But aren't we also like Jack Pearson, who loved the game as he loved his family? This is us, Pogo.
The infatuations and rationalizations of youth are hard to shake, even after we understand that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.) destroys minds and lives. Why do we still watch? Why do we still let our kids play?
"They knew what they were signing up for," we say, but until quite recently they did not - or did not want to. Players and fans seem to be instinctive metaphysical dualists, separating mind from body and pretending that one is insulated from the other. Mrs. Kelly says her husband knew football might wreck his body but didn't expect it to steal his mind and destroy his life.
On the other hand (it's easy for me to say), there also really are ennobling qualities on concurrent display in the best gridiron games - confidence, perseverance, resilience, toughness, trust, finally joy on one side of the field and stoic acceptance on the other - that we'd miss. They're qualities for which we'd need to find a moral equivalence. On my view, of course, we already pretty much have that in the old national pastime. (Happy birthday Babe Ruth.)
Could we ever replace halftime, though? There have been some good ones (like the Boss's) but you can keep Justin Timberlake's "psychotically chipper," "oddly benign," "eerily un-self-aware" production. Some of the commercials were okay, right Alexa? But please boycott Dodge Ram. And do you really want to encourage us to think about how much water's in your beer, Bud?
Today in CoPhi it's Empedocles and Anaxagoras.
But Phil's story has a sunnier, less "Faustian" outcome than Empedocles' legend avers. (I discount the magical theory that Phil actually died in Punxsutawney on February 1 and was thence stuck in purgatory, preferring the Buddhist interpretation of his release from samsara.) Still, in these calamitous times we all ought to give thought to where we're gonna go when the volcano blows. I just wouldn't count on coming back after the eruption, in any sensate form.
Love and strife clearly apply in many instances of sexual attraction, and sound a lot sexier than gravity and electromagnetism. They're useful categories for analyzing the interpersonal dynamics of social life, but do they really mirror the Big Bang and Big Crunch of astrophysical cosmology? Seems to me the value and relevance of such emotive terms, in mapping our psycho-sociological terrain, lies precisely in their intimacy - not in the scope, scale, and ultimate impersonality of universal laws. Stephen Hawking and Barbara Cartland aren't well matched after all.
On the other hand, Empedocles' prescience about biology and evolution are impressive. Darwin himself said he found his theory of natural selection "shadowed forth" by the Maybe Professor Dawkins would be a better match for Ms. Cartland? He does wax eloquent on the romance of science, in Unweaving the Rainbow and elsewhere.
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.” And so, “isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?”
Or if not Dawkins, then maybe we could hook her up with a popularizer of medical science like Lewis Thomas, Sherwin Nuland, Atul Gawande, or Siddhartha Mukherjee? The latter writes: “The art of medicine is long, Hippocrates tells us, "and life is short; opportunity fleeting; the experiment perilous; judgment flawed.” Gottlieb tells us that medicine ("or at least crude physiology") was Empedocles' favorite science.
Empedocles is said to have said:
- God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.
- No mortal thing has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration; there is only a mixing and then separating of what was mixed, but by mortal men these processes are named "beginnings.”
- The force that unites the elements to become all things is Love, also called Aphrodite; Love brings together dissimilar elements into a unity, to become a composite thing.
- Love is the same force that human beings find at work in themselves whenever they feel joy, love and peace.
- Strife is the force responsible for the dissolution of the one back into its many, the four elements of which it was composed.
- Many fires burn below the surface.
Anaxagoras was hugely important in our tradition for bringing naturalism and anti-superstition to Athens. In retrospect that might seem like coals to Newcastle, but in his day (c.460 BCE) Socrates was still an impressionable lad and the Greeks were still to discover the beauty of a rationally ordered nous. “Mind is god and god is Mind.”
Anaxagoras, it might be supposed, first seduced Socrates into a life of impiety (for denying godhood to the sun and moon). But Socrates ultimately thought him too far above superstition, paying "too much attention to the mechanical causes of things and not enough to their meanings and purposes." Wouldn't it be interesting to convene a reading club discussion of Unweaving the Rainbow with Anaxagoras and Socrates?
Anaxagoras thought "the senses provide us with blurred outlines of the world, which reason then brings into focus." Or tries to. That sounds right, so long as reason constantly checks its focus by returning, repeatedly, to the world of sense. A blurred outline is better than a blind speculation.
“Was Anaxagoras an atheist? There is nothing anachronistic about this question. In the late 430s, he was put on trial for “impiety,” on the grounds that he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies (which he undoubtedly did). This may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted for heretical religious beliefs.”
Anaxagoras, it might be supposed, first seduced Socrates into a life of impiety (for denying godhood to the sun and moon). But Socrates ultimately thought him too far above superstition, paying "too much attention to the mechanical causes of things and not enough to their meanings and purposes." Wouldn't it be interesting to convene a reading club discussion of Unweaving the Rainbow with Anaxagoras and Socrates?
Anaxagoras thought "the senses provide us with blurred outlines of the world, which reason then brings into focus." Or tries to. That sounds right, so long as reason constantly checks its focus by returning, repeatedly, to the world of sense. A blurred outline is better than a blind speculation.
“Was Anaxagoras an atheist? There is nothing anachronistic about this question. In the late 430s, he was put on trial for “impiety,” on the grounds that he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies (which he undoubtedly did). This may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted for heretical religious beliefs.”
"Set up about 438 BCE, the law against Anaxagoras’s atheism held that society must “denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky.”
“Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine, were taken away.” George Harrison went to India for that, he could have found it closer to home.
“Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine, were taken away.” George Harrison went to India for that, he could have found it closer to home.
Here's why students should love Anaxagoras: “In exile in Lampsacus, Anaxagoras made his final benefaction to humanity: the invention of the school holiday.”
According to Matt Ridley, “Anaxagoras’ belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated.”
According to Matt Ridley, “Anaxagoras’ belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated.”
So, he was a semi-emasculating philosopher. No dualist, he thought one would do. That brings us to one more point of praise for the old naturalist, from my perspective: he "thought of mind as a special form of matter, not as something completely different."
Finally, though, Anaxagoras was the worst sort of Stoic, far ahead of his time. Told of his sons' premature deaths, he said "I knew that my children were born to die." Knowledge is not always a consolation.
In Fantasyland today, a legend to rival Empedocles' volcanic leap. Ronald Reagan loved to tell the story of the supposed quasi-angel who showed up in 1776 to knock sense into our quarreling forebears before mysteriously vanishing.
Woodstock is the our great legendary sixties mise en scene, but Christianity had its Woodstock much earlier in 1801, as the wilds of Kentucky briefly became "among the most populous places in America." Cane Ridge (not to be confused with the mid-Tennessee softballers my daughter's team used to play) sounds like a bacchanal to rival the free love excesses of the flower power generation, celebrating "orgiastic individualism" with an evangelic twist. It heralded apocalyptic successor movements like Charles Finney's (his era's Billy Graham) and William Miller's.
Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831, gathering the observations that would inform Democracy in America's judgment that no country in the world is as fanatically Christian as America.
Joseph Smith wouldn't have believed his own story, if it weren't his own story. Hard to believe he was less credulous than the 15 million Mormons in the world today - not to mention all the deceased Mormons who've moved on to occupy their own planets-or have they?
In A&P we encounter several de-converts, one of whom - Lynnette - insists (contrary to common belief) that many upstart nonbelievers like herself were ardent and not lukewarm believers. She was devoted to her heavenly father, and perhaps needed to be, to compensate for the reported deficiencies of the earthly father whose "parental guidance" included the conviction that women are too credulous to lead. (Can anyone who's been paying any attention at all, in the age of Drumpf, possibly still subscribe to such a preposterous sexist stupidity? Too bad we can't sue our parents for malpractice.)
I've always wondered what made some theists so confident of their "personal relationship" with their lord and savior. It's really not much more than a feeling, Lynnette explains.
In Fantasyland today, a legend to rival Empedocles' volcanic leap. Ronald Reagan loved to tell the story of the supposed quasi-angel who showed up in 1776 to knock sense into our quarreling forebears before mysteriously vanishing.
Woodstock is the our great legendary sixties mise en scene, but Christianity had its Woodstock much earlier in 1801, as the wilds of Kentucky briefly became "among the most populous places in America." Cane Ridge (not to be confused with the mid-Tennessee softballers my daughter's team used to play) sounds like a bacchanal to rival the free love excesses of the flower power generation, celebrating "orgiastic individualism" with an evangelic twist. It heralded apocalyptic successor movements like Charles Finney's (his era's Billy Graham) and William Miller's.
Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831, gathering the observations that would inform Democracy in America's judgment that no country in the world is as fanatically Christian as America.
Joseph Smith wouldn't have believed his own story, if it weren't his own story. Hard to believe he was less credulous than the 15 million Mormons in the world today - not to mention all the deceased Mormons who've moved on to occupy their own planets-or have they?
In A&P we encounter several de-converts, one of whom - Lynnette - insists (contrary to common belief) that many upstart nonbelievers like herself were ardent and not lukewarm believers. She was devoted to her heavenly father, and perhaps needed to be, to compensate for the reported deficiencies of the earthly father whose "parental guidance" included the conviction that women are too credulous to lead. (Can anyone who's been paying any attention at all, in the age of Drumpf, possibly still subscribe to such a preposterous sexist stupidity? Too bad we can't sue our parents for malpractice.)
I've always wondered what made some theists so confident of their "personal relationship" with their lord and savior. It's really not much more than a feeling, Lynnette explains.
Chris, a wandering Catholic who went to Baptist churches to pick up girls, was taught (as so many of us were) to blame everything on our inherited sinfulness. Born broken, as Hitch used to say, commanded to be whole... And also like so many of us, he came to regard Hell as a ludicrous threat from a loving god. He found French existentialists and evolutionary biologists more credible, on matters of freedom, responsibility, and morality.
Cora wondered why God was so selective in answering prayer, and pray-ers, and was shocked to see how others saw the Saints of her Mormon faith. Naima, like everyone, could have benefited from early acquaintance with philosophy's exploration of choice and the enlarged conception of possibilities it reveals to be our discipline's greatest value - as Bertrand Russell pointed out.
In Bioethics we'll talk "research" - clinical trials and research involving animals and their rights, and genetics, and epidemiology. We'll look at the funding gap between what we need to cure and where our research dollars are actually going, and at the moral imperative of genuine and informed consent. We'll look at disturbing instances of fraudulent and dishonest research. And we'll consider Peter Singer's claims about "speciesism."
The future of research is a daunting source of apprehension and speculation. Michael Sandel and Bill McKibben have aired serious concerns about genetic and other "enhancement" research as potentially catastrophic for our capacity to achieve or even recognize "meaningful" lives. Enhanced may not mean improved, after all.
Happy birthday Babe Ruth, Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley...
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A smarter way to think about sexual assault on campus...
==
9.13.17. It was on this day in 1814 that Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner," by witnessing the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor... Before the war, the American flag had little sentimental significance for most Americans. It was used mainly as a way to designate military garrisons or forts. But after the publication of "The Star-Spangled Banner," even non-military people began to treat the flag as a sacred object... It's the birthday of the "Father of Bluegrass," Bill Monroe, born in Rosine, Kentucky (1911), a brilliant mandolinist and a hard-driving tenor singer... It's the birthday of British novelist, playwright, and essayist John Boynton — J.B. — Priestley (1894), who said, "Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness — when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be." And, "Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries." WA
==
2.2.17. 5:30/6:43, 39/47/29, 5:12. It's James Joyce's birthday. He who worried that people would look for a moral in Ulysses "or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.” Serious or not, there are some good lines: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.... To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.... “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past... Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand... I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”
He did take himself a bit seriously. When he met the venerated poet W.B. Yeats, he famously said, “We met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me.” And Yeats famously responded, “Never have I seen so much pretension with so little to show for it.”
Yeats, by the way, is usually credited with the bench wisdom attributed in our walnut grove to old Plutarch: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
My favorite Yeats quote, which sounds a lot like Emerson: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
==
Cora wondered why God was so selective in answering prayer, and pray-ers, and was shocked to see how others saw the Saints of her Mormon faith. Naima, like everyone, could have benefited from early acquaintance with philosophy's exploration of choice and the enlarged conception of possibilities it reveals to be our discipline's greatest value - as Bertrand Russell pointed out.
In Bioethics we'll talk "research" - clinical trials and research involving animals and their rights, and genetics, and epidemiology. We'll look at the funding gap between what we need to cure and where our research dollars are actually going, and at the moral imperative of genuine and informed consent. We'll look at disturbing instances of fraudulent and dishonest research. And we'll consider Peter Singer's claims about "speciesism."
The future of research is a daunting source of apprehension and speculation. Michael Sandel and Bill McKibben have aired serious concerns about genetic and other "enhancement" research as potentially catastrophic for our capacity to achieve or even recognize "meaningful" lives. Enhanced may not mean improved, after all.
Happy birthday Babe Ruth, Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley...
==
A smarter way to think about sexual assault on campus...
==
9.13.17. It was on this day in 1814 that Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner," by witnessing the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor... Before the war, the American flag had little sentimental significance for most Americans. It was used mainly as a way to designate military garrisons or forts. But after the publication of "The Star-Spangled Banner," even non-military people began to treat the flag as a sacred object... It's the birthday of the "Father of Bluegrass," Bill Monroe, born in Rosine, Kentucky (1911), a brilliant mandolinist and a hard-driving tenor singer... It's the birthday of British novelist, playwright, and essayist John Boynton — J.B. — Priestley (1894), who said, "Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness — when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be." And, "Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries." WA
==
2.2.17. 5:30/6:43, 39/47/29, 5:12. It's James Joyce's birthday. He who worried that people would look for a moral in Ulysses "or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.” Serious or not, there are some good lines: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.... To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.... “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past... Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand... I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”
He did take himself a bit seriously. When he met the venerated poet W.B. Yeats, he famously said, “We met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me.” And Yeats famously responded, “Never have I seen so much pretension with so little to show for it.”
Yeats, by the way, is usually credited with the bench wisdom attributed in our walnut grove to old Plutarch: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
==
*Groundhog Day, "a legend that traverses centuries" and an American tradition since 1887. Will Bill Murray's Phil Conners see his shadow? Do gods (or bodhisattvas) even cast shadows? Did you know the film's "a profound work of contemporary metaphysics"?
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