• Let justice roll down like dice: expectations of fairness.

• Let justice roll down like dice: expectations of fairness.
Fighting injustice has to start with recognizing it. But we have different ideas of justice and injustice, because we have different understandings of how the world works and what we can expect. Almost everywhere we expect to suffer a certain amount of theft and violence at the hands of the powerful (Do you think that's not true in the U.S.? Do you know how many people die here from industrial poisons or lack of health care?). Our judgments about how much is too much, on the other hand, vary from culture to culture and class to class.

It's not enough that people experience very painful and dangerous situations. For example, nation-states have so well organized their citizens that they can keep wars going for years, only now and then executing dissenters and deserters. Every underclass has figured out ways to cope with the murderous whims of its rulers, and may even accept a certain level of murder as part of the nature of things, and thus "just". Depending on what we expect from the world and our bosses, we can reconcile ourselves to very severe deprivations of food, sex, respect and security.

Another common reaction, when we see people hurt, is to figure they must have deserved it (Sloan 184). It's a distancing mechanism: That can't happen to me, because I follow the rules. Therefore those other people must have done something wrong. Then, when it does happen to us, we are even less able to fight back. We may be homeless, in jail, sick or dead. To organize against injustice we must have a sense that we deserve better and can get it. How do we come to that common understanding?

Mass revolution and rightist backlash alike are fueled by some disruption of the "moral economy," to use Scott's term, some political change that disrupts our survival strategies and the relationships of power and production they depend on. Even when we have come to accept certain levels of routine abuse, those expectations then become a norm which even the bosses may not violate without risking a fight. It's an intensely alienating kind of cognitive dissonance when what we thought we knew about the rules and risks suddenly turns out not to be true.

For example, in normal times, the peasants Scott studied might accept their low status and their debts of labor, crops and money to the big landowners, money-lenders, and the corrupt state. As Lord Percy’s dependents sang in the 1800s,

And Liberty, that idle vaunt,
Is not the comfort that we want.
It only serves to turn the head
But gives to none their daily bread.
We want community of feeling
and landlords kindly in their dealing (Scott 1976 p.185).

From this distance we can't know how sincerely they meant this. Perhaps they were simply trying to butter up Lord Percy. In any case, once established, any balance of power and resources takes on the aura of "rights" and any further encroachments --major new taxes, say, or closing off access to nearby forests, or assigning my best machine to a co-worker-- will likely provoke bitter resistance.

Widely-held expectations are almost always considered fair, as in "I have a right to expect thus-and-such," even if it is no more than a Christmas card from the boss or our right to shoot animals for amusement. Expectations can feel like our just due even when they are rooted in injustice, such as standards of living dependent on slavery, low-wage labor, or stolen land (such as this continent). We have a right to burn up the world's fossil fuels, no matter how many countries we have to invade, how many species we extinctify. Feminist advances have sparked a world-wide panic among men who fear losing their property. Here some religious people, no longer the sole voices in public affairs, feel they have lost their rights to post the 10 Commandments on the courthouse walls, and teach their religion in public schools. Weird, isn't it? The folks most worried that unemployed moms will become too dependent on their $185 a month welfare payments (2008, single mom, 2 kids, Tennessee) scream bloody murder at the news that the government wants GM to build fewer monster trucks.

We see these luxuries as our just desserts because we base our lifetime strategies on such established expectations. After we have worked and planned and saved and invested in one kind of future, to have that taken away without warning feels grossly unjust. We cannot go back and redo our past decisions. Which is why we will make provision to help people who have lost their privileges, even if those came at other people's expense. (Also, that's how groups come to see shared interests.)

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"As I've said in discussions of racism with white women who are sometimes overwhelmed at the implications of their whiteness, no one on earth had any say whatsoever about who or what they were born to be. You can't run the tape backward and start from scratch, so the question is, what are you going to do with what you've got? How are you going to deal responsibly with the unalterable facts of who and what you are, or having or not having privilege and power? . . . It depends on what you decide to do once you're here, where you decide to place yourself in relationship to the ongoing struggle for freedom." (Barbara Smith 77).
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It's no coincidence that arbitrariness is a central feature of any kind of domination relationships. Whether you're abusing your family or training employees or waterboarding some guy whose language you don't understand because some other guy whose language you don't understand supposedly said that a third guy whose language you don't understand has pointed a nukelar anthrax nerve gas incontinent missile at Wall Street, by arbitrarily changing demands and conditions you can disrupt any expectations your victims can develop, and any basis for coherent, organized resistance. Although not necessarily democratic in itself, the "rule of law," as the catch-phrase goes, is an important ingredient of democracy, precisely because, in setting rules, it gives even to ordinary people some way to respond to the powerful and predict the outcome.

(No wonder the most intensely abused people have trouble making sense of a less abusive environment. The kids I've met from abusive families also tend to resist any expectations laid on by teachers or case managers. They don't know what's coming tomorrow, they don't know how they will react, and they accept no obligation to meet others' expectations.)

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“In their [the silent women's) experience authorities seldom tell you what they want you to do; they apparently expect you to know in advance. If authorities do tell you what is right, they never tell you why it is right. Authorities bellow but do not explain. They are unpredictable” (Belenky et al 1986, 28).
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To grasp the importance of our sense of fairness and justice we need only scan the 'net, the talk shows, and the right-wing think tanks for their very vigorous and comprehensive campaign to dumb down our expectations. If you or I should wonder aloud why so many of us get cancer from oil refineries or blown up in the oil wars or made homeless by storms spawned by our oil civilization, we are simply the lazy, irresponsible dupes of the "culture of complaint." We are the greedy, whiny, stupid, petty, unrealistic, violent, and ugly stars of TV talk shows and blogs or columns like "News of the Weird." Bloom, Bennett, D'Souza , Hughes, Ingram, O'Reilly, Stossel and a thousand other servants make millions by blaming the victims of corporate crimes. O, and leave us not forget the efforts of some preachers to privatize injustice, to recast organized crime as the product of individual sinners spawned in equal measure by Satan's cosmic campaign and the victims' own unworthiness. It's crucial work for the master race.

Having written all that, I'm still mystified as to why certain well-off groups, I'm thinking especially of middle managers and public bureaucrats, will with such seeming sheepishness take beating after beating by the CEOs and their Halliburton handmaidens in the White House, without organizing to protect themselves. They are the target of every corporate innovation, or cropped into sped-up paper-pushing culture police without pride or pensions. Just following orders accounts for some of their meekness; but really, would you go jump off a cliff because I told you to? There are millions of such folks, privileged but dependent. Shall we regard them as yet another set of terrorized victims?


• Pfooey on Ptolemy: my kitchen is not the world.
A couple thousand years ago a guy name a Ptolemy figured that the Earth was the center of the universe, and the sun and stars and planets circled around us. Later on the Church incorporated this idea into Christianity. But Ptolemy’s explanation of the planets’ movements was very complicated and still couldn’t account for everything people could see. Finally Copernicus came around with a simpler if not complete explanation: the Earth and other planets circle the sun. Copernicus was careful not to publish his research during his lifetime because he didn’t want to end up in jail or burned at the stake. He knew very well that the authorities would freak out at the idea that we are not the center of the universe.

Possibly the most central expectation is that my life is the norm, typical of the way most people live or should live. The grand premise of these essays is that most people (in commercialized societies, anyway) share my desires and thinking processes. My effort here is figure out, given the basic similarity, why my neighbors and I have such different politics.

That’s hard enough to do, but I can try by exploring the differences of experience and social position. There is, after all, plenty of data --one might say an overwhelming amount-- to show how deeply class, gender and other variables affect our lives. Even so, a lot of people act as if it’s not only our ways of thinking that are similar, but also our social and material circumstances-- that the whole world lives in the suburbs, perhaps; that we all get cable TV, and have cheap, safe drinking water; that we’re all male or female. Mab Segrest, Chip Smith and many others have explored the phenomenon under the rubric of white privilege.

We don’t all have the same idea of what’s normal but it’s probably natural to start out thinking other people have lives like our own. For one thing, it promises to reduce our uncertainty in a very confusing world. But then we are so perplexed when other folks act differently. Rather than really find out about other people, it’s easier to fall back on the evil-or-crazy explanation. We start out assuming everyone is the same, and end up othering people.

I run into it everywhere. Just the other day a colleague was complaining about the union’s diversity rules. Get over it, she said to some invisible person of color, who was silently complaining too much. Life is unfair for everyone, my co-worker recited, silently, and if we all just tough it out like she does we’d all get ahead without a lot of unseemly, unattractive, unnecessary whining. Too bad! Tough! Like it or lump it! are the mantra of the right wing in this country, though relative to other folks around here my colleague is practically a commie. Not seeing or actively denying the unearned breaks she has had, she regards anyone looking to make the world better as some kind of deadbeat.

So it’s hard to know which came first: assuming that our lives are the normal experience for all people, or defending our privileges on the basis that our lives are the norm. We have a huge stake in claiming that our own lives represent what’s normal. It justifies what we do as the only right, sensible course of action. And woe to anyone who challenges that perception. If it turns out my own experience of the world is very foreign to most people, my expectations and standards cannot be universal. No ordinary identity theft could produce as much anguish as nudging us from the center of our own cosmos.

There are whole departments of the rightist enterprise devoted to confirming our prejudices. Virtually every message of Murdoch & Co., for instance, drips with aggressive, in-your-face reassurance that our ignorance is, must be, unchallengeably right; that we know the world and what to do without questions or hesitation of any kind (though the tone is much more anxious than, say, the millenial certainties of some old-timey Christians and communists.) Here’s another circumstance where the internet might be narrowing rather than broadening our knowledge, because of the ease with which we can join choirs of folks singing the same song, while ignoring the variety of people who live and work with us. Ever heard that tune, “I don’t . . . back . . . down”? It’s the pop equivalent of “I don’t negotiate with terrorists,” and runs through a hundred chop-socky videos and the wars they glorify. Some people pay good money to reassert their right to be jerks. Many others shed body parts defending Halliburton’s militantly ignorant foreign policy.

Hence the periodically renewed attack on “relativism”, the false claim that liberals believe all ideas are of equal value, as opposed to Halliburton’s profound understanding of right and wrong (though according to Clinchy 1986 p. 63, some people at a stage of “subjective knowing” do report something like this relativism). When we say that our perceptions are grounded in our circumstances and position, and that none of us can see the whole of reality, the authoritarians say that we accept all claims as equally truthful. This of course is a lie in itself, and we don’t have to believe we know all the truth to be able to recognize most lies and fantasies. We don’t need authorities to tell us, for instance, that the excuses for racism, sexism and militarism are lies perpetuated to keep gangsters in power.