BLACKS AND JEWS AND THE COCKEYED WAY WE MEASURE PAIN
BLACKS AND JEWS AND THE COCKEYED WAY WE MEASURE PAIN
by
David Gottfried
The Left has lost many debates, and America has had a lot of trouble surmounting its problems, because of the way in which people have looked at oppression and harm. This may seem a bit vague so I’ll try to get more specific really fast: I believe that a crude quantitative analysis of oppression – Group A suffered more, ergo we should expect A to be further behind in terms of income, advancement and assimilation – as opposed to a more refined, qualitative analysis of oppression – Group A suffered particular affronts which impeded the ability to make money – has undermined the Left. First I will examine this phenomenon in the context of race; then I will explore this process in mental illness. I invite readers to try to find other areas of life in which common quantitative metrics may have harmed the Left and, more importantly, reasoned discourse itself.
Race
At the end of the 1960s, as the nation’s interest in progressive change flagged and whites tired of the continued demands of the civil rights movement, conservatives began comparing the travails of blacks with those of Jews, Irish, Italians and other “white ethnics.” They noted that many in this demographic had suffered poverty and that the Jews and the Irish suffered persecution as well—the latter at the hands of the British and the former during the Holocaust, and before that in the pogroms and persecutions of Tzarist Russia, and so on.
Conservatives made this argument smugly and aggressively: The Irish made it. The Italians got out of Little Italy, and the Jews were storming through the professions. If the white ethnics could make it, blacks should be able to make it too. And if the blacks couldn’t make it, then they were not as deserving a minority group and lacked the initiative or intelligence to succeed and compete. The comparisons were made most starkly and bitterly with regard to blacks and Jews.
As the energy and élan of the Left began to decline at the close of the sixties, Jews and blacks, once strong allies, at times were at each other’s throats. All too often they seemed to be competing with each other for the title as history’s most victimized group. Both had a lot going for them in this very sad contest: blacks could cite hundreds of years of slavery; Jews could cite the Holocaust and at least twenty preceding centuries of persecution as well. And so we fought, and while we were divided, Richard Nixon and the right won.
I believe Jews and blacks were arguing about the .wrong thing. The important question was not quantitative, or how much one group had suffered, but rather qualitative: what were the ways in which they had suffered and how did different forms of suffering create different behavioral patterns that could either thwart or invigorate the will to overcome? I contend that blacks were hurt in ways which impaired academic and economic success and that Jews were hurt in ways which, odd as it may seem, bolstered intellectual and monetary gains.
For example, blacks were often ridiculed and taunted as “stupid.” They were said to be ape-like, less than fully human, and possessing of meager intellects. Jews, in the course of being hated and castigated, heard something very different: they were told that they were conniving, clever, and bright at business and poised to make a mint.
One of the strongest defense mechanisms, according to Freud, is our tendency to identify with our oppressor, and to adopt the oppressor’s point of view, which we supposedly do to ease the pain of our circumstance. Apply this dynamic to blacks and Jews: The black hears that he is stupid, he identifies with his aggressor, and when school time rolls around he approaches the material with a sheepish, defeatist air. When the Jew hears that he is clever and swift, he will tend to believe what the gentiles have told him and this will buttress his esteem and confidence and may serve as an impetus to commercial and academic gains.
Similarly, contrast the ways Jews lived in Tzarist Russia (most of Europe’s Jewry were subjects of the Tzar after Poland was partitioned at the close of the 18th century) with how blacks lived in the Old South. In Tzarist Russia, discrimination against Jews was clear and explicit as it had been in Russia at least as far back as the 16th century. The hated Jews were fully segregated from gentiles. They were more segregated than blacks had ever been in the Old South and, ironically, this had a salubrious effect on them.
How?
A Jewish court would resolve intra-Jewish conflicts. Jews also had their own system of education that they financed. When the state was desirous of garnering tax revenues, the task of tax collection was delegated to Jewish officials. While some of this self-government was corrupt and even monstrous, it generally helped lend Jews confidence to manage their lives on their own.
In this country, there were no such things as black courts or black policemen to handle intra-black quarrels. Blacks went before the nation’s and states’ criminal and civil courts, unschooled in the proceedings, on their own and very much at sea. None of this buttressed black self-confidence.
In the courts, blacks were beaten down and cheated, and this facilitated the growing pauperization of black America. I say growing because contrary to the common assertion that life has been getting better for blacks over time, in large stretches of our history the status of blacks declined. For example, the acreage owned by blacks steadily dropped from its Reconstruction peak to at least the end of the Great Depression. Also, the law did more than oppress blacks; it also rewarded blacks, in very concrete ways, if they lived up to white stereotypes: In many of the states of the old confederacy, and for many years after Lee surrendered, a white person could not assert contributory negligence if a black person sued him for personal injury. Let me explain:
A black pedestrian sues a white car driver for hitting him on the road. The white car driver will want to assert contributory negligence against the pedestrian. In other words, he will want to say that the pedestrian did something stupid to contribute to the negligence that resulted in the accident. For example, a car driver might want to say that the pedestrian ran into the car or wore all black clothing in the middle of the night and was, accordingly, contributorily negligent. However, this argument could not be made in much of Dixie. The southern courts held that blacks were too stupid to walk across the streets with any sense and therefore it would be unfair to penalize them with a finding of contributory negligence. This is akin, perhaps, to what Freud called the secondary benefits of a neurosis, i.e., sometimes a patient will not overcome his neurosis because people “cut him some slack” for being disturbed.
By contrast, the conditions in Eastern Europe never made Jews doubt themselves and their worth the way that conditions in the South eviscerated the pride and resilience of blacks. Jews, by definition, had their own religion. Blacks got the religion of their slave masters. If our slave master gave us a religion that we in fact love, then that slave master might, in some ways, know what is good for us and may be a benevolent man because he wants us to be saved. And as soon as black men credited white people with wishing them well and praying for their salvation, they must have been tortured by ambivalent feelings toward the white man. However, if the black man were to succeed, he could not be saddled and confused with these ambiguous sentiments. A certain clarity of outlook must prevail if one is to succeed, and I would go so far as to say that one must fully despise the white man’s system if one wants to bring down his slave society; so long as a part of oneself feels affection for the dominant caste, one’s battles against it will be ill-fated.
In addition, we must consider the value placed on intelligence. I do not mean to say, as so many people have said, that Jews revered intellectual pursuits. Jews did value the life of the mind, but I am sure you already knew that and it’s been said with such frequency that the assertion can prompt an attack of narcolepsy. Jews did more than value intelligence; Jews defined intelligence differently. Whereas in most civilizations going to school is a matter of students passively taking instruction, having their head crammed with facts the importance of which is rarely explained, Jewish education seeks to teach the child to ask questions and to adopt a curious, explorative outlook on life. In good Jewish schools, very small school children are told a Rabbi’s tale and instead of being commanded to revere the tale, they are beseeched to find the “kasha,” or the inconsistency, in the Rabbi’s account. This ineluctably leads to the development of powerful, probing minds.
The Jews were not merely the people of the book; they were the people of lots of books in addition to the Old Testament and many of these books interpreted the Old Testament in a multiplicity of ways. Jewish thought will take a proposition enunciated in a long drawl in five bold, apparently clear sentences and affix myriad interpretations to the words. Judaism is, in a sense, the anti-fundamentalist faith not because we don’t believe in the Bible but because we have so much respect for language and how the most seemingly unambiguous commands are subject to interpretation. Very simply, Jews had a culture that readied them for academic competition. As I understand it, blacks, by contrast, had a religious training which brooked little dissent and debate and was given to hearty and loud affirmations in the form of resounding Amens. This mental posture may make one pitifully vulnerable in a secular school. (This fundamentalism might also help to explain what I have often perceived as the intellectual torpor of the entire South, white and black, where the only two respected academic majors appear to be football and cheerleading.)
To summarize: the left has lost a lot of energy and credibility because people have said that since many white people were oppressed as much as blacks, black problems cannot be ascribed to white oppression. However, the relevant question is not how much a person has been hurt but rather if he has suffered the sort of harms that prevent recovery.
To some readers, my assertions may seem a tad nebulous. Accordingly, with a nod to the nineteenth century physicalists – who asserted that scholarship was at its finest and clearest when ideas could be reducible to mathematics – I will give you a quasi-mathematic defense of my theory that a quantitative analysis of oppression should be replaced by one that it qualitative:
A bookcase, weighing twenty or thirty pounds, has infinitely more mass and volume than a microscopic AIDS virus. If a bookcase fell on us, it would hurt. By contrast, if an AIDS virus were to fall upon our head, we would not feel a thing. However if that same AIDS virus managed to insinuate itself into our blood, devastating results might ensue. The bookcase is vastly greater from a quantitative perspective because it weighs 20 or 30 pounds, but the AIDS virus is more devastating from a qualitative view.
Mental Illness
In the 1960’s, the most respected doctors, and the doctors who appeared to have history on their side, posited an environmental etiology, or cause, for much of mental illness. Freud held that many emotional disorders had their origin in intra-familial conflicts, and after the atrocities of World War Two, we had a healthy skepticism toward the notion that behavioral traits were inborn. To hold that behavioral traits are innate is quite congruent with the notion that race is destiny, and World War Two made us realize just how deadly racism is.
Whereas Freud often found that neurotic conflicts had their origins in the anal and Oedipal stages of development, in the post war era some doctors said that psychosis, as well as neurosis, had an environmental cause and that the cause dated back to the twilight of life, to the oral stage and to pre-verbal stages of development. R D Laing, who was a hero to many schizophrenics, said that schizophrenics were the scapegoats of their families. Laing, in my view, was the champion of the left wing view of mental illness. He did not blame the victim and dismiss the mentally ill as cases of bad biology. He saw the mentally ill as oppressed people.
However, in the 1970’s we seemed to tire of the argument that mental illness can be explained by social factors or the familial constellation. First, a multiplicity of scientific discoveries allegedly buttressed the proposition that mental illness was biochemically determined.
[We tend to exaggerate the extent to which these discoveries actually proved that certain biologic quirks caused certain mental aberrations. Very simply the correlation of two things – mental illness and a specific biologic quirk – does not prove causation. The biologic quirk might have caused the mental illness, but at the same time the mental illness might have caused the physical quirk (Cigarette Smoking is implicated in changes in the genetic structure of alveoli) or a third factor might have caused the mental illness and the physical deviation. For example, when we see a man with large pectoral muscles we do not ordinarily infer that the man possesses the gene for large pectoral muscles. Rather, we assume that something in his environment – such as lots of bench-pressing coupled with adequate nutrition – gave him large pectorals.]
Second, in the 1970’s, when liberal and Avant garde thought fell out of favor in broad segments of the populace, when Spiro Agnew railed against a left whom he said was composed of “effete, intellectual snobs,” some people clamored for “common sense,” and in the field of mental illness, this meant the application of a crude quantitative analysis.
The dolts in the New York Daily News and the only slightly brighter New York Times argued like this: Mr. A grew up in Darfur, and watched his family suffer annihilation, and Mr. B grew up in a concentration camp, and now they are both successful businessmen in America. By contrast Mr. D has only suffered from the sort of quotidian conflicts one can sustain in suburban America, but Mr. D is psychotic. Applying their crude metrics, apostles of a biochemical theory of mental illness said that since D suffered so much less, and became so much sicker, this proves that D’s sickness was inborn. If his sickness was inborn, his oppressors, whether they be family members or the surrounding community, can be exculpated of guilt. His sickness is the product of his defective genes. This is akin to blaming the victim and is what I call the right-wing view of mental illness.
We would do well to apply a more refined, qualitative view of suffering. If one was the victim of horrendous brutality in Darfur or a concentration camp, the experience of course burns and stuns and singes the mind forever. However, it can also give the victim what I call a unifying and exhilarating rage: A furious desire, which summons up and unifies his energies, to get back at his persecutors by being successful and even, on occasion, happy.
And what of Mr. D, the individual who grew up in suburban tranquility and is now psychotic. The crude quantifiers would say that the relative benignity of his background – let us assume that he was never beaten or starved – coupled with his grim diagnosis means he was genetically destined to be mad. But, again, they are missing the point. They would never, ever for an instant realize that in certain situations it is better to be hated, and reviled, in one’s childhood than to be loved. It goes like this:
Suppose one’s parents were extremely pathogenic but at the same time loving and kind. Because one’s parents loved one it will be harder for that person to expunge the pathological aspects of his background. If his parents loved him, it will be harder for that person to reject all of the unwise and delusional counsel they gave him. If, however, one’s parents were both pathogenic and abusive, it will be easier for the child to “vomit-up” the pathology instilled in childhood. And so in this instance we can clearly see that a quantitative analysis is not the least bit helpful because the child who suffers a greater quantum of harm, whose parents are both pathogenic and abusive, has a better shot at having a successful adulthood.
And the question isn’t really whether you were hated by the Germans who tortured you, or harmed by your parents who merely chastised you, but rather if you hate yourself. If your injuries made you hate yourself, your injuries, no matter how seemingly slight, will be exceedingly malignant.
Some people, in the course of trying to quantify harm, might bring up the issue of psychotherapy. They might argue that since D (The person who grew up in suburban tranquility and became psychotic), had psychotherapy, the psychotherapy should have negated all of the harmful effects of his bad childhood rearing and that D’s continued maladjustment establishes his genetic inferiority. In doing so, they are accrediting psychotherapy with powers and abilities it has never been shown to have.
One study, for example, showed that classical analysis had a particularly desultory record, curing about 44 percent of its neurotics where as two thirds of the people in the control group recovered without treatment. (Eysenck 1954).
In any event, I do not mean to abjure the worthwhile goal of trying to assuage emotional pain; I merely aim to stress that psychiatry is still in its infancy and has a long way to go.
In any event, in mental illness, as in disputes between white ethnics and blacks, quantitative means of evaluating pain have proved to be a great disservice, and tiresome, ancient arguments over who suffered the most pain deflect us from the goal of overcoming pain and oppression.