Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Maybe I’ve just been hanging out with the wrong academics, but I don’t see a ton of this. There’s some, sure, and there are exceptions, but in my experience way more effort goes into writing e.g. articles condemning colonialism and teaching it in their courses than into actual relief effort. Of course professors have time limitations, but it doesn’t seem like they’re clearing, for example, their whole summer (which they might not have completely off, but do have more off than most professionals do) to do aid work, even the ones that have tenure. For all I know they are donating crap-tons of money relative to what they make, but I have no evidence of this happening, and I’ve rarely heard academics preach to their students to give to charity, whereas I have heard many times that evil white men did colonialism and it was bad (my source is the small liberal arts school I attended and my experience may not be representative of professors at other kinds of schools).

So it seems to me that the condemnation is of primary importance, any actual help to the 3rd World is of secondary importance. I’m sure everyone has a pet theory for this. One is that, as academics, they have a comparative advantage in convincing people with actual money to help, so they should focus on that and develop their own professional reputations instead of personally going to Africa to help or giving money. This could be true; however, I have a very low prior for it. I don’t personally know anyone whose motives are quiiiite that pure, though. Maybe all academics are secretly saints, but I know a few academics in training, and their thought processes appear to be as self-serving as the rest of ours. To me, this looks like the kind of explaination that comes at the end of a rationalizing game (from the other side, this is like a Republican saying they don’t need to give money to charity because they shop, thereby lifting all boats; whether these are actually effective at making life in the 3rd World better is beside the point, the point is that it’s not coming from a place of real devotion to improving lives).

Of course we can’t rule out signaling, and I’m sure that’s part of it. But I’m not sure signaling explains the discrepancy between rhetoric about how this is all our fault and action to mitigate this harm. A cheap signal is nice, obviously, but my expectation would be that, at this point, academics trying to signal in a world where everyone else was signaling in the same way would have realized that a more costly and therefore more effective signal would have been to actually go help out in Africa and actually give money (although they might in fact be giving money, if they are they aren’t broadcasting it, so they can’t be using it as a signal to others).

One possibility: Academics, for whatever reason (depending on your opinion of academics… it could be greater examination of the evidence, greater free time to devote to dwelling on guilt, etc), feel guilty about problems caused in the 3rd World by their civilization. Guilt is the primary reaction. They feel on a basic level that they should do something to help. But actual helping takes a lot of effort, and they have tenure to seek, conferences to go to, classes to teach.

However, they’ve stumbled upon a genius solution… they write articles about how they themselves are to blame, and teach it to the students! Now they can incorporate it into their work, which helps their purpose of being academics. And, by blaming themselves, they – in their own minds – become blameless. As in, nobody can blame them. Sure their ancestors may have done some actual oppressing and they may be privileged white people, but they are publically taking on the blame for their ancestors’ actions, so that no one can actually blame them, personally, for theirs. So they get a clear conscience and all the benefits of feeling good for having done some good, without having to sacrifice in any way.

Note that I’m obviously conflating private guilt and public shame, not because I’m (that) stupid but because they’re interwoven into how we process things. Some people only feel the guilt when others find out and apply shame and others feel the guilt until they tell others, at which point it evaporates into shame. Either way, after you’ve gone public with your crimes, you can ease the guilt by minimizing the shame. Raskolnikov, eaten alive by guilt, wants to reduce it by telling everyone what he’s done, but if everyone said “nbd” he probably could have lived with himself, at least if he was born in the 80s (IMO – I’m not a psychologist, nor an expert in Russian lit).

There’s another factor in this too – by denouncing Evil White Men, the blame gets turned not on the descendants of the actual evil men in Africa, but on the Evil White Men of today, even though by the logic of colonialism guilt ought to fall equally onto the descendants of the white people who benefitted from colonialism, whether a nun or an investment banker. Since academics (largely) don’t work on Wall Street, they benefit in this third way – not only are they helping their career and apologizing colonialism away, but they also aren’t actually to blame for colonialism, the actual villain was Wal-Mart all along. Phew.

Of course this doesn’t actually work in a long-standing way, because the guilt is always there, and it grows the more they remind themselves of it. But it keeps the guilt at bay, which is the only thing that can be done about guilt on this scale.

Report comment

I don’t think it’s unreasonable that Scott’s thesis is true of professional academics while virtue signaling is the case for the blue tribe masses and demagogues. Certainly my own experience (which was with actual academics) was quite different than other blue tribers.

Report comment

Report comment

Report comment

Certainly the problems discussed tend to revolve around either problems suffered by those people specifically (feminism pretty much runs on that in particular), or when they discuss the issues of groups outside that specific classification of people it’s with a condescending “white man’s burden” sort of tone.

The terms used in social justice (shibboleth is actually a pretty good way to put it now that you put the thought in my head) certainly revolve around how said terms are used by that specific classification of people, rather than on how the corresponding terms are used by the general population.

And, yes, I know the saying “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”, but I honestly hate assuming people are idiots.

Especially since this makes the problem harder to solve. There’s nothing more impossible to argue with than a person behaving in an ignorant way who thinks they’re being virtuous in doing so. Because they can then dismiss all attempts to educate them as merely being that of bigots trying to protest what’s right and true. The thought that they might indeed have the right cause but simply an unproductive or even harmful way of pursuing it, never enters their heads (because they specifically ensure it can’t).

@Harald K:

Bingo. Especially with your two quotes there at the bottom which illustrate the difference.

Because Calhoun is simply factually wrong… yet it’s an uphill battle convincing people on either side of the equation of that.

I feel the most productive way to get social justice rolling would be to encourage solidarity by showing men how they share similar issues with women, and whites (particularly impoverished ones) how they share similar issues with non-whites. Morality is all well and good, but I find nothing works more reliably as a motivator than enlightened self-interest.

And yet instead we have these divisive tactics which divide men and women with the same issues and so make progress on either side difficult, and also turn impoverished whites away from social justice–and conversely from liberal economic policies that would aid them–into the arms of Republicans who certainly do not actually have their best interests in mind but merely exploit them as useful pawns.

Why so many liberals–especially upper class ones–willingly engage in these sorts of completely self-defeating PR tactics is beyond me, unless we start getting into things like my “conspiracy theory”.

Report comment

Note that the Iraq war is something that happened recently, in a country vastly more developed than Leopold’s Congo, and the amount of information available on the Iraq war deaths is orders of magnitude greater than on Congo. The statistical estimation of deaths is extremely difficult in the case of Iraq, so it is not reasonable to suggest that the estimates on Congo, which are based on vastly inferior data and methods, can be trusted.

In Iraq, the vast majority of deaths were not caused by American and allied military forces but by internecine violence and the collapse of infrastructure. Whatever the number of victims, it’s not correct to say that the US forces killed all of them or most of them. Analogously, it is not correct to say that the Belgians killed five million or whatever.

A favorite trick was to use local Congolese, give them machetes, and say “you bring us back EITHER value X of rubber and ivory, OR an equivalent number of human heads to show that you made a serious effort. OR we kill everyone in your village. One, two, three, your choice.” After a while they realized that large numbers of heads were a PITA to carry around, so they allowed human hands instead.

I’ve heard that story, but is it something that actually happened regularly and all over, or is it just an isolated case that has been wildly extrapolated?

The Rwandans killed half a million people in a few weeks, using machetes. The Belgians had over a decade. What’s hard about this?

Leopold’s Congo was about 100 times larger than Rwanda, with a greatly inferior transport and communications infrastructure (it is said that radio was essential for the Rwanda genocide). Rwanda has been blamed on the Belgians, too, and I think they were equally responsible for a large share of Leopold-era deaths as they are for Rwanda, i.e., not really responsible at all. The suggestion that the people in Congo were mindless puppets whom a handful of poorly armed Belgians could easily persuade to do atrocities on an unprecedent scale is, frankly, quite racist.

Report comment

How did they estimate? Things like colonial records, records of actual deaths — those ran into six figures, easy — morbidity estimates based on comparable regions, and so forth. I mean, think about it. They could do easy, obvious stuff like comparing regions in the Congo with comparable regions in neighboring countries. So, if in 1924 Equateur Province of Belgian Congo had 50,000 people, while the pretty much identical Haut-Equateur province of French Congo just across the river had 200,000 people, it’s reasonable to conclude that something bad happened in Equateur Province. The fact that Equateur Province is full of people who will tell you exactly what happened and how is just gravy.

The go-to book in English is Adam Hochschild’s _King Leopold’s Ghost_. It’s not perfect — Hochschild gets a little worked up after a while — but it’s pretty solid, and includes a good survey of the available literature as of 1999. There’s been more work done in the last 15 years, but nothing that’s dramatically transformed our understanding.

“settling local scores” “disease” — I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you’re not going the “oh gosh you know Africa, bad stuff happens” route. Local scores and diseases were things all over Africa. There were local scores and diseases in Kenya and in Senegal. But the British in Kenya and the French in Senegal didn’t kill several million people.

“The sheer logistics of their crimes seem improbable” — dude. The Rwandans killed half a million people in a few weeks, using machetes. The Belgians had over a decade. What’s hard about this?

A favorite trick was to use local Congolese, give them machetes, and say “you bring us back EITHER value X of rubber and ivory, OR an equivalent number of human heads to show that you made a serious effort. OR we kill everyone in your village. One, two, three, your choice.” After a while they realized that large numbers of heads were a PITA to carry around, so they allowed human hands instead.

This is all tolerably well documented stuff — it happened in the 20th century, and the Belgians were slow to realize that the world might mind or care. (Which it mostly didn’t. As noted, it took over a decade of abominations before the world finally stepped in.) Hell, Mark Twain wrote a short book about the Congo genocide, back in 1905, when it was happening. It’s called “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” and you can easily find it online. Not quite as cheerful and upbeat as Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, but then Twain got less impressed with human nature over time.

TLDR: The figure of “five million”, while an estimate, is an estimate with some basis and is as likely to be low as high.

Doug M.

Report comment