Eric -
I appreciate your point here. I think the problem in *all* of our
"culture wars" is not that one side is evil and the other must fight and
defeat them, but that there is a schism in "Ways of Knowing" which,
while unresolved, will lead to a schism in "Knowing" itself.
I was raised in "two cultures".
My nuclear family and community were very conservative and rural in
nature. They believed in hard work every day, self-denial (to some
extent) for the greater good, and many had one version or another of a
Bible in their house and in their place of worship, but few (if any)
carried or quoted the Bible in everyday life. One of my best friends
fathers was a lay preacher but until I went with them for him to give a
sermon to a tiny congregation an hour's drive away, I had NO idea they
were particularly religious, but his sermon was well formed, articulated
and he was charismatic. By day he was a skilled timber-scaler,
measuring mostly by eye, how much timber was going to come out of the
trees as they marked them for cutting in the forest. He was a very good
father and husband. What I suppose people like to call "salt of the
earth".
I entered middle-school (then Jr. High) in a still conservative and
extractive-industry town, but large enough to have a few (more) free
thinkers, and it WAS the end of the 60's with lots of consciousness
about war, race, gender in the air. I had been so isolated (no radio
or TV reception, very little newspapers beyond the monthly "roundup
report" and only *some* magazines (Natl Geo, Life, Reader's Digest,
Farmer's Almanac). So the "big world" landed hard on me, but mostly
in a "good way". It took me most of 10 years past that point to
reframe my world according to the *bigger* world. It helped that I was
a DJ at the local small-time radio station for several years and *had
to* listen to a LOT of network programming as a consequence. I didn't
produce any local news myself to speak of but I *did* have to read it on
air and realized that a lot of what I was "saying" was a convenient
falsehood that fit the local (small town) aesthetic. I also realized
that among the several networks we had on the wire for direct broadcast
and record/rebroadcast that there were *some* discrepancies in the
"facts", or more to the point, as you bring up, the "perspective". I
took to firing up my parent's antique Zenith "WaveMagnet" radio after
work and falling asleep to the BBC which not only had funny "voices" but
also had an entirely (to my parochial ears) different "Voice". When
they canceled draft registration a few months before I turned 18, I
decided not to leave my country of origin permanently (as planned) but
rather to take the money I'd saved up and go to a *real University*
rather than the local Community College as *most* of my fellow A/B
students had planned. The C/D students (80%) weren't even considering
higher education, and sadly none were planning any adventures in the big
world either. My 10 year reunion was very sad, to see where *most* of
them had (not) gone with their lives. I'm pretty sure most of them are
still rooting for Trump, even though his policies and attitudes are
going to hurt THEM a lot more than me.
My point, I suppose, is merely to reinforce what you said... and maybe
add, that the rhetoric of the Right is heavily invested in "Facts" and
"Truth", and even though *we* might see right through how those facts
are cherry picked and the truth distorted (from our perspective), that
doesn't mean they aren't earnest. Trump supporters are nothing if not
earnest!
- Steve
On 1/28/17 11:59 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
"2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central
accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in
position as a feature of the population.... That is what worries me,
and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to
fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be
ascendent or robust. It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god
(loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth
as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the
tribe. "
Ah, but here is the rub, isn't it? It is not the central
accomplishment of the Right. Tough men have always had a place, and
"might makes right" is hardly new. The assault on Truth over the past
70 years or so has been lead primarily by people who describe
themselves as liberals, in the name of reducing "cultural hegemony"
and "colonialism". In that context, the WWII rhetoric about "Jewish
science" vs. "German science", is not easy to distinguish in effect
from modern rhetoric about "feminist politics" vs "the patriarchy." In
both cases it is asserted that Truth is not primary, but rather that
Ways of Knowing are primary. What Dewey had was a method of working
towards the truth, and as soon as we cannot agree upon a method, we're
in trouble.
Though they have some trouble with consistency, it is the Right that
has been fighting for "truth" as a central concept much more reliably
than the Left. They may seek it in bibles or successful businessmen,
but their boots-on-the-ground believe Truth is out there. It would be
hard to say the same for those on the left. Even the things they claim
to most strongly believe, they will typically drop in an instant if
faced with an assertion from another culture, or from someone with
multiple "victim" traits. The "your place is to listen" rhetoric, in
which claims regarding individual experience trump data, but only when
those claims are made by individuals from a "marginalized" group,
cannot possibly be compatible with Dewey's approach.
-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician
U.S. Marine Corps
On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu
<mailto:desm...@santafe.edu>> wrote:
Thank you for forwarding this Owen,
I didn’t receive the original.
> So. Let me just share one thought. I have said a hundred times
that I think the great achievement of the Right in my life time
has been to problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the
1950’s One of the elements of that consensus was that there is a
truth of most matters and if we gather inclusively, talk calmly,
reason closely, study carefully, investigate rigorously, we will,
together , come to it. What was, at the time of my coming of age,
the shared foundation of argument, became over last 50 years, a
position in the argument. The alternative to this Deweyan
position seems to be something like, “There is no truth of the
matter; there is only the exercise of power. He who wins the
argument, by whatever means, wins the truth. Truth is not
something that is arrived at; it is won.”
>
> So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that
he lies. It has to be
by demonstrating that liars don’t win.
Nick, with the little clipping (done above) of what felt to me
like a digression within this gem, it seems to me perfect. It is
the return to a clear focus on the center of the problem that I
have been looking for and not been able to express.
The thing is (acknowledging Marcus’s replies also, and the ensuing
discussion of the scoping of the claim):
1. Regarding trump itself, I don’t care about it except as I would
care if someone told me a vial of Marburg virus had been spilled
on the kitchen floor. I would feel a sense of urgency to get a
strong disinfectant to try somehow to scrub it out. If I felt I
couldn’t get rid of it short of cutting out and replacing a part
of the floor, that would be within bounds of the discussion. etc.
at that level. I care a little more about several of the craven
rats in the congress, enough to be angry at them, but again they
can go into the autoclave with my blessing, and not much more
interest than that. (I believe this is what the NYT editorial
called the dehumanizing motive of contempt, and argued is a bad
choice; it feels to me like they have more than earned the
category on their own.)
2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central
accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in
position as a feature of the population and whatever one calls the
“culture” of this (and probably several other) nation(s). That is
what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I
do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can
exist, much less be ascendent or robust. It’s not the same as
losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to
lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own
petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe. In a big and
complicated world where people have the impact they do, losing the
factual sense of truth is commitment to an undignified form of
suicide (emphasis on undignified, otherwise do as you like),
alongside a lot of other -cides that are not morally defensible in
any terms. To have arrived at a large number of people who have
managed to somehow get on the wrong side of this point requires a
kind of blindness that it is hard to see how to break through. The
“demonstration that liars don’t win” is to be a demonstration to
them (as I read Nick), to somehow flush out the narcotic that has
them in this bizarre non-mental state, and make room for the
common sense they routinely use when (for instance) not sticking
their hands into the kitchen broiler or diving head-first onto the
back patio, to again become the driver of decisions.
Any animal (that has a brain) has a part of its brain that is
subservient to the consistency of nature that we call fact
(filtered and processed, of course, but I claim still the point
stands). The heavily social animals start to develop bigger
veneers in which power starts to become a major motivator, and
partitions tasks with those motivated by an awareness of fact.
But even as socialized as people are, as long as they are not
self-mutilators in a clinical sense, that part still seems no
bigger than a veneer. Somehow it seems that cultures can, over
decades, perform enough decadance that the scope of control of the
veneer balloons and that pattern gets both frozen in to behavior
and reified in a lot of constructed cultural supports. What is
the manual for the needed task of jointly tearing out what needs
it, and re-building what has been built wrongly?
Eric
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