Current Books:
the Shadow Rising - Jordan
the Road - Kerouac
How We Are Hungry - Eggers
Lectures:
History of the US
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It’s the new millennium.
OK, that’s old news. Frankly, that was old news 8 years ago. With bloggers beginning to analyze the Oughts and ‘I Love the 90s’ celebrating its 5th birthday, I admit that I’m pretty behind the ‘Zeitgeist of the Cloud.’ Then again, we’ll be discussing Philosophy – a topic that is generally considered archaic (or, at least, out of touch).
That’s right. My musings today have been orbiting the following question: What form will Philosophy take among the new world order?
Not Your Grandma’s Philosophy
Before we get too far into it, in no way am I talking about the philosophy of universities and academic journals. My brother describes those philosophers as professionals striving to be living encyclopedias. And, for the most part, he is justified.
No, I mean the philosophy that Socrates himself practiced: wandering the agora, engaging whomever passed him by, bringing the arrogant ones down a few pegs. The question is, to risk a connection to an 80s classic, how would Socrates have done it had he been born into this world of TV, tweets, and Time magazine?
Before You Close This Tab
Now, you might think this question, while mildly interesting, is mostly academic and therefore pointless. However, I assure you that it is not. This topic is at the very core of whether or not Philosophy will continue to thrive or if it will join Alchemy and Phrenology in the semi-comical crypt of dead sciences.
Philosophy has been through quite the series of transformations [post on the Metamorphosis of Philosophy is upcoming]. However, while once a dynamic battleground of ideals and worldviews, the ole “love of wisdom” has long been absorbed by the aristocracy. That’s where the problem lies.
As Matt Mason illustrates effectively in his book ‘the Pirate’s Dilemma‘, once a major cultural movement has been appropriated by the establishment, it has the choice of adapting or fading away. Reinvention or obsoletion. Which will it be? For the study that has been the primordial soup of all major hard and soft sciences, I feel that there are few intellectual questions more pressing.
28 Days Later (…OK, more like 2800 YEARS later)
So, that is the question: will Philosophy be reborn or become the nosferatu from which all sane people run?
Well, if you must know anything about me, you should learn that I am (perhaps against my better judgment) an optimist. So death isn’t an option. Philosophy must adapt. Perhaps it already is adapting.
So Here’s the Project
Over the course of the next few articles, we’ll examine each of the major forms of media (Audio, Video, Written, Social) to see which vehicles are most predisposed to Philosophical discourse. Since speculation yields nothing related to reality, along the way we’ll examine whether or not philosophy has already begun to creep into these media.
I know, I know – I can hardly wait too!
But, before we continue down the path of rights, let me diverge and ask a different question (I know, I’m horrible with continuity in serial posts): is insurance the only role of government? Is law solely for protection of rights? What about the didactic power of law? Should that be considered as fundamental a facet of law as its preventative/retributive nature?
Here’s an example of the didactic nature to which I refer:
In the mid-to-late 90s, the internet began to replace cassette tapes as the ideal format for sharing music; while time-consuming and costlier, it opened up new vistas of music beyond the collections of your immediate friends. Songs were shared without guilt and without guile. Then, seemingly out of the blue, there were lawsuits and legislations that told the sharers that what they were doing was wrong.
Now, the debate of the issues of piracy is one for another time, but what -is- worth underlining here is the difference in the attitude of the citizens: some realized that what they were doing was wrong and stopped, others felt the same way but continued, still others believed themselves to be Robin Hoods and developed better ways to share. The point is that, whether or not they agreed with legislation, no one was innocently trading any more.
That is an example of the ability of law to act more prescriptively than descriptively. The underlying issue of course, is, in a democratic system, -should- laws be prescriptive? Or should they mirror the society? If the answer is “a balance of the two,” then where do we find that balance?
When I was old enough to form my own political opinions, I’m ashamed to admit that I opted for simplicity out of laziness. I thought that the role of government was to protect us from foreign invaders and from domestic violence, and that was it. Everything else (economic decisions, moral decisions) should be left to the people. In a world of the quanta, I was firmly sticking to Aristotelian physics. Why? Because it had the beauty of simplicity.
However, as Emerson put it, “truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.”
For me, its time to reform my opinions of political philosophy. I’ll be starting with the nature and role of government, and see where that takes me. I’ll be doing this without a map (isn’t that the point), so any contributions are welcome.
Firstly, I believe that government (as opposed to anarchy) is a good thing.
While I believe that the idea of governance is divinely-inspired, I don’t believe that specific individuals that govern do so because of divine appointment. In other words, instead of the divine right of kings, I believe that it is more like Hobbes’ social contract – an agreement to give up total freedom in order to protect ourselves should something happen (sounds suspiciously like insurance, now that I think about it).
But I have to stop here, because I’ve already started to overlook some unchallenged premises. Underlying the very principles of government is a fundamental acceptance of Mill’s pragmatism. In order to secure the greatest safety for the greatest number of people, some liberties would be given up under laws (by “liberty” here, I mean the ability to act as you want with no consequences other than those naturally occurring) and some people (the lawbreakers) would have to suffer more than the rest. The liberties of everyone would be given up for safety, and the sacrifice of some would be greater than that of others.
If that makes you uncomfortable, then I completely understand; however, you’ll have to tell me if you know of another way of avoiding anarchy.
So, in trite summary, government is a nationwide insurance program in which we pay a price (namely, complete liberty) in order to receive protection from disaster.
Fair enough. Now, what is the government supposed to protect us from? (This is where party divisions begin. Good times…)
I’ve come to understand that, for the most part, we as humans are simply an amalgam of unconsciously acquired prejudices. Now, I realize that this is hardly a revolutionary revelation on the worldwide scale, but the implications of that realization are finally sinking in with me.
Most (not all, but the vast majority) of what we believe to be true is given to us by others rather than discovered on our own. Now this is hardly a bad thing; the ability to pass down masses of acquired knowledge is what has given us the advantage over other animals. The problem, then, is not the fact that we are taught these lessons, it is that we are taught them before we are able to sift for truth. We are not accepting a gift, but are being inoculated before accountability.
The fact of the matter is that we all have thousands of closely-held beliefs that are not only unchallenged, but unrecognized! Because of this, instead of going through life collecting experiences, then forming beliefs, we go through life filtering our experience to verify beliefs that we neither chose nor are aware of. These predispositions – held only by merit of being injected into us before our ability to recollect – shape our everyday interactions. In essence, we are on a plane where the auto-pilot was set before we were old enough to know where we wanted to go, and then we were led to believe that we are, in fact, the pilots.
Actually, that isn’t entirely accurate. Instead of there being one auto-pilot controlling the plane, there are several dozen, each programmed by a different person, and each with a different destination. At any given time, one has control, that there’s an endless power-struggle between them. We as the passenger are, of course, unaware of this, and continue to think that we are at the helm.
Don’t think that I’m asserting that our parents and communities are aspiring to brainwash us (although that is not outside the realm of acceptable practice). This is simply a natural consequence of living in a structured society. It is how the Code is taught to the young in order to help them function, but it is also the source of prejudice, racism, and widespread cognitive dissonance.
If you have the discipline and the inclination, try to challenge and justify some of your most fundamental assumptions. Is our cultural system of courtship and marriage better than arranged marriages (or even polygamy)? Is capitalism better than communism? Follow the example of children and, for every answer that you produce, respond to it with “why”. You’ll find that, eventually, your answers will stop being rational and will begin to boil down to gut feelings. The thing is, nine times out of ten, the gut is a creature of habit.
This kind of recognition-scrutiny cycle, applied to every one of our unrecognized assumptions, has been the creed of philosophers for millennia. We each need to take a Cartesian meditation and “unlearn what [we] have learned.” We need to take apart what we believe and intentionally re-form them, wherever this may lead us.
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