Pulp Fiction III

Pulp Fiction III

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‘Swedish people suck! Swedish people suck! Swedish people suck!’ The other boys at the table mobbed the Swedish boy with a chant joined by three or four pairs of fists banging on the table in rhythm. Thinking back to that day, the Polemicist realized that it had never occurred to him that the other 7^th graders were expressing racist sentiment. It seemed more accurate that he was being singled out as an individual, and merely insulted in the same way that people insult one’s mother—attempting to hurt someone’s feelings by verbally abusing people they care about.

            No, rather than the limited concept of racism, which is institutionalized hatred based on ethnic pride on the part of the abusers, this was xenophobia. Fear of that which is strange or unusual, foreign to the experience. Xenophobia isn’t a thing that you can put your finger on, thought the Polemicist. It’s spontaneous and rather than a predetermined organized resistance against a perceived enemy, it’s more of a knee-jerk response. It is the ostracism of someone who does not conform to your expectations. Xenophobia underlies all racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and all other prejudicial ‘isms.’ But it is technically the instinct within the individual that is what is seen manifesting in the second-and-third-order tiers of human activity as more obvious hatreds: bullying, then brawling, then rioting, then war. Racism is limited to distinctly different cultures and people groups, and sexism is limited to gender, but xenophobia covers white, American, middle-class males bullying other white, American, middle-class males. The fact of the Polemicist being Swedish was not something you could see, and it wasn’t, after all, what was seen that was rejected by the other boys. It was his personal uniqueness, his nonconformity.

            He didn’t chase tail, he didn’t care about ingesting substances, he didn’t care about sports, he didn’t dress the same, he didn’t talk the same, and he was ambivalent about gaining peer approval. For that, he was distrusted, because people naturally feel unable or unwilling to trust someone whose behavior they don’t understand. A lot of interpersonal prejudice in modern culture stems more from this instinctual, low-level xenophobic tendency than from an organized, intellectually comprehended, intentional and institutionalized bigotry against whole classes of people by other whole classes. Defining what is really xenophobia as racism does not resolve racism; instead, it conditions people with xenophobia to much more frequently make the leap from petty dislike of some individual to the justifying of vandalism or murder in the service of an imagined class war. And imagined wars, if too many people participate in the imagining of them, become real wars.

            The Polemicist had been the victim of xenophobia in his life, but he was not omniscient, so he could not know if racist or sexist prejudice against him had ever caused him harm. But he was content not knowing. He did not have to know if people treated him despitefully because of his white skin or his genital anatomy. He did not have to hate those people back, so he was content to let it go and think the best of people until it was proved that he should do otherwise. And he slept restfully at night, knowing that God had said, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’ Keeping no list of wrongs gave him nothing to remind himself to be angry with, and he was consequently much happier than most people he ever spoke to. How he wished that they knew what he knew!

~ Rak Chazak

Where Is the Intolerance?

I still remember the first time I was "cut off" by someone because they didn't tolerate my political or religious views (if you do it right, they're essentially one and the same).

I encountered a lot of information I'd never known before, in the Spring of 2010, and I was excited to share it -- surely others would want to know the truth as well! I was naive. I posted articles from Answers in Genesis and ICR that I found interesting. Many other web articles from obscure sites I don't remember, also. 

One time, I posted some quotes by Margaret Sanger that definitively proved her to be racist, on Facebook. A "friend" of mine immediately left a comment under the link, chiding me for not being open minded to the truth, and telling me "you are being unfriended. Do not approach me on campus."  Another time, I made a comment to the effect that I had just learned that a "drag show" was not a car racing competition, after all, and that I didn't like how a particular segment of the population would reappropriate words for their own use, defying their given definitions (by which I was referring to other words like "queer," "faggot," "gay," etc). This inspired another person to post "wow. Unfriended," under that post.

Shortly after that, I encountered online mobbing and did not feel that I could trust many of the people who had access to my private information via Facebook, so I slowly purged most of the people and eventually closed the account for about a year. Consequently, I wasn't publicly defriended by anyone else after that. If there were others who did it quietly, I never found out.

Today, I was having an extensive debate over email about feminism and gender roles with a young woman my age. I was surprised when she suddenly made this comment:

I see no point in continuing a discussion with someone who does not believe that I am capable of rational thought just because I am a woman, worthy of questioning him because I am a woman, or capable of debating him. In fact, we are not having a debate. You are simply attempting to instruct me so that you can feel more manly, and that thought frankly makes me want to vomit. If I want instruction from men, I have a wonderful father who can give me advise, and I have a number of male professors whom I respect very highly. If you feel that that you are being oppressed, I am sorry, but I assure you that you are not being systematically oppressed by women because you are a man. If some women don't like you, it's because of the way that you view them and the way that you imagine an ideal relationship with them would go. If gay people don't like you, it's because you think that their sexual orientation is a choice, that their sexual orientation is evil, that they deserve to be lonely for the rest of their lives or else that some heterosexual person deserves to spend the rest of their lives married to somebody who isn't attracted to them just so that your jerkass version of the Judeo-Christian God will be happy, that they do not deserve the same opportunities that you do, and that their sexual orientation makes them irrational and violent. So, you're not being oppressed, if oppressed you are really being at all, for your maleness or your sexual orientation. You are just pissing off people because of your ridiculous prejudices.

Nice unknowing you,

Of course, many of the statements she made in that diatribe are willful misunderstandings of what I had said to her. It is certainly more convenient to reject an imaginary version of something than to deal with a complicated reality that doesn't suit your expectations.

It made me think. I have never angrily cut contact with someone else because of their strong beliefs. On the contrary, it appears that those who angrily cut others out of their lives are those who are politically liberal and theologically unBiblical.

Alfonzo Rachel, a black conservative Christian commentator, made an observation in a Youtube video to the effect that "democrats tend to believe what makes them angry. I believe what I believe, and it doesn't make me angry," and that that serves as one additional confirmation of the correctness of his belief. I have to agree. It's not so much a logically impervious argument, but it's a good point to consider -- wouldn't the truth, on some level, be emotionally satisfying? If your belief system makes you angry, maybe it's not a good belief system.

Those who are not Christian tend to be the intolerant ones. The irony of conservatives and Christians being accused of bigotry and intolerance would be laughable if it weren't for the sad fact that the people who make these statements are either trying to excuse themselves, or severely deluded. It's only funny at first. Then the realization makes me sad. 

~ Rak Chazak