The Fly

LISTEN. Frank Bruni's account reassures me we didn't miss much when my wife flipped off last night's veep debate early on. We did miss the Fly that took up extended unacknowledged residence on the Vice President's pate.

How could he be expected to register or exile an itty-bitty pest when he routinely puts up with a great big one? That fly was some crazy combo of metaphor, visitation and karmic joke...

Pence kept talking over the moderator, Susan Page of USA Today, ignoring her alerts that his two minutes were up so that he could commandeer more time than Harris got. Page was left to sputter endlessly, “Thank you, Vice President Pence. Thank you, Vice President Pence. Thank you, Vice President Pence.” But more than a thanking he needed a spanking...

He would not fess up to humankind’s role in climate change but said, preposterously, “President Drumpf has made it clear that we’re going to continue to listen to the science.” Continue? Science? Is this before or after the bleach injections?

“This is a president who respects and cherishes all of the American people,” Pence said, making me wonder if I’d spaced out and missed an antecedent and he was talking about someone other than Drumpf.

Pence also said: “Senator Harris, you are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts.” This confused me, because Drumpf gets to have his own facts and Pence just beams at him.

Let's just fly away.

Today in CoPhi we lead off with Mill on Bentham, on happiness, pleasure, quality and quantity, and (crucially) liberty. 

Would I rather be a sad human or a happy pig, Socrates dissatisfied or a fool satisfied? We get that question in both the Little History and How the World Thinks today.

Honestly, it depends on when you ask me. I'd prefer to be a happy human on some occasions, a happy pig on others, but never a sad anything.  That of course is not an option, in Mill's dichotomy, but shouldn't it be? Can't I be suitably attentive to the world's multifarious deficiencies, and concerned about them, and in select instances actively engaged in ameliorating them, without sacrificing my own good humor? 

And then, can't I have my moral holidays too? Can't I  indulge my own preferred equivalents of lolling in mud, for a bit? Can't I ride my bike, swim, walk the dogs (again), hit the hammock and read a novel, and so on? Well, I too just take my moral holidays. [Wm James: "I just take my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle" than the Absolute Rationalism of philosophers who insist the world is in better hands than ours.] 

J.S. Mill had to overcome his hothouse home-schooled "raisin" and learn that it was okay to spend a fraction of time listening to music and reading poetry, that doing so didn't make him a "pig" but a more sensitive and feeling human being. Wordsworth in particular, Mill's Autobiography reports, had a healing effect. "What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of." 

Worthy quest. Feelings rightly "colour" our subjective qualitative apprehension of pleasure and happiness, and while we should listen to people who've experienced "higher" pleasures we shouldn't allow them to deny us our own.

Thing is, the Mill who wrote On Liberty would never have thought to impose his own notions of "quality" on free individuals. He just wanted to start a conversation. Fair enough. I don't happen to think pushpin's as good as poetry either. We could talk about it. Free speech is really good for that sort of conversation.

Then today, Darwin. Huxley's reply to Wilberforce seems to me a tour de force of rhetorical brilliance. 

 

...Wilberforce ask[ed] Huxley if he considered himself descended from an ape through his grandmother or grandfather... Huxley, then an undergraduate, retorted: “[A] man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a MAN, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point : eat issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.” In short, Huxley preferred the disgrace of an ape to the ignorance of his opponent. Dday 

Debates, we've had occasion to notice, are frequently un-enlightening. This one at least had the virtue of being entertaining, and of spotlighting anti-evolutionists' aversion to science. Natural selection is an ingenious idea, one of the best ever in Daniel Dennett's estimation. Darwin didn't think it disproved God, a matter Darwin in any event thought beyond our power to resolve. He did think it proved the unified co-lineage of all humanity, probably far more powerful a belief if we all could accept it.

We read of the Scopes Trial last week in Fantasyland, I'd love to revisit the Dayton judge's disqualification of "my first landlord's" (and the other scientific experts') testimony.  Mizzou zoologist Winterton Curtis might have told them about the humanistic philosophy of life, its spiritual joy in living and confidence in the future, and the role of evolutionary theory in establishing our species' capacity for joy and confidence. What a missed opportunity.

If you heard a voice purporting to be God, telling you to murder your child, what would you do? I'd get myself to an infirmary, or a counseling center. I think I'd do that whether or not I happened to identify as Christian. Nothing should ever be allowed to violate the sacred trust of the parent-child relationship, particularly not disembodied phantom voices.

As for trust: Soren Kierkegaard was a Christian who mistrusted Christendom and thought true faith an irrational "leap." What would Anselm and Aquinas say?  Leaps into the darkness are sometimes required of us, but shouldn't we have a good reason to jump? And shouldn't a good reason be more than a subjective "truth"?

Julian Baggini: Kierkegaard's point is that no matter how rigorous your logical system, there will always be gaps. As these gaps are logical gaps, it is futile to try to bridge them. Instead, they can only be breached by a leap of faith. What characterises a leap of faith is the absolute uncertainty that underlies it. Faith is by definition that which cannot be proven or disproved. That is why a leap of faith is undertaken in "fear and trembling". 

Was Karl Marx an Epicurean communal-ist  rather than a statist/communist? Wasn't his vision of utopia ("from each according to ability, to each according to need" in a world where no one has to work at menial tasks merely to meet the basic necessities of living) unrealistic, in a world like ours and a moment like this? Unrealistic not so much due to an allegedly permanent intractability of human nature, but because we've repeated the charge about our essential greed and egoism so often that too many of us now believe it and can't see past it?

But it's a lovely vision, nonetheless. 

In Fantasyland we've entered the era of pre-Internet/YouTube/Netflix/Social Media/videogame  popular entertainment,  already monopolizing people's leisure hours in the 50s. Now we play and work on screens, as I'm doing right now. Thanks, both sincere and sarcastic, are due to Disney and Jobs among others. And what of Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy? [see Carlin Romano's America the Philosophical] 

Should small children be made to recite a pledge, "under god" or not? Should any of us pledge blind allegiance to anything? How about the New Age "create your own reality" mentality? 

How the World Thinks asks if it's more important to form good habits or to follow strong principles, to build our characters and become good people. Isn't that another false either/or? Don't Aristotle and Confucius have a better idea, about virtue and the mean etc.? Truly good people don't really need a Golden Rule, do they? And the people who need rules most are the least apt to follow them. "Nurture makes actual what nature makes possible." That's possibly the most hopeful statement of all.