I have admitted to myself that covering the Presidential election feels like watching paint dry, and I look forward to the inevitable coronation of Mitt Romney like one might look forward to a salad at VG Café.
Of course, there will be the occasional circus of ignorance — such as this week’s assurance that Rick Santorum does not “want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” He just “wants to give them the opportunity to go out and earn that money.” The astonishingly brusque statement was meant to answer a question concerned with rising foreign influence in American commerce.
However, I can admit my excitement for another customary spectacle which returned to Cal Poly this week and is just as political and rife with non-sequiturs as any of the banter that escapes from Rick Santorum’s mouth. So perhaps this week I can excuse myself from relating to you the politics and instead point you to the trough where you may help yourselves.
The Veritas Forum, at least in my memory, always fills capacity, and if you have never been to one you should absolutely attend one while you can. In one of the most fascinating comedies to grace our campus, what is marketed as an egalitarian and scholarly seminar on knowledge — and indeed on the “Truth” implicit in the title — fast reveals its devolution to a political football game.
How so? Let’s pretend you are a Veritas speaker.
Like a political debate, no tangible prize rewards your victory here; there is merely the opportunity to flex your ideological muscles in the scholastic spotlight, to rally your fan base, to smile and beseech the invaluable undecided minds in the audience to consider your ideas. If you accidentally cause confusion, you may direct calls for clarification to your book which is on sale by the door.
And like a political debate, there is no pressure for your answers to make sense. (In this fashion, Santorum is an excellent debater.) No, you can be well-assured of cheers and applause from your fans regardless of whether supernatural explanations are more cogent than natural ones or whether your “evidence” presupposes a moral, ordered universe. The only real difference between the other speakers and yourself lies in whether the bulk of your applause emanates from the waggishly-named Brights (now renamed the Alliance of Happy Atheists) or the previously offensively-named Campus Crusaders for Christ (now known as SLO Cru).
You would do wise to align yourself with the latter group, as they are more numerous and bestow more patronage to the event. Sure enough, you will be hard-pressed to find nontheism represented anywhere in the Veritas Forum, whose executive board is fraught with actively ordained ministers and whose Facebook page will refer you to “The Dawkins Delusion” and whose website maintains a solipsistic fetish for the “relevance of Jesus Christ” and whose …
Listen: It does not require a liberal conscience to detect how this scholarly event is structured to subvert an individual’s sovereign, methodological free-thinking. Mob mentality prevails, fallacies give way to generalizations and posture plays a pivotal role. Think of the Veritas Forum as the American Idol of ideologues, and thus, a virtuous model of the entire American election process.
For this reason, I urge readers to attend the event themselves next year. It truly is a fascinating political opera, and it begs important questions: what would a truly apolitical forum on science and religion look like? How could we position a pursuit of truth on a foundation of fact? How might we theorize about objective morality in the face of so many diverse and relative practices of morality in the world?
I seem to have demonized politics itself, by now, for muddying the waters of truth and knowledge, but I mean just the opposite. Politics is a necessity of the human condition; it is here to help us make some sense of society’s wills and whims, a task very much in line with such controversial debates in philosophy. So whether you’ve brushed up on your Bible or perhaps on WikiPedia, you may find it proportionately rewarding to approach Veritas with politics in mind.