I think this video is very good and very important.  T

his one’s also interesting. I’m always amazed at those wordsof Edward R Murrow’s whenever I hear them. I wonder how people can reach into themselves and find words that are so powerful and have such long term significance and can deliver them to such perfection. Lincoln and Martin Luther King are two other examples of people who have managed this, but the number of times that it has happened in history are few and far between. The interesting thing about all of these speeches is that what the speaker is saying is not complex, not unusual, not some profoundly subtle academic point. It’s just basic common sense stuff. But it’s stuff that’s so important and so easily forgotten that it doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves of it every day.

I heard a story today that the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for a live, televised, uncensored debate with US president George W. Bush. Here’s one article about it:
http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_27268043.shtml

What I found most disturbing about this is not the call but the way the offer is being looked at or I should say looked down at by the people commenting upon people. The reporter I was listening to on the radio called it “midieval”. That just didn’t make any sense to me so I just had to go look up the world “midieval”.  I found three definitions: generically ‘like the middle ages’, cruel just like the middle ages, and ‘outdated’.  Well none of these three definitions seem to be particularly applicable to an open televised debate. Debates aren’t outdated, they aren’t cruel, and they certainly didn’t happen very frequently during the middle ages so how exactly can the Iranian president’s offer be considered midieval. If it is midieval then so too must our regular debates held for candidates for office.

Here’s the thing. You can’t really turn around without hearing all kinds of horrible things being said about the Iranian President though the bulk of it consists of name calling and has very little in the way of verifiable details. So, if the Iranian president really is some kind of modern incarnation of Hitler, why is he calling for a debate exactly? I don’t get it. Debates are tricky business, they could secure you more power or they could back fire and turn your populace against you. And if you are a racist megalomaniac surely you’d find your strategy to be a lot more direct than televised debate. Murder, torture, secret prisons, death squads that kind of thing is the more expected route to power. So perhaps the plan to have a debate comes from some simpler mental  perspective. Perhaps Ahmadinejad just thinks that a debate would be a good thing. He thinks he can convince people and he thinks he is right and that people will agree with him when he lays out all the facts and tells the world the honest truth (or at least his version of it). Now he may be delusional about that but this is not the delusions of a mad serial killer but rather the delusions of a person a little too optimistic about the possible impact of his own words on the engrained belief patterns of the masses.

So maybe it is a cynical power ploy, maybe it isn’t, but regardless it strikes me as a perfectly reasonable and non-harmful proposal on its own face. Why don’t we have debates between national leaders? Why don’t we have them all the time in fact?  I personally would be thrilled if we got to hear the leaders of our nations have to justify their actions and beliefs to an audience consisting of the politically aware citicizens of the entire world. If such debates were to occur and they aren’t shams and they involve real discussion of real issues, I can only imagine they’d be a great thing for the world, giving everyone a more balanced and inclusive perspective of the world and making nations that are distant unknowns to us seem a little more real to us.

Regardless of whether the US accepts or rejects this particular offer, we should think seriously about the possibility of having live big translated televised debates moderated by the UN between national leaders of various states.  This would just be a good thing for the spread of democracy world wide.

One of the greatest illusions I had when I was younger was the belief that the world was run on the basis of specialized expertise. I really believed that everything worked like science and math where people dedicate their lives to finding the truth and then acted on their best guess as to what the truth is. I thought it was all a big collaborative where each person builds upon the knowledge of those who come before them well aware that they might be wrong but willing to push the world just a little bit closer to the truth. Humanity was always moving forward. I thought things were better than they’d ever been in the past and kept getting better. And I attributed it to the development of expertise upon expertise, truths building upon truths. Like math and science.

I believed that everyone with power was an expert. I believed journalists were scholars of journalism. I believed educators were scholars of education. I believed politicians were scholars of public policy. And worst of all I thought businesses were run by scholars of business.

In a way I was right. The world does run on specialization. But the specialization in some walks of life is not equivalent to anything remotely resembling science. 

The truth is a lot of things aren’t as complicated and specialized as the world makes it appear. How hard is to understand politics and government and history? How difficult is it really to grasp how the idea of going out finding the truth and sharing it to people?  How much expertise must a teacher have in order to share their knowledge with the next generation? The answer to all of these things and much more is “not very”. The truth is people don’t devote their lives to these tasks because it takes a lifetime to obtain expertise. Those who devote their lives to these things do so because they enjoy them or because they think it is an important valuable thing to do.

Oh there are specialized aspects of all these jobs but they are surficial They aren’t prerequisites in order to engage in the activity at all.  For example, the ability to tell the news well in an entrtaining way and a way that gets good ratings isn’t a requirement for being a reporter. They are requirements for getting on a popular network news program but they aren’t reqirements for journalism.

On one level I’ve always known this but I kept waiting for the point when I would study things and find that they were so much deeper and more complicated then they seem on the surface. I thought that if I studied any particular thing close enough I’d find out that even though it seems simple that it’s really intensely complex and beyond the grasp of anyone who doesn’t make it their life’s work to learn it. And as a result the further I went in my education the more and more disappointed I became at the simplicity of it all.  You learn what has no substance so you can engage in a more acceptable manner in things that you didn’t need to study in order to know how to do.

My old perspective is not uncommon I think and it’s a huge problem.  If individuals think that engaging in the world around them requires them to develop a lifetime of expertise why would they ever do it? If they think they have to know everything about something in order to engage in it they won’t engage in it. They’ll just leave it to the “experts” who have time to learn it and they’ll trust in their decisions.

But what is really needed is the opposite. People need to make decisions for themselves whenever and whereever possible. We can’t wait for “experts” to do and say things for us. We need to engage in learning and teaching and telling and debating all the things that matter. The fact that we will sometimes be wrong does not invalidate our engagement. It is important for us to be wrong in fact as through being wrong we learn what is needed in order be right in the future. And truth be told most of us won’t be as wrong as often or as badly as the experts who are caught up in  the illusionary importance of their own expertise.

How often do you wonder?

Why are we here? Wht kind of existence are we leading? How insignificant are we? What is our purpose? How is it that  a being such as <me> could ever come to be? Does anything at all really matter? What happens when I die? What happens when we all die….

Sometimes it seems like I wonder all the time….  I am sitting there talking to people, asking them questions, laughing with them, enjoying their company, learning from them and teaching them seemingly fully content and totally normal in my outlook. Part of me though is thinking about it. How is that we came to be here now in this place doing this thing living this life. Does it matter? Is it important? Or is it just the temporary pause between other more momentous things? Or will there be nothing momentous, maybe the irrelevancy is all that there is or ever will be. Do we just have to make the best of it? When I chat with you I wonder what the future will be like should you be gone and I live or vice versa. I think about the possibilities should your life change and mine remain the same, if we were to drift apart or become enemies or become closer? I can imagine the possibilites and for each I ask, would this be better? would this be worse? does this matter more? does it matter lesS? why? why? why?

To be honest there are times when these thoughts don’t lie at the surface of my mind, days can go by where I am caught up in the every day goings on and just forget to wonder and forget to be afraid.   I can’t really say that I like these time periods for I know that they are temporary and truth be told during them I am not thinking enough about anything to really examine my state of mind. But I can’t say I dislike them either. In a way it is just a kind of relief, a temporary repreive that keeps me away from the agony of wonder….

What enables me to make these escapes? I don’t know really. There are times in my life when I can’t escape the fear not even for a day. I wake up in the morning and the melachony hits me, I go to bed at night and the melancholy sttays with me until the dreams takes me. If I could remember the dreams I am sure that I’d feel it there too.

But there are the other times, times like these last few months where I haven’t wondered and haven’t dreamed and haven’t cared much about anything beyond the immediate. When I spoke to people, I can’t say I was fully attentive, but my mind wandered only to the mundane questions of immediate existence. How will I earn more money? What kind of career should I seek? What kind of person do I want to be? How can I help make the world better? How can I get people to understand things that are happening in the world on a deeper level? How can I gain that understanding myself?  These questions still plagued me but they are not the same. There is no fear there, now wonder. Just uncertainty.

So when I feel that, I can make decisions and engage in my life. I can do things, I can try things, I can care and everything I am doing does not feel like it is a partial lie.

But then I leave that space. Invariably. Inevitably. Something triggers it, such as a certain story or a certain event and I enter back into the shadowlands of wonder. My mind activates in a different way and I can’t stop caring about the question of the real of reality. It seems to me to immensely important. The only important thing. Everything else I do and say is just a waste of time really, a distraction from determining the real answers to the real questions that I have to believe are out there in order to ward off the possibility of utter despair.

Death. That’s the heart of it really. If we knew that this was all that there is and would persist without end, we could lose ourselves in the moments, experiencing everything and always content in our knowledge that we will always be able to find something else to do with our time.  But death?  Terror and Horror are far too weak to describe my state of mind when I try to turn my mind toward that thing. It is the thing you can’t truly face. The concept we can’t look at head on. We can think forever about what our death will mean for others and what we’d like to happen in the world after we are gone and even what we would want to see happen to our bodies, but those are just evasions. The concious experience is the ‘life’ that appears to ‘end’ with death. That is the thing that is beyond any term our language has for fear. It is simply the pure essence of the blank unknown.

Over the years I’ve talked to some people about some of these things. A little here, a little there. I’m not good at expressing it in spoken words and I can barely make myself intelligible. Also, it is too difficult to talk about the dark side so I lighten it, I talk about the good aspects of wonder. I talk about what greater understanding you can gain from pure thought and how much more more content you can feel in your place in the grand scheme of things if you think about how surprisingly significant we actually are to one another.  We matter more than we know and when we wonder about it we can come to understand it. It can be a comfort…. provided you don’t look at it head on.

Sometimes the people I speak to are surprised and think of me as an aberration. Not that I have these thoughts but that I should dare to voice them. Others see me as a kindred spirit. They often tend to think of “us” as amongst the few people who actually care about the real questions as opposed to all those other people who live out their lives utterly oblivious just seeking out their own small happiness oblivious to any deeper questions.

I do not believe that. I don’t think wonder is special. I don’t think it is unusual at all. I believe everyone does it, everyone has it and everyone is equally living out a life trying as hard as they can to turn away from terror that lies on the other side of the line of sentience. But people are like me for more or less of the time. They are able to bury the fear and doubt and uncertainty. They can, even without knowing what they are doing, embrace the every day doings, the questions about the here and now that are big enough to equally overwhelm the mind without holding quite so much hefty reality as the uncertain questions of our existence.  They can find joy while doing this because they are in a state of relieved pressure. The questions that plague your existence are in the back of your mind not haunting you the surface. You can forget they’re there and seek out the happiness of the moment. 

But they always come back. For everyone they do. And many of us have lived so long in the dream of the present we are completely unprepared to face the return of true wonder. And when we get it back it can be overwhelming. It can be devastating. We can lose sight of the things we faught for and earned that we cared about when in the other place. We can quickly turn to desapir and be lost. This can kill us or it can condemn us to a waking existence so overwhelmed with fear beyond fear that we cannot see anything or care about anything or love anyone. Your world can become surrounded and permeated with neverending torrent of “why”‘s.

I believe that this is what philosophy is. I don’t believe it is a bunch of dead guys who wrote the first thoughts that popped into their heads while they were living, or a bunch of old men sitting around chatting about books written by such dead guys. Nor is it writing papers or a kind of exploration of ideas. It isn’t a science. It isn’t an art. It isn’t a fun thing you do to distract you from more important issues. It isn’t the class you take because it’s easy and “fun” and not to be taken seriously.

Philosophy is, I think, preparation . It is the means to shield yourself to forify yourself, to prepare yourself to face absolute uncertainty. Philosophy is a means of protecting your sanity and your life and helping you to exist even when you look head on at your existence and find it wanting. This is why we have philosophy. It is what keeps us from waking up one morning and immediately dying from the fear of our own impending deaths.

Philosophy isn’t the only shield. The other traditional shield is religion. Religion has a lot of what we can philosophy within it. There is a lot of facing real and deep questions and learning how to answer them and how to face them and how to keep caring even after you do. But the, pardon the pun, philosophy with which the two shields are applied is totally different. Religion shields you with traditional answers. It is like ritual response. Some of it is bound up with good reason which you can look at and discuss but the primary answer at the heard of the sutdy is a ritualistic response that you have no particularly good reason to believe. To summarize it in a far too simplified way, it is basically that you are taught to say “God created me and the universe. He is the reason. He is the answer. Trust in Him and there is no need to fear.”

The shield of philosophy is different. It’s not as nice. It gives you no guarantees doesn’t even try to answer the bulk of the questions and often seems to leave you in just as bad a situation as you were in before yuo started. Philosophy however has equipped you even though you don’t realize it. It has given you a powerful shield with which to ward off true terror. It is the shield of your own capacity to reason. That’s all philosophy does. It helps you build up that strength and teaches you to build it up yourself. It shows you the importance of reason, the value of it, and how it can help you when you need it the most. Philosophy forces you to face tough questions, questions without answers, questions without there seeming to be any real hope for an answer. Philosophy teaches you to face these questions frequently and often and face them with an analytic mind. Philosophy tells you it’s ok to wonder, it’s ok to be afraid, and it’s ok to despair. Philosophy let’s you know that you will feel these things and that it is natural so there is no reason to try and run away from it. The only way you will be able to face them truly when the time comes if you have developed your capacity for reason and are prepared to fight the battle within your own mind between the real and the greater reality. That’s the heart of philosophy. It’s practice for the inevitable substance of life. That’s why I think it matters. I think it matters more than just about anything I can think of.

I’ve been trying to avoid getting into online discussions for a very long time. I really hate the experience. I think it’s a worthwhile thing to do but it always makes me feel terrible. I get far too caught up in it.

But the other day I ended up getting caught up into an online discussion on Israel. Why? I certainly don’t think it’s more important than a myriad of other discussions I’d rather be having. I really think the whole thing is a little over covered.

The problem is it was a forum I often read about something totally different and these people are generally very coherent and rational about that other topic.  The problem was that in reading this thread I noticed that nobody was saying anything. I mean sure a lot of posts were being made but nobody was saying one damn thing. It was rather terrible. The argument consistented of the equivalent of “you suck”, “no *you* suck”, etc.

I’d actually been pretty frustrated about this earlier too. You see it was driving me nuts in general that the news in covering this situation was only giving one narrow perspective.  The amount of time given to the Arab perspective was laughable. They’d give an occasional interview to a representative of Lebanon or Hezbollah but the only question they seemed to care about what the answer to the question of whether the person they were speaking to “recognizes Israel’s right to exist”.  Sure, they’d also say things like “80% of Lebanese citizens support Hezbollah”  but for all the explanation they gave you’d think this was a population of insane reasonless drones. I don’t believe your average person formulates strong opinions without reason. Often people lack the context to formulate ideas that are based on all of the facts, but by and large people have a pretty good morality radar and can pick up injustice pretty easily.

So I, who knew next to nothing about the middle east, did some research and found, surprise surpise another side of the story. There are numerous facts that provide context for the aggression on both sides and make explicable the considerable outrage expressed by many at Israel’s actions. It wouldn’t be hard to bring these things to light on the news but nobody’s doing it and for no good reason that I can see. So I posted some of this stuff on the forum and of course the responses were like “you suck” to which others replied “no *you* suck.”. Sigh. I don’t think anyone even read what I wrote. But then, I’m rather wordy so I guess I should expect that.

All this just goes to reenforce my belief that people won’t really be free until we have a world where all people have immediate free access to translated versions of all of the world’s media content. How can we understand one another if we don’t have any experience of one another? There should be no television show I can’t get on my TV, no website that can’t come up from my google search. And then we need filters. Non-biased filters. E.g. filters that show the highest grossing, most discussed, most viewed, and most recent media content accross all genres and all national backgrounds. And we can have biased critics who filter content too, just so long as anyone and everyone has equal right to be such a critic.