Kip Robisch takes a philosophical look at what it takes to be a good man these days.
I was never a Boy Scout, though in my adulthood I became something of an outdoorsman. When I was a boy, the practical skill set of scouting didn’t draw me. I preferred spending my time, well, drawing. But I liked the tidy and confident codes of the scouts—the transparent effort to become little Captain Americas by being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. To be prepared. To do a good turn every day.
The older I got, the more I was exposed to the dark side of the Scouts and other organizations of men—the rumors (and sometimes revelations) about certain scout masters, the paramilitary aspect of the code, the bias and conflation of Christianity with nationalism. Like the priesthood, the Scouts started looking less like an organization that did good and more like one committed to defining good in certain narrow ways.
As I progressed through college, I also learned that goodness, particularly as expressed in ethics, was a wild frontier more than it was a peaceful village. There were factions who favored certain thinkers and built either named or nameless organizations around those thinkers, then sought to evangelize others—to Ayn Rand in fraternity houses or Emmanuel Kant in intellectualist pool halls—to John Locke or Thomas Hobbes in the political science boys clubs or Junior Senator organizations priming young prospects for public service.
In time, the French continental philosophers (for many of whom that title hangs around the neck by a thread) such as Derrida and Foucault became popular in the academic humanities, then came to almost completely rule it, to the detriment of open intellectual and ethical range—a condition that has led to the dismal state of English and the breeding of various Cultural Studies dilettante courses taught by non-experts on the subjects of gender, race, and international relations.
Philosophy itself is not, as a discipline, in such a state; it has always occupied the part of the house about which visitors ask the question, “What’s the function of this room?” And science as a discipline is protected, too much, by the corporate apparatus that justifies its existence with profit for ideologues. Fortunately out of a fundamentally corrupt environment can come defensible, not just Defense Department, scientific practice. But that doesn’t make it easy, ethically speaking, to be a mechanical engineer in a university any more than in a company that makes gunships.
◊♦◊
Men in the 21st century have inherited an unfortunate philosophical situation affecting what I think of as “the grand dialogue,” the discussion of how the physical world of things relates to the conceptual world of ideas. My desire is for us to stop wandering in the relativist, subjectivist desert.
The 21st century has, largely through the concerted efforts of the academic humanities, sold out to subjective definitions of goodness and ethics designed to counter the stodgy old certainty about rules and the material measures of them, but that have instead produced what is approaching a second generation of solipsists, fast devolving into narcissists.
Solipsism is the idea that you can’t know anything you don’t immediately experience. On the other side of a windowless wall of your room right now could be a grizzly bear waiting to maul you when you step through the door. The odds are lower than, say, what you saw the last time you stepped through the door—especially if it was seconds ago. But you can’t know for sure, and you live in the sphere of your immediate experience generating outward from yourself. It’s easy enough to see how this can fast become narcissism, in which the radiated experience changes to a completely absorbed one—a world in which you consider every situation only in terms of what it means to your opportunistic exploitation of what others don’t know for sure.
A fundamental question of philosophy, on that list of big questions such as “Who am I” and “Is there a God,” is this one: “What is the relationship between the material and the ideal, the substance and the form, the physical and the metaphysical?”
This, to me, is our central concern as thinkers on what kind of men we want to be. What is our relationship with our physical and metaphysical worlds? Science tends to be thought of as a “masculine domain,” though it isn’t, couldn’t be, and so never has been except by one measure—the percentage of its laborers, which is its own disgustingly sexist problem. The arts tend to be thought of as a “feminine domain,” because of massive presuppositions about emotional expression being weak and/or beauty-driven and therefore (in an equally unsound sexist enthymeme) being feminine.
One thing makes solipsism a problematic philosophy for women in particular: the extent to which access to the material world is still mostly reserved for men. Another thing makes it a problem that transcends gender: the extent to which idealism has been turned into ideology—the clubbish approach that says, “We’ve figured out everything is just a cultural construct and will ostracize anyone who disagrees, sometimes on the basis of race, class, or gender.”
In the 21st century, we seem to me to have abandoned the most justifiable philosophical position on this matter. We have abandoned a negotiation of the material with the ideal. We just align, and the holy war begins.
Aristotle and Plato, Kant and Locke, Derrida and Dennett, and many other contrasting pairs of thinkers, have hammered lifetimes on the forge of whether or not the chair I’m sitting in is a chair first or the concept of a chair first. But the best of them—that is, the good men—have been willing to look at the friction and consolidation of those two schools rather than falling into the trap of choosing one. And, importantly, consideration of both major positions does not mean a slide into relativism and solipsism, through which one finally considers neither by pretending to have finally and in certainty accounted for both.
◊♦◊
We are in a terrible position trying to defend empiricism and scientific inquiry from an onslaught of ideological hostility. And we are at a disadvantage to defend art from the dehumanizing, technologically obsessed, Standardized Test machines of state government and educational institutions that have stripped away the possibility of enlightenment over utility. In short, we are losing our capacity to have ideas that are not pre-approved by some organization. We are losing the freedom to live out, if not to deeply think about, the relationship between what is and what we think is. And this makes it very hard to define what is right, and good, and ethical. We cannot let the dissolution of ethics result from the idea that every Tweet is wisdom, that every invention made should be used.
Ethics is not the Super Bowl. It’s not a war (which is itself a major ethical issue). You don’t pick a team of Materialist Builders versus Idealist Dreamers and try above all else to score and win. Intelligence of any kind but the strategic kind suffers in such an environment. As my friend, the outstanding scholar and teacher Robert Paul Lamb, likes to say, “ideology is what makes smart people stupid.” It seems to me that the good man of the 21st century is not open to everyone’s opinion being equal—because then you have to let a Klansman have a say in racial policy. And the good man of the 21st century is not closed to anything but the objectivist, or monetized, or stratified ethical code he himself has adopted as a bulwark against rebuttal.
What I think we need to be is the medium through which these ideas flow, and the mediators between concept and product, invention and method, that makes only what we can justify in the world to others as well as to ourselves. Kant is a good source for this, with his categorical imperative: “Act on that maxim which you would have become a universal law.”
I don’t know a man who would rather be considered bad than good, though some are out there, and we tend to find them valorized on TV crime shows and then revealed on TV news. But I do know a lot of men who have no idea what it would mean, beyond some set of laws they just inherit, to be a good man. We just list the Boy Scout code and shrug. We cheat and regret, live with guilt and failure, set the bar where we can’t meet it and cannot grow stronger in the effort, despite what Nietzsche thought we would do instead to become the great Over-Men.
Perhaps our first step could be to look at what we make each day—a happy and growing child or a hurt and ignorant one, a partner who respects and is drawn to us or one who suspects and is wary of us, a pet that wants to be near us or skitters back whenever we move, a house that is in working order or that is falling down around us. Perhaps what we need to be are scouts helping everyone navigate the desert of Big Questions with care, rather than drilling everyone we find into the war machine against any opposition that we probably fear without cause. The inability to brook disagreement or to avoid shouting “Offended” at every moment of question we face is certainly not a male trait. But we could as human beings consider to look at when it happens and stop gendering or otherwise politicizing it altogether, which in another great phenomenon of philosophy—the paradox—might find us walking out of the desert as better men.
— Photo by ilkerender/Flickr
Though I am not versed in the literature and history of philosophy, I have been a Boy Scout (for about a year). I have also been a Catholic, and later, a born again Christian. None of these things stuck. The mythologies associated with these creed driven institutions at some point exhausted their power to convince. Yet I continue toward a goal to be good (without parentheses}. The unattainability of this ambition only enhances its worth: to do good because it is good. Thanks Kip
There’s nothing here I would not ratify. I also like Kant’s admonition to “Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.” It resonates with what another of my favorite philosophers, Martin Buber, has to say about the world-shaking power of loving connections with others. I subscribe (casually) to a blend of Aristotelian and Confucian virtue theory, which basically says that a “good person” is one who is thriving in all the ways a human can thrive. So you figure out what counts as excellence in a human being, and you pursue it. Wisdom, Courage, Benevolence,… Read more »