Something Heady To Get Us Started

Here's some "light" reading, thoughts inspired by a re-reading of some of John Ralston Saul's books that I thought might be helpful, especially if you're feeling distressed at not being able to categorize his politics or summarize his philosophy...

Just as methods have no conscience as to the ends to which they are applied, so too is the written word without compunction as to its reader or conscious of its affects on that reader. The spoken, which is the living reality for which the written serves only as image, chooses its audience and is animated, augmented, pruned, enriched and directed by the Other. The word as spoken is shared, dynamic, social thought. The written word insofar as it represents thought at all is entirely dependant on its being discovered, and read attentively, by the right reader. Without the possibility of modulating form, revising or repeating content in response to the reader, the written word is at best a method for generating thought in another. And, like all methods, it can be abused. Socrates, via Plato, deformed humanism into ideology. Jesus, once written, justified genocide around the world. Adam Smith is cited in defense of corporatism, the modern euphemism for Fascism.

So what would Socrates have said about modern communication technology? What was it about the written word that kept him from writing, and do all our other inventions for sharing knowledge suffer from the same defects? Had he been a mathematician, he’d have no compunctions about registering his equations, formulas and proofs. Had his interest been history, he’d not have insisted that the catalog of events, expositions of motivation and personality be restricted to the memorized lines of players and poets. In his time, reading was codified speech, much closer to its auditory origins than today's silent prose, and meant to be read aloud, even where the audience consisted only of the reader.

Socrates wasn’t a philosopher in the modern sense of the word. Plato, yes; Plato had an agenda, ideas upon which he wished to build an ideology. But Socrates saw society differently. Civilization wasn't an autonomous agent designed by an elite of brilliant minds which could then be made to function by coordinating the actions of a well-trained citizenry or slave population. This synergistic system of human activity, this creative evolution of art and science, this life-sustaining and life-affirming something built from the raw nothing of Reason and unconscious Nature, was not and could not be designed, much less comprehended and controlled by man. Civilization was and is a process, and the best and only way of insuring its viability, its health and growth, is by nurturing doubt, examining and testing its assertions, rooting out and exposing its unspoken assumptions. Only by this constant dialog is civilization kept alive.

Socrates saw himself as the very antithesis of a heroic philosopher. He knew that if conscious humanity was to survive it must do so not by aligning itself with those lost gods of the unconscious and the ideologies that such allegiance requires, but rather by facing the void the gods left us; it is the same void, after all, that the gods themselves faced when they were offering their solutions, their creative yet increasingly catastrophic choices. Consciousness was thus, out of desperation, stolen from the gods and we now realize that, even equipped with their Reason, certainty still escapes us.

We can either deny doubt – manage it through fixed structures of false questions and fabricated answers as philosophers from Plato on have done, or, we can embrace doubt as our privileged inheritance, the very thing that sets us apart from unconscious nature and set out as Socrates did on the adventure of a lifetime: to know thyself.

Insofar as modern communication technology fosters doubt, arouses curiosity, rewards questions and encourages as valid and necessary the tentative and incomplete answers from which new questions emerge, it serves civilization. When, however, it is used, as the written word throughout history has too-often been used, as propaganda meant to divide and sequester knowledge, to anesthetize curiosity with authoritative answers, and as a methodology in support of an ideology with prescribed answers (disguised as structured thought and creative imagination) civilization is not served.