This morning is not old

A better answer to the student who asked how it feels to be old.

There are questions that I no longer ask
and others that I have not asked for a long time
that I return to and dust off and discover
that I’m smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time
yes I am old now and I am the child
I remember what are called the old days and there is
no one to ask how they became the old days
and if I ask myself there is no answer
so this is old and what I have become
and the answer is something I would come to
later when I was old but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question as the breeze passes through them and is gone

WA-Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning by W. S. Merwin

6:15/6:43, 55/70, 6:30

Original sin

Whenever the subject of original sin comes up in class, I'm challenged to give it a fair hearing. Why would anyone take seriously the suggestion of sinfulness as something you could inherit? But people do take preposterous customary things seriously. 

Today's poem will help, next time the subject arises. A god really should be

reasonable, like Emerson or Thoreau
without their stranger moments.

Just take away the transparent eyeballs, please, and give us more transcendent moments of exhilaration striding across bare commons. More natural effusion, less arbitrary omnipotent vindictiveness.

... it made no sense
that we’d need to be saved before
we’d even had the chance
to be wrong.

On the other hand, peoples and nations do inherit a responsibility to rectify wrongs that have been perpetrated by forebears and have continued to hamper the lives of our fellow humans. That's what Naomi Klein is talking about in her chapter on invoking the treaty rights of indigenous First Nations to block fossil extraction like the Alberta tar sands project.

If we're going to try to reap environmental victories in that way, we need to compensate the indigenous populations who've sacrificed so much and inherited so little. It falls to we the living to make good on our ancestors' promises. We didn't have the chance to be wrong in the past, when those treaties were disingenuously drawn. But we have the chance to be right in the present.

6:30/6:43, 50/63/49, 6:32

Descartes & Montaigne

Did you see The Choice last night? You need to.

And then today in CoPhi you need to think about choosing Descartes or Montaigne. I'm with Michel.

Poor Rene Descartes, a night person summoned by the Queen of Sweden to give her a daily pre-dawn philosophy tutorial. It killed him. "Most philosophers since Descartes have attached importance to the theory of knowledge," says Russell, and his cogito "makes mind more certain than matter, and my mind (for me) more certain" than yours. It makes thinking more certain than being.

He hadn't read or been impressed by his counterpart Michel de Montaigne, evidently. Que sais je? I know nothing firm enough to form a foundation for the edifice of certain knowledge, and neither do you; but we know, thanks to Montaigne, how to write an essay, how to get back on our horse after a spill, and how to live in "large and fruitful disorder."

And then he died, six months short of his sixtieth birthday "in dumb silence." He would undoubtedly have appreciated the irony.

6 am/6:42, 50/84, 6:33
CoPhi

Love trumps stupid

Too bad moderators aren't empowered to pull the plug when debaters rudely, repeatedly interrupt. That would have preempted last evening's reality programming almost immediately, and we'd have been spared yet another public display of contempt for facts, decency, and decorum. The transcript of last night's spectacle doesn't quite capture the tone, but it speaks clearly enough of the candidates' respective tempers, truthfulness, and "stamina." It doesn't much speak to the issue that changes everything, but there was this:

CLINTON: ...Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.
DRUMPF: I did not. I did not. I do not say that.
CLINTON: I think science is real.
DRUMPF: I do not say that.

The record does show otherwise.

Today's This Changes Everything chapter says what the world needs now is love, which really ought to trump stupid.

I hope millennials who tuned in weren't too disillusioned, like the indigenous British Columbian students Klein tells us about. We badly need their energy, clarity, and passion to turn us around and make us get our facts straight. 

And we need to divest (How to...Why), to get our schools and other public institutions to divest, and at least get our school's president to think again about endorsing the climate commitment (ACUPCC) so many of his progressive colleagues have already signed on to. It's been almost four years since we initiated that conversation, he's had time to give it serious consideration. I think it's time to revisit it, time for a transition and an "energy descent action plan" of our own. We who also think science is real are not isolated and alone. We too can "find ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic involvement." 

But let's not interrupt our guest.

5:20/6:41, 56/79/54, 6:35

Machiavelli & Hobbes, Osgood & Scully

What a memorable weekend, beginning Friday night with Ron Howard's Eight Days A Week at the Belcourt. The lads from Liverpool are timelessly, endlessly inspiring. Opie still impresses too.

Then there was Saturday's superior sushi at Sonobana. Try the crawdad roll, if you go.

Yesterday's departure of two grand old men, honeyed voices of the airwaves I've been making a ritual point of hearing my entire adult lifetime, was even more moving than anticipated: Charles Osgood, from Sunday Morning, and Vin Scully, from the Dodgers. Two more exemplary long lives for my collection, two more ringing endorsements of Theodore Geisel's smart optimism: "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." See you on the radio, Charley. And a very pleasant good evening to you, Vin. It's been good to know you both, though of course we've never actually met. The connective power of broadcast speech outpaces mere proximity, and shrinks the planet in the best way.

The lives they've lived stand as a strong rebuke to the low estimation of humanity we find in today's CoPhi philosophers, a pair of Power Politics proponents who expected the worst from people.

Italian Niccolo Machiavelli was all about appearances. He admired lions and foxes but seems in many ways to have been more like a chameleon, changing colors and stripes to suit situations, procure patronage, and manipulate people. Really, though, only the human animal is capable of the kind of duplicity and means-end rationalization he urged. Russell liked him more than I do, for his absence of "humbug." If "success" in a leader means simply staying power, a talent for deception, and a mania for winning, I vote for failure.

Brit Thomas Hobbes ("Tommy," my first PoliSci prof familiarly named him, "mainlining on utopia") was a peripatetic who derived great energy from his daily perambulations. Frederic Gros doesn't tell us that in his little "Energy" chapter, but Hobbes would certainly have agreed that the solid support of earth under foot makes realistic alliance with the pull of gravity. He thought we ought to build similar stability into our public institutions.

"He would go out for a long walk every morning, striding quickly up hills so as to get quickly out of breath" and to get ideas, which he preserved by extracting a quill from his walking stick. He seems to have been hail, healthy, hardy, and happy, living into his 90s (but not an optimist). Not the guy you'd expect to stump for a maximum state like his awe-inspiring mortal God "Leviathan."

Hobbes was a "rigid determinist" but something got him up and going each morning, out into the English countryside. Did it really feel involuntary? Does it? Not to me.

He didn't find any intrinsic  difference between religion and superstition, but thought the former might have its uses for the state. Like everything else, legislation governing what belief and conduct to allow in "utopia" is supposed to make life (not people, contrary to what a student once told me) less nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes had nothing against vertically challenged individuals.

It's a good day to be thinking about what qualities we desire in our leader and our nation. I'm not holding my breath for an edifying debate tonight, but as Mr. Osgood always said: "we'll be watching." Too bad he and Vin aren't on the ballot. As Vin once said, we're all "day to day."

6 am/6:40, 67/74/51, 6:36

Blockadia

"Blockadia" is where the climate action is, these days.

Where's that? Nowhere, everywhere, "wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill." Or frack, or lay pipe, or in some other way disrupt and despoil local lands and communal traditions. It's a "roving transnational conflict zone" immediately focused on environmental integrity but ultimately about democratic control of vital resources by those whose lives and livelihoods depend on them.

Who are the Blockadians? Increasingly, everyday people. Professors, students, grandmothers, all kinds. Increasingly not stereotypical activists. Klein travels the globe in this chapter, finding Blockadians in Greece, Russia, China, Canada, Texas, "the middle of nowheres" that become "centers of everywhere."

All of this is so heartening, so encouraging of hopefulness that a critical mass of concerned citizens might actually begin not just to hold invasive corporate marauders and their government sponsors accountable for damages but actually to anticipate and prevent home invasion before it happens.

But, remember the 2010 BP oil spill? It was such a horror, now it's another old news story nearly forgotten. Do we have collective memory enough to make Blockadia a permanent place? Wendell Berry says we all just need to recommit ourselves to the concept of home, making global thinking the unforced flower of local action and "affection." "If each of us loved our homeplace enough to defend it, there would be no ecological crisis, no place could ever be written off as a sacrifice zone."

He's surely right, if we can see and value the sweetness of home wherever anyone hangs a hat. "Look again at that dot..." We may not get it right in the first several drafts, but if we persevere we may endure.

6 am/6:37, 66/93, 6:42

Anselm, Aquinas, and Emerson's eyeball

It's Anselm's ontology and Aquinas's Aristotelian "special pleading" today in CoPhi, with a side of Emersonian transparency.

Anselm's famous argument, less popular among theologians than some philosophers, merits Russell's respect. Is there "a bridge between pure thought to things," an armchair way of knowing? Wouldn't it be nice! But subordinating reason to faith, believing before understanding, gets things backwards. Existence runs faster than our knowledge of essence, Aquinas concluded, so you can't really know God from your armchair.

And yet, Aquinas's five "ways" of knowing about unmoved movers, first causes, necessity, perfection, and purpose, though fair, forceful, sharp, and clear, are plenty sedentary. They too place the cart before the horse, the conclusion before the argument. 

And that's why good philosophers get up out of their armchairs and move themselves to walk, talk, and think before they issue their summas. They roam, they take in nature's pagaent, and sometimes they ecstatically effuse.

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all...

Ralph was getting carried away there, the way poets can. Nobody's ever nothing, no seer sees all. But knowers go looking and seeing, they don't just muse from their seats. And then, like the other poet we mentioned, they frequently and unapologetically contradict themselves. "Nature always wears the colors of the spirit," we see what we project. So we'd better look often, all over. Only the armchair affords a single prospect.

==

Happy birthday H.G. Wells, who said "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." WA

6 am/6:36, 63/90, 6:44

Dim desperation

"Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea," declared William James a century and a quarter ago in an essay whose title cuts to the chase of Naomi Klein's next chapter: "Is Life Worth Living?" If we think it is, we might think twice about following the geoengineers who propose to dim the sun, spray sulfur into the stratosphere, induce a permanent haze, create a virtual volcanic parasol, or do any of the other mammoth-scale projects whose unforeseen outcomes could very well make life unlivable.

Or, in a last-ditch Hail Mary situation they could be our final dimming prospect for salvation. We're not quite there yet. not quite to Plan B. But what's Plan A, if not harnessing the sun and other sources of life here on the surface of our earth?

Klein reminds us that it is indeed our salvation we're talking about here. "In pragmatic terms our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely." So maybe we want to instruct the engineers to tread lightly and put the parasol away, until our science is at least an island and not just a drop in the sea.

James's theme is suicide, Klein's ecocide. How to resist both? James had an idea: "Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact." Or at least the will to postpone Hail Mary. It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

6 am/6:36, 65/88, 6:45

Angell, Apples, Augustine, Boethius

It's Augustine and Boethius in CoPhi today, and peripatetic thoughts on solitude and silence.

First, happy birthday to the great New Yorker editor and writer Roger Angell. He made himself a place in Cooperstown, saying baseball is "a great game for writers because it's just the right pace. You can watch the game and keep score and look around and take notes. Now and then you even have time to have an idea, which in many sports you don't have room for."

Young Augustine had ideas, some not half bad, but he was also stuffed with a sense of his and our sinfulness. He prayed hard for deliverance in due course but first dallied with delight and the dark-and-light Manichean struggle that seemed to suit his temperament. Unlike the Greeks he was sure that space and time are ex nihilo. Bertrand Russell thinks his philosophy of time, unlike the core of his theology, is worthy of consideration. The idea that Adam freely bit an apple and corrupted the rest of us for all time, though, infants and John Calvin included, was not so brilliant. He might have said more, we may say in hindsight, to address the impending darkness of medieval time.

Boethius, on the other hand, impresses Russell greatly despite his Platonism. Finding his greatest consolation in the philosophy of the Stoics, he didn't whine over his appalling imprisonment or weep for his sins. 

Frederic Gros says you can't ever really walk alone. I agree, as did Charles Schulz. One thing to be said for canines (and maybe this is what the Cynics really admired most): they don't wear you down with too much chatter. Sometimes I do think I too could turn and live with them.

Weekend update. Highlight of parents' weekend in Illinois: the annual Apple Festival in Murphysboro where we met an old woman who said she'd been at the very first one, 65 years ago. We came home with apples, apple butter, apple cider, apple pie... but without apple-induced anxiety for our eternal souls. Life is still good.

6 am/6:35, 71/87/61, 6:47

Not the messiah

Speaking of cynics...

A cynic, as we deploy the term nowadays, is someone whose highest regard is for his own self-interest, who considers himself too cool for rules, who mocks and scorns the public and its problems. But he may also, simultaneously, be a gifted and charismatic self-promoter, skilled in the arts of public relations and image-polishing, a lively fellow well-met and fun to be with, widely admired and envied, welcome on all the chat shows, followed by millions in social media, an opinion-leader and trend-setter whose influence and largesse politicians lust for.

Meet Richard Branson. He's no Diogenes, with the original Cynics "ardent passion for 'virtue' but little interest in material wealth or the standard conventions and 'amenities of civilization'." But he is a bit of a dog, it turns out, not necessarily with respect to our best  friends' qualities of love and loyalty but displaying their inconstant tendency, their swerving and meandering sense of direction guided by their latest sniff in the wind.

That, at any rate, is the picture of Sir Richard that emerges from Naomi Klein's "No Messiahs" chapter. His pledge a decade ago to spend $3 billion battling climate change and developing alternatives to fossil fuels has withered, his $25 million dollar Earth Prize has disappeared, his fleet of carbon-spewing Virgin flyers has expanded considerably and they're "burning significantly more carbon than when the pledge period began." A Friend of the Earth naturally concludes: "Branson's reinvention as a guilt-ridden planet-wrecker volunteering to use his carbon profits to solve the climate crisis was little more than a cynical ploy."

So sad. He's really not the messiah. Nor is Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg or C. Boone Pickens. Or Brian Cohen. There's still no sign that help will come to save us and our pale blue dot from ourselves and our false messiahs.

But we didn't have to follow Brian, and we don't have to follow Richard. We just have to keep on swelling the ground with a canine kind of loyalty to our home the earth, and the cynics will be forced to follow us.

5:40/6:32, 71/92/68, 6:53

Ancient therapy

It's Cynics, Skeptics, Epicureans, & Stoics today in CoPhi.

Cynics weren't so cynical as many of us have become. Diogenes "had an ardent passion for 'virtue' but little interest in material wealth or the standard conventions and "amenities of civilization." He did not value the common script that people called honor, wisdom, and happiness. Like Thoreau, he considered himself rich in the extent of all he could afford to let alone. He and his friends were, says our walking guide Gros, the only authentic peripatetics. He so loved dogs that he decided to live like one.

Pyrrho the skeptic cultivated indifference and neutrality, with respect to belief and conduct. Timon the skeptic acknowledged appearances but withheld all assent to their reality.

Epicurus disdained luxury, sought tranquility, and said neither death nor the gods are anything to fear. Sex for him (despite his movement's spurious reputation) was overrated, friendship underrated. His priority was the avoidance of pain, not the voracious chase for pleasure. He died like a Stoic.

Seneca died like a Stoic's Stoic, either heroically or foolishly depending on how much you value consistency and fatalism. Like Diogenes he inverted the conventional view of riches, preferring "the example of a virtuous life." 

"It is remarkable that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius," slave and emperor respectively, "are completely at one on all philosophical questions." Epictetus said, and all of the philosophical therapists we're seeing today, Aurelius to Zeno, agreed: "I am a citizen of the universe." In that highest allegiance they all felt "safe," and at home. Their civic sense, I say, is far superior to the Spartan chauvinism that inspired Plato's vision of republican perfection.

5:30/6:31, 69/90/67, 6:54

Fruits and roots

"Fruits, not roots" is our next chapter today from Naomi Klein, opening the "Magical Thinking" section of This Changes Everything. "When the Big Green groups refer to (carbon) offsets as the 'low-hanging fruit' of climate action," they're picking easy fruit rather than digging up the roots of our trouble.

It's also a strong pragmatic slogan favored by the likes of William James, emphasizing (with a twist of meaning) the greater value and impact of outcomes ("fruits") over origins ("roots"). It counters the "magical thinking" and false reassurance that we're going to be "saved at the last minute" by the market, by billionaires of conscience, by technology, or something. That sort of thinking is rooted in denial, denial in ideology, ideology in what James called "moral flabbiness" and our national disease.

The cure? Clear-eyed focus on the perilous probable outcomes of such wishful thinking, and a groundswell of popular sentiment demanding a switch to something else. How do you create a groundswell?

For starters, you don't go and join the other side, give aid and comfort to the enemy, or pretend that we're all fighting the same good fight. Fred Krupp is the villain primus inter pares in this regard. As leader of the Environmental Defense Fund, as Klein sees it, he flipped the wrong switch, from "sue the bastards" to "create markets for the bastards." He scolded aggressive greens for being too shrill and called for more humility and compromise. He gave up the fight, for the "low-hanging fruit" that doesn't fundamentally challenge the fossil fuel industry or the profligate consumption and pollution it sustains.

Some pragmatists would offer a different characterization of such a run to the middle, suggesting that confrontation only marginalizes, that cooperation wins in the end. Klein's point is that it's too late for that kind of thinking, which in the present context is really just another tepid variety of magic. There was a time when genuine bipartisanship coalesced around responsible centrism to save the habitable earth, a time that gave us the Clean Air Act, the Wilderness Act, the Water Quality Act... It was the time of environmental statesmen and advocates for the earth like Stewart Udall.  But that time has passed. We're now, very clearly, in a fight. Its fruits depend on our success in cultivating and spreading another kind of roots: grassroots. 

And that's today's good news: "a resurgent grassroots climate movement has now arrived, and it is winning a series of startling victories against the fossil fuel sector." The ground has just begun to swell, the movement to grow. Can we help?

5:30/6:30, 65/91, 6:56

Progress, Plato, Aristotle

More Platonic reflections from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in CoPhi today, and Russell on Aristotle.

Goldstein continues her reply to the philosophy jeerers and their slight that philosophy bakes no bread and gets us nowhere. She might have recalled William James's opening salvo in Pragmatism acknowledging the former but entirely repudiating the latter.

Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation.

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread,' as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more than professional.

In fact, philosophy constantly progresses in this way, by illuminating the "covert presumptions" that lie buried beneath our awareness. Facing, discussing, and sometimes revising or rejecting our various unexamined convictions can be the epitome, and always is the requisite condition, of progress at the level of reflective thought. What is truth, beauty, or goodness? You may think you know, but we need to talk about it.

The path of progress for Plato is dialogic, argumentative, and collaborative, like much scientific discourse; but unlike most scientific results, those of philosophy register most powerfully in personal terms, and are revealed in the progressive personal transformations of individuals rather than in "paradigm shifts"  impacting whole disciplines and epochs.

What is Platonism? It's an unfamiliar idea about ideas, that when they embody truth they do so by subsisting in an abstract realm beyond the reach of everyday sense (and common sense). "A Platonist asserts that the abstract is as real as the concrete, the general as realized as the particular." Or moreso. A Platonist is the diametric opposite of a Pragmatist.

And, a Platonist asserts the eternal intertwining of goodness, beauty, and truth: a Sublime Braid that cashes out for Plato's Socrates as humility and piety of a secular sort, a "strengthened kinship with the cosmos" through an uplifted infatuation with wisdom and "love for that which isn't oneself."

Aristotle's student Alexander, "arrogrant, drunken, cruel, vindictive, and grossly superstitious," was evidently not a good philosopher. Russell doubts he learned much from his tutor, but he did us the service of keeping Hellenic civilization alive long enough to produce a big chunk of our curriculum.

Aristotle was optimistic and teleological (or purpose-driven), convinced that "the universe and everything in it is developing towards something continually better." Coulda fooled us, or most of us. (But Goldstein's husband Steve Pinker, with his Better Angels, might offer qualified agreement.)

Aristotle's "good," unlike Plato's remote and abstract Form, is immanent and practically universal. It's that activity of the virtuous soul called eudaimonia, flourishing, or happiness. Everybody wants some, for its own sake. Aristotle's god is another story.

And what is virtue? It's any action that tends to produce happiness (but don't confuse happiness with fleeting pleasure. One swallow does not make a summer.

Some more possible points for discussion today: If Aristotle's metaphysics is Plato diluted by common sense, what's so common about it? Does each of us have an "essence"? What do you think of Aristotle's airy and impersonal God? Is happiness the only thing in the world that's intrinsically good, for its own sake? Is Aristotle's golden mean really golden, or is it vapid, formulaidc, and equivocal? Is it true what Fish said to Boghossian, that philosophical conclusions "do not travel"? What can that possibly mean, from a peripatetic or pragmatic point of view? 

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Marathon, "regarded as the kicking-off point for the rise of Classical Greece and the birth of Western civilization" (if you want to call it that). We're debating, at this late date, the deplorability of racists and other haters? People who casually fling the ugly word that rhymes with stitch, and worse, are offended by that perfectly apt and descriptive word?  That's deplorable.

Why is it so hard to live in the present? Past and future do seem more safe, sane, and secure. But here and now is where it's always happening, and here and now is where we store our past and hatch our possible futures. Here's where the progress has to happen.
==
Weekend update. Highlights: the veggie chimichanga at Guac, Meryl Streep as a really good bad singer, one last Sounds game, honey (etc.) from the Green Door csa, wonderful songs at summer's end (loving the new WMOT roots music!), and Sunday brunch at home. Especially that. No time for Titans. Life is good. 

5:45/6:29, 57/88, 6:57

Sustainable spirit

We are Extractivists. We are addicted to extracting and depleting finite resources. We've got to leave it in the ground, against the wishes of powerful private profiteers and their paid operatives who intend to drill and dig until it's all out, and against our own wishful denial of reality. Facing reality means challenging the model of limitless material growth and consumption. That's the message of Naomi Klein's next chapter: "We extract and do not replenish..." That can't be sustained indefinitely.

Klein nominates Sir Francis Bacon as the patron saint of our profligacy. Knowledge is power, the power to subdue and "hound nature... penetrating into [her] holes and corners." Klein enjoys noting the "poetic justice" of his catching pneumonia while trying to subdue a chicken. Nature does bite back.

The anti-extractivist ethic recognizes and reveres our reciprocal interdependency with the Earth and all its life-structures and forms. Aldo Leopold's land ethic, for instance, places us firmly within the biotic community not as master but as citizen-steward. Rachel Carson called out the arrogance of presuming to control nature, an attitude "born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."

Thoreau stands as the anti-Bacon in this narrative.  “The earth I tread on is not a dead inert mass. It is a body—has a spirit—is organic—and fluid to the influence of its spirit—and to whatever particle of the spirit is in me.” That's no spooky spirit, it's simply the salute of life respecting life, living light to live long and prosper. It's the spirit of survival and sustainability, and it's the spirit we'll need to propel us to the stars. The cosmic piety of Sagan and Tyson and Roddenberry ("we are star-stuff" etc.) has its roots in the natural piety of Wordsworth ("my heart leaps up") and James and Dewey.

Happy Trek Day. #LLAP

6 am/6:26, 69/93, 7:03

Caving with Plato

More Russell and Goldstein on Plato today in CoPhi.

Gold, silver, and bronze don't just honor Olympians in Plato's "perfect" world, they sort and order persons. His "royal lie" is about as hostile to democracy and equal opportunity as it gets, his sense of justice as a matter of discharging our assigned roles without complaint or overreach is shackling and stultifying, his confidence in the unique capacity of the guardian caste to discern and distinguish knowledge from opinion is immodest and elitist.

But, the cave makes for a nice metaphor if we don't pretend it limns more than the shadowy recesses of the un-philosophic mind. He thinks it points to the very gates of heaven, the ideal world of Form. Escaping the cave, for Plato, is apprehending and ascending to another world. For us Aristotelian skeptics it makes more sense to correct our shadowy misapprehension of caveland by seeking not another world but greater clarity about this one.

Still, the philosopher's compulsion to return to the cave bearing light is also the teacher's, and the Buddhist master's. It's a humanely-motivated and compassionate impulse. It's why you'd want to bring Plato to the Googleplex.

So, amidst my mild Plato-bashing I must remember to credit his good points. They include generational respect for the larger experience of older people, a call for gender equality way ahead of his time, and a probing curiosity to know the real world(s).

We'll also continue our consideration and practice of the peripatetic life, observing with Frederic Gros how prolonged habitation outdoors inverts our normal sense of where we're most at home, and how slowing down has a way of filling up the hour. Speed, on the other hand, kills. As Thoreau asked, how can you kill time without injuring eternity? One world at a time, one step at at time, and the pure presence of that shining moment.
==

Happy birthday Joe Klein, who

said of Donald Drumpf: “He has a feral intelligence. He reminds me of the Emperor Caligula who got his greatest pleasure from destroying his opponents and humiliating them, and he is brilliant at that.” He told Joe Scarborough: “I think that we have a citizenship deficit in this country where people don’t look at the issues. They do not study them at all and I think that [...] the American people are more comfortable with reality TV than with reality.” WA

And in that dull flickering light, happy Philo T. Farnsworth day.

6 am/6:25, 69/95, 7:04

Sally Brown's new philosophy

Back from the long Labor Day weekend, from the last regular season Sounds game, from Cheekwood, from biking the former railbed, and from practicing life in the empty nest, with more of Goldstein's Plato in CoPhi. Then in Environmental Ethics we'll consider Naomi Klein's contention that our aversion to long-term planning and our inability to so "no" have cut us off from past and future. Our entire present is a state of deep disconnect.

Plato's Ring of Gyges might be a tempting tool to use, to try and restore our lost connections. Would that end justify duplicitous means? What would Sally Brown say?*

Some scientists can't see the philosophical forest for the trees and thus become trapped in generational prejudice. They become philosophy jeerers, programmatically Ionian but without the enchantment. As for Goldstein, Russell's History was the source of her first philosophical enchantment.

Just say "no," says Klein, "to pipelines linked to expanded extraction," to coal, and to "demands to open up new carbon frontiers (like the oil trapped under melting Arctic ice)." Saying no the the Alberta tar sands was a nice, if belated, start. [SciAm]

*No!! I like it! "No!" That's a good philosophy.

"No!" "No!" "No!"

[SCHROEDER]

That's you new philosophy, huh?

[SALLY]

Yes. I mean-- "No!"

==
"On this date in 1847, Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond..." He'd have said no to all that, and an emphatic yes to David Budbill's shining present.

...the crippling power of mind, the curse of thought,

and I pause and wonder why I so seldom find

this shining moment in the now. WA

5:45/6:25, 69/95, 7:06

Vox populi and Pogo

In Environmental Ethics today, we consider one of the obstacles to a Great Transition: ideological hostility to the public sector. Germany, whose public sector not so long ago was the scourge of history, has shown the way with its Energiewende. 

A war on climate change that strengthens local economies, spreads social justice, and secures health and happiness for all is one we can all enlist in, once we remove from our eyes that mote of disdain for public ownership and control. It won't be an easy extraction, so deeply embedded as it is in our tradition of contempt for guv'mint initiatives.

Ronald Reagan said it's not the solution to our problems but is itself the problem, and his unblinking acolytes haven't doubted him. But we just have to keep reminding ourselves why governments are instituted among free men and women in the first place - to do the essential things the private sector can't or won't, for the common good. The public interest. The general will. It's possible to serve our shared interest and will without sacrificing respect for individual voices in the collaborative effort of securing the general welfare. We shouldn't let the specter of Rousseau or Lenin haunt or halt our public spirit.

So the Germans have achieved the world's most rapid shift to wind and solar. Boulder and Austin have taken important steps that way too. Several reports have suggested we could all follow suit in the decades just ahead, if we harness that political will to do the public's bidding. Some say the shift could happen as soon as 2030.

The Big Five oil companies keep promoting their own public spirit, in television advertising championing themselves as leaders in the race to transition. In fact, they've devoted a relative pittance to renewables. We shouldn't be surprised. They're in it for the money. The government, aka we the people, is going to have to mandate the transition. We're going to have to make them pay.

President Carter's famous "malaise" speech gets a mention today. I remember that speech, remember thinking how impressive a call it made for frugality in service of our survival and eventual flourishing. That's not what the pundits heard, though, and Carter's own adviser Christopher Lasch said it should have made a greater populist appeal for sacrifice from everyone including the corporate polluters.

"Why not the best?" was the rhetorical question Carter used to challenge us with. Part of why we fall short of our best is because our political culture has ingrained in us a deep self-mistrust, and an inability to grasp the Pogo-wisdom that we are our own worst enemy when we fail to see that the government is us. Nobody else is going to demand leaders "committed to making polluters pay for a climate-ready public sphere."

5:45/6:21, 75/86/65, 7:13