Sarah Palin, Talking Heads and "Ways of Knowing"

Sarah Palin

It has taken nearly a lifetime for me to grasp what my philosophy professors in college truly meant by their use of the term “epistemology,” defined in the dictionary as “ways of knowing.” However, a few moments ago, the word’s meaning reared back and punched me in the gut. I had been sitting at my desk, reading a pile of conflicting commentary, downloaded from the Internet, regarding who’s to blame for the Arizona shootings, which left six people dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a coma for nearly a week.

In the West, we are taught to bring our minds alone to the task of authenticating what is true. In more gnostic-leaning cultures, such as those from which my slave ancestors were descended, the goal is a harmonizing of body and mind through dance, altered breathing techniques, and developing an intimate acquaintance with how our bodily sensations, alert us to what is real and what is not. This non-western epistemological vocabulary honors the rational and analytical mind. But it also recognizes the difference between raw emotion, mere lumps of burning coal, and the insights of breathtaking clarity, produced when such emotion is processed through our bodies.

However, does shifting one’s perspective on how to authenticate truth mean that I’ll get a definitive answer as to whether Sarah Palin’s map with the crosshairs contributed to the Arizona shootings, as opposed to Jared Loughner’s reading such leftist literature as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital? The conundrum for all western epistemologies, whether based on science, religion or ethics is that it slices the mind off the body. In lacking these tools, we’re at a loss to detect our own self-deceptions, which signal themselves to our conscious minds by a tightening in the solar plexus, goose bumps, a fluttering in the gut, or other such sensations. Without cultivating this knowledge, we find ourselves locked away in the windowless prison of our minds.

All cultures pass down their epistemological tools inter-generationally. In American society, the transition from kindergarten to first grade is not merely one of bidding farewell to the world of talking toasters, Thomas the Tank Engine, and a eukaryote named Sponge Bob Square pants. It is also the moment in which the educational establishment begins the step by step process of surgically lopping the child’s mind off his body. As children grow older, they learn to hide their emotional needs behind rationalizations. Upon attaining adulthood, they graduate to basing such momentous decisions as whether to go to war, on “talking heads.”

As the debate over the Arizona tragedy swirls around us, we should be reminded of the fact that our fact-obsessed, experience-devaluing, anti-gnostic, approach to life, does not make us more informed. It simply makes us more argumentative, dualistic (I’m right and you’re wrong), arrogant and confused. So what is my gut telling me? Firstly, the climate of political dissent since the election of our first African-American President has indeed become delegitimizing and militaristic in imagery. But secondly, America set in place two hundred years ago, a racial hierarchy that in subjugating blacks, unwittingly humiliated low income whites for not being better off. Obama symbolizes the tearing down of one wall and for that we have much to celebrate. But it is the fact that America’s unspoken association of white skin with privilege remains untouched, that the low-end of white society hides its shame behind Glenn Beck’s bombast and Sarah Palin's crosshairs.