Ethnicity and Racism

For the sake of "diversity" we allowed the concept of "ethnicity" to enter our cultures. While we have always valued differences here in the US--for example in Holland, Michigan the Dutch are so old fashioned that people from The Netherlands often travel here during the Tulip Festival to see the old traditions long forgotten in Holland--there is a difference between celebrating such things, and trading it up for racism, which we have done.

30 years ago, the author Ayn Rand saw this form of racism coming and described it:

"'Ethnicity' is an anti-concept, used as a disguise for the word “racism”—and it has no clearly definable meaning. . . . The term “ethnicity” stresses the traditional, rather than the physiological characteristics of a group, such as language—but physiology, i.e., race, is involved . . . . So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition—i.e., racism plus conformity—i.e., racism plus staleness."
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/ethnic…

For the sake of ethnicity, the left "celebrates" the dialect called Ebonics, and once advocated teaching it in schools! But by institutionalizing it as they did, they made it a target for educators who saw it, not as a valid dialect, but as as horrible lack of education, a failure by the educational system. Those educators didn't despise the uneducated, but despised the left for institutionalizing a failed system. However, those less educated than the educators looked at what the left advocated, and began hating the messenger--those who used Ebonics. Those who use Ebonics are now the targets of racists who say that the blacks and other poor who use Ebonics are inferior. This began when the left "celebrated" the diversity of the ethnic classes too poor to learn proper ( or at least good) English.

Because of our "celebration" of ethnicity, it has become taboo to question the many large and small Muslim communities in the US who refuse to learn English, communities we now find are organizing to send their youth to the Middle East for training in terrorist camps. This doesn't mean that even the majority of people living in those communities agree with terrorism--they do live in the US for other reasons, after all--but politically correct celebrations of ethnicity have not allowed us to properly question the motives of people who appear to be questionable citizens in those communities.

The same can be said for "ethnics" all over the globe. One reason for the Balkan War of the 1990s was "ethnic cleansing". That is what Hitler was doing, also.

"The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people....It was the culmination, largely influenced by the Belgian colonization which favored the Tutsi minority group because of their more 'European' appearance, of longstanding ethnic competition and tensions between the minority Tutsi, and the majority Hutu peoples."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Gen…

"Ethnic Cleansing: The elimination of an unwanted group from a society, as by genocide or forced migration."
http://www.munfw.org/archive/50th/4th1.h…

It is not what the Israelis want to do to the Muslims; after all half of Jerusalem is controlled by Muslims, and Yassar Arafat had the chance to create a Palestinian nation during his life time, but at the last minute, after all the years of wars and negotiations, "the Old Warrior" changed his mind and said no, because the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Palestine was more important to him.

So long as we celebrate "ethnicity" and not simply the cultural differences and traditions, racism will continue to escalate.

Ardi Pithecus ™,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism ^sm,
  Journal of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism ©,
 The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger ©,
   Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra ©
and   The Metaphysical Naturalist ©,
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The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC, and are:  
©2008-2010 by Curtis Edward Clark and, Naturalist Academy Publishing, ^sm

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

 

Locke: Perception and Knowledge

"Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas. In this alone it consists. [Essay IV i 2] "
http://www.philosophypages.com/locke/g04…

For some philosophers, "idea" is that which is in the mind as a condition of sensation, or "the given".
"Given, The: Whatever is immediately present to the mind before it has been elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction."
http://www.ditext.com/runes/g.html

In other words, for those philosophers, if you sense that your hand is touching something, there is the "idea" that something exists which your hand is touching. But whether or not you call that an "idea", I know of no philosopher who doesn't also call it "the given".

Locke meant more than this. Locke meant by "perception" something that is defined in the mind beyond the mere point of the given; it had to be elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction, (induction; deduction; conceptualization).

This is easy to acknowledge when you read his words again: perception is the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our Ideas. The mind's acknowledgment of "the given" will neither agree nor disagree with either previous nor future events of what is "given" to us to perceive. But a perception is the acknowledgment of the given; acknowledgment requires a correspondence between "ideas"; ideas must be that which is "elaborated by inference, interpretation or construction", because without those, ideas would remain only as perceptions about which we know nothing except that they exist.

Ayn Rand, a Lockean herself, put it this way:
"A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli [the given], but of entities, of things....A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. When we speak of “direct perception” or “direct awareness,” we mean the perceptual level. Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery."
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/percep…

Locke, therefore, meant that perceptions were separate from sensations, and as far as "knowledge" of them was concerned, we have that only when we perceive that one idea is connected to another, at which time we also see that it either agrees or disagrees with the others. If it disagrees, it or one or more of the others is "repugnant", or contrary.

Perception is not the simple acknowledgment that we have had a sensation of "the given". An infant is "given" many things at birth, and his mind is in terrible turmoil attempting to determine the nature of his new world. He must determine that "mother is good"; "food is good"; "dirty diapers are bad", etc. But even then, until he gains a language by which to identify these things, they are still nothing more than "the given". He doesn't have the conception of a dirty diaper; he only knows that something happened to him and he doesn't feel good after that, and until he is taken care of.

So for Locke, "perception" is acknowledgment--of one idea or concept either agreeing with or disagreeing with other ideas, whether conceptual or not. An infant without a language can still determine that one thing is contrary to another (such as his mother makes him happy, then she makes him sad or angry, and he must eventually learn how one person can do both.)

So the key to "perception" in the language of Locke is to understand that it means the acknowledgment of at least a pair of "ideas" which will be either in agreement with each other, or "repugnant" to each other. 

It is only from the perception of like/unlike ideas that we can come to have "knowledge", because what is not "knowledge" is literally "unacknowledged" and must be greater than "the given".

Ardi Pithecus ™,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism ^sm,
  Journal of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism ©,
 The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger ©,
   Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra ©
and   The Metaphysical Naturalist ©,
    are the educational arms of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC, and are:  
©2008-2010 by Curtis Edward Clark and, Naturalist Academy Publishing, ^sm

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com