To be blunt, this poster is pretty damn stupid, a word salad of buzzwords. I expect better from my counterculture. Which "lies of the alternative truth" should I reject? There are so many to choose from these days. The propaganda use of the word "alternative" is high on my list right now; it's the latest Newspeak for "politically correct" and "doubleplus ungood."
"Believe the evidence of your eyes and ears" is worse: it's painfully obvious that someone wasn't thinking. Urging the marks to believe what is right in front of their eyes is one of the oldest cons in the book. (Nothing up my sleeve!) It's used by the Right ("Obama looks like a terrorist, it's his name") as much as by the Left. Any political or other ideological position will be based not only on visible evidence but on interpretations and theories that offer to connect the dots, drawing the hitherto invisible lines depicting the Truth that They don't want you to see.
There is a speck of truth here, though: when something looks, feels, seems wrong to you, you should take the intuition seriously. But that is only the beginning. From there you must apply the canons of critical thinking. I collected some of them here; you could begin with the educator Deborah Meier's version, taught over decades to kids at Central Park East Secondary School:
They are: the question of evidence, or "How do we know what we know?"; the question of viewpoint, in all its multiplicity, or "Who's speaking?"; the search for connections and patterns, or "What causes what?"; supposition, or "How might things have been different?"; and finally, why any of it matters, or "Who cares?"Now I can add a passage I didn't quote last week from Patricia Roberts-Miller's Demagoguery and Democracy:
Trying to be fair in an argument -- enforcing rules, including the rule that the rules are applied to everyone equally -- will lead to arguments about the rules. And that’s a good sign. Participants often need to argue about how we should argue, what we will count as relevant evidence, what constitutes disruptive behavior or unfair moves, and what “stases”are the most relevant. In fact, arguments about how we should argue most interfere with demagoguery, especially if those arguments concern whether the rules are being applied to all participants equally—if argument by insult is allowed for us, then it is also permitted for them ... We can be mean, angry, vehement, and highly critical, as long as we don't whine if they are just as mean, angry, vehement, and critical with us ... We need to enter the conversation willing to be wrong, willing to admit the limits of our own knowledge, willing to reconsider our evidence, sources, and premises. That is self-skepticism [15-17].Of course I realize that this goes against common sense, the evidence of our eyes and ears, the foundations of all civilization. But common sense, the evidence of our eyes and ears, has brought us to the pass we're in, where we've pretty much always been, unable to see why They (you know, Them) are screwing things up for everybody, when all We want is to just get along. Why do you have to insist on not letting me and mine have all the goodies? Can't we all just get along? ... No, we can't, until we start looking beyond our clan, our tribe, all our granfalloons, and recognize that they're made up of people too. What Roberts-Miller, Meier, and others I've quoted and discussed offer are ground rules for moving beyond Us and Them; they can be debated too, but they have to be debated.
Somewhat curiously, someone -- a Facebook friend, whom I don't know at all in the meat world -- commented yesterday on something I'd posted by depositing a verse he'd composed. (I long ago unfollowed him to keep his smug doggerel out of my feed; I'd forgotten that we hadn't unfriended each other.) His reaction on the Charlottesville killing was to declare the final supremacy of Us and Them, and if You are Them, you ain't shit. I disagreed, saying that Us and Them is always an invalid move; he disagreed with me, and declared that we must leave it there. I agreed, and asked him not to post more of his verse on my page. He then unfriended me; big of him.
Some readers will certainly conclude that I'm denying that white racists are a threat (much as some of the same people concluded that because I didn't think the US should invade Afghanistan, I didn't consider Al Qaeda a threat). I'm not doing anything of the kind. Because white racism is a pervasive, endemic threat, we need to come up with better ways of confronting and blocking it than we have so far. Some people can't be argued with or compromised with. But I don't see a "bloodbath," as one commenter on a post at the Intercept argued recently, as a sane way out of our situation. As usual with wars, the people who initiate the war will probably be among those who suffer least. We tried that approach in 1861, and even though white nationalists lost on the battlefield, they fought their opponents to a standstill in the years afterward, and took control of America by working within the system. (It didn't hurt, of course, that white nationalism wasn't confined to the Confederacy.) We're still living with the consequences.
In the end, I suppose I'm something of a nihilist. To the universe it doesn't matter whether human beings blow ourselves up, enslave each other in some dystopic system, become extinct through natural selection, or are immolated when the sun goes nova, or an asteroid hits the earth. There's nothing in Darwinian theory (or in religion) to say that we will have a happy ending, and in the long run we are all dead. But it matters to us -- doesn't it? It matters to me, and to some others, how things go while we are still alive. Frankly, I'm not sure it does matter to most people. The poster I saw today is, to me, one more slice of evidence that it doesn't: that they can't think ahead any farther than the next ragegasm.
