praxistheologia.com

As part of Dr. Carter’s Black Intellectuals in Religion class, we were invited to interact with Fredrick Douglas’ 1845 Narrative. Carter argues, that Douglas uses hallowed language, –religious language– to describe both the current situation and his vision for a new future. Ultimately, however, this hallowed language is hollow. Which is to say, that the religious language used by Fredrick to describe –with irony– the philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of the world where slavery makes sense, ultimately describes –without irony– a philosophical and epistemological system where repression and slavery still make sense. The only difference is that the locus of power has shifted, or expanded, to include Douglas among the powerful.

Douglas’ paradigm is as follows

1. Powerful harnessing their power to oppress and repress others
2. The powerless struggling to re-envision the world where they are included in the locus of power
3. The powerless working to establish a new power system without evaluating the nature of the power system.
4. The evolution / emergence of a “new” power system that maintains the internal logic of the original abusive system.

Douglas’ use of this paradigm is quite prevalent, and not limited to race relations in ante-bellum US history. Indeed, two contemporary examples come immediately to mind.

First, Israeli foreign and domestic policy. Rising out of the aftermath of the holocaust a philosophical and epistemological system, that within the context of liberal modernity, logically includes the domination and extermination of others, is superseded by the expansion or reevaluation of the powerful. The new power holders, the people of the newly created Israel, establish a systemic world-view that mirrors the logic of the Holocaust. This leads, ultimately, to the creation of the Palestinian wall, and the tit-for-tat, life for life, state sponsored terrorism above and against non-state sponsored terrorism. The political views and actions of contemporary Israel, reflect the ideology, if not the practice, of holocaust: that Palestinians are, for whatever reason, less deserving of a place to live, a means of living or a bomb-free marketplace. Is the state-sponsored-terrorism of Israel against the Palestinians any less of a holocaust because it lacks the mind-numbing numbers? It is certainty racially based. Instead of harnessing the narrative of the Israelite people, and it’s injunction to treat the alien in their midst with kindness, they have harnessed the story of the holocaust with it’s oppressive power structures.

Similarly, the rise of GNU and Free Open Source Software, underwritten by the rise of Copyleft, or the Creative Commons license framework, relies on the same dialectical apparatus. Indeed, to counteract the constraints of the copyright system, the Open Source / GNU team relies ON copyrights themselves. After all, without the license provisions of the copyright statues, the copyleft system, of total or limited license of material is untenable.

It seems that most, if not all, advancement in thought / philosophy / belief is based in the work of others. A sort of standing on the shoulders of others to form a human, evolutionary chain of epistemological thought. The problem with this, as Fredrick inadvertently shows, is that this epistemological ladder induces a tunnel vision that constrains the imagination. It takes a true proclamation of the gospel to release the constraints and illuminate the world in such a way that people –that we– may imagine a world outside the confines of the status quo.