IS THERE A PHILOSOPHER IN THE HOUSE?

That relentless roar of oil savagely gushing from the bowels of the Gulf is the image of our times. Our skills and our technology joined at the hip to our dreams and our greed keep poking the planet's Pandora's Box. Given a world of natural gifts, our species has continued to play fast and loose with them.

Horace Walpole may have trumped even Shakespeare when he observed: "The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel." And while we cry through our laughter, we may finally be ready to ask: Have we at last outfoxed ourselves? Have we not only over-played our planet's gifts, are we now over-playing even our own gifts? Especially the one we call the mind?

It is in our nature to seek and search and subdue. By these lights we have conquered continents and mastered oceans. We stand at the edge of someday perhaps conquering space. Mankind is progressing in ever larger concentric circles of accomplishments. However, like a conquering army gradually over-extending its lines of supply, we may be over-extending our capacity to manage what we are conquering.

Technical experts rush to the scene of every natural and human disaster. As it should be, for these minds are needed to confront the crises we have created. How much better, though, to call upon our best minds before not after! Minds best not simply in perspicacity, but in philosophy. Real insight as well as certified intelligibility.

Philosophers were once part of the monarch's retinue. Today, none such will be found in the inner circle of presidents and prime ministers. Why is this...? Why are those few best at posing the why-questions not there to pose them...?

Whenever a few quiet why-should-we-do-this questions are posed (e.g. drilling, cutting, legislating or fighting), the only ones there to answer them are the ones responsible for -- well, for the endeavor's bottom line. I mean, get real here; this is a no-nonsense, bottom-line world, right! And yet, as humanity keeps learning, there's a line still below that one.

It has to do with what is the right thing to do! To reach that line usually takes the kind of moral courage they just don't teach at MIT or in the military academies....