“Since choice as a decisive factor in self-preservation has to do with appearances, and since appearance has the double function of concealing some interior and revealing some ‘surface’…there is always the possibility that what appears may by disappearing turn out finally to be a mere semblance. Because of the gap between inside and outside, between the ground of appearance and appearance…no matter how different and individualized we appear and how deliberately we have chosen this individuality – it always remains true that ‘inside we are all alike’…”
“There are no dangerous thoughts; Thinking itself is dangerous.” “It is the inability to imagine what others are feeling… That is what I called ‘banality.’”
Hannah Arendt
“To point to structures; they say it is in your head. What you describe as material is dismissed as mental. I think we learn about materiality from such dismissals…” “Ideas might be how we work with as well as on our hunches, those senses that something is amiss, not quite right…”
Sara Ahmed
Last year I was placed on the Professor Watchlist Redux as a ‘radical’ professor along with many of my fellow philosophers. The website was created to combat the alt-right’s attacks on professors who teach on critically important topics such as race theory, feminism, or environmental ethics, for example. I don’t deserve to be on this list yet, but I’m getting there. I continue to work and teach in areas of social justice, but some would say I am not radical enough. So-called ‘radical’ professors make attempts to get at the root of complex problems, often using unconventional or original ways and, at times, are subsequently cast off the island too quickly. In other words, not all theory or theorizing is bad. Radical teachers and students of philosophy test their theories regularly. The names on this list of radical philosophers are genuinely thoughtful and rigorous teachers and scholars. Much of what these thinkers do today is more in the realm of public philosophy than it gets credit for, and my career consists of a love of teaching specifically, another form of doing radical public philosophy. Ask my students. They have been telling me for over a decade how much they love and want to learn again after one of our courses.
The Redux list was highlighted in a Chronicle of Higher Education article that noted, “Wasn’t Socrates in his time, or Thomas Paine in his…or MLK, Jr. radical in his? Yes, indeed they were.” The article continues, “The word ‘radical’ means ‘at the root,’ so to be a radical intellectual is to be one who gets to the root of the problem. High time for more of that!” What I want to try and get at the root of today in this APA Blog piece is what I call the banality of rumor.
We live in a world of stories, histories, fables, platitudes. We are narrative beings and (might) think according to metaphor, but not only metaphor. The jury is still out on the “hard problem” of consciousness no matter what you may have heard or read. We like a good story, but we don’t have to live in a world of cruel, harmful, or false stories either. We can resist verbal assaults on our character, yet it is not as easy to trace the start of a harmful or false rumor nor is it easy to trace our need to spread rumors. Once started, they can continue for years. Telling stories is part of what makes living beautiful, interesting, even sublime. Yet, the socially acceptable practice and habit of rumoring teaches us that things aren’t always what we think they are and neither are others. We may not want to know the real truth either… As James Baldwin wrote, “People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.” Many challenges in critical thinking occur while attempting to correct false beliefs spreading like wildfire, and it’s worse when one prefers the content of the rumor personally. Usually too much time has passed and everyone has their own idea of what is and isn’t ‘true.’ We also have the problem of confirmation bias. We look for evidence to support beliefs we already hold or, worse, that we want to be true. Suddenly, the web becomes impossible to untangle, and errors in reasoning even more impossible to fully understand or stop. The logic of the banality of rumor as an acceptable social practice and way of bonding with others is what I wish to root out. As David Foster Wallace spoke in 2005 in the only public address he ever gave, “…but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance.” The perpetuation of false, banal rumors can destroy lives.
Philosophy is fun and important, crucial to our education and society in many ways. We don’t need to defend it here. We don’t need to continually prove that we know how to bake good bread. Our work and efforts, teaching, and philosophical systems speak for themselves. But our world is also white washed, driven by wealth and capital, not to mention the problem of ego in its need for control, as philosophers Mariana Alessandri and John Kaag, two of my favorite philosophers, have written about. A lot of philosophy can also be challenging, difficult, or un-nerving. Many do not read the rigorous systematic texts philosophers work with and on out of sheer lack of trying or desire. This is a mistake, especially when others are critical of philosophy without knowing what it really attempts to accomplish. Choosing what to think about and studying philosophical systems includes many challenges, physically, emotionally, psychologically, affectively, and theoretically, for example. For these and other reasons, it is pressing that we try to get to the heart of the problem of the banality of rumor. Spreading cruel, judgmental, or false rumors is a form of bullying, and it’s killing us, if not because of its sheer thoughtlessness and unfeeling aspects. In an era of growing fake news and seeming inability to believe actual facts, it is imperative we learn how this socially acceptable form of bonding operates, and then curve our habits to try not to engage in it.
Taken to its extreme, the practice of rumoring solidifies into actual perceptions, sometimes to the point of the one rumoring actually fearing they could be wrong and so find ways to keep the rumors alive. We seem to like to categorize others according to our personal preferences of who’s who and why, what we think they did and when, including according to race, class, gender, ability, job, family, ideas, appearances, or actions etc. Then, we actually start to perceive others accordingly. This all gets in the way of thinking clearly about the world and about some of our daily interactions or motivations for social bonding. Worse still; it gets in the way of feeling, really feeling for others. Ego often sidesteps our emotions, that is, our heart. We sometimes chose, in other words, not to think about the feelings of others. I am as guilty of this as you. Sadly, we often chose potentially false or hurtful rumors over love or more understanding. Why? Philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that what worried her most was “not stupidity but thoughtlessness.” [The Life of the Mind, 4] When non-thinking becomes normalized, even encouraged, everyday behavior becomes thoughtless… Rumoring about others is a thoughtless social behavior and an increasingly dangerous form of social bonding in these rising times of rapid fire headlines, hacking, fake news, violence, or past misunderstandings.
The opportunity to strive in our perseverance, in our conatus and creativity, as Spinoza might say, is over if we are thoughtless. Whereas all of Nature might be connected causally (and possibly quantumly…), not reflecting on our social practices adequately is dangerous. The force of our imaginative ideas and personal preferences or needs will become stronger than our ideas of reason. It’s physics. In other words, the imaginative ideas we have that we prefer to focus on will dominate our mind regardless of the logic of their truth or falsity. They will take up its space and energy. Individuals who allow cruel or hurtful rumors to continue without checking on their origin or truth prefer to live in a personal fantasy or a type of fanatical social bonding, rather than using reason to suspend judgement while attempting further understanding. Thinking this through is difficult, including for me. It’s similar to what Sara Ahmed calls a ‘sweaty concept.’ Ahmed writes, “A sweaty concept: another way of being pulled out from a shattering experience.” [Living A Feminist Life 12-13] Rumoring as a social practice of bonding and habit that we need to change is a sweaty concept. That one is not what or who you think or thought they are (or were) is a shattering, sweaty concept. We live among and create ‘situations’ every day of our lives. Ahmed writes, “A situation can refer to a combination of circumstances of a given moment but also to a critical, problematic, or striking set of circumstances. Lauren Berlant describes a situation thus: ‘A state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life.’” [Ahmed 13] Sometimes some just notice what’s developing ahead of time, but it’s hard to point out a potential problem relying on micro-perceptions with little to point to or that which some others cannot see. This is especially dangerous if the one perceiving a potential problem has been rumored to perceive incorrectly. “When we speak, no wonder: it can feel like everything shatters. We can become the point from which things cannot be reassembled.” [Ahmed 171] The harms caused by false or cruel rumors cannot be reassembled and no-one is held accountable for something so vague.
I believe we can trace some of the seeds of growing thoughtlessness in the social practice of spreading rumors. Is this a practice that allows us to feel disconnected to some others, with those we disagree with or who are different from the ‘norm’ or who we dislike for whatever reason? Why do we allow old rumors to fester or survive, for example? We’re being repeatedly trained to be thoughtless and marginalize others who we decide don’t fit in the way we want them to when rumors persist. Putting our well-thought out theories into practice on a daily basis is hard work, but let’s try to barrel through this sweaty concept. As Joy James notes, “Concretizing ethical ideals in action supports an unfamiliar form of thinking – theorizing in the face of political violence.” [Seeking the Beloved Community, 6] Along with James, let’s just say that I’ve paid the price of my ticket [James 190]. On Arendt’s theory of the abuse of power and the banality of evil, James writes, “…Arendt’s theory of power posits that it is neither force, domination, nor oppression; power is collective action for a common ideal rooted in freedom.” The question is: what kind of ‘freedom’ and type of collective action do you engage in? James continues, “[Arendt] appears not to see that her idealized political state, the Aristotelian polis [when Arendt found refuge from the Nazis in New York], subverted and undermined power and politics by oppressing the household.” [James 307-308] If academia is our household, then sharing and believing cruel rumors is a form of domestic violence. It’s personal and political.
As academics and philosophers who love teaching and do not consider it a form of ‘going to work’ nor take off our philosophy hats when we leave the classroom, where exactly is home? Our household is often, for better and worse, found within the polis of our institutions. It can be the city streets too, but there is no escape from rumors inside your own home, and the fuel for the fire is that we often don’t take responsibility for starting rumors or finding out how they originated (or if they’re true). Thus, academia is no place at all to thrive under such circumstances. In fact, I think one function of rumoring (or keeping old rumors alive) is to weaken the thriving of others and push them out. In this way, I adopt Ahmed’s perspective: “Becoming feminist involves a process of recognizing that what you are up against cannot be located or reduced to an object or a thing…” I cannot point to all of how or where one particular false rumor may have begun because it is not located in one person, place, or thing. Ahmed continues, “Feminism, in giving you somewhere to go, allows you to [safely] revisit where you have been.” [Ahmed 29, 31] I will admit, I am a bad, but “killjoy” feminist.
The banality of rumor includes that the initial incorrect belief will, in other words, shape one’s future seemingly accurate perceptions and an Other, especially if more than one person already believes the rumor. Yet, the banality of rumor is not about the little Nazi inside us who desires to harm innocent others. Not even Arendt would say that. I’ve read that Arendt’s work is grossly misunderstood on this point. “She definitely did not see Adolf Eichmann only as a cog in the monstrous Nazi machine, and she was at pains to emphasize unequivocally, in a 1964 radio interview with the German journalist and historian Joachim Fest, that she never meant that within each of us is hidden a small Nazi (nor is that notion found in her writings).” [Ushpiz, Haaretz, 2016] That being said, reading ‘the Other’ incorrectly is nonetheless dangerous and often cruel. Just think about how racism continues to perpetuate itself in the U.S., as another example. Our current racist President is addicted to spreading false rumors and hurtful commentary. It’s his tactic, the only strategy he has access to because it’s so effective. Rumoring in this way, as an acceptable social practice with growing support and mob mentality, is an act of bonding with others, others, that is, similar to oneself through moments of critique, ridicule, suspicion, thoughtlessness, or even banal humor. Joy James continues to write on the construction and perpetuation of the hyper-visibility of blackness within a racist culture in these ways. Citing Toni Morrison, James writes that these behaviors are “’…not only about the not-free, but also with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination.’” [Seeking a Beloved Community, 10] Is the root of the banality of rumoring as a social practice that we are not-free, desire freedom, and thus create a ‘not-me’ in order to imagine an illusory freedom and escape to the conformity and comfort of group think?
With Spinoza we might ask, what kind of self-preservation practice is this really? I believe this behavior is perpetuated socially because accountability is so difficult to uphold and daily thoughtless bonding so much easier. Many resort to talking about others because thoughtlessness leads to situations where we don’t have to think at all. Yet, rumors are hard to stop: “Once a flow is directed, it acquires a momentum.” [Ahmed 45] Spinoza would agree. Consider what the now infamous TED talk and vulnerability Sociologist Brené Brown posits about authenticity: inauthentic encounters are contagious. She notes, “Empathy is not a default response…[but] you can’t fake empathy.” Think about this for a moment. People laugh at jokes that they know are not funny, she notes, because they don’t want to be the only one of the group not laughing. They hide behind what is socially acceptable so that the focus never turns on them and they are welcomed into the group.
Referencing research on riot behavior from 1973 by Sociologist Mark Granovetter, in an essay titled “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Malcolm Gladwell (another misfit affect alien), in an interview with The New Yorker, explains that there is a social phenomena where the average person would never engage in any kind of violence against another unless there are several others doing (saying?) the same thing. That is, he researches the phenomena of an individual needing group support for their negative reactions or behaviors to continue (minus sociopaths who have egos that would believe their own imagined fantasies no matter who is listening). After explaining that his mother is the nicest person you could meet and has never done an aggressive thing in her life, Gladwell notes, “There is a condition where my mother will throw a rock through the window.” That condition is if others around her (more than 1 or 2) are doing the thing you wouldn’t normally do otherwise and trying to justify it while in action. Gladwell continues, “I’m opposed to simplistic readings of complicated social phenomena.” I concur and apply his method to this essay about our social practice of rumoring, especially when it becomes a critique of an-Other.
Our world is overwhelming and a mess. We’re not unintelligent, but it doesn’t look good because we are continually trained to be thoughtless. In a society that would benefit from more vulnerability and compassion, not to mention genuine education and play, we need to stop targeting others through our words and partially thought perceptions, as if that is the weapon of choice in a culture of violence when guns aren’t available. Talking about others is seductive. Time passes and we are acutely aware of this temporal aspect to our daily lives. Nonetheless, the damage is done. Within the halls of academia, rumoring and its effects are a form of social weaponization and domestic violence. But I am a misfit, part of a new species. I am an affect alien, as Lidia Yuknavitch would understand. I am interested in our ability (and inability) to rationally imagine the feelings of others instead of jumping to the personal perception or rumor of choice. We have to pay attention to how others might be feeling. “Affect aliens sympathize with alien affects.” [Ahmed, 59]
This acceptable social practice needs to become unacceptable. It can kill not only careers but also those the social norm of the power group deems unfit. The more one thoughtfully looks into the nature of a rumor, the more one discovers, to their joy or horror, that the rumors they’ve heard are often distorted knowledge, sometimes completely false, easily mistaken, or have been drastically altered as one whispers down-the-line… It is especially dangerous when they issue from a well-respected or otherwise very careful thinker or trusted individual. Significant errors in otherwise good reasoners and thoughtful people have always fascinated me, including my own. If you are blind to something (got it wrong) and don’t know it, how could you see it? Worse, what might motivate you to want to see the error if you prefer the rumor instead? This is about blindness and cognitive myopia, but it is also about what one choses to feel or not feel and why. We increasingly act in dangerous or harmful ways when we don’t have all the facts but believe that we do…
The banality of rumor enacts differing an-Other in order to keep those perceived as the same together. It can cease as a learned social practice through consciousness raising and thoughtfulness. I wonder how much of this societal practice is due the problem of our lack of vulnerability? Our society is plagued with a fear of being vulnerable, as Brené Brown knows all too well and the philosopher George Yancy discusses often. Let’s sweat through the concept and then change this social practice. Let’s open ourselves to more love. I say we start spreading more rumors of communion, talent, kindness, compassion and joy. Let’s start rumoring about how amazing it is to get to know each other well. We’re all too negative too often. Let’s start spreading affirmative rumors and change the social practice of the marginalization by eliminating our social need to talk about what we think is wrong with the Other. Let’s get more creative about what we chose to think and feel daily. Love thy neighbor. “We become a problem when we describe a problem,” Ahmed writes, but why? I have described the social bonding of the banality of rumoring about the Other. We should now go get a coffee, some tea, or a beer and undo any harmful past rumor we can. I always desired such habits, but perhaps you heard differently? Affect aliens create new affects. Thanks for the sweat…
Chris Rawls
Chris Rawls teaches philosophy full time at Roger Williams University. Chris received her Ph.D. in philosophy in 2015 from Duquesne University writing on Spinoza’s dynamic epistemology. Chris recently co-edited an interdisciplinary anthology Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides with Routledge Press’s series Research on Aesthetics (an experiment for the ages!) with Diana Nieva and Steven Gouveia. Chris also studies/teaches within the Critical Philosophy of Race and Whiteness Studies since 2006 and helped co-found the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) archive at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Theory, Brown University.
