Professional Thinking Persons
Travails, Victories, and Never a Dull Moment
The Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons
My family and I first listened to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on a cassette tape that a friend from England had recorded from the BBC radio broadcast. The program became our go-to entertainment on long road trips.
The first time we came across the philosophers Majikthise and Vroomfondel, they introduced themselves as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons. Without missing a beat everyone in the car looked at me with a comprehending smile. Finally, a group that could include me. It was like one of those moments when a person of color or other minority finds someone like themselves in movies, TV, or video games. I had had that experience as a Mexican American, but this was more personal.
As a professional thinking person, this was my first experience of finding myself on a galactic scale. For the most part, those of us philosophy majors keep a low profile. American culture is only partially anti-intellectual. It has a deep strain of philosophical pragmatism. “When am I ever going to use this?” “How are you going to make a living with that?” Somehow, contemplating Plato’s “the one, the good, and beautiful” resonated with our fellow students since it was thought to refer to wall calendars with “heavenly bodies.” Even art or music majors had something to show for their years of study. As would be deep thinkers we held on to clutches of cartoon word clouds tethered to heavy volumes of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Many of us developed reasonably sized biceps by doing curls with volumes of required reading like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Bernard Lonergan’s Insight.
My philosophical bent – more reclining than bending – had a noticeable impact on my biology major. I enjoyed science but more for its philosophical properties of order, beauty, and wonder. My poor physics professor looked at my second head with restraint when I asked “Why is there entropy? Why does everything move to a state of greater randomness?” He said, “Randy, this is physics, not metaphysics.” Then again, I lived in the alternative universe of the Society of Jesus – the Jesuits. I was a student member of the Society. I was a scholastic.
We weren’t as profound as the Dominicans, as fervent as the Franciscans, or as pivotal to western civilization as the Benedictines. Because we had operated universities for 400 years, people got the idea that we were intellectuals, maybe a little crafty, but well educated and good at raising money. When I was a scholastic, we left our monastic cloisters and took classes with “real” students and tried not to embarrass ourselves in front of the girls. As Jesuits, we were part of a larger community of philosophers, theologians, physicists, mathematicians, doctors, lawyers, artists, activists, and missionaries. Their ministries were not necessarily fixed. Scholars would have stints as parish priests. University administrators could become hospital chaplains. The founder of the Society, St. Ignatius Loyola, a 16th century nobleman injured in battle, became a mystic with a practical bent. This meant that as a novice I was sent to work as an orderly in a skilled nursing facility and to work in an inner-city parish with the undocumented and the homeless. I was supposed to “find God in all things.” I wish I could say that this always occurred, but most of the time I discovered my shortcomings and those in need became my teachers.
Although my own calling took me in a different direction, my six very formative years with the Jesuits were very much like living with philosophers, sages, luminaries, and other thinking persons who didn’t take themselves very seriously – most of the time. The question was the same. “What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?” While many if not most Catholics feel that the teachings of their faith provide these answers, the way we think about them is a moving target because our language and cultural experience change. For Iñigo Lopez de Loyola – St. Ignatius - the answer is “To know, love, and serve God Our Lord in this life and to be happy with Him in the next.” Yes, but what does it mean? How does it apply today when the growing consensus is that there is no God?
My friends in the Society wished me well as I set off on other ways of being a professional thinking person. After stints in academia and public health, and to the dismay of the practical people in my life, I turned down opportunities to pursue law and medicine and found my niche as a healthcare management consultant and futurist. There are very concrete and expensive questions to be dealt with. Doctors who wanted to build their own clinics needed to know how much money it was going to take and the odds that they would be successful after they committed their retirement funds, their real estate, and their boats. Deeper questions had to be answered. Why? Why now? What will happen to my life? Will my wife leave me if this fails? Medical device manufacturers wanted to know about social and economic trends that would affect their businesses. Would changing sex roles change consumer behavior? Would products have to be repackaged?
The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake damaged many of the facilities of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan in the San Francisco Bay Area. Buildings that were damaged and others which were undamaged were discovered to be located on earthquake faults. The questions were: do we rebuild or relocate damaged buildings? Do we strengthen undamaged buildings or build new at a better geological site? The questions were far from academic. They involved billions of dollars. Usually these are purely economic or engineering questions. You look at how things have happened in the past and build for them. The same thing happens in insurance. You know the likelihood of a house fire or how long someone will live based on experience that can be quantified.
In the case of earthquake safety, the questions our team faced could not be answered by probabilities based on previous earthquakes, since there no probabilities. What are the chances that everything will be okay if we just repair or rebuild buildings? What will the real cost be? Will rebuilding just be a huge money pit? What happens if another large earthquake hits? This is called stochastic forecasting, and it requires a lot of creative thinking and quantitative modeling.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pits the professional thinking person – the hapless philosophers Majikthise and Vroomfondel - against the almost all-powerful and wily computer, Deep Thought. The question is a real one today with the advent of artificial intelligence. Douglas Adams, the creator of this problematic galaxy, gives everything an absurdist philosophical turn. The philosophers are skeptics and “may or may not exist.” They are self-interested and have formed a union to protect their jobs and livelihoods. Not unlike real life, the Union and Deep Thought come to an agreement. There will be plenty of time while Deep Thought runs its 7,000-year program for the philosophers, sages, and luminaries to theorize about the coming answer and make a fortune in the media. Deep Thought is fallible and discovers that its programming is faulty after running for 7,000 plus years. The answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything (partial spoiler alert!) is 42. Fearful of announcing the result to a wildly expectant mob, the professional thinking persons turn to each other and say, “They’re going to kill us, you know.”
To be fair, philosophy gave us science, mathematics, logic, game theory, and most importantly, critical thinking in this age of the internet. It has also given us literary and artistic criticism, political science, economics, psychology, codified law, ethics, theology, religious studies, and theories of consciousness, as well as ideas about the meaning of our lives. You can get a longer and better list in an article in February 20, 2017 issue of Scientific American by John Horgan, “Philosophers Push Back - Philosophers react to a science journalist’s critique of their calling.” It’s not a bad track record.
My philosophical journey as a professional thinking person continues. My View from 30,000 Feet is the result of my setting forth on the airliner of philosophy and anthropology with an itinerary ranging from Socrates to Ayn Rand. There can be turbulence, but the vision is always worth it. At some point, I should heed my mother’s admonition, “Bájate de las nubes.” “Come down from the clouds.” Someday, but not today!
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