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The Boy Nearly Crawls

He’s been up on hands and knees for a while now, and within the past week or so he’s figured out how to get from laying on his stomach onto hands and knees. Since then, all he wants to do is rock back and forth and think about crawling. A few times now, he’s managed a few ’steps’, traveling a few inches or a foot at most before collapsing back onto his stomach. But he’s begun to understand the ‘hands, knees, hands’ pattern of crawling. Any day now. We have to get all the razor blades and thumbtacks up off the floor soon.

Exestintial Crisis

I am having a personal crisis. It has to do with ideology. This is an often bandied and ne’er well defined word. At a basic level, it seems that ideology is the set of ideas that guides a person’s decisions making. In that sense I think that ideology is important. How, without it, are we to know what decisions to make? One could argue that pure scientific management and ‘rationalism’ is the best way to make decisions, but even that is ideological; choosing scientific knowledge (rather than something like emotional experience or religious conviction, both of which are also valid) as the proper basis for decision making is itself an ideological decision. In addition, Science is not free from ideological bias. Scientists, like all of us, see the world through biased lenses, colored by a lifetime of experience, exposure to deep stereotypes, and all manner of cultural predispositions. Even if these biases don’t affect the outcome of research, they shape the questions scientists ask and the way those questions are framed. Ideology, then, is inescapable. It is also necessary. Without having some preexisting notion of what ideas will guide decision making, how are we to begin to make decisions? There is nowhere to stand without ideology, no way to make value judgments, no way to avoid a kind of relativism that leads to arbitrariness. The problem, as I see it, is not ideology. It’s dogma. That, I would say, is when we persist in ideological beliefs despite ample evidence that we are wrong. The problem, in other words, is not being able to change ones’ mind on the big questions.

In this sense, actually, my crisis is about a lack of ideology rather than an excess. My crisis is selfishly existential (which I think is totally appropriate, given that I am at the moment perched in the mouth Plato’s cave, and about to dive out into the real world). I’m feeling paralyzed by the idea that my actions have long lasting, unpredictable consequences for which I have to be responsible. I am feeling paralyzed because even seemingly obvious choices are cast into doubt in this light. An example will be helpful.

By devising programs to help the poor, you can ameliorate the effects of poverty on some people. You can even probably come up with fiendishly clever ways to invite and welcome a heretofore left out segment of the population into the economy and society in a way that is productive and feels good for everybody. These are all good things, and things that I can see myself doing. These programs also have some unknown consequences for the macro structure of society. I think you would agree that our particular form of corporate capitalism is fairly exploitative by design, that the system itself creates a great deal of suffering. Does ameliorating the suffering of the poor provide a sheen of legitimacy to this system? Is it not possible that by helping with the short term and small scale suffering of individual people, one can unintentionally protect an economic order that causes that suffering in the first place? Is is possible that by helping some people in one place, you create more suffering in another place? I think these things are distinctly possible. What’s more, if the poor didn’t have a social safety net it seems possible that they would organize to change the system.

I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily the case – only that it is possible. The problem is, I have no idea. With no way to predict the future consequences of my actions, how can I begin to act? Ethically, I think one has to take responsibility for the consequences of what they do even if those consequences weren’t predictable. On the one hand, by joining the system and helping people with their problems, or by trying to change the system from within to make it less exploitative by a matter of degrees, it is possible that I end up using my life energy to contribute to the very survival of that system, which will stay exploitative on it’s basic level. On the other hand, by staying outside the system and trying to organize for change on a systemic level, I may be engaging in a hopeless pursuit and wasting a lot of effort on a project that ultimately comes to bear no fruit. Or even worse, somehow as if by magic a small group of committed people are able to agitate for radical systemic change and it turns out that we were wrong. The revolution could cause more suffering than it alleviates, but not having the revolution could cause more suffering than it alleviates. This is a sticky place to be in.

A Note on Notes

Hello to any readers that I may have, at some point, gained. I’d like to point out a few things about this site that you might not have noticed. First, in addition to using the site as a blog, I also use it to post pictures of my family, and to store Notes for my classes at school. Finally, I have some of my poems posted. Please feel free to peruse any of this through the tabs up top. My classes this term are ‘Racial Politics in the US’, ‘Terrorism, WMD, and Nuclear Proliferation’, and ‘Political Economies’. They should prove interesting. I try to post a weeks worth of notes at a time, before the weekend. If you’re in one of my classes and I’ve directed you here for notes, please help yourself but keep in mind that I often use verbiage directly from my notes in take home exams and essays (so don’t cut and paste - it’s plagiarism).