Staying grounded when the temptation to conform to narratives is overwhelming

Gems from Steven J Lawrence, 27 December 2022

Steven is a very thoughtful USA writer on modern social philosophy. He presented (as did I) at the 2022 Counterweight Conference (online but based in London).

Here are some gems from his December blog, entitled:

Staying grounded when the temptation to conform to narratives is overwhelming:

The Ground Experience in a World of Ideological Capture

This is largely about how much can and should we hold onto a concept of ‘objective reality’.

Steven considers Dr. Erec S. Smith’s book “A Critique of Antiracism in Rhetoric and Composition” which introduces and challenges the concept of the “primacy of identity”. Steven goes on:

Readers who might question my assertion that empirical (objective) reality exists on some level will hopefully understand that I have given a great deal of thought to this question. Though I may lean in the direction of positing that an objective reality exists and can be known, I also acknowledge that at least to some extent, our subjective conditioning can “color” our perceptions of this (proposed) reality, which means that we have to take into account the many parts of ourselves that might inform or distort our perceptions, and thus, our beliefs and actions.

In the language of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories, we can be said to have a “subject-position” on the social and cultural map of our shared reality. This means that, according to CSJ, our sociocultural identities contribute substantially to our ability to accurately perceive what is actually in front of us. Thus, our gender, gender identity, ethnicity, racial identity, age group, religion, personality type, neurological patterns, sexual orientation, body type and size, and many other factors that make us who we “are” renders our subjective experience of reality (including how we experience other sentient beings in that reality) almost entirely unreliable in determining what reality actually is.

Though I have a good deal of respect for the idea that our ability to perceive and understand reality can be compromised by our personal identities, histories, and socio-cultural makeup, I part ways with followers of CSJ in taking the position that such conditioning can be overcome and that reality can, in fact, be known. The fact that reality can be known is no more an unverifiable assertion than many of the claims made by those who adhere to the deconstructionist practices of CSJ (e.g. racism is everywhere at all times and the only question worth asking is not whether racism has occurred in a situation, but how).

The possibility that we can experience reality outside of our subjective conditioning is a position that runs through all of the writings in the All We Are series. In fact, the very name of the series implies both:

1.         a statement that implicitly challenges CSJ adherents’ belief that extreme subjectivity is the alpha and omega of all existence, and;

2.         a proposal implied in the rhetorical question: is this really all we are?

For me, the question of “is this all we are?” is closer to the truth than the proposed answer of “this is all we are”.

I’ve been researching and drafting Part I of the All We Are series around the theme of differences and overlaps between the ground experience and the doctrine of lived experience, and I think now is as good a time as any to briefly explain what I mean when I say that the “ground experience” differs greatly from what some call “lived experience”.

Ground experience points to reality underneath ideology. Lived experience points to both the unfiltered information and natural insights that can emerge from the experience of actual events (which, of course, is legitimate) and the idea that a person’s personal experiences somehow dictate that person’s ability to, understand, perceive, experience, and have insights into those experiences.

Some time ago, I found an image on social media and recognized immediately that the words in this image perfectly captured what I’m calling the ground experience. The writer who is referred to in the text of this meme is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French philosopher who studied and wrote about existentialism and phenomenology and championed the importance of staying connected to the real world outside the realm of abstraction and “cogitation”—the world of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, egoic speediness, runaway imagination, political commitments, excessive theorizing, and raw emotionizing.

Abstract theories and worldviews, including tradition-oriented belief systems, deconstructionist theories, religious doctrines—all frameworks that structure our perception of ourselves, others, and reality itself—ultimately rest on a shaky foundation. And what is a foundation if it’s shaky?

As long as we are allowing our perceptions and perspectives to move away from what the meme above calls “the actual ground that we stand on, the earthly ground of rock and soil that we share with the other animals and plants”, we are not only lost and confused, but opening ourselves up to the potential for dropping more darkness and even cruelty into the world. According to the meme above, we would be wise to regain our natural allegiance to the “non-arbitrary ground” of empirical experience, for this experience is reliable, providing, as it always has, an unconditioned foundation for all of our thoughts, beliefs, habits, desires, fears, and all other “artificial structures” that we choose to “erect upon it.” It’s also the empirical reality experienced by other people—we perceive as separate and distinct from ourselves. Put another way, the ground experience is the beingness—the ontological reality—that lies beneath all of those same things that have been “constructed by many organic entities besides ourselves”.

So, it’s a fancy way of saying, let’s stay connected to what is real and empirically verifiable beyond our thoughts, fears, suspicions, and ideological positions.

Admittedly, this is hard to do, especially when we are saturated by information relentlessly coming at us in a 24-hour news cycle; and inundated by media interpretations of events and people that are biased towards specific political ends and tailored towards our desires to achieve the goals of the ideologies we identify with. It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to discern what is real from what is not real.

And, for people teaching in a highly politicized educational milieu on any scale (from society to an individual school, department, or classroom), the project of discerning what’s true and real from what is not true and real becomes even more difficult.

It also becomes potentially perilous for us in the inter-related areas of economics and reputation if we cannot successfully navigate our way. Thus, we are required to find a way to walk between the raindrops. A middle way.

The Middle Path

Teaching in a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) in a major East Coast city in the United States presents a challenge for those of us who have chosen the middle path—the path of what Greg Thomas has called the “Radical Moderate”, a path in which we must continually challenge ourselves not to fall prey to ideological possession, interpretive absolutism, and interpersonal cruelty in the name of our ideals. A path in which we must also be willing to challenge our own preconceptions and ideological commitments so that we can practice open-hearted immediacy, and learn to meet other people on their own terms. This way, we stand the best chance to find pathways to co-existing peacefully while also maintaining our commitment to both truth and justice. It is the path of epistemic humility, which is a very difficult path to travel in environments that have been captured by specific ideologies—especially what Robert J. Lifton called totalist ideologies that allow no room for fresh perceptions, original thinking, or innovative solutions that lie outside those already prescribed and imposed upon us by the totalist ideology that has become ascendant in our environment.

There are more of us who strive to walk this path than we might be led to believe.

Just today, I came across a similar perspective advanced by Africa Brooke, whom I made reference to in the previous chapter about The Problem of Bullying in Social Justice Activism. On Erec Smith’s “Free Black Thought” Twitter page, the following image was shared, along with a link to Brooke’s Instagram page, where she posts a two-hour conversation with Salomé Sibonex, a young writer and visual artist and philosopher, whose written work covers many topics, including the psychology of the self, and many dimensions of identity in both individuals and society.

Africa Brooke’s words here speak to me and many others who wish to avoid the extreme path of ideological totalism, even in the service of the highest ideals. Though it’s not easy, many people are finding their way towards the more dynamic and hopeful path of the “radical moderate”, especially after seeing the increasing social, cultural, and political polarization of the world over the past decade as many politically charged people have confused authenticity with the act of doubling down on beliefs without evidence and the accompanying patterns of finding a one-dimensional enemy to hate and the ego-comforting idea that the hate is justified by an intelligent-sounding ideological framework.

As Brook points out, we can in fact be in “the middle” without being milquetoast, fence-sitting, or non-committal to our values and principles, as long as we are willing to speak openly and candidly about what we are seeing or perceiving without resorting to social violence and rigid thinking. We can even be fiercely committed to a cause while practicing kindness and the willingness to question our own ideological conditioning and cognitive biases. Ultimately such a path requires a sense of embodiment, where we stay connected with the physical sensations of our body, maintain awareness of our emotional reactivity, and commit to slowing down our thought process long enough to really “take in” the world around us, including the people in that world.

What does any of this have to do with the effectiveness of our work as a college professor at a minority serving institution? And what does this have to do with the important project of working towards both depolarization and social justice? Everything. Without the academic and ethical freedom to deliberate, openly inquire, or present alternative solutions that lie outside orthodox ideology, we condemn students of color to low-grade educational environments, and we banish those charged with the duty to educate those students towards a kind of professional purgatory characterized by powerlessness, fear, and the depression and frustration of no longer having the ability—or even the permission—to really make a difference in people’s lives.

In the end, what is called for in any educational institution that seeks to accomplish its mission, is to actively defend against the lure of becoming a political cult—a rigid ideological community that no longer seeks the quest for truth, but that seeks to create an insular environment where not only is the pursuit of knowledge nearly vanquished, but a reduction of intelligence and the increase of interpersonal abuse and intergroup suspicion becomes the norm.

In my own professional context in which I work with students of color in a major city where many of its institutions, non-profits, political movements, schools and colleges are directly influenced by Critical Social Justice theories and practice, the rapid growth of political cultism presents a unique challenge. Within the next few years, for example, the Boston Public Schools system will be formally adopting an ethnic studies curriculum—one that is highly controversial and that many believe could potentially worsen racial tensions in our communities. As the curriculum is built upon the foundational belief drawn from Critical Race Theory that American society (and all of its systems) is entirely structured by “The Pillars of White Supremacy” and that students from different ethnic groups are assigned the roles of “oppressed” or “oppressor” based solely on their group membership, most reasonable people who have not been captured by this ideology have some reason for concern.

I have already explored the problem of group identity essentialism in Chapter 2 of “Beyond Cynicism”. I mention it here because, as the reader may recall, group identity essentialism posits that we can know the inner lives of individuals simply because they belong to a certain identity group. One example of how far group identity essentialism can go once it has become foundational to a theory or curriculum is a research article that Newsweek reported on in June of 2021, in which “whiteness” was described by Dr. Donald Moss as a “malignant, parasitic-like condition”. The fact that this article was published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association should be of concern to those who worry that the “helping professions” have begun to be influenced by an ideological framework that actively engages in bigotry under the guise of academic theory and a commitment to extreme and narrow conceptions of social justice.

Just a year earlier in February, 2020, Dr. Moss delivered a lecture for the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies that was advertised as a discussion about the ways in which “Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites as voracious, insatiable, and perverse” with “deformed appetites” that “particularly target non-white people.” In recognition of how hard it might be for the reader to believe that such rhetoric exists and has entered the helping professions, I’ll let the advertisement of the talk speak for itself:

These are not isolated incidents in which one influential thought leader in the broad field of psychology slipped up and temporarily went down the rabbit hole of “Critical Theory Gone Wild”. According to the Newsweek article mentioned above:

“Moss has previously lectured on the subject of whiteness before On Having Whiteness was published in the bi-monthly, peer-reviewed Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association on May 27. In 2019, he delivered his theory describing whiteness as a parasitic condition as a plenary address for the South African Psychoanalytical Association, and he also lectured on it at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York.”

It is no wonder that there has been some recent pushback against what can, once again, be reasonably called political cultism. We see this pushback among thoughtful, educated, and compassionate professionals in both the “Critical Therapy Antidote” movement that aims to bring the therapy and therapy-adjacent professions back into the business of helping people, rather than increasing inter-group conflict and the potential for physical and social violence. And we see this pushback in the Constructive Ethnic Studies movement , which aims to bring awareness to racial injustice, unfair systems that have held many communities of color back from the success that should rightfully be theirs, and the teaching of history that is candid, committed to even the most unflattering depictions of historical atrocities, intergenerational trauma, and unjust systems, but that does so without automatically assigning behavioral traits, intrinsic desires, and the level of morality to entire demographic groups.

We can also see the pushback from academics like Dr. Lyell Asher, whose series “Why Are Colleges Becoming Cults” expertly lays out the historical timeline of the institutional capture by extreme versions of Critical Social Justice Theory and the long-term implications.

It should be easy to see how such “teachings” can indoctrinate young people into either hating themselves for being “parasitic oppressors” or into being suspicious of people who belong to the disfavored identity groups that they have been trained to see as naturally wired to want to do harm to them. Such suspicion can lead to anger and even violence, and at the very least, we can all but count on the invocation of violence and cruelty from less morally developed people who would opportunistically use such teachings for their own nefarious purposes.

The tendency of opportunities to use us-against-them ideologies for their own self-gain and for the sheer pleasure of hurting and abusing others was described succinctly by Aldoux Huxley in his 1921 work of fiction, Crome Yellow:

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”