I’ve always felt like a rookie when it
comes to philosophy.
I grew up in a blue collar home where work
was done to put food on the table and buy things. I stood out from my
environment because I was interested in thinking about the reasons why we do
things on a bit deeper level, but learning about things in that way was frowned
on. “We do things because we have to”, was always the lesson I was given.
Thinking deeper, philosophy, was a waste of time. Something that people did
when they couldn’t do something useful. That lesson was drilled into me from a
pretty young age and it’s something I still hear from my dad pretty regularly.
I could never shake the need to know more
though. I started learning about philosophy from friends who lived somewhat
less sheltered lives than I did. We shared books about metaphysical ideas that
they seemed to understand far more than I did. So I would pretend I understood.
I’d listen to them wax on about the illusion of reality and whether god was
real or not and I loved it. I didn’t always get it but just hearing the ideas
expressed was something that brought me joy. Later, one of those friends went
on to study philosophy in university and I sort of tagged along. He would talk
about what he was learning while we smoked weed and got drunk and I felt like I
was a more knowledgeable person when he was talking. It became a thing that we
did. We talked about philosophy because we had the time. We compared ourselves
to Socrates and Plato and thought of ourselves as brilliant. Really it was my
friend who was brilliant.
Eventually my lack of education caught up
with me, so I had to move back to my hometown and work for my dad. Back to the
blue collar life where we worked and didn’t worry about the reasons behind our
actions. Motivations were for other people to examine and there wasn’t time for
questioning existence. There’s something nice about simplicity like that. You
work to eat, have fun when there’s time, and deal with problems as they come.
Still, philosophy would never quite leave me alone. I still spent my downtime
thinking and reading and learning.
I later started a family. I became a blue
collar dad, like my own but with a slight twist. I still loved philosophy and
despite a lack of education I tried like hell to read it and understand as much
as I could. Luckily, I reconnected with some friends from my younger days. A
university educated philosopher as a best friend can help you go a long way to
understanding concepts and when looking for resources. I was introduced to more
and more philosophers and their writings and while some ideas seemed to be
blatantly false, others were astonishing and brilliant. This was around when I
first discovered podcasts. In an audio format that I could carry in my pocket
at work I could listen to excerpts from pop culture and philosophy books,
lectures from philosophers who were current, and I could even take mini courses
on philosophy. Still my dad said I was wasting my time and still I felt like a
rookie with so little understanding and so much to learn, but I loved it.
When I discovered that there was an online
atheist community with a love of learning and a passion for science and
philosophy I was sucked in very quickly. I was around 30 and I had spent my
life thinking that I didn’t know much and not really understanding as much as I
wanted to but this explosion of information that was in front of me and a
community that validated my identity as well as my love of learning gave me
confidence I didn’t know I could have.
By the time I was 35 I was a separated,
father of two who was on his own again for the first time in a decade and I
needed something else. An outlet that I could focus on and that would help me use
some of the things I had learned over the years. I was listening to an atheist
podcast after a night out with friends and it occurred to me, “We should start
a podcast”. By we I meant my old friends who would sit and drink and talk
philosophy, politics, and science for hours on end. Why couldn’t we record that
and put it on the internet? Hell, we were brilliant, and people deserved to
hear how brilliant we were. That was the origin of The Brainstorm Podcast, a show
that puts a group of folks into a room together and records it. Even from the
beginning we talked about various philosophical topics from morality, to
meaning, metaphysics, to epistemology, to political philosophy, to the value
and meaning of postmodernism, and more.
The show is now made up of a few kinds of
shows from a current events type show that breaks down topics with a bent
towards critical thinking and skepticism, to an interview show that tries to
spread the message of critical thinking and compassion, to a round table
discussion on the controversial topics of the day. Every single episode is an
exercise in critical thinking and philosophy. Though the crew has changed over
the years. Brainstorm has been going for almost 5 years and has over 200
episodes published, and a lot of the original crew have gone their separate
ways. We lost a philosopher and we gained a physicist. We lost an agricultural
scientist and we gained a political scientist.
Philosophy and the practice of logic and
critical thinking is key to being a skeptic alongside epistemic humility and a
desire to self reflect. That’s what Brainstorm is about, even while we spend our
time examining different topics along the way. Our tagline is “The Truth
Matters”, and that seems to hold true even more in a time when fake news is an
epidemic, and pseudoscience and science denial is promoted by the leaders of a
major nation.
After all I’ve learned and all I’ve done I
still feel like a rookie when it comes to philosophy, but I think that’s kind
of the point.