Divide and rule

[I don't really feel confident that I have bottomed out all my arguments here, particularly around gender and sex. But I am sharing this in the hope that comments, either public or private, will help me do so.]

Early in my post-2020 reading of BLM literature I came across how whites use "divide and rule" to maintain systems that provide whites with material benefits while denying those benefits to non-whites. I bristled at this, thinking "I am white and I don't use divide and rule".

Since then I have learnt much that enables me to examine divide and rule without bristling. And now I see it in operation all around me - not necessarily dividing whites and non-whites but generally dividing people who have more in common than these externally imposed divisions allow.

I think part of my bristling may have come from thinking that even where the consequence of some action might be to divide and rule, that was maybe not the consequence intended by the (usually white) person or persons taking that action. Again, since then I have come to think that whether it was or was not intended does not particularly matter - the outcome remains.

So perhaps this should be seen as a caution about taking any form of action, the often-repeated law of unintended consequences best summed up for me by John Cage: Don't try to change the world, you will only make matters worse.

We live in a world where people have for millennia taken and continue to take actions that have the consequence of dividing and ruling. When considering race and racism, the key learning is that race is an invention, a fiction - there is only one race, the human race. The first underpinning of this assertion is that science can find no biological correlate to race. This follows a couple of centuries of scientists working hard to establish such correlates, and ultimately failing. For a while, including the lifetimes of many alive today, science was at best unclear whether or not correlates existed. This means that there are still many people who believe that racial differences are backed up by science, as that is what they may have learned when young, at least in a "the jury's out" kind of way. But to hold such beliefs today is to deny the current scientific understanding. It is a solved problem: race is an invention. We know that humanity began in Africa. Every person living today is a direct descendant of an African Black woman.

The second learning that shows that race is an invention derives from more recent historical study that pinpoints the invention of race to 1661. To my mind this date feels suspiciously precise, but the broad argument feels sound to me: at some point in history a bunch of people whose skin colour was pale found it expedient to claim superiority over people whose skin colour was dark. The particular expediency that justified this was that it then enabled them to justify trading other darker skinned people as slaves. To further this idea they defined themselves as white and the others as black. White people could then feel fine about enslaving black people, and the slave trade could then flourish.

Each of these foundations to the assertion that race is an invention is open to question. There are those who deny science and there are those who deny historical interpretation. For my part, I am 100% sure about the scientific argument and probably about 90% sure about the historical argument. That's because I know a fair bit about science and I know not much about history.

But also, I am deeply suspicious about binaries: behind every binary I look for the lurking continuum that tells the truer story.

It occurs to me right now, looking at binaries from the perspective of divide and rule, that every binary that acts as a false stand in for a continuum is an artificial division, and every artificial division results in winners on one side and losers on the other, and so the other thing to seek out when considering a false binary is who benefits, who loses out, or who gets to rule and who gets to be ruled over? 

In the false binary of race, it is abundantly clear that those who are racialized as white gain from the division, and those who are racialised as black lose out. In this particular case the gains and losses are obscenely great.

The male/female binary has much in common with the white/black race binary. What becomes harder to tease out is that there are two aspects: gender and sex. Are both inventions? 

Perhaps it matters less whether or not they are inventions than whether or not they are false binaries? Or maybe we should simply be asking ourselves: who benefits?

For centuries in much of the world, those who are gendered as male are the ones who benefit, and those who are gendered as female are those who lose out.

That statement feels dodgier than the equivalent one about race - there are many people who celebrate that they are gendered as female, despite the society they live in being a patriarchy. But then again, being black and proud is something many people who have been racialized as black profess to feel.

Looking at these two equivalent phenomena through a divide and rule lens makes them less something to celebrate. It is understandable that if you find yourself growing up in a world that has already divided you into a socially inferior category then you will want to push back to finding things to celebrate in that category. But in doing so you are further entrenching the division, thus colluding with the society that has foisted that category upon you, and thereby making that category so much harder to look beyond.

Of course, the same applies when society has sorted you into a socially superior category - all those lovely social benefits you find you have make it very hard to look beyond that category. But over time, nagging doubts creep in. Do you really deserve those benefits? Do those who have been denied them deserve their fate? And what should you do when you realize that you have something in common with those on the other side of the dividing line? Each division divides individuals from those aspects of their selfhood that lie on the other side of the dividing line. Each division lessens us all, whichever side it divides us into.

Rather than celebrating the divisions we find ourselves in we have to find ways of living together outside those divisions. To do so we must blind ourselves to them.

We are born into societies that divide us along so many different axes. Maybe we do have a choice as to whether or not we accept those divisions, but we are already well established in our various divisions before we begin to question them, making it all the harder to blind ourselves to them. We find ourselves in a capitalist society, and we behave as capitalists, and make seeking to maximize our earnings our number one priority, regardless of whether or not this is truly in our best interests. This is groupthink - because those around us are doing it, we do it as well. In contrast, critical thinking requires an effort of will - you will be swimming against the tide of public opinion.

Incidentally, it seems to me that capitalism divides without creating an obvious binary. Divisions of wealth are no less corrosive than divisions of race or gender, but capitalism is not just about how much money you have, or don't have. It is a mindset, a way of thinking. It is also an invention - it is not a necessary component of human society. Who does it serve? It serves entrepreneurs, stock market traders and venture capitalists; it does not serve nurses, or anyone whose ability to earn capital is correlated to the number of hours they are able to work. 

Maybe the capitalist binary is between those who have enough money to use it to make yet more money, and those who do not. But it is also a binary that separates those of us who see nothing wrong with using money to make money and those of us who find the idea deeply troubling. If you think the latter group would be vanishingly small in comparison with the former, consider that a tenet of Islam is that the use of money to make money is prohibited.

Capitalism serves pirates and robber barons. These are the people who seek to amass wealth by whatever means society will let them get away with. As they amass more and more wealth they find themselves able to obtain positions of power that enable them to further redefine to their advantage what society will allow. This is a project that has grown exponentially over the centuries until we now find ourselves in a time where the plunder is draining the planet of its last resources.

Divisions of race or gender inhibit our ability to find common cause across those divisions. How about capitalism? Can there be common cause between a robber baron and those he is robbing? That feels like a stretch of empathy too far for me. Add to that, most of the invented divisions I can think of exist to serve robber barons. So, is that the binary then - robber barons and the law abiding rest of us? Capitalism divides us into those who can stomach robbing others and those who can't? I'm still not sure if this is a useful line of inquiry.

Capitalism clearly divides and rules, and the division benefits the wealthy over the impoverished. The wealthy need not all be robber barons. Just as during the Atlantic slave trade there were a few slavers who benefitted greatly, alongside them were a far greater number of people who benefitted from the slavers' patronage: builders, furniture makers, architects among many. Substitute oligarchs and tech bros for slavers and much remains the same today. Are these servants of wealth titans being served by capitalism? Or more to the point, to what extent does their complicity enable this inequitable system to continue and become more and more mighty?

So far I have looked at divisive systems that we have all been born into. We did not invent race, gender or capital, our ancestors did. Or at least, my ancestors did. But somewhere midway through the course of my lifetime a new kid turned up on the block: the internet.

Is the internet divisive? Sure it is. It is divisive in many ways that mirror capitalism's divisiveness. It benefits those of us who can bend our brains to the ways of the computer, and those whose brains prove unable to bend lose out.

But this is just a generational thing, you might argue: in a generation or two we will all be tech savvy. I am not so convinced. Again, I see this as being like capitalism: we will all be working within its framing of the world to some extent or other, but some of us will be doing so to our benefit and others to our loss. And, just like the other divisions I've touched on, there are ways in which both the winners and losers in the internet world are all losing out.

It is fascinating for me that I witnessed the birth of the internet. You'd have to go back to the industrial revolution of the 19th century to see the birth of something anywhere near as world-changing, as mind-changing. 

At its outset, the internet was very different to what we see now. Some argue that the biggest world changer was not the internet itself but the World Wide Web. But back in the early days of the internet, capital had no hold. There was no Facebook, no Amazon. This is because in those early days the internet was the realm of geeks who were more interested in playing with it than trying to make money from it. That all changed once the capitalists got wind of it: Facebook, Amazon, Google and the like are the result.

And what did they do? Well, you probably know the story and I don't have much of an urge to tell it. Suffice to say that for the vast majority of internet users their use is as embedded in capitalism as any other aspect of their lives.

If we want to talk to each other now, we do so on social media. As we do so, we enter into an unspoken (OK, I know, Ts and Cs) agreement to do so in return for our privacy. Yet more than that, our every exchange takes place within the domain of capital. Every page view has one or more advertisements targeted at us. Our every click and view is monetized. We learn to accept that this is the price we pay for the delights on offer, and manage to convince ourselves that the price is small. 

When the BBC did a survey to find out what people thought of their website, young people complained that it was not very interesting because it had no adverts. In such insidious ways does capital tighten its grip on us. Will those children ever grow into adults who can see a better alternative?

Does social media divide and rule? Of course it does. We share heart emojis with the people in our silo and we troll the people in the other silo. It does not matter what those silos are, the important thing is that we are divided.

Who is this division important to? To the robber barons.

As long as we stay divided we will never come together to defeat them. Instead, we strive to become if not robber barons ourselves then one of their many servants rewarded with enough capital-defined status symbols to enable us to imagine that our lives are good, or at least good enough.

I have this feeling that I might be boring you by now. You may be agreeing with at least some of what I am saying, but thinking: well, what can we do about this? 

Thinking about these issues easily leads to an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The world is going to hell and there is nothing you or I or Greta can do about it.

Perhaps so. But while there is moonlight and music and love and romance, let's face the music and dance.

That lyric just popped into my head, but having done so I notice that the things it celebrates are things that come from a place in which divide and rule cannot operate. Moonlight, music, love, romance, dance. These are all aspects of the deep mystery of being human which race, gender, consumerism and virtual worlds cannot touch. Yes, capital's artefacts may provide endless distraction from our mysterious selves, but those mysteries remain waiting for us.

I can't say whether or not the world has a chance of avoiding catastrophe, but what about dancing while we wait and see? I don't mean fiddling while Rome burns. Let me be more specific:

Deny false binaries. Do not serve them.

Make connection with those from whom false binaries have divided us. 

Find common cause in our shared mysterious selves.

Don't be a robber baron.

In summary:

There are robber barons. They are the ones who divide and rule. They create divisions where one side has power over the other side. They then rule in two ways. First, they make sure that the division defines themselves as being on the side that has power: male, white, wealthy etc. Second, the existence of the division antagonizes those on either side of the division. The arguments that derive from this antagonization serve as a distraction while the robber barons continue their various robberies.

To overcome their rule we must become blind to their false binaries. Only then can we connect with our fellow humans who reject the robber baron mindset.