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Color is Everything

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced on the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

The American obsession with race still thrives, as the death of Kurt Vonnegut has been obscured by a media frenzy over a petty racial incident. While the BBC devoted a full segment to Vonnegut on 12 April, ABC omitted coverage in favor of the ongoing cause celebre of an aging disc jockey who referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” a term so offensive that it is repeatedly broadcast and printed in major media without censorship. Even conceding that the term is racist and that coarse discourse should be banned from the airwaves, we are a long way from accounting for the disproportionate magnitude of the reaction, stoked in part by career race-baiters such as Al Sharpton.

Vonnegut’s observation, “Color was everything,” remains poignant today, despite efforts to create similar obsessions over gender, ethnicity, and sexual behavior. Sharpton actually lamented that not enough feminist groups had mobilized against the sexist aspect of the deejay’s comment, apparently not realizing that even career feminists can’t possibly muster enough outrage to challenge every instance of the word “ho” used in public discourse. Recently, Hispanic groups have sought a share of the spotlight, demanding that a WWII documentary place special focus on Hispanic veterans, a pure example of special pleading taking precedent over scholarly analysis. For many historical questions, ethnic distinctions are simply not relevant, which of course is what no advocacy group wants to hear. Despite their numbers, non-racial advocacy groups can scarcely summon the hysterical shock that follows a single racial slur.

Race remains the ultimate taboo, a topic to be approached only at grave peril. A torrent of blasphemies against God is protected free speech, and our society even takes pride in its liberal tolerance of such discourse, but thou shalt not blaspheme against race, for that is “hate speech”. Our culture worships the gods of racial identity, these mysterious essences of social groups.

The racial pantheon is subordinate to a chief god, “America,” considered as a pseudo-racial identity. “America is the greatest country in the world,” is not a mere patriotic boast, but a conviction of theological certitude, not to be challenged even by those from other lands. A stark example of the supremacy of this cult can be found in the astonishingly racist attitudes of many urban black Americans toward blacks from outside the U.S. Ironically, the historically oppressed groups tend to be the most acutely race-conscious of all.

The cults of racial identity make it impossible to discuss race candidly, as a simple anthropological fact. Our American obsession with color exposes itself at the most importune times, transforming a simple rape allegation into a racial crisis, as was the case with the railroaded Duke University lacrosse team last year. The usual suspects, African-American studies, women’s studies, and English professors (beneficiaries, in some cases, of an academic ideology that favors social identity over qualifications), signed onto an advertisement that was clearly sympathetic to the alleged victim and not to the accused, yet they speciously argued they had not prejudged the case. They did not explain how they could regard the allegation as a sign of “social disaster” unless the rape actually occurred. Given that much of their profession is devoted to subverting academic inquiry to emotional causes, we should not be surprised by this insult to our intelligence.

The best remedy I can see for this self-righteous hypersensitivity is to gently mock these taboos so they are taken less seriously. There are ample opportunities to poke fun at these pseudo-intellectuals and media hos, but for now I’m fagged out.

Credibility Still Counts

The recent scandal involving a Wikipedia editor’s falsified credentials has laid bare the hypocrisy of the open-information movement’s disdain for academic authority.  It turns out that the disgraced “Essjay” repeatedly invoked his fictitious doctoral degrees in theology and canon law to settle disputes in his favor, a remarkable achievement in a forum where credentials ostensibly do not matter.

These fake credentials also served to improve the project’s standing in the media. In the now infamous New Yorker article, Essjay had been cited as an example of an academic expert willing to devote extended time and effort to the “free encyclopedia,” breaking the stereotype of the anti-authoritarian adolescent or young adult with too much free time.  The revelation that Wikipedia’s most notable expert contributor is in fact a 24-year-old community college dropout with too much free time only reinforces the stereotype that most of its editors are homebound young white males, explaining its inordinate emphasis on pop culture and computer science.

In this demographic sector, anti-authoritarianism dies hard (it is usually cured by age, maturity, and life experience), so many of Essjay’s fellow Wikiphiles have taken care to emphasize that he was an excellent contributor, proving that academic credentials are worthless.  In fact, all that is proved is that very little expertise is needed to produce mediocre content, especially when most of it is copied from other sources.  The quality content on Catholic topics came not from Essjay (who had a shallow understanding of most complex issues, regurgitating popular liberal theology), but from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia.  The fact that someone as ignorant as Essjay (see his wrongheaded imprimatur comment) could pose as an “expert on Catholicism” (as he laughably styled himself, while admitting to be a non-Catholic – strange vocation!) only reveals the level of illiteracy of the average editor.  This ignorance can be seen throughout the Wikipedia, especially in areas like philosophy, history and theology, where a writer needs to be more than a compiler of facts.

The information iconoclasts claim to judge people not on credentials, but on their expertise as proven by their ability to back up their edits.  In the world of amateur encyclopedists, backing up a claim means linking to an online source that repeats the claim. This practice is a poor substitute for expertise, since just because something isn’t on Google doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In 2007, the vast majority of human knowledge is still offline, including most scholarly sources published before 1995.  Those journals which are online are usually available only through secure access, and will not be accessible by linking from a search engine.  Thus the expert who appeals to any offline source of knowledge will be at a disadvantage in a dispute with an amateur who can back up his claim with a link to an online newspaper.

In the final analysis, all content disputes appeal to authority, not the authority of the editors themselves, but that of the references they cite.  It will not suffice to compose one’s own argument, since “original research” is prohibited, but one must appeal to the authority of journalists and academics, the same people whose authority is disdained in the editing process.  This appeal to “reliable sources” (and how can an amateur determine which sources are more reliable?) is a tacit admission that credentials are a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the construction of a credible article.  Authority cannot be derived from its opposite, but from other authorities who proved their expertise through the rigors of education and experience, and being subjected to expert peer review, for it is the expertise of the reviewers that makes peer review a potent indicator of credibility.  While it is easy to find numerous examples of bias or incompetence among experts, this is not a rational basis for rejecting the entire class in favor of amateurs who are completely dependent on the expert class for information, but lack the experience and judgment to discern the strengths and weaknesses of these authorities.

Modern Mythmaking: The Talpiot Tomb

All too often, the veneer of secular rationality is cracked by the spontaneous eruption of the most implausible beliefs. We have seen this phenomenon in the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination and the moon landings, in Erich Von Daniken’s “ancient astronauts” and other extraterrestrial legends, and in less grandiose manifestations, such as Elvis sightings, psychics, Ouija boards, and horoscopes.

In each of these modern myths, there can be found a form of wish-fulfillment, whether by depicting a noble, democratic people opposed by an evil establishment, or by fabricating a sense of purpose in a secular cosmos, often by radically reinterpreting the traditional legends of human culture. The myths pretend to empower the people, by freeing them from the establishment’s supposed lies, and in some cases by offering them some control over the preternatural world.

Most recently, the religious establishment has been the target of such mythmaking, as shown by the commercial success of The Da Vinci Code and its derivative works. As the popularity of such works greatly exceeds their scholarly plausibility (which is nil), we must acknowledge that they appeal to a popular desire, in particular the desire to “outsmart” the religious establishment. At the same time, this modern legend would validate contemporary fascination with feminine sexuality by reinventing Christianity with a narrative that reflects 21st-century mores.

Such reinvention is obviously ahistorical, but we must understand that “critical thinking” in common parlance often means skepticism towards the establishment, rather than cold, impartial analysis. The desire to prove the establishment wrong trumps the usual rules of evidence, resulting in pseudoscientific claims. Biblical archaeology is replete with implausible claims and outright hoaxes, motivated by a desire to prove a preferred interpretation of Scripture. Those who advocate a radical reinterpretation of the Bible are no different in this regard.

An especially clumsy attempt at special pleading can be found in today’s amateur claim to have found the tomb of Jesus’ family. As the highly esteemed Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner has noted, the claim is devoid of scientific merit, since only well-to-do families had such crypts, and the names Jeshua, Joseph, and Maryam were exceedingly common. We may further add that Jesus would have been denied burial altogether had it not been for the intercession of Joseph of Arimathea, who offered his tomb. We could also remark that the fact of the empty tomb was acknowledged even by the unbelieving Jews, as evidenced in their own writings.

This sort of argument would fall on many deaf ears, since, in the “skeptical” mentality, authority is not to be trusted, whether that authority is in the Gospels or in professional archaeologists. It is therefore of no concern that even non-Christians should refute this revisionism. The incoherence of an anti-authoritative epistemology is evident to any careful thinker, but our immediate concern is the fact that the experiment of secularism has failed in an important task. It has failed to produce a populace that values critical thinking, so that instead they synthesize new myths, revealing in this need the failure of secular philosophy to provide any sense of purpose to human destiny.