Ryan Wasser
Luzerne County Community College
Articles
There are few terms in the 21st century political vernacular that are as loaded as "conspiracy theory." Wherever one turns, one is faced with a political pundit or commentator talking about conspiracy theories on the Left and conspiracy theories on the Right, and in many of those instances, it is beyond apparent that the person speaking has little-to-no concept of what it means "to conspire," let alone what a conspiracy theory is or the effects that unbridled conspiracy theorizing are likely to have on a society. The main thrust of this article is an attempt to rectify that confusion, first, by clearly delineating what it means to conspire, second, by drawing various analogies about the nature of conspiracy theorizing in order to understand the pathway of the phenomenon as it evolves with technology, and finally, by highlighting the identified problems in two notable conspiracy theories from the previous decade.
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."
"Every person thinks and every person speaks, at least in one way or another. As such, the nature of silence speaks, however infrequent or in whispered tone, to something deep in the heart of every human being" (6). This quote is the crux of my essay and it speaks to two quintessentially human behaviors, to wit, metaphysical reflection about the nature of existence in toto and the universality of contemplative practices. These behaviors have been written about ad nauseam and with good reason, however, the attention paid to the conditions the precede them are lacking in some respects, and ideologically driven in others. Viewing conditions such as "presence" and "silence" ontologically, to the extend that we can do so, opens pathways forward for new qualitative discussion relevant to both the humanities and the social sciences.
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.
With the exception of the most ardent Platonists, who perhaps harbor a degree of skepticism toward writing (see Phaedrus), most academics would agree that writing is at the core of the Humanities as a broad-spectrum discipline, if, in fact, it is not the core itself. That said, the science surrounding the instruction of writing has taken a turn for the worse, as evidenced by the levels of first-year student remediation countrywide. My article is appropriate for Peerless on two fronts: first, because of my treatment of writing instruction using the language of architectural aesthetics as a mnemonic, and second, because of the practical application of my reasoning in a pedagogical framework that might be used by others pedagogues or those interested in the science of teaching.
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.
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