"..Especially in our age of communication, when I see how some thought patterns are prepared, packaged into easy to swallow thought tablettes to be consumed by public and served through public opinion channels worldwide is somewhat disappointing.
It's like these radioactive marker drugs they inject into your vein to see how your blood travels through your body; a thought is created and you see it travel from continent to continent, from country to country, from city to city, from neighborhood to neighborhood for years - without being questioned, without being re-thought, accepted as they arrive, used with confidence and pride in every intellectual conversation."
Ironically, technologies we used to create this environment are taking their roots without any exception from science and the idea of continuous questioning behind it. Yet, while science's products reach more and more people thanks to our consumption cycles, the philosophy behind it becomes more and more isolated to ever shrinking, privileged oligarchic structures.
In any second, pre-processed information is flowing from all around the world right to wherever we are in such quantity and frequency that we barely find the time to even only consume them. We rely on people who think for us, people who sum it all up and tell us what we should think about things.
We don't even need to go 20 years back in time to see how fundamentally amount of information we receive and share on a daily basis has increased. We tweet, we facebook, we google, we cnn, we bbc; we do many things to collect facts from and distribute to the world. Yet these "facts" are mostly products of a perception and rarely just simple facts. They are processed and prepared by individuals with an established paradigm to be served for the hunger of our already established perceptions.
Perceptions or paradigms more in general seem to have their own appetite. Just like we tend to favor a pizza as compared to celery, our paradigms seem to hunger for certain kind of information, certain kind of factual looking comments, not just the facts. Because, the idea is not to eat something good for our health and feel good in longer terms; the idea is to reach satisfaction as fast as possible through holding the hot, crispy crust and melted mozzarella. And today's information bombardment mostly plays on our need for junk food. Not on our civilization's health.
Come to think of it, none of the wars were caused by celery but almost all of them were caused by pizza.
We think we are talking about facts. But truth is we talk about someone else's truths. We fail to recognize how deceitful facts can be.
I truly believe that human kind is more open to influence than we think. I believe we tend to think human beings in general are close to influence so we find it easier (and more profitable for some of us) to milk them instead of trying to change them. Yet, mostly the problem arises only because we don't prepare environments to allow people's exposure to different ideas.
That's why, one of the three potential social responsibility (Like many other things, this phrase has been exploited so much for the sake of brand identities that it sounds miserably corporate) topics that I would want to work on in the future is improvement of the quality of social sciences education at primary and secondary schools.
Particularly in the context of history teaching, I have been trying to follow new developments. I'm happy to see that there are waves of improvement in many countries where the history books are being revised and much more importantly children are taught how to reason. Yet the efforts put are very slow and very small in their effects when compared with the realities out. Because mostly the books they are based on, the traditional history writing in short, is crippled.
A quite old article written by Stefanos Yerasimos (RIP) - a Greko-Turkish historian - had served as a great mind opener for me. In that particular article, we was mentioning how in history writing, events are used as an, what he calls, "Argument Library" where some historians tend to select arguments from this library to support THEIR VIEW they had ALREADY established and omit the rest sometimes to severely cripple the soul of mankind.Like every fundamentalism, nationalism has its echo, its even more irrational anti thesis. So as long as there is no global effort to revolutionize our education systems, we will keep failing.
But when we are doing this, I doubt it that rationalism alone could help us out:
In the biographical documentary named "The Fog of War", Robert McNamara (US Secretary for Foreign Affairs during bloodiest Vietnam war days) tells us about 11 lessons he had extracted from his long life. And one of the most important one goes; "Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us."
The reason why I wrote all of these is actually remembering about this favorite paragraph of mine from Charlie Chaplin's wonderful autobiography (My Autobiography, Charlie Chaplin):
"...His (Eisenstein's) film Ivan the Terrible, which I saw after the second World war, was the acme of all historical pictures. He dealt with history poetically - an excellent way of dealing with it. When I realized how distorted even recent events have become, history as such only arouses my skepticism. Whereas a poetic interpretation achieves a general effect of the period. After all, there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books..."
Granted, I never could manage to like "Ivan The Terrible" and to deal with history and with today's events for that matter poetically sounds naive but Chaplin surely has a point. I wonder how he would have felt in today's world.
Of course, writing History and getting informed about today's actual realities are two different disciplines. But I think these two disciplines are affecting and feeding each other where particularly the latter one feeds the former one. I think in a way, set paradigms of today establishes the framework of history writing of tomorrow.
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