Switching Epistemologies: Conservatives
A striking divergence has made itself apparent to me of late.
I noticed it first amidst the conservatives. In light of Melania Trump's plagiarized speech at the RNC, there was a surprising amount of right-wingers who came to her defense in order to claim that "she did not plagiarize." While a certain amount of political defense is always expected in matters of major social contortion, the expected response in this sort of situation should have been more to the point of "she did not mean to plagiarize" or "she and her speechwriter miscommunicated something that was intended to be quoted" or "she was quoting and left off the quote because it was Michelle Obama's words and we're Republicans." No, rather, the response was initially "she did not plagiarize," a claim which, unlike the aforementioned defenses, falls into the category of "objective statement that can or cannot be backed up by evidence."
After all, whether or not the American people are educated in the academic circles which have long defined plagiarism, that definition still holds true when discussing its verifiability - that definition being "the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own." To verify or falsify, then, the claim of the Trump campaign ("she did not plagiarize") would be to identify whether or not Melania Trump did or did not take someone else's work or ideas and pass them off as her own.
When one discusses the matters of "subjective" or "objective" truth / factuality / facticity / &c., while those terms are philosophically-contestable there are certain socially-accepted usages of them that might be useful for the claim I am about to make. To say that something is "objectively true" is, in the common parlance, to say that something is "provable," in a scientific sense. We can take evidence, apply that evidence to an experiment, and then make conclusions based off of that evidence. In this case, Melania Trump quoted the words of the First Lady without citing her (which could be, honestly, a rookie mistake - Melania is not a seasoned speaker the same way that Michelle was when she spoke at the DNC in 2008) and then applied those exact words to her specific context as though they were always about her context. The words she used were not the sorts that one would normally quote and then say "As so-and-so said..."; rather, they were common, everyday words that Michelle Obama had used to describe her husband and her family which now Melania was using to describe her husband and her family.
This is definitionally plagiarism. It is, dare I say it, objectively plagiarism.
Whether or not Melania plagiarizing in this situation actually matters or not is to me an unimportant question. What is more striking is the distinctly subjective response of the Trump-defenders. By saying "she did not plagiarize" they claim something that is distinctly oppositional to objective criticism. Of course, this is not the only moment where the objective truth of a matter has been wholeheartedly ignored by the Trump campaign. If one were to define this campaign, actually, one could describe it as one large propaganda machine that is churning objectively true principles into matters of subjective moral relativity.
What is most shocking about that is how the GOP has branded themselves over the course of the past several decades as the guardians of "objective truth." The association between the GOP and conservative Christian evangelicalism is grounded, in part, as a reactionary response to the liberal pursuit of what the right calls "moral relativism" which is a "subjective" view on truth. But here we see, in an anecdotal way, how the Trump movement signals a bizarre shift in the right's undergirding epistemology. They are becoming "subjectivists" (to coin a phrase) and leaving objective truth behind.
Switching Epistemologies: Liberals
But, as I began, I said "I noticed it first amidst the conservatives." The same thing is happening to the liberals. As observed by Jonathan Merrit earlier this year, the supposed "moral relativism" of the left is actually disappearing (if it ever truly existed). In a season of American history in which battle lines are being drawn for how we define the American culture, certain claims are revealing themselves to be the "orthodox standard," as it were, of the left. Is homosexual activity okay? Should welfare exist? Does racism and sexism exist? Questions that used to be matters of critical reflection - and then became solidified as distinct, calculated responses - are now treated almost like a new moral catechism of the liberal movement.
Despite a claim that views morality as a thing of the Victorian past, it seems evident to me, at least, that my liberal friends hold almost precisely identical views to one another, arrived at through no particular reflection or challenge, and stated with almost evangelistic zeal. A few vignettes should make this sort of intellectual hegemony clear: my liberal friends were unilaterally opposed to the Brexit, and, more locally, my liberal friends are currently unilaterally opposed to the University of Chicago's policy against "trigger warnings." Neither of these topics seem (to me, at least) within the central purview of liberal politics and liberal policy, and yet uniquely identical conclusions are being made about them as if those conclusions were "absolute truth." If moral relativism represented a subjective mode of truth that once claimed the epistemological center of American liberalism, then it has been supercessed by a new objectivity that claims orthodoxy over the liberal mind.
In other words, and to sum up this opening argument: the popular thought of the conservative and the liberal political communities within this nation while aspiring one mode of epistemology simultaneously enact the opposite mode of epistemology without being aware of that switch. Taking a cue from Jean-Paul Sartre, I would say that the conservatives and the liberals regard their own ideologies with "bad faith" - they believe something while simultaneously denying that belief through an oppositional belief.
Since the words "objective" and "subjective" here have served their purposes, I am going to discard them. I've pushed their colloquial definitions as far as I can, trying to avoid confusion with their philosophical / epistemological definitions. But since the following part of my argument is about to become a little more formal in its critical tone, those terms are no longer appropriate. In their place, I will call the truly subjective relativism of the conservatives "the Unorthodoxy of the Right" and the truly objective truth-claims of the liberals "the Orthodoxy of the Left." It should be clear that the use of "[Un]Orthodoxy" here is not, as far as I am concerned, actually about who is "right" and who is "wrong." Instead, it is to signify how the right has abandoned stationary social / ethical mores for relativistic mode and how the left has abandoned relativism for its own brand of "absolute truth."
Totemism / Ideologies
Around three years ago, I wrote a little essay about seeing the American political system through the eyes of totemism. In that essay I noted one problem that I keep coming back to time and again: that is, the way that American tribalism seems to demand obedience to certain "totems" (or "gods"), as it were.
Here's a little view into how that tribalism functions, using myself as an example: I firmly believe that there is a problem in this country regarding the police and how African-Americans are treated by institutions supposedly representing justice. As such, I will often comment or tweet or post - or however I engage the social media world - and tag on "#BlackLivesMatter." And, inevitably, one of my conservative friends will come along and, in some manner or another, insinuate that I have been "taken in" by the liberal media machine, that I have been brainwashed by the liberal university, or something to that regard.
(Nevermind them that I learned about social justice through an evangelical Christian organization doing incredible exegesis on the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis, or that I heard about African-American sorrow firsthand from my black brothers and sisters in Christ.)
On the same regard, I hold firmly the view that life begins in the womb, at conception, and thus am adamantly opposed to abortion in all regards. As such, when the occasion arises, I will make a comment to that end around my liberal friends, and inevitably they either try really really hard to make me see how abortion is a women's right issue [and there are women's rights issues surrounding the topic, no doubt], or they will say that I have been "taken in" by the collusion of conservatism and Christianity, or that I believe some sort of oppressive theology made up by the conservative spokesmen of this world (the Pat Robertson folks) that I can't reject because I've been raised in it.
(Nevermind them that I learned about the unborn from reading the Bible after I became a Christian, since I didn't grow up reading the Bible, or that I have thought very intently about the philosophical and ethical consequences of the pro-life movement, including the importance of post-birth support.)
I do not fit into the simple structures of political ideology that exist within this country. For my conservative peers, if I were to call myself a "conservative" (which I reject), they would call me "a Republican in Name Only," as they do with anyone who is not ideologically "pure enough" for them. For my liberal peers, if I were to call myself a "liberal" (which I reject), they would call me a "reactionary" with "Victorian ideals of sexual morality," or something like that [which, by the by, I saw a liberal peer say about this article by Prof. Ruddick of UChicago... and it seemed to me a very inappropriate label to slap on the Chair of the English Department!].
What these anecdotal, hypothetical name-callings reveal - and what the real-world, actually-occurring, name-callings demonstrate - is an unwillingness for the vast majority of the American electorate to accept structures of identity that are outside the hegemony of our current [totemic] system. In other words, as they say, "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down"... or it switches sides altogether, which in the ideological world of Christian politics (for instance) is how a blogger / thinker like Rachel Held Evans is created, or, by contrast, conservative speakers like Allen Hood who left mainline Protestantism for the Charismatic Movement. It is like a simple code in binary, which cannot accept anything but the inputs of 0 or 1.
The whole world, instead, gets re-defined by terms of "ideological purity" - either by the deceitful-commitment to the Unorthodoxy of the Right or the blind-worship of the Orthodoxy of the Left. Those who do not fit [within 5% of the scale of purity?] are identified as "radicals," as sleeper agents from the "other side" who are "not really one of us." They are "one of them."
An academic friend of mine - a liberal - once told me about how he voiced opposition to the public school system and found himself outnumbered by also-liberal detractors who found his claim... conservative. He, of course, had a different end-goal in mind, and through his critical reflection decided that the current state of affairs would not serve his vision. He improvised. He created. He challenged the hegemony.
Althusser's Ideology and the Invasiveness of Modern American Politics
I use the word "hegemony" in these instances very seriously. After all, in the back of my head I cannot shake a different definition of Ideology than the one I've been using so far. That is, the definition presented by the Marxist-Structuralist Louis Althusser.
While summing up Althusser's definition of Ideology in one paragraph might be a too adventurous claim, I'll try to do so anyways: Althusser said that Ideology is the way our ideas become material [= real, in Althusser's case] reality, continuing to support the structures and systems that already exist. Through Ideology, Althusser was able to point out the ways that society doesn't just reproduce the producers of labor (that is, humans under capitalism), but actually how society reproduces the always-already means and relations of production. To put in less "Critical Theory" terminology: Ideology is what ensures that a society continues producing, even though the ideologies, perspectives, worldviews, and epistemologies within that society might be vying against each other or against the society itself.
How this word is useful in the current context is to point out the increasing invasion of the private in American social life by - not the public, I must hasten to add - the Political. I propose that the Political Ideology of the modern American moment, capitalizing on the new technologies of social media and handheld Internet access which define the hyper-information age, desires the same sort of hegemonic influence as Althusserian Ideology, and that its methods of reproducing the modes and relations of its production are through the aforementioned modes of totemic identification.
This Political Ideology (or Ideological State Apparatus, to use the Althusserian term; ISA) aims for its preeminence by pitting its two "wings" against one another. By creating an ever-narrower gate through which citizens must properly identify their ideological purity, the Political Ideology sets up new subjecthoods. Citizens are no longer "concerned individuals" or "nuanced moderates," but, instead, "conservatives" and "liberals," with a smattering of "libertarians" who think they've escaped Ideology, but instead have simply crafted yet another pre-written subjectified template to experience the world through.
As it should be clear from my introductory remarks regarding the hackneyed and confused epistemological grounding underneath both ideological realms (and I am sure I could point out confused epistemologies in the libertarians as well, going from Descartes to Ayn Rand, ;-) ), this dichotomy between "Right" and "Left" is an enormously false one because it sets up the individual for major philosophical failure. Either accept the surface-claim of objective, absolute truth presented by the Right and end up being swindled into its true Unorthodoxy of relativism, OR follow the Left's relativistic road and end up with a iron-clad, unshakable Orthodoxy of ideals. If one rejects these paths, the Political Ideology course-corrects... "No, you're actually a liberal," or "You're truly a conservative" come the social voices.
I have no critical or investigative thoughts that lend me to the answer of the necessary question following this sort of study. That question, of course, is: "Knowing that this is the way things are, knowing that the Political Ideology desires to inhabit the daily lives of the American person, how should we respond?" That 'ought' is a complicated and difficult one.
But my contention, and, at the very least, the goal that I aim at with this post and with other posts, is that the free mind is worthwhile, and in order for a mind to be free it must cast off the masters that wish to dominate it. (Of course, I would also argue, as a Christian, that total freedom in the intellectual realm is only possible through "the renewal of the mind" mentioned by Paul in the Book of Romans.) To think critically is the answer and antagonism to the enclosing circle of Political doctrine. The free-thinking person is not pre-committed to his or her "party," but is instead challenged to consider each thought and idea on its own merit.
(It also strikes me that this is one of the claims of the Libertarian movement in this country - from their association with Ludwig von Mises, to "Reason.org," and etc. Some day I will write an essay as to why the Libertarian's "Free Mind" is just as submitted to Ideology and to the Political Ideology as the Conservative and the Liberal. It has to do with a flawed vision of the word "freedom," which is at the very root of their thought.)
This is an anticlimactic claim after a long, long essay: to think freely and to think critically is to challenge all of the Political powers-that-be. It is to call "fault" on truth-claims backed up by relativistic epistemologies, and to call "fault" on relativism backed up by absolute truth-claims. These epistemological digressions and dichotomized views of "Either/Or truth" are an affront to those who find Truth - actual, real, legitimate, divine Truth - to be worth defending. And to think freely and critically is to challenge the popular orthodoxy of the Right and the Left.
In those terms, to think freely and critically is to become a heretic in the eyes of the Political Ideology.
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