Montreal Philosophy
"Philosophy" is just a brand for a form of thought that seeks understanding in all its depth.
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- How a private-sector CEO thinks.
- LGBT asylum seekers, quotas and open immigration.
- Death and the Captain
- A brief letter on a facial beauty.
- An Open Letter to a Teacher: Listening can go both ways
- Life is Beautiful: A Letter to a Drunk Mind
- Democratic government and its approach to individual rights
- Public services: how should we pay for them?
- A letter on Haaretz, and the perspective we must take on Israel.
- Neoliberalism: The Misunderstood Ideology (assuming it exists).
- The problems of immortality and the value of death.
- Liberalism and Primitivism: Choice, or the natural and primitive life?
- Eye on the News: Surveys and Lingusitic Barriers
- Drugs: paternalistic government or absolute self-ownership?
- An Analysis of William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections Of Early Childhood”
There are people who worry about how our world has become, how trivial we have become. So many hours are spent in front of the television, watching hollow comedies, hollow dramas and hollow action. People spend on clothes, beauty products and drugs. Few people have creativity to share in science, philosophy and art. Comparisons are made to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where Ford is worshipped and humans have become little more than machines on an assembly line, created to be happy until they must be recycled.
Yet, I’m quite convinced that the last hundred years have so far been the most productive in terms of science, philosophy, art and wealth. Who at the epoch of Monterverdi, Bach or Mozart had access to such a variety and quantity of music that can touch people’s emotions as we have today? Of visual arts? Of stories? Why do people seem to be under the illusion that dramas of the past are any more profound than dramas of today, that comedies of the past are any more profound than comedies of today? And all of this art is infinitely more accessible to the common man than it was before. I don’t see how spending the day ploughing fields is more constructive culturally than watching television; I see no reason to believe that there was a regression. It seems to me that past eras are idealised based on the few names that achieved something great, all while forgetting that the common man was less likely to achieve anything of worth, since so much time had to be spent simply on sustaining himself.
Now, we have access to much more and some people have made the choice to do nothing interesting of their time, but a greater share would do nothing interesting of their time in eras past and could not make this choice.
The main concern about the culture in Brave New World was its systematic, homogenic, predictable nature, that there had been a regression in terms of the variety and quantity of culture that people would partake in. Today, more people consume a variety of culture than ever before. The contemporary world is quite opposite to anything described by Huxley: we are more diverse, be it in how we eat, how we dress, how we entertain ourselves, how we work and so forth. We have an extremely popular encyclopedia, there is more variety in music and the visual arts than we could ever have imagined before, children in many countries are all taught to write and read, they are given paintbrushes and colouring crayons at school, many will take music classes. We have tolerance for a variety of religions, the common man has more access to what the government does than ever before, with an army of journalists eager to find something to write about, to find knowledge to share.
Brave New World’s parallels to our world are relevant to humanity itself, to our attraction to even the most benign entertainment, not to our current epoch in contrast to past ones.
-Dussault
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