As I narrow my focus within my dissertation research, I realize that the broader focus that I’m working under is a “sociology of knowledge” project. Knowing is a complex social endeavor, one that happens in and through community. Epistemologies of ignorance represent an aspect of the social construction of knowing, or in this case, not knowing. Fundamentally, this social [not] knowing intertwines with power dynamics. Who gets to count as a person and thus contribute knowledge? Who gets to decide who counts? Who writes the books? Who publishes them? Who decides what/how events are interpreted and recorded? Who preserves these works? Who later picks them up and reanimates them with life as we adopt their lessons into our cultural pedagogy? Who gets trained to teach the classes using these works? And these “who’s” aren’t necessarily individuals. They’re groups of which individuals are apart. The group shaping the individual and the individual shaping the group.[1]
This week I picked up a book I’d previously read—Merold Westphal’s 2009 hermeneutics book Whose Community? Whose Interpretation: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture)—and ran across this paragraph as he described German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher Wilhem Dilthey’s fear about “non-scientific” forms of hermeneutics:
In other words, he fears that our interpretations will be relative to presuppositions that are not universally shared and are thus subjective. It matters not whether these are shared by whole cultures or epochs so long as they remain particular and not universal. So he asks, “But where are the means to overcome the anarchy of opinions that then threatens to befall us?” He fears a “different strokes for different folks” philosophy in which truth will be lost in a sea of opinions. A whole discipline, known as the sociology of knowledge, has arisen to deal with this “vertigo of relativity.”
Merold Westphal, Merold. Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The church and Postmodern Culture) (pp. 31-32).
What Dilthey describes looks like fear from a lack of certainty. Certainty encapsulated a modernist pursuit beginning with the arguments of René Descartes[3] in the 16th century. He catapulted modernity on a never-ending search that consumed the subsequent 350 years in white continental philosophy. To know meant certainty. Certainty came through a particular method—The Scientific Method. The ambiguity of reality was never entertained as a good, only a thing to be eradicated through the methodological investigation of empirical data.[4]The positionality and power relations of those generating knowledge remained unquestioned, because the voices of those screaming in the darkness went ignored, unexamined, while remaining willfully ignorant of the power that ensconced their every breath. The knowledge generating community thus became white men talking to themselves in an echo chamber which reverberated onto the bodies of minoritized men and women throughout society. The echo chamber issued the The Doctrine of Discovery in 1493 which authorized Spaniards to possess any land not inhabited by Christians which they may “discover.” The echo chamber loaded the musket and pulled the trigger committing genocide against Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, Caribbean Islanders, et al. The echo chamber planted the trees from which Black men swung, the tobacco and cotton fields which Blacks were exploited to cultivate and built the houses where Black women were physically and sexually subjugated. The echo chamber enacted the laws which excluded the Chinese, Blacks, Indigenous, Mexicans and anybody not able to possess the “legally” proper phenotypic complexion. The echo chamber pursued eugenics as a form of social power and control while masquerading as a scientific certainty. The reverberations continue today in the screams of the school-to-prison-pipeline, the brutality of state sanctioned violence where a white hood was traded for a silver badge and a matte finished Glock, and tiki torches usurp the burning cross. The reverberations echo to the continued colonization of Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.[5] And the question that underlies the echo chamber—who’s in control? Who gets to make the call about meaning? Reality? Objectivity? In short, who’s in power? The answer is inscribed in blood.
The vertigo of reality was never replaced with the intricate overlap of a community of knowing. Instead, the vertigo left untreated embedded into the very fabric of our social systems. The “death of God” became the “death of the author,” not because either had died, but because we could no longer maintain the powerful allusion of certainty these constructs offered within the complexified ambiguity of existence. God and author functioned as mere proxies for the certainty we longed for in the daily onslaught of ambiguity. In fact, the epistemologies of ignorance cultivated over the last several centuries has inaugurated a covenant of forgetfulness creating the exact thing Dilthey was afraid of—a “vertigo of relativity.” Not because everybody gets to believe whatever they want, but because we’ve intentionally covenanted to cultivate new and better ways of avoiding reality. New and better ways of forgetting. New ways of unseeing. These new constructs form a generationally discipled echo chamber inaugurating this covenant through a baptism of blood by the annihilation of the Imago Dei from my Black, Brown, Yellow, Red, LGBTQ, undocumented, et al. siblings. The echo chamber of empire extracts a heavy toll. Regardless of history, the currency always remains the same—blood.
[1] Thinking here of Iris Young’s discussion in Justice and the Politics of Difference where she outlines how groups identify themselves based on certain shared characteristics–cultural forms, practices, ways of life, music, food, history, language, geography, etc and how oppression thus operates. She writes, “And thus, in its new usage, oppression designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society…oppression also refers to systemic constraints on groups that are not necessarily the result of the intentions of a tyrant. Oppression in this sense is structural rather than the result of a few people’s choices or policies. Its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols…” (pg 41). Those embedded assumptions constitute the system that Charles Mills labels capital-W Whiteness.
[2] Westphal, Merold. Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (The church and Postmodern Culture) (pp. 31-32). Baker Book Group – A. Kindle Edition.
[3] I would rather argue this quest for certainty begins with Martin Luther who lived a generation prior to Descartes and radically upended the Roman Catholic hegemony which authorized a new search for authority. Martin Luther, coupled with other technological inventions such as movable type and the printing press, meant the people could begin to sidestep RCC authority. And, if as I was taught, Protestantism finds its father in Martin Luther “protesting” the abuses of a hegemonic power maybe we ought to reclaim that same attitude today? Protestants need to investigate the core of their own identity as a Protest-ant. Someone who can actively examine their own power while working to uproot individual and systemic injustices in our social experience.
[4] Thinking here of Simone De Beauvoir’s work where she argues for an ambiguity of existence whereby, we operate subjectively as one who doesn’t know how to sort out all the tensions in our identities. And it’s from this place of discomfort, according to Beauvoir, that we set about the work of what poet Rainer Rilke argues are the very questions of our existence. Rilke writes, “And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” (Letters to a Young Poet, Letter #4).
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/09/28/most-countries-have-given-up-their-colonies-why-hasnt-america/ As David Vine writes in that article, “Why, in 2017, decades after the civil rights and decolonization eras, does the United States still have colonies and citizens who lack full democratic rights by law? The answer is largely simple, but troubling: Because the desires and power of the United States military have overwhelmed the desires and rights of colonized peoples.”
Featured Image Photo credit: Giorgio Trovato. More information here and here
