Aggression was the theme of the panel I chaired and commented on, with presentations on microaggressions, aggression in football, and aggression in war. Personal highlight: getting on my stump with George Carlin to proclaim baseball, not football, the best alternative and "moral equivalent" to war.
Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.And so it goes.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying...
George was a comedic skeptic. He said “Don’t just teach your children to read…Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything. If someone says 'Do not think,' say 'I'll think about it.' If they tell you 'Do not question,' immediately ask 'Why?'"
Before departing the Circle City I fulfilled a longstanding ambition to visit the Kurt Vonnegut Library and Museum, in tribute to a great literary skeptic. I recommend it highly.
I don't recommend Mr. Vonnegut's workspace, so low to the ground, though it obviously worked for him. I do recommend his good words, including that wonderful welcome to earth in Mr. Rosewater, and his last speech (at Clowes Hall) just two weeks before he thanked us for out attention and was out of here.
Today in CoPhi it's skeptics. Or sceptics, if you prefer the British spelling. Or you can follow their lead and refuse to commit. "Don't commit, and you won't be disappointed."
I haven't generally found that to be a reliable guidepost in life, instead taking my cue from the lesson James's "first act of free will" (previously noted) seems to me to teach: don't just sit there, stand and select a destination. And get going. As my old pal the Carolina prof says, do something-even if it's wrong. And as James also said, "our errors surely are not such awfully solemn things." Lighten up. Pick a path. Move. (My friend's colleague David Henderson gave a first-rate presentation at the conference, btw, on not reducing wilderness and the national park system to an American thing but seeing wilderness as a call to cosmopolitanism.)
But that's my therapy, it may not be yours. Some of us really do prefer sitting on a fence, avoiding firm opinions, keeping all accounts open. And there's no doubt, a healthy dose of skepticism is good for you. But how much is too much?
My answer is implied by the bumper sticker message on my bulletin board: "even fatalists look both ways before crossing the street." If you stop looking, you're either too skeptical or not skeptical enough. Probably a lunatic, too. Or the ruler of the universe. "I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say."
Point is, we need beliefs to motivate action lest we sit and starve like Buridan's ass, or cross paths with a cart and get flattened. Prudence demands commitment. Commitment is no guarantee against error and disappointment, but indifference and non-commitment typically leave us stuck in the middle of the road or drop us off the cliff.
Is it possible to go through life questioning and doubting everything, committing always to nothing, and holding no firm opinions? Is it desirable or useful to try doing so? And do you know anyone who doesn't look both ways before crossing the street?
==
In Fantasyland today, Kurt Andersen's brush is a bit broad when he paints with it a picture of '60s academics who turned away from reason and rationalism as enthralled with the view that they were all raging relativists who saw no significant difference between truth and falsehood. Some were on the relativist spectrum, for sure, but - and this is a point to be made (for all the good it will do) to Pyrrhonists and other radical skeptics. If all is up for grabs, truth-wise, what's left to recommend your point of view?
Maybe an out-of-body perspective, UCLA psychologist Charles Tart might have responded. He got tenure after reporting that a young woman in his lab went for regular o-o-b nightflights to retrieve remote numbers. Can't believe that flew.
Tom (Electric Kool-aid) Wolfe said the Jesus People of the '60s were "young acid heads who had sworn off drugs... but still wanted the ecstatic spiritualism" and found in "Fundamentalist evangelical holy-rolling Christianity."
It was hardly "nonfiction," but Hal Lindsey's Late, Great Planet Earth was wildly successful with its even wilder Satanic/apocalyptic conspiracy-mongering. No wonder Billy Graham seemed relatively moderate compared to such stuff, and to his not-so-different compadres Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. If you want to earn a reuptation for reasonableness in America, just stake out a position slightly less hysterical in tone to that of your peers.
In A&P today we note Darwin's friend and seductee, Harvard botanist Asa Gray. He was the first important American scientist to advocate "a Christianized Darwinism" propelled by a divine first cause. He thought it "possible to teach evolutionary theory in entirely naturalistic terms without addressing the nonscientific issue," in this anticipating Stephen Jay Gould's late-20th century talk of "nonoverlapping magisteria."
Gould was often called to testify in court cases challenging the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools, a phenomenon that would have been unimaginable to the 19th century heirs of the Enlightenment-especially after the Scopes fiasco. The sense that Darwin had taken us down several pegs was not restricted to evangelicals and fundamentalists, however. "How insignificant we are, with our pigmy little world!" declaimed Mark Twain. But we're significant enough to note our own insignificance. Isn't that significant?
And isn't it significant that we're heirs to an Enlightenment tradition that's confident of our ability that, if we keep plugging, we'll eventually figure some things out about the ultimate origin of life, the universe, and everything?
Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable" was a catchall big enough to lure those Americans who wanted to "have their God and evolution too." Will we ever know enough to know if there is such a thing?
Civilization, for Darwin, is a game-changer that subordinates natural selection to environmental factors including, most prominently, civilized humans themselves. Darwin was no Social Darwinist.
My alma mater Vanderbilt fired a geologist named Winchell in 1878 for disputing literal readings of the Bible, with respect to the age of life on earth. The Methodists who founded Vandy have since modulated and modernized, but there's been no shortage of other southern zealots to grab the anti-evolutionary baton.
And you've always got to be on guard against university administrators anyway, whatever their denominational persuasion. Our new governing board at MTSU merits watching, they keep scheduling their meetings inconveniently out of town. Get tenure so you can show the Dean any finger you like, my earthly-elegant mentor Lachs said. But Deans haven't been our problem.
The Great Agnostic Robert Ingersoll's "larger and nobler faith" was in "all that is, and is to be." That's very large indeed, and to my mind is far more appealing than the Dawkins-esque en masse repudiation of all "faith-heads" etc.
Why aren't people called "Philo" anymore? I'm Phil O., but that's not as cool as Philo T(V) Farnsworth or Philo D. Beckwith, with whom I share a few heroes: Ingersoll, Paine, Voltaire, Whitman...
Freethought lecturers packed auditoriums back in the day, without the carrot of ultimate salvation or the stick of hell. Ingersoll was one of them, in an age seemingly more tolerant than ours of unconventional thinking. Their appeal was like Mr. Vonnegut's, to a better "vision of how to think and live on this earth." Hi-ho. So it goes.
The intellectual turning point in Robert Ingersoll's life was his youthful encounter with The Bard of Avon. That was a guy with a vision, an attitude towards "our little life/rounded with a sleep," and indeed a philosophy-as Colin McGinn has written (before becoming an untouchable, before #MeToo, before resurfacing with his latest and, in light of the events that ended his teaching career, his most preposterously-themed book).
...One of the most revolutionary aspects of Vatican II — as the Second Vatican Council came to be known — was the change in the church's attitude toward other religions, and other Christian denominations. Previously, Catholics were forbidden from visiting any other houses of worship, and encouraged to look down on other religions. Now they could attend the weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals of their non-Catholic friends and neighbors. WA
That wasn't Pyrrho's perspective, jay- and cliff-walker though he was. Fortunately for him, he seems always to have had friends steering him from the edge. His prescription - but is a skeptic allowed to prescribe? - was to free yourself from desires, don't care how things will turn out, persuade yourself that nothing ultimately matters, and you'll eventually shuck all worry. Or not. If we all were Pyrrho "there wouldn't be anyone left to protect the Pyrrhonic Sceptics from themselves." Prudence wins again.
Prudence and moderation. "The point of moderate philosophical scepticism is to get closer to the truth," or further at least from falsehood and bullshit. Easier said than done, in these alt-fact days of doublespeak. "All the great philosophers have been [moderate] sceptics," have sought truth and spurned lies, have deployed their baloney detectors and upheld the bar of objective evidence. Sincerity alone won't cut it.
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These anti-realist doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry... Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial-notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
So, be a skeptic. But to paraphrase David Hume and Jon Batiste, stay human. ("Be a philosopher, but amidst your philosophy be still a man.")
Read Skeptic magazine, which in a recent issue doubts the possibility of eternal youth and features the parodic perspective of Mr. Deity. Skeptic's editor Michael Shermer says “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” And, “I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.”
Pyrrho must not have been that crazy, to have lived to nearly ninety. "He did not act carelessly in the details of everyday life," said a defender, he just suspended judgment as to their ultimate import in the larger truths of things. Or maybe he just wanted to protect his batting average, so to speak. If you never swing, you'll never miss. But you'll still strike out if you take too many.
Read Skeptic magazine, which in a recent issue doubts the possibility of eternal youth and features the parodic perspective of Mr. Deity. Skeptic's editor Michael Shermer says “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” And, “I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.”
Pyrrho must not have been that crazy, to have lived to nearly ninety. "He did not act carelessly in the details of everyday life," said a defender, he just suspended judgment as to their ultimate import in the larger truths of things. Or maybe he just wanted to protect his batting average, so to speak. If you never swing, you'll never miss. But you'll still strike out if you take too many.
David Hume, again. He was a skeptic but he didn't let that interfere with living. He ventured opinions but couched them in philosophic humility. He knew we couldn't all be Pyrrho, for "all action would immediately cease" and "the necessities of nature" would "put an end to [our] miserable existence." Miserable? He must have been having a bad day. Generally he was of great cheer and humane disposition.
So let's not throw in the sponge on humanity just yet. What a strange expression, "throwing in the sponge"-it comes from the Roman Skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who told a story about a painter who stopped trying so hard to paint the perfect representation of a horse's mouth and discovered that sometimes it's best to just let fly. Fling your sponge, let it land where it may. Okay, if you're just painting. If you're living a life, though, maybe just a bit less skepticism is prudent.
So let's not throw in the sponge on humanity just yet. What a strange expression, "throwing in the sponge"-it comes from the Roman Skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who told a story about a painter who stopped trying so hard to paint the perfect representation of a horse's mouth and discovered that sometimes it's best to just let fly. Fling your sponge, let it land where it may. Okay, if you're just painting. If you're living a life, though, maybe just a bit less skepticism is prudent.
Is it possible to go through life questioning and doubting everything, committing always to nothing, and holding no firm opinions? Is it desirable or useful to try doing so? And do you know anyone who doesn't look both ways before crossing the street?
==
In Fantasyland today, Kurt Andersen's brush is a bit broad when he paints with it a picture of '60s academics who turned away from reason and rationalism as enthralled with the view that they were all raging relativists who saw no significant difference between truth and falsehood. Some were on the relativist spectrum, for sure, but - and this is a point to be made (for all the good it will do) to Pyrrhonists and other radical skeptics. If all is up for grabs, truth-wise, what's left to recommend your point of view?
Maybe an out-of-body perspective, UCLA psychologist Charles Tart might have responded. He got tenure after reporting that a young woman in his lab went for regular o-o-b nightflights to retrieve remote numbers. Can't believe that flew.
Tom (Electric Kool-aid) Wolfe said the Jesus People of the '60s were "young acid heads who had sworn off drugs... but still wanted the ecstatic spiritualism" and found in "Fundamentalist evangelical holy-rolling Christianity."
It was hardly "nonfiction," but Hal Lindsey's Late, Great Planet Earth was wildly successful with its even wilder Satanic/apocalyptic conspiracy-mongering. No wonder Billy Graham seemed relatively moderate compared to such stuff, and to his not-so-different compadres Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. If you want to earn a reuptation for reasonableness in America, just stake out a position slightly less hysterical in tone to that of your peers.
In A&P today we note Darwin's friend and seductee, Harvard botanist Asa Gray. He was the first important American scientist to advocate "a Christianized Darwinism" propelled by a divine first cause. He thought it "possible to teach evolutionary theory in entirely naturalistic terms without addressing the nonscientific issue," in this anticipating Stephen Jay Gould's late-20th century talk of "nonoverlapping magisteria."
Gould was often called to testify in court cases challenging the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools, a phenomenon that would have been unimaginable to the 19th century heirs of the Enlightenment-especially after the Scopes fiasco. The sense that Darwin had taken us down several pegs was not restricted to evangelicals and fundamentalists, however. "How insignificant we are, with our pigmy little world!" declaimed Mark Twain. But we're significant enough to note our own insignificance. Isn't that significant?
And isn't it significant that we're heirs to an Enlightenment tradition that's confident of our ability that, if we keep plugging, we'll eventually figure some things out about the ultimate origin of life, the universe, and everything?
Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable" was a catchall big enough to lure those Americans who wanted to "have their God and evolution too." Will we ever know enough to know if there is such a thing?
Civilization, for Darwin, is a game-changer that subordinates natural selection to environmental factors including, most prominently, civilized humans themselves. Darwin was no Social Darwinist.
My alma mater Vanderbilt fired a geologist named Winchell in 1878 for disputing literal readings of the Bible, with respect to the age of life on earth. The Methodists who founded Vandy have since modulated and modernized, but there's been no shortage of other southern zealots to grab the anti-evolutionary baton.
And you've always got to be on guard against university administrators anyway, whatever their denominational persuasion. Our new governing board at MTSU merits watching, they keep scheduling their meetings inconveniently out of town. Get tenure so you can show the Dean any finger you like, my earthly-elegant mentor Lachs said. But Deans haven't been our problem.
The Great Agnostic Robert Ingersoll's "larger and nobler faith" was in "all that is, and is to be." That's very large indeed, and to my mind is far more appealing than the Dawkins-esque en masse repudiation of all "faith-heads" etc.
Why aren't people called "Philo" anymore? I'm Phil O., but that's not as cool as Philo T(V) Farnsworth or Philo D. Beckwith, with whom I share a few heroes: Ingersoll, Paine, Voltaire, Whitman...
Freethought lecturers packed auditoriums back in the day, without the carrot of ultimate salvation or the stick of hell. Ingersoll was one of them, in an age seemingly more tolerant than ours of unconventional thinking. Their appeal was like Mr. Vonnegut's, to a better "vision of how to think and live on this earth." Hi-ho. So it goes.
The intellectual turning point in Robert Ingersoll's life was his youthful encounter with The Bard of Avon. That was a guy with a vision, an attitude towards "our little life/rounded with a sleep," and indeed a philosophy-as Colin McGinn has written (before becoming an untouchable, before #MeToo, before resurfacing with his latest and, in light of the events that ended his teaching career, his most preposterously-themed book).
In Bioethics today, Oryx and Crake and lab-grown meat...
==
10.11.17. It's the birthday of the longest-serving First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt (books by this author), born in New York City (1884) who said, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water." She began a secret courtship with her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt... She once said, "We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."
And, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
==
10.11.17. It's the birthday of the longest-serving First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt (books by this author), born in New York City (1884) who said, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water." She began a secret courtship with her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt... She once said, "We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."
And, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
It's the birthday of Mason Locke Weems (books by this author), born in Anne Arundel County, Maryland (1759). He was an Episcopalian clergyman and a traveling bookseller. He wrote extremely popular fictional tales about history and presented them as if they were fact... It was Weems who invented the famous story about George Washington cutting down his father's cherry tree with a hatchet, and then admitting that it was made-up.... Pope John XXIII convened the first session of the Second Vatican Council on this date in 1962. It was the first time Roman Catholic religious leaders had met to settle doctrinal issues in nearly a century. In 1870, the pope had been declared infallible, so people didn't see the point of arguing about church doctrine: whatever the pope said was what the church would do and believe. But Pope John XXIII — who had assumed his duties only three months prior to calling for the council — believed that the church had become too insular for modern times. He often said it was time to "open the windows [of the church] and let in some fresh air."
...One of the most revolutionary aspects of Vatican II — as the Second Vatican Council came to be known — was the change in the church's attitude toward other religions, and other Christian denominations. Previously, Catholics were forbidden from visiting any other houses of worship, and encouraged to look down on other religions. Now they could attend the weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals of their non-Catholic friends and neighbors. WA
==
3.2.17. Happy birthday Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), who said “If things start happening, don't worry, don't stew, just go right along and you'll start happening too.” And “It's opener, out there, in the wide, open air.” And “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.” And “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
Happy birthday too to Tom Wolfe, who admired the Stoics and asked "What is it you're looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you.” And “One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for."
Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation? Fact Check: Drumpf’sFirst Address to Congress
5:30/6:17, 38/54/31, 5:41
3.2.17. Happy birthday Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), who said “If things start happening, don't worry, don't stew, just go right along and you'll start happening too.” And “It's opener, out there, in the wide, open air.” And “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.” And “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
Happy birthday too to Tom Wolfe, who admired the Stoics and asked "What is it you're looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you.” And “One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for."
Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation? Fact Check: Drumpf’sFirst Address to Congress
5:30/6:17, 38/54/31, 5:41
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