LISTEN.
Friday's Lyceum with Robert Talisse, on
Overdoing Democracy, was timely, entertaining, instructive, and fundamentally right: democracy
is supposed to enable us to pursue good lives in multiple dimensions, not just obsess all the time over politics and the shortcomings, imbecilities, and crimes of our foes; and, it's supposed to enable peaceable, mutually respectful coexistence with our fellow citizens whether we voted for the same candidates or not. Instead, we've allowed our civic life to be invaded by a branding mentality (
Target vs. Walmart, Starbucks vs. Dunkin' etc.) that villifies the very humanity of partisans for the other party. (I actually defy the branding stereotypes myself, you'll find me in all the good coffee-and-donut emporia.)
There was a tense moment during the Q-&-A that threatened to subvert the larger message, but the moment passed. It did for me, anyway. Talisse is indeed, as our chair told him at the reception later, a star performer. Glad he could shine in front of his mom at our show.
Another weekend highlight: on the first rainy Sunday in a month of Sundays we went to see
Downton Abbey. As an Anglophile and hereditary Anglo on my father's side (descended from Olivers who resided in Bristol U.K. before landing in Kentucky and eventually relocating to mid-Missouri, if the genealogy my dad passed along can be believed), I revel in representations of the Old Country and its upstairs-downstairs social strata... even while sympathizing with formerly-firebrand Irish Republican resisters like Tom Branson.
He would understand Talisse's message: people for whose politics he "wouldn't give a tuppence" are, nonetheless, sometimes, decent at their core. And in his case they're also family. They love his daughter, giving her (and him) a place to call home. Remembering such things puts politics in its place.
What a lovely film, sentimentally nodding to both the charm and the contradictions of a bygone era that seems much more distant in time than it really is. Carson and the Dowager were so sure that Crawleys would still inhabit Downton in our day. Some heirs of the ancient estates do in fact still haunt those old mansions, mostly for the tourist trade. The class rigidity of that world is well lost, not to mention its various, racist, homophobic, xenophobic (etc.) intolerances and snooty superiorities. But they did know how to entertain royalty.
I had a hard time buying Arthur Dent as King George V, though.
Also this weekend:
Monty Python turned 50,
Naomi Klein was on BookTV, the Cards lost twice to the Braves... and Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas remained long dead, though not forgotten.
Not quite so long dead, but largely forgotten until a recent small revival of interest got him a
shout-out from David Brooks in the Times, is Josiah Royce. "Royce is the philosopher we need today. In an age of division, fragmentation and isolation, Royce is the philosopher we don’t know we have. He is the philosopher of binding and connection." Loyalty to a worthy cause makes life meaningful and satisfying, if not exactly happy in the conventional and superficial sense. "How does the individual fit into the community and how does each community fit into the whole? He offered a shift in perspective. When evaluating your life, don’t ask, 'How happy am I?' Ask, 'How loyal am I, and to what?'"
Contrarily, self-centered individualism in pursuit of “fleeting, capricious and insatiable” desires makes for hollow, unhappy, antagonized and antagonistic lives of lonely isolation. Royce showed us, and could show us again if we wanted to be shown, an alternative way to live good lives that's rooted as much in western philosophical traditions as individualism. You don't have to embrace Buddha, he said, to find nirvana. Or at least to find peace, love, and understanding. Was he right? That's what he and his friend James talked about on that wall.
Even if he is right, are we receptive to that news?
A piece in yesterday's Times suggests many are not. They cling to a self-defeating "go-it-alone" self-reliance that's not working for them, but they're stubbornly "determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them, to keep people with educations out, and to retreat from community life and concentrate on taking care of themselves and their own families. It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor." They don't read, or support the local library. They won't read Royce.
An old post. In late antiquity and the middle ages the big questions tended to be more about life's rumored sequel and how to achieve it.
Augustine first thought you had to make alliance with the forces of good, in their death struggle with the forces of darkness. He was on the right track, I tend to think, before his big conversion. He was right to suppose that our side needs all good hands on deck, to resist and overcome evil. He put that conversion off as long as he could, praying for purity but only in due course. For the record, though: I don't think he was right to think of our carnal condition as an entombment. Incorporeal souls sow no wild oats, ascetics enjoy few existential delights.
So, buoyed by Platonism, he "put all forms of materialism firmly behind him" and "turned back the clock of intellectual history." The old Greek commitment to reason was not finally comforting enough to him. "He returned to a version of the comforting supernatural stories which most of the first philosophers sought to dispense with, or at least to rationalize."
Boethius's
Consolation of Philosophy dialogue found its own form of comfort, not in Augustine's Christianity but in Lady Philosophy's timeless stoicism. God (or Good?) sees all in a single atemporal sweep, "at a go," and thus somehow leaves the hapless victim of tortured persecution and execution as free as it found him. He can still choose to be "philosophical" about every misfortune, even to his dying breath on the rack. His freedom's a lot like Kris Kristofferson's and Janis Joplin's, "just another word for nothing left to lose."
Anselm's God, "than which nothing greater can be conceived," and his famous "proof" thereof, is another of those notorious sleights of hand made to do heavy philosophical lifting with nothing more muscular than verbiage. It's still shocking to me, how many bright people (including young Russell, briefly) it's seduced.
Speaking of great misfortune, poor
Abelard's is painful to ponder. Gottlieb blames "his scholarly prowess and his passionate involvement with logic" for emboldening him to undertake his own fateful seduction. How ironic, that he would go on to make his mark as "the first serious moral philosopher of medieval times" and "to apply rational analysis to the nature of moral goodness." Too little, too late.
Moses Maimonides did not address Abelard's peculiar form of perplexity but did try to bring philosophy, science, and religion together. “Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.” But try telling that to the world. He was right, though. “You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” But, “Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.”
He was onto
confirmation bias early. “We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”
Was he really the first to say this?: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Did he anticipate James's
Will to Believe notion that "our errors are not such awfully solemn things"? “The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”
He was sort of a bioethicist before his time: “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it.” And, “No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.” Actually that might have helped Abelard, with a little timely saltpeter in his diet.
William of Ockham's famous "razor" said we should keep our theories simple, our ontology thin. "It is pointless to do with more what can be done with less." Remember Goober's beard?
Remember
Buridan's Ass? Apparently "no such animal appears in his writings." Too bad, he's been such a workhorse for logicians.
Giordano Bruno was a mystic friar, but he also had a vivd scifi imagination. He said there must be other worlds and "countless suns" out there in the Void, "innumerable globes like this on which we live and grow." We've only confirmed that in the past twenty years or so. It (and other heresies) got him torched in 1600.
Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson tell his story.
Finally today,
Aquinas. His First Cause Argument, echoing Aristotle, said a never-ending series of causes and effects would lead to an unacceptable regress. The first term in any explanatory sequence, he thought, has to be self-evident. But is that itself self-evident? Russell says, of "the supposed impossibility of a series having no first term: Every mathematician knows that there is no such impossibility; the series of negative integers ending with minus one is an instance to the contrary. But here again no Catholic is likely to abandon belief in God even if he becomes convinced that Saint Thomas's arguments are bad; he will invent other arguments, or take refuge in revelation." It's not just Catholics. Remember confirmation bias?
March 2017
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."
