Brown University physics professor Stephon Alexander strikes one as an amazing cosmologist. He has written a book, The Jazz of Physics, that describes the intimate relationship between music, especially jazz (Alexander is a saxophonist), and the vast open sea ‘up there’ of elegant mysteries. In his most recent book, he ponders the cosmos for the connectability of matter unseen, dark and light, and makes string theory come alive like a Stravinsky cello concert. He gave a TED talk connecting Albert Einstein to John Coltrane. He’s gone on to great scholastic heights, including not one but two postdoctoral appointments.
He’s a philosopher, a panpsychist. Stellar stuff.
But he’s Black, and that’s a problem for some of the intellectuals he has moved amongst throughout his illustrious career. Even the title of his latest work on cosmology suggests there is racial tension among the mental luminaries: Fear of a Black Universe: An Outsider’s Guide to the Future of Physics (2021). Alexander discusses the exclusivity of physicists in his two named books, noting not only the unpaved road left for Blacks to follow but also for women. It’s an old boy’s club with an unspoken -ism: The best you might hope to be, outsider, is Echo gushing up to Narcissus.
But this is not an article about Alexander, per se—I did one of those already for the APA blog—but rather his plight, his journey that requires of him the burden of growing his genius while at the same time having to deal with the stigma of being born Black and coping with a conflicting “double consciousness.” Like Richard Wright, Alexander writes about this in his books; he writes that it is still happening today, even in the Ivy Towers, where outside, if you listen hard enough, you may hear the chants of “Black Lives Matter” and the billy-bop of another cop beating on an Antifa skull.
Recently, I attended two philosophy conferences, one in Perth, Australia, and one online (Zoom), both sponsored by the Australasian Association of Philosophy. While both were useful for my intellectual life and academic career, as I attended several talks at the Perth conference and presented my propositions about consciousness in the Zoom room, I noted a peculiar feature of the offerings both times: Both conferences offered a “side” entree of philosophizing in Aboriginal ways of seeing. For instance, at a separate venue, you could see a screening of “two short documentaries under the broad theme of truth-telling, racism, and eugenic practices in recent Western Australian history.” As much as the panel discussion that followed might have opened up a broader discussion of universal topics in ethics, the session was kept separate from the international philosophy conference. However, at the opening of the all-white conference, the usual acknowledgement was paid, and gratitude was expressed to the “custodians” of the land on which the university was built. It’s a strange word to American ears, as back home, a custodian is essentially a janitor. But whatever problems Australians (whites) were having with Aboriginals (one of the oldest cultures in the world) was none of anyone else’s business elsewhere. That made the truth-telling session seem, well, decorative.
And the online conference had a similar split offering. Although embedded as a link in the online conference offerings, the Alan Saunders Lecture features a talk delivered by Krushil Watene, a New Zealand Aboriginal associate professor in philosophy at the University of Auckland. That lecture “details several insights for the pursuit and realization of intergenerational justice that Indigenous philosophies contain.” Again, though associated with the online conference, the link takes you to a separate site, the ABC News Network, where the program can be viewed. [Here is the 2024 Alan Saunders Lecture.] Apparently, ethics is a major theme of Aboriginal philosophy, but with white-privileged philosophers, not so much. For many professional white thinkers, ethics and the lot is akin to a chess match with an intellectual cuddle buddy in a doll house privileged with peace and quiet. Not every mind has that luxury.
Perhaps such a proclamation is harsh; I wish it were—I’d chastise myself with a scourge whip, like a character out of Flannery O’Connor—but, even at this late date, in this century of evolving crises, the world seems still divided between the Others and Whites, between Five Eyes (Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK, and the USA), the Anglosphere intelligence alliance that controls spying on everyone else. A mind more cynical than mine might think of this Anglos [here as the Mighty Whitey Empire]. But that’s not where my article heads.
The separateness at the conferences got me thinking about the usual Marxist quandary regarding the ownership of production—not, this time, of material but the immaterial essence of things. This is what Alexander seems to allude to. It’s even what the jazz greats seem to allude to—John Coltrane, say, or Sun Ra or Pharoah Sanders—in a language of sound, which is itself an iteration of the dance of waves now thought by some to carry our truest collective Origin tale. The separation of philosophizing privileges white thinking over Indigenous thinking. Blacks and colored peoples have always had to accommodate the white cosmology—Christianity and its controlling mechanisms by which colonial interests saw the Master-Slave dialectic introjected into the ‘soul’ of the Black man, and which reified the pain inflicted upon bodies and turned into Ma Rainey’s Blues and John Coltrane’s progressions. But people like Alexander see a cosmology where dark energy matters.
I thought of my early undergraduate studies when I started as an anthropology major and studied mostly Black cultures worldwide. At some point in the history of human thought, we seemed to have acknowledged our roots in Africa, as evidenced in archeological finds such as “Lucy,” which theorists then used to push the notion that the bones were a missing link that helped trace human evolution from the apes to contemporary humans. I read The Forest People by Colin Turnbull, which detailed the communistic practices of the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest and their symbiotic relationship to their eco-niche. I was convinced we, the readers, had much to learn from their social ways and mores. And I thought of Haiti, of something that anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston said about voodoo: If you want to understand: Believe. While voodoo is widely discredited today as unscientific and of dubious religious use, it can be a powerful reminder of how sympathetic magic works in almost all religions and how its effects point to a universal fragility of the human mind that remains vulnerable to magical thinking and propaganda—a ripe topic, indeed, for contemporary moral philosophers.
But also I have in recent years been exposed to panpsychism and its proposition that mind is in everything in the universe, perhaps emerging out of waves, then particles, then atoms, then molecules, then bio, then people, then the White Man who, according to The Last Poets, has a God complex. After reading hundreds of pages of his thorough and convincing takes on contemporary cosmology, Alexander shocks when he affirms that he is a panpsychist. But, more importantly, he does what no other white philosopher writing journal-ready peer-reviewed essays is doing: pointing back to Africa as the origin of the concept. Specifically, he cites the Bantu cosmological property mbungi. In Fear of a Black Universe, he writes,
Let us assume that consciousness, like charge and quantum spin, is fundamental and exists in all matter to varying degrees of complexity. Therefore consciousness is a universal quantum property that resides in all the basic fields of nature—a cosmic glue that connects all fields as a perceiving network.
This seems an interesting approach that requires more study—not merely anthropological but philosophical. The complexity could help explain why “we” still have no common, universal definition of consciousness. These days, consciousness, more often than not, languishes with the blow-up ideas piled high up in the attic with the other ‘epiphenomena.’ Something you take Amitriptyline pills for to cope with loss of mind.
These ruminations make me wonder if there is not more than one cosmology. The White male cosmology and then all the others, including several Asian modes of thinking hardly ever mentioned as being competitive with European-rooted thought. This possibility is unsettling. The space between the ears is the last frontier of cosmology, and “we” seem determined to colonize that space with white-centric serve-ups—all others sit in the Other section, served up equal scoops but not considered part of the more fervent party of discovery.
Recent statistical data seems to suggest a global dearth of people of color represented in the physical sciences and in philosophy. This absence of color suggests fraudulence in the mainstream findings of thinkers who would advance analyses that leave out differences in how Others perceive their world and personal experiences at great risk to what emerges in the post-Truth era. Gosh help us if AI gets a sniff of this and exploits our limitations.
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