Perchance to dream

In CoPhi today we return to The Dream of Reason. What an apt title at this strange moment in our country's history, when the drowsy absence of commitment to reason, fact, and truth in the new administration feels increasingly and disorientingly somnambulistic. Gerald Ford's "long national nightmare" has a sequel. It's been said before...

It's very tempting, in these stress-inducing early days of the new fabulating denialist regime, to just nod off and request a wake-up call when it's safe and sane out there again. A leader really should read, and breathe fresh air at least once a day. ("Mr. Drumpf, who does not read books, is able to end his evenings with plenty of television... Mr. Drumpf can go for days without breathing in fresh outside air.") New studies show, Mr. President, that "when people get up and move, even a little, they tend to be happier..." 

But as Lord Russell said, that's a form of slumber to conjure monsters. We've got to keep our eyes open. Fight the power, for the planet. Sapere aude. Make the world safe again for the dreamers. And Dreamers.

It does in fact feel a bit like retreating into an ancient dreamscape, to take up the topic of preSocratic Milesians and Pythagoreans at a moment when every time we look up we discover the jarring rollback of another hard-won milestone of progress, on healthcare, the environment, gender equality, the 1st amendment, immigration...

But we must remind ourselves, those old first philosophers were modeling the very activity we must emulate now more than ever: throwing off convention, defying false authority, standing up to face the facts and seek the truth. They didn't know they were pre-anything, but went ahead and invented the best method of fact-finding and whistleblowing we've yet hit upon. They were our first, if not our best, naturalists (physici), and they were smarter than popularly believed. 

Thales may or may not have fallen in a well or monopolized the olive presses, but his claim about the ubiquity of H2O, "intimately connected with life" and flowing wherever life has managed to sustain and replicate itself, was not crazy at all. "In order to refute him we have to reason with him," as opposed I suppose to just stating the facts and telling the truth on him. (Or "giving him hell," as Harry Truman had it.) 

If Thales was a reductionist and precursor of Ockham and Thoreau ("simplify, simplify"), Anaximander "exemplified an additional and equally fundamental" scientific impulse, to peek behind the veil of appearances to discover the world's real generative machinery. He thought it was something determinative of all the oppositions we encounter in phenomena (hot-cold, wet-dry, red-blue) but itself indeterminate and without "observable qualities of its own." He called it apeiron (απειρων).

You can't mention him without also mentioning the other preSocratic "Anax"'s (unless you'd rather not be gratuitously confused) - Anaxagoras, whose matter/mind distinction has dogged us every since, and Anaximenes, who said the world comes from a vaporous mist. Onward through the fog.

What an odd duck was Pythagoras, with his numbers mysticism and belief in reincarnation and antipathy for beans and love for the inaudible celestial "music of the spheres." Study numbers, geometry, astronomy, and music, he instructed, and you'll grasp ultimate order in the cosmos.

Young Bertrand Russell had a Pythagorean and Platonic phase (as indeed did Plato), alleging our "highest good" in the mind's spectral "union with the universe." He later rethought that commitment, but in The Conquest of Happiness Old Russell still spoke of conjoining our respective destinies with the great "stream of life" (as I recently told congregants of the Sunday Assembly) that both antedates and succeeds our brief groundtime on Earth. Rising above petty day-to-day worries to contemplate eternity does in fact allow a bit of it to rub off on us, to lift us up. For a time.

Russell had another rethink, another "retreat from Pythagoras," ultimately giving up the hyper-rationalist "feeling that intellect is superior to sense." No. Intellect and sense have to collaborate, ideas, sensations, and perceptions have to come together and sound the alarm, to get us up and doing. Sleep then can be the restorative it's supposed to be, not an escape from responsible engagement with monsters and tweeters and oblivious fabulators who would trap us in their own terrible needs.

In Fantasyland today, Kurt Andersen says our "first great American heroine" Anne Hutchinson, early "feminist crusader," mansplaining target, etc., was also an early establisher of the subsequent  American Way: "so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality... she didn't recognize ambiguity or admit to self-doubt. Her perceptions and beliefs were true because they were hers and because she felt them so thoroughly to be true... [she] didn't have to study any book but the Bible to arrive at the truth. Because she felt it. She knew it." That certainly takes her down a peg. And us.

Freedom of thought in early America leaned in to supernaturalism and self-made-reality just as Europe's enlightenment - in the persons of Shakespeare, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and the like - was going in the opposite direction, towards the Age of Reason. Here it was "freedom to believe whatever supernaturalism you wished."

And so we got witches in Salem. "In 1692 virtually no one in New England disbelieved in witches." That's the legacy of Protestantism, says Andersen, no less than its contributions to its eponymous "work ethic."

In A&P today we finish Julian Baggini's Very Short Introduction. Baggini makes the case for naturalism and optimal rationality, wherein we "don't have to plug any gaps with speculation, opinion, or any other ungrounded beliefs." He notes that while "avowed" atheism may have a more recent lineage, its precursors include the ancient pre-Socratic Milesians mentioned above. "Anaxagoras is the earliest historical figure to have been indicted for atheism" (Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History... & see Tim Whitmarsh's Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World - "Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills"). 

Against the canard that Hitler, Stalin, and other monstrous modern autocrats have all been atheists, Baggini observes that none of them was "straightforwardly atheist" while all have "sacralized" themselves to quasi-religious status - and "sacralization is utterly foreign to mainstream rational atheism." Is militancy per se foreign to it as well?

"Most religious believers justify their faith by an inner conviction," and many of them will probably insist that that's also how non-believers justify their faithlessness. We should talk about that. Do inner convictions ever suffice to justify anything at all? Isn't subjectivity or temperament an inevitable factor in philosophy (as James said), even though western philosophy's official view is that it should not be? Or is inner conviction just a mirror of external, local contingencies of birth that we're not obliged to honor, defer to, or even respect?

"Avoid dogmatism." Hard to argue with that, but maybe it's also harder to follow than we want to admit. Foot-stamping and cursing aside, how many freethinkers will readily admit there might be something to theism after all? I'll admit there's this in it, for some: peace of mind. But peace of mind shouldn't be bought with false currency.

Humanists don't all agree on what a humanist is, but I agree with Baggini's broad definition: "Humanists are simply atheists who believe in living purposeful and moral lives."

Here's what I should have said to my friend Brian over beers at the Boulevard the other day: "In the case of ghosts, we not only lack a rational explanation of how ghosts can exist, we also lack any rational reasons to suppose that they do." 

And here's one of Baggini's parting statements: "Atheism is the throwing off of childish illusions and acceptance that we have to make our own way in the world. We have no divine parents who always protect us... [this is] the precondition for meaningful adult lives." That will strike plenty of theists as unfair. How does it strike us, A&P? It strikes me as a sharply-stated but not incorrect echo of Carl Sagan's milder, but no less protentous, Pale Blue Dot proclamation of "no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."

So in other words: grow up, humanity. Childhood's end beckons. Unlike Sir Arthur C. Clarke, I'm not worried about that marking the end of our happiness as well. (“They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of autumn...")

In Bioethics today we weigh the influence - directive and sometimes distortive - of various "perspectives" (feminist, cultural, traditional, religio-philosophic). There's no such thing as a view from nowhere, so we must make an honest accounting of how our respective points of view may predispose our conclusions.

The "Perspectives" chapter asks whether and how professional healthcare providers should negotiate or accommodate the various framework beliefs of patients. Or their parents. How should physicians treat and care for children whose parents object to medical intervention on religious grounds?

James again: we all have a philosophy that "determines the perspective in [our] several worlds... a more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos." It's our task today, and most every day, to notice those perspectives and talk about them. Lucky us.
==
On this day... poem-a-day
==
Rivendell... What to do with Fort Negley?
==
9.6.17. On this day in 1916, the first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, opened in Memphis, Tennessee. Piggly Wiggly was the first grocery store to let customers choose their own products. Before Piggly Wiggly, you handed your grocery list to a clerk, who walked around the store and selected your items for you on a shelf, and then rang you up...

Today is the birthday of social reformer and peace activist Jane Addams (books by this author), born in Cedarville, Illinois (1860). .. While in London, Addams visited a vegetable market and was appalled at the sight of vendors throwing bread and food in the air as a sport for paupers. The paupers clawed and scraped for tiny morsels of food. Addams was struck by how inhumanely the poor were treated. She and Gates vowed to do something when they returned to Chicago...

She and Gates raised money from other wealthy women, and found a large mansion in need of repair. They named it Hull-House, and within two years, they were serving 2,000 residents a week.

Hull-House held classes in cooking, English language, and citizenship, and even operated a day care, library, art gallery, and a kindergarten. Addams was a firm believer that education could lift children from dire circumstances. She said: “America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live.” WA
==
1.26.17 - 5:30/6:53, 41/47/32, 6:53/5:06. Happy birthday Hans Selye, the endocrinologist and stress/strain researcher who said: "Find your own stress level — the speed at which you can run toward your own goal. Make sure that both the stress level and the goal are really your own, and not imposed upon you by society, for only you yourself can know what you want and how fast you can accomplish it. There is no point in forcing a turtle to run like a racehorse or in preventing a racehorse from running faster than a turtle because of some 'moral obligation.' The same is true of people." ...And so long Mary Tyler Moore. Thanks for Laura and Mary.