The ladder of kindness

(Above - Photo of World War II poster from diggerhistory.)


There's been a lot in the press in the last few days about immigration and new census findings of where immigrants are living in the US, which is increasingly outside the big cities, not in them.

Robert Putnam discussed some findings related to "diversity", or, more likely, related to recent changes in diversity.

By themselves, ethnic diversity and remixing are generally good things for a species, making the ecology more stable and the species more able to deal with change without breaking.

But, in today's human society, this process is overlaid with another set of processes related to bias, discrimination, fear, and hatred. What's up with that? Where'd that come from? That seems more "man-made" than "natural."

I was struck by a comment in the newspaper USA Today on August 9th, in a headline story "Hispanic growth extends eastward -- Areas unfamiliar with diversity" by Haya El Nasser and Brad Heath.

The lead was this:

Rapidly growing numbers of Hispanics are fanning out across the eastern half of the USA and settling in rural and suburban counties far from traditional immigrant strongholds, according to Census numbers released Thursday.

The increases in areas that experienced little diversity until this decade intensify the uproar over immigration. Forty-one states have enacted 171 laws this year aimed at illegal immigrants. About 100 communities have proposed similar ordinances; 40 have been enacted.

Again, we see a transition in those two paragraphs from changes in migration in the US, yawn, not the sort of news most people read about in a subscription to American Demographics. But then the article turns a corner and moves on to "uproar over immigration" as opposed to, say, delight in having new blood, new faces, new stories and music and food and dance s instead of the same old stuff "your parents had." Americans think of themselves as being innovative and discarding the past and seeking a new modern future - so, again, what's with the "uproar." This is surprising and demands further explanation.

Then the second paragraph changes the tone a third time and moves on to "laws aimed at illegal immigrants." Now suddenly we're no longer talking about boring internal migrations, or arrival of new neighbors, but we're talking about some sort of criminal activity associated with that. Again, "what up?"

The third paragraph drives in the spike deeper and goes for the jugular:

"We're seeing new immigrant minorities coming in to areas that haven't had very much minority populations or immigrant populations," says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. "It put immigration on the front burner politically. It scared a lot of people."

Now we have the term "Hispanic" associated with "illegal" and "scary", and the further implication that "everyone shares those views" and "it's time to panic! Hide the children and the silver! Man the barricades! Lock and load!"

So, if I said "there are some new Canadians moving in next door", that wouldn't have the same ring at all, would it? So why is the term "Hispanic" being emotionally charged up and poisoned this way? I know some people who are "Hispanic" and they seemed, you know, pretty much like you and me, and pretty human -- more like Catherine Zeta-Jones than something else.

So, I wheel out the multi-level model I've been working on in this weblog, and see what that "macroscope" reveals. It's interesting.

First, the anger and hostility and fear seem to be coming top-down, not bottom-up. In fact, at lower levels of the great hierarchy of life on Earth, we see higher levels of cooperative behavior taking place, amid the noise. The cells in our bodies work together, mostly, and we even get along stunningly well with other species who inhabit our gut and even our cells (thinking of mitachondria.) We get along fine with most bacteria who protect us from the few bad apples, and risk or health when we kill off our normal intestinal population of other species or the normal species that live on our skin, blocking bad guys like fungus from getting a foothold.

And, at the human level, we get along pretty well. Despite what is shown on Television, I don't actually see people around me at work murder each other on a daily basis. Violence is the exception, not the rule. Individual doctors are really nice people.

But as we get to higher levels of meta-life's players, things get increasingly dark. Corporations are very often not nice to each other. Although they do seek stability and permanent working relationships, inter-corporate violence and even cannibalism (disassembly for the parts) are common. While the individuals who make up a health system are really nice, caring people, the overall thing, the "system" often behaves in a cold, uncaring, even predatory fashion as seen by patients.

And Nations and Cultures, it seems, are often even nastier to each other, with random violence, murder, and conquest often dominating their lives on their scale. Cooperation between nations is possible, but rather fragile and volatile.

I'm continuing my approach of viewing each of these levels of organization of Life as having a "life of its own" -- which is a crucial element in this story. So, it is possible, even likely, that individuals in a larger organization have one agenda and view, while the entire organization, taken as whole, has a completely different agenda and view.

Further, the agenda of the larger structure is often completely invisible to those who are part of it. Doctors and nurses may have a hard time realizing how cold and uncaring the whole "system" level is as viewed and experienced by patients, for example. They experience it a different way from inside it.

Similarly, the whole of the USA is populated, mostly, by decent, caring people who love their children, enjoy sports and socializing, and mostly do not (despite TV) spend all day being either total jerks or killing each other.

Despite that, the larger entity, the USA, as a whole, as viewed and experienced by outsiders, is just like the health system -- it is far colder, more hostile, and more predatory than those inside it can directly perceive.

So, for that matter, are all the other "country" level organizations and Meta-life-forms - I don't mean to single out the USA.

So, some of the events going on around us are things that our cells are doing; some are things that people are doing; some are things that corporations are doing; some are things that nations and cultures are doing; and some are things that the planet as a whole is doing, etc. The time scales get successively longer as you move up -- cells live a world where life is measured in milliseconds, people in a world of hours and days, corporations in a world of "quarters", and nations and cultures in a world of years, decades, centuries, or millenia for many of them, aside from new kids on the block like the USA that are recent arrivals.

And, let me emphasize that the things larger systems do are only partly the actions of their executive level. We are seeing a lot of news lately that as humans, our "lower brains" and bodies and gut actually have a life of their own and make a lot of decisions for "us" that we, at best, run around after trying to make sense of and "take credit for". We are post-hoc rationalizing creatures, not rational ones, in terms of "our" actions.

Ditto for corporations. The CEO's may get paid big bucks, huge bucks in the USA, but in reality often their company has "a mind of its own" and is "damned nearly unmanageable."

Ditto for nations. The President and Congress may appear, to mere mortals, to "be in charge" but if you ask the Presidents if they "run things" they'd laugh hysterically at how little control of events they actually have. Again, events run on their own, "almost" with a "mind of their own" and our "leaders" are largely observers who run around trying to take credit for what seems to be coming out right and finding someone to blame for what seems to be coming out wrong.

That said, let's get back to this puzzle of discrimination and fear about "immigrants."

What seems to happen is that, on a national level, "the nation" (versus people) decides that it wants to take something from some other "nation". It could be land, natural resources, or slave labor. This activity is not "cool", and humans are, mostly, not cruel and violent people, and don't see themselves as such. So, to get the desired action from the people a new perception has to get created, that the nation, and people, who are "in the way", are actually bad people. In fact, they are terrible people. Monsters. Worse than monsters. Sub-human. Dangerously sub-human predators like spiders or poisonous snakes who are a threat to our children and, who, oh look, have no "human" rights because they are no longer "human."

So, myths are developed, often with the encouragement and assistance of a government, and generally along the path of least resistance - emotions that humans already have that can be mobilized to this end.

In wartime, this activity is extremely systematic and we pay big bucks to people to develop "propaganda" to deliver this message. Here's an example from diggerhistory.


(above picture from www.teacheroz.com - from World War II.)

Curiously, some of these images fade out from view, and some persist. Lately, most people don't think of the Japanese, or Germans, or American Indians (Native Americans) as brutal savage flesh-eating sub-life monsters.

On the other hand, some images do persist or grow. The USA was very active at enslaving and exploiting the people of Africa, not a pretty image to have in the mind, and for many it has been softened by debasing that continent as a whole, and those people in particular. They have been demonized, dehumanized, and blamed for their victimization which is seen as "deserved."

The USA also wanted a large chunk of land west of the Mississippi that was controlled by Spain and/or Mexico. This needed to be taken at gunpoint since Mexico didn't want to give up its land any more than the USA would be willing today to sell California back to Mexico.

(click on map to zoom. The whole southwest needed to be "taken" to meet the USA's goal of reaching both oceans.
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/united_states/us_terr_1820.jpg )

As well, large sections of Central and South American "needed" by be exploited by the USA, goods taken, and opposition forces jailed or killed. That wasn't a very pretty picture, and, again, the population was demonized, dehumanized, and a new image painted for Americans of Hispanics and Mexicans as backwards, deservedly poor, lazy, illegal, criminal, interested in mooching, etc.

While people participated in creating that myth, to a large extent it was a system action that used this myth to justify what it wanted to do anyway -- take the land and exploit the people.

So, getting normative here, I think it's our job to recognize when groups are becoming targets of such increasing myths, and dispel them before they grow so strong that violent action results. It's important to realize that these thoughts are not our own thoughts or experience, but are being selectively reverberated by "systems effects."

As with the poverty ghetto, these thoughts can be caught up in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop, that begins to "pile on" confirming evidence to justify that view, while conveniently and increasingly ignoring contrary evidence, until even our own personal entire experience becomes doubted. At that point, we fall into enslaving populations (as with African Americans) or exterminating them wholesale (as the Germans were doing to the Jews.)

And, again, as with ghetto formation, this effect appears to be a self-constructing web that requires no "spider". Certainly, some politicos will "ride this" and pour gasoline on the flames if they think it will bring them personal success, but that is more a reinforcing symptom than a "cause." Politicians couldn't amplify this effect if it wasn't already in motion.

Our job is to debunk such myths, recognize that these are someone else's thoughts, not our own, and return to sanity and common sense and trusting our own experience in the period prior to the call going out to rally the troops against the menacing advancing horde of Hispanics who plan to eat our children. It's too bad the broad-brush category even exists to justify a "them" versus "us" lumping -- without it we'd say - Oh, Mary and Rafael and their kids? What a nice family! Let's have them over for a barbecue on Saturday and maybe we can play some soccer or baseball or something.

























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