While I would normally take Democracy Lover's adivce and not address his comments in a separate post, his comments brought up something that I feel important to address at some length.
Some time in the past month, I wrote of the impact Isaiah Berlin's essay collection, The Crooked timber of Humanity has played in the development of my intellectual life, but I was prepared for what Berlin said by reading others before him. If Berlin's ideas were the seeds, the ones who tilled the soil and planted the seed were James Cone and Franz Fanon. From them I learned how to think from a different place, from a different reality set or gestalt (when I later read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I was immediately struck by the similarity, in a different context, of approach). It was Cone I read first, and his A Black Theology of Liberation showed me the possibilties inherent in a whole different way of udnerstsanding. It was from his book God of the Oppressed that I learned there is no "Truth" (another idea I simply confirmed when reading Richard Rorty), just different ways of coming to terms with the worl in which we live. There is no such thing as "History", just the varied and variegated histories we all accept as part and parcel of how we have come to be.
Two years after reading Cone, I came to Fanon's classic The Wretched of the Earth (if you don't have time to read all of it, try Hannah Arendt's deeply flawed but still important review essay "On Violence", which is available as part of her collection Crises of the Republic and as a stand-alone, thin, single volume essay; by trying to place Fanon's work within a larger context of theorists of violence such as Georges Sorel and Bakunin, Arendt misses the point entirely). While I have certain concerns (especially with Jean-Paul Sartre's Stalinesque "Introduction"; Sartre's ideological love affiar with totalitarianism is as unattractive as his wall-eyed stare from most photographs), Fanon's relentless ferocity, his passionate insistence that France pay attention to Algeria for its own sake, and that the Algerian situation was a subset of a much larger phenomenon of the assertion of power by the previously powerless can be exhausting and exhilirating simultaneously. One of the points to which Fanon returns again and again is that much of the rhetoric of violence used by the Algerian resistance is only giving voice to the non-spoken but very real policies of the French occupiers. In other words, they make explicit what is implicit, and inherently implicit, in colonialism, but they turn it around and use it as a weapon to fight those who are oppressing them.
Cone said something similar in his discussion of the rhetoric of violence coming from the Black Power movement in the United States. After 300 years of forced immigration, slavery, and the denial of the rights of citizenship and even personhood to blacks in America, for white people to turn on blacks and insist they embrace non-violence is not only hypocritical, it shows the fundamental fear the white majority has of the minorities in their midst, and the subconscious recognition of their own complicity on a national scale in the continued oppression of Americans of African descent.
This whole notion of seeing the world through other eyes was nascent, then. I didn't flesh it out thoroughly, or think through the consequences, until I read Berlin. Berlin put flesh on the bones of Fanon and Cone. Ideas are no univocal (they do not mean the same things to all people in all times and all places), but are part and parcel of the whole existence of those who use them. Even those who use them may have slightly different shades of meaning, emphasizing one thing here, another there. The point is, we cannot take such things as "freedom", "justice", "love", "equality" or whatever it may be, and find meaning for all time through some kind of Socratic discussion. It just won't work, because ideas are not things, but the products of people living out their lives, puzzling out their lives, and trying to make sense of them. We have to eradicate the whole notion that "freedom" exists independent of people who are free, or who are struggling to be free as they define it. We have to eradicate the idea that "love" exists apart from actual loving relationships. Since Plato, and especially since Hegel, we have this absurd notion that ideas exist independently of the minds that think them.
To say, then, that it makes no difference if one is a faithful Christian or a concerned secularist misses the point that we are speaking of individual lives, lived in a context and history of their own interaction with others, their upbringing, their education, etc. We have to surrender the notion that there is one right way to be human, and instead celebrate all the different ways there are actually human beings, even in all the contradictions and inevitable conflicts that result from these differences.
I tend to think of this way of thinking as an intellectual equivalent of a basic idea of physics, that no two particles can exist within the same space and time. Two human beings, no matter how close in whatever ways one may measure such things, do not exist within the same frame of reference and all that makes them who they are as unique individuals separates them in space and time, creating differences. Sometimes these differences are small. Sometimes they are enormous, even insurmountable. That does not make the differences bad. They just are.
Ideas, then, are not interchangeable, even closely related ideas. A faithful Hindu exists within a totally different frame of reference from a faithful Christian. there is nothing bad about being a faithful Hindu; I can certianly imagine myself as one. That option is not possible, however, not because of an intellectual decision on my part, but because there are a whole host of things - family history, education, life experiences - that would prevent me from making that choice for myself. I do not think it a evil choice; it just is not one I can make.
On the other hand, at one time I considered myself an agnostic with vague ethical notions. I realized, however, that there was an intellectual - and even more important a moral - dishonesty to my position because I was, without really being aware of what I was doing, hauling all sorts of baggage from my religious upbringing into my now-secular way of living, including a decisively, ahem, evangelical, proselytizing way of being. That is to say, I was quite insistent that the only way was my way, etc. When I returned to the church and began my intellectual and spiritual explorations there, I left all that behind. As a committed Christian, I no longer believe there is such a thing as "Truth"; as a committed Christian I no longer believe there is only one acceptable way of living a fully human life, although I would stake my life on the Christian way of living a fully human life. I am comfortable with contingency and error and the possibility that, as Lincoln said, "Two people may disagree on something, and they may both be right."
