A couple of somewhat disparate articles got me thinking this morning. The first was a quite bad piece of journalism in The Times, Comic Contempt, which uses the film version of Sin City to paint all comics fans as woman hating losers. It’s barely worth criticism and I was ready to just ignore it but then I read Martin Currybet’s response to John Harris’ piece in the Guardian attacking the very premise of the BBC’s In Our Time’s Greatest Philosophers Vote. At first Harris seems to be right - philosophy really doesn’t lend itself to a popularity contest and there is something vaguely worrying about the BBC’s obsession with lowest common denominator popular polls. But as Martin says, he’s missing a somewhat critical point, possibly even making that most basic of philosophical mistakes - the category error (as always when I talk about such things I should add that it’s been a long time since I studied philosophy and even then I didn’t quite get it all straight). To quote Martin: “it isn’t the vote that is key value here - but that the interactive web content will outlive the programme (even if you download the podcast of it). I think having an online resource gathering together academic argument on the significant contributions to thought of the twenty leading nominees is a useful thing for the BBC to be doing.” For someone who is curious about philosophy but doesn’t know where to start, such a resource would be very useful and would put them on the road to actually being able to read Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche or Popper without their brains exploding.
So, other than that one article is attacking the braining up of the dumb while the other the dumbing down of the brainy, what’s the connection? It’s something I’m seeing a lot of lately, not only in the mainstream media but across the opinion-obsessed sections of the bloggernet. The writer is annoyed by something and without really trying to understand it writes a piece that on the surface looks to be pretty solid. But because they haven’t bothered to spend a few hours or days really thinking about it, their piece is no better than a rant - one person’s opinion that preaches to the converted and makes them feel good about themselves while annoying the rest in such a way that actually backs up the opinion. “Of course they disagree! They’re idiots!”
The philosophy angle is interesting because most of those major thinkers didn’t actually write that much. A few books of note on the whole before an early death from syphilis after a life of isolated misanthropy tended to be the rule. They would spend months on one idea, thinking through every possible angle and taking it down to the most fundamental points. Hume famously spent a very long time pondering the existence of a shade of blue that he hadn’t personally experienced which might seem daft but it was fundamental to his thinking about empiricism (again see previous disclaimer) while the great father of it all, Socrates, said “All I know is that I know nothing” and built up from there.
None of them were bashing out 1000 word articles every few days that asserted that they were right beyond all reasonable doubt, and yet that’s what nearly every writer seems to be doing right now. It’s very rare that you’ll come across a piece of writing online or in a printed periodical that comes close to this sort of depth, mainly because it takes a very long time, would have a limited audience and doesn’t pay well. On top of that, not being 100% certain about your opinions and beliefs is suicide in todays intellectual world. I’m longing for the day when someone in a position of power goes on Newsnight or Today and says “to be honest John/Jeremy, I really don’t know the answer to that. I suspect it’s a very complex issue that would require a lot of serious thought and even then any conclusions would be tentative” and for John/Jeremy to come back with “fair enough - we’ll ask you again when you come back from your three month retreat”.
Coming soon - why your opinion is worth shit, but that’s not a problem as long as you realise that.
‘Opinions are like arseholes, everybody has one’.
This is a soundbite obsessed, instant gratification culture, and the media plays to that. I don’t really know who is spinning who any more. Maybe we do get the politicians we deserve.
Gone are the days when someone would sit and meditate on ‘Mu’ or ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping’, or meditate for 9 years in front of a wall. The best ideas are not writen down, they are experienced. This, in my opinion, is where intellectualism falls flat, it fails to connect to the human experience. But as you said, my opinion is worth shit :)
Your sidebar links have gone very self-help. Beware!
Marv: Have they? Can’t see it myself…
Oh, you mean the Google ads. Hmm, given their generally skewed interpretation of what’s on the page that’s very interesting.
‘Opinions are like arseholes, everybody has one…”.
”…and some smell better than others” I believe is the full expression. Don’t ask me who coined it though.
”Gone are the days when someone would sit and meditate on ‘Mu’ or ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping’, or meditate for 9 years in front of a wall.”
ah….those were the days, eh? ;) someone was asking the other day why they don’t teach rhetoric in schools (anymore)? I think opinions are worthless when they’re presented as isolated rant.
btw, (and I never studied philosophy at all) but isn’t socrates point more about not being an expert on anything - and owning up to that? So, his profound insight was to realise he had no profound insight. Not refuting what you know about socrates, because I know next to nothing.:)
Yes, I meant the advertising. I can’t resist quizzes that measure your self-esteem.
Yeah, my invocation of Socrates was a bit glib. The “I know nothing” schtick was used against sophists who claimed to have irrevertible proof of some theory or other but who hadn’t really thought it through. While sitting by the river (presumably after buggering their young charges) they would ask Socrates what he thought of their great common sense ideas and he would reply that he didn’t know. They would scoff at the “great” Socrates for admitting to such ignorance before he proved that they didn’t know anything either and that their ideas were utterly without substance.
I really should read that stuff again. It’s quite brilliant and amazingly easy to read. If you’re interested look for the early Socratic dialogues by Plato (Socrates never wrote anything down so we only have Plato’s word to go on. The early stuff is probably accurate while in later works, such as Republic, Socrates is just a character with Plato’s words in his mouth and it all gets a little bit turgid, though not as turgid as the bloody Enlightenment dudes…). There are, of course, free versions at Project Guttenburg though I can’t off hand remember which are which…
“Using Sin City as an excuse to paint all comics fans as women-hating losers.”
Heh. Heheh. Sin City had the most named female characters I’d seen in a single film for a long, long time. In fact, screen presence was a lot closer to the 50/50 I sometimes dream of, in wild moments. It also passes Alison Bechdel’s Rule (that a film should contain at least two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man). The author of the piece argues that because thong-wearing lesbians and pole-dancing law students are out of their experience of/expectation of what women are, that these were not portrayals of women at all, but sexist caricatures, and therefore intrinsically wrong –itself a sexist position, sorry.
Sin City knows it’s sexist, and uses this to say something about sexism. The Times fantasises that it isn’t — and uses its imagined moral superiority to brush the issues raised under a smug and patronising carpet.
None of them were bashing out 1000 word articles every few days that asserted that they were right beyond all reasonable doubt, and yet that’s what nearly every writer seems to be doing right now.
I don’t think any of the examples you give were polemicists though. They weren’t trying to be opinion forming, they were trying to open the universe with their minds and so they interacted with the academic community, not the world at large. There are still writers and philosophers doing that, just not in the national dailies.
Does notsosoft have a new page?