Squishies, loonies, & demons

LISTEN (recorded November 2020). Is it safe to look away from politics yet, for at least a day?

In CoPhi today our Fantasyland focus is first on the "nonjudgmental Squishie" academics of the '80s and '90s--presumably the period of Peak Squishie, coincident btw with my time in grad school-- who taught that reason was not for everyone, or that "someone's capacity to experience the supernatural" depends on their "willingness to see more than is materially present."

Yesterday [11.9] was Carl Sagan's birthday (as his daughter Sasha, an accomplished author herself, noted), making it the perfect time to consider his Baloney Detection Kit and its particular application to UFO "abductees" and their sympathizers. He also thought it would be very cool to have a close encounter with E.T., but it's really more than okay not to think with your gut (as Sagan said to his cabbie).

Has there ever been a more chilling prophecy than this, from Sagan in Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1997)?

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

What would Carl have said about the "Q conspiracy" nonsense? "Baloney!" And that's putting it mildly and euphemistically.

And would Thomas Jefferson say such nonsense "neither picks our pockets nor breaks our legs," figuratively speaking? There are worse forms of injury and harm, in a would-be democracy, than overt assault and theological dissent. The body politic takes a devastating blow when citizens can no longer think for themselves or distinguish truth from lies and fantasies.

In Why Grow Up? Susan Neiman thinks we ought to unplug from the internet periodically, and for longer intervals. The National Day of Unplugging comes up again in March [came up, missed it again]. But that's just once a year. How about one day a week? Okay, you first.

(Originally published 11.10.20)

But it's a great idea, next time I go to the beach I'm doing it. Maybe. (My wife's going to the beach tonight, I don't think she's planning to unplug entirely but she is hauling along a backlog of novels.)

Also in WGU today, Neiman notes Kant's view that "it's action that gives life meaning" and Hegel's that "actually doing something" is the "motor that pushes world-history forward" (not that he ever said it that straightforwardly, but it's not an implausible view).  And then Hannah Arendt's notion of natality gets a curtain call, with its hopeful gaze at "the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers" and have an opportunity to create something lasting, to" find a place in a cosmos" that will outlast us all.

This, by the way, is exactly the spirit of Bruce Springsteen's and Barack Obama's just-concluded podcast "Renegades." The Boss says he doesn't want to know pessimistic parents, who are doing it wrong.

There's also another nod to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, here extolling the virtues of carpentry. Reminds me of my Carolina pal from Indiana, who'll be stepping down from teaching and stepping into his woodshop. He knows at firsthand what Rousseau probably only imagined, that working with wood and hands is clean, useful, elegant, "a paradigm for honest, useful work." 

We don't have enough of that. Too many of us, in Paul Goodman's phrase, spend (at least) "eight hours a day doing what is no good." Most of us, wittingly or not, support and participate in an economy driven largely by fashion and planned obsolescence ("product life cycle") and an expectation that "most of the objects we use will need replacement before we have finished paying for them."

The great indictment of my profession: "We tell children that all the questions they've asked... will be answered at school, and we send them to institutions that dull their desire to pose questions at all." 

That is loony.