Applied Philosophy Lyceum: Oct 2, 5 pm, COE 164

The Digital Cave

Reading, Thinking, and Dwelling in the Age of the Algorithm

An Applied Philosophy Talk by John Kaag

Abstract

We live in an era of industrial-scale shadow-play. The map of reality is no longer drawn from our own experience but projected by algorithms designed to keep us looking at a particular kind of wall. This talk argues that the oldest resources in the philosophical canon offer the most precise diagnosis of our newest predicament. Plato's cave anticipates the architecture of the feed—with one grim perversion: his prisoners at least shared a wall, while the algorithm builds a bespoke cavern for each of us. The Buddhist vocabulary of maya, tanha, and upadana describes with uncanny accuracy the mechanics of craving, clinging, and curated selfhood that the infinite scroll exploits. And Heidegger's account of Enframing—read alongside his catastrophic biography, which cannot be waved away—explains how attention itself became “standing reserve,” a resource to be extracted.

The talk concludes with the question increasingly posed to our machines: why is talking to a large language model so strange? The answer reveals a schism between information and meaning, between the calculative synthesis at which AI excels and the meditative, embodied, abductive thinking that a life—with something at stake—alone makes possible. Philosophy's task has not changed since the cave: to make us suspicious of the reality that appears most obvious, and to recover the gritty practices that might let us turn our heads, a few degrees, toward the light.

About the Speaker

John Kaag is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of three widely acclaimed books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: American Philosophy: A Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. These books were named NPR Best Books of the Year and New York Times Editors' Choice selections.

His work bridges American pragmatism, intellectual history, ethics, and the philosophy of technology, and he writes regularly for general audiences on why philosophy still matters for everyday life.

“It could be worse”

Kurt Andersen’s novel The Breakup is out today. I’ve been looking forward to it. 

Are we middle Tennesseans living in the future “Free American Republic,” the post-split remnant of Red State America Andersen imagines? He’s an astute observer of our fractured Fantasyland, I’m not betting against him. But if this is a cautionary tale, maybe national reconciliation is not yet entirely how did the question. That’s a much bigger gamble. Anyway, and to look on the slightly-brighter side, I’m sure he’s right: It could be worse. Still can be. For now, this is just a good story we should take seriously. Less “active contempt” for our neighbors would be a positive step away from the brink.

“…I so badly wanted the crazy experiment of the United States of America to continue defying the odds, as always. Anyhow, what I said earlier about the half-life of the war’s traumas is true. But what to me feels even better is the fading of what preceded it—the compulsive politicization of everything, the fear and hatred of the Other Side as an animating, irresistible everyday emotion. The active contempt has become less salient, diminished, including in rural Middle Tennessee, where I’ve lived for all but a few months for the last decade. “I don’t disagree about the vibe shift, honey,” says my local best friend Victoria, who grew up around here and lives fifteen minutes away. “But isn’t it also true for you right now because you don’t have Asher around to bicker with so much?” 

At first I found the term “Disunion” too clinical and wonky. But it is more correctly mutual than “secession.” And has some history, dignity, a touch of grandeur. I’m a fan of all those. But I call it the breakup. It’s a little glib, but simple, factual, neutral, idiomatic, and broad enough to cover the whole era, beginning to end. It’s also a universally familiar concept, unlike Disunion. It’s relatable. Americans have been strange bedfellows in a mixed marriage for a long time. We grew apart. We stayed together, but finally came to find each other impossible. We fought. We had irreconcilable differences. We finally split. In a world where half the marriages unravel or rot or die of thirst or blow up. Or do whatever mine’s doing. A clichéd question about America since I was a kid concerned our national political “fever,” if and when it would ever break. The fever broke. Along with our beautiful, uncomfortable, brittle, breakable antique national governing arrangements, now being rebuilt and refurbished. It could be worse.” — The Breakup: A Novel by Kurt Andersen

Addicted to study

School starts in a week. Time to celebrate one of the more positive addictions.

“…As obvious as this may seem, it typically goes unsaid: to be a student is ... to study. Students are not clients; they are not consumers; they are not users who can be “captured” by outcomes, indicators, or throughputs. Experts recognize this fact, yet study is not a main theme or even a topic in the shelf of books I have on recent debates. Few philosophical arguments about the future of the university analyze what it means to study. 

So before we go any further, let the first idea of this book be the idea of study. What, this humanities professor asks, does the word student mean? In the academic field of higher education, students are the subject matter for vast research. But philosophers often examine what seems obvious, and, to me, this idea of study especially has the power to help reorient the research university. Framing the idea of study means making explicit a goal that exceeds our current practices. 

Framing the idea of study does not mean offering an empirical account of what students today “do.” Rather, it is an attempt to identify the ideas that may guide them. With some irony, I’ll try to outline the idea of study by exploring the words student and study as documented by the Oxford English Dictionary, which emerged from the philological research of great humanities scholars. 

So let me link, or turn to, the 1989 version of the Oxford English Dictionary, conveniently available to students and faculty online. student, n. 1. A person who is engaged in or addicted to study. 2. a. A person who is undergoing a course of study and instruction at a university or other place of higher education or technical training. Also const. of, in (a subject); often with defining word prefixed, as art student, law student, medical student...”

— What Could a University Be?: Revolutionary Ideas for the Future (On Campus) by Robert B. Gibbs

Moving on up

Began moving office yesterday. Trying to embrace a minimalist style this time, since I’m departing in May. My first office at MTSU was windowless. My second was tiny. This is better on both counts.

Following the moon, walking the path

Drove S to her PT session in Green Hills the other morning and, while waiting, decided to replicate my own post-surgical PT routine of five summers ago when I'd reward myself after every session by wandering over to Parnassus Books and the Donut Den. 

Glad I did, the apple fritter and the chocolate-covered creme-filled continue to delight; and I discovered an "adult fable" in the philosophy section that reminded me a lot of Freddie the Leaf.

I used to read Freddie to our girls, probably before they were quite ready to contemplate their mortality. As my last academic year approaches, the time is ripe for pondering my own... not in a morbid mood, but because I intend to enjoy the undiscovered country called Retirement starting in May '27. 

That little pup Amaya is Freddie's counterpart, the Wolf stands in for the wise old leaf who counsels Freddie to embrace every season of life. The path ahead may be a bit hazy, but let's go. [S'stack]

 

The Rossians

Contact, redux (but this would be the prequel, it’s happening during the Carter administration). 

We do need a reshuffling and a renewed sense of wonder. Maybe an alien transmission would be just the thing. But on the other hand, isn’t belief in aliens already pretty ordinary? You don’t have to go light-years away to find (in John Prine‘s words) humans who ain’t human. There seems to be a clutch of them at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., for instance. 

 But seriously… 

 “…Believing in aliens is suddenly ordinary. 

 It’s a massive reshuffling of cultural norms. 

 For every person who eschews their earthly belongings to go live in a commune, there are countless others who live their lives essentially unchanged. For every horrific, family-shattering suicide, hundreds of thousands of individuals push through their existential dread. The human mind is evolutionarily adapted to finding lessons and silver linings in shocking events, and this isn’t the first time humanity has been de-centered in the universe. Deniers exist, of course. People who insist that the Beacon is a hoax, a lie, a trick; people no amount of evidence can persuade. But overall, a sense of wonder prevails. 

 A name for this newest wonder is chosen: the Rossians. 

 The Rossians are out there, and they are waiting for a reply. There is a sense of power in this, of connection: It’s our move, and we need to move as one. The United Nations is suddenly taken a bit more seriously. Regions coalesce, speaking of unity. Dead-end negotiations sprout sudden exits. Hostages come home. An array of military forces works in concert to keep an eye on the sky as international hostilities cool and relations warm—not all, not everywhere, and in some cases not for long, but noticeably so. It’s a mental tic many people feel: We are not just members of a tribe or nation, we are members of a planet...” — The Radiant Dark: A Novel by Alexandra Oliva https://a.co/0g5DTOmC

Nagori

… and the last year of a teaching career? https://substack.com/@philosophyminis/note/c-308063068?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

“Why should I strive for happiness?”

Looking forward to John Kaag’s October 2 MTSU Lyceum visit, when I’m sure he’ll affirm the possibility of happiness in work. I’ve decided we’ll read this book in Existentialism just before he arrives (and we’ll read how William James saved his life in CoPhi then, too).

“For Nietzsche, I consoled myself, the point was not about avoiding or even conquering suffering: he recognized, like so many philosophers before him, that suffering was a fundamental fact of human existence. But the ascetic response to suffering was to understand it as a complaint about life. My challenge—the challenge Nietzsche raises—was to embrace life with all its suffering. When he wrote, at the very end of his career, “Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified,” he meant to show that suffering does not refute life as we experience it but must be welcomed, embraced, in exactly the same way we welcome and embrace happiness. In fact, Nietzsche often sounds as though happiness is at best a kind of secondary goal. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most famous character, having spent his life in the mountains, concludes: “Happiness? Why should I strive for happiness? I strive for my work.””

— Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John J. Kaag
https://a.co/02BXPDFc

Elon’s Academy

We’d better imagine something completely different, and fast. “The scenario that follows,” cartoonish though it is, “is built entirely on Musk’s own statements.” More than “perplexing”… “Imagine a day in 2035. …students port their Neuralinks into Grokipedia modules on history. They learn that the term “slave” originally referred to white people and the British Empire was important mostly for ending African slavery. Terms like “racism” and “sexism” never appear as they have been proven to correlate directly with the “woke mind virus”—considered eradicated since 2032. The great error of history in the dark years of the early twenty-first century was that “weak makes right.” This was part of what is described as the “vampire cult” of education now mercifully superseded. The powerful, she learns, should never apologize. Even great civilizations, though, do not last forever. She absorbs the surprising fact that all empires have fallen for the same reason: low birth rates. Fewer people mean not only less labor power—no longer relevant due to the replacement of almost all workers by humanoid robots—but, more importantly, less human intelligence. As she has been taught many times, intelligence is the “the primary evolutionary vector for humans.” On guard against further decline, her science class teaches her about the latest developments in selective human breeding for higher intelligence, including “iterated embryo selection” which allows for choosing specific genetic alleles and cross-fertilizing them without implanting them in a womb, as well as the now-standard “spell-checking” of genetic code to remove all mutations. Learning about this technology is framed as a patriotic duty to ensure strong offspring and reduce future burdens on the privatized health system. It is incumbent on smart women like her to produce at least 2.1 children. She is reminded again of the self-evident truth that there are only two genders and of the evils of past decades, when people changed their genders in what is now recognized as “child mutilation and sterilization.” Such actions are now punishable by imprisonment. More important of course is the pursuit of digital superintelligence. Advances have already made possible the creation of a fleet of humanoid robots ten times the human population on earth. They are a constant presence on streets and in homes. The school itself is maintained and guarded by them. They also lead the gym class, which doubles as border defense education with drills and carbon-fiber weapons. On the way home, the air is hazy with vapor and filled with a low-level hum from the cooling towers of the Neural Districts—massive data center complexes ringing the city. A Tesla sign on a fence reads “Data is Sovereignty.” Asking her parents why the trees are dead and the streambeds dry, they respond “critical infrastructure.” At home, the lights are dim because “nonessential use” is rationed to supply the data centers at peak hours. She talks to her parents about Mars. Starship is now launching twenty times a day and the rockets have become fully reusable, but the launch window only comes every two years. Promotional videos and gleeful simulations populated by animated companion AIs circulate constantly on X. One more push, one more sacrifice, they all sing, and humanity will ascend.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/0i68r6H4

Stay woke

“…By 2016, these political expressions had migrated from the margins to center stage. At the Code Conference in San Francisco that summer, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared beside Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson wearing a T-shirt that read “# StayWoke.” (The shirts had been made by Black employees at the company after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014). Everyone in the crowd received their own. 15 “Woke” was a word with deep roots in Black culture: as early as 1938, the folk singer Lead Belly had urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about the Scottsboro Boys. Staying woke meant being alert to injustice, and to the likelihood of police and white vigilante violence. 16 Dorsey coopted the term for his own platform. Twitter offered a way to revise the narratives of mainstream journalists and deliver a more authentic perspective on current events. For him, scrolling and posting were the way to remain woke in the contemporary world. In the coming years, the term would become a catch-all for progressive politics, as amplified through the megaphone of social media. Yet the woke social network of #HandsUpDontShoot and #MeToo was always shadowed by its obscene doppelgänger: the internet of trolls. In 2003, a year before Facebook was founded, another tech-savvy teenager launched a website called 4chan. It was a simple message board modeled on a Japanese predecessor named 2chan, and its founder was a fifteen-year-old student from New York City named Christopher “moot” Poole. 4chan was a networked public of pubescent humor and smut, shot through with homophobic, racist, sexist, and ableist slurs. It also incubated many mainstays of internet culture, such as the meme. The term “meme” was first coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where he described it as a “unit of cultural transmission,” such as an idea, song, or style of clothing. By the 2000s, the term had evolved far from its original context to mean a combination of text and image shared online.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/09sdsPgp

Stay woke

“…By 2016, these political expressions had migrated from the margins to center stage. At the Code Conference in San Francisco that summer, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared beside Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson wearing a T-shirt that read “# StayWoke.” (The shirts had been made by Black employees at the company after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014). Everyone in the crowd received their own. 15 “Woke” was a word with deep roots in Black culture: as early as 1938, the folk singer Lead Belly had urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about the Scottsboro Boys. Staying woke meant being alert to injustice, and to the likelihood of police and white vigilante violence. 16 Dorsey coopted the term for his own platform. Twitter offered a way to revise the narratives of mainstream journalists and deliver a more authentic perspective on current events. For him, scrolling and posting were the way to remain woke in the contemporary world. In the coming years, the term would become a catch-all for progressive politics, as amplified through the megaphone of social media. Yet the woke social network of #HandsUpDontShoot and #MeToo was always shadowed by its obscene doppelgänger: the internet of trolls. In 2003, a year before Facebook was founded, another tech-savvy teenager launched a website called 4chan. It was a simple message board modeled on a Japanese predecessor named 2chan, and its founder was a fifteen-year-old student from New York City named Christopher “moot” Poole. 4chan was a networked public of pubescent humor and smut, shot through with homophobic, racist, sexist, and ableist slurs. It also incubated many mainstays of internet culture, such as the meme. The term “meme” was first coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where he described it as a “unit of cultural transmission,” such as an idea, song, or style of clothing. By the 2000s, the term had evolved far from its original context to mean a combination of text and image shared online.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/09sdsPgp

“more reasonable and respectful”

Enjoying the new Garry Trudeau bio. Daily doses of Doonesbury back in the 70s and 80s shaped my political sensibility as much as anything. Before I encountered James’s message, imploring us always to array our beliefs and acts under the aspect of good,* there was Trudeau urging us to be “for something”… 

 “By the late 1970s, Trudeau morphed into a chronicler of the Zeitgeist; while he would still not hesitate to make fun of the powerful and the famous, he would step up his efforts to address the hypocrisy and ridiculousness at the heart of American culture. And all his efforts would be in service of a larger mission: to help Americans become their own better angels. As he put it in 1990, he was “propelled by a sense of moral indignation, which you hope doesn’t slip into malice when you’re executing. The critical difference is that you’re not only against something, you’re for something. It springs out of a sense of hope.” He was much less invested in opposing any particular individual or institution than in encouraging Americans to become more reasonable and respectful toward one another.” 

 — Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art by Joshua Kendall https://a.co/04ixYXsB

==

*Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. Talks to Teachers...

Catching thoughts

An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day | Lapham’s Quarterly

Michael Pollan:

[Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia] recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes…

Writers attempting to represent the stream of consciousness aim to catch thoughts on the fly, before they have coalesced into complete sentences that can be shared—sentences being how we dress our thoughts to take them out into the world… [Virginia Woolf] manages to evoke the free movement of her characters’ minds without sacrificing sentences and syntax…”*

The philosopher Henri Bergson, one of Marcel Proust’s major influences, believed in the existence of “pure” thought that precedes language, which was liable to distort it. (This was scarcely a new idea: Writing in the eighteenth century, poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller said, “When the soul speaks, alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks.”) The twentieth-century French writer Nathalie Sarraute felt that more mental contents slipped through the net of interior monologue than were caught by it, including “an immense profusion of sensations, images, sentiments, memories, impulses, little larval actions that no inner language can convey, that jostle one another on the threshold of consciousness.” For those who, like Joyce, did believe that language constitutes our minds, the stream of consciousness represented a radical advance in literary realism.

Those who didn’t, like Proust, rejected the method for being too “oblique.” It drew our attention away from all the nonverbal “mind-stuff” that William James had identified in consciousness, and that Proust worked so hard to capture—albeit in words… 

Adapted from A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan

—

*Or, as Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West put it:

“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” 

Albeit in words.

the right to think for ourselves

A helpful reminder, as we head into the long July 4 250th birthday holiday, of things worthy of rockets' red glare. The public library and its symbolism, for one. 

“…The library was not and is not perfect. Our public library system has been segregated and elitist. At various points in history, public libraries have reinforced white superiority, excluded sexual minorities and elevated men as knowledge’s gatekeepers. And only rarely does it receive consistent, secure funding to fill its many societal roles.

But however imperfect, wherever a public library exists, it is one of the few places where Americans can experience the public life that neoliberalism has defunded and partisanship has demonized. When you walk into one, you know that there are some things too precious to be trusted to corporations or consumer preferences or political influence. A library card is liberal democracy made manifest.

There is a reason that culture warriors hate the library. It is the same reason that Americans should defend it with our lives. No political spin doctor can sell us what is freely given at one: the right to think for ourselves.” Tressie McMillan Cottom

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/25/opinion/america-250-birthday.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

A Sisyphean labor

Jürgen Habermas Defended Reason in a Darkening Age

“…Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress. This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope.” ♦︎ Alex Ross

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/06/22/jurgen-habermas-desperate-fight-for-democracy

A very happy Father’s Day

Thanks to Younger Daughter (and her husband) for indulging my Father’s Day request to recreate those fondly-recalled wiffle ball games of her childhood. We set up bases out in Dogland, but let the funny-looking quadruped kids run them. What a blast!

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.

Mom

 Phyllis Dean Easterday, 1927-2008. Would be 99 today.

Thoughts renew, life shifts

Philip Davis, William James (OUP 2022):

The first and last words of this spirited little book are Henry James's:

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to." The Ambassadors

WJS Spg/Summer '26 newsletter sneak peek: prez's message

My Vanderbilt mentor John Lachs once said four great things about being a professor are May, June, July, and August... (continues)

More Everything Forever

  Does anything more threaten to derange our understanding of human existence, its meaning and possibilities, than AI and "Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity"? Or to disrupt our proper relation to the rest of nature? This might just be a suitable title for both Existentialism and Environmental Ethics.

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, science writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.

More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are. g'r

“If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There is no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can't heal the world. We have to do that ourselves.”

quotes

Portrait of a virtuous virtuoso

What a wonderful tribute to retiring MTSU philosophy colleague (and virtuosic musician) Ron Bombardi from artist Steve Magada-Ward. Inspirations both.

Vital conditions

“Psychology in James was about amassing the vital conditions for living well…” Philip Davis, William James (in the My Reading series, Oxford University Press, 2022) https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mlvbfmtrns2o