Caveat Emptor

I’m troubled by the ease at which we’ve come to identify ourselves primarily as consumers. To be sure it’s a role we all play, an inescapable one given the capitalist system we live in – the world is our market place and we love to see ourselves perusing the aisles picking up deals and indulgences. We like to express our opinions with our buying power, and even the Supreme Court has ruled that money is a form of speech.

I get the seductive appeal of being a consumer; it allows us to fantasize great wealth and shopping sprees. When we think of ourselves as consumers we naturally think of ourselves as wealthy. On the flip side it makes us resent any restrictions on how we might extend the power of our wealth. “I don’t want MY tax dollars spent on: the homeless, health care, the military, farm subsidies, etc.” We stop thinking about our relationship with others as anything but something transactional, and commoditized.

But consumer is but one identity we share. Most of us are also workers – a role far drearier to be excited about or identify with. It usually causes us to think about ourselves on a lower rung of a hierarchy. Indeed, perhaps one of the only pleasure we indulge ourselves in as workers, is in complaining about our bosses and our jobs. Being a consumer allows one to think of being an entrepreneur, being one’s own boss, having a side hustle where you monetize your hobbies.

An unfortunate victim of the primacy of our consumer identity, seems to be our identity as a citizen. We’d rather not think about what our obligations might be to our community. If anything we start to redefine our communities in terms of our socioeconomic status and try to find ways to exclude others from the shared role a citizen.

At its core to be a citizen is to have a vote, an equal say in how our society should be run. But it is also a call to think outside ourselves, to think about what is best for all of us, the kind of place we want to live in.

As citizens we are the government, as consumers the government is just another provider of products and services. As citizens we are part of a greater good, as a consumer our selfishness is a primary virtue.

As we swap out thinking of ourselves as consumers instead of citizens we start to pervert notions of democracy. We talk of voting with our pocketbooks seldom acknowledging the inequality in the distribution of dollars to vote with. As consumers we are not equals.

Information itself becomes distorted. We talk of the market place of ideas and have this notion of the efficiency of the market place to root out bad ideas and misinformation. And yet marketing and advertising have made information “free” and truth has become more costly than fiction. As consumers we don’t consider the impact of bad information – caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. Perhaps that is the lesson we need to heed, as we become consumers instead of citizens. We need to scrutinize this product and understand exactly what we are buying into. Because, as a consumer, no one is looking out for you except yourself.

Women in Philosophy

I’ve been reading and following a lot of women philosophers lately. It’s like a treasure trove of original thought that’s been hidden in plain site. Some 35 years ago when I picked up my BA in philosophy, it was a male dominated discipline. In my 4 years of study – I don’t think I read one page of philosophy written by a woman. What’s worse is that it didn’t seem at all strange to me. I just (wrongly) presumed it to be an unfortunate artifact of the preceding decades if not centuries of male dominated history - women just didn’t have the chance to develop their thinking to the extent men have.

The real criminal thing about my presumption is that I never thought to question it. Philosophers are supposed to be skilled at asking challenging questions. But this one I was blind to. That is the very handicap of privilege – and the very reason why philosophy must belong to a diversity of philosophers.

My current journey started when I stumbled upon Carrie Jenkins’ What Love is. It struck me as something wholly new and original. I was excited that here was clear evidence that there is progress in philosophy. I was envious and found myself regretting that i didn’t pursue that academic career in philosophy. In her book she comments that the topic of “love” is often excluded from philosophy, and yet I distinctly remember at least one classroom discussion on Plato’s retelling of Aristophanes’ story of the two faced, 8 limbed proto-humans cloven by the gods to be forever in search of their other half. Seriously? This is what I got instead of Simone de Beauvoir?

Carrie Jenkin’s work led me to Skye Cleary’s Existentialism and Romantic Love which gave me my first taste of de Beauvoir and the realization that there were serious gaps in knowledge. Hazel Rowley’s Tête-á-Tête quickly followed and then, last year,  I finally picked up the Ethics of Ambiguity. For someone interested in both Ethics and Existentialism, I should have read this text some 30 years ago.

I also picked up Bell Hooks’ The Will to Change and was surprised to learn that she taught at my school 2 years after I graduated. What a sad near miss, how might things be different if I had a chance to sit in on one of her classes? Of course she headed the Women’s Studies department, so why would some white male philosophy student take a class on feminism? Yes, I am complicit in my own ignorance.

Last year I read Down Girl, by Kate Mann and was once again blown away by such originality of thought. After reading this I could no longer “not see” the systemic misogyny that weaves itself into so many places in our culture including philosophy and the patriarchal cannon of which I was once a student.

I’m trying to fix that now, filling the gaps in my own knowledge. I’ve also contributed to Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting’s project to publish a collection of women philosophers titled, The Philosopher Queens - at least one step to hopefully erode the traditional cannon.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Instagram have made me a student again. Sandy Grant’s posts give me topics to ponder as she explores some of my favorite realms of existentialism, mindfulness, and hedonism - in preparation for a book I can’t wait to read. Myisha Cherry is exploring prejudice and social justice in her podcast (and book). 

It is exciting to see so much happening in philosophy right now and I think the women that are breathing fresh life into this age old discipline.

Let's Dance

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Last night we saw Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, a great retelling of the classic story along with the delightful twists that Matthew Bourne is renown for. Again I was transfixed by the ease in which dance can be some completely narrative – to be sure, staging, set design, and music all played a role in this endeavor but all of them without the use of words.

This got me thinking me thinking again about a few of my recent musings, one being the role of language in Philosophy, the other that of narrative. So often philosophy is steeped in language, and specifically the language of words and definitions, indeed there is even a philosophy of language that strives to eliminate many of the problems of philosophy by creating a precise and unambiguous language. The question this sparks in me is whether philosophy can exist without language – or more precisely, can philosophy exist without words?

So with Matthew Bourne and the ballet fresh in my mind I wonder if one could create a dance version of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Furthermore what would that dance look like? I know you can tell a story in dance, is philosophy just another story?

A quick trip to the internet reveals this Ted Talk by John Bohannon, who has encouraged scientists to use dance to express their ideas in a program called Dance your PhD. All I need now I a willing choreographer. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave might be an easy start, or even the Trolley Problem. Perhaps this idea is not so outlandish after all?

Which brings me back to narrative, or more precisely the primacy of narrative. Perhaps language exists in order to tell our stories. That’s probably too broad a stroke; there are things we need to communicate outside a story – presumably. But even if I want to tell someone that it is raining, there is still seems to be a narrative context implied: you should prepare yourself by taking an umbrella, that your picnic is now ruined, that you’ll have to stay indoors.

Perhaps it's just a neurological quirk of our brains, that while we can focus on a fact, it rarely does so without placing it in a context of how we might use it, fight it, hide it, or otherwise use it to our advantage in advancing our own personal narratives. Those are thoughts for another day.

Let’s Dance

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

   - Friedrich Nietzsche