Sunday, October 24, 2004
(1:14 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Candid Assessment of Potential Flaws in My Way of Thinking
First and foremost, I tend toward vulgar Marxism, otherwise known as economism. I often formulate my political and moral stances based on the idea that a reordering of economic relations will automatically produce solutions to other problems -- that is, while I would love for particular problems to go away, I view a change in the economic structure of our world as the only way to really, really solve all the problems. This leads toward a certain irresponsibility of thought, given that the world-wide revolution is not likely to occur within the next few years. I toy with more pragmatic solutions while treating them as band-aids in which I don't finally have a stake. This tendency may be part of the residue of fundamentalist Christianity. Such views could be critiqued from a cultural studies, feminist, queer theory, or psychoanalytic perspective (the latter is particularly ironic, given my penchant for psychoanalysis).Second, I tend to judge ideas based on their aesthetic appeal rather than strictly based on the arguments and evidence presented. All too often, this aesthetic appeal is based on some vague premonition that certain people (who may or may not exist only in my mind) would be annoyed by the ideas I espouse. Hence, although the idea that Paul did not write all the letters ascribed to him is a scholarly concensus, I tend to be biased toward positions that leave the fewest possible authentic letters, because that seems to produce more problems and thus be somehow "cooler." This tendency could account for my great devotion to the teachings of Ted Jennings, which may be deeply flawed in many ways -- but lack of coolness or lack of edginess is not one of their flaws.
Hand-in-hand with the above flaw is a tendency to take the latest controversial theory I have learned as an established fact and to discard the "conventional wisdom," even in cases where the conventional wisdom is barely established itself. The more "conspiracy-theory"-like the theory is, the more it appeals to me -- as I have noted before, conspiracy theories are in my blood, with my Grandpa Kotsko belonging firmly to the conspiracy theorist camp and my father being a devout Republican.
More generally, and third, I tend to be too easily convinced. I am more likely than anyone I know to say, "Okay, you're right" in a conversation about a controversial issue. It's not a matter of simply recognizing potential flaws or gaps in my ideas and taking other people's ideas into account -- I leap to affirm my interlocutor's position as a whole. I want to jump straight into having the whole truth, all at once. Again, the Christian, specifically Wesleyan, influences here should be obvious. (Similarly, I often seek after the one insight or action that will finally untie the knot of all my emotional and interpersonal hang-ups -- although entire sanctification never quite "took," and although I never delivered a sincere testimony in the appropriate context, I still do seek after it, similar to the broadly Hardto-Negrian insight that ideas and institutions are actually more effective when they are broken and propagated into more and more different contexts.)
I also hate it when people apply any kind of label to me -- whether it's my family referring to me as a "liberal," people in general calling me "Catholic," or whatever. I also hate it when people want me to affirm the impression they have of me -- "You're really smart, right?" or "You read a lot, right?" etc., etc. It's the same as the general problematic of when someone knows of one of your interests and that's all they want to talk about -- or the general problematic of people in literature classes learning two or three biographical facts about an author and interpreting every aspect of every text through the lens of what I like to call "footnote knowledge." Footnote knowledge is necessary, but it should not be mistaken for real knowledge. And so, if people try to deploy their footnote knowledge of me, I do everything possible to frustrate them and deny what they're saying. That's bad, because they're just trying to be friendly. If you're one of those people, I'm sorry that you probably felt put off -- but I was actually trying to make you feel put off, so I guess I'm not really sorry.
Further remarks about the flaws in my way of thinking can be directed toward the HaloScan-brand comments below. Thank you.
