One of my regrets about my very spotty blogging as of lately is that I didn’t blog all the way through Laura Blumenfeld’s Revenge: A Story of Hope. I did eventually finish it, and was, I must say, completely gobsmacked by the ending — it was so cinematic I’m not 100% sure it actually happened, but it’s a great read. In one of the posts I did write about it, I mentioned her discussion of the role of revenge in bonding between families and others. “In aboriginal Siberia,” she writes, “the word for kindred families is cin-yirin, meaning ‘collection of those who take part in blood revenge.’”

I can’t escape the feeling that revenge has a role in the persistence of American racial identity. By creating a common grievance among black people, white Americans created a common motivation for revenge, and therefore, a common reason to fear them. I remember during the last presidential election, a commenter on a British newspaper’s online coverage wondered if Obama was going to take advantage of his position to take revenge against white people on behalf of black people — because that’s what the commenter himself would want to do, if he were a black American. Such notions seem pretty outlandish, especially when applied to Obama, but it has, I think, been bubbling in the American subconscious for a long time.

Probably the most illustrative case is Malcolm X. Although people worried about his inciting violence in his lifetime, his main form of racial vengeance was returning slander with slander. You think we’re an inferior race? Hey, you’re the inferior race! The story about a mad scientist creating the white race wasn’t original to him, but his rhetorical gifts made it weirdly compelling even to people who didn’t literally believe it. And I can’t help suspecting that, although Malcolm’s fans like to emphasize his late conversion from racism, he would not be so interesting a character if he didn’t give voice to that irrational sense of justice. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a lie for a lie. This of course goes against the idea that justice is inseparable from truth — you must first find out what really happened — but in the old reciprocity ethic, it makes perfect sense. Slander is a form of injury that isn’t quite like anything else, and you probably can’t know what it feels like to think you’re the inferior race unless you do.

I don’t know any white person that believes the Nation of Islam’s theory of racial origins, but I have known some with at least a vague idea that theirs is a genetically nasty race. A co-worker I had some years ago claimed that the reason white people conquered most of the world is that “the Cro-Magnons ate the Neanderthals.” There are a lot of problems with that theory of course, but you can see how it’s really white supremacy turned on its head. There’s that old Paleolithic ancestor again, forming those traits that redound to the present day, only in this case it’s a bad thing.

Eventually, Malcolm X realized that the world is bigger than America’s racial conflicts. In his autobiography, he describes a stopover in Egypt on his way to Mecca, where he meets a white man who “didn’t feel like a white man.” It was a clue that American whiteness is a cultural identity, not a racial one, and a rather parochial cultural identity at that. Malcolm didn’t live long enough to form a full-blown alternative to his former views, but his story has been a source of hope every since. Maybe it is possible to go through revenge and come out the other side.

Russell was kind enough to quote my posts on government and teleology in his own musings on the election in Britain. It’s funny how, even though we are basically agreeing with each other here, whenever I read him on the subject I get the feeling we’re talking about different things. I think this may be because he’s an academic who’s been thinking about all this at an advanced level for many years, whereas I’m still working on the basics, like “What is government for?” Lately, I’ve been thinking about a slightly different question: what is ethnic identity for?

I’ve been thinking about this partly because yet another kerfuffle recently broke out on the Internet over race and IQ, and partly because of Kelefa Sanneh’s recent review of “whiteness studies.” Sanneh mentions David Roediger’s advocacy of the “abolition of whiteness,” which I remember hearing Roediger discuss on the radio some years back. In one sense, abolishing whiteness sounds ridiculous. We tend to think of race and ethnicity as things thrust upon us from the past, embedded in our genes, like family. And of course, people tend to think of ethnicity as being family writ large: we’re descended from common ancestors, we look alike, we act alike, and so on. That’s true enough, but the family analogy also shows the limitations of defining groups by traits. Everyone in my immediate family, for instance, is quite tall. Still, there are short people in my extended family, my sister married a short guy, and if they have children they might too be short. So while tallness is certainly an inborn, heritable trait that runs in my family, it doesn’t define my family. What defines my family, like most families, is the fact that we are related.

To some extent, of course, all white people are related; but our common ancestor was back in the Stone Age sometime, whereas many white and nonwhite Americans share common ancestors who were a lot more recent. The renewed interest among African-Americans in genealogy is showing just how related black and white Americans are. So that raises a natural question: why are we still identifying with this long-forgotten Paleolithic ancestor when there are much more immediate connections to think about?

There are several possible answers to that question, but one that Sanneh doesn’t bring up is that you can’t abolish whiteness without abolishing blackness. At least, I don’t see how. If every nonwhite race keeps its identity, then whites kind of have to be a race by default. Either that or we break up into sub-races, like was once the case in Europe, but I don’t see how that could happen in America.

And in fact, the question of why blackness goes on existing is just as legitimate. Blackness was not an African idea; it came about mainly to define an occupational role, a slave class. That occupation no longer exists in the West, so blackness is now essentially defined by the past: these are the descendants of people who used to be slaves. That identification has helped preserve discrimination, but I suspect that most black people would also be alarmed at the idea of black identity disappearing. For that matter, so would a lot of white people. In a lot of ways, the story of black Americans is the modern Exodus, a stunning testimonial inspiring — and warning — people far beyond its original ethnic group. But does the new version of Exodus, like the old one, require the continued existence of the relevant group? And is it worth all the trouble? In one sense, it’s strange to keep a whole multigenerational identity alive just to tell a story, but sometimes I wonder if there’s anything to nationhood but stories.

There are other possible answers to the question, but I will get into that in a future post.

Jill Lepore’s recent article about Tea Party activists includes a passage that summarizes neatly the themes of my last two posts:

Today’s Tea Partiers like to describe their movement as a catchall—Hess identifies himself as a libertarian, Varley describes herself as a social and fiscal conservative—but it doesn’t catch everything. “All the government does is take my money and give it to other people,” Hess told me. Hess’s own salary is paid by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security; he works for M.I.T.’s Lincoln Laboratory, studying chemical and biological warfare. “I’m not an anarchist,” he said. “It’s not that I think all government is bad.” Opposition to military power doesn’t have a place in Hess’s Tea Party.

What strikes me here isn’t his making an exception for military power, but the fact that he thinks the government is taking his money, even though the money comes from the government in the first place. This is part of what makes the concept of property rights so fuzzy in the modern context. When your income derives from skilled labor, your property is generally derived not from natural resources you control but from the market value of your job. What that is is hard enough to determine even in the private sector; but what is the market value of a military engineer? We could only find out if we allowed a market for people to build biological weapons for the highest bidder, which is a pretty alarming thought. But somewhere, Hess got an idea of what he should be paid, and thinks the government is misusing what is rightfully his.

Although in prior posts I emphasized the more exalted government jobs, the civil service is also full of ordinary jamokes like Hess, for whom working for the government isn’t much different from working for a large corporation. In fact, if he were a corporate employee grumbling about how management was misspending money that could have gone into his raise, he would hardly be seen as a libertarian champion. Yet the complaint is essentially the same, which is perhaps the real source of the Tea Party’s anger: in a world of big government, big business, and big everything, most individuals depend financially upon institutions that are too big to even notice them.

But I am still wondering if there’s a better way for people like Hess to think about their jobs, and the property that they derive from those jobs. If we think of individuals as bearing natural rights and governments as a natural threat to those rights, his status as both at once seems to be irreconcilable. But he’s right about one thing: if you’re not an anarchist, somebody has to do it.

Lee recently wrote a short post about property rights that led to a lengthy comment thread, which he followed up on here. This has led me to several different trains of thought, which I might elaborate on later. But for now I’ll just comment on the subject of how property was obtained in the first place. In the first post, Lee notes that “the currently existing distribution of property rights (is) in part a result of massive state intervention,” which makes it difficult to decide who, in a libertarian schema, holds property justly.

I think the issue is actually bigger than that: a lot of property today is actually owned by governments. This is especially true if you look outside the U.S. The Chinese government, despite no longer being formally communist, owns a whole sector of the economy known as state-owned enterprises; it also still builds most of the new buildings, and leases them to their occupants. But perhaps a more telling example is Saudi Arabia. It is certainly not communist, but is a very traditional monarchy, apparently following the theory that the House of Saud basically owns the country. Not only does the nation’s very name say that, but the government owns the oil, which amounts to 25% of the world’s proven reserves. As such, the Sauds basically run OPEC, and so in turn have a major hand in setting the price of oil all over the world. The government does not generally do this by force; instead, if another OPEC country violates production limits, Saudi Arabia can crank up its own production to the point of unprofitability. Because it has so much oil, it can do that without blinking for longer than any other country.

This may seem bullying, but corporations do that sort of thing all the time. Right now, Amazon.com is selling e-books at a loss so it can gain market share, which it can afford because it’s a giant. So really, who’s to say the Sauds don’t own all that oil, and therefore can’t run the world market? If it doesn’t belong to them, who does it belong to? And what, exactly, does that make them — a government or a corporation?

I think you see what I’m getting at here: if you recognized the right of all existing property owners, you would not create a libertarian utopia but simply freeze the status quo in place. A government like America’s could shrink through the electoral process, but ironically, those governments with the most complete control over their economies — that is, the ones that have effectively become giant corporations — would be untouchable.

Citizens of such a country could, I suppose, rise up and demand control over the judicial and military functions of the state, leaving people like the Sauds simply as very wealthy businessmen. It’s difficult to see how that would involve any real devolution of power, however, since the oil revenues would still be paying the soldiers and judges and so on. That is, I suppose, why premodern people didn’t see much difference between politics and economics. Politics is about who controls what territory; where wealth is based on land, the same is true of business.

This is why I said in an earlier post that libertarians actually demand a lot more of government, even as they want it to do less. Monarchs like the Sauds can have self-interests, friends, money, swagger — everything, in other words, that successful businessmen have. A justice system that hands out impartial verdicts based on principles of property rights, and has employees willing to fight and die for them, without asking for more than a civil-servant salary, is actually living the sort of ascetic collectivism that libertarians seem to despise. No wonder they can’t seem to find it in the real world.

I’ve been thinking that there is another way to look at the problem outlined in my last post, which is perhaps more generous to my Washington neighbors. I mentioned that some of the issues facing government and private businesses are the same, and one similarity is that government, like business, is filled with full-time professionals at it. This number gets even bigger when you count the various people who aren’t actually in government but whose job is to think about government all the time, such as political journalists, commentators, and academics. And while a more libertarian government would employ far fewer people, I don’t see a way to get around the existence of this class. Even the ancient Athenian all-citizen democracy had women and slaves doing the scut work. And if you got arrested, would you really want your case argued and judged by part-time legal experts?

I think that any activity, no matter how frivolous it may seem, that people do full a full-time living develops some heavy philosophical demands. In a recent discussion about Christianity and sports on Jesus Creed, a few commenters objected that sports are just for fun, so why do all this hand-wringing? But when sports put bread on the table (or money in the endowment), they can’t help but be serious.

What makes government special this way, though, is how modern Westerners seem to assume almost unconsciously that it must be self-giving — even self-sacrificial. People in almost any other profession are allowed to talk about how they profit from their jobs, financially or otherwise, but for politicians this is taboo in public. (This is why we are constantly disappointed in how they actually behave.) Jurists have to resist bribery and the social advantages of favoring certain people and groups. And on the ground level, government employees such as soldiers and police officers may sacrifice themselves in a much more complete sense.

So what, then, motivates this self-sacrificial ruling class? It’s here, in my view, that the various less-government arguments run into trouble, because a skeptical, mistrustful view of a profession is not very inspiring to sacrifice. Longtime readers may recall that that was my major beef with Yoder — he didn’t really think anyone should die for a government, but rather than trying to save them from this condition he seemed bent on directing it. And this is one thing I don’t get about libertarian and/or localist thinking (and maybe some readers who know more about this stuff can enlighten me). If you take it as the natural and desirable condition that most people are going to pursue their own interests and those of their in-groups (however they might define them), where do you get the people who are going to selflessly and impartially guarantee that everyone is able to do so? It seems more likely that what would happen is what, in fact, happens in countries with relatively weak central states — the government simply becomes another tribe interested mainly in its own survival and propagation.

This is why I tend to agree with Russell that a government, if it exists at all, needs a telos, even though some of his commenters seemed to object to the very idea. The U.S. system seems to be based on a sort of divide-and-conquer strategy, based on the theory that if power is split up among enough quarreling factions than it can’t get too concentrated. But why would anyone want to work in that? I don’t completely understand it, but it seems until we answer that question, al the theorizing in the world about the ideal self-abnegating government isn’t going to move the reality.