Being Captain Obvious
Against The Sophists and Swindlers
Wisdom, personified as a woman in Solomon’s Proverbs, calling aloud in the streets, public squares, and the gateway throws on its head my imagery of wisdom as the hidden man in a cave; contemplating while squatted and cross-legged. It violates my picture of the white-bearded man who is serene and removed from the fast-paced life. It throws out of residence, my idea of the man who has consigned himself to voluntary poverty, simple living, and who wears just enough clothes to shield his privacy.
Wisdom, situated where everyone can see, removes the romantic vision of the guy who solves the riddles of Schrödinger's bird. It is strange. And worth contemplating that wisdom is an extrovert. She is unfazed —because she loves— the hurrying pace of the streets, public squares, and gateways. She, like every outgoing and energetic person, has no stage fright; she delivers her speech in the openest of places. Which, of course, stands contrasted with the adulteress who is shy of the light. And although you find her "now in the street, now at every corner," you are more likely to find her lurking in every corner.
While the adulteress’ lips drip with honey and her speech is smoother than oil, Wisdom is not polished: she is unrefined, coarse, as she “calls aloud in the street, raises her voice in the public squares, and at the head of the noisy streets, cries out.” But surely one can see why she shouts and is coarse in her delivery. For we know that despite all that she does to seize the people’s attention and deliver her goods to them, she goes unnoticed, unanswered, brushed aside, neglected, insulted, and unheard. This is wisdom’s plight, for although wisdom is better than strength, “the poor man’s wisdom is despised and his words no longer heeded.” This is no mere observation, but a truth concerning human nature at large. One might say the love of foolishness is a human staple. Wisdom and the adulteress are archetypal features of the human attitude.
As such, it should offer little wonder that common sense is no hero. Telling the obvious wins no prizes. Most importantly, common sense and the obvious, being Wisdom’s progenies herself, are cast aside because they are not shiny objects.
However, we may not cast them aside without great costs to ourselves. We start recording calamity upon calamity; disaster sweeps over us like a whirlwind, distress and trouble overwhelm us when we refuse to listen to Wisdom calling. When we refrain from and eventually trample on, common sense.
And the “adulteress” need not be an outright human prostitute or unfaithful woman. The adulteress may typify the seductive moves which draw us away from wisdom towards bitterness veiled in smooth words.
In other words, the adulteress may be something like the sophist who spins up very novel and quite interesting theories, causing us to abandon what we can see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and perceive in our everyday intellect.
The adulteress may be “The Advanced Science” that “lets us know” that there are more than two sexes; because intersex people and others with congenital conditions exist. By this, they mean that because some people are ambiguous in their reproductive constitutions, or that because some others have defective ones, we must rewrite what is common and taken for granted —taken for granted that humanity presents itself via two sexes and two sexes only.
These adulteresses may write books and tomes of literature to try upending what we take for granted. They write and publish in ‘respectable’ journals; sometimes in impenetrable prose to the end that we look upon their sophistication and abandon the fundamental trust we have in our senses and meagre intellect.
In philosophy’s domain, the counterparts of the above are even more sprawled out everywhere doing damage to common sense. No doubt one smells a whiff of true intellect in philosophical proponents of gender ideology. However, it does not take years of academic training to know that their intellect is futile as it produces the darkest objects and iniquitous calamities in our world as it is. It is not my scope here to demonstrate the futility of gender ideology. But I trust the reader to trust themselves and their intellect in believing that gender is a brute fact, a first principle of human nature without which our human nature has no departure point.
Yet within philosophy’s realm, we see ideas and statements such as the idea that something appearing in nature in fact makesa a thing natural. Some might say that if same-sex relationships are possible they must be natural. The so-called evidence of animals exhibiting homosexual behaviour is used to rebut the idea that sexual relationships have a right order; an order we call “natural.” For when we say that sexual affairs between men are unnatural, we are alluding to a sense of purpose and direction that points us quite stubbornly to the fact the complementary sexual organs and reproductive system generally tell us something that refuses to go away.
Or maybe that is a very scandalous example. Shall we take milder observations such as the idea that casual sex is ‘evil’? Surely, people sleeping with people they are not married to is a thing as common as leaves on trees and sand in the desert. One must live in heaven to have never met with real cases of fornication and adultery. Nonetheless, all human cultures battle the excesses of sexual deviancy in various forms and give marriage a special place; a sanctity meant to provide health for the rest of society. And societies which themselves play host to sexual deviancy do not quell this restlessness that common sense stirs in the hearts of everyone with a conscience; the sense that something is awry when sexual profligacy is the order of the day. Contrarily, by kicking against the goads, those who refuse to have their intellects defiled reconstruct those fences that religions knew well to erect. Only that these people, who almost often lack the courage to take up religion wholesale, reconstitute these fences weakly. But even more interesting is the fact that even when the diagnosis reports that we are suffering from a deficit of common sense, we still go chasing high-sounding ideas that provide euphoria without a cure.
I am always baffled by the high theorising of my fellow countrymen who say that what Nigeria needs is not strong men but strong institutions. These are the worst types of idiot savants I have met: having read all of Lee Kwan Yew’s exploits in Singapore, they imagine the rise of such leaders who will throw the Lego bricks in the right order and make everywhere good. These people always burst into flames when they hear that a nation rises and falls to the level of its common man. They imagine a world where the leaders will take charge of everything that the common man needs not to develop their moral faculties.
Is it not common sense that if a democracy must build strong institutions, it must be staffed by men of moral spine? But these fellows, adulteresses of the lowest estate, well-chugged on books but low in thought, wish for a well-oiled technocratic aristocracy to rise spontaneously from our current moral squalor. In all fairness, I agree with these thoughtless people that leaders steer society’s direction. But the pertinent question that they refuse to ask is “How shall these things be?”; especially within a democracy that relies on popular rule and choice.
They say, rather dismissively, that successful and developing nations succeed, not because they have a critical mass of good people, but because they have good leaders. I think twice if they think at all. Of the fact that in a democracy the elected leaders reflect the moral baseline of the collective. For democracies are the absolute demonstration of a bottom-up constitution of things. How do you expect a priest to win against a robber when the critical mass are robbers? Even a child knows that people vote for those who best reflect them. Yet, these people have read; they know the schema required to build a society from ashes into a Singaporean haven. But they neglect the most important thing: what moral system will produce the kind of people we need to lead us. Is it not true that one cannot give what one does not have? These people read and spin yarns of adulterous theories from their readings. But they kick common sense in the behind as they smoke on the hookah of sweet-sounding abstractions. One tablet of common sense says that democracy works when and only when the common man is Lord over his own spirit. But it is hard to say this to someone who prefers his novel theories over the common appearance of common sense.
And this is why it takes courage to be Captain Obvious. To point to the true datum and stick to it no matter how faint and wrinkled it is. It takes courage, as it is today, to point out that we know what a woman is, even if we cannot define it as to escape all assault. Through common sense, we know that such things as decency and modesty exist, even when we cannot plot them on a clear graph and be as exact as we would like to be; which is the favourite revolver of these adulterous rangers: to appeal to ambiguity on the matters concerning nature and society. Being all sophisticated, and despite that sophistication, we realise that the subject of beauty is prickly. Nonetheless, the meek mind knows and grasps that some things are beautiful and other things ugly. But the adulteress drives off the cliff of saying anything is beautiful because we say it is. Now the warcry is “everything is relative.” But we know what a woman is, we know all things are not relative, and we know beauty is one thing and ugliness another. Even if we cannot give unassailable definitions to these things. Our minds and intellects make sense of them even when our language is too handicapped to map it all. These adulterators and sophists rely on our linguistic limitations to lead the fainthearted astray. Remember, the adulteress drips honey from her lips and her speech is smoother than oil.
What then shall we do? Be Captain Obvious. With much magnanimity, say what your eyes see, what your ears hear, and what your mind perceives. For it is the first step of those who will ensnare us to urge us to distrust our own senses. They make men stumble over things that can be easily passed over. They dupe honest men into believing that the emperor wears invisible clothes.
Speaking of that, I reflect on Nassim Taleb’s dislike for Socrates —our delightful pedant —whom he interrogates with his alter ego Fat Tony. When, in the imaginative dialogue Socrates questions Fat Tony as to how he could use a word like ‘piety’ without knowing what it means, Fat Tony replies, “I don’t know it in words but I know what it is” and continues a tirade that Euthyphro in the Platonic dialogue by the same name could not conjure:
FAT TONY: “Tell me, old man. Does a child need to define mother’s milk to understand the need to drink it?”
SOCRATES: “No, he does not need to.”
FAT TONY (using the same repetitive pattern of Socrates in the Plato dialogues): “And my dear Socrates, does a dog need to define what an owner is to be loyal to him?”
SOCRATES (puzzled to have someone ask him questions): “A dog has … instinct. It does not reflect on its life. He doesn’t examine his life. We are not dogs.”
FAT TONY: “I agree, my dear Socrates, that a dog has instinct and that we are not dogs. But are we humans so fundamentally different as to be completely stripped of instinct leading us to do things we have no clue about? Do we have to limit life to what we can answer in proto-Brooklyn English?”
FAT TONY: “Then, my good Socrates, why do you think that we need to fix the meaning of things?”
SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”
FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.”
I love Socrates, but he certainly did not know where to stop. And while he stands starkly different from adulteresses like Judith Butler, he remains in some sense their sane ancestor. Of course, a diligent reader of this publication knows the difference between a delightful pedant like Socrates and the painful pedant like those who, being locked in the ghost room of modern rationalism, ask ghastly questions like “why do you love him/her?” and “why do you want to have kids? (all reasons for wanting kids are selfish).” I have always said that these questions should not be dignified with answers; and I am pedantic myself.
But were we to attempt a response to those questions above, myself, being Captain Obvious —of all platoons in The Busymind Company containing about 300 soldiers— would say “I don’t know, I just love her”; “I don’t know, I just want to have kids, and I don’t care whether my reasons are selfish or not.” Will this suffice? For the adulteress no. But that is why they are adulteresses; they expect everyone to be dripping with lips of honey and speech smoother than oil.
However, wisdom is clear: love, being suprarational, brings its reasons after it like a litter of puppies. They trail behind, and are not the cause of the affections we feel. We are already in love before we know why. This is the wisdom of our bodies; reflecting the wisdom of our creator (have the adulteress convinced you we don’t have a creator?). In fact, I argue somewhere else that a (romantic) love stirred by “reason” is a dubious love. It best happens like the sunset—you don’t know exactly when it arrives, you just know that the day is bright; bright and fair. So it is with wanting children. The suprarational wisdom of our biological bodies understand something sophists will never grasp in their lifetime: that being is by default, better than nonbeing. That life is superior to nothingness. No amount of climate fears, wars, nuclear powers, alien invasions can stump the power of life and being that surges through our natural desires. These things are matters of givenness; they are gifts to us and we receive them with delight and without question. For givenness marks the beginning of all things. For why is there something rather than nothing, being rather than nothing? “To be” is always the answer to “to be or not to be.” It is only because beings are, that philosophy, the love of Wisdom herself, begins with wonder.
By being Captain Obvious, I mean here that against the cynical assaults of the endless skeptics, the nihilists, the adulteress, the sophists; against the tempestuous appearance of what passes for sophisticated learning, we must hold on to the things we have been given; to the things without which we can do nothing. We must grasp with both hands, the prephilosophical notions and data that makes philosophising possible in the first place. One must lock himself into the first principles that makes all questioning possible.
First principles such as the idea that there are only two genders. That love is a beautiful thing. Being is better than non-being. That the sexes, being fundamentally different in their constitution, affect how we order society. That family is the destiny of man; community is no mere added benefit for living, but the goal of living. That we are gifts to each other. That we owe the world: men owe the world their vision, their virility, their virtue, and their fatherhood. It should not scare us to say that women owe the world babies, their beauty, their delicateness and motherhood. Some things are more beautiful than others. Some people are more capable than others. Order is better than chaos. Incest is disgusting and homosexuality is unnatural. I urge the reader to fill in the gap.
Once these thoughts and ideas were commonplace. Now, the philosophasters and their adulterous ilks have swindled everyone. One cannot say “women owe the world babies” without being met with stares of misogyny. One cannot point to the unnatural and inconvenient acts of two men laying with one another. Now labels fly about. No one wants to be a bigot; even when ‘bigotry’ is the only thing that saves lives. To be Captain Obvious is to risk being a bigot; to risk being mocked. For it is not uncommon for someone to object that the idea that there are two sexes is “nursery school elementary science; try to get into the more advanced Biology.” Being Captain Obvious then is to, like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, point out that despite everyone’s pretensions, the emperor is in fact naked. Fairy-tales again provide wisdom over much academic labours.
I have said a lot. But surely people have written on this subject in better forms than I have. For if I were to summarise my thesis more succinctly, I would say that Being Captain Obvious is really just all what The Emperor’s New Clothes is all about. Do well to refresh yourself by reading it. Good luck.
A meme a day keeps the sophists away:
Wonderful essay, as always.