On taking truth and justice for granted

No picture can do justice to the original.

I don't watch television or read fiction anymore (unless I've needed to do so in order to teach my students), but the Game of Thrones universe plays with an interesting motif: "to break the wheel."  Daenerys was referring to a wheel of power through which the Iron Throne passed from Targaryen to Targaryen, connoting the wheel's crushing of resistance and of those found unfit to rule.

But I tend to interpret this metaphor a bit more broadly, as a representation of the political cycles of dominance and resistance.  My interpretation is inherent to Dany's; however, in the game of thrones, those resisting domination tend to do so only in order to dominate—themselves.

Therefore, I look toward a different breaking of the wheel, or at least toward a more exhaustively representative wheel to be broken.  If resistance is as cyclical as dominance, then the breaking of such a wheel would require an overcoming of both the resistors and the dominators or, in Freire's terms, of both the liberators and the oppressors—a transcendence, or at least a new wheel.

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For the minority who follow this blog consistently, this post could be considered a prequel to "It actually doesn't really matter if you're right."  The problem that I'm exploring predicates Edward Snowden's; stubbornness alone might seal our fate, even despite cowardice.

Snowden presumably broke, or at least exposed, the wheel of state mass surveillance in America.  "Presumably," because as I noted in that post, the status quo wasn't altered all that substantially even after the American public had hard evidence that their government was not to be trusted with their privacy or personal security.  The status quo spins on as the extremists among the governing and the governed continue to try to score points for themselves and their allies; the truth and justice among the relationships between both camps in America were merely adapted.

But those false senses of security and privacy that almost everyone outside of the NSA took for granted were challenged and, as a result, changed.  As with all other man-made constructs of the senses and reason, Snowden merely reminded us of their constructivism.  The truth of this perceived injustice merely altered people's senses of what can be "true" and "just."

In point of fact, our conceptions of truth and justice are artifacts, just like the words that we use to communicate them.  Ultimately, what we believe to be of most importance, even if it corresponds with the importances ascribed by the dominant authorities of our day—religious, political, or otherwise—exist as constructs.  Whether they're good or right doesn't allay their constructivity and therefore their ephemerality.

As a more-or-less life-long indiscriminate agnostic, I've been somewhat sensitive to this impermanency.  The Good and the right are only as good and as righteous as we will them to be.  Inherent goodness or rightness, (and inherence generally), is a dangerous proposition that should be consistently interrogated; as satisfying as it can be for one's world view, the ascription of inherent goodness or rightness to any value anticipates a harder fall when that construct's seams are exposed and sundered.

Moreover, if absolutely everyone you knew were in on an acclaimed lie, that claim would be indistinguishable from the truth.  I.e., if absolutely everyone you knew and trusted were lying to you, how would you know?  Their fallacious claim would be indistinguishable from the truth if your notion of truth were entangled in said claim.

Even fundamentality is constructed.  Our individualized/singular conceptions of the most fundamental elements or categories of our existences are culturally situated.  E.g., some would argue that biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry just applied physics, physics just applied mathematics, mathematics just applied epistemology, epistemology just applied ontology, ontology just applied epistemology, etc.

And not to break the divine wheel (or to reiterate its brokenness), but a classic case study of this trend remains worthy of the attention of the -structors: did God make humanity in His image, or did humanity make God in their image?  I tend to lean on the latter as an empiricist, but it's telling that even the most valued of values can be questioned, challenged, and imputed mortality.

Recently, I've been teaching my senior English students about Elie Wiesel's Night: the Nazis who coerced sonderkommandos to dig up the bodies of Hungarian Jews in Oświęcim in order to burn the evidence of their crimes also may have believed in their commitment to a construct of righteousness.  Trust our professional historians; many of the historical fascists were convinced that they were "right", and many were more than ready to die for the Nazi cause.  The fallaciousness and insecurity of their "rightness" could be identified and judged as false and deceitful only by those with other constructs.

It follows that, for humanity, fascism will always be right around the corner.  Not to beat the dead horse of the cliched cliché of George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and its endlessly compounded mimeses & parodies, but so long as truth and justice remain constructs of and by people, they will always be subject to erosion and potential destruction.

Ultimately, if we aren't willing to defend these constructs when it matters, then they won't be able to defend us when their essential meanings and consequences are all that stand between us and annihilation.  There's a real threat in denying or ignoring the constructivity of truth and justice until it's too late—too late for them to assist in the defense of the truthful and the just.

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A bunch of my white friends and allies tell me to avoid quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly (particularly in UofT graduate student governance spaces), seemingly insinuating that believing and/or attesting that he was right and just can be some form of appropriation.  Nonsensical of course, but we live in the era of woke cancel culture.  

MLK stood for something that most of us do not.  Make no mistake, MLK was hated and maligned by many of his contemporaries, even as he continued to make extreme personal sacrifices for his cause, as was basically every other person in history whose commitment to a truth and to a justice challenged others' commitments to inferior constructs of both.  Needless to say, the proportions of melanin in your skin do not determine the truthfulness of your words or the content of your character; the fact that this fact can be construed as taboo speaks volumes about the constructs of our day.  To break such a wheel as eloquently and bravely as MLK is something to which anyone and everyone should aspire.

But for us, to break the next cycle of domination and resistance, we need constructs worth preserving.  For me, MLK's righteousness, justice, and truth are worth the effort.

And so for not the first—and almost certainly not the last—time, I'll give MLK the final word, a paraphrasing of the original: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

On the fear of the intellect

If you can survive that poem, then you can probably survive this blog post.  Probably.

So this post was mostly a product of my reflections upon a rather poorly received and darker post that I published a couple of months ago.  If only the human project's obstacles were limited to not knowing what to do with the intellect.

In a world so dominated by conscientious educative processes, the pervasive fear of the essentially intellectual is perplexing, if not disheartening.  It's one of the greatest paradoxes at the fringes of human understanding.

From primary school play yards to international academic conferences, the fringes of human comprehensive potential tend to mark the beginnings of the antitheses to all things intellectual.

I have no problem admitting that I myself have a bit of an axe to grind regarding this particular historical tendency.  I've been told more than once to make my writing more accessible to my colleagues, particularly when broaching philosophers and philosophy in my academic writings.  Subsequently, I have lost more than a couple hours of sleep contemplating the question of the "Doctor of Philosophy."  Philia sophia isn't something one should limit to business hours for a corporate institution from Monday to Friday, if one's even getting that far.

I for one will probably never wear that honorific, except maybe in the final hour of written applications for a faculty position.  It's Adam.  You can call me soap if you want, or whatever; I give my students the same introduction.  My working class parents named me after A. J. Foyt; I'll put as much care into my name association as my parents did.  (I'll probably be publishing under a pseudonym for most of my more important writing.  A measure of humility and all that; there's gotta be at least one virtue ethicist left.)

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I was on a bit of a Jordan Peterson binge recently, not because I like or agree with the guy, but because I wanted to better understand why he's so maligned, (having been recently maligned myself by individuals with similar political affiliations), in the same way that I read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to better understand why I hate Aristotle.

After a sample of his lectures and reviewing some of his more controversial engagements, I realized that Jordan Peterson has in common that which led to the maligning of Christopher Hitchens, Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Nietzsche, and even Socrates: they all confronted the most sacred irrationalities of their respective epochs with a willing and courageous intellect distinct from their contemporaries.  

It's no coincidence that all of the aforementioned scholars were involved in the project of the academy in one capacity or another, and yet their most defining significance tended to be their willingness and courage to confront their contemporaries' intellectual weaknesses.  It follows that even our academic institutions have the odd tendency to fear the intellect.  The aforementioned scholars likely did not harbor a malicious or sadistic desire to harm their contemporaries (notably, the jury is still out for Peterson); they were all committed to the project of truth, to the honest and open truth of themselves and their interpreted realities.

Thus, even among professional academics, there's a tendency to malign or to reject that which they do not understand, and especially, to mischaracterize phenomena for which their understanding requires overcoming or transcending a certain established personal cognitive dissonance.  E.g., I've witnessed far too few academic freedom defenses in university institutions in the support of furthering the human project.  Instead, I've witnessed graduate students at my own institution using social justice education professors' writings against them for personal and political gain.  (Don't get me started on what's become of the university institution of tenure.)

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Essentially, the fear of the intellect, like most fears, tends to arise from the unknown.  Thought experiment: if you were the most intelligent person in the world, how would you know?  How would you validate this?  You could write a bunch of books, requiring you to synthesize and crystallize your understanding.  But only you would have the knowledge of what it meant for you to know what you thought and think you know.  This same problem is partly why I've been perennially skeptical of the concept of "genius."  How can one know that someone is a genius without they themselves having the "genius" necessary to appreciate this alleged "genius"?  By such logic, ascribing genius can become self-gratifying.  It's a label slapped on seemingly intellectual phenomena for the sake compartmentalization.  It's akin to referring to certain forms of the intellect as "magic."

To have the strongest or most vibrant intellect among your peers is to then also be the most alone.  At best, one could attempt to self- validate their intellect or, as institutionalized in our context, seek a credential among a community of like-intellectuals.  But, the problem remains: at the peak of specialization, you're an island unto yourself.  It's ironic; the beginnings and ends of most academic journeys can be equally plagued by imposter syndrome, plagued by the unknown of the validated and eventually the validity of the unknown.

This follows since, as social animals, our rationality is bound up in our relations. There's a constantly evolving collective rationality among human tribes.  The etymology of that word can be helpful here: its radix, ratio, evokes reckoning/calculating, and in accordance with its more recent mathematical applications, it also bears connotations of "balance."  To say that rationality among human societies is constantly evolving is to imply that these same societies are constantly re-reckoning and re-calculating a balance of their collective believed and practiced interpretation of reality.

Thus, for me, as a teacher, nothing said so far is more alarming than the consequences of this pervasive fear for our students.  It's not too complicated; if one fears the intellect when entrusted with the intellect of others, there're going to be substantial obstacles to the educating potential of those spaces.  E.g., how does one further the project of rationality if they don't appreciate it, or even reject it?  (Why do epistemological historians put so much emphasis on the Enlightenment?)

I've taught classes where I've found myself predisposed to hyper-tentatively introducing cause and effect relationships, as though causality is something essentially dubious.  Like, that's not pro-gression, if we've "already collectively experienced the Enlightenment."  I don't think that this is what Bertrand Russell meant when he disclosed, "I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine."

To conclude, in the earliest days of my writing toward the project of this blog, I wrote about fear (TL;DR death).  The most familiar with death tend to be the most familiar with the aforementioned problem of the intellect, especially with how to overcome this fear.  To face the unknown at the fringes of human understanding is to face one's mortality; I'd quote Tolle here, but it'd be the third (of fourth?) time in this blog.  The so-called philosopher king needs to confront his own mortality, or as Tim Minchin would say, his existence as a "tiny, insignificant, ignorant bit of carbon."