There Is No Such A Thing As A Right To Do What Is Wrong

- Everyone Should Be Encouraged To Write The Truth - Hate Mail

FIRST, I AM NOT "A WRITER" but I am a writer in that I write things and am a shameless enough writer that I publicly post my writing.  Early in my experience of online commenting I got past the mind forged manacles that keep too many people from writing their thoughts and making them public, standard spelling, and other arbitrary rules that serve the purpose of snobbery more than they do anything else. Let me break it to you, no one needs your permission to write or post it.

In the recent online course in writing I took, twice, the teacher who has published professionally said "anyone who writes is a writer," and since he is the only expert I've paid for evaluation and he's the expert, I'll go with his rule.  I think anyone who can manage to write something, read it themselves and make it clearer and better is performing the act of writing. They are as much a writer as someone who is talking is a speaker, maybe somewhat more so.  

And I think everyone should be encouraged to do that throughout their lives whether with the thought of making it public, sending it to one person or keeping it as their own record of their thinking, so as to find out what's right and what's wrong with their thinking.  Written language is far, far too good a tool for that to allow the snobs, the poseurs, the pros and other jerks to deprive we, the great unpaid, from having it as our birthright in language communities which have a written form.  I wish all language groups had writing and hope those without it gain it for themselves and their posterity.  If they do I would advise them to start out from the start making it informal and egalitarian without the ridiculous structure of rules and formalism and screwy archaeology of spelling that standard English currently has because that serves no one but the elites who want to keep it as their sole possession, the better to silence the rest of us.  Only some of us are shameless enough to refuse to go along with that the rest of our lives.  I am so shameless and shameless enough to be unashamed of that.

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As luck would have it, your objection to me writing this stuff and posting it online is relevant to my semi-public study of The Book of Jeremiah, or can be made an example of what is warned of in Walter Brueggemann's extraordinarily helpful lecture on Jeremiah and our own power elite and its service industry in educational snobbery.  

From Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version of Reality, with my inserted comments.

The God who presides over the historical process in poetic imagination connects and enacts what we would analyze differently. The outcome of such an odd reasoning is that internal anti-neighborliness yields external risk and danger.

It was very late in Jerusalem according to prophetic anticipation and if one were such a poet, if one were Jeremiah, what would one say about poetry about greedy exploitation and after poetry of external threat dispatched by holy resolve?   Well, this is what the poet Jeremiah says in the midst of that lateness.  "Do not let the wise" - here's our theme - "boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth."

I will start by noting that throughout his writing on the Prophets of the Jewish Scriptures, Walter Brueggemann notes two things about them, that the Prophets were poets and that they were "unauthorized," meaning they had no approving credentials that made everyone figure they were allowed to do what they did.  "Authorized" writers, in my experience of reading poetry and prose, often means someone whose credentials hold up their reputation only so long as they're alive or promoted enough to support the assignment of reading them and their inclusion in anthologies but whose readership immediately plummets when they drop off the twig. Obviously the uncredentialed, unauthorized (interesting word to use in the context of this post about "un-authors") prophetic poets poetry didn't suffer in the test of time due to the disapproval of the critics.  And they were really tough critics who tried to kill Jeremiah several times. I will forego making a list of just those over-praised, generally elite-university credentialed poets who were the toast of the town while they were alive but whose writing is pretty much a dead-letter now. Some of that failure was incredibly rapid.  Clearly the business of approving writing isn't much more accurate in assessing durability or quality than the least durable of the so-called social sciences.

The poet focuses upon the great triad of control and pride, the three facets of having one's way in the world, might, wisdom and wealth.

Might here means military force, the capacity to control markets and natural resources.  Wealth means the capacity to manage capital and impose requirements and restraints and leverage on all of the others so that the whole of the global economy is ordered to flow toward us.

But, then, wisdom.  We had not expected wisdom to come along with might and wealth. Especially because our theme is wisdom and the work of the university is wisdom. Who can speak negatively of wisdom when we remember our great intellectual inheritance from the Greeks?  But, of course, when wisdom is situated amid might and wealth something happens to wisdom.

"Something happens to wisdom," could be the title of this piece because "wisdom" in this case, approved writing, in that context is divorced from truth and morality.  That is exactly what requires subversive writing that is unapproved, unauthorized, etc. to challenge it. Authorized, approved, standardized writing and thinking is impotent to challenge deeply enough the authorizing, approving, standard-setting establishment that co-opts those who seek that kind of approval, seldom without some level of payment.  

 

I think the failed secular "lefts" of the United States and the rest of the West, that failure going on well into its second century of failure, fails in no small part because its figures are not really uninvested in the system of thought that the corrupt ruling class has mastered and uses to flourish. Most of that left is university authorized, approved, etc. and their "radicalism" is no more radical than what will still get them a job.  It is not shocking to me that the leaders of the vilely counter-productive, affluent-class, ego maniacal, self-indulgent Weather Underground, those who didn't get themselves blown up or jail sentences and some of those who did, went on to teach at universities, their "radicalism" producing nothing, whatsoever, their credentialing and payment being standard for their economic-social milieu.

I am shameless enough to point out that my unapproved, unauthorized critique of the Bill of Rights - especially as interpreted by Supreme Courts from the secular-liberal Warren Court to the fascists under Rehnquist and Roberts - something which the secular left championed as a means of freely publishing their impotent propaganda, is far more anti-establishment than anything on the topic which Noam Chomsky or I. F. Stone or the entire civil-liberties industry have come up with.  And the use of their conception of the First Amendment has served Republican-fascism far better than it has that secular liberalism which is just a milder form of top-down gangsterism.  There is a reason that neo-Nazis, fascists, America's indigenous form of fascists, white supremacists (the writers of the Bill of Rights were, by and large if not entirely white supremacists) are the biggest fattest "free speech" spouting group around today, because a liberty to lie with impunity is what has gotten the United States where it is today even as protections for real, substantial rights is crumbling under that regime of thought. The secular left, those who champion "first amendment absolutism" from the alleged left, are too invested to even ask themselves how their promised regime of liberties has devolved from the height of the Civil Rights Act, The Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, etc. so fast into where we are now under the regime of "rights" they championed.  

In terms of "speech," of publishing, I doubt there is any more radical a stance than to note that while there is a right to tell the truth, there is no such thing as a right to lie, whether the lie is knowing or the lie is lied through ignorance.**  The difference in effect is intimately related to the moral categories the two things, the truth and lies, belong to.

There is a responsibility to try hard to discern the truth and it is wrong to lie are things that the plain language of "the First Amendment" entirely discounts. That omission is a serious deficiency in it.  There can be no right to do what is wrong, the entire concept of "rights" so badly used in the framing of the Constitution* is based on that distinction.  Our Constitution, especially the Bill of "Rights," ignores that aspect of rights.  "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free," is an entirely sounder basis for any constitutional provision concerning the right to publish than the 18th century "enlightenment" notion that the truth will naturally win out in a contest with lies, especially distributed as published lies.  If there's one thing that Scripture was never a sucker for, it was the notion that such things happened automatically for the best. It is ironic, considering the 20th century pop-Voltairian disdain for panglossian thinking, that it is the basis for so much of "enlightenment" gullibility and that the subsequent two-centuries and more of counter-evidence have not made a dent in that stupidity. From the second half of the 20th century till today, I'd say we are stupider about that than they were in the first century and a half of life under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I will leave the next part of Brueggemann's speech as an example of what happens when official lie and the media lies and, now, the social-diseased social-media lies with the impunity that the Supreme Court has granted liars. . .

And, of course, that is what has happened among us. We have understood with Bacon that knowledge is power and we have transposed wisdom into knowledge that could control, that strange interplay between wisdom and knowledge has brought us the gift of the great scientific revolution in Bacon's time.  And in its wake the great technological advances that have moved toward control that is never disinterested. And before we knew it Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas have entitled a book "The Wise Men," a study of six of the titanic figures who have managed U. S. foreign policy with Niebuhrian realism and have produced the abiding superpower, ample wisdom, ample might ample wealth in order to be the chosen race in the modern world.

 But it has also led us to the sad picture of Lyndon Johnson in his last days concerning Vietnam with his head in his hands completely exasperated with ineffective power.  It has led to the verdict of the brothers Bundy, McGeorge and William, architects of that war who wrote at the end of their book, "We were good but we were not as good as we thought we were."  It has led to the departure of the wise men from the White House after conferring with the president about Vietnam and without a clue of what to do next.

It has led to the oil spills and to the Japanese nuclear crisis and to the widespread suspicion that our technology has outrun our capacity to think clearly. And it has left us with deep anxiety that seeks scapegoats along with the zeal to dispose of the others if necessary by violence.

. . . Only to note that today, after Nixon, Reagan, two Bushes and Trump, all with the freest of free presses in our history, we could look back on the days of LBJ as a less bad, less dishonest time.

* The fact that the framers of the Constitution didn't abolish chattel slavery in it while spouting "rights" proves that their use of the concept was blatantly dishonest and obviously wrong.  Their many anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic insertions as well.  The more I read about the framing and the push to adopt the Constitution the origins of our problems through that document become more obvious.  "Hamilton" style, authorized, approved civics class style pieties about that are bullshit that we will have to abandon if egalitarian democracy is ever to be established and not the devolution into American apartheid we are seeing "free press" and all.

** The game that pretends we cannot call Trump a liar based on the impossibility of "proving" whether or not he or his ilk knew they were lying as they lied proves the stupidity of that modern civil-libertarian conception of "free speech-press."   I wouldn't trust most judges and fewer "justices" to be honest about what they say, pretending there is a practical means of discerning when a lie can be called a lie under that rule just shows how absurd the whole thing rapidly becomes.  Though, really, I think that pretense is more a creation of the credentialed journalism racket than the law courts.  If I don't tend to trust "justices" I really don't trust "journalists" who often seem to be hired for their ability to lie persuasively and pretend shamelessly.  

Note:  You may also want to listen to Hannah Arendt on "Lying in Politics" from 1972.