...from philosopher Steven Gerrard (Williams) (part one); an excerpt:
Suppose I ask someone for the reason he or she believes something — anything. Without further context, the word “reason” is strictly ambiguous. Am I asking for the motive, the cause or the justification? If the question is “What is the reason a person believes in God?” the answer could be a motive (to find comfort at 3 a.m.) or a cause (his parents raised him that way). A justification would take the form of a rational argument.
Notice, though, that while motive and cause are subjective — that is, they only hold depending on the individual — justification is objective; if it holds for one, it holds for all. Only justification is directly tied to the truth. As the ending of “1984” brutally demonstrates, one can be motivated and caused to believe 2 plus 2 equals 5. For all the techniques of Big Brother, however, it still equals 4.
Thrasymachus, a post-modernist a couple of millennia ahead of his time, denies there is such a thing as justification — there is only motive and cause. There’s only one answer to the question Why should I be just? Swords and spears.
It took 2,400 years, but Thrasymachus has won in the comfort college. When objectivity is scorned, when justification is considered only subjective, when reason and logic are taken to be only the tools of oppression and the province of the oppressor, then all that is left is power.
To ask the reason for something can only mean to ask for the motive or cause. The study of logic has a name for what happens when we confuse the origin of a belief with its truth, or the origin of an argument with its validity. It’s called the genetic fallacy.
The comfort college’s acolytes make the figurative fallacy literal. It is the arguer’s genes that determine truth and validity, not facts or reason. That is why, in the comfort college, testimony has come to substitute for rational argument. When students (and more and more faculty) demand a new policy, their arguments often begin as (and rarely go beyond) accounts of victimization; the account is justification enough.
This ritual institutionalizes the denial of rational justification. It corrupts the healthy multicultural idea, built on Enlightenment universalism and cosmopolitanism, that different perspectives matter, and that what one sees often depends on where one stands — and that we are all better off from listening to those who stand in different places, who see the part of the truth that is blocked from our particular vision. The liberal ideal of the pursuit of knowledge is that by cooperating we all can see and understand better. But identity politicians reject the Enlightenment’s hope of mutual understanding and reason’s path to get us there. In the fragmented comfort college, the only tool is power — the power to enforce the dogma.
Do see the appalling account of the institutionalized hiring advice committees at Williams get as well!
Recent Comments