Before this week I had never purchased and read a book written by a politician. Without turning the front cover one can intuit that the politician, through this book, is trying to sell her/himself. I ignored this reasonable “intuition” and went ahead and started reading Barack Obama’s, The Audacity of Hope. Senator Obama is trying to sell himself with this book and trying to make the reader comfortable with his way of thinking about politics. Not that this is a bad thing but might as well call a duck a duck. Obama’s book is a duck… uuh, I mean – he wrote about himself so that you will like him and that is what politicians do. I would recommend this book to people who are interested in reading Senator Obama’s view of politics in the US but be prepared to not be shocked, offended or enlightened. That being said, I’m not writing a book review but am responding to his section on education in the chapter titled, “Opportunity.”
Senator Obama has a very sympathetic view towards education. He wants to lower tuition costs, to increase grants to students and research programs, and to increase teacher’s salaries (based on performance). I agree that these things should be done and that education should be more of a priority in our government’s spending. What struck me was why he thought spending should be increased and what he expected from this increase in spending. It boils down to a direct relationship between education and the economy. Increased government spending in learning is not so much an investment in the people as it is an investment in our economy. Nicely funded research programs stocked with well educated students will help keep the US competitive in the global economy. The more people we have entering engineering/physics/computer science programs the better chance innovative companies will be created – companies that will keep our economy afloat. Tax payers and politicians are meant to be soothed by the idea that money spent on education will have a high return.
Education = money. More education = more money. While reading this I was having flashbacks of reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto. I had a bearded man in the back of my head telling me that in a capitalistic society every institution finds its value in its monetary productiveness, that every relation is a monetary relation and that education is valuable if and only if it has a high return. Areas of study that don’t have a direct translation to the marketplace are devalued. Obama isn’t concerned if we stay competitive in literature, philosophy or the study of history (etc.) because these areas of study have no monetary worth. He even suggests that high school teachers of math and science should be paid more because what they teach has (yet again, monetary) worth.
Not that this is particularly anything new. Anyone studying in the Humanities at a University in the US knows the feeling of having to pay an ever increasing tuition, seeing their department experience cuts and walking past brand new buildings dedicated to the sciences. It is also happening in Germany.
To give Senator Obama some slack I highly doubt that any of the other candidates view education as something that deserves government spending because it is in itself valuable. I voted for the guy in my state’s primary and, if given the chance, will vote for him again. I am just incredibly turned off by this view of education and despair the future of our humanities.
What do Mr. T and Nietzsche have in common? Their view of pity. I was thinking about this the other night while trying to fall asleep – I don’t know why but I just kept seeing Mr. T yelling at people and pitying fools.
I think it is understandable that when T belts that he “pities the fool!” he isn’t trying to be nice. What happens when the church pities? I imagine their reasons being that they feel sorry for someone, that they want to spread love, to help. Nietzsche imagines their actual reasons being that they want to make small, to subordinate, to dominate, to exert their power, to take advantage. Does the same thing happen when Mr. T yells “I pity the fool!” as when the pope says “I pity you, my son”?. Does the tone of the voice actually change what “happens”? Nietzsche expects the counter-argument which states that it is the intention that counts – T wants to degrade, the pope wants to help. What does Nietzsche have to say? Don’t believe the church – their actions are no different from Mr. T’s (he didn’t actually say this), they want to exert their power by pitying, by making people feel small. The difference is that Mr. T is honest with himself when he pities (he knows he’s being cruel) and the church isn’t (they may or may not be aware of their “hidden” intentions). The only thing I mean by “hidden” is only that a lie replaces the truth if it is repeated often enough (we are just helping, helping, helping).
as she saw me cooking noodles without adding salt to the boiling water. I defended myself by saying that I wouldn’t be able to taste the difference anyways – salt or no salt. She ran and grabbed the neighbors for back-up, each of them as equally shocked at my cave-man-esque cooking style. They made me read the package to them… the part where it says to add salt to boiling water (so cruel). I still protested at the futility of using their white diamonds. Four of them held me back while my roommate carefully rubbed salt between her fingers at into my pot of noodles. Collapsing in near tears I didn’t want anything to do with the seaweed in the pot – those kelp like noodles tumbling in a salty, boiling sea. My roommate then drained and placed the noodles on a plate. She handed me a noodle and said, “here, eat this and you will feel better” – that is when I saw the light. That week I went out and bought a box of salt. I’ve learned the art of throwing salt at noodles.
According to Karl Löwith in Meaning in History there are two main ways to view history; either through a Judeo-Christian or ancient Greek understanding, all other attempts to interpret history “are nothing else but variations of these two principles or a mixture of the both of them.”
The remaining question for us readers after we’re done is: what should we think? Especially as philosophers, philosophers who don’t want to admit or (even worse) have someone say that their thinking is based on Judeo-Christian foundations. Löwith leaves us a problem without an answer (something he often does). He does, however, respond to this criticism in the preface to the German edition – (my free and loose translation) if we value truth I will not subordinate these observations under a principle. In other words, he’s telling us that our question is too Christian and that giving an answer would be forcing him to become a prophet (i.e.; pulling a principle out of thin air and displaying how history plays along this principle – such was done by many philosophers, the easiest to think of is Marx who said that history is nothing but class struggles).
