Labelling a straw man

When I get into an argument with someone, I've noticed that it's terribly easy to turn the person I'm arguing with into a straw man. I see myself, then, as this complex, three-dimensional being with intricate webs of thought and experience and my opponent (or friend) as a kind of mathematical equation that needs simply to be figured out rather than loved or understood.

Typically, the phrase "straw man" refers to an argument that has been misrepresented in some way so as to be easily defeated, but here I'm using it to refer to the misrepresentation of actual human beings. And typically "to attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of intellectual superiority over a particular proposition, idea or philosophy without actually ever taking that proposition, idea or philosophy on its own terms. Here I'm suggesting that "to attack a straw man" also refers to when we turn people into cardboard cut-outs like those you find at a shooting range in order to suggest that we are in some way better, more together and just generally more astute than the people we debate with.

How we turn multi-dimensional human beings into straw men is simple: we put a label onto the person in question, thereby substituting the label for the person. In other words, we take the idea being discussed, remove it from the context of the human being in front of us and then, at least on a conceptual level, discard the person in front of us. I remember watching a journalist do this to the philosopher Slavoj Zizek (See below for Part 1):

It's not that labels are avoidable, but they are merely words, not people. They are ideas, not people. They are just labels, nothing more really. I remember reading Anthony De Mello's 'Awareness' a few years ago. In that book, he talks about the necessity of dropping our labels. He says, if I remember this correctly, that the problem with labels is that sometimes they become a dirty lens through which we view everything. In other words, they can stop us from seeing. Even when we label ourselves as smart, empathetic, stupid, lazy, active or whatever, we are in danger of living in a kind of unreality.

What I'm trying to learn now is just to live: not to make judgments about people and their ideas, just to listen; not to decide that I know what I'm talking about, but to question; not to be so concerned with the destination that I forget the present moment. In short: to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch without worrying too much about how well any of my experiences fit into my theories. I don't want to be the kind of person who changes the facts to fit the theory, but rather the kind of person whose theory fits with my experience of reality. Yes, of course, we need to make decisions at some point, but even those decisions ought to be seen in the context of our whole human story, rather than as a destination that prevents us from ever going anywhere else ever again.

Thoughts at 12:13 pm

Behind the facade of these words is more than an idea. Behind this constructed veneer of pixels and binary code is a person who spills milk and laughs about it. So, when you consider your interaction with this world of idols and surfaces, remember that it is not me you’re looking at but rather an idea you have of me. Remember that I am not who you think I am, nor probably even who I think I am. I am not the words I attach to this fleeting digital expression of self. I am (not) what I profess to believe. I am (not) a pure expression of something deeper than a creed. I am (not) found in this or that label. And I really hope that my identity isn’t something I care too much to preserve, because I understand that I will only lose what I try desperately to keep, and that I can only keep what I do not own.

Virtual carbon footprints

The thing we've got to remember out here in cyberspace is that we may just be disconnecting signifiers from signifieds. The signs we set up may just be misty concepts pointing into a fog without any substance.

We're posting stuff onto Facebook and Twitter that some people read, endorse, like, get lost in and forget. We're stepping outside of our real lives to carve our names into a tree that doesn't even exist. We're graffiti-tagging the walls of the unreal to remind people that, here, there, somewhere, we are desperate to be heard. We're putting down signatures without the personality of our own handwritings. We're calling out words without the resonance of our own voices. We are, perhaps, dwelling in the domain of non-being. We are tenting in the campsite of disintegration.

Wonder

The word wonder means two things that are, I believe, intricately connected. In the first place, wonder means to question, to be curious, or to search. It implies a journey towards something more than it implies a sense of absolute certainty or clarity. But in the second place, wonder is a synonym for the word awe. It means a sense of joyful bewilderment experienced when standing before something that is both utterly true and yet also utterly inexplicable. It means accepting, with genuine humility, just how small and powerless we are in the face of all that we cannot or will not understand or control. This awe is not to prevent us from asking, seeking or searching, but is precisely what makes us want to know more. Awe propels us into deeper things. This is why it's fair to say that wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

Placebos and hypochondriacs

I've been thinking a bit lately about the idea of a placebo – an unreal cause that has a real effect. Obviously the idea of a placebo is central to medicine testing and to the treatment of hypochondriacs, but it is also a tremendous metaphor for how people may sometimes relate to the world. More specifically, for me, it describes how people may be manipulated by news media.

Naturally, news media carry what we would happily call 'true stories'; journalists are required to report on facts more than they are asked to report on speculations or their own imagineerings. At least, that's what we like to think. The main problem I've noticed in South African newspapers, as is probably true of most journalistic outputs worldwide, is that they provide bite-sized snippets of events or facts without necessarily explaining or unpacking the context or the full consequences of these events or facts for readers.

Moreover, because of the nature of journalism, the 'mere facts' often miss the nuances and complexities of social scenarios and cultural contexts. In other words, the rhetoric of (apparent) realism produces what may be called the unreal. In an attempt to reflect only reality, what tends to happen (and this generalisation is by no means flawless) is that reality gets lost somewhere. Even the most neutral, factual, truthful journalism is a placebo of some kind.

So whether journalists are reporting on mass tragedies like 9/11 or smaller but equally terrible tragedies like the crime in South Africa or teenage hooliganism in the UK, the removal of these stories from the wider contexts in which they are found leads to what I describe as cultural hypochondria. A climate of fear is perpetuated. People feel like victims in the face of the insurmountable. People live too reactively.

I'm not saying that I have this idea completely figured out or that this idea is without its faults, but it is, I believe, a notion worth exploring in relation to how we engage with the world we live in. Even if I'm taking the idea too far, it is certainly worth asking if our perception of reality is largely constructed through a second-hand, mediated, vicarious experience of the world. It's certainly worth asking if most of our actions are born out of what isn't even real.

Cynicism is the new hope

In the last few days, I've had a chance to chat to a few of my students about the state of the world, about the bad and the good out there, and about the mysteriousness of and inevitable difficulties in the future that we all face. Overwhelmingly, most of the students I speak to – most of whom are just about a decade younger than I am – are unabashedly, out-and-out cynical. 

In all honesty, I think it's easy to feel really cynical about life on planet earth. Generally, we human beings are good at making war, good at messing up our relationships, good at squandering the earth's resources, good at doing next-to-nothing about the rise of displacement and xenophobic violence and the increasing distress caused by the AIDS pandemic. It seems we're good at everything except being good. And this, I guess, is why my students are cynical. Who wouldn't be cynical when the message plastered all over the media is one of a world in turmoil.

But something rather surprising is evident in the cynicism of so many of these twenty-year-olds. It's not the sort of cynicism you would find in a jaded old businessman who has squandered his life in pursuit of mamon, nor is it the sort of cynicism you would find in someone who has spent their whole life going from one heartache to another. In fact, the cynicism I find is a mask for something far more profound, which you could even call hope. Underlying this apparent bitterness at the state of the world and the fallibility of human beings is a profound and deep desire for something better. Underneath the sorrows expressed at the pain that people cause each other and the environment is a yearning for something that could help them to transcend this madness. Not only is this a yearning for what is not-yet, but a profound sense of what ought to be. My question, as always, is where does that sense of 'oughtness' come from? Perhaps it is the echo of a voice from a distant memory that has existed since long before we were even born.

Scapegoats and sinners

One of the less talked about symbols in the Bible is that of the 'scapegoat' (cf. Leviticus 16). In the Bible, the chief priest would symbolically lay the sins of the people onto a goat and then drive the goat off into the wilderness, where it would most probably be found and killed by wild animals. I'm just briefly going to use this idea, not in its theological context, but in the context of social interactions, because it exposes some of the fundamental problems in human nature. 

In societies, people don't generally deal with their sins properly. Guilt is ignored, or justified. The wrongs we do are easily explained or explained away by circumstance or some other weak deflection of responsibility. Psychologists may blame our pasts, and psychiatrists may blame our physiologies. But, either way, the evil in us – in people – is not widely dealt with in a very constructive way. It is repressed and denied.

And because of this, we can never get rid of the darkness inside us. Subconsciously, we know we need a scapegoat to send our sins away with. But we aren't always aware of the problem in any constructive way. What often happens, then, is that someone in the group gets picked on. Someone gets chosen as the scapegoat; as the one who has to bear the brunt of the failings of the group.

This person can be anyone, perhaps the slightly socially awkward kid or quiet guy in the corner who minds his own business. It could be a poet, a clown. It's usually someone who is as innocent as that goat; someone who hasn't got a bone to pick with anyone – a peacemaker, meek and friendly. I've seen this a lot recently in the groups that I've spent time in – groups of lovely, good-natured, well-meaning people, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways will find someone to be the brunt of their jokes. In other ways, they will be nice to their scapegoat, but in the way that counts – in their understanding and consideration of him or her – they will be utterly short-sighted. It is, however, not just the crowd's fault. Literal scapegoats don't have a choice, but human scapegoats do. Everyone is to some extent responsible for how they let others treat them. 

If you find yourself in the position of being a scapegoat, get out of there before you get weighed down by the hurts and the disappointments of others. If it means leaving a party early, fine. If it means not spending too long with a certain group of friends, fine. Everyone needs to have the freedom and the space to not have to deal with the weight of the sins of those closest to them. Everyone needs to have the freedom and the space to make sure that they become neither the perpetrators nor the victims of what seems to me to be one of this, one of the most alarming facts of social interaction.