Plague Journal, Two Orders Of Thought
Today I was at the crossing point of an email conversation between two friends. It was as if I were standing on a curb before a cross walk at a busy intersection. Two vehicles approach at speed limit velocity, each at right angles to the other. Each driver is oblivious to the other, and to a functioning traffic signal. The laws of physics such as they are, the result is a tremendous crash, a howl of twisted metal, the energy of both vehicles expended upon bare pavement.
That is the upshot of the Black Lives Matter movement, — the public assertion that a white majority has unjustly and murderously imposed itself upon the Black minority by means of the Police. Police continue to kill Blacks, a legal system incarcerates citizens of color at a rate disproportionate to their numbers in the population — a state of affairs continuing with impunity. This is captured in the tagline, “All cops are bastards,” used by the Black Lives Matter movement. Is the assertion to be taken literally, as a snapshot, a factual statement of “truth?” Or as one of the parties to the email exchange to which I was copied put it:
“…a political statement suggesting that the existence of cops is inherently antithetical to a stable new status quo that everyone would be happier with.”
Are the two realities reconcilable? Black Lives or Black Lives
Would everyone be happier with a new status quo? Would it be stable?
Language is the offer of a hypothesis, the casting of a potential future…
Place your bets !
In any case, the two orders of thought are irreconcilable.
They each follow their own path without blending into one another.
At best, they slide on one another, like tectonic plates, and from time to time their collision or their subduction creates fault lines inside which reality is engulfed.
Fatality is always at the crossing point of these two lines.
Similarly, radical thought is at the violent crossing point of sense and non-sense, of truth and non-truth, of the continuation of the world and the continuation of nothingness.
— excerpt Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard
2 thoughts on “Plague Journal, Two Orders Of Thought”
Having read the same exchange that you mention, I view the interaction in a different light. I believe the participants were speaking of completely different subjects. One of them speaks to a pragmatic view of the present moment as compared to the idealism of what many of us believe could be a utopian model.
The concept that in a world where everyone takes responsibility for themselves while remaining mindful of their own behavior would indeed alter our need for law enforcement, relegating “police” to deal with traffic accidents and other unforeseen unfortunate events. The current cultural situation involves two seemingly opposite sides: biased law enforcement vs angry protesters. I loathe quoting our former occupant of the White House, but in this case I will say that there are very fine people on both sides. As a singular example, in Michigan, Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson joined BLM protesters in expressing outrage over the death of George Floyd. Just as many members of the BLM movement reached out to local police to bridge the gap.
The news media has always focused on the most salacious of stories, thereby skewing the perception that there is more distrust between the two sides than may be the case. To clarify, this point of view by no means mitigates the fact that institutional racism exists and in some communities is rampant.
What we need to keep in mind is that there are solutions. Numerous communities are finding ways of opening dialogues between warring factions, creating conduits of communication and therefore lessening the tensions. Ultimately, both sides must also take responsibility for the bad apples among them. Looters are looters, for instance, and should not be equated with the citizens who are struggling to free themselves from racism’s shackles. Bigoted police are law enforcement’s worst enemy and make the job of any police force both more dangerous and next to impossible for officers to do the duty of protecting the members of any community.
This has been a human issue for millennia: The mindful vs the mindless. Those of us who see this disparity and acknowledge the issue must remain involved and continue to hold all accountable for their actions, otherwise we will continue to descend into chaos.
“Let us be human.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein