[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":536},["ShallowReactive",2],{"home-insights":3},[4,66,218,263,312,351],{"id":5,"title":6,"body":7,"date":54,"description":13,"extension":55,"head":56,"image":56,"meta":57,"navigation":58,"ogImage":56,"order":59,"path":60,"readTime":61,"robots":56,"schemaOrg":56,"seo":62,"sitemap":63,"stem":64,"tags":56,"updatedAt":56,"__hash__":65},"articles/articles/what-exactly-is-philosophy.md","What Exactly is Philosophy?",{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":50},"minimal",[10,14,17,20,23,39,42],[11,12,13],"p",{},"There are a number of ways in which the history of consciousness is demeaned or misplaced. Some of these occur within the bounds of discursive thought itself, thereby taking their slatternly place within that same history, and less important, but still revealing of a wider antipathy and most often a willing ignorance of thinking, occurring outside of discourse entirely; in popular media or in casual conversation. Philosophy, the ‘love of wisdom’’, though ancient relative to known history, is yet very recent when compared with the tenure of an evolving human consciousness itself. It is quite likely that due to its own presentation of self – it must be studied formally by literate persons – and its own career – it has been both the privilege and purview of cultured elites more or less from the beginning - philosophy can be much more readily dismissed, not only by those deemed outside of its discursive circle, but the more so, those outside of discourse as a whole.",[11,15,16],{},"And this denotation comes from both the philosopher and from the non-philosopher alike. We are apt to hear, from sports broadcasts to face-to-face shills, that the ‘philosophy of this coach’, or ‘our philosophy in making pizza is’, somehow superior to all others. Today, however, there are far fewer excuses to be made, and correspondingly, far less rationales available for such, for philosophy to be treated as if it were a permanent resident of cloud cuckoo land, with its acolytes floating somewhere above the world and its more guttural realities. All the more so because the greatest of thinkers lived in that same world, the world of humans and our shared history, and the world which is both the origin and destination of Dasein as a ‘being-in-the-world’. There is no record of any figure in the canonical history of Western thought who turned away from that world, eschewing it in search of something other, better, higher, or deeper. Indeed, the insights of these persons, at once human like ourselves and as well, persons who pushed themselves to discover their fullest humanity and for some, even humaneness, came from their engagement with said world, and not at all from disengaging from it. It is of more than mere picaresque interest to read what can be known of the philosopher’s lives, from their encounters with other important figures, to their interactions with the polis and with rulers, both positive – Aristotle tutoring Alexander – and negative – Socrates being executed by the State – or yet their daily rounds – Kant providing Königsberg with a consistent timepiece on his way to the tavern. In our own times, these vignettes are generally more gentle, but not always. One need only compare Bourdieu or Derrida’s curricular work for the French department of education and Scruton’s writing of libretti and novels with Foucault’s reckless sexual misadventures and his ultimate AIDS diagnosis and Ricoeur’s wartime incarceration in a labour camp, to be reminded that the world contains every possibility, even for the thinker.",[11,18,19],{},"The first thing to recall to oneself, if one is feeling some resentment against thinking in general and philosophy in particular, is that these figures were and are human like ourselves. They live in the same world, are challenged by the same travails, endure many of the same hardships and feel the same fleeting joys. There is indeed no possibility of becoming a thinker at all if one abandons one’s own humanity. The chief difference between the thinker and the one who elects to avoid most of the confrontation between the present and the past and that between self and other, is that the former makes what is already his own, his ownmost. The apical leader of the guild, Socrates, in his defense against his coming execution, famously uttered that same guild’s motto: ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. This examination can, it is true, take a number of forms, but all such roads lead to an awareness which is simply unavailable in day-to-day life. Without suggesting a morality of mundanity, one can at least say that this is how it must be. The social world runs on its rails, and needs to run on them if society is itself not to falter. This is also not to say that any reflection which becomes necessary from time to time when such rails no longer function as they once did should be the sole responsibility of a few august figures, to be consulted as did the ancients their oracles and haruspices. For the philosopher is no mystagogue; she is, more accessibly and much less mysteriously, a resource person. In this way, she is no different from the plumber; a professional who has learned a body of professionalized know-how. What the philosopher adds to this contractual availability is that her skill set is not oriented to a specific task-at-hand; philosophy is not about ‘fixing’ things.",[11,21,22],{},"Rather, the thinker performs a number of functions which are generally outside the daily expectations we have of ourselves and others:",[24,25,26,30,33,36],"ol",{},[27,28,29],"li",{},"The thinker opens up the questions of the day: the general rubric here is that if everyone appears to agree on something, whatever its cultural content or political fashion, the thinker deliberately steps away from this sensus communis and says ‘are you sure about this?’. Such agreements are all too easy to find in our contemporary world, for by way of them persons and well as governments can carry the day their way. Hence the role of the philosopher in this first sense is that of questioner, doubter, critic and analyst.",[27,31,32],{},"The thinker is as well tasked with querying our shared history. For general agreement upon this and that does not only occur with reference to the living present and the worldviews which remain extant for those who live in that present. It is for the historian to interrogate the contents of history, but the philosopher must ask, more penetratingly perhaps, what is history itself? Add to this the question concerning which history is the preferred one and why so, and what are the implications of viewing history in the rather Whiggish manner of vanilla verisimilitude. Instead of this, the thinker understands the presence of the past in our lives to be the thesis in an ongoing dialectic. It is what has been and what has been done, over against the new and the very concept of the future. So, secondly, the thinker’s vocation demands that she live that dialectic in search of a novel synthesis.",[27,34,35],{},"The philosopher also clarifies what people already know and seeks to communicate this ideally limpid vision to the world. Gadamer specifically notes this third aspect of what philosophy is supposed to be doing, in view of the many sources of obscurity and obscurantism which reign mostly unchallenged; the State, media, schools, families, the church, and even what used to be referred to simply as gossip; misinformation and yet disinformation, much of it in our own time purveyed through digital media. In order to confront such deliberate obfuscation, the main challenge for the thinker is to not present more of the same! It is often a fair cop to suggest that the philosopher gets carried away by his own insights, to the detriment of being able to be both clear and indeed insightful, in a manner almost all could comprehend.",[27,37,38],{},"Given that obscurity and the deliberate narrowing of discourse also happens within the history of thought, a fourth task for the philosopher is to be constantly vigilant against the tendency of intellectuals to flaunt their apparently superior historical abilities. What she finds, in doing so, is that those who have closed off access to the history of consciousness have done so by themselves ignoring or refusing that very history. ‘Academic’ examples unfortunately abound, from the mathematically inclined thinkers and logicians declaring that ‘anything before Frege’ is irrelevant, to the ‘third-wave’ feminists who declare the same thing for male authorship as a whole, to the Marxists for whom Hobbes is the true beginning of thought, or yet the ‘modernist’ who dismisses anything written before Hume and Vico. If thinking was strictly an ivory tower pursuit, a disconnected discourse would be its result, with its practitioners overly and overtly specialized to the extent of becoming ignorant of thought both human and historical alike.",[11,40,41],{},"This is indeed what we see, in the majority, in the university today, where the students of even their own disciplines are often unaware of that specific discourse’s history. Psychology is particularly at fault here, but the other social sciences are close behind in their own self-willing ignorance. The humanities fare somewhat better simply due to their being understood as in themselves historical disciplines, and thus more closely related to philosophy. When Ricoeur states that ‘the history of philosophy is itself a philosophical endeavor’, this is a testament to, and an acknowledgment of, for one, Dilthey’s enduring contribution to thinking; that we must include ourselves in our studies, that the human being is not merely the vehicle for an otherwise transcendent consciousness but in fact is its home and hearth: we are philosophy embodied. The only thing that separates the human species from its animal cousins is our distinct duo of reason and imagination, the two essential aspects of thought. It matters not a whit how this uniqueness came about, only how it has enabled us to become what we are and how we utilize this astonishing ability in our own time, with a view to a collective future. In light of this, one might be tempted to add a fifth point to the philosophical star: could it also be said that the thinker’s duty is encapsulated in his reminder that each and all of us must orient ourselves only towards what may come in our shared futurity?",[11,43,44,45,49],{},"It may at first seem a contradiction to be so concerned about history, and about coming to know the history of thought, and yet at once state that our entire goal must be about the future. But in fact, the whole function of having a past is to allow us the perspective necessary to walk forward; the past does not welcome us back within it, for this defeats its elemental purpose as resource and as the beginning of wisdom. Philosophy is not about the past, even if, necessarily and by definition, the vast bulk of its wisdom hails from another time to our own. The philosopher reaches into the history of consciousness with her mind, on our behalf, and thereby brings back to us its enduring self-understanding. By acting at once as an historian, a critic, a voice of clarity and elocution, and as a discursive dialogician, the thinker serves his culture in the most adept manner imaginable. No other figure in the human career has had such demands, but no other has brought to them such abilities. In the end, however, philosophy is not about philosophers, and it is Merleau-Ponty who has stated its case perhaps most pointedly: “Philosophy is not a body of knowledge; it is the vigilance that does not let us forget the source of ",[46,47,48],"em",{},"all"," knowledge.”",{"title":51,"searchDepth":52,"depth":52,"links":53},"",2,[],"2024-11-24","md",null,{},true,1,"/articles/what-exactly-is-philosophy",10,{"title":6,"description":13},{"loc":60},"articles/what-exactly-is-philosophy","TInIBQa_tJvBnn8_NgLOzvwyYqCs5tQ66ozg-zmEKWc",{"id":67,"title":68,"body":69,"date":210,"description":73,"extension":55,"head":56,"image":56,"meta":211,"navigation":58,"ogImage":56,"order":52,"path":212,"readTime":213,"robots":56,"schemaOrg":56,"seo":214,"sitemap":215,"stem":216,"tags":56,"updatedAt":56,"__hash__":217},"articles/articles/why-is-science-doubted.md","Why is Science Doubted?",{"type":8,"value":70,"toc":201},[71,74,77,80,83,106,109,114,117,120,124,127,130,133,137,140,143,146,149,153,156,159,162,166,169,172,176,179,182,185,189,192,195,198],[11,72,73],{},"As I stand upon the earth, I appear to be motionless. The breeze ruffles the leaves, the clouds approach and hang breathlessly above. A car passes briskly by, and then, far up in the sky, an airplane does the same. To the unaided senses, things move upon and around the earth, as I might if I take my next step, but the earth is itself static and unmoving. Even the erosion of eons or the explosion of a sudden Vulcanism, the torrid heat and desolate drought, the sodden rain and blistering wind, are effects upon the earth, movements that alter its image but do nothing to its being. And it’s being seems nothing other than eternal.",[11,75,76],{},"More so even than the firmament, for the stars do appear to move! And surely I am, in my widest definition, part of what they orbit or move past. Until the Ionian school in Ancient Greece, the earth was thought not merely unmoved but immovable, the center of things, the focus of creation. Today, we are decentered, constructed not created, in constant motion both in life and in character. It is thus, in this day of anxious doubt and in this tomorrow of anticipated unknowing, a most pressing question to examine how we as a species have come from one place to the other, from the center to the margins, from Being to mere beings.",[11,78,79],{},"Yet this is a question that must be approached from both places at once, as it were. It takes little enough to imagine the perspective of our predecessors, and indeed, the very fragility of modern scientific knowledge when placed beside simple sense perception – and this aside from customary bigotry and personal experience – is what puts today’s self-understanding at such risk of consistent, even constant, doubt. Even so, it is more than germane to imagine the center, to formulate Being, for it has remained a magnetic value for us even if it has not retained the same cultural status it once possessed. This is the larger question, of course. The doubting of science at once proceeds towards, and emanates from, the resonant ideal of Being.",[11,81,82],{},"There is a list of commonplace traits to which the ‘anti-science’ person holds, but for the moment, let us cast the net more widely to see what characteristics are present for anyone struck by the knowledge presented by the sciences. The following is not meant as either an exhaustive or a ranked compendium, but surely each of these traits must be present for anyone who doubts science as a source of rationally reliable and cross-culturally valid truth:",[24,84,85,88,91,94,97,100,103],{},[27,86,87],{},"My personal experience contradicts the findings of science, especially those of the human sciences.",[27,89,90],{},"Science always seems to be changing ‘its’ mind about what is a fact and what isn’t. How can I trust it?",[27,92,93],{},"Scientists themselves appear to regularly disagree about not only the validity of this or that finding, but also their general value.",[27,95,96],{},"And speaking of value, how do I translate the often acutely picayune and abstruse knowledge of science into a language and experience I can understand?",[27,98,99],{},"My cultural upbringing does not admit to human truth as the ultimate arbiter of the cosmos.",[27,101,102],{},"Science is itself beholden to political and corporate interest in the questions it asks in the first place. How can I trust its claims to objectivity?",[27,104,105],{},"Finally, it seems you have to either be a genius or at least well-heeled even to become a scientist. If I am neither, as the vast majority of people are not, how can I simply hand over my life to those who don’t know what it’s like to be me?",[11,107,108],{},"The ‘feeling’ each of these difficult objections to the sciences brings to us is one of passive mistrust ever verging into a more active distrust. At once these are questions of loyalty, of literacy, and of location both social and personal. Let us then take them one by one, in the above order, with a view to examining their premises as well as suggesting possible alternatives. In doing so, we will not be simply defending a popular view of science, nor will we be attempting to construct an ontology that will forever be unassailable to such questions or yet others. At base, however, the question of Being is unavoidable, and so we will in the end have to face up to the problem of what can in fact, and more or less, function for our mortal existence as a source of reliable knowledge.",[110,111,113],"h2",{"id":112},"_1-my-personal-experience-contradicts-the-findings-of-science-especially-those-of-the-human-sciences","1. My personal experience contradicts the findings of science, especially those of the human sciences.",[11,115,116],{},"At the heart of this doubt is the problem of intersubjectivity. Each of us knows our own heart, but equally, we also know that the other’s heart differs from our own. My experience will not be yours, and in many contexts, cannot be or can never be. As a white male, I cannot know ‘what it is like’ to be a non-white female, and so on. And if the devil is in the details, God will be thus found in the abstractions. It is at either ends of the human existential spectrum that I must look for common ground. She and I remain human beings to one another just as we both love Bruckner. It is mostly the mid-range, shall we say, of our shared humanity that casts us up as different from one another. This is not at all fatal, though it is a too fashionable thing to overemphasize this middle range of values and validities – I am a white, heterosexual male of European consciousness and background who is highly educated and relatively wealthy when compared globally – and make it the sole arbiter of my being-in-the-world. As the bumper sticker states, ‘The person with the most toys still dies’. My suggestion to this first doubt is to look for that which makes us the same as one another, for these contrasting poles are the two spaces in which science in fact operates. The very small and the very large, the devils and the gods.",[11,118,119],{},"The question of the human sciences is less simple, of course, because it’s very subject matter, ourselves, occupies mostly that very middle ground wherein difference is highlighted. But even here, such differences that do exist need not be seen as divisive. Indeed, the very understanding of ‘social location’, first presented as thematic in the study of humanity by Vico in 1725 and made proverbial in Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’ in the 1880s, is necessary to expose the facts of historical and cultural existence. But beyond this, the most important thing for each of us to recall to themselves is that I am but one perceiver. That when I am confronted with a social fact that contradicts my personal experience, it simply means that others, many others, have experienced the world differently than I. To not accept this is tantamount to denying that these others even exist at all.",[110,121,123],{"id":122},"_2-science-always-seems-to-be-changing-its-mind-about-what-is-a-fact-and-what-isnt-how-can-i-trust-it","2. Science always seems to be changing ‘its’ mind about what is a fact and what isn’t. How can I trust it?",[11,125,126],{},"The methods of science are classically understood to be ‘self-correcting’. What does this mean? It is old hat to trot out all of the historical shifts in perception a better equipped and more technically astute science has undergone. That Newtonian physics is a kind of local charade and quantum mechanics the truth of things. There is no need to cite the history of science as over against its historical mechanism. The underlying fact of science is not in fact scientific at all. This fact is that science has been and remains a human and thus an historical endeavor. This not only in the sense that it is we humans who ‘do’ science, also old hat, but more penetratingly, that through the doing of science we have discovered, astonishingly, a manner in which to construct a bridge over the chasm of difference represented by the diversity of historical epochs as well as across the polyglot of contemporary cultures. Science is yet historical through and through, but what emanates therefrom is, at least for a time and from the human perspective, transcendent of once again the middle range differences that divide we contemporaries from our predecessors, no matter how historically recent or distant.",[11,128,129],{},"Indeed, to make a distinction between the historical and the temporal is one of science’s chief aims. The first is all about difference, and this can be seen with no greater gravity than the fact that it is at the foot of history upon which all moralities fall. But the second is about sameness. The Sumerian was a human being like myself, able to contemplate his existence in much the same manner as do I, gazing up at the stars and imagining the heavens yet beyond. Feeling the basic desire of a living existence, expressing himself in art and in craft alike, and having to make meaningful his mortality. He ate and slept, he made love and he cared for others. He is my historically very distant cousin but he is my temporal sibling. Between the basic method of science as something which can overcome many of its own biases given enough time, and the equally basic subject matter of science which it treats as if it were an object-class alone and not a singular ‘thing’, we can suggest that this second doubt regarding the validity of science across time is overblown. Most importantly, each demographic needs a slightly different knowledge base to fulfill its generational duties, and the same can be said for each wider historical epoch. It is a mere device of the comic book artist to wonder ‘what if’ the ancients had had modern technology and so on. What if myth and reality were combined? What if becoming a hero as a human meant that one also had to become a God?",[11,131,132],{},"Far more so than even doubt, much of the simple disinterest in science falls along these lines. It is patently not only not mythic, its very essence stands against all myth. Its subject matter is not heroic, but rather basic. It seeks what is normative and what is regular, and not what is individuating and extraordinary, No, that is the realm of art, not science. And today, mostly, the realm of popular art at that.",[110,134,136],{"id":135},"_3-scientists-themselves-appear-to-regularly-disagree-about-not-only-the-validity-of-this-or-that-finding-but-also-their-general-value","3. Scientists themselves appear to regularly disagree about not only the validity of this or that finding, but also their general value.",[11,138,139],{},"Once again, this is mostly a function of how science ‘works’ in its overarching method, in contrast to the more singular methods devoted to specific forms of science, biology or chemistry, or physics and so on. It is not surprising that the chemist would value her discoveries, or the history of their own discipline, ahead of those or that of the biologist. This kind of valuation has in fact little to do with science and places the scientist back into the day to day humanity of personal sensibilities. It is the case that a personal bias can perform a deviant function within scientific investigation, but this ‘personality’ of the scientist is at once a great boon to the making of novel discoveries. The disagreement we hear of in the public everyday realm is a necessary function of science at its best. One, experiments must be corroborated, duplicated, interrogated again and again. We know that singular data might be misleading. We know that scientists are as human as are we ourselves. Disagreement, even outright conflict in the scientific community is something that must be encouraged by those of us who are outsiders. The more such questioning, the more such back and forth, the more assured the rest of us can be that science is indeed living up to its reputation as a self-correcting dealer of insights and not merely a numbly reproductive facilitation of the same old bigotries.",[11,141,142],{},"That, I think, addresses the question of interpersonal validity. To be scientifically valid is to be ‘factual’ in the broadest sense possible given the conditions of experiment. That what this result or outcome states can be relied upon to hold not only in differing contexts, but as well for different persons. None of this, however, attains the pitch of being able to satisfy our questions related to value. And this is a good thing, for at the very point value enters the discussion science itself must leave the floor. It is up to society at large to decide upon the value of facts. The person who harbors doubt number three along the lines of value is actually being irresponsible in shoving this work back onto the shoulders of scientists alone. No, they have done their part of the knowledge generating bargain, and it is time for the rest of us to step in and step up.",[11,144,145],{},"But the question of value, once taken on by the wider community, of course presents itself as a complex problem. At once it must borrow from what is seen as customarily valuable, while understanding that these new data coming from the sciences may force a reckoning upon custom. Over time, this potential conflict has overtaken all that was once valued at the cultural level, and thus the suspicion that underlays doubt number three may be traced to a much deeper sentiment: how can it be that all I know is wrong?",[11,147,148],{},"This immediately takes us to the center of our next listed doubt:",[110,150,152],{"id":151},"_4-and-speaking-of-value-how-do-i-translate-the-often-acutely-picayune-and-abstruse-knowledge-of-science-into-a-language-and-experience-i-can-understand","4. And speaking of value, how do I translate the often acutely picayune and abstruse knowledge of science into a language and experience I can understand?",[11,154,155],{},"There are actually two responses here. The first is simple: the language of science, applied mathematics, is by itself untranslatable into any other context and this is actually how it must be. We can overcome any angst we may feel about this necessary distance by working backwards, from my experience in daily life to its scientific description. There is an element of the ‘need to know’ here, just as Sagan reminded us that if we had to consciously adjudicate the techniques and biochemistry of our digestion we would surely starve to death. A black hole at a distance is a fascinating cosmic phenomenon. It only becomes a threat at a certain proximity and that only over a certain period of time, usually equally cosmic in scope. The language of science thus must at once maintain its aloofness to everyday description and experience, but it must also bridge the gap between that experience and structure. What do I mean by this second task?",[11,157,158],{},"One’s experience may seem to be intensely personal, and though it is that to us, if we live long enough and meet enough other people, we begin to realize that not only can others supply their own intensity to life but that what I held as precious and beyond the sacred is actually quite commonplace and well shared after all. Thus it is to the structural or ’secular’ quality of human experience that science appeals. By this I am not referring to the casual distinction made my ideologues between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’. Science is not a religion nor is it a politics. With these others, along with art and philosophy, science takes its distinct place among the widest human categories of endeavor without being blended into any other. Instead, ‘secular’ experience is simply that which is shared and also known to be shared. As William James reminded us, the most acute quandary for the visionary is how to communicate her experience to others. No matter its original intensity, if I don’t know what you know, there’s an end to it.",[11,160,161],{},"This is one of the beauties, if you will, of science. It is the only ‘vision’ humanity has generated that in fact can be shared by all, though the ‘intensity’ of such a sharing may differ and indeed must differ, according to our valuation and technical knowledge, and this even within the sciences themselves. A mathematician will see the elegance of the proof, a high energy physicist will see the enactment of a slice of basic reality, the biologist will see the molecular architecture of the gene, the sociologist the impassioned expression of a ‘type’ of person, the philosopher perhaps a form of consciousness written into the worlding of the world. Science is shareable precisely because it does not present a traditional vision at all. It is rather a series of interrelated and mutually imbricated perspectives, each with its own authentic value and from each emanating a way in which to understand our already shared human consciousness in its more cosmic guise. This is how daily experience is itself already part of science and not at all distanced from it.",[110,163,165],{"id":164},"_5-my-cultural-upbringing-does-not-admit-to-human-truth-as-the-ultimate-arbiter-of-the-cosmos","5. My cultural upbringing does not admit to human truth as the ultimate arbiter of the cosmos.",[11,167,168],{},"Though this may seem to be the most troubling of listed doubts, at both the level of bedeviled detail and that of divine abstraction, it is less fatal than it so appears. For modernity, the non-teleological character of both cosmic and organismic evolution has been overstated as the leverage by which God could be murdered. In fact, science makes no claims regarding the existence of transcendental beings. This is rather a question for religion, myth, and art. Evolution does not define its own ‘original’ creation, no matter how many cycles the ‘big-bang’ oriented universe has progressed through. The fact that science cannot define a starting point makes the entire question a non-starter. In a word, evolution does not obviate creation, it just sets it back a few jots.",[11,170,171],{},"On top of this, science is the one human creation that does not admit to purely human truth. In that, it ‘reveals’ itself, excuse the term, as a child of religion. If science had an ‘upbringing’ in the individuated sense, it too would tell us that there is a truth to the cosmos that lies far beyond those of human consciousness, though not necessarily beyond the future ken of that same consciousness or developments thereof and therein. Anyone who drives a car or a golf ball assumes upon the same science as reveals evolution to be an ongoing fact. The fact that one can be a creationist and a golfer is also not fatal, either to one’s character or to one’s epistemology. Though the best outlook of a scientist is the same as that of the philosopher, an agnostic, there are many perfectly objective scientists who imagine that they are simply exposing the truth of creation, a truth already present before human experience but also discoverable through human acumen. And there is nothing in science per se that proves them incorrect. In short, each of us, as human beings, is at once partial to the truth of things in that we can know only what our own historical period can know, and impartial, in that we as individuals stand aloof to any kind of truth and must needs do so because, as Krishnamurti stated, such a wider ‘truth is a pathless land’, and it cannot be found along any known way or track, nor by any creed nor crucis. Science reveals truths about the cosmos, and these are, by definition, not human. In that, it differs in no important sense from any ‘upbringing’ that casts up the value of truth upon an equally non-human source.",[110,173,175],{"id":174},"_6-science-is-itself-beholden-to-political-and-corporate-interests-in-the-questions-it-asks-in-the-first-place-how-can-i-trust-its-claims-to-objectivity","6. Science is itself beholden to political and corporate interests in the questions it asks in the first place. How can I trust its claims to objectivity?",[11,177,178],{},"This doubt is actually much more serious than the one preceding. Because basic scientific research is so unutterably expensive, it can come as no surprise that the only institutions capable of funding it are corporations and governments. And in almost every case, such institutions or their denizens have a vested interest in not only the questions that are to be investigated, but in the results that may, or may not, come from such investigations. It is often the case that the rest of us must simply be willing to take the ad hoc outcomes of an agenda-rich applied science as we can, whether in medicine, engineering, cybernetics, psychology or even demographics or economics. This in itself is not a total loss, because both private and public sector giants are out to please most of the people most of the time; in other words, this means that much of the time you and I will fall into that rubric of who is ‘the most’, and thus see some partial benefit from agenda research.",[11,180,181],{},"Alongside this, it is not only always possible, but even likely, that over the course of investigating a specific issue or phenomenon that other data will be revealed which in turn point to another vital discovery. In creating an anti-viral we may discover the genetic structure of an entire class of organisms. In creating a new material we may note that the way we currently build things out of older materials can be improved. A new source of energy might require a new kind of collector or turbine which in turn has other uses. So agenda science is not perfectly blind to the more general scientific process sometimes referred to as ‘pure’. Many subsequent grants come out of an originally quite narrowly assigned task. And this is the case in every facet of the sciences, including those which study humans themselves. Between the sense that agenda-driven research must generally adhere to available market, whether that be consumer or political or both, and the fact of the scientific process itself, we should not despair that most science that ‘gets done’ is funded by vested interests. For better or worse, we the people mostly share those self-same interests.",[11,183,184],{},"And this wider fact brings the issue of objectivity to the fore. Max Weber arguably remains the greatest mind on this job, and in spite of being also arguably the greatest expert on human relations, he was unequivocal in his own argument that we cannot leave the big decisions to those same experts. In this, at once he was stating that science has its place and it is one of utility alone, but more profoundly, that we need not get too hung up on the much-vaunted ‘objectivity’ outside of the realm of science precisely due to the objective fact that our diverse but nonetheless shared humanity experiences the world subjectively and not in some manner transcendental to life. And in that life, the expert, including the scientist, is a human like ourselves, with values, subjectivities, objections, and who may be subjected, objected to, and even devalued. But what we cannot be is invalidated, for we are not objects in the purely scientific sense, just as we are not logical constructs in that philosophical. So the doubt that questions my ‘trust’ in scientific objectivity is actually a self-doubt; it is not about science at all. To place this doubt back into science is the same kind of irresponsible action that we saw shoved the work of valuation, and specifically the kind which opens up onto self-understanding, back onto the scientist, calling upon her to become an ‘expert’ beyond her means.",[110,186,188],{"id":187},"_7-finally-it-seems-you-have-to-be-either-a-genius-or-at-least-well-heeled-even-to-become-a-scientist-if-i-am-neither-as-the-vast-majority-of-people-are-not-how-can-i-simply-hand-over-my-life-to-those-who-dont-know-what-its-like-to-be-me","7. Finally, it seems you have to be either a genius or at least well-heeled even to become a scientist. If I am neither, as the vast majority of people are not, how can I simply hand over my life to those who don’t know what it’s like to be me?",[11,190,191],{},"This doubt follows necessarily upon the lack of responsibility we take when we engage in declaiming valuation and self-understanding and pass it back to the scientist or the specific science as a discourse of expertise and authority. Yes, very few of us can become quantum mathematicians, but we as a world society do not need a bevy of such people given the subject matter at hand. There needs rather to be, over a sequence of generations, merely a quorum of chefs in this or that particular scientific kitchen to make the cosmic menu available to us. But it is we who must choose what to consume and indeed, make it digestible to our diverse druthers. And genius is itself too often very narrowly defined. Just as we cannot proclaim a Stephen Hawking to be the ‘smartest human in the world’, we cannot declaim our own personal wit as part of what imagines and thence constructs genius in others. No God survives the loss of His believers. Just so, no genius works in an asocial vacuum. It does not help, at all, that popular media both celebrates and mocks the so-gifted person as some kind of autistic freak, narrowly brilliant and thus both unthreatening to morality while at the same time being great fun at the burlesque big-top of resentful reckoning.",[11,193,194],{},"That said, it is an ongoing problem that science is mostly a realm of educated elites. I say this not in any sense that one cannot but be highly literate in specific aspects of mathematics and science in order to attain these lofty heights of discovery and even application, but rather that we live in a highly stratified society that does not always bring all of its actual talent to the table. There is, in a word, a gulf between the actual and the available, when it comes to gift and future ability. We cannot know where the next ‘genius’ is to be found, just as we cannot predict where the next discovery of such genius will be had. But doubt number seven orients itself too quickly to an issue which can be solved quite simply by continuing to open up educational opportunity for more marginal persons, especially those who are young. And the only way we ‘hand over’ our lives to science is if we ourselves refuse to take responsibility for them in the light of science. We are free to evaluate both its specific fruits and its general methods, though as once again Sagan more famously cautioned, we should not eagerly accept the former while at once so easily dismissing the latter.",[11,196,197],{},"More than any of this, we can respond to this final doubt by reminding ourselves that in fact scientists are enough ‘like us’ to not escape the basic human and social challenges that come with living on in the world. This aspect of such a response can have its ‘hallmark’ tones – scientists are parents, are workers, are children, are golfers even – but it is more salient to call to mind its aspect which is Whitmanesque; the scientist sleeps, the scientist loves, the scientist lives, the scientist dies.",[11,199,200],{},"The pattern of popular doubts regarding the place of the sciences in both social and personal life is based upon our unwillingness to practice, strictly speaking, a very much non-scientific form of self-questioning. It is not within the ambit of science but rather within that of philosophy to which we should bring these existential questions. A lack of understanding of what we are as human beings will inevitably bring to any human endeavor a similar incompetency. It is therefore to the ‘illiteracy of the self’ that I, as a philosopher would commend immediate attention. Where did my values come from? Why do I value this or that and perhaps deny this or that other value? How can this other seem so different from me that I cannot even speak of them, let alone to them? In asking such questions and many like others, I think you will find that your doubts about science are both a function of your self-doubt and the manner in which our culture, both popular and literate, portrays both science and those who practice it. In non-scientifically excavating the assumptions we each of us are too comfortable holding to ourselves, often at the expense of the other, we become at the personal level as the scientist already is at that cosmic. This is why the study of the cosmos is at once a ‘personal journey’ and one that takes our very person completely out of the equation, for it is a journey that compels beings to contemplate Being. That we can do this, within our abbreviated consciousness and inside the brevity of human history, is the truer meaning of both genius and humanity alike.",{"title":51,"searchDepth":52,"depth":52,"links":202},[203,204,205,206,207,208,209],{"id":112,"depth":52,"text":113},{"id":122,"depth":52,"text":123},{"id":135,"depth":52,"text":136},{"id":151,"depth":52,"text":152},{"id":164,"depth":52,"text":165},{"id":174,"depth":52,"text":175},{"id":187,"depth":52,"text":188},"2022-11-28",{},"/articles/why-is-science-doubted",20,{"title":68,"description":73},{"loc":212},"articles/why-is-science-doubted","b2rnTa-9ixL_KvKFhjKKGv93fFHmpc45yiGa9YLnrKo",{"id":219,"title":220,"body":221,"date":254,"description":225,"extension":55,"head":56,"image":56,"meta":255,"navigation":58,"ogImage":56,"order":256,"path":257,"readTime":258,"robots":56,"schemaOrg":56,"seo":259,"sitemap":260,"stem":261,"tags":56,"updatedAt":56,"__hash__":262},"articles/articles/online-harm-groups.md","Wellness Bulletin #1: Analyzing On-Line Harm Groups",{"type":8,"value":222,"toc":252},[223,226,229,232,235,238,249],[11,224,225],{},"The recent phenomenon of adolescents urging their virtual peers to commit acts of self-harm and the harming of others constitutes the very crest of a wave of digital youth violence. Predators come from abusive homes, while their prey come from homes in which they feel isolated and alienated, lacking attention and affection. The majority of the former are male, of the latter, female. They are to be wed within our novel virtual church, with it fullest faux humanity in its digital pews. On-Line ‘communities’ are such in name only; they are quite loosely connected, and often involved in internecine competition and rivalry wherein members seek to enhance their status by the sheer numbers of victims they can claim. They cajole their prey into self-scarification, the results of which are mindful of nothing other than the ‘kill logos’ drawn on fighter planes during the world wars. The more enemy aircraft one had shot down, the greater one’s status as a pilot. Similarly, armor aces and their crews would often record numbers of enemy ‘kills’ on the chasses of their respective tanks. The torsos and limbs of young women are the chasses and fuselages of the predators who populate groups such as ‘764’ and ‘O9A’. There have been a number of suicides associated with these interactions, for the ultimate ask is to have one’s acolyte sacrifice their life, while of course recording it, for the vicarious pleasure of the predator. Exhorting the death of the other is the transcendental demand which validates one’s own continuing existence. It is the evidence necessary to convince a mortal that he is, in his own eyes, divine.",[11,227,228],{},"While disturbing in its practice, there is in fact nothing new in its principles. Seen anthropologically, self-sacrifice as a gift to a master, to an embodied deity, or to a political ruler, is an essential, if extreme, aspect of political organization in general. Those who are marginal to the contemporary polis, through the effect of abuse, mental illness, anomie or yet ressentiment, seek to contrive their own society, wherein they are themselves the masters and leaders. They work fervently to discover those from whom they may extract favors; sexual, emotional, psychological, and even mortal. Young women who lack the acknowledgement of others, and who report the affection and adoration they receive during the ‘grooming’ process undertaken by on-line predators makes them feel valued and thus gives them a novel sense of self-worth, are ultimately betrayed by their suitors. Yet it appears to take a great deal of suffering, manipulation, abuse and even torture, to overcome the set-up of adoration and fondness engendered by the predator. Some victims are able to shake themselves out of this tantalus, while others are not, perhaps going to the grave believing that their sacrifice was but the sternest test of authentic love.",[11,230,231],{},"It is vexing, to say the least, that the most noble principles which humanity has created for itself – 1. Self-sacrifice on behalf of a community in altruistic suicide; the chief vehicle of warfare amongst social contract cultures based upon mechanical solidarity; 2. Self-sacrifice to rescue and preserve the life of another individual: the duty of parent to child, for instance, or of the adult to the youth in general; 3. Self-sacrifice as the ultimate act of the lovers’ bond; a favorite in literature and opera, with Tristan und Isolde being perhaps its most far-reaching expression – can be debased and given an infernal twist. The ease of which cultural tropes can be represented within the shadows of social life speaks to their ubiquitous presence in our mental template. Of course, we do not here speak of ‘human nature’, for the essence of being human is to adapt and to ever be a generalist; there is no singular human nature. But what is being connected in the fetid fake-lore and desperate disingenuities of on-line harm groups is the essential necessity for a human being to feel wanted, loved, and thus to become part of something larger than oneself.",[11,233,234],{},"This is the synchronicity of all such forms of deviant assemblies. Street gangs serve as surrogate families, just as do political groups such as those Neo-Nazi, White Supremacist, and the like. Religious cults serve the same needs, as do the more normative churches, gaming communities, and hobbyists. There is a spectrum, likely almost measurable, whereupon two variables chart their respective courses; rate of alienation over against rate of disaffectivity or ressentiment. The cult registers high on both counts, as do on-line harm groups and the like. The virtual thread of Jaguar owners or like hobbyists registers correspondingly low on both counts, and one can easily fill in exemplifications of any ratio in between these extremes. The point is, however, that the seeking of community, of whatever sort, is an absolute prerequisite, not for personal improvement or yet the good life, but for personhood and human life itself.",[11,236,237],{},"Given this, anthropological history runs into psychopathology. The works of Bataille, within the discourse of the former, and those of Minkowski, in the latter, contain more than enough analysis and explanation to counter any lightheaded accounts of what precisely is ‘going on’ with the seeming advent of on-line harm and hate groups, often connected as they are. In a word, anomie cannot be used as a failsafe against the accursed share; autism will be the result in each attempted case. The hobbyist manifests a generally benign and controlled form of autism. His is a semi-disconnected world within which only others of his marque and specialty reside. The key difference between the philatelist and the child predator is that the former regularly steps out of his bell-jar and rejoins the remainder of his fellowpersons as a self amongst selves. The latter only does so when compelled, sometimes through violence, and in turn learns that violence can be a most effective source of suasion. For sociopathy only hails from three origins:",[24,239,240,243,246],{},[27,241,242],{},"A mental pathology that has created for the patient a separate world; those suffering from schizo-affective disorders or even schizophrenia – it should be noted that autism is itself originally a mere manifest of the schizophrenic condition – are thus highly suggestible to a knowing grooming but at once susceptible to developing for themselves a predatory prowl, seeking to bring others into their projection, which is for them already a form of self-torture.",[27,244,245],{},"A severely alienated self-consciousness that does not develop an internal rationale but rather accepts an external analytic which is betrayed by its paranoia and talent for making conspiratorial connections which do not exist in fact. One of the basic problems of historical consciousness, in which we are made aware that the past can always and again be rewritten by the present, allows a certain latitude for the conspiracist to reinterpret world events. This kind of personality also manifests as both predator and prey.",[27,247,248],{},"A sense of mastery and of destiny which can be summed as the messianic complex. Success in politics or in business can germinate a self conception that gives this person a self-promoted aura which in turn explains their dramatic rise to status and power. Lord Acton, in a letter, penned what has become a cliché, if yet a wise one, when he spoke of ‘absolute power corrupting absolutely’. Many of the oligarchs, plutocrats, and other political leaders of our time provide nothing other than role models for the on-line predator, as their mission is no different; the adoration of, and power over, others.",[11,250,251],{},"If we combine the subjective alienation of the anomic, the ressentiment felt by the marginalized, and the saturation of our popular sensibilities by the shiny success of the latter-day gods on earth, it is in fact not astonishing in the least to witness the phenomenon of guided self-harm. Though it could be said to lie at the polar opposite of health and wellness on-line guides, such as those of Calm and HeadSpace, the dynamics utilized by on-line harm and hate are not at all so dissimilar to preclude analysis. My own health and wellness company makes virtual self-help and self-improvement guides, and the graduated steps the client follows mimic the processes of any cult initiation, religious conversion, or sexual self-harm grooming, if assuredly none of these contents. The consistency and indeed essence of moving a human being from one frame of mind to another is psychologically old hat, and indeed, it is rather to ethnography that we must turn in order to understand its deepest language. For the Ursprache of consciousness-altering methods is also the well-spring of both our reason and our imagination. These two most human essences can be turned to the noble or the base, and thus the on-line harm promoter asks of us a challenging question: who of us is capable of distinguishing the dreams of reason from its equally attendant nightmares?",{"title":51,"searchDepth":52,"depth":52,"links":253},[],"2025-03-23",{},3,"/articles/online-harm-groups",8,{"title":220,"description":225},{"loc":257},"articles/online-harm-groups","n22lainiXZtfoC5FyhzvYpvhhvJHivVBtkBlTmres78",{"id":264,"title":265,"body":266,"date":302,"description":303,"extension":55,"head":56,"image":56,"meta":304,"navigation":58,"ogImage":56,"order":305,"path":306,"readTime":307,"robots":56,"schemaOrg":56,"seo":308,"sitemap":309,"stem":310,"tags":56,"updatedAt":56,"__hash__":311},"articles/articles/understanding-others.md","Understanding Others",{"type":8,"value":267,"toc":300},[268,276,279,282,285,288,291,294,297],[11,269,270,271,275],{},"“…we must remember this, that the art of understanding adversaries is an innovation of the present century, characteristic of the historic age. Formerly, a man was exhausted by the effort of making out his own meaning, with the help of his friends. The definition and comparison of systems which occupies so much of our recent literature was unknown, and everybody who was wrong was supposed to be very wrong indeed.” (Dahlberg-Acton 1906:202 ",[272,273,274],"span",{},"1895",").",[11,277,278],{},"The great challenge of our own age, that which imagines itself as verging upon post-historical, remains an historical challenge. The shock of the other, her very existence, both promotes this challenge into an orbit that appears dauntingly distant, but also demotes the value of taking up this challenge as something unworthy of our collective efforts. For the other is at first no friend. And yet the stakes could not be higher. Even in Lord Acton’s period, which is still very much our own as modulated from imperial colonialism to economic neo-colonialism, from biopower presumed to biopower desired, from sex to gender, from race to ethnicity, from labor-based classes to those status-based and so on, people were well aware of the historical cost, not so much of misunderstanding, but of deliberate disagreement for the sake of political opportunism and messianistic adoration. Like moving to the relative minor from the nineteenth century’s dominant major key, our own time has been modulated by these structural forces so that the otherness of the other is much more apparent to us, and much more troubling. There no longer is a ‘white man’s burden’, and if anything, fashionable discourse says to us the opposite: that the white man has imposed a burden upon the world that reaches out from beyond his own recently dug grave. Yet it was this very personage who invented the concept of understanding, after many painstaking millennia. Almost all of our philosophical ideas which aid us in coming to both the understanding of the other and what is also of the utmost, one’s own self-understanding, emerge from the ethics of the West, authored and thought out loud by the best of what is often considered a bad lot.",[11,280,281],{},"If this sounds apologetic in any way, it is because abandoning this discourse means that we are thrown back over into a pre-modernity that is too sure of itself; its religious beliefs, its sense of social order, its political reason, its morality. The Enlightenment, the penultimate fruit of the tree of reason that was first planted some 2.6K years ago in Greece, is the source of historical understanding and also that ethical, for it goes beyond the sense that tolerance alone is a good enough showing to otherness as a principle, just as it makes larger the compassion that was to be shown, in Christian ethics, to the other as an individual. This is one of the reasons why Acton refers to understanding the other as an ‘art’. Art simultaneously participates in the universal and the individual. It brings the cosmos to the person without presuming to personalize it. It allows the intimate to experience the infinite without aggrandizing what occurs between persons into a universal force. Similarly the art of self-understanding, which too must attain a new intimacy in the face of an overwhelming and anonymous world, let alone the incomparably larger cosmos.",[11,283,284],{},"If this is an ideal, let me suggest that before one can attain art, one must task oneself with the more modest act. The act of understanding the other is a beginning, but in our own day, even this appears to be often absent. We hear popular writers speaking of ‘reaching out’ to one another, of tolerance, compassion, even acceptance, but are any of these, or can any combinations thereof, truly generate an authentic understanding of the other as a vehicle for otherness? Here, I am using the term to connote neither the untoward nor the uncanny as such. Yes, both are present in the encounter with the other insofar as the first may be the case if we fail to understand something of her – she may end up presenting a threat to our own parochialism, which is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself – and the second occurs simply because of the shock of realizing that another human being can in fact be so different from me that I am stretched to recognize her as human. The untoward is what we seek to avoid, but the uncanny cannot be expunged. We simply have to accept this in ourselves through the other as part of the act of understanding. For otherness also resides within, from the metaphoric rhetoric of the unconscious life, to the role stress and conflict that occupies our waking hours. It is quite enough most of the time and for most of us, to nod again to Acton, to ‘make out our own meanings’, oft enough without any help at all, from either friend and certainly not from foe.",[11,286,287],{},"Just so, just now, we see that friend and foe are becoming all too clear, so much so that if one is not the one, one is the other. This is the very essence of pre-modernity in all of its diverse organizational forms. From hunting and gathering, through horticulture and agrarian means of production, the stranger could not be one of us. It is a long-germinating resonance of the second Great Awakening period (c.1790-1840) in the USA that American politics – ironically heralded as the most ingenious, reasoned and liberating if experimental dynamic in world history by De Tocqueville at the very moment it was about to turn inward and fold back upon itself – has seemingly regressed into a bipolar pre-modernity; one is either friend or foe and there is nothing, and more importantly, no one, in between.",[11,289,290],{},"The art of understanding is the culmination of a series of acts which direct themselves toward a sense of self-recognition, thence further, toward a more risky comprehension that the other really is her own person who is under no obligation to agree with me about anything at all. Coming to terms with the other is at first a mere political exercise, but right now we appear to be lacking even this. Such terms are necessary in order for a society to function in its basic sense. We do seem to be starting at a zero point, or rather, restarting. This is due to the fact that what were originally very small populations west of the Alleghenies – it is important to note that the first railhead through this range was only accomplished in 1857 – grew at a rate similar to their political disenfranchisement. When agriculture and ranching became themselves marginal to the emerging industrial economy, these Americans had already girded themselves with a century of ‘awakened’ ideas. If the Puritans were intolerant and neurotic, those whom they pushed westward were idealistic and victimized. This victimology, present from the moment the new republic recognized itself in a post-colonial core, urban, commercial, capitalist, and seeking its own culture, has come down to us as a wider Western culture as the song of all those who suffer from yet larger forces; chief amongst them, globalization. But while Western economies are downshifted by the intense competition afforded by yet further others – those yet more distant and far more strange than even the neighbor who votes for the other party – the deeper source of marginality is the very history of internal colonization and the sheer geography of a land unlike anything one’s ancestors could have imagined. A big land required a big god, required a big man, required a big stick. But did it require a big State, a big heart, a big purse? Perhaps in contradiction with itself, the USA got all of those aspects of largeness, amongst others. ‘Very well, I contain multitudes’, Whitman famously writes at the moment the Alleghenies were pierced by the new industry. Whitman is known as the first truly modern American artist precisely because he recognizes the other inside of himself. In our own age, and contrary to any idea that emanated from that previous, otherness is not something distant, obscure, inhuman, and necessarily defined by existential threat, of whatever nature the corresponding variables may have been in one historical context to the next. But both the language and the countenance of this Great Awakening promoted the old ideas once again to the fore. With just as great an irony, the nation that was once the radical hope of the enlightened world in two centuries would risk becoming a caricature of itself.",[11,292,293],{},"This is why the act of understanding the other must come before that very other, in reaction to our malicious mocking and vindictive vitriol, makes herself into the very caricature we had all along presumed her to be. The rioters at DC were the self-fulfilling prophecy imagined by all those who had marginalized them over the decades. We tend to make our own enemies, most especially, of ourselves. This is why the act precedes the art, just as an apprenticeship comes before any supposed mastery. We are not asking each other to become such masters overnight. Rather, we are proposing the modest endeavor of authentically trying to comprehend what the other really needs, what they think of the world, who they imagine themselves to be. That this is the essence of any human relationship should not be lost on us. For the others are also married, are also working, are also trying to ‘make their own meaning’ in the face of powerfully anonymous forces which are far beyond any individual’s control. The sense that globalization is alone the wedge that drives the West apart from itself is simply another way of pushing off on a yet stranger other the responsibility for self-understanding. If my neighbor is, after all, not my enemy, then the Chinese person is, the Indian person, the Muslim. These ‘strangers at the gates’, to allude to Kipling once again, have, like the rioters, found their way into our way of life. But they are who they are, and not caricatures, not neighbors in the narrow sense. So we must extend the sense of self-understanding, and the only manner of doing so is by augmenting what was originally a religious ethics with that of post-religious thought.",[11,295,296],{},"In book three of my new trilogy, the newly conjoined Queen Guinevere’s final words to the major narrative heroine, telling her at once of the state of her own lover as well as the state of our contemporary love in general, are as follows: “She is alive but you must not delay. The power she has is munificent, but the power they have is not based on one soul, however great. It is known that Dvorak said of Brahms, ‘such a great man, such a great soul, but he believes in nothing.’ Take heed of this mischance, modernity, and choose carefully your nothing.” Our conception of love, and who is worthy of it, are endangered. It is because we have severe doubts regarding our own worthiness and on both counts; are we deserving of love and our we the ones who can love? ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ always carried this deeper caveat: it assumes one can love oneself. This is the ‘as’. Then again, to imagine that only we are worthy of love, our own or that of another, is to conflate the abstract ethic with the practical act. It is to submerge a revolutionary sensibility back into a revelationary discourse. What is appropriately ‘revealed’ by relatively freeing ethics from metaphysics is not religion but rather otherness, both internal to self and external in the other to self. Loving oneself includes the task of understanding that we are not one thing, singular, stable, secure in our knowledge of the world. Our global rivals have shed their own parochiality enough to step onto the world stage. Is it either reasonable or ethical that we shrink back before their example and turn inward, replacing what they were with ourselves?",[11,298,299],{},"Enjoin then the act of understanding, which discloses to one’s own being not merely the presence of the other as if she were a distraction or an annoyance, a threat mortal or otherwise, but in fact the authenticity of humanity in its diversity and in its similarity. For in the end we are both like and unlike the other. We may also like and dislike them, just as we already know that we too are likeable on one day, the other on another. Choosing carefully our unbelief includes the ability to comprehend that belief of some sort remains relevant. Even so, of whatever ethic it may promote, the otherness of the other, the difference within, must become a part thereof. The currently faithless faith in ourselves travels with us only until we reach the limen over which otherness dwells. Today, that threshold is what separates the neighbor that must be, and not the stranger that she has previously been.",{"title":51,"searchDepth":52,"depth":52,"links":301},[],"2025-03-01","“…we must remember this, that the art of understanding adversaries is an innovation of the present century, characteristic of the historic age. Formerly, a man was exhausted by the effort of making out his own meaning, with the help of his friends. The definition and comparison of systems which occupies so much of our recent literature was unknown, and everybody who was wrong was supposed to be very wrong indeed.” (Dahlberg-Acton 1906:202 1895).",{},4,"/articles/understanding-others",9,{"title":265,"description":303},{"loc":306},"articles/understanding-others","HEhpbTHGazHjGItKyHlg_yKD214YWd2Go7CEhUL1vLE",{"id":313,"title":314,"body":315,"date":343,"description":319,"extension":55,"head":56,"image":56,"meta":344,"navigation":58,"ogImage":56,"order":345,"path":346,"readTime":61,"robots":56,"schemaOrg":56,"seo":347,"sitemap":348,"stem":349,"tags":56,"updatedAt":56,"__hash__":350},"articles/articles/how-do-i-fit-into-the-world.md","How Do I Fit into the World?",{"type":8,"value":316,"toc":341},[317,320,323,326,329,332,335,338],[11,318,319],{},"When I regain the day, upon awakening, the mode of reality into which I am extended shifts. I had been asleep, traveling within the world of dreams, for the most part autonomic in orientation; the involuntary communication of states of bodily function. We do not know precisely the ratio amongst dreams of anxiety, of neurosis, and those simple ‘public service’ announcements that prevent me from minor midnight mishap, but what is clear is that in each genre of dream, hyperbole, metaphor, and desire are employed to get the message across. The ‘reality’ of dreams is not entirely unreal, since it borrows heavily from my waking experiences with real others alive to our shared world, but due to their unshared and unshareable character, dreams lack the sociality of the social which our daily interactions with those same others possess. Though I may sometimes discover a limited volition within the dream-sequence, I am never ‘in control’ of the space of action itself. In this, dreams also mimic the wide-awake reality; the world at large is as well mostly beyond my individual control. Yet neither are dreams irreal, the mode of reality befitting the vision. Instead, it is their surreality that, upon awakening, either shocks or amuses us. The most important factor for any model of reality is that the distinctions between its modes must be quite significant. For realities, by their nature and definition, cannot share their selfsame presence.",[11,321,322],{},"In experiencing a vision, for instance, I depart from the mutually shared social reality of my contemporaries. This irreality is sudden, prompting Kierkegaard to note that it is often received by us as a form of evil. Yet the unplanned and unexpected irruption of the Nothing or perhaps only the non-rational is, as a phenomenological event, no different in its structure than that of the phantasm, wherein we consciously plan for ‘projects of action’. My responses to it are inverted, as I can only react consciously to the irreal, rather than plan for it and thus expect it, but the elements of the ‘interaction’ do not differ from any other self-world experience that may come my way. In waking, social reality too I find that I am oft only reacting to others’ actions rather than initiating my own before being overtaken by events local or general. The chief difference demarcating the irreal from the real is that the former attempts a waking dream. The vision is the middle ground between dreaming and waking, between fantasy and reality. As Rod Serling might have it, ‘it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge’. This is perhaps too strong a characterization of the vision proper, but apt enough for a theatrical version thereof. Yet within this eloquent line does lie the sense that radically other forms of knowing present to us a challenging choice: do we take them into ourselves and thus become somewhat different than our human fellows, or do we leap into their fire and thus potentially lose our humanity entire?",[11,324,325],{},"If an excursus into the ‘twilight zone’ of irreality is not always to our advantage, we do maintain an anchor out to the windward cast of the realismus, where, appropriately, the sensus communis of normative social life rules the day. We have no such access when dreaming, and must first awaken to once again partake in the world as we know it to have been, and as we assume it shall continue to be. The world as a worlding being provides this safer succor to our mortal self. It does not need us, and thus is able to nurture our finite beings with the goal understood to be itself a confrontation with both tradition, on the one hand, and finitudinal futurity, on the other. Neither dreams nor visions have either of these goals, nor are such recognizable when we are ourselves within their odd, even oddball, embrace. The waking dream of the vision might appear to be shared and thence shareable, but in fact the visionary finds that he must retreat from the irreal source of wisdom in order to share it with others. This is why the descent from the mountaintop is a near universal feature of the cosmogony of morality, for instance. From Moses to Zarathustra, the visionary, as a vehicle for the new sociality and as a midwife for the world to come, cannot remain in the space of the vision itself. Dreams, by contrast, present no radically liminal landscape, for each night everyone enters into her own version thereof, and upon awakening, returns to the collective consciousness of both symbolic forms and behavioral norms.",[11,327,328],{},"This is the ‘lifeworld’ of Schutz. It implies, without specific judgment, that neither do visions nor dreams possess that which animates conscious being; life itself. As Lennon sang, ‘it is not living’, referring to dreams in what was arguably the most important song of the 1960s, simply taken as creating a break from the going-rate. Given that ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ (1966) was used as the sonic backdrop to a crucial moment in the series Madmen, marking the advent of the new social reality of the then youthful baby-boom, we are thrown into both a cultural maelstrom as well as a pop-culture event. Born in that same year, I had no conscious experience thereof, even though I was alive therein. And this distinction too is of import, because lived experience must first be in possession of a modicum of rational consciousness, the very thing generally absent in both dreams and visions. The lifeworld enumerates the structures of shared consciousness, including the conscience, self-consciousness, and self-understanding. The lifeworld thus has its ‘personal’ side, if you will, wherein I, as a reflective agent in the world, come face to face with my ownmost being as a social character. The Husserlian might protest that the lifeworld is a model only for the phenomenological psychology of hyletic reality alone, but though this is a reasonable criticism which brings our attention toward not abusing the language of phenomenology, it is not as germane when we as well become aware that eidetic structures must, if they are to themselves animate the ‘collective consciousness’ without recourse to mythos, remain as part of the scientifically irreal. In ‘On Multiple Realities’ (1953), Schutz implies that scientific reality is in fact the practical means by which cross-cultural communication can occur in reality at all. Phenomenology, when examining the structures of consciousness rather than those of the lifeworld, is the irreal version of science.",[11,330,331],{},"Within the lifeworld, I am presented with two agentive options: the social reality of my peers and contemporaries, and the social world of humanity as a whole. I take the former as a given, and also take that others will do the same, on our mutual behalf. I do not question the ‘whys’ of the day-to-day, but rather duly perform them, without much conscious effort, and the affront I take when others do not live up to the standards of the day reminds me that this form of agency, acting in the social reality, is both a performance and does require some effort after all. Most of the tension in today’s political life emanates from the emerging sense that a growing number of these others are unwilling or unable to ‘do their part’ in upholding the performance-based version of the social world. If they refuse to do so, or recuse themselves from this shared effort in some other manner, they move from simply being an ‘other-like-myself’ to a more authentic otherness, and thus may constitute a threat to the reality of the lifeworld itself. Through this possibility, I discover that in fact social reality is not a given, since it requires daily upkeep. Part of that work is expressed in me being able to take this reality as a given, which mirrors the selfhood about which I too am required to make certain assumptions. None of this, however, touches the question of ‘existence’, which is contiguous with other kinds of ‘why’ questions that the normative person leaves for the philosopher. Within the phenomenology that seeks to understand the structures of consciousness itself, a kind of ‘Kantian’ sensibility is present. But in social reality, we are not Kantians but rather Jamesians; wholly pragmatic in outlook and aware of the general rubric that only the outcome matters.",[11,333,334],{},"It is not quite the same stance that I bring to the social world, which, in contrast with social reality, includes the past, as well as something of the sense of a general future, within its phenomenological ambit. History is our chief source of what has been in relation to the career of our species. Archaeology and paleoanthropology extend the technical and temporal reach of history, but they neither alter its mandate nor its scope. Here, instead of simply living out the day in a calculated indifference to its ‘how’ – why these norms instead of others, for instance – I can delve into their history, their own careers, and the politics presented in other times and places that eventually combined to bring us to where we are right now. The social world does not attempt to examine itself as an ontological form, but it also does not simply shrug off any epistemic analysis. The discourses of the sciences too are available in the social world, whereas once again in social reality they are sloughed off as areas for the specialist alone. It is clear, then, that on any given day, I can cross from social reality into the social world more widely, precisely in order to explain, at least to myself, why and how the former functions the way it does. Indeed, if I am a cultural newcomer, I must make this crossing not only on a daily basis, but many times per day. Schutz’s ‘The Stranger’, (1944), remains the most exacting, and even poignant, account of this challenging dynamic. Here, I am presented with the ultimate problem of distinguishing what constitutes social reality for my new hosts, and am flummoxed by the realization that social ‘reality’ is itself plural in nature via human culture itself. This is why it is scientific reality which is the only generalizable form. Dreams, phantasms, visions, and most vexingly, even wide-awake social reality are not portable in any ultimate sense. All the more so the altered realities of the addict or the mentally ill cannot provide the species with any kind of useable works in view of the future. For it is specifically Dasein’s future-orientedness that both allows me to shore up the waking reality with which I am most familiar, as well as take occasional forays into the more aware and reflective space of the social world.",[11,336,337],{},"But in order to do so, I must myself maintain the rational consciousness which not only befits social reality but as well reproduces it. This dynamic, between reproduction and reflection, between action and contemplation, and between the historical act and the aesthetic work, compels me to attend to its inherent tension: without respect of its origins, social reality’s primary goal is to simply get through each day, just as my own goal is the same. This goal can conflict with any sense that I should more deeply understand why I have this goal in the first place. To what end, I might ask, is the effort expended in and for mundane life? What is the ‘me’ that is offered such solace in the routine, the otiose, and the repetitive? And why do I often prefer this version of myself over against the human being possessed of, and indeed, created by, the confluence of reason and imagination and given an existential hold upon temporality through both memory and anticipation? At first, this appears a pressing issue: social reality neither requires nor encourages reflective or critical thought. The social world contains the discourses of both, but it is still up to me to both access them and thence put them to living use. If I take a second glance at my predicament, I realize that it is not quite as tense and dire as it seems. In fact, even in daily life, there are times when I have to reflect upon my actions. Very often it is through the presence of others which cautions me to take a step away from action, and thereby enter into a more contemplative stance. When this does occur, I find myself able to question more generally the reality of my hearth. I need not become a philosopher to do the work necessary to engender self-examination with a view to attaining a mature self-understanding. I need not even alter social reality to engage in this species-essence project. I only need to alter my own sensibility which I usually bring to it.",[11,339,340],{},"And this is precisely where the perspective of all the generally available realities come into play. I may be inspired by a vision, enlightened by a dream, shuttered by a passing addiction, relieved of a mental illness, become learned and rational through the sciences, or take on the guise of the future within the phantasm. Social reality does itself engage, willingly or no, with these other six forms, all of which may be found within the combination of the social world and that which abruptly breaks in upon it, emanating from some lesser known function of consciousness itself. When I do gain the perspective of multiple realities, I find that both my self and my being within the world’s worlding of itself become more adeptly apt and more deeply alive. For the selfhood of the world rests in its ability to go its own way, apart from my intents or desires. Just so, any authentic worldliness that I accrue to myself, living within the landscape of both a shared and waking social reverie, must do the same.",{"title":51,"searchDepth":52,"depth":52,"links":342},[],"2024-12-13",{},5,"/articles/how-do-i-fit-into-the-world",{"title":314,"description":319},{"loc":346},"articles/how-do-i-fit-into-the-world","0wDGC--bfdwquWjlWsg6iYTZlEpJxuf-2EOp3yrjxq0",{"id":352,"title":353,"body":354,"date":528,"description":358,"extension":55,"head":56,"image":56,"meta":529,"navigation":58,"ogImage":56,"order":530,"path":531,"readTime":61,"robots":56,"schemaOrg":56,"seo":532,"sitemap":533,"stem":534,"tags":56,"updatedAt":56,"__hash__":535},"articles/articles/why-do-minors-make-pornography.md","Wellness Bulletin #2: Why Do Minors Make Pornography?",{"type":8,"value":355,"toc":522},[356,359,362,365,369,372,375,378,382,385,388,392,395,398,401,404,407,410,413,416,419,422,425,428,431,434,437,440,443,446,449,452,455,458,461,464,467,470,473,476,479,482,485,488,491,494,497,500,503,506,510,513,516,519],[11,357,358],{},"“I thought I’d become entranced with myself. I got into it because I wanted to have fun and it’s my body, right? But instead of it being ‘hey, look at me’, it quickly became ‘hey, look at all the people looking at me.’ It was all about the numbers.” (19-year-old female university student).",[11,360,361],{},"“My only regret is that I started too young. I was twelve. I wouldn’t recommend it before say, 16, as my body is now no different than it was at 16. But at 12 I was so taken with myself and that I was in control, you know? And all these thousands of people following me. But ten years later, I look at those people and say, ‘Uh, excuse me? You’re following a naked 12-year-old. There’s something seriously wrong here.” (22-year-old female university graduate).",[11,363,364],{},"“Girls who are on the net want to be on the net. It’s that simple. Many do, most don’t. It’s like anything else you do, from vaping to playing volleyball. Most don’t, but some do, who cares? And yeah, you’re told about risks, but how many suicides have there actually been? I’ve read of three in the backstory news over the past twenty years. Three! Out of tens of thousands of girls per month, who knows, maybe way more. You’ve got a better chance of being struck by lightning, speaking of risks.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).",[110,366,368],{"id":367},"introduction","Introduction:",[11,370,371],{},"When I consulted as an expert for the senate committee tasked with setting new government policy preventing access to violent pornography by minors, I was struck by the assumptions everyone in the conversation made about the topic itself. Eventually, Bill S-210, (age verification for online porn sites), was adopted by said body on April 18, 2023. Its coverage had, perhaps inevitably, generalized itself from restricting access to ‘violent’ pornography to all online pornographic sites. In good faith, I did not suspect the bill’s sponsors of any prior intent to widen the scope of the bill, and indeed, given that one could neither properly define ‘violence’ in sexual portrayals with any efficacy, and that even if one could, such (per)versions of intimacy would be mixed in with all other possible versions, given the scope of the sites in question themselves, any bill seeking to restrict access thereto for minors would, in the end, have to inure blanket coverage. I supported the bill as is, in practice.",[11,373,374],{},"But the process left many unanswered questions. Why did minors seek out pornography, even participate directly in making it? Why did adults seek to limit such access, even ban it outright? The usual arguments hailing from developmental psychology were, to a philosopher’s mind, verging on the vacuous. Psychology itself is the source of our knowledge of children’s sexuality. Children are sexual beings. The question must rather run along the lines of the sexualization of children for adults. And this is not a question for psychology at all, but instead, one for ethics. As the American Psychiatric Association defines pedophilia using phrases such as ‘a prurient interest in children under 12’, by its own discursive and policy standards, the banning of youth access to pornography must, in turn, be argued as well along lines other than those from psychology. The argument I put forward to the committee is that, under Canadian law, persons under the age of 18 cannot have sex for money. This was the only point of consistency wherein an outright ban of access for those between ages 12 and 17 would make any ethical sense. Since pornography as an industry is not truly about sex but rather money, minors should not be able to participate in it.",[11,376,377],{},"But what of pornography itself? Between parent-pandering politicians, schools concerned about lawsuits, psychologists and counselors drumming up business for themselves, and NPO’s fulminating the latest moral panics, it was clear that neither clarity nor objectivity were to be found in the public sphere regarding issues surrounding youth and shared sexuality. In order to discover the reality of such a conflicted and ideologically laden scene, it was equally clear that one had to properly study it oneself. And for better or worse, I did.",[110,379,381],{"id":380},"the-study","The Study:",[11,383,384],{},"For the past three years I employed a battery of mixed qualitative methods, including unobtrusive, indirect participation, and interview as well as dialogue. Participants were solicited from their on-line profiles found either on porn servers or from my own academic networks, and the therapists were recruited from the Psychology Today listings. I was up-front uncomfortable about asking actual minors about their intimate doings and so I did not attempt to do so. This is a weakness in the study, as I had only past and indirect access to youth participation in pornography, through the voices of those who were youth in that past but had in the interim, before the study commenced, become legal adults. The epigraphs above are examples of hundreds of like interview out-takes. Some of the methods involved deception, including posing as a female youth online to attract groomers in hopes of disclosing the process by which illicit pornographers recruit their victims, and posing as a patient with a pornography addiction in order to access psychotherapists’ on-the-ground practices and methods of combatting this medically real health issue. As a veteran member of 4 university research ethics boards and a co-founder of two, I was well aware of both the pitfalls of engaging in deliberate deception during research as well as the ‘dangers to self’ involved in certain kinds of human subjects ethnography. Indeed, as an ethicist, it was often my role on such bodies to look for possible risks to researchers and over the years, I found many. This specific study presented a number of risks, since I was interacting virtually with both criminals and at-risk young adults. Perhaps ironically, perhaps fittingly, the vehicle of digital media lessened those risks for my vocation just as the informants claimed it did for theirs.",[11,386,387],{},"Such a study would not have passed any ethics board I sat on – not on my watch, at least - but since I am long outside of the institutional circle, itself mostly concerned with litigation against it and less so about the truth of things, as an independent scholar I remained uniquely qualified to engage in this kind of research, having both twenty years of social science fieldwork behind me, much of it in arenas of social deviance and other marginal communities such as UFO cults, American Civil War reenactors, and artists. I had as well authored the first detailed scientific study of a specific genre of sexuality, the BDSM theatre, which appeared variously in peer reviewed journals as well as in my monographs of 2006 and 2011B. Even so, this recent study was different than any other I have completed in a number of important ways: 1. I no longer was capable, nor felt it necessary, to include amongst the methods those of direct participation. 2. The atmosphere surrounding the topic at hand was muddied beyond any possible clarity by moralizing, anxiety, and fashionable politics, as well as a vague fear of technology in general; and 3. Given 2, it is unlikely anyone will pay the least bit of attention to the nonetheless interesting results thereof.",[110,389,391],{"id":390},"a-summary-of-the-responses","A Summary of the Responses:",[11,393,394],{},"All vectors requiring the suite of methods outlined above were ongoing simultaneously. It invoked, in the traditionalist view, a sense of that old-world ethnographic immersion, with the major exception that I had no novel ‘natural language’ to learn, as one would do, with pith helmet atop head and notebook in hand, ‘among the natives’. Nevertheless, I found the denizens of the pornographic scene to indeed be restless in their own, sometimes fetching, manner:",[11,396,397],{},"“I was like, ‘Okay, I know I’m hot’. All my friends adored me. I wanted to pay for my own college. So, I get on there and I’ve got thousands, then tens of thousands of views and so on. I felt like I was the hottest thing out there. It was very empowering. But then I checked out the competition and it was like, ‘Okay, yeah, she’s kinda hot too’, and ‘oh, uh, okay, she’s hot’, and ‘Hmm, damn, she really is hot!’ and on and on, right? And then the whole thing became kind of a spiteful, vindictive battle of who could generate the most followers and you know these were all the same people following everyone, because young guys, and huh, I guess old guys too, can’t just look at one pretty girl.” (19-year-old female university student).",[11,399,400],{},"The motivation for intimate expression and display was in some majority income related, especially for youth but also for young adults:",[11,402,403],{},"“My parents couldn’t afford college. I was the first person in my family to ever go, and the only reason I went was because I did my own internet porn. It was by far the easiest way to make money. No managers bitching you out, no guys harassing you at the workplace, no minimum wage and then getting home and taking three showers and still the fast-food grease smell is on you. Its shit, utter shit, anywhere else teens work, right? So as soon as I actually was a teenager, I got on there. I’d seen my older sister work fast-food and it killed her. Not me.” (21-year-old female college graduate).",[11,405,406],{},"The sense that making pornography, even illicitly, was a superior form of both self-expression and of employment, was a major theme in interview:",[11,408,409],{},"“Don’t talk to me about morality. Is it a ‘good’ thing to put on a micro-skirt and sashay your way around a restaurant, smiling and flirting and flaring your skirts and bending over surreptitiously just to generate bigger tips? Is that ‘moral’ behavior? No, you wanna look, you’re gonna pay. And the only way a young person can balance those books is by doing porn. I can’t say I love it, but its way better than anything else out there. So, save me the lecture on responsibility. I fucking told my mom to shut it, I’ve paid for college through it, and what do you know? She did.” (25-year-old female graduate student).",[11,411,412],{},"I was unable to access more than a handful of young males who were willing to speak of their online activities, legal or no, but those that did manifested an apparently sincere understanding for their female counterparts:",[11,414,415],{},"“I don’t know if you ever worked a shit-job in your life, no offense. But people don’t know just how badly girls are treated out there. Guys like me, almost all guys, think girls are just objects for their amusement and desire. I got so turned off by that. And then one day my girlfriend told me she was doing porn, take it or leave it. Well, if her, why not me? It only seemed fair, you dig? But only when I got into it did I gain empathy for women. There was no danger for me at least. I read that the audience for young guys is either gay men or middle-aged women! Makes me laugh because I’m not gay and I was a teenager at the time. Like, hey, my mom and her friends think I’m the shit! It was a huge joke, but the money was better than anything I could have made short of becoming an actual sex worker. But then I’d have to have actual sex with my ‘mom’, so, uh, no way!” (21-year-old male university student).",[11,417,418],{},"As in most professions, amateur pornography favors men, in this case mainly because the vast majority of workers are female, even though the audience for pornography of all genres is evenly split between the dominant genders. Even so, doing pornography was still found to be alienating for some in this study:",[11,420,421],{},"“With all the tech toys out there, I learned quickly that I could have much more intense pleasure than any man would be capable of giving me. Overnight, it was like, ‘well, who needs men?’. And many women I know feel that way. Like, in general. Virtual solo sex for money. Sounds perfect, you know? No obligations to anyone, no health risks like STDs, no chance of rape or whatever. And cost-free admiration. Who cares what they’re doing, right? Some people I know get off on others getting off on them. I guess they could be called exhibitionists. But all these labels do is make things clinical. It’s irrelevant. The only thing that matters in the end is the money, on the one side, and the lack of real community on the other.” (27-year-old female white-collar worker).",[11,423,424],{},"The anomie, or subjective alienation, expressed by some in interview was, however, not a universal sensitivity. Feelings of loneliness and usury developed only over time, and were associated strongly with older participants. Those younger adults who had been manufacturing and distributing illegal pornography for some years as youths shrugged off suggestions of any potential Weltschmerz in waiting:",[11,426,427],{},"“Do you really think I’m going to be doing this at age thirty? One, no one would watch. Two, I should have two degrees by then and some normal job. I might even be married, who knows? That’s the whole thing about people who worry about teens and sex. They don’t understand that it’s just a phase of life, like anything else. Old people don’t have sex, or not much of it. Young people do. It’s that simple. Do you jack yourself off and record it? ‘Hey girls, the famous philosopher is fucking himself on-line! A can’t miss, that one.’ No offense, no really, but you get it right? I mean, I appreciate you doing a study like this because like, no one knows what this shit is really about.” (19-year-old female high school graduate).",[11,429,430],{},"Very often, during any research process, participants themselves suggest promising lines of querying. So, I began to ask that seemingly simple question, and the responses were intriguingly critical:",[11,432,433],{},"“What is this all about? Well, for me, it’s about control. My parents tell me what do to 24/7 and after a certain age it’s like, ‘Well, go fuck yourselves’. Hah, and then, its well, I can fuck myself but in a good way, unlike what others try and do to me. Okay, so now I’m in college but I still live at home. There’s nothing illegal like them hitting me, but there are still rules. The economy forces young people to stay young for far too long. I get that. I can’t afford anything by myself. Even if and when I get a degree, is that really going to set me free? Making porn is an insurance policy; that’s what it’s all about.” (18-year-old female university student).",[11,435,436],{},"With more veteran producers, a semblance of a politics emerges:",[11,438,439],{},"“Okay, good question, if vague. For me, it’s about exercising some sort of agency in a world that cares nothing for me. What are my skills? I have a great body and lots of energy. Fine, what else? Do I sell my body and my face for next to nothing waiting tables, or do I sell it on-line for decent wages? You tell me. You didn’t have to make that choice, no offense. But anyone who moralizes at me and anyone else who hates what I do needs to look in the mirror. Are they jealous of my youth? Are they the same people who leer at my peers who do wait tables? Yeah, I’ve ‘converted’ a few of my friends. They’ve seen the light, hah! No more butt-pinches and slaps at the fast-food joint, no more stares and comments at the sit-down restaurant. You get the picture. Long live the internet!” (23-year-old female sex worker).",[11,441,442],{},"In spite of the consistent if not constant caveats generated by government agencies and NPOs alike regarding the risks to youth who involve themselves in pornography, whether as viewers or actual producers, when asked about such risks and their attendant campaigns, respondents were universally critical:",[11,444,445],{},"“The only time I was stalked was when I worked fast food. You get all kinds in places like that, and all the wrong kinds, whether its people with disabilities, criminals, unhappy husbands, INCELs, you name it. And you know, like, right away, ‘this guy is dangerous’. On-line there’s no contact. If there is any danger to it, well, two can play that game, right? You expose me I expose you. The police can track your IP and the rest of it. Don’t insult me or play with me on-line. You have no idea where I live or even who I am. Those few girls who were threatened with exposure, maybe one or two killed themselves, well, how did that even happen, right? I have no fear of ruined reputation because there’s a million girls out there who look basically just like me. Do I live in Lithuania? No, but she might. And when I was still in high school it was like, ‘okay, make my day asshole’.” (20-year-old female university student).",[11,447,448],{},"Not all research participants were as confident, nay, yet belligerent, as were some, but even the more cautious ones sneered at the nay-sayers:",[11,450,451],{},"“You have to be smart with it. Of course you do. I would not tell a young girl to try this. I started when I was 15 and I learned quickly what not to do. Never invite anyone into a chat. Never focus on one consumer at the expense of others. Never say you’re single. Never offend anyone, like by saying anything about their own sexual prowess or ego. Obviously, never mention where you live or what school you go to or your real name, I mean, a ten-year-old knows that part of it, not that she should be doing what I do, but really. The biggest thing is that you’re being paid to be someone’s fantasy object, and as long as it stays at that level, there’s no risk. Like, none at all.” (19-year-old female sex worker).",[11,453,454],{},"I asked producers what was going through their minds during actual performances, and correspondingly, reported further on, I asked therapists what transpired mentally during their respective interactions with those who did, or had, performed:",[11,456,457],{},"“When you’re live it’s all about the act. You’re getting pleasure and so are they. Nothing else should intrude upon this ‘duet’, if you will. It’s a total fantasy only in the sense that I would never be together for real with anyone who views me, and they know that. But they can dream, and when they do, I’m there for them, almost equally for real. The thing that pisses me off is now the 3D AI ‘girls’ are stealing my views and you know it’s not other teenagers making those. It’s some loser who has tech gear and skill and he’s making money from some of the same people I used to make money from. Pretty soon all the moralizers can just go home, with that going on. Who knows, maybe some of those religious fanatics are actually making the AI shit, trying to put real girls out of business!” (22-year-old college graduate).",[11,459,460],{},"I had not thought of that possibility, as ludicrous as it may sound on the face of it. Whoever is generating artificial sex objects however, is panning for the same guttural gold as are real persons; that much was clear. Another common response:",[11,462,463],{},"“Okay, so it’s a business like any other. There’s you and there’s the competition. So, you innovate, just like any good entrepreneur. As far as the AI stuff goes, well, I have a video where I slash myself on the back of my arm and it bleeds a little, no biggie. And I say, ‘No fucking sex doll or AI mock can do that, boys.’ And some people are turned on by that, and word gets around, right? I got good responses from that one, a lot of views. People said they really appreciate me ‘being real’, and that I’m ‘not a coward’. And though I’m not quite real in one sense, I do have guts. It takes guts to make porn, which is something the haters like to forget. You try it.” (20-year-old female university student).",[11,465,466],{},"The therapists and counselors involved in the study were not of one mind in their responses to being shown patterned interview out-takes with young adults. Many were shy of making any final judgment at all, which was consistent with their professional duty to act as resources rather than evaluators. The following was commonplace, whether I myself was feigning illness or no:",[11,468,469],{},"“We should never moralize about sex. It doesn’t help at all. Especially for young women, I feel they are driven to place themselves at risk because they are looking for some reassurance. Not only that they are beautiful, because they know that it’s no great turn of trick to be beautiful at their age, but much more so, a kind of validation that they have some social worth, that they have a place in society more generally. What kind of place is, of course, another matter entirely.” (middle-aged female psychotherapist).",[11,471,472],{},"A male professional counterpart added what turned out to be as well a well-travelled road:",[11,474,475],{},"“I’ve worked as a counselor for only two decades, so while I’m still young, I have increasing difficulty identifying with youth. You told me you had the same issue as a professor, when you were still teaching. It makes me raise my eyebrows, when a teenager tells me she’s making porn, but I don’t judge. That only makes what might be a bad situation worse. Instead, I ask such a person, ‘what’s in it for you?’. I get very similar responses as you have shown me from your study. The sum of such responses is, I dare say, quite convincing.” (middle-aged male psychologist).",[11,477,478],{},"Professional psychologists and counselors varied only upon their methods of guiding minors or others, and in turn, based this variance on whether or not the client in question actually wanted to get out of the business or did not. No clinician or counselor with whom I spoke, either as a health research colleague or as a ‘patient’, said that they had ever recommended to a porn producer that they stop, let alone suggesting that they were necessarily placing themselves at risk, contrasting mightily with the journalistic, political, and other grassroots voices regarding the topics at hand:",[11,480,481],{},"“I don’t want to ever say to a young person involved in porn that, ‘there’s no risks’, but we have to look at the stats. We know that 95% of violence and abuse against minors happens in the home and from family members or friends thereof. 95% of the other 5% happens in the schools or in other like contexts, as in, where there may be coaches, music teachers, ballet instructors, and the like. We know this, and we have known this for some time. But it is only very recently that stories of such abuse are appearing, and some very high-profile ones, like the Olympic gymnasts and what-have-you. And yet parents blithely drop their kids off at ballet or whatever, and those same kids, when older, with their same trained and disciplined figures, may be making porn, because they know they have the right type of looks for it. And only then do parents hit the roof. So, there’s a problem with the whole discourse surrounding risk in our society, and I for one am glad you’re doing this expository study on one of the core arenas of these misconceptions.” (middle-aged female clinician).",[11,483,484],{},"I have argued elsewhere that most organized activities for youth in our culture serve multiple, often conflicting purposes. Henry Giroux is the most sophisticated name in this part of critical discourse, but alas, I could not access him to comment upon this study. Yet psychologists themselves appeared aware that there was a studied hypocrisy afoot when it came to comparing activities such as sports and the arts with pornography. I then, in turn, threw that out in the direction of the pornographers themselves:",[11,486,487],{},"“Hah! Well, that really makes me laugh. I was in ballet for years. That’s exactly how I got this body and the confidence to strut my butt, right? But dance is like all the rest of it for us girls. The adults bark at you, touch you when and where they should not under the guise of ‘positioning’, some parents even still spank their kids if they’re younger. The dance teachers don’t dare but they tell on you, right? I got it up until I was 12. Now I spank myself for money and I’m in complete control of it, which I never was as a little kid. So yup, hypocrisy? That’s basically any older adult’s middle name as far as I’m concerned.” (19-year-old female university student).",[11,489,490],{},"There were many respondents who also did not see any serious difference between doing sports or dance and doing porn, given the apparel and physiognomic feats required for many athletic and performing arts venues:",[11,492,493],{},"“Yeah, well, the thing of it is, what I wear online and what I wore in dance or when I was in track at school; not much difference. And I’m still doing crazy things with my body either way, so no real difference there either. And the people who showed up to watch me play volleyball in high school weren’t all there to watch the game, if you know what I mean. Same with track, same with dance. The bottom line, excuse the expression, is that people want to look at young girls, the less clothes the better, and so we’ve got all kinds of ways people can do just that. And my parents never batted an eye at it. So, it’s all porn, at the end of the day. All of it.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).",[11,495,496],{},"When I asked how making porn itself, illicitly or no, compared with just viewing it, after explaining that I was consulting for the Senate committee, a number of responses shared the following themes:",[11,498,499],{},"“The viewers are losers, at least in one sense. But I’ve read other studies of porn usage. On the one hand, you have the stereotype, the INCEL guy who could never get a date, or that’s how those people think of themselves, anyways. I’ve always found that there’s someone for everyone out there, sad but true. But on the other, you have some married guy with a professional job and an attractive wife but they now have kids and he’s not getting enough. Women too, of course. So that audience isn’t losers at all, and so I have to perform with both in mind. But as far as the difference between making and just viewing it, producers have the bods and the guts, the consumers are just anyone, and they might be cowards too but I don’t really judge or care about that.” (23-year-old female sex worker).",[11,501,502],{},"The other category of respondent were the groomers, but since they were, by their own tacit admittance, criminals, and their process of recruiting for underage sex labor was shot through with both a cloying extortion and hortatory clichés that I felt even an eight-year-old would not fall for - though apparently, I remain naïve about such entrapment - I do not consider any of it worthy of reproduction here.  Rather, I end the results section with a typical summary of responses of amateur and unaffiliated professional producers when asked to characterize the essence of the falderal surrounding their chosen workplace and their activities within:",[11,504,505],{},"“It’s not for everyone. But what is? Don’t tell me I can’t do it because you don’t like it. Or you pretend you don’t. Too fucking bad. Look, I’m 18. Everywhere I go people stare at me. Do I get paid for any of that? Do I get a guy, young or old, come up to me and give me a hundred bucks and say ‘Sorry, miss, I was leering at you. I know this doesn’t make up for it, but take it anyways and just know I’d never do anything more than just look’. Never. Never in a million years would that ever happen on the street. But hey, I discovered a wondrous land where it does happen! And in that land, that’s all guys do, is ‘just look’. You hear people yelling ‘keep it real’. No, reality is what sucks. Virtual reality is a godsend. I’ll be making porn until no one is willing to pay me for it. And every critic can just suck on that. Full stop.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).",[110,507,509],{"id":508},"the-analytic-upshot","The Analytic Upshot:",[11,511,512],{},"In every field study I have conducted as principal investigator, I have found that the commonplace sociological rubric regarding people defending their own values is true to life. The sentiments expressed by sex workers, of whatever age or style of performance, was no different. Even if their community is disparate, partly fictional, and connected only loosely, they still felt that they were a part of something greater than themselves as individuals. Many saw themselves as rebels with a noble cause, even as social critics. Policies which censored them or targeted them in other ways were disdained and mocked, the apparent hypocrisies of their political and parental vendors exposed. I was myself asked, on some occasions, about my role in such censorship, and I explained that, as an ethicist, I would like to see some formal accountability within the organizations benefitting from uploading their materials and profiting from them, as often as not without the original creator’s knowledge. But even this was a hedge, and I knew it. Better to state that the distinction between a shared everyday reality which is always public and must place the whole of itself before any specific part thereof, and the semi-private reality of the internet and like venues, needs to be preserved insofar as the former does not find itself too engrossed in the latter. For cultures too can become addicted.",[11,514,515],{},"The most important points raised by respondents in an ethical sense were those directed against the idea that pornography was somehow qualitatively different than other activities youth partook in, and that the conception and definition of risk within its scope was severely overblown. For myself, and from an analytic standpoint alone, there may be a sense that if young people in any society become too taken with themselves in one relatively narrow way – the perfect physical and sexual specimen – then their once-respective identities would be as narrowed. As an ethicist, I think this is the greatest danger at the level of personhood. At the level of character, I feel that there is a danger of a craven cowardice in virtual sexuality, precisely due to there not being a real other with whom one must confront, conflict with, reassure and rapproche, and most of all, try to love. Given that almost all respondents themselves appeared to understand these dual dangers when questioned about them, and put their lack of interest in their ethical themes down to simply not being part of the phase of life we generally refer to as youth - thereby implying that when they were more mature, such themes would then take on more weight in their lives - I could not in turn simply dismiss such a reply. We do not yet have the longitudinal data to document either way this implied transition.",[11,517,518],{},"In light and in lieu of this present absence, I will end this summary with a final quotation to these regards:",[11,520,521],{},"“No one does this forever. I’m certainly not planning on it. In ten years, I’ll be married and probably have at least one kid. I’ll look like everyone else you see; that is, not great! My husband will want to fuck me at his discretion, my kids will want me to feed them, drive them somewhere, help them with their homework, all that. Right now, ‘all that’ feels like a kind of death. So, what’s so wrong with living a little before you start to die?” (19-year-old female university student).",{"title":51,"searchDepth":52,"depth":52,"links":523},[524,525,526,527],{"id":367,"depth":52,"text":368},{"id":380,"depth":52,"text":381},{"id":390,"depth":52,"text":391},{"id":508,"depth":52,"text":509},"2024-11-01",{},6,"/articles/why-do-minors-make-pornography",{"title":353,"description":358},{"loc":531},"articles/why-do-minors-make-pornography","eoipgc4YmGCwFtDpXzJ6PxbHyfpJSchBXjeMIAe_Jok",1777252018890]