Some comments to my class.

Class,

To call an essay “biased” is to say that it is slanted, or really, that it has a particular point of view. To tell your readers that something is biased is useless unless you identify the nature of that bias. I know very well that the author in question is "biased";sure, he believes in something, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, his arguments draw much from the intellectual foundations of Leftist thinkers like Karl Marx, and more modern ones like Barbara Ehrenreich, among others––all political thinkers with strong opinions and academic writing styles. 

The world is a political place. There is no way around it. As your teacher, I am not going to tell you what to think, that is not my job. I will give you some indication of what I think if you ask, but that’s it. I will not use my position of authority to tell you what you should believe (I am your instructor, not your priest). 

What I want you to understand that objectivity in matters of social life is not possible, practically speaking. Objectivity is an issue for graduate philosophy seminars and for formal methods in the natural sciences, stuff like that. But for most issues that people care about, sorry to tell you, it doesn’t exist. No one can escape their point of view when discussing matters of morality and social life––none of us are omniscient. We cannot escape our own skins.  

What I want you to do is to both identify an author’s point of view and then evaluate it; then, if you disagree, tell me why. Over time, you will learn to develop a point of view of your own––this is not an easy task, though. Developing a fully formed opinion takes work and even sacrifice. It means learning to be patient and to evaluate the evidence and the claims to truth that are presented before you. 

My job is to give you the tools to become critical, independent and self-reliant thinkers. In other words, as Neil Postman once said, my job is to try and teach you to detect B.S. You must learn to recognize when an author is saying something important and when he or she is not. You must learn to train yourself to judge between truth and falsehood, between balderdash and profundity. Part of my job is to train you in intellectual self-defense against all the forms of nonsense and misinformation that you will be confronted with for much of your adult lives.  

When it comes to answers and small "t" truth, I will do all I can to give you the tools for you to begin to make your way towards your own personal truth and answers, but you must patient, these things take time. The German poet Rilke once wrote, I'm paraphrasing, that young people must not seek answers, yet, because it is much too early in their lives for that. Instead, the young must be very patient towards all that is unresolved in their hearts and try to love the questions themselves. For now you've gotta live, that was his point. Because someday, in your living and searching, you will live your way into an answer. Live now you guys––live now and question.

Philosophical Pessimism and the Mirth of the Universe

[Dialogue]

I: Where does your humor come from?

The Grieving Male: It comes from my getting the big joke. This stupid predicament we find ourselves in, I get how fucking funny it is. Like how we are born into a consciousness that gives us the ability to realize that we will, no doubt about it, get sick and old and eventually die. It’s the joke of the universe­. And we, as sentient beings, seek to escape the reality of our inevitable demise by totally submersing ourselves in the mundane minutiae of career and personal life, all without realizing how small we are; like how none of the things we care about matter in the face of this massive, infinite space that we float around in. None of it matters. Your job, your personal life, your kids, all of it, all of the things you hold dear are totally ephemeral and insignificant. You’re caught up in a larger, historically contingent order indifferent to your personal story.

And worse yet, even your suffering isn’t meaningful; it’s only the consequence of an evolutionary accident that created a linguistically capable being with an ill-advised illusion of a self. And this self, this individual consciousness, thinks that it matters, that the pain it must endure has some sort of teleological end—that it adds up when it’s all said and done. It doesn’t. You suffer only to die. And that’s funny. Like really funny. 

I: So humor is the only way to respond to this, ‘s that right?

The GM: Well, gallows humor. That’s the name of the game now. Before I was speaking about the individual, but it doesn’t get any better when you think about the society, the whole enchilada, all of us. Here’s another gut buster for you: Human civilization will not continue. It will eventually destroy the eco-systems that sustain it. And, with climate change and environmental collapse all the revolutionary Left can do now is mourn. The jig is up. The revolution isn’t coming. It may take a century or two, but our complex industrial society will collapse under its own weight. Environmental unsustainability and political rigidness is a lethal combo. This should scare and depress you. We have just walked through the doors of our own funeral, and here I am, whispering jokes in the pews.

I: Suicide, you sound like you are writing a suicide note. First, you establish that an individual’s aspirations are all meaningless, and then you establish that the civilization is doomed. So then there is no way out, no matter how you look at it. It sounds like you are in mourning; your revolution isn’t coming; you have lost an infinite, a unifying thing that was probably only a dream to begin with…

The GM: Thus, now it’s…

I: Now it…

The GM: Now it seems impossible, sure. At one time the dream didn’t seem like a dream at all, now it seems as if it’s totally lost. We are all wide-awake and can’t remember what we were dreaming to begin with. And suicide is another, very big, question; and I just don’t wanna talk about it. 

What I am talking about is laughing in the face of despair. In fact, humor is, for me, the only way to discuss what is most terrible and odious and despairing. It's the only way to even begin to move towards an ineffable monstrosity. Yes, monstrosity and despair, people write very long books about these things and sometimes even get close to circling them. But really you cannot even discuss them in a straightforward way because they lose their actuality if you do; they lose their force and power. But I think jokes begin to move in the right direction. Jokes are like a solar viewer that grade school kids use to look at an eclipse––you have to use jokes/humor to confront something that is truly horrible without getting burned. And confrontation is important, because you can’t turn your back on despair; it will swallow you whole if you do.

I: It will destroy you.

The GM: Yes, I think so.

  

The Two Faces of One City

Phew, I'm back in GA after a week in Dallas, Texas. Here's the thing about Texas: On the one hand it really is the republican stronghold you've heard scary campfire stories about. Every gas station I went to along I-20, under the big Texan sky, had for sale special edition TIME magazines dedicated to the legacy of Ronald Reagan, prominently displayed, right in front of the cash registers. In Dallas, there were numerous highways named after George W. or Reagan, and, of course, Dallas is the town where the G.W. Bush library is located (I drove by––I didn't actually go in).

But on the other hand, the part of Dallas where I stayed looked almost exactly like little 5 points in Atlanta or the end of Washington street in Athens, GA. Which is to say, no more than a 5 minute drive from the G.W. Bush library was a section of town filled with tattooed hipsters riding fixies to specialty craft beer pubs or co-opt grocery stores with banners advertising "No GMO" products (at one point, I even spotted an organic dog food store). It was strange. I mean, it was odd that in what is arguably the most conservative state in the country, in Dallas there was a sizable amount of what might be called progressive/Whole Foods style culture right next door to the super-patriotic cultural monuments of the New Right.

This dichotomy was epitomized for me when I spotted a Volvo emblazoned with numerous liberal bumper stickers supportive of Obama and the local library system right next to a car with Army of God style anti-abortion stickers. And it was nothing to spot a group of goth girls all with polychromatic hair walking behind a group of frat guys wearing pastel Polos and khaki shorts. There was something almost schizophrenic about it, cowboy boots and doc martens all walking alongside each other without anyone batting an eye. I didn't stay in Dallas long enough to get a handle on it, but I do have free place to stay if I every decide to go back and try and understand it––the seemingly binary culture of Dallas, TX.