aside the moral issue of eating meat from domestic animals and examine it strictly as a matter of environmental economics, we can easily apprehend the egregious inefficiencies in sowing grain to produce meat. Sixteen pounds of grain plus an enormous amount of water are required to produce one pound of beef. It’s also clear that the world is losing topsoil at an alarming rate, making global famine a frequent occurrence. Thus we can conclude that the health of the planet and of human beings would be much improved if we dramatically reduced our consumption of red meat.

In his eloquent book Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, Charles Patterson makes a compelling case that the indifference we exhibit toward the needless suffering of animals breeds inhumanity among our own kind. Such suffering occurs on a scale so grand and so horrific that it’s almost incomprehensible. I will spare you the vivid daily details of factory slaughterhouses and the depraved indifference and abject cruelty that happen routinely behind those closed doors, but it’s not hard to find if you’re interested. (The movie Food Inc. is a good place to start.) I will, though, ask you one question that interjects morality back into this subject. If you were told that a particular furry mammal’s flesh tastes better when the animal is subjected to a rush of adrenalin just before it is killed, would you approve of burning it alive or beating it to death to improve the flavor? I didn’t think so. But it’s naïve to think this hasn’t happened in the past, doesn’t happen in the present, or won’t in the future.

If you feel you have thoroughly examined the morality of being a carnivore, and that no further reflection is necessary, try a simple thought experiment: Imagine you are sitting on a hilltop overlooking a canyon below and that before you is a seemingly infinite stage as far as the eye can see. Upon this stage, facing you, is every animal whose flesh you have personally eaten. You have to work at this for a while to get your mind around it. All of these creatures could and did feel pain.

Chances are, if you are a senior citizen like me, you can remember when livestock and farm animals had something of a life before they were slaughtered, but that was before industrial, assembly-line farming took over. Currently many creatures live in such tiny spaces that throughout the whole of their lives they don’t even have enough physical room to turn around. When we consider how many cattle might be represented in all of the hamburger we’ve consumed in the half-century or more that we’ve lived, you have to wonder if it’s even possible to position the stage in our thought experiment to include all of these animals without blotting out the earth and sky.

No, I’ve not adopted the vegetarian lifestyle, but I do intend to pay more attention to food choices and to speak up about the maltreatment of animals who suffer needlessly on industrial farms for the sake of expediency and profit—or for the sake of Sarah Palin’s reality television show. I do agree with Sorkin that Palin would kill damn near anything for political gain.

But back to factory farming. The ubiquity of supermarkets has had the effect of anesthetizing the general public from the inhumane realities of industrial farming. There is something deeply offensive about sending five-day-old calves to slaughter because it means veal will be slightly more tender. I’m reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “no view of life is valid that omits the odious facts,” and factory farming is the epitome of odiousness and thoughtlessness.

The stress we encounter in life is escalating exponentially, and the hidden immorality of it all may be in the realization that much of the food we eat represents the epitome of stress that could be avoided for pennies on the dollar. Surely the thoughtfulness required to kill animals humanely could ripple though society as a measure of unspoken respect for the sanctity of life itself and ultimately make the world a better place.

Think about it this way: If stressed people live on a diet of animals rife with stress hormones, what is the biological consequence for human health? What does this say about the quest for civilization? I believe the indifference that Patterson writes about leads to a kind of insensitivity that feeds on itself, dulling our senses and closing down our natural predilection for empathy. Moreover, this general disregard is fertile ground for arousing political contempt with a vengeance—something Sarah Palin is very good at.  

In her book Animals Make Us Human, Temple Grandin lets us off the hook a bit when she writes about her own cognitive dissonance. Because she cares strongly about the well-being of animals, one would expect her to agitate against the slaughterhouse industry instead of working for it as she does. She describes watching cattle going to their death, in an assembly-line system of her own design, when suddenly she began to cry. Then it occurred to her in a flash that without the industry itself, none of these animals would have ever existed in the first place. Moreover, when she considered the harshness of the order of life and death in the natural world, a humane death in a slaughterhouse seemed almost preferable. That said, Grandin has worked tirelessly for the humane treatment of animals raised for food.             

Learning more about this subject is the only way to break the seldom acknowledged codes of the ideologies that bind us together and pit us against one another. There are three books on meat for human consumption that I recommend highly: Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I encourage you to read more about factory farming and to take the same approach with any subject that you have treated till now with only superficial knowledge, especially those you consider very important.

Too many of us have adamant opinions on subjects that, for all practical purposes, we know very little about, and this applies doubly to politics and supermarket food. On the latter subject Sorkin quotes Palin as having said, “Unless you’ve never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather chair or eaten meat, save your condemnation.” Having worked in the oil industry for more than thirty years, I use a similar rationale that people who ride in automobiles, fly in airplanes, and use commercial products should save their condemnation of the use of fossil fuels as well. Nevertheless, I’m all for reducing our consumption of fossil fuels and exploring alternative energy, just as I’m all for treating the creatures we raise for food in a manner that enhances their brief well-being and fosters our humanity.

Reading and asking questions can take us beyond the deceptively antiseptic and seemingly benign shelves in our supermarkets. Yes, we may have to contend with some dissonance along the way, but if objectivity is the goal, it seems a shame not to follow that course. Indeed, that’s what books are for, except maybe for Sarah’s. But of course she doesn’t write her own books, she just poses for them. Metaphorically that’s all her political gesturing amounts to: an ideological pose and a shallow one at that. Here again I agree with Sorkin that The Learning Channel should be ashamed of itself, but not simply because of Palin. Their lineup of new programming is an insult to education.

In her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Kathryn Schulz writes about three tacks we most often take toward people with whom we disagree: The ignorance assumption, the idiocy assumption, and the evil assumption. People have in the past and will in the future accuse me of claiming Palin is ignorant because she doesn’t agree with me. And to that I say, you betcha. But Palin jumps to the third tack, which Schulz argues is the most dangerous, namely that the people who don’t agree with her are evil.

As those who participate already know, the greatest lesson of all of self-education is that things are seldom as they seem. Examining the food industry is good way to prove this to yourself. Then apply what you’ve learned to politics. The world could be a better place if more people would do this.

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© Charles D. Hayes

Discombobulated Wingnuttery

 © Charles D. Hayes

If you can think of a better description than discombobulated wingnuttery to describe today’s Tea Party politics, I would like to hear it. Their current level of political discourse is so deeply disturbing and so out of tune with our democratic ideals, that at times I have trouble believing my eyes and ears. For more than thirty years I have been engaged in a serious effort of self-education. I’ve studied and continue to study myriad subjects, with the experience being its own reward. But now I find it increasingly the case that the position of ignorance from which I began to study three decades ago has become something of a Tea Party platform: a surplus of Stone Age contempt is aimed at all perceived manifestations of otherness, and the world is divided into every possible avenue of identity to reflect an ethos of us versus them, while reason is overwritten by a form of destructive passion driven by existential anxiety.

The Tea Party platform is in large part a political stance that professes to be proud of our Constitution and our philosophy of “We the people,” but it is motivated to a significant degree by politically contrived hatred for all that we do collectively in the name of government. The exception, of course, is military action, which very often gets enthusiastic support. You see, government-sanctioned war is a means of redirecting existential anxiety—anxiety that could and would dissipate through a serious effort to understand the complexity of our political circumstances at any given time. But in a world existing largely of us and them factions, war is the only thing that really makes sense, so we shouldn’t be surprised that so many people embrace it with enthusiasm. It makes sense because hatred as Eric Hoffer observed is one of the most effective unifying agents available to ideologues.  

It’s difficult to describe the depth of disappointment I feel when people carry signs that depict the president of the United States as Hitler or Stalin. Or of people whose overt racism is so obvious that only psychopaths could fail to detect it. I suspect any well-educated person returning to America today after being absent and out of touch for many years would be stunned at the pervasive level of ignorance being passed off as patriotism and a defense of the Constitution, when it is anything but.

During the past two decades, revelations in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience have granted us precious insights into human behavior. We know more than ever before about bias and how it works. We also know why practicing democracy is so incredibly difficult. It’s because our default nature is to act tribally, especially under duress. Only now are we beginning to understand the psychological difficulty of maintaining our reasoning abilities when we discuss hot-button issues. For a couple of centuries we have thought of ourselves primarily as rational creatures. But we most assuredly are not. We default to an emotional level while still feeling that we are being perfectly rational. We imagine ourselves far removed from tribalism, but we practice it daily.

Consider the explosive success in social media with groups such as Facebook and Twitter. We instinctively relate to members of our group, and we are equipped with a hardwired expertise for detecting otherness. We are so good at it that it requires an extraordinary amount of attentive awareness just to catch ourselves doing it. Relating to members with whom we identify is so emotionally satisfying that we tend to regard the process as that of reasoning. In other words, strong emotion, because it is so powerful, feels precisely like reason ensconced in righteousness and thus, this sentiment is an integral part of our identity.

We still relate better to small groups of people than to large ones. Because of our tribal temperament, many of us intuit a tipping point where overt differences begin to bother us. Psychological research clearly demonstrates that dissimilarity past a certain point can become tangled up with our sense of mortality—we can become fearful of too much otherness because it is related to change and, subconsciously, it reminds us of our demise. As a result, many individuals become fanatical about preserving the status quo, present inequities and all, because it feels safer than coping with an uncertain future or with people whose differences make us existentially uncomfortable.

I can find no way to be charitable about the pseudo- conservative political ideology touted by placard-wielding Tea Partiers, and yet I can’t help but feel some sympathy for people who look up to the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as great leaders. In my view, this amounts to one of the greatest examples of educational failure in America. A person of any political persuasion left, right, or center, who cannot deconstruct the incoherent nonsense of Palin and Beck as being just that—nonsense—cannot be considered to be sufficiently educated to think independently about politics.

The validity of their arguments aside, it’s not uncommon for Beck and Palin to contradict themselves profusely in the space of a few sentences. Neither of these individuals is knowledgeable enough to discuss any subject with any degree of complexity in a public forum, and yet they have become wealthy doing so. Astronomer Phil Plait, who writes for Discover magazine, stated it perfectly in a recent blog when he said that, given Beck’s intellectual capacity, “he shouldn’t even be allowed to rant in public parks to passing squirrels.”

Moreover, Alexander Zaitchik’s book Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance shows that because of his depraved tactics to improve his ratings in talk radio, Beck may very well be one of the most unscrupulous individuals in media, and yet he passes himself off as a person of great virtue. Indeed, his rally in Washington D.C. in August 2010 was supposed to be about rediscovering honor. But how does that work exactly? How does a dishonorable person help others find honor?

Both Palin and Beck have achieved their fame and notoriety, not by expressing a sound political philosophy, but by pushing people’s hot buttons. Indeed, they have perfected the technique of tribal relating to such degree that their very presence makes reasoned discourse unnecessary. They have become relational icons for a sector of society suffering a deeply disturbing form of existential anxiety. In an appearance on C-Span2’s Book TV, Zaitchik described Tea Party discourse as being sub-rational, which is precisely what it is. So, how do we get beyond discombobulated wingnuttery? How do we educate so that relational nonsense doesn’t substitute for democracy?

Elsewhere I’ve written extensively about the need of every citizen for an existential education—based in part on the premise of being familiar enough with literature and the humanities to be able to cope with one’s own existential anxiety without becoming so unnerved as to lose the ability to use one’s reasoning faculties effectively. When that happens, the default position is to find someone to blame for one’s own misfortune regardless of the cause. I advocate existential education fully aware that our emotional self and our reasoning self are one and the same; they are so interconnected that treating them as separate and independent functions is a deceptive oversimplification.

In The Happiness Hypotheses, Jonathan Haidt describes the human psyche as being made up of reason and emotion—expressed metaphorically as rider and elephant. Reason, as the rider, can ride the elephant, but never completely control it. The elephant has a mind of its own, the larger part of which exists as the subconscious—inaccessible to the rider. An existential education can make a crucial difference because it can enable us to get better and better at influencing the elephant as we age. Moreover, it helps us to understand that the human race is made up completely of riders and elephants. If we know we don’t have total control over our own emotions, then why must we feel it necessary to characterize everything we can’t agree with or relate to as evil?

Civilization requires that we explore and negotiate methods to keep our political dialog on a rider-to-rider basis. Our elephants can relate to one another emotionally when provided with some guidance from the riders, but there is no avenue open to resolving emotional differences with emotion alone except violence. The slippery default that occurs when we encounter people with whom we disagree is that if we view them as the other, we don’t even hear their reasoned arguments when they speak, we simply tune them out. Research in neuroscience reveals that unless we are very careful when our hot buttons are pushed, we misrelate by flooding our minds with emotion, essentially blocking our ability to reason effectively.  

  

Democracy is undoubtedly an idealistic aspiration. But if you buy into the idea that democracy is a legitimate method of governing, then our reasoning abilities must take precedence over our tendency for tribally motivated relating. Otherwise the actual practice of democracy is a misguided objective. This is not rocket science. It is, instead, a commonsense notion that seems to totally escape the Tea Partiers because the movement at its core is an extreme example of tribalism: you are with us or against us. And thus, it comes down not to democratic differences about governing but to a battle of good versus evil. When our relating becomes overly tribal, we leave the discussion to the elephants and the best they can do is stampede or trample our best intentions.

Emotion is an essential part of our humanity and a vital ingredient of reason itself, but when we let our emotions dominate, our democratic aspirations are moot—there is nothing to negotiate because our reasoning ability becomes inaccessible. The result is anger, rage, and outright hatred. We have to be very careful when it comes to politics, or our elephants will take control of the conversation. When this happens there is little to do except butt heads and trumpet. People ignorant of this reality grow angry at one another with ever-increasing fury; educated people—existentially educated people, that is—are able to calm themselves down, keep their emotions under control and talk, rider to rider. Otherwise, when elephants run wild and attempt to turn all that is political into emotion, the result is discombobulated wingnuttery and it leads us ever closer to the abyss.

The sad but profound truth seldom discussed for fear of offending a significant percentage of our population is straightforward but so politically incorrect that it’s nearly unthinkable to mention. Still, it needs to be said. If a person is uneducated to such a degree that articulating their political views rationally and coherently is not possible, then emotion is all they can bring to the table. If a person knows little of history and little of the dynamics of human behavior and politics, then any and all arguments that they don’t fully understand are perceived as an assault on their identity. When this is the case, the only avenue they have for a defense is to demonstrate their loyalty to their kind by showing contempt and anger toward those who are viewed as the other.

Thus, without an educated citizenry, democracy is untenable and we are stuck with discombobulated wingnuttery. Citizens politically left, right, and center must care more about discerning the better argument and be willing to reason it into existence, or democracy is doomed to the ash heap of dead ideas.

My latest books:

September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life

Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher

Back to Autodidactic Press