How We're Put Together

Freud’s last book, and probably his most famous, is Civilization and Its Discontents . In it he discusses the sacrifices of enjoyment that are required to participate in civilized life and the stress of having to behave ourselves. Both our violent and our sexual impulses have to be inhibited and reorganized. But I want to turn to another kind of discontent: the generations of forced labor over several thousand years, including today, that make civilizations possible. The achievements of civilization are indeed remarkable, and they go back at least as far as   to ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, China, Greece, Rome. There were, of course, magnificent civilizations in the Americas, but these were largely destroyed by European invaders before they were able to teach us much. But the others created and bequeathed to us developments in the arts – including architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature, as well as the foundations of the sciences, technology, philos...

Heard on the Old Mole Variety Hour (kboo.fm), April 30, 2018 Near the end of his recent book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America , Ibram X. Kendi asks, “When will the day arrive when Black lives will matter to Americans? It depends,” he says, “on the strategies antiracists use to stamp out racist ideas.” The whole 500-page, highly readable book demonstrates that previous strategies going back to the days of abolition in the early 19 th Century will not work. The white power structure benefits from racial disparities: those disparities impede working class solidarity and put a brake on wages. They create and maintain an underclass who can be counted on to work at low-status jobs for minimal wages. So there is no way that moral persuasion or education about the value of black lives will alter the racist policies still in effect. As Kendi writes, Trying to educate these powerful producers or defenders or ignorers of Amer...