Process of Change: Part Five

Yesterday I talked about a foundation of logic for society, which might make my reliance on emotion today seem somewhat ironic.  Life demands balance, though, and to dogmatically adhere to either logic or emotion would be a mistake.  For instance, I recently read an article about a nineteen year old male who killed his four year old sister and only received forty years.  I felt indignation at that, especially after the article described how the child implicitly trusted her murderer right until the last moments.  I then had to ask myself, however, if such indignation at the sentence was warranted.  I am, after all, a strict opponent of the death penalty, and have argued that it is not the place of the government to validate desires for vengeance.  Given that, I had to evaluate whether or not similar urges were driving me.  I concluded that no, my indignation was valid and my desire to see the young man receive a life sentence was based as much in logic as in emotion.  Not only did he take a life, but the life of someone who trusted him unconditionally, who followed him to the proverbial chair and let him throw the switch.  I see no reason why such a person should avoid a life sentence, there is no possibility of complete rehabilitation and separation from the rest of society is a fitting punishment.

Here we see the synthesis of logic and emotion, one complementing the other.  More importantly, it is an argument based on logic, using the methodology of the scientific method.  I do not proceed on the validity of my opinion, I subject my hypothesis to testing and then arrive at a conclusion.  This is how society should proceed, on the basis of logic and reliance on the scientific method, while not ignoring personal feelings and emotion.

This story serves another purpose, though.  I am currently reading A People's History of the United States, and in the first chapter author Howard Zinn describes Colombus' first foray into the Americas.  The natives, he said, swam out to meet Columbus, and when he reached ground gave whatever he asked for freely.  Similarly, when Cortés first encountered the Aztecs they had the same hospitality, 'they even thought of him as a god, and for it Cortés sacked Tenochtitlan, a city far more advanced than any that could be found in Europe at the time.  Columbus enslaved the people who did not hesitate to shower with him with gifts, and settlers on the mainland slaughtered the natives over minor disputes and burned their crops.  All of this amounts to a total cultural genocide of the native peoples of this continent.

To the Europeans, these were inferior civilizations, yet as Zinn points out, the evidence says otherwise.  The Iroquois had organized a league of individual tribes, forming a central government that allowed for tribal autonomy long before the ideas that inspired the founders of the United States ever entered western minds.  These people achieved gender equality centuries ago, and yet today misogynistic law developed by a European conqueror still governs New Orleans.  Tenochtitlan itself was a marvel of engineering in its own right, not to mention compared to the cities of Europe at the time.  Perhaps most striking, though, are the economies many of the tribes used.  It was nearly a perfect example of Marx's "utopia," with people producing what they could and taking what they needed (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need).  At the same time, these explorers were seeking gold and silver to perpetuate a grossly flawed economic theory that would eventually collapse.  Still, these cultures were deemed inferior.

The reason that such determinations were made was because the one area where Europeans were more advanced, principally because the Americans didn't have the same natural resources used in developing weapons, was in warfare.  They were more adept at killing the natives, and therefore they deemed themselves superior.  It was not a new idea, however, years before that the religious had used the same measures to deem which gods were superior.  This does bring up an important point, though, that the state of western culture is not simply natural.  Karl Marx, in fact, posited the theory that society's conditioning factor is economy.  This deserves some examination in this discussion.

In the spirit of Mill, I shall examine the arguments of my opponents.  Capitalist theory is full of this social-Darwinist outlook.  Our current discussion on taxation asks how much each group deserves, and the conservatives argue that the rich are entitled to what they have, but why?  Their answer is because they earned it, but is that necessarily true?  Most conservatives I talk to would not say that everyone who owns wealth necessarily earned that wealth, yet the people who they say have not earned it are the exceptions, subjectively categorized of course.  The answer is never clarified, though, how do you determine what someone deserves?  Not do you think this person deserves what they have or not, what principles do you use to make such a determination.  The truth is that they have no standard, which leads us to the conclusion that you tell if someone deserves what they have by merit of having it.

This is strangely similar to the logic employed by the early settlers of the American continent, they deserved the land more than the natives because they could take it.  We can thus see how this is endemic to capitalist thought, and the juxtaposition of natives living in egalitarian communist societies quickly debunks any claims that the capitalist outlook is the natural outlook.  This then brings us to the cultural genocide, the enslavement, the destruction of livelihoods.  Europeans were not content to simply drive the natives away from the coast, they had to push them continuously into the interior until they were finally reduced to living on reservations decades later.  Why could the European capitalists not simply be content to remain in their settlements and live alongside the communist natives?  Marx writes, "The dominion of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property."  Not only is capitalism not the natural position, it seeks to destroy anything that would expose this truth.

Now let us switch to the emotional side of things.  As i was reading about the natives showering the Europeans with gifts and adulation, I could not help but think of that older brother staring at his sister with a knife in hand, while she looked back up at him with complete trust.  These natives knew nothing of capital, of greed.  They gave and took freely, and the Europeans certainly took without question.  Then they went even farther, they took what was not offered and killed anyone who protested.  Just like the brother who killed his sister, they took advantage of a trust that was offered without thought.  Here we have the right to indignation, to outrage even.  That is not always the best agent of change, though, as the entities at whom the outrage is directed often have harsh responses.  A majority of Americans are European-descended Caucasians, and many take offense that their ancestors would be slandered in this manner.  Now we come to a crossroads of emotion, a question of whose is more valid, and I will soon endeavor to answer such a question by employing thorough logic.

The Process of Change: Part Four

Much has occurred since my last post, and I have much to discuss.  I was just reviewing my last post, and I continued to be amazed at the rhetorical talent and philosophical insight of John Stuart Mill, that he does not hold a more revered place in American academia is a disservice to us all.  Mill even said as much when he wrote, "[Genius] in its true sense, though no one says that it is not a thing to be admired, nearly all, at heart, believe they can do very well without it."  I am not sure if I have mentioned this yet or not, but I have a very conservative history teacher this semester who has drawn my distinct ire.  The issue is not that she takes a conservative slant, the issue is that she posits conservatively biased opinion as fact, which I find patently hypocritical considering how much time she spends lecturing about slants in sources.  For instance, when I jumped to the defense of Planned Parenthood recently she came out of left field with a statistic I had never heard before, that 90% of their funding is for abortions, and it rightly seemed a victory for her to the rest of the class.  Imagine, then, my frustration when I came home and saw on the internet that not only do abortions make up for only 3% of Planner Parenthood's budget, but that John Kyl (who I am sure was her source, perhaps indirectly through Fux News) had issued a statement that his previous statement about Planned Parenthood was not intended to be factual.

For the moment, I will ignore the disgust I have at a U.S. Senator for making statements like that on the Senate floor knowing full well they are not factual.  The point of this story is to demonstrate my teacher's methods of argumentation, of course she looked like the victor using fabricated facts.  This is just the beginning, though.  Straw man arguments, poisoning the well, and begging the question are par for the course with her.  I honestly have half a mind to hire a judge to supervise her classes and admonish her when she begins to lead the witness (class).  What this has to do with Mill is simple, as I said in my previous post I enjoy political dichotomy, so why was I so angry at my teacher?  Mill easily provided the answer in arguing, in the Ciceronian tradition, that the best representative of any given opinion is the one who understands the best logic of their opponent.  What I dislike the most about my teacher are not her opinions, but that she presents arguments that are far from the best, in addition to deriving legitimacy for these arguments not on the basis of the arguments themselves but on the authority of her position.  Much can be gained by contesting a sophisticated argument, yet nothing is gained by listening to an argument built on fallacy.

Thus we return to the process of change.  Mill is such a great figure because of his skill as a logician and rhetorician.  It was not simply his adeptness at debate, however, that made him great, but rather his understanding of the principles of debate.  It is in this spirit that the first Soviet Commissar for War, Nikolai Krylenko, instituted a national initiative to bring the game of chess to the masses, and subsequently established Soviet dominance in international competition that lasted until the fall of the USSR.  An eternal lament of modern American society is our fallen status in international academic rankings, and yet what solutions do we have?  Vouchers to send children to private school, mostly religious.  These are schools like the one I attended, schools that contest evolution and arrange syllabi based not on what will best transfer to other institutions of learning, but on their own subjective opinions and biases.  China has soared recently in education, and what are they teaching?  Western philosophers, men like Mill, Hegel, Marx, Descartes, and Hume.  It is not the end conclusions of these men that are providing the greatest benefit, but rather their methodology.  Anyone even remotely familiar with my philosophical outlook knows I have a very low opinion of Descartes' conclusions, one derived from the charlatan Aquinas.  However, Descartes is an essential figure in philosophy in his aspiration of setting out a logical basis for knowledge.  It is, therefore, prudent to study and teach Descartes, regardless of how his conclusions are perceived.

And yet we continue to teach religion and dogma in schools.  As Mill argues, the fault of teaching dogma is not so much that the end conclusions are wrong but that it stifles intellectual growth.  Schools that continue to teach doctrines that contradict accepted science, ones derived from dogma and religious texts, stifle the intellectual growth of their students.  No wonder our scores in math and science are dropping, we are teaching children to question or disregard any conclusion they dislike.  This is patently unscientific, it provides a weak foundation for education; it is, as the Bible says, like building a house on a foundation of sand.

The goal, therefore, should be in the spirit of Krylenko's programs, to establish logic as a basis of education, politics, and society.  This does not necessitate an acceptance of Soviet doctrine, nor does it amount to forcing the religious into atheism.  Religion can still exist, just not as an agent of indoctrination, teaching students that the occurrence of the flood is as historically valid as that of World War Two.  This will be to the benefit of all creeds, in that as Mill said, the best arguments will be made and the opponents of a given argument will have to dispute the best-formed opinions of their opponents.  This is the beginning of a holistic school of secularism. 

This word has taken on a negative slant as of late, the Pope just recently said it was contributing to the downfall of society.  However, as I argued previously, the goal of secularism is not to erode religion.  The goal of secularism is to establish a common foundation.  Descartes' approach to debate was exactly this, refuse affirmation of anything that could possibly be false and create a foundation which could not be disputed.  From there, concurrent levels of the argument could be made, each gaining the support of the last as in a pyramid.  This is the goal of secularism, to establish a foundation which only takes as true that which cannot be false.  On this society is built and, though subsequent structures built on the foundation may themselves be not as sound, they are still built on the unshakable.  This is holistic secularism, the unshakable foundation.  In it, government is devoid of religious influence.  Furthermore, the pedagogy is built on logic.  This is not to say that logic is always supreme, but it is what is universally affirmed.  In addition, though a foundation of logic does not necessarily negate emotion, the tendency of the foundation of emotion is to negate logic.  Thus as we move forward, the process of change and society itself must be founded on logic so as to be inclusive as possible to all creeds, so as to provide the maximum benefit to the advocates of any given creed, and so as to build the most reliable foundation on which to proceed.