Hope in stressful times

LISTEN. Margaret Renkl has once again found and borrowed the just-right words for what so many of us are feeling.

The news feels nothing less than apocalyptic. Climate change on irrefutable display as wildfires turn California and the Pacific Northwest into a furnace, as hurricanes gather and floodwaters rise. Universities returning to in-person classes just in time to worsen the already raging pandemic. Deepening economic pain as aid to our most vulnerable communities expires. Black men still getting shot in the back. Russia interfering with our election, and a Russia-supported president using the White House — our house — as a backdrop for a political convention that promulgated nothing but lies.

I could keep going, nonstop, until Nov. 3, but I’ll end the list right here lest your own blood pressure rise to a worrisome level.

I have friends who tell me that they can’t follow the news anymore, that it makes them too upset to sleep. It’s like the topless dancer’s advice in John Prine’s song “Spanish Pipedream”:

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own

Blow up all your news and social media appliances, I'm tempted to add. I'm not looking for Jesus, but more peace and peaches would be great. Actually Jesus in this song does mean peace and equanimity, something like what the Greeks called ataraxia - "the ability to remain calm despite fear, anger, sadness, or stress." Prine's Jesus, like Tom T. Hall's, was a Stoic of sorts. But, not the sort that renounces all hope. Alain de Botton of the School of Life is that sort, or says he is, but I still like his videos about the Stoics. They're upbeat and fun, words we don't usually associate with the likes of Seneca.

And by a happy coincidence, we're talking Stoicism in CoPhi today. 

And Epicureans. (And the Enlightenment, as fathomed in  Andersen's Fantasyland by Kant and Jefferson... And "tradition,"  and Pragmatism as apprehended by Baggini in How the World Thinks, as we conclude Part One of that book... Lots to work out. Good distraction from the news.) 

But Renkl's right, we can't just retire to the country and leave the country in the hands of the lying liars and reality-deniers. We've got to do something about them. We've got to vote, for a start. That's only a start, she concludes. 

It always helps to plant a little garden, that’s true, but Mr. Prine understood, even as he wrote, that hiding out from bad news was only ever a dream.

Commitment is what changes things. Hard work is what changes things. Powerless outrage doesn’t help anyone, the outraged least of all. nyt

So be a Stoic, but be a Pragmatist too. Stoic Pragmatists like John Lachs have a good thing going. They're "committed to making life better until their powers are overwhelmed." They're not yet ready to pack it in.

Today in Environmental Ethics we pick up a new book, paleobiologist Hope Jahren's The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to go from Here. She's a terrific writer, one of the charmed few who can speak both Science and English fluently, bridging the "two cultures" and making you laugh -- even at something so dire and depressing as climate change -- in the process. 

Hope's not ready to pack it in yet either. I've recommended that the class take a look at the conversation she had with the great novelist/environmentalist Barbara Kingsolver at Harvard Bookstore last month. They're both my kind of pragmatists, committed to doing something on the immediate and personal scale about climate change rather than surrender to the Overwhelm. Hope trumps fear. But of course, we must also act collectively with our peers. Personal action is no substitute for activism.

In her earlier book Lab Girl, she said “My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe." I like that a lot, and will borrow it. My classroom, my desk, my recliner, my hammock, my dogwalks, my bikerides... they are my churches. And oh yeah, the ballparks... if they ever let me back in. I'm an unintentional lapsed congregant of the Church of Baseball, which does not play well for me on TV in front of cardboard cutouts. And football, if anything, is even weirder without spectators. 

(Speaking of WEIRD, Dan Dennett has a glowing review of a new book by Joseph Henrich that says we westerners are just that: "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic". But what does he mean, we?)

I also like that, like the Lorax and Bill McKibben, she speaks for the trees. "Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less then six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.”

I also like the serendipity of the fact, on Stoic day in CoPhi, that Hope begins with an old Stoic. The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it, said Marcus Aurelius Antonius. For an emperor he was a pretty good thinker, but of course our thoughts only make something better of the universe because thought drives action.

And as for Enlightenment, Mr. Light Bulb: too bad the guys who first drove us to drive to excess, Edison, Ford, and Firestone, didn't act on the thought Edison expressed: The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

What a change in our present circumstances they might have driven.