Public Service Announcement

I didn't realize when I walked into the first meeting of my Philosophy 100 class many years ago that it would have as much impact as it did. My other courses were things like Music History, Music Theory, German Literature, Linguistics and English. But none of the courses and professors had as much long term impact as the philosophy one. Mind you, English came close. The philosophy professor was a new hire, probably no more than thirty years old. The class had only 20 or so students (that same class in the same university today has 300 students) and he taught it like a graduate seminar. Each week we were assigned readings from people like Thomas Aquinas, David Hume and Bishop Berkeley (I'm afraid I forget the others) and the following class we would argue about them. I'm pretty sure this is exactly how Plato taught at the Academy. A lot of the course seemed to revolve around questions of epistemology: how do we know what we know and do we really know it? The reading from Berkeley was really memorable. It was one of the dialogues between Hylas and Philonous about the principles of human knowledge. I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say that we were all outraged at the absurdity of Berkeley's claims and went into class to argue them. We crashed and burned. The professor won every argument because he was trained in how to argue philosophically. The whole course was like that and it was pretty much the only one in my many years at university in which critical thinking skills were not only taught, but actually practiced.

Occasionally the professor would begin a class with what he would call a "public service announcement." One day he cautioned us against hard contact lenses, for example. Today I would like to follow his example and offer a few public service announcements. Forgive me if they wander away from strictly musical questions!

1. Borrowing one from Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life, his rule 8 is "Tell the truth--or at least, don't lie." This is a really good one and it has an epistemological dimension. When you lie to someone you are giving them false knowledge instead of real knowledge. The consequences can be terrible. You can judge this by what happens when someone lies to you.
2. Read something worthwhile every day. A few months ago I realized that I had gotten out of the habit of reading actual books in hard copy. I would get up every morning and read a few newspapers and blogs online before getting into my emails. I was still reading light fiction on my Kindle so I wasn't a complete cyberslug, but close. So I resolved to start the day by reading something meaningful before doing anything else. It was an excellent plan as since then I have read a Schoenberg biography, a book on musical analysis, another on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, another on music in Java and now I have started the biggest project of all: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. This is a 3,000 page novel that hardly anyone actually finishes. When people talk about it they always mention the bit about the madelaine, the little pastry the taste of which brings back all the narrator's memories of his time in Combray when he was young. Yes, it is a nice bit, but the reason it is mentioned so often is that it is on page 48! And that's as far as many people get. I have been trying to finish it for, believe it or not, about forty years. I have gotten as far as the beginning of volume two (in English translation) but no further. I am reading ten pages a day, so in three months I will have finished volume one.
3. Never vote for a socialist. It may seem a good idea as they are always promising nice things like healthcare and free tuition, and they always seem to be really, really ethical and so on. But let's take a Canadian example that should be remote enough from most people's experience to be able to be viewed objectively. Back in 1944, after considerable social unrest, Saskatchewan elected its first socialist government, also the first in North America. Over seventy years later, it is still trying to recover. Here is an illuminating article: Saskatchewan is still struggling to overcome 70 years of socialism. A quote: "Canada’s breadbasket – which had 921,000 people in 1931 – still had just 968,000 in 2006. Meanwhile, Alberta (the neighboring province) grew from 731,000 people to nearly 4.4 million today. Saskatchewan ex-pat oil executives in Edmonton and Calgary jokingly called their former province, “the old country.” Proof of the Saskatchewan diaspora was made evident by fans wearing green at Roughrider games in every city. Some still left in the homeland, drove with novelty license plates which read, “Soviet Saskatchewan Smothered in Socialism,” complete with a hammer and sickle."
4. Try to save 10% of your income for a future rainy day. When you have enough saved up open a brokerage account and buy some stock indices. The best one to start with is the S&P 500 which trades under the symbol SPY. Just buy it and forget it. From time to time, buy more. After a while you might look into getting an aggregate bond ETF as well. This strategy, by the way, is more successful than 92% of all active money managers, so don't bother paying them to advise you.
5. How about some musical ones? Practice slowly, really listening to what you are doing.
6. Listen actively, not passively. In other words, don't put something on just to be sonic wallpaper in the background. If it is suitable for that purpose it is not worth listening to (except maybe if it is by Erik Satie...). If is is worth listening to, then turn it up and really listen.
7. Don't worry, things are never as bad as they seem and especially don't worry that we are all doomed by climate change. It ain't so. The models are not successfully predictive and they are based on faulty data.
8. And finally, quoting from Kanye West, the thing to remember is, Don't Believe Anything You See On The News.

And that was our public service announcement. Now for some nice music. We should always either play or at least listen to some Bach every day (hey, that should have been number nine) so here is Misha Maisky with the Cello Suite No. 2.