Neoliberalism: Dream & Reality

Corey Robin, as usual, writes an insightful post. He explores neoliberalism, the dream and the reality:

The complexity of modern life, especially modern American life, is no accident. It is an intentional component, maybe even a cornerstone to the entire project that we are all living in. It is the dream of capitalists and plutocrats, of libertarians and conservatives, of Republicans and more than a few of Democrats. But I would point out that this neoliberal vision is a liberal scheme (a distorted and depraved liberalism, but liberalism nonetheless) and some self-identified liberals are on board with it or have submitted to it in compromise of dreaming small dreams. Many liberals, however, are increasingly waking up from the dream, some conservatives as well. But radical liberals and left-wingers have been awake for quite a while now.

I maybe first came across a good explanation of this issue in the book Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher (p. 20):

“The persistence of bureaucracy in late capitalism does not in itself indicate that capitalism does not work – rather, what it suggests is that the way in which capitalism does actually work is very different from the picture presented by capitalist realism.”

But it isn’t just neoliberalism for the monster has another head, neoconservatism (Fisher, pp. 60-1):

“In her essay ‘American Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and De-democratization’, Brown unpicked the alliance between neoconservatism and neoliberalism which constituted the American version of capitalist realism up until 2008. Brown shows that neoliberalism and neoconservatism operated from premises which are not only inconsistent, but directly contradictory. ‘How’, Brown asks,

“does a rationality that is expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means (neoliberalism) intersect with one that is expressly moral and regulatory (neoconservatism)? How does a project that empties the world of meaning, that cheapens and deracinates life and openly exploits desire, intersect one centered on fixing and enforcing meanings, conserving certain ways of life, and repressing and regulating desire? How does support for governance modeled on the firm and a normative social fabric of self-interest marry or jostle against support for governance modeled on church authority and a normative social fabric of self-sacrifice and long-term filial loyalty, the very fabric shredded by unbridled capitalism?”

“But incoherence at the level of what Brown calls ‘political rationality’ does nothing to prevent symbiosis at the level of political subjectivity, and, although they proceeded from very different guiding assumptions, Brown argues that neoliberalism and neoconservatism worked together to undermine the public sphere and democracy, producing a governed citizen who looks to find solutions in products, not political processes. As Brown claims,

“the choosing subject and the governed subject are far from opposites … Frankfurt school intellectuals and, before them, Plato theorized the open compatibility between individual choice and political domination, and depicted democratic subjects who are available to political tyranny or authoritarianism precisely because they are absorbed in a province of choice and need-satisfaction that they mistake for freedom.”

“Extrapolating a little from Brown’s arguments, we might hypothesize that what held the bizarre synthesis of neoconservatism and neoliberalism together was their shared objects of abomination: the so called Nanny State and its dependents. Despite evincing an anti-statist rhetoric, neoliberalism is in practice not opposed to the state per se – as the bank bail-outs of 2008 demonstrated – but rather to particular uses of state funds; meanwhile, neoconservatism’s strong state was confined to military and police functions, and defined itself against a welfare state held to undermine individual moral responsibility.”

Between neoliberalism and neoconservatism, the dominant worldview becomes an all-consuming vision. It preoccupies our media and our politics, our minds and our time. It defines our possibilites and choices, often giving us a forced choice and denying all else. As long as one thinks within the rules of this game, one can’t win for the entire worldview is a trap and its only purpose is to perpetuate its own social order, its own power and authority, to subsume all of reality into its narrative (Fisher, pp. 16-17):

“Needless to say, what counts as ‘realistic’, what seems possible at any point in the social field, is defined by a series of political determinations. An ideological position can never be really successful until it is naturalized, and it cannot be naturalized while it is still thought of as a value rather than a fact. Accordingly , neoliberalism has sought to eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense. Over the past thirty years, capitalist realism has successfully installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently called realistic was itself once ‘impossible’: the slew of privatizations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political-economic landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have been imagined in 1975. Conversely, what was once eminently possible is now deemed unrealistic. ‘Modernization’, Badiou bitterly observes, ‘is the name for a strict and servile definition of the possible. These ‘reforms’ invariably aim at making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so’.”

Corey Robin, from the same post linked above, offers a common critique from the left which brings the issue down to the human level:

This reminds me of two things.

First, I’ve often doubted the claim that the free market just gives people what they want. With PR, as with propaganda, the so-called ‘free’ market more often tells people what they want (and I would add punishes those who would seek something else). Actually, it goes further still. Through commercialized indoctrination of a corporate media that is society-wide infiltrates every nook and cranny of our lives, the capitalist worldview shapes our desires and fears from a very young age. The more fundamental wants and needs that are inherent to human nature continue to exist. No amount of PR can destroy that fundamental level of reality, but it can obscure it and misdirect our attention.

Second, what Robin describes touches upon my recent post about the morality-punishment link. As I pointed out, the world of Star Trek: Next Generation imagines the possibility of a social order that serves humans, instead of the other way around. I concluded that, “Liberals seek to promote freedom, not just freedom to act but freedom from being punished for acting freely. Without punishment, though, the conservative sees the world lose all meaning and society to lose all order.” The neoliberal vision subordinates the individual to the moral order. The purpose of forcing the individual into a permanent state of anxiety and fear is to preoccupy their minds and their time, to redirect all the resources of the individual back into the system itself. The emphasis on the individual isn’t because individualism is important as a central ideal but because the individual is the weak point that must be carefully managed. Also, focusing on the individual deflects our gaze from the structure and its attendant problems.

This brings me to how this relates to corporations in neoliberalism (Fisher, pp. 69-70):

“For this reason, it is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Žižek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis – the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those ‘abusing the system’, rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure – since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible. This was what happened with the Hillsborough football disaster, the Jean Charles De Menezes farce and so many other cases. But this impasse – it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic – is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals – but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/ expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-a-subject: Capital.”

Corporations are part of the structure of capitalism, but they are merely the outward form of the deeper social order. They express that deeper order. They are the results of it, not the cause.

This directly relates to issues of structural racism, specifically in terms of the New Jim Crow. Our prison-industrial complex isn’t just a system of social control. It is also a system of privatized for-profit companies. The connection of those two isn’t accidental, no more accidental than the disproportionate imprisonment of minorities. It is a system designed to be unequal and to continually reinforce that inequality. It isn’t a byproduct of the system. It is the modus operandi.

Neoliberalism and neoconservatism each form a bar of the Iron Cage. Together, they imprison our minds and bodies, our individualities, our families, our communities. But it is a prison of our own making. It exists because we believe in it. It demands our belief and we acquiesce. But what if we lost our faith in this system, not just partly or temporarily? What if looked beyond the bars and saw that a whole other world existed, a better world full of promise?

Since Nelson Mandela is on everyone’s mind, I’ll end with words by him that contain a moral force that is the antidote we need. There is no quibbling in his naked demand for justice:

“While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.”

Answers About Every New Technology Since the Written Word

Simple Answers

Morality-Punishment Link

Morality and punishment share an interesting relationship. Society seeks to punish immoral acts. But I also thought of how a relationship between the two applies in the opposite direction.

Take AIDs as an example. It carries its own punishment or rather it is the punishment. The moral crime that is supposedly being punished is sexual promiscuity. AIDs has a stigma. To be infected proves you are guilty, within a particular worldview. However, in reality, not everyone gets AIDs from sexual promiscuity and not everyone who gets infected becomes sick. If a simple prevention or cure for AIDs were discovered, the morality-punishment link would be broken.

There are many other STDs that don’t capture the moral imagination. The reason they don’t is because they are easily cured if caught early enough. There is less consequence and so they seem less attractive to moralizing. How can you know something is morally wrong without a moral punishment that follows from it?

This works for other issues as well. The reason why a certain type of person sees the poor as moral failures is because poverty is seen as a punishment in the ‘natural’ scheme of things. Any negative consequence is easily transformed into a moral punishment. This type of thinking particular captures the religious mind; after all, if not God or the Devil, who else causes people to suffer or not? The Invisible Hand of the ‘Free Market’ is just another supernatural being doling out moral punishment and reward, an economic Santa Claus who keeps a list.

This points to what is so interesting about the world of Star Trek: Next Generation. Most major problems have been solved, especially poverty and hunger and probably STDs as well, although the latter doesn’t seem to come up in the show. That future utopia has almost permanently broken the morality-punishment link. There is no negative consequence for being lazy or for being perceived as lazy by others. The conservative moral imagination is severely weakened in that world.

Liberals do seek to break this link in many ways. Liberals seek to promote freedom, not just freedom to act but freedom from being punished for acting freely. Without punishment, though, the conservative sees the world lose all meaning and society to lose all order.

Inconsistency of Burkean Conservatism

I’ve been reading, since it became available the other day, The Great Debate by Yuval Levin. I won’t attempt a review until I’m finished with it. For the time being, let me use a particular point as a jumping off point.

Levin, in introducing the lives of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, writes (Kindle Location 163):

IT MAY SEEM STRANGE to seek philosophical arguments in the words of two men so deeply involved in day-to-day politics. We are not used to political actors who are also political theorists. Such actors were certainly a bit more common in Burke’s and Paine’s era— when in both Britain and America we encounter some politicians who wrote and thought like philosophers— but they were still very much a rare breed even then. And because nearly all of Burke’s and Paine’s pamphlets, speeches, letters, and books were written with some immediate political purpose in mind even as they made larger arguments, scholars of both men’s views have battled over some very basic questions through the centuries.

Part of the problem is that both of these people were political actors rather than political philosophers. Both were seeking to change the social world around them. This seems even more central for Burke who was first and foremost a life-long professional politician. Raised by a father who was a lawyer for the Irish government, Burke was raised in a political family. Burke never had to learn a trade like Paine, never personally experienced poverty, homelessness and hunger like Paine. Burke wasn’t part of the English aristocracy, but he was very well off compared to most British people at that time.

One major point is that the worlds in which Burke and Paine were living were vastly different. Levin makes a false portrayal when he claims that, “Each was a man of humble origins” (Kindle Location 239). To Burke, the prospect of revolution threatened his class privilege and socio-political position. To Paine, the prospect of revolution offered him rights and freedoms he was being denied. They were hardly responding to the same situation and so it is unsurprising that their responses were so different.

As I explained it in a comment to a review of this book:

Historical context is everything.

A person would be entirely clueless about Paine’s position if they didn’t know this historical context: the Commons (as it relates to the Charter of the Forest, common law, the rights of Englishmen, and pre-Lockean land rights) and land enclosures (privatizing the benefits of public resources while externalizing the costs); populations being pushed from their homes and communities in the countryside and forced into concentrated cities where they experienced desperation and rampant disease; growing rates of unemployment, homelessness and poverty; protests and the formation of the first labor unions in London; starvation and food riots while the poor were being hung for simple crimes like stealing a loaf of bread; massive numbers of the destitute being imprisoned, put in workhouses and sold into indentured servitude; et cetera. All of that was what was the background to what was going on when Paine came of age.

Before Paine was a revolutionary, he was a civil servant of the British government seeking gradualist reform within the system. Understanding the historical context that made Paine a revolutionary would also help one understand why Burke transformed from a moderate progressive who supported revolution to a reactionary conservative who opposed revolution. It wasn’t necessarily inevitable that these people would become who they became. Paine was no more inherently a revolutionary than Burke was inherently a reactionary. They were products of their times and of specific environments, especially large rigid class divisions with Paine coming from the working class and Burke coming from the upper class.

When Paine was growing up and becoming and adult in England, the government wasn’t open to being reformed. If it had, Paine might have lived a long contented life as a civil servant. The British government only took reform seriously after it was humbled from its loss during the American Revolution. It is unfair and unreasonable to compare Paine’s response to a reform-resistant pre-revolutionary British government and Burke’s response to a reform-accepting post-revolutionary British government.

Unfortunately, Levin apparently (from what I can tell by my reading of his book so far) doesn’t discuss this historical context and doesn’t give evidence that he understands it.

So, they were both political actors. However, they were acting in response to and toward very different life experiences. If Burke like Paine had been raised working class and had been treated dismissively by the British government, he wouldn’t have developed into the same person. That is an important thing to keep in mind, assuming one desires genuine understanding of historical figures instead of trying to force them into ideological boxes.

As Levin continues (Kindle Location 169):

In Burke’s case, the leading question has been whether he had a consistent set of views throughout his life or whether the French Revolution transformed him somehow. As we will see, Burke spent the first two decades of his political career championing various sorts of reform: of the British government’s finances, its treatment of religious minorities, its trade policy, and more . He spent much of this time pushing against the standing inertia of English politics. But after the revolution in France, which he was concerned might be imported to Britain, Burke was above all a staunch defender of Britain’s political traditions. He strenuously opposed all efforts to weaken the power of the monarch and the aristocracy and warned against fundamental political reforms (like moves toward greater democratization) that might unmoor the nation from its long-standing traditions. He has sometimes been accused, therefore, of changing his most basic views and turning against his former co-partisans and friends. The charge could first be heard in his own lifetime (voiced by Paine, among others) and has been repeated by some of Burke’s biographers and interpreters ever since.

Consistency is more of an issue of theory than of subjective human nature in the context of the messy details of living. Both Burke and Paine changed over their lifetimes. And so neither, in that sense, is ‘consistent’. Understanding why Burke changed is not unlike asking why Reagan switched loyalties from the New Deal Progressivism of the Democratic Party to the Neocon-ruled movement conservatism of the Republican Party. Burke, like Reagan or like Paine, changed because the social and political conditions changed around him.

Few if any people remain unchanged during drastically changing times. Furthermore, no one knows who they might have become under different life conditions, with different events and experiences, in response to different opportunities or oppressions. We all have endless lives not lived, potentials not manifested, roads not taken.

Still, we all want to think we are consistent, that we are morally principled rational actors. So, we try to make sense of what we have become. It is hard for us to know what is genuine insight and what is mere rationalization.

This is also something Levin doesn’t consider, instead taking Burke at his word (Kindle Location 177):

But such a charge miscasts both Burke’s earlier and later views, neglecting the arguments he offered both as a reformer and as a conserver of Britain’s political tradition. Those arguments were always about finding a balance between stability and change— the quest that, as we will see, was at the core of Burke’s ambitions. In the concluding words of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, clearly foreseeing the coming charge of inconsistency, Burke described himself as “one who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end, and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise.”

This image of the man seeking to balance his ship—or to balance his country in a sea of troubles—against various threats to its cherished equipoise, is fitting, in light of Burke’s varied causes and arguments throughout his eventful career. He was a reformer when some elements of the English constitution threatened to suffocate the whole. He was a preserver when it seemed to him, as David Bromwich has put it, “that revolution is the ultimate enemy of reform.” Equipoise, for Burke, is not stagnation, but rather a way of thinking about change and reform, and about political life more generally. As we will see, it was a central metaphor of his political thought.

Of course, no person, especially no professional politician, wants to be seen as inconsistent. That is the dreaded waffling and flip-flopping for which conservatives like to blame liberals. Conservatives pride themselves on supposedly being principled whereas liberals get characterized as moral relativists. As such, Burke the father of conservatism can’t be a moral relativist. God forbid! Burke was more noble than that. He was seeking ‘balance’ and ‘equipose’. Could you imagine a politician today trying to rationalize away charges of inconsistency with such highfalutin language and getting away with it?

I don’t know Burke’s writings all that well. From Levin’s explanations, Burke seems to have been, if anything, a bit wary of being too principled for in that direction lies radicalism (Kindle Location 312):

Burke argues that human nature relies on emotional, not only rational, edification and instruction— an idea that would become crucial to his insistence that government must function in accordance with the forms and traditions of a society’s life and not only abstract principles of justice. “The influence of reason in producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed,” Burke writes. 5 We are moved by more than logic, and so politics must answer to more than cold arguments.

Having “stark and fundamental principles” (Kindle Location 499) from which one reasons toward political action is what a radical like Paine does, not Burke. “Universal principles” (Kindle Location 543) are dangerous for all worthy values must submit to and serve the social order rather than the other way around. The danger of being too principled is that way lies the extremes of revolution (Kindle Location 120): “the French Revolution launched in earnest the modern quest for social progress through unyielding political action guided by uncompromising philosophical principle.”

This Burkean conservatism sounds like moral relativism to me. Indeed, Levin argues that Burke was fundamentally a utilitarian in that he supposedly didn’t believe humans could know natural law. Moral principles were only to be invoked as they were useful or, as I’d say, when convenient to his purposes.

Even so, Burke wasn’t even consistent in this. When it was inconvenient to limit himself to tradition and established order, he would invoke abstract universal principles as needed (Kindle Location 1453):

Because he had very little positive law to appeal to in making his case, he grounded his passionate and powerful appeal in a higher law. “I impeach him,” Burke told the lords regarding Hastings, “in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, at every age, rank, situation, and condition of life.”

The accusation of the radical left by the likes of Burke was that they were essentially too principled; yet the left, radical or otherwise, continuously gets accused of being unprincipled. Which is it? Talk about inconsistency. We can’t even determine the problem, much less the proper stance that would offer a solution. It seems to be that this Burkean stance allows for whatever is convenient at the moment, convenient that is for maintaining the social order and maintaining the power of those who already have it. Burke, in justification, uses yet another fancy term — ‘prudence’ (Kindle Location 1573):

Prudence is not the opposite of either principle or theory. Prudence, rather, is the application of general experience to particular practical problems. In Burke’s view, the prudent person believes that the experience of our society generally points to underlying principles of justice (and of nature) and so offers more reliable, if less specific, guidance than do abstract theories like the natural-rights liberalism that Paine would import wholesale into practical politics.

“History is a preceptor of prudence, not of principles,” Burke writes; it does not offer us direct knowledge of precise or abstract rules. But it does give us general rules, which are certainly good enough most of the time.

Prudence isn’t immoral. It is just morality that is relative to human experience (i.e., moral relativism). The practice of prudence doesn’t deny theory. Rather, it is the theory of the practical (i.e., utilitarianism). I guess it was relatively moral and practical for a conservative like Burke to support monarchy and anti-democratic oppression and yet conservatives today would find that less relatively moral and practical. That is as close to consistency as this kind of conservatism gets.

The descriptive is the normative and hence the prescriptive, or in the words of Levin: “For Burke the resort to history is the model of nature’ (Kindle Location 1623).

The problem with this was explained by the author of another book I was reading the other day — Racecraft by Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields (p. 128):

All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements. Or, to put it another way, part of what human beings understand by the word “nature” is the sense of inevitability that gradually becomes attached to a predictable, repetitive social routine: “custom, so immemorial that it looks like nature,” as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote.

An additional problem is that even conservatives like Burke don’t consistently seek to defend all traditions and in fact they will even actively attack traditions when they don’t like them. Their vision of tradition is dependent on cherrypicking. Liberals like Paine, on the other hand, often find themselves in the position of defending tradition against the attack by conservatives:

Someone like Paine wasn’t simply attempting to create something new. He was trying to save what was being destroyed, the commons along with the rights of Englishmen. This relates to a long English tradition going back to the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. Liberalism arose not just in envisioning new liberties but in defense of old liberties. Such things as the commons are what modern conservatives would like to conveniently forget. Conservatives want to pick and choose what they want from the past and discard the rest.

So, is there anything consistent to conservatism besides, as Corey Robin argues, reaction? If the seemingly inconsistent Edmund Burke is the father of conservatism, then what is this conservatism?

Let me lead into my conclusion with one last quote from Levin (Kindle Location 824);

Paine’s book was the most significant reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, though it was by no means the only one. Indeed, dozens of counter-pamphlets soon appeared, mostly from English radicals and dissenters accusing Burke of abandoning both Whig principles and his own principles. They charged him with a profound inconsistency, given his support for the American Revolution and his earlier assertion (in his 1770 pamphlet Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents) that the deep disgruntlement of an entire population is proof that the state requires serious reform. Thomas Jefferson spoke for many when, upon reading the Reflections, he remarked that “the Revolution in France does not astonish me so much as the revolution in Mr. Burke.” 56 This theme of inconsistency would follow Burke for the rest of his life and indeed well beyond his life, among historians.

This charge of inconsistency, with Burke as their ideological father, continues to plague conservatives to this day. As far as I can tell, they have no better justification to offer to refute this charge. Conservatives barely even acknowledge it, much less try to explain it.

Maybe conservatives need to look for a better foundation.

Culture of Paranoia, Culture of Trust

Paranoia is easy to wave away and laugh about. The craziest of conspiracy theories are known about by almost any American. It is redundant, in respectable company, to even say a conspiracy theory is crazy. But this condescension toward the paranoid misses the fundamental relevance of paranoia.

This country is a paranoid society, I would argue. It goes beyond the radical conspiracists and affects us all. There could be many reasons for this state of affairs. The most obvious one is that we live in a large and diverse country. Few other countries come close to the distance found here between geographic regions and ethnic cultures. Furthermore, the distance between the powerful and powerless is at least as vast and growing vaster. In the space between these distances, there is much room for fantasizing and projection, for fear and mistrust.

I find myself more sympathetic and understanding of paranoia than many people, partly because I have my own paranoid leanings. I came of age reading Robert Anton Wilson and listening to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM. I tend toward considering all perspectives, even when they seem improbable, if only for amusement and the exercise of my imagination. This isn’t to say I will waste my time trying to make sense of incoherent ramblings or unsupported speculations. Nor does it mean I won’t judge harshly and call bullshit. I’ll look at someone’s evidence and claims, but I will do so critically with utmost intellectual standards.

I take paranoia seriously because it feels like an all too reasonable response to the world we live in. Particular paranoid responses often aren’t plausible or relevant. Sometimes they can lead to harmful beliefs and dangerous behaviors. Still, paranoia taken on its own terms is a useful and maybe a necessary attitude. It simply tells us that there is something that isn’t known and that such is a less-than-optimal situation. So, even when paranoia leads to an invalid conspiracy theory and/or problematic levels of mistrust, the impulse itself shouldn’t be denied or ignored.

Truth often hides in odd places, if we dare to look. But we can’t know what truth that might be until we look for it. When we notice paranoia, we should take very seriously what is provoking it.

There are plenty of issues an American should be paranoid about. Trust needs to be earned, most especially in a supposed democratic society. Yet particular individuals and groups in our society have proven to be questionable in their trustworthiness. We have endless examples of trust being abused and betrayed, often in major ways.

One of the greatest of injustices in this country, of course, is that of racism… or call it racialization, racial bias, institutional racism, racecraft, the New Jim Crow, whatever. Everyone acknowledges the dark past beginning with slavery, but political correctness has made it near impossible to speak openly and honestly about the continuing reality and the enduring repercussions.

From Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness The New Reality of Race in America by John L. Jackson:

“Most commentators don’t emphasize, however, that the stakes of political correctness are located in a slightly different place than our conversations on the matter imply. The culture of political correctness actually generates one of the essential foundations of contemporary racial distrust. Since most Americans aren’t as transparent as Archie Bunker (even when he’s trying to hide his ethnocentrism), PC policies actually lose their ability to cultivate the kinds of good-faith dialogues they are meant to foster. Instead, blacks are stuck in the structural position (vis-à-vis white interlocutors) of their ancestors’ slave masters: they see smiles on white faces and hear kind words spilling from white mouths without the least bit of certainty about whether those gestures are representative of the speakers’ hearts. “The American Negro problem,” wrote Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in the 1940s, “is a problem in the heart of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on.” And it is there that the search for racial honesty and truth continues today. But not in the same ways that Myrdal emphasized.

“When individuals’ words and some of their actions can no longer be trusted, we look for other seemingly invisible and interior clues about people’s racial positions. We long to look past calculated performances and into the very hearts of men and women. Social analysts should take the features of this need, this search for de cardio racism, seriously—this racism attributed to the hearts of other-than-explicitly racist actors. De cardio racism is imagined to be a kind of hidden or cloaked racism, a racism of euphemism and innuendo, not heels-dug-in pronouncements of innate black inferiority.

“We’re living in a moment when what I’m calling de cardio racism has elbowed out room for itself at the head of America’s political table, right alongside still operative de jure and de facto forms (think of sentencing disparities for possession of crack versus powder cocaine as a contemporary version of the former and our seemingly effortless, self-perpetuating reproductions of residential and educational segregation along racial lines as a twenty-first-century instance of the latter).

“Given this newfangled reckoning of American racism’s potentially cloaked animosities, the white man’s newest burden is hardly lightened by political correctness—just as black people’s deepest racial suspicions are only bolstered by America’s current penchant for dressing up every ideological position (no matter how reactionary or elitist, partisan or self-interested) as simply another better version of egalitarianism.”
(pp. 77-80)

Without genuine public discourse, the silence belies something unspoken and unadmitted.

“As an anthropologist studying how black people talk about race, I’ve heard this silence described many times and in many ways, but one young security guard in Brook – lyn, New York, captured the thrust of the de cardio racism critique most succinctly: “They were sending dogs to maul black kids in the street forty years ago, and all of a sudden there are no racists in America at all.” De cardio racism asks, where did all of yesterday’s racial wolves go, and why do all these sheep seem to be standing around licking their chops?”"
(pp. 88-89)

Racism hasn’t disappeared. It has simply mutated into some strange creature, a mind parasite that burrows deep (as the Toxoplasma lies hidden in the brain of rats telling them that they want to run fast in open spaces, that the smell of cat urine is actually a pleasant smell to be sought out). Hidden behind political correctness and post-racial colorblindness, the infestation of this soul-sickening mind-warping racial oppressiveness goes untreated.

“The point isn’t that race is less important now than it was before. It’s just more schizophrenic, more paradoxical. We continue to commit to its social significance on many levels, but we seem to disavow that commitment at one and the same time. Race is real, but it isn’t. It has value, but it doesn’t. It explains social difference, but it couldn’t possibly. This kind of racial doublethink drives us all crazy, makes us so suspicious of one another, and fans the flames of racial paranoia. Nothing is innocent, and one bumps into conspirators everywhere.”
(p. 11)

This isn’t to deny the progress that has been made, but it is to look deeper past the superficial narrative and into the even more intransigent problems.

“The demonization of public racism is clearly a social and moral victory, but it has come at a cost. Political correctness has proven tragically effective at hiding racism, not just healing it. In sacrificing noisy and potentially combative racial discussions for the politeness of political correctness, we face an even more pernicious racism, a racism that’s almost never explicitly declared, except among the closest of confidants. But as the “White Like Me” skit’s lampoon shows, people recognize the fact that racism might be even more effectual under the cover of color blindness and rhetorical silence.”
(p. 91)

The fact that political correctness has become the ultimate defense of racism is one of the saddest results of all. The words of political correctness are invoked like an invisibility spell. With this talismanic use of magical words, all the old racisms simply take new form and in some ways they are more powerful than before. Now they are presented, instead of as belief and bigotry, in the guise of neutral observation or even scientific reality.

We Americans live in a society, not just of vast geographic and cultural divides, but also of vast racial and class divides.

There is no other major developed country in the Western world with equivalent high of rates of economic inequality and no other country anywhere in the world with even close to our high rates of incarceration rates; other high rates of social problems could be added to these two egregious examples. The injustice of this American society is beyond comprehension. Those on the bottom or those threatened with ending up on the bottom have a lot to fear. If you are deemed useless or simply in the way in this society, you will be lucky to fall through the cracks rather than be ground beneath the wheel. And no one in the mainstream media will bother to report on your sad fate. You’ll just be another faceless number or maybe not even that.

It is hard to blame people, under these oppressive conditions, for lashing out at shadows.

“When you wire skepticism and paranoia directly to questions of racial discrimination and inequality (and in a context where economic inequality is rising just as social safety nets are deteriorating precipitously), you then have a perfect storm for severe responses to severe times.”
(p. 200)

The danger in our society isn’t in being paranoid but in not being paranoid enough, especially if you are part of the economic underclass or worse still the racial under-caste. But paranoia speaks of deeper undercurrents still. In a society of fear, the sickening taint of mistrust and doubt seeps into our very pores.

“De cardio racism can even be hidden from the very person who harbors it. They may not even admit racist feelings to themselves. If we were all self-aware and totally self-transparent, every psychotherapist in the country would be begging for bread.”
(p. 237)

Now there is paranoia for you. The monster lurks within the unsuspecting. Look in the mirror, if you dare, and see what may look back.

The more we deny something the more we fear being judged to be in denial. Still, it isn’t just that this judgment may come from others but that we too have suspicions about ours own potential guilt, a sense of past sins and ongoing complicities. Everyone understands that each of us harbors ugly thoughts, cruel grudges, repressed memories, and who knows what else. So much of civilized behavior is pretense, as much to convince ourselves as others. For certain, political correctness isn’t a recent invention. People have been speaking around uncomfortable truths and dangerous ideas for as long as humans could speak.

“The eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire once claimed that human beings really only speak to conceal what they truly feel, as much to miscommunicate as anything else. Humans are complicated and dissimulating creatures with the uncanny ability to misrepresent themselves and their deepest inner thoughts, to be purposefully economical with the truth. It could be as harmless as a “little white lie” about how good your child was in the school play or as catastrophic as a governmental cover-up of Watergate-like proportions. And there are few areas of public life where people put these gifts to work as often as they do in the context of discussions about race.”
(pp. 89-90)

It doesn’t even matter if we’d rather not admit to what underlies our own thoughts and motivations. The data points toward the inconvenient knowledge of our all too human tendencies. Research shows a million examples of hidden biases and prejudices, many of them racial.

“Although nobody went on CNN or Fox after the Hurricane Katrina disaster to proclaim that they would like to donate money to white victims instead of black ones, a Washington Post/Stanford University study found that white Americans were willing to provide more financial assistance to white victims than black ones, to the tune of about $1,000 extra a year. And the darker the victim, the less money she would have received, with lighter-skinned blacks benefiting from about $100 more per month than those who couldn’t pass the brown-paper-bag test (i.e., those not lighter than a brown shopping bag). Americans may hardly admit it in public, but they are clearly willing to put their money where their color biases are.”
(p. 88)

I have my doubts that we, as a society and as individuals, would know how to be non-racist, even if we tried. We are the products of our society and are no more capable of being colorblind than Pavlov’s dog could be mute to the sound of the bell.

“If psychologists have shown that people don’t even necessarily know what makes them happy, they may not be able to identify exactly what makes them potentially hateful or discriminatory either. If we can “stumble on happiness,” we might be able to stumble right into prejudice as well.

“The more blatantly racist a society has been in the past, the steeper its climb out of explicit racial discrimination and the harder it is for contemporary citizens to shake fears of de cardio racism. The farther we advance from overt racist doctrines and laws, the more material traces those past sins leave behind, which means all the more surfaces to which contemporary racially charged paranoia might stick.”
(p. 95)

Alleging that our dark nature is to be found in our genes or elsewhere instead of the unconscious hardly alleviates the paranoia. Ours is a society full of people claiming secret sins are hidden away within the hearts, minds and bodies of their neighbors, coworkers and fellow citizens. All white people have hidden racist beliefs and thoughts. All black people (along with other minorities) have hidden inferior genes and culture. And all of society has hidden structures of privilege and oppression, of class warfare and cabals of special interest groups. Endless seething nightmares of paranoia.

The real dark secret is the paranoia itself. We all go on acting normal as these dark visions play out in the background of our daily activities and interactions. It isn’t about proving one’s own preferred paranoia and disproving all others. The paranoia itself always speaks to our shared reality. The question is: What does it signify? What are we really afraid of?

“Rumors about race, racism, and racial distrust are not just fringe beliefs held by a few hard-line crackpots, not even the kinds just mentioned. They define the surreal core of all racial stereotypes and race-based social policy. Race, as a concept, is only useful as a way to ground conspiratorial claims—about research on inherent cognitive differences between social groups or about secret government surveillance technologies. Race is one of the shortcuts we use to convince ourselves that the social differences we see in the world merely reflect more latent and inflexible differences in genes or culture. And racial paranoia is the realization that we are all far too afraid and polite to deal with any of these assumptions head-on.”
(pp. 108-110)

Racial paranoia is just another expression of the return of the repressed. If we don’t deal with an issue at the conscious level, our unconsciousness will find a way to force the issue and command our attention. The central conflict of race itself demands resolution.

“In the early 1970s, psychologist Joseph White penned what is now one of the most classic formulations of black paranoia as a reasonable response to white racism. “Part of the objective condition of black people in this society is that of a paranoid condition,” he writes. “There is, and has been, unwarranted, systematic persecution and exploitation of black people as a group. A black person who is not suspicious of the white culture is pathologically denying certain objective and basic realities of the black experience.””
(p. 189)

There is more to racial paranoia than fear-fueled suspiciousness and dark visions. Very much real social conditions, historical and present, give plentiful evidence for mistrust. How could the average black person in this society not at the very least have some occasional misgivings? Heck, I’m a relatively privileged white male and even I have healthy skepticism about the good intentions of certain people who share this society with me. A bit of paranoia is a perfectly normal response when faced with such deeply entrenched power structures and power disparities.

“What detractors pooh-pooh as irrational racial paranoia might represent an appropriate, if incomplete, response to euphemized forms of racism today.”
(p. 214)

So, what kind of response is needed?

Simply trying to be more reasonable and rational won’t save us. We humans never lack for reasons, never lack for an ability to rationalize and explain away. The surface level of our thoughts and words is just so much distraction. If we seek justice and fairness, there is no way for us to keep an objective distance and keep ourselves clean from the inersubjective muck of it all. It is all too personal for all involved.

“As a society we should never pretend that we have successfully reasoned or legislated our way out of race’s suffocating grasp. Our historical investment in it is too dynamic and affective for that, too irrational and deep-seated. We are being naive if we think that we can sit down and intellectualize ourselves out of its sticky clutches, if we imagine that ending explicit commitments to blatant types of racial discrimination must mean that we are done with racism’s awful legacy for good. It is a trap that scholars fall into as well, assuming that all they have to do is objectively “deconstruct” race, prove it isn’t real in the biological ways that we once thought, and then imagine that by doing so they have somehow inoculated us all against its most hazardous features, dulled its sharpest talons. That isn’t nearly true.”

“We want to believe something very similar about racism and accusations of racism. If we can prove that a particular allegation of racism is unfounded or untrue, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief and try to move on. That is part of racism’s power. It tricks us into thinking that we can wish it away with a string of logical premises and conclusions, with a singular decree of guilt or innocence. We fantasize about isolating this thing and determining its measurable impact once and for all, especially now that blatant forms of racism have been so thoroughly demonized in mainstream society.”
(pp. 84-85)

Yeah, I’ve lately read a number of books whose authors could be accused of falling into that intellectual trap. I’m not sure it is an entirely fair accusation, but I understand the point. Intellectual analysis of data is just a tool. It is one tool among many and no less useful when needed.

If I had an accusation against the author of this book (John L. Jackson), I might say that he didn’t ground his argument in enough intellectual analysis of data. His argument would have been so much stronger had he been as thorough as, for example, Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow. It was the data-driven strength of Alexander’s presentation that made her book so effective in its impact and hopefully its influence.

I love that Racial Paranoia presents fresh insight and an innovative perspective. So, I wouldn’t judge Jackson too harshly for I understand his purpose. He is making a very important point that maybe no one else is making, at least not in the way he is making it. The only comparable book I’ve come across is Racecraft by Fields and Fields. Both books try to get beyond the standard repeating of data and, in doing so, try to get past the cognitive traps of our own making.

Some have criticized Jackson for what the perceived failure to more fully include the problems of more overt racism, but I especially think that is unfair.

“I do want to argue that racial paranoia isn’t racism, but racism is also still alive and well (even in its more explicit guises). I don’t want to privilege individual psyches over larger structural forces. In fact, I want to argue that a structural transformation in the American racial order created current versions of race-based paranoia. All I suggest is that we not simply reduce accusations of racism to simplistic assessments of truth or falsehood. We shouldn’t just try to vet them for provable accuracy and then go on to something else once we think we’ve shown a particular allegation to be unfounded. Instead, I want to remind us that we now live in a political atmosphere that promotes racial dissimulation and insincerity. The self-conscious parsing of racial speech brings a certain kind of distrust and bad faith into the center of every interracial conversation, even if through the back door and against some people’s best intentions.”
(pp. 195-196)

His point is that taking seriously racial paranoia is a necessary and essential part of our dealing with the more concrete racial problems that confound us.

“We promote racial paranoia when we combine discussions about color blindness with silent acceptance of continued structural differences in racial realities.”
(p. 206)

As such, racial paranoia is a sign of our collective failure. It is proof of how far away we still are from coming to terms with the real issues at hand.

There is a further issue that brings me to my own thoughts on American society. Jackson touches upon this in the following:

“Some critics downplay the significance of Americans’ publicly concealing their racial biases in mixed company, even as some of these same naysayers admit that most blacks and whites don’t have many substantial relationships with one another. In fact, political scientist Robert Putnam argues that Americans who live in diverse communities are more likely to disengage from civic life than those who live in homogenous racial and ethnic enclaves. This just further highlights fellow political scientist Diana Mutz’s persuasive contention that “participatory democracy” (civic engagement, people rolling up their sleeves and taking part in political life) and “deliberative democracy” (substantive discussions about political life) operate at cross-purposes to one another.13 If the lack of racial intimacy breeds distrust, the increase of interracial contact only makes good-faith social dialogue and interaction a casualty of that social mistrust. Social distance can make the heart grow frightened, but it takes more than just passing a diverse array of strangers on the street to allay those fears.”
(pp. 202-203)

I’ve so far spoken only of our culture of paranoia. That is the challenge before us. But what is the antidote? I would suggest that the only force equal to the task would be a culture of trust. The fact that this country has such a culture of paranoia could be interpreted as demonstrating how weak is our culture of trust, but I don’t know if that is actually the case. Conditions supporting each might not be oppositional.

The reason I say this is because the United States, in the studies I’ve seen, measures relatively high as a culture of trust. Not as high, of course, as Germany or Japan. Still, we’re not doing too bad, better than most countries. Besides, one might point out that, if not for a significant culture of paranoia in Germany, the Nazis wouldn’t likely have come to power by scapegoating so many people.

A culture of trust is about social capital. And a culture of paranoia is one possible result of insufficient social capital. But a finer point must be added that there are many kinds of social capital that serve different ends.

That is what Jackson explains in the quote directly above when he says, ““participatory democracy” (civic engagement, people rolling up their sleeves and taking part in political life) and “deliberative democracy” (substantive discussions about political life) operate at cross-purposes to one another.” Maybe so. If so, that is quite a dilemma. I doubt it is a forced option of one or the other, but it could imply a necessary third that bridges the two, a factor of social capital that is of a higher order.

This is shown by yet another study. Children who grow up in multicultural communities tend to become more socially liberal as adults. For a social democracy, the ultimate form of social capital is social liberalism. Without it, social democracy can’t function. Multiculturalism teaches kids how to tolerate and accept, how to cooperate and compromise with those who are different.

As this all shows, it isn’t simply a matter of social capital or its lack. Rather, what is required is a balance of social capital that achieves a particular end. A different blend of social capital would be required in a traditional society than in a modern society. In speaking of cultures of trust, we must consider what kinds of trust toward whom and for what purpose.

A kinship-based society would measure low in these kinds of studies for people in those societies only trust kin, but their trust of kin is very strong. In America, there is less trust (or loyalty) to large extended families. Few Americans could honestly speak of having a traditional clan or a tribe to which they belong. Also, as we aren’t an ethnic nation-state, we don’t have the same kind of patriotism and communitarianism found in the countries that do measure highest as cultures of trust. The Japanese when dealing with other Japanese know that they can make business deals on a handshake for someone’s word is their honor and, when the Japanese fail by their own sense of honor, that means social death and if severe enough a responsibility to commit suicide. We Americans aren’t so honor-bound.

Even so, we Americans have our own variety of trust. Unlike societies of kinship and ethno-nationalism, we are more likely to offer trust to strangers more quickly and with fewer reservations. We are more likely to assume someone is trustworthy until proven otherwise, especially in terms of face-to-face personal interactions.

My dad gave an example of this. His career led him to visit many factories. He remembered visiting a closed-down Japanese factory, but Japanese management were wary about him seeing their operation since he was an outsider, not just an outsider to Japan for he was also an outsider to the company. In visiting American factories, it was more common for management to let him freely wander around factories that were actively being used.

This might relate to a behavioral trait I’ve heard many foreigners observe in Americans. Americans on average are more openly gregarious, quick to help others, go out of our way to make people feel welcome. But to many foreigners this feels superficial. I can only imagine that it is something like how my Midwestern mother felt when interacting with our Southern Belle neighbor in South Carolina, a cordial friendliness that was just a formality. This observation of foreigners seems to show that there are two levels of trust. In everyday interactions, Americans act trustingly. But otherwise, Americans go by the policy that deeper trust needs to be earned. We don’t give someone that deeper trust simply because they share our kinship or our ethnicity.

Racial paranoia seems to operate on that deeper level.

It goes back to slavery, as Jackson explains. Many slave masters weren’t so wealthy that they could sit around sipping iced tea on the veranda. They had to be out there working in the fields with their slaves. Even for wealthier slave masters, their entire lives were intimately entwined with their slaves and, in the more isolated Virginia plantations, this went as far as slaves being part of an extended sense of family. It was the simultaneous closeness and distance between people in a slave society that necessitated trust even as it provoked paranoia. Segregation offers a false portrayal of geographic separation, but the reality is that people lived separate lives while often living next door to one another. Even after slavery, whether as sharecroppers or servants, blacks in the Deep South tended live near the whites they worked for. My Southern Belle neighbor, for example, had a black woman who was her personal servant for years and only lived a few blocks away.

A similar dynamic has happened also between other diverse demographics: ethnic groups, regional populations, etc. This is an immigrant nation and so that has meant diverse people have had to learn to work together, even when there was potential for animosities and inequalities. This has been magnified by the American tendency to move around a lot from region to region. American-style cooperative trust goes hand-in-hand with wary mistrust.

It could be that the paranoid imagination is how societies process divisions and conflicts. As people imagine dark possibilities, they imagine brighter possibilities as well.

Along with being an immigrant nation, the corollary is that this is a dynamic society. There is a constant influx of immigrants and, about every few generations, a new large wave of immigration comes along. This has meant that, unlike traditional societies with established ethnic populations, Americans in general has never been able or particularly interested in trying to remain unchanging.

Like all of modernity, this dynamic instability is taxing on human nature. There is an endless need for negotiating and renegotiating relationships. No seeming certainties go forever unchallenged.

This reminds me of my eternal fascination with boundaries and boundary types. I’ll let this angle bring me into my concluding thoughts.

The reason race is most prone to paranoia is because it isn’t an objective category. It can be almost anything to anyone. This is clearly shown with issues of definition. Even relatively dark-skinned North Africans are technically Caucasians. A large number of American blacks have as many or more European genetics than African genetics. There is a long history of light-skinned blacks passing as whites and also some examples of whites passing as blacks (e.g., John Howard Griffin). Then there are all those ethnic groups that have struggled to fit into American categories: Italians, Irish/Scots-Irish, Eastern Europeans, Jews, etc.

America is one of those places where differences come to die, although some take longer than others, race being one of the more stubborn. There are few ethnic immigrants whose American-born descendants aren’t assimilated within a few generations, often along with marrying across ethnic divides.

As boundaries shift, everything else shifts along with them: social identities, religious practices, communities, etc. And so we as a society shift from what is known to what is unknown, to what has been to what might be. This past century has been a time of the greatest shifts in American history. It shouldn’t be surprising that, when so much is up in the air, paranoia would become rampant. Of the uncertainties of our age, racial identities and categories are among the most challenged. A large part of the population today has few if any ancestors who were in America during slavery or even Jim Crow. The very history behind racial dogma is becoming ever more irrelevant, and so its ideological nature is becoming more obvious.

At the same time, the historical racial divides have been growing as the class divides grow. The racial order that benefits the few is increasingly becoming harmful to the many as those in power become increasingly oppressive in maintaining all aspects of the social order. It is in the interest of those least worthy of trust to discourage the development of a culture of trust.

The only thing that can move all of this forward against such resistance is public dialogue. Even paranoia expressed is more constructive than silence.

Racecraft: Political Correctness & Free Marketplace of Ideas

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
by Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields
pp. 40-44

Race-Racism Evasion

From Racecraft (pp. 100-102):

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Law and Order

JUL 2013

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Page 54 of 67

where the law does not specifcally exclude non-motorized vehicles, it provides for the reasonable speed of the vehicle in question, thus accommodating farm tractors, horse carriages and bicycles. Why is it cyclists are being cited for "impeding" when they are actually driving defensively and in a manner reasonable for their vehicle? The Law Some bikes require more space on the roadway. crashes and near-misses cyclists experience. Hugging the edge of the road is actually dangerous for a number of reasons. Most traffc lanes are too narrow to safely accommodate a motor vehicle and cyclist side by side. Cyclists who keep right so motorists can pass them without changing lanes actually encourage close passes and sideswipes. Cyclists who ride farther left and control the lane report no such problems. Motorists pass them in an adjacent lane. If they have to slow down and wait for an opportunity to pass, that's OK. Empirical evidence shows that any delays motorists experience waiting to pass are usually 30 seconds or less. Bike lanes make cycling safer: In fact, bike lanes were created because of the myth listed above and the desire for a separate space. Bike lanes force cyclists to ride on the edge, sometimes even in the "door zone" of parked cars, where they might be directly hit or startled into swerving in front of traffc. Channeling bicyclists to the right of other traffc encourages them to be unpredictable— unexpectedly passing slower traffc on the right. When cyclists are forced to ride on the edge of the roadway conficts arise at intersections and driveways—the most common location of bicycle/ motorist crashes. There the cyclist's position conficts with turning cars—thru cyclists are to the right of right-turning vehicles and are often screened from the view of drivers turning left. Bicycle paths are safest for cyclists: Since paths fall outside the scope of traffc laws, behavior on them is unregulated, unpredictable and unenforceable. Conficts and crashes increase at intersections. Unlike roads, paths don't go everywhere people need or want to go. Cyclists riding in the middle of the traffc lane will impede traffc: Where "impeding" laws exist, nearly all clearly state that only drivers of motor vehicles can illegally impede. In the six states In every state, bicycles are either defned in statutes as a vehicle or cyclists are given the same rights and responsibilities as other vehicle drivers. They have the right to use most roadways, which means the fog line to the centerline. The term "roadway" does not include the shoulder. In many non-snow states, shoulders may be non-existent or too narrow to be rideable. While most states forbid bicycles on freeways, some western states—with vast open space and fewer roads—allow cyclists to ride the shoulder of controlled access highways. Only New York, Hawaii and Alaska mandate shoulder use if it is safely usable. Most states require cyclists to ride "as far to the right (FTR) as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway." This sentence is often misunderstood. For purposes of the statute language "practicable" means as close to the right edge as is safe and reasonable under existing or probable conditions. It does not mean as close as possible to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway. Moreover, it is up to each cyclist to decide where he/she believes is safest. After all, the cyclist not only has the least protection, but also is passed with the highest speed differential. Many statutes list specifc reasons why cyclists need to ride farther left within a lane. These include avoiding road hazards, preparing for a left turn, passing another vehicle, or avoiding objects such as parked cars, pedestrians or animals. The most signifcant reason given is a "substandard width lane" within which a cyclist and motorist cannot pass safely side by side. This last reason is the most misunderstood, largely because it applies to the majority of traffc lanes on today's roadways—making the exception the rule. Anywhere bicyclists choose to ride in such a lane is legal. More experienced cyclists choose to "control the lane." By using a large portion of the lane, cyclists send a clear message to motorists that they must change lanes to pass when safe and legal to do so. Cyclists legally controlling a narrow lane cannot by defnition "impede traffc" even though they are moving substantially slower than surrounding traffc. It is important to remember that a traffc lane is a public utility there for the purpose of moving people, not merely motor vehicles. Substandard Width Lanes It may shock many to learn that a 12-foot-wide lane is considered a "substandard width" for the purpose of this statute. Federal roadway design standards suggest a cyclist needs a minimum of 4 53

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How to Be Size Zero?

To get to size zero, count your calories and eat right. Load your plate with lean protein such as chicken, fish and legumes, get plenty of vegetables and stick to complex carbohydrates. Exercise a lot and track your progress by measuring how much you exercise, your weight and your measurements. Be patient and be accepting since losing weight the healthy way is a process.
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I would also like to warn anyone about the formulas in Champlin's book which contain organic acids such as benzoic and salicylic acids. These chemicals may cause softening of the emulsion leading to reticulation.

This book illustrates why I take a jaundiced eye to all old developer formulations. Modern emulsions are very different from those used when these old time developers were formulated. There is no reason to believe that these formulations will provide better results than modern developers. Despite what some advocate on APUG, there is no "holy grail" of developers.


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