Place of my Way: October 2019

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
- Tacitus

is the question of 'is' the fundamental misunderstanding between humans?

question of being vs questions of things that beings do?
is homosexuality something that someone is or something that someone does?
many people see it as a "doing" - a choice made

for them homosexuality isn't a question of identity but rather preference

ideologically safe spaces are everywhere - and are not good

echo chambers - positive reinforcement - people become more and more certain with less and less actual knowledge

identity safe spaces are important especially against the danger of the tyranny of the majority
problem comes from the blurred lines

blurred lines from when an ideological challenge challenges the value or very validity of an identity
blurred line between when words make that challenge and when the challenge is won and the words incite action

it was once just words for the Nazi party to challenge the patriotism and integrity of German Jews (Nazi ideology)
Then those words invalidated their identity and redefined their identity as other (Jews that claim to be German instead of German Jews) and made it okay to kill them like livestock (ideology redefines an identity)

who is the arbiter of identity?

who is the arbiter of which identities are significant?

of great importance because identity determines the agency of voice

why people place great importance on the identity shared by judges and less on the identity shared by children

who determines which individuals meet the criteria for an identity?

this is of great importance because authenticity of identity determines legitimacy of opinion

is a person a judge if fellow judges don't recognize them as a judge?
is a person black if they don't look black?

how much black must a person have in them before they are worthy of being listened to regarding the black experience?

how much do black people collectively have in common?

how much do africans, caribbeans, afro-americans, and afro-europeans actually have in the way of shared experience?
raises the question of the ideological value of identity classification known as 'black'

seems to mean everything and nothing at all - based solely on an ambiguous and highly variable amount of melanin in the skin

yet at the same time an albino can be black - so it is based on skin tone yet not based on skin tone - is it based on anything?
and if it is based on anything...again, what is the value of the identity classification? what does 'being black' tell you definitively about a person the way that being 'tall' tells you that it is easier for a person to reach for tall things?

So it is not unreasonable to say that 'black'ness - the quality of being black and the identity known as black, really doesn't amount to anything

the majority of people can agree upon this and every affirmative action program meant to factor in the historical legacy of discriminating against people because they were 'black' can be wiped away in an instance
the ideological challenge to identity becomes more than just words - it becomes action that obliterates their existence in terms of thought, alienates them from their own ideas of themselves and affects their bodies in a material way due to social convention
a type of conceptual homocide for no one to believe you are who you say are

a type of conceptual genocide for no one to acknowledge that what you are is reality rather than a choice or a mere claim to truth rather than a truth

given the gravity of the language we use:

it is easy to see that a liberally inclined mind might come to the conclusion that anything approaching a challenge to one's identity should be off limits

people are who they say they are, what they say they are, their lived experience of being what they say they are is more important than any outside quantification, and their identity should be respected as definitive, inviolate and worthy of voice irrespective of anything else

a person that says they are black is black, you can't know what their experience is

questioning of a person's identity, assigning value to it starts the process of outside forces determining whether that identity will be incorporated into the majority or marginalized as 'other' and pushed to annihilation

it is easy to see that a conservatively inclined mind might come to the conclusion that anything approaching a protection of the identity of others represents a challenge to freedom of speech and the process of evaluating statements, claims and ideas

people make claims of identity that need to be evaluated, truth isn't served by having topics that are off-limits, the burden of proof for recognizing an identity as significant should be high, anyone can make a claim of lived experience that amounts to basically hearsay, what matters are facts that confirm and support these claims or else any meaning classification of things and beings becomes moot, subject only to opinions

a person can be homosexual not because they are interested in members of the same sex but rather because they say they are - homosexuality begins to mean nothing

questioning of a person's identity, assigning value to it starts the process of outside forces determining whether that identity will be incorporated into the majority or marginalized as 'other' and pushed to annihilation

and this is good: certain claims need to be struck down as untrue, certain voices should be extinguished at the expense of other more credible voices
people who actually are who they say they are can prove it, people who can't are not an identity - they are merely claiming an identity by choice

choices can be changed, modulated by conditioning of right and wrong

the idea of a safe space is seductive

safety is an aspiration not a destination

it is a process not a place

to fashion an absolutely safe place would be to create a world without risk, without offense, without dialogue

all great things require risk - at a minimum the risk of failure
most truths come from dialogue, all dialogue has the potential for offense

without the explicit acknowledgement of the paradox between an ideological challenge and an identity challenge - people are arguing at cross purposes

the liberal mind sees one slippery slope - towards marginalization/annihilation of the minority (tyranny of the majority); the conservative mind sees another slippery slope - towards silencing dissenting voices (tyranny of the minority)

At the bottom of the page, the conclusion is what you didn't want to hear: no one is the good guy. No one is right on 100% of things, 100% of the time; no particular way of thinking, save perhaps good old skepticism, will make you right more often than you are wrong. Everyone is selling something - the people who yell the loudest can be the most right or the most wrong. Or as the great Greg House puts it - "There are only two things you can depend on: Everybody dies. And everybody - everybody - lies."

Place of my Way

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Doing, being and becoming

"Safe" spaces