According to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in her most recent book titled, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, most Athenian citizens presumed that “all of this business of what it is to live a life worth living had been taken care of, that they didn’t have to think about these questions since they had the great good fortune of being Athenians . . .”
Today, Americans don’t think much about life in Greece 2500 years ago. We don’t have to. The Greek vision, its essential features now encapsulated by the Scoreboard, supplies a good many of our marching orders. Today, we are very often heedless avatars of the same simplistic approach to life, sure in our bones that if we arrange our lives by conforming to the dictates of Scoreboard, we will experience a life worth living.
We assume (without thinking about it) that all this business of what it is to live an elevated life has been taken care of by the Scoreboard and its self-congratulatory confirmation bias. To be exceptional by Scoreboard’s in-bred, close-minded, self-affirming standards, and thus celebrated, is notionally the pinnacle of life.
As an American thinker, how could I not examine this unrealistic and shallow premise based on the lower range of the normative field? Indeed, on such field, the field can’t be seen. You and I must “stand” elsewhere when we try to make sense of our lives, to assess what has meaning. We know that when we don’t deliberatively examine the conditions and circumstances that give rise to us, we are apt to misunderstand ourselves in relation to the world. This misunderstanding predictably yields the desperation revealed by corruption and exploitation or the quiet desperation, à la Thoreau, revealed by disappointment and discontent.
Goldstein makes a case for why philosophy is still relevant in today’s world. But we don’t have to be trained in academic epistemology or logic to access wisdom greater than that dictated by the Scoreboard. By coming to grips with the matters we bring to our mind (rather than the matters that Scoreboard brings to our attention), we can outwit the pressure to conform almost single-mindedly to the acquisition of celebrity standing.
In sum, we are born into a superior feeling about ourselves. Our genes drive us to compete for sustenance, attention and differentiation, to know and to be known. This superior feeling is also born of the Goldstein-described historic tradition that envisions and adulates human possibility—the heroic and the distinguished.
We internalize the vision and tend to associate a meaningful life with rank and status, being admired, being publicly praised. Not everyone aspires to be Bill Gates or Beyoncé, of course, but comparisons being omnipresent, we can’t help but measure our status against that of others.
It’s a romantic and engaging notion or perspective. Who of us is not familiar with the heroes of yesteryear, the digitally animated super-heroes that populate today’s world and the heroes who achieve the cover of People? But it is not an empowering perspective. Why? Because it is unexamined and unrealistic and because it breeds irrational conduct and hopelessness.
Arnold Siegel is the founder of Autonomy and Life and leader of its Retreat Workshops and Advanced Classes.