On Bigotry and it's Advantages:

It's labor day weekend. I was out for a ride yesterday, Saturday, evening, and stopped at a bar near Grass Valley. Not to drink so much as just to talk. A man I was speaking with outside the front door told me a bit about the town we were in. He mentioned, among other things, that there were many bigots in the town. I think that's going to be the case everywhere.

Anywho, I mention this because my conversation with him got me thinking about the advantages of bigotry. Now that I think about it, bigotry exists because it is a tool that has aided the survival of humanity over the years. I would go so far as to say that bigotry is an unavoidable characteristic of all life. It is true that it is not a constructive way of resolving a problem, but to the bigot, some problems need not be solved, only conquered. (Ha, this makes me think of Gödel's incompleteness theorems!) Is conquer not a solution? Bigotry can be a helpful tool for uniting like minded people, like a common point of identity, to drive a cause.

:-) For example, there is, in our country, an enormous bigotry toward the middle eastern culture and religion. It is true (is it not?) that this puts up a wall between our people and those of the middle east, but it also makes us more tolerant of our behavior toward them. Our bigoted intolerance of them is used to build tolerance of our own.

I don't like using examples like that. They are too personal. I and others (that I identify with) identify with this country, so to say that it, the country, is something is to say that we are something. I am not necessarily as objective if I am thinking about something that I identify with... The idea that made me think of the above example was that of the warring tribes I read and heard about in history class so many years ago. Can one fight against another if they do not believe in the purpose of their cause? In the case of two warring tribes, they may be fighting over natural or economic resources. To win a fight and gain those resources is undoubtedly helpful for either tribe, but who is just in taking those resources?

Assuming possession of the other tribes resources could be the means of their demise. Does one tribe deserve to live over the other? If two tribes are fighting over the only watering hole for 100 miles in the middle of the Sahara desert, there is no question that each knows the consequences of their actions. Whether the watering hole is large enough to support both tribes or not, to make war against the other is to assume that they are not as deserving of that resource. In this case, the tribe which is the most strongly bigoted against the other may have an advantage in fighting against them. For that tribe, bigotry is the characteristic of their perceived differences from the other tribe and the justice in their actions because of those differences.

For a moment, I felt like saying that it is also a tool of faith, but I don't believe this is the case. It is a tool of religion, perhaps. This, of course, is dependent on there being a difference between faith in general and faith in religion. Religion is something that persists in time. For this to happen, it has to have somewhat rigid doctrine. Bigotry is an unavoidable consequence of this. Faith with out religion can change. For me, faith feels like questioning, listening, and trying to humble myself. If I am rigid in what I believe, I have nothing to question, and no answer to search and listen for. If I am not humble, I become more rigid. The bigot is not humble? Perhaps I am bigoted against bigotry.

Hrm... I've got a bunch more to say about bigots :-), but I'm far enough down this train of thought for tonight.