Category Archives: Martin Luther King

The “Savage” Mind

31 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in Community, Donald Trump, Fascism, John Dewey, Martin Luther King

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The phrase that opens this post is one that has been around for some time. Claude Levi-Strauss used it as the title to what has since become his most famous, and possibly most important, book. Even in 1962, when the book came out, one could use such a phrase without irony and be accepted as a scholar. These days, the imputation of a “savage mentality” is likely to be met with considerable resistance, and general antipathy (at least from those with a more liberal political orientation.) “Savage” is a pejorative term, and its application (especially in matters of thought and mentality) was almost always applied to aboriginal peoples whom colonial invaders (almost always of European descent) wished to demean, degrade, and – rather savagely – exploit. Such attitudes have been quite rightfully (even righteously, in the non-pejorative sense of that word) denounced for many decades now.trump-rally-nazi-salute

Nevertheless, I submit that there really is such a thing as a savage mind, where such a mentality is understood as an antithesis to that of a civilized mind. It is an example of the genetic fallacy to reject the term because it has been seriously abused in the past. This is not a comparison between persons in pre-scientific, non-technological, &/or aboriginal societies and our own, “gloriously” developed Western cultures. Rather, I submit that the distinguishing characteristic of savagery is its rejection of community in various forms and to varying degrees. Continue reading →

Foolish Consistency

16 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Donald Trump, Inquiry, John Dewey, Logic, Martin Luther King, Philosophy of Logic

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It is certainly disturbing to see how many people prefer a convenient lie over a disquieting truth. But more importantly, we should make note of how many people will flee in abject terror to the warm, terroristic embrace of a convenient lie when confronted with an indisputable uncertainty, the unavoidable knowing that you do not know. I should get that tattooed somewhere … somewhere where no one will ever see it …dunce-cap

There is a formal structure to at least some kinds of disruptive uncertainty, and that structure is not all that hard to understand. I’ll mostly be discussing that logical structure, which often requires a kind of patience with inconsistency. But I will turn to the psychological issues of those who embrace inconsistency without thought at the end. What I wish to address here are kinds of inconsistency, most importantly noting that there are genuinely and importantly different kinds. I’ll mainly draw on investigations by Nicholas Rescher and Robert Brandom, coupled with developments by Jon Barwise and John Perry. Continue reading →

A Few Resources

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Authoritarians, Donald Trump, Education, Inquiry, Martin Luther King, Politics

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I am, with certain notable constraints, a book collector. Those constraints are worth noting here: since I have no space to store masses of wood pulp, those books have to be electronic in form, and since I have little disposable money, those books have to be free. In light of the looming political catastrophe facing us not only in the United States, but sadly across much of the world, it occurred to me that many of those books have become horrifyingly more relevant. With that in mind, it occurred to me that I ought to share what I’ve collected for any and all who might be interested. I will update this post as I discover new things, and list the date of the most recent update just above the foldeugene-debs

This in no way pretends to be a comprehensive list, merely a list of things I’ve variously stumbled upon and, on rarer occasions, went out looking for. I’ve not added anything that might be considered “classical” political theory (i.e., part of the “canon” in a philosophy class) as these can be readily found at places like Project Gutenberg. Nor have I included anything that might be viewed as socialist polemics since, once again, this can be readily found at places like the Marxists Internet Archive.

Updated: January 4th, 2017, the Indivisible guide book. Update is at the bottom.

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The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King

18 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Ethics, Ferguson, Martin Luther King, Moral Law

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I missed Dr. King’s actual birthday, because I’ve the organizational skills of an F3 tornado and the discipline of a goldfish. But at least I’ve something for the official Martin Luther King day.King Injustice Anywhere

While the Reverend Doctor King had a Ph.D. from Boston University in Speculative Theology, he was also (of course) a Baptist Minister. I’ll have some thoughts to share about right-wing reactions to this fact below the fold, but now I wish to point out some facts that make some atheists on the left side of the political spectrum a bit uncomfortable. First among these, not only was King a Baptist minister, but the entire American Civil Rights movement was religious to its core. A number of the noisier atheists seem to think that, after watching five minutes of Pat Robertson, they are now experts in theology and the history of religion. This presumption often leads these folks to conflate right-wing ideologues spewing twaddle clothed in a veneer of religious talk with the entire spectrum of human religious experience, and utterly oblivious to theological (to say nothing of philosophical) ideas about “god.” (See for example HERE and HERE.) But more importantly for our purposes, there is oftentimes a systematic failure amongst some secularists and atheists to understand that the American Civil Rights movement was irreducibly religious in character, in organization, and in philosophy. Secularists participated in the movement, but they played no substantive role. So these types of atheists contradict themselves when they simultaneously praise the civil rights movement and yet damn all religion wholesale. Continue reading →

Tortured Logic

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Ethics, Martin Luther King, Objective Morality

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So, the Senate’s report on torture has come out. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, as singularly despicable a human being as has ever crawled out from under a rock, assures us that this program was approved at the highest levels. Is a crime a crime if Important People decide not to call it such? For example, the excuse given by one active participant in the CIA’s blatant torture of prisoners (conducted without regard for the prisoners’ guilt or innocence – to say nothing of basic human decency – and the repeatedly demonstrated FACT that such methods never produce reliable information; more on this momentarily) was that three out of four past Attorneys General of the United States had approved of the practices. Iron Maiden

As Jon Stewart points out in the previous link, the three were all Attorneys General appointed by the Bush administration, which administered the programs of torture as a matter of policy orchestrated at the highest level. Stewart’s approach – via satire and such humor as one may bring to bear in the face of our public complicity in crimes against humanity – to the contrary not withstanding, his argument nevertheless bears appreciation. Continue reading →

Ethics, Pedagogy, and Process

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by in Critical Thinking, Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Ethics, Martin Luther King

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This entry is a follow-up to The Road To Hell, insofar as it concludes with an outline of Edgar Sheffield Brightman‘s Moral Laws. gavel1-md Brightman, as I noted in that earlier post, is the man that the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King went to Boston University to study under for his (King’s) Ph.D. On this account alone, Brightman is one of the most singularly influential figures in American thought. So it is more than a little disturbing that he is not given a single mention (to say nothing of an article) in either of the main online encyclopedia’s of philosophy. But leaving that travesty aside, I thought it might be useful to embed the outline of Brightman’s argument in a larger discussion about the nature of philosophical ethics. Specifically, how ought one teach it (note that that “ought” is itself an ethical imperative), and what ought one to teach? As usually happens, these questions are not unrelated.

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