Glorious dawn

Summer's suddenly fading fast. Our penultimate Enlightenment Now class tonight closes Steven Pinker's book, and we begin hearing final report presentations. And suddenly it will be August. Time's arrow moves in mysterious ways. As my friend Ben's dad memorably remarked, near his end of days: "I don't know what time is."

I do know it's "the stream I go a-fishing in" and "drink at," like old Henry. Well, I don't actually fish. And I prefer to drink filtered water. But I do share his aspiration for astral streams, and his admiration of the pebbly stars in the "cosmic ocean" that bespeak innumerable possible worlds and possible futures. Our local morning star goes cycling on, and we with it. Where do we want to go today?

I hope more of us want to go toward the light, not the one "which puts out our eyes" but the dawning light of reason, science, humanism, and progress. If we're really to be a "woke" age we must wake to the realization that we humans have only really begun to probe the possibilities of applied knowledge and resolute amelioration of our condition.  

There can be "more day to dawn," a glorious dawn, if enough of us want it enough to resist the reactionaries who've renounced the dream of enlightenment. There are a lot of those. There always have been. "Finally, drop the Nietzsche... what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?" 

But there have always been dreamers too. 

Pinker leaves us with a dream, promising "no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing" and affirm that "life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, and knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance."

And goals are better than resigned despair.