The way out

LISTEN. It's time to wrap things up. We'll not be Zooming any more, this Fall semester, after Thanksgiving.

For our last week, in both CoPhi and Environmental Ethics, I'm inviting students to think about our larger legacy. Will we be well regarded by our descendants, after we've thinned out?

"...we're gonna be like him! I mean, he was probably one of the BEAUTIFUL people. He was probably dancing and playing tennis and everything. And now look: this is what happens to us. You know, it's very important to have some kind of personal integrity, you know? I'll be hanging in a classroom one day, and I want to make sure when I thin out, that I'm... well-thought of." Manhattan

Or will they excoriate us, as short-sighted and selfish Oncelers?

Bertrand Russell was asked, late in his life, to articulate a message for future generations. He told them to value facts above wishes (Always ask "what is the truth that the facts bear out?") and love over hate ("love is wise, hatred is foolish").

What would be Immanuel Kant's (or Susan Neiman's) and William James's (or John Kaag's) messages? Presumably, based on our reading in CoPhi of Why Grow Up? and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, something about enlightened maturity and life's possible (but not guaranteed) worthiness to be lived.

My message would certainly be along those lines. I hope people in the future will value thinking for themselves (in the Kantian sense of Sapere aude!)  I hope they'll find life worth living. And I hope they'll forgive us. 

And what will future generations' message be, to us? I hope they'll say we were "good ancestors," that they're grateful people in the '20s (Americans in particular) recoiled from "Peak Fantasyland" and began at last to really value truth, facts, and reality.

 

"...seven trillion people will be born over the next 50,000 years. 

How will all these future generations look back on us and the legacy we're leaving for them?

 ...A global movement has started to emerge of people committed to decolonizing the future..."

 Will the view from 2050 be anything like the following?

 

A message from the future... "We knew that we needed to save the planet 

and that we had all the technology to do it, but people were scared. They said it was too big,

 too fast, not practical. I think that’s because they just couldn’t picture it yet..."

 

A message from the future II... the virus changed everything. We finally understood that we couldn’t keep patching up the same broken systems: we had to build something new... The first step was rebuilding the economy around the core of essential work -food and farming, care for young and old, public health. Not to mention the essential labor of the more-than-human world: the winged pollinators. The leafy oxygen makers. The Full Employment Act made the new priorities clear, and there was a wave of new worker co-operatives –in everything from mental health support to public art and tree planting. Many bosses were made redundant. Our information ecology needed tending too: and so we built a digital commons, vaccinated it against surveillance, and built up our herd immunity to disinformation. Fossil fuels were running on fumes by that point. So we harnessed their final profits to clean up their messes. Whatever we could, we did outdoors: school, theatre, celebrating. At first because it was safer, then because we realized it made us happier. Nobody talked about missing shopping... (continues)

• "We are all now stuck in a science fiction novel that we are writing together." Kim Stanley Robinson
  
  
  
• "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Abe Lincoln 
• "The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?" William James

More questions, as we close the books on Fall 2020:

SSHM

• "Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation." 129 Can you (partly) describe an example of that?
• "Everything makes sense. Just not to you or me." 133 Does this make sense?
• What do you think it means to say "truth is our story about the facts"? 134
• Something's being "useful at a particular time for a particular person" does not make it true. 136 Why do you think so many of pragmatism's critics misunderstand this?
• What do you think it means to have "conversations with sensations"? 137
• Are you a meliorist? 143-4
• What do you think of the Gertrude Stein anecdote? 152
• Do you like James's "Hands off" message? 158
• How do you interpret Protagoras's "Man is the measure" statement? 161 Is it a "radical humanism"? 164 What does that mean to you?
• Do you agree about "the greatest use of life"? 169
• Do you agree about "the art of being wise"? 172
• How does chance make the difference between resignation and hope? 174
• Must James's "unseen order" be something supernatural? 177 Or can it just be aspects of nature not yet understood?
• Have you ever experienced "the sublime or the religious" in some mundane activity (like Whitman on the ferry)? 182
• Kaag concludes his book with a sunset, which Neiman (201) says young people typically have no time for. Do you? 

WGU

• Which of the synonyms for "serious" Neiman mentions do you associate with being adult? 193
• Is Peter Pan a worthy hero for a grown up? 194
• In what way is growing up "the work of generations"? 195 
• How is life like Neurath's boat? 196 Is Otto Neurath  a good adult role-model? 197
• Neiman wishes she'd "known enough to ask my teachers the right questions before they died."  Do you know some of the right questions? 198
• Does the U-Bend surprise you? 199 Does it encourage you to think more positively about aging? 
• Do the older people in your life (grandparents for example) "manage emotions more smoothly" or remember fewer negative things? 
• Do you think James was wrong about what happens by age 30? 200
• Do you look forward to "escaping" the urgencies of "your natural force" (like Sophocles)? 202
• Do you yet realize "that no time of one's life is the best one"?
• Do you look forward to "giving back"? 204
• Are the people you know who possess the soundest judgment and the most common sense also the wisest? 207
• Was Kant right that philosophy is (or should be) "natural to all of us"? 208
• Did you "grow up in a home filled with good books and articulate people"? Did that "enlarge your mind" and world? 209-10
• Can you "tell  someone how to think for herself"? 215
• Would you choose to live your life again, unconditionally-as Nietzsche's eternal recurrence proposes? 220 Or only on condition that it would be different next time, as Leibniz said? 216
• Was Voltaire right about why people would choose life? 217
• Do you expect the next 10 years of your life to be better than the last? What will you do to fulfill that expectation? 221
• "It's more common to think about death in your twenties than it is in your fifties..." 230 Do you hope that's true?
• Do you think fear of growing up is really fear of living, not dying? 230
• "Real grown-ups are not long distracted by bread and circuses." 234 Are you?

FL

• What will you do to escape, or avoid falling deeper into, Fantasyland?

Responding here to just those last two questions, it's clear that bread and circuses have long distracted too many of us. They've led us deep into Fantasyland.  The way up and the way down  are not the same, Heraclitus. Prolonged consensual commitment to truth, facts, and reality are our only way out.