So what are the big ills that afflict our modern society, do you think?
My list would include excessive use, or abuse, of drugs and alcohol; an over-emphasis on the physical in life rather than the cerebral, so that girls value themselves by bust size, hair colour and the ability to make men want to sleep with them (which, let's face it, has never been difficult), rather than iq or aspiration; the consequent unbearable waste of young lives and latent talent thrown away by a teenage pregnancy, or two or three or four; lack of respect for other people, one's community and one's environment; the positioning of an individual square at the centre of his or her world, so that anything or anyone who gets in the way of the immediate gratification of a desire cannot be tolerated and must, in fact, be attacked. There are numerous others, but those are the ones that spring to mind today.
So it is suggested that children receive health education about the dangers of narcotics and unprotected sex. Positive images are encouraged in the press and antisocial behaviour orders are handed out like sweets. And what happens? Nothing. Well, what a shock.
But if, instead of messing about at the edges of the issues, we taught chhildren in school to THINK about cause and effect, to consider abstract possibilities so that they can measure the value of an individual act against the long-term effects of that act, to think long-term about what life would be like if they took that next hit, or had that quick shag while off their faces on Bacardi breezer, is there not a small possibility that, equipped with that facility for thinking things through, they might gently say 'No' and take another road, spome of the individual and societal devastation would be avoided?
Philosophy, like Shakespeare, is derided as elitist, but really, is it? Is it not more elitist to suggest that the capacity to think is beyond all but the very cultured and intelligent? And, after all, philosophy is no more than rational enquiry or critical thinking. Everybody is capable of doing that until they are told they're too stupid to do it.
Teach kids to think, and then a lot of other educational sticking plaster will become redundant. Citizenship. Personal, Social and Health Education. Ethics. Get rid of it all - trust the human mind and teach them to think for themselves.
2 comments:
I would very much agree with your list of societal ills. And I agree with your assertion that people need to be taught to think. I was raised in Orthodox Judaism, and while, like any orthodoxy, there were some hellacious, narrow-minded aspects of it (which led me to the pro-spiritual, anti-religious place where I am today), the one gift that it gave me was the ability to think and analyze. That might seem counter-intuitive, but when you believe that a document is the actual, literal word of god, you apply a tremendous amount of intellectual power to analyzing and deciphering it.
But thinking, in general, is a lost art. I've done a lot of public speaking about the nature of work. I always ask the audience what they're impression is when they pass someone at work who neither has their head in the computer monitor or their fingers on the keyboard. They're just sitting there. The answer invaribaly comes back, "They must be goofing-off." To take the time to think in our current work culture would make one suspect, which is one of the reasons work is so unrewarding today.
I also agree that a course of philosphical training would help most people. The problem I see there is that in the 20th century philosophy became so formal and formulaic that it seemed just another branch of theoretical mathematics and was totally divorced from anything approaching real-life. As you say, I will not take the elitist position to say the masses are incapable of comprehending philosophy. But I will say that philosophy is doing nothing to make itself accessible. The position of influencing day-to-day life that was abandoned by post-Marxian philosophers was claimed instead by the demagogues of the 20th century who rushed in to fill the void. The advent of demagoguery led to the cheapening of the media, which you've spoken about brilliantly in other posts.
Philosophers from Marx going back to the pre-Socratics were not afraid to include the emotional in their philosophical systems. I think that by limiting itself to the purely reational, philosophy has basically abandoned the field of the battle for Hearts and Minds to the purely emotional. And that has led directly to the woes and ills that you have catalogued as our primary social ills.
Lable,
Your classical education is something I envy and lends a certain je ne sais quoi to my ramblings! Keep putting in your erudite oar - it's a joy and an education!
Oh, and keep furiously agreeing. We are not alone.
fx
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