Monday, April 20, 2015

The Truth Will Set You Free Its Absence Will Set You Barking

My morning e-mail informs me that I've been accused of thinking I'm a philosopher, which is a statement so absurd that I think only someone who has read little to no philosophy could have made the accusation.  There's also a very serious accusation made about someone else, that they're me.  Which is rather hilariously off the mark but I'm not going into that.  It would involve dragging someone else into this who didn't ask to be and who I have little to nothing in common with.

Maybe you have to have read at least some philosophy to understand how silly the accusation is.  What I do could only be mistaken for philosophizing by someone who had read no real philosophy. The person who made the accusation is a Brit, probably the result of the dreadful class assignment of the British schools under the influence of Social Darwinism and eugenics, so perhaps that accounts for the lack of philosophy in her education. My methods aren't anything that wasn't taught in American high school in the early 1960s, research your premise to support it, subject it to at least some level of criticism and draw logical conclusions, necessary ones especially, from what you've found out.   To mistake that for philosophy in the modern sense of the word is, maybe, a result of that loss of a liberal education I noted among those who go into the sciences.   Though I've read enough of the philosophy of science to know that science can't be divorced from those same methods and retain anything like reliability.   If you want to see what happens when that is the case, you can look at the social sciences and, especially important to consider, the invasion of the methods and short cuts of the social sciences into evolutionary biology, beginning in the 1860s, what may account for the faulty education of my accuser growing up under the regime influenced by the liar and scientific fraud, Sir Cyril Burt*.

No.  What I do isn't philosophy, it's more like writing a high school expository theme with serious intent.  Or, at least, what that used to be like in a small town high school in New England a half a century ago, if you were lucky enough to get a couple of good teachers.

The same e-mail notes that a charge of fundamentalism was also included in the accusation, which only reinforces that the accusation is made from someone who is both ignorant and lazy, someone who knows nothing about what fundamentalism is because they don't know anything about religion.   For a start, I was not raised a Protestant and have never had the mistaken notion that The Bible is an inerrant text (not even in the imagined uncorrupted 1st edition that fundamentalists propose was inerrant) and  I'm not convinced that all of it is equally inspired.

Though, since I have taken on Marilynne Robinson's last book which I hadn't read, When I Was a Child I Read Books, in the past two weeks, I have found out how by those same methods, of careful reading in consultation with history, the study of various texts and translations, what theologians have concluded from their study of those, that even what seemed legalistic and uninspired can reveal a far deeper level of understanding by a far more rigorous and sophisticated application of them.   I doubt Marilynne Robinson would consider herself a philosopher and if she doesn't do philosophy, I certainly don't.   What she says about The Law, about Moses, noting things you read in the text and don't notice for the sweep of the general narrative reveals an impressively deep reading.

The idea that an Irish Catholic, American style liberal**, a proponent of marriage equality, the wall of separation, etc. can be honestly called a "fundamentalist" could be an expression of ignorance or it could be an expression of not caring enough about accuracy or the truth, though it could be an expression of all three. As I've also come to conclude by looking at the milieu in which those accusations were made, when you don't believe in sin you don't believe it's a sin to lie and bear false witness so you do that when you figure you can get away with it, and I don't see any way for that not to be the rule in a secular society.  Even the level of truth telling that science, philosophy, all of intellectual life depends on as much as it depends on words and their accurate denotation, are totally dependent on a sense of moral obligation to tell the truth to the best of your ability.  To people who lack that it's not surprising to find that someone who tries to do that looks pretentious.  They believe the truth is a matter of pretense, after all.   It's no accident that free public education arose in New England as a matter of religious obligation by people who believed the truth would make you free and that moral obligations were as real as the food they raised and the rocks they had to move by the ton to subsist here.

* Burt, after his fraud was exposed, was championed by scientific racists such as Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton.  The propensity for that school of social science to deny equality to things like equal educational opportunities is too consistent to be anything but intrinsic to it.  

**  I will recommend reading the distinction Robinson notes between the American use of the word "liberal" informed by the Renaissance French definition connected to generosity and liberality of giving aid to the poor while the typical British use of it is informed by the late 18th century use of the word in what was, no doubt, considered a more scientific way of thinking which can lead to the opposite of what American liberalism is and must be for it to be distinguished from neo-liberalism, an attempt by conservatives to follow the British concept of liberalism.   I like the American version better.  The version that produced free education with the aspiration of providing as much as possible, something we've lost due to such modern, sciency thinking.

Update:  I really can't be bothered to address every misrepresentation of what I said but if I figure I can make a point I want to make with it, I will.  I certainly don't care what people who don't bother reading what I write choose to believe about it if they can't be bothered to find out.  Liars lie.  That's why they're liars.  People who don't see for themselves are probably not worth the bother to worry about.   I write for the people who do bother to read what I said before they make up their mind about it.

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