Colleagues and friends have helped my thinking in writing this..
thank you all. The responsibility for the outcome is wholly mine.
‘Bewilderment and deep concern’ among thinking Americans is reported by Gideon Rachman in his Financial Times article of 31Mar25. We must be glad of that.
My search of the workings of government in the USA failed to reveal where the Department of Philosophy sits. Many other countries lack this critical source of “existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language”, too. How is that possible? I asked several people. Clergy said that their whole raison d’étre was philosophical. Politicians, both democratic and autocratic, explained that they were themselves the fount of modern philosophical thought. They were unable to prove it.
Human civilization is based on how to live together to the optimum benefit of all. To have bred almost 10Bn residents on the planet was a good achievement – until recently. Now it looks as though it is falling apart. Political aggressiveness is sweeping the world. It is a consequence of pressures that have come together as a result of the number of people it must support. Air to breathe, space, food, water, minerals, energy all need sharing disciplines however imposed.
Add the ability to send the mercurial emotions humans have at an unprecedented speed and the innocuous smirk of a sceptic becomes the violent riposte of an angry hornet.
There is no focal point for vital disciplines other than ourselves or a mystical divinity. When the latter is believed, it seems accepted that that source of power has delegated its authority to us anyway – ‘free will’. Sharing in a world where competition is thought to bring out the best in us is a complex concept. “I earn, I become wealthy, I give” is simple enough but leaves three unanswered questions, one for each situation – “How much?” If restricted, the spur of competition is removed. If unrestricted, greed, a main driver of competition, is unleashed.
Civilisation is a moderation of extremes. Without moderation civilization is dead.
Our present world culture, which is the sum of millions of individual cultures, took a long time to establish. We cannot change it overnight, not even by the imposition of hysterical tariffs. To change it at all requires that we have a credible culture to aim for. 5% of the world owning and dominating 95% of the population is not credible. The 95% know too much about how the other 5% live.
The culture envisaged by Tariff Turbulence is a flight to riot and war.
Coming to this conclusion is not rocket science, it is philosophical sense. But there are precious few philosophers considering it and none in political positions to articulate it. The population at large hardly knows how to spell philosophical, let alone what it implies for a life. For a long time religion was a practical and helpful version of philosophical thinking. In the last fifty years it has been either abandoned or relegated to a one-day-a-week ritual of worship. It no longer asserts the cultural influence that it used to.
Technological advance needs to be balanced by philosophical logic. There appears to be no such balance. To introduce one will take time, maybe a century. Failure to introduce one immediately would, in years to come, be seen as an act of the worst kind of vandalism. To find a way to make philosophical sense of value to money-makers will be even more difficult than trying to convince them that climate is a critical problem. But both must be done.
The world is packed with universities full of highly intelligent people bent on improving life. Creating a demand for the moderation of extremes that are needed to make philosophical contributions accepted and acted upon is the job of those in political power. The voters’ job is to put the people with vision in a position where they can exercise it philosophically.
Our responsibility, I humbly suggest, is to help make it happen.
Will you?
Good morning
John Bittleston
Please tell us your views at [email protected].
We will appreciate them tremendously.
08 April 2025
