In Other Words

An intelligent man can get him self out of problems that a wise man would never have gotten himself into.

When I studied my small bit of philosophy, I was told that the trick to finding the right answers was in asking the right questions. If nobody asks the right questions, then nobody will end up getting the right answers and thus, we are left without progress. After all, progress depends on us answering questions. That is what science is all about.

In normal society, it is the people who find the answers that get celebrated. The people that discover the cure, the people that make the gadgets. When you get inside the group that makes these discoveries, however, you often find that our heroes' heroes were the people that managed to start people on the road to finding that cure and that discovery. Those are the real geniuses, especially if those people managed to foresee the problem before it truly became a problem.

Of course the average person on the street couldn't care less that one person helped make something not become a problem. The problem hasn’t cropped up in their lives, so for them it is unimportant. It is only when the problem has hit them and dragged them down that the problem solver is hailed as a hero.

Bugger the men and women who avoided major wars by finding peaceful solutions. Laud instead those people who then go about guns blazing, winning the wars that could not be avoided. Never mind that the first saved more lives then the second could ever end. Never mind that the first managed to preserve peace while the second only committed murder.

As a species, we constantly get ourselves into situation where we then have to work damn hard to get back out again. We’re mighty intelligent, but our wisdom is severely lacking. It’s because we ignore the right questions until it’s almost too late, until they can no longer safely be ignored.

Look at our environment, look at our oil dependency, look at the growing poverty gaps between rich and poor.

Here’s a question for you: Why do we have so many more famous basketball stars than famous philosophers? Philosophy has been around for millennia, while basketball has only been around for a few decades or centuries. The first tries to answer the fundamental questions of our existence, while the later boils down to putting a piece of rubber through a metal hoop again and again.

It’s a combination of mass apathy and overall short-sightedness that blinds those of us that could find the answers, channeling their cleverness into money making pursuits, rather than finding the right questions. Their skills end up being channelled into building another resource consuming gadget we don’t really need, rather than the less profitable gadgets we really do need.

It’s a situation where governments are so opaque that even if we do care and really do want to know, we can’t (and shouldn’t) understand. It’s a situation where institutions don’t want criticism and debate, for fear of being wrong. It’s a situation where the schools aren’t trying to teach scepticism, but agreeability. Where teacher are expected to teach obedience, not doubt, where learning by rote is awarded higher marks than imagination is.

We’ve jumped off a cliff and we’re flapping our arms, certain that the wind rushing by our ears means we’re flying. We’re too short sighted to realise that what’s rushing towards us is hard and solid. Like addicts, we’re too confident that we can change our ways before its too late. Like the alcoholic in the corner bar we’re almost comical, except for the hairline cracks of desperation all over our brazen loud-mouthed disbelief.

How much longer do we have before Mother Nature puts on that ‘closing time’ song that we’re all secretly dreading to hear? What will we do when the bar closes and we realise that beyond the front door is nothing but an abyss? Will our children hate us when they look back at our society and how it was driven purely by consumption and waste?

Will our children be able to even have children?

posted by Symbol @ 25.8.04