Plato's Phaedrus: Beware of Bullshit

Phaedrus by Plato
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Spoiler alert: This book is not about a "philosophy of love" as many reviewers seem to believe. As every dream has its manifest content (a storyline) that masks a latent content (the suppressed, unconscious emotions that bubble into our semi-conscious REM sleep), Socrates' discourse on the nature of love thinly masks the true subject of this dialogue: bullshit, how to produce it, and how to recognize it. For the reader, his dialectical approach gives us a hint about how to resist it.

With self-deprecating charm -- true to form -- Socrates schools beautiful young Phaedrus on his own susceptibility to bullshit, alternately praising Phaedrus's current object of infatuation, the silver-tongued rhetor Lysias, and ruthlessly dismantling the rhetorical artifices of Lysias' manufacture.

This excellent translation by Christopher Rowe is not only accessible to the reader not familiar (or terribly comfortable) with the Socratic dialogs, but manages, too, to emphasize Socrates' sharp wit, good humor, and gentleness of pedagogy. Rowe's scholarly introduction provides context and background making clear the significance of this work.

It is a testament to Plato -- an early generation child and devotee of alphabetic literacy -- that he takes pains to accurately convey to us Socrates' belief that writing would sap the intelligence of the Athenian youth, making them both less knowledgeable about the universal precepts of logic, and less inclined to engage in a dialectic with thought externalized and made permanent.


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We're ALL Trayvon Martin...

There's a lot of bullshit being spouted about the cold-blooded murder of Trayvon Martin; specifically, that it was not racially motivated. Americans are too busy either patting themselves on the back for electing an African-American President, or hating that President for being a Muslim, Socialist, Kenyan who planned a coup de etat in utero and unconstitutionally stole the presidency, to admit to themselves that we live in a society where racism not only survives, but thrives. And white progressives can't see their own racism; and white conservatives think that the only racists left in America are black.

Geraldo Rivera, in a classic example of "blame the victim," reduced the crime to a morality play about fashion:

You have to recognize that this whole stylizing yourself as a 'gangsta' … You're gonna be a gangsta wannabe? Well, people are going to perceive you as a menace. That's what happens. It is an instant reflexive action...

The President has become a contortionist trying to avoid saying...well...anything that someone on the right might construe to be "playing the race card." He made s imple statement of sympathy for Trayvon Martin's parents, noting that if he had a son, he'd look like their son. The right-wing extremists who call themselves "conservatives" responded as expected. They called the President a "race baiter."

Newt Gingrich insisted beyond the boundaries of reality that race did not and should not play an issue in this case, and took a slap at President Obama:

Any young American of any ethnic background should be safe period. We should all be horrified no matter what the ethnic background. Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot that would be ok because it didn’t look like him?

Meanwhile, at a pistol range in Louisiana where Rick Santorum was burnishing his right-wing bona fides by firing off a couple of dozen rounds, a woman in the crowd watching the candidate to him to "pretend it's Obama." And I suppose that's not racist, either.

While I appreciate the sentiment that envisions a "post-racial society" and says "this is not a black/white issue," I also think that there's a self-consciousness about racism that too many people are vulnerable to. We are, of course, the worst judges of our own faults. Most Americans refuse to believe that their purchasing decisions are influenced by advertisements. Yet advertising is a $400 billion industry in the US alone. Like my right-wing friend in New York, constantly reminding the world that "I am not a racist," Americans -- particularly white Americans -- simply don't want to admit that racism is alive and well and living right smack dab in the center of their hearts. I happen to agree with Howie (no, really) that there's such a thing as "reverse racism." What he (and most of America) refuses to admit is that the dominant racism (white racism) is based on deeply-seated feelings of privilege and cultural superiority, and "reverse racism" (black racism) is based mostly on resentment and fear -- fear of someday, for no reason, becoming a target -- or worse: having one of your children become a target, of some hate-filled asshole like George Zimmerman. And then having the authority of the state essentially endorse that hatred by failing (or refusing) to bring that person to justice.

I happen to understand black racism a lot more than white racism.

The point is that we have to stop all of it. George Zimmerman didn't hate Travon Martin. He didn't even know him. He hated some *image* that Travon looked like in Zimmerman's ignorant, hate-addled brain. He didn't kill an innocent kid; he killed a stereotype. And that stereotyped thinking has to stop. The responsibility is white America's. When white people FINALLY see people who don't look like them as equal, when they stop looking at the Trayvon Martins of the world as "thugs" and "gangstas" and treat each individual human being as a person (as, by the way, Christ taught us to do), then people of color, immigrants, Muslims, and other groups suffering discrimination will be able to see white people as people too, and not as dangers to their safety.

Gandhi once said, "I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians." Well, I love America. But there are too many hateful Americans.

The way I see it, we're all either Trayvon Martin or we're George Zimmerman. The choice is ours. There's no in-between.

TIPS FOR PEACEFUL TOTALITARIAN RULE

Despite all the media crowing about “democracy” breaking out in the middle east, it is unlikely that democracies will arise there. While we still use the word to describe the nations of the technologically developed west, democracy is, for the most part, dead; a remnant of the Enlightenment that flourished between the 18th and 20th centuries.

What developing nations seek today is not democracy – for they see no evidence of its usefulness anywhere in the world – but stability. It is stability that is necessary to create the fertile ground for investment, technological development, and global trade. It is to this end that I offer ten tips to achieve this stability, and peace:

1] Celebrate materialism and eliminate idealism. Happiness comes from the consumption of material goods. Utilize the vast resources of mass media to reinforce this message on a minute-by-minute basis. Transcendent ideas – whether “God,” or “liberty,” or “sovereignty,” or “truth” – can never be allowed to subvert the primacy of money and material goods.

2] Extol the virtues of a “free-marketplace of ideas.” Flood your media networks with entertainment, diversions, amusements, and trivia. Remind the people repeatedly that they have an absolute right to choose whatever “information” suits them.

3] Make truth subjective. There can be no absolutes. Truth arbitrarily limits human behavior to the moral. Moral absolutes have no place in a pluralistic society. Everyone should have the right to his or her own opinion, no matter how preposterous, or self-serving, or manipulative it is.

4] Redefine “objectivity” in journalism to mean “neutrality.” Journalism must be “fair” and “balanced,” not truthful. Neutrality implies openness to all points of view, even those that are objectively false. Objectivity implies openly acknowledging truth and falsehood among arguments. This is dangerous.

5] Make the people understand that education is about a skilled workforce, not about an informed electorate. The Enlightenment is over. History ended with the fall of Communism. It’s all about jobs now. Focus on skills, not critical thinking. Focus on technology, not ethics.

6] Encourage reductionism in public discourse. Nuance demands careful, critical thought (see number five). Seeing gray areas in a situation only invites ethical analysis. Presenting problems as “us vs. them” or “good vs. evil,” and referring to “enemies” is more effective in engendering and supporting group cohesion. Use stereotypes at every opportunity. Any problem that can’t be explained in a 20 second sound bite should be left to “experts” to solve.

7] Nurture “individualism,” but discourage individuality. People should labor under the illusion that they are true individuals rather than mere constituents of a mass. The isolation of mass society encourages group identity and consensus building. Constant connection to the group via mass-mediated diversions ensures no real, meaningful critical thought will ever occur.

8] Make a fetish of personal responsibility; ignore social responsibility. Emphasize constantly the notion that people are responsible for their own actions; ignore any possibility that they may be responsible to one another. As long as one’s behaviors are consistent with those of one’s group, no good can come of dwelling on the consequences of those actions for others outside the group.

9] Don’t persecute dissidents – ignore them. Americans still know the name Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and can identify him as a dissident of the former Soviet Union. The same is true of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo who enjoys a prominent place in the US media. But Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn or Daniel Berrigan? Who are they? American media simply ignore them. Prison is unnecessary when no one knows you exist.

10] Keep ‘em smiling. ☺

My (Imaginary) Conversation with Marshall McLuhan

I had heard of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media as a freshman in high school in 1968, but didn’t read it until four years later when I got to college. It was only the second book I had read about the power of media to shape societies (oddly enough for an eighteen-year-old, my baptism into the field of media studies was provided by Harold Innis’s The Bias of Communication, but I had to read that one several times before I really, truly even began to comprehend it), and it so captured my attention and fired my curiosity that I was compelled to spend the rest of my life studying the interactions of technology and culture. So I was thrilled and proud when my first book, Printing, Literacy and Education in Eighteenth Century Ireland: Why the Irish Speak English, won the Media Ecology Association’s Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology in 2007.

Yet, since almost the very beginning I’ve been bothered by McLuhan. I was looking for answers and McLuhan kept posing me riddles. Alternately dazzlingly clear and maddeningly cryptic, so much of what he had to say left many people feeling uncomfortable and skeptical; others, wildly enthusiastic and hopeful. For me – and many others who were moved to dedicate their lives to understanding media – McLuhan’s words were intriguing and enticing, inviting questions and urging deeper consideration. They made my head hurt, but they showed me for the first time that questions are, after all, far more important than answers.

I have, I believe, come to terms with McLuhan in the intervening thirty-eight years. Or I have almost come to terms with him. I’m at the very least minimally comfortable with his method; the “probe,” oracular aphorisms, heuristic in nature, not particularly suited to empiric measurement, a kind of “intellectual Rorschach test” that everyone can read something into and get something out of.

What I am not comfortable with is a single phrase: “A moral point of view is a poor substitute for understanding in technical matters.” So I decided to sit and talk with him about it.
What follows is a (totally imaginary) conversation I had recently with the “the oracle of the electric age.” Many of McLuhan’s responses are direct quotes from his works, many more are close paraphrases altered only for the sake of the literary integrity (such as there may or may not be) of this essay. I have, by necessity, invented some of McLuhan’s responses to my questions posed here, but only then on the basis of what I honestly believe might have been his actual response. Needless to say, this essay very possibly says more about me and my understanding of McLuhan than it does about McLuhan himself. But I’d be willing to argue that point:

Peter K. Fallon: “A moral point of view is a poor substitute for understanding in technical matters.” Why? It seems to me that understanding technical matters absent a moral point of view is not “understanding” at all.

Marshall McLuhan: Well, first of all let me just mention that I don’t always agree with everything I say. The point is not to say something and stand by it; the point is to push the limits of human perceptions and assumptions and see what we can find beyond them. If you don’t like that idea, let’s try something else.

PKF: Well, it seems to me that you’re abdicating moral responsibility for questioning the role of media in social change. It seems to me that you’re presenting as a given certain, almost pre-determined, consequences of technology and positing that this vague concept of “understanding” is all human beings can do in the face of rapid and radical technological change.

MM: Does that bother you?

PKF: Yes, it bothers me. It bothers me something awful. I have spent years defending you – from many who I don’t believe really understand what you’re saying – against the charges of “technological determinism,” yet in far too many cases you sound as though you’re saying that the best we can hope for is to understand the changes that technology brings us, not manage them.

MM: What does it matter if some call me a “technological determinist” or a “guru” or, for that matter, a “Charlatan”? There is absolutely no determinism in my work, because I urge a willingness to contemplate what is happening. I need no defense, Peter, from such charges. My job, as I see it, is to alert people to the changes going on around them. That in itself is a moral imperative, and no abdication of responsibility. Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior. I’ve just tried to bring more understanding into the picture. The electronic age has presented us with a dilemma: we are awash in electronic and digital information, and the swirl of this maelstrom of information tosses us about like corks on a stormy sea. But if we keep our cool during our “descent into the maelstrom,” and study the process as it happens, like Poe’s sailor we can save ourselves.

PKF: Yes. That’s another thing. It’s always bothered me that the “old sailor” – who was, of course, not old at all but aged prematurely by his ordeal – did not or could not save his brothers. One brother is flung outright from the boat, another goes mad at the sight of the enormous whirlpool and dies in its vortex. But the “old sailor” “keeps his cool” as you say and studies the patterns of the maelstrom. He notices – in a way that presages Einstein and relativity – that in the midst of the maelstrom’s power, with its force propelling the boat in circles within its cone, he appears to be sitting still, and the opposite side of the whirlpool remains stationary in relation to him.

MM: Moving along within the maelstrom, at its speed, in its direction, there is a certain curious peace, and the sailor has time to study its patterns and make inferences about its behavior.

PKF: Yes, and he saves himself with the knowledge he gains within the chaos. But his brothers die.

MM: Well, yes. But, Peter, it’s only a story. No one actually died in its telling by Edgar Poe.

PKF: But it’s a story that describes your views on understanding media, that you have stated serves as a metaphor for your approach to studying media and their effects. And so we’re back to my original difficulty: the idea of understanding anything absent a moral point of view. Why didn’t he try to save his brothers?

MM: Because he would have died, it’s as simple as that. Why is what you call “a moral point of view” so important to you, Peter? Is a “moral point of view,” by its nature, any better or worse than an immoral point of view, or an amoral point of view, or a secular point of view, or a humanist point of view? Point of view, whatever its orientation, is imaginary. It is part and parcel of the typographic mindset, the cordoning off of the individual from the group, the artificial separation of one from the other. We don’t live in that world anymore, but in a world of electric simultaneity that brings people together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man. In such a world a point of view – any point of view – reveals itself to be a dangerous luxury, an intellectual self-indulgence, especially when substituted for insight and understanding.

PKF: A world of chaos and – to use Harry Frankfurt’s term – bullshit, if you ask me. A world with no point of view and no real knowledge. “Understanding media” today means the opposite of what you probably intended – or perhaps not…? “Understanding media” means knowing how to work them, knowing how to use them. Literacy has given way to “media literacy” and “information literacy” and “visual literacy” and point of view has given way to pointlessness and objectivity has given way to a truly egoistic subjectivity…I see no “rich and creative mix” – although people tell me I’m constantly surrounded by it – any more than I see understanding. And I don’t see understanding any more than I see a moral point of view. We’re left with nothing except a sort of psychic “I got mine, fuck you” environment that empowers us (if that is at all the appropriate word) to focus on ourselves to the detriment of the rest of the world. It seems to me that in a world like this, a point of view – if it is a positive point of view – is a Godsend. But what is worse, any point of view – even an entirely stupid one – strikes many who have none of their own, and are entirely unable to identify one, as a Godsend.

MM: Peter, you may be over-reacting. This age we live in of infinite connections and the liberation of consciousness from the body – the age of “discarnate man” – is barely half a century old. Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair such as those you appear to feel invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition. Your assumptions about alphabetic man, if you’ll allow me to say to you critically, may have outlived their uselessness. It was alphabetic man himself who was disposed to desacralize his mode of being, not we. In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness, a seamless web of experience. This is not the individualist, trivial (in all senses of the word) consciousness of alphabetic man, but a consciousness that begins in the senses, is rooted in perception, and is derailed by concepts or ideas.

PKF: I know you’re referring now, however obliquely, to your Christian faith, and specifically to your adopted faith of Catholicism.

MM: As you say.

PKF: And here again I have a hard time coming to terms with your ideas, which to my ears sound so sanguine. I know that your work was profoundly influenced by that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

MM: I am not in the slightest influenced by Fr. Teilhard’s works, even though we may share areas of common interest.

PKF: As you say. But Teilhard famously anticipated many of your ideas and even your tone. And I am a great admirer of Teilhard’s work, as I am of yours…

MM: (~~feigns satisfaction with an irrelevant opinion~~)

PKF: …and I hope – no, I pray – that Teilhard is correct about many of his ideas, but I fear he is wrong. Because in the final analysis I do in fact see a determinism in your work, but it is not a technological determinism. It is a determinism of faith and salvation. Teilhard’s “noosphere” is merely an anticipation of your “global central nervous system.” And Teilhard’s conception of the “Omega point” – the parousia – sounds very much like your idea that “Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.” You appear to have adopted an eschatological approach to your pursuit of understanding media – very, very similar to Teilhard’s – that you don’t ever explicitly identify.

MM: Is that so?

PKF: Well, I certainly believe it is so. It seems to me that you’ve put your faith entirely in acceptance of Christ – medium and message – without ever considering the human agency involved in salvation. As a Catholic, and in the knowledge of your devout Catholicism, I’m confounded by what sounds to me like the Protestant principle of sola gratia – salvation by God’s grace alone – ignoring the quintessential Catholic principle of salvation by grace and good works. Your “evangelism” – it seems to me – is more of the Lutheran or Reformation variety than of a fully- (and rightly-) formed Catholic one.

Understanding media alone will not bring about a better world (the Kingdom of God?), but ought to be the foundation of good works that may bring it about: constructing an environment of truly free-flowing and uninhibited information, to be sure, but also reaffirming and supporting the structures of thought that allow us to identify error and falsehood, and empowering us to label bullshit as bullshit, as Harry Frankfurt suggests. The global village, with its “rich and creative mix” full of “creative diversity” can be the perfect venue to put bullshit on an equal footing with truth. I see nothing in this situation that is either constructive or Catholic.

MM: That is your point of view.

PKF: (~~sigh~~) Yes, it is. I’ll stand by it.

MM: In my defense, I’ll say only this: The revealed and divinely constituted fact of religion has nothing to do with human opinion or human adherence. In Jesus Christ, there is no separation or distance between the medium and the message; it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same. To know Christ – to truly know him – is to accept Him. And there is no greater moral action – no greater “good work” – than understanding media.


At any rate, that's how I imagine the conversation going...