I remember that first college class rather well. My first question wasn’t philosophical. Rather, I asked myself, “Why is the floor inclined? If I put a pencil on my desk, it will roll off.” I didn’t know at the time that the inclined floor was the result of the college’s transforming its original “chapel/auditorium” in Old Main into two classrooms, the old fixed seats removed and replaced with school desks that favored right-handed writing shelves. At the bottom of the slope stood the professor, later a friend and colleague. Jack, as I knew him, was a mild-mannered Heideggerian existentialist who taught philosophy through ten questions, not a bad approach for young people used to thinking about the present moment and circumstances (like the floor’s incline) and not used to thinking historically or philosophically. One of his ten questions centered on the evolution of any thought system. Looking back, I see I was as unaware of thought transformations as I was of room transformations.
 
At the time, I had little familiarity with how ideology contains its opposite, but I have in the interim seen plenty of examples of thought transformations. Such examples abound today—they probably always abounded. And no better examples seem to exist than those provided by people on university campuses, where thesis inevitably evolves into antithesis.
 
Take two events at the U. of Michigan, Dearborn, for example.* In an effort to combat social division through planned “safe gatherings,” the college’s Center for Social Justice and Inclusion hosted two “cafes” in which the participating members were, by definition, segregated mostly by race. There’s the fundamental problem: Well-meaning, but intellectually vacuous university administrators, seeking to appease in the name of emotional “safety” and “diversity,” ended up causing a controversy over their taking a principle to its opposite. They transformed the idea of inclusion into the idea of seclusion. And the same goes for most, if not all, religious, political, economic, and social movements as they evolve: Follow them to their logical ends or practice, and you find their opposites. My old philosophy professor was correct. Inherent in any thought system is the potential for the emergence of its antithesis.
 
We live in an intellectual multiverse where philosophical boundaries meld and opposites become rebellious offspring. Universities, the so-called seats of “higher education,” have become thought-limiters, at one time decrying “liberal thinking,” but now decrying “conservative thinking.”** Ostensibly founded on the principle of “leading out,” of ignorance (from the Latin e, or the Latin ex for “out of” or “from,” and ducere, “to lead,”) many universities have become refugia for specific perspectives they “induce.” “Leading out of ignorance” has transformed into “leading into a specific way of thinking.” But, lest I suggest historical ignorance on my own part, I should note that there’s probably nothing new in these swings of intellectual pendula because of the principle of ideological transformation.
 
Perspectives aren’t physical entities or processes; they aren’t conserved the way energy is conserved. The Law of Energy Conservation is universal and unaffected by time, as Emily Noether explained and Einstein applied. A wheel or circle that turns looks the same regardless of the amount of transformation (turning) it undergoes. Perspectives don’t conserve. They change with time. History is replete with examples, mostly those that begin as “people’s movements” that end in dictatorships. Movements for an egalitarian society end by suppressing individuality and creating a ruling class of mostly bureaucrats who cannot be held personally accountable for their collective actions. The end product is the antithesis of the ideals on which the ideology originated. Extreme Left becomes Extreme Right.
 
And as each generation enters the classroom of perspectives, it has to discover how the world became the world as is. Just as I was unaware of the transformation of the old college chapel/auditorium in Old Main, so I was unaware of the ideological transformations into which I was born. Independent thought occurs only after one understands the inculcation into which he or she is born.
 
Unaware that I sat in a transformed amphitheater, I asked myself about what I observed, that is, the inclination of the floor. I suppose I could mark that time as a beginning of independent consciousness and intellectual growth. Had I taken another class in that room, say Composition 101, I might never have evolved intellectually with respect to seeing the present as a transformation of the past and as a clue to a probable future. But in that beginning philosophy class, Jack made the point about running any intellectual system to its logical conclusion to see the opposite emerge.
 
From my perspective, those who today seek change through turmoil are largely unaware of the historical precedents for such actions and, more importantly, of the historical results. Administrators at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, probably had very good intentions, believing they were enhancing “social justice” or some other ideal du jour, such as “equality.” In doing so, they segregated groups, did the opposite of what they intended, and stirred up ad hominin and ad populum reactions in social media.
 
One would think that “intellectuals”—I assume that’s how UM, D people would classify themselves—would recognize the potential for ideological transformations that turn theses into antitheses. Surely, there’s some professor in the Philosophy Department who is familiar with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Fichte. Someone at the university could have given some practical advice based on precedents. But, then, maybe such a person was afraid in these times of cancel culture to offer a prediction of what would happen if the university pursued an ideology to its logical conclusion.  
 
 
*https://www.wxyz.com/news/university-of-michigan-dearborn-responds-to-controversy-over-white-cafe-for-non-persons-of-color   Accessed September 11, 2020. And https://reason.com/2020/09/09/univesity-michigan-deaborn-bipoc-cafe-white-social-justice-segregated/   Accessed September 11, 2020.
**And in both instances, the objection to either kind of “thinking” has descended into ad hominems that vilify individuals and ad populums that vilify groups.

“Hey, I think I found some place where I don’t have to worry about COVID-19, riots, car accidents, plane crashes, product warnings, and incessant punditry, that last thing probably the most vexing of modern ailments.”
 
“Where’s that? Middle of Australia?”
 
“How’d you guess? Well, not really the middle, a little bit west of middle. Anyway, it’s not in Australia at all, but rather what people in the outback of Australia found.”

​“Huh?”
 
“There’s a widespread array of radio receivers, some dipole antennas spread across the Australian outback, that looks like a bunch of spiders; it’s called the Murchison Widefield Array. So, get this. They—I don’t know them, but they are some of those elite science ‘theys’ that study stuff I can’t really explain—anyway, they looked at ten million stars in a patch of sky without finding any trace of technological life.* Get it? No life exuding radio waves, specifically messages or music broadcast on FM bands. A life-void. Nothing. Nada. Just stars and planets and stuff, but no sign of any alien life. That’s the place where nothing bad happens because for something ‘bad’ to happen, there have to be life-forms that recognize that something ‘bad’ can happen.”
 
“Yeah, but if you go there and pick any planet orbiting one of those ten million stars, won’t you be the someone who can expect something ‘bad’? Won’t you by your very presence open the possibility, nay, even the probability that something ‘bad’ will of necessity happen? How about my using the word nay? Always wanted to use that with the words possibility and probability.”
 
“But when I get to one of those uninhabited, undefiled places…”

“You’ll take the bad stuff with you. Don’t you see? You can’t escape the bad stuff if the bad stuff is inherent, if its existence is endemic to humans, or, in fact, to any life-form. Life processes include ‘bad’ processes with ‘bad’ outcomes. And on your trip to those distant havens of imagined ‘good’ stuff, you can add that anxiety you’ll have, especially when you get to a section of the universe that seems to be devoid of life. I mean, what if ‘they’ were wrong in their assessment that those ten million solar systems are devoid of life? What if the life is hiding like an Australian funnel-web spider, waiting for you to walk by and then…well, then, that’s when the ‘bad’ happens. Don’t the ‘theys’ that operate the Murchison Widefield Array have to worry about stepping near a funnel-web spider on their way to check their metallic spiders?”
 
“I see. I guess I’ll just stay on Earth, then. But what if I permanently self-quarantine?”
 
“And what kind of life is that? Talk about a life-void, or, rather, a ‘living-void’; that’s one in my estimation, and it’s one you don’t have to travel light-years to find.”
     
 
*Tremblay, C.D. and S. J. Tingay. A SETI Survey of the Vela Region using the Murchison Widefield Array: Orders of Magnitude Expansion in Search Space. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA) doi: 10.1017/pas.2020.xxx. Online at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.03267.pdf
 

 
For Plato, the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, were manifestations of geometric shapes.* Earth is the cube; Air, the octahedron; Fire, the tetrahedron; Water, the icosahedron. Those are four of the five perfect and regular solids. The fifth regular solid is the dodecahedron.
 
Now, one might wonder how the four elements fit into a scheme that has five representative forms. Not to worry. In the Timaeus, Plato gives the dodecahedron an encompassing position: It is the entire ordered universe, what we often call the cosmos. Order appears to prevail in Plato’s structure of the universe. And in light of his ascription of creation to a master builder or craftsman of some kind, an orderly universe makes (teleological) sense. But of course, it’s only the conscious universe that recognizes and desires order. Sure, we can say with Einstein that the rules of order are universal, that, for example, gravity plays the same role here that it plays across the cosmos and that on a macro scale determinism prevails, and cause leads to effect. We can even argue, if we choose, that apparent disorder in nature is merely concealed order: The chaos of weather, for example, is the product of numerous, even if uncounted and unidentified, physical processes, such as the flap of the butterfly’s wing in the Amazon that causes an unpredicted tornado in Kansas.  
 
In the 25 centuries since the rise of Greek philosophy and attempts to explain the world either through theology or science, order pervades in some form. It’s only when we get to the principle of entropy that we see disorder in the cosmos. Sure, in many explanations across those last 2,500 years, chaos is the point of departure from which an orderly universe arises, one with identifiable “laws” that keep it together. But what started out as chaos in the modern interpretation of creation will end as chaos and complete entropy.
 
Order requires work. Heck, I look at my desk and see papers, books, a little bust of Socrates and a solar cell powered Einstein with a moveable hand pointing a finger to his head as if to say, “Think.” Keeping my desk in order is a task, and it requires thinking—thank you, Albert. Entropy takes over the moment I ease up.
 
I think most people understand that order requires effort. If there is a force of disorder, it’s always at work, like some wind that blows through an open window to scatter papers carelessly piled on a desk. And that’s what we see in 2020: Forces of disorder like an indifferent virus and groups of anarchic rioters with no planned end-order, as evidenced by the CHAZ in Seattle, where there were unchecked thefts, injuries, and even two killings within the “ideal” utopia sans order-keeping police.  
 
Inside the dodecahedron, there’s an array of disarray. And it’s not just the social dishevelment that disrupts order with anarchy; nature, too, disorders and disrupts through processes inimical to human harmony, e.g., forest fires, earthquakes, storms.
 
Life inside the dodecahedron isn’t easy because however the cosmos obtained its fundamental order—through the actions of a Creator or through fundamental laws arising from Chaos—it requires maintenance energy.   
 
*The Timaeus.

Just when you think you have “heard it all,” you hear another story that makes you say, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
 
AJ’s Unisex Hair Salon in Stroud, England, advertised for a “happy” stylist: “This is a busy, friendly, small salon, so only happy, friendly stylists need apply.”
 
No go. The local job center called to say they could not run that ad “because the word ‘happy’ is considered ‘discriminatory.’”* No joke. You don’t have to use much imagination to know owner Alison Birch’s reaction. Birch and some of her clients wondered whether the world had gone completely mad. “Does this mean that every descriptive word is discriminative…happy, tall, smart, elegant?” one person asked.
 
Yes, you’re right. Some people just need to “get a life.” Let’s guess the next victimization based on identity. I say serial killers and incorrigible thieves will claim discrimination just because they happen to kill people and steal stuff.
 
And for people who know that there are real problems like famine, war, terrorist acts, slave-trade and sex trafficking, the disheartening aspect of this politically correct, wimpy culture is that it shows no signs of abating. If you want a sample of your coming world, simply go to YouTube and look up videos from the recent “Democratic Socialist Convention.”** Buckle up; the ride to sanity will be long and rough. If you fear what the future will be, I'm sure there's a safe space for you somewhere, maybe on some university campus, where no one will offend anyone. 
 
* https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/hair-salon-job-posting-happy-hairdresser-discrimanatory
Accessed September 5, 2020.

**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHRxu3XrsHg    Accessed September 5, 2020

Jerry:  So, where’s my sneakers?
Kramer:  That’s what I want to know. I saw Mom and Pop this morning, but on my way home, the place was empty. Everything is gone. Mom and Pop vanished.
Jerry:  So, all my sneakers are gone?
Kramer:  I’m afraid so. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been askin’ around; they didn’t even have any kids.
Jerry:  Mom and Pop aren’t even a mom and pop?
Kramer:  It was all an act, Jerry. And they scored BIG TIME.
Elaine:  Mom and Pop’s plan was to move into the neighborhood, establish trust for 48 years, and then run off with Jerry’s sneakers?
Kramer:  Apparently.*
 
In the Middle Ages in Europe, relics became prized and valuable. In fact, a trade in real and knockoff relics developed for items, such as clothing and even the body parts (like teeth, bones) of saints. According to Morris Bishop, “Wandering friars and imposters in clerical dress sold pig’s bones as those of saints, slivers of the True Cross, and drops of the Virgin’s milk at country fairs. Said San Bernardino of Sienna: ‘All the buffalo cows of Lombardy would not have as much milk as is shown about the world.’” And Bishop reports on another tale similar to the “Mom and Pop” skit in Seinfeld: “The monks of Conques commissioned one of their number to steal a saint’s body from Agen. The criminal inveigled himself into the monastery, and after ten patient years, managed to be appointed custodian of the relic, which he triumphantly carried off to Conques” (157).
 
Ignore that these tales of the mom and pop and of the monk involved subterfuge and criminality. They provide another lesson: You want something? Be patient.   
 
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwnanPuuCwk
 
**The Middle Ages. 1970. New York. American Heritage Press.

During the Cold War, nuclear holocaust was unavoidably on people’s minds, especially during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis. That crisis was, in fact, real; the threat was immediate; death seemed imminent for millions. Children were taught to “duck and cover” away from windows either in hallways or beneath desks.
 
For the general public, fallout shelters in the basements of many buildings were supposed to provide refugia, all of them marked with yellow and black signs. There wasn’t much science in designating which buildings were “bombproof”; the choice, made by some government official was probably based on the ostensible solidity of the foundation, maybe one with a granite-clad exterior. The fallout signage and choice of buildings were no doubt part of a plan to instill confidence in the citizenry that survivability was possible. No one seemed to question how a group of strangers shopping in local stores or taking their classes in old schools could gather under a fifteen-minute warning without food or water until the radioactivity subsided, maybe in a couple of hundred years or so.
 
But even in those potentially bleak times, there was a sense that one could survive, that life could go on. Recently, I came across an old public service announcement advocating the “duck and cover” procedure. “Here’s Tony in a cub scout meeting,” the narrator begins. And then he says that Tony knows to duck and cover when he sees the flash of a nuclear bomb. Never mind that if one sees the flash, blindness is a possible effect, and ionizing gamma rays already passed through the body, not to mention the vaporizing heat that would leave only Tony’s shadow. Anyway, the announcement ends with a cute ditty.* It’s almost Disney-like, the Disney of Mickey in his earliest days.
 
No doubt there were some in government and in the media of the times who were well aware of the horrors of a nuclear bomb blast. But maybe the times were a bit different. The media might have been complicit in a government plan to instill confidence and hope. Not many people understood radiation. Atomic bomb tests were televised. I know. I used to get up early in the morning to turn on the black-and-white TV to see a blast in Nevada—if I could line up the rabbit ears antenna properly. And what did I know about radiation except what I saw in science fiction movies? Oversized ants, or grasshoppers, or even rabbits that plagued the locals. Or radiation gave special powers to those irradiated, normal people turned into either monsters or superheroes. I had entered the atomic age. Could anything have more promise?
 
Fast forward to today. Sure, nuclear holocaust is possible, maybe even more so with terrorist-minded people and countries seeking to get the bomb or neighboring nuclear powers like India and China squabbling over borders. But I’m guessing that on your current list of concerns, nuclear holocaust is at the bottom. What’s on top? Why COVID-19, of course. And why is that?
 
Well, look at the difference in the media coverage. Social media, the Internet, radio, TV cable and networks, and traditional print media keep telling us that we’re doomed. Governors and mayors have shut down states and cities. Everyone is told that even ducking and covering is no guarantee of safety. Life is dire. COVID will kill us all. There are no safe shelters save living in one’s own basement. And even then, the virus might sneak in on some package, letter, or food wrapping.
 
What is interesting is that so many in government and media seem to thrive on negative news. I’ve seen no coverage of hope, especially when politically motivations prevail. Sure, I could argue that though COVID might not last for hundreds of years like radioactive fallout, it still poses an immediate threat. After all, look how many have died. I might be next. Isn’t there a shelter; isn’t there a ditty to make me feel a bit more light-hearted in the midst of widespread sickness and death. Wait! Is there widespread sickness and death? I seem to remember a 2009 pandemic that infected tens of millions of people. What am I looking at in September, 2020? Six million Americans infected? Sure, that’s a lot, but not tens of millions. Sure, that’s a lot, but in a population of 325 million? Sure, more could be infected before the virus either mutates or yields to a vaccine or therapy.

These are definitely different times from those Cold War days. Someone needs to write a cute ditty about Tony at his cub scout meeting when he hears someone cough. "Yes, Tony knows to put on his mask and socially distance." 
 

*Listen to Number 17 at https://music.apple.com/us/album/duck-and-cover-atomic-bomb-psa/584957485?i=584958071

If you are an American, you are used to hearing (or maybe you’ve said it), “Reality is my reality. It is what I say it is.” How far does that philosophy go in “the real world”? What’s that, you say? Who’s to say what is “real”? If you asked, then you do, in fact, adhere to a belief that “reality is an internal matter.” And, with enough qualifications, your belief is hard to dispute. But surely, even you recognize that some processes and materials are real. Cancer, for example, or injury by car accident or assault. Or, what about bank accounts or trees? How about math, or at least, about arithmetic?
 
The recent flap over a statement by Kareem Carr, a self-identified Harvard-trained analyst, that 2 + 2 = 5 makes an interesting comment on perception of reality. The problem with Carr’s thought is that it uses numbers to play with meanings and vice versa. Whereas there’s some truth to his claim that statisticians use “models” to manipulate data and that mathematical terms can be interpreted subjectively, the hard realities of daily life demand a universally applicable arithmetic. Carr’s thoughts on the topic make a Twitter feed that elicited a number of responses, some of them quite humorous.* The most humorous of responses, in my mind, is by David Sinfield: “If you give me £5 and I give you  £2. + £2  back, we’re good, right?” Reality is inescapable when it affects the wallet. It’s also inescapable when cancer, hurricane, earthquake, or tsunami strikes.
 
There’s little doubt that the traditional way of counting is highly practical. Want to build a brick wall of a certain height and length? You don’t have to estimate the number of bricks. Given the measurements of a standard brick and its accompanying mortar joints, a relatively untrained mathematician can buy the precise number of bricks needed to build the wall. Maybe Carr understands that; maybe his point only concerns how data analysts can manipulate data or use numbers “to create reality.”  
 
But the flap over the answer to the problem 2 + 2 bespeaks a larger flap that pervades the minds of academicians and their young students. Outside academia “things” get real. Outside the world of the ideal, realities have consequences. But when anyone tries to objectify matters moral, political, social, or philosophical, many inside academia or inside ideological castles maintain a subjectivist’s position. We’re seeing this today with regard to rioting in American cities, rioting that is not acknowledged by some, such as Congressman Jerry Nadler, who called the riots and their anarchic perpetrators “a myth.” **
 
I suppose being subjective is an inescapable characteristic of all of us; that is, inescapable until our own wallets or lives are affected. More than 700 police officers have been injured and more than 30 people have been killed in “protest” areas over the past few months. The math is a rather gruesome reality for those injured and killed. It is also a gruesome reality for merchants who have lost money and business totaling millions of dollars.
 
Yet, here we are, occupied by an analyst in an academic squabble over the meaning of 2 + 2. No doubt those who can put Carr’s thoughts in the perspective of data analysis will side with subjective interpretations. And I can understand their subjectivism in light of their distance from the realities of injury, loss of property, and death. Out of sight, so to speak. But when the realities of life are forced upon individuals’ consciousness, numbers become real. Look, for example, at the paucity of paper products like toilet paper on grocery store shelves. The number of rolls is quantifiably insufficient to meet the objective demands of subjective people.
 
But let’s go back to Carr’s point about subjectivity and data analysis. At the same time that riots occupy the minds of some, the pandemic’s numbers occupy the minds of just about everyone. And here, we see that numbers can be manipulated and mean different things to different people. When the CDC says that only 6% of the COVID-19 deaths were in people without co-morbidities, the population of people without such risk factors sees the disease one way. Those with “co-morbidities” see the disease another way. And the arguments multiply: “But those with co-morbidities like diabetes would have lived longer lives under doctors’ care if they hadn’t contracted the disease. Therefore, the virus can be directly blamed for their deaths.” Makes sense, doesn’t it? Then why does an agency like the CDC put out a statement about deaths outside the co-morbid population? Obviously, it’s making a distinction. It is pointing out a cause with a numerical conclusion. And then there’s the question about how any death is counted as a COVID death, a question raised by reports both that testing returns tenuous results and that money is involved in labeling because both hospitals and individuals can receive benefits otherwise unavailable to them.
 
The matter of the meaning and efficacy of math seems like a silly academic argument, a game for rhetoricians to pursue in debates without consequences other than bragging rights about who beat whom. Instead, math (or arithmetic) is often a matter of concern as it relates to personal risk and potential personal danger. Am I one of those who would fall into the 6% category or into the 94% category? And can I believe the quantification of study results on the efficacy of therapeutic drugs that cure the disease?
 
Take the numbers associated with Hydroxychloroquine. A Belgian study of more than 8,000 people infected by the virus led to the conclusion that the ordinary prescription for the malaria medicine was an effective therapy for many, reducing deaths by an objective percent (you can look it up, but I think it was at least 30%).*** The standard dosage has been used safely for decades. However, a WHO study of far fewer COVID patients on the medicine (than the Belgian study) used an amount about twice that of the standard dosage, and then its results became the widespread conclusion that Hydroxychloroquine is ineffective. The WHO study got wider coverage than the Belgian study. Populations around the planet heard the results of one and not the results of the other.
 
Subjectivity in math or arithmetic might have a place in human affairs, but not when those affairs are both the livelihoods and lives of “real” individuals.
 
*https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1300231244916064256
 
**https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-iba-syn&hsimp=yhs-syn&hspart=iba&p=nadler+calls+rioters+a+myth#id=1&vid=6efe217f294c6e9b5ac9c0198fe4ff6d&action=click
 
***See video on YouTube of Dr. John Campbell’s discussion of hydroxychloroquine under the title “Hydroxychloroquine, evidence of efficacy,” August 27, 2020. For the study of 8,075 patients, see
Catteau, Lucy PharmD, PhD, et al., Low-does Hydroxychloroquine Therapy and Mortality in Hospitalized Patients with COVID-19: A Nationwide Observational Study of 8,075 Participants. Published online through ScienceDirect/Elsevier, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, 24 August 2020, 106144, online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920303423
 
For related studies, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893920302817?via%3Dihub
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-05983-z
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)30534-8/fulltext
 
Media with political agendas pushed the WHO study to the foreground and ignored the Belgian and other studies, demonstrating that some would rather foist their political and highly subjective analyses onto an unsuspecting audience even though such omission could exacerbate human suffering. The same media failed to cover the violence in cities, the deaths associated with the movement du jour, and the businesses—and thus neighborhoods—destroyed by looters.