“How We Reached the Point Where We Can’t Hear Each Other” is a article on Counterpunch by Joseph Natoli. I’ve excerpted some of the beginning bits for context, but the best is when he focuses on what is happening in Education and how people are taught to think these days. I’m also a fan of his borrowing of radical feminist methodology that focuses on the the material reality of the situation and the naming of the problem. I heartily recommend you read the full article, as it suggests reasons why we are becoming less social despite ‘social’ media and the corrosive effect that identity politics, one of the crown jewels of post-modern theory, is having on our society.
[…]
“The intent of a past analog world to put us all on the same page so we could all direct ourselves in common to our common, societal problems is something now disseminated into an infinitude of self-designed enclaves. We have connectivity between the like-minded, or opinionated, but not conjunction which Bifo Berardi defines “as a way of becoming other.” (And: Phenomenology of the End, 2015)
If you want to reflect beyond the entrapment of your own personal experiences and the personal opinions derived from such, you are desiring something that has been superseded.
If you want not to be the blind man who feels the tail of an elephant and pronounces the elephant to be shaped like a snake, you are hoping for a door that leads out of the room of your own limited experience.
Unfortunately, there is no longer any need to leave that room because cyberspace has designed the whole world to be your room. You can blog, tweet, text. Video, emoji your reflections online without any intent to augment social knowledge or understanding or to encounter a counter-punch that will cause you to adjust your views.”
[…]
“We exist now within narratives, not impeccable logics and sound proofs, air-tight arguments or binding adjudications. For reasons too elaborate to condense, we have accepted Nietzsche’s view of reason as a pawn of power and have retreated to our own personal reasoning.
This retreat to personal arbitration of all matters is expressed in the politics of identity, a politics concerned with the full emancipation of the individual not as defined within any cultural, religious, historical, or anthropological notion of the individual, but defined by each and every variety of individual. It is as if the individual is a knowledge within itself.”
[…]
Education is also in a special dilemma considering the mission here is get a student to put his or her personal opinions and preferences and different experiences out of sight and attend to a rationally validated collective representation of a subject.
Nathan Heller points out that elite colleges find that the cultivation of the individual is not an easy matter when students will not leave their personal “experiential authority” at the door. (“The Big Easy,” The New Yorker May 30, 2016) One is not reading to extract eternal verities, the Enlightenment dream, or to deconstruct the pretenses of those same verities. In the climate that Heller describes, no content can be permitted to transgress the personally defined identity of the reader or listener.
An Oberlin student who Heller describes as “a trans man …educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder …lately on suicide watch” objected to a discussion of Antigone without a trigger warning, i.e., characters in the play committed suicide. Identity-based oppression is responded to with a theory of intersectionality, which contends, “who knows what it means to live at an intersection better than the person there?” Thus, personal experiential authority now contends with a pedagogic tradition of minimizing the effects of personal experiential authority on objective, rational reflection.
Education attempts to respect individual arrangements of the results of critical thinking but not allow those arrangements to taint the process of critical thinking. This long standing agreement is no longer in effect. We have reached the point where we cannot engage in any way what may “trigger” our personal dislike or what may upset a private space we have self-designed. Long standing notions of both education and society are dissolving.
We now listen to our own voices and our clones in “social” media, a pathological condition that undermines much needed social and political communication and interrelationships. The way out, as with all pathologies, is to first recognize the condition, observe the point we have reached and reorient our compass.”
Teaching critical thinking in public education has always been a revolutionary activity, as this article confirms, it looks like it shall continue to be in the revolutionary category for quite some time.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
10 comments
July 5, 2016 at 7:21 am
john zande
On target.
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July 5, 2016 at 7:35 am
lovetruthcourage
I can not understand how this whole POMO thing got so much momentum or why anyone would believe such tripe.
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July 5, 2016 at 7:41 am
The Arbourist
@Lovetruthcourage
One theory I’ve seen is that it is a response to minorities entering the halls of academic power and changing the status quo.
Challenging the status quo while immersed in the nothingness of post modern theory is much more challenging.
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July 5, 2016 at 9:05 am
The Intransigent One
A few things bothered me about this article.
1. “the corrosive effect [of] identity politics” – so often when I hear this phrase, it’s code for “women/POC/etc aren’t sitting at the back of the bus and waiting their turn to get rights until after the white dudes are totally happy with everything”.
2. The description of the guy who wanted a trigger warning for suicide, in Antigone. I got a feeling that “a trans man …educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder …lately on suicide watch” was a bit on the snide side, a bit “look at this speshul snowflayke demanding hir speshulness be venerated” – especially considering what followed –
3. Pooh-pooh-ing trigger warnings. Yes, “personal dislike” is taking them too far, and sometimes people are dicks about it. But, as a way of allowing people with actual trauma and genuine problems a way of knowing what’s coming up so they can steel themselves for it (or take the necessary steps to request an alternate assignment), they’re a way of being inclusive, and accommodating people who might not otherwise be able to participate in a conversation/class/educational opportunity. Because let me tell you, getting unexpectedly slapped upside the head with your personal demons in the middle of class, is not educational for anybody. Have I ever told you about my experience of being sexually (assaulted? coerced? not sure the word for what happened to me) on a Saturday, and reading “Leda and the Swan” (Yeats) in class Monday morning without any introductory remarks about what we’d be looking at? Let’s just say, my education was not well-served.
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July 5, 2016 at 11:52 am
lovetruthcourage
To address your points
1: I disagree wholeheartedly. Personal identity movements themselves are destroying the coherence of categories like women and POC. It is POMO, male-centered, personal identity movements themselves pushing us to the back of the bus, using word salad as a weapon. If we want to come forward collectively, we have to stop centering the individual. Personal identity movements also imply that if we are oppressed, we just didn’t choose wisely enough. This presumption is insulting.
2. I do not know the author’s intent with regard to word choice. If it was snide, then how else could the author have conveyed the fragility of this individual?
3. Trigger warnings should be pooh-pooh’d. They are ridiculous, and only needed by people privileged enough not to have their sensibilities constantly affronted. Getting slapped upside your head with your personal demons? Only if you over-share them. Otherwise, no one knows anything about your personal demons. We have to reckon with them anyway. Monsters hide in the dark.
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July 5, 2016 at 2:10 pm
The Intransigent One
So the individual described in the article was “privileged enough not to have their sensibilities constantly affronted”?
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July 7, 2016 at 11:29 am
lovetruthcourage
The comment about “privileged enough to not have their sensibilities constantly affronted” was in reply to your reply, and not in reply to the article. People who want to put trigger warnings on everything do display their privilege. Some of us are offended without warning all of the time, and no one cares. How would you account for this disparity?
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July 7, 2016 at 11:48 am
The Intransigent One
That’s interesting, because the people and spaces I’m familiar with that do use trigger warnings, do it BECAUSE they care about the people who, in the rest of the world, are bombarded with offensive and triggering material, and they want to create a space where these people are able to participate more safely and have their voices heard.
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July 7, 2016 at 12:03 pm
lovetruthcourage
And these safe spaces are where, exactly? At pricey colleges. Point made.
Monsters live in the dark.
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July 7, 2016 at 4:36 pm
The Intransigent One
The ones I’m talking about are feminist, activist, and survivor spaces on the internet. This is where trigger warnings originated. It really seems to me that trigger warnings are good things whose use should be expanded, not something that should be thrown away because in some situations they are used to cushion the privileged.
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