Culture Is Malleable, and That’s the Good News
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I have a legitimate question. No bullshit. No funny stuff. A real, serious, sincere and earnest question.
Maybe you can help me?
I have a friend. He is educated. He has a doctorate in philosophy, which is the study of wisdom, the best that humans have come up with in all domains, a kind of meta-discipline, if you will, that takes for its subject matter anything it feels compelled to examine, from science to literature to mathematics and religion and economics and biology and knowledge and meaning and where it all comes from and morality and where that comes from and everything else under the sun.
Philosophy exists for the love of wisdom.
I feel what follows would be different if my friend was a doctor of business administration, or health care policy, psychology, or music.
A medical doctor.
Anything but philosophy.
And, here’s the deal: my friend and his wife are boarding a flight to Italy, hopscotching around Italy before jumping a ship to sail to Greece and around the Mediterranean.
And, then flying home, of course.
Sounds pretty grand, right?
This friend also laments the climate crisis. This friend is informed. Undoubtedly, this friend is aware that Greece has just burned and then flooded, the scars still visible, that bodies are still being recovered from the massive flood in Libya, caused by the same storm that inundated Greece and the Balkans, and this friend is undoubtedly informed about these same floods and fires and extreme weather all around the globe.
This friend has just endured a summer of hazy skies and unhealthy air from the unprecedented wildfires in Canada. This same friend has just endured the hottest summer months on record for the planet.
This informed friend is also aware of the catastrophic ocean heat waves blistering waters all over the world.
This friend and I have discussed how our real world mimics the opening montage of many disaster movies, when everything is falling apart at once, and human civilization is on the brink of collapse.
