This are some personal musings based on the interview highlighted above. Since the interviewees bridge outward to larger contexts, I feel I can do the same, and metaanalyze the conversants, and generalize about my impressions of where Canada is on it's journey. I have seen the same kind of social dynamic among intellectuals in the usa in previous decades. This is quite an introspective few paragraphs, actually.
This is a very fascinating hour long cbc interview with Peter Galison - it's one in a long series of philosophical musings where different interviewees elaborate on their perspectives about the field of science.
It's very interesting for me to listen to these cbc podcasts. It's almost like stepping back in time to the 1970s and 1980s, for a person like myself who has lived in the usa my entire life. Listening to this podcast today was like lying in a meadow in the summertime, and receiving a massage all over my body by a light breeze which is blowing in. It's really a delightful experience. And as a person who as a child, and as a young man aspired to be an essayist - I can see how I would have envisioned that niche for myself. Sadly, times have changed in the usa, and the social dynamics aren't as they were decades ago. And touching base with Canadian mainstream media is a really excellent opportunity for reflection. I can see that where the people in this conversation are darting back and forth between so many intriguing topics - and exploring all the important contexts - there is an underlying reason for that manner of conversation. And that reason is actually quite a sad one. They are avoiding pointing out the elephants in the room... in order to avoid ruffling feathers. And what this means is that the best and brightest intellectuals of Canada are actually ceding power to those who are verbally combative. The verbally combative are focusing, as they did decades earlier in the usa, on making inroads into the real seats of power - they are going into politics, and seeking to change the face of journalism in Canada, to where it is more like the sensationalistic and moral dualistic journalism to the south of Canada, here in the usa.
Today, in the usa, there is no place for thinkers, anymore. There's too much jeering and cheering going on by folks who wish to make intellectual discourse a spectator sport. It's just not safe for a philosophical thinker in the usa. And thus the quality of many things goes through the floor - music, film, television... etcetera. Antagonism rules the roost here in the usa.
It's fascinating that after living a few decades, you can look at other nations, and view them in much the same way as you look at young people, who you can see would be headed for all the same mistakes you, yourself have made, if they continue on their current course. I hope they change that course.
At any rate, this is a great interview. But one elephant in the room which is not frankly addressed is the fact that specious ideas oftentimes become mainstream in science. People need to think critically about scientific research, and not blindly give credence to things simply because these folks are considered to be the professionals. This need for independent logical critical assessment of the issues in the world was very much emphasized by the philosophers of the past - people like Immanuel Kant.