Conflict Without Cause
At every crossroad where we become divided by difference, where we confront fundamental Others, we fail to understand or even imagine what is divided and what is dividing.
When there are visible differences we can’t help supposing our separations must be across the differences most visible to us. When our differences are not so visibly obvious, we infer separation and struggle must nevertheless be rooted in tangible causes, in real grounds divided by material categories. Class, race, gender, history, geography – and a swelling host of ever-more fine-grained divisions of difference. But what we keep failing to even imagine, and the reason we cannot come to grips with why we cannot stop coming to blows, is how our differences are grounded in the breakdown of meaning itself.
Black and white people do not have to conflict. Women and men do not have to conflict. The poor and the rich do not have to conflict. But if or when everybody does eventually conflict? Disputes can be negotiated. Differences can be worked out. Conflicts can be resolved.
There have been some very silly arguments that tangibly different peoples can never really work out their differences. That they cannot stop fighting because they can’t understand each other well enough to work things out. That they can’t understand each other because their necessarily differing experiences make their ways of knowing and being too different.
What makes such arguments so terribly silly are false assumptions that knowing, understanding, imagination and meaning can only be functions of lived experience. It just isn’t so. Sure — categories such as knowing, understanding, imagination and meaning can’t be considered completely outside all reference to experience. But neither can such categories be thought entirely restricted by and limited to prior experience. It is far too late in the day to keep forgetting how reliably and categorically in meaning, in understanding, in imagining and knowing we go beyond the information given –- and past every experience already had.
Whether human or artificial — there can be no intelligence without going beyond the information given. And while no one can yet answer how spectacularly we transcend every past experience — no way does that license forgetting how reliably we do so. To the contrary. Epistemology that forgets or purposely ignores the creativity of human thought and language is not radical — it is just ignorant.
That’s why mutual understanding cannot be restricted to common past experience. Why no material difference — whether glaringly visible or barely tangible — can in itself mean those divided by that difference cannot reach some understanding. Cannot stop fighting. No material difference can mean those divided by it must conflict in the first place. Material differences are not that meaningful in themselves.
But some differences absolutely are meaningful in themselves. Obviously. Differences in meaning.
Difference necessarily transcends experience when it becomes necessarily different meaning. When the meaning and significance of experience grows too different. And although not every different meaning must produce conflict — there are some that do. Some that must. Whenever our differences become both fundamental and contradictory in meaning. Whenever differences glare in fundamental contradiction across gaps made insuperable by inconsistency in how peoples’ most basic experience signifies.
That’s why we can never avoid or resolve so much conflict. Because fundamentally irreconcileable differences mean people are bound to conflict. Because fundamental contradiction cannot be reconciled — and hence people cannot stop conflicting.
There’s no basis for avoiding conflict and for meaningful reconciliation across fundamentally glaring contradictions. Not unless there is yet more, deeper fundamental consistency and agreement to be found. But, if there is? Then contradictions were not fundamental in the first place. It was only a misunderstanding.
This is how irreconcileable differences grow insurmountable. It happens every time fundamental meanings become too glaringly inconsistent — and conflict turns utterly obdurate to any possible material conciliation. From some elements of criminality to cultural fragmentation to the scorched-earth between inimical cultures, violent conflict can remain the only meaningful expression when fundamental meanings become too contradictory, too glaringly inconsistent — when meaning itself fails.
How can there be anything meaningful between fundamentally contradicting meanings? There can’t. Not if the contradictions are indeed fundamental. Not until one or all fundamentally contradicting voices are silenced.
Is it really hopeless, then? Why not simply abandon contradicting meanings and truths? Why not just give up the most divisive cultural differences? What’s wrong with sticking to facts?
Unfortunately, we can’t. For while more scientific stories may remain provisional, subject to refutation by experience – the precise opposite applies to cultural narratives. We can give up our cosmologies on the basis of new evidence arriving from one day to the next. But we can’t alter our fundamental cultural meanings, principles, and truths that way. We could never shuffle the identities of peoples and nations so provisionally — even if we wanted to.
Culture must continually provide sufficient agreement in fundamental meanings. The most basic coherence giving rise to the possibility of human society. It is the ideal and ideological counter-factual glue to hold peoples, tribes, nations together against almost any disruption by experience. But even while consistency within cultures provides invisible bonds of common thought — and the cloying bondage of common thinking. Even while cultural consistency keeps peoples living and working together. Contradictions between cultures can bring about yet greater incoherence. The meaningless, violent incoherence of ideologically entrenched contradictions between cultures. The endless human conflicts not caused — but entailed by fundamental contradictions in meaning.
Regardless whether ideological deadlock occurs on relatively small scales — as it did during the 2008/09 strike at York University. Or if it occurs large-scale as in the Middle-East. Or if it occurs on an absolute scale as between almost every human culture and nature. There cannot be meaningful resolution to conflict when meaning itself fails.
By eliciting the expressions of ideologically deadlocked cultural contradictions, the Ultimate Culture Clash seeks to interrogate culture itself. Whether there can be any meaningful way to address cultural contradiction. Because the question is not whether cultures clash. The question is whether they can ever stop clashing. Particularly now, with our world so precariously hinging in the balance.
Last modified on 2010-06-25 07:41:01 GMT. 75 comments
Left & Right-Wing Brains: Ideology 101
Several weeks ago a friend challenged me to explain the difference between left and right-wing ideologies.
“Can you do it?” challenged friend. “Moreso, can you do it fairly and without the usual right and left stereotypes and with the history of where these ideological groupings come from?”
Sure. Why not. There’s no resolving the esoteric spectra of political ideology – Marxism, communism, socialism, liberalism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism, neo-conservatism, neo-liberalism and fascism, to name just a few – if we can’t even tell left from right. If we can’t say why we keep leaning either way.
Let’s put aside the history of our political divisions, though. History can’t explain why people keep slanting left or angling right – while knowing next to nothing about history. In fact? It almost seems like people can’t really help their own political inclinations.
That’s what research has shown. When it comes to left or right political leaning, people don’t just forget their history. They disdain plain facts and otherwise common sense. Both those leaning left and those leaning right will consistently rely on the identical facts when justifying how they lean. Which can only suggest complete disregard for facts. For how consistency gets sacrificed when it comes to political leaning.
Yet more astonishing has been research showing significant, detectable brain differences between people leaning politically left and right. Research so remarkable that mainstream media headlines blared: “Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain”.
Could significant brain-differences mean that political inclination is inborn? Genetically hard-wired?
Better not get carried away with that joke. Finding brain differences doesn’t mean that political inclination is hard-wired. That it isn’t learned. Since learning too, just as well, may account for brain differences. Since we know that learning can and does correspond with presumably structuring events in the brain. Since learning is precisely not inborn or hard-wired. Learning is everything we acquire – albeit not only – by experience.
For the most simplistic analogy, it may be possible to significantly distinguish computers by their operating systems. Would we then conclude operating systems are hard-wired? Of course not. Operating systems are precisely not hard-wired.
What surprises is not that learning or knowing can correspond with variance in people’s brains. Rather, it is how deeply fundamental our political leanings must therefore be. How persistent, reliable and robust a division political leaning must constitute. In order to correspond with real, significant brain differences, leaning left or right politically must divide us – how we learn, how we know — fundamentally.
It would not be surprising to find significant brain differences between, for instance, people who distinguish right from wrong – and people who do not. But we would not expect significant brain differences between people who think it’s right to vote for Barak Obama – and people who think it’s wrong to vote for Obama. That’s what’s surprising. How much deeper than just voting choices our political inclinations must go. How political inclination now seems more like being able to tell right from wrong. In terms of the prior analogy, political leaning isn’t just elective software. How we lean seems more like a module of our operating system.
Taking a minute to think about it, though? There should be no surprise. Because, in Western societies, political inclination is predicated on our understanding of fairness – and because fairness has replaced god when it comes to telling political right from wrong.
Right and wrong used to be functions of god-given truths. But at least since the American and French revolutions – if not since yet earlier during Western Enlightenment – we have lost every faith in the truths god gave. And absent definitive, pre-ordained, absolute truths to sanctify each social injustice? The alternative has become culturally ingrained in Western societies that humanitarian fairness must decide public morality.
Now, in the West, fairness is the needle in our public morality compass. Fairness has become the vane of political legitimacy. On this much, in the West, we can agree. We have got to be fair.
But fundamental and imperative as fairness has become? We totally can’t agree on what it means. When it comes to our understanding of fairness we are utterly divided.
On one hand, there is the belief that fairness must mean relative parity. Such that, whenever observing material non-parity, we have to conclude non-fairness. Any inequality, in itself, must therefore constitute evidence of discrimination, of oppression, of exploitation – of prevailing social injustice.
On the other hand, there is the belief that fairness must mean not only relative parity – but must also reflect relative merit and virtue. Such that we cannot conclude non-fairness from material non-parity alone. Since inequalities could always stem from differences in relative merit – rather than any social injustice prevailing.
The more we believe material non-parity entails injustice – the farther left we have to lean politically. The more we believe material non-parity does not entail injustice – the farther right we have to lean politically.
And when we lean too far – either way? That’s when our ideals of fairness turn ideological. Because it is false, absurd and harmful to believe merit has either nothing or absolutely everything to do with people’s material circumstances. Sometimes people can shape their material circumstances – whereas, at other times, circumstances can overwhelm anyone.
It comes down to this. Western ideals of fairness are most admirable. Absent such ideals – had we kept faith with god-given truths or just relied on might determining our relative rights – there could never have evolved even partly free and democratic Western societies. But Western ideologies of fairness are turning uniquely absurd – and damaging.
Right-wing brains believing only merit can truly determine what’s fair ought to remember that no society can thrive which turns its back on those most overwhelmed by circumstance through no fault of their own. Whereas left-wing brains believing merit has no bearing whatever on fairness had better remember that societies collapse and fall when turning blind eyes to how enduringly only human self-determination and free-enterprise can improve, enhance, augment and ultimately transcend every possible circumstance. That’s right – ultimately transcend. Because circumstance and human conditions hinge not only on potentially alienable means of production – but yet more so on potentially inalienable productions of meaning. Because absent comprehensive appreciation for human production of meaning – there can be no real conception of human productivity.
Ideologies of fairness are absurd artifacts produced by genuine cultural ideals of fairness. Ideals of fairness but for which there could never have emerged even partly free and democratic Western societies. And our most extreme ideologies of fairness are just as uniquely Western.
Could left and right-wing brains have preceded our ideals and expectations of public fairness? Could there have been left and right-wing brains prior to left and right political alternatives even existing? Even now, can there be left and right-wing brains in the totalitarian Middle East or North Korea? Of course not. There can be no meaningful left or right political alternatives in totalitarian societies. No political alternative can have coherent totalitarian meaning. Since the meaning of totalitarian is to deny all alternatives.
Our ideals of fairness are at the cultural roots of relatively free and democratic Western societies. Yet our ideologies of fairness – ideologies at the expense of real fairness – like rot, are beginning to erode Western societies from inside out. Can Western societies recover – or will left and right political ideologies continue dividing us until we can no longer work and live together?
That’s the real question the survey was meant to address. Not whether Bush or Obama hatred has been worst – responses to which, either way, likely reflect only prevailing ideological devotions. Rather, whether any significant proportion of respondents might indicate some rejection of ideology by choosing the third option: “Ideologues left and right are all a pestilence on democracy.” Unfortunately, to date, the third option accounted for merely 8% of responses. Meanwhile, the first two – ideologically divisive – options accounted for over 85% of responses.
By way of bad news, these numbers shout for themselves.
Last modified on 2011-08-16 07:26:00 GMT. 283 comments
How the West was Lost
There is a sense of doom leading up to the 2012 elections. A sense that America is doomed. Ever more voices arise declaring they shall not live under socialism or communism. Regardless what next year’s elections outcome will be.
Political historian Larry Schweikart asserts that America is more divided now than it was during the Civil War. Yet even such dire words cannot express the real severity of the division. For even while America’s economy fails, the division cannot be understood merely in terms of failing economics. Nor is it only America so divided. Like a crack of doom, the rupture runs unabated through all Western culture. All Western discourse and public spheres are collapsing beneath an astonishing and crushing stupidity. An utter ideological corruption destroying us economically, dividing us socio-politically and disintegrating our very identities as Western people.
From America’s credit crisis and Europe’s defaulting economies to Norway’s home-grown terrorist murders, one way or another, a surging wave of calamity attests the West’s clashing ideological antagonisms. Less flagrant yet more fatal, half the people in Western societies revile rather than speak to the other half. And while coming to blows through violence in the streets, through mass unrest and murders and civil wars runs counter to our tolerant and democratic traditions – nevertheless there appears no logical possibility remaining to compromise or resolve our most fundamental divisions.
Just imagine two neighbours. Any neighbours living next door. Next door to you, most likely.
There are routine greetings. Climate is mentioned daily, sometimes twice or thrice when there’s weather to speak of. But when it comes to values, beliefs, who we are, what we stand for or against? Silence. Rather than declaring who we are, it’s more as if we have nothing whatever to declare.
Yet the appearance of terminal shallowness is deceiving. In covert fact, all too many neighbours seethe internally. Grow more outraged from one day to the next. From one hour to the next. But silently. Knowing how easily genuine self-expression could hurl us at each other’s throats. We have no option but struggling to maintain placidly shallow appearances. No peaceful option.
We agree something is terribly wrong. But because we so fundamentally disagree what is wrong, we cannot really talk about it. We can’t even mention what’s really wrong without exposing how fundamentally we disagree. How violently. And while it isn’t just neighbours so fundamentally divided – our media and governments are equally divided – it is the utter division between neighbours tearing Western social fabric from its once vibrant richness to today’s ragged shreds.
It isn’t just Democrats and Republicans gone too ideologically far to compromise as the future crashes and burns in the balance. It’s all of us in the Western street. In every Western neighbourhood.
Between two neighbours, one fundamentally believes, beyond any shadow or capacity for doubt, that Western society is being decimated by unscrupulous, unrestricted, unregulated, laissez-faire neoliberal piracy. That the corporatist state not only disenfranchises and victimizes – but viciously assails and vilifies precisely those most disenfranchised and victimized by it. That the essential language of our shared responsibilities has been undermined by a reactionary rhetoric of purely personal responsibility designed to deny voice, extinguish breath and exact every recourse from the trammeled. A reactionary rhetoric designed to inculcate and to inseminate even the poorest and hungriest with the venomous ideology of purely personal responsibility for their own hunger and poverty. Designed to contradict the very existence of circumstances and social forces beyond all personal responsibility or control. Forces that can and too often are contrived to crush, savage and vitiate particularly the vulnerable.
Between two neighbours, the other believes no less fundamentally that Western society is being decimated. Not by failing social responsibility, though. To the contrary. By the failure of personal responsibility. By the rabid and virulent assault, across Western welfare states, not only against our core Western values and the means of honest production – but against the very meaning of productivity. Against any sane production of meaning. Thus, the worst failure is due not just to entrenchment of individual irresponsibility and generational dependence on government. It is not just how big government runs amok. Western societies used to be sufficiently productive to propagate, to lift and to carry entire classes of not-workers. Worst is the prevailing cult of personal irresponsibility that has come about in the permanent shadow of false entitlement. The performance of victimhood. The condemnation of achievement as illegitimate privilege. Because no society can survive so radical an inversion of its scruples and fundamental values. An inversion that makes individual life a ward of the state, enshrines human parasites over the bodies of honest workers and elevates narratives of victimhood to tramp the tale of human achievement into meaningless corruption. That’s what’s worst. Tramping what is most valiant and meaningful in sewage of shame.
Extreme views? Most individuals do not subscribe to views that extreme? Perhaps not yet. Not knowingly. But certainly this contradictory, divided understanding of the function of responsibility in fairness and social justice sunders us individually no less than it ruptures our economics, media and politics. There is no conspiracy sufficient to divide us. No left or right wing conspiracy in Western media. No left or right wing conspiracy in western politics. There’s only our fundamentally divided understanding of responsibility in fairness and social justice. Our views growing ever more extremely divided, cleaving and embittering us as neighbours, inexorably yet routinely reflecting in our institutions.
We know it, too. Though we don’t much like thinking about it, this is all terribly familiar. Like a seeping sore, festering in, and due, to ignorance. Beyond vague allusions to far left and right, even adequate terminology is lacking from our language. Despite how, in everyday reality, Western society is staved by ideological clashing between neo-liberalism – no hale liberalism could have suggested the abnegation of all collective responsibility – and neo-Marxism – no sane interpretation of Marxism could have imagined the abnegation of all individual responsibility.
The everyday reality is that Western culture is torn by ideologies no less extreme than either the communisms or fascisms of the 20th century. Alas, it is precisely because we so stolidly strive to ignore the gaping rupture in Western culture that we fail to not only address it – but even to recognize its most crucial, critical character. How totally Western our ideologies are. How they afflict all Western culture. How they afflict only Western culture.
Principles of fairness, equality and social justice have long been fundamental Western values. They have been our brightest ideals, illuminating and making it possible to live, to work, to dispute and to decide together – without coming to blows – in myriad pluralistic, marvelous, historically unprecedented ways. We can and do agree we have to be fair in the West. In large part, fairness defines what it means to be Western. Fairness, the ideal, unites us.
But, simultaneously, we cannot agree what fairness really means. We clash always more zealously over questions of fairness in practice. And while ideal fairness unites us – false, absurd and harmful ideologies of fairness divide us utterly.
Today, one of two neighbours can no longer conceive personal responsibility. Every material disparity provokes railing against the unfairness, the inequality and the social injustice of it. The other neighbour has no concept of social responsibility. The typical response to disparity, regardless how extreme, is: “Get a real job. You bum.” On the left, ideological oblivion to personal responsibility corrupts ideal fairness into wanton addictions and depraved dependence on unsustainable entitlement. On the right, ideological oblivion to collective responsibility mangles fairness to suit some false meritocracy where citizens might as well die in the streets through no fault of their own. No fault other than having been overwhelmed by circumstances outside their control.
The West is divided beyond rupture. Crumbling institutionally, fragmenting constituently. There’s no hope bonding together again. Not unless we first recognize and genuinely appreciate how united we stand for ideal fairness. And second, not unless we cease discounting both individual and collective irresponsibility when questioning fairness in practice. The left must realize that personal irresponsibility multiplies disparities beyond any scope of social redress. The right must comprehend that collective irresponsibility aggravates disparity beyond all possible individual remedies.
It is past time to appreciate fairness as our common ideal – and get over our ideologies of it. Otherwise it’s too late for Western culture and societies. Altogether.
If only it were possible to recognize fairness as our ideal. In actuality, there is bound to be more skepticism – even more-so as we cling to our patently divisive ideologies. How and why has fairness become so fundamental in Western culture?
The correct answer is deceptively simple. Western culture is rooted in fairness because it is no longer rooted in faith. But there is bound to be incredulity that Western culture is no longer rooted in faith. Nor can simple answers explain how and why faith gave way to fairness. In order to explain, the tale must be told. The tale of faith grudgingly, bitterly, haltingly – unavoidably – giving way to fairness. The story of the origin of fairness as the Western ideal.
It began, like so many stories, somewhat arbitrarily long since. Certainly church and faith ruled one thousand years back. Absolutely and unequivocally. Increasingly during the past millennium, though, Western culture broke trust with church and faith-based knowing. As a culture, we abandoned absolute, god-given truths – and replaced our trust in provisionally evident, fallible truths. Truths that hinge on available evidence. Truths that change from one day to the next. That alter as new evidence continues arriving. Which it does. Continually arrive. Every single day.
We do recall past prophets leading to our present materialism. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin. Yet even as we remember those most instrumental transforming Western culture, we fail to appreciate the scope of our cultural transformation. How the epistemic shift from faith-based to evidence-based knowing spanned a millennium, how tectonic it persists as we speak – how thoroughly it implicates the totality of our ways of knowing. More so than anything else, how it defines Western culture.
However unrecognized, the implications of the shift in our ways of knowing are astounding. It was not just burgeoning science and technology entailed by hobbling faith with evidence. Freedom, democracy, tolerance, fairness and social justice were no less entailed. Today’s cultural principles and core Western values could not have existed while faith-based knowing prevailed. Could not exist in the context of cultures where fundamentalist faith in absolute god-given truths triumphs. Cannot survive in societies ruled largely by temple, church or mosque.
Whatever biblical violence was originally required making god’s truths manifest to the people – there could be no questioning, no debate once god’s own truths had been revealed. There could only be yet greater violence – reflecting some presumably greater god’s truths – or obedience and submission to god’s social orders. One’s proper assigned place in society was necessarily ordained as anything in god’s divine creation and the ordering of nature. Questioning could signify only confusion to god’s will. Debating could only mean resistance to god’s plan. Diabolical enmity to god himself.
But after Copernicus, Galileo and Newton? After Darwin drove that last spike through god’s coffin while making such complete monkeys out of us? Nietzche confirmed god dead and, as a culture, we lost every faith in the truths god gave. It was alright, though. It was better that way. That novel new way of knowing. Because our faith alone had once been blind. Whereas, by hobbling faith with evidence, the West could begin to see. Western people could begin to understand.
Absent definitive, pre-ordained, indisputable truths to sanctify every social injustice, questioning and debating became not only possible and meaningful – but absolutely necessary. The tectonic transformation in our way of knowing gave rise to everything we now take as granted. Pluralism and constitutionally lawful dissent, human rights and tolerance, freedom and democracy, fairness, equality and social justice. Indeed, when it came to questions of politics, public morality, the individual’s place in society, it was humanitarian fairness, equality and social justice we turned to for answers. When questioning public morality in the West, in a very real sense, fairness replaced god.
Now we’ve come to terminal disagreements about what fairness really means. And because ideal fairness has displaced divinity, our disagreements are as terminal and fundamental as the divisions over divine revelations in faith based cultures. Consequently, we can have either cultural breakdowns, paralysis, fragmentation, reformations and ultimately sectarian violence. Or we can begin to recognize and appreciate the common commitment to ideal fairness. Appreciate what is so positively unique to Western cultural identity. Begin realizing our division is not so much over ideal fairness – as it is about the ideological perversions of that admirable principle.
That’s the imperative message to launch out there. Fairness demands both personal and social, individual and collective responsibility. Neither may be removed. The idolatry of irresponsibility – be it personal or social irresponsibility – must cease. The perversion of fairness must desist. Let’s stop desecrating our highest, most fundamental Western ideal with such perverse ideologies. Stop before it’s too late. Before the self-destruction gets all biblical.
Last modified on 2011-09-04 15:29:19 GMT. 8 comments
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