Category Archives: Philosophy and Science
MEGAN’S PHENOMENON CAN’T BE COLONISED
Megan has become a champion by training herself to be independent, learning from her lived experience, in the moment, selfish, seeking quality, professional and committed. She won’t be directed, controlled by others’ experience, not by clocks, not by false equality, not without purpose, nor obsessed by quantities, neither amateurish, nor detached. She is more like a brush turkey than a bee.
She has support from her boyfriend Chance, a renegade escaped from employment as a physicist, who was on a treadmill and now revels in his academic freedom.
They justify her characteristics with well known philosophies, psychology and science. She learns phenomenology and flow. Megan opposes greedy coaches, jealous competitors, narrow-minded researchers, sports officials intent on profiting from her performances and from health officials who want her vaccinated. Megan is non-violent. Can she win by passive resistance?
Turkeys Not Bees is novel fiction by Martin Knox. On Amazon. Reviews: martinknox.com
CAN ONE WOMAN END PARTISAN POLITICS?
Australians respect and protect their politicians even when their ranks are divided by political differences. When the unthinkable happens and feisty independent politician Jane Kenwood disappears from a hung parliament’s cross bench before a crucial vote, the ability of the system to bring the perpetrators to justice challenges the partisan democracy. Will justice be done? Jane’s friend Dr Phillip Keane follows a feint trail with a new forensic philosophy, which employs a novel Euler Walk strategy. He is opposed by the political establishment and his findings shake it to its foundations.
‘Presumed Dead’ is a crime fiction thriller by Martin Knox, a page-turning non-partisan read which exposes the fragility of parliamentary democracy under the Westminster system.
Available on Amazon. Reviews are on my blog martinknox.com
DOING THE RIGHT THING ISNT EASY
Restrictions during the pandemic have tested people’s obedience and resolve. It has resulted when groups with opposing value systems have clashed. When people are forced to adopt values against their beliefs, they feel dishonest and fearful, especially when their views are ignored.
Individuals relate their views to others’. Those who believe in a religion have often have a ready-made morality but there has been a decline in divine faith. With belief in the rational laws of physics growing, the philosopher Kant was torn between religion and rationality. He compromised, wanted people to do only what they would allow others to do, calling it the ‘categorical imperative’. The philosopher John Stuart Mill wanted personal liberty to be constrained by laws that had been agreed.. Rousseau propagated a social contract of liberte’, egalite’ and fratenite’ to control individual behaviour. All this made ‘the right thing’ harder for individuals to do.
Doing the right thing and benefitting others does not come to animals naturally. Charles Darwin had individuals seeking to survive in nature, helping kin sometimes, by selfish actions and by exploiting others. In evolution theory, altruism with individuals sacrificing their genetic inheritance to benefit others’ genes and volunteering to make sacrifices for others’ benefit, was confined to group selection, or kin. Our concern here is with ‘doing the right thing’ by strangers.
Humans have used politics to compromise and reconcile differences with strangers. Where one group is requested to help another, some individuals in both groups may regard the help proffered as a social control, causing frustration, passive resistance, protests, anger, civil disobedience and even insurrection. Venting does little to appease differences in core beliefs and rebels may strive to overthrow the system by force.
Large groups of humans exhibit The Matthew Effect, with individuals trying to join the most numerous groups. When a herd is spooked, it may be intolerant of those who don’t do what to them is the right thing. There is a sizeable industry of media trying to instigate groups to lemming-like rushes, inevitably towards cliffs with unpleasant outcomes.
A difficulty is to distinguish the voices of reason from false prophecy. There may be differences of principle that can only be solved by debating. Instead of productive discourse, the sides may engage in identity politics, which increases hostility. Some groups may think they know best and if they can get the upper hand, they will impose their solution on everyone. It could be that those people who extol the virtue of ‘doing the right thing’, without saying what it is, nor why everyone has to do it, are the problem.
I have applied the above in adopting a moral position on climate science in my satirical novel Animal Farm 2
BOOK SATIRIZES CLIMATE TOTALITARIANISM
Animal Farm 2 (2021) is a sequel to Animal Farm (1945) written by George Orwell.
Orwell was an English writer of lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.
Orwell’s book was published when the USSR confronted the West. Farm animals who had been repressed under human despotic rule, rebelled and chased away their farmer, establishing a socialist commune. Leaders of the revolution, the pigs, set themselves up as a new bourgeois class. Orwell uses humour, irony, exaggeration and ridicule to expose and criticize plebian stupidity and bourgeois corruption, effectively satirising social change at that time.
Orwell’s novel ‘1984’ (1950) warned readers against allowing totalitarianism, with its centralism, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), newspeak, and manipulation of the past, including “unpersoning” of individuals. These techniques remain in use today, by repressive governments.
Animal Farm 2 (2021) by Martin Knox is a sequel to Orwell’s Animal Farm, with story themes of anti-totalitarianism, animal liberation and climate science. The story elucidates the philosophies of science and suggests how our deep divisions could be resolved with a paradigm shift, all within a humorous story about fun animal characters.
martinknox.com
