christopherphilosopher

[christopherphilosopher]

Can art even be revealed when there are attempts to homogenize it or us?...

[christopherphilosopher]

Is art something with which you feel a certain singular kind of connecti...

[christopherphilosopher]

It was such an honor to deliver the inaugural Presidential Speaker Series lecture -- here is my entire interactive presentation -- at Fairmont State University, at the kind invitation of its visionary president, Mike Davis, whom I've known since his days at James Madison University, where I was invited by its then-president, Jon Alger (for whom Mike had chief of staff) to be a speaker for their Madison Vision Series a bit over a decade ago.  My interactive presentation, "Building Bridges of Mutual Understanding in a World of Walls," stresses that disagreements across the political spectrum don’t have to lead to division, but instead can be transformative opportunities for one and all, and can enable those of us in America who will listen with all our being to become more informed voters, and hence more participatory democratic citizens - what we need, as the federal 2024 election approaches! This presentation is for my Dad, Alexander Phillips, who never was afforded the opportunity by those with him to say his goodbyes before his tragically unexpected death, as are all my good works and deeds. BE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE TO OUR SOCRATES CAFE YOUTUBE CHANNEL :)

[christopherphilosopher]

"Let's let's talk about how we're going to make peace & mutual benefit" ...

[christopherphilosopher]

Podcast 1127: Learn How Christopher Phillips Uses Philosophy to Transfor...

[christopherphilosopher]

cannot cannot

© 2023

[christopherphilosopher]

terminality

he wonders 

what it will be like not to experience what it’s like to grow old

not to have to concern himself about planning (or failing to) for retirement

or make anything more or less of himself, his life, than he already has or hasn’t

wonders whether

before all is unsaid and undone 

he will get over her abandonment

when she learned of his terminality

wonders if he will go out of this world much like he came in 

cry-laughing with a baby’s abandon 

he wonders what it will be like

not to wonder

@2022

[christopherphilosopher]

Cancel Culture & ‘Soul of Goodness’

I write here in Medium my ruminations about how and why it is that, though my new book Soul of Goodness, in its Spanish iteration as ‘Hacia un alma de bondad’ is receiving the most gushing reviews and touchings messages from readers of anything I’ve ever written, it is largely being ‘cancelled’ in the U.S. by mainstream media (interviews and such). 

[christopherphilosopher]

Make Our Electoral College Great Again

Today is the big day when the electors of our Electoral College formally make Donald Trump our next president (be still my beating heart).   That’s how it’s set up. Now, how do we arrive at 535 Electors? Each state has allotment of Electors equal to the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for its Senators.  Plus the District of Columbia is allotted three Electors. Bringing the total to 538. So you have to garner 270 Electors to be the winning candidate for the highest office in the land. 

There has been an unusual amount of chatter about convincing a sufficient number of Electors to undo the voters’ choice -- not the popular vote, but the vote as calculated by the winner take all (in most states) system in which the candidate of each state who garners a majority of the votes (or a plurality) wins all the Electors.

Most notably, my nonprofit Socrates Cafe / Democracy Cafe’s own amazing advisory board member, Lawrence Lessig, a committed advocate for a truly open society if ever there was one, has been at the vanguard of the Electors Trust, aimed at getting a sufficient number of electors to vote their consciences and vote for a candidate other than Trump, who many feel is not of the right temperament, among other things, to be our president. 

As admirable as this effort may be, it ain’t gonna work -- and it ain’t even the best way to go about it (as fascinating as many of the proffered arguments are for the efficacy and legitimacy of this approach). What we must do first is to unfreeze our republic.

And to do that, we need to undo Public Law 62-5 -- which a bit over a century ago, by majority vote in both chambers of Congress, froze our number of members in the House of Representatives at 435 -- as I wrote about here in my Huffington Post column a good deal back. 

If we’d continued to gradually increasing the number of members of the House, as we’d done until 1911 when Public Law 62-5 was scandalously enacted in a Nativist-driven effort to keep the swelling immigrations in cities from having a political voice, we’d probably have about 2000 House members now, rather than the 435 we’ve been stuck with, each with constituencies (fiefdoms, really)  on average of well over 700,000 (and each with about 22 unelected staffers to keep their fiefdom unassailable). 

This was not how our republic was envisioned by our Framers, not how it was meant to be. 

What would the outcome of our latest election have been if we had far more ‘representativeness’ than we do today? What would the outcome have been If we enjoyed today around the 2,000 members of the House we would have had, if the numbers kept increasing after each 10-year census? (And don’t forget, our Constitution gives us the right to have one House member for every 30,000 constituents -- yet right now, we’ve ‘settled’ for one for every 710,000 or so, making it impossible to have the kind of intimate representativeness our Framers had bequeathed to our vast republic).

For one thing, we wouldn’t have just two major parties vying to be the leader of the ‘free world’ -- we’d have a number of viable candidates, and viable parties (or maybe even no political parties, since their efficacy would be so greatly diminished (and our Framers never envisioned the advent of such parties in the first place)). 

For another, this’d likely mean that a candidate for president would have won by a plurality rather than a majority, so there might be some horse trading to see to it that the one who was elected by Electors (there would have been at least 2,000 in this scenario). Likely a genuine statesman or -woman would have been the result - someone who authentically mirrored our higher democratic aspirations. 

For yet another, it would greatly reduce the odds that a candidate would win based on his or her ability to raise gazillions of bucks primarily in corporate dollars, or to win if he or she were fabulously wealthy (and maybe a demagogue to boot) based on his or her own ability to contribute massive amounts of personal wealth towards financing the campaign. 

By having a genuinely representative constitutional republic of the democratic variety, we’d have had at least some presidential candidates with their hats in the ring who would have put the interests of the country above all else -- and hence would have put the interests of open societies in general first and foremost, to make not only America but the promise of open societies for one and all great again. 

Rather than what we have, candidates like the two major candidates, with extraordinarily kinds of flaws that lead to patterns of tragic misjudgment and contribute to precipitating pernicious forms of factionalism that over time bring down the democratic curtain of the country down with them.

So here’s what we have to do in order not just to unfreeze, but to rescue  and revive our republic -- we have two years to cajole all candidates running for Congress in the 2018 election to sign a pledge promising irrevocably that the first thing they’ll do when they take office in Jan 2019 is pass a law that rescinds Public Law 62-5. Tell ‘em you’re not voting for them, not voting period, unless they sign the pledge.

All it takes is a mere majority vote -- perhaps a daunting feat, but not an impossible one required via a Constitutional amendment.

Join me in this effort. Write to me at Christopher_Phillips@mac.com and tell me you’re in, and we’ll establish a grassroots movement in all precincts.  If our representative democracy means enough to you, and I bet it does, I bet you’ll join me and help make our Electoral College great again.

[christopherphilosopher]

The Irrational, Our Country, E.R. Dodds, and Socrates Cafe

This from my first book, Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy:

The “modern-day embrace of the irrational reveals that overall our civilization is hardly more rational than in the days when Roman commanders sought to predict their immediate future by examining the intestines of chickens. In a way, it is startling to me that otherwise rational people can give in so easily to the temptation to see a connection between independent phenomena that happen to coincide in time. But then, even the 4th-century Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived amid a resurgence of belief in supernatural phenomena, was not surprised by the citizenry's pervasive love affair with the irrational. Based on his observations of human nature, Aristotle came to the conclusion that few men "can sustain the life of pure reason for more than very brief periods." 

The classical Greek scholar E. R. Dodds noted in The Greeks and the Irrational that in the days of Aristotle, astrology and other irrational practices "fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island." Why? "For a century or more the individual had been face to face with his own intellectual freedom. And now he turned tail and bolted from the horrid prospect--better the rigid determinism of astrological Fate than that terrifying burden of daily responsibility." The fear of and flight from freedom--which goes hand in glove with a fear of honest questioning--that is taking place today does not simply parallel what happened in ancient times. Rather, it seems to be the same fear and same flight. Today we're not so much experiencing a return of the irrational as we are an upsurgence of the irrational elements in us--such as tendencies to build belief systems on foundations of quicksand, and proclivities for destruction and self-idealization--that are part of the human fabric. There are antidotes to the irrational. Though by no means perfect, and certainly not always skillfully handled, such antidotes can enable us to better understand ourselves, better overcome our fears, better come to grips with the irrational in us. One such antidote is the Socratic way of questioning utilized at Socrates Café. The Socratic method of questioning aims to help people gain a better understanding of themselves and their nature and their potential for excellence. At times, it can help people make more well-informed life choices, because they now are in a better position to know themselves, to comprehend who they are and what they want. It can also enable a thoughtful person to articulate and then apply his or her unique philosophy of life. This in turn will better equip a questioning soul to engage in the endless and noble pursuit of wisdom. The dialogues, as Socrates says in Plato's Republic, are "not about any chance question, but about the way one should live." So the discussions do not just enable us to better know who we are but lead us to acquire new tactics for living and thinking so we can work toward determining, and then becoming, who we want to be. By becoming more skilled in the art of questioning, you will discover new ways to ask the questions that have vexed and perplexed you the most. In turn you will discover new and more fruitful answers. And these new answers in turn will generate a whole new host of questions. And the cycle keeps repeating itself--not in a vicious circle, but in an ever-ascending and everexpanding spiral that gives you a continually new and replenished outlook on life. Wherever Socrates Café is held, those who take part form a community of philosophical inquiry. My fellow Socratics have an enduring curiosity that cannot be quenched or satisfied by the facile responses of know-it-all gurus or of psychologists who cubbyhole their existential angst into demeaning paradigms of psychological behavior. Those who take part in Socrates Café are more concerned with formulating fruitful and reflective questions than with formulating absolute answers. Everyone is welcome and virtually all topics are valid for debate. Together, and alone, we push our thinking in surprising directions. The possibilities are limited only by the questions your imagination and sense of wonder enable you to come up with. They don't have to be the "big questions." Or, at least, the big question may turn out to be something like "What are the big questions, and what makes them so?" During the hundreds of Socrates Cafés I've facilitated, I've often come to find that it's the unexpected, the seemingly trivial or inconsequential, or the offbeat question that might well be the most worth delving into and examining for all it's worth. By becoming a more adept questioner, by developing a lifelong love affair with the art of questioning, I'll wager that you'll be able to answer more expertly than ever that question of questions, "Who am I?" Contrary to popular belief, the more questions you have, the firmer the footing you are on. The more you know yourself. The more you can map out and set a meaningful path for your future.”

[christopherphilosopher]

E.R. Dodds and the Irrational

As I read all the essays about by the polling experts and pundits about they got it wrong with Donald Trump’s ascendancy, something they were sure would be stymied, I find one thing -- they are all trying to offer rational explanations for why their prognostications were so way off the mark.  But sometimes there are no rational explanations. This is just the germ of a thought right now, I’ll expand on it later, but it may well be that we are entering a new ‘age of the irrational’ -- an unnerving thought that in the past, though not always, has preceded some of the most pernicious mass movements in human history. And these have often occurred in so-called open societies, in which the very mechanism that made them open were subverted for far different ends. 

And this makes me think of the late great classical scholar E.R. Dodds, whose keen insights into the days of antiquity revealed timeless insights into the irrational. Periods of great flourishing can be followed by periods of deep decent. It has happened time and again.

In his masterpiece The Greeks and the Irrational, Dodds pontficates on how this blossoming progressive society that embraced rational inquiry like no other, for a while, went on an irreversible downhill slide. Here’s what Dodds says: “What is the meaning of this recoil, this doubt? Is it the hesitation before the jump?...Was it the horse that refused, or the rider? That is really the crucial question. Personally, I believe that it was the horse—in other words, those irrational elements in human nature which govern without our knowledge so much of our behaviour and so much of our thinking.”

Until and unless we come to grips with the irrational elements within self and society (a kind of self), we may be destined and doomed to succumb to the irrational again and again.

[christopherphilosopher]

The World Within Your Heart

In The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming An Individual In An Age of Distraction,  the follow-up to his bestselling Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, the refreshing thinker Matthew Crawford makes the case that we are “living in a crisis of attention” - a sort of societal attention deficit disorder -- and responding in a way that makes it only worse, by embracing a kind of freedom that is all about having the greatest range of choices with the fewest outside-imposed limits. But far from liberating us, the choices lead to a pervasive blandness and deadening of the human soul and spirit, he asserts. 

The remedy? To Crawford, we must push back against this “highly mediated existence” of modern times in which “we increasingly encounter the world through representations” by “attending to real objects” and cultivating “skilled practices”-- learning to play a musical instrument, or mastering some sort of hands-on skill that requires great devotion and concentration and effort -- that enable us to reclaim the real deal of individuality -- rather than the specious kind to which we pay lip service today -- and, as a result, flourishing of a far different and more redeeming sort. 

Crawford’s claim is that we have the Enlightenment in general, and (to me) the highly overrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant in particular, to blame for worshiping at the altar of the wrong kind of freedom. Above and beyond the fact that, while provocative, his claim at best is squishy, one might argue that all the world is and always has been ‘representational,’ that there always has been, for the leisure class, a world of distractions to keep us amused and at bay from more meaningful endeavors, everything is relational, try as one might to divorce oneself from such ‘restrictions,’ 

For me, an essential question is: How do we make ours a world in which ever more people can enjoy the kinds of individual pursuits that Crawford limns? Right now, while his audience of individuals looking to find more meaning of the kind that he espouses and that resonates with them is quite large, how might we make it far larger?  

Wealth and income inequality is on the upswing, a deep concern to most Americans, and poverty is on the rise in America in areas where you’d least expect it and most expect to find people who might have time to devote to the pursuits Crawford believes are the pathway to individual sculpting. And since Crawford intends for his message to be a universal one, then before it can be applied, one must address the tragic fact that half the world lives with restrictively low income, making it nearly impossible for these fellow humans enjoy the kind of leisure time needed for the skilled practices Crawford endorses. 

I know I must sound like a wet blanket or spoilsport, but while it may be a great intellectual exercise to note, as Crawford does, that corporate monoliths can be just as blameworthy as onerous government statutes as culprits for keeping the leisure class distracted and constricted, this actually can deflect us from asking: What can those of us fortunate enough to live in fairly privileged circumstances do to create a world in which all have time for creative and reflective and soul-kindling pursuits?  

And can it be that the act of creating such conditions, of digging into the world in ways that make it possible for more people in all parts of the globe to discover and cultivate their passions and talents, is itself one of the most meaningful and creative and individual-affirming acts of all, that leads to greater self and societal flourishing at one and the same time?  

Surely the kind of bland and guilt-assuaging mutual respect that Crawford seems to extol is not enough? Isn’t compassion (a word that fails to make a single appearance in his book) what we need far more of, and can’t it be at the core of individual blossoming of a kind that also leads to greater connectedness with other individuals and the world as a whole?

In the end, Crawford seems to me to extol a type of individualism that may seem sublime, but nonetheless is still ‘all about me.’ He’s mostly proselytizing an exalted and glorified and elevated form of individualism that places insufficient stress on the inculcation of any keen sense of duty (a term mentioned once in his book, and in a negative light) to others -- and how this duty can redound to greater individual unfolding.

The fact is that human autonomy and social conscience go hand in glove. They drive one another –  they are a tag team for impelling and inspiring a person to involve herself deeply as a civic or social entrepreneur, to undertake kinds of challenges that expand a person’s imaginative, physical, existential bounds, and that do so for others in the world itself as well. These kinds of practiced skills do not in any way diminish the kinds that Crawford speaks so highly of, and in fact there should be plenty of room for both. The process of putting into practice Crawford’s ideas for individual soulcraft, if undertaken by someone with social conscience, might be the ideal setting for the emergence of new ideas for how to dig into the world 

What is required is a kind of philia, or bond of affection, that goes far beyond individual friendships, and leads as a matter of course to a sense of communal caring, even for those one might never meet.

The Greeks of old, in their halcyon days, knew all about this. The practiced such expansive philia because it was part and parcel of arête. 

What’s arete?

iThe classic Greek scholar H.D.F. Kitto writes in The Greeks that arête means that a person is “an excellent all-rounder." Someone with arete has "a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life" along with an understanding that achieving harmony "exists not in one department of life but in life itself."

This "wholeness" and "oneness" are equivalent to the holistic "balance" and "order" and "harmony" of the Navajo philosophy of hozho. 

Kitto further writes, "What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism is not a sense of duty as we understand it -- duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself." Or rather, as I point out in my Six Questions of Socrates: A Modern Day Journey of Discovery Through World Philosophy, it is a duty towards self and other at one and the same time. 

To the Greeks of antiquity, for those males who enjoyed being democratic citizens, a big part of becoming all we can be is doing our part to create conditions that enable others to do so as well.We might recognize that the bounds are blurred between public and private self, and between the individual self and the societal variety. Such recognition is probably required if one is to practice fully arete. 

I go on to note in Six Questions that in

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, Robert M. Pirsig, commenting on Kitto's book, concludes that this "motive of 'duty toward self' … is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the 'one' of the Hindus". Pirsig asks, "Can the dharma of the Hindus and the 'virtue' of the ancient Greeks be identical?"Pirsig clearly thinks they are one and the same. But what both Kitto and Pirsig fail to grasp is that for the ancient Greeks, there was no distinction of any sort between duty towards others and duty towards self; they were one and the same.  Every act, every deed in ancient Greece was committed by a member of its citizenry with a keen mindfulness of its impact on everyone else. Each recognized that one could not attain personal excellence at the expense of others, but only by paving the way for them to attain it as well. There was no private self as there is today, only a self that was part of a whole, part of an excellent citizenry and society. In that respect, arete is like the Hindu conception of Dharma, which, contrary to what Pirsig states, encompasses an individual's duty not just to himself, but to his religion, his society, his nation.This sense of duty towards others and oneself is equivalent to the hozho's underpinning philosophy of t-aa ho ajit-eego, in which the Navajo are inculcated from a young age to believe that there are no divisions between duty to themselves, to their tribe, and to the universe as a whole. They have the same respect and sense of duty for the wholeness or oneness of life" that Kitto ascribes to the ancient Greeks. In striving further to develop this individual wholeness, in becoming an "excellent all-rounder," one is at the same time furthering one's duty to one's community, contributing to greater social harmony.

So rather than, as Crawford exhorts us, strive to “reclaim the real” (one can argue ad nauseum about what that might amount to, and whether the world ‘in our mind’ and the world ‘out there’ is actually a false and fruitless dichotomy advanced for far too long), what one might do instead is regularly engage and encounter one’s fellow humans in places and spaces that lead a thoughtful and compassionate person to share and discover and sculpt new visions and ideas and ideals, and even work out strategies for making them a reality. 

We can also make more of the ‘compassionate real ‘by recognizing our rightful role and duty to become a co-creator of the universe in ways that enable others to do so as well.

A core traditional Navajo belief is that every move you make must be done with the idea of bringing yourself into harmony with your total environment, or ho, which is made up of things like nature, family, tribe, society, country, planet, universe. 

Rather than paralyze a person from acting, such a belief system can be a great impetus and inspiration to do so, in ways that make so much more of ‘the real’ than ‘the real’ is at any given moment.

The life of the mind, the spirit, the body, are interwoven not just with the individual self, but the world itself – and a sense of duty to do one’s utmost in one’s mortal moment to make ours a more connected world.

This calls, I believe, for the skilled and dedicated hands-on practice of duty to self and others. Or at least, that’s my code.

I put it this way in Six Questions: 

This sense of duty towards others and oneself is equivalent to the hozho's underpinning philosophy of t-aa ho ajit-eego, in which the Navajo are inculcated from a young age to believe that there are no divisions between duty to themselves, to their tribe, and to the universe as a whole. They have the same respect and sense of duty for the wholeness or oneness of life" that Kitto ascribes to the ancient Greeks. In striving further to develop this individual wholeness, in becoming an "excellent all-rounder," one is at the same time furthering one's duty to one's community, contributing to greater social harmony.

One of the few sensible and meaningful things Kant has ever said in his tortured writing and thinking that resonates with me was his dictum to treat people as ends in themselves, rather than primarily or only as means. To me, that is the real soulcraft of today, and that is where we should get our hands dirty – digging into the world and sculpting it in a way that makes everyone an end in themselves.What the Greeks knew was that by making the world one in which all are ends in themselves, we are making it more so for ourselves as well.

copyright 2015

[christopherphilosopher]

Philosophy: Out with the New, In with the Old?   (Part I)

What if so much that has been considered ‘philosophy’ since the days of antiquity is not really philosophy?  What if we’ve built on a foundation of quicksand?

Can we have a do-over? Should we consider such a possibility? What would Socrates think of what philosophy has become since his time?

To Socrates, the philosophical enterprise didn’t constitute the investigation of a certain narrow range and realm of questions -- though, to be sure, one of his truest loves was delving into what the virtues amounted to, with the end of discovering new answers to that question of questions, “How should we live?”

Rather, what distinguished something as ‘philosophical’ was the way that one went about questioning, into whatever areas of knowledge one was quizzical and curious about. A method is no mere prescriptive device, but usually is woven with an ethos, a spirit, and ends. He had a method that is kindred to the scientific way of inquiry, but that can be applied to any dimension. He was the antithesis of those who are studied to death and revered in academia. (Why oh why aren’t there courses in Socratic inquiry?)

The likes of Heidegger and Hegel and Kant are still considered the cream of the crop of philosophers in modern times, and profs and their students too often, and in my view tragically, still worship at their alter, and even are permitted to write doctoral dissertations about some aspect of their work, 

For instance, Heidegger’s Being and Time is gushed over by many of my philosopher friends, and I bite my lip about this. Heidegger’s work is an exercise in tortured writing and thinking, and is so poorly wrought that it can be interpreted (and is interpreted) in any way one sees fit, to mesh with one’s own point of view. One of my favorite moderns, a genuine Socratic, Walter Kaufmann, tried his best to show that this philosophical emperor had no clothes, but Heidegger is more idolized than ever. Kaufmann had a beef also with Kant, whom he agreeably called a “constipated casuist.” 

Kaufmann gave a relatively free pass, though, to Hegel, perhaps because he spent so many years studying and writing about him, but Hegel too needs to be classified in the same group.  There are kernels of decent pieces of writing in their excruciatingly awful writing, which is emulated by far less insightful thinkers. Many (including the director of a horrid ‘critical writing’ program in which I was once a fellow) believe Hegel’s “dialectic”of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is the gold standard for expanding the bounds of knowledge, when in fact it inhibits and even prohibits the discovery of the novel and unfamiliar. It is the epitome of Manichaean thinking.

But Socrates too, even by some of his most well-known acolytes today, often remains misunderstood when it comes to what his way of plumbing the world was all about.

Martha Nussbaum, whom I greatly admire and who considers herself a proponent of the Socratic method, characterizes it as an interplay of argument and counter-argument.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  

Rather, in a nutshell (a book needs to be written about this nutshell), his method  is an exploration and consideration of a variety of well-supported perspectives on any given question, looking at what speaks for and against each. In many or most cases, an array of perspectives might have elements of both rightness and wrongness, of truth and lack thereof. One considers perspective, alternative perspective, alternative perspective, and on an on, rather than argument and its antithesis of a counterargument. Socratic inquiry is an endless journey, with no arrival once and for all at a destination.  Even if one feels that one has arrived at a truth for all time, the love for and devotion to Socratic honesty one require one to keep testing and challenging this truth. 

Socrates thought and examined and interrogated  in a wide array of colors. He was by far our most colorful thinker. His best modern exemplar in the academic realm I believe was Justus Buchler (even if his writing at times is unnecessarily stiff at times). Buchler never lost his childlike curiosity and openness, and he revolutionized the way one might go about philosophizing, in the process undermining most of what constitutes philosophy today.

Alfred North Whitehead went so far as to say that “I think almost the entire history of philosophy is against such an idea” as that propagated by Buchler with his breathtaking philosophy of natural complexes (which I’ll go into in a later post), While noting Buchler’s “courage,” Whitehead has too much of a vested interest in the existing system to allow the ‘truthiness’ of Buchler’s insights to stake their just claim. Buchler was both methodical a la Socrates and systematic, while most are systematic and non-methodical (or use a method that is largely a logic-type chessgame that leads one to preconceived and foreordained ‘truths’).

 I’ll write much more on this later, but wanted to post this opening salvo, to start putting down my code. I’ll also write about other legitimate ‘Socratic’ approaches, including that of the Socratic gadfly, who may not be as faithful to the Socratic method as he should -- but would be even more fruitful in his approach if he was. 

copyright 2015

[christopherphilosopher]

On New Declarations, Blindspots and Our Better Angels

On July 4, Congressman Alan Grayson from Florida’s 9th district issued “a new declaration” that built on FDR’s January 6, 1941 declaration of four freedoms that people the world over should enjoy — freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear (which inspired Stewart Harris, Democracy Cafe advisory board member and host of the wildly popular Your Weekly Constitutional, in crafting his personal MyDeclaration). Grayson believes we also need to declare our independence from “other forms of oppression” — specifically, from bigotry, from the greedy, from “narrow-minded, extremist or violent fundamentalism”, from exploitation, from “1984-style surveillance,”  from misinformation, from hubris, and lastly, from “a rigged system of faked trade.”

In Roosevelt’s case, the president said that his was “no vision of a distant millennium”, but instead is “a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”

One wonders what he’d think of what we’ve made of the world since then. Would he be ashamed, dismayed, that we haven’t met his challenge to realize these freedoms on any broad scale? In Grayson’s case, no such optimistic assertion is made when it comes to achieving his enumerated freedoms from oppression within our lifetime.  However, he personally walks the walk in his final declaration of independence “from the corrupt system of campaign finance.” Walker says “the only Member of Congress to draw most of his campaign funds from contributions of less than $200.”

I’ve written a few times to Rep. Grayson encouraging him (okay, imploring) to post his declaration on MyDeclaration. So far, not a single politician (and I’ve written many, especially those running for the highest office in the land) has taken me up on my offer. Maybe in due time.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering what each of us privileged enough to live in circumstances that are fairly free from the most pernicious forms of oppression can do right here and now to realize FDR’s and Grayson’s vision.

And then there was stirring speech by then-president-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 17, 2009 in Baltimore, just a few days before his first inauguration, which encapsulates some of Grayson’s vision and Roosevelt’s optimism for overcoming what some considering insurmountable in order to realize a better day here and now:

We are here today not simply to pay tribute to those patriots who founded our nation in Philadelphia or defended it in Baltimore, but to take up the cause for which they gave so much. The trials we face are very different now, but severe in their own right. Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast. An economy that is faltering. Two wars, one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely. A planet that is warming from our unsustainable dependence on oil.

And yet while our problems may be new, what is required to overcome them is not. What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that those first patriots displayed. What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry — an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.

Yet most of our original pantheon of patriots, admirable as they were in ever so many respects, also were enchained by prejudice and bigotry (and hence small thinking and ideology to some degree). Many who have written declarations in the generations since our July 4, 1776 document — from those seeking suffrage for women, to equal rights for black Americans, to equal rights for LGBT Americans — not only have adapted much of the language of the original, but have made us aware of our contradictions and hypocrisies in a way that, rather than put us on the defensive, appeals to “our better angels” rather than all too easy instincts.

I personally believe one of the glaring blindspots we still need to come to grips with is our treatment of children and youth, and their marginalization in civic life.  I have issued a sort of declaration in this regard and elaborated at more length elsewhere about why I feel this is so important, and why we must remedy this.

How about you? What’s your declaration? What problems and prejudices do you think must we own up to, confront and surmount in our time?

[christopherphilosopher]

I was reading the other day a New York Times interview with Peter Catapano, who launched in 2010 the Philosophers’ Stone series (now just called ‘The Stone’). Catapano explained that journalism and philosophy are very much alike, that they both “will gather facts, analyze them, break them down and...

[christopherphilosopher]

The nine couples attending the first week of my wife Ceci's natural childbirth course look on as she points to a chart that provides a preview of a baby-in-the-making's journey from conception to birth. When she reaches the part of the chart that d...

[christopherphilosopher]

Doubt and American Democracy

What type or types of doubt, if put into widespread practice by citizens in the public sphere, would best serve American democracy?

Political theorist William Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, asserts in his essay “When in Doubt” that “(w)hile there is still no shortage of assured conviction in American politics, it has become intellectually fashionable to place doubt at the heart of one’s political principles”. 

As a consequence, Galston contends, there is today a “quest for alternatives to dogmatism” among Americans across the political spectrum. He has identified what he considers three separate but vital strains of doubt that are important for cultivating democratic vibrancy – common sense doubt, skeptical doubt, and moral doubt. 

Let's take a look at the efficacy of each of these forms of doubt before then going on to make the case that just one of them – and a specific version of one of them, at that – is urgently needed in the public arena in the United States.

 Common Sense Doubt

According to Galston, the practice of common sense doubt is widely exhibited today among America’s citizenry, with its “renewed focus on the incompleteness and indeterminacy of data, and also on the vagaries of human judgment.”  When it comes to arguing for the criticality of exercising this form of doubt, Galston maintains, “We need not tarry long”, because in his estimation, American citizens, gleaning its necessity, already have reasserted its practice in American civic life.

In the wake of gross errors of fact (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) and judgment (Iraq’s readiness for a democratic transition), the case for ensuring that all perspectives are given a fair opportunity to be heard … is compelling, indeed crashingly obvious. Every generation, it seems, must re-learn the dangers of ‘groupthink’: the temptation to fit facts to pre-established judgments and to marginalize unwelcome dissent.

 Have Americans in fact clearly re-learned the dangers of ‘groupthink’?

A critical case in point – one that would seem to contradict the contention that common sense doubt is alive and well in the United States’s public sphere -- is the debate that has swirled around the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ in New York City. The central controversy has been whether the construction of an Islamic prayer and cultural center – called Park51 -- situated two and a half blocks from ‘Ground Zero,’ site of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centers, should be allowed to go forward. Vocal conservative groups have protested against it, claiming that such a center is somehow associated with (or at least tainted by) those radical Islamic followers who had taken part in the terrorist act of September 11, 2001. 

The implication is that no Muslim can be trusted, and that such a center would be a desecration. Counter-protesters have been no less vehement nor simplistic. ABC News reported on August 22, 2010 of one confrontation between those supporting and opposing Park51: “Chants both for and against the center resounded in the streets of lower Manhattan. ‘Hallowed ground, that's a lie, you don't care if Muslims die!’ blended with ‘USA, USA!’” (Davis and Dover).

Protesters on both sides of the issue did not countenance thoughtful engagement on the issue. Voices of reasonableness tried to advance the perspective that it is a hallmark of American democratic identity not only to tolerate but embrace religious pluralism, and that it is especially when emotions are running high that Americans must go out of their way to adhere to this ethos. But they tend to give momentary pause at best – even when such voices are those of the President of the United States and the Mayor of New York – and ultimately, rather than sparking thoughtful dialogue featuring the consideration of diverse perspectives, they are again drowned out by shrill protesters.

Why is this so? One likely reason is that the media continually presented this controversy in a simplistic fashion, impeding rather than facilitating nuanced debate. Hence, the media continued to serve as an enabler of the tendency (as Galston puts it) “to fit facts to pre-established judgments and to marginalize unwelcome dissent”. 

Just as the mainstream American media often served as an uncritical mouthpiece for the Bush Administration -- and as a result contributed to the drumbeat in support of a pre-emptive U.S. military strike in Iraq, all the while abrogating its proper function of scrutinising government claims, such as the one about (chimerical) weapons of mass destruction – it also appears to have contributed to unrest over the Muslim center. For instance, venerable publications such as the Boston Globe (Jacoby) and Dallas Morning News featured blaring headlines that lead a reader to believe that Park51 is literally at the site, as if a person could reach out and touch Park51 from Ground Zero.

Only after the simmering controversy reached a boiling point did Clyde Haberman of the New York Times enters the fray as a voice of some reason. Haberman wrote, "There's that ‘at.’ For a two-letter word, it packs quite a wallop. It has been tossed around in a manner both cavalier and disingenuous, with an intention by some to inflame passions. […] ‘Near’ is not the same, as anyone who paid attention back in the fourth grade should know."

 Moreover, as Haberman went on to point out, “That it may even be called a mosque is debatable. It is designed as a multi-use complex with a space set aside for prayer -- no minarets, no muezzin calls to prayer blaring onto Park Place [where the site is located].” Even after Haberman set the record straight, ABC News reporters, for one, continued to insinuate that the site was just about at Ground Zero, only from then on couching its insinuation in more subtle language, noting that the site “has often been referred to as the ‘Ground Zero Mosque” (Davis and Dover), but failing to point out that the media itself gave it this inflammatory name.

This instance would seem to make clear that common sense doubt of the type that Galston depicts has been sorely lacking in the U.S.  But if Americans really aspire to dispense with those dangerous types of certitude that are hallmarks of groupthink, then they must begin to emulate Haberman’s ethos, which drives the practice of a different kind of doubt than the one he extols – not common sense doubt at all, but rather one that regularly calls into question and challenges what is widely considered to be common sense facts or truths or wisdom.

As a case in point, for ever so long, so-called common sense wisdom held that it was perfectly okay for blacks and whites in America to have separate public restrooms, schools, restaurants, seating sections on buses. It was only when civil rights activists challenged that putatively common sense notion that, after great upheaval, it was eventually supplanted with a new and more humanistic form of common sense. The same might be said today of the successful struggle to end the long-time prohibition on gays being allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, the culmination of a decades-long effort by activists who challenged the ‘wisdom’ that such a ban was a commonsensical measure that was indispensable for preserving a healthy state in the U.S. military.

Skeptical Doubt and Moral Doubt

In fairness, even if common sense doubt is eliminated from the equation, Galston does in fact advocate the need for the widespread practice of a type of doubt that would indeed call into question prevailing common sense – namely, skeptical doubt, which to him amounts to “a comprehensive stance questioning the availability of any final and definitive truth.”  

But arguably this type of doubt should not be employed solely or merely for the sake of calling into question whether there are in fact any final or definitive truths. Rather, it should be employed to ascertain which set or sets of certitudes – as they pertain, in the context of public sphere discussion, to policy issues and to foundational matters on which policy decisions are based -- are the most warrantable or tenable, based on thorough examination of the evidence at hand and the comprehensive consideration of objections and alternative approaches or remedies.

While I will go on to maintain that cultivating a specific type of skeptical doubt is the vital modus operandi for ensuring a flourishing democracy, Galston does not believe this is so; indeed, he considers skeptical doubt of secondary importance at best. To him, the form of doubt that most effectively counters dogmatism is moral doubt, which he defines as “the suspicion, grounded in psychology or religion, that the actual motives of individuals and nations are never pure and that the announced motives are always in some measure self-serving.” To Galston, “it is moral doubt that is most needed to re-establish balance within our government and American authority and respect throughout the world.”

It seems that what Galston is actually advocating is not so much moral doubt, but rather a type of moral honesty in which one admits that one’s motives are never as morally pure (he considers moral purity tantamount to selflessness) as professed, because there is always a self-serving element to them (as if there is something inherently impure about acting in ways that hint of at least some degree of selfishness). 

While to Galston the widespread “absence of moral doubt makes it far too difficult to recognize and rectify our mistakes”, I would attribute this shortcoming more to a lack of moral honesty coupled with the largely missing practice of skeptical doubt in America’s public sphere. When exercised judiciously in a democratic milieu, skeptical doubt has a built-in moral component that challenges a citizenry to assess scrupulously and continuously whether it is in fact achieving the ends it claims.  While such assessment may result at times in the ‘finding’ of moral impurity, this is not necessarily, much less automatically, the outcome. It likely does, though, require the recognition of the human tendency to fall short in one’s attempts to bring about even the most exalted ends, no matter how well-intentioned the attempt, and no matter how selflessly pure one’s intent.  Moreover, even if there is near-universal agreement over shared humanistic ends among a society’s members, people in a democracy will invariably differ, often dramatically, over the best means for achieving them.

But one need not extrapolate from this, as does political scientist Bob Pepperman Taylor in Citizenship and Democratic Doubt, that we must dispense with moral certainty altogether.  “Public life does not allow us to evade making decisions, taking responsibility, standing by our word,” Taylor claims, “but democratic citizens must find a way to do these things without the comfort of moral certainty”. Yet, far from gainsaying the need to have objective benchmarks in a democratic society that amount to moral certainties -- even or especially as we continually fall short of achieving them – advocating the practice of skeptical doubt does not at all necessarily obviate moral certainties. In the case of the United States, Americans historically have gauged the underlying morality (or immorality) of any action, belief or policy in its relation to the further realization of those foundational moral certainties, considered “self-evident” truths by the nation’s founders, embedded in the Declaration of Independence, which holds that

"all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis notes in American Creation, these words in the Declaration would “become the seminal statement of the American creed”. They planted “the seeds that would grow into the expanding mandate for individual rights that eventually ended slavery, made women’s suffrage inevitable, and sanctioned the civil rights of all minorities.” Ellis notes that Abraham Lincoln considered them moral absolutes, calling them in an 1858 speech tantamount to “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times".

Likewise, Barack Obama points to these truths as a lasting and unyielding moral benchmark that in his case “helped me understand that America is great not because it is perfect but because it can always be made better… It's a charge we pass on to our children, coming closer with each new generation to what we know America should be”.  

How is America “made better”? Among other means, by engaging in skeptical doubt of a reflective and constructive sort that not only might bring a citizenry to recognize at certain junctures those glaring contradictions or hypocrisies between its nation’s promise and actual practice, but that, more positively, inspires it to imagine and then go on to strategize and realize ways to attain an ever more inclusive and participatory democracy.

Doubt and Discontent

Employing skeptical doubt, one might well ask: Is the approach I am advocating possible or practicable in the United States today? Or is it now a nation too replete with a citizenry of cynics who are convinced that its government is up to no good?  After all, as notes David R. Hiley in Doubt and the Demands of Democratic Citizenship, opinion surveys repeatedly confirm that “the pulse of the American people’s disillusionment with government”. On the other hand, as Hiley further maintains, “Doubt and distrust are not unreasonable attitudes in a democracy with serious problems and deep divisions”. Nor are they necessarily unreasonable in a healthy democracy with far fewer seemingly insoluble problems and irreconcilable divisions.  What is needed is the resuscitation of a specific tradition of skeptical doubt – namely, Socratic doubt.

Democratic Citizenship and Socratic Doubt

Socratic doubt is a type of skeptical doubt that demands not only a dialogical ambience in which a variety of perspectives are offered and given equal recognition, but insists upon the methodical consideration of which of these perspectives withstands scrutiny and so is most tenable. Built into this method is a requisite consideration of compelling objections and alternatives, which in turn requires empathy, moral vision and imagination. While a primary aim in employing this form of doubt is to heal divisions, an even more overarching objective in American democracy is to work towards resolving those problems that can then lead to the further concrete realization of the truths spelled out in the Declaration. 

Political scientist Dana Villa makes a compelling case in Socratic Citizenship for the pervasive practice of Socratic doubt, which to him requires a critical-skeptical disposition aimed at cultivating the practice of constructive dissidence that is “cause-based, group-related, and service-oriented”.  Martha Nussbaum suggests that individual transformation and democratic evolution on a societal scale go hand in glove with the habitual practice of Socratic doubt. In Cultivating Humanity, Nussbaum asserts that “we must produce citizens who have the Socratic capacity to reason about their beliefs”, since a democracy cannot be in a healthy state “when people vote on the basis of sentiments they have absorbed from talk-radio and have never questioned.

This failure to think critically produces a democracy in which people talk at one another but never have a genuine dialogue". To Nussbaum, the concomitant nurturing of individual autonomy and social conscience that is characterized by employing Socratic doubt foments a more participatory and democratic society, in that it develops a type of citizenry that “can genuinely reason together about a problem, not simply trade claims and counterclaims”.

 In Democracy Matters, the social philosopher and public intellectual Cornel West stresses the importance of assuming the Socratic disposition for maintaining overall democratic vitality. To West, Socratic doubt is tantamount to the “Socratic commitment to questioning – questioning of ourselves, of authority, of dogma, of parochialism, and of fundamentalism”. West believes that democracy cannot be had – much less revitalized – without this commitment, which enables us to “wrestle with difficult realities we often deny”. Bereft of the tradition of Socratic doubt, West maintains, the democratic tradition itself is susceptible to falling victim to those who would distort and pervert it for the pursuit of ends far removed from and counter to their original sublime function.

West goes on to say, "The Socratic commitment to questioning requires a relentless self-examination and critique of institutions of authority, motivated by an endless quest for intellectual integrity and moral consistency […] that unsettles, unnerves, and unhouses people from their uncritical sleepwalking […]."

 West’s call for a return to the practice of Socratic doubt amounts to a plea that Americans seek to recapture “the deep democratic energy of this Socratic questioning in these times of rampant sophistry on the part of our political elites and their media pundits”. Only then can citizens wrestle with and hopefully surmount those difficult realities often denied, and as a result work towards further visualizing and carrying out humanistic endeavors inspired by the Declaration’s truths.

 copyright 2014