MISDIAGNOSIS

There is a tendency to cast general social and political issues, shared universally in all  times and places, in single-culture terms. Maybe it’s an attempt to make them “more relevant” to the readership in a single culture. But it results in a parochialism, an overemphasis of one culture’s manifestation of what is better understood as a universal human condition. It also results in attributing “cause” to a specific social structure that isn’t the cause but the effect of universal human traits. It’s a prevalent form of misdiagnosis, and it’s crucial to identify when it’s happening in ostensibly sober analysis.

Such misdiagnosis is rampant in the US now, because we are deep in one of the cyclical spasms that cultures pass through. I’ve written extensively about it in the book The Three Rs, but the cited examples were primarily those of moderately conservative commentators. The problem of misdiagnosis is also prevalent among progressive social commentators. It’s not limited to extreme voices of either conservative or progressive views—in fact, it’s more notably a feature of attempts at reasoned, responsible commentary made in good faith.

The premise is this: we repeatedly see analyses of American disunity and dysfunction that claim the problem is historical and cultural, produced by unique political and social conditions of the American experience. There’s a place for such analysis, but it’s always self-limiting. A related premise here is that very little of human disharmony is attributable to the specific cultural and social structures and institutions of a country, and that everything is traceable to the nature of human beings.

Put another way: the most useful analyses are those based on the human condition, not those filtered through the particular manifestations of the human condition in any given place with its own historical development. The same sad story plays out over and over, because it is the story the species plays in this stage of human evolution. That “stage” has been consistent since we’ve been making a record. We don’t appear poised to evolve to another stage.

That might itself explain our attachment to misdiagnosis—seeing our current problems as rooted in the very nature of humanity is more discouraging, less hope-inducing, than imagining the problems result from our habits as a single country and culture. After all, maybe we can change structures and institutions and cultural complacency, but we can’t do much about our essential nature. I’m invoking an image of a hair-shirted doomsayer that the end is near, maybe, but the intention is the opposite—the end is near, but it always has been and always will be near, and humans have existed and subsisted under that dispiriting reality always.

What prompted this piece is an article in Time magazine for the week of February 13-20, 2023. Its heartening cover title is “Division and Destiny: How to Build a Truly American Democracy,” by Isabel Wilkerson. The title provided to the actual text of the article inside is “Our Enduring Discontents: How to Understand America.” Neither title is a useful summary of the substance of the piece. Its prescriptions, either for how to understand America or how to build a truly equal American democracy, do nothing of the sort. The prescriptions, including what the author “prays” for us, are that humans ought to be better than humans can be, something superior to human.

Ms. Wilkerson is the author of the popular 2020 book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Oprah declared it “might be the most important book” she ever chose for her book club. That may be true, but it isn’t pertinent to this look at why the Time article (which draws on the book) is a misdiagnosis.

This is fraught territory, because suggesting a Pulitzer-Prize-winning Black female author and a prominent Black female cultural icon are both missing a major point is likely to be deemed by many as per se racist. I disagree. I’m racist, yes, because I’m human. I’m also racist because I was raised in the South in the 50s and 60s and got inculcated with so much racist cant that I’ll never fully overcome it. To me, that’s another regrettable human reality. We’re all racists, because we have been acculturated in ways that make it impossible not to be aware of a person’s race and to have that awareness affect our relationships with those of other “races.” There are more and less pernicious versions of racism, of course, but there are no benign ones, just as there are no fully benign humans.

But that’s an excursion. What is the “misdiagnosis” in Ms. Wilkerson’s article? It’s that she appears to think the moniker “caste” or “casteism” offers an explanation of our systemic cultural infirmity. Neither word is an explanation, but merely an identifier of the underlying human tendency. Caste or casteism isn’t cause but just names for the phenomenon. At times, Ms. Wilkerson seems to acknowledge this, but she persists in suggesting “caste” casts an illuminating light on a human proclivity, when all it does is label it.

The proclivity is a human’s ineradicable need to distinguish self from other selves. There are two main motivators, one material and one psychological, I think. We are self-interested and self-preserving (not entirely as individuals but also as tribal units). We, like all animals, have a sense that life is a zero-sum enterprise, that we survive and thrive by doing a better job at surviving and thriving than the unit over there or the one a little farther off. Every success for one unit is a failure for another unit, or at least potentially so in times of sparsity of resources. This is the elemental, material level.

Beyond that, even if all units are fed, sheltered, surviving, even thriving, there’s the psychological motivator. Yes, we’re thriving and surviving now, but we know times of deprivation are coming. We should prevail. We’re entitled to prevail. We’re different and special, God’s people. We’ve been better than they, we are more industrious, we think and believe and behave in ways superior to them. Our family, clan, tribe is purer, and rightful dominance is not just a useful, aggressive hedge against deprivation but our entitlement.

Caste. Fine. It’s also law of the jungle, hierarchy, advantage, position, status, dominance, aggression, insurance, righteousness, tribalism, us versus themism, power, survival of the fittest. It reiterates through all cultures and times. It’s not specifically national, or cultural, or period-related, or historical, or product of an original sin like slavery, or a matter of social and political structure. It’s basic humanness.

We all have to have someone or something to be the N-word. It’s how we justify our fear-driven power, aggression, status-seeking and status-maintaining. Humans of a different color are the most convenient candidates to be made the N-word, because they sensibly announce themselves by appearance. Whites could be as useful N-words in another historical frame where dominance and power and status reside in Blacks.

Ms. Wilkerson acknowledges this, saying caste is deeper and more pervasive than mere racism. But she still insists caste is a product of our history and culture. It is, in a sense, but any other history and culture also produces caste. That’s the central misdiagnosis. The problem isn’t uniquely American. Its particulars are American, and the particulars of caste expression are different in other cultures. But they all come from the same source. She says our problem is having strayed from “a truly equal American democracy,” that it’s a failure to “understand America” and its particular brand of discontents. I don’t think so. The problem is anthropological, psychological, and philosophical, sourced in the nature of the human mind, soul, heart, and psyche.

Some might object I’m missing that Ms. Wilkerson is using caste as I am, that she means it to express an irrepressible human quality across time and cultures. I don’t think that’s so, either. She writes, “the ancient lens of caste helps explain most every regression we are now undergoing. It accounts for oppression of all kinds across time and space, allows us to understand the human impulse toward tribalism and domination and the ways in which the restrictions on those least valued in a hierarchy radiate outward to everyone and endanger our planet.”

Caste doesn’t “explain” our regressions. The tribalism and domination she mentions explain it far better. Caste doesn’t “account for” oppression—it’s simply another word for the oppressive instinct. Caste doesn’t “allow us to understand” tribalism and domination—they account for what she’s calling caste. Caste is the ubiquitous manifestation of tribalism and domination. Her “explanation” is a tautology.

The misdiagnosis is like saying the chaotic proliferation of cells explains or accounts for cancer. That’s true in the simplistic sense that “chaotic proliferation of cells” is cancer. It tells us nothing about what deregulates the cells, what process underlies the passage from orderly reproduction to pathologic, rampant proliferation.

Ms. Wilkerson sees the expected demographic shift to a majority-of-minorities over the next two decades as “the caste system under threat.” The system isn’t at all under threat. Some of the present beneficiaries of caste are under threat of being replaced by others who are now its victims. Those others are “under opportunity” not threat. Every election doesn’t put democracy under threat; it only puts the party in power under threat of losing power. The caste system will endure just fine. The relative positions of all strata of the hierarchy may change, with different people ascending to high rank and others falling from it, but the system itself is guaranteed by human nature. It’s indestructible.

Of course, the threat of losing power, position, prestige is terrifying, especially to those so long used to being the dominant ones that another status is unimaginable. They’ll fight like their lives depend on it, because their lives as currently configured do depend on it. They’ll abuse their power even more recklessly, become ever more unrestrained and unhinged. Maybe that’s all Ms. Wilkerson means to say. But caste itself is safe.

She writes, “A caste system relies on strife and inequity to sustain itself. It programs people to believe they have no stake in the well-being of those they have been told are beneath them, those they are told are unworthy, undeserving. It makes for a less magnanimous society, a built-in us-vs.-them distance between groups.” She could as easily and as correctly have written: “Capitalism relies on strife and inequity to sustain itself. Nationalism, patriotism rely on strife and inequity to sustain themselves.” She could have written: “Cultures program people to believe they have no stake in the well-being of those they have been told are unworthy. Religion programs people to believe they have no stake in the well-being of those the religion says are unworthy, undeserving (like Muslims, Jews, homosexuals).” She could have written: “Humans have a built-in us-vs.-them distance we impose between groups.” Humans don’t and can’t create “magnanimous” societies. That’s why we call them “Utopias.”

The misdiagnosis carries Ms. Wilkerson to misprescriptions for positive change. She notes the insufficiency of laws to address caste: “Even when the formal barriers [to fairness] are removed, caste can persist in the human hunger to be better than someone else, to assure our place in society, to quell our fears and insecurities.” Once more, she’s on the verge of acknowledging that “caste” isn’t an explanation but a name for the condition. The “human hunger” she mentions is the progenitor of caste, not the other way round. That hunger is the sole problem she is addressing, thinking she brings clarity to its management by dubbing it “caste.”

Her suggested remedies include “a lasting and meaningful reconstruction of our society.” This is declaring that the cure for cancer is getting rid of cancer. She calls for “a massive re-education of our citizenry to lay bare the ways in which the state has systematically favored some groups and excluded others and become aware of the urgent, long-overdue need to atone for past and current injustices and rectify continuing disparities for the collective healing of our nation.” In other words, the solution is simply to adopt a progressive program to alter hearts and minds for the better.

A central part of our current disruptions is precisely this “education” issue. Half the country opposes exactly her prescription for re-education. Half the country rejects that the state has systematically favored some groups, rejects the need to atone for injustices, rejects there are continuing disparities other than the ones they feel they endure. Hostility to the 1619 Project, to Black Lives Matter, to reparations, to nontraditional gender identification and sexual practices is hostility to precisely what Ms. Wilkerson proposes for re-education. The manner and substance of how we inculcate values and beliefs is the vortex of our social and cultural divide, yet she suggests we simply all accept the progressive agenda.

She expresses that she has “long believed that if the majority of Americans knew the true, full history of what was sacrificed to create this country, they themselves would be calling for reparations.” This is naïve at a profound level. The “majority of Americans,” or at least a sizeable plurality, sees no particular problem in our having taken the continent from indigenous people, or in our past institution of slavery, or in our persistent systemic racism, or in our inequality. All Americans have a rudimentary knowledge that we took the land, that we had a slave economy, that Blacks weren’t treated very well or fairly or in a “Christian” manner. Ms. Wilkerson seems to believe we can impart a better understanding of these problems and all Americans will become magnanimous. This ignores that all people want and need a narrative, and that the literal truth or falsity of the narrative isn’t particularly important. Powerful figures like Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Abbott as just as intent on proper “education” as Ms. Wilkerson. They just favor the opposite curriculum, want to instill a narrative more protective of their current perch in the hierarchy.

Someone will always be dominant, powerful, and privileged. Every grade school and high school is stratified with dominators and dominated, favored and despised. Every church, every social organization, every workplace has a hierarchy. Ms. Wilkerson has made a name for herself by putting a half-new and less used name on pecking order. Pecking order is a human problem in terms of harmony and empathy and fairness and justice and equality. All those high ideals exist because inveterate pecking order behavior is the main impediment to them. Calling it caste doesn’t help.

Written February 8, 2023
©2023 by Lawrence Helms