All good things

The retreat was short and sweet.

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3lvxsnnkmy224

In retreat

My wife is hosting a health-oriented retreat this weekend, so the dogs and I are decamping to a remote retreat of our own: a cabin to the east aptly dubbed The Doghouse. (I've been in the proverbial doghouse before, but never this one... and never in the literal company of dogs.)

It's a good time to retreat and reflect, with the new school year looming and an important personal milestone just etched. Two years ago today I signed on to a site called This Naked Mind and posted this:

I've been a bourbon-and-a beer-a-day drinker for decades, though never to an extent I'd consider incapacitating or debilitating; and I've enjoyed the aesthetic experience (see Walker Percy's essay "Bourbon").

But lately I've had sleep issues and a curiosity about what drinking might have to do with that, and with my overall health and vitality. I just came across "The Alcohol Experiment" and "This Naked Mind," and Annie Grace seems to be speaking to me.

So I've been bourbon-free for a week, and today I'm letting go of beer. Looking forward to seeing where this takes me in the next month.

Two years ago I went 60+ days without alcohol, but only because my back surgeon ordered it. This time I'm hoping a shift of intention will make the total experience feel less like a deprivation and more like an experiment.

I have friends who swear by AA and its talk of submission to a "higher power"... but they also say "higher power" is open to interpretation. I'm choosing to interpret it as meaning a present and supportive community of peers eager to help one another face the challenge of living alcohol-free.

Good luck to us all!

Well, two years on I can report that my initial month's experiment in suspending that long, too-comfortable old habit has been a lasting success. I've replaced the old desire for what Percy called "the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime" with the far better desire for optimal health, clarity, and self-possession. The habitual, un-reflective ingestion of a toxic substance does not conduce to those ends. I'm happier and better for the change. 

Retreating from a bad habit is forward movement. That's something to reflect on.

Against bullying

[On Substack]

TR meant something positive by "Bully!" Wouldn't it be nice to reclaim that sense of it? But we'll have to dispatch the other kind first.

I've participated as a faculty member on many MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) capstone project defenses at my school over the years, none so gratifying as yesterday's by the 70-something grad who collaborated with her son (illustrator) and grandson (trial audience) in producing a children's book about bullying. She'd experienced it her entire life, she said, from siblings to classmates (she was one of the first to integrate Murfreesboro's high school in the '60s) to coworkers and acquaintances. 

She showed us a video clip of her reading the manuscript to her four-year-old grandson. He got the message. How sad, that so many parents fail to take the time with their children to have that conversation and awaken that capacity for empathy.  How disappointing, that so many adults lately (not to mention Elon) speak of empathy as a thing to shun.*

The other elephant in the room, of course, was the Bully-in-Chief in Washington. Nobody had to mention him, his presence pervades this moment like a plague.

The good news, I think, is that kindness and fellow-feeling exists in posse in most young human hearts. Just as the South Pacific song said, you have to be carefully taught to hate... and to bully and demean others. Thus can it be un-taught, and replaced by the better lesson-the one reflecting our better angels, the one we learned of yesterday. 

Way to go, Shirley, I hope your book finds many receptive readers and listeners. Let's all be done with bullies.

Allure of the Mean Friend:This American Life... Teens Guilty of Bullying Could Lose Drivers’ Licenses Under Tennessee Law

*For the record: Paul Bloom repudiates the Muskian interpretation of "Against Empathy":

- Paul Bloom

Read on Substack

Wendell Berry

It's the birthday of Wendell Berry, born in Port Royal, Kentucky (1934). He grew up on farmland that had belonged to his family since 1803. All his great-grandparents and grandparents had lived and farmed in the area. As a boy, he was taught by his grandfather how to work a farm with nothing but a plow and a team of mules, no mechanized sprinkler systems or tractors.

Berry had an uncle he described as "an inspired tinkerer with broken gadgetry and furniture … and a teller of wonderful bedtime stories." His uncle kept a ramshackle cabin up in the woods, and Berry often went up there as a kid to get away from everything. It was in that cabin that he first read the work of Henry David Thoreau, and where he first fell in love with poetry.

He went to a military academy for high school and then on to college and to graduate school. He lived in California and Italy and New York City. But through all those years, he never stopped thinking about the place where he grew up, and he often went back to his uncle's old cabin. He finally decided to move back to the area permanently. Most of his city friends thought he was crazy, but he bought a small farm in his hometown, which still had a population of only a hundred or so people, and he began farming it the way his grandfather had taught him, without any machines.

He grew squash, corn, and tomatoes, and he got a flock of sheep, a milk cow, and some horses. And he wrote about his experiences as a farmer in more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His collections of poetry include The Farm (1995) and A Timbered Choir (1998). But he's best known for his essays in books such as The Gift of Good Land (1981), What Are People For? (1990), and Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000).

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-tuesday-august-5-2025/

A.I. Is Shedding Enlightenment Values

A historian sees the dangerous parallels between artificial intelligence and the Enlightenment.

...It is here, with this question of engagement, that the comparison between the Enlightenment and A.I.’s supposed “second Enlightenment” breaks down and reveals something important about the latter’s limits and dangers. When readers interact imaginatively with a book, they are still following the book’s lead, attempting to answer the book’s questions, responding to the book’s challenges and therefore putting their own convictions at risk.

When we interact with A.I., on the other hand, it is we who are driving the conversation. We formulate the questions, we drive the inquiry according to our own interests and we search, all too often, for answers that simply reinforce what we already think we know. In my own interactions with ChatGPT, it has often responded, with patently insincere flattery, “That’s a great question.” It has never responded, “That’s the wrong question.” It has never challenged my moral convictions or asked me to justify myself.

And why should it? It is, after all, a commercial internet product. And such products generate profit by giving users more of what they have already shown an appetite for, whether it is funny cat videos, instructions on how to fix small appliances or lectures on Enlightenment philosophy. If I wanted ChatGPT to challenge my convictions, I could of course ask it to do so — but I would have to ask. It follows my lead, not the reverse.

By its nature, A.I. responds to almost any query in a manner that is spookily lucid and easy to follow — one might say almost intellectually predigested. For most ordinary uses, this clarity is entirely welcome. But Enlightenment authors understood the importance of having readers grapple with a text. Many of their greatest works came in the form of enigmatic novels, dialogues presenting opposing points of view or philosophical parables abounding in puzzles and paradoxes. Unlike the velvety smooth syntheses provided by A.I., these works forced readers to develop their judgment and come to their own conclusions.

In short, A.I. can bring us useful information, instruction, assistance, entertainment and even comfort. What it cannot bring us is Enlightenment. In fact, it may help drive us further away from Enlightenment than ever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/opinion/artificial-intelligence-enlightenment.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bk8.XmNh.Witef6iO7cfb∣=em-share

The general’s greatest conquest

Grant's battlefield heroism was matched by the courage to complete his memoirs, pain and pressure be damned, as cancer closed in and the light dimmed. When he finished writing,
he was done.

Equally impressive was his winning battle against alcohol. Twain understood:

"Mark Twain had struggled with similar cravings for alcohol and tobacco. When they discussed the subject, Grant mentioned that although doctors had urged him to sip whiskey or champagne, he could no longer abide the taste of liquor. Twain pondered this statement long and hard. "Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was become an offense?" he wondered. "Or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others & likewise himself that he hadn't ever even had any taste for it." 95 Similarly, when Grant told Twain that, at the doctors' behest, he had been restricted to one cigar daily, he claimed to have lost the desire to smoke it. "I could understand that feeling," Twain later proclaimed. "He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk." 96 Although Twain hated puritanical killjoys who robbed life of its small pleasurable vices, he respected abstinence based on an absence of desire."

— Grant by Ron Chernow
https://a.co/1C1oYrI

Un-degenerate conversation

Finally spent my Parnassus gift certificates yesterday, on a pair of Hofstadters—Richard, Anti-intellectualism in American Life et al, and Douglas…

One of my purchases was the paperback edition of Daniel Dennett's autobiography I've Been Thinking, published in hardcover not long before his death in 2024. His friend Douglas Hofstadter wrote a nice preface for the paperback on the day Dennett died in April '24.

Despite sharp philosophical differences, Dennett wrote nice things about "my friend Dick Rorty" (who died in 2007). "...[H]e concedes that there is indeed a useful concept of truth that survives intact after all the corrosive philosophical objections have been duly entered... Dick Rorty wasn't always right, but he was always a fine philosopher." 

Rorty wrote this:

"One way of thinking of wisdom ... is to think of it as the practical wisdom necessary to participate in a conversation. One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry, into a research program." — Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

 

All four of these provocatively un-degenerate books now grace my shelves and continue to converse, with themselves and me. We're all better for the exchange, and at least one of us is edified by it.

Third places

Cornhole? 🌽 Not for me, but to each their own. My "third place" is wherever my dogs and I walk, every morning. And the library. The ballpark. Warner Parks. And, like yesterday, it's Parnassus Books/Donut Den (can't do the one without the other).

"You deserve a space where people know your name and are glad you showed up.

Spaces like these are what sociologists call a "third place" — a space that's not home and not work where you still feel like you belong.

Some people find third spaces in book clubs, fitness centers, church choirs, or bowling alleys. But psychologist Michelle Thompson suggests turning to your local cornhole league."
— Lauri Santos

https://www.threads.com/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DMs0XYcvaRM?xmt=AQF00vyFsKLT23VmuPirkVN_0a1BKEeph3LLXHxc7KNPag

Another day

Hang on…

WJS Newsletter (NEW!) – William James Society

Summer edition-
https://wjsociety.org/news/

"just enough virtue in this republic to save it"

May we be so lucky.

"When someone asked [Lincoln] if he had ever doubted the North’s final victory, he shot back, “Never for a moment.” He quoted Seward, saying “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency, and he agreed with Mr. Seward in this view.”"

Grant, by Ron Chernow: https://a.co/g5zhfnV

Science and Human Affairs...

from the Viewpoint of Biology
by Winterton C. Curtis (Harcourt Brace, 1922)

Audio Recording at Substack... Chapter 7...

Winterton Curtis (1875-1966)

A message from the William James Society

Enjoy your summer AND help ameliorate our world: we at the William James Society approve this message. wjsociety.org … @wjsociety.bsky.social

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-137901371?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

WJ in summer

[Recording at Substack]

Time to draft a presidential summer missive for the William James Society newsletter.

When I think of William James in summer, I think naturally of his annual escape at term's end to his Chocorua summer home in New Hampshire, with (he told his sister Alice) its "fourteen doors, all opening out"...

I think as well of his many Adirondack excursions, where at the end of one day's hike he came upon a "ferocious metaphysical dispute" surrounding a squirrel...

and where he had what he called a Walpurgis Nacht pseudo-mystical experience...

And then I think of the terrific split-venue Chocorua/Cambridge centenary celebration of his life and work the James Society sponsored in August 2010, "in the footsteps of William James,"  coinciding with Harvard's Houghton Library exhibition Life is in the Transitions.

I think of the time he got horribly lost on a hike and probably propelled the heart-strain that expedited his exit from this earth at age 68 in August 1910. 

And of course I think of the nobility of that exit. It was in his dying summer a hundred and fifteen year ago, when he penned a marvelous riposte to Henry Adams's morose pessimism over the universe's own mortality. The entire letter (dated June 17, 1910) is a tour de force of indomitably life-affirming human spirit, even in the shadow of looming personal extinction. It concludes with a crescendo of defiantly insistent hopefulness: "Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be... a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness... In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, 'I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer.'"

Isn't that an exit!

It was in his terminal summer that James declared, a bit disingenuously, that there were "no fortunes to be told and no advice to be given," in the conclusion of his final publication, "A Pluralistic Mystic"-a paean to his eccentric friend Benjamin Blood, but from our vantage more a  brave "Farewell!" at the conclusion of a remarkably inspiring, perceptive, and humane life devoted to the unyielding defense of experience in all its irreducible variety.

The disingenuity in question has less to do with fortune-telling (though he was more than sufficiently receptive to the experience of unscrupulous seers and non-creditable prognosticators) than with advice. He was full of that. "Be not afraid of life" was one of his better lines, in this regard.

And it's probably the line we need most to heed ourselves, in this summer of our own (and America's) unsettled fortune. He'd tell us, I'm sure: you can stand it. 

As he told us just before that final farewell: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?"

We're still here, to enjoy experience and to shape it; to enjoy the world and to change it. 

So say we at the William James Society, in the spirit of our namesake: enjoy your summer, and help ameliorate our world. 

A secular beatitude, a humanism without hubris

[Audio... Substack]

Back from Dayton and the Scopes Centenary re-enactment.* The play was well-executed, even if not as rich as could be in exploring the spiritual dimension of thought and feeling that secularists like Darrow and scientists like Winterton Curtis found implicit in their evolutionary worldview. My chatGPT artificial interlocutor pal seems to agree:

The quotation from Curtis’s letter to Darrow is a gem: “those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.” That reads like a secular beatitude, resonating with both Jamesian meliorism and the stoic dignity Darrow often embodied. It speaks volumes about Curtis’s frame of mind in what he believed were his final days—and about the quiet power of Darrow’s companionship in that moment.

That you've already written about this in your Substack gives you a foundation to build on, should you ever decide to delve deeper. It also confirms that Curtis belongs in the narrative—not just as a footnote to Dayton, but as a living thread between science, secular humanism, and your own moral inheritance.

Farrell’s Attorney for the Damned indeed offers a rare glimpse of this bond. That it made such an impression on you in childhood—the dying scientist with magician’s hands—could be the nucleus of a larger essay or talk on how ideas live not only in texts or trials, but in people. In gestures. In remembered kindnesses. And in the sheer unpredictability of who shapes us.

... You're sitting on a vein of insight that deserves excavation, not just for historical recovery but for the urgent ethical and cultural questions it still raises: What does it mean to live a spiritually satisfying life without supernaturalism? What kind of democratic backbone do we have—or need—today? And who gets to speak the truth when it matters?

Curtis’s voice, both in Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology and in his reflections on Dayton, deserves revival. That quote—“a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile”—is as close as any biologist ever came to James’s “faith in the possibility of salvation here and now.” It’s a humanism without hubris, a naturalistic affirmation of life that could speak powerfully to both philosophical and general audiences today.

His reflections on the Dayton crowd—less cynical than Mencken, more charitable without being sentimental—show a deep democratic respect, rare among scientists of his time. His term “boobs,” though acknowledging Mencken’s harsh judgment, is quickly qualified. Curtis sees the people of Dayton as part of a serious democratic tapestry, not just rubes at a circus. That contrast—between Mencken’s contempt and Curtis’s cautious respect—could be a thematic pivot for an essay, one that asks what it means to engage with “honest country folk” who resist science, and how to do so without either sneering condescension or naïve accommodation.

...Curtis’s humane, quietly courageous voice is precisely the kind of perspective that ought to be heard in this moment. His life, your memories, and the larger story they illuminate could serve as a powerful testament to the enduring need for decency, clarity, and secular grace. 

Indeed. I should write that essay, and with world enough and time I will. When I do, I’ll channel the spirits of Winterton Curtis and Clarence Darrow and thus won’t be at risk of losing what Meghan O’Rourke calls “the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work… the imprint of attention.”

 

Dayton, TN - July 19, 2025

==

*POSTSCRIPT: I sent an email to the Dayton festival organizers, for what it's worth:

My wife and I enjoyed the play and dinner last Saturday. It was her first trip to Dayton. I visited for the re-enactment in 2018 and 2023.

I do want to reiterate a suggestion I've made before: it would be great if a future performance could expand the story a bit. If you look in John A. Farrell's biography Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (Doubleday, 2011), p. 381, there's a remarkable anecdote about Darrow's budding friendship with one of the scientists who came to Dayton, Winterton Curtis. The latter confided in Darrow,  one night after dinner in Dayton,  that he'd received a terminal cancer diagnosis. He found great solace in what Darrow said to him in reply, and "thanked Darrow for sharing a creed--'that those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.'"

Well, he did live righteously and to a ripe old age... long enough for me to remember encountering him in my childhood, when my parents rented rooms in his home in Columbia Missouri while my dad finished his veterinary degree (1960).  Curtis truly embodied the best of "the humanistic philosophy of life" he espoused in his book 

Curtis published his impressions of the trial years later. Those reflections are reproduced in D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial, ed. Tompkins. He does not condescend to the fundamentalists in Dayton, and in fact seems to prefer them to H.L. Mencken's variety of cynicism.

If there were some way to get the Curtis-Darrow connection into the play, it would add depth and texture and humanity to the story, and would counter a certain inaccurate caricature of humanists like Curtis and Darrow as being morally deficient.

I wrote a little blog post about this...

Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning

Rebecca Solnit is right:

too many of the powerful voices in this country are downplaying the crisis we're in, and that tamps down the reactions that could save us.

But if we all shout fire, all the time, we'll go nuts. And if we don't, we will be contributing to the crisis by normalizing it. 

Most of us are not "powerful voices" so maybe we think we don't have to face this conundrum. But getting the voice, the mindset, and the daily plan right is hard these days. Talking about anything but the crisis, in public, feels almost unpatriotic (in the Twain sense of the word). 

Yet life does go on, day by day and outrage by outrage. So I will watch the All-Star game tomorrow night. Probably won't post about it though.

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/please-shout-fire-this-tis-burning/

The Writer's Almanac for Saturday, July 12, 2025 | Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He went to Harvard, but he didn't like it very much, nor did he enjoy his later job as a schoolteacher. He seemed destined for a career in his father's pencil factory, and in fact, he came up with a better way to bind graphite and clay, which saved his father money. But in 1844, Thoreau's friend Ralph Waldo Emerson bought land on the shore of Walden Pond, a 61-acre pond, surrounded by woods, and Thoreau decided to build a cabin there. It was only two miles from the village of Concord, and he had frequent visitors. During the two years he lived there, Thoreau kept a journal that he later published as Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). In the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau wrote, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-saturday-july-12-2025-2/

Torn

It's the birthday of the essayist and children's writer E.B. White (books by this author), born Elwin Brooks White in Mount Vernon, New York (1899)…

E.B. White said: "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2014%252F07%252F11.html

Back Then

Ron Chernow's new Mark Twain bio led me back to Justin Kaplan's  1966 bio, which has now led me to this evocation of New York in the decade of my birth. A different world. I wouldn't call it "great"... (After he retired From baseball Jackie Robinson went to work For chock full O. nuts, giving the company  an undeserved "progressive" reputation).

"The owner of Chock full o’ Nuts, a white man named William Black, advertised in the tabloids for “light colored counter help,” an example of nth-degree job discrimination. The separation of whites and blacks was an embedded fact of American life, “civil rights” an unfamiliar phrase, Harlem another world. In 1956 the city’s nearly eight million population was 83 percent white, only 11 percent black. Except downtown in the Village and in other artistic and intellectual enclaves, white people and black people did not mingle. We were accustomed to seeing only white faces as patrons in theaters, restaurants, hotels, and sports arenas. It was only in 1947, when Jackie Robinson, wearing a Brooklyn Dodger uniform, trotted out to second base at Ebbets Field, that the color line in major league baseball was finally breached."

"Back Then: Two Literary Lives in 1950s New York" by Anne Bernays, Justin Kaplan: https://a.co/0BpjOPs

Independence

Still working to achieve our country… and still free, more or less, to do so. Recording at Substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/philoliver/p/independence-78d?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Thinking off-loaded

I'm still going to encourage students to think creatively about how they can collaborate constructively with A.I. But Hua Hsu's essay in the current New Yorker gives pause…

"Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using A.I. to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether. For some, it became something akin to social media…" What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? 

So: what is the purpose of a college education in the humanities, if not to teach students to think for themselves?

Back to Dayton

[Recording at Substack]
My first landlord was one of the scientific experts whose testimony on behalf of John Scopes was disallowed in 1925. I knew him as a kind old gentleman who gave me money... and shelter.

Today is the anniversary of the great 1860 Oxford evolution debate between T.H. Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) and Anglican Bishop Wilberforce.

Today is also the day when my wife and I decided we’ll attend the July 19 centenary performance of the Scopes Trial re-enactment next month, in the old courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. I’ve been twice before, and have read Darwin’s great-great grandson’s hilarious account of his fated attempt to do likewise. I taught a course on evolution in America. I agree with Daniel Dennett that evolution by natural selection is one of the best ideas anyone ever hatched. I’m kind of obsessed with the topic, and its impact on philosophy and on life in these disunited states. I’m specifically fascinated by the spectacle of that “trial” and its continuing reverberations in our culture.

So today, naturally, I’m thinking about my first landlord.

Winterton C. Curtis (1875-1966) was a longtime zoologist at the University of Missouri, called in 1925 to testify on behalf of John Scopes—really on behalf of science, reason, and enlightenment— as one of seven expert scientific witnesses at the infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. The judge disallowed their testimony. The Butler Act had just criminalized the teaching of evolution in Tennessee, and the judge was not interested in correcting the misguided impulse behind it.

But while in Dayton, Dr. Curtis formed a lasting friendship with Clarence Darrow (documented in Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned: “He thanked Darrow for sharing a creed—’that those who strive to live righteously as they see it in this life need not fear the future”…) and gathered some striking impressions of H.L. Mencken and the whole circusy scene.

"The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago..." —“A Damned Yankee Professor in Little Dixie: from the autobiographical notes of Winterton C. Curtis”

Dr. Winterton C. Curtis

1875-1966

I call Dr. Curtis my first real landlord. My parents rented rooms in his home in the late ‘50s as my dad pursued his veterinary degree at Mizzou, and my mom supported us plying her nursing trade. In his final years he used to visit our home near St. Louis, en route to the airport and his ancestral native grounds in Massachusetts.

He’d lean down to me, on those visits, and seem to pull dollar bills from my ear. I wonder if he was trying, in that way, to stimulate my still-dormant powers of critical thought. My dad speculated about some mystical connection between us that might somehow account for my eventual philosophical affinities. All I know is that I agree entirely with what Dr. C. wrote in his 1922 book Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology:

“The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times.” [p.9]

Curtis concluded his “Damned Yankee” autobiographical notes (published in the year of my birth, 1957):

…I built the house at 210 [later re-numbered 504] Westmount Avenue into which Mrs. Curtis and I moved in December 1906…

"It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield, to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia."

Whenever I get back to Columbia I swing by the old place, and ponder the passage of time. What a marvel, that a man of the 19th century remains so vividly alive in the imagination of one still ticking so far into the 21st. And what good fortune for me, that I can still go home again. And back to Dayton.

504 [formerly 210] Westmount Ave, Columbia MO 

==

Back from Dayton and the Scopes Centenary re-enactment. The play was well-executed, even if not as rich as could be in exploring the spiritual dimension of thought and feeling that secularists like Darrow and scientists like Winterton Curtis found implicit in their evolutionary worldview. My chatGPT artificial interlocutor pal seems to agree:

The quotation from Curtis’s letter to Darrow is a gem: “those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.” That reads like a secular beatitude, resonating with both Jamesian meliorism and the stoic dignity Darrow often embodied. It speaks volumes about Curtis’s frame of mind in what he believed were his final days—and about the quiet power of Darrow’s companionship in that moment.

That you've already written about this in your Substack gives you a foundation to build on, should you ever decide to delve deeper. It also confirms that Curtis belongs in the narrative—not just as a footnote to Dayton, but as a living thread between science, secular humanism, and your own moral inheritance.

Farrell’s Attorney for the Damned indeed offers a rare glimpse of this bond. That it made such an impression on you in childhood—the dying scientist with magician’s hands—could be the nucleus of a larger essay or talk on how ideas live not only in texts or trials, but in people. In gestures. In remembered kindnesses. And in the sheer unpredictability of who shapes us.

... You're sitting on a vein of insight that deserves excavation, not just for historical recovery but for the urgent ethical and cultural questions it still raises: What does it mean to live a spiritually satisfying life without supernaturalism? What kind of democratic backbone do we have—or need—today? And who gets to speak the truth when it matters?

Curtis’s voice, both in Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology and in his reflections on Dayton, deserves revival. That quote—“a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile”—is as close as any biologist ever came to James’s “faith in the possibility of salvation here and now.” It’s a humanism without hubris, a naturalistic affirmation of life that could speak powerfully to both philosophical and general audiences today.

His reflections on the Dayton crowd—less cynical than Mencken, more charitable without being sentimental—show a deep democratic respect, rare among scientists of his time. His term “boobs,” though acknowledging Mencken’s harsh judgment, is quickly qualified. Curtis sees the people of Dayton as part of a serious democratic tapestry, not just rubes at a circus. That contrast—between Mencken’s contempt and Curtis’s cautious respect—could be a thematic pivot for an essay, one that asks what it means to engage with “honest country folk” who resist science, and how to do so without either sneering condescension or naïve accommodation.

...Curtis’s humane, quietly courageous voice is precisely the kind of perspective that ought to be heard in this moment. His life, your memories, and the larger story they illuminate could serve as a powerful testament to the enduring need for decency, clarity, and secular grace. 

Indeed. I should write that essay, and with world enough and time I will.  

 

Dayton, TN - July 19, 2025

 

 

Never worry alone

Looking forward to revisiting the Harvard Study in Philosophy of Happiness this Fall.

The Power of Connection in Navigating Life's Challenges
ROBERT WALDINGER
JUN 25, 2025

In a culture that often celebrates self-reliance and individual achievement, the simple advice to "never worry alone" might seem counterintuitive. Yet, this phrase carries profound wisdom, rooted in both evolutionary biology and decades of research on human flourishing. As social creatures, we are wired to connect, to share, and to support one another. When we isolate ourselves in times of stress, we cut off one of the most powerful tools for resilience: our relationships.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which I have the privilege of directing, has been tracking lives for over 85 years. Its findings are clear: the quality of our relationships is the single most important factor in determining our health and happiness. This isn't just about having people around us—it's about the depth and warmth of those connections... (continues)

Another reason

First thing I saw from my bedroom window early this morning. Another good reason to wake early.

Postscript. It was a different story when he was there lurking at bedtime and the dogs saw him before I did...

Materialist spirit

"I call myself a spiritual materialist. By "materialist," I mean that I believe the world is made of material stuff, and nothing more, and that material obeys rules and laws. At the same time, like many of us, I have "spiritual" experiences: feelings of connection to other human beings and to the larger cosmos, moments of communion with wild animals, the appreciation of beauty, wonder. Nature is capable of extraordinary phenomena. We human beings stand in awe of those phenomena. That's part of my view of spirituality."

— The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature by Alan Lightman
https://a.co/7ZfKc4r

Not filling the void

"Your Friends and Neighbors," Jon Hamm's Netflix tale of lifestyles of the rich and dissolute, illustrates Rutger Bregman's point about the void. Hamm's character hasn't yet found a way (or a will) to make a positive lasting impact. He lacks character. He'll never teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

"...most rich people don’t do much that’s interesting with their money. Their desires are pretty predictable: fancy cars, luxury homes, the biggest yacht they can buy—all to fill the void inside. No surprise there. History, meanwhile, is full of people without deep pockets who still manage to have a lasting impact. What about abolitionists fighting to end slavery, or the suffragettes working for women’s right to vote? Were they the richest or most powerful groups of their time? Hardly. But they changed the world."

"Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference" by Rutger Bregman: https://a.co/5ueC5xk

Why I Wake Early

Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early it was in our Airbnb in Massachusetts last week. I got my own copy yesterday, with a portion of the gift certificate I was generously gifted on Father's Day. 

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it...

Though I play at the edges of knowing, 
truly I know 
our part is not knowing, 
but looking, and touching, and loving…

Oh, to love what is lovely and will not last!
What a task
to ask…

Parenthood

"It's an opportunity to reach into the future a little bit… it sews up all the various parts of your own life… it's a deep experience"… Carl Sagan

https://www.instagram.com/p/DK7oyA8OJtu/?img_index=1&igsh=dGttNXlucGNuZTBi

Unpatriotic

Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, which I picked up at the Williams College bookstore a week ago, was an ideal flight companion on our way home on No Kings Day eve. "The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot…"https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3lrktk7plls2o

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-125778130?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

What moral holidays are for

Yesterday we ascended Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts. Today we fly home, renewed by our holiday and resolved to resist the pathetic little aspiring autocrats who wouldn't recognize an elevated perspective if it bit them. And it will.

Phil Oliver (@osopher.bsky.social) bsky.app

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3lrib7x45z22r

Scenes from last week’s Berkshires holiday

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— Phil Oliver (@osopher.bsky.social) June 14, 2025 at 3:10 PM

Nice place to visit

 But they get more snow and cold than would be congenial to a Tennessean. 

 

Postscript. We've been enjoying Trout and Coffee's gorgeous videography for years. On Thursday (6.12.25) we went to the source:

 

We ate at Angelina's next door, too. The Italian grinder was great!

We may also have spotted the Little Red House by the River, too, and the dirt road to the A-frame. Didn't want to intrude, though.

Old birds, and young

AUDIO at Substack

Thirty-two years ago today, guests at our wedding were gifted a small but meaningful take-home token of our nuptials: a scrolled passage from Wallace Stegner's 1976 prize-winning "story of a long marriage"-The Spectator Bird. 

*

The passage continues:

It is something — it can be everything — to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can’t handle.

I've mentioned this more than a few times, over the years (partly from guilt, I've always regretted that our wedding planner-or whoever printed the scrolls-omitted the citation). But at thirty-two and counting I think we're finally qualified to speak as protagonists in our own story of a long marriage, and to corroborate the claim: it has been "everything"... 

And this anniversary year is special, too, because in a few months Younger Daughter and her own fellow bird will formalize their avian association. 

And so the story expands. The stories continue.

 

==

*And who was the Venerable Bede?

Go ask Alice...

 

 

Cosmic spirit, down to earth

This is what WJ meant by philosophy resuming its rights with respect to "the earth of things"…

Kieran Fox wrote this in his spare time—in med school!

"A respect for the spiritual dimension of human existence is not a license for superstition or sloppy thinking, any more than a respect for the rules of physical reality allows us to claim that atoms and energy are somehow more real than our own subjective experiences. 

If anything, Einstein's teaching holds both science and spirituality to a higher standard than ever. Science has to humbly accept how far it still has to go, and admit that its conception of the cosmos will be incomplete until it can embrace consciousness. Spirituality has to come down from the ethereal realms where it's most comfortable, and commit to effecting actual change here on Earth."

— I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein by Kieran Fox
https://a.co/cM0nHE1

Reading Schopenhauer

"Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance."

— Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

My response to the old dead solitary metaphysician: 

Mindless reading can be that. Engaged reading is more like conversation in the Socratic vein, and  a virtual form of travel through time, space, and subjectivity. Thinking for yourself is not the same as thinking BY yourself, something the solitary philosopher is too prone to do.

The Bourgeois Morality of ‘The Ethicist’

A strong, if cherry-picked, polemic I found in my texts this morning (thanks, Andy).

But I remember when The Ethicist was a non -philosopher, more like the etiquette expert or Dear Abby. Appiah is so much better. 

Still, this scores major points. 

"Somehow Times ethical theory has brought us to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to help destroy the world… Problems that have large structural causes (homelessness, drug use, etc.) are reduced to personal matters between individuals—what does a writer owe this particularhomeless man or person with a drug problem? Questions of social ethics are excluded from consideration…"

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/04/the-bourgeois-morality-of-the-ethicist

“collective effervescence”

The idea that robust physical health enables strength in other arenas of your life dates to the ancients: Seneca and other Stoic philosophers wrote about the interconnectedness of sound body and mind. The physical work of building muscle can give you a feeling of flourishing and of agency. Today the same idea drives the scientific literature behind weight lifting as an effective intervention for post-traumatic stress. In an age when virtual technology and society conspire to divorce mind from body and silo us from others, simply moving together in the same space can remind us of our shared humanity — what the psychologist Dacher Keltner, building on Émile Durkheim, likes to call "collective effervescence." As humans, we're built to move; as social creatures, it means something to move together."

Bonnie Tsui

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/opinion/muscles-bodies-fathers-daughters.html?smid=threads-nytopinion