Harmony

LISTEN. WATCH (please pardon the abrupt phone interruption at the end). Speaking of harmony, and visions of a harmonious world that seems beyond present reach but is still worth reaching for... Today in 1966, Star Trek (the original, with Shatner's Kirk and Nimoy's Spock and Takei's Sulu, et al) debuted. It featured Gene Roddenberry's vision of a harmonious earth, c.Century 24. A harmonious federation of planets, in fact. There are still Klingons and Romulans, but their aggression is seen as incongruous and on the wrong side of galactic history. And btw, Spock's Vulcan philosophy of IDIC ("infinite diversity from infinite combinations") sounds a lot like Confucian harmony as explicated by Julian Baggini (more on that shortly). Total harmony eludes the half-human science officer, as it eludes us wholly-human earthlings. But we can continue to evolve, if we remain open to that harmonious vision.

Also worth noting: Taoist harmony is about one's relation to, or place in, nature. The Tao is the way, the road, the path forward to greater natural accord. So, as my bumper sticker says, walk your path to enlightenment. Later this week we'ere going to look at cosmic and peripatetic philosophy. Both are ways forward. Ad astra, per aspera, to the stars, through hardship... but before we can navigate the stars we must learn to tread the earth together in peace.

(Someone asked me the other day, coincidentally on the same day I published another paean to Trek, if I liked sci-fi. I do. Cli-fi too, as noted in Environmental Ethics.)

Labor Day this year should have had a particular resonance for a society, a world, suddenly forced to realize just how essential are the workers who do most of the heavy lifting for us all, who stock and sell and deliver the goods and services we now find we really can't (or don't want to) do without, and who've been taken for granted for too long. It's past time we compensated and appreciated them more tangibly.

We're taking a day in CoPhi to glance back at what we've read so far in How the World Thinks. Julian Baggini's lecture in The Netherlands last Fall is worth a look, with its particular insights into key differences between eastern and western ideas about things like "harmony" (as we'll read in a later chapter). Westerners generally seem more accepting of strife and conflict, as the natural accompaniment to what we call our individual liberty. But the disharmony this pandemic has blasted into our lives may have many of us reconsidering.

When I think of harmony I recall the discussion in the first text I ever used in my Intro course, back before it became CoPhilosophy. 

"Confucius and Lao Tzu agreed on their overall emphasis on harmony as the ideal state of both society and the individual, and they insisted on an all- encompassing or "holistic" conception of human life that emphasizes a person's place in a larger context. For both Confucianism and Taoism, the development of personal character is the main goal in life, but the personal is not to be defined in individualistic terms. For the Confucian, the personal is the social. For the Taoist, the personal is the relation to nature ...[they] were in considerable agreement on the necessity of harmony in human life and a larger sense of the "person" than the mere individual." Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, A Passion for Wisdom: A Very Brief History of Philosophy

The mere individual, we've seen, when given a megaphone and a following in the age of Twitter and other social media, can create unsettling waves of disharmony that many of us find too high a price to pay for our vaunted self-importance.

You know which "mere individual" I'm thinking of, in particular. He has so much to be modest about, but so little modesty. Or dignity, or decency. In the name of harmony, and the urgent need for a model of leadership our children can respect and emulate as they pursue the harmonious development of their own personal characters -- not to mention peace, justice, social stability, and environmental sustainability -- it's time for him to go. Delete his account.