Chauncey DeVega, Respectable Negro Number One (with a bullet) has thrown an idea over the transom. The nut of it is this:
FROM feckless fathers and teenaged mothers to so-called feral kids, the media seems to take a voyeuristic pleasure in documenting the lives of the "underclass". Whether they are inclined to condemn or sympathise, commentators regularly ask how society got to be this way. There is seldom agreement, but one explanation you are unlikely to hear is that this kind of "delinquent" behaviour is a sensible response to the circumstances of a life constrained by poverty. Yet that is exactly what some evolutionary biologists are now proposing.
There is no reason to view the poor as stupid or in any way different from anyone else, says Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in the UK. All of us are simply human beings, making the best of the hand life has dealt us. If we understand this, it won't just change the way we view the lives of the poorest in society, it will also show how misguided many current efforts to tackle society's problems are - and it will suggest better solutions.
Long before I was a conservative, back in the late 80s, I spent a lot of time thinking about a couple phrases. The first was 'senseless violence' and the second was 'God don't make mistakes'. In both cases I was thinking about the broad class distinctions between my sort of buppies, and the long suffering blacks of the ghetto. The first phrase related specifically to the matter of gang violence, and the second to teenage pregnancy.
In both cases, I was generally defensive of the ghetto stereotype. Since I was not invested in racial essentialism, then or now, I readily copped to a cultural explanation. While I had my own set of values that I would not sacrifice to be one of the multitudes, I did not appreciate the cultural dissonance or the Culture Wars that made use of racist reductions of black ghetto culture. Black ghetto culture had *logic* and that logic may not be my logic but it is logic. In this way I made some excuses and evasions for values I didn't believe in, expecting some political tolerance - or at least a more accurate and non-racial sort of dialog about The Struggle.
Part of this was motivated by the long standing argument about what the responsibility of Cosby-type families and individuals should have for the likes of those who run afoul of the conventions of marriage and the social contract with police, law and order. Because this raised serious conflicts of interest. It was in recognition of these conflicts that I refused, not long after my college days, to enjoin any role modeling. I then began to call it 'role monkey'. How could you stand in front of people whose values you don't share and have the nerve to tell them that which makes your life work should make their life work. The absurdity of the imperative of the Talented Tenth was impressed upon me those days as it became clearer that much of Affirmative Action was cherry picking ,the symbolism of which did not resonate in the communities of hypersegregation, just around the way.
I had personally recieved a copy of a manuscript from Monster Kody, the notorious Crip leader who made the basic connection between his reign of terror and military leadership. It made perfect sense to me that he and his lieutenants were not merely father figures for that class of the fatherless in his neighborhood, but that he was actively challenging them and training them to his ends and purposes. He had more contact than all of the priests, and playground directors and coaches and neighbors combined. He was their world leader, and like with any great organization, the Crips broke down boys and remade them into men. There was logic and a basic understanding of human needs in that equation. And when you understand that human beings will take life and death decisions into their own hands, sometimes they will choose death. Was all that violence senseless? Of course not, it served the purposes of the Crips. But these gangs were operating counter to those purposes established by the American middle class whose lost boys traded loyalties. These gang soldiers did not lose their logic, nor their humanity. They simply did it for an outlaw team.
Similarly, I asked myself if in all of its marvel the human female was able to get pregnant, by what rules should anyone say she shouldn't? Why should some bourgie version of femininity triumph over the biological urges of physically mature human beings? Why should any woman put up with chemical mods to stay the fetus? My girlfriend at the time was doing what Mexican and Mexican American women were doing - taking DepoProvera injections once every quarter rather than brave the hormonal roller coaster of the Pill. At the time, the introduction of Norplant was coming into fashion against accusations of subtle racist genocide. Here, my argument was similar. When human beings take life and death decisions into their hands, sometimes they choose life. At the same time, it was unavoidable to consider the value of teenage pregnancy without considering the counter-value of teenage abortion. In my own politics, I argued that there was something about the new black extended family that could bear the shame of teen pregnancy whereas the white nuclear family could not. Black women had babies. White women had abortions. An oversimplified argument to be sure, but it did beg the proper question of a cultural difference.
The arguments against both of these 'ghetto mentalities' were cultural, and some were racialized, but overall they were economic. It was, after all, the question of an economic disinvestment in the cultural mainstream that was at the heart of the matter. The people themselves disinvested by their life and death decisions, and experts and pundits all over second guessed their decisions in their attempts to answer the degeneration of the Negro Question for the 80s. But it wasn't a Negro Question, it was a class question that hadn't often been posed making distinctions between black Americans of different persuasions. It was a political question of cultural choice in the context of the Culture Wars that still persist to this day but at bottom, economic.
The economic and cultural and political questions around these basic human choices get ever more sophisticated, but the answers are still the same. Now 30 years later we have a new cadre of people suggesting yet another second guess of the 'ghetto mentality'. These cats call themselves evolutionary biologists, and as such come from the 'Nature' school. The Nature school as I see it says very little more than 'God don't make mistakes'. If you have an instinct to have a baby or to kill another human and you follow that unconsciously then you are following human nature, no matter how anti-social that action might be considered. Evolutionary biology gives us a 'healthy' option. If somehow human beings have instincts and learn to follow those instincts *consciously*, you might call it Nurture, or enlightened self-interest. That depends upon how many yuppies accept the premises of evolutionary biology. For example, these days a lot of runners and joggers are trying shoes that resemble feet, or even running barefoot. That's a social acceptance of Nature and God's design, n'est-ce pas? But I wonder if that's what the evolutionary biologists are all about. I think they serve the purposes of Progressivism or at least will have their studies hijacked for Progressivism's purposes.
You see when I was a Progressive, the solution to teenage pregnancy was not to accept that it was anti-social behavior, but to change society. How could we claim to have an economy that served the needs of human beings if it made social rules antithetical to the basic biology of human females? Indeed was not our economy and social mores hostile to women and black women in particular? The point of the social evolution of the 40 hour workweek is not to give men football games to watch. Restructure work so that women can get pregnant, dammit! To a lesser extent the same argument could be made for the Crip soldiers. Don't remove them from society because they kill, put those energies to work. Let them kill for America, not for street gangs. My Progressive friends didn't like that suggestion so much, but the logic was the same. Don't forcibly assimilate these people into the boring bourgie mainstream and destroy the spirit that enabled their courage to defy society, take advantage of that powerful blackness. After all, could Al Jarreau hold a candle to Ice Cube? Why should the nation of millions hold them back? All that did fit rather nicely into multiculturalism - halfway at least. Now multiculturalists forgive and forget gang murders, as witness to clemency against the 'prison industrial complex' shows time and time again. Nobody cares much to stop harping against the vast income differentials in our society - even after Clinton's compromises on welfare. Children in poverty raised by single mothers is really only a problem to conservatives. No Progressive wants to curtail the female reproductive urge.
In fact the evolutionary biologists will have nobody fighting any urges. We will all be told that our urges are Natural, and so they are. But we must also be social and we must always decide what kind of society we wish to maintain. And in that regard, what's natural is essentially an excuse. And if you wish to defy that point, consider the argument that whatever human nature is, is God's design, and then see if you're consistent. Consider the argument that evolutionary biologists are just the smartest humans yet in discovering what God intended. You see nobody knows what the brain is doing when we laugh, so there are many many years we have for science to come to its revelations of Truth. In the meantime we can trickle down this university study about the effects of chocolate or red wine on our health, and have plenty of time to adjust our lifestyles. Somehow I think whatever the finding, people will take the path of least resistance, or 'trust our guts'. In the end human beings will still make life and death choices, and experts will continue to second guess, and ideologues will hijack all of that to validate their agendas.
I don't choose a 'middle road'. I weigh the consequences of destroying or establishing another culture, and I look at the power involved in doing so. It's clear that people who take the Cosby Show values do better in the economic mainstream of our society. It's clear that many humans in our society decide their life and death choices according to their local economy. But if it is true that these are serious choices, then it is foolish to try and undo them, and this is why there is a fundamental conflict in the conclusion of the article as well as the idea that we might socialize some solution.
The solution begs questions of a classless society and the horror of income inequality. Income inequality is a power law phenomenon. There's no way around it except for to kill off the rich. America requires, as does Brazil, India and China, a way to have a civil society that works across multiple classes of people - you don't get that by engineering solutions that undo the choices people make that are appropriate to their situations.
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