The rifle brought about the birth of these United States

 From Geoff Mann "Give your mom a gun" (LRB Vol. 46 No. 5 · 7 March 2024)

Guns are central to America’s mythology. In the patriotic version of its history, from an imaginary ‘revolution’ to westward conquest to cops keeping the streets safe, guns are the tools of America’s self-creation. ‘This country was born with a rifle in its hand,’ Philip Sharpe wrote in The Rifle in America (1938). ‘As a matter of fact, the rifle brought about the birth of these United States. The United States and the rifle are inseparable.’ 

"This country was born with a rifle in its hand" which is how the white colonialists established the Racial Contract in America.

Understanding events in Palestine through the narrative of the Racial Contract of Charles W. Mills

According to the “Racial Contract” of Charles W. Mills [1] there is a binary divide: white and nonwhite. The whites are fully human, have the power, money and, crucially, human rights. Nonwhites have less power and money, do not have full human rights and, indeed, are slightly less than human.

The Racial Contract allows whites to exploit nonwhites in the same way that people exploit animals. There are countless examples in the history of European and American imperialism and colonisation: the slave trade, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North and South America and Australia, British atrocities in India, apartheid in South Africa and so on.

Who is defined as white and who as nonwhite is not fixed [2]. In the UK, Irish people were once classified as nonwhite. Infamously, rooms to let in London would stipulate: No Irish, no blacks, no dogs [3]. Few people would now think like that about Irish people. For most people, the Irish are now unequivocally white.

There was a time (and still is, for modern-day antisemites) that Jews were classified as nonwhite. That, in harness with the Racial Contract, was one of the weapons of anti-semitism, and it reached its terrible climax in the Holocaust when Jews were murdered alongside other not-quite-human people such as Roma and Sinta people, homosexuals and people with disabilities.

One of the unique features of the Holocaust was that it took place on European soil, and after the war Western powers recoiled in horror as they were presented with details what had gone on, and declared ‘never again’. It turned out, though, that the mechanism for 'never again' was not the ending of the Racial Contract. No, the Racial Contract remains in force to this day. "Never again" meant redefining Jews as white so that they should no longer be oppressed. They could join the ranks of the oppressors. Israel was set up as white colony, not even acknowledging the existence of the Palestinians. It could be said that it was “a land without a people for a people without a land” because the Palestinians were, in the terms of the Racial Contract, not really people.

And today the terms of the Racial Contract allows the slaughter of Palestinians by the state of Israel backed by white Western powers, especially the USA and the UK. The nonwhite victims are the Palestinians. The Racial Contract requires the nonwhites to be perceived as barbaric, so every opportunity is taken to talk-up the killing of Israeli civilians on the 7^th October. By contrast, the whites are by definition civilised and not barbaric, so no matter how many civilians, including children, are slaughtered by the IDF, no matter how indiscriminate the Israeli air bombardment of Gaza, never mind the individual tales of cruelty by the Israeli forces, the Western narrative will always be of Western civilization, represented by Israel, up against the barbarian terrorists of Hamas.

Read, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks on the situation in Israel and Gaza to the General Synod of the Church of England on 13^th November 2023 [4]. Justin Welby calls for an end to the killing of both Israelis and Palestinians, but the killing of Israelis he describes as “barbaric slaughter of innocent Israelis by Hamas” whereas while he calls the killing of innocent Palestinians “a great wrong” and says it “cannot be morally justified”, he doesn’t call it barbaric. Indeed, he says “there is no equivalence between the atrocities of Hamas against Israeli civilians, and the right and duty of Israel to defend itself”. Even today, after the bombing of hospitals, targetting Red Crescent ambulances, killing people who are waving a white flag, the murder of more than 12,000 children, you will search in vain for any suggestion by Justin Welby that anything done by Israel is barbaric. [5]

Notes:

1 Mills, Charles W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press

2 It is information.

3 https://www.rebelnews.ie/2023/01/18/no-blacks-no-dogs-no-irish-a-short-history-of-discrimination-against-irish-migrants/

4 https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/speaking-writing/speeches/general-synod-archbishop-canterburys-presidential-address

5 Search Twitter (X) for from:@JustinWelby barbaric

Information and identity - the Rachel Dolezal story

The basic story:

Civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal misrepresented herself as black, claim parents

The biological parents of a prominent civil rights activist in Washington state have claimed that she has been misrepresenting herself as a black woman when her heritage is white.

Rachel Dolezal is an academic, chair of the office of the police ombudsman commission in the city of Spokane and president of its chapter of the African American civil rights organisation NAACP.

Dolezal, a professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, where she specialises in black studies and African American culture, has spoken out regularly on local media about racial justice.

This week, however, in an interview with the local Spokane news channel KREM 2 News, Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal said their daughter’s biological heritage was not African American but German and Czech, with traces of Native American ancestry.

Jessica Elgot, Guardian Friday 12 June 2015.

Gary Younge comments:

It is a cardinal rule of social identity that people have the right to call themselves whatever they want. [...] But with this right comes at least one responsibility: what you call yourself must be comprehensible to others.

“A tree, whatever the circumstances, does not become a legume, a vine, or a cow,” explains Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Ethics of Identity. “The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity is a good thing ... but that the identity must make some kind of sense.”

The problem for Dolezal is that her “black” identity does not make sense.

Gary Younge, Guardian Friday 12 June 2015

All grist to my mill about information and identity, and the provisionality of information.

Information and identity: UK census and being British

"'British whites' are the minority in London" shouted the headline in the Daily Mail when the results of the 2011 UK census were released last year.

UK readers will know that there are all sorts of issues with the Daily Mail (just have a look at Tabloid Watch) but this piece of data from the census, that 45% of Londoners described themselves as 'White British' in answer to the question about ethnicity, was widely reported in the press (see some comment in the Guardian).

What does it mean to be British?  And why is it significant whether you are 'white British' or British of some other colour?

When I start to think about this, I find I'm completely at sea. Lots of strands, going nowhere. The only thing that holds it together is that it is about information and identity.  We crave identity, we need to label things otherwise they might as well not exist - they don't exist unless we can label them because we can't think about something unless it has a label - so we choose the set of labels to use, and they create the identity.

OK, some of those random strands, maybe going nowhere.

The 2011 census page of the UK government Office for National Statistics is headlined "Who we are. How we live. What we do." "Who we are": so the categories in the census tells us who we are? 'Who we are' is constrained by the categories allowed in the census questions.

'British' is a construct by what or whom?

I'm currently reading 'Bring up the bodies', Hilary Mantel's second installment of her account of Thomas Cromwell.  In some sense it has an extra interest to me because it is about British history, it is about my history. I think so anyway.  Or maybe it is because the themes, all the stuff it reaches out to, the physical geography, the Church of England, are things I know about, so I get more of the richness of the story than I would have done if I was reading about a similar event in a 'foreign' setting. Or maybe the point is that is what it means to be British: to know these things. Ah, but no. come on, I can't say that someone who doesn't know them is not British. The again, I suppose that is what UK citizenship test is about. Hmm, have my thoughts really led to supporting the UK citizenship test?

As I said, going nowhere!  But we have the theme of Information and Identity in DTMD 2013: maybe some of the talks there will get us somewhere.

Special Issue of TripleC on the nature of information

The Special Issue of TripleC arising from last year's interdisciplinary workshop on information and technology (DTMD 2011) has now been published and is available open-access.

Vol 11, No 1 (2013)

Table of Contents

Special Issue: The Difference that Makes a Difference 2011

Introduction: The Difference That Makes a Difference
David Chapman, Magnus Ramage

Emergent Information. When a Difference Makes a Difference…
Wolfgang Hofkirchner

Emergence and Evolution of Meaning
José M. Díaz Nafría, Rainer E. Zimmermann

Mind, Matter, Meaning and Information
Robin Faichney

Communicative Modelling of Cultural Transmission and Evolution Through a Holographic Cognition Model
Ambjörn Naeve

Arrows Can Be Dangerous
John Monk

Race: The Difference That Makes a Difference
Syed Mustafa Ali

Do We Need a Global Brain?
Jan Sliwa

Information and the Transformation of Sociology: Interactivity and Social Media Monitoring
Hugh Mackay

Information, Race, and Racism

One of the many fascinating talks at "The Difference That Makes a Difference" (DTMD2011) last September, was by my OU colleague Mustafa Ali, entitled: "Race: The Difference That Makes A Difference". As with all the talks at DTMD2011, you can get the slides and hear a 'podcast' of the talk via the Programme and Proceedings page of the website. Mustafa looks at race from an information-theoretical perspective and information from a race-theoretical perspective. His work is ongoing, and we hope to have a paper in which he develops his ideas further in the planned Special Issue of TripleC Journal.

As usual, whereas Mustafa's work is well-grounded, rigorous academic research, here in this blog post I want to wave my hands around and argue that understanding information provides some new insights into understanding race and racism. (So don't be put off if you are unimpressed by my comments, please go instead to Mustafa's presentation!)

The key word is 'difference'.  Information is the difference that makes a difference, and race is about defining differences.  I find it helpful to hang the ideas on those trapeziums again. Underneath are people in all their miscellaneous colours, shapes and sizes, while out the top comes some way of categorising people. Maybe, for example, as 'black' or 'white'. But why?  Why would the decoding the 'data' (people) give that particular 'information' (racial categorisations or by skin colour)?

An anecdote. Apparently (according to my mother - I've no memory of it) when was 5 or 6 years old, I came home from school one day and announced that I'd got a girlfriend. My mother quizzed me to try to identify her, and asked me whether she was black. I said no, but it turned out she was.

The point (and one that is often made about children) is that I hadn't yet learned to categorise people in that way - and therefore that the skin colour categorisation is not innate but is learned. The only reason it is a story worth relating is because of the baggage in the implications of defining someone as black. If the feature had been red hair, it would have been a reflection of my lack of observation and the incident would have been long forgotten, but because it was skin colour, and because I can now tell the story in a way that defines this girl 'as black' and readers will know what I mean, it becomes a story with a message.

Mustafa talks of race as a social construct, which is "genealogically-related to racism" (see his presentation). He says:

I think a really good case can be made that Race has a genealogical relationship to Racism, so it's not that race is some kind of neutral classification that just happens to have a historical development, but that it emerged in the context of a set of specific contingent social, political and economic circumstances

The way I'm describing it, it comes down to what determines the content of the trapezium. It's not that we can do without the trapezium. We can only deal with information[1], so we need to do the 'decoding' (the cognition, in the terminology of triple C[2]) - it is an example of a:

...binary opposition which we employ in our cultural practices help to generate order out of the dynamic complexity of experience

Chandler - see a previous post

I said it comes down to what determines the content of the trapezium, but maybe in this context more importantly it is a question of who determines the content. Who says 'this' is the information we get from the data - who has the power to construct the trapeziums that we all use?  Perhaps we might talk in terms of the dominant or hegemonic trapeziums which have come about because of "a set of specific contingent social, political and economic circumstances".

To finish, I want to flag a couple of stories which seem relevant, but I don't have time to discuss:

• Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?  A article from the BBC website, says:

"The fallacy, then, is simple. Just because some black people are good at something does not imply that black people in general will be good at it."

• MP Diane Abbott tweeted: "White people love playing "divide and rule" we should not play their game".
  BBC report of the story and Laurie Penny's commentary in the New Statesman.

------------------------------
Notes:

1  It's like I've been saying about maps. We can't deal with the territory, only with maps of the territory. Similarly we can't talk about people, only about information about people.

2  I'm coming to the conclusion that the suggestion I put forward in an earlier post that cognition = triangles whereas communication = trapeziums just won't do. I want to use the trapeziums for cognition too.

Environmental and Semantic Information: Natural and Non Natural Meaning

Luciano Floridi, in his map of information (see, for example, "Information: A very short introduction" Oxford University Press 2010, or Semantic Conceptions of Information on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), has the primary distinction between Environmental and Semantic information.

Floridi's informational map, Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/

This is closely associated with Grice's distinction between Natural and Non Natural meaning (H. P. Grice, "Meaning" The Philosophical Review, 1957, Vol. 66(3), pp. 377-388 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2182440).

I talked about information being data plus meaning in a previous post, which is what Floridi refers to as "The General Definition of Information (GDI)", so we see that the two categories of information derive directly from the two categories of meaning.

Floridi points out that his concept of environmental information might not be 'natural'. Here's how he explains it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (op. cit.):

One of the most often cited examples of environmental information is the series of concentric rings visible in the wood of a cut tree trunk, which may be used to estimate its age. Yet “environmental” information does not need to be natural. Going back to our example, when you turned the ignition key, the red light of the low battery indicator flashed. This signal too can be interpreted as an instance of environmental information. 

Environmental information is defined relative to an observer (an information agent), who is supposed to have no direct access to pure data in themselves. It requires two systems a and b to be coupled in such a way that a's being (of type, or in state) F is correlated to b being (of type, or in state) G, thus carrying for the observer the information that b is G [...]:

Environmental information:
Two systems a and b are coupled in such a way that a's being (of type, or in state) F is correlated to b being (of type, or in state) G, thus carrying for the information agent the information that b is G.

However, I don't think this in any significant way makes it different from Grice's 'natural meaning', or not in any way that matters for my concerns at the moment at least.

My interpretation is that semantic information/non-natural meaning requires intention, whereas environmental information/natural meaning 'just happens'.

Switching to the language of semiotics, a point about signs is that the signifier can be arbitrary. I'm wondering if there's a distinction between, say, natural signs and non-natural signs, where the signifier in a natural sign is necessary, but the signifier in a non-natural sign is arbitrary?  We might interpret the rings visible in the wood of a cut tree as the signifier in a sign meaning the age of the tree (or maybe not, I'm not sure about that), but in that case the rings can't be said to be arbitrary: they are a necessary consequence of the way the tree grows. However the word 'tree' as the signifier for a tree is arbitrary, in the sense that we could equally say "arbre" or "der Baum" (http://translate.definitions.net/tree).

One thing I'm still not quite ready to concede, though, is that non-natural/semantic information/meaning/signs necessarily requires people.

Certainly I want to suggestion that animals can be responsible for semantic/non-natural signs. I want to say that when a peacock displays his tail this is a sign with meaning, that there is intention on the part of the peacock, and that the sign is arbitrary (since other birds manage with different signs meaning essentially the same thing).

Source http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peacock.jpg

I'm still trying to get to grips with what we mean by 'meaning', however, and I'm not sure saying there is a distinction between natural and non-natural meaning gets us any closer to what meaning is. I'm still ploughing my way through Ogden and Richards, 'The Meaning of Meaning' (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949) but can't say it has been especially enlightening so far, and has been made a little more difficult by their style and the casual 'of-their-time' racism in one the examples they use to illustrate their argument. Wittgenstein's perspective that I mentioned in the previous post sounds rather more promising so perhaps I need to track that down.

Everything in miscellaneous

I think Weinberger is on to something, in his book 'Everything is miscellaneous'

I'm reading it at the moment - OK I'm always behind the times, but it was only published last year - and it is resonating with lots of things that I'm thinking about.

As always, there's lots more that I want to say about than I have time to do at the moment. For now, start with a quote from Chapter 9:

To know what a thing is, thought Aristotle, is to see what is essential about it [...] and not be fooled by just what happens to be true about it [...] The definitions of those essences determine those things that are in a category and those that are turned away. Here there is no messiness, only an order so precise and harmonious that it is beautiful.

Or so Aristotle and generations of thinkers assumed. So do we when we argue about, for example, how to define race, knowledge management, or blogging. But suppose this sort of Aristotelian categorization-through-definition were shown to be an essentially artificial way of approaching the world. Suppose messiness is not a flaw in our thinking but enables it.

I think there is a link here to Michael Frayn's "The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe". We create the universe by defining order. The order does not exist out there independent of us, waiting for us to find it. We make it.