Open letters to friends

In response to Pat's email of the other day--

https://eand.co/how-american-discourse-died-3a482f37099d 

Can we do anything to help illuminate and elucidate the sentiment here? Let's start a 90's throwback email chain! 

Pass it on, my friends. Hope all is well wich'you

--I wrote back to him and to Ryan:

 Hi fellas,

Well, I don't know about American discourse being dead as long as Americans get to write whatever they want in emails back and forth to each other in the comfort of homes bought and sold on an open market--seems to me the American dream and discourse are both doing fairly robustly, in the parlance of our time. If the market goes down a bit and no one is jumping out of windows, so much the better. 

I frankly get the impression this young vampire fancies himself quite the writer and has a case of sour grapes about his particular strain of the discourse not leaping out at people from the headlines of the bigger media outlets. But maybe that's just me projecting a bit there. I like his use of the word whataboutery, but I just don't think the case against nuance is all that strong. The point, again, is that you're free to say whatever you want, however you want, within certain well-understood legal paradigms, and the people you're talking to get to hear as much of it as they're willing or able to. If they--it seems to you--don't hear much other than a buzzword here or there and then shout you down with rote talking points about nuance, well, sorry, but there's probably someone out there who heard a bit more and is actually thinking about it. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear, sort of thing.

To his second point, about pseudoscience or reductionist materialism, yeah, that is a biggie, but that has been a long time coming. Ever since the Enlightenment, at least, we've had to think about reason's role in explanatory hypotheses, primarily about nature, but also its limits in speaking to the lived experience of people in the world. Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and the existentialists, James and Freud and the psychologists, and lately the illustrious Jordan Peterson and his detractors and admirers alike have all had a lot of smart stuff to say about this. You'll know them by their fruits, you might say. 

And as for the ideology issue, it seems like a bit of a straw man of capitalism and the level of discourse surrounding it. I haven't talked to many staunchly conservative or libertarian people, but at least some of them don't have robot voices, nor do they pretend everyone takes a super narrow view of self-interest. Or if he's talking about Adam Smith and the American Federalists, who were so into theories of political self-interest, well, a) the structures they've put in place have held up so far when no other ideology has, really; b) they had a tremendous dare I say nuance in their thinking--Adam Smith has a long book of Sentiment which no one reads any more--and were incredibly learned in classics which few people have any inkling of, save for certain proverbs that trickle down to us today, so whatever ideology they espoused, it is much richer than what seems to be meant by capitalism in the US today as the article characterizes it. And when you look at stuff Jefferson was writing in his letters (cited in the Righteous Mind, which I highly recommend skimming through at your local library), he clearly had a notion that head and heart each have their sphere of influence, so interest had a fairly broad range of applications for him, as it should. It's always a bad trap to fall into, conjuring up opponents and then giving them weak and shallow arguments which you can delight in refuting while displaying your of course much broader understanding--but it's a tempting one all the same. You see the mote in your neighbor's eye, and there's a great big beam sticking in your own.

Last, I'll just say that it was a pretty good article, so I'll try and share it around, sure! I like the word eudaimonia, too, and would say looking at Socrates' relationship to his daemon is a good place to start.

Viva America, amigos!