How often does this happen between the teacher and the pupil? Is most teaching reduced to dictation and a certain amount of tolerance by the teacher when the pupil speaks? How much valuable and transformative learning can take place in a monological teaching? Very little of course, perhaps none at all. Teachers should not be agents of knowledge transfer. They ought to enter into dialogue with their pupils, whereby the teacher and the pupil are each other’s subjects and knowledge is an integral topic of dialogue. That is dialogical pedagogy.  

The fact of the matter is what Webster dictionary describes as “habitually revealing sensational facts about others in the form of chatty talk” is a universal cultural attribute. From a little village in Lithuania to Manhattan, men and women practice this time honored tradition with regularity—some with more fervor than others.

Commenting on women’s oral culture, feminist theorist Deborah Jones has praised the bonding role gossip plays amongst women by describing it as, “a way of talking between women in their roles as women , intimate in style , personal and domestic in topic and setting.” To be sure, women do not have a monopoly on gossip, as men do it more often than they are willing to admit. Thus to take an essentialist stance on the notion of gossip is a folly.

From a philosophical standpoint, I should like to put a Daosit lens on this cultural practice. Like many other forms of communication amongst human beings such as small talk neighbors have with each other or the trivial question and answers that go on between merchants and their customers, it is not the content that matters in gossip. In fact, I argue that the content is irrelevant. It is the naturalness of it that makes gossip an integral part of the way of going about living. We intuitively understand the interconnectivity of humans and one of the ways we reinforce this connectivity is through gossip. In many ways gossip is a medium that brings us closer together. Of course, from a Buddhist perspective gossip is alright so long as we can say the sensational stories about a person behind his or her back, also in his or her presence. That is one way to keep the content of gossip ethically sound—an ethics of gossip, if you will.  

One day, Narcissus happens to see his own reflection in a pool of water and, naturally, falls in love with himself. He cannot stop looking at himself, not unlike the current governor of California, and dies right there near the pool. Afterwards, where he dies a new flower blooms, and the myth calls this flower “the narcissus.” Of course, the fact of the matter is that we all have a bit of narcissism about us, and if directed in the right channels and kept in check, it can be very helpful to build self-esteem and give us abilities to help others too. It is the narcissism that has morphed into all consuming self-absorption that creates problems for humanity. In a self-perpetuating form, reinforced by consumer mythology, narcissistic folks gain a misplaced sense of superiority about themselves, and we end up with things like Wall Street and Lobbyists…you get the picture!

Some folks maintain that phenomena like New Age Buddhism are narcissistic. What is important for us to note is that Buddhism misappropriated by those narcissistic individuals who wish to skip the suffering part of the path towards enlightenment and buy their way to it, is not the intended Buddhism—we can call it pseudo-Buddhism perhaps.Moreover, while narcissism is usually considered vis-à-vis individuals, it can also be a collective form. A narcissistic society can be a very dangerous society. A narcissistic group of followers of one kind or other religion can be destructive. The socio-political implications should always be part of a discourse of humanistic study.        

Au contraire, the “anarchists” subscribe to the notion that the world is quite complex—and it is—and therefore human societies must be complex too—and they are. Moreover, they would like to see society to be operating with diverse forms of organizations working together in a seamless web. Organizations must find and embrace different dimensions to their structure, purpose, and functions. Following this logic, one can argue anarchism is, in fact, aligned with what post-industrial democracy ought to be like.Dialogue, perpetual debate, cooperation, diversity, multitude, and altruism are the ways of anarchy—one can interpret.  

This sort of theory (i.e., a kind of social contract), when applied, gets messy and the terms of the contract are subject to change on a regular basis, hence the label!

But don’t you think that those who accuse me in the way you described understand the essential of what they claim not to understand, namely, that it is a matter first of all of putting into question a certain scene of reading and evaluation, with its familiar comforts, its interests, its programs of every kind? No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn’t understand at all, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with Your own language, with this “relation” precisely, which is yours… I assure you that I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous. It’s just that I believe in the necessity of taking time or, if you prefer, of letting time, of not erasing the folds. For philosophical or political reasons, this problem of communication and receivability, in its new techno-economic givens, is more serious than ever for everyone; one can live it only with malaise, contradiction, and compromise.”

Given the way in which communications are in accelerated modes, whether in the form of body language, spoken word, written word, or moving pictures, Derrida’s work is indeed difficult to grasp. One needs to do further reading to prepare for Derrida. Moreover, one ought to cogitate with Derrida’s writing. First soak it in and then absorb the finer points. It is only upon reflection that one can gain access to Derrida’s thoughtfulness. In the end, it is always worth the trouble, because it will most certainly give one a deeper understanding of the human condition. This is of course not unlike what visual arts like Picasso’s paintings do for us. They teach us about the complexities of the human condition.    

To answer this question one can look within and, as Nietzsche famously suggested, ask “what does my conscience tell me?” Or such a one can look at the greatest thinkers and their body of work in respect to the philosophical problematic of “means and ends.” In my view, one towering figure stands alone in this regard. And that is Mahatma Gandhi. For Gandhi there were no boundary demarcations between ends and means. Where some dialectical materialists steadfastly cling to the thesis of ends justifying the means, thereby excusing violent methods via which they and their followers sometimes achieve their goals, Gandhi always stood in a moral space diametrically opposed to such a view, never accepting it.

It suffices to say that Gandhi—correctly, I shall argue –believed in a direct moral connection between means and ends. Given the commitment he had to truth and nonviolence and their interdependence, it follows that one ought not employ immoral acts to gain social justice, as these acts will transform one from a moral agent to an immoral agent. In one of his early writings in Young India journal he wrote, “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.”  

To follow Gandhi’s duty-ethics of truth and nonviolence is to pursue what Rousseau called “civilization.” No civilization can be achieved by violent means. Dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima may have led to an early surrender of Japanese imperial forces (one that many historians argue was inevitable without the bomb), but it destroyed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and led to the nuclear proliferation, which is a major planetary concern. The means transformed the world in this case into a more violent place where smaller wars in tandem with potential nuclear annihilation are not farfetched realities. To be ethical human beings we must think in holographic ways and see the means as part of any end. In other words, ends do not justify the means. We must commit to the morally correct philosophy of truth and nonviolence if we seek planetary peace.

I should like to argue differently. I say, it is good that certain rich people willingly accept the moral obligation to give back to the world. That is all good and always welcome. But the world needs something else to balance the scale. There is too much evidence to prove that individual acts of altruism are simply inadequate. To permanently and in a wholesale manner remove poverty from the planet, help should come from the governments. What is more, the wealthy nations ought to take the lion’s share of this systematic contribution. If and when aid comes through the state, all citizens who earn above the mid range national income of their respective countries will contribute something as part of their duty-ethics—enforced by the law.

As it stands now, the fate of millions of people around the world hangs on the decisions of rich countries such as the US contingent upon the strategic interests of the giving nations. The fact of the matter is that rich nations have never given enough and that speaks badly about their ethics of state philanthropy. The Europeans and the US have benefited from the world’s resources, including its cheap and sometimes free labor (i.e., slavery) for the past five hundred years, but given back very little.

Given the planetary condition that humanity finds itself in, with all the cross-migrations and interdependencies that get more complex rapidly, the rich must give back systematically or the whole ship will go down like the Titanic.  

But a new reality is emerging and people are pushing back against the new vertical integration. The Internet is at the heart of this up and coming reality!

Now you take all of these differentiations and integrate them together, what do you get? An enormous  complexity, known as the United States of America. Any modern society has two major factions; the government and the civil (or civic) society, which from time to time exchange members and/or overlap in their actions. There has been a lot of discussion, thus far, about the role of government in respect to health care. Given that we are not senators, congress people, state legislators, governors, or other high-ranking powerful agents of government, we can consider our discussions a dialogue amongst members of civil society.

But what is clear is that we as individual members of civil society have different value systems, while at once also having a collective value system. So, generally speaking, what is it about our society that allows for access to decent health care to become a privilege and not a right? Is there a pressing need to reevaluate our collective value system? Every man and woman for himself or herself, is that concept at the center of our value system? But we seem to value patriotism. Is patriotism same as militarism or is it about loving one’s nation deeply enough to sacrifice for it when needed. Why do we say yes to the idea of decent health care for all, but collectively are reluctant to pay for it by way of taxes and personal sacrifice—when needed.

Why don’t we teach bioethics to our kids at K-12? We seem to value greatly our national security, but isn’t excellent health care for all of our citizens part of that security? Our civil society seems to distrust our government(s) to the extent that we display hopelessness towards any meaningful change. Do we fail ourselves as a result of collective poor ethics? Or are we just a work in progress as a nation and must learn from failures in order to succeed. FDR’s new deal put an end to the gilded age era, and we were on a decent path–concerning bioethics. But since the return of the gilded age some thirty years ago, we seem to be on the wrong path. Or are we just reaching a learning curve, which results in collective punishment of a large part of our citizenry, but will soon teach us ways in which to achieve our goal of excellent health care for all.

In the final analysis, bioethics matters, and it matters a great deal. A human life is not a commodity and ought not to be treated as such. Humanity matters, and it matters a great deal. A sick citizenry victimized by poor bioethics ought to be everybody’s problem and not just the uninsured or underinsured. After all we are all in this thing together, regardless of race, class, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Aren’t we?  

In order to understand quantum reality, predicated on findings of quantum physics (mechanics), we need to acquire a new language. We cannot speak in Newtonian language and expect to be inside this paradigm. With the new language of course we can start asking questions like, “To what extent can we find freedom to gain access to the real reality?”

Freedom vs. determinism has been one of the most fundamental issues that have kept philosophers of past and present occupied. Given this fundamental problem at hand, how does quantum paradigm deal with freedom, consciousness and determinism or rather indeterminism? If Newton was right, and many still think he may have been free will is a convoluted notion. What if the future is determined because the physical reality presents to us the states of objects, conceived in time and space?  Conversely, Quantum physics, producing a sort of quantum realty, dictates much indeterminism. Ironically we have to employ Aristotelian logic to make sense out of quantum reality, hence the language problem we must solve. Scientific experiments have proven that subatomic particles are quite unpredictable and can be at two places at once. So, if we as human beings are made up of these subatomic particles, does it not make sense to draw a conclusion that we can be at two places at once as well? As I alluded to earlier, this of course requires a radical way in which we understand reality. We as human beings may just be indeterministic. As it stands, we simply have not acquired the tools to access the “real” reality. The internet is ushering in some of these new tools to help us to at least develop new metaphysical theories.    Someday, perhaps! Unless of course that day has come and gone or keeps coming and going!