New Paths of the Discontent
Welcome.
We are in the habit of looking at the world from other angles. Problem is; when everyone walks in the same tracks for long enough, the paths can sometimes get so deep and so worn that we forget that there are new places to go that are not on the worn path. Mostly those are not interesting places otherwise the paths would already lead there. But sometimes those paths lead to places more of us need to visit. Sometimes the world simply makes progress by virtue of some people going in unconventional directions. Our hope is that some of the desultory comments we post here will lead us to ask new questions and get us to step off the beaten path long enough to explore some new idea.
Discontent is the progenator of exploration; for if everything were idyllic, perfect, unable to be improved, the same old paths would always be good enough. And many are the people who can learn to ignore life’s flaws, insults, and disappointments, seeing them as the trade-off for the good things life has to offer. But if one happens to live near the stench of a great sewer, one cannot hold one’s breath forever. Either one moves or one mobilizes opinion and gets the thing treated so the stench goes away. Otherwise, one comes to resent the very air that sustains life. Rage boils up, then violence. No. One does what one can to change the things that cause dissatisfaction, even when they are so much a part of our lives that we are inclined to have grown insensate to them.
We are reminded of the gentleman who, late in ninteenth century Austria proposed that the reason people treated by doctors died was because the doctors failed to wash their hands. Doctors would spend their mornings dissecting the newest crop of corpses - some of whom would have died the day before of terrible, communcable diseases - and then these same doctors would go out and do surgeries in the afternoon. The poor fellow scandalized a powerful profession so by his outrageous proposal he was declared a madman and forcefully thrown in an asylum where he was kept until he died decades later. Not long afterwords, Pasteur proved that infectious diseases were caused by germs, vindicating the poor fellow’s argument.
He went down a new path. And eventually people followed. Doctors still kill tens of thousands of patients a year with infections by failing to wash their hands, but at least now we know it is mostly out of inconvenience. It is no longer out of ignorance. Change is slow. But when the new paths are illuminated by a continued flow of knowledge, eventually even the new paths can carry us to some helpful place.
We ask questions like “What do we know?” “What can we know?” “What should we know?” “What can’t we know?” “How do we know the difference” ” How do we treat issues bounded by lack of knowledge?”
We ask questions lke “Assuming we cannot know, what then? What if we assume X? What if we assume its opposite. What if we assume something not related to X or its opposite?” This is the stuff of theology and philosophy. But theology and philosophy have grown so abstract and abstruse, we are inclined to take them in new directions, starting from simple beginnings.
We ask questions like “Is this what we really want to be doing?” or “Who are we? Who do we think we are? Who would our granchildren wish we were in a half a century from now?”
We ask questions like “What is society?” “What is the purpose of institutions?” “What is the place of liberty in a civilized society?” “What is the role of an individual in a civil society?” “What happens to civil society when civility is vanquished by greed?”
We ask questions like “What is the basis for success of a society?” “How does a society craft roles and expectations for individuals that support societal success?” “How does it craft rules, cultures, expectations, norms, and laws that support it in this?” “How does it punish justly, in ways that are fair to individuals and ways that represent societal values?”
We ask questions like “Is specialization inevitable in societies?” ” Is it inevitable that societies that are highly structured and highly stratified will win out over ones allowing more individual freedom? Or is the opposite true?” “Is power the ultimate end of man?”
We question assumptions about culture and society and technology. We wonder aloud about the usefulness of all things assumed sacred. These are not meant as attacks on things sacred. They are meant to cause us to understand the basis of strength of institutions. All institutions go through periods of decay. And if they are to remain vital, they adapt and re-envigorate themselves to serve societal needs. These periods of envigoration generally occur when the attacks on them are most profound. England was shaken by the loss of the American colonies. And she responded by building a bigger, stronger, more durable empire. The Catholic church was shaken by the Reformation. And she responded by making changes that addressed real needs.
Today a number of institutions suffer from lack of thoughtful attention and are under attack. Some may perish. Others will find the intellectual capacity and the energy to transform themselves to meet old needs in new ways. We hope to add some little bit of new thinking to this process.
Our own personal weakness is a lack of specific training in philosophy or sociology or political science or law or science or religion or theology or psychology or journalism. But we have rather broad interests and have been part of several diverse cultures. We see the way cultures and environments interact and the way they create each other in predictable ways. And we see that the way people view themselves and their place in the world is absolutely critical to the kind of society people form - the kind of culture they produce. Finally we understand that man’s environment - the world he experiences - is fundamentally the one he creates for himself. It is severely limited by constraints of nature, but the world we create as a culture is the one we must live in.
If we are mean and hateful people, then we will find that soon this is the world we live in. If we are generous and helpful, kind and loving, we will find this is the world we live in. If we create a world of peace and justice, this is where we will live. If we strike out in fear that another will strike first, we create a world where there is space only for fear and violence. If we are malevolent and manipulative, we will soon find it impossible to trust or to love any person. Only to use and be used until everything is used up.
So we must ask ourselves about our actions. By our actions as a society, what do we know about who we are? What kind of a world do we create for ourselves? For our children? For our great great grandchildren?
We hope to enter into a civil dialogue about big questions and to go down paths rarely or lightly trod. We hope to visit old ideas and to float new ones. We hope that our new ideas will be entertained in the spirit of exploration. And we hope we will be forgiven when we occasionally lose control, and rant and rave. Or when we conjoin seemingly disjoint ideas. Sometimes we need to be wrong if we are to be right in new and needful ways.
We need to make a lot of misakes if we are to find new and better ways to live.