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LIAISON magazine, volume 0, number 1
Volume 0, Number 1 Electronic Edition January 1991
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| A journal of social, political, |
| ethical, and environmental concerns |
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Created and Damian T. Lloyd and
produced by C. Anthony Linklater
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CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE
Call for submissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 2
SOE--From The Outside Looking In . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 4
by Stan Rowe
A New Manner Of Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 6
by Damian T. Lloyd
All essays are copyright © 1991 by the respective contributors.
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 2
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ATTENTION WRITERS/ARTISTS/PHOTOGRAPHERS
*Liaison* magazine is seeking quality, innovative writing, drawings,
and photographs for publication.
We are a fledgling independent publication, endorsed by no
political party or religious denomination. We hope to provide
ongoing discussion of social, political, ethical, and environmental
concerns, a discourse that challenges the scope of our
communication today. We wish to give people the chance to address
the issues that affect our lives, and thus become a tool for that
communication.
The deadline for submissions to the May 1991 issue is April 10,
1991. The theme for this issue is "Law". Submissions may take any
position or deal with any aspect of, or issue relating to, this
topic; we expect thought-provoking pieces, outlining new or
different approaches or carefully considering established
positions. Of course, we will always examine submissions on any
topic or field of endeavour; we want to know what you consider the
most pressing issues facing our world today and how the problems or
questions surrounding these issues may be solved.
We concentrate on essays displaying critical thought, but also
accept innovative fiction, drama and poetry (humorous pieces are
always welcome); we ask that you write for an intelligent but non-
specialist audience. We also seek photographs, drawings, cartoons,
and other items of graphical interest.
Essays should be typed, double-spaced, on 8.5 x 11 inch paper, with
one inch margins on all sides, and generally should not exceed 5000
words (although submissions of any length will be considered).
Please ensure your name, address, and phone number appear at the
head of your text. Submissions are also accepted electronically,
on MS-DOS 360K floppy disk (ASCII or WordPerfect format only). If
photos or artwork are available to accompany your essay, please
include them.
Photographs submitted should be large, clear black-and-white
prints. Please include the appropriate credits and releases.
Artwork submitted should be clear black-and-white originals, or
good quality photocopies. Shading or wash is acceptable. Please
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 3
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contact us about colour cover artwork.
We will respond to all submissions within four weeks of receiving
them. Please enclose a self-addressed envelope and sufficient
postage if you want your work returned. Although all reasonable
care will be taken, we cannot be responsible for unsolicited
submissions.
Payment for submissions is tendered in two installments: half upon
acceptance and half upon publication. Essays earn a rate of three
cents per word; payment for photographs and artwork will be
negotiated upon acceptance. Creators retain copyright to their
work.
Please address all submissions or enquiries to:
Liaison magazine
Department 105
Box 236, Station E
Victoria, BC
V8W 2M6
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 4
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[Editor's note: This article is reprinted from the *State Of The
Environment Reporting* newsletter, no. 4, July 1989, published by
the SOE Reporting Branch of Environment Canada. To add your name
to the mailing list, contact: SOE Newsletter, SOE Reporting
Branch, Canadian Wildlife Service, Conservation and Protection,
Environment Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0H3.]
SOE--FROM THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN
An essay by
Stan Rowe
Marshall McLuhan is credited with the insight that environment
tends to be invisible unless transcended in time or in space. "We
don't know who discovered water," he said, "but we're pretty sure
it wasn't a fish."
Humans discovered their environment with the first outerspace
photos that revealed the ecosphere as a blue, cloud-swathed globe
in whose watery skin various protoplasmic bits and pieces are
enveloped. Suddenly we saw ourselves as a part of it: self-
conscious, deep-air animals.
How would today's science look if we had seen this vision
first? Just suppose that this vision, this reality, had preceded
the development of today's science. Suppose we had been given the
outside perspective to see the Earth whole before, immersed in it
and feeling around like the six blind men, we had decided what was
important. Would we not have recognised the ecosphere as the unit,
the whole thing to be valued and studied? Then we would have
analyzed it into its sectoral components--atmosphere, water bodies,
continental platforms, plants, and animals--to understand better
its marvellous functional unity.
Unfortunately, submerged in it, we were unaware of the whole.
We took the parts to be the real entities, things-in-themselves,
starting with humans and working out from there. To us, the most
important objects were those with properties similar to ours--other
organisms. Later, it was forced on our attention that various
peripheral odds and ends were somewhat important too: climate,
soils, sediments, salt water, fresh water, surface and sub-surface
geological strata. These we tagged with the vague name
"environment", meaning that which surrounds something of greater
importance, namely organisms like us.
By the time we got this view from outside, our disciplines
were already set in cement, our universities and governments
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 5
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departmentalized, assured of certain certainties. In hundreds of
thousands of books and learned treatises, the fragments of the
ecosphere have been confirmed by the savants as self-standing
entities. "Soils are natural bodies." "The proper study of
mankind is man." "Endangered plants and animals must be
preserved."
Today, ecologically educated, we know intellectually that the
parts we study in the disciplines are indeed parts. What we call
atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere have no
evolutional or functional reality except in our heads. But we
haven't assimilated the facts; we don't know them in the way that
counts: in our hearts.
It remains difficult to accept the implications: that the real
thing is the ecosphere, one of whose properties is the phenomenon
called life. Life is not a property of bundles of protoplasm nor
of complex protein molecules; it is a property of the skin of the
planet and of the ecological systems that it comprises.
The ecosphere, the world, is the Unit, the Real Thing, the
most perfect ecological system, evolving, adjusting, self-
repairing. It is layered, consisting of an air layer lying on a
water-earth layer with organisms sandwiched at the solar-energized
interface. It is a three-dimensional entity.
One of the tools of human understanding is reduction,
anatomizing an object of interest into its parts. Into what parts
should the ecosphere be dissected to aid comprehension?
If it is accepted that the three-dimensional ecosphere is the
unit of importance, and that life is not a phenomenon that exists
apart from it, then anatomizing the ecosphere into three-
dimensional, sectoral ecosystems whose components include plants
and animals will provide simplified but almost complete homologues
of the Real Thing. Volumetric ecosystems, chunks of the ecosphere,
can very nearly exist on their own, like terraria and aquaria. No
way can plants and animals do that!
Given that we have begun to accept the ecosphere as the Real
Thing, reporting on the state of the environment must deal with
comprehensible units. While it is still important to report on
sectors of the environment, the changes and quality of each should
be described as ecosphere chunks to which Canadian environmental
stakeholders relate. Areas such as the Saint Lawrence River Basin,
the Great Lakes Watershed, the grasslands of the Saskatchewan River
drainage are being used.
Using an analogy, people who want to purchase a home will
examine each room and section in turn but will make their decision
on the overall home environment. Even though the house has a
perfect kitchen and bathrooms, it will not be considered highly if
there are no windows and the roof leaks. The earth is our home; we
should evaluate its state in the same fashion.
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 6
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A NEW MANNER OF THINKING
An essay by
Damian T. Lloyd
If mankind is to survive, we shall require
a substantially new manner of thinking.
-- Albert Einstein
For many years now, I and my friends have spent many a
pleasant evening indulging in the old-fashioned art of
conversation. We leave the television set off, put on some light
background music or maybe not, smoke a joint, and grapple with the
issues of our time, and of all time. We may lack formal
qualifications: we are not recognized psychologists, or
sociologists, or political scientists, theologians, economists, or
historians; and yet we are all of these. We are social critics.
We are--if it is not being too presumptuous or pretentious to claim
the title--philosophers.
Philosophy lies at the core of our being: the questions it
raises and attempts to answer are intrinsic to our humanity,
present within us all regardless of race, culture, or station in
life. Who has not felt, at some point in life, that gnawing in the
guts, that cold lump in the chest--the almost physical need to know
why? That person, I submit, is less than fully human.
Children are instinctive philosophers: "Why is the sky blue?"
Not how is it blue; science handles that quite nicely, with
theories of spectrum and waveforms and such. There is an elusive
element in the question; the best answer can always be confounded
by the child's "But why?"
Our teenage years are loaded with philosophical angst. They
are indeed
that wildly unpredictable period of life between
puberty and the early twenties when huge personality
changes can take place in a matter of months, talent
and beauty appear--or disappear--overnight, when
minds are at their most inquisitive and least
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 7
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controllable. (1)
It is perhaps the very process of establishing one's own
social and sexual identity that makes these questions vital: "Who
am I?" "Why am I?" "Is there anyone else out there, or am I
alone?" Teenage angst is not really taken seriously by those who
have survived it; "puppy love" and other "growing pains" are just
"natural for your age", all "part of becoming a man/woman". These
pat answers and labels do nothing to address the very real
anxieties and questions. People often speak dismissively of
"normal adolescent philosophizing", once they themselves are too
old and pre-occupied to bother with questions of existence and
order.
The younger of my two sisters is in grade ten now. She lives
at home with our parents, so we only see each other for a couple of
weeks at Christmas. Last Christmas she opened up to me her then-
fourteen-year-old psyche, allowing me a glimpse of her soul. She
told me every excruciating detail of how unreasonable Mommy and
Daddy are being about curfews and dress codes, and how they don't
understand her at all. She described the activities of her peer
group--her friends and enemies, and their characters and
relationships. She confessed that she went through a brief period
of induced vomiting (she can apparently throw up at will) because
she thought people would like her better if she was thinner. She
asked me endless questions about sex. She conveyed to me a feeling
of being very alone, understood by and understanding nobody,
including herself, and feeling very lost. She reminded me of
myself, and almost everybody else I've talked with, at that age.
This period of intense and personal questioning and
examination--both inner and outer--is something we are supposed to
outgrow. I myself am now supposedly an adult. I have graduated
from high school, attended university, and am now part of the
workforce. Part of the flag of society has been passed to me, and
I must bear and uphold it. Yet I feel the same as I did in high
school. I am still that person, and the world is still a large and
complex place, not fully understood, frustratingly eluding my
complete comprehension as it did when I was in grade ten. When do
I begin to feel like an adult--grown up, mature?
It is philosophy that allows us to tackle these issues, to
address that void within us we attempt to fill with CD players and
low golf scores and money and attention and lovers and power and
celebrity divorces and more money. It is philosophy that allows us
to explore ourselves and our universe, to attempt to answer these
questions that are humanity's greatest curse and ultimate treasure.
We may finally try and answer the "Why?" of the child within
----------
(1) Tony Hendra: *Going Too Far*, p. 243
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 8
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us all.
Emmanual Kant says that
Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the
status of "immaturity". And by "immaturity", he
means a certain state of our will that makes us
accept someone else's authority to lead us in areas
where the use of reason is called for. (2)
Everywhere in our life today we see people abrogating the use
of their own minds, swallowing whole and unquestioned the party
line of some third person. Unarguably, this makes the day-to-day
business of life easier to get through. Thinking requires effort,
and accepting another mind's version of the world prevents me from
having to spend the time and trouble in forming my own; "the
complexity of modern life makes people yearn for the simple
enduring values that motivate them on an emotional or spiritual
level," (3) and thus encourages this acceptance. How much easier
it is to say "I am a Catholic," or "I am a Socialist," accepting
the answers these orthodoxies offer to our questions, than to spend
the time in study and contemplation necessary to arrive at my own
spiritual or political outlook.
This fundamentalism, whether a positive embracing of "someone
else's authority", or a negative passivity and apathy (simply not
bothering and abrogating our own authority by default), is the
"immaturity" that prevents our Enlightenment. Whether we like
somebody else thinking for us, or whether we don't care enough to
demand for ourselves that authority of mind which is ours, we are
limiting our lives to less than full humanity. It is our duty as
human beings to throw off this yoke.
And yet we must be careful of going too far, and descending
into mere reactionism.
An issue that's hot right now is "the environment". (Anyone
remember "world hunger"? I sure am glad all those rock stars
solved that problem.) More people than ever before are recycling
their household garbage; companies now brag in their advertisements
that their products are "environment friendly". Everyone seems to
be awakening to an increased awareness of our ecological
----------
(2) Paul Rabinow, ed.: *The Foucault Reader*, p. 34
(3) Michael Adams, president of Environics Research Group,
quoted in "Face Value" in *Saturday Night*, May 1990, p. 15
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 9
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responsibilities.
I count myself as one of the supporters of an increased
awareness of ecological systems and our effects on them. We can't
see ourselves as completely separate and apart from nature when we
must live within it. No decent, reasonable, caring person can
argue against the necessity of considering the environment in
decisions that could affect it. Yet as P.J. O'Rourke has said:
That's what bothers me. Mass movements are always a
worry. There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the
lemming migration about any overlarge gathering of
like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous
their cause.
[...]
A mass movement that's correct is especially
dangerous when it's right about a problem that needs
fixing. Then all those masses in the mass movement
have to be called to action, and that call to action
better be exciting, or the masses will lose interest
and wander off to play arcade games. (4)
And what does a mass movement require to motivate its members
to take action? Simple: "an enemy, someone to hate". (5) Thus:
The Luddite side of the environmental movement would
have us destroy or eschew technology--throw down the
ladder by which we climbed. (6)
This type of reactionism is an outgrowth of the same one-
stroke quick-fix mentality that proposes portable ozone screens as
a solution to the problem of a depleted ozone layer. To toss aside
technology, as many "green anarchists" propose, is to set up
opposing battle lines, defining ourselves by its absence. Such an
attitude may make us feel good, but it is not conducive to solving
the problem: valid aspects of the establishment are discarded along
with the invalid, and our energy is directed across the battle
lines rather than to solving the problem that lies moaning in the
middle of No-Man's Land. Mindlessly applied technology will not
----------
(4) P.J. O'Rourke: "The Greenhouse Affect" in *Rolling
Stone* 581, p. 38
(5) Ibid, p. 38
(6) Ibid, p. 39
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 10
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save us; however, "Genuine hard-got knowledge is required," (7) and
science and technology can help provide us with the raw data we
need to make informed decisions.
"Science is just a dogmatic religion" is one of
those ideas, like "Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's
plays" or "the gods were actually astronauts from
other planets" or "the Rockefellers (Jews, Pope,
Trilateral Commission) control the world", that are
terribly seductive to a certain kind of mind. They
generate a feeling of liberation from orthodox
structures that can be quite exhilarating, but it is
a false liberation, and that way lies madness. (8)
Reactionism is not a move to freedom, it is the shadow of
slavery. The original hated orthodoxy still defines our horizons,
now by its absence rather than its presence. A reactionist
attitude is not a true Enlightenment--we are still allowing some
else's authority to define our world for us, to take the place of
our own minds.
As in all things, balance is essential. We mustn't throw the
baby out with the bathwater, and a soundly critical eye doesn't
mean abandoning completely an entire intellectual discipline
without examining it for jewels. Technology is our saviour, but
technology developed and applied with conscience and forethought.
Throughout the history of our development so far, we have been
governed by our basic biological urges: eat, excrete, reproduce the
species, etc.
We have the same physiological needs as any other animal: we
must consume food, we must sleep, we must shelter ourselves from
the elements. All these needs may be grouped together under
survival needs--physical requirements for the continued existence
of the individual organism, and as such of primary importance for
survival.
Beyond individual survival, we find species survival. This is
necessarily of immediate secondary importance; if, for one reason
or another, existing organisms cannot survive, simply bringing more
of them into the world is counter-productive. Species survival
encompasses not just the desire to have sex, but the desire to have
a mate and offspring--to nurture and be nurtured, to love and be
----------
(7) Ibid, p. 39
(8) R. Fiore, in a reply to a letter from Norm Breyfogle in
*The Comics Journal* no. 135, p. 36
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 11
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loved--and the desire for community.
And beyond both the individual and the collective we find that
which connects them: philosophy. The last step of Abraham Maslow's
"hierarchy of needs" is "self-actualization needs". These are the
needs we must fulfill to define ourselves to ourselves: the arts
and crafts we pursue, the religions and politics we practice; the
philosophy we embrace.
Philosophy is the most useless thing in this physical
existence. It will not feed us, clothe us, warm us, make people
love us. Yet it is essential to us, the most important part of our
existence, and its lack makes worthless all of our physical
creature comforts.
Those of us who have not managed to lose ourselves in careers
and the "relationship" game and the day-to-day business of life--we
poor immature, unfocussed souls--have perhaps a greater luxury in
questioning ourselves. We have no vested interest in justifying
ourselves and our situations; questioning "the system" does not
call into question everything we have worked for and believe in.
It might seem a shame that the highest reward our lives offer today
is to become too preoccupied and busy to question ourselves, to
become so involved with getting through our lives that we don't
have time to live them, we don't wonder why--that we have no need
for philosophy.
I have, so far, been waving around the term "philosophy" like
some sort of holy mantra, that will assume meaning my osmosis if I
repeat it enough. What do I mean by the word? Am I some over-
educated boob whose idea of a good conversation is "Socrates is a
man"?
Philosophy itself has a reputation as something deadly boring,
practised by Greeks who died thousands of years ago and kept alive
today by high-brow academics for their own perverse and elitist
amusement. I have taken a couple of courses in philosophy myself--
my other sister has a bachelor's degree in the subject--and can
attest that it's hard to stay awake through a whole class (a few
times I thought I noticed the professor nodding off). A large part
of the blame for this can be put on the manner of teaching, both
generally (I shall grapple with the issue of education in a future
essay) and specifically to the subject. We did not study
philosophy; we studied philosophers: their lives, their characters,
their teachers, their antecedents, their influence, their style,
their arguments; but we never got around to examining their ideas.
While it is most certainly important to locate ideas in their
proper historical context, one must know what those ideas are, not
just how they are put down on paper, for the whole thing to have
meaning.
Philosophy is much more general, more far-reaching, than many
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 12
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people might assume. Indeed, "Philosophy in the full sense is only
man thinking [...]". (9)
In his introduction to the second edition of *Perspectives In
Philosophy* (10), Robert N. Beck supplied the following definition,
which is worth quoting at length:
Looking back over [...its] history, we discover that
philosophy has attempted to do four distinguishable
though interrelated things. It has sought to work
out some inclusive conception of the universe in all
its aspects, including man's place in it. Here
philosophy has been synthetic. Making use of the
beliefs of common sense and the results of science,
and adding to them the insights of our moral,
aesthetic, and religious experiences, it has
undertaken to "see life steadily and see it whole".
It has also been speculative, advancing hypotheses
that seem, at least, to transcend the deliverances
of ordinary experience. To put it briefly,
philosophy in this activity is the attempt to give a
comprehensive theory of reality as a whole.
A second philosophical activity has been called
technically "phenomenological". Here the interest
of the philosopher has been not so much speculative
as descriptive, and descriptive in a complete and,
at least initially, uninterpreted sense. Many
facets of our experience are not immediately
obvious, and some are neither clear to common sense
nor studied by the natural sciences. Still others
may be so muddied by inherited beliefs and
interpretations that the philosopher feels obliged
to return to the data, to the facts themselves.
Facts must be revealed, the implicit made explicit,
and the misinterpreted or uninterpreted brought
forward for examination.
Besides these two activities, there has been
yet a third that, unlike the others, is close to the
etymology of "philosophy". Philosophers have
sometimes tried to provide not only a vision of the
world in which we live, but standards and guides for
individual and social action as well. The
principles of right and wrong, the ideals of
----------
(9) William James: "Philosophy And Its Critics" in
*Perspectives In Philosophy*, p. 12
(10) On page 1, to be precise.
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associative life, the meaning of the good life--such
normative concerns have been central to the philosopher's
search for "wisdom".
In pursuit of the real and the ideal,
synoptically and descriptively, philosophers have
usually engaged in a fourth activity that we shall
call analysis. Perhaps less exciting, yet essential
to the philosophic spirit, analysis has included a
critical assessment of the assumptions or pre-
suppositions and of the methods upon which common
sense, the sciences, and even philosophy rely.
Analytic inquiries have also been directed toward
key terms like "real", "true", "good", "matter",
"mind", "space", and "time", which play a central
role in all systematic thinking. Here the
philosopher--whatever his ultimate goal may be--is
simply searching for fundamental clarity and
understanding.
But why would people undertake this? Ah--why is it precisely;
"why" and "how" and "what" and "who" and "where" and "when"--
Rudyard Kipling's six noble serving men.
We see these questions echoed in our every construct.
Religion tries to provide one total, all-encompassing explanation,
attempting to answer all these questions with one holistic
framework. Art and mythology make our inner questions explicit,
rendering consciously our unconscious (and subconscious)
grapplings. The fields of scientific inquiry quest constantly for
new data to aid us in making our decisions, answering our
questions.
Nor is philosophy immune from its own scrutiny. Why we need
to know why is also a topic of concern.
We have reached a McLuhan-esque point in our physical
evolution: the world is now one community, one village--we have
only to pick up any newspaper to read about events in Iraq or the
Soviet Union on the front page right next to an article on the
latest building torched by our own friendly neighbourhood arsonist.
Technological advances in computers, television, telephones,
satellites, highways, and other globe-spanning technical jungle
drums have presented an unprecedented highway for public discourse--
for people to communicate. We may not meet them each day, but
there's a lot of people in our neighbourhood.
Our increased communicative abilities may assuage our
collective loneliness angst; we may finally be able to assure
ourselves that we are not alone, that there are other people out
there in the world.
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Which is not to propose a hippy-dippy togetherness utopia,
where we find we have no real differences when we sit down with our
enemy and chat. People will continue to have differences of
opinion, creed, worldview, and to argue otherwise is to deny the
existence of individual quirks and idiosyncrasies. Richard Nixon's
point is applicable also to individuals:
If we can just get to know and understand each
other, runs the argument, we will find that we
actually have no basic differences. In reality,
nations are different, and their interests do
differ. Friendship treaties sealed with handshakes
and toasted with champagne will not eliminate these
differences. The best we can do is to learn to live
with our differences rather than dying over them.
(11)
We do not want to homogenize all the Earth's disparate
cultures and groups into one "world citizen". We don't want to
conscript people into the "correct values", even if we are sure
that they are the correct values. I'm sure everyone who has tried
has been convinced of that. It is conceivable (in fact,
inevitable) that at some point two persons may disagree, their
interests in conflict. We cannot expect them every time to
compromise right down the middle any more than we would expect one
to give in completely. Consensus cannot be imposed from without;
it is a term that describes an internal and occurring phenomenon.
Enlightenment does not promise to be easy to attain. There is
not only the difficult of the attaining, but the necessity of
constantly evaluating our progress to determine if it is real. We
must, for the first time, define ourselves positively, not
negatively: we must say what we are rather than what we are not,
what our position is rather than what it is not, what we stand for
instead of what we stand against.
We must each of us take responsibility for our own
intellectual life. We have a duty to inform ourselves, to keep an
eye on our leaders, our gurus, ourselves. We must not accept
someone else's view of the world without question, objection, or
modification. We must all, each individually, attain Enlightenment
for us all to be completely free.
This manner of thinking may be the next step in our progress
as a species, what C. Anthony Linklater has termed our "conscious
evolution": that which allows us to unify and address our
individual and our collective identities. The ability--the luxury--
to address our needs of self-actualization does not guarantee that
----------
(11) Richard Nixon: *In The Arena*, p. 348
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 15
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we will attain Enlightenment, but it provides the chance for us to
do so, if we want to and if we work at it.
This is not an easy thing to do individually, nor a painless
process to endure collectively. An informed revolution is, after
all, a dangerous one; yet an informed revolution is ultimately the
only successful one.
In accordance with our theory, revolution means
construction, but it also always implies
destruction. Revolution requires the demolition of
all that is obsolete, stagnant and hinders fast
progress. Without demolition, you cannot clear the
site for new construction. (12)
But we don't need total destruction. "Prove all things; hold
fast that which is good." (13) We must discard what we find
useless, but not without careful scrutiny, and a vigilant eye on
the trash heap for any jewels we might have overlooked on first
examination.
With calls for increased examination of issues, internal and
external, with calls for greater public discourse, an I proposing
a world of ivory-tower intellectuals, arguing ourselves into an
ever more rarefied and esoteric atmosphere? Is this a call for a
complete, impartial, and secular rationality? Is life's quest
after all a sterile project?
Enlightenment is not unemotional and passionless, a mistake
too frequently made:
From its abstractionist posture,
intellectualism typically conveys the impression
that it is chiefly or only from passion that
rationality can suffer; the folk-wisdom among
rationalists is that emotion is the primary
pollutant obstructing rational processes. But it is
also, and far more pertinently in our age, from
apathy that rationality suffers: when people do not
care enough to think about received opinions, when
they have no inherent drive to dissociate themselves
from the dogmas and biases of their age, when their
own freedom and the transcendence of the truth mean
so little to them that they will not endure the
painful task of self-reflection, when the very scale
----------
(12) Mikhail Gorbachev: *Perestroika*, p. 51
(13) I Thessalonians, 5:12, from a little book entitled *The
Bible*
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 16
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or profundity of problems the modern age has generated
invite a defeatist attitude, then indeed it is truer than
ever what Kierkegaard wrote a century and a half ago:
"What the age needs is passion," not barbaric but
sublimated energy. Hegel's truism about history--that
"nothing great is ever accomplished without passion"--
explains a great deal about our effete culture, our
sterile education and stagnant politics. Like Marx and
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hegel wrote out of a
prodigious reservoir of passion that did not in the least
prevent them from being critical and rational. In our
present era--wracked by a morbid boredom and an
unshakeable conviction that there is nothing worth
learning and preserving--I believe the lesson is clear.
Difficult and risky as it may be, heat as well as light
is called for. (14)
Or as Howard Beal said in *Network* (15):
I don't know what to do about the depression and the
inflation and the Russians and the crime in the
street. All I know is that first, you've got to get
mad! You've got to say, "I'm a human being, God
damn it! My life has value!"
This, then, is the call I am crying: a call to a new manner of
thinking, each of us using our individual consciousnesses to pursue
our own singular individual and the collective common good. We
need to examine every issue, its component parts and united whole,
with every faculty available to us. We need to exercise
intelligence, discretion, and--yes--moral judgement about what we
find. We need to become Enlightened.
"[...] Enlightenment must be considered a process in which men
participate collectively and as an act of courage to be
accomplished personally." (16) Pursuing Enlightenment necessitates
a change in our manner of thinking, but it is an evolutionary one
rather than revolutionary. We must outgrow not only our dependence
on unexamined orthodoxies which keeps us "immature", but also the
reactionism which is the unifying agent of a mass movement and
----------
(14) Kenneth Smith, in a reply to a letter from Fred Butzen
in *The Comics Journal* no. 137, p. 39
(15) A 1976 film from United Artists
(16) *The Foucault Reader*, p. 34
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 17
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likewise keeps us from Enlightenment, and the boredom and apathy
which lead us to allow others to usurp our own authority and human
dignity.
So where is all this florid prose leading us? What do I hope
to accomplish?
I am a citizen of this society, by chance and by choice. By
its own terms, I have a moral duty to try and improve it. Said
Albert Schweitzer, "Whoever is spared personal pain must feel
himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others."
Not that I claim to have been completely spared personal pain.
Nor do I want to present myself as a Painfully Earnest Citizen,
crying Together We Must Stand and believing Love Will Conquer All.
The problems, issues, and questions we face are--as they always
have been--too complex to be encapsulated in the most well-meaning
platitude or catchphrase. (17)
This is what I propose to do in future essays: to explore
issues, to ask questions and attempt to answer them, to offer to
the public eye my own modest attempts at thinking. Every point I
have touched on in this essay, and many others--in short, anything
that concerns me--I will raise and discuss. The spring from which
my ideas flow shall be my own passion. I propose, in the fullest
sense of the word, to philosophize.
I invite you to accompany me.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
WORKS CITED
Robert N. Beck: "[Introduction To Part I]" in *Perspectives In
Philosophy*, second edition; pp. 1-3. Edited by Robert N. Beck.
Published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969.
R. Fiore: "[Reply to a letter from Norm Breyfogle]" in *The Comics
Journal* number 135, April 1990; p. 36. Published by Fantagraphics
Books, 1990.
Mikhail Gorbachev: *Perestroika--New Thinking For Our Country And
The World*. Published by Harper & Row, 1987.
----------
(17) A good example of doing just this is Nancy Reagan's
famous "Just Say No" campaign against drugs, reducing a complex and
multi-layered social, civic, and criminal problem to a single
banality.
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January 1991 LIAISON Page 18
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Charlotte Gray: "Face Value" in *Saturday Night*, volume 105, number
4, May 1990. Published by Saturday Night Magazine, 1990.
Tony Hendra: *Going Too Far*. Published by Doubleday, 1987.
William James: "Philosophy And Its Critics" in *Perspectives In
Philosophy*, second edition; pp. 10-13. Edited by Robert N. Beck.
Published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969.
-----: *Network*. Written by Paddy Chayefsky; directed by Sidney
Lumet. Released by United Artists, 1976.
Richard Nixon: *In The Arena*. Published by Simon and Schuster,
1990.
P.J. O'Rourke: "The Greenhouse Affect" in *Rolling Stone* 581, June
28, 1990; pp. 38-39, 88. Published by Straight Arrow Publishers,
1990.
Paul Rabinow, ed.: *The Foucault Reader*. Published by Pantheon
Books, 1984.
Kenneth Smith: "[Reply to a letter from Fred Butzen]" in *The
Comics Journal* number 137, September 1990. Published by
Fantagraphics Books, 1990.
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