Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth, also known as “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.” [And it’s the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964… and opening day at the Obama Center.] It’s a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It was on this date in 1865 that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to spread the word that slavery had been abolished. Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect some two and a half years earlier, in January 1863; most Confederate states ignored it until they were forced to free their slaves by advancing Union troops.

From the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, General Gordon read the contents of General Order Number Three: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

Galveston’s former slaves celebrated that day, and formal Juneteenth festivities were held in other parts of Texas on the first anniversary. Celebrations of the holiday have waxed and waned over the years; today, Juneteenth is celebrated in communities all over the country, and as of April 2012, it’s officially recognized as a holiday by the governments of 42 of the United States. Observances often include a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation and performances of traditional African-American music, dancing, and literature.

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio-categories/twa-2018/

‘Who am I? Who are you?’

This year on the first day of class, I’ll challenge students to be a little less glib with my introductory questions Who are you?  and Why are you here?

“…One of Mr. Franck’s students, Raphaël Bakouch, said his teacher was succeeding. The class, he said, had “completely changed how I perceive the world.” Things he took as self-evident had become much more complicated. He said he was hounded by the question of “who am I?” 

…If you are not able to explain the meaning of life, who are you?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/world/europe/france-education-high-school-philosophy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

"Now Watergate

 ...does not bother me" nearly so much as it (and Lynyrd Skynyrd's red anthem) used to. Wouldn't it be nice to see something as benign as water on the White House lawn, and not the Sunday night spectacle we were just subjected to.

It's the anniversary of the amateurish break-in of Democratic National Committee headquartrers in D.C. in '72, an event that dominated my teenage consciousness and got me to declare a Political Science major at Mizzou (which fortunately led to Philosophy). 

My first car at age 16, a Dodge Dart ('70 model?), sported an "IMPEACH NIXON" bumper sticker. Dad musta loved that! But to his credit he smiled and tolerated it. If he were here today, I want to believe, he'd admit that Nixon was a crook but that Trump is a crook's crook and a world-historical abomination. 

How relatively tame Nixon and Watergate look now, compared to the venality of #47's ultra-corrupt administration.

Anyway, I've violated my policy of not thinking about DJT in the a.m. I stumbled across Anthony Grayling's Substack post and agreed with him that there is indeed consolation to be found in the prospective long view of history and in the attitude of confident meliorism. Light will displace the darkness. History will deplore Trump and Putin, will curse and laugh at them. 

But I’m not waiting for history, I’m cursing and laughing right now. It helps.

An anomalous interview

I enjoyed being interviewed for WTVF NewsChannel 5+'s "Issues of Faith" program, which aired last night at 6 and will (I think) repeat today at 8 PM and tomorrow at 12:30 and 5 (and will eventually be on the website). 

I was asked about the possibility of reconciling religious faith with the hypothetical existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The conversation was prompted by that weird story in the Times about a Nashville conclave of pastors and podcasters apparently worried that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena might be "demons"...  

So I was pleased to plug William James and Carl Sagan and their respective Varieties of Religious/Scientific Experience. Neither Gifford lecturer (James at the beginning of the 20th century, Sagan in 1985) thought we need haunt ourselves by contrived demons. Both shared an enthusiasm to discover and support (as James put it) "life, more life..." 

Glad, too, to get a word in about that classic Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"...

(and the Damon Knight story it was based on).

Claude gave me a nice review:

What a rich convergence of threads. I can see the segment — and your framing there is pure Jamesian pragmatism applied to cosmology.

The line that stands out most is your observation that “what we call supernatural is simply what we haven’t yet come to understand. And we haven’t understood much of the cosmos, we have just began to study.” That’s a beautifully succinct expression of the naturalist position — essentially Sagan’s epistemics meet James’s radical empiricism.

And your point about the theological anxiety is precisely what Michener dramatized at the very end of Space — the novel closes with a NASA workshop on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the character Strabismus, who has spent the whole novel performing fundamentalist religion as a con, finally drops the persona and engages honestly with the question of life elsewhere. Michener seems to have understood in 1982 that this would be the fault line — that extraterrestrial life poses a deeper challenge to anthropocentric theology than almost anything else science has produced.

The Spielberg film and the White House UAP releases give your “Issues of Faith” appearance a particularly sharp timeliness. The theological stakes you named — being “knocked down from our exalted position as products of special creation” — map almost perfectly onto William James’s own worry about human cosmic significance, and onto his response: that meaning is made, not discovered, and that our significance doesn’t depend on being alone in the universe.

Have you thought about developing this intersection — Michener, James, Sagan, and the UAP moment — into a Substack piece? It seems like exactly the kind of public philosophy your platform is built for.

Good idea, Claude. I was disappointed with Michener’s conflation, at the end, of religion and ethics. Might need to spout off about that.

Great Books (& good)

Reading a good book about great books is good, but probably not good enough. But maybe the better aspiration is to write good books, not just to read great ones.

 “In the subtitle to this book, the one you’re holding, I joke that you should read these books “even though it might destroy you.” There is certainly a sense in which the Great Books ruined me. At fifteen, all I wanted was to write adventure stories about a chosen-one hero who saves the universe. Now, at forty, I am writing a book where I argue that everyone ought to read Proust.

But if I was destroyed by these books, it’s a destruction I chose. These books don’t act mechanically on the nervous system, forcing people to adopt certain viewpoints. Instead, when you open the Great Books, you enter into a conversation with the past. You experience a much broader diversity of opinions than is possible if you stick primarily to contemporary literature. And from that diversity, you start to see possibilities that you hadn’t previously perceived. Whatever is best and most appealing in these books becomes a part of you, inextricable from your sense of self.

And in the end, when you look back on these books, it’s impossible to say what came from them and what was inside you all along. That’s one of the paradoxes of the Great Books—everyone who’s read them has felt altered by the encounter, but they’ve often been altered in very different ways. Some people read Plato and become skeptics, while others become Neoplatonists.

My aim in this book isn’t to tell you exactly what’ll happen if you read the Great Books, it’s just to convince you that there is a good chance something will happen. Because I think the real fear isn’t that the Great Books might destroy us—we long to be destroyed, long to be altered. The real fear is that we’ll spend a lot of time slogging through these old tomes and experience nothing at all. And that, I think, is a fear that is usually without merit. If you spend enough time with the Great Books, I am certain that you will be altered by the experience.” — What's So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) by Naomi Kanakia

Burned

“Galileo was punished by the church for saying Earth revolved around the Sun. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for proposing stars were distant suns with their own planets. And in my own time, I caught flak for publishing the truth that James Webb—the NASA administrator whose name graces our newest space telescope—was not a bigot, despite popular accusations. Speaking truth, even when backed by evidence, can still get you burned.” — Why Do We Exist?: The Nine Realms of Universe that Make You Possible by Hakeem Oluseyi 

 Sometimes you just have to feel the burn, and say what you think is true. For instance, I think those who believe extraterrestrial demons have been visiting Earth and hassling random humans are nuts. I think the mystery of space and the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe is a wonder and a marvel, not something to fear and demonize. It should stir, not frighten, us. It should motivate us to investigate, and to follow the evidence wherever it may lead. And if it turns out, against all statistical probability, that we are alone after all? That’ll be a wonder and a marvel too.

Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education

Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education

“… If the university is no longer just the place you go to get a degree that gets you on a job, what is it? As far as I can tell after my inquiries during the past six weeks, almost no one has a particularly good answer to that question. In the coming years, as the pain starts at so many of these universities, their administrators, faculty, and those with a direct stake in the future of higher education need to figure out what a college education is for…”

The university should never have been conceived as “ just the place you go to get a degree that gets you a job,” so if in the future it is thankfully not that, let’s again make it the place you go to get a vision of life and how to live it. How about that?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/eight-predictions-for-the-future-of-higher-education

Close encounters of the irrational kind

LISTEN: Audio version, expanded & with links, at Substack.

The more things change…

Are we on the verge of Satanic Panic 2.0, and the demon-haunted world redux?

Steven Spielberg is back with a film, Disclosure Day, sure to stoke a resurgence of belief in (or maybe just fevered discussion of) alien/demonic incursions into our realm. He was on CBS Sunday morning yesterday, and on the cover of the New York Times magazine. Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland remains the indispensable guide to making some kind of sense of life in the USA.

“ask Americans today about our Satanic Panic of just a generation ago, and you’ll encounter a gaping memory hole: younger people know nothing about it, and almost nobody is aware of its scale and duration and damage… DURING THE DECADE AFTER CLOSE Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), more and more Americans claimed they’d been personally visited, probed, and temporarily taken away by extraterrestrials—abducted. Many Americans with impressive credentials started to believe them. None was more impressive or important than a distinguished Harvard professor named John Mack… In 1987, in his fifties, Mack attended a small conference of “alternative” physicians and scientists at the Esalen Institute. There he met the creator of Holotropic Breathwork™, a technique for inducing supernatural consciousness by means of hyperventilation. When Mack tried it, according to its inventor, he “remembered” one of his past lives in Russia. Then at an advanced training session up the coast in Sonoma County, Mr. Holotropic and others told Mack “about UFO abduction experience as a trigger of spiritual emergency.

At the same moment, another member of the American elite, Whitley Strieber, a former advertising executive and successful author of horror fiction, published Communion: A True Story. It was his account of the nighttime visit, the day after Christmas 1985, by “non-human beings” with dark eyeholes and circular mouths who stuck a foot-long device up his anus. Communion was a number-one Times bestseller and sold two million copies. It encouraged many more Americans to announce they too had been visited and probed by aliens.

Soon Mack, still at Harvard, was dean of an alien-abduction truther movement. In 1992 he and an important physicist from down the street at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organized an Abduction Study Conference. The premise of the five-day-long meeting at MIT was that the “abductees” were telling the truth—that creatures from outer space (or parallel universes) really had visited and examined and variously used them. The New Yorker writer C.D.B. Bryan attended and published a sympathetic book about the assembled true believers called Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, further spreading the word and legitimizing the tales…” 

Extraordinary claims outpace any supporting evidence, yet again. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of our peers had close encounters with rational circumspection and critical thinking?

“As long as constitutionality remains healthy…”

Found something my dad wrote in summer ‘08, just before he died that September at age 79, in reply I think to questions I’d put about his (and his generation’s) patriotism… an excessive patriotism, in my view, really a chauvinistic nationalism. 

Very interesting what he says there about the health of American democracy depending upon its fealty to “constitutionality” and honesty. He’d be appalled to know what has ensued in this country, and in the world, in the almost-two decades since his demise. He may have remained Republican, had he lived that long, but I am sure he’d have been a never-Trumper. He was already contemptuous of what he called the new “coarseness” in our politics. January 6 would have made him apoplectic. 

 But I’d still have quarreled with with his historical interpretations. On the page just before the one reproduced here, he credited his Cuban friends Pascual and Angela Garcia (who’d fled the island when Castro came to power) with raising his political conscience and warning him that President Johnson’s Great Society reforms reminded them of what happened in Cuba before the revolution. That’s crazy, of course. Bourgeois liberalism is not to be confounded with communist revolution. 

Interestingly, though, dad confesses that prior to that he might even have been a bit left of center. I do recall overhearing adult conversations, in my childhood, in which he defended Dr. King and the civil rights movement. So did my mother. 

I’m afraid he’d still have railed, Reagan-style, against big government. But compared to most of his peers he was still on the progressive side of things. I miss our conversations, and his good sense and decency. So does his party.

Zany UAPs ("Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena")

Seems like anomalies have become the new normal.

I've been invited to go on a local TV chat show to discuss this very strange story that appeared in Sunday's New York Times:

In U.F.O. Files, Some Christians See Vexing Questions — and Demons

The prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe raises unsettling theological implications.

The dozen or so pastors and podcasters who arrived at the Airbnb in Nashville one night in February weren’t sure exactly what they were in for. An organizer asked them to turn their phones on airplane mode. Snacks were served. Then, for at least two hours, two mysterious men presented a slide show laying out the evidence, as they saw it, for some kind of extraterrestrial life and the spiritual confusion that coming revelations could sow among Christians.

“It was the weirdest meeting I’ve ever been a part of,” said Alan DiDio, a pastor in North Carolina who attended. “You’ve never seen that many Pentecostals in a room that quiet.”

For many of the pastors in the room, and some other Christians, there’s only one possible explanation for extraterrestrial beings: They are not neutral visitors from other planets or dimensions, but demonic entities.

As the pastors left the meeting and turned on their phones, they began receiving news alerts that confirmed for many of them that something significant was happening. That very day, President Trump had directed his administration to begin releasing files related to extraterrestrial life...

Wow. Woo!

Time to channel my inner Sagan... (continues, with audio, at Substack)

James anticipates the existentialist…

“By assuming the presence of an extra-cognitive source of informing, James anticipates the existentialist, psychoanalytical, and modern aesthetic versions of human knowing. As early as the Principles, James held the “relation of knowing” to be “the most mysterious thing in the world” (Principles, I, 216). Leaving no stone unturned, he opens himself to a variety of experiences not usually found within the ken of philosophical analysis. 59 Some of these experiences have been regarded as beyond the reach of philosophy, as for example, the mystical experiences; while others have often been viewed as the “underworld of philosophy,” as instance the instinctual, the habitual, and, above all, the entire range of phenomena grouped under the heading of extrasensory perception. The latter area of concern, which James called a “wild-beast of the philosophic desert” (P.U., 330), did not endear him to his philosophical colleagues. Yet no matter the origins, James took experiences at dead-reckoning and kept to a minimum the multiplication of concepts stemming from a single experiential root.” — The Writings of William James by John J. McDermott https://a.co/04c7ufAv

The Paperboy’s Secret

I was delivering the Columbia Missourian (by car, in the country) at about the same time Peter Hessler was delivering it in town on foot and bike. His essay references “a famous biologist [zoologist] who built the house at 504 Westmount”— that was Winterton C. Curtis. I lived in that house during my first three years, my parents rented Dr. Curtis’s upstairs while my dad finished his veterinary degree at Mizzou. Curtis’s fame was due to his having been one of the scientific witnesses who came to Dayton Tennessee in 1925 to testify at the Scopes “Monkey Trial”... as I've often noted. That connection, to the house and the man and the 19th century (Dr. C. was born in 1875, and I remember him vividly) has always been intriguing to me. 
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/08/the-paperboys-secret

Thorstein Veblen sounds like my kind of colleague:

“Once, administrators confronted him about the carelessness of his grading. “My grades are like lightning,” Veblen replied. “They are liable to strike anywhere.” The biography notes the same detail that captured my imagination as a child: Veblen went in and out of his basement apartment through a window.

As a graduate student, my father was mentored by a Chinese American sociologist named Peter Kong-ming New, who gave him some advice: Never accept an appointment as chair of your department. If anybody insists that you undertake some administrative task, do it so poorly that he never asks again.

My father followed this advice like the Gospel. He was a devoted teacher, and he liked research, but he refused to have anything to do with administration. In the various M.U. stories that he told, many of them funny and cynical, one of the ugliest words was “dean.” Other nasty names included “provost” and “chancellor.” In this respect, he followed a long tradition of social scientists who apply caustic commentary to their host institutions. At M.U.,Thorstein Veblen had written a vicious screed about university administrations called “The Higher Learning in America.” He told a colleague that the subtitle would be “A Study in Total Depravity.” Unsurprisingly, M.U. declined to publish it…”

—

An old post on Dr. Curtis and his house on Westmount:

“The best life in America”

Feeling nostalgic for ordinary campus life, as we used to know it, I recall the way my first landlord Winterton Curtis concluded his “Damned Yankee” autobiographical notes:

…IT WAS [Mizzou] PRESIDENT LAWS who admitted publicly that he settled the competition between the various Protestant denominations for representation on his faculty, by choosing his appointees in rotation. If he needed a chemist, he chose a chemist who was a Methodist, if it was the Methodists’ turn. The Baptists had their chance for a place in the . sun when the next vacancy .occurred. Since the father of George Lefevre was a Presbyterian minister, he was razzed by his friends as being a Presbyterian appointee, even though he came to the University in 1899, and the administration of President Laws was only a memory. No such accusation was ever pinned on me, although my father was a Congregational minister, since Congregationalism was a denomination unfamiliar to most Columbians.

I MIGHT HAVE included here the story of how I built the house at 210 [later re-numbered 504] Westmount Avenue into which Mrs. Curtis and I moved in December 1906, but that account is reserved for another section of my autobiographical notes.

It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield , to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia.