From: joe@spdcc.com (Joseph Francis)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Do hard times cause hate?
Keywords: economics, cause, prejudice, sociology
Date: 6 Jan 93 11:12:53 GMT
Article-I.D.: spdcc.1993Jan6.111253.6471
Organization: S.P. Dyer Computer Consulting, Cambridge MA

In article <lkk511INNaa3@news.bbn.com> rrizzo@star-trek.bbn.com (Ron Rizzo) writes:
>
>
>        	HARD TIMES AND HATE
>
>
>I haven't been reading the net much for months (due to my workload)
>so I don't know if there's been any discussion of the following topic
>or if anyone's already criticized the notion as I do below.
>
>The past year a lot of people (in politics, the media and punditry) 
>have said something like, economic hardship causes more outbursts of
>bigotry as people look for scapegoats.  Both they and their audience
>seem to take this as proven.

[good summary: I thought Adorno had been discredited long ago, but it
seems it is fairly recently]

>To sum up, the simple idea that hard times causes an increase in bigotry
>because different social groups are competing, or perceive themselves as
>competing, for scarcer resources, is a gross oversimplification.  The idea
>as baldly stated was discarded by serious investigators years ago, it
>overlooks decades of focussed social research, and it is probably simply
>wrong.  

It also overlooks the growth of media-feedback. An interesting
criticism that I've heard by Germans of Neo-Nazi activity in Germany
had to do with the fact that these kids were getting tremendous media
attention, and feeding on it. Simplistic, but on a mass scale
(American fundamentalism) I think there is a real tendency to want to
go along with the party.

Personally, I marked a strong start of the decline in U.S. Standards
of Living with the advent of AIDS. I've never seen an adequate
analysis of the societal impact of removing 200,000 of the best and
brightest men of a generation from circulation during a time of
relative prosperity. In a strong sense, they could act as agents to
make gentle heavy-handed male heterosexual aggression in a number of
spheres. I remember noting to myself that the peak of 'sex sells' in
advertising (or rather: female sexuality sells) as noted by newspapers
and magazines, for newly sexually aggressive advertising, that this
was at a point when HIV deaths were peaking in NY, LA, and SF. Can it
be difficult to connect the loss of gay male sensibility with an
onslaught of het male sensibility? It was a relief to note that
towards the end of the '80s, lesbians and nominally straight women
started taking reins which were for the most part left open. (I've
remarked in the past about how much magazine writing, editing, and
publishing is now done by women).

>I don't think we or lesgay leaders and organizations should contribute
>to easy assent to this idea.  We should examine what we say, as well
>as what others say about us, when discussing the times and why they've
>soured so much.

>The idea has a dangerous aspect to it.  It seems to predestine us to
>abuse.  When people adopt such an idea, then to that degree they become
>fatalistic, and emotionally, if not intellectually, fatalism tends
>ever so little to dull us morally, making us less likely as onlookers 
>to intervene or protest and as victims to fight back or feel outraged.

Also, it really, to me, is putting the cart before the horse. there is
a good book on Native American homosexualities, "The Spirit and the
Flesh", where it was noted that some tribal lore indicated (to
paraphrase) that when the last gay died, it would be the end of
civilization.  I think we have been given a taste of that eventuality
ever so slightly right now.
-- 
US Jojo; damp, slighly soiled, but tasty nonetheless.
Newsgroups: soc.motss