On Dec. 25, GOP nominee Newt Gingrich unveiled his plan for reversing America's spiral into irrelevancy. "By the end of my second term," he said, among an unsettling flood of laughter and cheers, "we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American."
That's right — Newt has vowed to colonize the moon by 2020.
And you have to respect him for his vision — if only for the fact that his cojones must be larger than my head and his brain must be smaller than my cojones.
I say that facetiously, of course. Newt has the unfortunate quality of being one of the smartest men to participate in the GOP debates. But for a man with a plan, he lacks some innately human faculties — common sense and conscience — faculties that also seem to be lacking in the field of philosophy.
First we'll focus on Newt.
There's something fundamentally wrong with his moon mission — it has no rationale or realism. The "Reagan conservative," the tax cutting militant, wants to build a base on the moon using revenue from America's $15 trillion deficit (deficit meaning debt; debt meaning money we owe; money we owe meaning money we don't have).
Newt failed to detail how exactly he'd fund the project but, extrapolating from his policies on child labor laws, expect him to employ children age 8 to 16 to screw hinges and weld panels for minimum wage.
Newt's moon mission and thoughts on child labor laws reveal his apparent lack of conscience and awareness of the struggles in this country. In 2010, 17.2 million American households were "food insecure" (a pseudo-honorable way of saying people were hungry). In the same year, 46.9 million people were in poverty. These figures hardly improved in 2011.
Still, Newt wants to fund a station on the moon while children starve on Earth.
I was sure that Mitt's $10,000 bet was the epitome of a nominee's dissociation with the state of American society, but I'm willing to withdraw that claim and appoint Newt as the current head of obliviousness.
But what can philosophers learn from him?
For one, aim for practicality. Discussing the metaphysics of metaphysics and trying to solve Zeno's paradoxes is only going to dissolve the practice of philosophy into deeper abstraction and obscurity and make it that much less culturally relevant.
More, philosophers need to reclaim their conscience. Too often philosophers-and many other academics-detach themselves from their emotions and inclinations (see Immanuel Kant), and attempt to live lives of reason and logic alone. Again, this questionable pursuit draws philosophy closer towards irrelevancy and further from its only worthy subject of study: human experience.
Philosophers are responsible for analyzing their culture, the present, the past and the human experience and then extrapolating into the future to found a consciousness that best serves mankind. In our technological society, this guidance is needed now more than ever. By avoiding the habits of Gingrich and by returning to practicality and reclaiming their consciences, philosophers may still play a vital role in shaping our future.
Posts in Poor Philosophy appear on Tuesdays.
