Realism and Inhumanity
Press Action
Saturday, August 21, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/secor08212004/
By James L. Secor
In the late 19th century, a style of writing was developed that tried to be a genre, that is, more than it was. This was Realism. Realism is broadly defined as the faithful representation of reality or verisimilitude. Realism was a reaction against romanticism and showed an interest in the scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history and rational philosophy. Realism purported to be objective, removed from the emotionalism of life yet describing said emotionalism; for, after all, life is full of emotion. Emotion colors our choices. Feelings are what make life, in fact. But, in truth, Realism only dealt with a particular kind of reality: the representation of middle-class life (certainly not all of reality). So, it was a lie. This was made patently plain with the advent of Naturalism, a genre of writing that utilized realistic techniques to paint a picture of the underside of life, the forgotten masses who were victimized by the rising middle-class.
Naturalism was not only possible because of the narrow vision of life that Realism portrayed, it was possible because Realism was inhuman. In its objectivity, Realism removed humanity from humanity. There was no comment upon what was observed. There was no assessment of the situation. There was just reporting, pure and simple. This led, in the 20th century, to the objective reporting of newspapermen and, later, television journalists, i.e. newsmen. The dehumanization of life continued because the objectivity these people reported was the reality they wanted to see. The reality they believed to be there. And so, if this belief in what life was all about was not there, it simply was ignored, not reported, forgotten. It didn’t exist.
This is not reality. This is not objective observing, reporting of the facts. It is a particular kind of bias. Before ever this syndrome became evident to the general public, the world of physics had axiomized the observer-observed phenomenon. This is where the observer affects the process he is observing. Sometimes this means that the observer sees what he wants to see. This came to light in experiments involving the behavior of light. We can’t believe our eyes—at least, not all the time. Lately, feminists have proven that this is true via the interpretation of data: the interpreter makes his belief system known in what he chooses to declaim as “the” findings. This later was made plain in the law courts when it was discovered that eyewitness reports differed. Indeed, they are only about 40% reliable and, therefore, cannot be relied on in exculpatory testimony before the Court.
What all this boils down to is that there is no such thing as objectivity.
Yet this objectivity, this belief in impartiality has become the ultimate ideal in reporting. This is true not only in news reporting but in reports issued by various think tanks, corporations and the military-industrial complex. And America accepts it without question—even in the face of opposition: “Oh, it isn’t true, that. It isn’t that way. It’s this way.” Objectivity is bias without admitting to bias. Objective reporting is used as a sop against the wastage of human life. As Humberto Mariotti maintains, any “society that discards ... productive individuals ... is a self-mutilating and therefore pathologic system.” Objective reporting does exactly this: it discards, it ignores individuals in its obsessive drive to prove its point. It is pathologic. The defining characteristic of a pathologic personality is that it believes itself to be sane.
It is via this Realism and its objectivity that the present state of inhumanity to man has arisen and taken hold in America. America, quite simply, dehumanizes ... others and well as its own. This is how we got slavery: the slave is somehow less than human and therefore treatable like an animal (at best). Not even a pet. Some creature kept for your own amusement or utilitarian purposes, much as horses and cows have been domesticated. This dehumanization has become institutionalized and all of American society is but machine parts, resources to be used, things to be discarded when not needed; domesticated animals. A domesticated animal, when it misbehaves, is beaten. The American people are beaten: if they cannot be beaten into submission, they are put in prisons. We even say they are “cowed.”
There is more than one way to beat someone into submission. In present-day America, it is supposedly against the law to physically abuse another citizen—though this law, this axiom only applies to the not rich, the not aristocratic who do not own the law courts. In present-day America, the people are battered and beaten into submission by the word. The shapers of culture jumped on the bandwagon of realism’s objectivity, knowing it was a false proposition, and changed it to suit their purposes. Jacques Brul saw this coming 40 years ago. These people are called Propagandists. And what they sell, what they beat people with is words; that is, with their view of what the world is, how it operates. Their imposition of the objective world for us to see and delectate in is no more than their seeing what they want to see and telling us this is what we should see.
The people who can see this, this false reporting, this objective irreality, are fast becoming extinct, so long has it existed. And when these people are dead and gone, there will be no one to disbelieve and slavery is complete ... if it is not already. As Stanley Milgram postulates, it only takes 70% of a people to make the world over into some view or other (Obedience to Authority, Perennial, 1983). Milgram was immediately hounded out of the academic-scientific community for his findings, though the disbelievers, the believers in the basic goodness of humanity, people who are no further along than the Middle Ages or, even worse, the Confucian era—these people said it was because of his (Milgram’s) methodology; that is, something inhuman, not alive, removed from life, cold objectivity.
There is no such thing as objectivity. There is no such thing as cold reason. Cold reason is, itself, a bias toward something, toward a particular way of looking at life. What must be understood is that life is not reasonable. Life is not unemotional. It is our emotions that make up our life. It is our imaginations and our intuitions that make up life. Language, too, makes up our life. But you cannot talk about this life discursively—which is what realistic, reasonable, objective men wish to do. You can, however, express it by way of art. Thus, art itself becomes a former of our life. Art, imagination, intuition, emotion, reason—they are all subjective. Nothing about life is objective. We are too much a part of it and ... it is experienced in toto, not in bits and pieces that are juxtaposed:- et voila! To be objective, then, is to be inhuman. There is no doubt that present-day America—to name but one country, one government, one way of life—is inhuman. That so many countries in the world have adopted this objective, realistic, reasonable approach to life and living is truly frightening. Not only for others but for their own people. Life is subjective. There is more than one subject in the world. Therefore there is more than one perception of the world, even though the world’s sense organs are just about all the same. All of these subjective perceptions make up life. People exist in relation to each other. People react to others. To objectify this, to make it cold and like billiard balls on a pool table is to negate life, to negate interaction. Objectivity juxtaposes elements and then says they do not interact or they interact this way and this way only. Cause and effect. Which takes life completely out of our hands and negates the subjectivity, the experience of life. This is inhuman because someone can say, “Oh no it doesn’t.” But, of course, that person is then declared insane.
Objectivity is false. By extrapolation, so is the world made up by it. Let it be understood from the beginning: people make up life. Humans. If there are no humans, if there is no humanity what have you got? Life?
We make life. Our lives. We make culture. That is, people make culture. They can unmake it. In this instance, we can unmake objectivity and, in so doing, make life human again.
James Secor can be reached at shikejian@care2.com.