It may sound odd or even unphilosophical – but that won’t stop me from saying it: a single essay, just under sixteen pages in length, which I first read in the 1970s, has influenced my thinking more than anything else I’ve read in philosophy. And it’s an essay that I return to every few years to get, or to retain, my bearings. 

A recent post by Scotty Hendricks on the Bigthink platform posed four unsolved questions of philosophy. They are not the only unsolved questions, but they are foundational to how we understand the nexus of our minds and the world; and you don’t need to be a philosopher to think about them. (Spoiler alert: I don’t have much in the way of answers).  

A quarter-century ago, I wrote a book titled The Sound Bite Society in which I argued that electronic media (at the time, mainly television and radio) are systemically biased to the right. Not intentionally or maliciously biased, but structurally biased. Not “systematically” biased, according to some rule or law, but systemically biased. The argument was – and remains – that by radically atomizing and simplifying information, these media are naturally conducive to the values and messages of the right and inconducive to the more complex, holistic, and egalitarian messages and values of the left.