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I'm going to assume that by ISA's you're talking about Louis Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus (basically, how society shapes the individual in it's image). It's a little more likely a candidate than the International Seabed Authority, which probably can't make people racist unless they're on the seabed.
The thesis is 2/3 complete at the moment. What's missing is a 'because' at the end:
"If we are disadvantaged by a class status (which includes food, health, education and prospects) it is harder to think constructively about attitudes towards people from other races/sexes/sexualities, which attitudes might be our own innate fear of the other, or might be imposed from outside by the media and the ISAs, because..."
The elipsis representing the unknowable something we will hopefully discover during the course of this thread.
(There's also the minor issue of the word 'constructively' there since 1) what is being constructed isn't stated and 2)it assumes that, like a construction project, a society can be built to a final point where it can be considered 'complete' (c.f Marx on one end, Fukuyama on the other). There's also the issue of whether harmony is a positive thing- it may seem like a given but for somebody like Howard Bloom* (see The Lucifer Principle) and other proponents of kin-selection in biology inter-group competition drives evolution, but that's something for another thread and another time.)
Innate fear of the other and the media are both universals, so if we accept the assumption that disadvantaged people are more likely to be sexist, homophobic, racist etc. (something I wish I could say wasn't true) then something must be making them more susceptible to the influence of these two universals, just as an allergy can turn household dust into a deadly pathogen.
(I'll leave ISAs aside for the time being.)
Food and health are unlikely to be the factor here, for obvious reasons, leaving us with education and prospects, prospects being a scarce resource, education (at least the 'don't be an asshole to other people' part) being basically free and relatively easy for people to acquire irrespective of class (there are 'no hoodies, no trainers no Burberry' signs on pubs, not libraries, and it is not only in elite cultural products where you will see anti-bigotry messages but everywhere).
In terms of education, this assumes that working class people are generally profoundly stupid (which anybody who has spent any good length of time around them knows is not the case), since the theory behind not employing -isms is very, very easy to grasp on an intellectual level (for an experiment talk to a child of ten years or younger, if you happen to have one to hand, about bigotry, in terms they'd understand obviously, and see what they say- they're likely to know the theory even in if they are fairly bigoted in their innocent way). Similarly, those who have interacted with bigots of any stripe will know that not amount of education will change their minds. Bigots go to cognitive dissonance like John Prescott to a buffet table, and they profoundly distrust the 'liberal media' and 'activist' politicians/educators, so whether there is no anti-bigotry education on the national curriculum or nothing but will make little difference.
It is rational for those without good prospects to gain better ones or maximize those they already have. There are many ways in which it is not the the advantage of disadvantaged people to subscribe to 'isms'. In rational terms, Bloom aside, it just doesn't make sense to believe oneself to be at war with your neighbors (and if one is of a Marxist bent, your allies in class struggle). Antagonism increases the likelihood of you or your kin dying of violence, decreases the number of potential mates (in the case of racism) and prevents one from forming temporary or permanent equal partnerships with those outside of one's group for mutual benefit or protection. Though it's horribly damaging, this war of all against all is happening every day: this article details a study of the civic engagement habits of 30,000 people, concluding that those living in more diverse communities (irrespective of class) are less likely to "vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects". They are also half as likely to trust their neighbors as those living in more homogeneous communities.
My suspect here is kin selection- we all have a natural preference for our 'kin' over non-kin (as has even been observed in babies), something some of us get over to a greater or lesser degree. When resources are scarce, as is the case in disadvantaged communities, this instinct bites harder, becoming much more pronounced. This, as you've probably observed, explains only racism, not sexism, homophobia or even religious bigotry. However, in (at least) Western society racism rarely manifests in somebody without sexism, homophobia etc. People don't say "I hate immigrants- unless they're gay" or "I hate gay people- unless they're a different color to me" (experiment on the racists you know to see if this is the case). The ideological justifications of the kin-selection impulse are bound in what Adorno calls the authoritarian or 'F type' (F for fascist) personality**. The 'will to power over others' Arthur Adler identifies as the central neurotic trait of F-types could easily be understood as heightened evolutionary pressure, the most natural posture to assume difficult situations which, as history and psychology shows us, brings out the worst in people.
*= I'm aware of his dodgy position regarding Muslims, so let's keep focussed on the matter at hand, 'kay?
**= Of course there are other forms of racism beside frothin-at-the-mouth Nazism, but with even the more subtle forms of racism there is also likely to be low-level homophobia and sexism present. |
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