Problems solved (or at least ameliorated, for now)

 An eventful weekend: got my second COVID shot yesterday morning, spent the afternoon with wife and Younger Daughter and Brother-in-law celebrating his birthday and his recovery from COVID and heart surgery; and on Friday, before Saturday's day-long deluge and resultant flooding (pics), had a charmed near-perfect early Spring day featuring (1) helpful physical therapy (decompression and laser) for my increasingly-debilitating ambulatory impairment, (2) a delightful bikeride in Warner Parks, and (3) a practically unimpaired and painless hike, first such in months, through the Burch Reserve. 

Looking forward to Democracy in America this week, where we'll conclude midterm reports--they've been great--and wrap up Kurt Andersen's Evil Geniuses. It's been eye-opening.

We began the course with its eponymous inspiration, Alexis de Tocqueville's 19th century classic. We come almost full-circle with Andersen's pointed observation of just how far we've fallen, in our corporate "donation"-driven, oligarchically self-interested and uncompromisingly polarized politics. "And so, inevitably, we must consult Tocqueville... In the 1830s [he wrote that] 'money does not lead those who possess it to political power'..." 

Andersen asks rhetorically if his grandchildren will grow up "as ignorant of [2020] as I was of the global viral pandemic that my grandparents survived and of the 1919 'race riots'...? Extrapolating from the present generation's collective lack of historical interest, I'd have to venture a probably. How does that make me feel about the long-term human prospect, and the future of American democracy? Not great. But also not overconfident that any of us has a clue where we'll be in a generation or two, either.

What would George Santayana say? I told you so? "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Santayana is (was?) my mentor Lachs's favorite, and William James's teacher before he was his colleague. James described Santayana's Platonist philosophy as possessing "a perfection of rottenness". But as a pluralist he was still happy to make room for it. If Santayana didn't exist we'd have to invent someone like him.

 

Much in Andersen's final chapters deserves mention, but I'm particularly drawn to this: "it's all about solving the one overriding problem--what economists call the economic problem, how people decide how to use the available resources to survive and, beyond mere survival, to enjoy life... it becomes primarily a cultural and psychological problem that people must decide is solved." 

That is, if we can eventually automate and thus enhance our economy to the extent of displacing scores of people from jobs that fail to fulfill, and can free the greater number of us to flourish with a form of happiness based on activities rooted in work we actually enjoy, then we'll be in a position to decide there's more to life than material consumption. We'll be free to live what GS called the life of reason, and to validate his statement that there's no cure for life and death "save to enjoy the interval."

I'm just hoping they don't try to automate my job, which in the classroom or zoomroom most days (excluding those involving the filling out of forms, and the other administrative stuff) is truly a source of deepest enjoyment.

Tomorrow, for instance, we get to talk in CoPhi about John Rawls, Peter Singer, and (in the context of Alan Turing and AI) our future robotic overlords. So glad I still get to do that.