I just have one song, it’s my go-to when I’m talking and thinking about issues like this, but it has three verses, so I’ll make it count as three.
It is, of course, Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World
Here are the three verses:
There’s colors on the street
Red, white and blue
People shufflin’ their feet
People sleepin’ in their shoes
But there’s a warning sign on the road ahead
There’s lot of people sayin’ we’d better off dead
Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them
So I try to forget it, any way I can.
I see a woman in the night
With a baby in her hand
Under an old street light
Near a garbage can
Now she puts the kid away, and she’s gone to get a hit
she hates her life and what she’s done to it
There’s one more kid that will never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive
War. Poverty. Environment. These are to me the three major educational issues of our time.
Let me tell you a story about braiding.
When I was in the latter years of my PhD (which of course I never completed) following what I thought was the logical progression of connectionism and associationism, etc., I embarked on what turned out to be a two-year project of mapping every philosopher’s influence on everyone else - I worked my way though various history texts, the Bible, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and many more works, and created a great giant graph that covered entire walls (no longer extant; I left it behind when I moved from Eaglesham to become a distance education specialist).
What I discovered was a 3000-year old dance between empiricism and rationalism (to greatly over simplify it). The two poles in opposition: they would revolve around each other, then split as each influenced the other; you’d get empiricism, empiricism-r, rationalism-e, rationalism, then these would reform, and on they’d go, twisting around each other, some weaker versions trailing off, the stronger versions remaining, two main threads, that persist to this day, with myriad sub-threads and sub-themes weaving throughout.
These threads repeated and re-repeated through the great issues of the day - physis (atomism vs holism), substance (essence vs accident), knowledge (experience vs reason), inference (freedom vs authority), meaning - over the 3000 years (we are still preoccupied with meaning and all its sub-entities: identity, value, worth, etc).
What’s different today is that the major traditions are beginning to weave together. Right now, we perceive the strands as distinct and essential - ‘western’ knowledge vs ‘indigenous’ knowledge - but that’s just the first go-round.
None of the individual strands matters (though without them there would be no culture). How they intertwine, and what results, is of paramount importance.
The best music, to me, captures this - captures the two ideas in opposition, captures the revolution of each around the other, captures the resolution (though often - as with Neil Young’s song) that resolution is left in the mind of the listener.
It doesn’t matter to me whether we’re doing Taoism, Hofstadter, Indigenous knowledge, Hegelianism, whatever. I won’t say it’s all the same - because it’s not, each time we go through again, it changes.