This is the introduction to a paper I gave at Santa Fe College at the inaugural meeting of the Socratic Saints the Santa Fe philosophy and ethics club. The complete paper is available here as a .pdf.
One may very well be depressed by the majority of the news one sees on TV or the Internet. And why not? Such a reaction seems entirely appropriate. Many (if not most) of the major themes of the news stories we see are to do with catastrophe. For example, $700 billion has been taken from US taxpayers to bail out (or more euphemistically to 'rescue') the financial institutions now at the heart of the world economy. Take another example: unemployment is at record levels nationally and in Florida. Over 10% of those who want work can't find it, and many of those who do have jobs are underemployed. The lack of health insurance is a related issue. In the US, health insurance is usually had as part of a benefit package that accompanies full-time employment. If unemployment and underemployment are rising, then health insurance is sure to be a problem for the unlucky unemployed or underemployed. As a final illustration of the unending cataclysm we're told that we face, global climate change is thought to be under way and progressing faster than previously predicted. As if this problem with our environment weren't enough, many believe that the global peak of oil production has already occurred or is fast approaching. Once production has peaked, we're told, we must begin the inevitable process of economic decline.
It's saddening stuff, and stuff that shouldn't be taken lightly or disregarded if we're to believe what we see on TV and believe what we read on the Internet. In fact, if we take seriously many of the things we see and read, then we should be worried, very worried, about those vast and immane elemental forces with which we're unable to mettle but which may affect us all in very important ways.
I've tried to get your attention with the sort of stuff that would appear at the top of the local news at 11. They dictate that if it bleeds, it leads, and the biggest bleeders these days are taxpayers supporting Wall Street fat cats, rising joblessness and fast approaching environmental Armageddon. I hope I've just been every bit as dramatic and disturbing as AM talk radio or the Colbert Report.
But, as much fun as generating an uncontrollable hurricane of emotion is…. I'd like to try to give you a paper that does not continue on in the same way that Stephen Colbert, Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann might. I'd like to try to give a paper in which we consider the sorts of frightening news stories I just sketched, and perhaps more importantly our reactions to those news stories, and try to think about these issues in a calm, analytical and dispassionate way.
In this short paper, I would like to do three things. First, I want to bring some issues, pressing issues I believe, to our attention. Apart from the pressing issues themselves, I'd like to focus on our reaction to those issues. Second, I will offer some analysis on why the issues that we face are in fact pressing issues. And even though these issues are pressing and serious, I believe that there is something that can be done and done by us. Finally, I'll offer a sketch for the sort of actions I believe we should take. This sketch will be too vague and indeterminate, but I hope it may point us in the right direction.
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