October 25, 2007
Senior demure
"If you can interact with the thing you are investigating in such a way that you can determine . . . that it is questioning you back, then you have something real."*
1
Imagine you are not from Mars and most days you still have your wits about you. You enter an establishment and suddenly you have no idea. Where are you? Why are you here? What is this place? Nothing clicks. Nothing makes sense. Mind a blank. Another one of those damn moments, hey?
Before the next logical step gains traction across your mind's slippery surface, or you can read the menu on the wall--number, item, price in three columns across, three rows down--a greeting promises to save your sorry face. Without your giving a hint of bewilder--'cause you've really done this many times before--you see the smile behind the counter as it begins to ask all the right questions in binary if distant fashion. You think, I can manage this.
Smile: "Burger or cheeseburger?"
"Cheeseburger."
"Everything on that [or not]?"
"Hmm. Everything."
"Lettuce and tomato?"
This is a binary question?
"Hmm. Yes."
"Mustard and ketchup?"
Let's break this one down.
"Mustard, yes. No ketchup."
"Soda, shake?"
Must be a variation of the classic binary form.
"Shake."
"Flavor?"
Clever answer needed.
"What have you got?"
"Chocolate or vanilla."
"Vanilla."
"Small, medium, or large?"
I'm getting the hang of this. Choose one of three. No brainer.
"Small, thanks."
Whew. I have my wits about me. I am hungry!
"Would you like fries with that?"
Fortunately, the smile behind the counter has been helpful, but appears as if from plastic planet unknown and apparently has limited wits. But no matter, right?
Now listen. Yes, senior moments do happen to people of all ages. Notwithstanding other challenges, most people can usually tell when they are on Earth in a burger joint in the US. Pretty difficult to lose a sense of the chapter you are reading and the page you are on in the circulinear plot that goes from hunger to not and then back again daily several times with almost clock-like regularity. The world is a friendly place, and should be, yes. But do you need help surviving daily routines in a landscape filled with chained commercial choices? a life filled with certainties about what to do and how to handle--the ordinary?
Given full knowledge and awareness of self and context, when asked if you'd like fries with that, you can politely think to yourself: If I had wanted fries, I would have ordered them. No, thanks, I know this is a burger place, I wanted a burger and shake. I told you what I wanted. I've ordered.
"No. That's it."
But do you understand what I have ordered?
She repeats for confirmation, as if commanding mission control, life or death in the balance. But she doesn't deliver her lines with that much critical mission intensity. Hmm. More like ho-hum.
"Yep, you got it."
You pay, get your food, eat it, probably too fast, leave, reach your car in the parking lot, get behind the wheel, and feel as if you have just ingested a heavy stone from some asteroid.
2
I am experienced shopper for food. Food has been an important staple my whole life. As far back as I can remember. I am pretty sure that before I can even remember, it must have been so.
I used to go with my mother to the Food Mart. She would hunt and gather what our family needed. I may have helped or just messed around. She paid and someone would help her load the paper bags into the back of the station wagon. I think I learned the grocery store routine and how to find things pretty early on. Like learning to speak my native tongue well enough to understand and be understood day in and day out now, come to think of it, for many, many years.. Came pretty naturally without lessons and teachers, and mostly without tests of my intelligence and training sessions for workaday survival skills.
During my single years and multiple marriages, I have shopped for food, mostly at Safeway, there being few other choices from the early 60s on in my part of the woods. Today I am regularly asked in the checkout line at this store if I found everything I was looking for. Huh?
I must be from Mars. So when did grocery shopping become other than a normal hunt-and-gather situation with the usual, nicely ordered and labeled dead flora and fauna to pick from? Because I am older, do I look lost or more stupid? unqualified to find what I am looking for and have been able to find for over fifty years? Has the stock become so replete and diversified that most of what I want is hidden from view?
Oh, they are asking the same questions of most everyone. Why didn't they ask the kids ahead of me in line? I guess they assume nowadays that all generations above three feet five need guidance if not direct aid. And I just thought those three employees on the aisle with the noodles and tomato sauce were demented, or illiterate,** when they asked if I was finding what I was looking for. What was I missing? What else was there to find besides spaghetti fixin's? Maybe this is the never land of the much, much more?
"How do you wish to pay for that?"
"Oh, sorry. Bit of a senior moment."
3
Buying a car from a dealer has always been a trip. For many years now the line has been, either early or late in the game, "What can I do to earn your business?"
Like I am going to be the employer and he is going to get paid by me for doing something I want to employ him for. This is to formalize a labor relationship I didn't bargain for. After all, I just want some transportation. And now I have to supervise this wannabe wage-earner? Do I have to withhold something so I don't get into trouble with the SS admin and IRS? Do I automatically contribute to his health plan and retirement, or can he opt not to have these? Surely he will want both.
I bought a new car a few years ago. I told the salesman what I wanted exactly: Simplest, least expensive model X you've got. He was young, and after getting my answer to electric windows or not, got the message. Not fully trained or automated, I guessed.
At the end after I had bought the car and was about to get in and drive away, he said I had not given him the chance to tell me all the great features the car had. I let him have his ten minutes. I drove away.
He is a goner. The next guy will get that spiel up front, and off to another planet we'll travel to the programming of?
4
Who is it who writes these scripts? What kind of supervisor makes each employee say the same thing? Are teachers educating kids or just training them? Is consumer culture and the products on offer so obscure that we have to be led from deciding why we are in a given place to what to buy, concluding the quest finally with the question of whether we got what we were looking for? Not only that, do we need to be told by the warning on the cup that the coffee is hot, in the restroom that it is hygienic to wash your hands before leaving, in the theater to turn your cell phone off--it will disturb others trying to listen to the music and the hear words spoken by the actors on the screen?
Plodding, frickin' didacticism re the self evident, hey?
Forget senior demure for a moment, which is not pointing out the bleeding obvious to the robot in front of you, the one with the inert matter between its anthropomorphized ears. If you still have your wits about you, regardless of your age, for fun, hack the program.
Ask the girl behind the counter if she had been told to ask if you wanted fries with that. See what she says. Her answer might be something like, "Yes, we are told to say that." I whoa myself each time I hear this and consider what it might mean--like maybe there is indeed a big brother behind the scenes somewhere. Is he watching some monitor that uses that camera up in the corner? Plus, how will she and her children cope in the world she is creating?
Ask the cheeky checkout clerk at the grocery store with the ever-growing database of names and purchase preferences, since s/he now knows your name and you are fast friends, looking forward to seeing each other again, perhaps during your next GSSE (grocery store shopping experience): "I can see your name is Paul on your nametag. But what is your last name? I am filling up a database myself of [insert adjective] clerks I should know in the shops so I can [insert verb] them on the street. Oh, and by the way, what is the first and last names of your manager here? I need that information too."
The car guy is more of a challenge. After all you shouldn't have to talk to these guys too often. And with the Internet, maybe you don't have to talk with them at all. But if you find yourself found on the car lot darting between the chunky bits in stock so as not to be seen, and you are approached by the guy who has been stalking you since you set your tentative big toe on the property with the intent of not having to deal with a salesman at all--you just wanted to look--you'll need something to crack the Truman Show stratosphere. Prepare your hack ahead of time. Certainty of its use can almost be guaranteed.
"How can I earn your business?"
"I need a car. You're hired to find it around here somewhere for me. But there will be no stock options or health insurance."
If he says no problem, that they don't offer him those benefits here anyway, you've probably cracked the stratosphere. But my guess is he won't.
On second thought. You'd better not. There is surely a sign somewhere that demure is the prefer, and social hacking is illegal and likely to cause unrest, or at least disrupt the orderly flow of commerce.
Is the gene pool now in constant and unrecoverable entropy, sliding down or backwards? Are we under some mandate to make a replica of a plastic utopia some bright person dreamed up? Who is ordering this universe and has invaded US? Can someone answer me other than, "Yes, we are told to say that," which actually doesn't even follow from my question?
Okay, okay. Remember, demure. Damn moments, hey? So scratch that last question.
_____
* Don Ihde in a November 14, 2000 interview. http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/dihde/articles/ihde_interview.htmlIncluded here to connect this writing to noematics. There are at least four variations of the demure.
** Language is at the heart of what is experienced and how. Thus this note that more and more, the continuous is being used for the simple present or past tenses in American English.
1
Imagine you are not from Mars and most days you still have your wits about you. You enter an establishment and suddenly you have no idea. Where are you? Why are you here? What is this place? Nothing clicks. Nothing makes sense. Mind a blank. Another one of those damn moments, hey?
Before the next logical step gains traction across your mind's slippery surface, or you can read the menu on the wall--number, item, price in three columns across, three rows down--a greeting promises to save your sorry face. Without your giving a hint of bewilder--'cause you've really done this many times before--you see the smile behind the counter as it begins to ask all the right questions in binary if distant fashion. You think, I can manage this.
Smile: "Burger or cheeseburger?"
"Cheeseburger."
"Everything on that [or not]?"
"Hmm. Everything."
"Lettuce and tomato?"
This is a binary question?
"Hmm. Yes."
"Mustard and ketchup?"
Let's break this one down.
"Mustard, yes. No ketchup."
"Soda, shake?"
Must be a variation of the classic binary form.
"Shake."
"Flavor?"
Clever answer needed.
"What have you got?"
"Chocolate or vanilla."
"Vanilla."
"Small, medium, or large?"
I'm getting the hang of this. Choose one of three. No brainer.
"Small, thanks."
Whew. I have my wits about me. I am hungry!
"Would you like fries with that?"
Fortunately, the smile behind the counter has been helpful, but appears as if from plastic planet unknown and apparently has limited wits. But no matter, right?
Now listen. Yes, senior moments do happen to people of all ages. Notwithstanding other challenges, most people can usually tell when they are on Earth in a burger joint in the US. Pretty difficult to lose a sense of the chapter you are reading and the page you are on in the circulinear plot that goes from hunger to not and then back again daily several times with almost clock-like regularity. The world is a friendly place, and should be, yes. But do you need help surviving daily routines in a landscape filled with chained commercial choices? a life filled with certainties about what to do and how to handle--the ordinary?
Given full knowledge and awareness of self and context, when asked if you'd like fries with that, you can politely think to yourself: If I had wanted fries, I would have ordered them. No, thanks, I know this is a burger place, I wanted a burger and shake. I told you what I wanted. I've ordered.
"No. That's it."
But do you understand what I have ordered?
She repeats for confirmation, as if commanding mission control, life or death in the balance. But she doesn't deliver her lines with that much critical mission intensity. Hmm. More like ho-hum.
"Yep, you got it."
You pay, get your food, eat it, probably too fast, leave, reach your car in the parking lot, get behind the wheel, and feel as if you have just ingested a heavy stone from some asteroid.
2
I am experienced shopper for food. Food has been an important staple my whole life. As far back as I can remember. I am pretty sure that before I can even remember, it must have been so.
I used to go with my mother to the Food Mart. She would hunt and gather what our family needed. I may have helped or just messed around. She paid and someone would help her load the paper bags into the back of the station wagon. I think I learned the grocery store routine and how to find things pretty early on. Like learning to speak my native tongue well enough to understand and be understood day in and day out now, come to think of it, for many, many years.. Came pretty naturally without lessons and teachers, and mostly without tests of my intelligence and training sessions for workaday survival skills.
During my single years and multiple marriages, I have shopped for food, mostly at Safeway, there being few other choices from the early 60s on in my part of the woods. Today I am regularly asked in the checkout line at this store if I found everything I was looking for. Huh?
I must be from Mars. So when did grocery shopping become other than a normal hunt-and-gather situation with the usual, nicely ordered and labeled dead flora and fauna to pick from? Because I am older, do I look lost or more stupid? unqualified to find what I am looking for and have been able to find for over fifty years? Has the stock become so replete and diversified that most of what I want is hidden from view?
Oh, they are asking the same questions of most everyone. Why didn't they ask the kids ahead of me in line? I guess they assume nowadays that all generations above three feet five need guidance if not direct aid. And I just thought those three employees on the aisle with the noodles and tomato sauce were demented, or illiterate,** when they asked if I was finding what I was looking for. What was I missing? What else was there to find besides spaghetti fixin's? Maybe this is the never land of the much, much more?
"How do you wish to pay for that?"
"Oh, sorry. Bit of a senior moment."
3
Buying a car from a dealer has always been a trip. For many years now the line has been, either early or late in the game, "What can I do to earn your business?"
Like I am going to be the employer and he is going to get paid by me for doing something I want to employ him for. This is to formalize a labor relationship I didn't bargain for. After all, I just want some transportation. And now I have to supervise this wannabe wage-earner? Do I have to withhold something so I don't get into trouble with the SS admin and IRS? Do I automatically contribute to his health plan and retirement, or can he opt not to have these? Surely he will want both.
I bought a new car a few years ago. I told the salesman what I wanted exactly: Simplest, least expensive model X you've got. He was young, and after getting my answer to electric windows or not, got the message. Not fully trained or automated, I guessed.
At the end after I had bought the car and was about to get in and drive away, he said I had not given him the chance to tell me all the great features the car had. I let him have his ten minutes. I drove away.
He is a goner. The next guy will get that spiel up front, and off to another planet we'll travel to the programming of?
4
Who is it who writes these scripts? What kind of supervisor makes each employee say the same thing? Are teachers educating kids or just training them? Is consumer culture and the products on offer so obscure that we have to be led from deciding why we are in a given place to what to buy, concluding the quest finally with the question of whether we got what we were looking for? Not only that, do we need to be told by the warning on the cup that the coffee is hot, in the restroom that it is hygienic to wash your hands before leaving, in the theater to turn your cell phone off--it will disturb others trying to listen to the music and the hear words spoken by the actors on the screen?
Plodding, frickin' didacticism re the self evident, hey?
Forget senior demure for a moment, which is not pointing out the bleeding obvious to the robot in front of you, the one with the inert matter between its anthropomorphized ears. If you still have your wits about you, regardless of your age, for fun, hack the program.
Ask the girl behind the counter if she had been told to ask if you wanted fries with that. See what she says. Her answer might be something like, "Yes, we are told to say that." I whoa myself each time I hear this and consider what it might mean--like maybe there is indeed a big brother behind the scenes somewhere. Is he watching some monitor that uses that camera up in the corner? Plus, how will she and her children cope in the world she is creating?
Ask the cheeky checkout clerk at the grocery store with the ever-growing database of names and purchase preferences, since s/he now knows your name and you are fast friends, looking forward to seeing each other again, perhaps during your next GSSE (grocery store shopping experience): "I can see your name is Paul on your nametag. But what is your last name? I am filling up a database myself of [insert adjective] clerks I should know in the shops so I can [insert verb] them on the street. Oh, and by the way, what is the first and last names of your manager here? I need that information too."
The car guy is more of a challenge. After all you shouldn't have to talk to these guys too often. And with the Internet, maybe you don't have to talk with them at all. But if you find yourself found on the car lot darting between the chunky bits in stock so as not to be seen, and you are approached by the guy who has been stalking you since you set your tentative big toe on the property with the intent of not having to deal with a salesman at all--you just wanted to look--you'll need something to crack the Truman Show stratosphere. Prepare your hack ahead of time. Certainty of its use can almost be guaranteed.
"How can I earn your business?"
"I need a car. You're hired to find it around here somewhere for me. But there will be no stock options or health insurance."
If he says no problem, that they don't offer him those benefits here anyway, you've probably cracked the stratosphere. But my guess is he won't.
On second thought. You'd better not. There is surely a sign somewhere that demure is the prefer, and social hacking is illegal and likely to cause unrest, or at least disrupt the orderly flow of commerce.
Is the gene pool now in constant and unrecoverable entropy, sliding down or backwards? Are we under some mandate to make a replica of a plastic utopia some bright person dreamed up? Who is ordering this universe and has invaded US? Can someone answer me other than, "Yes, we are told to say that," which actually doesn't even follow from my question?
Okay, okay. Remember, demure. Damn moments, hey? So scratch that last question.
_____
* Don Ihde in a November 14, 2000 interview. http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/dihde/articles/ihde_interview.htmlIncluded here to connect this writing to noematics. There are at least four variations of the demure.
** Language is at the heart of what is experienced and how. Thus this note that more and more, the continuous is being used for the simple present or past tenses in American English.
Lest hope
Little bird, little bird,
whisper me truth.
I've stormed the world
my self and seen none.
Little bird, little bird,
show me the trust.
Been stormed world o'er
in spite of self, none.
Little bird, little bird,
have me believe.
Storms and storming
I'm just not enough.
Hey, screech my deaf ear.
life feats and repeats,
we know, lest hope.
And call this help,
all will be well all,
as we take flight
in the fear that pervades
the now and pending storms.
October 10, 2007
Performative contradictions
I chanced upon the October 2nd Cancun edition of The Miami Herald. Actually, someone left it on the beach during their cheap off-season vacation, and I, a bigger cheapie, picked it up. I am here in Cozumel managing the world for as long as I can reign.
Edward Wasserman's piece on the Opinion page was entitled, "Can books fill the news media's gaps?"* His view is that "Great reporting--factual, richly detailed and burning with significance--belongs on the most powerful and most universally accessible channels we have for news . . . the Internet." In presenting this case, he says that newspapers have "largely" failed in supplying this kind of content, and books by journalists that do measure up fail in timeliness, or the content is packaged in an outdated technology. There is a growing dearth of book readers, I guess.
So here is a journalism guru who publishes an article in a newspaper citing failures or inadequacies in the honored medium while at the same time suggesting that the mainstream and most accessible and appropriate are elsewhere--not in print but online. This is a kind of performative contradiction, using the same medium to discredit it. In addition, is a journalism guru writing in a newspaper talking to average readers today, or fellow journalists or book publishers or blogophiles? I was not quite sure. Regardless, it is a curious message. (I am paraphrasing.) We--journalists--have largely failed you. You didn't get what we promised in newspapers and other traditional media, and most of you won't get it from our books either.
For some reason, I reacted. Something inside said respond. After all, I, an average reader, was reading his piece in a newspaper, which was being cast as irrelevant. Not totally so, but all the same.
Without length and breadth and depth, how will anyone encounter anything other than longish, well sourced and researched and organized texts written or spoken? If factual, richly detailed, and burning with significance is the gold standard regardless of delivery medium, you won't get that in bits and bites. You will and should get it in bytes, perhaps megabytes, whether on a screen, including the best of TV programming, or on the radio, or via printed matter, broadsheet or bound.
If people insist on the cell phone for their news, there is perhaps an object lesson. The phone is an intermediary at best, a medium to read or hear that which you should find out more. Newspapers can also be seen in this light. Read the latest summary, more than headlines but less than the gold standard. And then go online, or to books, wherever you can find the bytes required to be more fully informed. Newspapers may not conform to the standard they once aspired to but now they should to fit with the other media of our times. Instead of delivering factual, detailed, significant, newspaper journalists might focus on representative facts and details plus the possible implications of same, ending with, "Consult our online version or podcast for more, or see our Sunday, expanded news and analysis edition."
The literate, ready to hear what journalists and others write, is estimated to be eighty-two percent of the world's population. According to Internet usage stats though, those connected, and presumably literate enough to consume the news electronically, comprise less than twenty percent of the world's population.** The newest edge may be the Internet. But there is still room in the less-than-fully-electronically-connected world for newspapers, books, in-person commentaries, radio broadcasts, and so on.
That we have journalists' contributions to the library of books we need to read to understand current events may not be the failure of newspapers or how well paid the profession is, but may point to the failure of journalists themselves to deliver the facts in rich detail, burning with the self-evident or highlighted significance as close to now as possible. If this is the case, don't blame how the message is delivered but the substance or vacuity of the message itself.
The way to achieve the gold standard is for journalists to observe and describe meticulously and ask the best, most penetrating questions, reporting today's results without word-smithers, text abbreviators, or content deleters. If we need interpretation or translation of what is going on, the ones closest to the sources and the contexts they are reporting on can also supply these for our consideration--labeled as such.
The front page of the same issue of the Herald that presumably should qualify under Wasserman's standard had these headlines from top center to bottom right of the page.
- Rising tensions, violence in Pakistan
- U.N.: Urban crime scaring investors
- Putin eyes new post as country's prime minister
- Correa appeals for closure of Congress
- Holy Water
Timeliness of news is a relative criterion. For one, always there seems to be a lag between when a message is sent and the time the last person really hears it in its full significance. Taking time to report more comprehensively allows journalists to uncover and see exactly what it is or was without the interference of the immediate. Books serve to order and analyze the frenzies of the moment into synthetic, partial wholes that can be better digested and managed than today's partly boiled details that include the ultimately unimportant.
Passing judgment on the quality of these headlines and articles is also possible without the books journalists may or may not write. Haven't we had useful, timeless texts from other disciplines and professions that have addressed these same central issues of front page articles? Insightful observations from even before the time of [insert name of Greek or Roman writer, or default to William Shakespeare]? Gaining power or position, and keeping it, resorting to political, religious, economic means, was the talk of the town and as these articles evidence still is. These headlines continue a long tradition of interest in the stories of people and institutions that affect our lives.
Maneuvering to maintain or gain power has been in books non-journalistic, and they have shown rather consistently us the likely development and outcomes. Books are not dead nor are the Cliff versions to them we can find online, or in bookstores still. We can learn from history if we can access the messages and lessons and themes from sources plural, from high lit to low rant. And if steeped in the observations and wisdom of the past, plus either reflecting or reading reflections on these, we do not need to repeat ourselves today but rather surmount. We might use our deeper knowledge to manage modern instances of similar phenomena. At the most, knowing what we collectively knew can supply the recognition of the headlines as significant or not and help us quickly determine whether more and accurate details are required.
The faster societies and aspiring ones want it all now and relevant and applicable. Great for the ability to help understand and guide realities local and farther afield. But if we are too busy trying to consume and digest what is going on now, and focus only on the now, we will never be able to act with wisdom.
That quality of praxis comes from experience including, yes, the experience of consuming bytes of text. It involves thinking long enough about things to ask the penetrating questions. It also comes from being able to decode the languages that would confuse or obfuscate. To see with greater clarity surely is the corollary of Wasserman's benchmark. Clarity comes from knowing how to respond to the ebb and flow of themes and decisions that can take us, or not, to acceptance and respect of others, or to what is onward and upwards for those whose priority is action and what would be better.
An apology for education and a plea not to focus too much on only and always getting what is now and relevant and applicable? Positively. Knowing today's issues and voting or taking other action on them can be informed by history, ethics and philosophy, science, and other old as well as new and emerging disciplines that have as their complementary goal or standard, the ability to see implications, relate contexts, learn from experience, create better alternatives and choices. That is education, not some kind of just-for-me, I'm-informed-about-today solution. Journalism in the best sense is to report and to help us understand. And in doing this, journalists just don't cough up information. They also select and digest and interpret it by the very nature of the observations they make and the questions they ask, or don't. Without some sense of what it all means and where it comes from, daily news and book-writing journalists can't ask better, wiser questions.
Well, enough of this. I believe I have conveyed what is Wasserman and some further thoughts. I do not take issue with the guru but would only like to widen the scope a bit and extend his comments from an average reader's perspective. The minimum is--reading or otherwise consuming longer texts is not dead. If journalists early or late deliver, we will pick it up wherever or however it appears and examine it for what it is worth. Today's multimedia buffet includes the traditional as well as the latest and coolest. Different technologies serve different purposes. We are too clever to kid ourselves with the illusion of having the full story from either a newspaper or a Blackberry.
I am here on a beach in Mexico managing the world for as long as I can reign. Send another tourist with a newspaper to discard. More of Wasserman would be fine, and more words like those of Jonah Goldberg*** from the same Opinion page would be nice. (In fact, if you put Jonah's and Edward's pieces together from this issue of the Herald, we are getting somewhere with journalism as Wasserman would have it.)
Some of us are still around but not connected electronically 24/7, and we are still interested in today, relying in part on humankind's yesterdays and a storehouse of insights and lessons tacit or otherwise. We are interested in what could be tomorrow, in part because of deeper experience, performative contradictions notwithstanding. Newspapers and books and all the rest continue important. Internet servers serve; let them. For those who rely on other media, let them. And if Wasserman is talking to others in journalism, noting that they are losing ground to other delivery media, maybe an answer is to hone the niche better, especially with more careful observations, better questions, and less interference, which is another subject for another time.
I gaze over at the residents on the adjacent beach and realize they are among the majority. Am I committing my own performative contradiction here? Who is really the average reader or consumer of news? Regardless, let's not disenfranchise others now that they have their satellite dish and are coming to the table having their conversations about the convergence of the worlds they can now, perhaps for the first time, see and hear and read about. Factual, richly detailed, and burning with significance: A good standard any way we can get it.
---
Afterthought
From an interview dated November 14, 2000, the American philosopher/phenomenologist Don Ihde reports,
During a visit to Berkley [sic] a number of years ago, I decided to take a look at the bulletin board in the philosophy department to see what they were offering. As you know, they had a very large graduate program with some very eminent people. I looked at what was offered and found there were two courses that could have been termed historical. There was a course on Kant and one on Descartes. All of the other courses followed the rubric of living authors only.***A prestigious institution weighs in on this issue. And here is an eminent thinker, who adds that by design he teaches his courses in contemporary time with electronic drafts and Internet-published works. The choice for now-only higher education course readings rests in part on the assessment that we "do" the disciplines better nowadays, and so it is better, perhaps more practical, to focus on the cutting edges. Ironically, today's philosophy sits atop the shoulders of people most know by name but perhaps haven't read or studied, Plato and Kant, for example.
My mentor, a highly respected educator with a national reputation, urged me many years ago to read the classic works in the field of education. I argued that I was a product of people who had read and applied "that stuff" on me. I wanted to forge ahead and saw the effort, and going back to graduate school, as a waste of time. That was then. And I did go back to school. (Been in it ever since!)
My "liberal education" bias today may be outdated. But then again, there are inevitable performative contradictions. Ihde and I, although clearly not even playing in the same league much less ballpark, have had the experience of dead teachers and masters who have helped shape our thoughts today. To deny or ignore these formative figures is to commit the contradiction, at least in our cases.
If starting only from now indeed embodies the best of the past, our loss seems to be the experience of first hand accounts of delight and discovery in their words. If modern thought is but a footnote to Aristotle or Plato, do we need to check the original sources from time to time for the freshness of their insights, the skills that can be learned from examining their arguments, the accuracy and novelty of what today's cutting edges claim?
__________
*Mr. Wasserman's discussion is richer than suggested here and worth a read.
** Figures are based on UN world population and literacy rates; Internet-population usage is as reported by Miniwatts Marketing Group.
*** Mr. Golberg addresses freedom of speech, noting in part that saying "I defend your right to say what I disagree with" is avoiding the more important issue of what it is you said.
**** http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/dihde/articles/ihde_interview.html
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