Nothing left to lose

LISTEN. In CoPhi today we're into Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age. At his best, her muse Kant had a succinct and compelling answer: grow up because that's the meaning of enlightenment. Throw off self-imposed immaturity. Take responsibility. Think. Sapere aude.

At his worst, though, in that film about his last days, Kant and his umbrella-toting manservant come across as a pair of pathetic peripatetics, the Sage having paced creepily past maturity into a doddering, declining senescence. He won't inspire our rising next generations to rescue democracy and summon the courage to think for themselves (and not by themselves).

But I do like this representation of Kant, by an able Attenborough imitator. 

In Environmental Ethics we're onto the Food chapter of Regeneration, which includes a detour to consider the legacy of the great E.O. Wilson before it gives Jonathan Safran Foer the last word. "We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go." Eating habits, transportation habits, residential habits, urban/suburban design habits, and so many other habitually destructive behaviors. Again, Gen Z, it's your time to shine.

Jonathan also said:

“It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”

Maybe we don't need the option of draining every last drop of fossil fuel either, or of sprawling beyond the suburbs, or choking on our meds, et al, unless we really do want to confirm Kristofferson's Bobby McGee definition of freedom as nothing left to lose. I vote for losing the bad habits, before it comes to that.