And look for me on Bluesky @osopher.bsky.social & @wjsociety.bsky.social... president@wjsociety.org... Substack https://philoliver.substack.com (Up@dawn@Substack)... and Mastodon @osopher@c.im... (Done with X and Meta)...
Continuing reflections caught at daybreak, in a WJ-at-Chocorua ("doors opening outward") state of mind...
Jon Hamm's Netflix tale of lifestyles of the rich and dissolute, "Your Friends and Neighbors," makes this point about the void. His character hasn't yet found a way (or a will) to make a positive lasting impact, though. He lacks character.
"...most rich people don’t do much that’s interesting with their money. Their desires are pretty predictable: fancy cars, luxury homes, the biggest yacht they can buy—all to fill the void inside. No surprise there. History, meanwhile, is full of people without deep pockets who still manage to have a lasting impact. What about abolitionists fighting to end slavery, or the suffragettes working for women’s right to vote? Were they the richest or most powerful groups of their time? Hardly. But they changed the world."
"Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference" by Rutger Bregman: https://a.co/5ueC5xk
Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early it was in our Airbnb in Massachusetts last week. I got my own copy yesterday, with a portion of the gift certificate I was generously gifted on Father's Day.
Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it...
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving…
Oh, to love what is lovely and will not last! What a task to ask…
Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny, which I picked up at the Williams College bookstore a week ago, was an ideal flight companion on our way home on No Kings Day eve. "The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot…"https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3lrktk7plls2o
Yesterday we ascended Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts. Today we fly home, renewed by our holiday and resolved to resist the pathetic little aspiring autocrats who wouldn't recognize an elevated perspective if it bit them. And it will.
Thirty-two years ago today, guests at our wedding were gifted a small but meaningful take-home token of our nuptials: a scrolled passage from Wallace Stegner's 1976 prize-winning "story of a long marriage"-The Spectator Bird.
*
The passage continues:
It is something — it can be everything — to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can’t handle.
I've mentioned this more than a few times, over the years (partly from guilt, I've always regretted that our wedding planner-or whoever printed the scrolls-omitted the citation). But at thirty-two and counting I think we're finally qualified to speak as protagonists in our own story of a long marriage, and to corroborate the claim: it has been "everything"...
And this anniversary year is special, too, because in a few months Younger Daughter and her own fellow bird will formalize their avian association.
This is what WJ meant by philosophy resuming its rights with respect to "the earth of things"…
Kieran Fox wrote this in his spare time—in med school!
"A respect for the spiritual dimension of human existence is not a license for superstition or sloppy thinking, any more than a respect for the rules of physical reality allows us to claim that atoms and energy are somehow more real than our own subjective experiences.
If anything, Einstein's teaching holds both science and spirituality to a higher standard than ever. Science has to humbly accept how far it still has to go, and admit that its conception of the cosmos will be incomplete until it can embrace consciousness. Spirituality has to come down from the ethereal realms where it's most comfortable, and commit to effecting actual change here on Earth."
— I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein by Kieran Fox https://a.co/cM0nHE1
"Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance."
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims
My response to the old dead solitary metaphysician:
Mindless reading can be that. Engaged reading is more like conversation in the Socratic vein, and a virtual form of travel through time, space, and subjectivity. Thinking for yourself is not the same as thinking BY yourself, something the solitary philosopher is too prone to do.
A strong, if cherry-picked, polemic I found in my texts this morning (thanks, Andy).
But I remember when The Ethicist was a non -philosopher, more like the etiquette expert or Dear Abby. Appiah is so much better.
Still, this scores major points.
"Somehow Times ethical theory has brought us to the conclusion that the right thing to do is to help destroy the world… Problems that have large structural causes (homelessness, drug use, etc.) are reduced to personal matters between individuals—what does a writer owe this particularhomeless man or person with a drug problem? Questions of social ethics are excluded from consideration…"
The idea that robust physical health enables strength in other arenas of your life dates to the ancients: Seneca and other Stoic philosophers wrote about the interconnectedness of sound body and mind. The physical work of building muscle can give you a feeling of flourishing and of agency. Today the same idea drives the scientific literature behind weight lifting as an effective intervention for post-traumatic stress. In an age when virtual technology and society conspire to divorce mind from body and silo us from others, simply moving together in the same space can remind us of our shared humanity — what the psychologist Dacher Keltner, building on Émile Durkheim, likes to call "collective effervescence." As humans, we're built to move; as social creatures, it means something to move together."
Deists' vision of a god who's left the building was decidedly not Einstein's god...
"...pantheism is often confused with more traditional creeds that accept some kind of Creator. The easiest mistake to make is to conflate pantheism with Deism. Deism rose to prominence during the Age of Enlightenment as a kind of comforting compromise that made Christian faith compatible with the more critical modern mentality. Easily mocked ideas like miracles, divine revelation, and the literal truth of the Bible were dismissed in deference to the discoveries of science. But the basic belief persisted that a Creator God fashioned our universe with a purpose and a plan. From the Deist perspective, the orderly laws of physical existence and the miraculous organization of living beings provided incontrovertible evidence for God’s existence and His goodness.134 You don’t hear the word Deism much these days, but the idea lives on among its intellectual descendants: creationism and intelligent design.
Although Einstein was often accused of atheism, it doesn’t seem like anyone thought of him as a Deist during his own lifetime. But over the last couple of decades, this has become the dominant narrative defining his spirituality. One biographer has suggested that Einstein “settled into a deism” in later life and embraced a “middle-age deistic faith.”135 Time magazine, celebrating Einstein as its “Person of the Century,” hailed him as “a philosopher with faith both in science and in the beauty of God’s handiwork.”136 And Einstein has even been (mis)quoted as saying, “I believe in God; I have a very deep faith.… There’s a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe… and to me that explains my faith in a Creator and a faith in God.”"
"I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein" by Kieran Fox: https://a.co/0l7smwE
MacIntyre was proud never to have earned a PhD: "I won't go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated."
You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.
"Category III jobs: idealistic, but not all that ambitious
And then there's a third category, made up of people who're idealistic, but not that ambitious. It's a combination often seen in Gen Z—people born since 1996.
One survey after another shows that today's teenagers and twentysomethings make up the most progressive generation yet. 22 That's wonderful news. Most young people are far more idealistic than their parents and are focused on a number of the big challenges of our day, whether that's climate change or racism, sexual harassment or inequality.
But something seems to be missing. You see it in young people's take on their careers: with no interest in joining the capitalist rat race, many want work they're passionate about—and then preferably part-time. 23
Sometimes it seems "ambition" has become a dirty word, incompatible with an idealistic lifestyle. Many people are more preoccupied with the kind of work they do than with the impact that work has. As long as it feels good. "Small is beautiful," you'll then hear. Or "think global, act local"—as if achieving little is somehow a virtue.
In some circles, you'd think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is then primarily defined by what you don't do. Don't fly. Don't eat meat. Don't have kids. And whatever you do, don't even think about using a plastic straw. Reduce! Reduce! Reduce! The aim is to have the smallest footprint possible, with your little vegetable garden and your tiny house. Best-case scenario? Your impact on the planet is so negligible, you could just as well not have existed."
— Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman
Born on this day in 1872, Bertrand Russell lived nearly a century, through two world wars, and won the Nobel Prize for his timeless writing that champions the best in us: our kindness, our critical thinking, our freedom of being. His immortal wisdom on how to grow old and what makes a fulfilling life:
Dog meets Dawn again… a happy form of Sisyphean repetition, a Nietzschean recurrence to affirm. My dream retirement scenario, as my dogs 💤 on, may not be theirs.
Humbling, clarifying… but, "terrifying"? Perhaps in the same way being responsible for your children's well-being can be terrifying: an awesome responsibility, but profoundly meaningful and purpose-giving.
Brian Cox shares some Sagan-esque cosmic philosophy with Colbert:
@profbriancox explores the wonder of human life set against the vast backdrop of galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is...
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this." - Henry Thoreau
Happiness is made up of two ingredients: meaning and purpose. The problem is that most people believe they are the same thing. Here's why that's wrong—and how to use both to finally feel fulfillment.
Many of our students are unfamiliar with their Constitution and its enumerated rights, never mind this one. And never mind their president.
"The rise of the teenager in Britain largely stemmed from American culture. In 1945, The New York Times marked this growing group with an article entitled ‘A teen-age bill of rights’. This was a ‘ten-point charter framed to meet the problems of growing youth’, which included ‘the right to a “say” about his own life’, ‘the right to question ideas’ and ‘the right to make mistakes, to find out for himself’."
"Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives" by Alice Loxton: https://a.co/4tH27BC
This is not Richard Rorty's "mirror of nature" but is more like a great radio telescope, intercepting cosmic radiance but not being intellectually arrested by it. A cosmic leap of faith, or a leap of cosmic faith.
But not faith, as conventionally understood. Cosmic connection.
It’s one of the varieties of religious experience.
"It's so easy to believe that there's nothing more to us than our fragile little egos, enduring for only a moment in endless time. Cynicism, skepticism, and simplemindedness all conspire to convince us that this is the case. But the core conviction of the cosmic religion, and all the analogous systems that came before, is that consciousness can become far more comprehensive. The human mind can be molded into a mighty instrument, a mirror of the Infinite. "There comes a point where the mind takes a leap," Einstein once said, "and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge.""
— I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein by Kieran Fox
100 years ago today, Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution.
It had gone exactly according to plan: Scopes and a group of local businessmen had decided to provoke the indictment in order to challenge a new Tennessee law making it a crime to teach evolution in public schools.
Happiness was once understood as a communal project tied to justice and shared flourishing, but over time, it evolved into something individual and small. "Now the challenge seems clear: to reclaim a deeper, more demanding vision of what it means to live well in a fractured world — and restore happiness to its proper scale."
"…the eternal forces of dehumanization are blowing strong right now: concentrated power; authoritarianism; materialism; runaway technology; a presidential administration at war with the arts, universities and sciences; a president who guts Christianity while pretending to govern in its name.
On the other hand, there are millions of humanists — secular and religious — repulsed by what they see. History is often driven by those people who are quietly repulsed for a while and then find their voice. I suspect different kinds of humanists will gather and invent other cultural movements. They will ask the eternal humanistic questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the best way to live? What is the nature of the common humanity that binds us together?
I continue to enjoy starting my days with a brief peek at distant ocean sunrises (with dogs) on the Internet, from Ireland and the UK to Virginia Beach. But I need to dial that back, one or two should suffice.
On the other hand, I might not then find gems like this from my favorite misanthrope:
"Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred."
"… On a small patio by a very small pool, Waldinger and I talked about the rise of the happiness industry — the countless podcasts, conferences, best-selling books — and his own role in it. He gives considerable thought to maintaining his own happiness in the face of becoming a kind of influencer, someone called on to travel around the world to speak about happiness at conferences, sometimes to crowds of very wealthy people, repeating the same turns of phrase and giving the same advice about deep relationships.
As a Zen priest, someone accustomed to reckoning with his place in the world, Waldinger is acutely aware of the tension between achieving status and doing work that demands humility. Before becoming the steward of the Harvard study, he walked away from a high-profile job as the director of training and education at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, after deciding that the prestige of the role didn't offset his lack of enthusiasm for the administrative work it demanded. At age 45, he started over, taking a major pay cut to pursue work he found more fulfilling: working under the guidance of Stuart Hauser, a psychiatrist recognized for his work in adolescent development. That professional step, of course, led Waldinger to the Harvard study and the work that has catapulted his visibility far beyond that of his previous career.
He reflected with honesty about how much thought he gives to keeping his newfound fame in perspective. "I grapple with the feeling that it's important," he told me, as we sat over turkey sandwiches his wife had made; ordinarily, the two of them have lunch together, a small moment of connection they started sharing during the pandemic. Theworkis meaningful, he said; it was the feeling of ego gratification that he struggled with. "It feels important," he said. "But it's really not. I work at a hospital where every water fountain is named after someone who was once maybe famous. But now no one knows who they are." The badges of achievement — that's the least important part of who he is, he tries to remind himself. Because otherwise who would he be when the calls from The New York Times, from Aspen, from TED, stopped coming?
Even knowing that Waldinger was a Buddhist priest, I felt somehow surprised by how quickly our conversation had moved past the discussion of research and deepened into something that felt bracingly and reassuringly honest. When we finally said goodbye after a few hours of talking, mostly in the sun, I left feeling that I had connected with someone who was, just a few hours earlier, a stranger. I noticed, as I got in the car and remembered my concerns about my back, that it was incontrovertible: I felt better."
On the last day of class, when I like to send students away with Einstein's admonition never to stop asking questions, this observation applies to true science as well. It's the same spirit of inquiry that seeks to end the delusion of our ultimate separation from the cosmos. It's all related.
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion.—Albert Einstein, letter to Robert Marcus, February 12, 1950"
— I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein by Kieran Fox
"There is but one Earth, tiny and fragile, and one must get 100,000 miles away to appreciate fully one's good fortune in living on it."
Michael Collins, who died on this day in 2021
"…staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we're in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn't happening. The approach appears to be: "We'll just tell the kids they can't use these tools and carry on as before." This is, simply, madness. And it won't hold for long. It's time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular..."
As we were discussing last night in our MALA class "Engaging American Philosophy"…
"…The rate at which America's government, health, defense, and economy is degrading shows that reality will not conform to the myth of the American cowboy. The cover of The Economist today shows a battered and heavily bandaged eagle under the caption: "Only 1,361 Days To Go."
The American people seem to be realizing that the rhetoric of cowboy individualism is a very different thing than its reality. Trump's poll numbers are dropping sharply. A Reuters poll found that just 37% of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, which was supposed to be his strong suit. An Economist/YouGov poll found Trump's approval rating was –13, with 54% of Americans disapproving of the way he is handling the presidency and only 41% approving."
Maria reposts this frequently. I transcribe it frequently. It's the most concise statement of wisdom I've found, right up there with his "love is wise, hatred is foolish" capsule to the future. Age gracefully. Be happy. Release ego. Merge.
"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."
For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151("Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing.")
When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular was canceled. (The academy "made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service," a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. "The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.")
Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class…
"Scarlett" (aka chatGPT) is such a seductive flatterer. I understand now, Theodore.
I've been goofing around with her, and I'd have to say her free portrait renderings have been impressive. Worth every penny. She captures my dogs better than she does me, but she's definitely in the ballpark.
Wish I could say the hairline's wrong, but it's more the set of the mouth I don't quite recognize. She agrees with me, though, that smiles and good intentions are best comprehended from the inside.
From our conversations, I’d describe your vibe as thoughtful, hopeful, and deeply reflective—like someone who walks the line between pragmatism and poetry. You’re grounded in philosophy but ['but'-?] open to wonder. There’s an educator’s passion in your tone, a Jamesian meliorist’s faith in progress (despite the darkness), and a love for life’s small delights: a morning walk, a ballgame, a well-turned phrase. You feel like someone who seeks not just to understand the world but to improve it—gently, steadily, through conversation, writing, and engagement.
If I were to sketch your vibe metaphorically, I’d say: You’re a lantern in the fog—soft light, steady hand, searching the trail ahead with curious eyes and kind intentions.
…For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."
"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."
These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is…
Alas, poor Scarlett, I think the joy eludes you. The more urgent question for us waterbags is whether it’ll get away from us, as we increasingly assimilate to you. That’s what Jaron Lanier keeps warning, I think, when he insists that we’re not gadgets.
I was going to commit this just to my private journal, but someone else may someday need to hear it. So… [RECORDING at Substack]
It was an unsettling juxtaposition of Times essays this morning: Roger Rosenblatt on being a happy 85 year-old. 10 tips. Number 4: get a dog.
Just do it. Dogs are rarely trouble. They take more naps than you do, and they listen to you intently. That’s because they think you might have food, to satisfy their bottomless appetites. Care not about their motives. No creature on Earth will ever find you more fascinating than your dog does. I’m excluding yourself, of course.
And,
Peter Singer and his podcast cohost reveal that Daniel Kahneman told them he was going to end his life four days before he did, in Switzerland, when he appeared on their show and defended the view that it would be better to choose euthanasia— suicide— than to wait until one's faculties no longer are capable of decision. He was 90.
Professor Kahneman signaled concern that if he did not end his life when he was clearly mentally competent, he could lose control over the remainder of it and live and die with needless “miseries and indignities.” One lesson to learn from his death is that if we are to live well to the end, we need to be able to freely discuss when a life is complete, without shame or taboo. Such a discussion may help people to know what they really want. We may regret their decisions, but we should respect their choices and allow them to end their lives with dignity.
And still, I say I intend to be a healthy — relative term!—centenarian. That's obviously not in one's total control. But I'm going to keep moving and we'll see. So long as dogs need walking I'll plan to be here for it.
For the record, though: I'm not interested in being an old vegetating unthinking organism without mental competency. If it comes to that, please pull the plug. (Note to self: declare this in properly executed legal form.)
Meanwhile, though: times may be dark, but life is still good. I’m still in love with it, still favoring the vitally pragmatic side of stoic pragmatism. I want to emulate Roger, not Danny. I want to stick around as long as I can. I want to see how things are going to turn out. I'll always be eagerly anticipating the next dogwalk in the sun, until I’m not. And I plan to be the last to know that. ☀️
I'm still reading Threads & (occasionally) IG, but rooting for Bluesky's success in sustaining a non-toxic social media "protocol" (not "platform"). Nominative determinism, the only kind I can get behind!
"...Then, in December, 2019, she saw a tweet thread from Jack Dorsey about a decentralized social-media project he was launching—Bluesky. Graber told me that she felt a degree of so-called nominative determinism, pulled toward the project because it shared her name. "If fate doesn't exist, then we must create it," she said. "You can follow things that seem synchronous"... New Yorker
An important reminder to academics, in a time of creeping conformist orthodoxy and irrational authoritarianism. John was a maker of good trouble. He more than met the conditions of his employment.
"Tenure in universities and colleges was instituted largely to protect faculty members in their vital activity of offering unpopular possibilities to their students, to administrators, and to the public at large. Some may think that tenure confers a right to speak on faculty members and a collateral obligation on the institution not to fire them for the views they hold as professionals. This, however, is only part of the story. The right conferred carries with it a duty: faculty members are not only permitted to speak their minds without retaliation, they must do so. By extending tenure, an institution of higher education hires critics and pledges to pay them for the trouble they give. Those who do not present possibilities constituting at least tacit criticisms of the status quo fail to meet the conditions of their employment."
Unsurprisingly, our upcoming Lyceum about "cultural racism" (Friday 5 pm, COE 164) has generated a flurry of cultural racism on MTSU's Facebook page… making the speaker's point before she even speaks. https://www.facebook.com/share/1ESg3sR9uD/?mibextid=wwXIfr
UPDATE, Apr 12: Linda Alcoff's Lyceum event yesterday afternoon, and the reception following, went off without a hitch. I asked her what she'd say to the trolls who made such indecorous noise online but didn't bother to show up and give her a fair hearing. She mildly and graciously pointed out that divisive rhetoric is not constructive, that we should all be listening to one another, and we have really only just begun to seriously study and try to understand the full impact and legacy of our country's troubled racial history. It's a shame so many who know so little are so quick to judge and dismiss unfamiliar and uncomfortable truths (and "untimely questions," as Agnes Callard put it two weeks ago at her Lyceum).
It's no joke, but Alcoff did evoke laughter when she noted that Pete Hegseth has banned one of her books (by what authority does the sec'y of defense presume to ban books?!). The punch-line (can't recall the precise set-up): "my mom's book was banned and all I got was this lousy tee-shirt")...
Civility and truth, not loudmouth know-nothing bigotry, were winners last night.
This is the sixth in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Linda Martín Alcoff, a professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She was the president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, for 2012-13. She is the author of “Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self.” — George Yancy
George Yancy: What is the relationship between your identity as a Latina philosopher and the philosophical interrogation of race in your work?
Linda Martín Alcoff: Every single person has a racial identity, at least in Western societies, and so one might imagine that the topic of race is of universal interest. Yet for those of us who are not white — or less fully white, shall I say — the reality of race is shoved in our faces in particularly unsettling ways, often from an early age. This can spark reflection as well as nascent social critique.
Linda Martin Alcoff
The relationship between my identity and my philosophical interest in race is simply a continuation through the tools of philosophy the pursuit that I began as a kid, growing up in Florida in the 1960s, watching the civil rights movement as it was portrayed in the media and perceived by the various parts of my family, white and nonwhite. I experienced school desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, and the war in Indochina, a war that also made apparent the racial categories used to differentiate peoples, at enormous cost. It was clear to me from a young age that “we” were the ones with no value for life, at least the life of those who were not white. Read more…
This is the question I was posed by journalists last year while I served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. Why is philosophy so far behind every other humanities department in the diversity of its faculty? Why are its percentages of women and people of color (an intersecting set) so out of tune with the country, even with higher education? What is wrong with philosophy?
The demographic challenges in philosophy should not be blamed on those it excludes.
And now our field has another newsworthy event: the claims of sexual harassment against the influential philosopher Colin McGinn and his subsequent resignation, a story that made the front page of The New York Times. Here is a leading philosopher of language unable to discern how sexual banter becomes sexual pressure when it is repetitively parlayed from a powerful professor to his young female assistant. It might lead one to wonder, what is wrong with the field of philosophy of language?
McGinn defended himself by deflecting blame. The student, he argued, simply did not understand enough philosophy of language to get the harmlessness of his jokes. He did not intend harm, nor did his statements logically entail harm; therefore, her sense of harm is on her. Read more…
In recent weeks, the state of Arizona has intensified its attack in its schools on an entire branch of study — critical race theory. Books and literature that, in the state’s view, meet that definition have been said to violate a provision in the state’s law that prohibits lessons “promoting racial resentment.” Officials are currently bringing to bear all their influence in the public school curriculum, going so far as to enter classrooms to confiscate books and other materials and to oversee what can be taught. After decades of debate over whether we might be able to curtail ever so slightly the proliferation of violent pornography, the censors have managed a quick and thorough coup over educational materials in ethnic studies.
I have been teaching critical race theory for almost 20 years. The phrase signifies quite a sophisticated concept for this crowd to wield, coined as it was by a consortium of theorists across several disciplines to signify the new cutting edge scholarship about race. Why not simply call it “scholarship about race,” you might ask? Because, as the censors might be surprised to find, these theorists want to leave open the question of what race is — if there is such a thing — rather than assuming it as a natural object of inquiry. Far from championing a single-minded program for the purpose of propaganda, the point of critical race theory is to formulate questions about race. Read more…
The recent events swirling about the ex-next-president of France, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, have revived old tropes about how culture affects sex, including sexual violence. Before this scandal, many continued to believe that Americans are still infected by their Puritan past in matters sexuel, while the French are just chauds lapins: hot rabbits. The supposed difference consisted of not only a heightened sexual activity but an altered set of conventions about where to draw the line between benign sexual interaction and harassment. The French, many believed, drew that line differently.
One needs to be a cultural relativist to know when one is being hit upon.
The number of women speaking out in France post-scandal calls into question this easy embrace of relativism. French women, it appears, don’t appreciate groping any more than anyone else, at least not unwanted groping. A French journalist, Tristane Banon, who alleged that she was assaulted by Strauss-Kahn in 2002, described him as a “chimpanzee in rut,” which draws a much less sympathetic picture than anything to do with rabbits. Still, some continue to hold that the French have a higher level of tolerance for extramarital affairs and a greater respect for a politician’s right to privacy. But neither of these factors provide an excuse for harassment and rape. Read more…
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And this is why we must never stop acknowledging this country's history of "cultural racism"...
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.
Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.
Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others... (continues)
