Tending the Mind

TENDING THE MIND

The blues of scientific method  complements  the jazz of humanistic inquiry.

How do you minimize the probability that essential ideas  fizzle and evaporate?  Read.  Reading helps you to locate your mind in the universe of possibilities.

 Read

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

David Faust, The Limits of Scientific Reasoning

George Yancy, On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis

Richard Wright, The Color Curtain

Brain Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher, eds. Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference

Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life

Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lukin, eds. Futures of Black Radicalism

Gayle L. Ormiston and Raphael Sassower, Narrative Experiments: The Discursive Authority of Science and Technology

Reflect

Perhaps one or two people share my belief that it is valuable to read among the humanities, the social sciences and the empirical/theoretical   "hard" sciences.  You can search for common sense that isn't common.  If no one shares my belief, that is cool.  Nothing is lost.  I just gain a different perspective on what  is unique in contemporary American life and savor the perspective. 

Purposeful uniqueness is somewhat rare in 2017.  Is it a victim of paradox:  to be in control is to be out of control?  In the Age of Trump, being beyond control seems desirable.  Use the power of paradox and the dislocations of what is relatively true in "the cultural/linguistic matrices in which science and technology take shape."  Yes, I agree with Ormiston and Sassower that we ought "not assume that science and technology constitute domains of inquiry separate from inquiries undertaken in other traditional disciplines or areas of research, such as philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism, music, or hermeneutics ( the histories and theories of interpretation)" (ix).  Do I assume holistic thinking or critical analysis that embraces non-traditional ways of knowing has power that all elected officials and want-to-be masters of the world should fear?  YES.  Should we think that individual adjusting of terms of engagement in arenas of global violence is necessary?  YES.  Does such adjustment preclude our being co-opted or even destroyed by forces of evil?  HELL, NO.  Language is language, and speaking out or writing against  delays damage.  It does not prevent damage absolutely.  Let us not fall into delusions in matrices of stupidity.

Write

Writing helps  us to deal with problems for a brief span of time.  It doesn't make the enormous problems of this world disappear;  it does not resolve them.  Problems are problems are problems, and they reproduce themselves endlessly.  You already knew that?  O.K.  Did you also know how reassuring it is to have face-to-face conversations with people who realize H. L. T. Quan's insights about the hidden dynamics of pure radicalism are more useful than the entertainment provided by Cornel West's "Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle," The Guardian, December 17, 2017? And the Guardian has fallen into such inattention that it did not care to correct the grammar of this sentence:"The disagreements between Coates and I are substantive and serious."  I suppose inattention is crucial for entertainment. 

Did you already know the stern discipline of Angela Davis's thinking about  the state of international affairs ultimately has greater value than Toni Morrison premature anointing of Coates as the heir of James Baldwin?  Perhaps you are afraid to say what your heart thinks?  That is something you are bound to know or to discover when you talk with people who are not mentally enslaved by our nation's systemic propaganda. Our daily doses of tweeted propaganda.

 We do need for West to bring good, old-fashioned black prophetic fire to dinner; we do not need for him to tell us yet once more that Coates is the HNIC of good will for lukewarm, expendable neoliberals of all colors.  First and last, Morrison's observations about the damnation of the bluest eye and the presence/absence of Africans wherever stand us in good stead; the love and romance from her larder of fictions  is not to be dismissed, but we have to be selective about how much of it we pass on.  And as you write, do not hesitate to write that Jeffrey Goldberg went bananas in trying to be a Norman Mailer "White Negro" who could cast shade in a podcast --- Atlantic Interview, Episode 1, November 8, 2017 with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Coates in Paris.  If you listen to the streamed interview, his mouth embarrasses him as if he had drunk three flutes too many of French wine.  And his naughty raving, his lack of respect of talking to Coates as if Coates was the help for The Atlantic  (yes, we know how much Coates has helped and been helped by the magazine) and to making cheap jokes with the very cosmopolitan Adichie, his verbal bad boy sounds were edited out of the transcript of the interview.  Some of us have relentless ears and are not taken in by his saying "And the truth of the matter is that white people are often assholes to white people."  We know how an asshole  from a tribe of chosen people sounds.  If writing as much gets you into deep trouble, know that you have done a responsible job of tending the mind. Know that your blues and jazz are cooking some righteously radical dishes.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            December 18, 2017