Monday, June 09, 2008
Have you hugged your philosopher lately?
Ray Stubblefield
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
You probably already know. We landed on Mars again. A spacecraft named the Phoenix was sent to look for evidence of life in the cold northern reaches of the planet where there is ice.
The assumption is, where there is water, there is life or at least organic compounds that are necessary for life. They gave it the name Phoenix to make up for the other spacecraft they crashed on Mars a few years back. Landing on Mars isn't easy.
Getting a plane to fly is impressive to me. Just think how smart you have to be to send a space probe all the way to Mars and have it send pictures and stuff back.
But I used to tell my physics students that my biggest asset was not being smart. I was just average. So if I can understand this stuff, I can get you to understand it. You don't need Einstein in a high school physics class.
Half my friends in college were engineers, and the other half liberal arts types. I felt comfortable in both camps, and it allowed me to get to know some engineers up close and personal.
There's no denying, those engineers are a smart bunch, if not a little quirky. I was always kind of envious that I wasn't that smart.
But after awhile I would get tired of tech talk and leave my engineer friends to their pocket protectors and calculators, and go hang out with my English, art and philosophy major friends.
A good number of them had long hair, smoked cigarettes and drank lots of coffee. It kinda went with the territory of being a poet-philosopher.
Rather than talk about breeder reactors and how safe and efficient they are, we would stay up into the wee hours of the morning discussing deep stuff, like God and the meaning of life. I miss those times.
Does anyone have those kinds of conversations anymore, or is it only about who will win on "America Idol" or what team will take the pennant this year?
Sometimes I think the world needs more poet-philosophers and fewer engineers.
Our modern world, with all its specialists, is bursting at the seams with knowledge, but is dying for lack of wisdom and insight.
Knowledge comes from study. Wisdom is supposed to come with age. But insight is a gift. Poet-philosophers have that gift.
The world needs poet-philosophers to pull us from the mire of daily living and point to a higher way. "Man does not live by bread alone." We need to feed the soul and the spirit as well.
Think of your favorite poem, piece of literature, work of art or even your favorite movie or song and how much it has touched you, and you begin to understand what I am getting at.
Maybe you remember the show "Northern Exposure"? If you do, then you know that the character Chris Stevens was the consummate modern-day poet-philosopher.
If you are a poet-philosopher, you can forget about any appreciation or recognition.
Our society would rather have the person who can give us a longer-lasting battery, save us money come tax time or remove an appendix when necessary.
You aren't going to find the title "poet-philosopher" on any job application or career survey your guidance counselor is likely to give you.
Being smart and being a deep thinker aren't the same thing. But then maybe deep thinking is just another type of intelligence our society refuses to recognize.
I know brilliant people in all sorts of disciplines: engineering, medicine, finance and computing, and too many of them don't even know what a deep thought is, let alone have one.
They are not alone. Many in our society are in the same boat. If it doesn't get the job done or make a buck, most of us aren't interested.
In some ways, I understand. The last thing we need is a world full of navel-gazers with their heads stuck in the clouds all day. Someone's got to, "Get 'er done."
But wouldn't it be nice if we had people who were not only competent professionals but had a bit of the poet-philosopher in them as well?
Wouldn't it be nice if those sending young men and women off to war or those making the guns, bombs and missiles they use were not only technically competent, but possessed insight and wisdom as well?
Maybe if more engineers, politicians and military leaders took more philosophy, literature and art classes in college, there would be fewer bombs and fewer wars? But what do I know?
So give your favorite poet-philosopher a hug today, and let them know how much you appreciate them. The world needs them now more than ever.
Stubblefield, who teaches earth science at Franklin County High School, is a Roanoke Times columnist.
