On the great subjugations

Upon initially reading Edward Said’s “Orientalism” I was struck by a similarity between the terms used to justify the rationale for the Occident’s subjugation of the “Orient” and the subjugation of other supposedly inferior groups. For example, the words used to justify enslaving Africans or denying rights to women based purely on gender. As I began to ponder these related struggles of power I could not be help but be particularly struck by one of the terms used. Rational. The dialectic of Rational/Irrational permeates these struggles. One party, always western man (and not woman) are the “Rational” party while the “subject” race are innately “Irrational”. Presently, my mind is racing through connections to epistemology and morality. First off with morality, not sure if morality is right word, Rationality is the god of all values. In all these battles, rationality is used as the main argument to justify the deprecation of the ‘outside’ group. As if only western man can know rationality. There is nothing inherently wrong with being rational, in fact, it is probably something to strive for. However, in the present case being examined “rational” is perverted, is transformed from its original meaning and usage into a political tool used to subjugate, deprecate, and manipulate the supposedly irrational group. Where western society makes its grievous error in its designation of rational or irrational is in the ethnocentric approach they take towards culture and what is rational in it. Culture is a context that is very sensitive to perspective and location. The histories of a people leading up to the present day have an enormous impact on what a culture will define as its values, mores, taboos etc. This mistake of perception, that is, the mistake of perceiving another culture through the lens of your own will indubitably lead you to a belief that the other culture is irrational, different, misdirected. Moreover, even if you know this it will be extremely difficult, maybe still impossibly so, to really be able to understand the culture. Of course, as Said said the idea of Orientalism was not to understand the other culture. It was a tool of quasi-knowledge used to subvert the culture. Used to make it “knowable”, and thereby direct-able, researchable, a subject privy to academic discourse and because of this, susceptible to domination.

Before embarking upon the more rigorous endeavor into the more serious epistemological questions raised by Said and Kolak (the author as well as a contributor to the philosophy textbook I have) I would like to put forth a criticism of “Orientalism”. In examining how the west came to “know” the east and the epistemological pitfalls this academic discipline became privy to, Said made many of the self-same overgeneralizations bemoans. For example, Said remarks of the Orientalist attitude, “It shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter.” But throughout the book, Said implies the west is a closed system as well. Perhaps, this is the type of view that academic discourse forces one to take. Perhaps it is not even the view that is forced but rather through this discourse, and more importantly through the way humans glean “knowledge” from the discourse, an implication of a closed system is innate. It seems it could come in the form of how humans store knowledge, as units, as eternal, as concrete.

W.K. Clifford contra the choice to go to war in Iraq

Presently in my philosophy class we are discussing the arguments for and against God. One argument that stuck out was that of W.K. Clifford. Clifford was a mathematician and philosopher that started out as a catholic but later turned against religion. He argues that it is morally reprehensible for anyone to believe anything based on insufficient evidence. I immediately thought of our rationale for the decision to invade Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11. What belief did this decision stem from? It seems it would have to stem from the fact that we believed Iraq was involved in the attacks. Since then, that belief has been shown to be completely unfounded. Now someone with an opposing viewpoint might say that we had to act quickly in order to prevent another attack; this is the exact type of situation that Clifford spoke of when he authored this philosophical principle. By making this decision countless lives have been either lost or impacted in a negative manner. Who has paid for this mistake from insufficient evidence? The troops of both sides immediately spring to mind. The Iraqi civilian population has suffered greatly as a result of this hubris. The worldwide reputation of the United States has been adversely affected. The idea of national sovereignty was violated, both in Iraq and Pakistan. All for a belief based on insufficient evidence. No one doubts that the President verily believed that Iraq was in someway responsible for this attack. However, the sincerity of conviction does not relieve him of the responsibility for this mistake. The point is that he(we, they, etc.) had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. And let me be more clear, had we gone into Iraq and found the WMD’s we so desperately believed were there, we would still have been at fault. For it is not whether we were right or wrong in our belief, it is whether we were right to believe it based on sufficient evidence. Now you might disagree with this but let’s use an analogy to help illustrate the point, and because I am not nearly as eloquent as would be necessary to convey this point I will quote the example of Clifford himself.

“A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not over-well built at the first: that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the hip sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections.” … “He would put is trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such way he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.”

Now almost everyone would agree to the guilt of this man, but let us now look at a similar case and see what the determination is. And once again I will borrow from Clifford

“suppose that the ship was not unsound after all; that she made her voyage safely, and many others after it. Will that diminish the guilt of her owner? Not on jot. When an action is once done, it is right or wrong forever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.”… “The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it”

That last sentence is something we often take for granted. Right or wrong is decided at the time of decision and only then. Consequences can be left to the realm of chance and in that way one might get lucky even though his decision was made in bad faith. But the decision itself is still wrong. If more people held such stringent constrictions on their beliefs it seems very plausible there would be less war, less conflict in general. That maybe people would not think they knew what was best based on feeling rather than evidence. One of the earliest things learned in a sociology class is that we act on our beliefs as if they are true whether they are not. It’s through this rational that people feared they would sail off the end of the earth, that they thought the earth was the center of the universe, that Europeans thought colonizing and enslaving other peoples was their right and duty, and now that we can invade a society we have no understanding of and expect to solve their problems. Maybe if there were more second-guessing of our beliefs there would be less action, but there would also be a lot less perilous action.

Meditations on "Last Night I Dreamed of Peace"

Reading this account has been an interesting experience. My feelings of it as an historical document are a bit on the fence. As a skeptic I am disinclined to believe that all of this is truth, that the author did not in some ways embellish her feelings and sentiments. She seemed to not be writing the diary only for herself but also as something for her family and people to read after the war. Her prescient knowledge that the diary would be for others would have to affect and possibly compromise what she really felt for other sentiments and feelings she felt were more “noble” and “pure”.

From the standpoint of literary non-fiction, this is a brilliant account. It is utterly heart-wrenching and idealistic. Upon reading the diary, a recurring thought kept entering my head, “how could we fight a people so wholly possessed with ideals and nationalist sentiment and expect to win?” Certainly, had our leaders known the perseverance and adherence to principle the Vietnamese people embodied we would not have waged such a fruitless and unnecessary war. Another thought was that I doubt our soldiers would have had so many vested interests in a “victory” as the natives of the country. How could a G.I. drafted into a war he didn’t want to fight ever be expected to serve as these people did. They were willing to sacrifice everything for “freedom”. As for freedom, it is interesting to think that we were supposedly there fighting for the “freedom” of the south Vietnamese. Why is our aversion to communism so great that we regard any nation that chooses it as not choosing to be free? How can you fight an entire nation’s sentiment? I am reminded of V for Vendetta, when V said an idea is bigger than any one. It is bigger than you than me and bigger than everyone all together. You can not fight an idea with bullets, with bombs, no matter how large they are. When something is willed it is above death, above pain, above all.

The conviction evinced in this diary is something I look upon with a sense of longing. In our country today, I don’t believe we have these convictions. We would never understand the self-sacrifice these people were prepared to go to. It makes me nostalgic for a more noble time, a time when honor was valued. Real honor. Not the type politicians use to make headlines or the type we use as rationale for a cause with ulterior motives.

It is amazing how an idea can permeate a culture like this. This idea really has no bearing on everyday life. People who supported the ARVN would have lived very similar lives to those that supported the North. They ate the same foods, participated in the same holidays, and wore the same dress. They are infinitely times more similar than different, yet these ideas of revolution cause them to think of each other in very different ways. Even to the point of calling them “enemy”. Why is it these small ideological define how we view others? Why can we not see the similarities and embrace them? Would there have been a war had it not be for our intervention? Foreign occupation is never appreciated. For the most part, people’s want to solve their own problems. I think people would rather have their problems and be left to solve them than have an outsider mediate or arbitrate the individual group differences.