Postcards from the Edge of Racism

For over 100 days, self-identified members of the "Six Nations" group of people who consider themselves to be ancestors of people who lived in North America before the Europeans did - some of the descendants of which Europeans, in turn, think it is somehow important that they were here before Africans were here - have been occupying a stretch of land abutting a recognized "Indian Reserve" in Caledonia, Ontario CANADA. The usual arguments are in place: "Yes the document was signed, but those natives didn't have authority to sign...or more should have signed for that document to count...or we were tricked" etc..

So far as I can tell, the current gaggle of protestors are over a hundred years late in commencing their action, any witnesses are dead, and title to the land is in fact registered to a land developer. Nobody is suggesting that the registration of that land happened only recently. Moreover, there haven't been "squatters rights" (gaining title to land by occupying it absent the title-holder for the requisite number of years) since Ontario moved from a Registry system to a Land Titles system (back in the 1990s).

Nobody, so far as I can tell, has raised the issue of a Statute of Limitations. Among "white man" living in Ontario, you get two years to sue over title to land...after that, you cannot sue and the issue is dead no matter whether you are in the right or in the wrong.

Meanwhile, bars the world over are filled with half-stoned World-Cup watchers who are cheering and flag-waving their way through a dream, chanting "I hope WE win the cup". Most have never so much as touched a soccer ball, and most couldn't run from one end of the field to the other without suffering a myocardial blow-out. There's no "WE" about it.

What do the ATV-riding, flag-waving, Tim Horton's coffee-drinking "natives" in Caledonia have in common with the overweight, nacho-dipping, beer-swilling, flag-waving soccer fans who are currently shirking work the world over? Excerpts from two Ayn Rand essays - Global Balkanization and Racism, both of which appear in Rand's book Return of the Primitive - are definitely of assistance in this regard:

On July 3, 1976, in a column entitled "The Split Nationality Syndrome," [Mr. Sulzberger] writes: "The present era's most paradoxical feature is the conflict between movements seeking to unify great geographical blocs into federations or confederations, and movements seeking to disintegrate into still smaller pieces the component nations trying to get together."

He offers an impressive list of examples. In France there is a Corsican autonomy movement, and similar movements of French Basques, of French Bretons, and of French inhabitants of the Jura belt west of Switzerland. "Britain is now obsessed with what is awkwardly called 'devolution.' This means watered-down autonomy and is designed to satisfy Welsh, but above all Scottish, nationalists." Beligum remains split "by an apparently insoluable language dispute between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish." Spain is facing demands for local independence "in Catalonia and the northern Basque country...German-speaking inhabitants of Italy's Alto Adige yearn to leave Rome and submit to Vienna. There is a tiny British-Danish argument...over the status of the Faroe Islanders...In Yugoslavia there are continuing disputes between Serbs and Croats...There is also unresolved ferment among Macedonians...some of whom, on occasion, revive old dreams of their own state including Greek Salonika and part of Bulgaria."

Please remember that these tribes and subtribes, which most of the world has never heard of - since they have achieved no distinction to hear about - are struggling to secede from whatever country they are in and to form their own separate, sovereign, independent nations on their own two-by-four stretches of the earth's crust.

I must make one correction. These tribes did achieve a certain kind of distinction: a history of endless, bloody warfare.

[...]

Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join some group - any group - which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group - they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices - so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omnisicient power of your body chemistry.

This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called "racism": it will be called "ethnicity".

[...]

We are dealing with a phenomenon that is rising out of prehistorical ages.

Atavistic remnants and echoes of those ages have always existed in the backwaters of civilized countries, particularly in Europe, among the old, the tired, the timid, and those who gave up before they started. Such people are the carriers of "ethnicity." The "ways of living" they transmit from generation to generation consist in: folk songs, folk dances, special ways of cooking food, traditional costumes, and folk festivals. Although the professional "ethnics" would (and did) fight wars over the differences between their songs and those of their neighbours, there are no significant differences between them; all folk art is essentially similar and excruciatingly boring: if you've seen one set of people clapping their hands while jumping up and down, you've seen them all.

Now, observe the nature of those traditional ethnic "achievements": all of them belong to the perceptual level of man's consciousness. All of them are ways of dealing with or manipulating the concrete, the immediately given, the directly perceivable. All of them are manifestations of the preconceptual stage of human development.

[...]

A symptom of the tribal mentality's self-arrested, perceptual level of development may be observed in the tribualists' position on language...to a tribalist, language is a mystic heritage, a string of sounds handed down from his ancestors and memorized, not understood. To him, the importance lies in the perceptual concrete, the sound of a word, not its meaning. He would kill and die for the privilege of rinting on every postage stamp the word "postage" for the English-speaking and the word "postes" for the French-speaking citizens of his bilingual Canada.

[...]

But of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.

[...]

The tribalists clamor that their language preserves their "ethnic identity." But there is no such thing. Conformity to a racist tradition does not constitute a human identity. Just as racism provides a pseudo-self-esteem for men who have not earned an authentic one, so their hysterical loyalty to their own dialect serves a similar function: it provides a pretence at "collective self-esteem," an illusion of safety for the confused, frightened, precarious state of a tribalist's stagnant consciousness.

The proclaimed desire to preserve one's language and/or its literary works, if any, is a cover-up. In a free or even semi-free country, no one is forbidden to speak any language he choose with those who wish to speak it. But he cannot force it on others. A country has to have only one official language if men are to understand one another - and it makes no difference which language it is, since men live by the meaning, not the sound, of words...

But to the tribalists, language is not a tool of thought and communication. Language to them is a symbol of tribal status and power - the power to force their dialect on all outsiders.

[NOTE from Mack the Plain Little Turtle: all of the preceding quoted material appears in Rand's "Global Balkanization", the quotes below are from her essay, "Racism"]

Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force - and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.

[...]

Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned...Modern racists attempt to prove the superiority or inferiority of a given race by the historical achievements of some of its members...

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements - and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

Even if it were proved - which it is not - that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one's judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race - and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.

It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has "produced" some brutes- or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has "produced" Goethe, Schiller and Brahms.

[...]

There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico- economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism.

Individualism regards man - every man - as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, co-operation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights - and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

It is not a man's ancestors or relatives or genes or body chemistry that count in a free market, but only one human attribute: productive ability. It is by his own individual ability and ambition that capitalism judges a man and rewards him accordingly.