What do we need when the dust settles? Critical thinking, and above all, philosophy.

Image source: Will Lion

Why is this happening to our society?  Everyone seems to be asking that question, and many are filling in the pause after it with their own interpretative explanation.   I don't have an answer, and wouldn't presume to be able to explain it, but what I do have is a series of thoughts on what I've seen and heard (as represented by a media under question), and these thoughts have led me to question my own position on fundamental aspects of human nature and society.  Morality, ethics and the role of the government  are the things people are talking about on our streets today, and I'm glad. Glad that people are thinking, glad that they are arguing, questioning, giving their opinions.  This is what enables our society to balance itself, and it's this critical, multi-perspective thinking that I and my colleagues in higher education seek to help our students develop.  This, is philosophy, and we need it now more than ever.

Perhaps seemingly counter-intuitively, in order to illustrate the importance of breadth and depth of critical thinking,  I'm going to start with a reference to science. Events taking place in our cities have particularly reminded me of the work of Milgram, who, in the 1960s, conducted a series of experiments aimed at determining how willing individuals would be to inflict pain on others when instructed to do so by authority figures.  Very willing was the overwhelming answer, to the shock and disgust of many of those involved and the wider public when the results were published.  

Milgram's work suggests that when placed in a situation where we consider ourselves to be subordinate to a perceived authority figure, we 'switch off' our moral compass and do as we're told, no matter how unpalatable the consequences.  This, along with the Asch experiments of the 1950s on group conformity (which showed the willingness of people to consciously give an erroneous response to questions in order to conform to the responses of the wider group), seem to me to provide some superficial insight into the behaviours we have been seeing in our cities in recent days.  Are we seeing an extreme negative example of  Janis's 'Groupthink' here - where group pressures lead to questionable decision making?  Group conformity, the exploitation of this by organised criminals and gang hierarchies, and this removal of a sense of morality through the ability to rationalise the activity as a response to 'social problems' blamed on government, the police and other authority figures are, it seems to me, all in the mix here.

I could, of course, also refer to the rather obvious example of  Golding's Lord of the Flies. Like the experiments above, this was first published in that post-war period of questioning and attempts to understand the horrors of war and the senseless destruction of human life in the Holocaust, and with this in mind there are all sorts of directions in which this particular comparison could lead us...the involvement of children in these activities, the underlying influences (socio-economic, cultural, political, or individual), and in a broader sense, the question of how this reflects our own place in history (the shock of 9/11 and other terrorist acts, the tumbling dictatorships of the Middle East, the loss of confidence in our political and economic leadership, loss of faith in the media and the police) are all relevant here.

Do these events create a situation in which we are more likely to behave in destructive and negative ways?  Are we all seeking a sense of direction, order and leadership amongst the chaos?  Can chaos in fact lead to its own form of stability through self-organisation?   For example yesterday saw citizens organising themselves to clean up their neighbourhoods after the damage of the previous night.  Is this what Kant meant when he referred to self-organization?  Is this a complex, self-organising system which, in the absence of leadership and direction, is achieving a balance by itself?

Questions, questions...but who will answer them?

I could continue here ad infinitum, trying to get to grips with this myself - twisting and turning this complexity over, but this would be mere speculation, and with respect to those positivists out there, and to the empirical research to which I refer above, I'm not going to continue without evidence...

What I do believe, however, is that this highlights the importance of one thing, and it's something that's currently under threat from cuts to higher education and a lack of engagement with the topic. Right now, we need philosophy and philosophers.   What we are seeing relates to the fundamental questions philosophers have been asking for milennia, about ethics, politics and logic, and so our society needs people to read, think, reflect and debate these problems we are facing, so we can make the right decisions on how to act - and not just those from a small section of society for whom philosophy is an open book.   We need people from all backgrounds and communities to value, nurture and respect the role of philosophy in our society, and to do this we need to engage more young people with the subject and above all keep philosophy departments in Universities open.

If you are reading about these issues, watching them on the news, and discussing them, you are already engaging in philosophy as well as politics.  And just like politics, philosophy should be something for the massess not just for the elite.