The Death of Thought: Common Sense

I have learned that to be right and useful, one must accept a continuing divergence between approved belief - what I have elsewhere called conventional wisdom - and the reality. And in the end, not surprisingly, it is the reality that counts.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"Common sense" is so called because it is (supposedly) truth that is known and accepted by most everyone. Common sense makes an appearance on both sides of the culture wars, but is most frequently cited by cultural conservatives in a bid for (or assumption of) populist acceptance. Wherever common sense appears, it must be resisted: common sense is the most virulent of anti-intellectualisms. Common sense is the death of rational thought.

Common sense is invoked to avoid thinking. Common sense is an intellectual shortcut: any "truth" it expounds is an unexamined truth, at least at the point it exists as common sense. The more one's moral and intellectual makeup depends on common sense, the less one is personally involved in the moral and intellectual process.

Ideally, we would develop morally and intellectually first from personal experience, and secondly from our interfaces with the ideas of others. It is important to understand that moral and intellectual development is a process - one would hope a never ending process - as opposed to a nirvana-esque state of enlightenment we hope to achieve. Every day we have experiences, and we struggle (one hopes it's a struggle, anyway) to put the experiences into the context of the moral and intellectual framework of our lives. We do the same with the ideas and values of others as we encounter them. These experiences and ideas are the things we "know" and the things we "believe". As we come to understand moral and intellectual development as a process, we continually question the things we "know" and "believe" in the context of new and ever-changing information. Our ideas and values are subject to constant and never-ending scrutiny. As unexamined "truth", common sense is the enemy of evolutionary thought. I'm not so naive as to believe that life completely innocent of assumption is possible; but the more life is examined, the more new truth comes into focus. This is the "truth process", an evolutionary process that we, as rational beings, owe allegiance.

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The truth process always requires new information to continue. Lack of new information leads to the end of the process. New information only arises in a break with the known: it is only at this break (Badiou's "event") we can re-contextualize our world, only at this break that we can examine what we know in a new light. A muscle develops by breaking through its sheathing in a continual process of injury and renewal; the intellect and its double, morality, develop in exactly the same way.

The truth process requires two seemingly contradictory things at the same time: fanatical devotion to what we know as well as the fanatical devotion to questioning what we know. All truth must be hard-earned in this way. Anything less than both a radical questioning and a radical allegiance undermines the truth process . . . throws it out of balance, if you will.

Common sense can take the form of radical allegiance, but it is never (as we've seen) a radical questioning. As surely as it is a way to avoid thinking, it is also a way to avoid the impact of the break, the catastrophe of the event. Common sense is the unbroken sheathing that imprisons and atrophies the muscle of the moral intellect.

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I've consciously dialed back my rhetoric for this little rant, lest it become political in nature. While it's true that conservatives most consistently evoke common sense (Galbraith's "conventional wisdom" is exactly the same thing), the intellectual poverty exists beyond party or philosophical allegiances . . . as surely as the concept of tax cuts as economic stimulus is ridiculous, so is the altruistic model of foreign aid. The curse of common sense exists anyplace where too many people hold too many unexamined truths, whatever those truths may be.

REJECT COMMON SENSE!

The Death of Meaning Pt. 3: Hyperbolic Destruction

"I will ask you to not hang and lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer" - Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., during a Chicago news conference in which embattled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich announced his appointment of Roland Burris to the senate seat vacated by Barack Obama.

Let's peruse this statement for just a moment: African-American Congressman Bobby Rush says not to "hang and lynch" fellow African-American Roland Burris. One is left to assume that all symbolism of this statement is absolutely deliberate, since no African-American (least of all an African-American politician) would ever make this statement "innocently" - i.e., without knowledge of the full implications of the statement.

As the living witnesses of slavery have faded away, lynching becomes the most visible symbol of the oppression of Africans (though certainly not limited to Africans) in the United States. Lynching is justifiably kept in front of the American populace as a symbol of white oppression. Unlike familiar "hate speech" terms (such as "nigger", "queer", and so on), lynching is an action, rather than a linguistic tool of oppression . . . and, as such, can not be subverted or "reclaimed" in the same way that the affected subcultures try to reclaim such linguistic tools. Irreducible, lynching stands beyond language as an act of simple evil.

"This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree." - Clarence Thomas, responding to a Senate Committee's investigation of sexual harassment charges against him during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Thomas's famous quote starts a little differently, since his is not a simple lynching, but rather a "high tech" lynching: adding the term "high tech" to lynching makes the language more metaphorical. Using the colloquialism "uppity blacks" adds to the metaphorical nature of his high tech lynching. But, right at the point where his rhetoric is the strongest, he reaches for the brass ring: "You will be lynched." By distilling the high tech out of lynching, he moves back from the metaphorical to the concrete. He tries to move back to the metaphorical again later in the sentence ("caricatured [. . .] rather than hung from a tree"), but the lynching is still there in its most concrete form.

To the degree that the social sphere operates in an "ethical" manner (i.e., in a manner codified as "ethical" - the code's actual efficacy can still be open for question), there are concrete markers of evil that will be cited. These markers are irreducible events that are horribly unique and "unthinkable" yet frequently (and paradoxically) cited as measuring sticks for the concept of everyday evil. More common even than lynching references are comparisons of political situations to the Holocaust and of repressive leaders to Hitler. Think, for a minute, how many situations have been compared to the Holocaust: just recently, Bosnia, Darfur, and Rwanda top the list. And how many leaders have been compared to Hitler? Mainstream Western popular thought has put up Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and even tin horn dictators like Ruholla Khomeini and Muammar al-Gaddafi as Hitler surrogates.

"Relating to the Nazi extermination, it exemplifies radical evil by pointing to that whose imitation or replication must be prevented at all costs - or, more precisely: that whose non-repetition provides the norm for judgement of all situations. Hence the 'exemplarity' of the crime, its negative exemplarity. But the normative function of the example persists: the Nazi extermination is radical Evil in that it provides for our time the unique, unrivalled - and in this sense transcendent, or unsayable - measure of Evil pure and simple. [. . .] As a result, the extermination and the Nazis are both declared unthinkable, unsayable, without conceivable precedent or posterity - since they define the absolute form of Evil - yet they are constantly invoked, compared, used to schematize every circumstance in which one wants to produce, among opinions, an effect of the awareness of Evil - since the only way to access Evil in general is under the historical condition of radical Evil." - Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, pp. 62-63

The establishment of radical Evil in this way creates a set that aspires to include all radical Evil. All elements of this set become, by definition, unthinkable and unsayable, like the radical Evil that serves as its model . . . and, as such, they also become irreducible and inaccessible. Anything thrust into this set becomes pure type and beyond scrutiny - which is exactly what those who use these classifications intend.

As what would have to be considered a radical Evil (in and of itself, separate of the set of radical evil as conceived above), lynching can be used to define a set of radical Evil in the manner described above. And, in the above quotes by Bobby Rush and Clarence Thomas, lynching is clearly deployed as a yardstick of Evil. In so doing, Rush and Thomas not only call the game, they set themselves up as judges and arbiters of truth, empowered by the (irreducible) symbols of Evil they utilize.

Obviously reading, listening, and speaking in a social sphere requires a level of sophistication from the actors involved. The majority of utterance is stacked to some degree, and communication doesn't necessarily take place on the surface level: for instance, when my dearly beloved decides she needs a drink from the fridge only after I have left the kitchen, it's doubtful that my death is immanent, no matter how much I claim that she "is killing me". It is here that these utterances (especially the Thomas quote) duck and dart around meaning. Again, Thomas moves between pure lynching and a mixed lynching metaphor. I insist that Thomas wants the lynching to be taken seriously, but (in a lawyerly manner) he leaves himself some wiggle room to claim the lynching as metaphor instead of event. Rush, on the other hand, is nowhere near as equivocal. In either case, the speaker clearly wants his lynching to be taken either seriously or not according to his own judgemental whim. The question becomes very simple: are there any bodies swinging from the trees here? The answer is, alas, no. We are left to assume that either Rush and Thomas are unreliable witnesses/judges, or that lynching as event has lost its singular meaning.

Here, there are actually three axes to the devaluation of utterance: not only is the speaker called into question and the symbol devalued, but the event described has been robbed of its unique character and posited as type. It has been filed away, listed as irreducible, and its irreducibility protects it from examination. The event, unexamined, remains misunderstood by its faulty (hyperbolic and incorrect) definition. So, Burris's exploitation by Blagojevich is misunderstood, as is the exact manner in which a legitimate inquiry into allegations against Thomas got turned into a partisan political circus. Both are unfortunate situations, but neither are lynchings (no bodies!), so we are left without any real concept of exactly what these events are.

Some would say that I am taking this language too seriously; I would say that these exchanges demonstrate a lack of commitment to meaning, if not truth. Burris's entanglement in an unfortunate political situation is in no way a lynching, and Rush is an idiot for using the word. Neither is Thomas's high-tech lynching a lynching proper, and as a Supreme Court Justice, he should have a very clear concept of the power of language. As surely as the commentator who would compare Hussein to Hitler, Rush and Thomas contribute to the death of meaning.