MosAbstrakt’s blog

Love the art, poor as it may be, which thou hast learned, and be content with it; and pass through the rest of life like one who has entrusted to the gods with his whole soul all that he has, making thyself neither the tyrant nor the slave to any man.
- Marcus Aurelius

 

Aim: To find/develop a moral language by studying the commanding movements, institutions, ideas, and deviances of recorded history for the purpose of creating more egalitarian habits of coexistence.

 

“Unlike values, facts—the things that make beliefs true and false—are the natural inhabitants of the world, the things that scientists can study or that we can explore with our own senses. Check.  So, if people in other places have different basic desires from people around here—and so have different—values that’s not something that we can rationally criticize.  No appeal to reason can correct them.  Check.  And if no appeal to reasons can correct them, then trying to change their minds must involve appeal to something other than reason: which is to say something unreasonable.  There seems to be no alternative to relativism about fundamental values. Checkmate.”
- Kwame Anthony Appiah

 

MAKING CONVERSATION

One of the biggest discontents I have growing out of the west is the veneration of the strangely peculiar mindset of rugged individualism—that curious and overweening sense of the “I” over the “Thou”. This is not to say, however, that other societies have a monopoly on ethical custom—that doesn’t seem right that they would or should, or do they (we need only cite the case of female circumcision or the choice of cuisine of some cultures as an example. Then, again, there are numerous cultures who do not fathom many western desires of various body piercings and their seeming narrow understanding of the world)? Stemming from this saturation of individualism in daily life, I have been in numerous conversations (the most recent being the role of God/Religion versus Evolutionary Theory) where the exchange ended in, “Well, I think this is true.” Where does the other opinion stand? It would suggest that my friends and I would live in concurrent and plural realities (at least on that concern). But that doesn’t seem right either.

There is indeed only one world. What there is a plurality of is facts about this one world—the earth has a vast reservoir of ice on two opposite ends or, there are things that we humans can eat for example. Our understandings of these facts are predicated on our perceptions of them, that is, to say, our beliefs about them. We can all reasonably agree that our understandings about the world come from our upbringing and our influences of socialization. Since facts of the world are universal (or universals for you Platonists out there) and we as humans have certain beliefs about them, that is to say, which ones we choose to accept and/or consider in daily discourses, facts easily turn into conceptual entities when they are mixed with our beliefs. After all, it is a fact that the earth has things that we humans can eat for sustenance. But how do we decide on what to eat? Our beliefs answer this question.

THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

Our understandings of concepts (what facts turn into when they are introduced to our beliefs) are plagued with the human problems of abstraction—that is to say the plurality of beliefs about natural facts (specifically, concept acquisition and concept dispersal). Since beliefs can only be certified or rusticated by facts, and we can reasonably agree that there are many of them, the same facts can lead to different belief structures equally logical to two opposite sorts of minds. But what happens to our situation when we want to share our beliefs with others? We could say that we value our beliefs such that we want people to adopt them as their own.—we want them to value the same things and act the same way we do. This situation, one that grazed the brow of philosopher David Hume on more than one occasion, is called the Naturalistic Fallacy—the attempt to make ethical claims based on natural facts or, more commonly, the “is/ought” problem.

Though I attempt not to speak for a brilliant man, I, and Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton, intellectually agree that by virtue of our shared humanity, human beings owe something to one another. By looking beyond the shattered mirror and rugged individualisms of personal belief and distantly shortsighted and often political self-interested (personal or State) ideology, we will be able to realize that a language needs to be created between the different people of the world. More specifically, a moral language, predicated upon the culturally universal value of kindness—a certain good seems to be part of it. It’s not an acquired taste. This is what I define as the Moral Cosmopolitan’s goal. There are however some problems for this project.

PLATO’S ANALOGY OF THE CAVE W.E.B DU BOIS AND A COSMOPOLITAN PROBLEM (‘The Matrix’ for those who haven’t read the book)

Imagine prisoners (or Neo), who have been chained since their childhood deep inside a cave: not only are their limbs immobilized by the chains; their heads are chained in one direction as well so that their gaze is fixed on a wall. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which puppets of various animals, plants, and other things are moved along. The puppets cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. When one of the puppet-carriers speaks, an echo against the wall causes the prisoners to believe that the words come from the shadows. The prisoners engage in what appears to us to be a game: naming the shapes as they come by. This, however, is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of images (The Matrix). They are thus conditioned to judge the quality of one another by their skill in quickly naming the shapes and dislike those who play poorly. Suppose a prisoner is “released” and compelled to stand up and turn around (by taking the ominous red pill). At that moment his eyes will be blinded by the sunlight coming into the cave from its entrance, and the shapes passing by will appear less real than their shadows. The last object he would be able to see is the sun (the Matrix code), which, in time, he would learn to see as the object that provides the seasons and the courses of the year, presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some way the cause of all these things that he has seen.

The Moral Cosmopolitan faces a deep problem of articulation. In respect to the analogy, how can one return to the cave to explain a facet of life to a people that have been socialized in a language of imagery and limited exposure? How does the Moral Cosmopolitan deal with the seeming indelible notions of the nation-state and sovereignty when speaking of a global language for more egalitarian practices in order that people can escape death and isolation from others?—Each country has the constructed right to instruct or command it’s people (at times by force or fraud) into certain habits of living which create different beliefs, values, and in turn, ideologies about the facts of the world. W.E.B. Du Bois touches on such a problem in his essay Of Our Spiritual Strivings,

“…the beauty revealed to him was the soul beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,--has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.”

On his 2000 Black On Both Sides, emcee Mos Def declared that "You know what's gonna happen with Hip Hop? Whatever's happening with us. If we smoked out, Hip Hop is gonna be smoked out. If we doin alright, Hip Hop is gonna be doin alright…Hip Hop is goin where we goin."

I've been thinking about that for a couple of days and I honestly believe that the current state of hip-hop (lyrics, male supremacy, Don Imus and all) is largely an economic issue with a peculiar spiritual dimension.  I don't know how many of you guys have read Marx's Capital but it seems to me, with hip-hop, language and culture have become a commodity and a means of control.  If we consider where most of the "popular" artists have arisen, they mostly come from places rich in crime, disease, and idle striving.  Vulgarity and lethargy are the norm, and aims beyond apples of gold and satisfying the belly are distant if they even at all manifest properly.

"Poverty educates....It shapes the way you look at the world." - Dr. Cornel West