Probably inspired by my interactions with the guys at the NE maker-space in Newcastle, I’ve been doing some techy things of late. One quite simple but effective bit of techy twiddling involved setting up a mobile wifi hotspot in my house. I decided quite some time ago that having mobile broadband at home wasn’t going to be particularly productive for me. It is easy to spend long hours just following your nose making connections between the infinite number of interesting things in the world. All the time you are doing this, well, you are not adding to the sum of interesting things in the world - you are staring at a piece of glass, much the same as a couch potato with a plasma telly. That said, it is sometimes useful to have access to the internet, to check something/look something up/fire off a lengthy email. Not having TV/cable or a landline makes having broadband pretty expensive. An old HTC phone used as a mobile wifi hotspot makes for a cheap alternative.

Intellectually, this week has been one of the best I can remember. I attended a Cafe Philosophique lecture (wrote about it earlier) and on wednesday I attended a talk by a visiting professor Kathryn Moore. She talked about a great many things, but the main topic revolved around how her philosophical stance as a pragmatist informs her practice and her teaching. Kathryn drew heavily on the work of Richard Rorty, somebody whom I came across relatively recently (I posted a quote here a week or two ago). One of the senior lecturers suggested that I might be interested in the philosophical ideas of the ‘pragmatists’ during a research mentor session last month. He was right.

I managed to chat with Kathryn after the talk and she described the journey to her current philosophical position, and again reiterated her debt to Rorty. It all sounded very seductive so on Kathryn’s recommendation if downloaded Rorty’s ‘Philosophy of Social Hope’ and dived straight in. So far it is proving to be immensely stimulating, with ‘highlightable’ passages presenting one after the other. Rorty seems to be describing ideas and world views which I have always (and I mean always) felt, but have never been able, or lacked the courage to voice.

During philosophy drop-in on Saturday my head was so full of Rorty that I was unable to take a step back and hear what was being said without trying to test it against what I now think I understand of Rorty’s pragmatics. Childish I know. After a particularly ill mannered interjection on my behalf, one of the attendees made an observation which give ‘another way’. It was done in such a way as to make one think about what we were engaged in by congregating in order to discuss philosophical ideas on a saturday morning. I’d be hard pushed to recall a better lesson learnt in quite a while.

Yesterday I bought an iPad. So what? Well, I had kind of promised myself that I wouldn’t, but the thing which is bringing me the greatest pleasure right now is reading, writing and music. The iPad allows me to do all of these things rather well, and nomadically. Set-up required a couple of hours at the university library whilst I downloaded the apps which allow aggregation of my chosen sources of literature. The first piece I read on the device was a New Inquiry piece entitled ‘How bad is it?’ by George Scialabba.

The piece starts with a list of facts about the life of the average American, although I would imagine that many of the trends would map onto the majority of the inhabitants of the global west. Scialabba describes the work of the social historian Morris Berman, specifically his trilogy of books about the history of the development of American culture.

I read the first of this trilogy (The Twilight of American Culture) back in 2000, and was unaware that it was part of a trilogy until yesterday. The main thing I remember about the book was that towards the end, Breman described how the current cultural malaise is not without president. Empires always come to an end, those ‘in charge’ (positions of power) become corrupt, bureaucracy stifles, cultures coarsen and ossify. When this happened in the dark ages, Europe was plunged into centuries of religious wars, superstition, and stagnation. People quite literally did not have the mental ability to imagine different ways of being.

‘from AD600 to 1000, most people forgot how how to read to thing, and, in fact, forgot they had forgotten’. The Twilight of American Culture.

Now, as stated, I read this book 12 years ago, but as I remember it (and I will re-read the final third again soon) the tools that can give a person the ability to see beyond their immediate day to day existence, and allow them to hope for a better world, were devised centuries earlier by the Greek philosophers. However, written descriptions of the works were few and far between. At the time, a book took a year to make (painstakingly write by hand), cost the equivalent of a semi-detached house, and could be read by a vanishingly small percentage of the population. On top of this, decimation of their work was restricted (possible banned) by religions leaders of the time. It was left to a handful of monks to study these texts and keep them alive until the lighter days arrived. As I remember it, these texts were instrumental in the birth of the enlightenment, the legacy of which I do not need to describe here. One of the monks who helped preserve and keep the ideas alive was our very own St. Aidan, who founded the monastery and cultural centre at Lindisfarne.

Berman posits what he calls the ‘monastic option’ as a means of keeping alive the ability to think during dark times. Over the last few years of occasional participation with the Newcastle Philosophical Society, I have felt that we are indeed engaged in a marginal ‘monastic’ activity along the lines of the endeavours of Aidan and his contemporaries. Stepping out onto the streets of Newcastle filled with stag and hen parties, and dawdling shoppers, after the realtive calm and civility of the philosophy session, somewhat reinforces this perception. Yesterdays meeting illuminated the need for the ability to be able to engage in productive discourse and that it is an ability that is to be learnt and nurtured through practice. The Berman piece made me see that the Philosophical Society is a place to do this and, as such, is something to be cherrished and nurtured. I intend to do both.

Reading Philosophy of Social Hope - Richard Rorty

Interesting philosophy talk in Newcastle yesterday. The topic was ‘is saving two lives better than saving one?’. The premise was that it is not as easy to answer as it first seems. It brings into question the nature of the ‘good’, which the speaker did a fine job of exploring through the work of Peter Greach(? - from a 1956 paper on The Good) and somebody called Moore. Lots of binary situations where constructed to demonstrate the difficulty of decision making involved… Save a young child and let the old person die - save a young person and let two old people die - save the town of 10k and let the village of 1k perish - The last 10 snail of a spices vs a child.

What occurred to me during this seemingly never ending stream of binary quandaries was that nobody appeared to ask of themselves what right they had to make a decision in the first place. Surely the ‘starting condition’ is an important factor. Taking thing into your own hands and deciding to physically act (switch railway points to divert a runaway train for instance) to save a child but kill an old woman who would have otherwise lived would seem morally indefensible. Again, who are you to choose who lives and dies?

Making decisions which affect other people both near and far is an existential human condition. What differentiates the binary situations being discussed from everyday situations is their complete lack of opacity: Our choice will have an immediate and obvious affect. Consequences are not diffused across the globe or hidden in an unimaginably complex set of social and material relationships.

Everybody who spoke on the evening gave the impression that they had an answer to each of the situations. Some appealed to definitive notions of ‘the good’, whilst some called on ultimate truths. None questioned if they had any right to act at all - the option to do nothing and let the situations play out as you found it was apparently no option at all. I wont read too much into this since many of the speakers were ‘the usual suspects’ with well defined world views and a willingness to expound them. I’ll assume that there were some in the room happy to listen and keep their position to themselves. Incidentally, there will probably be a name for what I just described - in philosophy there is a name for everything since nothing is new. I must find out what I am.