The Brooklyn Rail

“When you argue with an intelligent person you can’t win. When you argue with a stupid person you can’t stop.”— Vietnamese proverb

“He who has a ‘why’ to live for can endure any ‘how’.”— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Though the advent of social media has created a brilliant democratic openness, those same social media also carry a lot of destructive tendencies. Many of us remember that we once received thoughtful letters from people who agreed or disagreed with what we may have voiced in an essay, an exhibition, or a lecture; and we knew that those complimentary or dissenting responses each required a certain amount of time to compose. So, while we may be delighted by the speed that is now possible in communications from both our friends and people we do not know, it is also distressing to receive rushed negative responses from people whose main motive seems to be either consciously or unconsciously taking out their anger or frustration upon us. Social media allow anyone who to say what they think in a public square where thousands or even millions of other people will see what they have written. And they often do so with a kind of religious zealotry, in a rambling scattershot way.

As many of us came to realize when we witnessed how no one was able effectively to counter the misrepresentations of Donald J. Trump, the master of Twitter, during his emergence as a presidential candidate, and then during his presidency, the most effective way to respond to Twitter, or any social media mob, which passes like a storm that comes and goes, is to practice silence. This kind of silence is not a void or negative act, but rather a positive act of restraint, a way of not joining the tyranny of mass hysteria, or surrendering to the Lord of the Flies phenomenon whereby the collapse of order, civilization—the moral fabric that once held the group together—comes from prioritizing immediate desires and acting violently to obtain supremacy over others. In other words, the judiciously applied practice of silence is in the long run a constructive act. If we refrain from immediately responding to social media mobs, they will move on to their next feeding grounds of short-lived novelty.

Given the current worldwide situation, in which endless crises have been caused by war and violence abroad—be it the war between Israel and Gaza, between Russia and Ukraine, or the civil wars currently happening in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Libya, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Colombia, and Mali—what are we to do in our home front with the fragility of our own democracy, including issues such as safe spaces and free speech, before the next presidential election on November 5th? We tend to rest assured that the United States is the world’s leading power, whose status has not been effectively challenged by a legitimate rising power since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and communism in Russia in 1991, and that even the steadily growing power of China does not pose a real threat. We also believe that our democracy has a remarkable self-corrective mechanism. But we also must ask whether our complacency can last in the light of developing events—without an external archnemesis to keep our feet agile? We’ve learned at great cost that such complacency can lead us to political disasters, such as the Trump presidency. And it seems self-evident that once the country tolerates corruption, dishonesty, and even worse, moral, and intellectual laziness, we run the risk of putting our democracy in peril through a breakdown of moral and intellectual virtue. This is a condition that may seem elitist to many of our compatriots, but it is the shared foundation upon which our democracy is built. We may well ask ourselves what has happened to our desire for the aspirational ideals that created this ongoing American experiment in democracy, which has been so resilient and unique, and stands in opposition to many other cultures in our world that are susceptible to authoritarian rule.

Can we imagine the evolution of democracy without the nature of the self in its constant inquiry and its perpetual search for a higher purpose? Should we remind ourselves that long before the United States became a nation-state, the early settlers had to confront themselves with critical issues of their origins and destiny before learning how to build new communities by combining themselves into a civic body politic in the seventeenth century—leading to Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), who distilled and assimilated Calvinist theological thought and the emergence of Newtonian scientific approach in the eighteenth century? What about our thinkers of American transcendentalism in the nineteenth century, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and Walt Whitman (1819–1892), all of whom, in opposing any mechanistic view of the world, proposed organic metaphors that stressed the subjective nature of human experience and existence? These people helped to create the perspective of us being agents in the world rather than passive observers of the world. They prompted other thinkers who fought for greater social and political equality, especially Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), leading to the demands of the abolition of slavery by William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) and Frederick Douglass (1817–1895). To this day we can profit from reflecting upon pragmatism, the sustaining philosophical movement led first by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839– 1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952), and then by Richard Rorty (1931–2007) and Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), among others. Two brilliant principles of pragmatism can serve us well today, with regard to the philosophy of education: one being the principle of continuity as we remain temporal agents and today’s experiences are parts of a continuum with yesterday’s and tomorrow’s; the other being the principal of interaction, for we are social beings, and all of our experiences are inherently and inescapably connected with the experiences of others.

While it’s true our moral ecology seems to have lost its footing, which has led to what has been called our Telos Crisis, many of us are committed to elevating the intensity of higher purpose with a hunger for wisdom. We desire to put forth our ideas out in the world without the fear of failure, and to pass on the baton of culture to our youth, so they can have the gratification of creating their own hard-won virtue and have the ability to see clearly and the capacity to face unpleasant facts knowing that they are standing on a strong foundation. Perhaps we may collectively propose to measure our love by what we are willing to give up for it. And alternatively, at the same time we should remind ourselves to be careful of what we love, for what we love is what we will become.

May 2024 bring us all lots of love, courage, and cosmic optimism,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is dedicated to our mentors and friends whose lives and works have made profound contributions to our culture: From Robert Whitman (1935–2024) to William Pope.L (1955–2024), we at once recognize how the evolution of ‘happening’ and multimedia art has expanded into interventionist and performance art with such a timely continuity; to Carl Andre (1935–2024) who, through his radical use of unaltered industrial materials and innovative experimentation in language, has expanded the boundaries of sculpture and poetry; from Richard Hunt (1935–2023) to Martha Diamond (1944–2023), the exploration of abstraction, for welded synthesis of industrial materials and organic forms in the former, along with the painterly expressiveness of urban landscapes in the latter has never been matched with singular vigor of monumentality and invention; Brent Sikkema (1948–2024) who, as visionary gallerist, has fostered many brilliant careers of artists in his stable; while it’s equally difficult to imagine experimental music, film, and photography without Phill Niblock (1933–2024), the same can be said of Antonio Negri (1933–2023) in philosophy without his theory of autonomism. We send our deep condolences to the immediate members of their families, friends, and admirers here and across the world. Lastly, we welcome Jonathan T.D. Neil as our new Editor-at-Large.