Creating Reality

I am apparently not done with Ms. Penman yet. This next bit is just about as irritating as the claim I just posted.

Central to the new postmodern constellation of beliefs is the crucial role played by language and communication. In this world, language is not subservient to knowledge, as Locke would have it; rather it is the means whereby knowledge is created. Our knowledge of the world is created out of our communication about it. - Robyn Penman, “Making a Place for the Practice of Dissenting,” Dissent and the Failure of Leadership, p. 215

This idea, too, smacks strongly of relativistic thought – knowledge is certainly shaped by the language used to discuss and describe it, but the object of that knowledge does not change based on its linguistic construction. To borrow from Saussure, the tree remains the tree whether we call it a “tree” or a “rabbit.” The word/sign may describe and invoke the ding an sich (thing itself), but it does not alter the substance of that thing. Our knowledge – as a product of reality – is not created by language, although it may be manipulated and colored by it. While I will allow that ideologies are born out of language, discussion, communication, and - yes - dissent, objects are not. Objects are objects. We might connote those objects through language and communication, but we do not change their essence in the process. Similarly, we do not change knowledge through communication and language. We might alter the way in which we consider that knowledge, change the way in which that knowledge is related to other parts of the canon, manipulate the presentation of that knowledge, etc., but the knowledge itself - like Saussure's tree - does not alter based on the way we describe it, argue about it, or deny its existence. Yesterday, one of my students brought up the example of the creation museum in Kentucky. This museum frightens me on a fundamental level because it participates in this ideology of linguistic reification to which Penman also seems to subscribe. The idea that by denying evolutionary fact, we make creation "science" a reality is profoundly disturbing. This is not "dissent." This is "delusion." "Dissent" should be reserved for ideological conversations, not refusals of established fact. Similarly, we should never suggest that facts - knowledge - can be created out of our description and discussion of them. A fact is unalterable. Its meaning might be - and often should be - debatable, but there are things that are simply not up for discussion. They simply are.

Dissent and Relativity

during the seventeenth century, the philosophers of the day – most notably Descartes – made a number of fundamental moves away from the foundational beliefs of the Renaissance and the humanism entailed in that era.
First, the seventeenth-century philosophers moved from an oral mode of argument for making judgments to a written form of proof that could be judged in terms of formal logic. Rhetoric as a means of questioning the conditions and the circumstances in which arguments carry conviction was dismissed as a way of assessing the rational merit of argument. In such circumstances, the value of people arguing for and against ideas was dismissed. By extension, the role of dissent went as well. There was no place for the dissenting voice in the rationalist pursuit for truth.
Second, the seventeenth-century philosophers moved from a concern with the local, transient and particular aspects of life and language to a preoccupation with general, abstract principles that would apply across time and place. This set of moves took modern philosophers away from particular, practical problems to the search for abstract and timeless methods for deriving general solutions to universal problems. Implicit in this search for principles was the belief in the idea of certainty. If you applied the right methods, then you could be assured of the certain, right answer. This drive for certainty also militated against a role for dissent. It’s just not acceptable to laud the role of dissent, when it is believed there can be once certain universal answer. - Robyn Penman, "Making a Place for the Practice of Dissenting," Dissent and the Failure of Leadership, pp. 210-211.

My essential problem with this account is that seems to dismiss out of hand the written “voice” – just because rationalist arguments were being written did not inherently eliminate the “voice” of dissent: written dissensions of popularly held beliefs were commonplace among humanist philosophers and thinkers. In fact, one could argue that the advent of written (and printed) dissent made it all the more possible and commonplace, rather than arguing that it was eliminated.

Furthermore, the idea that there is a truth does not detract from dissent in the process of attempting to find that truth. Scientific thinking – which is what is being described in the second point – does not revel in the elimination of dissent; Penman here seems guilty of ascribing too much value not to dissent, but to relativism – to dissent for dissent’s sake, rather than to dissent as a vehicle for the improvement of knowledge, ethics, or society.

Michael Shermer, in Why People Believe Weird Things, points out that one can, in fact, be too skeptical: "The flaw in pure skepticism is that when taken to an extreme, the position itself cannot stand. If you are skeptical about everything, you must be skeptical about your own skepticism" (16). It seems that Penman has reached this point in her argument about dissent - that one must dissent even to one's dissent, or one is stifling dissent. But this isn't productive. There is no need to dissent simply to be the dissenting voice. To dissent a proven fact, for example, is non-productive, and could actually become harmful.

While in principle, I do agree with Penman's essential argument that dissent - and the opportunity to do so - is a good thing (I've certainly been a dissenter often enough), there comes a point when constant dissent undermines its own value. If the dissenting opinion is always put forth - even when absurd or fruitless - it has a similar detrimental effect to the oppression of dissent; in both cases, dissension becomes meaningless and useless, undermining its own position as a valuable check on our ideological paradigms.