Allies all, or creators of the hate that we denounce in others - Part ONE
The greatest challenge of the XXI century, the paradoxical safeguards of tolerance and inclusion, revisiting the end of history, and a last appeal for grace and compassion.
I stand with her.
Black lives matter.
I am different, not less.
Love is love.
Who you are is beautiful and amazing.
Stop genocide, everywhere, anywhere, period.
Introduction.
In a world that increasingly fosters otherness, we show less and less grace for one another. We retreat and decrease the space we welcome and accept those who do not identify as us. It’s easy to feel like we must pick a side, that we must manifest an allegiance to one group, and that we must embrace one identity. It’s easier still to find that someone has already made those choices for us, by placing us in a certain category of others based on their own superficial perceptions and hurried assumptions of us.
While we now have tools to translate all languages in this world, we are finding new, more unsurmountable and consequential language barriers emerging every day, within our own language. Words have become signals, signifiers, and even shibboleths – secret affinity passcodes and passwords - that we award the weight of the world to, as means of acceptance or of exclusion, to judge and to cancel each other, to place us in a camp of us versus them.
Words are by no means meaningless, they are important, and yes they can be deeply triggering, but not all ignorance of subjective or cultural meaning are reproachable, intentional, or deplorable. Here again we are showing less and less grace to one another to fuel selective outrage, to lessen the space to which we accept others, to give a face and an outlet to all the wrongs and micro-aggressions we carry within us - as if any word, or any action, can carry the burden of all the sins and all the wrongs of this world.
How easy has it become to cancel someone, to dehumanize them, or to frame them as an other - someone not deserving of the same dignity and opportunity as us, or worse still, someone who is an enemy. Conversely getting to know someone, trying to build relationships and being accepted by someone, lifting them, and building consensus among different groups has become such a minefield. We are so quick to judge, to look for - and to look forward to - a “gotcha” moment. We are so sparse in showing grace, compassion, and the benefit of the doubt. More often than not however, I think we will find that we are all aggressors and victims to someone else, at different times, and under different circumstances. This does not negate the great preponderance of times and circumstances where and when objective discrimination still occurs, and how systemic inequities are pervasive.
There is a great asymmetry in the distribution of wealth, influence, justice, compassion, opportunity, power, and dignity in this country. It is built on pervasive and perversely adaptive structures of privilege - which have been empirically demonstrated, and which no executive order or alternative facts can empirically disprove or deny. In a post-truth world, if you trust nothing else, look around you and trust in your own eyes.
Hate and discrimination operate in nonconcentric circles of exclusion, with a preponderance on race, gender, territorialism, religious identity, cultural identity, but no longer solely along those lines. Alongside objective discrimination, i.e. the general and abstract discrimination triggered by the above categories and identities, we are witnessing the rise of subjective discrimination, and the same denial of grace, of opportunity, and the benefit of the doubt, to those that trigger us by their words, their personal qualities, their political loyalties and personal allegiances, and most of all, by our flawed, reductionist and superficial assumptions of who they are and what they represent.
In the short article that follows I identify what I believe to be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century, and our unsustainable framework of socio-economic ordering[1]. I will argue that the incentive structures in our current models of economic governance are increasingly myopic, fueled by greed, the dangerous belief that we can replace the legitimacy of norms with the legitimacy of power, the hubris belief that our world’s resources are infinite, and the immoral belief that what we take for ourselves does not come at a cost to someone else, either now or in the future. I will also argue that perhaps Francis Fukuyama was right all along, that we have reached the end of history - not because we have reached the optimal or final form of socio-economic governance, but because we cannot escape it, and therefore are doomed to reenact our darkest failings.
We cannot escape conflict, and we cannot escape otherness. Perhaps because we cannot escape unsustainable and unethical greed, and we cannot escape entrenched prejudices. We have not learned how to manage and to protect the paradoxical safeguards of tolerance and of inclusion. More importantly, we have not learned how to preempt the systemic and pervasive incentive structures that prevent law and the normative construct of a constitutional democracy from fulfilling its true purpose, which is to allow for social life, to give it scope and dignity[2].
In the following critique of competing frameworks and claims of primacy and of exclusion; blind allegiance to structures of power and of influence; the ever present us versus them mentality; unreflective, reactive, and selective knee-jerk outrage; and our unsustainable and unethical frameworks of socio-economic ordering, I ask for grace. I ask that my words are never interpreted to betray what is in my heart:
- I will always stand with women.
- I will always abhor racial discrimination, or any form of hate toward others.
- I embrace and celebrate neurodiversity, please believe that there is nothing wrong with you, only something STRONG with you.
- Love is the greatest blessing we can hope for in this life, whomever you find it with.
- Who you are to me is beautiful and amazing, never reduced to a binary or any other reductionist taxonomy.
- Genocide anywhere will always be our most unforgivable failing as a species, whether from the river to the sea, from the sea to the river, or anywhere else and in-between in this world. It is a denial of everything that makes us human, and there is no greater line in the sand, for once crossed we have no humanity nor morality left that any amount of relativism, ignorance, indifference, distance, or otherness can ever overcome or justify. It is one of the few truly collective sins and crimes, for regardless of it being enacted by one or a group of us, history will hold all of us accountable.
- Finally, I also firmly believe that all innovation must be purposeful, ethical, sustainable, and inclusive.
In short, I wholeheartedly believe that we must be allies all lest we risk creating the same hate that we denounce in others. Put differently, we are allies all, or creators of otherness.
[1] You will find that I approach the concept of sustainability in a broad sense, to encompass normative and economic frameworks, which impact not only our environmental commons, but our intellectual commons, our dignity, our capacity for self-determination, and our allowance for intergenerational justice.
[2] “The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life–to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.” Archibald MacLeish