in reading philosophy, one notices that all philosophers call
for change… that has been one of, if not the vocation of
philosophers since the beginning of time, since Socrates,
and the call to change has lasted until Marx, Nietzsche,
and of course, Foucault…
change, become something different…but the question then becomes,
change into what? what are we to become?
we know so little as we don’t even understand how change is done…
for example, scientific change wasn’t even a question until Kuhn
write his book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” written in 1962…
within my lifetime…
we can follow this path of change in reading about the history of evolution,
from before Darwin to such writers as Gould…how evolution itself,
went from being slow, methodical, quiet, to Gould “Punctuated Equilibrium”
which said that there was “sudden” burst of evolution, that evolution
wasn’t as slow and methodical as Darwin painted it…
so, we are here, and how do we go to there? the question then ask,
well ok, where is here and then, where is there? Once again the question
has been asked, where exactly are we going? This question has been quite
frequently asked…for example, Marx wrote that the creation of the
“working state”, one where the workers own the means of production
and not the capitalist, at that point, according to Marx, was the last
day of history… and he was wrong…for Marxism and the workers
state are both just temporary moments in history and will pass on,
leading us to another state and another state and another state…
this thinking about the “last Man” is nonsense… because if there is one,
one thing we know about history, is that it changes, all the time… the question
has been how does it change? and what changes should we embrace and what changes
should we avoid? what is called for and Kuhn got the ball moving is this question
of change itself…
we have seen change in history… for example, the change in France from
the monarchy to the rise of the French Republic to the dictatorship of Napoleon…
so exactly how do we account for the change in France from 1789
to 1801?
recall that Napoleon wasn’t really on the scene until 1796…so we cannot
use him as a springboard to understanding the change in France during those
years…
we could use as possibilities for the change in France as one of several different
factors… the bad weather which caused several famines in France during those
years, the effects of the 1000 year old monarchy which no longer took notice
of, or cared about the vast majority of the population of France, the peasants…
the bewildering array of local and state wide taxes which dominated the peasant’s
life…the effects of the movement of the Enlightenment… where, however dimly,
that the peasant came to realize that they could become something else beside
just being peasants all their lives…the French revolution began as a movement,
not lead by anyone in particular… the beginning action was the storming of
the Bastille… which had no leader and was driven by decades, if not centuries
of “people living lives of quiet desperation” and finally having enough…
“we have been pushed almost to the brink of devastation and we will take no more”
seems to be the attitude of those who stormed the Bastille…all we have left is our lives
and that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone outside of us… “we have nothing left to live for”
might be the belief of the average person engaged in the storming of the Bastille…
whatever the cause or causes, it was enough to cause the death of the monarch
Louis 16, 4 years later…
but were the massive changes in France the changes they needed to make?
clearly the country as a whole agreed to some degree with the wholesale changes
made over the next decade till the return of the monarchy with Napoleon in 1801…
entire books have been written about the French revolution and its causes…
and I certainly won’t solve that issue in one post, but it does offer us a glimpse of
how change works and its nature…
so the question facing us today is this… what change should we engage
with and why that change? if the study of philosophy is to encourage change,
then what change should we engage in?
or should we stick with the Status quo? the amount of the undercurrent of
discontentment in the Status quo seems to preclude any possibility of
standing still… we can see this discontentment with the refusal of
people to go back to the sweat shops of retail and restaurants in which
businesses are engaged in being a poverty exploiters, not a job creators…
where I saw one ad that, as condition of working, required an degree
and several years of working, just to be offered 13 bucks an hour…
your basic starvation level paycheck…
the modern sentiment that one is “lucky” to have a job is no longer
true…why should I consider myself “lucky” to have a job that
doesn’t even pay the rent?
I would walk away from my job in a heartbeat given half a chance…
and I believe so would millions upon millions of people would do the same
if given half the chance… that isn’t a group that is happy and content with life as is…
if we are willing to walk away from jobs…
so right now, right here, change is required, demanded but what change
is deemed necessary… from what to what, becomes the question…
if we don’t have jobs, then what?
the solution seems to be on the easy side, pay people a living wage,
one in which people don’t need to dance on the edge of starvation…
pay at least $25 dollars an hour… but Kropotkin, business will go out of
business… at this point, I really don’t care… if all they do is engage in
exploiting people to hold jobs that won’t even pay the rent, then I am not
interested in keeping those businesses…
so the overall question lies in something more then just wages and benefits,
the question is really this, how are we going to treat people?
are we going to continue to dehumanize and diminish people in the name
of capitalism? are people an end or are they a means? using people to
becoming wealthy off the work of them is using people as an means,
offering them a living wage, enough for them to survive on, that is an
engagement with people as an end…
so, once again, I ask… what changes and why those changes and not
other changes?
Kropotkin