Trump’s Victory and the Liberal Resistance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRBsJNdK1t0

Following the inauguration of the 45^th President of the United States of America just two days ago I feel compelled once again to post here following a long and unintended silence. 

It was with a bizarre mix of shock, horror and bewilderment that I watched the rise of Donald Trump from bumbling, self-congratulatory, racist, xenophobic and misogynistic Republican nominee to President of one of the most powerful nations in the world.  His unlikely Republican nomination seemed to be an uncanny foreshadowing of a series of unlikely and unfortunate events that led to Trump’s eventual inauguration on 20^th January 2017.  Fear, anger and hate appeared to many to be the catalysts for such an unlikely win;  greatly aided of course, might I be so bold as to suggest by the undemocratic , electoral college system that allowed for an individual holding three million less votes than his opponent to take office.

In the two days since the inauguration thousands have taken to the streets in over 20 countries around the world to voice their descent.  From Washington to Dublin to the Bahamas individuals with opposing views to those espoused by Trump have taken to the streets to let it be shown that this man does not and will not stand for them. 

So how have we found ourselves here?  How have we found ourselves just 72 years after the end of World War II staring xenophobia, hate and nationalism in the face once more? 

I can only express my view.

We in the West live in a world of instant gratification, instant access to entertainment and to information and in a world where all of these have become so inseparably linked through social media that we are forced to choose between light entertainment and details of real human-suffering every time we log on.  We live in a world of ‘jpegs’ and sound-bites, of over-simplification and dumbing-down of complex concepts for the purpose of capturing the attention of an over-stimulated and apathetic audience. Trump, if he excels at anything, excels at providing simplistic solutions to complex problems.

We also live in a world that revolves around money. Our capitalist society dictates the nature of our everyday lives.  We live with the illusion of freedom in a world where we are bound to participate in the generation of wealth or the security of food and shelter is taken from us.  We are all aware that the election of Donald Trump followed hot-on-the-heels of the greatest economic crisis ever to hit the West since the ‘30s.  The very foundations of capitalism have been shaken and we are living with greater uncertainty now than ever before and where the world in the 1930s had real alternatives to Capitalism on offer, the only alternative we can conceive at present seems to be chaos. The American public that watched the election campaign of 2016 were, knowingly or unknowingly, a people in crisis.  The economic crisis was taking a real toll on the lives of those who had once dreamt the American Dream, and this toll was real and manifested itself in unemployment, homelessness and uncertainty.  

And they were also a people in intellectual crisis.  A generation who grew up in a world where knowledge had to be sought out through activities such as reading newspapers,  visiting libraries, attending lectures, schools and universities and seeking out and listening to well-informed individuals debate key issues now find themselves living in the Internet Age.  In the space of just over thirty years their access to information has been transformed so radically that it is barely recognisable.  Raised in a world where information was earned through activity and was therefore highly valued they now find themselves engulfed and mesmerised by a world of information and misinformation that reveals itself at the click of a mouse.  We are now privy to any amount of information at any time and the lack of energy and enthusiasm required to acquire it is equalled only by the lack of legitimacy required to post it.  Suddenly rather than debating issues all view-points can find validation.  The current generation of financially beaten down citizens can find affirmation and self-worth in online echo-chambers of their opinions, however misinformed or misguided, at the touch of a key.  Because capitalist society offers the individual no basis for their self-esteem beyond the acquisition of products, people seek their self-worth through online validation of their ideas, no matter how misguided those ideas may be.  We thereby see a rise in superficial notions of nationalism and race that are unamenable to reason and logic, but which provide a sense of self to those who have none.

At a time in history when information is more readily available than ever before we are witnessing the degeneration of intelligent discourse.  It is being replaced by sound-bites, memes, fast-talk for a fast world.  It is being tuned-out by a world of social media, entertainment and consumerism that hypnotises its citizens.  At a time in history when for the first time the atrocities happening around the globe can find their way into our living-rooms and bedrooms, our offices and schools, we are more inured than ever before to human suffering.  We have undoubtedly turned on and tuned out.

So it is against this background that Donald Trump, the narcissistic, xenophobic, racist, sexist Republican candidate entered the White House: a background of economic strife, information-overload, intellectual-degeneration and uncertainty.

In a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, where eight individuals hold more wealth than the wealth of the rest of the world put together, in a world where all view-points can find validation no matter how unjust, unintelligent or inhuman those view-points are individuals are voting for racist, misogynistic, xenophobic leaders. We’ve seen all this before, but many have not learned history’s lesson. If there’s any silver lining to this cultural shit-storm it might be that Trump’s victory is uniting those horrified by it, as we saw from the marches that followed hard upon his inauguration. We shouldn’t allow this momentum of resistance to abate, by becoming accustomed to political folly. The left has always suffered from a lack of unity – the Spanish civil war is a frightful but apposite example. The people on the Right like to follow, to march in unison, to wear a single uniform, which makes them stronger in politics and conflict. We on the Left debate on the finer points of ideology while Brian is crucified, if I may adduce Monty Python. We must instead remember that we have a concrete threat to our practical and intellectual liberty, and put our differences aside to fight it.

Lynn Crampton

The Idiot's Dilemma - A Guest Post by Maurice J. Larkin

“All those gleams and flashes of the highest awareness and, hence, also of the 'highest mode of existence', were nothing but a disease, a departure from the normal condition, and, if so, it was not at all the highest mode of existence, but, on the contrary, must be considered to be the lowest”

Dostoyevsky, The Idiot.

The Idiot rates pretty low for me as Dostoyevsky's novels go, but the quote  above has stuck with me for years.  It is one of those rare sentences that hints at a fundamental term of human experience. What I mean by a 'term of human experience' is something that would appear in a user manual for living, were such a thing to exist. It would be found somewhere under “you will die”, “you will feel how others see you” and “the mere existence of Simon Cowell will annoy you beyond endurance”. Heidegger called such things 'existentialia', but I don't like using a word I can't pronounce, so I'll refer to such things as 'Terms' with a capital 't'. Were I to state tersely the Term that Dostoyevsky's sentence suggests, I would say - “the highest mode of existence is also the lowest”. That's a bit gnomic and obscure, so let me put it in plain English.

Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky's wryly named 'idiot', suffers from a neurological illness we would currently recognise as epilepsy, arguably, temporal lobe epilepsy. It is believed Dostoyevsky suffered from this condition, and several of his novels feature a sufferer thereof. In keeping with the symptoms of the illness, the Prince's seizures are often preceded by a kind of ecstasy characterised by a sensation of profound enlightenment and clarity. “His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments... All his agitation, all his doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of knowledge of the final cause... For the infinite happiness he had felt in it, it might well be worth the whole of his life”.

The Prince is no idiot, of course, and he is possessed of the inclination and ability to critically analyse his own experiences. He does not and cannot doubt that this experience is genuinely “beauty and prayer, that it really was the highest synthesis of life”, but “the reality of the sensation somewhat troubled him all the same. What indeed was he to make of this reality?” For as our chosen quote explains, the same experiences that reveal to him the meaning of his life are also just the abberant and accidental activity of his diseased brain. We might say that the experience the Idiot values most in his life is, in its objective reality, an aberrant brain event, a mere glitch, a case of neural wires getting crossed. It is a neurochemical accident without meaning or significance. It may seem real to him, more real than anything else. But why should a neurochemical machine undergoing electrical contortions be regarded as an organ of truth? When the provenance of an epiphany turns out to be something so mundane and contingent as brain cells firing wildly, the subject of that experience is surely wise to qualify the assertions by which he expresses it – or perhaps dismiss them altogether, as pathological. 

But there is no reason to limit the epileptic’s perspective to abnormal or pathological experiences. We are each of us a chemical machine, as the physicist Schrödinger put it. The leading thinkers in contemporary philosophy of mind will tell you that, however your mental states should be understood in the last analysis, they must be rooted somehow in the activity of the brain. Ultimately there is nowhere else for them to inhere, nothing else that can produce or ‘realise’ them – the precise phrasing will depend on the terms of the theory you opt for. Personally, I believe the difference between mental states and brain states is merely one of perspective. There is but one state, which through introspection has one appearance, while through a microscope or MRI assumes another – just as an object appears variously when apprehended through different senses. Whatever way we want to state it precisely, we must acknowledge the mind's basis in the brain, unless we cast reason and evidence aside and believe in some 'Casper the ghost' type of entity; a non-physical soul that, while it occupies no space, can none the less manipulate my body, connected incomprehensibly to its ontological opposite. No – every experience you have can only be a neurochemical stirring in your skull.

Hence, when you think of the greatest experiences of your life, that form or ground the meaning, purpose or logical centre of your life, you can think as the Idiot thinks. This highest mode of existence - this great or pivotal experience - is also the lowest thing, tiny cellular signals harried or lulled by chemicals in a simmian skull, of no more significance than some subterranean crawling revealed on an upturned rock. Indeed, every act of valuing is such a surging in neurochemical soup, every occasion of human valuing in history has been such a low thing. The Idiot's dilemma applies to all of us and to humanity as a whole. It a consequence of our being composed of cells. It is one of the Terms.

Now you might say that the fact that these neurochemical events in our skulls are the ground of meaning makes them important, imbues them with significance, with the highest significance. After all the brain is about the most complex entity we have encountered in the universe. Shouldn't we be impressed by its workings? Of course, we're into a knotty problem here, because what we're talking about is the business of applying the values that inhere in the brain to their own basis or substrate. The brain in question is party to the dispute. But it is instructive here to think about the provenance of this brain's nature. Where did it come from and how did it come to have the design it has? It's nature proceeds from evolution through natural selection, of course. And what kind of beginning is that? Can we attribute significance, meaning, worth to the process of evolution? Does evolution have an agenda we can respect? But of course, it doesn’t really have an agenda at all. Biology produces mutation, and if any particular example of that mutation is fit to survive long enough to propagate its type on this particular ball of bacteria, that type will have some perpetuity. Like the rest of our genetically determined nature, our basic cognitive and emotional repertoire is the product of mutation weeded by a world indifferent to the needs of its tenants. It is that control system that proved to be adaptive, where other mutations were less so. It is what was left after nature’s cull of the maladaptive. Eventually, after millions of years and a lot of failed experiments it produces incredibly complex systems exquisitely adapted to their environment, but these remain the products of chance regulated by death. Understanding the designer of the human brain does little to edify its status as the ground of all values.

I think it comes down to this question: can we look critically at the basis and origins of our nature, and of our experiences, and still take them seriously? I pose that not as a rhetorical question, but as one each must answer for his or herself. We are each of us left in just the same position as Dostoyevsky's Idiot, and there is no eluding his dilemma.

The Importance of Voting YES in the Same Sex Marriage Referendum

In May those of us who are Irish citizens will be called upon to vote in the same-sex marriage referendum.  This referendum will ask the people of Ireland to decide whether gay people in our society should be allowed to marry the person that they have fallen in love with and thereby enjoy the same civil, legal and social rights currently enjoyed by straight people.  In short May's referendum is one which asks the Irish people whether the oppression of gay people in this country when it comes to the issue of marriage should continue or whether we can find it in ourselves to be grown up enough to realize that this sort of oppression should and can no longer be tolerated.

It is important as we head into this referendum to reflect on how it is that in a so-called enlightened and scientific age religion still holds such sway in issues such as this.  Unfortunately the Irish Constitution is not a secular one, rather it is one heavily influenced by Catholic dogma, it is not surprising therefore that oppressive laws are still in existence in this country.  It is also not surprising given the predominantly Catholic history of Ireland that many still hold fast to the cultural 'norms' that this history has given rise to.

Most of the people that I have encountered who plan to vote 'No' in the referendum cite religion and specifically the Bible as the source of their wisdom on this matter.  In doing so, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they pin their wisdom to a book that advocates the stoning of gay people.  Thereby these religious individuals are unfortunately not only pro-oppression but it must also be assumed that they stand behind the torture, castration and murder of homosexuals in countries such as Saudi-Arabia today. When confronted with this reality I'm sure many of them would deny this and argue that they certainly don't condone such harsh punishment but they must at the very least acknowledge that in voting 'No' they are simply voting for a more subtle and insidious type of oppression; the type of oppression that allows the oppressor to sleep a little more soundly in bed at night as no blood is shed.  But it is a type of oppression that wages psychological warfare on a group of people simply for being who they are.  It is the type of oppression that was so heart-breakingly described by our own Panti Bliss from the stage of the Abbey theatre and the type of oppression that the anonymous writer to the Irish Independent last week has lived with so unhappily for 60 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXayhUzWnl0

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/at-60-and-gay-i-can-dream-letter-to-the-editor-31085474.html

In May we will be given the opportunity to put an end to the oppression of the gay members of our society at least in one small area, the institute of marriage.  This opportunity is a privilege that should not be taken for granted as it is the opportunity for those of us who have a voice and are being afforded the right to use that voice to stand up for equal rights, the end of oppression and the progress of liberty.  Use your voice, use your vote. Vote YES for all of those who have suffered as a result of oppression not just in our society but in any society around the world.

The Liberal Viewpoint

 It is perfectly acceptable and rationally sound as a Liberal NOT to accept and tolerate everything. As Karl Popper explains; 'Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them...We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant'. So to support pluralism and oppose the Berka for example or other religious/cultural customs that subjugate certain individuals is not in fact hypocritical as many believe, rather it is an appropriate liberal response to discriminatory practices.

Arguments against those who believe homosexuality is 'unnatural'

This appeal to nature that is often made by those opposed to homosexuality is extremely weak and simply does not stand up to scrutiny. It's logical progression is that everything that is naturally occurring is acceptable and everything that is not naturally occurring is unacceptable. If we take the example of the tom cat who often eats his young should we therefore find infanticide and cannibalism acceptable? Nakedness is also natural so should we be lobbying to outlaw clothing? Not to mention the fact that biologists have documented thousands of cases of homosexuality in the natural world among other species. So if you are going to make homophobic arguments please at least try to come up with something a little better than 'it's not natural'.

Can you be a moral atheist?

There are many people who believe that without religion there would be no moral code for people to live by. This belief is based on the notion that God is the author of morality; those things that he commands are moral and the things that he forbids are immoral. Such a view gives no credence to the fact that morality is in fact a basic function of social interaction and human society. Scientific experiments have shown that children display an innate sense of justice from a very young age; communities of apes have also been shown to behave in ways that demonstrate a set of social values that are upheld within each community. Furthermore history has shown that religion and morality very often do not go hand in hand; the Christian Crusades and Islamic Jihads are just two examples of religion leading to grossly immoral actions. The reality is that religion is not necessary for morality to exist. Moral values can be based on reason and our innate sense of justice as fairness.

Racism and it's objective failings

Notions of race are simply outdated and baseless. Scientists have proven that there is no significant genetic difference between the so-called races - white, black, asian, whatever. To believe that being black implies any difference beyond skin colour is simply false. Being of a particular skin colour is just that and nothing else. 
The reason why many people in Ireland fall into the habit of racism is because, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they are subscribing to collectively constructed thoughts that are dominated by a white male world view. We all have a choice of whether to follow collective thought like sheep or to evaluate the information around us and come to educated decisions about what we believe to be true. Personally, I subscribe to Enlightenment values; objectivity, reason and evidence and I base my beliefs on what these values bring to the fore. In the case of racism, as I have stated above, it simply does not stand up to scrutiny. It is an ill-informed and baseless standpoint and one which maginalises and silences vast swaths of individuals who have as much right to be seen and heard as any white male.