Sundance and Butch Could Teach Blind, Bankrupt French a Lesson
22 07 2007Sundance Kid: “You just keep thinkin’ Butch. That’s what you’re good at.”
Butch Cassidy: “I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”
Certainly, the new president himself has cultivated his image as a nonintellectual. “I am not a theoretician,” he told a television interviewer last month. “I am not an ideologue. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete!”
I’m not an outlaw like Butch but my thinking is outside the law, in the sense that it isn’t controlled or circumscribed BY the law. You might say I’m a subversive thinker :
“Subversive Christianity” - -the blog’s header defines “subvert” as
“to turn over; to reveal what is hidden; to uncover roots; to undermine false structures; to rediscover true foundations; to bring what is hidden into the light; to get to the heart of the matter; to prepare for renewal.”
Say we bring The Intellectual Devotional into the light: if these are the seven key fields of knowledge, then bleeding and sweating over money — either banking or bank-robbing — doesn’t make the cut, and it didn’t work that well for Butch and Sundance.
And I’m no French citizen (my kids just play them on stage this summer) but rediscovering foundations and preparing for renewal is what’s revolutionary in my book — more so than dutifully jogging to the bank in concrete!? — and would serve France much better than willful blindness in a world wearing bifocals. . .
But the disdain for reflection may be going a bit too far. It certainly has set the French intellectual class on edge.
“How absurd to say we should think less!” said Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher, writer, professor and radio show host. . .
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled . . .
“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Mr. Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials B.H.L. “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases.
“I’m pro-American and pro-market, so I could have voted for Nicolas Sarkozy, but this anti-intellectual tendency is one of the reasons that I did not.”
The furious energy of liberty? A vision worth thinking about–
I quoted Winston Churchill the other day in a blogpost about politicians not thinking well enough to help us or even themselves, and wouldn’t it fit here too?
“True genius resides in the capacity
for evaluation of uncertain,
hazardous, and conflicting information.”
We always need more subversion. People always get too comfortable and forget how little they know. But maybe Sarkozy is just subverting the French people’s unexamined value of intellectualism.
Nah, I think he really is someone concrete.
Philosophy sure is unpopular these days.
At least unless it’s decked out as religion . . .
Butch has a telling line when he learns that Mr. E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad has outfitted a special force to come after him: “If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbin’ him, I’d STOP ROBBIN’ HIM!”
This is a thinking error.
He felt aggrieved; to his best way of thinking, this did make sense. Harriman was being irrational, and about money!
Why I always think we need better thinking to solve the world’s real human problems, one brain at a time . . .
More about Butch and Sundance as education power of story in “What’s the Matter with THOSE Guys??”
Or by stubbornly setting their boots into concrete, especially the clunkiness of insisting it’s just about the money:
“The difference between brilliant and mediocre thinking lies not so much in our mental equipment as in how well we use it.”
–Dr. Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats
I’m not sure philosophical religion is very popular. Somehow a lot of people seem to think that even though nobody they know has all of the theological answers, it is wrong to ask questions and look for answers. I like the way John Ziman puts it:
It makes you realize that church and state have a lot in common (that’s why they must be kept separate).
So I think we’ll have to keep working for better thinking, and we’l probably have to rescue the same brain more than once. I know I’ve had to rescue mine a few times already.
***It makes you realize that church and state have a lot in common (that’s why they must be kept separate).****
You can play that again Sam! (er, Rolfe)
Not just separate from each other but in my view, separate from education. Church and state can’t foster true inquiry. They tend to prefer inquisition.
Maybe Rolfe is right that Sarkozy has room to challenge extreme French intellectualism, like obsessing over how to keep their official language including baby names pure and true to that unique, indefinably French sensibility.
But the opposite problem seems more critical to me, all the dehumanized data-crunching and profit-wringing without regard to intangible, ineffable value (for example, it’s delicious but quirky and clearly unquantifiable to contemplate how words themselves can have “ineffable” and therefore wordless value) :
[...] that vanished along with it — apparently we’re not holding that harmless either. Reason is just too darned expensive for our schools to afford these days? Looks like we’re going back to the basics of human [...]