The New York Sophist

I discovered Doctor Who when I was starting high school. Late Saturday nights on PBS stories were shown without breaks for hours and hours every week. I loved watching it and thinking about how incredibly strange and radical the ideas in the show were. Without internet, I also wondered how or why British TV shows were so long. Only later did I figure out it was episodic.

John Pertwee who was the third doctor (my favorite) once said in an interview that he thought the Doctor was a boring know-it-all cruising through space – or something like that – and decided he would add in some bits of dialogue to humanize the doctor, or well, make him seem a lot less like a intergalactic know it all and more like an adventurer. The current show with all its backstories, twists, and recurrent characters I think owes a bit of a debt to Pertwee’s idea here.

I think the difference between classic who and contemporary who tracks on the difference of public attitudes toward science and knowledge. Contemporary versions of the Doctor are a lot more certain and a lot more committed to a particular base of knowledge that companions can’t really access – although they can understand. In classic who, the Doctor would be as in the dark as his human companions however he had something they did not – a method of inquiry and a process of working through a moment or a situation to determine what he should do (or more often not do).

The 2005 reboot is a product of its time – here’s a guy who is an expert on the future, science, history, everything. This might not really be possible or even desirable among a time travelling scholar. Commitment to a certain mode of inquiry – the kind the 3rd and 4th doctors represented best – is not only more reasonable to imagine in relation to time travel, but could also be a very good model for us when we encounter the novel and inexplicable.

Recent episodes, since the end of the 10th doctor to today are all about the Doctor’s psychology and personal traumas. This resonates with our contemporary situation where trauma, personal experience, and known innner truth have taken the lead in public discourse, inquiry, politics, and the like. Instead of questions, the Doctor has answers. And those answers are only revealed in the last act. We, the audience are to marvel at the Doctor not stand beside them. We are to be impressed, not seeing how easy it would be to think, believe, and act like the Doctor.

It’s not possible to know all the history, science, and meaning of cultures across every point in space time. It’s also unreasonable to think personal trauma and feeings would be able to be mapped across culture and civilization through space and time. It’s not possible for us to do either on one planet with one creature (humans). It’s better to think of Doctor Who as a show about how we should encounter the strange and new – with a process of inquiry, interactivity, and uncertainty – rather than the idea that we know or have felt what others have.

Here’s the latest episode of “Winning Arguments,” a podcast I’m doing with some friends I’ve made who work with Canonical Debate Lab.

What we’ve been trying to do is build the podcast in public, meaning we share the run up, pre-show and all meetings about the podcast, then have the episode separate. I’m sharing the whole thing on here, and I thing I’ll just send out a note every time we make one.

We’ve been trying to find a Tweet-as-argument and evaluate how it works and what could be done to improve it. I think it’s really coming together in a lot of good ways. Looking forward more than anyone to see what the final form is.

Using stasis to expand productive policy invention

“All cops are bad” – this kind of lazy thinking that is not only dismissive but a refusal to address the problems facing the police state (as it reveals itself more and more to only be this) is a phrase that should be altered to “All cops are cops.”

It’s weird to think of a cop as a Swiss army knife. A cop – based on what they are meant to do and their training – is really a steak knife. It’s difficult to think of a diverse police force, or a police force that would be able to respond to a number of situations out there. But since neoliberal faith has destroyed all public institutions, gutted them, or made them functionally a joke there is little left to do but call the police for every situation that requires government intervention.

Realizing that cops are cops – they are there to stop, halt, detain, and intervene in criminal situations – means that we limit the conception of the police as a multitool. Instead we realize how inadequate it is to have the police come to every single crisis moment that happens. Instead, we should reserve the police for particular kinds of interventions, then create other organizations to respond to issues that do not require the full force of the state to stop something.

This makes me think back to rhetorical stasis, that ancient world conception of how to find the controversial points in an argument or debate. Stasis theory was used, and is still taught, as a method to explore a controversy to determine the best place to hold the disagreement. By “hold” we mean something similar to the ancient Greek word stasis – a point of no movement, frozen (not temperature), where the force is high but motion is not happening. In the case of “All cops are bad,” people have decided to have the argument around the stasis of degree, or quality: How intense? How harmful? It’s a debate about degree or amount. I think this is a mistake as it encourages us to “measure” the individuals who are cops against one another, or take the set of people who serve as police, and equate them all with the worst possible actions of the police.

Instead of a judgement on the nature of the person or the title or organization – “All Cops are Bad” – it might be better to provide a more definitional approach rather than qualiity (using the old stasis terms). “All Cops are Cops” indicates that the police attract a person who wants to do police work, comes with training in police work, and does not offer much else. Police are trained to enforce the laws. This seems like it’s at the center of things. After that you could make claims like “The police protect the public.” This is a bit harder to prove but you could make a convincing argument here based on what police are taught and paid to do. As you move out from this, it becomes more and more spurious to prove. This is where you might get the idea that they are “all bad.”

In a recent book, Benjamin Bratton argued that the only part of the state apparatus to survive both neoliberalism and the COVID fiscal cuts is the police. This means the police will be relied on for just about any public need that requires state intervention. If we want this as our world, we should either alter police training, or have the police serve as one branch of a response force that is publicly funded for the variety of things that require state intervention to protect citizens. But in order to get here, we should stop looking at the quality of the people in uniform and just the uniform itself. Cops are not failing in totality; cops are cops. Sometimes – very rarely – this kind of legal force is required. But it shouldn’t be the first response. Realizing that cops are cops – and only cops – is the starting place to have the “defund the police” conversation, however that naming is a lot of trouble too.

reconceptualizing travel

The end of the pandemic is the opening up of travel for me, which has been a pretty amazing time.

Enjoyed nearly a week in Boston exploring the art and food of the city, and thinking quite a bit about the privilege of travel. I’m lucky to be able to take trips, see people, and have experiences to think and write about.

The thing about travel is it always creates more demand for itself. The trip is upcoming – it happens in your mind as a fantasy or a prediction. The trip begins. You can’t wait to get there. You experience the going as anticipation of arrival. You have the trip. You imagine yourself remembering the fantastic moments while living them. You compare your experiences to your predictive fantasy. You are going home. You wonder about the trip and remember it as you miss the trip home again. At home, you wonder where the trip took place, when it happened, what counts, and what was left out/behind.

Travel has taken on a powerful meaning of freedom and ability for me, along with joy and gratitude. For a very long time travel was a part of my teaching. I took students all around the world. It was a great time doing that, but it was always coupled with anxiety and concern about their safety, experience, and other things that could go wrong. I didn’t really like travelling as such during that time because it was pretty exhausting.

Now I can’t imagine feeling that way and I’m somewhat embarrassed that I would look forward to the end of trips sometimes. I think it might have just been the stress of responsibility or care for others, both physically and psychologically. I think I’d be better at it today.

Rhetoric teaches us that meanings often come from what we preconceive of being there in the thing or the moment as we encounter it. We look for what we assume to be there and then confirm its presence. Travel is no different. It’s hard for me to imagine what meanings I used to easily find in travel. Now it’s very easy to see it as something really special. The trick is to understand that whatever you look for you’ll find it – it wasn’t really there at all, you brought it in yourself.

The most well-known version of this idea comes from the film The Empire Strikes Back where Luke enters the cave, fights Darth Vader, decapitates him and realizes he’s decapitated himself. The better version of this is the Ox Herding Woodcuts, carved around 15th c. Korea and detail the story of a young man going into the woods to find and tame an ox. He learns from this experience that there was no ox, just himself there, and he tamed his own mind.

My friend tells me of a stolen Buddhist temple bell that is in a park somewhere in Boston. We seek after it, like the ox, and have the conversation about the ox herding pictures. We look up after some walking, and see the ox. We then took photos with it. The question then becomes: What did we take pictures of or with? It seems clear I took a photo here of my conceptions that I brought with me on the hunt for the bell. Or ox. Or whatever I thought was out there.

Maybe this ancient story of the ox is a good way to keep preconceptions where they should be – on our minds, from our minds – not received from out in the world (where we most likely put them). This might be a good way to keep travel where it should be – a conception that can and should change before it becomes anything else.

Teaching rhetoric is a lot more like teaching art or creative writing than it is some sort of job skill. But you wouldn’t know that to look at what passes for a public speaking class these days. Farewell creativity, hello corporate conformity.

Strangely, departments that are dedicated to inquiry against ideological systems and the exposure of the ideological structure of the natural order are perfectly comfortable offering courses that are little more than box-ticking in terms of what type of speech you do, how many sources you have, and whether or not you have the three parts of the introduction completed properly.

This practice of fitting things into measurable units of reality (or whatever you’d call it) is a global trend. We are obsessed with conforming because conformity is measurable. We don’t have to think too much about it to understand it or place meaning on it. If we can look at it, and see if it has the parts, we are good.

Propriety is another way to define rhetoric. Concerns about decorum and appropriateness have always been subjects taught by rhetoricians, have sparked controversies, and are also powerful ways to thread the needle in argument if you are aware of and comfortable with the edge of the edge of the line. But part of appropriateness is being able to appreciate and understand just how close to the edge a rhetor can get. This requires some work, some creative attenuation to the moment by the listener and speaker, and is often lost in the desire to present it the “way it should be.” Although this appears to be propriety, it misses the mark. It’s propriety on propriety’s terms, not the contingent sense of the moment’s propriety as interpreted by the audience, waiting to be constituted with words.

This adherence to propriety is costly. Now we see nothing but cynical snippets and angry shouting in society. When we see a speech, it’s a drab, formal, and sad reading of an essay. The only people out there maintaining a semblance of the power of oratory are the storytellers and the slam poets. Remember the amount of media attention that Amanda Gorman received after delivering a poem at Joe Biden’s inauguration? If only Presidents could speak like this.

Rhetoric has been and will continue to be the creative art of influence. People will always need to create meaning out of a numbered of fractured bits of perception, time honored practices, and deeply held commitments to value. They will either be compelled to do this by community, friends, or family or they might feel that burning pressure in their heart to speak out against or for events and words surrounding them. Either way, the duty of the rhetoric teacher is to ensure that they are prepared to do so both mentally and emotionally.

Without this preparation one of the most vital forces in creating identity, community, and meaning that leads to induce important action just won’t happen. We are already seeing it through social media’s working over of our communicative norms – sharing memes with those who already agree with us is hardly inspirational. The orator has the capacity to cut through the situation with well placed words, getting everyone to reform themselves as the audience in the contingent moment, ready to discuss, consider, and act when the time is right.