Chong embraces solipsism

Jane Chong asserts that because people have their own experiences, we should tolerate their "reality"-a reality based on group identity ("Flipping the race card," Feb. 29). Identity politics, though, is solipsism; it allows people to-in the name of personal experience-categorize themselves. Chong says, "[the minority] does not sit up at night, thinking up ways to twist history to fit his life." Because, Chong says, "He has history enough of his own." But isn't that history to fit his own life right there? His own history, we assume, fits his life. Could we call history that does not fit our life our own? No, of course not. Indeed, this person has no need to twist history to fit his life because it already does. Whatever his perception of his own history is-his "reality"-it already fits his life. This is the philosophical question, then: is there a reality of a single person independent of that single person's assessment of it? In other words, is an individual's history, as he perceives it, not his actual history? I would say that the nature of memory and time-that the former is incomplete and that the latter forces the human to always be in the present-necessarily obfuscates reality-even of our own history. In light of individual failure I argue for universal standards that proscribe solipsism. An individual's perception of his/her own reality serves no purpose for society. Therefore, we need another reality-a collectively shared one to serve in its place. The most salubrious collective reality in terms of an effect on society is one based on universal truths. What are those universal truths? I offer one: that a man be judged by the content of his character rather than on the color of his skin-a truth that has no place for solipsistic racial categorization.

Wheeler Frost

Trinity '10