The national news media, in general sympathetic to some of the overall anti-capitalist aims of the protestors, ask few critical questions as to why the people are protesting. The protestors are thus given an epistemic pass: they apparently do not need to justify in the logical space of reasons why they are behaving the way they are. They do what they do without seemingly sensing an obligation to give reasons why they are doing what they do. A visit to the Black Lives Matter website where their "campaign focus" is provided states no reasons for the positions they advocate, but simply lists the following issues of concern:
- Racial Injustice
- Police Brutality
- Criminal Justice Reform
- Black Immigration
- Economic Injustice
- LGBTQIA and Human Rights
- Environmental Conditions
- Voting Rights and Suppression
- Healthcare
- Government Suppression
- Education
- Commonsense Gun Laws
Reasonable people adjudicating any issue first want a description of the problem, a showing that the problem actually exists, before they then offer a normative solution to the problem by providing an account of what ought to be done given the fact that the problem exists. Presumably, the onus is on those wanting to change society to show that the problems of which they are concerned actually exist. Accordingly, to proceed rationally with respect to these issues would be to establish through statistical means the truth of these claims within American society:
- There is racial injustice.
- There exists police brutality.
- There is an unjust criminal justice system.
- The current laws and practices with regard to Black immigration are unjust.
- There exists economic injustice.
- Human rights are violated with respect to LCBTQUIA.
- Current environmental conditions are dangerous.
- Significantly relevant voter suppression and voting rights transgressions exist.
- The healthcare system is unjust or not functioning correctly.
- There is widespread government corruption.
- Current education is inadequate or not otherwise not rightly occurring.
- Current gun laws do not conform to common sense.
After describing the problem -- showing that it obtains and has the contour it has -- then one would have to lay out various possible solutions to the problem, showing that one solution would, if adopted, mitigate the problem. One would need to defend one's solution against other possible solutions normatively, and then offer one's solution as a general prescription for the societal ill at issue. In offering the solution, one must take in effect its "side effects." There are all kinds of drugs that would work for many people, but that kill some. To be reasonable in recommending a solution to a social problem, one would have to show how enacting the solution does not ultimately have more deleterious social consequences than not so enacting it.
But none of this seems to be happening. It is almost as if the alleged societal ills should be self-evident to anyone whose intellect is not clouded by prejudice, scilicet, the prejudice of one's own capitalistic and racially privileged position. The ills seemingly cannot be seen by those who are citizens of the "old order," an order of class, race, gender, and species relying on distinctions and hierarchies. The old can't see what is self-evident because it evidently does not have the eyes to see nor the ears to hear.
There is thus no epistemic criterion by which we might arrive at the self-evidence of the points in connection. While BLM or those protesting would not say it this way, they believe there is a spiritual problem in America. Those of us in the system have our perceptions, conceptions, awareness and language determined by that system. We exist withing a schema of understanding or world that cannot but judge the truth claims assumed on the BLM website as having insufficient evidence. We can neither see these claims as buttressed sufficiently by evidence nor as being solvable by the courses of action recommended. We have a spiritual malady; we are not woke; we cannot see. But those who are economically and socially disadvantaged can glimpse that towards which we are blind. This is why they must protest.
The protesters wish to speak a prophetic voice in and amid the day-to-day activities of men and women in early 21st century America. Just as Jesus and the prophets short-circuited the language-games of the men and women of their age by pointing towards transcendent truth, so the new New Left in America looks beyond the epistemic games of the bourgeoisie towards that which transcends such games. Whereas the Old Testament prophets looked to God as the ultimate arbitrator of what should be the case in criticizing the prevailing social order, the new New Left in our streets look to another what is, they point to an underlying determinism, true in itself, that ultimately justifies their behavior in trying to bring down the prevailing social order.
For many in America, the protests on our streets are simply inexplicable. They don't see the reasons why the protests are happening, nor what the protestors really want to change and achieve. This is because most in America do not really understand the rather sophisticated theory underlying the social protests we are seeing. (Most protestors likely don't understand the theory either, but that is a different story.)
In order to understand this I want to use the distinction of the philosopher Wilfred Sellars between the manifest image of the world and the scientific image. The manifest image is our everyday view of the world. We live in a world of macrophysical objects that have particular phenomenal qualities, e.g., colors, shapes, textures, etc., a world in which there are persons, that is, human agents who can reason, act freely, and thus have a responsibility for the actions they initiate. Our manifest image of the world is the world as it seems. In this seeming world, people justify their actions by pointing to the reasons that explain them. This world is deeply teleological; it is filled with purpose. The best explanation of why I drove to the airport and stopped by the airport entrance at 2:15 Saturday afternoon is that I believed that Smith was coming in on the 2:05 plane from Chicago, and that I desired to see Smith. Such a world is filled with what are sometimes called folk psychological ascriptions; we regularly explain our behaviors in terms of our beliefs and desires.
Our manifest image of the world is the image of the everyday world in which we immediately and deeply dwell. Such a world was explored with great success by the phenomenologists, especially Martin Heidegger who argued that the everyday world in which we are already embedded, is the world in which Being, though it is often occluded, can ultimately reveal itself. This is the world of primordial meaning in which we find ourselves before we ever become philosophers or scientists.
The scientific image of the world, however, is the world we discover in the natural and social sciences. It is a step away from the immediacy of the manifest image of the world. It is deeper than what is manifest because it reveals the ultimate causal map of the world. Whereas color is part of the manifest image of the world, from the standpoint of the scientific image, all that exists is electromagnetic wave propagation of certain frequencies. The scientific image of the world attempts to uncover the ultimate "stuff" of reality and the laws governing behaviors among these ultimate "stuffs." For instance, quarks of many flavors relating themselves to each other in varying ways constitute hadrons, of which protons and neutrons are fundamental kinds. Hadrons acting with leptons of various kinds, notably electrons, constitute the structure of the atom, that out of which everything else is comprised.
If you are a biologist your scientific image of the world does not contradict that of the physicist, but it concentrates on other aspects of the deep underlying structure that drives the movements and dispositions of objects within the manifest image. As a biologist you might be interested in DNA, genetic mutations, and the synthesis between Darwinian natural selection and modern genetics generally, and you might be prone to explain manifest human behavior by pointing to deeper level causal explanations in terms of natural selection and adaptability.
Sellars believed strongly in science and thought that ultimately we understand rightly when we understand scientifically. To my knowledge he did not write on German social theory, and it would be interesting to see what he would say about the scientific image that putatively underlies the views of the new New Left, the image that seemingly grounds their oracular pronouncements about society and ultimately justifies their deepest claims: Capitalistic society must be overturned if people are to be truly emancipated for life within a just social structure. What is this image?
In order to understand this we must think about parts and wholes and ups and downs. Considerations of parts and wholes within philosophy is called mereology. Accordingly, mereological considerations deal with the relationships between parts and wholes, and the ontological status we afford to each. What is the being of the whole and can the being of the whole be accounted for on the basis of the being of the parts? The question simply is this: If we could accurately describe all of the parts, and all of the relevant laws governing the behavior of the parts, have we given a suitable description of, and explanation for, the whole? Reductionists claim that the being of the whole (or aspects of that being) can in some way be explained by the being of the parts (or aspects of that being). There are many kinds of reductions, of which the following is a partial list.
- Ontological reduction is the strongest, claiming that the whole is nothing but the parts.
- Causal reduction claims that causal relations among the wholes can be explained by, or might simply be, the casual relations among the parts.
- Semantic reduction claims that the very meaning of the whole is nothing but the meaning of the parts.
- Type ontological reduction claims that the being of whole types, e.g., general properties, is nothing but the being of particular types in particular relations. For example, the being of the mental event "thinking of Alice" just is the being of some set of brain events.
- Token ontological reduction claims that the being of whole entities is completely realized in the being of particular entities in relationships. Accordingly, while the mental act "thinking of Alice" cannot be biconditionally linked to any particular set of brain events, the individual occurrence of so thinking is nonetheless physically realized by some set of brain events or other.
Using merological language can be helpful, of course, in trying to grasp what the ultimate stuffs are that operate to make the manifest world do what it does. More useful, I think, is the language of levels. I want to distinguish lower-levels of description or being from higher-levels descriptions or being, and draw a function from the lower-level to the higher-level as follows: Two lower-level states indiscernible with respect to one another will entail an indiscernibility of states at the higher-level. There is no higher-level difference without a lower-level difference. It is simplest to illustrate this with respect to the mind-body problem.
The higher-level is the level of our psychological states, e.g., our thoughts, hopes, dreads, feelings, particular perceptions, etc. The higher-level is our mental world and the immediacy of experience we enjoy with respect to it. The lower-level consists of our brain states, the neural firings and flow, synapse formation, C-fiber stimulations, or whatever are the most basic objects over which neuroscientific theories now quantify. To say that the lower-level determines the higher-level, is to say that the neuro causally explains activities at the higher psychological level. Neuroscience advocates, in general, the lower-level determination of the higher-level. The distribution of psychological properties can be understood as a function of the distribution of neuro-properties. Two brains identical with respect to their neuro-states would have minds identical with respect to their psychological states. To capture this asymmetric dependency relationship between the higher and the lower, the language of supervenience is used. The higher-level supervenes upon the lower-level if and only if on every occasion of the instantiation of lower-level states indiscernible with respect to each other, the higher-level would have states indiscernible with respect to each other as well.
We might generalize the example above with respect to the physical sciences. Chemistry supervenes upon physics because there would be no discernibility among upper-level chemical property distributions if two lower-level physically indiscernible instantiations where to occur. The fundamental physical thus determines the chemical. Moreover, this relationship is transitive. If the fundamental physical determines the chemical, and the chemical determines the biochemical, and the biochemical determines the biological, and the biological determines the physiological (of which brains are part), and the physiological determines the psychological, then the fundamental physical determines the physiological. If the neurophysiological thusdetermines the mental, one could say that the fundamental physical actually determines thought itself.
All of what I said is in some sense part of the scientific image of the world with respect to the natural sciences. We might quibble about certain features of the story, but the story has been with us long enough that we are not deeply troubled by it. After all, Descartes taught us that while bodies are governed by deterministic laws, nonetheless souls are somehow free in the "steering" of those bodies. He was not able to give a successful account of how this was possible, and so the problem was bequeathed to Kant who argued that the deterministic is the way that humans must know the physical empirical order. However, since duty is immediately encountered in human experience, we are permitted to believe and act as if there were freedom. Late 19th century Neokantian inspired images of the world spoke of the distinction between the realm of nature (with being and cause) and a realm of spirit (with value and freedom). We still deal, of course, with the problem of how the macro-level mind with its complicated psychological properties is possible in a physical universe instancing physical properties very much different from those properties displayed by mind.
It is clear, however, that we somehow have gotten used to the problem of how human agency is possible in a physical universe. We continue in America to have public forums where, until recently, reason was assumed to be able to justify political positions held and we thought ourselves reasonable free to act so as to change the world. In other words, despite our theoretical problems with determinism, a Lockeian bottom up view of the social order was still in place. Human beings could meet together, reason together, and upon a common basis of what was natural for human beings (e.g., in accordance with their various rights), argue for, advocate, and bring about social transformation. While this basic Lockeian view did not want to reduce the autonomy of human decisions to fundamental physical law, many advocates of this approach certainly assumed that the higher-level property distributions of a society were a function of lower-level property distributions in this way: Individuals were conceived to be autonomous moral agents who in their external relatedness with other human individuals could make decisions and carry out behaviors that would affect the higher-level property distributions of the society. Accordingly, justice could be instantiated at the higher-level if some set of properties at the lower-level were themselves instantiated. Simply put, if individual human agents were placed in some set of relationships with respect to each other, then society -- an higher-level entity -- would be just. If not, the society would be unjust. Accordingly a just society supervenes upon the relationships sustained among individuals comprising it. (Note the mereological relationship here.)
But the Lockean view of things has been under attack for a very long time. This attack was most forcefully made by mid-nineteenth century materialism as it was appropriated by thinkers like Feuerbach and Marx. Many people today hear the term "Marxism" and think of the horrors of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It is estimated, in fact, that Marxist-inspired communism is responsible for over 100,000,000 deaths in the 20th century alone. But I don't want us to detour into a considerations of the effects of Marxism on the twentieth century, but simply to look at the underlying picture of the world advocated by Marxist presuppositions and assumptions.
The idea is that there is an underlying scientific image of the world that provides the causal explanation of human behaviors at the manifest level. For Marx, material conditions at the underlying scientific level determine the distribution of properties at the manifest level. Since human reasoning, human agency, human responsibility et al, is at the manifest level, the basic claim by Marxism is that the Lockeian conception of the world is a manifest image of which there is a deeper structural explanation. This means, inter alia, that reason itself, including epistemic justification and warrant, is itself explainable by virtue of deeper material conditions. For Marx, these lower-level determinants were economic. Money and its movement explains, i.e., determines the existence of, human value and thought. Accordingly, human value and thought supervene upon the material economic conditions of society. Our philosophical and political positions are thus ideological, they are determined by, and thus expressions of our particular location within the field of money and its movement. The guys at the country club hold a different set of values and think differently than the women sewing garments 12 hours a day in the old textile mills.
While the nineteenth-century world of Marx might seem quaint to most, and while many might believe that his theories were actually disproved by the fact that the proletariat did not rise up spontaneously in opposition to the bourgeoisie and violently end their rule after WWI, Marxist thought was regenerated in many ways in the twentieth century through the work of the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School in Germany, and at the New School of Social Research at Columbia University in New York City. There are first-rate scholars attached to these movements, and the last thing anybody should say is that these thinkers are naive. They are, in general, quite sophisticated in their philosophical orientation and method, and they do succeed in providing penetrating insights on great number of social issues.
All of them did notice, of course, that the predicted revolutions in Europe did not happen as Marx had predicted, and all were concerned to adjust Marxist-inspired theory to fit the actual facts. Accordingly, they were noticeably less materialist than Marx and his ilk, and were much more open to thinking that class consciousness was determinitive of thought and value rather than class itself. They argued that there were deep structures of oppression within modern capitalist societies that caused human suffering, that humans could be emancipated from this suffering, and that the normative prescriptions they offered about how this emancipation could take place were themselves an important part of this transformation. In other words, they wanted both to understand what basically drives social values and thinking and to transform those societies by offering more just trajectories of future development.
These thinkers were neo-Marxist because they held that capitalism itself is a deeply flawed way of organizing society, especially the "monopoly capitalism" of post-war western industrial capitalism, with its commidification of all aspects of our society, including art itself. (The protestors on the streets today would not want to know what one of the giants of the Frankfurt School, Theordor Adorno, would say of the music to which they listen.) These thinkers were united that capitalism, and the consciousness of exclusion that arise from it, is determinative of the social ills of post-war society itself. Another way is needed, they thought.
So far I have only talked about the classic model of bottom up causation, that is, that the distribution of the properties of the higher level (often the whole) is determined by the distribution of the properties at the lower-level (often the parts). But Marxist and Neo-Marxist thought has always sought to transform society, and thus they are committed to the much more philosophically suspect notion of top-down causation. Simply put, they must hold that the social order itself caused by lower level property distributions can produce a consciousness that is itself causally efficacious in changing the distribution of properties at the lower-level. In other words, certain people (or sets of people) can somehow achieve a correct view of things that allows them properly to change the lower level property distributions to bring about long-term positive societal effects!
We might call this the paradox of the woke. If the thought and value of people are themselves wholly determined by class consciousness or class inclusion, how is it possible for the woke to achieve the requisite epistemic standpoint to achieve wokeness? How is wokeness possible, if wokeness itself is determined by underlying economic and social conditions?
The answer is simple: It can't! It's impossible. Since the argument by the woke for their wokeness is itself wholly determined by material conditions or material consciousness, the content of their woke thinking cannot literally be true or false, but merely an ideological expression of that deeper level class location and consciousness from which it emerges.
Maybe the woke instinctively know this. If the game of reason-giving and moral responsibility-taking is itself determined by lower-level class, race, gender, etc. consciousness and location that they do not occupy, then they cannot play the game at all. To play the game is to abandon being woke.
At the end of the day, the woke must be as silent as Abraham in trying to justify the murder of Isaac. He heard a voice. Was it of God? Abraham must remain silent, says Kierkegaard, because in explaining his openness to murder his son, he is either a madman or a ghastly man. There can be no comprehension by Reason of why Abraham would hear God saying what He said.
This same seems true of the woke. He or she cannot state his or her position nor argue for it without presupposing the particularity of that position, without exposing that position to the relativism and perspectivalism of all positions that issue from, and are thus determined by, a particular class location and consciousness. The woke can only explain their position by not explaining it. They can show it, but not say it. To say it would be to admit that it cannot be universally true. To avoid the paradox they must simply remain silent.
And so they do. They wait for a new spirit to arise that does not look any longer to warrant, reason and individual responsibility. As they tarry in their wait, they can point to that which they cannot speak, for speaking undermines what they say.
We can speak, however. They can't remember how to hear, of course, but we can speak. Maybe others can hear. Liberal America is not of the same spirit as that which is dawning. They don't know it, and since many of them can still speak, they still believe they can speak to those who are approaching. But this will not be possible. So let us all together who can still speak, speak.
Remember that scarcely anybody thought a little corporal could seize power in Germany. The Nazi movement was lampooned and laughed at by the cultural elite. But something like what happened then could happen here, if we don't talk to each other. The new New Left cannot speak, but only show. Those of us who are Christians know the Word has power. The Old Way is the way of the Word. Let us not sacrifice the power of the Old for the nameless void that marches today on our streets. Let us call a thing what it is, and not be frightened into not speaking. We must understand that those who cannot speak want the rest of us to be mute as well.
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