The deep clean air of democracy

  I early-voted at Hillwood High School this morning.

“Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
― Winston S. Churchill

When I early-voted in 2020 I posted these reflections, which still seem all too relevant:

Still in the game

We finish Falter today in Environmental Ethics. It would be nice to think we’re all about to finish faltering, as a democratic nation under siege of pandemic, political chaos, and climate denial/indifference. For a brief while yesterday morning, queuing to vote in the pleasant middle Tennessee sunshine outside the Bellevue branch of the Metro Public Library, I believed. 

The simple act of casting a ballot feels constructive and empowering, the very opposite of faltering. It feels like moving forward. The feeling would linger if only we could lose the electoral college that effectively denies some of us proportionate representation. Ranked-choice voting in the primaries would be good too. 

But never mind, for now. Yesterday was all about the invigorating sense of democratic dignity that free people expressing their will in free and fair elections still, for now, get to enjoy in this country. Conjuring Chris Stevens’ invocation of Einstein (vs. Randian selfishness) from the memory vault yesterday I’ve also recalled his paean to democracy in little (fictional) Cicely, Alaska. “You see, the act of voting is in itself the defining moment.”

My friends, today when I look out over Cicely, I see not a town, but a nation’s history written in miniature…we exterminated untold indigenous cultures and enslaved generations of Africans. We basically stained our star-spangled banner with a host of sins that can never be washed clean. But today, we’re here to celebrate the glorious aspects of our past. A tribute to a nation of free people, the country that Whitman exalted. (reading) “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives and legislators, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.” I’ve never been so proud to be a Cicelian. I must go out now and fill my lungs with the deep clean air of democracy. Northern Exposure Season 3, Episode 15-“Democracy in America” 

A lung-full of freedom is bracing. Breathe deep. Vote. Resist democracy’s destabilizers and dismantlers while you can. The great game of self-governance has never in my lifetime felt so imperiled, or more worth fighting for.

But as Bill McKibben acknowledges in Falter, resistance comes at a cost. “I know so many people who have given over the prime of their lives to this fight.” But he also knows “many people who’ve found their lives in this work, in burgeoning movements that are full of love and friendship.” The tired cliche about finding meaning and purpose in causes larger than oneself is not wrong, the vivifying and ennobling benefits of personal and shared commitment are real. Resistance may be frustrating and may finally fail, but it’s not futile. Remember Grantland Rice, a game well-played is its own reward. You don’t have to fly the “W” to be a winner at life. 

Still, though, to lose democracy, humanity, and Gaia to indifference and inattention would be tragic and stupid. Resisting the apathy and amused-to-death distraction that permit the plutocrats to plunder the planet for personal profit, is in that light not radical or subversive. You might even call it conservatism, if that word weren’t already so tainted, to want and work for “a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software.” Solidarity simply means the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Ask the Scandinavians, who consistently top the World Happiness Report. In 2018 the USA was #18 on that list. If we say we believe in humanity that should embarrass us... (Up@dawn Oct '20, continues)

I’m not a scientist but…

"It took me 10+ years to realize this and I will tell you in 5 minutes:

(from a scientist)

1. You can solve most of your problems by walking outside.

People still undervalue the power of physical movement.

A substantial part of every therapy should include walking in nature."

https://www.threads.net/@husseinnaji_/post/DBJUxC4q0xY?xmt=AQGzw1pjzhOKh2mHOup87t8ve-OGkKlbB6NPw0QoGC9ufw

A second naivete

Sounds a lot like WJ's "twice-
born"…

"Then George mentioned the people who stumble upon Quakerism later in life. "They are often going through a second naivete, as some philosophers call it." I stopped him when he said that and asked him to elaborate. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, he said, had first floated the concept of a second naivete. On the other side of adult critical thought, Ricoeur posited, resides a place where ancient symbols and myths and stories can regain their power to instill hope and wonder. A second childhood of sorts—but of a higher order, if one is so fortunate. The phrase, when George said it, lit up in my mind, not unlike when Neal Weaver mentioned the line from St. Paul about renewal and a transformation of the spirit.

Years earlier, after my cancer diagnosis blurred my future prospects, I put a lot of thought into how I should fashion my sixties if I were so lucky as to have them. I imagined a period during which I attempted to shed my hardened conceptions and to look at things anew. A time to revel in what I didn't know while trying to fill in those huge gaps. I would aim again to greet things as I found them and savor the complexity, which only grew as one saw and learned more. A recapturing, as I saw it, of a much younger phase in life when the limbs and mind and spirit were much more fluid and more limber. I had no name for this approach, but suddenly, "a second naivete" fit quite well."

— American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal by Neil King
https://a.co/bIQ4PxE

Fellow-feeling

Aka empathy.

Enjoyed our discussion of Mr. Rogers (and SpongeBob) in #H1 yesterday, prompted by Ella's reading of Lyceum speaker Mariana Allesandri's essay "It's a Terrible Day in the Neighborhood..."

It's okay to feel what you feel, but it's noble to feel for others.

"When your heart can sing another's gladness,
Then your heart is full of love.
When your heart can cry another's sadness,
Then your heart is full of love." -Fred Rogers

Fred moved a crusty old Senator to emotion when he testified on behalf of public television's children's programming in 1969:

 

Love those theme songs:

 

How I loved this show (and miss it)...

 

Remember when this word didn't conjure the specter of pandemic?

Nothing wrong with SpongeBob either, even though several students report that their parents had forbidden them to watch. Reddit says many find him "too gay"... Really?! 

 

 

Other titles in Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy series... (including Mister Rogers, The Good Place, RuPaul, ...)

Happy Fall Break!

Ben and Me (and me)

 I'm enjoying Eric Weiner's Ben & Me: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life.

He writes that old Ben Franklin was not (as I and others, including *AI, have believed) an early proto-pragmatist but rather "what neuroscientist David Eagleman calls a 'possibilian' [who] asks [not] what can we do about this now [but] imagines what might be done in the future, no matter how improbable. The possibilian is infinitely patient. The possibilian always perseveres, and never sighs."

Well, I think he was both. I know I am, though I do often sigh these days and my patience is definitely not infinite. But it's a useful reminder that desired practical results are not always delivered promptly. Nonetheless, we must persevere if we intend that we and our successors in the great parade of humanity are to continue to  live long and prosper.

Anyway, it's nice to have a new perspective from Esoteric Eric on the Founder who winks.

==

*Yes, Benjamin Franklin was a pragmatist, and his pragmatic spirit was a key part of his success: [1, 2, 3]

Practical results

Franklin believed that what mattered was the practical results of improving himself and making others happy. [3]

Experimental approach

Franklin's pragmatism included an experimental approach and an orientation toward human progress. [1]

Resistance to dogma

Franklin's philosophy was unique in its resistance to dogma. [2]

Championed virtues

Franklin championed virtues like industriousness, frugality, and common sense, and believed they were foundational to a prosperous society. [2]

Understood virtues as habits

Franklin believed that virtues were habits or skills that could be improved through practice. [4]

Franklin's biographer Walter Isaacson claims that Franklin laid the foundation for American pragmatism. Franklin's pragmatic spirit was closely tied to his life experiences, including growing up in a poor family in Boston and dropping out of school at age 10 to work in the family trade business. [3, 5]

Generative AI is experimental.

[1] https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/view/49522

[2] http://mastersinvest.com/newblog/2024/5/9/the-munger-series-learning-from-benjamin-franklin

[3] https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/download/49522/26690

[4] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254965724_Ole_Ben_Franklin_the_Pragmatist_On_the_Philosophical_Credentials_of_an_American_Founder

[5] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/467713/summary

Play's the thing

Finished Playground, but I don’t think it’s finished with me. The themes of play, story, evolution, death and life, and this wondrous but under-appreciated oceanic planet where they all play out will resonate. We’d like it to be an infinite game, continuing for the sake of the play itself. But we may be in the process of writing our final chapters. 

Powers's final chapter, in this book, gets the game:

But the look the humans share says: What does it look like? Call it what it is. Every dance is a game, and every game its own best explanation. Everything alive, even we newcomers. . . . What are all creatures—even me—doing at all times but playing in the world, playing before their tinkering Lord?

Our tinkering Lord is natural selection, with or without a pre-meditative tinkerer. Play on, Hamlet. And Richard. Can't wait for the sequel. 

(And because the mlb regular season ends today, let's play into the post-season. Then, start counting the days to Spring Training.)

part of the stream

"To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future."

— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Anxiety: the bright side

MTSU's Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies is hosting its first Applied Philosophy Lyceum of the academic year on Friday, September 27, 2024, at 5:00 PM in COE 164. Catered reception following.

Looking forward to introducing our Lyceum speaker this afternoon, assuming we're not flooded out…

I'm delighted today to introduce Dr. Mariana Alessandri, professor of philosophy at University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley and (it is possibly relevant to note) a New Yorker.

I met Dr. Alessandri last Spring in Boston at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy's annual meeting, and immediately thought she'd make an excellent Lyceum guest. The author-meets-critics session devoted to her 2023 book Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods, was enlightening, insightful, entertaining, and even at points actually cheerful.

I do understand that when she writes "Against Cheerfulness," she means forced and phony cheer, the "American way [that] borders on psychosis." I don't think she's against the spontaneous and natural sort of joi'e de vivre that even the gloomiest of Guses can occasionally enjoy. No less committed a Scrooge than Schopenhauer, after all, said

"Cheerfulness is a direct and immediate gain, — the very coin, as it were, of happiness… for it alone makes us immediately happy in the present moment, and that is the highest blessing for beings like us, whose existence is but an infinitesimal moment between two eternities. To secure and promote this feeling of cheerfulness should be the supreme aim of all our endeavors after happiness." -The Wisdom of Life

Schopenhauer--the guy who said “What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life"-- said that! 

But he also said "It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else."

And aren't we in fact, in this present moment, happy to be here and looking forward to learning about feeling better about all kinds of feelings?

Dr. Alessandri has written widely and in public, contributing (according to its editor) some of the New York Times philosophy series The Stone's most impressive essays. One of those, in 2019, found the late Fred Rogers' dark side: "It's A Terrible Day in the Neighborhood and That's Okay" concludes:

"If we are convinced by Rogers' and Aristotle's claim that feelings are not wrong and that "what's mentionable is manageable," we should begin mentioning our own sad, lonely and disappointed feelings. In doing so, we would show children — and our grown-up selves — how to appropriately manage them."

Dr. Alessandri introduces herself, on her website, this way:

"I'm a teacher, philosopher, accidental activist, and mother, but if I could be a superhero, my cape would read: 'Defender of Dark Moods.'

As long as I live in a world where people apologize for crying in public, I will write books and essays on why complaining is good, why [fake] cheerfulness isn't, and why Mister Rogers was right that "everyone has lots of ways of feeling and all of those feelings are fine." You can find [her] my work at The New York Times, New Philosopher, Womankind, [Aeon,] and other places."

[And] Check out what drives [her] nuts on Instagram and in her newsletter, In the Cave.

Speaking myself as a mostly-happy melioristic pragmatic pluralist, and despite her reluctance during the Q-&-A in Boston to endorse the hopeful positivity of meliorism, I was gratified by Dr. Alessandri's inscription in my copy of her book: "Dear Phil, I think the pragmatists and existentialists have a lot of common ground!"

And so we have.

Please join me in welcoming

DR. MARIANA ALESSANDRI

Professor, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

 

“THE UPSIDE OF ANXIETY: Kierkegaard on feeling better about feeling bad”

 

Is anxiety best described as a lack of faith, an error in reasoning, or a brain disease/chemical imbalance? Do any of our contemporary definitions or descriptions of anxiety help us feel better about it? In 1844, the “congenitally anxious” philosopher Søren Kierkegaard posited that the more anxious a civilization is, the more profound the culture. Can Kierkegaard’s defense of anxiety help us, in 2024, to feel better about feeling bad?

 

Join Dr. Mariana Alessandri, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and author of Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods, as she talks about the mental illness that 1 in 3 college students suffers from.

 

 

* This event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the discussion.

Playground

I woke up way early this morning to start reading the story that's been described as doing for oceans what "Overstory" did for trees...


http://dlvr.it/TDdSS9

Playground

Richard Powers' new novel was waiting for me in my kindle library this morning. A Kant-Rousseau moment: everything else must wait, while I read.

And here's a passage that describes my every trip to Parnassus:

"I WANDERED AROUND THE BOOKSTORE for so long looking for my prize that my father lost it. "All right, already. Pick one and be done with it." But that was the problem: How could I pick the right one when it might be any book in the entire store? Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. I started my rounds again, across Chicago's finest chain bookstore's two large floors. "Five minutes," my father said. "Then I'm picking one for you." I was in the Nature and Science section of the Young Adult books when my eyes fell on a turquoise spine with shimmering letters that read Clearly It Is Ocean. I opened the book and was dismayed. The font was smaller and denser than I liked. But the pictures of surreal sea life were incredible, and I wanted them. On the back was a picture of a skinny woman with long red hair and a diving mask pulled up over her radiant face. I had never seen an adult look so fulfilled. One glance at the author and I fell in love as only a ten-year-old can. My father scowled at my choice. "Are you sure?" I was sure. "Are you sure you're sure?" He waved his hand, taking in all the superior treasures that I was passing up. I was sure. The author in the photo was sure. All the fish in all the lakes and oceans were sure. Clearly this was the book I was meant to have."

— Playground: A Novel by Richard Powers
https://a.co/5o7xdRt

Schopenhauer’s mornings

https://www.threads.net/@yzenberg/post/DAGQIvLSPNj/?xmt=AQGz4N9XJBGPjEZ_b6hQjEeCHwRJ__Bx5FK72_kBsalTtw

Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us

Eagerly anticipating "Playground"…

Should we be feeling awe, delight, terror about the environment, AI, etc.?

"Do I have to choose one of them? I mean, all of them. Don't you feel all of them?" 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/richard-powers-profile

9/11

23 years, before most of my students were born.

Macho “Stoics” on the internet

I was asked in class yesterday about how some internet popularizers of Stoicism seem to equate that philosophy with "masculine values"… This seems relevant:

"Working through a book with some students yesterday and had a realization.💡

Many of us would agree that our culture is broadly nihilistic — lot of despair, feelings of pointlessness, atomization, and isolation. "Does anything matter?!"

A lot of the toxic stuff online targeting young men is flourishing IN THIS CONTEXT. Guys are offered "systems," and "discipline," and "tradition" as a balm for this aimlessness and anxiety about meaning."

👇 https://www.threads.net/@greatbooksprof/post/C_vF9PnusBk/?xmt=AQGziKuazBiKpApNr6Oa7gCvvqV9D39ZVA3FnnNdKNkC_Q

Cousin Mary‘s instructions

"Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."
Mary Oliver, born on this day in 1935

https://www.threads.net/@reboomer/post/C_u3B2wOcYK/?xmt=AQGzPk2MS5HzI2P78zSTO4gVzAH3AmvRjRN2bl-_xjQAWA

How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity

"Poetry and music escape the constraints of intellect, Taylor argues, persuading us by inspiration rather than argument." 

Does his argument inspire?

Does reason alone reveal the constraints of intellect? 

Or does experience, a broader category of wisdom? 

Asking for the friend who shared the essay and said: "It's the music that's alleged to do the work. But Taylor's work comprises arguments, not music or poetry. Does reason provide evidence of its own limitations? I find that sort of view attractive."

In other words: define "reason"…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/24/cosmic-connections-charles-taylor-book-review

Get up and move

The Brahma Muhurta, "creator's time"-

https://www.threads.net/@arthurcbrooks/post/C_lA1mSh166/?xmt=AQGzBrjFTm0gO1PI4UQCCxp9eAdnCwVWMRA56a_sieKdPQ

“Divisive concepts” form (for the convenience of my students)

Why fascists hate universities | Jason Stanley | The Guardian

"…Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature. The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolutionto honor the Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state representative Justin Jones questioned why the state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán's thinktank. Tennessee has a state ban on the teaching of "divisive concepts", one that includes public universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form..."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/why-fascists-hate-universities-us-bangladesh-india

Happy Labor Day!

Leisure, the Basis of Culture: An Obscure German Philosopher's Timely 1948 Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism – The Marginalian

"…when we take a real vacation — in the true sense of "holiday," time marked by holiness, a sacred period of respite — our sense of time gets completely warped. Unmoored from work-time and set free, if temporarily, from the tyranny of schedules, we come to experience life exactly as it unfolds, with its full ebb and flow of dynamism — sometimes slow and silken, like the quiet hours spent luxuriating in the hammock with a good book; sometimes fast and fervent, like a dance festival under a summer sky.

Leisure, the Basis of Culture is a terrific read in its totality, made all the more relevant by the gallop of time between Pieper's era and our own. Complement it with David Whyte on reconciling the paradox of "work/life balance," Pico Iyer on the art of stillness, Wendell Berry on the spiritual rewards of solitude, and Annie Dillard on reclaiming our everyday capacity for joy and wonder."

Maria Popova

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/10/leisure-the-basis-of-culture-josef-pieper/

A fruitful inspiration

It's Opening Day! Time for stubborn clarity and inspiration. (And the Dean says we can wear our tee t-shirts to class "to foster a greater sense of community"...)

"The fact is that the history of philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than the history of a sharply defined discipline. The traditional image of it as a sort of meditative science of pure thought, strangely cut off from other subjects, is largely a trick of the historical light. The illusion is created by the way we look at the past, and in particular by the way in which knowledge tends to be labelled, chopped up and re-labelled. Philosophical work is regularly spirited away and adopted by other disciplines. Yesterday’s moral philosophy becomes tomorrow’s jurisprudence or welfare economics; yesterday’s philosophy of mind becomes tomorrow’s cognitive science. And the road runs in both directions: new inquiries in other disciplines prompt new questions for the philosophically curious. Tomorrow’s economics will be meat for the moral philosophers of the day after. One effect of these shifting boundaries is that philosophical thinking can easily seem to be unusually useless, even for an intellectual enterprise. This is largely because any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful soon ceases to be called philosophy. Hence the illusory appearance that philosophers never make progress.

It is said that the psychologist William James once described philosophy as ‘a peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly’. This is a rather dry definition, but is more nearly right than any other I know. True, clarity is not exactly the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of philosophy. There is no denying that philosophers’ attempts to think clearly have often rudely backfired. (Any subject that is responsible for producing Heidegger, for example, owes the world an apology.) Still, William James was right to describe philosophy as he did. Even the darkest of its practitioners are struggling to make sense of things, and it is this effort that makes them philosophers. Sometimes the effort does not pay off, but often it does.

To call philosophical thinking ‘stubborn’ was particularly apt. Bertrand Russell once described it as ‘unusually obstinate’. For the one thing that marks it off from other sorts of thinking is its unwillingness to accept conventional answers, even when it seems perverse not to do so from a practical point of view. That is why philosophers often make such excellent figures of fun. The earliest Greek historians of philosophy understood this better than we do today, for their books were peppered with ludicrous anecdotes, some of which may actually have been true and most of which are very much to the point even if they were made up. To disapprove of such lampoons of the eminently lampoonable is to miss the joke at the heart of philosophy. Philosophers have regularly cocked an eyebrow at what passes for the common sense of the time; the punch line comes later, when it is ‘common sense’ that turns out to have been uncommonly confused. Sometimes the joke goes wrong, of course, and it is the philosopher who ends up looking foolish, but that risk comes with the job.

The attempt to push rational inquiry obstinately to its limits is bound often to fail, and then the dream of reason which motivates philosophical thinking seems merely a mirage. At other times, though, it succeeds magnificently, and the dream is revealed as a fruitful inspiration."

The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (New Edition)" by Anthony Gottlieb

Opening Day feeling: “this one thing”

What Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Took from the Tornado

"…d.r.: And you stand up onstage in front of all these people and play. It's such an honor to have all of your energy focussed on this one thing that you care about so much. And to know that all the work you've done in the past—all the thinking about what the next line's going to be, or what the next story you're going to tell is, or what the next note you're gonna play is, or what you played last night that really was fun and you need to remember how to do that again because people enjoyed it so much and you enjoyed it, that you have this North Star. It's unreal.

g.w.: It's so heartening that, with everything that's going on in everybody's lives and in the world, people still feel that impulse. They still want to go and sit in a dark room and listen to people sing."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/what-gillian-welch-and-david-rawlings-took-from-the-tornado

AOC on Janeway, KDH on the Titanic

"It's not sci-fi anymore." Captain on the bridge...

 

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Kamala on the Titanic-"It's not about you..."

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