lecture 7: Professor Leonard Harris

Professor Leonard Harris shares some notes to his lecture below:

“Building Futures, Shaping Futures & Epilogue”
Chap. 6, “Building Traditions, Shaping Futures:  Values, Norms, and Transvaluation” (McBride, Ethics and Insurrection; Chap. 16. “Telos and Traditions:  Making the Future-Bridges to Future Traditions,” L. Harris, A Philosophy Born of Struggle

I have argued that traditions mediate between the past, present and imagined futures – crucial of our wellbeing in a non-moral universe.   I favor conceiving of traditions as inventions rather than preservationist rituals.  The concept of tradition we forebear is crucial to the kind of utopia -albeit- ideal future, that we want to applaud.  Let me offer some themes, based on Chapter 6, Ethics and Insurrection and Chapter 16, A Philosophy Born of Struggle, for further consideration.

One way to think about the value of traditions is to think about the limitations, and benefits, of the concept ‘utopia’.  We do not want to rely on our current preferences to determine what counts as a defensible utopia.  Reporting on our own experiences and feelings are notorious convolutions, e.g., descriptions of our emotions differ depending on what day, time, and place we give the description.  If we rely on what we want now, even if what we want now is determined by a well-designed survey, persons in the future who will have invariably different moral emotions.  In short, we would be defining a utopia that satisfies moral emotions that for future generations are antiquated.   In Arcadia, a mythical location of pastoral perfection originally inhabited only by Gods but the Greek poet Theocritus imagined it an abode for humans, or like the Romans celebrating utopian reality on the holiday named in its honor, Saturnalia – the wealthy served their servants, and the servants applauded the existence of common wellbeing – Arcadia is a communitas perfecta.

Peace, friendship, health, sustenance, and good weather were static.  Arcadia was thus a place of the immortality of absolute sameness.   No variables.  The value of utopia, if Arcadia is the model, is the value of permanent sameness.  The transitional, temporary, transitional, and the impermanent are less valuable.  That is, less worthy as a form of existence. The laws of physics matters, but not the platform upon which those laws work.  The law that bodies fall at 32 ft per second squared in this atmosphere matters; the entropic bodies that fall matter less.  Arcadia as utopia, if achieved, is death.  The end state, the final imagined goal of the best without any form of remainder, is death.  No redemption, recompense, rebirth, or well-being, let alone development; it is being that is absolutely terminal.

We are, however, metaphorically the bodies that are entropic falling at 32ft per second squared in this atmosphere; the illusory soul gets to be permanent.  Let us care for both.  That we are healthy and that we age; youth and senior years.  The sadness of eventual death and the joy of having lived a well lived convivial life.  

If traditions are special events or celebrations which intend to be replicas of life in the utopia of Arcadia traditions would be death rituals.

Consider the criticism of the concept utopia offered by Jose Ortega y Gassett in the Modern Theme.  The concept, he argues, requires that we avoid the ‘problem of the real.’  The problem of the real is that reality changes and conflicts exist.  Yet, pure reason constructs an ‘exemplary world’ without change or conflict. The concept of utopia portends an ‘infinite process,’ namely, (p. 145) the background assumption that reality is always a becoming and thereby   the concepts provides a neat way of avoiding reality and giving credence to an ideal that reinforces, through confirmation bias, what we already believe. 

If traditions were enactments or confirmations of inalterable values or modes of production they would be cheap escapes from the reality that meanings always change, even if so slightly. Kudzanai Chiurai paintings of “Genesis” and “Shopping for Jesus” are examples of tradition change showing previous generations defining wealth in terms of persons (how many and what type of persons were under your domain) and status in terms of rare bird feathers, beads and ornate leather garments.   After European settler and colonial subjugation of Africans, European modes of beauty and religion has sometimes come to define status by rare bird feathers in a woven hat, cotton clothing, white Catholic flocks, pearls, white gloves, fur coats, white shirts, and cotton or wool suits and wealth defined by exchange (what type and how much currency owned).  Shop for Jesus because the old gods no longer denote wealth and status.  Rare bird feathers are now in zoo’s, shopping is on-line and Jesus is a star on Broadway. Value modes, and what traditions exist to make them alive,’ change.

It is fascinating to be a member of a species that knows, as a matter of empirical cosmological evidence from telescopes, light spectrum analysis, and distance calculations that all living things are doomed for extinction because of the natural evolution of star depletion and the death of galaxies.  There is no escape from cosmic evolution, there is no escape for the need to be energized and optimistic. We can have more than one moral emotion, simultaneously:  sadness and elation, self rection and fatalistic resignation.   Albert Camus was right in his evolution of the Myth of Sisyphus.   The story goes like this:  The notoriously ruthless and deceitful Sisyphus was doomed to pushing a boulder up a mountain only to see it role down once he nears the top.  Instantly he is required to start all over.   This was his punishment for disloyalty to Zeus.  He betrayed the God Zeus by revealing the location of a woman Zeus had stolen and sequester on an island for his adulterous enjoyment.  Sisyphus helped her father, Asopus, find his daughter after Asopus granted his request to create a freshwater spring on Corinth's acropolis, which would benefit Sisyphus and his community’s commercial interest.  Sisyphus’s condition and the reason he is in it are absurd.  Is it better to violate a sacred covenant to gain water benefits for your community than to honor the covenant and let the community continue without the benefit?  Whatever the choice, the situation is absurd.  

The reality of absurd situations, meaningless efforts nor relatively inconsequential benefits of even meritorious actions are not conditions that stand as reasons which defeat the warrant of optimism in a disenchanted universe, a universe in which we have no reason to posit a teleology of a utopian Arcadian death.   “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Sisyphus has the great condition of constantly being motivated to try and the benefit of constantly being in a condition where he can try.  It is the trying and the success of moving the rock that matters, not the imagined goal of completeness, absolute success, finished effort.  Analogously if we accept our fallibilism and traditions as valuable inventions it is our revelry in imagining futures that to some degree we live now.

Further, arguably one common denominator value that we share with all past and future generations is the value of life as such.  Care for agnates, need for respect, etc. may also be common denominators.  Viva negativia – necro-being, however, is never a good.

Even if there is a focus on mitakpa (the Buddhist concept of the impermanence of all things and thereby all that exists has less value than an imagined queer universe of permanence), death or undue illness is not a feature of wellbeing and conviviality is a precondition necessary for its absence.

We create traditions by what we are doing now; make it institutional; and imagine a future that is not an end state of absolute death but of radically improved preconditions for the possibility of wellbeing.  Orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy; nata ex conatu – a leaning forward into the future.   We need not search for an end state of Being death or portend we are slaves to blind evolution.

We need not be entrapped in the background assumption of utopia as a forever becoming and an avoidance of reality; “we are the ones we have been waiting for” (June Jordon).  There is a weird simultaneity that defies even a Hegelian absolute – the future is here and the future is what we build here that may be of use for future generations to reinvent.  Rewarding traditions  - doing public philosophy and making it an institutionalized tradition -makes this possible because it simultaneously creates wellbeing and makes possible a platform for future generations to achieve ideals proffered by existing interventions.

The argument against pessimism and nihilism (Chap. 6, “Building Traditions, Shaping Futures:  Values, Norms, and Transvaluation,” Ethics and Insurrection and L. Harris, Chap. 16. “Telos and Traditions:  Making the Future-Bridges to Future Traditions,” A Philosophy Born of Struggle) is hopefully correlative to and bolstered by the above account of using an analog of traditions and utopia and appealing to traditions as inventions above themes.

Further works…

Corey L. Barnes, Alain Locke on the Theoretical Foundations for a Just and Successful Peace

Shenna M. Mason, Theory of Racelessness

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Bruno S. Martins, editors, The Pluriverse of Human Rights

Daina R. Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

Ruha Benjamin, editor, Captivating Technology

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South

Insurrectionist Ethics: Radical Perspectives on Social Justice, Jacoby A. Carter, D. Scriven, eds. 

https://link.springer.com/book/9783031167409

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/insurrectionist-ethics-jacoby-adeshei-carter/1142014897

Octavia Butler, Adulthood Rites

Kudzanai Chiurai, “Genesis” and “Shopping for Jesus”