Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [118]
Since NO ideas should be kept out of our marketplace, professors must offer to students whatever is available. So, the idea of creationism, for example, should be offered alongside the idea of evolution. If the idea that the holocaust never happened best suits students, it should be offered and they should be encouraged to buy it. According to scholars such as Stanley Fish, to advocate for one idea over another is to indoctrinate. So, when professors teach that the holocaust did happen, and refuse to entertain the viewpoint that it didn’t, they are indoctrinating students. Not only must they teach both sides, but according to Fish, they must remain neutral—professors cannot advocate for one view over another. Of course, if Fish advocates in his classroom for his view of neutrality, which I’m sure he does, I wonder whether he considers himself an indoctrinator? But, I digress. Let’s get back to Stephen.
Those of you who watch carefully will notice that Stephen has been slowly introducing the idea of making reality from what can only be called “believing in large numbers by brute force.” We just will or believe reality into existence, or something to that effect. What’s real is what we say is real. What’s true is what we say is true. This is supply-side ontology and supply-side epistemology. “I’m no fan of reality,” Stephen tells us, “it has a liberal bias.” And, he is also no fan of encyclopedias. “Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves?” he asks. “If I want to say he didn’t, that’s my right! And thanks to Wikipedia (now violently typing on his laptop), it’s also a fact.”
Supply the facts that you want to be facts, and thems is the facts! Consumers of facts, then, are irrelevant, and one needn’t care about them (consumers, I mean). They simply will buy what’s made available by those in a position to supply the facts. This, I think, mimics the irrelevance associated with consumers in the free market model laid out a bit earlier. What licenses someone to do business in Wikiality, as Stephen calls it, is their having access to a computer and a connection to the internet (there is a Ted Stevens or John McCain joke in here somewhere, but I’ll let it go).
Stephen, in the typical far-right attempt at making all things far-right appear patriotic or pro-American, casts the construction of Wikiality as a democratic process. The facts that win out are those that the majority of suppliers supply. If the majority of people say that the holocaust never happened, then that is the case. To not accept this fact would be to hate democracy, he says. Stephen argues:
We should apply these principles to all information. All we have to do is convince the majority of people that some factoid is true… . What we’re doing [he includes the Bush administration and the Wikipedia community of users here] is bringing democracy to knowledge. Now, the “blame ignorance first crowd” is going to say that something is either true or it isn’t, and it doesn’t matter how many people agree… . See, if you go against what the majority of people perceive to be reality, you’re the one who’s crazy. Nation, it’s time we used the power of our numbers for a real internet revolution. We’re going to stampede across the web like that giant horde of elephants in Africa. In fact, that’s where we can start. Find the page on elephants on Wikipedia and create an entry that says the number of elephants has tripled in the last six months… . Together we can create a reality that we can