I'd be frustrated too...
.
You might know that one of my jobs involves philosophy and today's speaker drops enough philosophers' names and philosophical concepts certainly to have attracted my attention. Clive Hamilton says it's all Jean Paul Sartre's fault, but what exactly? The state of the modern, or if you like, the postmodern world. A place in which we are promised unending freedom to choose the shape and direction of our lives without restraint or coercion; where despots, racists, sexists, and meddlesome priests have been put in their place, and new connective technology has been a force for liberation. But is it really like that?Clive Hamilton has called his new book The Freedom Paradox. In it he asks why we are so discontented, despite all the wealth and freedom we appear to enjoy. And in the process he cites the work of Sartre, Kant, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Leibniz, Erasmus, Mill, Hayek, Descartes and Derrida, among others. Well, he's got me in.
What is this paradox? And what role do these philosophers play? In essence, Hamilton understands our predicament to be one of being free not to be free. That is, using all those hard-won gains of the second half of the 20th century to deliver ourselves to the marketers, who understand us as only cogs in the soulless machinery of consumerism. And postmodernist thinkers have provided the ideas to make the whole operation smooth and seamless. Clive Hamilton's arguments have met with much disagreement, most notably from those associated with the sexual and civil liberation movements of late last century. So, is it a campaign against the delights of the modern world, or a disquieting inquisition into a dehuminizing set of processes coming together in a perfect storm in the 21st century? And can we really blame philosophers for anything?
I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.I'm very good at integral and differential calculus;
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;
I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox,
I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,
In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous;
I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes!
Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore,
And whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore.Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform,
And tell you ev'ry detail of Caractacus' uniform:
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.In fact, when I know what is meant by "mamelon" and "ravelin",
When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin,
When such affairs as sorties and surprises I'm more wary at,
And when I know precisely what is meant by "commissariat",
When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery,
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery—
In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy—
You'll say a better Major-General has never sat a-gee.For my military knowledge, though I'm plucky and adventury,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century;
But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.