WHY did the chicken cross the road?
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| Chickens crossing road Image from wikipedia.com |
Aristotle: To actualize its potential. It is the nature of chickens to cross roads.
Roseanne Barr: Urrrrrp. What chicken?
Ludwig van Beethoven: What? Speak up.
Bodhidharma: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
George Bush: To face a thousand points of headlights.
Julius Caesar: To come, to see, to conquer.
John Calvin: It was predestined.
All of these different people are analyzing this phenomenon using circumstances from their own life. They are answering this "why?" question. However, nobody likes this why question:
Louis ck describes this situation: (content contains some explicit language and crude humor)
Today in discussion, we discussed the idea of legitimacy. We discussed how certain philosophies are used to legitimize or rationalize certain human behavior and functioning as well as understand society formation and government rule. Being that is is my last blog post of the semester, I feel it appropriate to present my own interpretation of political theory. This class is called "why 101". The word theory indicates that everything we learn is a hypothesized and not necessarily proven. We ask why all the time and just as Louis says in the video, this question is endless. We attempt to understand every little thing in the world, analyze every little slight intricacy that defines us as people, and therefore we miss out on just living. Political theory is a way of thought thats roots in philosiphy make it a theoretical science. In reality, every political idea has become revised and revised and revised as times have passed. The ideas of Locke and Plato and Marx and Rousseau and Hobbes may exist in our modern day culture, and people may live by them subconsciously, but the benefits of understanding such concepts (of understanding "why?") have not payed real dividends.
We live in a country in which we believe that we are the greatest country in the world (that we are a country that has learned from such political philosophies and adapted to new circumstances) yet according to Newsroom America is still:
7th in Literacy
49th in Life Expectancy
178th in Infant Mortality
3rd in Median Household Income
4th in Labor Force
4th in Exports
Internationally there are issues as well:
Wars are fought all over the world over religious, economic, and political reasons
Poverty defines the lives of many citizens across the globe
Many countries still fail to defend against the horrors of nature
Unity is not existant on a global level, nationalism in our nation is also weak
Our political system in America is one full of strife and disagreement as well as the governemnt of many nations across globe
Why haven't these problems been attended to? We have learned from some of the "greatest" minds in history. There have been many people who have attempted to answer the "whys?" of the world. Yet, these facts listed above are very well real.
And that is the bottom line. They are real and not theory. In no way do I mean to devalue the practice of abstract thinking or search for reason, but I do have the right to question what is the point. Just like they ask why, so can I. We live in a world so complex. And again, I stress the words "so complex". Life is so complex. Searching for the answers to understand such complexities is an admirable practice to say the least. Yet, when are we going to find real answers and not theoretical ones. When are we going to look back and say that these philosophers have made real world differences and not just formed the basis of the textbooks we read.
So this brings be back to "Why did the chicken cross the road?".
Does it really matter why. Someone who is going to comment on this post is going to respond to my post by saying something to the extent of "we theorize in the attempt to understand" or "we must search for answers to learn about the world that we live and make changes for the future". And I would agree with these posts. However, at the end of the day the chicken crosses the road because the chicken crosses the road. That is the only reason that in reality matters. It doesn't matter if it was to escape a predator or to chase food or to run to its mom. But, it just matters that it is on the other side.
The work of the political theorists that we have discussed in class is with out a doubt well thought out and remarkable. Each of the men discussed were brilliant in their own way. Yet they all preached their own unique, different ideas and therefore we end up with a lot of different theories and still a lot of different problems. When will one of these theories be proven? When will we finally know "why".
Just a thought
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ReplyDeleteYour argument essentially hinges on the fact that we, as a race, have made no progress in any field whatsoever because of theory. I strongly disagree with this and can think of many examples in which theory has proven to be incredibly valuable. Isaac Newton theorizing about gravity yielded Newtonian physics, Charles Darwin's theorizing yielded evolution, and our founding fathers engaging in political theory yielded the American government. Our government draws on many different political theories and reflects the vision of what the American founding fathers thought government should be like. In fact all nearly all the problems the Americans were subjugated to at the hands of the British as colonists were resolved by the founding fathers theorizing. Issac Newton famously said "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants." This simply means that he used the knowledge of his predecessors to build his revolutionary theory. Though it may seem like we have made little progress, I think we have accomplished great things. New problems have risen from the old, but many of the old problems have been solved. Now we can build off all the work of past theorists to solve these new problems and I'm confident that these problem's will be solved as well.
ReplyDeleteI think your train of thought here is misguided. That which is is the province of political science, that which should be is the purview of political theory, and we are in a political theory class. But I understand your frustration with the abstractions of the readings and discussions; sometimes it's hard to see how they apply to the real world. But by answering "Why did the chicken cross the road?" with "Because the chicken crossed the road" we don't have any more information than we started with, and that answer leaves us standing in the street, scratching our heads, waiting to be hit by a Tyson truck. I think saying it's the only answer that really matters is a pretty bold statement to make without supporting arguments.
ReplyDeleteTo address a different part of your post, it is true that the United States is not a perfect country. But our problems (grinding poverty, high under- and unemployment, an embarrassingly low literacy rate of only 99%, shameful infant and maternal mortality rates, etc.) are, I think it's safe to say, less due to political theorists asking "why?" than to historical, political, scientific, and socioeconomic circumstances.