Objectivity. And my club.

Have you heard that story on This American Life called ‘Chip in My Brain‘? (For those of you who do not know This American Life, click on the link and get to know this great American radio show! Warning: it is addictive!)
The ‘Chip in My Brain’ story is about a teenager who gets brainwashed by his basketball coach. Yes, really! Slowly but steadily, the boy is drawn into this parallel universe where he is in danger all the time and the only person who can keep him safe is his coach.
It is a fascinating story, even involving a super computer in Belgium, and it gives you an inside view on how kids or young adults can get brainwashed by probably anything. Hell, it might happen to me, gullible as I am. But I am bringing the story up for a different reason.
Something that really stood out to me while hearing the story: the reasons why Cody, the kid who got brainwashed, takes Aj, the coach who brainwashed him, to court. The storyteller articulated it like this:

I usually think of courts as deciding who goes to prison or how much money someone owes someone else. Here, it was doing something much more basic, just saying who was right, deciding for the record what actually happened.

This statement goes together with his earlier description of a court:

This is the system we’ve come up with for settling disputes between people. We get a bunch of strangers together, the jury, who just have to decide what they think happened and how bad it was.

If you have always wanted to learn something about Hannah Arendt, here you have a very important part of it in a nutshell! For Arendt, reality (and history, understood as reality over time) is what rises “out of the sum total of aspects presented by one object to a multitude of spectators” (The Human Condition, 57). By living, we do not only develop and as such tell the story of our own life; we also talk about and act upon what we see around us, in our private life and in the media, and we all do so from a different angle, from a different perspective. Therefore, Arendt redefines objectivity in the human world as what is reached through the multitude of different spectators.

It also explains why she is less concerned with extreme standpoints of spectators than with the loss of a common object. From Arendt’s perspective, extreme points of view are ‘softened’ so to speak by the multitude of other less extreme spectators. What is dangerous in her view, is the loss of a common object: we need to be concerned with the same object and we need to see it as the same object, that is, our common world. I find it an interesting idea in times of fake news and social media bubbles.

Using the courtroom from the ‘Chip in My Brain’-story as a metaphor, it seems as if we are no longer sharing the same courtroom, to decide on what actually happened. We now have a variety of courtrooms. We can pick the topic of the trial and the way things will be presented. And, as a result, we unanimously agree on the truth. Unfortunately, it is no longer a shared truth, only a piece of it. The objectivity of a shared human world has given way to the objectivity of a club, my club.

So, I want to welcome you to my new club house. Because we all like to read what we agree with. But if you happen to disagree or have a different perspective, club member or not, I hope you will share your perspective – respectfully – with all of us.