A new understanding of today, time and space.
I am old, 56 and I have read, studied and written philosophy for
over 40 years. I have read the posts written around here lately with some interest, not for their direct content, but what they mean in general. The first point to understand is this, everything is connected. Problems that look totally separate and isolated, aren't,
they have a connection and sometimes a deeper connection than we think. Everything is connected, I cannot emphasize this enough.
We have Majs complain about a social media "debate" "encounter" that was weird and we have gamer bring up a debate between Harris and Chomsky, that collapsed.
I suggest that the two are connected and the connection is communication and how communication is perceived.
I work with a bunch of young kids and they lack communication skills. But the issues runs deeper than just communication skills.
It is about (in part) with an overall failure to expand one's vision
beyond yourself.
Kids nowdays have no historical sense.
I look at something like, immigration and I see not just the immigration issues of today, but I see an America that has immigration issues since the beginning.
I am aware of the outright discrimination of the Irish for example from the 1820's to the 1880's. Signs in shops that said, NO IRISH ALLOWED IN. That was common for decades in stores nationwide. You include the Italians, Chinese, the Jews, and you
have decades of immigration woes and issues. It is not a new event and has been happening in the U.S since the beginning, since 1619, when the first ship arrived carrying slaves from Africa.
We don't exist isolated in time and space from events that have occurred in the past. Watching the news and listening to politicians, you would not know that America even has a past and where events occurred in that past. 9/11 didn't occurred in a vacuum,
but exists within a context that takes up time and space that last decades and continents.
so you have a generation that lacks communication skills and no understanding of where they exists in time and space in relation to prior generations. Almost like dogs, whose understanding of events is basically that moment of the event and nothing before or after that event. A dog gets into the garbage and for the dog,
the only thing is that event, but for humans, we see that the dog has gone into the garbage before, we see the event in time and space and we react to this event in time and space.
or said another way, we see this event within a context that makes sense. I submit that we have a generation of kids that cannot communicate and cannot place events into the proper context of time and space. Our understand of events is not different or better
than a dogs. We see 9/11 as an isolated event and react to it as an single, isolated event whereas 9/11 has context that spans decades and space.
As I have noted, these two aspects are related in some fashion, the lack of communication and the failure to have context. The United States Supreme Court has a bunch of partisans hacks (right wing)
who decide law based on personal and paid for opinions that not only lack any legal justification, but are seriously bad for America, (citizens united for one).They write opinions that don't even pretend to offer any legal justifications for their absurd rulings anymore. The court exhibits another aspect that is pertinent to this, the court has made its personal opinion far more important
than what is good for America. They don't offer any overarching principle that might be a justification for their actions. Citizens united for example, only says that limits on campaign contributions limits one's free speech. This ruling means that money is free speech and those with money have more free speech that than those without money. There is no pretension that this ruling is nothing other than the legal justification for the wealthy to buy elections. The ruling voids the idea of one man, one vote,
because politicians now just listen to the money, not the voters. Now place citizens united into context of American history and you see how truly bad a ruling this is. Run the ruling into the past and into the future and you see how bad this ruling sits with the past history of America and into the future, how this ruling becomes America for the rich, by the rich.
This ruling destroys democracy and so we have something else now. You see this only by placing the ruling into context of the past and future.
We lack an understanding of time, space and communication. I would like to say that America has a bright future but that would require people to understand context of where we are and that context is lacking. An understanding that everything has context
and is related. Citizens united didn't come out of isolation, it had context of time and space, where everything is connected. Everything is connected in time and space.
src : http://www.ilovephilosophy.com
