{"id":934,"date":"2014-01-23T13:48:41","date_gmt":"2014-01-23T13:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wearedone.org\/?p=934"},"modified":"2014-01-23T17:13:50","modified_gmt":"2014-01-23T17:13:50","slug":"the-2000-year-circle-jerk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wearedone.org\/?p=934","title":{"rendered":"The 2,000 year Circle Jerk"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"philosophers\"<\/a>
\nI get irritated. Character flaw: probably. I\u2019m not better than anyone else in the personal faults department, that\u2019s for sure. Patience is not always one of my virtues and I find I can only listen to so much bullshit for so long. I suppose that\u2019s what drives me to bash religion\u2019s absurdity as often as I do, along with the natural human empathy we all share that compels me to try to change the world for my brothers and sisters who are merely buffaloed or seriously persecuted to varying degrees by religious claims and coercions. But there\u2019s a special place in my anger box for philosophy and it shares that space with theology. Theology gets its drubbing regularly so philosophy gets its moment of retort this morning.<\/p>\n

The physicist\/cosmologist\/author Lawrence Krauss<\/strong> took some heat awhile back for pretty much saying words to the effect that philosophy was pretty much fucking useless, and especially philosophy of science. Under pressure he back pedaled a bit and apologized for hurt feelings, but really didn’t change his stance or rescind his perspective: <\/p>\n

“With honest philosophers I have interesting arguments… It\u2019s always interesting to hear people\u2019s thoughts. It is true that scientists and philosophers tend to talk past each other, and theologians are one step down from philosophers (or 100 steps down) but that\u2019s what I want to point out. I was at the Vatican, invited to the Pontifical Academy, and I said to them something that sounded facetious but it wasn’t. I was amongst theologians and philosophers and I said, \u2018Look you have to listen to me, but I don\u2019t have to listen to you\u2019. I wasn\u2019t being pompous, although it sounds like it. But scientists don\u2019t have to understand, or know anything about what philosophers write. They don\u2019t; the proof of the pudding is that they don\u2019t. They don\u2019t read philosophers, they don\u2019t think about what philosophers have to say. But a philosopher who wants to talk about the world has to know what science is talking about.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

And it wasn’t the first time I\u2019d heard a practicing scientist express disdain or at least indifference to the pronouncements of \u201cprofessional<\/em>\u201d philosophers trained to coalesce the vapors of existence for us so we can continue on with our science finally knowing what the fuck we\u2019re doing thanks to their pronouncements of what science is and how it really proceeds. <\/p>\n

Krauss is of course referring to the fact that all the armchair rationalizations and deep thinking (something he fully understands, he is after all a theoretical physicist) of the theologians and philosophers doesn’t mean squat if it doesn’t map onto the real world. You have to do the empirical observation part, you gotta collect the data.
\nLike Jacob Bronowski<\/strong> has said: “When people aspire to the knowledge of gods, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.<\/em>” He was referring to the horrific case of the millions who died at the hands of the Nazis in the Holocaust, but armchair philosophizing and theologizing (new word) can get you in trouble as well… <\/p>\n

Yo Freud, didya catch that?<\/em><\/p>\n

The essence of it all is captured by the incomparable Mel Brooks<\/strong> and this bit from “History of the World part 1<\/em>” on Stand-up Philosophy!<\/p>\n