Image courtesy of The Public Domain Archive
Capitalism
Definition: The economic system that replaced feudalism in the 19th century. Until then wealth was in land. Not just the rock and soil but the output of the labor on it, which was controlled first by slavery and serfdom but then by workers having no other way of making a living.
Capitalism replaced land ownership with "capital"—wealth in money. Capitalism in those days meant starting a business, making a profit and putting the profit back into the business to make it better or expand it. It was strongly supported by what today we call the "Left." The "Right" were the landowners. But that sort of Capitalism evolved into industrialization, factories, 12-hour, six-days-a-week labor at subsistence-level wages, including for nine-year-olds. That was when the Left fell out of love with Capitalism and it became the darling of the rich.
Today's Capitalism bears only a faint resemblance to the original idea of a hard-working man (not yet a woman) starting up a successful business and plowing the profits back into it, as well as paying a "dividend" to people who had invested the start-up or expansion for the new enterprise. Capitalism now is Wall Street, big banks. They control corporations and are themselves part of a handful of financial overlords who control or own them. Capitalism today means the opposite of its original meaning. Now it's money itself that is the manufactured product, created by complicated financial manipulations that amount to something very much like a casino or a Ponzi scheme. Only, as happened in 2008-2009, when it becomes obvious there's no there there—just "derivatives" and "credit default swaps," the federal government steps in and supplies trillions of dollars to save those financial institutions from going bankrupt and bringing down the entire economy.
Socialism
My Conservative friends don't distinguish between Socialism and Communism. They believe that either idea means the government owns everything and individual initiative is stifled, everyone reduced to ciphers, political and economic zombies. These friends don't recognize that fire departments, toll-free highways, garbage collection, public education, tax exemption for religious organizations, clean air and water, and a host of other services Conservatives take for granted, are "socialism." All the word means (without the capital "S") is neighborliness, being "sociable," people pooling resources by funds they agree to collect for the common good. Farmers getting together to build a barn for a neighbor is socialism. If you want to argue, Ah, but nobody is taxed to put up the new barn, it's done with free labor, freely donated. But that's not true. By helping out a neighbor without getting any cash money in return does not mean the neighbor doesn't "owe you." Payment for the labor you gave him is a credit s/he is obliged to make good on when you need help yourself. Most of human economic activity as far back as there is evidence to go by involves this kind of credit economy. A neighboring farmer needs to borrow your horse to bring in his harvest. You give it to him with a smile and ask nothing in return. But both of you know that you will expect and get something from him when you need it.
Religion>
Most people believe that without religion people would run amok, robbing, murdering, raping. They say the wars and genocides of the 20th century are ample evidence for this belief. With "God dead," as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, any moral restraint people had for not engaging in atrocious behavior is gone. Never mind that the worst war in European history was the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, which was between Christians. The pope at the time didn't want the war to end on the terms negotiated, even after one third of Europe's population had died. For more than a thousand years popes had de facto control of European politics. They ordered wars rather than prevented them. Think the Crusades. Think how modern popes and cardinals have supported wars, not stopped them (the Cardinal Archbishop of New York when he addressed the troops in Vietnam told them they were on a "crusade").
But you can go back much earlier in history to find organized religion not just supporting but claiming a divine mandate for oppression and genocide, starting with the biblical Book of Joshua. The so-called Pilgrims of what is today New England believed they were God's chosen people, as has the nation they helped to found. Only, instead of "chosen people" that later iteration of the nation used words like "Manifest [meaning "obvious"] Destiny. Even today no serious candidate for president will admit to being an atheist. When Bernie Sanders was running in the primaries in 2016, the Hillary Clinton machine thought they could gain votes in West Virginia by telling voters he was a Jew. To their surprise the voters there didn't have a problem voting for a Jew. What they would not do, though, was vote for an atheist.
Can any religion, with few exceptions, claim to be more moral than non-believers? The revelation of widespread sexual abuse of children that goes on in all organized religions is only the most obvious and shocking recent example of the immorality of the religious. Venality, theft of church funds, support for racism distributed among all three major religions and in all parts of the US... at least it's hard to think of any "sin" the religious aren't guilty of as much as unbelievers.
Black/Race
We all think we understand what we mean by those words. It seems even more obvious than the other words/ideas above. We even have checkoff boxes on the census forms for "race" or "ethnicity." But Black is not just an ethnic/racial description as the words Irish, German, Hungarian, Mexican once were. It seems silly to us now to imagine those other non-Anglo Saxon peoples as races. "Race" has been shown to have no significant biological basis, any more than eye color or hair color does. "Ethnicity" has replaced the older meaning of Race. It indicates factors other than physical appearance such as language, customs, food, music, etc. All of those categories used to be understood as Race, which as late as the first third of the 20th century was the term used in courts of law to describe anywhere from three to 42 different "races."
But "Black" is another matter, in a category of its own. Few among us would hesitate to use the word "race," even in a benign manner, to describe someone of African ancestry. Every other "ethnic" category is flexible. Latino, Asian, Native American, all the other boxes we can check on the census form do not stand for a fixed biological identity valid even after several generations of intermarriage with Whites. Our universities and colleges are of the same opinion. An applicant for admission to just about any US college can claim Black "privilege" even if their Black ancestor is one who lived hundreds of years ago—conflating in a bizarre bit of mental sophistry racial prejudice with racial privilege.
Senator Elizabeth Warren admits to checking off the "Native American" box on her application to Harvard, thereby getting a leg up over non-racial, i.e., White applicants. She did so because, she said, there was a family tradition that there was a remote ancestor who was American Indian. But does anyone look at Senator Warren and see "Indian" the way they would look at someone of equally distant descent from African ancestry, no matter how "White"-looking they may be, and not see Black?
The truth is, "Black" is neither a "racial" identity nor an ethnic one. It's a caste. There are historical reasons for this. The so-called one-drop rule adopted in the Jim Crow era after the Civil War was a way of making sure no one of African ancestry could ever "pass" for White (tens of thousands already had and still do, including one of Jefferson's sons by his slave-wife Sally Hemmings). But the chances are pretty good that if you consider yourself to be White, you actually have some genes, between two and 20 percent of your total, that are African. Some of those genes were acquired during the time of slavery, but others were picked up through marriage, not to a Black person but to someone you or your ancestor believed to be pure White. Every year for at least the last two centuries, thousands of "Black" men have passed for White and married White women. Genes get around.
Why is "Black" an identity all its own, a true caste like the ones in India, unlike any other identities which can be, literally, altered by an act of Congress, such as the Federal Housing Administration mortgage program in 1935 which made everyone except "Negroes" eligible for home ownership, in effect eliminating those dozens of racial categories judges had had to deal with. All Ethnic groups became at least honorary Whites. Why not Americans of African descent?
Partly this is was because of real "racial" prejudice. Even many people of African descent (including some historians White or Black) believe prejudice is natural, that people feel an aversion toward the Other, especially if they can identify them by obvious physical characteristics. But history shows this is not the case. It's actually the other way around.
Maybe we need to come up with new names for all of these shopworn words. But new words mean a new way of thinking. The use of the word "faith" in recent decades is an attempt to put a more sympathetic spin on the word "religion," which can be associated, at worst, with some of the most atrocious behavior humans have engaged in and at best an adherence to strict and mostly discredited dogma. It's hard to speak ill of someone's "faith." The word sounds so innocent, well-meaning. We would never speak of a White supremacist's "faith" in the superiority of Europeans over other peoples, or of someone who believed in witchcraft or Satan worship as a person of "faith." It's a word we use, consciously or not, to rehabilitate an old and morally discredited word with a new, acceptable one.
Likewise for "Capitalism" and "Socialism." By using those words in the twisted meanings they have for most people, we are trying to hold on to concepts not descriptive of today's reality. Capitalism rooted not in production of useful commodities but in the manipulation of money, sometimes called "financial capitalism," has little to do with the original meaning of that word for those who embraced it as a liberation from serfdom. And the same anachronistic thinking that goes into our ideas of Capitalism or Socialism is true for Religion as well. Replacing that word with "Faith" gives the illusion of something better than "Religion."
Anti-Semitism/antisemitism
Another word without a meaning, at least not a meaning rooted in something other than what its user wants it to mean. It started out its life in the 19th century and was, ironically, coined by what today we would call antisemites. A Semite is someone who speaks a Semitic language like Arabic or Hebrew. Neither of those categories are descriptive of someone who practices, or whose European ancestors practiced, the Jewish religion. But the original use of the word was coined, by Anti-Semites, to set apart Jews (however you choose to define that word) as a race in the sense of a physical, genetic entity.
Why do we call a prejudice against Muslims Islamophobia but not, usually, prejudice against Jews as Judeophobia? Is it because the word anti-Semitism (not capitalizing it does not erase its root meaning) means something everyone knows, or think they know, the meaning of? Arabic Jews were Semites like other Arabs, but if someone's ancestors lived in Europe for more than a millennium and spoke one of a variety of European languages (except in religious ceremony, much as Latin was the ritual language of Christians). Or is it because Jews who have lived in every part of the world, from Bejing to Lima, are descended from a people who lived in the ancient land of Israel, a claim not supported by any objective history?
Why hold on to a word created by non-Jews to ostracize fellow Europeans from their common nation? Before the invention of nation-states (meaning political entities, not just related peoples) in the late 18th century, a Jew could become a full-fledged member of a society by converting (in Western Europe a citizen of France, Germany, et. al). Being Jewish meant belonging to a religion, not a race, which to be sure did not mean being exempt from persecution on that account.
Words can be predigested thought, baby food for the mind. They are also fences ("define" derives from a Latin word that means "setting boundaries"). It's only by going beyond those boundaries, seeing the original meanings are no longer applicable, that new words are required, new ideas, ways of seeing the present reality, not the ones we hold onto or despise like a child clutching its disintegrating but still favorite doll, that we can come to any kind of possibility of seeing things as they are, not as they used to be 50, 100, or 1,000 years ago. And that can require courage, even an audacity in the face of the general consensus that makes physical bravery seem like a walk in the park.
