The Fallacy of the Absolute: Milquetoast Blacks & Oblivious Whites

Stacey Dash recently was recently recorded saying that if people wanted actual equality, they wouldn’t support such organizations as NAACP, BET, or the Essence Awards.

While there has been plenty of outcry this week, these positions are anything but new. Ms. Dash has been under fire for quite some time now starting with her endorsement of Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign. Since then, she has been spokeswoman of color for a brand of opinion that comes off as myopic, if not juvenile, and certainly idealistic. Being a person of color, these opinions often cast her in a light of suspicious self-hatred — endorsing the platforms of individuals who have done nothing for the various elements of her being, namely her gender and ethnicity — and the intelligentsia from every niche of society have come to the fore to peddle their reception of her statements.

There is one blaring inconsistency that is evident not just with Stacey, but in the formation of opinion as a human being. I have written extensively about this on this blog see Simulacra and Wars of Meaning, but a point I find myself having to make obsessively is that human beings were not built for pure, passive computation. We were form fitted to make choices as an organism in a complex ecology. To this point, there is absolutely no such thing as absolution in human mentation — we make choices not on pure merit or strict objectivity, we make them based on how our biology constructs what can be said to be reality.

At the level of an individual human, our psychological worlds can be broken down in a few different ways; the way I like to think about them is what is consciously accessible and what is not consciously accessible. Our conscious world is, for the most part, what most of us tend to consider our deliberate — or at least volitionally thinkable — domain. The thoughts that pop into our working memory constitute the basis of the here and now; it is the experience you are currently having as you read this piece. However, the unconscious is integral in providing the “norm” or the selectable content of which your conscious mind then is offer and subsequently considers. Therefore, what is willed is still to a large degree preselected — or perhaps a better term, pre-processed.

At the level of a complex interaction between multiple or aggregates of multiple individuals, what must first be established are parameters within which information can be communicated. The parameters mitigate confusion, false positives, and other risks of miscommunication. However, these are abstract concepts, not real spatial parameters, and while all humans are tuned to similar biological frequencies in terms of experience, decision making, and problem solving, these frequencies have extensive wiggle room and variability to them. This is why language can never be captured in a dictionary or any other static communicative device. Language, like humans, is dynamic and adaptive.

An issue I’ve covered in the aforementioned blog posts is the ubiquity of a priori decisional structures. A priori simply means prior to and in this case, I’m specifying “prior to conscious awareness.” Given that the non-conscious aspects of our being have already done a great deal of processing, freeing us from the tedium of deciding about every signal and sign accosting the nervous system, we should take our preferences and convictions with a grain of salt before harolding them as facts.

 

The conscious aspects of our selves are napalm to our personal and organismal evolution. What the conscious world is able to do through contemplation, planning, and feedback analysis, is update some of the automaticity of the non conscious world. You cannot go back and alter your genes or your past experiences, however, you can train your brain to react and respond differently over time, promoting behaviors and activities that bring benefits. To have such a hand in one’s evolution is remarkable and I think we are only just starting to see what that will mean.

What I have tried to lay out, thus far, is an argument against human absolution. We don’ have the biological structures to see the universe “as it is”; therefore, it is dubious to think that our psychologies support such pure computation. We are not objective. We are subjective creatures trying to navigate a highly complex survival space.

Stacey Dash, Ben Carson, and Don Lemon are black influentials that seem to go against the grain of what has traditionally been the black response to said survival space: society. Whether they are naively misguided or clinically delusional remains to be seen, but what I can touch on is that they purport a grasp on objectivity that is not consistent with actual human interactions.

Ms. Dash’s statement that, “we are human first, not black, not a woman first” [paraphrased] is theoretically true. I, myself, have used those exact words in my lectures to motivate marginalized youth. However, where our similarities disappear is that I’m well aware of the necessity for group identification; I’m well aware that history’s effects are a part of a complex adaptive system and there are not objective “correct” responses to them; humans have within them instinctive drives that contradict each other; most human behavior is about the function of the action and not the action itself.

Group identification is necessary. Whether you root maniacally for a sports team or you identify strongly with your role in your familial structure, identification in and with a group is paramount for one’s identity at large. Humans tend to group themselves with those that do things similar to them: its hardwired into our DNA. As complex as society is, there are not clean hierarchies or ever heterarchies —  it is better to think of interactions as series of continua bound within certain parameters like biology. A clearly cut identity is a hallmark of a healthy mental life.

History’s effects are a part of a complex adaptive system. Complex adaptive systems can be illustrated by this simple concept: the individual is changed by the environment, while simultaneously changing the environment. With that being said, the poor treatment of many groups in this country (and the globe for that matter) have led to variable responses often times predictable by the psychologies of the individuals within the group. It isn’t cogent analysis to tell someone to “get over slavery” without understanding what traumatic stimuli exercised systematically does not just to the oppressed, but to the oppressors. Being within a complex adaptive system, there will be countless mutations to the system over time, and if you are sticking to some rigid prescription of what is “correct”, you’ve missed all the nuanced approaches and are surely treading in the territory of ignorance.

Human drives often contradict each other. This is also easily illustrated: when your sexual drive is kicking in, but you are at work, you must stifle the urge to procreate. The drive to evolutionary success (procreation) and the drive for social acceptance (containment) are oppositional in that instant. The same can be said for more complex drives. While many of us wish to be accepted, acceptance is not identical across social groupings and responses to variations group-to-group differ as well. Therefore, it is the purest foolishness to attempt to impose objectivity on what it means to be human in total.

What can this all mean? Put plainly, the best way for you to navigate social complexity is to admit that 1) shit is complex, and 2) you are not an agent to ABSOLUTELY understand said complexity. Since you cannot, ABSOLUTELY understand said complexity, you must, against everything kicking inside you, get into a practice of trying to intuit what causes others to do what they do. Potential pitfall: you cannot project your personal feelings during this analysis. Not all people don’t have jobs because they’re lazy, although for a great number of them this is probably true. Understanding these subtle nuances from person to person does not instantiate a moral integrity, it simply allows for more efficacious decision making.

Stacey Dash, Ben Carson, and Don Lemon are just like all of us, but the fact that they’re in the public eye makes their unpopular opinion amongst salient in-group groupings (being black, being a woman) appear treasonous. They have mistakenly taken their perspectives on complex social phenomena as objective, self-evident facts instead of truly appreciating the complexity of what it means to be human. While their opinions are conceptually laudable — picking yourself up by the bootstraps; treating people with pure equality; and so forth — they are egregious affronts to the idiosyncrasies of life as a human being.

Thus, they are no better than the vitriolic spew of less than laudable opinions consistent with extremism and bigotry.

NAACP, BET, and the like serve a function in the dynamism of socialization. They are algorithmic responses to other algorithms and as such, they come and go as necessary. If there was actual pure equality, there would be no need for them and their obsolescence would be self-evident. However, the fact that they do exist is a testament to their purpose. Racism is prevalent in human affairs — these groups attempt to even the playing field. You don’t have to agree with their methods, but their existence is predictable.

bryce