Eight jurists of my pantheon look down on me as I write this.  One that no-one gets is Sir Henry Maine.  He published his book Ancient Law in 1861.  That year saw the start of the American civil war and the emancipation of Russian serfs.  That timing now causes us to reflect how backward each such nation was then.  Maine wrote when scholarship could be broad and its product literary.  He referred to the ‘vigorous controversy still carried on upon the subject of negro servitude’.  ‘Where old law fixed a man’s social position irreversibly at his birth, modern law allows himself to create it by convention’.

Two propositions in this great work have stayed with me.  One was the warning 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 other was that ‘we may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.’  There is an obvious link in the two propositions.

The recent (2020) book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson,is a little precious and preacherly, but it touches on raw nerves that matter. 

A nation that could elect someone like Donald Trump looks to have something rotten in its core.  He never sought to conceal his weaknesses.  A nation that could elect him the second time, after all that he has done, looks to be cursed, and headed for the status of a failed state.

White Americans have long looked down on three types of people – native Indians; Negroes; and, now, Latin Americans.  We all apparently want someone to look down on – even inmates of jails have their hierarchies.  ‘The mill worker with no-one else to ‘look down on’ regards himself as eminently superior to the Negro.  The coloured man represents his last outpost against social oblivion.’  That is so true.

The slavery in America was unique.  It made people into currency, or beasts of the field, and brought violence, rape and torture into the mainstream.  It debased humanity and it contradicted the essential premise of the Enlightenment – that each of us has our own dignity merely because we are human.  How can any nation, so conceived, remove such a stain?  How can any such nation endure?

The Nazis admired Americans for what they had done to the natives and the Negroes.  They studied their laws and borrowed the word ‘subhuman’ – Untermensch.  Hitler especially marvelled at the American ‘knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.’ (I regard that as the most chilling phrase in a long book.  The wording is not I think that of Hitler – it is too subtle.)

Caste involves narcissism – as does Donald Trump.  Big time.  The psychoanalyst, and refugee from the Nazis, Erich Fromm said:

If one examines the judgment of the poor whites regarding blacks, or of the Nazis in regard to Jews, one can easily recognise the character of their respective judgments.  Little straws of truth are put together, but the whole which is thus formed consists of falsehoods and provocations.  If the political actions are based on narcissistic self-glorifications, the lack of objectivity often leads to disastrous consequences.

Fromm said the working class was the most susceptible.  The lowest worker was at least white, or Aryan, a ‘part of the most admirable group in the world and superior to another racial group singled out as inferior.’ 

There you have MAGA.  And God help those who deride it.  The function of Trump is to ensure that lower class whites continue to have a caste that they can look down on.  (My wording.)

Indians of lower caste in the US do not look those of higher caste in the face.  They are frightened.

In Germany, you can get three years for displaying the swastika.  In the US, the confederate flag is all over the place.  They had the solution for slavery.

The American attitude to heath care and violence is a blot on its psyche and standing in the world.  Both are linked to the Negro and slavery.  Why pay tax to support the Negro – against whom we must have protection?

Einstein moved to Princeton.  Marion Anderson came to sing there.  As a person of colour, there was no room for her at the inn.  Einstein put her up at his home.  The greatest mind of his time with one of the great singers of all time.  Both rejected in their own country.  Hannah Arendt reflected on the banality of evil.

Then came the greatest insult of all.  Some piteous, misadventured white people put a Negro at the top of the pyramid – in the White House.  And the most insulted white man of all was a fraudulent property developer named Donald Trump – who could not lie straight in bed.

The U S is falling apart before our eyes.  I see no reason for confidence.  Nor do I see any for India, which is even less willing to confront caste in its past – compared, say, to the U S, much less to Japan or Germany, two of our strongest allies.  When you look at the most obvious sources of threat – China, Russia, and Iran – the future is not bright.

The American Confederacy was dedicated to the continuance of slavery.  The civil war was fought on that issue.  Lincoln abolished slavery during the war.  The defeat of the Confederacy, at a cost of more than half a million lives, entailed the repudiation of the premise of slavery – that the Negro was inferior to the white man – an Untermensch. 

What now looks to be a fatal flaw in the Union is the failure by so many white Americans to accept the judgment of the nation on this issue.  The cancer of caste remains.  And too many now support a white man who has never read a book or seen a play, but who has made a career of refusing to accept the judgment of the nation on any issue.  His whole being depends on conflict. 

There you have the hallmarks of the American tragedy.

Caste is mandated by religion in India.  In the U S, it is merely tolerated by religion.  Which is worse?  You may not want to put this on a sandwich board in Washington or New Delhi, but it is hard to regard as ‘civilised’ any nation so engaged with caste.

Both the U S and Australia were founded by British rejects – Puritans in one and convicts in the other.  We got the better deal, and we at least avoided the stain of slavery. But after the failure of the First Nations referendum, have we avoided the stain of caste?