Reason is a discipline of mind that allows people to generate knowledge. Knowledge is the stuff through which one may navigate cleverly to gain an advantage in life. The beasts don't have much knowledge. In our IDW discussion this past weekend, that got a little out of hand, our band of prickly interlocutors tried to get going on this subject. I don't think much was resolved, as a great deal of the talk got tangential to Jordan Peterson and to matters of faith. But what emerged to my surprise was a bit of bonding in the afterparty which came after the Fall.
Just after 7pm as a subgroup of the main decided on where to eat dinner the five of us headed down to the parking structure. Now at this point, to be fair, I suppose I need to start using pseuds, because basically none of these are public figures. I found them, they're my associates. Find your own. The first guy I'm going to mention is Brother. It's probably not fair that I call him Brother, but I do find myself in agreement with his empiricals and his description of the hard knock life. What many of you know about me is that I am the oldest of 4 boys and grew up in a roughneck neighborhood. I was somewhere along a third axis between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and as a young boy very much likely to get into the same kind of mischief and shenanigans, some of which involved cursing, smoking, fighting and wandering far from home. Brother understands a hierarchy of force escalation that I appreciate, as well as a respect for the eternal reasons to cool your own jets, without which one may become very quickly an agent of chaos. Brother and I agreed to carpool to the restaurant.
On our way down the single functioning escalator to the parking structure, our way was blocked by two way traffic and an 89 year old woman who faceplanted on the cold hard steel stairs. We observed momentarily a sea of frozen faces. If they hadn't been in close proximity to the poor old lady in age, I'm sure a dozen smartphones would have been in evidence. As two or three of us snapped to attention and pulled her to her feet and then to a 2/3s chair carry, the stairs were cleared. We sat her down on the large landing one level down. Her face was a bloody mess, but her hips and legs were intact and she was conscious. I immediately ran down the next flight to get my first aid kit from the truck. I had several triangle bandages, and no sterile wipes. I guess I never thought about injuries to the face so it made my ample saline wash useless. There were three lacerations on her forehead that were clearly from the familiar steel pattern of escalator stairs and blood saturated her auburn bangs. There was also blood in her ears, but I quickly assessed that it must have dripped down there. After we got her wiped up a bit and bandaged she was holding the left front of her mouth. She may have lost or chipped a tooth as well. The paramedics arrived about 20 minutes into our impromptu rescue, and we finally scurried off. We got beaming faces and kind words. My heart rate was up to 137, but my hands were steady.
Brother explained as we were washing our hands clear of blood, him much more than me, that we understand something about seeing people hurt. I have since gone through a short inventory of my own bloody scrapes, but from the point of view of whether or not I was fighting for myself or fighting for somebody else. It occurred to me that I have never lost a fight. I certainly lost what, if it were scored like a boxing match, was an ugly fight. But it wasn't a TKO. I guess that means I can take a beating and not quit. Sounds like stupid me. Funny as I write this I think of three other fights I got into, one of which I declined. That was John from Fedco whom I let ride my motorcycle which he promptly laid down within 20 minutes of begging me to let him ride. He said he'd understand if I wanted to punch him in the face (just once) but.. It was an effective enough apology. But I can't remember his last name. Brother reminded me of chivalry. I know he'd have my back in a fight.
At dinner, neither of us said much more about the Fall, but we both said that there is something we owe to bullies. I reiterated the gist of this 'On the Necessity of Knuckleheads'. (Wow, 2004 was a different era of my writing). And that trip down memory lane was abstracted a bit. While I was mostly interested in listening to my new associates, in the back of my head was something I recently said about the logic of violence, something I could not articulate well at all before my martial education but knew implicitly. I think the first time I talked about it was in the mid 80s during the gang wars of Southern California. I remember the movie 'Colors', and I remember saying "There is no such thing as senseless violence." People always have good reasons to squabble, because only psychopaths squabble spontaneously.
As many subjects as we covered through the course of the afternoon and evening, it is the matter of the rationality of conflict that touches closer to my current self. I think it is directly related to the reason each of us who did were comfortable dealing with the bloodied matron. We understand the logic and the rationality of violence. Brother paraphrased a meme which we probably both saw over the past week. "Those who are not capable of violence are not peaceful. Only those who are capable of violence can be peaceful, the others are harmless." And that's my paraphrasing. One must fight for a better peace. That too is rational. It is that rationality that tends to make me believe that Steven Pinker is rather smarmy in his predictions. Like many men who have not learned the hard way, long hair is an easily exploitable weakness. In male company (sometimes) I refer to man buns as a 'bitch handle'.
I struggle to come up with the appropriate handle for our fearless leader, but I am confident that he understands something about the rationality of the warrior spirit. Yet I wonder aloud whether or not such a spirit should be outsourced from society as it is today in our volunteer armies and our combat sports. When I'm in Texas I don't have such concerns, then again I haven't been outside of Las Colinas or Plano for some time now. We Americans are hung up and confused about gender, and many of us men are as well. It's a shame. We don't have very good arts to communicate the virtues of reason, courage, honor and toughness. We pretend to know what we need from our pop culture. Yet when we are faced with sudden violence, even the violence of gravity, most of us freeze. Some of us run towards the trouble. Learning how to survive trouble the hard way is not necessarily a blessing in disguise. Many a hard man has been laid low in our society by perfidious answers to "Or else what?". Beware the vengeance of politics and the force of lawsuits. It's getting easier to punk people via keyboard these days. But what kind of real man doxxes?
There is reason in violence because there are reasons for violence, most of which we don't bother to study or understand. And such ignorance is incapable of navigating cleverly through that knowledge. So it's no surprise that a great deal of mouthing off posing as intelligence is nothing more than propaganda which can often only be unlearned the hard way. Too many Americans are incapable of being peaceful. The have got a lot to learn. Especially those who claim to be innocent of aggression, but call for Leviathan forces in their attempts to turn the tides of history, remake the meaning of culture and manipulate the climate of the entire planet.
At length I am drawn to consider our common sense understanding of violence vis a vis liberty. It goes a little something like this: "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose." Yet one of the reasons I have a category in this blog called 'A punch in the nose' is because I would much rather suffer a bloody nose than get hounded out of a job by cancel culture fanatics. What offends me a great deal is how a large contingent of wrong-thinkers, by Jonathan Haidt's definitions, are willing to stand 'in solidarity' with certain victims and support their violent acts.
Hardly any students say that they themselves would use violence to shut down a speech, but two surveys conducted in late 2017 found that substantial minorities of students (20% in one survey and 30% in the other) said it was sometimes “acceptable” for other students to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking on campus.
Is that the effective courage of one's convictions, or is that more like being a football fan? I think it's cheerleading for bullies, but only because most college campus speakers woudn't dare to ask a protester to take it outside. There's a time and a place for roughhousing. If you ask me, there is a very good reason 2019 is nothing like 1967 when there were over 150 violent race riots in America. Racial oppression is nowhere near so violently oppressive. I don't think there was anything so intellectually profound about those riots or of any at all. People who lose their livelihoods fight back. People who are roughed up on the streets of their own neighborhoods toughen up. Human beings are naturally territorial and always will be. There are foolish and wise ways to deal with this territoriality. But a hastag mob defies all territoriality and deals vindictive virtual vigilantism. Who wouldn't face such accusers if they could? The principle of Habeas Corpus demands the face to face conflict. There is reason in this.
I say that reason is no different in the court than outside, and our liberty is fundamentally tied to and inextricable from that reason. A government of the people is granted a proxy of violence not a monopoly. The judicial system holds that proxy and the judge pronounces the coercive violence of law enforcement with a bang. The system is not a substitute for our natural rights, it is an extension made regular. Due process insures the right about of violence is administered on a consistent basis. But our systematic liberty and rights are inalienable from ourselves. So when we are faced with sudden violence we should respond justly according to our reason. The judge is not ever present. The paramedic is not ever present. If we are to be a nation of individuals, then it is our responsibility to know. It is our responsibility to use reason, generate knowledge and navigate cleverly through that knowledge - not be mere unthinking harmless beasts in the ship of state, but free men possessed of reason, toughness, courage and honor.
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