The Peerless Review: A Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences@tpr

A number of recent thinkers on technology have described the ways in which technological change often proceeds apace, in spite of the varied efforts that human beings have made to check its advance. This essay explores how these circumstances have undermined human agency in the political arena. Through a close analysis of the work of major critics of technology such as Langdon Winner, Jacques Ellul, Theodore Kaczynski, Lewis Mumford, and others, I demonstrate how technological change has reached a point where every major contingent of the liberal democratic political order has been neutralized in its ability to direct the course of future advances. After describing how the masses, the elites, and the experts have each been rendered powerless, I explore the implications of this situation for the practice of politics in human society.

In spite of referring to the human tendency to "breath together" or share the same spirit, the word "conspire" has developed a negative connotation in contemporary society, specifically as it pertains to theorizing about conspiracies as a result of the human proclivity to recognize patterns recognition and coalesce common themes amongst those with shared perceptions into something resembling a unified narrative. This proclivity has only become more pronounced with the dawn of the Internet age, and as a result, the tendency to assume the actuality of certain conspiracies and insulate ourselves from viable, competing ideas has led to a series of microenvironments not dissimilar from those that allow for the proliferation of cancerous cells in the human body. In this article, I draw out the analogy between cancer and conspiracy theorizing in order to present readers with a clearer picture of the deleterious effects of the contemporary phenomena such as unbridled political polarization and the effect of sociopolitical news coverage presented by low-correlation outlets, otherwise known as "echo chambers."

There is a troubling trend in contemporary writing pedagogy to construe classical approaches to writing instruction "as fixed, static entities . . . produced by asymmetrical power relations that . . . reinforce oppressive or stereotypical attitudes and ideologies" (Mutnick and Lamos 25). In place of the classical tradition, progressive educators, following the lead of Paulo Freire, have championed student-centered approaches to education, in effect developing students in the service of themselves as opposed to in the service of knowledge as is characteristic of classical approaches. In this article I argue against the pedagogical monism that characterizes contemporary educational models by positing an integrated model of writing instruction that builds contemporary, theory-driven frameworks on top of historically valid and progressively developed principles, using the languages of modernistic and classical architecture as a mnemonic. Using the "Palladian Arch" as a guiding image, I then close my article by describing how vertically-aligned, foundational approaches such as process pedagogy and genre and rhetorical studies relate to the horizontally-aligned, theoretical approaches that ultimately lead to the apotheosis of each student's intellectual persona.

The nature of "silence" is something of a recurring theme of contemplative philosophies far and wide, but more often than not silence is relegated to being little more than a mere concept or worse, a completely social phenomenon that chalks the matter up as some negation of humanity's "linguistic" way of being. Silence, it would seem, is "nothing" of the sort, but the only way to determine whether or not that is the case would be to contemplate exactly how silence ought to be considered, if, in fact, silence can be considered at all. In this article, I wrestle with the ontological reality of silence using Heidegger's treatment of the Nothing as a waymark, ultimately revealing the interrelatedness of presence and silence as conditions, and opening up possible avenues for new discussions related to meditative and contemplative practice.

As part of his Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology course, the author engaged students in developing a survey about perceptions of hostile work environments and academic freedom. Students were interested in the extent to which identity and beliefs might predict perceptions and judgments. Survey respondents expressed their perceptions and judgments regarding 20 ecologically valid scenarios. The sample of 120 respondents was broadly representative of the Berea College campus community. Stepwise multiple regressions within a path analytic framework helped develop and refine a general predictive model. Gender and sexual orientation, and their interaction, predicted political identity. Political identity, an activist orientation, and explicit support for hostile environment protection were positively related and predicted over half the variance in respondents’ perception of environmental hostility. These ratings strongly predicted their subsequent judgments of academic freedom protection. Once respondents categorized a situation as being “a hostile environment,” they concluded it would not be protected by academic freedom. A respondent’s explicit academic freedom support added little to the prediction of one’s expressed willingness to protect academic freedom. Although academic freedom may be acknowledged as being important, in practice, the perception of environmental hostility diminishes support for academic freedom. These results have many educational and organizational implications.

Many recent studies observe that the religious genre of apocalypse has been adapted to secular purposes. In observing examples of secular apocalypses, researchers typically locate them in contexts that are nevertheless concerned with spiritual and mystical matters. In contrast, this essay demonstrates that secular apocalyptic rhetoric is also utilized in the official discourse of scientific experts and government representatives. Through a close analysis of official documents on the topics of anthropogenic climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic (two urgent issues of public policy that are framed as agents of global cataclysm), I demonstrate the ways that experts appropriate religious forms of rhetoric to persuade audiences to accept the measures proposed by authorities. In the process, the essay identifies the rhetorical features of the secular apocalyptic subgenre in contradistinction to its religious predecessor. Ultimately, this study exposes the ways that secular officials – whose power is justified on the grounds of a purportedly objective, rational, empiricism that is opposed to mysticism – make use of persuasive strategies drawn from traditions that do not conform to the standards of scientific epistemology.

Following the work of Kenneth Burke, most theorists understand modern identity as something that is formed through the processes of identification, recognition, and association. Further, recent work on personal transformation suggests that new identities are legitimized through personal, confessional testimony about the self. In contrast, this essay focuses on “voluntary disappearances” as one example of a type of personal transformation that operates through dissociative practices. Voluntary disappearance is the term given to situations where a person wishes to completely cut ties with all aspects of the present life and achieves this by moving to a new place and assuming a new identity. Through a rhetorical analysis of various books on the topic of how to enact such a disappearance, this study demonstrates two central insights: a) that some modes of ethos formation are achieved by dissociation rather than association, and b) that dissociative personal transformations are achieved through disidentification, non-recognition, concealment and deception.