More than "Just the Facts"

“Just the facts, Ma’am,” is what Sgt. Friday, played by Jack Webb, used to say on the old police show Dragnet. He said this to witnesses when investigating a crime in order to head off the their emotional reactions to what they had seen or their speculation about causes and motives. Some philosophers, logical positivists in particular, put forward the idea that the real world consists only of facts, that our feelings about the world are merely subjective and have no bearing on truth – except perhaps truths about human psychology. Facts are objective and real. Feelings are subjective and not real in any way that counts.

But what could be more real than the tension in a difficult relationship, or the love between people in love or between parents and their children? Try to convey these feelings and the way they shape what goes on between people in purely factual terms! Here’s another thing whose reality is undeniable, but that would not exist except for what goes on within us.

[Music: “Pan’s Lullaby”; Thelonious Monk, “Blue Sphere”]

What would it mean to describe what you just heard in objective, factual terms? You could describe the sounds in great detail as wave patterns in the air; you could discuss the pitches and the tempos. But what makes what you heard music is what happens within us as we hear those sounds. When we listen to music, with full appreciation, we let the rhythms and melodies play through our bodies; we ourselves become part of the music, we are moved by it. Apart from our feeling it, music is nothing. Without listeners, music would be “mere sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Music stirs us to our depths, engaging our emotions, even the emotions we don’t have names for. The same is true of the visual arts: they are made to be seen by living human beings who respond deeply in their bodies and souls to what they see.

But isn’t this true of the world we live in and are part of? We respond to the world not just as terrain we must find our way around in and manipulate to give us what we need. If we are fully alive, we are always responding to what is going on around us aesthetically and emotionally – with hope, fear, desire, disgust, love, and hate, and whatever emotion we are expressing when we say “That’s beautiful!” The world would not be the world if it were not for the complex feelings involved in our encounter with it, any more than a Bob Dylan song or Beethoven’s Fifth would be what we know them to be if we did not respond to them as we do – nor, of course, would Dylan or Beethoven have created them.

Yet it is not only philosophers like the logical positivists who can be seduced by the idea that the real world consists of nothing but facts that are entirely independent of human feelings. In fact, this idea is like a defense mechanism many of us employ to get along in a capitalist society. Why? Because capital has but one way of thinking about and acting in the world, and that is to expropriate and exploit it to turn it into a singular unit of value: money. Bankers and landlords cannot see breathing, living men, women, and children with needs for safe shelter; health insurance and pharmaceutical companies cannot see the injured and the sick; Apple and Amazon cannot see the human beings who work for them. Capital can see only sources of income and units manufactured and delivered. Capital can see nothing it can care for except opportunities for growth.

Everything on earth becomes a resource for the production of profit. Forests, prairies, mountains, rivers and oceans and all the living beings in them are fodder for the capitalist machine that chews it all up and excretes one substance: money.

So when we look at our world, including each other, from within the system of capitalism, what is most real is just the facts: by what machinery and at what costs can oil be extracted from this or that sea bed and what is its value on the market? How many hours can we employ these workers at what wages to maximize our profits? How much timber can be cut in this old growth forest at what cost and what return on investment? “Just the facts, Ma’am, and don’t give me irrelevant subjective feelings about the natural world or the quality of people’s lives. Yes, the beauty of the world and the love that people have for each other is fine for leisure time and vacation–– as long as they don’t get in the way of production.”

The world that consists of facts and just the facts, the world as conceived by logical positivism and seized and governed by capital is a thin, cold, and colorless world. It is like music that evokes no pleasure, human life without passion, a tale told by an idiot, lacking even sound and fury, and signifying nothing but death. It is a world where the impulse to love struggles to find anything worth loving or anything to call beautiful, where our need for beauty must be content with the imaginary realms of fiction, art sequestered in museums, and nature fenced off in preserves.

Capitalism would blind us to everything that could evoke our love and our pleasure, to most of what impels us to say, “That’s beautiful!” The movement to do away with capitalism and to reconstruct the world, to make the world our world, a human world, is underway and needs our support and active participation. There is a world beyond the world of facts that we can cultivate together, guided by our desire for what can be loved because it is beautiful.

Presented on the Old Mole Variety Hour, July 15, 2019