A Jester in the King's Court

Yes, I was torn between both possible titles for this sblog entry, so I went with both. This is the same line of thinking that has often times found me holding 2 different flavors of chicken wings, and probably should be put to rest. However it is still wide awake…

Topic: Treating ideas like porcelain dolls

I have many times in the past written about the need for Christians to be “close-minded” because when we aren’t devastatingly dangerous theology starts creeping into the church. This is not such a rant. If you would like such a rant, I kindly suggest you look at a note I wrote on Facebook back in February which turned into the motivation to start the Sblog.

No, this entry is actually more pointed at the sad state of society and the way that it views ideas. Throughout history, ideas have existed mainly because another idea was seen as inaccurate. The reason Aristotle became popular was because everyone love Plato and Aristotle had the gull to throw him under the bus…clearly making him the Richard Hatch of classical thought.

Throughout classical and even early modern thought, people would actually bring forth ideas, believe them, and then wait others to disagree with them and defend them. Through doing so, their ideas became more precise. They became more careful thinkers. Aquinas could write a 2 million word masterpiece because people would disagree with him and debate the matter.

Even in the early 1900’s people would still debate ideas and challenge them, even if they didn’t really “believe” them so much as feel like they ought to believe in something. This has all changed though. People do not challenge ideas. Ideas are cute little cuddly things that should be looked at and accepted, but if you challenge them, you are awful. The predominate value in western society today is freedom, with tolerance riding close behind (and I’ve much to say about those subjects as well…). This is of course ironic, because ideas are no longer roaming free….its as though they have been put in what we can call an Idea Zoo.

As I envision it, the Idea Zoo is a fanciful place where people can walk around and look at ideas in various locations, but from a safe distance that will make sure they do not interact with the ideas too much. Sure maybe when you walk past the Tolerance aquarium you knock on it to get its attention. And there are plenty of times that visitors to the zoo take pictures pretending they are riding on the back of Pluralism. Heck, you might even be allowed to feed Self-Centeredness and Self-Esteem if you pay the required 25 cents for feed; but that’s about all the interaction we are allowed to have with ideas any more. If you dare to jump over the fence and try and play with one of these ideas, the guards at the idea zoo will shoot you down immediately.

Ideas are meant for the wild. The reason people keep such strong fences around their ideas in the aforementioned zoo is for the same reason that actual zoos don’t let lions birthed in captivity into the wilderness. They can’t survive. The people at the San Diego (Zoo Mecca as it were) know that is they released one of their lions into its natural habitat, having been raised in captivity it will be unable to find food or defend itself. Ideas birthed in captivity are the same way.

See, when ideas get to say what they want, unchecked and unchallenged, they produce weaker and weaker offspring that cannot stand up under critique. I’m listening to a series of lectures by a professor of Rhetoric at Berkley and he is asserting one of the foundational ideas of Deconstructionalism as fact, when in reality it is an idea that just has not say through a roundtable poking fun at it. He has said many times in his lecture that there is nothing outside the text. Once an author writes or speaks a sentence, the sentence can mean whatever it is interpreted as, it does not matter what the author says. This is a defiantly proud theory, and seems rather bold. He has used it to break down all manner of literary analysis in the classic works and has said that all that matters is what the reader—the interpreter—gets out of the text. The class seems in awe of this ideas brilliance…and yes, its plumage looks wonderful in captivity…

But thrown out in the wild it gets mauled to death by one of Post-Modernism’s natural predators: Reason, Logic or the speckled Common Sense. Any idea that must refute itself in order to be true is hardly an idea at all. If authorial intent doesn’t matter, than the professor’s words mean nothing by the time they hit the ears of his students. He is using a medium to convey meaning that he asserts is meaningless. Further, he will grade their papers on this topic based upon whether or not the paper reflects a proper understanding of what he has conveyed about the words not having any meaning aside from what he gives them. Therefore he is grading a paper that means nothing, written from students who have learned nothing about an idea that can only exist in the professor’s head. This is why it is foolish that Derrida wrote a 500 page book arguing that words have no meaning. It sounds challenging, but when logic is applied, the idea dies.

Sadly, this leads to those that unleash reason on the ideas being labeled “close-minded” or “judgmental”….and called these things in a bad light, which truthfully is odd, but will be talked about at a later date I’m sure. Granted this dialogue does at least shed light on where the aforementioned idea came from. You see, when pressed, those who come up with such foolish ideas cannot defend them, but will throw and endless stream of “why’s” at the idea’s assailant. The thought is that if they can push an objector away from the idea enough by having to give an infinite regress of reasons that eventually they will get to a point they can say “Oh, we just have different opinions” and pretend the matter is therefore solved. This is very much what Mindy from Animaniacs would do before saying, “Ok I love you, bye bye” which oddly enough is a very postmodern ending once all things are considered.

If you actually made it this far in a purely philosophical rant that had less humor in it than Shindler’s List playing at a 5 y/o’s birthday party, I’m rather impressed. I suppose what I suggest is that people start storming the Idea Zoos and little all the inhabitants out and seeing how well the ideas born in captivity fair against real ideas. That’s what happened when AJ Ayer finally had his own verification principle thrown at his ideas and he saw them die a very savage Discovery Channel/Natural Geographical style death. And truthfully, in many of the Universities where thinking is held in a higher regard than feeling (Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, etc), Post-Modernism is dead anyway. The philosophical movement has already lost the war. Let’s just speed up the process in destroy all the rest of the foolish ideas that people don’t question anymore.