Existential

Okay, enough about what the US Supreme Court's historic ruling to uphold Obamacare means for the country. Let's talk about what our reaction told us about us. It sure was a strange reaction.

The decision was scheduled to be announced on Thursday morning, June 28, starting at 10:am. The first few sentences of the announcement appeared a few minutes later on the SCOTUSblog live stream, and as soon as the first sentences appeared, public hysteria ensued.

At least a full half hour of absolute hysteria followed, mostly caused by the fact that two cable news networks, CNN and Fox News, reported incorrectly that Obamacare had been overturned. The confusion was cleared up quickly, but now everybody was confused, and somehow the hysterical pitch of the first few minutes became the de facto tone of the news coverage for the entire day.

Even today, two days later, there is still an undertone of shock to all coverage and discussion of the Supreme Court verdict -- appreciative and relieved shock on the pro-Obamacare side, and indignant, infuriated shock on the anti- side.

I wasn't shocked. I've been following the healthcare debate closely for years, and I know the bill had been carefully designed to make it through the Supreme Court (the Obama administration is not stupid, after all). I was amazed that so many allegedly knowledgeable people were predicting that the Supreme Court would find ACA unconstitutional, because anybody who knows the history of the US Supreme Court knows how unusual a decision to overturn a law on such optional grounds would have been. The Supreme Court (as Chief Justice John Roberts would finally explain in his preamble) doesn't have a history of challenging legislation at this level, and makes an effort to steer clear of partisan politics. The honor and reputation of the court would clearly be at stake if it made a dramatic decision to overturn such a major piece of legislation, and it was Chief Justice John Roberts's responsibility above all to defend the integrity of the Supreme Court by moving cautiously.

There are three misconceptions about philosophy that I'd like to clear up today.  The first is that it's an academic discipline, carried out by professors and graduate students in quarterlies and journals while the rest of us breathlessly await reports of their findings.  Actually, many people like me who care about philosophy don't pay any attention to the back-and-forth of insular academic journals.  If anything useful emerges from one of these journals, we figure, we'll eventually read about it on a blog. This doesn't happen, we notice, very often.

It is a fact that many professors call themselves philosophers, and that some top professors at top colleges consider themselves very important philosophers.  But there is little evidence that any academic work is getting noticed in the real world, and philosophy is thoroughly concerned with the real world.  It's a telling fact that the most popular American philosopher of the past hundred years, Ayn Rand (who I have been knocking myself out here to refute) was not an academic, and also that the most popular European philosopher of the past two hundred years, Friedrich Nietzsche (who I have been knocking myself out to promote) began his career as an academic, but only managed to find a reading audience after leaving the University of Basel and slowly going insane, at the same time writing the great non-academic works that made him a star.

I hope the philosophy professors in all the colleges of the world are doing a great job teaching their students (this is, after all, the primary responsibility of a college professor).  But as for the original work they are doing, it's mostly fan-fiction as far as I can tell.  Lots of words, very little impact.

I can never guess which of my Philosophy Weekend blog posts will turn out to have legs.

Nine months ago, researching the origin of the word 'altruism', I learned that the term had been coined by Auguste Comte, a 19th Century French philosopher I had heard of but knew little about. Comte had developed a humane and optimistic system of political, ethical, scientific and metaphysical philosophy called Positivism, and during his lifetime Positivism was a gigantic sensation around the world. Intrigued, I wrote a blog post to wonder what it signified about our own culture that a major 19th Century philosopher with an ambitious platform of international peace, respect for human diversity and freethinking scientific rigor had fallen completely off the radar immediately after the disaster of the First World War.

What I didn't expect was that my blog post would start getting lots of hits from Google, and would become one of my more popular Philosophy Weekend posts (I do watch my traffic statistics, not to feed my ego but to discern trends in reader interest). Then, a mysterious late comment appeared on my Comte post that brought a big smile to my face. In response to my statement that Positivism was defunct today, and this commenter posted a single sentence reply:

Well, we are not quite that dead, are we?

This was accompanied by a link to Positivists.org, a well-designed website with an active Facebook page and a lively blog. The new web presence is apparently the work of an eager German philosopher named Olaf Simons who appears to have some clue how to use social media to spread a message. Positivism lives!

Years ago, when I was working for a small litigation software company in New York City, I was leaving the office one day when I thought I heard someone shout my name from far away.  I stopped in the building lobby and looked around, but I didn't see anyone and couldn't imagine why somebody would be calling for me. So I continued on my way and was just about to reach the building's front door when I heard the muffled shout again, coming from the mezzanine above the escalator I'd just taken, along with the sound of pounding footsteps.  A figure finally came into view, running down the escalator. It was my co-worker John T.  "Did the servers crash?" I asked when he finally reached me.

"No," he said, breathless, grabbing his knees.  He regained his composure and began digging around in his pocket, finally pulling out his wallet and handing me a single dollar bill.  "The soda machine before," he sputtered.

The soda machine.  Several hours earlier, he'd asked me for a dollar to buy a soda, and I had handed one over.  I'd completely forgotten about it, and he could have too for all I cared. After all, we're both software developers, allegedly well paid -- what's a dollar to either of us? But I guess he takes great pride in being the kind of person who pays back every single dollar he ever borrows.  I could see the pride on his face.  "Thanks," I said, shrugging and turning away, shoving the dollar bill in my pocket.