Ascent or decent?

It has been a long time ago since I published here. About seven years ago I was proud to be aut(istic). Since then I graduated as a philosopher with a master's thesis on the Catch-22 of autism, I obtained a PhD in philosophy with a dissertation on Tourette's, I became a scholar with several publications at the intersection of neurodiversity, science and ethics and taught several courses at the University of Antwerp. I even published an introductory handbook to Western philosophy (Dutch speaking people can buy it here, to all others: just subscribe to our new blog with my take on the history of philosophy). In those same seven years, I also saw my income dwindle and my job security evaporate into thin air. Me being me I continued to build castles in that very same air (cfr. my book, our blog and this Flemish self-advocacy group for autistic adults). Anyway, times were hard and I wonder: is this now ascending or descending the stairs of life?

It would probably be more in the spirit of this site to avoid being seen as doubtful, certainly given this period so easily reads as a success story of achieving what I once abandoned as too fanciful: becoming a professional philosopher. It is not that I'm not proud, or that I'm not thankful for all the luck (and great people) that made it possible for me to so radically switch careers. It is just that boasting - and, in a way, I did start this post by boasting - feels at the same time, merited and indecent. Call me a philosopher or an overthinker - in my experience these are far from synonymous, most philosophers do not overthink their own success - but there are simply too many success stories around. They tend to cover up that our world is a very unjust world; a world where the choice often is between ascending or remaining decent.

Let me not beat around the bush: there is a design flaw in our Western societies. It is that we - for instance in LinkedIn posts - focus our gaze in the above image towards the right to only see the rabbit of merit. Doing so we avoid focusing our gaze towards the left, since, if we do that, we would be confronted with the ugly duck of privilege. The rabbit-duck image was the favorite image of both Wittgenstein and Kuhn. Both of them just focused on the fact that the animal we see depends on how we focus our gaze. The truth, then, is simply that there is no simple truth. However, this is only the simple part of the truth. The complex part is that there is - and we know there is - a rabbit in the picture even if we focus on the duck. Just as there is a duck in the picture even when we focus on the rabbit. This is a completely objective fact about subjective seeing (before long I will bore you with Bohr), since it is both independent of who's doing the seeing but entirely dependent on somebody doing the seeing. Anyway, in our theme of merit and privilege, it means that when we see merit, we also always could see privilege. And only seeing merit is willfully ignoring privilege, which is, in turn, indecent as it condemns the unlucky to continue in their unlucky circumstances. Indeed, I would want that everybody could radically switch careers but the fact is most can't because they don't have, as I have, built up enough savings being a (somewhat mediocre but well paid) engineer.

It works vice versa as well, by the way. When there is privilege, there is also merit. I, for one, do not think it all works better if we just focus our gaze only to the left. It may well be a more decent gaze, but it lacks the merit of considering that the origin of privilege in some way lies in not resting with the status quo. To complicate matters further however, a new rabbit-duck distinction needs to be introduced: that of individual and collective merit. Individual privilege can be rooted in collective merit. In my own case, having been a well-paid engineer is based largely in me being born in a country in the West where education was accessible (to people like me) and the economy was thriving. The collective merit on which my individual privilege is based is the fact that the West has innovated, against traditional power imbalances, up to and including effectively terminating the status quo of institutionalized traditionalistic power. A further duck-rabbit complication sets in here again. Indeed, in terminating this status quo, a new status quo of Western power sets in, one where individuals, who are born into money, get to exclude others (the way the West has excluded the non-West from wealth). This new status quo is stabilized, for instance on LinkedIn, by people actively selling their luck simply as individual merit to lock in the status quo of the 'wealthy getting wealthier'.

So, you see, to me the art of philosophy is to never succumb to only seeing the duck or the rabbit. It is the art of knowing that, whilst you cannot see them at the same time, they both are there all the time. You can choose to only see privilege and think the decent thing to do is to relativize all success. Doing this will just lead to a certain form of 'decency-stagnation' that Nietzsche rightly called out for its lifeless sterility. You can also choose to only see merit and think the 'only way is up no matter the consequences'. Doing that just leads to run-away escalation of capitalist competition rightly called out by Marx for leading to concentration of privilege regardless of individual merit. The fact of the matter is that, if I have any individual merit, that merit is associated to me taking the risk of radically changing my career with the attendant dwindling income, job insecurity and so on. This again should not be simplified in 'no risk, no gain' or 'there is no such thing as a free lunch'. If anything, it could be simplified into 'doing things differently' is the decent thing to do but it is also increasingly penalized in a society organized to reward people for merely trying to 'ascend the stairs of success'. The simple truth is that we have to do things differently if we are to merit a future in which there is less overheating of individuals and the climate.

Most probably this way of me re-entering social media via LinkedIn (after the sad demise of Twitter) will just have left you bewildered. It is both personal and philosophical. It's also both critical and appreciative of the Western tradition. Like it is both pointing to the value and the pitfalls of traditions of regarding things as 'the decent thing to do'. Still, what I personally did learn these past seven years is something young people (including my children) taught me: I am at my best when I just do me. Being a philosopher making complicated statements which require the reader to connect my personal history with the sorry-duck and the happy-rabbit state of the world, is just what 'just doing me' means to me.

The choice of the title which you maybe did not see (or saw as a mere typo) is not between ascent or descent, but between just seeing ascent and being decent. Just seeing ascent in an 'the only way is up' way is - as the planet increasingly makes us feel - the only sure way of collectively going down. Being decent is owning up to the privilege part of your success, and wanting all other people could just do them without being penalized for it to the point of personal bankruptcy. This requires us to do things differently instead of just maintaining the current, growing inequality of money and, therefore, privilege. Unfortunately, as all the latest election results in the West show, many in the West are hell bent on maintaining a status quo in which they destroy their merit by claiming it as a right of birth.