What if?: The freedom of imagination, the constraints of reality, and the value of philosophy

Getting to the heart of the question

Our son’s favorite pastime these days—for years, really—is to scrap systems and start over. He’s mapped and re-mapped the interstates and also plans a full-scale railway system for the U.S. He’s redesigned the NFL and NBA to have what he deems to be a nicer number of teams, complete with mascots, logos and uniform designs. Lately it’s also been Division I universities, including inventing one in our town of 14,000 people on the Mississippi: the mascot is the River Riders, with some pretty cool purple and light blue uniforms. He remodeled the English alphabet to make it match the sounds we actually use. He’s not a fan of the historical forces that drew our current maps, so he redrew the borders of countries and U.S. states to group people together in ways he thinks make more sense based on (his knowledge of) history and current events. And the calendar: ten-day weeks (seven work and three weekend¹), twelve months of thirty days, then a five- or six-day New Year’s holiday festival.²

River Riders uniform designed by our son using EA Sports College Football 26 Team Builder

The spirit of reinvention

I love the imagination of this activity, and I love its spirit. The Boy wants to make the world a better place, and he wants systems to make sense. I’m not sure how much NFL and NBA reform matter in the grand scheme of things, or the alphabet for that matter. But the idea is to fix things (whether or not they needed fixing), to think about what makes sense in some kind of objective—or at least disinterested—terms and strive for that. So right now he mostly follows an internal logic, not necessarily connecting much to what works in the real world. But that’s okay; he’s fourteen. There’s plenty of time for reality to intrude. Right now he’s practicing design and creativity, and those skills will serve him well down the line.³

I’ve had some practice in recent years with scrapping and reinventing systems as well. Or, well, not entirely scrapping. That’s the thing about working in the real world: it’s extremely difficult to start entirely from scratch, ditch history and practicality, and just ask what makes sense—not just within existing design constraints and assumptions and values, but rethinking the constraints and assumptions and values themselves. Sometimes I wish we had the courage to do as The Boy does and just start over.

Can we ever really do that, though? Everywhere I go, damn there I am.⁴

In the last ten-plus years, my university has revamped our general education program and my department has restructured our major—twice. Like our son, I enjoy the early stages when we’re setting up the parameters within which we need to work. At the beginning, there’s a lot of room to ask what if? Let’s get to the heart of what we care about and start from there.

What if no one could start their major until their second year, so that the first year was entirely exploration and students could be exposed to lots of different subjects before having to choose one? What if the major were the thing you had to “get out of the way” and the liberal arts were really the focus of your education?⁵ What if students could take classes loosely related by themes like “Truth” or “Justice” and use them in a capstone to think deeply about the complexity of those concepts and their operation in the real world?

What if philosophy wasn’t focused on its history and who said what? What if we emphasized public philosophy, or framed philosophy as the quest to understand the “questions of life” and seek answers to them?

Freedom, values, and constraints

The Existentialists taught us that the human condition is one of vertiginous freedom. We think we’re constrained by all sorts of things, but ultimately, those constraints are choices we’ve made based on values we’ve adopted, and if we don’t see that and take responsibility, we’re fooling ourselves and acting in bad faith. That’s a heavy burden when you think about it.

Freedom and boundaries. Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash

In some lights, I see the point. In the end, however, I’m not sure I subscribe fully. I think valuing things (especially our ties to others) is what make us human. And while I think we have the freedom to choose our values in theory, in reality it just doesn’t work like that. Caring about things isn’t something you can just stop (or start) doing. But you can examine and reinterpret what caring about things really means.

So in my experience, when the redesign project isn’t just hypothetical fun, what-if mode is engangled with reality mode. Sometimes this means that constraints drive the what-ifs. The “questions of life” approach to our major was born of the need to make philosophy “sexy” or at least “relevant,” something students could care about.

On the flip side, sometimes what-if mode takes a cue from the Existentialist premise of freedom and questions whether the seemingly fixed constraints really are fixed. Reality says many programs won’t trim their majors to make them fit into three years and free up that first year. What-if mode pushes back: But could they if they had the will? Does this have to be a constraint? Could we persuade people to prioritize (and then advocate for) the flexibility that will be graduates’ biggest asset in their futures?

That’s an enormous ask. Time, energy, money, and material resources are always constraints, of course. You can’t just conjure up new faculty or facilities, nor the money to pay for them. But in the initial phases of a redesign, even before questions of resources are on the table, a lot comes down to values. The question of whether we could ban starting a major until the second year of college was born of the desire to force exploration and increase the likelihood that students will fall in love with something they wouldn’t otherwise have tried when there was time to change directions. The values driving that question have to do with breadth, discovery, and—to be fully transparent—the hope of preserving shrinking programs like classics, philosophy, gender studies, sociology, even math. In this phase, we’re sorting out what we care about and analyzing what values are embedded in the way things are done and in the changes we desire.

The biggest what-if

Years ago I came across this short piece that reports on a book that raises a huge what-if: the question of whether America can be saved in something like its current form, or whether it needs to be rebuilt. This question echoes themes from the feminist roots of care ethics, suggesting that the individualism on which our democracy is founded is a sneakily unstable foundation, and the better we are at practicing individualism, the worse off we are as a whole. In recent years I’ve heard increasing questions about whether our democracy can survive the polarization we currently live within and what we can replace it with that isn’t autocracy. This strikes me as the most important what-if of our times.

What if we could preserve what’s important about (political) individualism—the idea that everyone matters and deserves to be taken into account—without thereby sinking into the (human-nature) individualism that makes an ideal of “every man for himself”?⁶ What if we started from the idea that people are inherently relational and do best when they connect and take responsibility for one another? What if we made it easier to build community from the micro- to the macro-level, taking care of one another from making meals to making policy? And while there are vast differences between people on opposite ends of the political spectrum along which we’re so divided, I do think there’s common ground to be had, and both sides value care. What if we start from there? What from our current structure would we keep, and what would we reshape from the ground up?

Visionary thinking is not my personal strength; I’ll leave that to folks with different expertise, more experience in the public sphere, and the courage to disassemble what needs disassembling and rebuild what needs rebuilding. What I’m good at, what philosophy is good at, is honing the questions that need to be asked to uncover the values at the heart of the project. As my dad likes to say, “Before you have good ideas, you have to have ideas.” To understand what counts as a good idea, you need to understand the values that set the ideals you’re aiming for and the boundaries of your freedom to design the world you want.

1. 7/10 is slightly less than 5/7, so this arrangement would give us a little less work overall.

2. He used to use so much paper for these projects that one year for Christmas we bought him an electronic notebook so that we didn’t have to figure out what to do with the piles he generated. It was expensive, but the best use of $300 ever as far as I’m concerned. It would take reams of paper to make up the cost, but I’m at least $290 worth of happy not to have to deal with the mess.

3. People who learn his name often remark that’s it’s a great name, the name of a senator or an actor. I doubt he’s destined for either of those roles—he’s got his eye on some kind of engineering—though you never know—but of course as his mother I love the thought of him doing something quietly-but-tremendously important.

4. I don’t know the actual origins of this phrase. I became familiar with it through Ben Folds in the song linked above.

5. Turns out—no surprise—that I’m not the only person to have wondered this.

6. There's individualism, and then there's individualism