Schizophrenia, Universalisms and Darwin

Schizophrenia and Universalisms The first great and terrible “ism” is monotheism. I’m not the first to figure that out. Monotheism is like a totalitarian view, in the original sense of the word – it’s an answer for everything, it’s a total system, it’s the unified field theory of the meaning of life on the physical planet Earth. An odd thing about monotheism is that founders of the its various forms look schizophrenic, espeically in the Abrahamic tradition. I am not saying the Abrahamic religions are false – I don’t know that, though typically there isn’t much in the way of empirical evidence to support certain beliefs, especially the beliefs that defy what we know about life on Earth. The modern approach is to say the religion is a question of faith, though ardent believers do not think it’s just a question of faith – they think it’s all true. One has to be at least a little schizophrenic to believe that the world as we know it is not the real world, but that there is another world that is real, or more real than this one. (That’s “the world to come,” or eternity, or Paradise, in the Abrahamic religions) The irony of schizophrenia being related to monotheism is not lost on me, but monotheism isn’t really monotheistic anyway – witness the existence of the devil, for one thing. Only Zoroastrianism, of the religions that are commonly credited as monotheistic (and which is not Abrahamic) is honest about the co-equal role the devil has in the scheme of things, at least until the final battle, set in the future, when the devil loses (compare to Marxism and his final Crisis, but compare also to fundamentalist Christian notions of Armageddon). The dualism behind a belief in this world and another world is pretty clear. On a normative level, it’s also easy to see dualism in religion – we believe religion teaches us what is (the creation myth, for example), and additionally teaches us what we should be doing (worship God, give charity, and more). This feature of religion totally mixes normative and descriptive statements; religion simply doesn’t understand that there’s a difference. But there's a difference. We don’t think of bears in the forest or whales at sea worrying about what is right and wrong, and more importantly, when we, as humans and as scientists, describe the behavior or bears and whales and molecules and atoms and stars, we don’t distinguish between good animals and bad animals, or good atoms and bad atoms. But we think of good people and bad people. Normative statements are strictly part of the human experience; it's a characteristic of our human behavior. Late-20th century philosophers were troubled that you can't "prove" normative statements. Yet all you have to do is prove that humans believe normative statements can be true or false, not that normative statements themselves might or might not be true. I believe humans think normatively because of schizophrenia, though I can't prove this. If there were not a kind of dualism in our make-up, I don’t see how we could have such a dualism as making both normative and descriptive statements. I recognize that “don’t see how” arguments aren’t worth much, of course. Political ideologies – the real extreme ones, the universalisms in the way I use the term – also merge the normative and descriptive (or, empirical) contexts. They're just like religions in this regard, which is another reason to lump religion and ideology into the notion of competing universalisms. And, lo and behold, most humans are attracted either to religion or to political ideology. We demand a system that explains both what is and what should be. I’ll be writing more about the theory of supersession later – that’s the well-known theory that Christianity replaces Judaism, and Islam replaces both – to show that modern “leftist” ideology purports to be the next stage. It makes sense to conflate religion and ideology if you think of ideology not as ideology and religion not as religion, but all of them as universalisms in the sense that I use the term. Science is not ideology, it is not religion, it is not a universalism. Science is just science, very empirically based. Ideology and religion are direct assaults on empiricism, and the persistence of religion and ideology (universalisms, in other words) suggest that empiricism is too much to ask of people – for some reason, we like religion and ideology, and we think religion and ideology explain things and are truth in a way that science and empiricism can’t be. In this sense, transcendental statements are held to be more true, more valid, more profound than mere descriptive statements or statements made in the empirical realm. I know that many religious thinkers mock a faith in an ephemeral world - the world of dust unto dust - which by definiton cannot be as great the world to come, a world that lasts forever, a world where God rules directly. It's all a grand tautology, of course, but people believe it. They believe it. There's something about conflating the normative and empirical contexts that makes it so. T.S. Kuhn, in his book on the structure of scientific revolutions, explained the history of science in terms of organizational behavior – scientists act paradigmatically, doing what scientists have done before them, or picking up where earlier scientists left off. If so, he wondered aloud, how can there be change? His answer was the paradigm shift, but logical thinkers jumped all over Kuhn – if there is something so highly deterministic as paradigms, how can there be something like a paradigm shift? Kuhn, an honest thinker, admitted he didn’t have a good rebuttal. The answer to paradigm shifts is in Darwin, and it’s called mutation. The paradigm shift is a function of a mutant scientist; his or her mutant thinking that violates the paradigm. Most mutations die quickly – Darwin taught us that – but some survive. Progress in science is when a mutant idea survives, and when it survives under a regime of the usual tests for science. Kuhn is good because he’s consistent with basic learning theory – we learn by doing, we learn by imitation. That’s his “paradigm,” and that’s all learning is, too, according to basic learning theory. Yet, something is wrong with that – we know there is growth (if not progress) in thinking; we know there is creativity. Where does that come from, though? The answer, again, is mutation, but on an intellectual plain. Some mutant ideas are useful and survive, most mutations are not useful and do not survive, and some mutations that should not survive do survive because they are useful in unexpected ways – they are useful to “explain” the world, to give “meaning” to life, or to teach us how to behave. Sounds like religion and ideology, right? Schizophrenia seems useful in helping us distinguish between what is true and what is not, even if this seems counterintuitive. For, you must be able to form what is unreal, and untrue, in some sort of cognitive way in order to be able to distinguish reality and truth from unreality and falsehoods. Just think of "compare and contrast." Schizophrenia is a survival mechanism, from this point of view. Schizophrenia may also be involved in conceptuatlizing things that patently are unreal, albeit attractive, which always are found in the major religions. The personal histories of major religious personalities doesn't dissaude me from this line of thinking. I’m more willing to call ideological thinkers schizophrenic than religious thinkers, though in part this is just the sensitivity issue. Was Marx schizophrenic? He saw history revealing itself; he saw a Crisis marking the end of capitalism; he saw a Utopian end-time where time stops, and stopping time is the hallmark of all psychoses. Was Hitler schizophrenic? He believed that the devil was incarnate, which means he believed in the existence of the devil – “the Jew” was the devil incarnate in his world. The intellectuals in France who loved the Cambodian holocaust in the 1970s, who believed it doesn’t matter if a whole “class” of humans is exterminated because they’ll just be replaced by another, better “class” of humans – were they schizophrenic, or just psychotic in some other way? Those war lovers (on the Left) seem to have believed that a "class" could be more important than the members of the class. I’d call that schizophrenic – they believed in the existence of a “class” of human beings more than the existence of humans per se. Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis. << ? --Indiana Blogs-- & >>

The Arrow of Time

The arrow of time mostly is a concept in physics, even cosmology, but its common sense meaning is good enough here – you can’t go back in time. This is even clearer in biology – something that’s dead is dead. Everything that is, is a function of time, both in the ordinary sense and almost certainly in the mathematical sense of function.

But speaking of “the arrow of time” is the same as talking about change over time, or perhaps it is better to say it includes change over time, but in one direction only. If there were no change over time, then there would be no time. Instead of going back in time (unchanging change, if there were no arrow of time), however, we’d just be stuck. Not stuck in time, either. Just stuck.

Sartre thought the one thing we know about the world is our personal existence. I’ve never seen how this is different than Descartes, who famously said, “I think, therefore I am.”

Not Sartre, not Descartes. Not Hegel.

Actually, what we know is that there is time, including the arrow of time and change over time. It is time that proves existence, too. There could not be an arrow of time, and there could not be change over time, if there was not a world outside of our senses to change. If there were no change over time, then that would be a refutation of the arrow of time, so the arrow of time is real, and change is real, and so we are real. It is the arrow of time that dictates everything; this should be clear if you accept that the arrow of time and change over time are the same things. Darwin fits in nicely with the arrow of time, and with change over time. People think Hegel fits in with change over time, or that Marx does, but they don’t. They violate the arrow of time badly. History does not reveal itself; the future does not dictate the past; and, in a normative sense, there is no reason to suppose there is a purpose to life or an end stage in history anymore than nonsensical talk about immortality or any other utopian state.

Darwin is the true dialectic – things change over time, the present is a reaction to whatever came before, and the future will be a reaction to whatever came before it. It’s all aimless, though – it’s just action and reaction. Any aim, any teleology, is our invention. But the arrow of time is real. In fact, we know that the world is real (and that Berkeley was wrong), because there is an arrow of time, and things change over time.

There’s just action and reaction – that’s what Darwin has got right. The fact that something survives and something else does not survive matters not to history; the world exists with or without this or that thing; the world exists as long as things change over time, and as long as there is the arrow of time. Darwin’s dialectic fits in best with this true dialectic, which is aimless.

There’s action and reaction; there’s mutation and survival (or not), but it’s all aimless. There’s no “reason” for evolution; things that don’t evolve just don’t exist anymore. Even Socrates, who had the most academic notion of dialectic, was weak on this point. There is no synthesis, which implies some kind of improvement. Darwin really has it right – the “s” in synthesis is for survival.

Now, because this is a Web site dedicated to political philosophy: Political ideologies and religions of the sort described in this series of essays, which is to say competing universalisms and competing hegemonies, with the possible exception of Liberalism, all are invalid because they violate the arrow of time. Why? Because there can be no utopia or immortality, which is what political ideologies and religions, e.g., competing universalisms and competing hegemonies, always promise. And why is that? Because utopia and immortality imply a steady state universe, and there can be no steady state universe because that would violate the arrow of time and change over time. People like utopia and like immortality because they don’t like suffering and they don’t like oblivion – I don’t either – but that doesn’t make utopia and immortality real.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.

Neo-Stalinism, Proto-racism, and Competition

To the left, to the right, there’s nowhere to turn. The center recedes in either direction.

The common denominator in both Stalinism and racism is that they are supremacist and imperialist. Whereas the racists claim superiority based on birth, or genetics, the Stalinists claim the moral high ground and lord it over others. Because both philosophies are supremacist, they can do what they wish with inferiors. The racists kill you or enslave you just because you’re an inferior, whereas the Stalinists invent some kind of due process to justify killing you or enslaving you, accusing you of being “an enemy of the people” in the classic context, but there are many kind of enemies and moral inferiors today.

Religion also is supremacist and imperialist. Why do you want to proselytize me? Proselytization is conquest, by definition. Why do you want to spread the word of God? Let God speak to me if he wants to, but who are you? Maybe I don’t want my soul to be saved?' And so on. Any belief that must be spread, and must be accepted, is imperialistic, by definition. The common term for both big religions and big political theories is simply competing universalisms, and what they all advance is hegemony.

It is not racism per se that concerns me here. No one in respectable circles accepts any tenet of racism. It is not the “neo-Cons” who concern me here, nor so-called political correctness that is of concern. It is neo-Stalinism that troubles, because it is ascendant.

The neo-Stalinists (and others on the authoritarian Left) claim that nationalism is racist – that’s mostly a marketing ploy. The neo-Stalinists can claim to lead the war against an “ism” that no one in respectable circles endorses anymore in any case. As they say in the Southern United States, that’s “mighty white” of the neo-Stalinists.

But it’s certainly useful to denigrate nationalism as a form of racism because nationalism is a competing hegemony. The neo-Stalinists, who are not a card-carrying membership organization, but simply identify themselves by their behavior, attack nationalism because it competes with them. The Social Democrats in Europe, and the Progressives in America, also attack nationalism, and they are not necessarily Stalinists – indeed, many in Europe suffered at the hands of Stalinism. Nevertheless, if nationalism can sometimes be portrayed as a form of racism, then Social Democracy, which when it is imposed on people, can easily slide into Stalinism.

In fact, the danger of the authoritarian Left absorbing the democratic Left is well known – it’s called “consolidation of power.” Vietnam had various factions resisting France and America, but the Communists consolidated power, including evicting, jailing and slaughtering resistance groups that wouldn’t go along with program. If you want to take over anything – a country, or the world – you get rid of the competition. Lenin's “Defense of the Revolution” in the early days of Soviet rule in the former USSR was nothing but a consolidation of power for the Communist Party, and European Christian Democrats, who are sometimes castigated as racist, are not wrong in saying the Defense of the Revolution contributed to a backlash that led to the rise of fascism and Nazism between the world wars.

The Beloved always exists, and in the world of competing universalisms the Beloved is the death of the competition. The death of America is the Beloved for critics of America – if America is number one, then you are number one if you destroy it. King of the Hill. Alpha male. Predator, not prey. If the predator – what you perceive America to be – is vulnerable, then it is really prey. It makes no difference if America really is a predator, or if America is after “you.” It is the Beloved. Destroy it, and you are complete.

"Competition" is an important word here. Just as one religion attacks another religion that is in competition with, one political philosophy attacks another that is in competition with vis a vis the affectoin and loyalty of people. Think Darwin – competition is the true dialectic in history. The Left attacks the Right, and vice versa, because that’s the competition. The Islamists attack America and Britain, and vice versa, because that’s the competition.

Marxism and radical politics sometimes are denigrated as secular religions, and rightly so. All have a theory of the elect, for example, a class of people who have special privilege and special knowledge of the way things are, and the way they're supposed to be (e.g., dominance in both the empirical and normative realms). Good leadership is one thing, but you can't get more anti-democratic than accepting a theory of the elect.

Christianity, Islam and the Social Democrats all follow the Abrahamic narrative – there was an unspoiled age of innocence, perhaps called the Garden of Eden; then there was some Evil that fell upon the face of the Earth, and all will be good when the vestiges of Evil are erased. This is why, for example, the Social Democrats and, in the USA, the Progressives, talk all the time about racism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism and Zionism and capitalism – remove these evils, and all will be good again, a Paradise on Earth. The Marxists follow the Zoroastrian narrative, however – there is an ongoing battle between Good and Evil, between the proletariat and big capital, and we find ourselves in the middle of the process. Even if the outcome is inevitable, and Good will triumph over Evil (because religion is teleological, the future determines the past), we still have to go through the motions. It is a catastrophically wrong dialectic that the Marxists believe in, though at least it is a dialectic. But Darwin had the true dialect - there is competition and someone survives and someone doesn't. There is no reward or Paradise or anything of the kind - there is just survival. There is no justice - there is just survival. Might does not make right - might just makes might.

Liberalism is harder to pigeon hole. Most modern people in the West have a “live and let live” attitude, e.g., they accept pluralism, which is a hallmark of liberal politics, but also the non-authoritarian Left. It’s not just a normative value; it means, ‘I’m not going to try to conquer you and you’re not going to try to conquer me. We’re not in competition with each other.’ This is a real modus vivendi; it’s very pragmatic. Certainly, liberalism in the traditional sense accepts all this, as does the democratic Left. (Where George W. Bush and Tony Blair shock is that they are going to make people be Liberals – it’s a kind of extremism of the center.)

The Nazis tried to create a Darwinian ethics - survival of the fittest as a moral imperative - and it didn't work. Why? Because there is no normative context in Darwinian thinking. That's one way we know it is an empirically-based theory, not normative theory. Competing universalisms pretend to be moral. In general, using normative constructs is the cover story many people use to get what they want, and no religion or political movement has a patent on this technique. Hiding behind normative constructs is a common means of advancing one's interests and, in the extreme, hegemony.

Conquest based on religion is well-known. But it’s neo-Stalinism that concerns me today. Just like racists who think they can harm you and do what they will with you because they are superior, the neo-Stalinists can intimidate because they have the moral high ground. It’s fascinating, and it’s not just an “ends justify the means” argument, either.

For example, there’s a rough consensus among many people as to what the evils of the world are today – extreme disparity in income, extreme disparity in outcomes, continued wars, starvation and disease, and so on. Many groups may say that, in effect, if you’re against these horrible things, you must be for this or that group. That’s a pretty standard campaign stump speech in most democratic circles. The neo-Stalinists go further – they’re going to make you follow them; because they have the moral high ground, they don’t have to ask your permission for anything. Just like religions that burn people at the stake for heresy, neo-Stalinists invent phony due process to punish their victims, not merely argue against them. It’s supremacism, not democracy.

Josef Stalin famously asked once, “How many tanks does the Pope have?” No, the neo-Stalinists don’t have tanks, either. What they mostly have today is a very successful finger-pointing and scapegoating methodology, along with real power to set the research agenda on college campuses, to stall an academic career by refusing publication of a journal article or vetoing an unwelcome academic appointment or sabotaging tenure altogether, and to influence editorial content in mass media by the proliferation of expert sources. This point about what is usually called "the campus Left" cannot be overemphasized: Most sociological research today seems intent on identifying this or that bad outcome, then looking for its intersection with someone or something you want to blame for that bad outcome. Compare how the eugenics people and the modern leftist sociologists treat the same kind of data. Do you have some crime data? Just link that with the people allegedly perpetrating the crime, the eugenicists would say. Politically leftist sociologists can say, however, not so – ‘Here’s the intersection of crime and poor living conditions.’

Liberal sociologists must not be confused with Social Democrats, Marxists, Progressive or neo-Stalinists, however. Neo-Stalinists will simply retrofit the bad outcomes to theory. If minorities or women are doing poorly in this or that measure, then it must be because, and only because, of racism and sexism. Go back in time far enough and you’ll find evidence of racism or sexism, hence that will be deemed the root cause of things, just as racists and eugenicists can go back in time and link blacks or Jews to every crime in history, if they connect enough dots, that is.

Neo-Stalinism is no different than proto-racism in this kind of argumentation. If there are bad outcomes in the world (and there are), and if you use the interconnectedness of things to find some intersection between the bad outcome and the root cause of said outcome, you can blame anyone you want for anything. It’s just like the kid’s game of “the six degrees of separation.” That’s how neo-Stalinists link bad outcomes to racism, colonialism, imperialism, Zionism and so on, it’s how eugenicists used to link bad outcomes to “the Negroes,” or to “the Jews,” and so on. But using the interconnectedness of things to insinuate any cause and effect is self-contradictory. If everything is interconnected, then the putative cause itself is connected to something else, to many other things, and cannot be a simple causative agent in its own right.

Liberal social scientists at least generate hypotheses that are empirically testable – improve living conditions for poor people or people of color, for example, and see if outcomes improve. Provide more education, if deficits in education are seen as a problem, and see if outcomes improve. And so on. The hard Left just rules out alternate hypotheses a priori – only studies that conclude racism, sexism and so on are the root causes of evil are acceptable. It’s more than the reductionist fallacy; it’s a tautology.

Neo-Stalinism and proto-racism have something else in common - each posits evil exclusively on the supply side, which fits in well with finger-pointing, scapegoating and blaming "them," or what I like to call "they, them and those people." Many thinkers have written about the concept of "the other" and of "the evil one," but unless they're linking this insight to that of supply side versus demand side, the analysis is incomplete. For example, think of pornography. "They" are the pornographers, supplying pornography. But where is the demand side in all this? There may be evil in the world; if so, there is a supply side and a demand side for it. Emphasizing only the supply side is both racist and Stalinist.

Does the US Constitution protect Americans from neo-Stalinism? It protects people from Christianity – there is no state religion, and people cannot be compelled to adopt Christianity. Ditto for Islam, or Judaism, or any other religion in America. Ditto for monotheism per se, though some in Washington, on the right, indeed don’t seem to understand this. But does the US Constitution protect writers and thinkers and academics who are guilty of what the old Soviets liked to called deviationism and obstructionism and reaction, which are all equivalent terms to the religious concepts of apostasy and heresy.

The use of the concept of free will is another proto-racist tactic neo-Stalinists use. The people who allegedly do all the evil in the world have free will and consequently are culpable for all the bad outcomes, but their victims have no free will and hence are blameless for everything, including blameless for bad choices. Yet Darwin trumps Marx again. A few million years of human evolution should guarantee that we all have free will, or none of us do. Just like there can be no master race, there cannot be two races of human beings on the Earth, one that is completely hapless and can only react to inputs, and the other a willful, intentional predator class they preys on the former.

There are certainly people who do evil, and there are victims of that evil, but the moment the neo-Stalinists link certain behaviors exclusively to certain people they have become racist themselves.

Again, think Darwin. The appeal of any competing universalism is just this: Why be the alpha male when you can be the Lord of the Universe on Earth yourself? You just have to take over the planet, not some crappy little herd of four-legged animals. That's what competing universalisms are all about, in Darwinian terms.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.

The Fallacy of Grievances

You destroyed my property, you didn’t pay me for work I did in your garden, you stole my spouse’s affection.

These are all grievances I might have against you, and they are grievable. Various civil suits probably would settle the above matters; you provide restitution and the matter will be settled.

All grievances should be so simple. Paying people for slavery, for example, is not so simple. Reparations for stolen land may not be accepted. Sometimes people seem to go to war over their grievances.

It’s not the rightness or wrongness or magnitude of this or that grievance that is of interest here. It’s the proposition that certain behaviors obtain if, and only if, people have certain grievances that is of interest. And it’s the corollary of such a proposition, that aggrieved people will stop acting in a certain way if, and only if, their perceived grievance is satisfied that is just as problematic.

On the international stage today, to use that unfortunately trite expression, the Islamic world is perceived as having grievances against the West. The fundamentalists, allegedly acting on behalf of the Muslim world, see an obligation to punish the West over these grievances. They say they will stop their retaliation once the grievances are satisfied. This is a repeated claim of al-Quaeda - we will stop killing you when you stop killing Muslims and/or when you leave our soil. People who believe in this construction of grievances accept that the fundamentalists are acting only because of their grievances, and that their actions of necessity will stop once grievances are satisfied. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has argued just this point about Iraq - the Jihadists came to Iraq only because the U.S. Army is there, so of course the Jihadists will leave when the U.S. Army does. She apparently forgets that the Ba'ath party in both Iraq and Syria killed Jihadists and their supporters by the tens of thousands.

This is the fallacy of grievances: If x (they; whomever) have a grievance against y (us; whomever), then x will act to punish y until the grievance is resolved.

The fallacy is in confusing “if and only if” statements with “if, then” statements. Would x (they; whomever) attack y (us; whomever) if and only if they had a grievance? Unless you can successfully argue this point, you don’t know why the aggrieved party is really acting. You don’t know if other alleged grievances will emerge; you don’t know whether the grievances are just a cover story for some other purposeful behavior; you don’t know how the grievances are being leveraged, even if they are real grievances.

Furthermore, the deduction that the offensive, putatively retaliatory behavior will stop once the grievance is satisfied can only be a valid deduction if, and only if, the grievance really was the only thing that led to the retaliatory behavior in the first place.

People who fall for the fallacy of grievances also engage in false dichotomies. The catastrophic Arab-Israeli conflict is a case in point. Without a doubt the Palestinians have a grievance against the Jewish state in particular, and the West in general. Most people who lived in geographic Palestine in 1917 were not Jewish, and almost none of those non-Jews would have supported the Balfour Declaration, which was the British document authorizing a Jewish national home in Palestine. The situation was not much better in 1947, when the United Nations voted for partition in Palestine (e.g., a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state).

Critics of Israeli policy, or of the existence of Israel itself, in effect say Palestinians and the Arab rejection front, confrontation states and steadfastness group couldn’t possibly be motivated by hate, or their own competing hegemonies, because they have valid grievances. That’s a false dichotomy. You can be motivated by hate, and by an historic sense of injustice, and by your own competing hegemony all at the same time. Why not?

Critics of Israeli policy say they are falsely maligned as anti-Semites. Of all the crimes allegedly committed by the Jews in history, from A to Z, we now have an additional one – the Jews can’t tell the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. I think some anti-Zionists are falsely maligned as anti-Semites. But being anti-Zionist cannot logically buy one immunity from the charge of anti-Semitism. One can be both anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist, and an appeal to false dichotomies is hardly a refutation of anything. One can even be Jewish in some way (the Jewish Question is still open, so it’s hard to say what is meant by "being Jewish"), and be anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist at the same time. None of these are mutually exclusive statements.

False dichotomies show up directly in competing universalisms and competing hegemonies. For example, if the Marxist critique of capitalism is valid, then Marxism must be the correct ideology, right? (And vice versa!) If the Muslims are right about Jesus, then the Christians must be wrong about Muhammad, and so on. But it's not true - everybody markets themselves and attacks the competition. It's not an either/or situation. Just because X is right in attacking Y does not mean Y is wrong in its attacks on X.

Let’s say the Muslim world overall has grievances against the West (which actually means against Liberalism and liberal democracy, one of the competing universalisms and competing hegemonies). Let’s not just say it; let’s believe it. Let’s accept it. The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, is quite correct in pointing to the failures of diplomacy after World War I and a long history of meddling in the Islamic world. Osama bin Laden made essentially the same charges against the West in his first televised speech after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. While bin Laden fabricated most of the numbers of the dead in Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere – just as the “Peace and Justice” groups often do in America – the overall points were valid.

I’m not equating Ken Livingstone with Osama bin Laden. I’m saying they’re referring to the same, sorry history.

I’ll leave aside whether it is for someone like bin Laden to enforce those grievances. That’s not for me to say, but it seems heretical for him to do so – the community has to decide what is to be done, not someone who seems to be elevating himself to the level of Prophet, which cannot be according to the relevant teachings.

Logically, and empirically, people hide behind grievances to push their real agendas, which in many cases is just their own hegemony. They don’t necessarily want to erase the alleged injustices, but to replace the regime that put in place the alleged injustices with a new regime. You leverage the grievance; you exploit them. The more valid those grievances are the more leverage you will have.

Can we say that bin Laden is only acting because of Western meddling in the Islamic world? Is Ken Livingstone right that there would be no terror had there not been meddling in the Islamic world, continuing up to this day?

They would be right only if we can argue that the terrorists have acted because, and only because, of those of grievances. But no one can argue that. At best, that would be to confuse “if…then” statements with “if, and only if” statements.

Given the theory of competing universalisms, and competing hegemonies, however, bin Laden would be doing exactly what he is doing even without grievances, and he would have wide support even without grievances. If there is only one God, and if there is only one correct community of believers, he would feel he’s right to do everything he’s doing.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis

Perpetual Motion Machines

What a wonderful machine it would be – once you input energy, the machine runs forever. Think of a generator that, once started, generates additional energy forever. Think of a motorcycle engine – once you kickstart it, it runs forever.

It’s called a perpetual motion machine, and everyone knows it doesn’t exist. If nothing else, there always will be friction in any machine, and that represents a loss of energy that has to be replaced. No perpetual motion, in other words. In fact, the only thing you need to know about perpetual motion machines (other than the fact that they don’t exist) is that you can repudiate any engineering model or theory of physics that legitimates perpetual motion machines. The moment you see, hear or even smell “perpetual motion machine,” you are dealing with a fraud, pure and simple.

An economist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis once taught me what was wrong with lots of economic models, such as extreme versions of Keynesian economics that suggest you can create wealth and full employment by simply creating jobs, whatever the job may be. They’re “perfection models,” he told me, systems that allegedly produce wealth (unlimited, or just enough, I don’t remember) indefinitely. You just need to plant the seed money, or start the enterprise somehow, then the economy takes care of itself. Wow – that’s a lot better than capitalism.

But perfection models don’t work, he explained. If they did, you could pay half the population to dig ditches, and the other half to fill them in. That is full employment, friends. But it’s no way to create wealth. It also shows an utter lack of understanding as to what “value” really means in any economic system – value goes beyond mere “labor” or mere “capital,” though this lack of understanding of value is more a characteristic of Marx than Keynes.

The economist said the way to expose any economic system or model as a fraud is simply to identify it as a perfection model. If someone is espousing a perfection model, it’s a fraud. It’s just like exposing a perpetual motion machine. If someone is selling something that good, it’s a fraud, because things that good don’t exist.

Think of this in the context of competing universalisms. I don’t think heaven exists, and I don’t think Paradise exists. I don’t think utopia exists. I don't think you can live forever, without additional inputs. Life, like a machine, once started, that can go on forever? It may be a moral value, but it has nothing to do with reality. Ditto for any utopian models - a society, once established, that can continue forever? They're perpetual motion machines. These models all are literally too good to be true. I think Christianity, Islam and Marxism are promising more than they can deliver, no matter how valid parts of their critiques of others may be, and irrespective of how valid other aspects of these belief systems may be. Liberalism, curiously, doesn’t promise as much as the other competing universalisms. It just promises a chance; with fair rules, there may even be equal opportunity. But you may lose and, of course, you will die one day.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.

The Quality Control Function of a Free Press

Historically, Marxists have considered “free speech” and a “free press” to be bourgeois values, mere “property rights,” especially a free press. This was always used as justification for state-owned media in the old Soviet Union, because the state, being the dictatorship of the proletariat, was more democratic than any capitalist-owned media ever could be. This also is the real world, hard-core meaning behind A.J. Liebling’s statement to the effect that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one, though I don’t know that Liebling was a Marxist. To this day, some academics in America continue to dismiss “freedom of the press” as a mere “property right” and are angry that the press does not work to support leading ideology, which would include ending oppression, redistributing wealth and power, supporting internationalism and so on.

Freedom of speech, when it first tentatively emerged in the old Soviet Union, simply was a means of encouraging people to reveal their concerns and true beliefs about socialism, internationalism and the state, so that pockets of resistance to leading ideology could be identified. The Soviets would try to re-educate individuals, and would reform educational and political structures that were doing a poor job of inculcating citizens with proper beliefs.

Intriguingly, the old Soviet Union was at least going in the right direction, in terms of the expansion of free speech, while America has been going in the wrong direction. There has certainly been media concentration in recent years (the property rights issue). The criticism of media concentration, whether by Marxists, Social Democrats or American Progressive, nevertheless more closely mimics historic criticism of “Jewish-controlled media.”

I’m concerned with the suppression of free speech by Leftists and Progressives on campus. This can be seen in basic writing classes controlled by Modern Language Association professors, instructors and graduate students, which is to say virtually all basic writing classes in America because the MLA simply dominates curriculum, textbooks and hiring in the classroom in English departments.

Part of the tendentious curriculum installed by the MLA is reflected in the code words “critical thinking.” Rhetoric and basic writing classes now teach “critical thinking,” and the professors seek to deflect criticism by insisting that “critical thinking” is a legitimate part of the curriculum.

It's related to critical theory, of course, in which you talk about the oppressed peoples of the world, identify the oppressors and at least think about overthrowing the oppressors. It's prosecutorial, it's a call to arms. That's the innocent construction. More dangerously, it is the old Soviet model the MLA may be following. You encourage limited free speech so as to identify pockets of resistance to leading ideology, then you correct those errors in thinking. ICritical thinking classes also are a great recruiting tool for graduate school admission and future teaching positions - most undergraduates will just go through the motions, but true believers will easily be identified and encouraged to continue a political career on campus. This is the pattern of the Modern Language Association in America, today, more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union. This is worth emphasizing - students may not be ordered to think in a certain way, but this is agenda setting theory and the agenda is tendentious.

The suppression of free speech on campus also is evident in the small but growing trend to require de facto loyalty oaths to progressive causes, such as during the hiring process. This is a form of enforcing party discipline; it’s a suppression of free speech (because people have to say what they’re expected to say or they risk not being hired) and it’s a betrayal of the marketplace of ideas ideal. A personal example illustrates this trend, though I try to avoid personal examples in this series of essays. I was twice challenged by a union leader at a major Midwestern university to which I had applied for a teaching job to declare whether I would sign the department’s diversity and social justice statement. I am a union executive at my newspaper, but I would not agree to sign such a statement. The professor who had challenged me on this turned in her seat and faced away from me during the rest of the interview process; there was an embarrassed silence while several other professors in the seminar room at the time said and did nothing. If you’re familiar with the interview process at colleges, there often is a final chance for faculty to meet the potential new hire, at the end of the day. No faculty member came to greet me at the final scheduled meeting of the day, however. I was a non-person by then, and only the department chair and a friend from the philosophy department showed up.

I had not been asked if I believed in diversity or social justice; I had been asked if I would sign a document.

The Soviet evolution of the concept of free speech is worth exploring. In the early days with Lenin, and especially during Stalin’s reign, there was no free speech. But starting at least with Nikita Khrushchev (whose greatest contribution to free speech may be his “secret speech” against Stalin in 1956) the Soviet Union began expanding free speech rights in a legitimate way.

This was the “quality control function” of free speech and freedom of the press. Corrupt officials, inefficient state enterprises, faulty record keeping and data collection, and other real ills that the Soviet leadership needed to know about had to be brought to their attention somehow, and free speech and a little freedom of the press were good, pragmatic means to achieve this. Every journalist will recognize this as the searchlight function of the free press, as embraced by the old Scripps-Howard lighthouse logo for their newspaper chain.

The first person to tell me about the quality control function of a free press was my thesis adviser in graduate school in 1982. He also taught me that freedom of the press already was being dismissed in America as a mere property right.

In the late 1990s I wanted to write a book about these free speech and freedom of the press issues, and I tracked him down. He was by then the head of the journalism department at a major American university. But he completely disavowed any knowledge whatsoever of these topics. He didn’t know what the quality control function of free speech was, he said.

He had to be careful. While the old Soviet system was going in the right direction, albeit in fits and starts, we were going in the wrong direction in this country. Clearly, people on campus would see through any plot of ours to embrace a valid notion of a free press, one associated with liberalization in the old Soviet Union. Free speech would be a heresy, a threat to leading ideology in which everthing that needs to be known about society already is known (compare to any revealed religion), a racket to protect someone else's property rights, and an insult to all the oppressed people's of the world who don't need to hear the other side of the story, but only need to have their oppression stopped.

The Left often talks about free speech and invokes it to protect this or that controversial writer or thinker. But it's tactical, not strategic. The Left invokes free speech when it's useful either to protect its own or advance its own. Compare this to authoritarian religion - the truth is known, so why would you allow anyone to challenge the truth? But your truths of course can be allowed to challenge someone else's lies.

Liberalism is a competing universalism; Marxism (and the authoritarian Left) is a competing universalism. Liberalism can tolerate Marxism, but the latter cannot long tolerate the former. Coalitions between Liberals and Marxists (or simply the authoritarian Left) will fail if the Marxists gain the upper hand; they will “consolidate” power, as they always do when they take over countries.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.



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All Narratives Are Equal (But Some Are More Equal Than Others)

All narratives are equal (but some are more equal than others).

Many will recognize the above line as an Orwellian-style parody of the old Stalinist-era value, namely that all citizens are equal, but some are more equal than others. And, some will recognize the allusion to post-modernism, literary theory and deconstruction, at least in the popular senses of these terms.

The popular notion of deconstruction, and the way in which it’s used in political discourse, long has been to say that no point of view can be privileged; nothing is the way it seems to be on the surface; and everything you think you know actually comes from something you don’t know (hence, you don’t know anything).

Not so long ago, it was believed that post-modernism in general and deconstruction in particular would “take out” Marxism along with all the other enshrined truths of history that can’t really be proven. Certainly Marxism (or any variant on the “hard Left”) would not be privileged. If Lenin once said religion is the opiate of the people, at least post-modernism could be construed as saying that Marxism, as any universalism, also was an opiate, metaphorically speaking.

Curiously, though, “the Left” has embraced post-modernism in general, and deconstruction in particular.

Deconstruction, at least in the way it’s used in political discourse, is philosophical relativism incarnate. It is philosophical relativism that says nothing is knowable, other than the claim that nothing is knowable, which apparently is very knowable. As relativism goes, no statements can be proven as true, other than the statement itself that no statements can be proven as true. Philosophical relativism always gives itself an exemption, but it is overtly self-contradictory.

Authentic deconstruction may or may not be a little more interesting than as described above, but in the political realm that’s all it is. It’s no surprise, then, that the most political department in the highly politicized American academy (that secular temple not of empiricism anymore, but of competing universalisms) is, in fact, the English department. The death of empiricism in the humanities, to the extent this happened, only enables the behavior.

The Marxists (and I use the term very liberally, pardon the pun, as Liberals certainly are not Marxist or Marxian) like to deconstruct others, but not themselves. Nothing anyone else knows is really known; but what the Marxists know, they know! It’s just an exemption, ala philosophical relativism, and unworthy on the face of it. The Social Democrats in Europe and Progressives in America seem to be adopting the same line. Political thinker Thomas Sowell long aro argued that Leftists were jealous of the Marxist claim that they - the Marxists - had proof for their claims, that history was on their side and that they were doing scientific socialism, but that the Social Democrats and Progressives more or less were relying on normative values to making their case.

Marxists (or, if you will, the “hard Left,” perhaps “the Left” that is outside of the “democratic Left”) are fond of deconstruction because, first, it gives them parity with anyone else and the other’s views (because no one view can be “privileged” over another); then it allows the Marxists to say the other’s views are not valid (because no views are valid in any case); then it allows the Marxists to privilege themselves by saying they own the real truth (e.g., the exemption clause, which rhetorically is employed as a kind of multiple choice quiz, because as everyone else’s views are eliminated, the Marxist or Marxian point of view wins by default).

Christians, Muslims, Jews and anyone else with holy books do something that’s functionally equivalent – their particular holy books are “true,” and things that are outside of them or which contradict the holy books are not true. For the Marxists and increasingly the Social Democrats and Progressives, it’s “theory”; for the believers, it’s divine revelation.

Marxism (and anyone else on the “hard Left”) have something else in common with religion. By virtue of owning the truth, the Marxists can accuse people of deviationism, revisionism and so on. They can demand de facto loyalty oaths, a small but growing trend on American campuses that is typically done through asking about research interests to see if they support or threaten leading ideology, inspecting citations in a scholars list of publications, looking at a scholar's collaborators, grading down submissions to peer-reviewed journals so threats to leading ideology don't get published and so on. The major religions, as we know, demand fidelity and accuse people of heresy or apostasy and so on.

Only Liberalism seems true to a live and let live attitude. Maybe the free thinkers are the Liberals, and vice versa, in which Liberalism is the antidote to competing universalisms.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis.