Give me a break

LISTEN. It's already February, and just the second week of the Spring 2021 academic year. We're not ready for a break, yet, but I predict we will be in about six weeks. Will Phil see his shadow tomorrow? 

"I feel I need to take a break from academia."

This time last year, I was about to deliver my Honors College talk on the environment and looking forward to my trip later in the month to Chicago (where I sat in an over-crowded and poorly-ventilated space, across from Daniel Dennett, to hear Martha Nussbaum), followed by our Arizona spring training holiday in early March (it was glorious for a couple of days, a vivid picture-memory of the Dodgers-Rockies game with David Price on the mound and Nolan Arenado in spitting distance on the on-deck circle stands out). At the time there were eight - 8! - confirmed cases of COVID in the U.S. 

And now here we are. 60 Minutes last night offered a sobering reminder of how lucky some of us are, unlike so many who've been devastated by this scourge.

We turn next in CoPhi to Aristotle, and in Democracy in America to Democracy in America.

Aristotle was no democrat, though he harbored more grudging sympathy for its potential in some circumstances and societies than did his teacher Plato. 

Although Aristotle classifies democracy as a deviant constitution (albeit the best of a bad lot), he argues that a case might be made for popular rule in Politics III.11, a discussion which has attracted the attention of modern democratic theorists. The central claim is that the many may turn out to be better than the virtuous few when they come together, even though the many may be inferior when considered individually. For if each individual has a portion of virtue and practical wisdom, they may pool these assets and turn out to be better rulers than even a very wise individual... (SEP)

Tocqueville is a little harder to pin. He famously warned of the tyranny of the majority, but also (says John Keane in Why Read Democracy in America)

was sure that the fundamental problem of modern democracy was not the frantic and feverish mob, as critics of democracy from the time of Plato had previously supposed. Modern despotism posed an entirely new and unfamiliar challenge. Feeding upon the fetish of private material consumption and the public apathy of citizens no longer much interested in politics, despotism is a new type of popular domination: a form of impersonal centralised power that masters the arts of voluntary servitude, a new type of state that is at once benevolent, mild and all-embracing, a disciplinary power that treats its citizens as subjects, wins their support and robs them of their wish to participate in government, or to pay attention to the common good.

 That sounds about right. We've met the enemy, Pogo, and he is us. 

He's also the generic idiot in fur and horns, with whom I do not claim a shared identity but whose ilk will be the final ruin of this experiment in self-government if the rest of us don't pay a whole lot more attention to the common good.