Intellectual Seriousness, Part II: Patience and Ideas in America
In my last post, I talked about intellectual seriousness, and as a follow up, let’s add intellectual patience to the list.
We’ve all heard about the “town halls”, with the anger, misinformation, fear, and antagonism that many of us hoped and expected the last presidential election would put behind us.
The hopes, fears, and illusions around health care have proved that intellectual patience in the United States is in as short supply as ever, even with (or in spite of?) a public intellectual who can speak the people’s language as President.
I suppose the problem with the cult of the personality that surrounds presidential politics today is that so much hope and fear surrounds candidates, and Barack Obama is the largest repository of hope and fear imaginable. He appeared and still appears to personify so much possibility or so much danger, depending on your point of view, that people forget about their own responsibility as citizens to think, read, and talk to their representatives. After all, representatives make laws. The President only enforces them, or, that’s what’s supposed to happen. But we left that constitutional viewpoint in the rearview mirror a long time ago.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama appears to be a “strict constructionalist” or Constitutional literalist in that regard. He hoped to be a facilitator in this regard, but people expect him to lead, put out his own plan, and let the individuals of Congress pick it to pieces. After all, that, too, is a representative’s job. The Founders wanted, above all, a decentralization of power, or “checks and balances”, if you will.
But I digress. Intellectual seriousness…
Right.
Intellectual patience.
Right.
I have often thought that in this most impatient of societies that two issues around which people do show intellectual patience around is the Constitution, with its complexity, and baseball. I find it remarkable that such an impetuous populace as the American one can consider baseball, the game of the lazy days of summer, with its lack of a time limit, its endless nuance, its amazing and bewildering serious of required decisions and possibilities, as the National Pastime.
But the health care debate has brought out the constituents into the streets, the Talk Show hosts, with their aging and passionate storm troopers, vs. the equally hard-charging partisans on the left, such as Moveon.org.
Lost in the discussion about health care, is the discussion of cost and health insurance, the yelling about which has drowned out the word “care” in any meaningful sense.
(By the way, I urge people to read two wonderful articles on health care, emphasizing the word care, attempting to divorce care from insurance, because the partisans on both sides are missing the boat, and enforcing a dialogue of the deaf that will necessitate that real reform from a CARE point of view will not happen.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
These two authors talk in the sort of depth and complexity that we all need to in order to fix health CARE, as well as health INSURANCE. They’re not the same thing, and only intellectual patience will get us to understand that.)
After all the shouting stops, we will have no one to blame but ourselves for what we get.
Keep thinking and grappling, people. Avoid easy answers, and get out of your comfort zone, including and particularly your intellectual and political one.
Stay tuned.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Soul Satisfaction
Well, it’s been almost two months since I’ve contributed a post, and one kind reader (I seem to have one or two) suggested it might be time for another, so here goes.
My themes have loosely followed 1) speech, particularly political speech; 2) my intellectual evolution and how I see thought/reality/consciousness; and finally 3)simply how to express yourself.
Where do I go from here?
Well, let me start by admitting why my posts have lagged at late. I certainly do enjoy writing them for the few of you who read them, and I like to think they add some value to the world of thought and communication, but at the moment, my posts aren’t tethered to the rest of my business in any substantial way.
Maybe it's time to somehow change that.
I started Ideas That Speak to contribute to both speechwriting as well as help non-profits with their fund-raising copy. No one has asked me to write speeches for them, but a couple of clients and prospective clients, have asked me to write fund-raising material. Both these entities have come from the niche I want to help the most, theatre companies.
Why? Because I enjoy writing plays.
Since I was a kid, I found that the idea of intellectual seriousness provoked my deepest interest, and I reserved my strongest disagreement with those who were and are intellectually superficial, contemptuous of ideas and implications (NOTICE, I DO NOT SPEAK ABOUT INTELLIGENCE) from professors to business people to George Bush the younger. My great challenge is to sustain intellectual seriousness, to grapple with important issues of politics, history, the “humanities” as a whole, ethics, religion, and more in every way I can, through reading, speech, thought, writing, and, especially creative writing.
Here’s a list of things I don’t like.
I don’t like it when people say that disagreements simply come down to “semantics”. Well, semantics are words. If we can’t express disagreements clearly in words, we get desperate and resort to a lack of respect and violence, so we can’t simply think that labeling disagreements as “semantic” differences is a good thing.
I dislike “easy answers”, people resorting to “usual sources” when it comes to expressing opinions that come from their “comfort zone”.
I dislike laziness and a lack of curiosity.
How do I push back positively against these negatives? Well, I write plays that incorporate playfulness and idea exploration. My latest play performed (thanks to the Vermont Playwrights Circle’s Tenfest) was The Aspirants.
In Aspirants, a chartered flight is full of people who ostensibly do one things, but would rather do the other. The only passenger, who, it turns out, has boarded the plane by mistake, who isn’t an “aspirant”, ironically, is an actress.
I won’t tell you what happens, since I hope that it will get performed again, and you might see it. Much that happens on the surface is silly, but the play’s seriousness lies in the individual’s perpetual search for not just vocational satisfaction, but soul satisfaction.
I want to write non-profit copy because so many causes out there need someone to champion language on their behalf, and I am just the person to do it; these groups bring hope and joy to the world, especially theatre companies, and we ought to help and support them any way we can.
You might say that I aspire to help them and bring deepest contentment to my soul in the process.
Stay tuned.
My themes have loosely followed 1) speech, particularly political speech; 2) my intellectual evolution and how I see thought/reality/consciousness; and finally 3)simply how to express yourself.
Where do I go from here?
Well, let me start by admitting why my posts have lagged at late. I certainly do enjoy writing them for the few of you who read them, and I like to think they add some value to the world of thought and communication, but at the moment, my posts aren’t tethered to the rest of my business in any substantial way.
Maybe it's time to somehow change that.
I started Ideas That Speak to contribute to both speechwriting as well as help non-profits with their fund-raising copy. No one has asked me to write speeches for them, but a couple of clients and prospective clients, have asked me to write fund-raising material. Both these entities have come from the niche I want to help the most, theatre companies.
Why? Because I enjoy writing plays.
Since I was a kid, I found that the idea of intellectual seriousness provoked my deepest interest, and I reserved my strongest disagreement with those who were and are intellectually superficial, contemptuous of ideas and implications (NOTICE, I DO NOT SPEAK ABOUT INTELLIGENCE) from professors to business people to George Bush the younger. My great challenge is to sustain intellectual seriousness, to grapple with important issues of politics, history, the “humanities” as a whole, ethics, religion, and more in every way I can, through reading, speech, thought, writing, and, especially creative writing.
Here’s a list of things I don’t like.
I don’t like it when people say that disagreements simply come down to “semantics”. Well, semantics are words. If we can’t express disagreements clearly in words, we get desperate and resort to a lack of respect and violence, so we can’t simply think that labeling disagreements as “semantic” differences is a good thing.
I dislike “easy answers”, people resorting to “usual sources” when it comes to expressing opinions that come from their “comfort zone”.
I dislike laziness and a lack of curiosity.
How do I push back positively against these negatives? Well, I write plays that incorporate playfulness and idea exploration. My latest play performed (thanks to the Vermont Playwrights Circle’s Tenfest) was The Aspirants.
In Aspirants, a chartered flight is full of people who ostensibly do one things, but would rather do the other. The only passenger, who, it turns out, has boarded the plane by mistake, who isn’t an “aspirant”, ironically, is an actress.
I won’t tell you what happens, since I hope that it will get performed again, and you might see it. Much that happens on the surface is silly, but the play’s seriousness lies in the individual’s perpetual search for not just vocational satisfaction, but soul satisfaction.
I want to write non-profit copy because so many causes out there need someone to champion language on their behalf, and I am just the person to do it; these groups bring hope and joy to the world, especially theatre companies, and we ought to help and support them any way we can.
You might say that I aspire to help them and bring deepest contentment to my soul in the process.
Stay tuned.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
