Fundamentals to Misunderstanding Politics

Chapter 0.0 Toward Political Riddles (Rather Than Maxims)?

0.1

Oak Boat: I remember you told me how one night in April 2016 your hosts in Rome took you on an after-dinner drive across La Roma, how the vehicle you rode in passed by the Vatican, passed the Colosseum––passed the Bocca della Verità (“Mouth of Truth”), which is that stone orifice into which Audrey Hepburn’s hand once slipped at the behest of Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953)–– then you said your ride passed a well-lit mansion that the driver said was owned by billionaire ex-prime minister Berlusconi (famous for his “bunga bunga”parties).

Newt Monk: Yes, with our bellies full of pizza from one of our host’s favorite restaurants nestled in the non-tourist part of the Eternal City, we were afterward shown the city sites. And, as they drove us around and pointed at the various ancient stonework as seen under modern light fixtures, our Italian hosts picked our brains about American politics:

“Would it be Trump or Hillary?” (“Hillary, of course!”)

“What is your opinion about all these school shootings?” (“It’s a sort of pornography that the gun nuts enjoy indulging in.”)

There may’ve been other questions, better answers, but I don’t remember, except to make a note to myself to reread Boethius and Machiavelli once we got back home.

Oak Boat: Why?

Newt Monk: It just seemed (at the time at least) like a practical thing to do, being a participating citizen of the American democratic experiment. I’d read them before, found some rules of thumb that seemed (at the time) wise on the surface, noteworthy at first glance, possibly valuable for pondering, bothering to brood on later, in other words, I took notes while reading them.

Oak Boat: Oh yes. And now that you’ve pondered and brooded and done all that?

Newt Monk: It may be time to say goodbye to all that and now unlearn whatever it was I think I might’ve once learned.

Oak Boat: Is it that late in the day already?

Newt Monk: I’m afraid so. For the things we think we learn too often turn out to be completely separate and disassociated from whatever it is we’ve actually learned and apprehended and put into practice without thinking about it.

Oak Boat: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” [1]

Newt Monk: Yes, and I think it’s time I unlearned everything. It’s time for me to pour out that knowledge onto the ground, in a kenosis-kind-of-way,[2] I guess. Let’s let it evaporate (and thus we won’t let it ever poison Old Isaac’s well). Let it never reach the nether-aquifer we tramp on all the days of our lives.

Oak Boat: Yeah, pour it out, get it out of your system, like the character of Rosalind in Shakespeare:

I prithee tell me who is it quickly, and speak apace. I would thou could’st stammer, that thou mightst pour this conceal’d man out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of narrow-mouth’d bottle––either too much at once or none at all. I prithee take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy tidings. ^[3]

Newt Monk: Before you now, Oak Boat, take I this oath, full of flowerily language, over-laden with pollen, overgrown with unpruned polyps:

The Oath

Let me fast forthwith and abstain ever more from indulging in the emotionalism that forever accompanies the consumption of:

• any crumb (whether fresh or stale) of political wisdom,
• any and all strategies for voting,
• any philosophies of leadership (whose names, brands, and public relation campaigns merely disguise prescriptions of followership),
• any more damned electoral divination—particularly that variety of divination as performed by jingo-journalists and soothsaying commentators and self-appointed experts in the name of their holy culture war (when cheap and simple Rorschach tests made of used sheets of toilet paper fished out of the pipelines of Shawshank Prison would better serve society).

Oak Boat: Truly you have said a mouthful.

Newt Monk: And though the words of that oath may bind me to their meaning, I also find freedom—a fresh kind of freedom—in recognizing, as one of the consequences of having taken the above oath, that philosophy, particularly political philosophy, can never coerce, but only point in some direction. It cannot unwillingly drag you down the rabbit hole (or Hobbit hole, or badger burrow, or through snake-filled tombs of prairie dog towns). As Iain McGilchrist has explained in The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021):

With the best will in the world, on both sides, I can’t make you see what I experience as the truth. I can never convince you of a point of view unless you already, at some level, get it. As Friedrich Waismann [a writer whom both I Newt Monk and you, Oak Boat, know not a jot] put it,

We cannot constrain anyone who is unwilling to follow the new direction of a question; we can only extend the field of vision of the asker, loosen his prejudices, guide his gaze in a new direction: but all this can be achieved only with his consent. [How I See Philosophy, (Macmillan, 1968), p. 20).] [4]

Oak Boat:Yes, you have to content yourself with not being able to see the “whatever-it-is,” as McGilchrist calls it, that someone else sees, even if they think they saw it in something so quaint as an old book:

If I can’t see the moon, that doesn’t mean it stops being there for others. If we are all tuned in to the same whatever-it-is—and I believe it makes no sense to assert we are not—something very like what I can’t see is probably being seen by others, and ultimately that will affect me. It is perfectly possible to be deceived about, or to be in denial about, an aspect of whatever-it-is. [5]

(Continue to Chapter 0.1 here.)

NOTES

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[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Shadow of the Past,” The Fellowship of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954–55; 50th Anniversary Edition, 2004), (I, ii), p. 51.

[2] Philippians 02:03–08.

[3] Shakespeare, As You Like It: or, What You Will, (III, ii).

[4] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), (Introduction), p. 12.

[5] McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, p. 15.

“Faux the Humanities?”
When the (Lack of) Value in Literature
Overtakes the (Lack of) Quality in Literature

A lot of talk going around (this is only one of the latest examples) about the demise of the humanities etcetera.

But I suspect it has something to do with mistaking the past-present-future value of literature for the present quality (which includes quantity) of literature.

Here are three quotations I’ve been pondering lately concerning this subject. No analysis to provide just yet (though that may come later), for there is plenty to ponder:

The first is from Karl Popper (1902–1994):

I admire the mediæval cathedrals as much as anybody, and I am perfectly prepared to recognize the greatness and uniqueness of mediæval craftsmanship. But I believe that æstheticism must never be used as an argument against humanitarianism.

(“Preface to the Second Edition” (1950), The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2013, 2020), (ch. 11, n. 61), pp. 663–64)

The next is from Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), on how one can’t draw conclusions from literature:

James Peck: You once said, “It is not unlikely that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do.”

Noam Chomsky: That’s perfectly true and I believe that. I would go on to say it’s not only not unlikely, but it’s almost certain. But still, if I want to understand, let’s say, the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions. Look, there’s no question that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes—Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don’t remember a thing about it, except the impact. And I don’t doubt that, for me, personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes changed by literature over a broad range—Hebrew literature, Russian literature, and so on. But ultimately, you have to face the world as it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate. Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.

(“Interview [with James Peck],” The Chomsky Reader, ed. Peck, (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 4)

The last is from Iain McGilchrist (b. 1953):

I readily accept that there is no cast-iron certainty here, but there isn’t any anywhere. So let’s get over it. There are, however, degrees of truth, some of them very great, and carrying increasing conviction with experience. Though truth is always my personal judgment, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account your and many others. It is far from random, but it is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination. That doesn’t make it less reliable than being informed by a single source, such as reason, might have done, but more reliable. Acquiring a degree of judgment that can make these elements intelligently cohere is—or used to be—the whole purpose of education. It [p. 398] is why we study the humanities. What history and classics and literature tell us is not to be found in the sciences anywhere. Nowadays we seem to have forgotten this crucial insight, on which the future of our civilisation nonetheless hangs. Judgment used to be the foundation of the idea of reasonableness—a concept you may remember, but which we are in danger of losing, if we have not already done so, in a mechanised, bureaucratic society. The popular reaction to this has been only to intensify the mechanistic vision: no longer seeing complex, unique individuals but only representatives of groups, no longer open to appropriately nuanced, but simple ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ positions, and shouting more and more loudly. Reasonableness is as far from unbridled emotion as it is from rote rationality, on the worst excesses of which it acts as a much-needed brake.

(The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), (II, x), pp. 397–98)