In Ancient Law (1861), Sir Henry Maine spoke of occasions where ‘that division into classes which at a particular crisis of social history is necessary for the maintenance of the national existence degenerates into the most disastrous and blighting of all human institutions – Caste.  The fate of the Hindoo law is, in fact the measure of the value of the Roman code…..Even now, Hindoo jurisprudence has a substratum of forethought and sound judgment, but irrational imitation has engrafted in it an immense apparatus of cruel absurdities.’  The Oxford English Dictionary gives us ‘a race, stock or breed….one of the hereditary classes into which society in India has long been divided.’

Caste therefore has at least these characteristics: a division of people of a community into classes is effected by criteria and means provided within the community so that it is binding by custom or law or both; that classification is hereditary – you are born into a particular caste; and the distinction carries different rights, privileges and obligations depending on where you are in the hierarchy.

In Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson compares the status of African Americans to those that had caste imposed upon them in India or in Germany under Hitler.  I doubt whether the status of those Americans would warrant the application of the term ‘caste’ in the sense referred to above, but the exploration of that standing provides insights that are as luminous as they are unsettling.

Here are some of the anecdotes.

In southern courtrooms, even the word of God was segregated.  There were two separate Bibles – one for blacks and one for whites to swear to tell the truth on.

The Führer admired America.  He attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock.  He praised the country’s near genocide of native Americans and the exiling of those who survived to reservations.  ‘The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them.  Hitler especially marvelled at the American ‘knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass deaths.’’ 

Big crowds would turn up for a lynching.  Sometimes the press gave advanced notice of a lynching.  ‘Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism.’  A roaring trade in postcards helped spread the guilt.  ‘This was singularly American.  ‘Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs at Auschwitz,’ wrote Time magazine many years later.’  Singularly American indeed.  When the post refused to carry these post-cards, the sender put them in an envelope.

‘In America, a culture of cruelty crept into the minds, made violence and mockery seem mundane and amusing, built as it was into games of chance at carnivals and public fairs.’  ‘Coon Dip’ involved patrons hurling projectiles at live African Americans.  Hurling baseballs at the head of a black man was great sport.  Baseball, you will recall, is the national sport.

Now for some of the meat.

Those in the dominant caste who found themselves lagging behind those seen as inherently inferior potentially faced an epic existential crisis.  To stand on the same rung as those perceived to be of a lower caste is seen as lowering one’s status….The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself; thus equality feels like a demotion.  If the lower-caste person manages actually to rise above an upper-caste person, the natural human response from someone weaned on their caste’s inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their very survival….Who are you if there is no one to be better than?

In explosions in France in 1789, and Russia in 1917, the infighting was about those wanting to be at least close to the top – and certainly not close to the bottom.  This attitude underlay the Nazis’ demonization of the Jews.  It is a sentiment in the air at a MAGA rally.  The torch-bearers at Charlottesville Virginia in August 2017 chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘White lives matter.’  The reaction of the President showed the depth of the problem.  When Trump referred to ‘fine people’ at Charlottesville, the world knew that the problem it had with the White House was worse than we had thought.

As soon as you create a hierarchy that rewards people by their standing in that hierarchy, you give fuel to resentment and jealousy – and the conviction that the unjust treatment you have received is an offence that cries out for revenge.  The question to the aristocrat The Marriage of Figaro was ‘And what did you do except take the trouble to be born?’  But people rising above their levels create their own problems.

It turns out that the greatest threat to a caste system is not lower-caste failure…but lower-caste success… Achievement by those in the lowest caste goes gainst the script handed down to us all….Achievement by marginalised people who step outside the roles expected of them puts things out of order and triggers primeval and often violent backlash.

This looks like the kind of force behind the election of Trump and his irrational drive to reverse anything Obama had achieved:  anything – the achievements of Obama were outside the normal script.  They were unnatural, and Trump was put there by God to set things right.

The author looks at film of the crowd’s adoration of Hitler.  ‘In that moment, you are face-to-face with the force of willing susceptibility to evil.  The Nazis could not have risen to power and done what they did without the support of the masses of people who were open to his spell.  And the author has the same view as Hanna Arendt.  She quotes a philosopher: ‘It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people.  But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong.  What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.’  This is crucial.  There is a bit of Hitler in all of us.

The author refers to ‘tremors within the dominant caste.  Insecure white people were concerned that minorities were taking jobs from whites.  This was one lever pulled by Trump.  This point is pivotal.  In a chapter on the price we pay for a caste system, the author looks at the failure to adopt the welfare state enjoyed by the rest of the Western world – and to the indifference to mass shootings.  Most Australians think that the U S is decently run except for two things – a failure to provide universal health care, and the embrace of mass murders involving guns that comes from a hopelessly twisted theory of rights according to unelected judges.  This leads the author to say:

A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy toward one’s fellows.  The result is that the United States, for all its wealth and innovation, lags in major indicators of quality of life among the leading countries of the world.

You cannot prove or even measure these propositions, but they do appear to be fundamental.  The nation has never rid itself of the stain of slavery. It is not going too far to suggest that the nation has not attained the maturity claimed by the pronouncements of its founders (who, it may be said, were anything but democrats according to our understanding of that term.)  Robert E Lee was a southern gentleman and a great general.  He told those of his slaves that had escaped that he ‘would teach us a lesson we would never forget.  He personally supervised the whipping of men and women.  He told the county constable to ‘lay it on well.’  Then, not satisfied ‘with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.’  The General believed that ‘how long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise merciful Providence.’  God save us from that wisdom and mercy.  Lee is one of trump’s favourite generals.

The institution of slavery was, for a quarter of a millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner’s death or to spite a rival or to settle an estate.  They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them.  Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil.

Before there was a United States of America, there was enslavement.  Theirs was a living death passed down for twelve generations.

It may well take a lot longer to settle the treatment of that cancer than we had thought.  This book by a coloured American journalist states a case to be answered.

 

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book as yet unpublished called ‘My Second Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’. The content of these may change before further publication.]

IDEAS AND OPINIONS

Albert Einstein

Folio Society, 2010.  Bound in figured boards, with photographs and slip case.

The word Einstein now stands genius, just as Hoover means vacuum cleaner, but it was Einstein who once and for all put science beyond all but the select.  Before Einstein, people with a good general education could come to grips with the laws of science on which the world revolved.  But they could not do so after Einstein rewrote the whole book.  Now for most of us science is, at bottom, like God or Mozart, something that we must take, if at all, simply on trust.  It would be fair to hazard the assertion that the mind of Einstein has had more effect on the world than any other mind.

Einstein was born of Jewish parents in Ulm, a small city on the Danube in the south of Germany.  He at first attended a Catholic elementary school, and then attended the local Gymnasium.  He was introduced to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at the age of about ten – which is like saying that Mozart started composing at the age of five.  He took his tertiary education in Switzerland and got employment as an examiner in the Swiss Patent Office.

The work of Einstein led him to conduct thought experiments about the nature of light and the relation of time and space.  He was crossing the borders of existing knowledge.  In 1905, he published four revolutionary papers, one on special relativity.  He then developed his general theory which was later verified.  He was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, and a professor at Humboldt University from 1914 to 1932.  He won a Nobel Prize in 1921.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein was in America.  He stayed there – back home they burnt his books and put a bounty on his head.  He then warned the U S that Hitler might be first to get the Atom bomb.  This led Roosevelt to implement the Manhattan Project.  Einstein later wrote a manifesto with Bertrand Russell on the dangers of nuclear weapons.  His total scientific output was staggering.  It does not bear to think what might have happened had Einstein returned to Germany in 1933 and provided the means for Hitler to be the first to get, and most certainly use, the bomb.

Einstein had a mature view of religion.  Towards the end of his life he said ‘I very rarely think in words at all’.  He thought in pictures, in his thought experiments, and mathematically.  Whereas some people see what they believe to be miracles as evidence of God’s existence, for Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence, and revealed a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists’.  This is very much like what Kant thought.  When Einstein adhered to this dictum and said that God does not play dice, the rejoinder of Nils Bohr was: ‘Einstein, stop telling God what to do!’

Einstein had the problem that Darwin had with people trying to get him to express views on religion.  People were out to get him.  A New York rabbi sent him a telegram: ‘Do you believe in God?  Stop.  Answer paid.  Fifty words.’  The reply was: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind’.  Einstein never felt the need to put down others who believed in a different kind of God: ‘What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos’.

In a paper headed The World as I See It, published in 1931, Einstein said:

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.  Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.  It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion.  A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge, and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.  I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves.  Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.  I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvellous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

You can see why Einstein poses a challenge to religion as it is usually practised.  It is not just the rejection of a personal God and life after death – he finds a source of wonder and mystery from contemplating the world as he finds it.  In a paper published in Germany in 1930, Einstein had affirmed that man could get by ethically without God.

A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable for the simple reason that a man’s actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God’s eyes he cannot be responsible….Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust.  A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.  Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Elsewhere he made a strong allegation: ‘The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the gods.’

He knew how to take a stand.  Here is his advice on a 1953 inquisition.

What ought the minority of intellectuals do against this evil? Frankly, I can only see the revolutionary way of non-co-operation in the sense of Ghandi’s.  Every intellectual who is called before one of the committee’s ought to refuse to testify, i. e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country.

However, this refusal to testify must not be based on the well-known subterfuge of invoking the Fifth Amendment against possible self-incrimination, but on the assertion that it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition and that this kind of inquisition violates the spirit of the Constitution.

If enough people are ready to take this grave step, they will be successful.  If not, then the individuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.

That was written by someone proscribed by Nazi Germany.  He could prescribe very high standards.  Here he is on human rights in 1954.

The existence and validity of human rights was not written in the stars…There is however one other human right which is infrequently mentioned, but which seems to be destined to become very important: this is the right or the duty of the individual to abstain from cooperating in activities which he considers wrong or pernicious.  The first place in this respect must be given to the refusal of military service.  I have known instances where individuals of unusual moral strength and integrity have, for that reason, come into conflict with the organs of the state.  The Nuremberg trial of the German war criminals was tacitly based on the recognition of the principle: criminal actions cannot be excused if committed on government orders; conscience supersedes the authority of the law and the state.

The last clause is potent.  Finally, this is what he had to say to Mahatma Ghandi in 1944:

A leader of his people, unsupported by any outward authority: a politician whose success rests not upon the craft nor the mastery of technical devices, but simply on the convincing power of his personality; a victorious fighter who has always scorned the use of force; a man of wisdom and humility, armed with resolve and inflexible consistency, who has devoted all his strength to the uplifting of his people and the betterment of their lot; a man who has confronted the brutality of Europe with the dignity of the simple human being, and thus at all times risen superior.

Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.

Those words were spoken by the man who referred to Jesus of Nazareth as ‘the luminous Nazarene.’  This book is a big clean window into one of the most powerful minds the world has known.