Everyone who is close to me knows a few important things about my biography:

1. Throughout high school, I was a poor, unmotivated student. The subjects occasionally stimulated me, but never enough to drive me to hard work. I did not know what it was like to engage in hard, dutiful work. I possessed no perseverance or endurance. My grades were poor, and I did not think that my future held anything remarkable. I had few close friends and was socially awkward. I was bullied.  There was nothing to look forward to. This feeling peaked at the age 16 or 17. I despised this time of life, and I despised who I was. I wanted to be excellent, superior, in theory, but I had no purpose or drive to achieve this.

2. Sometime in the summer prior to my junior high school year, I decided to visit a military recruiter. The Navy seemed like the best fit, for reasons I forget. I thought the military would give me a chance to get away from home, start life anew, and give me a new chance for achieving excellence. Joining as an enlisted man meant that my previous mediocre performance would be disregarded, and that my record and reputation could begin from scratch on day one of my arrival at basic training. I visited the Navy recruiter, but thought I’d give the other recruiters a try as well. First I visited the Navy, then the Air Force, then the Army. Nothing quite grabbed me. All the recruiters told me about the benefits that I’d receive, about the great job training I’d get that could be applicable to the outside world. The Air Force recruiter in particular told me about the apartment-like barracks and superior military base amenities AF personnel experienced in comparison to the other services. He made fun of the other services, and in particular the Marines, who apparently received virtually no perks beyond the minimum whatsoever. 

I didn’t know much about the Marines at that point, but I eventually visited the recruiting office. Whereas the other recruiters fell over themselves trying to impress me, the Marine recruiter barely acknowledged me. I wasn’t worth his time. There was a poster on the wall, with a mean looking drill instructor staring at a scrawny, scared recruit. The caption read, “We didn’t promise you a rose garden.” The implication was clear: the United States Marine Corps is here to kick the shit out of you until there’s no shit left. It will be hard. You will want to quit. But if you don’t, you will be a better person. 

That was all it took. The other recruiters, particularly the AF recruiter, were telling me how nice things would be. To me, that meant, “you don’t have to change.” But I hated myself, and I wanted to change. I knew I needed something to kick the shit out of me in order to change. There was no doubt in my mind. I was going to become a Marine. I signed up at the end of my junior year, and spent my senior year preparing. 

3.  During the last semester of high school, I took an introduction to philosophy class. We read some of Plato’s Republic. It was the first time I fell in love with a book. I read as much as I could. 

4. By the end of my senior year, I had two purposes: to become a Marine, and to be a philosopher. These dual purposes saved my life. As I spent more time in the Marines, I found myself going back to a couple philosophy texts more and more. I became obsessed. By the time I had served three years, I knew I needed teachers and education. I wanted to go to school, and to do it excellently. I wanted to learn. Once I finished my four years, I left and became a philosophy student at Bemidji State University. 

This time, my educational experience was radically different. Using the diligence and fanaticism I gained from the Marines, I turned all my powers to philosophy and school, and I kicked ass. It felt amazing. Looking back, I was happy that I had changed so much since my high school days. I felt like a new person. 

5. Then came graduate school. It was far more difficult, and I did not kick ass, but I persevered and completed it. Then I was an adjunct philosophy instructor, striving to earn my keep, though the future looked dim. Teaching fulfilled me, because I embraced the purpose of bringing philosophy to my students. But at another level I was depressed, because I knew that this kind of life was unsustainable. Finally, just as I was about to throw in the towel on education, I was hired for a full-time, tenure-track position, and I was again filled with the purpose of getting a tenured job. 

But as my years on the tenure-track progressed, I was pulled further and  further from making teaching and philosophy as the center of my pursuits. There was a goal, and I threw myself at it, but that pursuit was supposed to be a mere means to an end. 

All the good parts of my life have been due to feeling a strong sense of purpose: and not merely a purpose, but a purpose that felt meaningful. The depressing parts of my life have always been bereft of that feeling of purpose. 

Now, tenure has been achieved. I have no further major career goals ahead of me. I’ve “made it.” I have a great, reliable career ahead of me. But there are no major goals being imposed on me like there had been before. I’m feeling a sense of despair, actually, as I don’t know whether or not I have the energy to set my own goals and work toward them. I’ve built myself up by submitting myself to institutions which have imposed goals and demands on me, and I pushed on until I achieved the most worthy goals, and abandoned those I felt weren’t worth my time.

It is like, for the first time since high school, I am looking out into a future where the world is not imposing any challenges on me than mean the difference between my success and failure. This should be liberating, and I hope I feel that soon. But it is also frightening: I have never been good at setting high goals for myself and working diligently toward them to achieve success. I have always aligned myself with an institution that has imposed these demands onto me. The deadlines had an external source. If I wish to continue to grow and find success, I will need to learn to set these goals and deadlines for myself, and continue to work toward them. 

 

A desert is empty and barren. There is nothing to do, nothing to distract. Forgetting for a moment about survival, the desert is a place where one if forced to think inward, because there is nothing outward to distract or give focus to the mind.

The city is the opposite. Every time one opens the door, one is assaulted with things to do. This is where your friends are, who tap you to engage in various activities. This is a place filled with objects, a huge quantity of which are designed and placed for people to attend to. The mind is pulled outward. This effect has been compounded and multiplied in the past thirty years with the advent of personal computers, the internet, and most recently, the smartphone. At every moment of every day, the mind is pulled outward to a great number of external objects. One can go months or years without spending time merely with one’s self. A person can forget who she is, never having to spend time with herself. The prospect of spending time in one’s mind can even be unpleasant, dissatisfying, and painful. One must struggle to subdue to urge to find distraction.

It becomes more and more difficult to sit for long periods of time with only the rich contents of one’s mind to occupy the mind.

The mind’s content is, in a way, what the mind is focused on. When the mind is pulled toward external objects, the person is only half themselves. They become what they’re focused on.

In the desert, one needs to create things to attend to. The desert provokes one to create, to be active. This is work, and is often less pleasant than being passive: but in the desert, one isn’t given much choice for an alternative. The city allows one’s mind to be passive in the face of so many objects of entertainment and distraction.

In this city, I yearn for less distraction, for more time alone, divorced from the multitude of distractions that are constantly barraging themselves against my consciousness.

Four more days before I report to school for a week of pre-semester duties. Last semester left me exhausted.  A year of continuous work, most of which was neither philosophy nor directly pedagogical, have left my passions withered. Some of the work was somewhat fulfilling and educational, though nowhere near as much as the study of philosophy.  Most of the work, however, I simply hated. It has left a distaste in my mouth for anything related to school. This is a terrible thing to realize. I am not excited about teaching.

Perhaps this realization will help me separate the distasteful work from the fulfilling work in my mind. Perhaps this
realization is all I need to help me uncover my passion for teaching and philosophy again.

Are my feelings permanent condition? How do I rid myself of them? I am not who I am when I am this way. I need to do some soul-searching over the next few days.

We have already completed the first week of the Fall 2012 semester. This past year has been one great challenge after another for me. The past three weeks have been no different. I recently took over the duties of department chair while our actual department chair is on a semester leave. Learning these new duties has forced me to grow in unusual directions, and has been demanding. I was afraid that the chair duties would consume me, and that it would cause me to neglect my teaching duties.

But my classes of the past week have been one of the greatest teaching moments of my life, if not the most. My mind was thirsty for these classes, and I feel like I hit almost every note well.

The students in my classes seem great. The material I selected for this course seems great. I seem to have the support  of my faculty colleagues, college staff and administrators of the institution. I have never been more excited to blast in to a semester of thinking and teaching philosophy: my greatest and most fulfilling passion since I first opened Plato’s Republic in 1997.

I have stopped blogging. That was an illness. I will strive to bring it back.

 

I was born in Tehran, Iran: a great city where the majority of my family still lives. I gave four years of my life serving in the United States Marines, to thank the USA for the freedoms and privileges I never would have received in Iran. Obama, the president I voted for and despite my criticisms I still greatly admire, is pledging that we must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons: a stance that I grudgingly accept. But Iran is a country that has been abused for decades from internal and external forces, and I cannot blame it for acting aggressively to establish itself. From the day I joined the Marines, I always knew this would be a possibility, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling sick about the whole thing.

This is also interesting: “When it comes to the use of force, [the Obama doctrine] seems to boil down to this: Mr. Obama is willing to use unilateral force when America’s direct national interests are threatened — the bin Laden raid is the most vivid example. But when the threat is more diffuse, more a matter of preserving global order, his record shows that he insists on United Nations resolutions and the participation of many allies.”

This is mostly a bookmark for myself, but this article about scientists breaking into an old philosophical/theological question looks interesting, and mentions a lot of books that I’d love to read sometime soon.

It’s about the philosophical question of where existence comes from. Note, this is not the question of where the universe comes from, and “the big bang” is not a correct/incorrect answer so much as an inappropriate answer: an answer that misses the point. The big bang is the answer to, “Why does the universe exist as it does today?” But theorists of the big bang posit that there was something prior to the universe: the universe came from this something.

But why is there something? The classical theological/philosophical answer, of course, is that something outside the natural order of things must have brought this into existence. It’s impossible for it not to have been something outside the natural order, because the question is not (once again) why nature exists as it does, but why nature exists at all. Any answer that resorts to natural causes of course is already presuming the existence of nature; it still begs the question.

Given that all scientific explanation depends on natural causes and observation (which is necessarily of natural phenomenon) the question of “from where nature comes” has rightly been placed outside the realm of science, as I point out to my students from time to time.

But this article claims that scientists actually are using science, for the first time, to deal with this question legitimately. As a philosopher, I’m naturally skeptical: these sorts of claims are made from time to time, but once investigated we find that these scientists were misunderstanding, well, science. (Rarely  can you trust a scientist to understand the true nature of their own field! I recently met a biologist who claimed biology wasn’t a physical science, based on the fact that the college’s biology department is not in the physical science department! Nevermind the fact that biology deals strictly with molecules, cells, and processes that result from complicated formations of these things! As if cells, molecules, and resulting processes shouldn’t be considered physical. Sigh. I’m ranting. Sigh.)

Anyway, the notion that we can understand, scientifically, how something comes from nothing would be astonishing and revolutionary if true. So I’d like to see how these scientists give it a go.

In philosophy, one thing that is often noted is that if something comes from nothing, then that something, call it N, required no cause to come into existence: lacking cause is sufficient for N to exist. If something exists for no cause, then nothing, as a thing, is sufficient for it’s existence. Which means that thing necessarily exists. The self-existing thing is the basis for many conceptual descriptions of God, particularly in Spinoza.

For Spinoza, God is Nature, and lacks the moral, mental, and teleological (goal-oriented) qualities almost always ascribed to god. Spinoza was declared an atheist in his day, and a “god-obsessed philosopher” some 130 years later for this very reason. Perhaps all these new scientists are declaring is that Spinoza basically had it right all along…. perhaps. Though I’m sure there’s more to it than that.

To what extent should the distribution and management of welfare programs be regulated? I am no expert on the economics of such things, but I feel equipped to take a moral stance on these questions. I’m not making this a long post, but I do want to quickly consider three cases.

1. Unemployment checks are routinely distributed to individuals who are seeking and failing to find employment. Recently, a conservative movement in Florida attempted to mandate a law stating that anyone who received these checks must undergo a drug test. The justification was that if these recipients would accept public money, they should at least be clean of drugs. It seems most liberals criticized this move, though for different reasons.

Part of this makes sense to me: if you are going to burden society by receiving public money, then it becomes your duty to do your best to make it worthwhile. If the recipient is not seeking employment, or is engaging in activity that makes employment more difficult, then the recipient is unjustly receiving these payments. So, at least in part, I agree with the conservative’s motivation.

But from the financial reports I read, this seemed silly. First of all, the cost to administer the tests was very high, and cost the state far more than they saved. So the economic motivation was completely unfounded when taking the long view. Second, something like 1.8% of recipient testees were found to be taking drugs, which is less than the state’s average. The idea that recipients of unemployment were doing drugs turned out to be an unfounded, dangerous prejudice. Third, the rule seems to be applied inconsistently. There are many recipients of public funding that do not need to undergo similar tests, and there are many other measures of deservedness than doing drugs. In short, the rule was too broad by one dimension (testing something that it wasn’t worth testing) and too narrow by two dimensions (doesn’t apply to others whom it should apply to for the same fundamental motivations, and doesn’t measure all the things it should to know whether the recipient was deserving).

2. Republican State Senator Ronda Storms of Florida recently advocated a law that says food stamps cannot be used to buy junk food. According to Mark Bittman, liberals criticized the move because it attacked the poor, perhaps for related motivations as above. And conservatives attacked her for engaging in the same sort of “nanny-statism” that Michelle Obama engages in.

But in this case, I support the action. For the same principle that I advocated for above–that if one accept public funds, one must use those funds responsibly, in a way that is honest to the taxpayers who provided those funds. Mark Bittman made a longer and more complete defense of this point than I do, but my ultimate point is that this sort of governmental action is not a restriction on liberties: it is a mandate on how government assistance can be used.

3. This is not yet an issue that has been discussed, but I can only imagine it will be an consequence of universal health care, or any sort of publicly funded health care. If health care is provided by the government, then any use of that health care is a burden on public funds. An individual’s choice on their diet and exercise clearly affects, if only probabilistically and not deterministically–  how much health care a person requires. If something like universal health care is adopted, then to be consistent, would I have to support a law that requires people to exercise if accepting health care? Should there be a penalty for people who don’t stay reasonably fit if it’s within their power? Would I be opposed to such a mandate?

I am not justifying all mandates on government assistance, of course. I support the Obama administration’s move to require institutions to distribute contraceptives, while against pulling funding from abortions, Planned Parenthood counseling, and other things that I don’t have time to get into this morning.

Of course, the next question I need to ask myself is, “What is the principle that permits some mandates to be just, while others are unjust?”

Other questions come up: for every restriction placed on food or consumption, some food business is going to send lobbyists to Washington to fight against these restrictions: not because the restrictions are immoral, but because it cuts into profit. I’m a pragmatist, and believe this is important for the sake of jobs and economic stability. Higher unemployment and economic instability breed all sorts of other problems, including fear or resentment toward other factions within one’s own society, which in turn slows positive social change.

Questions for another day, or a better mind.

Hilarious. After making that last post, wordpress.com congratulated me on completing my 165th blog post (arbitrary marker?), and attached this quote:

“The desire to write grows with writing.” -Desiderius Erasmus

So true: the desire to write grows with writing, the desire to read grows with reading, the desire to teach, play my fiddle, exercise, and pretty much all things regarding the improvement of the soul.

And drinking and watching tv. Sigh.

Just a quick note before dashing off to the department faculty meeting:

A few days ago, in my February 19 posting, I noted how my teaching had seemed more mature, my classes felt more successful, and that I didn’t stop to reflect on my failures as a teacher as frequently; that this was perhaps a sign of better teaching, or perhaps a sign of focusing on other duties at the expense of teaching.

Something has been developing–or rather, not developing–in one of my classes that has been cause for concern. Maybe I didn’t notice it before, maybe I thought it was too early in the semester, maybe I was being careless. Maybe now, because I’ve started to write again, I have begun to notice things again.

I have a class that seems almost devoid of motivation. Multiple students with their heads down, absences high, students are more inclined to change the subject or become obstinate in face of challenging questions rather than interrogating them. Yesterday, I had a student say right in front of me that she wished she was in the next-door class that was playing loud music. Perhaps it was a joke, but it stung. In week 6, this is not what I have come to expect. My other classes all have various degrees of enthusiasm, but their attention and devotion is, at minimum, better than average, and at best, simply amazing. This one class, however, seems nearly completely devoid of an interest in philosophy.

But it reminded me of a question that I asked frequently when I was a new teacher, that I have not been asking myself enough lately: what good is philosophy for our students? Why is this required for community college students? Yes, it’s fascinating, and it’s changed the world. But what are my students getting from it?

When a class of students is almost entirely consumed with curiosity and enthusiasm, it is easy to ignore this question. I don’t need to, because the students don’t need any convincing. They are sold: I can focus on the ideas.

But what if the ideas aren’t serving them in any useful way? What if it’s all just a spectacle, and the skeptics and critics of philosophy are right?

I don’t believe they are. But can I articulate my response? Do I teach my response?

With my troubled class, I need to think about this. I am motivated to think about this: to present them with the arguments and ignite in them a legitimate and productive curiosity for the value of philosophy.

I remember that, when learning how to teach, this was one of the most productive lines of thought I engaged in. It changed everything about my teaching style for the better. Perhaps I have been spoiled with overly enthusiastic students, or did not sufficiently attend to it before, but I had abandoned this question.

That’s bad, because I know the City Colleges of Chicago are undergoing some radical changes, funding is getting cut, and, as our president noted this morning on his blog, we all need to think about how we’re serving our students. Sure, the duty in my heart is first to philosophy, I admit, but I am also legitimately devoted to opening my students’ minds in ways that are in accordance with their greater goals.

So much for quick notes.