*The ‘Objective’ Intellectual…Whatever That Is!

"Unlike Socrates, I’m not going to be super-modest as to say that ‘I know nothing’; however, I see myself as knowing less than I’m supposed to know."

Photo: University of N. Hamshire

Editorial* - I will pretentiously posit this: the ‘objective’ intellectual isn’t some weird animal. S/he is someone who values ‘what is said’ not ‘who said it.’ What matters to the objective intellectual is that X is good and X has been uttered, performed or procured.

The saddest case for any ‘learning’ individual is to say that X is true or acceptable only if uttered by B. And if the same X is uttered by A then we’ll reject it with all our politico-intellectual and socio-intellectual might.

I don’t see myself as an intellectual; I see myself as a student. Unlike Socrates, I’m not going to be super-modest as to say that ‘I know nothing’; however, I see myself as knowing less than I’m supposed to know. That’s my general truth! And this ‘knowing’ comes from people of all works of life. Indeed, learning doesn’t come only from comfortable endeavors but also from things that make us sad or mad.

 Essentially, I see myself not only as a student with epistemic enterprise and pursuit but as a student of life. ‘Knowing’ things can be called my obsession. I always want to ‘know’ even when I might not manage to ‘know’ what I wanted to ‘know’ all the time. And Lao Tzu is right to call knowing of one own self enlightenment. It takes great initiative and self-preservation to know oneself.

As human beings, we were created as beings with ‘scientific’, rational minds. We always want to know the ‘why’ of everything. Some of us settle for less than the reason ‘why’ things actually happen. However, some of us aren’t satisfied by face-value impression of things; these are the people who make sure that ‘whys’ of things are better explained.

In South Sudan, this ‘satisfied-with-first-impression’ is exacerbated by the assumption that what my uncle said or has done is an exceptionalist truth. And anyone who tries to question my uncle’s truth is branded or hated. But this twisted state of mind comes from ‘learned’ minds who ‘know’ the affairs of the world. How can this ‘learned’ people not know that disagreements are normal? How can these learned heart not know that our uncles can be wrong, or even stupid?

If you hate someone because of his considered opinion, then you are either pretending to be learned or you need emotive intervention. You can't just unleash your negative, vengeful ‘intellective power’ on someone just because they disagree with you. On what planet are we all expected to agree all the time?

Like Zarathustra, the Objective Intellectual is calling on all learned hearts to value what is said not just the very people who say them. How many of us quote Mahatma Gandhi all the time but he’s the very man who looked down on Africans in South Africa by calling them ‘kaffirs and inferiors’? 

If X is good, it shouldn’t matter who did or uttered it! But No! Our young ‘intellectuals’ think this: Agree with me and my uncle, or you go to hell! We learn by contradictions and we learn when our ideas are subjected to scrutiny! Why should there be an exception?

So who’s the ‘Objective Intellectual?’ I don’t know! It could be me or you! However, we can only be the Objective Intellectual if we value deeds and not merely the people who utter them.

If a man/woman’s opinion makes you mad, then check yourself…you’re wasting time learning or being in school. School and life should teach you how to dismiss people's ‘wrong’ ideas without being abusive or vilely dismissive!

We might not be the Objective Intellectual, but we sure need her/him in this world and more so, in South Sudan. 

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*The Philosophical Refugee

Paradigm Shift: Breaking Free From Confirmation Bias

By Lual Garang*

"Shifting our paradigm could be a powerful campus for navigating the world."

Paradigm shift refers to a fundamental change in the way we view the world. This shift is not in the visual sense of sight but rather in terms of how we understand, perceive and interpret the world. This view can be a gradual process or a sudden change in perception. For example, our priorities tend to change when we experience a major health problem or when a close friend dies, our paradigm shifts. This phrase was made popular by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 classic book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 

The most popular scientific example being the widely held view that the earth was the center of the universe by many scientists, who followed the work of the great Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy. But a paradigm shift happened when Copernicus placed the sun as the center of the universe. Though this was met with great resistance by the church and the popular scientists at the time, it still changed the way many things were interpreted. After Galileo came through with the discovery of telescope, the orbits where observed not to be perfect circles but elliptical. This further view shifted the model used to look at the universe and other stars.

The further we are away from that point of view, the likely we are to have that ‘aha’ moment. 

I remember reading a story about two New York train commuters. One Sunday morning, passengers were sitting quiet, some reading newspapers, others lost in thoughts and some resting with their eyes shut. And then suddenly a man and his kids entered the subway car and the kids were loud and running rage. The nice and quiet environment changed. The kids’ father sat down and closed his eyes as though those were not his kids. Everyone was irritated by the whole situation and possibly exercising restraints. Eventually, the man next to him got more irritated and couldn’t believe how he could be so insensitive to let his kids run wild and not take responsibility. He turned to him and said: “Sir, your children are disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you could control them a little more!” 

The man then woke up from his trance as if he'd just realized the nature of his kids for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother just died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.” 

Guess what happened to the man who asked him to control his kids? How he felt that very moment he heard the man’s tragedy? His paradigm shifted, his irritation of the kids’ wild behavior disappeared and he suddenly saw things differently from the rest of the subway commuters who didn’t hear the man’s story. Because he saw things differently, he thought differently, felt differently and behaved differently. His heart was filled with the man’s pain and his compassion flowed freely and he asked how he could be of a help to the man.

Shifting our paradigm could be a powerful campus for navigating the world. It will make us treat people of other cultures, religions and social backgrounds differently if we take time to learn about them. But a paradigm shift comes with so much resistance as it disrupts careers, put companies out of business and change entire industries. Yet this is the way forward for civilization. What would you tell the Wright brothers if they told you that they were building a machine that could fly and you were their neighbor at the time? 

The key is not in changing the world but changing how you view your world. I have no idea who wrote this quote but nevertheless, I will share it here:

It starts like an itch. Something happen in our lives that cause us to question what we know. We open our eyes and seek the truth. The more we uncover, the hungrier we are for understanding. But the world isn’t perfect and there’s a lot of pain and deception. We have the burning desire to do more. We read a lot. We start protesting. Our family label us as too negative. Our friends start to pull away. Our spouses reject us. We are labelled as hippies, anarchists, angry kids, conspiracy theories and terrorist. We are beaten by police and mocked by news. Yet we have become obsessed with spreading the truth. It becomes a very solidarity journey.”

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 *Lual Garang's informative and educative writings appear on his blog: www.unclemesh.com. Visit his blog to read more of his writings.
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