On Being "Post-Modern"

• What is difficult with labels is that one doesn't just accept the label, but what others say the label is (these might be the same thing). I remember in high school talking to a girl about feminism. Even at that age, I felt a disdain for the term and when I asked her "Are you a feminist?" I suspect that the tone of my voice denoted disapproval and a certain "You're not supposed to say 'yes'" attitude.
  • Her response was "Yes, but not a crazy one"
• It's hard to fit oneself in a label because one takes pride in their beliefs and wants to be seen as an intelligent individual by those around him--"John's "ism" is only 'Johnism'"--but perhaps this need to be independent in one's thinking (that is--ahistorical, asocial, etc.) is an adolescent one. As I grow older, I notice more and more how my inclinations and conclusions are those shared by other people. One rarely speaks "outside" of context and one's interpretations (a la Hegel and Stanley Fish) are expressions of the Zeitgeist or Interpretive Community. One can take solace in one's ideas being found elsewhere by virtue of the fact that one has them.
• So, yes, I suppose I am a post-modern. I am one despite the attempts by the reactionary right and the revolutionary left to repudiate the term. In my mind, the critiques never held much water. I think this is because of a particular doubting and unsure sensibility that I was born with. I believe that Nietzsche was right in saying that the philosophy one writes about is, more than anything, a psychological autobiography rather than one finally arriving at the Truth, something which all other human beings have avoided in the past.
• For me, the post-modern is the viewpoint which one previously criticized without knowing it. Once that criticism becomes explicit, then one sees the error that they were committing all along.

Assumptions

• One holds assumptions, and the one's that really govern one's beliefs and actions are the ones that are unknown to the holder. Said another way, the one who truly believes in God is the one that cannot imagine God's impossibility. To have doubts is to no longer truly believe, yet there is the compulsion to double and triple down on a belief with the vain hope that if one exhibits the behavior of belief, one's belief will change.
  • In fact, the opposite happens: the gulf between one's belief and what one "should" belief is made even larger.
• The assumptions that really guide us are the one's that we do not talk about. The moment the counter argument appears for a previously unknown-to-be-held assumption, the assumption escapes the bliss of ignorance and is kidnapped into the violent wasteland of discourse.

Disagreement

• Disagreement is not based on a mistake or the implementation of evil. Disagreement is the natural outcome from different preferences. Each side uses truth and freedom as a rhetorical strategy to make their side more attractive, but eventually they realize that conversation will not close the gap, and the result is a game of power.

The Utopist

• The utopist does not want to remove constraints, but to change preferences of the public to one that the utopist (arbitrarily) likes more.

Therapeutic beliefs

• Beliefs are held based on the therapy they supply to the believer. Show me a strongly held belief, and you will show me a belief that solves a chronic problem that person can now deal with better because of their belief. As such, these problems are always experiential and personal.
• As such, one should abandon facts as the medium for argument. Instead, one should express how their worldview is harmless to the other's--much better yet if the other person psychologically stands to gain from seeing things in your new light.
• For a mind to change, one has to see the benefit of seeing their experience in a new light, and realize the harm they were doing to themselves by believing what they did.
• Resistance to changing one's mind is absolutely understandable once one understands that the resistance to belief is leveraged by a traumatic experience. Wouldn't anyone prevent their own descent to a personal hell as if their life depended on it?

The one thing we receive from philosophy

• How to argue strongly for that which we do not believe.

Babies as animals

• Babies don't have language, and when we recognize the sounds that come out of someone's mouth as language, we prescribe "personhood" to them--or so it seems. Can we tell the difference between someone who is forgetting how to speak and someone who is catatonic?
• I suppose there are other behaviors usually implied with speaking--one doesn't just make noises but we associate a facial expressive dynamism to them as well, not to mention gesticulations of the hands and arms. Nevertheless, there is always the doubt, especially with the old. Suddenly, this person who was speaking all day long is now silent, and we are left in uncertainty over whether they are "really there" at all.
• We clearly separate regular animals to human beings--that is, we determine that the "mind stuff" present in a human is different from an animal. But then what about babies? Isn't what is in their brains merely animalistic? Sure, there might be an increased intelligence or sensitivity compared to, say, a dog. But the question is whether a dog and a human baby have different types of thoughts, rather than merely more elaborate ones.
• This is, of course, an unanswerable question because we can't peak into the minds of others (even then, we might not really be certain). But if a baby is indeed just a smarter animal in terms of mental processes, then that implies that language is that special something which, if the society determines that someone has it, they are now considered a full person--one with dreams and aspirations and fears and beliefs. A pre-linguistic human can theoretically have all of these, however we seem to be less empathetic or worried about how they experience their life, compared to a child who grows up not speaking, then learns language, and finally says "What I want to do when I grow up is..."