King George III
GEORGE TEMPLETON:COMMENTARY
The Phenomenology of True Patriotism
What distinguishes justified belief from opinion? We turn to a joke from Tom Cathcart and Dan Klein’s book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…
“Secretary: Doctor, there’s an invisible man in the waiting room. Doctor: Tell him I can’t see him.”
Perfect Government
Existence
is human and individual. Essence is the collective sharing of ideas.
Our Founding Fathers were individuals, but did their thinking have some
deep guiding principle?
In
1763 the colonists were proud members of the British Empire. Britain
had a parliament, not a dictatorship. The Seven Years’ War kicked the
French out, but the British deprived the colonists of the spoils of
their victory by imposing the Proclamation Line. Who would pay the
costs of war? There were loyalists, neutrals, moderates, and our
radical Founding Fathers. They needed the very government that they
feared. They would hang if their Declaration of Independence failed.
We
are choosing our future. Our ethos is one of materialism, tariffs,
isolation, blacklists, sanctions, and economic war. The Trump
Administration proposes to solve the world’s conflicts with golf courses
and hotels, but who pays? If diplomacy is simply a matter of
friendship with autocratic leaders, will they agree with us when he
attacks them personally?
The
three happiest countries are Denmark, Finland, and Norway. Wealth,
life expectancy, and safety do not predict happiness. It is something
richer, deeper, and more meaningful. We should ruminate over the
positive things in life, not just what is wrong. The wrongs of the
world result in an unhealthy sort of “tunnel vision”, impacting not only
us but all our relationships.
We list leadership properties:
- Honesty and Integrity
- Confidence
- Inspiring others
- Commitment and Passion
- Communicating clearly
- Demonstrating decision making capability
- Accepting accountability
- Delegating power
- Creativity and innovation
- Empathy
We turn to the perception of patriotism.
Living Dead
Phenomenology
is not scientific, but it is rational. It creates explanations from
our experiences. Our thinking and awareness is human. We cannot
measure the feelings we get seeing the sunset, the stars at night, or
the fields of flowers extending forever on the San Carlos Reservation.
Patriotism is like that.
Science
prefers a material explanation. Our mind is revealed by our
behaviors. Phenomenology takes self-evidence before, but not instead of
science. It claims that perception is the cause of meaning. Words
like friend, respect, love, bad, amazing, tremendous, and terrific, are
phenomenological. They are shorthand for detailed assertions.
What
is consciousness? Is it just a response to a stimulus? Newton
believed that colors are objective properties in the world
(wavelengths). Goethe thought color was subjective, a matter of
perceived essence. Hegel thought that consciousness was never
completed. When we look at the world, we have no choice other than to
use our minds.
George A. Romero's 1968 movie, Night of the Living Dead,
depicted hordes of zombies. They were like us, but they had no
feelings. It would be simpler to be like zombies. Our consciousness
seems different than a mechanical device. We inherit feelings because
they are an advantage. We use them to make up stories.
True Stories
Recollection is a story, not a memory. Robert Ornstein explained in his book, The Evolution of Consciousness,
“… Memories, dreams, and imagination are all the same process, for the
mind uses the same interpretations whether it is dreaming at night,
recollecting infancy, or imagining a new home. What we think of as our
memory is an illusion, as are our dreams. And, surprisingly, so is the
sight you see now.” Our minds are adaptive, not rational. We oscillate
between objectivity and subjectivity, trying to see patterns and
similarity to simplify a chaotic world. We fill in the blanks.
Stories
seem to have a prior essence, already existing within unexplainable
creativity. Our minds don’t start from scratch. The Swiss
psychiatrist, Carl Jung (1875-1961) believed in the subconscious, but he
thought that it was collective, a pattern inherited from our
ancestors. We turn to a story in hopes of grasping something more than
novelty.
The dark ages (500-1000) marked a period of cultural deterioration following the decline of the Roman Empire. The 17th and 18th
century enlightenment turned toward culture, reason, science, and
religion, away from hundreds of years of lost history and barbarism.
But it did not reach deeply into the darkness inherit in our hearts.
Joseph Conrad’s 1899 story, Heart of Darkness,
visited the problem of incomprehensible terror. Marlow, a figure
transporting ivory from the Congo, tried to understand Kurtz, a brutal
production boss. Kurtz’s dying words, spoken to Marlow, were, “The
horror, the horror”, but what horror? Marlow returns to fulfill his
promise to meet Kurtz’s fiancée. She inquires about his last words, but
Kurtz lies when he tells her it was her name. We are left to wonder
whether the brutality that exists at the edges of the civilized world is
the same as that hidden in its heart. Was Kurtz telling it like it
is? Did he identify the horror when he spoke her name?
Nature’s Nurture
The
mystery of consciousness dates back to the philosopher Rene Descartes
(1596-1650). Is the mind separate from the body, and if so, how? Is it
just a calculating machine that has no idea of why or whether its
results are true? Aren’t we actors and not just stage props?
Information
changes probability. When we learn, it changes our perception. The
complex interconnected networks of mind, social norms, and economy seek
certainty.
Husserl,
(1859-1938) had the idea that the world is somehow “set up” or
constituted by our consciousness. He explained the world by way of
consciousness instead of mind as a product of the world. The world is
aesthetic, like a subjective work of art, instead of mathematically
objective.
Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976) saw the world as equipment to be used instead of
“things”. He claimed that most people, most of the time, are not their
real selves and that they become authentic through their capacity to
make choices.
Einstein
conducted thought experiments. What would it look like if he were to
ride along with a beam of light receding from the Big Ben clock in
London? If he looked back at the clock, it would not change because the
next minute could never catch up with him. And so it was. For him,
time would stop even though it continued in London.
Consider quantum physics. Here we have a violation of the understanding that the world imposes its order on our thinking.
David Deutsch’s book, The Fabric of Reality,
supports Hugh Everett’s many worlds, instantaneously split into hidden
existence by each of our conscious decisions. Its only evidence is the
two-hole experiment. A wave cannot be a particle at the same time, but
only when a conscious observer looks at it does it change its physical
behavior and its “real “identity. We understand wave and particle
physics, but we have no way of knowing what is out there. For 100 years
we have tittered on the precipice of paradigm change. It is a constant
reminder that there is something that is missing in perception that
needs to be inserted in a fundamental way.
But this does not stop in the microscopic world. John Gribbin’s book, Schrodinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality,
presents a simultaneously dead and alive cat. Sensitive measurement
apparatus, in with the cat, cannot “realize” which without a conscious
observer. What is the difference between the apparatus and the
observer? It is only a story, but the reality is like mirrors looking
at mirrors in potentially infinite recursion, limited only by the
efficiency of reflection.
A Man in a Looking Glass
In
1871, Lewis Carroll wrote a story about seeing the opposite of
expectation in a mirror. Philip Hefner, a professor of Systematic
Theology, claimed that the media is our mirror. It reveals:
- What we care about and depend on.
- A denial of our mortality and finitude (Ref. 1982 film, Blade Runner and 2001 film, A.I., Artificial Intelligence)
- Alternative worlds, the old and the new (Ref. 1997 film, Gattaca)
- Confusion and uncertainty.
When you look, do you see fake news? Then, what is the nature of truth?
Honest to God
Glen
Kessler, who runs the Washington Post Fact Checker, counted 10,111
false or misleading claims by Trump in 828 days. Like pornography, we
know “truth” when we see it but we cannot explain what it is. Because
an authority claims it is so, does not make it true. The majority
opinion neither defines nor verifies truth. So, here is the truth:
Correspondence: What is true corresponds to facts.
Coherence: “The truth is the whole”, not statements out of context. It is relative to history and era.
Pragmatic: Ideas are made true by verifiable events. There can be many individual truths.
Semantic: Truth applies only to sentences and the objects referred to.
Existential:
Subjective truth features intense emotion and an unreasonable
willingness to believe that which cannot be understood.
Relative: Truth is an opinion based on partial knowledge, limited experience, and imperfect senses.
Can
you find Trump’s truth in the above? Is it exterior, materialistic,
and for himself? Is it interior, subjective, and in himself?
Phenomenon in Perspective
Science
often looks at things upside down: Admittance instead of impedance,
compliance instead of stiffness, conductance instead of resistance,
Newton’s equations versus energy conservation, polar instead of
Cartesian coordinates, discreetness instead of continuity, and sequence
versus combination. “The thing out there”, does not change.
The
truth is a complicated thing. Knowledge is interpretation. What
about “alternative facts” and “unfacts”? They are compounded by
ignorance and omitted details. Facts are indisputable. Propaganda and
lies are the tools of dictators and the undoing of representative
democracy. Free speech allows them, but we should not ignore it.
An Unstable Government
The
Trump Administration is unstable. It can tip in any direction! This
Independence Day brings to mind how British leadership influenced the
genesis of America.
King
George III lost us. He was a different kind of king, a high-energy
nonconformist. His nemesis was America. His daily diet of compliance
and loyalty served neither himself nor Britain.
The
colonists knew that the King would use Parliament to get his way, and
Parliament would use the King to get their way. The result was divided
government. The British say he was a good man who was just
misunderstood, but history thinks he was going mad (1994 film The Madness of King George). His famous quote is, “A traitor is everyone who does not agree with me.”
We
construct meaning. We are its architect. So, what is the meaning of
patriotism? It is something that we feel inside of us and a desire to
see our country succeed. It is pride in America for what we do, not
hubris that justifies no matter what. It recognizes imperfection. It
builds unity.
ack in December 2017, Donald Trump
signed into law the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, claiming the bill was going
to do wonders for the middle class. Of course, as it turned out, that
wasn't exactly accurate. In reality, the legislation was all about
saving corporations billions—money that, shockingly, has not trickled
down from the pockets of multinationals, top executives, and
shareholders. In fact, American workers received, on average, 
he
US generated more electricity from renewable sources than coal for the
first time ever in April, new federal government data has shown.
