Shoot the messenger

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In olden times, if the messenger brought bad news, chances were good he's pay for it with his life. It wasn't his fault the news was bad, but he paid the price anyway. In retrospect, we considered it a grave injustice, but we practice it everyday ourselves.

One of the underlying themes of my past few posts has been just this: our willing to shoot the messenger. In any discussion of a current event or current situation, the easiest, quickest, and most devastating response is to simply call the source into question. There are not a few people who actually consider themselves serious, critical thinkers who have nothing better to offer in the way of discussion. This is unfortunate.

The English philosopher R.G. Collingwood has been my role model for this. In his brief, but extremely readable, fascinating autobiography (called An Autobiography, in English; the German title was Denken, "Thinking"), he relates how most of his colleagues belonged to the Logical Positivist or Analytic schools of thought (the former being focused, according to itself as the logical clarification of thought, whereby formal grammars and logic play a dominant role; the latter being influenced to a great extent by mathematics and the natural sciences, allegedly focusing on narrow themes and logical precision ... that is to say, it's more a style than type of thinking). He himself fit in much better with what is often characterized as Continental Philosophy, in particular Hermeneutics (the art and science of interpretation and understanding). In their monthly department meetings, they would present their latest findings and debate them. Their biggest fear, apparently, was that Collingwood would want to take their side. He believed the best way to figure out whether a position or argument was valuable was to use it as conscientiously as possible. To do this, one has to delve into it and understand how it works. Too often, Collingwood revealed that the argument was a mere house of cards. You're right. He didn't have a lot of friends in the faculty. People who are looking for truth often don't have a lot of friends.

I miss guys like Collingwood. One of my two best friends from college feeds me regularly with articles and op-eds from publications that I would most likely never dream of reading. But, since he's a friend, and I respect him, of course, I seriously engage these readings and we discuss them, sometimes lively and heatedly, but in a very rewarding and satisfying manner. I always learn something, and often something important. He allows me to infuse a little of Collingwood's spirit into my own life. He does the same with the stuff I send him.

Unfortunately, my friend is pretty much one of a kind. I encounter far too many people who are busy building their own little bubbles in which to exist. I don't know why, I can only surmise, and for the moment I believe that this behavior is so widespread because there are simply too many things wrong with our world. Keep your job; whatever you do, don't get fired; keep a low profile; arm yourself to the teeth, if necessary; don't get involved; don't get out of line; but whatever you do, don't think too seriously about what you're doing.

And the best way to keep that process going is to simply shoot whoever shows up with something you really don't want to hear.