Chicks For Free
Saturday begins on a mellow note. The coffee here at Starbucks is hot, astringent, a bracing effect – just as I like it. I know, I know that it’s an acquired taste. Only three of us now occupy the customer area. Each reads quietly. A coffee shop is a public space dedicated in part for concentration upon a text, absorbing nuance of another mind. Gentle blues music is the background. The volume is a bit loud though. Unless I happen to think about the music, I can “tune it out” due to my interest in reading or writing such as I am doing now.
I have started reading The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor. Taylor is Canadian, now a professor emeritus at McGill University. I noted that he is referenced frequently in the philosophy podcasts that I have happened upon. He is adept at pulling together warp and weft themes of our way of life, rooted in the writing of Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche.
Taylor writes:
These, then, are the three malaises about modernity that I want to deal with in this book. The first fear is about what we might call a loss of meaning, the fading of moral horizons. The second concerns the eclipse of ends, in the face of rampant instrumental reason. And the third is about the loss of freedom.
He forthrightly states in the final paragraph or two of the first chapter that his intention is not to derive a calculation by which we will know how to benefit from our way of life, at a cost we are willing to pay. But Taylor desires to know “how to steer these developments towards their greatest promise and avoid the slide into debased forms.” I could not be more eager to consider what he has to say. Stay tuned for more from Charles Taylor.
This 1985 tune by Dire Straits endures, having lost none of it’s meaning in the intervening forty years since Gordon Sumner and Mark Knopfler penned these lyrics. Consider this stark assessment of the parody of “success” which we’ve settled for. How entwined with consumption, quickly obsolete convenience, wrapped in a ersatz sensuality – we have become, even our manner of speaking becoming debased. Remember MTV? Money for Nothing by Dire Straits:
