That’s a fair point; however, I don’t think it undermines my overall claims very much. I think the lack of rule of law for black Americans was bad in a comparable way to how the lack of rule of law for various European colonies was bad. That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
I’m speaking speculatively here, but I don’t know that it didn’t leak out and undermine the mechanism that supported productive and functional societies. The sophisticated SJW in me suggests that this is part of what caused the eventual (though not yet complete) erosion of those mechanisms.
It seems like if you have “rule of law” that isn’t evenly distributed, actually what you have is collusion by one class of people to maintain a set of privileges at the expense of another class of people, where one of the privileges is a sand-boxed set of norms that govern dealings within the privileged class, but with the pretense that the norms are universal.
This kind of pretense seems like it could be corrosive: people can see that the norms that society proclaims as universal actually aren’t. This reinforces a a sense that the norms aren’t real at all (or at least) a justified sense that the ideals that underly those norms are mostly rationalizations papering over the collusion of the privileged class.
eg when it looks like “capitalism” and “democracy” are scams supporting “white supremacy”, you grow disenchanted with capitalism and democracy, and stop doing the work to maintain the incomplete versions of those social mechanisms that were previously doing work in your society?
That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place
Coming back to this a year later...this seems pretty implausible to me, especially when the people in a separate category are physically proximal, for largely for social-psychological reasons.
It seems hard to maintain a trust in the justice of the court system, if a whole class of people is colluding against a disempowered class of people, specifically to keep them disempowered. To believe in the court system while the court system is very evidently subverting its stated ends in that way requires a massive load-bearing blindspot, which seems like it would interfere with your ability to reason about courts and justice. And many people, instead of developing a blindspot, will just (reasonably) loose faith in the justice of the court system.
That’s a fair point; however, I don’t think it undermines my overall claims very much. I think the lack of rule of law for black Americans was bad in a comparable way to how the lack of rule of law for various European colonies was bad. That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
I’m speaking speculatively here, but I don’t know that it didn’t leak out and undermine the mechanism that supported productive and functional societies. The sophisticated SJW in me suggests that this is part of what caused the eventual (though not yet complete) erosion of those mechanisms.
It seems like if you have “rule of law” that isn’t evenly distributed, actually what you have is collusion by one class of people to maintain a set of privileges at the expense of another class of people, where one of the privileges is a sand-boxed set of norms that govern dealings within the privileged class, but with the pretense that the norms are universal.
This kind of pretense seems like it could be corrosive: people can see that the norms that society proclaims as universal actually aren’t. This reinforces a a sense that the norms aren’t real at all (or at least) a justified sense that the ideals that underly those norms are mostly rationalizations papering over the collusion of the privileged class.
eg when it looks like “capitalism” and “democracy” are scams supporting “white supremacy”, you grow disenchanted with capitalism and democracy, and stop doing the work to maintain the incomplete versions of those social mechanisms that were previously doing work in your society?
Coming back to this a year later...this seems pretty implausible to me, especially when the people in a separate category are physically proximal, for largely for social-psychological reasons.
It seems hard to maintain a trust in the justice of the court system, if a whole class of people is colluding against a disempowered class of people, specifically to keep them disempowered. To believe in the court system while the court system is very evidently subverting its stated ends in that way requires a massive load-bearing blindspot, which seems like it would interfere with your ability to reason about courts and justice. And many people, instead of developing a blindspot, will just (reasonably) loose faith in the justice of the court system.