ONE MAN'S JOURNEY FROM YESTERDAY TO TOMORROW and what it means to him!

ONE MAN’S JOURNEY FROM YESTERDAY TO TOMORROW

And what it means to him!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 30, 2014

A READER WRITES:

From what has gone on in Ferguson, Missouri with an 18-year-old African American shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer after an altercation, watching television, I find I harbor mixed emotions about this tragedy. 

A grand jury found the officer not guilty of any crime, after which riots occurred in Ferguson, and literally across the United States, instigated by people with no connection with this Missouri community, and certainly no access to the grand jury testimony that exonerated the police officer.  The incident killed the young police officer’s career, as he has now left the police force. 

I wondered if we are truly a mean-spirited, cruel, and violent species and that this is part of our Nature?

When does our evolution peak?  You saw the separatism of the races to the extreme in South Africa with apartheid, and wrote a compelling novel (A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA) about that experience.  Are we selectively indifferent to the violence that separates us?

St. Andrew's in Scotland is finally admitting women as students due, I’m sure, to the fact that a woman is president of the University.  Perhaps we are not very far on that path of evolution after all.  I’d appreciate your take on the subject.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

It is only my opinion, and has no more weight than that.  I frame the situation as you describe it more broadly than you have indicated, and so ask your indulgence as I attempt to get my arms around this most significant problem that impacts our collective destiny. 

When we talk of violence, gratuitous violence or purposeful violence, which in fact does exist to protect ourselves, our property, our heritage, our sensibilities and our families from being marginalized or destroyed, we are entering the world of philosophy and philosophical speculation. 

Over my lifetime, and through the process of pondering several lifetimes before me through my reading, I have found us, as a society and as a people less “self-directed,” and increasingly “other directed.”

Paradoxically, as we have become more individualistic and free, we have at the same time been victimized by convention, where the “other directed” thrive.  Our response to being “other directed” finds us in a cage of our own making.  Society has become that cage.

“Self-direction” can be defined as leading a life that is essentially self-determined on the basis of choices made, experiences realized, and quality assessments of life, liberty and happiness.

Being “other directed” involves leading a life of dependence or counterdependence on others or institutions for our well-being, sacrificing the freedom, the will and the power to significant others to make those choices for us, which amounts to voluntary enslavement.

THE MEDIA IS THE MESSAGE

The social media and 24/7 cable news has made the “other directed” essential entertainment that connects us to each other in comfort and complacency, reducing us to the image and likeness of a commercial stereotype.

Being "other directed" is endemic to our three major religions as they have devolved: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  They took self-direction and self-appreciation away and assumed responsibility for our worldliness and filled the void with dogma and belief systems. 

Curiously, religion has lost its edge, and with it, its self-direction, falling prey to "other direction" in an attempt to be relevant and poised for the future, surrendering this advantage to the guile of the media.  

We are like puppets on a string responding to media diction and dictates. 

Religion in crisis has become more political and less purposeful, more obsessed with survival than dedicated to its mission, unwittingly fallen prey to media as predator. 

How could it be otherwise with industrialization and democracies on the one hand on cruise control, and wars and dictatorships destabilizing with a vengeance on the other?  There is precedence for this.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Great change occurred in Europe in the 18th and 19th century, and in America in the 20th century.

Radical social and political change has brought about an upheaval in Western culture and thinking.  This has been accelerating and doesn't seem to be slowing down. 

People of all matter of beliefs and social practices are lost in the frenzy.  

We cherry pick our problems which are only symptomatic of our collective state of confusion finding us in our “other direction” essentially operating on automatic pilot as a coping mechanism, surviving on secondary information from the media, social network and the Internet.  Stated another way, we are controlled by media and media outlets.  Ergo, as a consequence, we are in control of nothing, including ourselves.

Violence, and this missive is based on your response to the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, always hides the real cause of the violence. 

Everything that transpires after the fact has little to do what previously occurred.  That was as true of Ferguson, Missouri as it was true in the case of the preemptive invasion of Iraq after 9/11.  Reason takes a holiday as emotions take control.  

That said we are an animal, the best and least of us, yet no more beast than we ever were, but no less so.  Gratuitous violence today differs little with that in the time of Jesus.      

We act shocked with the scandals of Catholic priests abusing children who were in their trust.  We look at Israelis and Palestinians and see both sides equally ineffective and wonder what is wrong.  We decide that Islam is a bad religion judging an entire society of people by its radical fringe of Jihadists.    

This is cherry picking.  Media is good at cherry picking.  We are good at validating the cherry picking by behaving as media paints a picture of "what is," which often is "what isn't."  Instant "truth" is always a lie because it hides the truth in the lie.  

Philosophy has traditionally penetrated our confusion and promoted understanding of where we are, what we are, and what we value, and why, as it gets inside the why that we have become to who we are right now.  Philosophy moves slowly but methodically.

But, alas, philosophy has retreated into specialization and spontaneity like everything else.  No longer is philosophy “self-directed,” but is now mainly "other directed" into systems (like how religions are now perceived) so complex they mean little or nothing to us.  

Validation comes from professors in philosophy earning tenure at some university, preferably some elite university.  It has not always been like this.

During the Enlightenment period of the 17th and 18th century, Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Berkeley spent time appealing to our rational side and looked at the prospects for the modern man to find contentment and purpose in his being.

This was a time of feudalism, the imperial dominance of Roman Catholicism, which was unraveling, a time of empire and the aristocracy, which was also fading.  Philosophers of the Enlightenment period saw man as a thinking being capable of self-direction, out of nature but part of nature with a balance of spiritual and cognitive possibilities.

Not surprising, once man came to realize and understand his potential, once he believed in self-direction, a series of revolutions in the 18th and 19th century occurred to unshackle man from the iron chains of the enslaving and demeaning status quo.  This led to among other revolutions the American and French Revolution. 

The philosophy of revolution of the 20th century twisted self-direction into other direction with Nazism and Communism. 

While more than 100 million souls perished in wars of the 20th century, self-direction was now superseded by the crafty manipulation of other directing propaganda by Germany and Russia.

War always disrupts the social fabric not unlike a child leaving home and rebelling against the dictates and domination of the parents.  

Revolution has one voice but many authors: Jefferson, Paine, Burke, Rousseau, Godwin, Marx, Proudhon, Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci.  The world these philosophers envisioned had the spirit of the Enlightenment but not always its mind.    

Thus followed the Counter Enlightenment period, the dark and uncertain world that shattered the earlier triumphs of the march of reason.

We are still in the Counter Enlightenment period, which has been dominated by philosophers of "romanticism and existentialism," philosophies that question the "good life." the presence of "God," "Free Will," and the idea of "Happiness." 

These are the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Freud. 

What these philosophers held in common, apart from their distinct literary talent to express their thoughts in comprehensible and often compelling language, was a singular contempt for religion and the prospects of the soul.  These thinkers saw man on earth as on an island, alone, in the darken jungle of despair with no prospects beyond this life for anything.

They lived in the "other directed" world where no one has control of destiny, or anything else, so why try?  This is it!  Period!

Yet, of the more than 7 billion souls on this planet earth, three quarter of them believe in a monotheistic or polytheistic faith, in other words, in religion.  It is apparent they feel the need for a sense of someone or something beyond the human experience with which to identify and to seek connection.

THE INFORMATION AGE

A small sliver of the world's population believes and thinks otherwise, yet it is this sliver that controls the Information Age and all its outlets. 

With young people today, essentially unaware of what I have just summarized in a few words, which is the foundation of our Western civilization, are influenced largely by media and the instruments of media in what is considered more or less as the tangible world of "Science and Utility." 

Young people have been turned into "things," for everything is a "thing."  Education is a thing, life is a thing; the emphasis is on the empirical useful application of things. 

The Information Age is a thing that Bentham, Russell, Dewey, Popper, Kuhn and Wittgenstein would approve of, a cadre of philosophers of mainly atheistic temperaments.  

For them there was no God, no soul, no religion, and therefore the violence of man's nature; his pettiness, envy, greed, licentiousness, and immaturity were considered by products of this nonsensical preoccupation with religion.  Indeed, religion has been found the source of modern man's dilemma, the citadel of violence, and wasted lives.  Other directed individuals and groups have an uncanny gift for projecting the blame on something or someone in a vulnerable state.

Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Max Weber, Karl Schmitt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, and Jurgen Habermas projected what modernity was all about, and what man must (or should) do to corral the beast that he is, and make him a more useful social being. 

Should you read these compelling thinkers, and they are compelling, you would see little evidence much less acknowledgement of the spiritual side of man's character, and how vital it is to life and living.  Man to them is a thing in a system with the focus on the system and how man is likely to behave in that system. 

In the postmodern world, the world of tomorrow, a world with a state of mind and attitude that is still in its formational stage, a world that I came back from South Africa to discover in 1969, a world that saw the end of the "American Century" some thirty years early," a world of old ideologies declining -- that includes all the great religions -- and new belief systems emerging of popular culture led by the likes of Dylan and Madonna, while the world was declared flat and nations reduced to a "global village."  None of it was true, but it sounded as if it were true, and so it became part of the lexicon.

The dystopia novels of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1924), Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932) and George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1949) are now coming to fruition as the nightmare they predicted.

To be fair, there is hope if philosophers such as Michel Foucault can see their ideas penetrate the categorization of humanity into such stereotypical groups such as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the upper class, middle class, and the poor. 

My atomistic, individualistic nature has been subjected to such categorization by those who know me and those who think they know me. 

What I am and what I have always been is a poor boy from Clinton, Iowa who has read a lot, seen and done a lot, but has never abandoned his roots, while having the propensity to go against the grain of popular beliefs.

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