(from the CD jacket)

I’m not sure what kind of cosmic copulatory magic occurred to bring this baby into the world, but this whole album is the happy place I didn’t know existed. Enjoy.

Yellow-gray cereal rain chimes from the glass bowl on the table. He pours the half empty gallon of whole milk over the wheat byproduct squares. The cereal is soggy before he begins to eat, but it empties. He pours another serving, except more than cereal filled the bowl:

Jon Alston is a native of Northern California, and graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from California State University, Sacramento. Married for over seven years, he and his wife run JSA Photography. On the off chance he isn’t writing or working on photography, he works for Copilot Press as an intern, editing and binding handmade books. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in such journals as Midnight Screaming, Conium Review, Skive, and The Encyclopedia Project. Writing is his life.

Last year I wrote an open letter to Ira Glass, host of ‘This American Life’, telling him why I listen to NPR without paying for it. Glass, in step with his colleagues at member stations across the nation, employed a tactic of sanctimonious chiding in an effort to convince non-paying listeners (like myself at the time) to pony up. To be fair, I’ve never met Ira Glass. As such, I have no way of knowing what he’s like as a person. I’m not claiming he or anyone else at NPR are the haughty, finger-wagging jerks they often come off as during the pledge drives. Far from it. I suspect these are passionate, thoughtful people who care deeply about what they do and honestly don’t understand why so many people are willing to spend five bucks a day at Starbucks but not five bucks a month to support a service they claim to love dearly.

At issue was not the logic of Glass’ argument. It makes sense to financially support something that relies heavily on individual donations to exist, and would be sorely missed if suddenly absent. It makes sense that a great many people who listen without paying can probably afford to part with five dollars a month. I agree with both of these statements. The problem was that the current pledge-drive model is ineffective, and it seemed like NPR didn’t care. After trying in vain to open a dialogue with WBEZ Chicago (the station of which I was a member at the time), I decided the only way to get their attention was to stop rewarding their fundraising efforts with my hard-earned dollars and to encourage others to do the same.

Recently, a gentleman posted a comment to my blog pointing out that KQED, the San Francisco NPR affiliate, had implemented one of the suggestions I made in the letter to Ira Glass (they did so prior to, and quite independently of, my post). The idea was to provide pledge-drive-free streaming to members of the station so that contributors would no longer be forced to endure a week-long guilt trip that didn’t apply to them. The comment led to a series of conversations with KQED staff that convinced me to support my local affiliate, KPBS, with a monthly contribution of five dollars a month. I did not do this because I changed my mind about pledge drives. I did this because I learned there are people within the NPR community who care enough about the organization to be honest about its shortcomings and persistent in their efforts to deal with those issues head-on. In other words, I didn’t become a member because the pledge drive convinced me. I became a member in spite of it.

This video is an apt parody of an NPR pledge drive in that what it portrays is pretty much what people hear when they encounter a real one* — two effete liberals on a soapbox espousing the belief that you’re somehow a lowlife shithead if you don’t give (if anyone from KPBS is reading this, I swear I’ll up my monthly contribution if you can get me a T-Shirt that says “I am not a shithead” below the NPR logo).  The video is funny because there’s an element of truth to it, and the truth is that nobody responds well to sanctimony. This is evinced by the fact that, only about 10% of the people in the United States who listen to NPR donate, yet, the average listener has an annual household income (HHI) of US$93,000 (see this Washington Post article for more details). In other words – it’s not that people can’t afford to pay, it’s that the pledge drives are doing a crappy job of convincing people they should.

*NOTE: What’s heard is not necessarily what’s said – try this to see firsthand how great the difference can be between what someone says and what someone else hears.

Imagine a lawyer who was only able to persuade a jury 10% of the time. Picture a politician who could convince only 10% of the electorate to vote for her. Think of a surgeon whose patients survived only one of every ten operations. These, and the pledge drive, are examples of failure – the latter of which I grew tired of supporting. Who wants to keep enabling an activity they know will never work right?

Originally I was going to try to insert some kind of deeper meaning into this story but that’s really all there is to it. I stopped giving money to my NPR station because I wanted them to be aggressive about finding better ways to fund their operation. It turns out there are at least some in the the NPR family who are doing just that. KQED with their pedge free streaming, and WNYC likely to follow suit, are great examples. Hopefully this will not only spread, but encourage further innovation such that more people contribute to the financial health of their local station, and do so for reasons other than they were made to feel like a shithead if they didn’t. I promised in the aforementioned letter to Ira Glass that “until NPR member stations change their pledge-model, I and many others will continue to listen for free”.  Therefore, true to my word, I’ve become a paying member of KPBS San Diego.

La-Dee-Da.

PS – to KPBS Management – I’m serious about that T-Shirt. Com’on. Hook a brother up.

Some of this happened and some of this didn’t. It’s all true.

I was reading the Paris Review for the first time. It was late and I was inebriated and enthralled with a long-unpublished interview they did with Ray Bradbury. As a lover of both sci-fi and superb writing in general, Bradbury is one of my all time favorites. This as much for his works as his persona. He was talking about how there are certain writers for certain times in your life. It reminded me of Henry Miller and that collection of his stories edited by Lawrence Durrell that’s been sitting on my shelf for about a decade unread. Henry Miller was the author of my twenties.

Now in my mid thirties, I’ve moved on – but reading that statement by Bradbury made me wonder why, and what it was that I connected with in the first place. Was it the work, or the writer who penned it? Also, why haven’t more people read Durrell? Why haven’t I?

Writers, especially the ones like Philip K. Dick or Hunter S. Thompson or Henry Miller, are farmers of colorful experience living only to harvest their crop and mill it into some kind of recognizable truth. We feed on that truth — but only if we’re hungry, and only if we have faith in the chef. I never read Durrell because, next to Miller, his cooking never looked as good.

What follows is what sailors refer to as ‘a no-shitter’. It’s those quiet and rare moments in a life spent through the looking glass that whisper lovingly a truth so virginal it must be a lie. It’s not the facts. It’s the flavor.

I hope you’re hungry.

- Robert Heinlein

We in the United States live in communities where punching someone is against the law. We all seem pretty okay with the idea that hitting one another is a no-no, as evinced by the fact that nobody seems upset enough about the current state of affairs to do anything to change the law. In fact, most of us teach our children this from an early age. So why is it that this kind of physical violence (or the threat of it) is so ubiquitous in our media? It seems as though, so long as the audience is made to feel that the recipient somehow ‘deserved it’, nothing wrong has happened when one person clocks another.

My confusion stems from the fact that, given our aversion to this sort of thing in real life, our moral outrage is noticeably absent when we see it on television, in a movie, or in a book. At first I assumed this had something to do with the fact that, on some level, we recognize that a movie isn’t real and as such, don’t get too worked up about what’s depicted. However, in light of the fact that the stories we love are the ones in which we become emotionally and intellectually invested, this doesn’t make any sense. We engage with fiction precisely because we want to feel that kind of outrage. We want to care about the protagonists and we want to see wrongs get righted. Otherwise, it’s considered badly made. Therefore, if fiction is a kind of playground for the mind, then what is the fantasy that is being satisfied in a world where jerks can get punched with moral and legal impunity? If it’s just that – then what does this say about our real moral stance on physical violence which doesn’t cause permanent harm?

The way I see it, we either don’t have a problem with punching someone we think deserves it, or we do but we all secretly want to beat the snot out of people who annoy us. Either way, I can’t help but wonder if Heinlein didn’t have a point. Not necessarily in endorsing violence, but in recognizing its supreme effectiveness. As such, we all may be closet supporters of it – and will continue to be – until someone somewhere discovers some way of resolving conflict that’s at least as effective, and requires as little effort as physical violence.

Here is my humble attempt at an answer:

(P1) A ‘system’ is a collection of parts interacting with one another according to a set of rules.

(P2) Human beings are psycho-physical systems (herein referred to as ‘PPS’)

(P3) Our awareness of self in the third person and our other senses (sight, taste, smell, etc) are in a natural kind. (See “The Rediscovery of the Mind” by John Searle p128 for roughly the same idea).

They are in a natural kind because:

1. they provide input into the PPS which endows it with some form of awareness of itself and/or its environment
2. the presence of that input is predicated by the manner in which those faculties are physically constituted.
3. the nature of that input is governed by the manner in which those faculties are physically constituted.

The first is reasonably non-controversial. A detractor would be hard-pressed to argue that our ability to see or taste or feel is a perceptive ability while the ability to be self-aware is not. Both are, by definition, perceptive abilities in that they provide us with data regarding ourselves and the temporospatial context in which we exist. The second and third, barring belief in souls or some form of psycho-physical dualism, is equally non-controversial. The second claim simply states that the presence of these perceptive abilities supervenes on certain physical properties. We can see because we have eyes that are physically constituted in a particular way. We can taste things because we have a tongue that has particular properties. We are aware because we have a brain that has certain features. Finally, the third claim states that not only is the ability to see and taste and be aware supervenient on certain physical features of the PPS, but so is the manner in which those abilities function.

For example, if a person has bad eyesight and goes to the doctor for LASIK, what are they doing? They are using a LASER to change the physical structure of their eyes such that they effect a useful change in the manner in which their sense-organ functions. They couldn’t see too well, so they used a LASER to change the physical makeup of their eyes, and now they can see clearly. If awareness is in a natural kind with sight, then it’s reasonable to claim that a change in the physical features which engender awareness also changes the manner in which we are aware. In the same way that our ability to see is supervenient on the physical structure of our ocular organs, our capacity for third-person awareness is supervenient on our brain states. Therefore, just as a change in the manner in which we see is necessarily conjoined with a change in the subvening physical properties of our ocular faculty, any change in our awareness in necessarily conjoined with a change in the subvening brain state.

When I stub my toe, the nerves in the affected area send signals to my brain which in turn changes my brain state. Due to the supervenient relationship between my capacity for awareness and my brain, the manner in which I am aware changes with the change in brain state. I not only am cognitively aware of being in a state of pain, I feel pain because the manner in which that third-person awareness is accomplished has changed such that, like a filter over a camera lens, what is perceived is colored by the manner in which that perception is accomplished. In other words, phenomenal experience comes from the confluence of a PPS:

1. having awareness of itself in the third person
2. the fact that the faculties that enable (1) supervene on a system with physical tokens capable of multiple states and as such, the manner in which (1) is accomplished changes with each physical state which gives rise to phenomenological experience.

Therefore, the answer to Chalmer’s hard question is that

(C1) Phenomenal experience accompanies awareness (in the third-person sense) because phenomenal experience is simply the manner in which we are aware.

image courtesy memolition.com

-Desiderius Erasmus

In the over two thousand year history of philosophy, practitioners of our noble pursuit have worked tirelessly to see past the veil of appearance and cast their eyes upon the unmitigated face of truth. It is the privy of our endeavor to discover the essence of what is, the meaning of its existence, and the nature of its relationship to the other constituents of reality. As we with all the courage and fortitude evinced by David when confronted by Goliath, engage the seemingly intractable questions of life, the universe, and everything, we pat ourselves and each other on the back for our efforts. We labor under the stalwart notion that the work of philosophy is of paramount importance and we, like the Marines, are the few and proud capable of getting the job done. Unfortunately, this perception we have of ourselves and the supreme efficacy of our work is not shared by our our learned colleagues in other departments, nor by the community at large. Ironically, the academic discipline dedicated to the discovery of truth and meaning has shown itself to be completely incapable of providing a suitable account describing what philosophers do and why it matters. The view of Desiderius Erasmus, arguably one of the most influential scholars of Renaissance Europe, has been the persistent and most deleterious charge against philosophy for the whole of its existence, and one which must be put to rest once and for all if our beloved profession is to survive in the new millennia.

We exist in an environment of severe economic peril. Funding for institutions of higher-learning are being drastically cut, which in turn, is causing said institutions to severely cut their budgets and raise tuition. Given the severe shortfall in funding, university administrators are having to make difficult decisions about how to allocate financial resources so as to maximize the return on that investment. Students are forced to make a similar decision, due both to the increases in tuition and the lack of employment opportunities available even to college-educated individuals.

Imagine: if you were a university administrator and didn’t have enough money to properly fund all your departments, would you choose not to support the departments that bring in the most students and consistently conducts research which confers upon the school prestige and money in favor of something like Philosophy which does neither? If you were a student paying out the nose for your education would you pick a major like Philosophy that, to your mind, won’t significantly improve your chances of getting a job over one like Computer Science that will? Like it or not, the answer is no, and unless philosophy finds a way to change that ‘no’ into a ‘yes’, it is our contention that the consequences may well be the death of the professional practice of Philosophy.

The issue at hand is hand can be reduced to two questions. First, does the work of a philosopher have value, and second, if the answer is yes, why is that value not acknowledged?

Dr. Stanley Fish has argued against the thesis that Philosophy, and the humanities in general, has demonstrable value. The thrust of his claim against Philosophy is that the fruits of philosophical research in no way helps the average person deal with the challenges of everyday life. Fish cites the debate among Philosophers regarding absolute and relativistic moral theories as a prime example, contending that when an everyday person is confronted with an ethical quandary, the question of which moral paradigm is preferable isn’t a factor.

He is, of course, grossly mistaken. While his contention that almost nobody who has an ethical decision to make says to themselves ‘I’m a moral absolutist, so what according to the dictates of that doctrine should my action be,’ is sound, there is not, nor will there ever be, an ethical paradigm that covers every possible situation a person may face. It is moral philosophy that saves the day by providing a person the tools they need to make ethical decisions in the dynamic environment that is everyday life.

Example: if you are a moral absolutist you probably have a dictate not to be dishonest. At some point, however, you have to contend with a situation where lying is preferable. The classic case of lying to the Nazis at your door about whether your Jewish neighbor is hiding in your attic comes to mind. The rule ‘don’t lie’ is an absolute imperative, so how do you keep from lying without getting your neighbor killed? You could argue that a new rule may be created to cover this case, but then you have the problem of determining who speaks with sufficient authority to create the new rule. Conversely, if you decide that nobody can create new rules, you are left with a hermeneutic problem of applying the rules you have to situations not explicitly covered. Further, if you are a relativist, the issue is amplified in that you must determine what’s right and wrong sans the presence of hard-and-fast rules which dictate ethical conduct.

This is where philosophy becomes relevant. The purpose of the study of ethics is to uncover the reason behind why something is or is not moral. It deepens a person’s understanding beyond the letter of their moral code to the spirit of it so that when confronted with a situation not explicitly covered by whatever ethical paradigm they subscribe to, they are equipped to make the best decision possible given the constraints of context. This is an example of the value Philosophy brings to the community. It trains a person to evaluate the world in an objective fashion and in so doing, enables the individual to make better more efficacious decisions.

This benefit is not limited to moral philosophy, but is true of the entire endeavor. By any measure, a person’s success or failure in life is predicated on her ability to establish a goal, correctly assess the situation in which she exists, and act productively within the confines of the situation towards said goal. Given that philosophical training significantly improves a person’s ability to see past the appearance of things to its very essence, philosophy is exceptionally useful towards all three of the above desiderata. To put this another way, how can a person effectively set goals if they are unequal to the task of understanding what they truly want and why? How can a person accurately assess a situation if they are unable to see past the obvious surface details to the root cause at the heart of the matter? How can a person execute a course of action if they are unable to accurately assess the effectiveness of their plan and make alterations if necessary? They can’t. Therefore, given that Philosophy explicitly trains an individual such that their ability to succeed in life is greatly enhanced, the indictment against the usefulness of Philosophy is false.

Someone may raise an objection to my account by arguing that it fails to show why institutions of higher learning should fund philosophy. Given that there is a direct relationship between the funding an academic department receives and the number of students the department is able to attract, what this really amounts to is a question of value asked not by the university administration, but by prospective students. In other words, given the fact that the research of Philosophy rarely brings to a university world-wide acclaim or funding, the best argument a department of philosophy can make in favor of its continued existence is one built upon the presence of a healthy number of new students entering the department each fall. Our answer to the objection, therefore, will focus on the manner in which a department of Philosophy can demonstrate value to prospective students as in so doing, it demonstrates value to the University. To avoid further objection, I will not include in my response arguments showing how Philosophy can help you with respect to higher education in other fields (Law School, for example), or how philosophical training can make you an better employee. I will specifically answer the question How does a BA in philosophy help you get a job?

First, let’s start with the common misconception that a degree in philosophy is somehow uniquely useless in the job market. The reality is most bachelor’s degrees are useless in the job market because they provide inadequate training to perform anything but the menial work of their respective fields. What does a BS in Physics get you? A low level lab job, if you’re lucky. Think you’ll be conducting research or seeing patients with a BS in Psychology? Think again. Most people with bachelor’s degrees who don’t go on to graduate school end up doing something far afield from their major because they are simply unqualified to perform meaningful work in their respective disciplines. A BA in Philosophy, therefore, stands not alone with respect to lacking direct training to a particular industry, but shoulder to shoulder among the the BA’s and BS’ of the vast majority of academic disciplines available to a prospective student.

With the exception of individuals graduating with degrees in fields like Accounting or Computer Science (which I’ll address in a moment) where their course of study did adequately prepare a them for career-track employment doing something germane to their education, the majority of people holding a bachelor’s degree are in the same boat. They all are competing for the same entry-level jobs for which they have little to no direct training. To be successful, a recent graduate needs to take stock of her capabilities and goals, accurately assess the landscape of the job market, and aggressively market herself to prospective employers by forming and communicating compelling arguments as to why she and not the five hundred other applicants should be hired. Sound familiar? It should. This is a direct application of the skill set acquired by a person pursuing a BA in Philosophy. As such, who but a philosophy grad is best prepared to succeed in this endeavor?

Admittedly, there are a few degrees which offer training directly applicable to a particular industry. While a graduate with one of these degrees isn’t guaranteed a job, they tend to have an easier time given the greater availability of internships and the direct relationship between what they learned in school and what they are being hired to do. Therefore, if a student’s concern is solely maximizing their chances of getting a job after graduation, then a degree in something like Accounting or Computer Science would be more desirable over something like Physics, Psychology, and yes, even Philosophy.

That being said, there are plenty of ways for someone looking to get training germane to a particular job without incurring the significant expense of a four year degree. A person can build a career as a police officer, a barber, an auto mechanic, a court reporter, or a nurse without burying themselves beneath a mountain of student loan debt. However, the risk a student runs in training as a tradesman (we regard a person with a BS in Computer Science or Accounting as a tradesman in a white collar) is that if there aren’t jobs available to them either because of trouble in the industry or a glut of other tradesman looking for work, the individual is at a disadvantage in that they’ve severely limited their employment options by virtue of their limited skill set. Therefore, a BA in Philosophy still has good cause to be regarded as desirable both for the previously mentioned advantage with respect to job acquisition and because the non-industry-specific nature of the training affords the individual a certain degree of flexibility with regard to the kinds of work they can and cannot plausibly perform.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

-Karl Marx

Now that we’ve addressed the objection of why a prospective student should consider a degree in Philosophy, and how a Philosophy department can demonstrate value to a University, we can answer our first question in the affirmative: yes, the work of philosophy has value. Let us now turn our attention to the second question: why has the negative view of our profession been so virulent?

Unfortunately, the blame for the persistent misconception of philosophy lies squarely on our own shoulders. We are in the situation we are in because for the entire history of our profession, we have failed in the most spectacular way imaginable to demonstrate the value of our work to our academic peers and to the community. By in large what have we done to demonstrate the value of our work? Despite our unrivaled expertise in matters of ethics, people do not seek the aid of a philosopher when confronted with a moral concern, they either consult one another or a priest. While I’m not by any means arguing against religion or the value of faith in matters of ethics, I am positing that the voice of philosophy in such matters is also of value and our lack of acumen in demonstrating that fact to the general public is not only tragic, it’s symptomatic of the deeper issue of Philosophy’s historical inability to make use of the fruits of its research and do something productive with it.

This oversight on the part of practitioners of Philosophy needs to be corrected if we wish to avoid the potentially disastrous consequences to the health of our profession in coming years. If we stubbornly continue on the path we are on, we will fail to attract sufficient numbers of new students to warrant the continued funding of our departments at institutions across the country. The perception of the efficacy of our work will continue to deteriorate to the point where the fruits of our research will be meaningless to anyone but other members of our discipline. Our task will not be an easy one, but given the exceptional quality of persons whom I am fortunate to call my peers, and the dire consequences of inaction or failure, I have no doubt that the outcome will be nothing less than success.

IMAGE CREDIT: Nick Agin via Dribbble.com