I am much inclined to agree with William Blake's thought that the fool who persists in his madness can become wise.... It is for that reason that I persist in this blog which sometimes takes an unplanned personal tone.

During my years in Slovakia, I acquired something like a greater sympathy. That word "sympathy" carries too much baggage, but it will have to do. Neither a graduate student nor a Professor-Temp, I lacked the hopes of the former and the status of the latter. (Even a Visting Assistant Professor has more respect than a teacher of EFL or a high school teacher--even a relatively well paid teacher in an "International School".) Consequently I changed.

One of the questions which vexed me, and continues to do so, concerns the sane reaction to the obvious injustice and very real insanity of existing social, political, and economic structures.

Recently, Professor RP Wolff discussed the problem in a way that resonated with me at his blog, "The Philosopher's Stone". An alternative to engagement is political exile, internal exile of the sort enjoyed by some artistically oriented residents of the Soviet Union. I am currently reading the Google Books-abridged (0r should I say "adulterated"--lacerated?) version of Terry Penner's essay about Socrates as political philosopher. (Found in the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. CJ Rowe) Penner suggests that Socrates' aversion to public life was based upon a calculation that he could be more effective as a private person engaged in daily discussion (of an extremely forthright and lively style largely not tolerated in the USA or any of the workplaces I have known) than if he were to enter public life. That reminds me somewhat of Wolff's mention of the internal exile approach. I don't say they are identical, nor should you think that they are. (Socrates did think that philosophical conversations make the participants better, and that there was no other way to achieve a better life. I'm not sure the aesthete who seeks internal exile necessarily has such thoughts, though I'm also not sure that, at their best, the arts don't do something very Socratic by way of undermining our habits of thought and forcing us to confront our inadequacies.)

As the USA has become increasingly a controlled society, Socrates' thought seems to me not at all foolish. I am, however, attracted to internal exile more for reasons of escapism than a deep commitment to thorough philosophical argument. So few of the people I meet seem inclined in the direction of honest conversation, and, in the workplace the Socratic approach seems to be a sure route to the workplace equivalent of death---termination, or non-renewal of a contract.....(That, indeed, suggests my greatest discomfort with the Socratic model: Don't our societies tolerate Socratic voices less and less? And does that make cowards of us all?)

The USA a controlled society? Well, what about the TV cameras everywhere? In El Paso, Texas, you find them at every demi-major intersection. It seems simply wasterful, given the facts of global warming and the disappearance of fossil fuels. At any rate, the multiplication of TV cameras in public spaces is terrible, even if it is not limited to the USA......(Czechs, at any rate, seem not to have wholly lost their common sense--if I correctly recall a recent poll in "Lidove Noviny". Most seemed to think the idea of adding cameras to Prague's metro had more to do with interference by the authorities than any form of public safety.....)

The Socratic approach (by which I mean the preference for face-to-face conversation) might get some support from a thought that the psychologist Dacher Keltner has had. Keltner has expressed the worry that electronic conversations lose the benefit of the marvelous products of our evolutionary history, namely, our ability to read faces and respond to gestures.

In a Socratic conversation, the other person is physically present, and, so those face and gesture-reading abilities are called upon. (An interesting project would be to see what kind of job Plato manages to do in his dialogues with calling our attention to the things interlocutors do with their bodies....e.g., interlocutors blush in the "Lysis"...)

after-thought: Of course, if societies can make Socratic conversations less likely, they are also thereby interfering with our ability to live well....(I'm Socratic enough to make that claim)....which may just mean they really are making you miserable, or death is better than living in them....(frightening to say that Socratic thing when I didn't mean to end up there, but it is consonant with my mood in general, and as reflected in this blog)....

Once again about art and internal exile:
Contrast two ways to cope with the horrendous fact of existing inequalities, injustice, and misery: fact-checking versus an artistic vision. With all due respect to Noam Chomsky, we might describe him as following a fact-checking model: he patiently wades through the lies that governments (especially the US government) tells and sets them side by side with the truth. By contrast, in "The Quiet American" Graham Greene was animated by an artistic vision, and he managed, no less than Chomsky, to show us the deep ignorance of the American empire. Both Chomsky and Greene have much to teach us about the American empire and the war in Vietnam, but there is a difference of approach. I see Greene as representing the possibilities latent within the approach of an internal exile..... (although, of course, Greene himself wasn't an American, so could not really be an internal exile....and he was undoubtedly was able to see things more clearly on account of it..... Nevertheless, I think his case suggests that there are possibilities available to an internal exile....)