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."

On Responding to Fan Mail

As alluded to in my most recent blog post, I was publicly defamed during the April 2020 UTGSU Executive Elections.  The defamatory email cited "evidence" from this blog.  It's estimated that this email reached anywhere from 400 to 800 UofT graduate students after its initial publication some time on or before April 21st, 2020.  For a prospective political campaign and for peace of mind, I decided to unpack the potential inaccuracies of some of the authors' claims.  The fan mail is transcribed verbatim in the following red, bolded text.  My commentary and changes are appended in black.

From: [REDACTED for the sake of the individual]

Date: Tuesday, Apr 21, 2020 at 11:55 AM

To: [REDACTED for the sake of the individual]

Subject: GSU election: vote today to defeat racist, sexist candidates!

Hi friends!

Tbh I haven't remotely looked into student politics/elections at UofT but a friend just sent me this below. In the end it is something very important - I didn't know about the two anti-equity, anti-union candidates that currently hold positions at the university. So do please take the 5 minutes today to vote to be sure that you rank them last so they won't be re-elected to their positions at the union.

best,

[REDACTED for the sake of the individual]

P.S. Please fwd on to others as we have until 5pm for folks to vote. I imagine it is because student politics has a very low voting turn out (it is a low priority for most of us) that these candidates were able to get elected in the first place.

Hello fellow graduate students and friends, 

I hope you are all staying healthy and safe. I am reaching out about the Graduate Student Union executive elections to urge you to help elect the first truly diverse, equity-minded leadership at our Union with grassroots experience during these critical times.

Voting is now open until Tuesday 21 April at 5pm and it’s super easy!

Just click here to log in with your utorid and vote.

Please consider voting for Jacqui Spencer (External Commissioner) given her stellar record in social justice and student governance. I also believe it is vital that we elect June Li (Academics & Funding Commission Div3&4) and Lynne Alexandrova (Internal Commissioner) to promote a diverse leadership and defeat men’s rights and anti-equity candidates, Adam Hill and Jesse Velay-Vitow (see below). 

Given the appositional syntax, it's implied that I was a "men's rights and anti-equity candidate."  The first category error is easily dispelled.  I am not, nor have I ever been, a men's rights candidate.  A cursory review of this blog might implicate my critical predisposition toward toxic masculinities and the broader problems of men's violence against women; my four years of experience volunteering as a counselor in the domestic violence clinic, Changing Ways, in London, Ontario led me to fight to write and defend my Master's thesis and, more recently, to pursue my PhD.  I was literally counseling men twice my age who were on and off men's rights activism online fora before and after our group therapy sessions.

As for "anti-equity [candidacy]", at the time this defamatory email circulated, I was to be considered for impeachment due to ongoing equity concerns within the UTGSU Standing Committee that I chaired, the Policy and Operations Committee.  Notwithstanding my ongoing research and publications regarding the importance of empathy and humanization, including multiple posts in this blog, I hear and acknowledge the authors' concerns.  I am a volcel white dude from southwestern Ontario.  Equity, for me, requires a constant interrogation of my privileges and a dedication to affirmative action for others with less or different privileges; as I've argued many times in the past, the game was rigged from the start.  We need to do our part to change or at least subvert the game.

Furthermore, MLK is one of my personal heroes; his warning has comprised the last words of my Facebook profile for almost a decade, not to mention serving as the basis for my justification to continue writing this blog.  My research, and ultimately my life, is dedicated to the human project; fostering empathy and humanization has the potential to contribute toward redressing inequities.  I never put down Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed; I physically carried it around with me throughout most of the writing and editing of my Master's thesis and have variously argued that people should read it asap, multiple times if necessary, to understand the meaning and importance of the oppressed's liberation of their oppressors and themselves.

But anyways, let's continue reading.

Dhanela Sivaparan (Academics & Funding Div1&2) and Luwanga Musisi (University Governance) have been acclaimed, which is great news since they have strong equity and social justice credentials! It’s more important than ever for us to have a strong and equitable union leadership as we face the fall out of this pandemic on our studies and lives in the coming months. It is also especially important given that over the last year, there’s been a series of equity-related complaints and resignations at the executive and committee levels of the Union that the predominantly white cis-male leadership has proven incapable of addressing adequately.

More information on the candidates can be found here. To cast your vote, click here.

If you have the time, will you consider also reaching out to your graduate student contacts and help mobilize the vote?

Why is it vital to not elect Adam & Jesse?

Adam is currently UTGSU Internal Commissioner and Jesse is an elected member of the Policy & Operations Committee. In these and other roles, they have demonstrated their anti-union and anti-equity agendas.

So, I've already addressed the anti-equity bit; therefore, I'll problematize the "anti-union" accusation.  The authors and disseminators of this email might have been alluding to my past comments regarding the OSSTF.  As of this writing, I've been teaching high school on and off for six years overseas in China and for a private school in Toronto.  When I completed my practica for my Bachelor of Education, I met and worked with a brilliant and inspiring public school teacher who happened to currently serve as their school's OSSTF representative.  They confirmed that they despised the job since, time and again, they were forced "to defend the indefensible."  I can understand why they argued as such since I had a law teacher in high school who taught the entire course from beginning to end, including the exam, via our reading the textbook and completing fill-in-the-blank handout exercises.  She's still working there as of this writing. 

There's a threshold after which defending unprofessional, weak, and/or abusive teachers becomes dubiously moral or ethical, especially when such defenses come wrapped in a rhetoric of protecting and benefiting students & young children.  However, such is not the case for labour unions like the ETFO.  On multiple occasions, I have articulated to my colleagues and friends the importance of the ETFO since the Ontario public generally underestimates and/or misunderstands the jobs of kindergarten to grade 8 teachers.  These teachers need aggressive representation, especially during a pandemic.

Although I remain critical of the OSSTF, I love the UTGSU.  I have fought up hill to preserve the UTGSU, even since leaving office in May 2020; I have persistently argued, with close colleagues and friends who believe that the UTGSU is beyond saving, that we should still do everything we can to preserve it.  A part of the reason I still haven't sued the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Caucus leadership (who probably had a hand in writing and disseminating this email) for defamation is because I still believe that we can resolve this internally like adults.  Maybe I'm wrong.  But I'll keep fighting for the UTGSU, and I'll be there to help rebuild it once the dust settles.

Jesse is a men’s rights activist and libertarian. He has run as a candidate for the Libertarian Party of Canada [yadda yadda yadda defaming Jesse]

NOTE: I'm omitting the next couple of paragraphs since they only concern Jesse, and he doesn't deserve this.

[...]

Adam is currently facing an impeachment motion due to complaints by members and staff that he has violated the Union Equity Statement and abused his power as UTGSU Internal Commissioner. Complaints allege that the Adam has made racist, homophobic, and transphobic comments and microaggressions. They also allege that he has overtly and subtly demeaned, belittled, and undermined the contributions of equity seeking members at the Union while creating an unsafe environment for Union members to participate. Such behaviors, which I have witnessed many times, include consistently misgendering and misnaming queer, gender liminal and racialized members verbally and in print. 

As I've acknowledged in public and in writing multiple times, I misgendered a Member of the UTGSU at least once in person and once in writing.  I formally apologized to this Member and committed to redressing their concerns regarding my behaviors and those identified in the Policy and Operations Committee.  

I haven't written about my positions regarding transgenderism in this blog, but a hand full of people might remember posts that I've written on Facebook in the past.  In short, I've articulated the position that traditional gender theory, particularly Betty Friedan's gender constructivism, can contradict the alleged intuitivity and/or a priori status of gender.  It's difficult to argue that gender can be both innate and constructed, but maybe this is the case.  Regardless, these people, like any people, should be respected and validated.

It has also included interrupting, belittling, and blocking attempts by racialized and other women (trans and non-trans) to speak in Union spaces. He has also organized to block resolutions and motions pertaining to equity agendas through procedural tactics and voting alliances with other ostensibly straight, white cis-men. He is a close ally of Jesse at the Union. 

I cannot stress how strongly I believe in procedural justice as the basis for all other Justice(s).  It's the primary means in deliberative bodies to create equal and even equitable space for all voices.  As Chair of a Bourinot's Rules of Order-governed Union body, I had the responsibility to enforce procedure to the best of my ability.  In a email to all voting and non-voting members of the Policy and Operations Committee, I even offered to suspend procedure, promising to prioritize safety before procedure, something that I myself did not agree with at the time since I believed and still believe that procedure is the primary means of preserving safety.  "Points of personal privilege" are sacred for a reason.

His blog gives a good sense of his politics where he makes baffling and unsettling statements like:

“If you happen to have a phallus, have you endured blue balls deliberately more than once to the degree that you could no longer stand erect?”

This quote is referencing this blog post.  If you read it yourself, you might discern that the question is part of a bad ironic joke since it's part of a "check list" to determine whether one has achieved selflessness.  It's also a subtle reference to my status as a volcel.  I've been voluntarily celibate for quite some time; in that blog post, I discuss how selflessness requires a "denial of sexuality."  Blue balls are a real thing, and they can be pretty painful.

“I've always been fascinated by women, due to both previous sexual attraction as well as my general appreciation of humanity. For a while in high school I was even a bit of a ‘man whore.[...] In fact, I've desired to write this Facebook note for a while, I just lacked the courage and the balls. [...] Much of women's self-worth is based on what they think other people think about how they look. That's why much of society has taken to consistently reassuring women that they are aesthetically pleasing. [...] we never once touched the topic of women's relationship with the visual. I - as the only guy - had a unique sensitivity to this relationship - I think most women take it for granted. For example, my self-proclaimed radical feminist professor wore (extensive?) make-up to every class - and never once talked about it.”

The material referenced in this paragraph can be found here.  In another post that I've reverted to draft for an indefinite period, I explored that second statement: "For a while in high school I was even a bit of a ‘man whore."  I was a bit of a man whore in high school until I began to realize the full impacts of my willful negligence and lies on my partners.  When I voluntarily quit "the game" as we called it during grade 10, my wingmen legitimately contemplated killing me because of the challenge that I presented to their lifestyles and world views.  As quoted, I had wanted to write the Facebook note that preceded the blog post, back in 2012, for years.  However, my position has changed a bit since I wrote that Facebook note.  

The typically feminine has a greater affinity for the visual, the seeing and being seen, than the typically masculine.  I don't know how people could dispute this decisively.  I was referring to a gender studies and history professor who taught my third year North American Women's History course at Western University.  I don't, and never have, worn make-up, unless it was for theatrical shows in high school; (I starred in my high school musical, Tommy).  As an avid proponent of "the unexamined life is not worth living," I still wonder what we could have accomplished in that North American Women's History course had we engaged in academic discourse regarding these latent values.  Interestingly, there's arguably far more damning material that they could have cited from that almost decades-old Facebook-note-republished-as-blog-post.

“Hate-speech is rarely a thing in itself: i.e. people don't just hate on other people for the sake of doing so. They do it because some one or group's behavior or way of life threatens their own. Hatespeech then, is not what most believe it to be: an objective moral judgement, but is simply a situational perspective. Accusations of hate-speech represent one of the ultimate forms of repression, because those who would accuse others of "hate-speech" most often do so self-righteously. In reality, they're doing more harm to progress and the planet than good.”

I imagine the target audience of the defamatory email devoured this particular tidbit from this blog.  I recommend reading the 2012 Facebook note republished as blog post yourself, since it's relatively short, and it's difficult for me to argue that they're decontextualizing this paragraph without your knowledge of its content and position in a dialogue.

Okay, assuming you've read my short blog post, it's vital to understand that it was written as a response to one of my old professor's blog posts.  In some ways, both my old professor and I mischaracterized hate-speech since we neglected some of its vilest forms.  I overgeneralized in 'On Freedom of Speech', partly because I was naïve to all of the forms of hate-speech possible.  Hate-speech can describe some of the most maliciously abusive human communication.

However, the concept of hate-speech can be used repressively.  I'm sure some of the more radical among the people who assisted in writing and disseminating the defamatory email would argue that even my writing this blog post could be construed as hate-speech.

Please help me ensure that our Union leadership is committed and able to uphold the basic principles of equity and safety for our diverse membership. As CUPE 3902 prepares to enter a bargaining year and the student union continues to field off attacks from our right-wing provincial government, it is so important that there be a pro-union UTGSU leadership that fosters an equitable, open space for all to participate and build our Union.

In solidarity,

UofT Divest

To be honest, to this day, I'm not even angry.  As indicated in the graph preceding this post, my blog had another ~500 hits in the month following the dissemination of the defamatory email.  People actually read my nonsense for once.  Make no mistake, I am no less committed to all that I've said and promised in this blog.  Although, as a professional teacher and as an educator of teachers & education graduate students, I think the UTGSU's Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Caucus leadership might need a time-out.

This world doesn't know what to do with its intelligence.

You keep using that word...

Ponderous parables for pivotal paraboles

Once upon a time, there was a human child who wanted to know the Good.  Being the insufferably inquisitive and rather philosophically minded youth they were, they figured that the problem wasn't so much identifying the Good, (there were already lots of suggested candidates), but rather determining a method by which to validate the Good.  Well, the kid did find a sort of litmus test, a rather radical one at that.

You see, this kid was raised Christian, and so they were already quite familiar with the traditional parables.  In fact, this kid would ultimately go on to endure most of their Confirmation before dropping out at the last moment.   This kid wondered whether they needed religion in order to live and be just, whether the Good was predicated on traditions and consensual wisdom, or whether it had any contingencies at all as alluded by some of its progenitors.

On the way home from elementary school one day, this kid was contemplating hell. You know.  The bad one.  Where one would burn.  Forever.  The kid was already skeptical of the existence of hell, especially since they had already studied how allegorizing hell became a tool of church compliance and coercion from the 15th to the 20th centuries historically and even earlier pre-historically.  As this kid approached the turn in the sidewalk that redirected to their home street, they stopped walking as their reflection shifted to a consideration of Jesus's divine sacrifice, especially the willingness to sacrifice mortal existence.  Within this space of reflection, this kid noted that a morality becomes transcendental in character, relative to Christian systems, the moment the agent has identified a conviction for which they would be willing to sacrifice beyond their mortal existence, assuming the verity of a transcendental existence.  Hell was conceived, or at the very least <used>, as a method of enforcing compliance to an alleged transcendental morality.  However, this threat and its invoked fear are consequential only when one's moral system is subject to and therefore determined (at least in part) by the threat of hell.  The moment you believe in a moral code self-righteously such that you would bear that code in any and all eternities in any and all transcendental existences, this coercive form of Christianity no longer has any power over you.  

Furthermore, this conviction that authentically survived an existential threat of eternal damnation likely comprises or can be characterized by the Good, if we're conceiving the Good as its progenitors did: as a universal, unchanging, and all-encompassing form.  For how could the substance of that imperative be naught but Good for someone to willingly suffer eternally?  If it did not comprise the sum total value of everything they believed and/or assumed to be right or good, would the willingness to suffer eternally be naught but insanity?

In the words that the kid used to articulate this insight at the time, the moment you become "willing to burn in hell for all eternity for what you believe", you become liberated from all preceding and subsequent moral systems.  It's a different kind of freedom.

Although this kid grew up to be relatively agnostic, exercising a reasonable measure of doubt with regards to any kind of afterlife, since that moment, that kid has been relatively fearless.

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A word has been frequently floating in and out of my reflections as of late: "subsumption."  It seems that every action, resistance, and aspiration to significance supports or is eventually constitutive of a subsumption, a subsuming of the intents and character of the action, resistance, or aspiration into a more general category—notably, in democracies a category generally acquiescing of what people call the "middle class".  Historically, people called this latter process gentrification; i.e. the process of changing the nature of actions and contexts such that they further satisfy the gentry, the traditional middle and upper classes (think "gentlemen" and "gentlewomen").  

I've often attributed this trend to tribalistic exigencies and the dominant classes' exclusive rights to delineate the parameters of signification.  Self-identifying groups of people are naturally inclined to defend and further their common interests.  The middle class emerges as the bulk of the normal distribution of their collective needs and subsequent demands.  Notably, this collective reserves control over signification: the identification, renewal, and creation of significance.  For evidence of this control, look no further than the burgeoning demands and sequitur supplies of popularized formulaic T.V. shows and movies.  Especially in democracies, this dominant group generally dictates which meanings have the most power.

Subsumption, then, presents the means by which the middle class renews its power.  As both the product and producer of subsumptions, the middle class regulates meaning-making and the power (read: significance) of meanings.

I've commented on this Blog before about the cyclical nature of dominance and resistance, especially how both sets of aspirations eventually normalize; i.e., that the status quo/societal homeostasis necessitates their constant renewal.  These days, I would characterize these Sisyphean (r)evolutions as yet other forms of subsumption.

Why does this happen?

Simply, they're engaged in the classical pursuit of meaning and purpose.

On my own permutation of this quest, I infrequently engage in the following thought experiment: if we're trying to identify the most meaningful and significant values—the usual source of purpose—and actions, then start from the opposite.  What is the most meaningless thing a person can believe or do?  I usually turn to expressions like "all tautologies are tautologies."  But even the categorization of expressions of A = A has meaning and significance, especially since the meaningfulness of other expressions of relations hinges on the alleged meaninglessness of simpler expressions.  Maybe it's the void?  It's telling that vacuousness draws from the same etymology as "vacuum."

Or, maybe it's more useful to consider meaninglessness according to its (in)significance.  However, this merely politicizes the question of meaning by evaluating meaning according to its power, as what does "significance" signify?

Logically, if the most meaningless choices, values, and actions were dichotomized, then the most meaningful choices, values, and actions could be characterized as the most exhaustive, unique, and powerful.

Yet, in the endless pursuit of purpose and meaning, a staggering proportion of people find themselves "settling down to start families."  Inhabiting the aforementioned logic of this post, this domestication follows from a subsumption of intents and purposes under a set of generalizable traditions.  But I remain perplexed as to the following: is it not suspect that so many individuals' pursuits of purpose and meaning have been resolved in starting families?  That after millenia of human development, the consistent stopgap for the problem of living with meaning is to furnish the next generation of people who will undoubtedly have the same problem?

Potential vacuousness notwithstanding, even monogamy raises the specter of a failure of the imagination to do something with one's intelligence before or after the status quo.  "Welp, I have run out of ideas.  Might as well chase tail."  

I realize that the more nihilist-leaning among my readers might counter with the axiomatic assumption that existence has only the meaning that we ascribe to it; i.e., there is no guarantee to any inherent purpose or meaning in anything.  But can we not do better?  

Especially when faced with an existential threat?

Obviously the species needs to reproduce itself at some point, but there's a threshold after which existence is merely existed for the sake of existence.

What does it mean to succeed in the midst of global turmoil?  Does it mean the same to you now as it did in September, 2019?

People tend to define success in numbers.  Equity, valuations, and margins.  There are people who I've encountered that I pity every day because the system is so absolutely rigged against them.  I have yet to encounter a "successful" company or personality cult that doesn't have at least 1-2 bodies mortaring its foundations.  I promised myself in the earliest days of my social justice and peace studies course work that I would never slit a single throat, metaphorically or otherwise, to get ahead; I'm increasingly convinced that many of my classmates didn't share that conviction.  The global pandemic just aggravates these moral and integrous discrepancies.

This world doesn't know what to do with its intelligence.  Our public schooling systems in Ontario are about to crumble wholesale because our administrations, among the ministry, school boards, and unions lack the organizational and creative capacity to imagine and to implement a new vision of schooling necessitated by one of the greatest threats of our lifetimes.  Smarts won't save us; they might give us a better way to mitigate the effects and infectivity of this virus, but this is just one relatively benign pathogen.  I predicted at about the age of 16 that antibiotic resistance alone could bring this world to its knees; you don't need to search too deeply into Google to ascertain with relative certainty that this is only the beginning.  

We've survived this long because we've adapted.  The most maladaptive systems will degrade and degenerate as we're witnessing on the daily.  Classists hate change, yet I'm not calling for a "Marxist (r)evolution."  Our systems, starting with our schools, need to refocus and reconstitute their operations in accordance with their long-standing mandates.  

And this stuff aerosols.  For the love of reason, don't pack elementary school students into enclosed spaces with no exit or contingency plan.

I worry that the problem is less about whether we have the collective intellect to survive this, than about whether we have the moral convictions and courage to think laterally and take risks.

Otherwise, private industry is going to take over every failing public system; it was already happening among pre-college schooling in Ontario; this crisis has been an invitation for private schools (especially those structured and equipped for online learning) and for privatized health care to build and to consolidate empires in Canada.  My own school is restructuring in anticipation that publicly schooled students could fall behind their private and home schooled peers by almost a year as of September, 2021.  Theodore Sizer is/would be churning in his grave.

---

"Civilization" is a derivative Anglicization of its root, "cīvis", a rough Latin equivalent to our current word "citizen."  It's legal definition succeeds its essential and primordial meaning of "city-dweller".  Citizen-ship, or the rights and responsibilities inherent to constituting a city, implies higher duties than simply participating in the governance and perpetuity of the polis; thriving usually requires more of us than surviving.  We can still thrive under these conditions, as we should; but we need to commit to this end.  I know it's hard.  My own commitment wavered after March, partly due to my experiences with the bad faith of certain members of the graduate student community of UofT.

But we cannot give up.  Doomscrolling is a deontological necessity, in moderation of course.  Our appreciations for and exhaustive grasping of the significance and consequence of the Good and the right depend in part on our lucidity of the darkness.

This world cannot abide the unwillingness to speak the honest, good faith truth of our experiences, courageously in adversity.  Wisdom cannot be wasted on the wise unwilling or too dispassionate to act Justly when we're on the brink.

On Selflessness

Because Bale B-Movie Morality~ (Excerpted from Equilibrium, 2002)

There is no self-deprecating humour readily conceivable for a sufficiently humble introduction of this topic.  It must-needs be approached with the same sobriety by which it is practiced.  Of the many frames of approach⁠—as the question, as the problem, or as the object⁠—none seem as appropriate as an approach from the self.

Story time!

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a moron decided to become involved in student politics.  From the beginning, this moron argued that they were only trying to get the job done.  The moron reasoned that not enough decent people had the stamina to persistently engage in decision-making with what the moron eventually identified as bad faith actors.  "You know the decisions that they'll make when you're not there," the moron insisted.  People wondered why the moron endured; the moron's supervisor even wondered out loud whether it was a waste of time altogether.  Then, the moron blogged about it:

There's a rizomata panton irony (or paradox) to be found within the reality that the most idealized moral telos, selflessness, is also the least practiced and/or understood.  Its value as a moral object transcends time, space, culture, and even morality; Nazis could be selfless.  Within a morally relative universe, something about selflessness elevates it into a class of its own in significance and consequence.

And yet, basically no one is actually selfless, at least, no one still with us.  Of course, it's impossible to be and persist selflessly.  A baseline of biopsychological being is necessary to bide.

What does it mean to nullify the self as much as one can abide?  Well, most consequentially for one's humanity and for traditional conceptions of human flourishing, without the self, there is no intimacy, or at least authentic intimacy.  Long-term, sustainable intimacy relies upon some form of co-dependency.  A great friend of mine once argued at length that sustainable intimacy or healthy relationships more broadly require that intimate partners fill voids in each other's lives.  The trick with selflessness is there is no one void to be filled in one's being or self.  Conceptually, it's all void—or all filled; the consequence is the same.  A selfless individual has denied even the possibility of a void, regardless of its potential verity.

Naturally, selflessness leaves little room for ego as its traditionally understood.  Just as the self cannot be nullified to void, ego will always linger as long as we remain sapient and finite.  The ego can be denied, but never truly destroyed.  A similar line of reasoning likely predisposed Eckhart Tolle to conclude that "to be wrong is to die." (The Power of Now, 1997)

Up until this point in my reasoning, selflessness may appear to be infallible as a moral means and object, but in many ways, to pursue selflessness to its extremity is also to dehumanize oneself, depending how one construes of "humanity."

What might not have been obvious is that selflessness is also a nullification or at least complete denial of sexuality, excepting the most base and sentient gratifications.  A selfless person, in forgoing intimacy, inevitably encounters the truth of humanity that intimacy and sexuality intersect so wholistically and exhaustively that it's impossible to embody or reify one without the other, unless one is biologically predisposed to extreme asexuality.  "Volcel" individuals could be among the most selfless, but if we presuppose intimacy and sexuality as constitutive of our humanity, then volcel individuals could also be classed among the most inhumane.

And as you might have guessed by now, embodied selflessness necessitates an inevitable denial of emotion.  The emotive would inevitably be repressed by the drive to deny the self any validation.  As alluded by the preambulatory video, the value of selflessness to the degree and intensity that it can be practiced by human beings depends on the fact of choice.  In many ways, one could construe embodied selflessness as one of the ultimate sacrifices that an individual can make for others, exemplifying one of the most obvious and explicit cases of a human sacrificing their humanity for others' humanity.

It's important to remember that to be anything other than selfless is a tremendous gift and privilege.  I've written at length about how the capacity to sacrifice is a privilege; to be selfless is to give up even that capacity.  You can only sacrifice what you have.

So then why might it be worth considering selflessness regardless?  Succinctly, selfishness won't save us.  There's other rabbit holes in this blog to wander into if you'd appreciate an elaboration on that particular point.  If "some very few of us" don't attempt to embody selflessness, I reckon we're on a one way train to hell.

So, for the sake of praxis, I created a useful check list for those go-getters.

Selflessness Checklist

1. Are you dead?
2. If you happen to have a phallus, have you endured blue balls deliberately more than once to the degree that you could no longer stand erect?
3. Do you believe that intimacy is an unnecessary part of your being?
4. Were you never a human baby?
5. Have you yet to consider your money your money?
6. Does your parental figure complain every major visit that you're not being selfish enough?
7. Do you routinely lie by omission about your self, anticipating that these details might provoke self-hatred among others?
8. Do you regularly feign emotion?

If you answered in the affirmative to any and all of the above, then you might be or have been selfless, but probably not.  Don't worry; people attempting this perfect self-destruction can also be proficient thespians.

On empathic projection

From the webcam of the laptop with which I edited most of this post when I should have been writing my comprehensive exam.  FYI, Einstein was defending Bertrand Russell.

What is social justice?  No. Seriously. What IS it?  Thousands of years of philosophizing and insightful reflection have yet to glean a satisfactory response to a simple yet eminently consequential question.

From the pre-Socratics to Socrates himself, the Western tradition passed down an, at best, provisional explication derivable from the first books of Plato's Republic.  Philosophers have long grappled with the gravity of the question and with the associated gravity of a proficient answer.

Lately, scholars of social justice have gravitated toward the discourses of empathic understanding when confronted with the question of the criteria and/or substance of social justice.  The problem in practice, as I've witnessed it, is that the respondents confronted with social injustices apply empathy undemocratically.  Under the guise of equity, these "social justice warriors" exercise a limited form of empathy that privileges empathizing with particular groups as opposed to a consciously and rigorously maintained, indiscriminate empathic disposition.  Almost daily, I encounter new politically selective applications of empathy that violate the presupposed humanistic ethics and morality of empathetic practice.

Just as Henry Giroux argued that a "democracy can never be democratic enough," empathy can never be empathized enough.  The schools of liberal democratic thought taken to their logical extremes necessitate a democratic empathy and an empathetic democracy in which people practice empathy as democratically and exhaustively as possible.

The idealized desire for the practice of democracy and empathy in their extremities echoes the philosopher's restless pursuit of timelessness and universality.  During a heated philosophical discussion that feels like yesterday but actually transpired about 8 years ago, a great friend and I were arguing about the possibility of objective morality: or in other words, a morality that could transcend time and space and that would be applicable for any human context.  The other discussant was a staunch Christian, while I was a less radically agnostic version of myself.  We couldn't agree on anything other than that if such morality were ascertainable, it could be determined only through an application of reason and empiricism and could only be validated through some leap of faith.

Upon that insight, I wrote one of the first Facebook notes that became one of the first posts in this blog; it attempted to begin elucidating a rationalistic morality.  My consistent contemplation of this construct anticipated my attempt to illustrate the highest moral imperative.  Only recently did I realize that these explorations betrayed a deeper goal of uncovering a (read: the) universal morality via what I now refer to as empathic projection.

In order to practice empathy as democratically and exhaustively as possible, arguably, one must embrace empathic projection.  The OED defines "projection" as "an estimate or forecast of a future situation based on a study of present trends" and as "a mental image viewed as reality."  Essentially, "empathic projection" depicts a practice of empathy through which one estimates or forecasts the situations of future human beings in order to generate a mental image of what might comprise these beings' lived realities.  This practice might enable one to "empathize with potentiality."

In other words, empathic projection can enable an inquiry approach with which one extends inferences beyond past and present circumstances.  An indiscriminately empathic democracy necessitates that the thoughts, wills, and actions of its citizens not only consider empathy with those whom exist and will exist within their lifelitimes but with those whom potentially will exist (to be as democratic, equitable, and non-egoistic as possible). It's a narrowly presentist assumption that one need only empathize with those whom exist in one's generation or with those of the immediately succeeding generation.

The most universal ethic would require that moral judgement be situated not only by empathizing with those whom exist and will exist soon, but with those whom will exist who will never interact with you directly: a morality of the substantive Other.  Caring about people exhaustively inevitably anticipates caring about the future because there are infinitely more potential people of the future than there could ever be living today.  Ask yourself what these timelessly succeeding Others would ask of their preceding Others; this abstraction's moral intimations could validate a trans-generational human morality.

At the very least, logically, these succeeding Others would desire the same degree of opportunity (potentiality) as those whom preceded them since anything less than at least that potentiality would constitute a perfect injustice.  Thinking historically, this justified continuancy of opportunity followed a timeless trend of taken-for-granted equivalency of potentiality which, until the past ~50 years, had remained more-or-less uncontested.

Thus, empathic projection might reveal semblances of an ultimate universal "moral high ground" through the application of empirical reasoning and logic.  If this form exists at all—a morality and/or value system that exists in spite of and simultaneously among and within us, timelessly—then it might be revealable through empathic projection.

In sum, if there is a social justice to be realized, then empathic projection could be pivotal.  These intellectual gymnastics might be essential to cobbling together the political will to do what is necessary to preserve the sentience and sapience of this planet.  Without it, we will undoubtedly continue to elect those antithetical to the future.

On greatness

Memes have supplanted captions.

I have decided to endeavor to dedicate time to write non-academically; [(un)ironically, this post mostly concerns professional academics].  This blog has nearly ceased to exist because every time I think to write, I am compelled to do so toward my PhD coursework and research.  Those of you whom have read this blog previously would likely surmise that I have a complicated relationship with doing things for myself.

The topic of this blog post has been brooding since I attended the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Regina, Saskatchewan, last May (2018).  It was a major milestone in my life as it was the first time that I engaged with the highest echelon of academics as relative equals in candid, authentic dialogue.  I attended at least five two-hour sessions per day for five days, which, if you've ever attended the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, might be considered... ambitious.

I absolutely loved the experience; I reflected that I'll likely make most of my name as a academic through conferencing.

More critically, the experience lended credence to a philosophical outlook that I had been incubating over the past several years.

I've observed that the more eminent the intellectuals in my presence, the more elucidated becomes the relative dichotomy among academics, between those whom embrace greatness as a means and those whom pursue greatness as an ends in itself.

To illustrate this relationship, I need to explicate what I mean by "greatness."  I'm not just referring to renown, but more primordially to power and influence; regretfully, my vision of this idealized quality probably roughly mirrors that of Trump and his infamous slogan.  If all human intentions and relations engage with power discourses as Nietzsche and others would have us believe, then "greatness" could be construed as prominence within these discursive power relationships.

Listening to other professional academics speak candidly among their equals, I became increasingly curious as to where they fell on this spectrum from "greatness" as ends to "greatness" as means.

Those engaged as scholars whom embrace greatness as a means have variously abstained from the seductive, self-affirming influences of egotism.  They pursue grants and tenure because they know that these resources and positions will enable them to do increased justice to their research and to the beneficiaries of their research.  They respect and appreciate their and their colleagues' reputations, not because they have a vested interest in representationalism, but, rather, because their reputability factors into their capacities to continue to build and to refine knowledge for civilization.  These academics are seemingly marginalized.

Indeed, the seeming majority are engaged as scholars whom pursue greatness as an ends in itself.  Each of the signifiers of those embracing greatness as means becomes self-serving: egotistically, materialistically, nepotistically, etc.  Research becomes a means to self-empowerment as opposed to a means to empowering others; (this genre of academic inquiry becomes especially alarming when said research ostensibly bears the banner of social justice and/or decolonization).  Collegiality, for this group, tends to be first and fore-most self-interested.  The development of knowledge is an after thought of careerism.  Unsurprisingly, the scholarship of this latter group tends to crack under the burden of instrumental CV stacking.

I'm sure social, psychological, cultural, and economic theorists have systemic and/or discursive explanations for this lived reality, but, arguably, this growing chasm between these two increasingly insulated and institutionalized groups of academics could be, at least partially, dispelled philosophically.

As the cliché admonishes, "absolute power corrupts absolutely."  Absolute power in academia is usually determined by reputation that immunizes individuals from governance, collegial, and student scrutiny.  Those of this caliber who have objectified greatness rarely risk their immunities for the sake of others, especially for the most marginalized.  Followers of this blog would probably guess that I would argue that the academics of this echelon have the greatest capacities and therefore duties to act.  However, my cursory exposure implies that these high capacity intellectuals rarely threaten and/or sacrifice their positionality if such actions might diminish their objectified greatness.

Succinctly, greatness should never be an ends in itself.  It should always be a means to empowering others.

Those whom have objectified greatness rarely authentically find it with integrity.  The fact that the preceding statement could be construed as sanctimonious speaks volumes as to the contemporary and growing institutionalization of objectified greatness.  They, and we, need to do better.

Notably, this philosophical insight may speak to the political movement down South.  Political actors often narrativize the pursuit of others' greatness, merely co-opting this narrative that portrays what they should be doing, increasingly serving themselves and/or their families.  It's a terrifying and damaging hypocrisy with higher consequences for the higher the stakes.

Moreover, it could be reasoned that the pursuit of greatness is antithetical to the condition's realization, given the associated egotism and disempowerment of others necessary to confer and to sustain "greatness."  Proselytizing "America First" concomitant with xenophobic racism and nativism for the "restoration" of American greatness invariably illustrates this trend.

The objectification of greatness nearly always anticipates its depreciation and eventual nullification. Historically, the "greats" immortalized their greatness through their empowerment of others: They supported others for others' support for yet others' greatness.

And so, I admonish the reader to chase their greatness and to find their place in the zeitgeist, but to channel that pursuit as a means toward an end for and with others.  It's a deontological necessity that academics vanguard your and our students' greatness.