Fogwalking

A Poem

~~~
Flying saucers and Jews are shapeshifters

They search the culture when they arrive
To build a vehicle to drive
You see some thing familiar but not the whole truth
Behind image and projection is a booth

Flying saucers and Jews are history

Agents of change that demand respect
In the margins more often than you'd expect
At liminal times of anti-structure
There as catalyst and trickster

Flying saucers and Jews are religions

It matters not if disbeliever,
Doubter, faithful or hater
In praise or in bile
In worship or denial

Flying saucers and Jews are important

They affect the course of things
In radiating concentric rings
Everywhere and nowhere
It is important not to stare

Flying saucers and Jews are dangerous

To your employment and your sanity
To culture and humanity
Your life and home and such
And especially if you know too much

Flying saucers and Jews are secret

There are shadowy groups of men
Who have this as their ken
Causal forces are kept from you
Whether UFO or Jew

You'll lose family and friends
Who won't follow 'round the bends
They'll think you mad or cruel
Or just a hopeless fool
They will not hear your facts
And they will not have your back
Their worldview is their ground
So they must assume it's sound
They don't want to leave confused
Or think that they've been used
So they start on the offense
And say you don't make sense
The alternative seems bad
To learn and become sad
Ignorance is bliss
But there are some things they have missed

Have YOU heard the news?
Flying saucers and Jews!

Autopsy of an Education

~~~
I considered framing this as a selfless and objective account. I told myself (as I would tell you) that it wasn't a petition for pity, not a rant rooted in ressentiment, nor a humblebrag, nor a piece of excuse-making. Those are lies. The truth is that I am sad, and angry, and I do feel unfairly deprived of my privileges.  I can only bring myself to admit so because I suspect I'm not alone in this feeling.

The question lurking behind the present storytime is "How many?" How many young men like me had every reason to believe they were going places, so they did their best, only to discover that the system was not interested in their contributions?  How many have given up, and shut down, as I have?  Finally, what are the results for a society if this happens on a regular basis?

Speaking from my own experience, grade school gave me the sense of being singular, at least among those kids within busing distance.  My alleged smarts were spoken of like sorcery, a strange mysterious power conferred on me by the Fates. A classmate once asked if I had eaten a dictionary. I finished Grade 8 Math with a final mark above 100, which might say more about my math teacher than myself. All of which is to observe that the ear of one's ego has to bend toward something. It wouldn't have been sports. It couldn't have been church. Lord knows, it wasn't Canada. Not having a tribe of my own or a healthy and harmonious family, I could only take pride in my numerically-quantified academic accomplishments as an atomized individual.

So I was a student. A good student. A very good student. I would often like to protest that I didn't work that hard, only as hard as the projects apparently required, yet that minimal standard seemed to exceed that of others.  Completing these mostly pointless and stupid assignments, and watching others struggle with them, undoubtedly warped me in all kinds of ways.  I only wish that inflation and distortion of my character might have been harnessed for good.

This may be where I went astray. I never got to a point with math or science where it was anything more than rote learning. If you understood the principles and followed them correctly, you always found the right answer. Maybe I could have been a great mathematician, but I could think of nothing less interesting. The practice of science looked similarly thankless, long stretches of dull routine broken up by occasional excitement.  I made the choice to go into arts and humanities instead as soon as I had the option.

What was the essence of that choice? Was I moving toward understanding humanity, expressing myself, and thinking creatively, or was I just fleeing from the boring business of keeping this shit show running? I surely revelled in the maverick move of not doing the obvious, and I really hoped to find engaging shades of grey demanding messy interpretation, but I was also lazy, and worn-out from a decade of busywork while my peers were having childhoods. I think I had legitimate grievances against the status quo, against war and waste, corporatism and kakistocracy, but did I actually believe that I could not operate within the establishment without compromising my principles, or did it just look like too much trouble? I'm trying to recount the ways my education failed me, but I can't get past my own complicity. I could be a rich doctor right now, instead of a destitute dreg. Sometimes smart people are improbably stupid.

On that note, I eventually chose to attend Trent University. They had a department of cultural studies, and Maclean's magazine said they wore Birkenstocks and sometimes went to class in pyjamas there, so that's the school I picked. The highfalutin hand-waving the program used to describe itself sounded good enough. Of course there are power imbalances in society. Of course there's injustice. Who wouldn't want to make the world more just and fair? It did all sound a little airy, but the program promised workshops in the arts.  I would learn practical skills.  If not a professorship, I could go into film or theatre.  Three career tracks in one degree! What could go wrong?

I must pause at this point to draw out another animating idea for this bit, and that's the good faith assumption of a functioning society.  You want to believe that your elders and superiors have guarded against decadence and decline. You want to believe that expensive degrees have value. It looked on the surface like cultural studies might be an indulgently speculative enterprise, an ivory tower endeavour far-removed from reality.  I knew that to be the unschooled assumption of retrograde country bumpkins.  It simply wasn't conceivable that so many smart people could be caught up in a lie.  If the Emperor had no clothes, someone would have said something, and that cultural studies department would disband in shame.

Of course, they had no shame. I was told about the pathological propensities of my people to want a happy family and a strong leader, and I was told that another people were the supreme paragons of moral virtue in human history.  I figured out that I was only being very poorly taught how to put on a play or make a movie so that I could advance the social theories of my professors. Despite my efforts to avoid the drily predictable patterns of rationalistic quantitative analysis, there was still only one right answer, and what was worse: it didn't even agree with reason. 2 + 2 was always 5.

My experience of cultural studies was akin to gaslighting. The hostility to anything normative seemed to come out of nowhere in second year, after I had committed to the major, yet all the students and professors treated it as established, proven, and beyond debate that we should all be Marxists disassembling the dominant culture. I looked around the table and couldn't see anyone as confused as I felt.  Maybe it was me.  Maybe I was mistaken.  Maybe I was mad.  The alternative was a lot worse to contemplate.

I never kept my grades up for their own sake. The mark was a measure of the degree to which I had committed myself to understanding and embodying the principles conveyed. I could feel good about myself because I was playing along.  I was learning the ropes so that one day I might captain my own ship in a vast armada. Together we would do great and glorious things, noble things we can't even imagine.  All I had to do was listen to the words of those older and wiser than myself, apply what they had taught me, be reasonable, and speak the truth. Speech is social, and justice is true, so I thought that I was on board with social justice.

I never expected that my degree would end with an epic moral quandary.  I was just a few papers away from earning my Honours, papers that I had imagined would be the culmination of my learning, tying it all up in a neat bow that would point to what the next step should be.  Instead I was more confused than at the beginning, not to say that I didn't have more ideas in my head.  I knew the sociopolitical bullet points that I should work from if I knew what was good for me, but in truth, I had not been convinced of them.  I could fake it, I was sure of that, but I wasn't sure I would emerge from that process the same person. A little part of me would die, the part that wants my reason, actions, and conscience to be in accord with one another.  The very part that torments me to this day, but I keep alive anyway, in the hopes that one day I'll find a worthy use for it.

Pragmatic Provisional Perspectivism

 

 ~~~

A person's sense of reality is established by their upbringing, their education, their experiences, their culture, society and community, their friends and family, their idols and enemies, their values, beliefs, politics and religion, the books they read, the programs they watch, the people they listen to, the knowledge they have accumulated and the questions they ask, their fears and joys, their feelings, intuitions, hunches and reactions, the wisdom of their soul, intelligence of their mind, and awareness of their body through touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing and all the other senses, by their health, their habits, their diet, their dreams, by what must be said and what goes without saying, by those things not mentioned, and to some extent, by reality itself.

The fuddy-duddy fundamentalists are no fun.  A youth still discovering their world may do well to push against the edges, to think new thoughts and create new conceptions.  That's where great art and ideas are born.  The old ideas can be too constrictive and conservative for an optimistic young person without the information or experience to place them in context.  Why can't we have candy for dinner?  It's because the grown-ups are mean, they hate you, and they lack the imagination to conceive how great a plate full of candy would be. 

What happens when the objective pretentions of a society come to answer to the whims of the uninformed and unreflective?  What happens when our collective efforts to dwell in the same reality are stymied by conflicting experiences, definitions, protocols and ideals?  The danger is an appeal to subjectivity, a defeatist surrender to incommensurable contradictions that borders on solipsism.  We see things differently, therefore we cannot know the truth.  I can't see your point of view, therefore I can't see you.  You're so wrong as to be effectively unreal, and I'm under no obligation to grapple with phantoms.

It would have been relatively easy when things were boring.  When everyone had the same information, the same experience, and the same faulty reasoning, everyone was wrong together, and there was no trouble.  Divisions of caste and class were stifling to the odd outlier, but they ensured that no one pretended to know everything.  As long as the priest was mumbling in a dead tongue, it was much harder to dispute his points by using the same words.

Print a copy of the good word for everyone in their own language, then tell them they all have an equal capacity to understand it, and you have created a recipe for discord.  Send all human knowledge through the air into the palm of an incurious idiot who believes the ideal of equality is a measurable fact, therefore they're not an idiot, and you stand the risk of breaking down reality itself.

Undoubtedly there is an objective reality beyond human perception.  It may rely on the attention of God or spirits in order to establish and maintain itself within the quantum soup, but it's there in a way that sympathetic parties can agree on.  Even when different perceptions of reality conflict, the fact of their disagreement attests to some fundamental reality.  The disagreement itself may be the only real thing that can be agreed upon.

It just doesn't follow from the purported existence of objective reality that anyone should be able to observe it accurately.  To think so is a pleasant fiction to ward off madness.  As such, a common perception of things is not presently a viable goal.  It was easier when we knew less.  We know more now, and we don't all know the same things.

There are in fact limits to the powers of reasoned empirical science, of logic, and of fact, but the greatest limitation may be different understandings of what constitutes science, and different valuations of that project.  Something being illogical means nothing to someone who doesn't know what logic is, but then blasphemy means nothing to someone outside the religion.

It seems inevitable that we will all be very offended for the foreseeable future.  It's the inevitable consequence of a fractured society that can't agree on the operative criteria of what constitutes truth.  Is it fact or feeling, subjective or objective, collective or individual?  At a time when there seems to be more disagreement than ever before, merely stating one's own perception of what is can be received as a personal attack, to say nothing of an attack on the world itself.  It is actually the means of interpreting the world that is being threatened, a worldview that the person has come to identify with personally.  The ego is threatened along with the idiom.

As long as it's the case that even the best of us are bound to some extent by our perspectives, and our infinitely divisible society is still up in the air about what we collectively can believe, being right won't be enough.  Winning the argument logically is of no use if your counterpart murders you in a rage. 

Understand that the people in this place have strange ideas and customs.  They do this weird dance, and everyone always wears these hats.  They have a litany of taboos you want to stay away from.  They're good people, though, for the most part, just a little superstitious.

We must become anthropologists of each other.  Beyond all differences real and imagined, we are all human.  Mastering one language does not mean you can speak to all people.  The more humanity fragments, the more facility in different conceptual languages will become valuable.  The greater the multiplicity of perspectives, the more it is incumbent on those sure of their own ground to venture elsewhere.  One must not simply refute the other, but learn the language well enough to understand how a nonsense statement sounds to a native speaker.

In the end, it may fall on those favouring the cold rigour of reason to cultivate the empathy necessary to get us through this alive.

JBP on the JQ

Disappointed Liberals

 

~~~

George Carlin said, "Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."

These are cynical times.  The assumption that others speak in good faith is unfashionable. The basic etiquette of rational speech isn't observed, yet these very unreflective arguers, blind to their own psychology, are happy to guess at the motivations of others.  It couldn't be that you know something I don't.  It must be that you're driven by a stupid animal urge to be a bad person.  I feel better about that.

At the risk of returning the favour, it seems safe to say that the vitriol on the left today must emanate from some deep wounding or disappointment.  Progress sounds good, but it sounds linear.  When it encounters complications, changes, cycles, or conservatives, the expectation is disappointed.  In order to hold on to the faith, the cultist must adapt their belief system to the new reality.  Heaven didn't come to Earth because someone somewhere was sinning.

But behind that steaming resentment is the hope for a better world, twisted and perverted into hatred for those who stand in its way.  A sincere wish for good things becomes transmuted into a disingenuous attack.  This reverse alchemy turns gold into garbage.  The disappointed progressive says in their heart that we will have our world of peace and love, even if we have to hate and kill to get there.

The lines are ever-shifting, but not so long ago liberals and progressives appeared to have a common cause.  Disappointment has driven them apart.  Disappointment that those who don't agree with the program of change won't get on board with it has driven progressives further to the left.  Disappointment with the dismissal of natural law, utility, and objective measures of progress has driven liberals to the right.

If we place to the side the rabid projections of their opponents, we find among the growing ranks of conservatives a good number of former liberals and libertarians.  These are people who believed in freedom, for the individual and society.  They believed in the promise of progress.  They believed that tolerance and compromise would reduce strife.  Ultimately, they believed in the power of egalitarian principles to hold everyone to the same standard, and thereby establish a common understanding. 

Instead we are at war for reality, perceiving different worlds, speaking different languages with the same words, and disagreeing on the most fundamental values.  Those who would stay out of it and go home to their families are treated as traitors or deserters.  It was never about fairness, or logic, or stability.  We all wanted to make the world a better place, but we forgot to stop and make sure we were talking about the same thing.

Some or quite possibly all are born that way, but the haters of haters should be aware that inside many a deplorable, there is a disappointed liberal.

Truth in Different Registers

 

~~~

"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."

That's said to have been said by Thomas Sowell.  I have no reason to believe he didn't say it, except that the really good quotations always seem to get misattributed.  Often you can't even find who originally said something, and yet the saying persists, and the false association with whomever somehow informs the statement, lends gravity, and makes it more meaningful.  That person ought to have said that thing.  Let's pretend they did, as it gets at something that feels true.

Sowell is right to suggest that literacy extends to being literate in how to think straight, but the turbulence of unexamined emotions should not be confused with an acute instinct.  The body and the unconscious are continually collecting information to which the conscious mind is not privy. 

Absent a civilised education, without culture or knowledge, a person would be right to trust their gut.  With an education, a person may be inclined to disregard their instinctual reactions, as their brain provides chemical rewards for unintuitive conclusions. 

The educated are right to think through the first reaction to bubble up into their awareness, but if their belief structure can't accommodate the instinct, it will be tossed away as unreasonable, or perhaps immoral.  The ignorant rabble are right to know in their bones that two hundred thousand years in the wild, and ten thousand in town, have established certain patterns of predictability that can almost be depended on.  It's just too bad that the pace of social and technological change have accelerated past what we're naturally equipped to instinctively understand.

Truth is a thing that can be measured and marked down in different registers.  The objective aspirations of logic and empiricism are usually preferable, especially in any effort to establish a common understanding, but they are subjectively less true than a flash of anger or experience of grace.  As long as reason and science are an imposition that require mental work, an unsexy enterprise that can't be known by instinct, it is necessary for the thoughtful people to be aware that their objective accuracy is irrelevant.

Johnny has a feeling.  It feels true.  We think about it.  We think it's false, but that feels true too.  The same machinery is ultimately activated, but Johnny got there quicker.  He might even be right.  For all our highfalutin logic and evidence, we might still be wrong.  And Johnny knows it.