The Truth May Have It’s Trousers On But Will It Ever Be Ready To Leave The House
Critical thinking is an art form. It takes creativity to find one’s way around the formidable maze that is the human psyche and it is a lifetimes work that most are not prepared to engage with. The skills for critical thought are being eroded in education in much the same way as the rest of the arts and humanities.
“We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated — I love the poorly educated. We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people.”
Despite the lack of coherent thought evident in the quote above, it is possible to glean one salient point and that is, lack of ability to question the status quo leads to unthinking adherence to the easiest option. Whilst those that hold the reins of power will do anything to “control the horizontal and the vertical” it is the natural position of many to accept what is set before them.
“Never again shall a single story be told as though it is the only one”
People want a convenient truth, one that does not mess with assumptions or create a paradox in terms of their own belief systems. But the truth of the matter is, that truth cannot exist; for the right price truth will belong to anyone. This is evident when we look at our systems of governance and communication.
“There are three types of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Once a lie has transcended ground zero; the politician, it receives Creedence at the second stage; the media, it then reaches the status of god in the hands of the final department of obfuscation: the statisticians. Here any lie can obtain credibility with a thin veneer of objective maths.
“When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?”
Truth, being subjective, may not exist but objective facts do. This does not mean that all objective facts may be observable but they must be quantifiable, and crucially even they can change too. The above quote attributed here to John Maynard Keynes is actually a paraphrased version of what he actually said circa 1924, but is oft quoted as though it were the whole thing. The original quote differed significantly due to the fact that it was specifically referring to investment strategies in an essay entitled ‘Investment Policy for Insurance Companies’. The paraphrased version appears to have emerged much later through, in one instance, Winston Churchill and in another case the economist Paul Samuelson (1970). The point of including this potential fact is to note the difficulty in pinpointing exact details when utilising information from esoteric source material. Material which is then changed to suit a narrative other than that for which it was originally intended.
In recent months BasementArtsProject has been involved in the ‘Faces and Threads’ project with Dr Lone Sorenson of the University of Leeds, Chris Bailkoski, Saman Rizwan of Longsight Art Space in Manchester and the Artist Parham Ghalamdar. The project has involved a number of workshops designed to look at peoples perceptions of climate change when refracted through the lens of media: legacy and social. How likely are we to take the word of those who seem knowledgable and sincere? How likely are we to accept something if it challenges our world view and even more crucially if it impinges on our pocket or convenience? Of course the last point has a different level of severity for the individual dependent upon their financial or social status in society. At the bottom of the ladder, changes in lifestyle can be the difference between personal survival and poverty, life and death even. Moving up the food chain towards the decision makers in our society, acceptance of the answers is also economic, only here it is not about survival but it is instead about profit and loss margins. And so we find ourselves, as usual, staring at a sparsely populated middle ground; a place where true answers could be found but also the place where no-one wants to look, a no-man’s land littered with the unexploded ordnance of all previous battles.
The workshops attracted members of the local communities and students of both Longsight and South Leeds along with, in one case, a Reform party councillor, coming as it did in the lead up to the local elections. It is my belief, a belief that I have expressed in many journal entries over the years, that learning should, no NEEDS TO BE a lifetime project. It was during one of these sessions that I had just such a moment of learning. In conversation with one participant the subject of the earth being tilted on its axis by human activity came up, and I have to say I had never heard this before. We discussed the subject at length and I admit that I was incredibly sceptical. Surely The Earth could not move in space; any change in our positioning would result in us being catapulted into the sun, after all it is only our speed and trajectory that stops this from happening anyway. And, if we were moved in the field of gravitational pull that would affect every other planet in the solar system too. Whilst these facts are true -observable and quantifiable- so to is the subject of the Earth moving on its axis. A quick google led me to the website of NASA where they state that the Earth has shifted on its axis by 0.000000007 degrees since the early nineties. And the reason for this, exactly as our participant had stated, was the displacement of water on the Earth’s surface through a mixture of things including melting ice caps and the building of massive dams. So there are facts that we can rely on, but they too can change over time, and that is why we must always pay strict attention to detail and the reasons why people may not want us to question things.
‘A rising tide should raise all ships’
For many, ethical decisions are not possible due to the nature of extreme poverty that great swathes of our society find themselves trapped in. Ethical behaviour must be driven by those with autonomy, those with financial freedom. They must act with integrity and bring people along with them. It is up to them to find the carrot (provide people with the means to thrive) rather than brutally administering the stick (you are awful selfish cretins if you use plastic or eat meat) as is currently the case. For those making such accusations are the ones who will be busy enriching themselves through their own carbon footprint; made larger not just through the overproduction of useless tat, private jets and lifestyles that show no regard for the rest of the world, but also the destabilisation of the rest of human existence through war.
It is interesting that when searching via Google to find out how much carbon is thrown into the air through the explosion of bombs, the ai overview tells me in the first line that “A single bomb explosion produces relatively small amounts of direct greenhouse gases (e.g., \(1.356\) tonnes of carbon monoxide per ton of TNT exploded)”. It does however go on to state that “[…] the broader carbon footprint of warfare is massive. The vast majority of war-related emissions come from the production of explosives, the manufacturing of concrete for infrastructure reconstruction, and the enormous amount of jet fuel and diesel burned by military vehicles.” (this is the ai overview but all are linked to various sources - we must however also learn how to determine what is a credible source: NASA probably is, Nigel36529 with a Union Jack Avatar on TikTok is unlikely to be) This is a war that the majority of us can have no say in or effect upon. It is reliant entirely upon those who seek to rule.
When finally the bombs fall silent and elite society has relinquished its facile obsession with borders and growth and productivity, then, and only then, does the subject of how the rest of us live become relevant. Of course it is important to be as ethical as possible, poor though many of us may be, but our lives and spirit must become a beacon to those who seek to rule in the name of preservation, not just of human society but also the natural world. We must become part of the map upon which the areas populated by the working classes currently labelled ‘here be dragons’ becomes a warning of how the future will look without us rather than an opinion of how things are with us.
“As the culture wars intensify, the left needs to set out not its blue roots, but its true roots, showing how, at its best, it delivers emancipation. That means telling a story that recognises how poverty, inequality and injustice take many individual forms but are collectively devastating. Each holds back people in every community from realising their potential, to the detriment of all of us who will not benefit from what their talents can achieve.”
For the avoidance of doubt; I do not consider myself left or right but centrist, on the basis that no argument can be solved from positions of polar opposites, in the same way that war cannot be ended by fighting. Yet, when I do the online ‘which way will you vote’ surveys I always come out as close to communist. The reason for this is because I answer such questions from the point of view of how I would like to see the world rather than through what methods these outcomes may be possible. The ultimate feeling in my answers is basically one of ‘just be nice to each other and try to do the best we can for the comfort and survival of everyone around us’. We must acknowledge our spheres of influence and concern, and one is much bigger than the other. But small actions and the building of communities of trust, honesty and cooperation, no matter how small, are the only ways that we can influence the larger sphere.