Piaget, Archimedes, and a Defense of the New (and Necessary) Centrism

“Evil exists,” writes the man in my Twitter bubble as a caption to his post, a news piece about a man who tortured & murdered a two-year-old. Were I in the other, right-wing bubble, where it’s a given that evil exists, I’d more likely be hearing a call to disembowel the perpetrator or the liberals who are soft on crime. The Trump era has taught me the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives assume no one can be trusted, even those who can be trusted, while liberals like me assume the good in everyone. For two years, we’ve been reeling from the blows of every hateful word, each corrupt act, pulling out our hair, chanting, “How could they do this?” It’s time, I guess, to shove past the formal operations stage of development, though I’d argue that far too many conservatives have yet to even reach it. Having reached it, though, too many of us on the left have been content to perch here, looking down at the ones beneath us who fail to even try to make this milestone. Even Piaget was clear that it isn’t an end in itself, that adult life tempers the high ideals of the young adult abstract thinker, and though he, being a serious scientist, didn’t use the word realpolitik, many of us need to recalibrate without becoming utterly cynical, push off from this shore we thought was safe and good, though laced underneath with larcenies with longer half-lives than plastic, as we’re often reminded by those in a particular bubble that often overlaps with ours—the purity left. While we cry out, “How could they do this?” they pounce (hi Glenn Greenwald!) and say, “How can you be upset by this when X has been done in your name?!” This bubble intends to live in the formal operations stage, hang portraits of Hegel and Marx on its immaterial walls, imagining that the privilege enabling them to do so is the fulcrum Archimedes dreamed he could build.

The Kind of Dream You Have Near the End of the Spring Semester

When the mediocre male student defends the mediocre female student against my utterly fair grading mainly because he loves her and is desperate for her to return his love, it’s a sad chivalry but one I secretly applaud while outwardly chastising him for interfering where he has no business, flooding him with such guilt that he cuts out his own tongue, which floods me with such guilt that I search the streets for the tongue, in hopes of keeping it alive long enough to be reattached. I find it in a planter under dirt outside a coffee bar, a piece of jerky I put in my mouth to reanimate, later finding a cup of water where it softens and flaps in a promising way. The problem now is I can’t get my phone to show me his number. Hours pass as I try to figure this out. People stop by and try to help. A Middle Eastern dignitary passes in a motorcade. The dean would like a word with me. My daughter thinks I should just let it go. In a window of time between security shifts, three thugs come in and begin gathering my things nonchalantly, as though they are collecting trash and not robbing me. When I tell them there’s a tongue in there they drop everything and run. In the end, he shows up fluent as before, something about stem cells, he didn’t need the piece. The woman he loves still hasn’t done enough to earn the grade she wants. I want to tell him she will also never love him, that he is just a foot soldier on her chessboard, but I bite my tongue.