Monthly Archives: July 2020

Is Economic Inequality Really a Problem?By Samuel Scheffler

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Professor Frankfurt argued that it does not matter whether some people have less than others. What matters is that some people do not have enough. They lack adequate income, have little or no wealth and do not enjoy decent housing, health care or education. If even the worst-off people had enough resources to lead good and fulfilling lives, then the fact that others had still greater resources would not be troubling.

When some people don’t have enough and others have vastly more than they need, it is easy to conclude that the problem is one of inequality. But this, according to Professor Frankfurt, is a mistake. The problem isn’t inequality as such. It’s the poverty and deprivation suffered by those who have least.

Professor Frankfurt’s essay didn’t persuade all his fellow philosophers, many of whom remained egalitarians. But his challenge continued to resonate and, in 2015,even as concerns about economic inequality were growing in many corners of society, he published a short book in which he reaffirmed his position.

And Professor Frankfurt, it seems, has a point. Those in the top 10 percent of America’s economic distribution are in a very comfortable position. Those in the top 1 percent are in an even more comfortable position than those in the other 9 percent. But few people find this kind of inequality troubling. Inequality bothers us most, it seems, only when some are very rich and others are very poor.

Even when the worst-off people are very poor, moreover, it wouldn’t be an improvement to reduce everyone else to their level. Equality would then prevail, but equal misery is hardly an ideal worth striving for.

So perhaps we shouldn’t object to economic inequality as such. Instead, we should just try to improve the position of those who have least. We should work to eliminate poverty, hunger, bad schools, substandard housing and inadequate medical care. But we shouldn’t make the elimination of inequality our aim.

Is this the correct conclusion? I think not. Economic inequality matters a great deal whether or not it matters “as such.”

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posted by f.sheikh


Preliminary theory of in-Group contrarian-by Geoff Shullenberger

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We can now return to the concept of the In-Group Contrarian (hereafter IGC). Anyone who has observed social media platforms, especially Twitter, will know the type. This is the person who, precisely when mimetic snowballing is in progress, attempts to apply the brakes. What’s important is that this figure is not simply an outsider to the group, in which case they could probably be ignored, but instead claims to share the group’s goals, beliefs, etc and merely objects to some aspect of this manifestation of them. The appearance of this figure is as predictable as the mimetic snowballing itself.

Of course, the majority of IGCs are low-follower anonymous accounts, and can be simply ignored. But a few IGCs already have, or gain, a certain reputation and a following (more on that in a minute), and become harder to ignore. The reaction to these high-profile IGCs differs from the response to an ideological opponent (out-group member). The latter’s criticisms of one’s group can usually be dismissed. Often, in contrast, the IGC must not just be dismissed, but destroyed. In fact, many in-groups seem to dedicate more time and energy to attacking the IGCs attached to their group than they do to attacking their straight-up enemies. In fact, hatred of the IGC can become one of the main things that binds the in-group together.

This would be a version of the scapegoat effect, central to how Girard modifies Durkheim’s theory of collective effervescence. For Girard, groups only truly coalesce by expelling, or sacrificing, a group member. It is in the act of violent unity against this “surrogate victim” that the group’s collective identity reaches its apotheosis. That’s because whatever antagonisms exist within the group are displaced onto the designated scapegoat. The repudiation of the IGC represents an incomplete version of this operation, because usually s/he never goes away, because the in-group itself can’t fully expel him or her. That’s partly, I would argue, because on some level it doesn’t want to.

It’s easy to observe that the IGC, rather than simply being cast out, often becomes a persistent object of perverse fascination for the in-group. Here too Girard is helpful. The IGC’s objections function as an obstacle to the fulfillment of desire for collective effervescence and self-affirmation in the group. In this way, he or she functions as a skandalon or “stumbling-block,” a term Girard takes from the Bible.

But the relation to the skandalon is more complex than it seems, because it is never simply an obstacle, but an obstacle to which we return again and again, as if addicted to it. We see this when in-group members obsess over and fixate on the IGC. Why? To restate a prior point, if my desire is mimetic, it comes from observing others. I copy my desire from the large mass of similar people I observe engaging in herding behavior together. But then, the IGC transmits a counter-signal that blocks the full movement of desire. As a result, my desire, and the sense of being I obtain from group belonging, is placed in question. The IGC becomes an object of fascination because of the power he or she is capable of exerting on me by attenuating the fulfillment of my desire. But this, in turn, makes the IGC into another potential model – a prospect that throws my sense of self into crisis.

There are two possible results when this has occurred. One, the most numerically likely, is that I remain fully attached to the group, but must periodically, ritualistically cast out the IGC (in sync with the rest of the group) – an act that both conceals and reveals his/her enigmatic effect on me. But in a certain percentage of cases, the IGC will show my desire a different path, and I will follow it. In this way, the IGC can peel off certain in-group members and push them to the outer boundaries of the group. These IGC hangers-on become mimetically attached to the group’s fringe, rather than its orthodox core.

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posted by f.sheikh

“THE HARDHAT RIOT” Book review by David Paul Kuhn

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(Worth reading historic account of 1970 NYC riots when anti-Vietnam war protesters were beaten up by white blue-collar workers. It was a moment when white blue-collar workers became Republicans. f.sheikh)

Kuhn, who has written before about white working-class Americans, builds his book on long-ago police records and witness statements to recreate in painful detail a May day of rage, menace and blood. Antiwar demonstrators had massed at Federal Hall and other Lower Manhattan locations, only to be set upon brutally, and cravenly, by hundreds of steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the nascent World Trade Center. Many of those men had served in past wars and viscerally despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snotnoses.

It was a clash of irreconcilable tribes and battle cries: “We don’t want your war” versus “America, love it or leave it.” And it was bewildering to millions of other Americans, including my younger self, newly back home after a two-year Army stretch, most of it in West Germany. My sympathies were with the demonstrators. But I also understood the working stiffs and why they felt held in contempt by the youngsters and popular culture.

New social policies like affirmative action and school busing affected white blue-collar families far more than they did the more privileged classes that spawned many antiwar activists. For Hollywood, the workingman seemed barely a step above a Neanderthal, as in the 1970 movies “Joe,” about a brutish factory worker, and “Five Easy Pieces,” in which a diner waitress is set up to be the target of audience scorn. (Come 1971, we also had “All in the Family” and television’s avatar of working-class bigotry, Archie Bunker.)

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The Beinart Controversy over the End of the Two-State Solution and Juan Cole On Palestinian Statelessness-By Juan Cole

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(Worth reading article on Palestinian issue. f.sheikh)

Hannah Arendt points out that with regard to the Nazis this policy of denaturalizing people, or leaving them without citizenship rights, was a demonstration project. That is to say the Nazis began by thinking that Gypsies and Jews and other groups are flotsam and the scum of the earth and a kind of infection in the body politic, and by taking away their citizenship, they demonstrated that they’re scum. So Goebbels said that depriving the Jews of citizenship made the Jews the scum of the earth and he said, you know, let’s see – everybody’s criticizing us how we treat our Jews, but will they take them? Does America want them? Does Britain want them? And of course they didn’t once they were stateless. So by marking them as non-German as taking away German Jews’ citizenship, the Nazis were then demonstrating the wothlessness of their Jews….

I want to make an argument about the character of the Palestine issue. I’m not going to argue that it’s a unique problem but I am going to argue that it’s almost unique in contemporary affairs, and that there are some aspects of it that explain why it is so seemingly intractable. I’m going to start with an increasingly important field of study, citizenship studies. There are journals now devoted to it; it’s become a big thing in academia. My colleague at the University of Michigan, Margaret Somers, wrote an important book on citizenship not so long ago. And as she points out, Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958 wrote: “Citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights. Remove this priceless possession and there remains a stateless person disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his countrymen.” So Warren is drawing here implicitly on the work of Hannah Arendt but this is the key point that I want to make today. Citizenship is the right to have rights. People who lack citizenship in a state ipso facto have no right to have rights ….

If we came to the Palestinians, their situation of citizenship is obviously deformed. There’s no state. They’re lacking an entire section of the column. And then their market is not very robust and of course in Gaza there is no market to speak of, the Israelis have Gaza under siege. There’s no airport, there’s no harbor, and the Israelis don’t permit the Palestinians in Gaza to export most of what they make, some strawberries, off of which the Israelis take a cut. But mostly the export market doesn’t exist in Gaza. So the market and the separation wall and the politics of the neighboring states are such that the Palestinians don’t have a strong relationship to the market, they don’t have a state at all, there are a lot of NGOS, and so for the Palestinians, the NGO sector is the one place where there’s a little glimmer maybe of some citizenship. But that’s weird. And that’s unexampled in the world. There’s no other group of people that look like that. In the world, right now…

So when you’re stateless, you don’t have the right to have rights. So everything is unstable. It’s a little bit like being a child of an alcoholic abusive family. They suffer from everything always being interrupted. You never know what’s going to happen, you can’t make plans, let’s go for a picnic today but then the picnic doesn’t happen because the parent got drunk. Well, if you’re stateless you don’t really know what’s going to happen to you. Your property is unstable, your rights are unstable. Even if you were stateless and you get citizenship, your citizenship is unstable. So Jordan gave citizenship to the West Bank Palestinians at one point and then because of the Rabat Accords after Israel conquered it, they took the Jordanian citizenship back away. They just denaturalized about 30 or 40 thousand Palestinians from Gaza in Jordan.

I don’t think that the world will put up with Apartheid forever. So there will be increasing boycotts, increasing pressure, increasing economic problems. Ultimately it seems to me very likely that you end up with a single state. I’m not arguing for it, I’m not saying it’s desirable, I’m not saying it’s the best outcome but I think somebody has to give citizenship to the Palestinians. Increasingly, the only one that could plausibly do that is the Israelis and the Israelis increasingly own all of Palestinian territory so they’re responsible for the people that live on that territory even though they don’t think they are. I don’t really care how this problem is solved, from my point of view, it’s all the same to me. The important thing, as you can tell is that I insist, the Palestinians must end up with the right to have rights.

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