State of the Beer

I finally got around to racking the Grove Street Honey Wheat lager this past weekend (and I’m glad it’s a lager, so I don’t feel too bad about having ended up leaving it in primary for eight weeks…).  It started out at 1.050 and hit 1.009, which is excellent; honey is great for efficient fermentation.  Nice light, clean taste.  It’ll be time to bottle in late July and time to drink it in early August, which should be perfect weather for this kind of beer.

I also finally made myself dump out the defunct barleywine.  I’ll try one again someday, but maybe not real soon; quite aside from the psychological blow of having all the expense I put into it go literally down the drain, it kept one of my carboys out of service for much too long.

As to what’s next, well, I still haven’t found the time to finish my mash tun, even though the remaining steps are relatively minor (cleaning up the burrs from making the slots will be a pain, though).  I’m going to try to get it done soon, but who knows.  If hop prices were lower, I’d be leaning toward an IPA, since I haven’t made one in a while, but as things stand that may not be practical.  When I come up with a recipe I’ll post it here.

Implicit Bias

It’s taken me a long time to get around to writing about it, unfortunately, but there was what I think was a very important article in Scientific American back in May about “implicit bias” — unconscious prejudices we all have, no matter how enlightened we think we are, and which affect our day-to-day behavior in ways we generally don’t notice.  Perhaps I’ve just missed it, but I feel like there was woefully insufficient recognition and discussion of the significance of this report (so there’s an additional mea culpa for my being so late in writing about it).

The key findings of this study, assuming I’m understanding the SciAm article correctly, are that these prejudices largely match stereotypes common in the culture; that they are generally things that, individually, seem quite small, rather than big, blatant, overtly hateful ideas; that even people who don’t consider themselves prejudiced do in fact display these biases; that denying the bias doesn’t reduce the degree to which it affects one’s behavior; and that acknowledging and being aware of the bias does.

Why does this seem so important to me?  Because this is (roughly) how liberals have always said prejudice works, and it’s not how conservatives think it works.  This is yet another example of reality’s well-known liberal bias, and it shows why (to take racism in particular as an example) “colorblindness,” high-dudgeon objections to “the race card” and attacks on affirmative action are not only based on a misguided understanding of the nature of prejudice, but actually work to reinforce prejudice, by silencing efforts to point it out and discuss it openly.

To my knowledge, the liberal/progressive view of prejudice has always held that it’s a systemic problem, reinforced by social norms and inculcated unconsciously, and only enforced by overt, ugly, violent hate at the very extremes — that to think of “racism” as being epitomized by the KKK missed the point entirely.  And the conservative view, by contrast, holds that prejudice is only that explicit hatred demonstrated by fringe hate groups, that bias is a characteristic of certain twisted individuals who make up those groups and not at all a trait embedded in the fabric of society.  So on the conservative view, to point out perceived bias is just an attempt by “special interest groups” to garner attention and guilt-trip society into awarding them special privileges; and if everyone stopped claiming to see prejudice everywhere, and thereby making people think about it, there wouldn’t be any more prejudice, because Americans are naturally fair-minded, and all those nasty extremist hate groups would just fade away into obscurity.

But as the SciAm article makes clear, that’s just not true at all, while the liberal view is pretty close to reality; and behaving according to the conservative view — discouraging any discussion of bias in the hopes that if ignored, those nasty prejudiced people (who of course aren’t us) will just go away — actually reinforces and encourages societal prejudice.

Surely I’m not the only one who sees how important this is; it’s very strange to me that I’ve seen so little discussion of it on other liberal blogs.  Many differences between conservatives and liberals are essentially matters of opinion, on which reasonable people can disagree, wherein each side seems “clearly” right if you accept their set of starting assumptions, and “clearly” wrong if you accept the other side’s (yes, of course, this “liberal vs. conservative” two-sides construction is a gross oversimplification).  This issue is no longer one of them, however.  One view — as it happens, the conservative one — is in fact simply, demonstrably, factually incorrect.

Our Impoverished Discourse, Our Impoverished Thought

This will, I expect, be the first of many posts on, or related to, this topic; so here I’m not really going to do more than sketch out some ideas.I’m not a big believer in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least not as I think it’s commonly understood — not in its reductive, absolutist formulation — but on the other hand it seems plain that the way we talk about things and the way we think about things are closely connected, and the one can influence the other.

Four Decades of Mourning

Forty years ago last Friday, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, capping off five awful years of murdered political and civil rights leaders.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like to live through those years — but I don’t need to imagine the long years of cynicism and hopelessness that followed, because I’ve lived three-quarters of them.  To have the promise of real, positive change so violently cut down so many times must have felt as though some malign force beyond mortal ken were deliberately crushing all hope for a better future.  It’s no wonder conspiracy theories sprung up; but the explanation I find both more plausible and more terrifying than some notion of a shadowy cabal manipulating the levers of power is this: that American society up to and in the 1960s was (and, to a greater extent than many of us would like to think, still is) so hidebound, so racist, so terrified of change, and that certain strains of conservative thought, capitalist/anti-communist ideology, violent nativism, heroic mythology and valorization of vigilantism, and anti-intellectual populism are so deeply woven into American culture, that in the face of attempts to bring about radical change in the social system — even in ways that in the short run will hurt only those who enjoy unearned privileges at others’ expense, and in the long run work to everyone’s benefit — individuals willing to commit acts of violence, murder and terrorism in the name of preserving an oppressive status quo will arise organically, and communities will be willing to tolerate or turn a blind eye to them.

(It’s true that this is not really a good explanation for RFK’s assassination, as Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian Christian who was angry over Kennedy’s support for Israel in the Six-Day War, or mentally disturbed, or both.  He had lived in the US since the age of 12, so he very likely absorbed something of these cultural traits, but a twelve-year-old, though impressionable, is also already pretty strongly enculturated.  But even if the motivations of the assassin himself do not fit the pattern of the previous five years, the assassination, and its cultural repercussions, fit all too well.)

The title of this post, then, is meant to suggest not that we have been in mourning specifically for RFK for forty years — but for the radical hope of the ’60s, to which the final deathblow seemed to have been delivered on June 5th, 1968.