Scholars tend to be shy or humble, often going to great lengths to avoid anything that might smack of self-promotion or over-confidence. There’s good reason for this. The academy trains you to be skeptical, to demand evidence, and to be reserved about matters that you’ve not yet carefully considered.
There are two troubling consequences of this phenomenon, however. The first is captured in one of Bertrand Russel’s famous sayings. In New Hopes for a Changing World, he wrote that
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
It’s a riff on William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” where he writes that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
In other words, self-doubt and the training for skepticism, so vital to good philosophy, can lead scholars not to speak up, while so many ignorant voices cry. If scholars are waiting for certainty, we’ll never hear from them. This is one of the troubling dangers.
Here’s episode 2 of Philosophy Bakes Bread, titled “Purpose in Life and Work.” You can listen to it here above or you can visit the podcast’s page for this episode here. You can subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed here. If you prefer, you can download the MP3 file here and listen to it later.
iTunes has it too, though for some reason as I post this the episodes are out of order.
“Purpose in Life and Work”
This second episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread considers the challenge of envisioning and choosing the right purposes for oneself and for one’s organizations in life and at work.
On returning home from Germany, I was startled to hear a voicemail from a white supremacist campaigning for President. It repeated the old trope that there is a genocide being perpetrated on the white race. In the United States, we often throw around words like “Nazi” and “genocide.” Seinfeld’s funny “Soup Nazi” story is one thing, but ridiculous demonizing of political opposition is another. The Iowa Tea Party offered one blatant example, but so do national commentators warning of “liberal fascism” or labeling conservatives “Nazis.” We should sober up and remember what real genocide looks like.
Some of the ovens made to dispose of bodies at the Dachau concentration camp.
In Democracy and Leadership, one of the key virtues of democratic leadership I wrote about is moderation. Today people so often dismiss moderation, seeing it as a weakness of will, as a lack of principled character. I find that view tragic, as it inspires such polarization that even the Federal government was shut down in 2013, despite the fact that the world is watching and the credit rating for U.S. debt was downgraded in 2011. Unstable societies are risky investments, as are unjust societies.
One of the remarkable things rarely considered among average museum-goers is the somewhat unbelievable fact that nations in the Western world have gone to places like Egypt and taken out of sacred and historical landmarks beautiful cultural treasures. It is true that archaeologists get permits. It is true that the explorer who found Tutankhamun’s tomb spent the better part of a decade looking. It is true that he secured and invested somewhat incredible financial resources to have upwards of 100 people helping him to dig and to search for years. There was enormous work that went into finding Tut’s tomb. Nevertheless, I can’t help but appreciate the point of view which says that relevant artifacts belong to the people and region from which they came.
Of course, I also appreciate the view which says that the labor one puts into a work makes it partly yours. Tut’s tomb may have remained lost to this day without the investment of time and money that helped find it. The issue would be less troubling for me if Egypt were not a quite poor country, compared with the U.K., and had the U.K. not had troubling colonialist practices of domination and exploitation.
I’ll write more about this soon. I’m still processing what we saw there. It was harshly jarring for my sense of what human beings are capable of doing – not one or a few troubling individuals, but a coordinated secret police force. Truly sobering. The experience was visceral.
The gate door to the camp reads “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which translates as “Works makes one free,” or “work makes you free.” The message was a horrible lie, as were the fake shower heads in the gas chamber there. More on that in a follow-up post.
It is easy today to find examples of things that are simply marvels of human invention and brilliance. The everyday cellphone today is a pretty amazing instrument, considering all that one can do. This past week, I had a chance to see an exhibit of replicas of the items that were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
What I find remarkable are the incredible effort, skill, and resources that were put into respecting Tutankhamun. At so early a period in history, people gathered and used a simply massive quantity of gold, masterfully designed and adorned, to pay homage to a ruler who died quite young, Tutankhamun. Tut’s tomb featured countless treasures (ok, there were a little over 700), besides the multiple nested shrines, each of which protected yet another shrine of gold-leaf covered wood. Ultimately, inside the larger gold-covered shrines there was an incredible whole piece of carved alabaster, which contained several solid gold nested sarcophagi.
I am an alumnus of SIUC’s Ph.D. program in philosophy. I am writing to urge you to continue full support for the Center for Dewey Studies. I understand that the center has been asked to prepare a budgetary plan for a reduction of its support by 50 percent. Were that reduction to be applied, it would incapacitate the center. That would be a truly terrible mistake.
The Center for Dewey Studies is one of the jewels of SIUC. As I said in a recent interview with the Daily Egyptian, it is simply the best resource in the world of its kind. John Dewey’s work remains deeply important. Presently, Penguin Books is in contract negotiations with me to release a collection of Dewey’s public writings, in part because of help I received from the center, its director, and its relationship with the SIU Press. Dewey was America’s greatest public philosopher, and next year marks the 100th anniversary of his master work, Democracy and Education. There is also a burgeoning movement in public philosophy for which Dewey is the exemplar to whom people will be looking with increasing interest. This is not the time to cut support for the center, but to increase it.
Rorty, Rawls, and Dewey on Culture’s Role in Justice
This piece, published in 2014, represents an important early step in a book project in progress, titled A Culture of Justice.
Abstract
In this essay, I review the writings of three philosophers whose work con-verges on the insight that we must attend to and reconstruct culture for the sake of justice. John Rawls, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty help show some of the ways in which culture can enable or undermine the pursuit of justice. They also offer resources for identifying tools for addressing the cultural impediments to justice. I reveal insights and challenges in Rawls’s philosophy as well as tools and solutions for building on and addressing them in Dewey’sand Rorty’s philosophy.
This episode focuses on challenges for live and work that concern uncertainty and fear of the unknown. Philosophical ideas about the nature of knowledge can be of help, as well as some conceptual and practical tools for addressing or overcoming our worries.
2013 Philosophy Born of Struggle conference, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
This is the video of a short talk I gave at the 2013 Philosophy Born of Struggle conference at Purdue University in West LaFayette, IN. The talk is called “On Culture and Self-Respect,” and it represents an early stage in the development of my book in progress, called A Culture of Justice. I got some invaluable feedback at that conference that has helped to sharpen my thesis for this paper and for the book.
If you’re interested in having me come speak with your group, visit my Speaking page.
Here’s episode 2 of Philosophy Bakes Bread, titled “Purpose in Life and Work.” You can listen to it here above or you can visit the podcast’s page for this episode here. You can subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed here. If you prefer, you can download the MP3 file here and listen to it later.
iTunes has it too, though for some reason as I post this the episodes are out of order.
“Purpose in Life and Work”
This second episode of Philosophy Bakes Bread considers the challenge of envisioning and choosing the right purposes for oneself and for one’s organizations in life and at work.
The transcript for this episode is available here.
Check out the other episodes of Philosophy Bakes Bread here.
Finally, if you’d prefer to “watch” the podcast on YouTube, here it is:
If you prefer that format, here’s a playlist of the podcast episodes on my YouTube channel.