Hi Raymond (if I may; please, call me Aaron!), sorry for the delay in response. I'm on vacation on the sun-bleached island of Rhodes. Kalimera!
I agree that the social construct of "race" is here to stay. With this essay, I'm basically batting clean-up before I move on to the new season of the podcast and other topics on Substack (although there may be some more special episodes of the podcast with interviews on this topic now and then), so with my parting words I was hoping to offer some advice based on a few sequential lines of argument:
1) Hobbes was right to insist that fear and distrust pervade human interaction (although I'm not sure about the debased-state-of human-existence-outside-of-social-contract thing).
2) Our negotiation of those fears gives us basically everything we have, both very good and very bad.
3) Thus, the realization that "race" is among those things we've socially constructed is maybe a bit trivial—it doesn't inform our decision about whether to abandon the practice of sub-species categorization. Instead, we have other, normative grounds for modifying that practice
4) We are not powerless in the face of emergent social phenomena like "race." We can self-reflect and change the rules as we see fit (E.g., we can implement targeted affirmative action rules—always with the fact in the back of our minds that being an individual doesn't usually feel like being the token of some category—or changing the word we use to talk about categories of human diversity.
5) One self-reflective bit of rule-changing will inevitably be a disdain for other's proposed changes and a subsequent impulse for retribution.
My advice is that we foster a well-trained meta-motivational self-reflection—in public, in private, in science—of the fact that this process is inevitable, and thus to give perceived dangers less credence. That is the most pragmatic rule change of them all.
What do you think? Is this advice just tautological cold comfort?
Hi Raymond (if I may; please, call me Aaron!), sorry for the delay in response. I'm on vacation on the sun-bleached island of Rhodes. Kalimera!
I agree that the social construct of "race" is here to stay. With this essay, I'm basically batting clean-up before I move on to the new season of the podcast and other topics on Substack (although there may be some more special episodes of the podcast with interviews on this topic now and then), so with my parting words I was hoping to offer some advice based on a few sequential lines of argument:
1) Hobbes was right to insist that fear and distrust pervade human interaction (although I'm not sure about the debased-state-of human-existence-outside-of-social-contract thing).
2) Our negotiation of those fears gives us basically everything we have, both very good and very bad.
3) Thus, the realization that "race" is among those things we've socially constructed is maybe a bit trivial—it doesn't inform our decision about whether to abandon the practice of sub-species categorization. Instead, we have other, normative grounds for modifying that practice
4) We are not powerless in the face of emergent social phenomena like "race." We can self-reflect and change the rules as we see fit (E.g., we can implement targeted affirmative action rules—always with the fact in the back of our minds that being an individual doesn't usually feel like being the token of some category—or changing the word we use to talk about categories of human diversity.
5) One self-reflective bit of rule-changing will inevitably be a disdain for other's proposed changes and a subsequent impulse for retribution.
My advice is that we foster a well-trained meta-motivational self-reflection—in public, in private, in science—of the fact that this process is inevitable, and thus to give perceived dangers less credence. That is the most pragmatic rule change of them all.
What do you think? Is this advice just tautological cold comfort?