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.

The Circle

Characteristic of all competing universalisms, competing hegemonies, nationalisms, tribalisms, and so on is the circle – you’re either inside the circle or outside of it.

National Public Radio broadcast a guest essayist several years ago who had converted to Islam and gone to Saudi Arabia during the Hajj in search of the real Malcolm X, who was the essayist’s hero.

The essayist found people of all colors and shades, from the proverbial four corners of the Earth when he arrived in Mecca; he found the rich and powerful in humble proximity to persons who had invested their life savings into making the journey.

The essayist concluded that the reformed Malcolm had been correct – chauvinism, hegemony, hate and oppression of any kind were wrong because we are all the same under the skin.

Then the essayist changed his tune. It is not Malcolm X who had become a beautiful thing, he argued, but Malcolm had discovered a beautiful thing, namely Islam.

I think Islam is a beautiful thing – if you are a Muslim. For all its inclusion, generosity and respectfulness, it still draws a circle, like almost all other beliefs – you are either inside the circle, or you are outside the circle.

I see this as a problem. The community of believers still functions like a membership organization. It is no different than Christianity, or Judaism, or the Communist Party or any other membership organization in this regard. It may be a better membership organization than any other; I’m neutral on that point. Christianity may be better; I’m neutral on that, too. Communism may be better. The National Alliance may be a better membership organization (I hardly believe it is, but for sake of argument, I don’t want to privilege one membership organization over another).

The above applies to nationalisms, too. It’s characteristic of internationalism and the left wing of the human rights movement to be hostile to national borders for the very reason listed above, because of the practical implications of any belief system that say some people are in, and some people are out, which is what nationalism does.

Imagine, if you will, a human rights plank that would say Americans deserve better medical care than Rwandans, or that Germans deserve better housing than Peruvian Indians and so on. You can’t do it. Defenders of nationalism these days are dismissed as racist (even though that’s often unfair and often inaccurate), but they are dismissed for doing something that is no different, and no worse, than what proponents of any competing universalism are doing – they’re drawing a circle, and you’re either inside it, or outside.

Internationalism, which on one level of interpretation simply means the doing away with national borders and privilege and expanding human rights to everyone, equally, has in fact often been associated with hard-core Marxism and Leninism in the 20th century. As such, it’s just another circle. Its idea of inclusion ultimately is conquest of the Earth – it’s no different than any other competing universalism. A lot of people suffered under the worker’s paradise; blaming Soviet-era mistakes on Josef Stalin won’t do, either, because Marxism enabled and promoted Stalin.

So it is with churches, though I put religion and ideology together in one basket, as competing universalisms. They all try to take over the planet; they all seek to explain human behavior on an empirical level; they all seek to guide human behavior on a normative level. Curiously, Judaism, which is the mother of the daughter religions Christianity and Islam, is accused of being “exclusive” and "particularistic" by the adherents of the latter two. The issue of Judaism is confounded by its association to a particular race and/or particular national history, but Judaism as a religion is not exclusive or particularistic – anybody can convert to the religion, and there are scores of national groups represented among the “Jewish” population of Israel, for example. But Judaism does not proselytize, and does not say everyone must belong to the faith, so it is not a competing universalism. In fact, it is the one major religion that has not sought to take over the planet, in spite of the well known charges against it. Judaism does draw a circle around itself, however, and either you're in or you're out.

Conceivably, one of the true universalisms (Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, Marxism broadly defined) could actually conquer the planet, and then everyone would be inside the circle. But that can never happen in the real world because there are competing universalisms that will fight increasingly harder to not let this happen in proportion to how much they are threatened, and there are all the troublesome little “isms” like Judaism or any of hundreds of nationalisms that won’t go away so quietly, either.

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 Theory of Root Causes

The theory of root causes often is invoked by critics of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

One thing the war in Iraq cannot be about is root causes, however. Why? Because there is no such thing as a root cause.

And why is that? Because, what are the root causes of the root causes? You cannot arbitrarily start a chain of causation at a certain time in history, after history already has begun.

The root cause of the problems in Iraq often is held to be Israel (but not the reaction to Israel, for some reason); the root cause of all instability in the Middle East often is held to be the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, at least by most American Progressives, European Social Democrats, many academics and others who are sympathetic to the Arab point of view in the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.

But why was Israel created in 1948? American hegemony? British imperialism? Soviet imperialism (the Soviet Union was, in fact, the first country to extend diplomatic relations to Israel)? World Jewish government?

Some voices more sympathetic to Israel will say it was because of Hitlerism in particular and European anti-Semitism in general (see the Dreyfus Affair for insights into French anti-Semitism, which greatly informed Hitler and the Nazis; see also the Russian pogroms of the 19th century). Sympathetic voices will say Israel was a response to these root causes.

And Zionists will say Israel was actually a response to the Roman conquest of Judea and Samaria (geographic Palestine) in approximately 70 A.D. Israel would not have been created in 1948 had Judea, anchored in Jerusalem, never gone out of existence in the first place. That's the root cause, right?

Where do you stop looking for root causes, in other words?

In terms of logic, the theory of root causes makes no sense because you cannot start the chain of causation somewhere in the middle of causation, and you cannot isolate one agent of change as the cause, and discount all other agents of change, and you cannot have a localized cause while ignoring other localized causes.

Causation as a thing – not just an a priori concept – cannot start in 1948, or 1917, or 1881, or 70 A.D., or anytime after the world itself has started. The theory of root causes says that once the root cause is established, everything else follows. In fact, the whole illusory notion of root causes is just a subset of strict determinism – once something starts, everything that follows is affected.

X caused Y; Y would not have happened without X.

But strict determinism either exists from the beginning of time, or it does not exist. You cannot have strict determinism at Creation, or at the Big Bang, then have an infinite number of new strict determinisms that keep changing earlier strict determinisms. That may be good chaos theory, but it is not strict determinism. The theory of root causes might make sense as a subset of chaos theory, but it makes no sense as a subset of strict determinism.

In real terms, adherents of the theory of root causes are confused between the interconnectedness of things and anything that might be called causation. But they have no theory of causation. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, adherents of root causes see a connection between the creation of the State of Israel and the continuing turmoil in the Middle East. OK, there’s a connection. Most observers see a connection. I see a connection.

But there’s a connection between the lack of democracy and the continuing turmoil, too. There’s a connection between the lack of modernity in the Arab world and continuing turmoil, particularly in terms of the Rule of God versus the rule of law and elected officials. We take the separation of Church and State for granted, but it took the Christian West long enough to separate the two. The separation of church and state was a triumph of Liberalism, one of the competing universalisms.

The theory of root causes fails on the normative level, too. It allows moral culpability and free will to be assigned to certain actors on the world stage, but not to other actors. In the Middle East conflict, the Jews, or the Americans or the British, are held to be culpable, and to have caused others to react in whatever ways they reacted, because these others apparently have no free will, because they are incapable of moral choices, and because their behavior was entirely caused by elements outside of themselves, e.g., the theory of root causes and strict determinism excuse the victims of root causes.

In religious movements per se, the devil is the root cause of evil. Most people who are troubled by that argument are troubled by the notion of blaming everything on the devil (easily accounted for in Zoroastrianism, not so easily accommodated in the Abrahamic faiths). But critical thinkers should be troubled by this notion of the "root cause" of anything.


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.