“As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the cor- porate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race re- quires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon cor- ruption of that system, it is up to the individu- als to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the pro-

cess is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assem- bled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an ille- gal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Execu- tives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and dis- crimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming sys- tem through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, con- finement, and cruel treatment of countless ani- mals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip em- ployees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut work- ers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the

culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have de- liberately declined to recall faulty products en- dangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have pro- duced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or pro- vide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to mur- der prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the tor- ture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass

destruction in order to receive government contracts.

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to ad- dress the problems we face, and generate solu- tions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard! Occupy Wall Street”

— October 4 

If you are a “True Believer” in centrism, what is the nature of your beliefs? What about your doubts? Centrism may not really exist. Moderation may be an illusion.

What do centrists positively and affirmatively believe? Maybe not much more than that we should all (or mostly) vote for them. Or maybe they genuinely believe that we should avoid any organized and consistent policies. We have seen what this means. But often so-called “moderation” is a posture assumed for deception. To conceal a deeper purpose- conservative and extreme.

“[It is] bogus “objectivity” or bland centrism that always locates truth equidistant from two points…”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason. Pantheon Books, New York. 2008. pp xvi.

A “midpoint” between two differing perspectives, narratives or points of view lacks even theoretical meaning.  Contradictory and antagonistic convictions do not invent some kind of “center.” Moderation is not an articulable and defensible belief, or genuine ethical stance. Nor is it a coherent policy, of substance in itself.

At the “center” of any apparent conflict or controversy, there is not even a valid opinion. Such a “place” is vacuous, a vacuum. Any “thing” there could be an accident or coincidence, or a distracting (diversionary?) illusion. Or an epistemological falsity, a tautological error and a failure of reason.

The “center” is an imaginary “place” where nothing happens and nothing matters. It contributes nothing to momentum, strength or resistance. The principle of the Moment of Inertia is an interesting metaphor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia

“Not only basic knowledge but the ability to think critically are required to understand the factual errors (as distinct from differences of opinion) that generally provide the foundation for policies at the far ends of the political spectrum.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason. Pantheon Books, New York. 2008. pp. 298

Have we simply lost our clarity of shared language about our public affairs? Are we bewildered and benighted due to imprecision? Intellectual sloppiness? A failure to consult our dictionaries? If so, this alone is a bad thing. At best, confusion immobilizes and diminishes us.

But this is much more than a semantic problem, or a matter of confused and murky definitions. Remember that the right wing seeks to cloud our words and our reason, and to silence and paralyze us all. They steal away the power of our language. Let’s not abet them with uncertainty and insecurity about what we know to be true and what we know to be wrong.

Definitions For A New World Order:

“Independent” = Uncomprehending

“Common Sense” = Uneducated and uninformed

To be sure, the fearsome matters before us are complex and easily confused. The richer, more nuanced and multi-dimensional our dialogue is the more understanding we will share.

The languages of art, music and architecture startle, amuse and enlighten. Poetry and literature titillate and provoke. Each of these is a whole, evolving, ineffable and organic living thing. They can be sublime, transforming and transcending. Or they can be very bad. But maybe they can be wrong only insofar as they are covert ideological projects.

“LEXICOGRAPHER, n.  A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.”

Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary (The Peter Pauper Press 1958) Pp 36

We strive to be anything but dogmatic stiflers of the multi-dimensionality and nuance of plastic language. Metaphor and irony add greatly to the art of communication. Certainly they contribute manifold dimensions of meaning to our conversation about who we are to be.

Integrity demands our dogged pursuit of what we- and our words- truly and completely mean. When we must understand one another, words really matter. In dire times, we owe ourselves, and one another, their certain and precise use. We can only recover the means to really understand one another with intellectual rigor and honesty.

Surely we each have a unique social position, experience and subjectivity. But mutual respect for cultural and ethical differences does not excuse us to simply invent our own private languages from our respective “experiences.”

“Moreover, the much lionized American centrists, sometimes known as moderates, are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling-block to deeper, instinctive “ways of knowing.””

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason. Pantheon Books, New York. 2008. Pp 211

When we truly need our terms, we must not condone the proliferation of invented, idiosyncratic usage. Indiscipline can do us great harm when we are the targets of bad intentions, covert dogma, dissembling sophistry and quasi-mystical cant. We do no disservice by aspiring to precision and clarity.

Maybe we are just uncomfortable. About wholesale injustice and violence undertaken in our names, by our governments and those who hijack them. Living among others who embrace it may make us anxious. We may be afraid to resist. Afraid to be victims ourselves. On the other hand, living among people who oppose it may make us uncomfortable. Afraid to appear weak.

So we may just be… uncomfortable. Does this distract us (or excuse us) from what really should discomfit us most? Real convictions- about wrongs, injustices and horrors- are often decidedly disquieting. Openly acknowledging and opposing our personal and collective injustices to others is challenging. It may even be personally risky.

For some of us, to acknowledge the wrongs we jointly do to our fellows and all living things is literally inconceivable. What we do, and what we believe, just must be honorable and justified. When we are dishonorable, our perceptions of ourselves are too discordant. To admit and confront the violence and injustice in which we are all implicated strains us too much. Our impulses to exceptionalism, nationalism and violence are strongest when we are a part of a polity that is doing some significant evil.

Our integrity and our honesty confront us. We should honor, embrace and heed this sort of irritant. Our greatest discomfiture should be our failures to resist racism, intolerance, oppression and violence. There is no dishonor in honesty.  No-one is innocent.

Even shared, honorable beliefs don’t centripetally “pull” toward some kind of pole of ethical gravity. People are drawn toward one another by like beliefs and commitments. Individuals are drawn toward appropriate collective action.

Nor do disparate, divergent beliefs “pull” toward one another. Repulsion –repellence- cannot “pull” us diametrically into the middle of a spectrum of beliefs. No more than beliefs themselves can.

Fear has a “pull” though. But neither is this specie of “discomfort” a coherent belief or a common conviction- or any kind of “center.”

Such a middle is an illusion or a manipulative invention. It is the absence and negation of conviction and belief. It is not “reason.” Here there are no common beliefs. Only a seething, irrational, pre-cortical fear, and a directionless immobility. Inertia. And fear begets anger.

Here is begotten extremism. Or rather, an incoherent patchwork of extremisms: divergent, hostile and irrational. This vertiginous, centrifugal vortex is where mobs are mobilized.

This is not a trivial point. We know it is a deliberate, fear-mongering strategy of both the politically crass and those who are motivated by fear. They exploit and profit by this. The only thing attractive in this “center” is the delusion of comfort and safety. Repugnance is not a virtue. Revulsion is not attraction. There is nothing “attractive” about it.

“Centrism” plays a more sophisticated game than just inciting and exploiting a blunt fear of danger. It plays upon the anxieties of those who yearn to be among the judges and not among the judged.

Those who are afraid to be judged deficient in their knowledge, education, wisdom, tolerance and humanity. To be deemed of inferior class, uneducated and uninformed. Outsiders, mocked and reviled, marginal and vulnerable. To be judged… extreme.

“The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason. Pantheon Books, New York. 2008. Pp 211

False tolerance is dangerous. When must we challenge the falsely tolerant? When is compromise irresponsible? Is there no such thing as responsible moderation? Do inclusivity and collective responsibility oblige us to sometimes say no? To not only confront but to censure the theft of our public conversation? This is a dilemma of democratic inclusion. Unambiguously, though, it illuminates an obligation to recover our language.

“We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.

Daniel Gilbert. In The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007.  Dave Eggers (Ed.) Houghton Mifflin, New York: 2007. pp129-30.

Public commitment to inclusivity obliges us to tolerate the anti-democratic polemics of the hateful, the destructive, the intolerant.

“Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.”

Harris, Sam: The End Of Faith. 2004: W.W. Norton, New York. pp. 202

“One of the researches most urgently needed is into the whole problem of compromise and noncompromise. I am dangerously and mistakenly much against compromise: “my kind never gets anything done.”  The (self-styled) “Realists” are quite as dangerously ready to compromise. They seem never sufficiently aware of the danger; they much to quickly and easily respect the compromise and come to rest in it. I would suppose that nothing is necessarily wrong with compromise in itself, except that those who are easy enough to make it are easy enough to relax into and accept it, and that it thus inevitably becomes fatal.  Or more nearly, the essence of the trouble is that compromise is held to be a virtue itself.”

James Agee: From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Cited in Robert Coles: Teaching Stories. Modern Library, New York: 2004. Pp. 233.

So-called moderate “centrism” disguises itself as reasoned, grounded and pragmatic. It camouflages itself as practical and principled.  It pretends to a paternalistic toleration of differences and a sympathetic understanding of multiple perspectives.

It claims to acknowledge, accommodate and even honor positions that it identifies as, well, extreme. Relative to itself.  It paints all that is thusly “extreme” as fundamentally immature and lacking its tolerance, wisdom and superiority. Its practitioners pretend to indulgent and paternalistic care for our well-being.  They claim to patiently –indulgently- represent the interests that they betray.

They smugly presume to define and validate “solid ground” by naming a sort of “middle ground” among competing claims, and calling it “common ground.” They arrogantly claim moral ground by defining all else that lies around it, as far as the eye can see, as “extreme.” And somehow immoral.

This is not complicated. “Moderation,” as a false episteme, endorses the rejection, without serious consideration or analysis, of everything anyone -especially another  “extremist-“ might call extreme.

By positing other positions as extreme, as unbalanced or incomplete in basis or reason, it POSITS EXACTLY NOTHING. It is vacuous. In principle and in fact, it actually logically requires the rejection of… everything. Every affirmative assertion, every conclusion, every truth. Every single valid epistemological stance. It is a vast, comprehensive tautological error.

The opposites of stances don’t seem to be anti-stances, but rather opposing stances. But the opposite of taking a stance could be an absence of stances, a void of convictions. It isn’t overtly opposed to actual, identifiable principles or mores, but it isn’t a nullity. It may be appear to be amoral, but it is truly gravely immoral.

Centrism is not a measured, sober and calculated response to complex and consequential human situations. It is not a sound basis for anything. It is not reasoned, or even real. It is certainly not a valid (or useful) opinion. It is not, in itself, a policy or policies. It is actually ruinous to purposive, coherent public policy. It underwrites pallid, vacuous, directionless inertia.

However, it is political, we must admit. It is the fictive, deceptive posture of political “realists” and opportunists. It camouflages the covert dogma, hypocritical dishonesty and reactionary agendas of conservatives. It is where the fearful and the fanatical seek false comfort among the fearful and fanatical. Cynical, opportunistic operators and predators range among them, inflaming and exploiting them and betraying us all. In this sense it is a “political” position.

But it is not a real “position.” It has no real coordinates in the world. It is actually locatable and given discursive meaning only by being exterior to the coordinates of real, grounded truths. There is no “there” in the center of this metaphoric geography, this compass, that can be found by any honest geography, or any honest geographer. It is also the intersection of apathy, passivity and inaction. A true “moment of inertia.”

ONLY A STRONGLY POLARIZED MORAL COMPASS WILL ALLOW US TO NAVIGATE SURELY.

This false moderation is worse than merely sanctimonious, paternalistic and dismissive. We should fear this phenomenon. It is not only an amoral absence of ethical convictions and beliefs. It is the very epitome –the epicenter- of intolerance and oppression. To mistake it for a morally grounded stance –much less a position on an issue- is worse than intellectually slovenly. It is beyond sloppy, epistemologically erroneous, and irresponsible. It is beyond moral weakness to mistake it for an ethos or screed.

Remember that the right wing will subvert and anaesthetize our power to act. They steal away our common good and our common welfare. They plunder our societies and our ecosystem. They radically endanger the very survival of a functioning civilization and a recognizable planet on which living things may dwell.

Our proposition is that for us to fail to commit and to act, under cover of false, sanctimonious morality –whether our own or others’- is immoral.  It does wholesale damage to the operations of ethics and mores in the world. It gives protective cover to evil. It exposes us all to abuse, violence and anti-democratic tyranny.

We all become flaccid civilian “human shields,” cloaking the fear and cynicism of the supposedly “neutral.” And the incendiary, apocalyptic and blind impulses of all manner of extremists. We complicitly legitimize and give inadvertent comfort to anti-democratic extremists by putting all claims on some kind of fictive “common ground.” If we submit, if we fail to resist, we admit, abet and expose ourselves to the spread of fundamentalist extremisms and their consequences. Is that immoral?

Supposed “neutrality” can be a fearful delusion. Or it can glorify smug, triumphal and sanctimonious superiority. It makes knuckleheaded ignorance infinitely more powerful than reason or ethical conviction or truth. It confounds and paralyzes serious contemplation of matters of ethical gravity. The true natures of ideas and ideological conflicts are trivialized and debased..…and finally erased. We are numbed and mesmerized. Finally, speech is silenced. This is how we know it is a deliberate, furtive strategy of the right wing. And that it is perilous.

When there is nothing moderate about the horrors you oppose, how can you be a “moderate?”

Most of us are not “somewhere in the center.” Most of us are chickenshit, or lazy. Probably both.

(end)

WHEN THERE IS NOTHING MODERATE ABOUT THE HORRORS YOU OPPOSE, HOW CAN YOU BE A “MODERATE?”

“The Insidious Nature Of Panics…” JoAnn Wypijewski

“The insidious nature of panics is that they exceptionalize the ordinary, and then make ordinary the legal machinery supposedly instituted for extraordinary circumstances.”

JoAnn Wypijewski: What We’ve Become. The Nation, June 7, 2010 (Vol. 290, No. 22)

CARTESIAN, adj. Ambrose Bierce: THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

CARTESIAN,  adj. relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum  –whereby  he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”; as close an approximation to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

Ambrose Bierce. The Devil’s Dictionary (The Peter Pauper Press 1958). pp 14.

Link: Wikipedia Entry for Ambrose Bierce

Link: Powell’s -a Genuine Bookstore: Ambrose Bierce

Saturday, 27 March 2009

“One of the researches most urgently needed is into the whole problem of compromise and noncompromise. I am dangerously and mistakenly much against compromise: “my kind never gets anything done.”  The (self-styled) “Realists” are quite as dangerously ready to compromise. They seem never sufficiently aware of the danger; they much to quickly and easily respect the compromise and come to rest in it. I would suppose that nothing is necessarily wrong with compromise in itself, except that those who are easy enough to make it are easy enough to relax into and accept it, and that it thus inevitably becomes fatal.  Or more nearly, the essence of the trouble is that compromise is held to be a virtue itself.”

James Agee: From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Cited in Robert Coles: Teaching Stories. Modern Library, New York: 2004. Pp. 233.

Centrism may not really exist. Moderation may be an illusion.  Please consider this premise for the moment.

Maybe there is a “center.” While you read our argument, please keep in mind our openness to this proposition. Maybe you are a scholar and a leader in the domain of that “center.” It may exist. Maybe there are several! There may be substantial, reasoned and reasonable policy positions, ethically supported and credible, somewhere around the region of space we fondly and fuzzily call “the Center.” 

We, the Editors, are willing to have this whole line of inquiry be completely wrong. Divisive, inflammatory and offensive, even. Oh, yeah. But we ask you to consider the following as a radical thought experiment. As always, our postulate is not a solution. We theorize not to conclude anything, but to deepen the question and invite the conversation. (We urge you to read our Essay entitled HYPOCRISY IS BAD: A deliberate, Numbing Assault On Our Public Conversation and dated 05 November 2008 at  http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=904 ).

So please indulge us for a moment. We apologize for some weak geographical metaphors, and we ask you to consider this proposition:

Centrism may not really exist. At any “center,” maybe there is no substantial policy, no ethically supportable stance, no passionately held and shared belief (or indeed belief of any kind). Or even a valid opinion. Just observing reality from a place can only be fuzzy, soft, incorrect and epistemologically incomplete.

“The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason: Pp 211

Is it an illusion that there is anything at any sort of “center” that is not vacuous?

There really is no “place” in this region of the map. There is no “center” that can be reliably found and identified by any honest geography, or any honest geographer.

At the empty space at the “center” of our peculiar cartographic discourse there is really only fear and directionless immobility: inertia.

There is something at this certain “Center,” but it is not opinion, policy, ethical conviction, or shared belief. It is nothing of the kind. This something is not without “gravity.” It is fact extremely dense! It is like a black hole of Infinite Ignorance, from which no meaning and communication can escape. (Please see our Essay entitled EXTREMISM IS SAFE: How Is Radical Extremism reassuring? and dated September 5, 2008 at http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=174 ).

It is a kind of perch where the unsure, insecure and ignorant find a craven, sanctimonious pulpit from which to chortle and dismiss.

Have we have simply lost any shared clarity of language about a real, responsible “center” of policy positions and ethical substance? Maybe this is nothing more than a semantic issue, or a matter of confused and uncertain definitions. Has it become confusing and opaque due to imprecision? Intellectual sloppiness? Failure to consult our dictionaries?

We assert that if so, this is in itself a bad thing. At best things are certainly muddied and blurred by confusion. Imprecise, ambiguous usages are simply incorrect. We owe it to ourselves, and to one another, to commit ourselves to certain, precise and respectful use of language.

The richer, more nuanced and multi-dimensional our dialogue is, the more understanding we will share. Multiple meanings and metaphor add immeasurably to the art of communication.  Language is a living thing. Do we kill it by disrespecting its whole, ineffable existence? Believe us; we (the Editors) are social and anthropological radicals. A look around this website should convince you that we strive to be anything but dogmatic stiflers of language.

To be sure, the fearsome matters before us are complex, contradictory and multi-dimensional. Do we imagine we are simply being respectful of cultural and ethical difference? Do we accept another’s unique usage of terms because of her “unique social position, experience and subjectivity?” No. Mutual respect for cultural and personal difference does not allow us to simply invent our own language from our respective “experiences.” It is dishonest and destructive. We can only recover intellectual honesty, and the means to understand one another truly, with intellectual rigor about our meanings.

“Rereading Hofstadter at the end of the nineties, I was struck by the old-fashioned fairness of his scholarship- not the bogus “objectivity” or bland centrism that always locates truth equidistant from two points, but a serious attempt to engage the arguments of opponents and acknowledge evidence that runs contrary to one’s own biases.”

Susan Jacoby: The Age Of American Unreason: pp. xvi

Confusion and blurring may reflect more an intellectual sloppiness than a moral weakness- but we believe that both do us great harm. Mutual respect requires us to commit to complete, mutual integrity and shared, dogged pursuit of what we -and our words- truly “mean.” To fail is a moral weakness.

Moral weakness exposes us to genuine peril, though. We detect a theft of our language-  abstruse and dishonest: a hijack of  our public conversation. We witness the discursive appropriation of power through the appropriation of language and discourse. Done by “Blue Dog” Democrats, yes? Heinous! Grave injury is done to shared meaning, real ethical commitments, and convictions. Honest public conversation is suffocated by the instruments of power and identity. The true natures of ideas (and of ideological conflicts) are trivialized and debased.

But! Maybe worse yet: maybe the “center” is an epistemological falsity, a tautological error and a failure of reason. Under cover of smug righteousness, it mesmerizes us, and confounds and paralyzes serious contemplation of matters of ethical gravity. 

“Moreover, the much lionized American centrists, sometimes known as moderates, are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling-block to deeper, instinctive “ways of knowing.”"

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason:___ (***) Pp 211

Okay. Maybe you are not religious, but not antireligionist. (And not an activist.) Maybe you are uncomfortable with the consequences of religious extremism. Or  hey- maybe you are an anti-religionist. More power to you.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about violence, or dislike it.  Or maybe you are passionately, committedly opposed to it, and you abhor violence by extremists— from any of the cardinal points of extremism. Or maybe you are actively anti-violent. More power to you.

But maybe you are just uncomfortable with conflict. You just don’t like -or don’t engage in- shrill, polarizing conflict.

Maybe you passionately, devotedly oppose hate and intolerance. Hurray. But maybe you are just not that angry with, or hateful toward, others. 

Maybe you are uncomfortable about some of what “extremists” and “extremism” produce. Or maybe you have complete conviction about the unethical and moral wrongs that some extremisms produce.

Maybe you are just- UNCOMFORTABLE. But not an activist.

But does this discomfort distract and obstruct us from having real convictions about what might discomfit us most? Discomfort may push you away from positions of real conviction- about racism, about sexuality, about violence. This is not neutrality, or even reason. Often, it is not even very complicated.

Our greatest discomfort should be at failed convictions, and failed resistance to racism, oppression and violence of all sorts. We should honor, and embrace, this sort of discomfort.

Only a strongly polarized moral compass will allow us to navigate surely.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about men having sex with other men, or women having sex with other women. But… maybe you are anti-gay.

Or maybe you just don’t want to have sex with other men, or women. Maybe you’re just altogether a bit uncomfortable about sex. Shouldn’t we be? It’s fun, but it is really quite an abyss, isn’t it? But maybe you are truly intolerant.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about wholesale violence undertaken abroad by your country. Maybe you are uncomfortable -but just a bit- that it is undertaken in your name.  Maybe you are also uncomfortable with people openly opposing and condemning that violence. You may be afraid to resist it yourself. You may be uncomfortable that you may be a victim of violence. But… maybe you are an ultarnationalist warmonger and advocate, nay embrace it. We don’t know.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about black people starving in Africa, and the oppression and killing there. Maybe you are uncomfortable about black people approaching your car. Maybe you are racist, and oppose the enfranchisement of others. Dunno.

Does discomfort ”pull” you diametrically into the center of a spectrum of beliefs? No. This is repulsion, not attraction. There is nothing “attractive” about it. The only thing “attractive” about the center is that the instinctively craven feel more secure when surrounded by the like-minded (-or the similarly un-minded). The “center” o(of a herd) is a matter of perceived reproductive advantage (for those of us who “believe” in evolution). There is an evolutionarily conferred reduction in the statistical likelihood that one will be eaten- especially by one’s own kind. (Please see our Essay on herd-opinioning, titled “EXTREMISM IS SAFE: How Is Radical Extremism Reassuring?” and dated 05 September 2008 (http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=174 . It is quite funny).

Could the following be true? If you are a “centrist:

This is not pallid neutrality.

You are not Neutral.

You are not Sober. 

You are not Responsible.

You are not Moral.

You are not “Moderate.”

You are not a “Centrist.”

You are not in the “Center” of anything.

You are Nowheresville, man.

You are not in a safe, secure and comfortable place.

You are not a political “actor,” or an “actor” in the world at all. You are not an “agent” and you are not a civic participant.

Centrism and moderation are not a moral stance.

Maybe there is no such thing as responsible moderation.

Try this: If you are a “centrist:”

You are at the margin.

You are at the sideline.

You are “on the bubble.”

You are at the junction of Apathy, Inaction and Passivity.

But you are not safe. You are at risk. You are in danger. You expose us all to extremisms.

You are next.

This is the absence of a moral or ethical stance.

You have an absence of conviction.

An absence of belief.

Maybe this is not really the opposite of taking a stance. That would be taking a stance, wouldn’t it? Maybe it isn’t Anti-stance. But it is an absence of stance, a failure of stance. It may not be the opposite of conviction, but it is an absence or failure of conviction. Not anti-conviction but a-conviction.  It may not be opposed to morals and mores, but it may be a-moral. Actually, it is anything but amoral. We assert that it is immoral, especially because it disguises itself as principalled and gives protective cover to evil. That is not amoral, is it? But let’s not lose sight: does it do wholesale damage to the operations of morals and mores in the world? Does it pretend to morality? Does it do violence to shared meaning, and to language itself?

Maybe you just don’t give a shit. You are still not a “centrist.”

But it may be that these are really horrible failures. Our proposition is that to fail to believe, to commit and to act may in fact be immoral. It may admit and abet the spread of extremisms and destruction. When there is nothing moderate about the beliefs and practices (and horrors) that you oppose, how can you be a “moderate?”

Is there no such thing as responsible moderation?

We argue that what we describe here far worse than irresponsible. Worse than merely sanctimonious, self-righteous and craven.

“Centrism” paints itself as reasoned, sound, grounded, and pragmatic. A sympathetic, accepting understanding of multiple dimensions and nuanced perspectives. It propounds to be knowledgeable and tolerant and honoring -perhaps embracing- of positions that it situates as, well, extreme. Relative to itself.

“Moderation” may seek to materialize and validate “solid” ground simply by finding a sort of “middle” ground among competing claims and calling it some sort of “common” ground. It is defined, manifested, and located in the world only by the coordinates of the “grounds” around it, however unfounded and spurious the claims thereto may be. It is “ungrounded,” and unfounded in the way that colonies and settlements may be unfounded.

It then (perfidiously) presumes to define all else, all that lies around it as far as the eye can see, as “extreme.” It paints all that is “extreme” as fundamentally immature. As lacking its multi-perspectival maturity.

Here: the premise is false that “centrism” is a measured, calculated response to real, complex and consequential situations. It is not measured, calculated or real. By positing other positions as extreme, relative to itself, IT POSITS EXACTLY NOTHING. It is vacuous.

Without inherent substance, “moderation” nonetheless endorses -even requires- the rejection, without serious consideration, analysis or understanding, of anything that another extremist might call “extreme.” 

“…With a renewed esteem, it may be the scholarly equivalent of the general public’s weariness with ideological polarizations that has sanctioned not only the demonization of opponents but the trivialization of all opposing positions.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason: Pp xvi

It endorses the rejection of … -everything. Every conviction, every conclusion, every assertion and every truth. In fact, as a false epistemology, it requires the negation of every real (grounded) position or epistemological stance that matters.

It cloaks such rejection and intolerance in smug sanctimoniousness.

It glorifies knuckleheaded ignorance. More, it makes ignorance more powerful than reason or ethical conviction or truth. It evades them, trivializes them, infantilizes them and then eradicates them.

“As both dumbness and smartness are defined downward -among intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike- it becomes much easier to convince people of the validity of extreme positions. Not only basic knowledge but the ability to think critically are required to understand the factual errors (as distinct from differences of opinion) that generally provide the foundation for policies at the far ends of the political spectrum.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason: pp. 298

We assert that it is intellectual sloppiness, moral weakness, and worse to mistake this “centrism” for a “stance” or position on any sort of issue.

But is it worse? Does it cosign, endorse, legitimize, in very fact give manifestation to, radical extremism? By putting all claims on some sort of “equal ground?”

It is far beyond sloppiness and weakness to mistake this for an ethos or creed. This is a comprehensive tautological error. It is the absence of any such things.

“Most” of us are not “somewhere in the center.” “Most” of us are chickenshit, or lazy.

 We ask: Are there solid, substantial, reasoned and reasonable policy positions, ethically supported and credible, somewhere around the region of space we fondly and fuzzily call “the Center?”

Centrism may not really exist. Moderation may be an illusion. What do you think?

(End)

KEEP YOUR HANDS AND ARMS AWAY FROM THE AISLE; Stay Inside The Vehicle.

The notion of “reaching across” some “aisle” is nonsense.

It is nothing more than notional, really, isn’t it. It is metaphor. It is an abstraction of an abstraction. Go ahead; extend the metaphor. Try to complete it so it actually makes sense: I’ll be reaching across (this) aisle and… what? Furtively handing across a tight roll of large bills? Agreeing to disagree? 

This acknowledges no relationship to real, particular issues, differences, interests or money at stake. Nothing to do with judgments about policies by people in real circumstances. 

There is an aisle, somewhere, we are told, but there sure as shit isn’t anyone reaching across it, especially at this hour of the night. Unless, we hope, it is the brown-skinned Cleaning Staff, reaching for the wet end of a blunt. I suppose there is some kind of “gallery” somewhere, though I suspect it is place where schoolteachers make public school children be quiet. There may be homeless people and stranded travelers sleeping there now…

 The Aisle is something that we will all use to elbow our way to the Exits, when the shit comes down. We’ve all seen it, haven’t we? Isn’t it always in the aisles that people are trampled to death? And they plunge, from the balconies… into the aisles.

 What is intended by saying “reaching across the aisle” makes more vivid sense to me as reaching from the rail of the cacophanous, tumultuous deck of one hideous, crowded ideological ship to the deck rail of another.

 The very image suggests people who have crowded their way on to these particular vessels like sheep or ungulates elbowing their way to perceived safety in the center of a herd. If agitated by rabble-rousers, cows and sheep will shove and crowd and elbow their way onto a Stock Trailer of Doom- or the deck of a ship, for that matter, I suppose. It’s just a degree of stampede, really. Fires will get these started really well, sure thing. And so, it will be one deck or another, we suppose…

 So be careful reaching across this particular imaginary “aisle.” It is a canonical rule of boatsmanship in moving water- never end up standing downstream from a broadside hull- and never, never end up getting pulled into the gap between two heaving, rolling hulls. If there is a sure way to get mashed into a thick, splintery, salty paste, this is it.

We have been fooled enough times to be skeptical that those people reaching across that “aisle” want us over there, on that side of the “aisle,” anyway. We think they may want us down there, between the hulls, as they roll and buck and grind and slam together. Doesn’t it make you a bit nauseous?