Rising To Your Humanity

 Our American politics (the world's politics?) feel as if they depend on us dehumanizing one another. I think that will more likely cause our extinction than a free-wheeling asteroid. 

In my view, this can be stopped by our refusing to be manipulated by politicians. That we should be demanding facts, not slogans.

If you feel the same way, I suggest reading the review, Raimond Gaita: A philosopher with the humanity to touch the truth

This is not just a matter of tone or temperament. It is itself an expression of Gaita’s philosophy, in that it opens a conversational space in which everyone is regarded as “sacred” – called upon, as Stephens puts it, “to rise to the demands of our common humanity”. Nor is that common humanity a purely abstract proposition; rather, it stems from a deep recognition that all human beings belong in the world, as they do to a particular family and place.

When Gaita writes of the “summer-coloured humanism” of Romulus and his best friend, Hora, he is not being blandly metaphorical. He is telling us something significant about the embeddedness of a particular conception of truth, relating it to his own experience as a young boy in the Victorian bush. It’s a theme that runs through Justice and Hope: one cannot separate our love of the world from the embodied nature of our at-homeness in it.

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In The Intelligentsia in the Age of Trump, Gaita suggests that the Cheeto Jesus is a categorically different beast from your average dissembling politician, in that he has eroded the conditions under which people can call their fellow citizens to “seriousness”. While the dissembling politician cares enough about the truth to want to hide it from the public’s gaze, Trump doesn’t care about the truth at all. It follows that his devotees are suffering from something rather more serious than “ignorance or an incapacity to reason”

 Jay Tolson's Adjacency: Just a suggestion feels relevant here, more so than in a separate post. Adjacency is not a concept that I feel comfortable with - reality as symbolic rather than real. It makes me think we have spent too much time in front of a computer.

To draw on the theory of a more recent thinker, the French semiotician Jean Baudrillard, we may be living in what he calls the age of the pure simulacrum, when signs and symbols no longer refer to any kind of reality but only to each other, tokens in the consumerist play of signifiers. To extend the Baudrillardian conceit, we are participants in an ongoing, commercial Walpurgisnacht in which the triumph of surface and appearances is celebrated in and through the immolation of all depth and meaning. In short, we inhabit an unabashedly reality-adjacent world.

Well, so what? At minimum, I suggest, understanding adjacency as the condition of our times brings some clarity to many of our contemporary mysteries. Why, for example, does work feel as though it has become work-adjacent, relegated to something quite different from what work used to feel like? To some degree, it does so because, since the rise of COVID-19, much of it takes place in office-adjacent settings. (Or would those be setting-adjacent settings?)

But the relegation of work to work-adjacency has even more to do with the declining significance of work as a source of personal meaning and worth, particularly as more and more jobs acquire the job-adjacent status of what the late anthropologist David Graeber dubbed “bullshit jobs”—jobs that in the future are likely to be taken by algorithmically governed and human-adjacent machines. Also called “nonessential” jobs during our once and continuing plague, work-adjacent activity, instead of producing goods or providing services of real value and worth, is taken up with the manipulation of symbols that monitor flows and exchanges within the abstract information-based realm of administration and finance, a realm increasingly detached from the ever-dwindling value-producing activities that sustain it.

“But what about our burgeoning, world-shaping, wealth-generating tech sector?” the skeptic objects. To which one might reply that it exists only to facilitate the functioning of that reality-adjacent realm, feeding vampire-like on what remains of real value. If it all feels like a value-adjacent con (directed by various leadership-adjacent figures at the top of our institutions, political or otherwise), it sort of is. Yet would the world as we know it, this reality-adjacent world, come crashing down if we called the con’s bluff? The scary truth is that we have trouble seeing, imagining, much less setting out to build, a world that would be otherwise—a world that is in fundamental ways ordered according to a reality beyond mere appearances.

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Even before receiving his death sentence, Kafka had committed himself to writing about what he acknowledged language could not grasp, the reality of being itself, forever just beyond but still informing whatever is of value behind our fleetingly inhabited “world of the senses.” 

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