There's a story that's been on my mind since... well, roughly November 10th, let's be real. Nothing I find interesting happens much in my daily life, and I hate posting links or memes unless I can add further context to them, so if I post at all it will tend to be related to political philosophy.
Growing up we lived in a re-purposed school house, old school Little House on the Prairie looking stuff. The first floor had a side room that was a sort of teacher's study, complete built in cupboard designed to hold books. Previous owners as best as I could tell tended to leave the books there, including whatever books they themselves had picked up. So we had things like encyclopedias from the 30s, atlases from the 70s, so on.
My mom was on a major religious kick through most of the 90s (hilarious in retrospect), and the atlas had little summaries of each country in terms of religious makeup, governmental system, major exports, so on. So the fact that Iran had a theocracy really stuck in my memory. And at some point as a somewhat older child (I dunno, 13? That area) I remember learning a bit about medieval Europe and the Church and coming back to that.
So I had this whole logic chain. Medieval Europe was pretty terrible, and being run entirely by the Church was probably a big part of that. Islam was formed about 600 years after Christianity, so of course their system of government is about 600 years removed from the modern world. So sure, things are bad there now, but in a few hundred years it'll probably turn around.
That makes sense, right?
Sure, if you don't know anything about Islam, the history of Iran, western influence in the middle east throughout the entire 20th century...
Y'know, like that the 8th century caliphates weren't meaningfully different from their European contemporaries in terms of stability, technology, etc etc. Or that a lot of the turmoil in the middle east and Africa in modernity stem in part from a bunch of nations being formed around arbitrary lines on the map with no regard to which cultural groups were living where. Or that Iran's previous government was an extreme pro-US oppressor, so the resistance movements against him tended to be a wholesale rejection of the west... which means hearkening back to fundamentalist forms of Islam and reinstating a religious caliphate.
Y'know, basically that the worse people feel about their future, the more they turn to fundamentalism. Even though this provably only makes the situation worse.
But let's circle back around. Why did I come to that original conclusion? Because I was starting from the assumption that middle eastern countries are backwards, and that Islam was inferior socially and technologically, and worked from there to find the simplest explanation for that based on the little bit I knew about it.
Which is to say, I didn't know something and let racism fill in the blanks.
This is the sort of racism people struggle with. It's great that the average person doesn't think it's okay to be rude or hateful or violent to someone because of their race. But that's just one component of racism. Lazy thinking, letting stereotypes and things we assume to be true fill in the blanks of real knowledge and appreciating the complexity of the world.
So if you see liberal or other leftist types talking about racism, this is what they're talking about. I imagine most white lefties could tell a story very like this, where learning history and philosophy and religion revealed just how easy a trap being racist can be. And it's a daily struggle to look at your feelings and watch those same thoughts, or ones built the same way, creep back in because the human brain needs stereotypes to function to some degree- remembering every detail of every subject all the time keeps you from noticing things changing, and changes are critical to survival. Oh shit there's a deer in the road gotta break.
And over time reflecting on your own thoughts and beliefs can become second nature. But this causes another trap; I spent a long time telling this story, but I can remember the basic process in seconds and do it all the time if I'm engaged in thoughtful activity. The temptation becomes the assumption that someone who believes otherwise is simply refusing the engage in the same mental work, and is willfully ignorant. So instead of breaking down the process, you jump straight to the conclusion. And this is the failing of many leftists. We've tried hard to learn and stay engaged, but settled for the easy way out of simply ignoring people who disagree rather than finding the root of the disagreement.
And for a lot of people I can't fault that. Explaining something you experience daily to someone who just doesn't see it is an enormous mental and sometimes even physical effort, and you need that to navigate daily life. But if you did arrive at liberal viewpoints intellectually, the duty of taking that time and spending that energy does kinda fall to us.
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