Locke & Spinoza, "chalk and cheese"

Happy Opening Day!

Today in CoPhi, "chalk and cheese" as Matthew Stewart has it. "Locke and Spinoza are the chalk and cheese of the early Enlightenment, or so it has long been maintained. One was moderate in all things; the other a thoroughgoing radical. One was supposedly a devout follower of Jesus; the other was known in his own day as the 'atheist Jew.'" But both had a huge impact on the enlightenment revolutionaries of our patimony. More on them below.*

Today in Fantasyland, Kurt Andersen says professors and college graduates ought to be important fighters defending reason but have instead become enablers of magical thinking. Case in point: Princeton-trained poli-scientist Jodi Dean, author of Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace and enthusiastic defender of "the veracity of people claiming to be not just (UFO) witnesses but abductees."

It's not just Higher Ed that's the problem. The largest charter school operator in Texas, a company called Responsive Ed, issues textbooks presenting Genesis as a scientific theory and dismissing evolutionary biology as "dogma" and "unproved theory." And that was before Betsy DeVoss.

Wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say about that. "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Sure, neighbor, say what you want. But don't compel young students to hear it in their science classrooms unless you want to turn out generations of blathering scientific illiterates. Oh. You do.
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Today in A&P, we meet Epicurus's dangerous idea, "a kind of universal acid [that] dissolves every pretension of religion... top represent the meaning of existence": nature always explains itself. Or will, given time and literacy.

Thomas Hobbes said Epicureanism is truer than Aristotelianism, invested as it is in understanding nature's causes but not positing prior purposes. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility," Einstein agreed, precisely because its causes are discoverable.

Is it better ("less remote from the truth") to believe nothing than to believe what's wrong? Jefferson the Epicurean thought so. That didn't block him from facing the hard but (speaking for myself at least) consoling truth that death redistributes our vital matter and grants our continuation in "a thousand forms" - animal, vegetable, and mineral.

Epicurus tumbled to Darwin's dangerous idea, approximately, that the complexity and diversity of life are due to natural selection and time, which "transforms the nature of the entire world." Nothing stays the same. As Lucretius put it, the pressures of survival, not the decrees of a transcendent authority, are responsible for "the creation of better and more just arrangements of society." May the pressures continue. They must.
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Today in Bioethics, Eula Biss plays some more with the vampire theme and her recognition as both a new mother and a patient that "we feed off of each other, we need each other to live," and that the whole mutual dependency framework of our lives is beautifully "aglow with humanity."

One of the troubling and less lovely expressions of humanity is our tendency to panic in the face of unwarranted and unsubstantiated fears. Such was the "cascade of panic" triggered by Andrew Wakefield's discredited study linking the MMR vaccine to autism. "Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford."

Refusal of immunity "as a form of civil disobedience" is an opportunity of privilege - "a privileged 1% are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99%." The refuseniks who think they're striking a solid blow against inhumane capitalists, especially Big Pharma, are missing a vital point: shared immmunity "is a system in which both the burdens and the benefits are shared across the entire population," hardly standard operating procedure under capitalism. Opting out really looks more like buying in and supporting the status quo, which is to devalue or ignore appeals to ethical principle in favor of (as Susan Sontag said) "the calculus of self-interest and profitability." What an impoverished state of mind and a shrunken state of heart.

And speaking of Dracula, one more time: "medicine sucks the blood out of people in a lot of ways." So maybe Biss's dad was right: "Most problems will get better if left alone." Problems abound, though, if our reason for choosing to leave them alone is an absence of trust in medical practitioners.

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*Spinoza didn't make it easy on himself by affirming pantheism, but perhaps he found the solace of solidarity with nature and the universe sufficiently off-setting and worth the cost in personal terms. He thought he'd touched all the bases: God, nature, freedom, emotion, everything. QED(Not quite easily done.)

He "claimed to demonstrate both the necessary existence and the unitary nature of the unique, single substance that comprises all of reality. Spinoza preferred the designation "Deus sive Natura" ("god or nature") as the most fitting name for this being, and he argued that its infinite attributes account for every feature of the universe."

An infinite God leaves no remainder, but also leaves individuals without a personal savior. He didn't think he needed one, with his rationalist's intellectual love of God. Free will may be an illusion, but a Spinozism of freedom is supposed to free us from reactionary passions like anger and self-pity. He would have been pleased by Einstein's endorsement. “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind..."

But, freedom? "It would be moral bondage if we were motivated only by causes of which we remain unaware, so genuine freedom comes only with knowledge of what it is that necessitates our actions. Recognizing the invariable influence of desire over our passionate natures, we then strive for the peace of mind that comes through an impartial attachment to reason." Much easier said than done. But again, Spinoza wasn't about easy.

Anthony Gottlieb's Spinoza brought "a breeze of the future," a foretaste of our present, with determinism and secularism in the ascendant in the most enlightenend quarters. Was he really "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers," as Bertrand Russell averred? "Those who were acquainted with him," said Bayle in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, called him "social, affable, honest, obliging, and of a well-ordered morality." But they didn't confirm his mythic identity as a humble lens grinder scrabbling to sustain himself for his philosophic labors. "[H]is lens-making was primarily a scientific pursuit rather than a commercial one."

If we "understood clearly the whole order of Nature," according to Spinoza, we'd come to his conclusion that "all things [are] just as necessary" as a true mathematical proposition. "Unfortunately, people did not come to see this at all." Fortunately, I say, lest we stop trying to be the change we want to see in the world. He'd say not to sweat that, if we want change then we necessarily will do what we think we must to achieve it... but we can't bank on making a difference that confounds the "whole order." And I say, again, I'm banking on it.

This God-intoxicated man has many secular and atheistic intellectual descendants, who are tarred by "no stigma in economically developed countries except the United States." Still, "he believed that he believed in God." Maybe Einstein did too, Gottlieb's judgment that he was "probably just being diplomatic" notwithstanding.

John Locke's empiricism overstated the blankness of our slates, and relied too heavily on memory as a guarantor of personal identity. Thomas Reid was not in his league, but may still have had a better idea with his overlapping memories thesis. Until we become cyborg, total recall will not be an option.

"Locke's grand work," said C.S. Peirce, "was substantially this: Men must think for themselves."

Thomas Jefferson may have overstated the case for Locke's influence on the founding generation of the American republic, but if he influenced the sage of Monticello it would seem to follow that in fact his shadow has loomed large. A direct line can be drawn from his social contract to John Rawls's, and from there to the current generation of progressive politics in America... to say nothing of his namesake on Lost. The authority of a rulers derives from the freely-contracted consent of the governed, or from nowhere. It doesn't come down from heaven nor out of the barrel of a gun.

Locke "greatly admired the achievements that his friends in the Royal Society had made in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and he sought to clear the ground for future developments by providing a theory of knowledge compatible with such carefully-conducted study of nature. The goal of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was to establish epistemological foundations for the new science by examining the reliability, scope, and limitations of human knowledge in contrast with with the pretensions of uncritical belief, borrowed opinion, and mere superstition. Since the sciences had already demonstrated their practical success, Locke tried to apply their Baconian methods to the pursuit of his own philosophical aims. In order to discover how the human understanding achieves knowledge, we must trace that knowledge to its origins in our experience."

The Essay Concerning Human Understanding sounded the Enlightenment keynotes: think for yourself, question conventional and inherited wisdom, stop quibbling and splitting hairs about angels on pinheads (etc.)

Samuel Johnson's stone-kicking refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealism is usually met with derision, but as a practical response I place it in the same category as Diogenes' ambulatory refutation of Zeno's paradoxes. Works for me.

Berkeley's idealistic immaterialism ("in which he employed strictly empiricist principles in defense of the view that only minds or spirits exist") deserves some derision, though it also makes a perverse kind of sense if we don't repudiate Locke's representational realist assumption about ideas and their putative inferential sources. Better to repudiate, and admit that experience gives us the world - not just ideas of a world. But it gives us a world in need of elaboration and refinement, which was always the point of reflecting on experience in the first place.

Better also to repudiate the idea that being and perceiving are one. But, Berkeley's Three Dialogoues between Hylas and Philonous (1713) is still an entertaining read. "Here Berkeley spoke through Philonous ("Mind-lover"), who tries to convince his reluctant friend Hylas ("Woody") that it is only by rejecting the artificial philosophical concept of material substance that skepticism can be finally defeated and the truths of common-sense secured."

3 Gauls in faith and doubt

Finally went to see Black Panther. What a lavish, gorgeous cinematic spectacle! But I'd like to believe a technologically sophisticated society like Wakanda would also have developed more sophistication in its governance and leadership succession. Death challenges really do not suit an advanced civilization.

But King T'challa had a sophisticated point when he said: “In times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” He's got my vote... if he explains how all that technology can sit easily alongside a pre-scientific worldview involving the conjured spirits of the ancestors. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," said Arthur C. Clarke, but not from the standpoint of those who developed the technology. Or are we going to say that Vibranium did it, and we don't know or care how? What a backwards, apathetic stance that would be. Speaking of apathy...

On Saturday, noted David Remnick, "thousands of American teen-agers marched on Washington to protest gun violence in their schools. This was more than inspiring—it was a bracing reminder to the rest of us that the course of events is in our hands, and that apathy is a choice." I hope their teen spirit is contagious, at our school and everywhere else.

Three Gauls today, in CoPhi: Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal - a humanist skeptic, a rationalist/foundationalist, and a fideist gambler, respectively. The first and last were known for slogans in their native tongue: "Que sais-je?" ("What do I know?") and "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point." ("The heart has its reasons that reason does not know at all.") More on them shortly.*

Today in Fantasyland, another "channeled" dictation: A Course in Miracles alleges confirmation of Descartes' worst nightmare - "that physical existence is a collective illusion--'the dream.'" Dreams preempt systematic scientific inquiry but, mirabile dictu, make it possible for each of us to "create your own reality." What if yours contradicts mine, though? Aren't we going to need some applied science to sort it out?

Her hat's not formally in the ring yet, but Andersen's probably not going to support a presidential bid from Oprah. He says she, "more than any other single American by far, outside conventional religion and politics, is responsible for giving a platform and credibility to magical thinking... an inclusive promoter of fantasies--extraterrestrial, satanic, medical, paranormal..." She propelled The Secret to its iconic status (but don't call her New Age). She elevated Drs. Phil & Oz to celebrity status. She does seem, ironically enough, to be a force of nature.

The not-so-secret "law of attraction" says you just need to think the right thoughts-and if things aren't working out for you, you're just not thinking and believing hard enough to harness "placebo power." Believe and receive. This magical doctrine becomes truly pernicious when it's invoked to excuse dishonesty, as in the case of our benighted Tweeter/Grabber in Chief: "...it doesn't matter if he lies as long as what he says feels true." It does. It doesn't.

Today in A&P, we pick up Matthew Stewart's Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. "Many historians today take for granted that the reference in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence to 'the laws of Nature and of Nature's God' amounts to a gesture of conventional piety" supporting religious conservatives' declamation that America was founded as a Christian nation.

But Stewart's thesis is that it instead reflects the founders' Deism, that "it refers to nothing that we commonly mean by the term 'God,' but rather to something closer to 'Nature.' It tells us that we are and always have been the source of our own authority; that we govern ourselves not through acts of faith but through acts of understanding." It invites us to pair John Locke's ideals (life, liberty, property) with Baruch Spinoza's understanding of nature as entirely inseparable from ourselves.

When I was growing up, all I knew about Ethan Allen was that his name fronted a furniture store we often drove by. In fact he was a revolutionary hero and, despite a lack of formal schooling, an inspired/inspiring author and advocate of enlightenment values. His Oracles of Reason (was it all his?) was for some a secular Bible. It had words for the spirit behind A Course in Miracles:

“In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in such parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue; which is of itself a strong presumption that in the infancy of letters, learning and science, or in the world's non-age, those who confided in miracles, as a proof of the divine mission of the first promulgators of revelation, were imposed upon by fictitious appearances instead of miracles.”

And

“I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism make me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not, strictly speaking, whether I am one or not, for I have never read their writings... [I] wish that good sense, truth and virtue may be promoted and flourish in the world, to the detection of delusion, superstition, and false religion..."

And in a self-referential "hoist on your own petard" passage, "Those who invalidate reason, ought seriously to consider, "whether they argue against reason, with or without reason..."

He also believed, as we'll see in an upcoming chapter, in intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, in "alias worlds." He'd surely agree with the Pythons' Galaxy Song - "there's bugger all down here on earth."

Was Melville thinking of Allen when he said he wrote the godliest things with the soul of an atheist? Is "godly" the word he's looking for?

Thomas Young, "unquestionably the most unwritten about" distinguished revolutionary, may have "collaborated" with Allen on his Bible. His writing chops were all over the propaganda "engine" he cofounded with other infidel Deists. (Were there any important non-Deist infidels then?) He thought "the whole story" of Christian salvation a "big fraud."

Nature's God goes boldly where just a few "scrupulous and worthwhile" scholars including Susan Jacoby have gone before. Young Jefferson boldly went to Philadelphia for an inoculation against the pox. Deism was another form of inoculation, against another form of pox. Allen thought the very air (and sunlight, and natural waters) a tonic source of knowledge.

The "individualistic side of Protestantism" pushed to its extreme by Jonathan Edwards was, we've seen, an enabler of magical fantasyland thinking.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man inspired Young, as well as Enlightenment icons Kant and Voltaire, and gave us some of our favorite literary cliches. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast... to err is human... fools rush in... a little learning is a dangerous thing."

But, “Whatever is, is right” is wrong wrong wrong. Thus spake the pragmatic meliorist.

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee;All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good. And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is right.”

Young and his fellow "natural-born rebels" sought more than freedom of religion?, but the fuller freedom that exempts the irreligious from self-misrepresentation - a "religion of freedom," if you will. (I won't, freedom needs no religion if free men and women have sufficient understanding.)

Today in Bioethics, we wonder what's "natural" and why we sometimes forget how natural it is to incur illness. Michael Pollan says natural doesn't mean anything, anymore. "Something in the human mind, or heart, seems to need a word of praise for all that humanity hasn’t contaminated, and for us that word now is “natural.” Such an ideal can be put to all sorts of rhetorical uses. Among the antivaccination crowd, for example, it’s not uncommon to read about the superiority of something called 'natural immunity...'”

We also look at the legacy of Rachel Carson, wondering if it should bother us that some of her specific predictions about DDT have not been confirmed. Is the fact that she "woke" us to a problem we'd not acknowledged all that finally matters? How does that claim play against the backdrop of these specific times, when truth-telling is so compromised?

*Descartes, of course, preferred his previously noted Latin cogito declaration. I can't help repeating Kundera's quip: that's the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothache. I've never been more certain of anything in my life, than of the body's various aches and pains. I'm more certain of them every day. Fortunately, solvitur ambulando is still my working slogan.

Descartes wanted only good apples in his sack, by Nigel's analogy. He was prepared to waste a lot of perfectly acceptable beliefs, in order to avoid potential errors. Unlike James he thought our errors are awfully solemn things, not necessary and instructive steps along the way of life and learning. He rejected what Pyrrho and Montaigne both  accepted, the inevitability of uncertainty. As Sarah Bakewell says of Montaigne, “Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection in this way, and even to embrace it." Pascal also hated not knowing, but decided the best route ultimately was not the Rationalist Road.

Might we be dreaming? Doubting Descartes, early in his Meditations, says what do you mean we? Ultimately he decides we're all here, at least as awake as Gilbert Ryle's ghost can be. If we can trust our clear and distinct perceptions we can rule out the evil demon hypothesis, and stop worrying that we might be brains in vats, or humans in matrix-like pods, or something.

Descartes' "most practical critic" was the American C.S. Peirce, who said we shouldn't pretend to doubt in philosophy what we don't question in life. One of Descartes's surprising contemporary admirers is A.C. Grayling. He thinks Descartes was wrong about consciousness and the mind-body problem, but wrong in wholly constructive ways that have benefited subsequent philosophy.

Montaigne, Bakewell points out, answered his own question about "How to live" with hard-won but much-treasured lesson that Epicurus was right, death per se is not one of our experiences. He learned that from his own "near death experience," which he says taught him that nature drips a comforting anaesthetic into our veins when we need it most. “If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”

But, "as Seneca put it, life does not pause to remind you that it is running out.”

Many readers through the past half-millennium have been struck by the contemporaneity of Montaigne's mind, his capacity for "living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history" and speaking to them like a friend and neighbor despite the distance of centuries and the differences of culture. He achieved that authorly immortality so many have aspired to, but so few actually attained.

He achieved, in his own terms, freedom. “Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.”

"Given the huge breadth of his readings, Montaigne could have been ranked among the most erudite humanists of the XVIth century. But in his Essays his aim is above all to exercise his own judgment properly. Readers who might want to convict him of ignorance would find nothing to hold against him, he said, for he was exerting his natural capacities, not borrowed ones. He thought that too much knowledge could prove a burden, preferring to exert his ‘natural judgment’ to displaying his erudition." SEP

And, as we've already apreciated about him, Montaigne was a peripatetic who said his mind wouln't budge without a big assist from his legs.

Pascal's best thoughts (and worst) are in his best-known book, Pensees.  His best invention was a rudimentary calculator called the Pascaline. His most noted argument was for a wager that asked "what have you got to lose" by believing? That depends on how you think about the integrity of belief, and on how much you value your Sundays. I'm betting there's both more in heaven and earth (if you invert the terms) than Pascal dreamed.

Pascal said: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” And “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” And “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” (But, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”)   And “I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.” (That's what Mark Twain, and really all the wittiest wits, said too.) And “To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” (But Nigel says he said he wasn't one.)

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” But, “People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” That's why Descartes took the Rationalist Road. Pascal sticks to Faith Street: “It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.”

So, how do you know you're awake and not dreaming? Is it meaningful to say "life is but a dream"? Does "Inception" make any sense at all? Are you essentially identical with or distinct from your body (which includes your brain)? If distinct, who/what/where are you? How do you know? Can you prove it? Is there anything you know or believe that you could not possibly be mistaken about, or cannot reasonably doubt? If so, what? How do you know it? If not, is that a problem for you?

Do you believe in immaterial spirits? Are you one, or hoping to be? Can you explain how it is possible for your (or anyone's) material senses to perceive them?

At what age do you hope to retire? What will you do with yourself then? Will you plan to spend more time, like Montaigne, thinking and writing?

Have you had a near-death experience, or known someone who did? What did it teach you/them? How often does the thought occur to you that you're always one misstep (or fall, or driving mistake) away from death?

What have you learned, so far, about "how to live"? Have you formulated any life-lessons based on personal experience, inscribed any slogans, written down any "rules"?

Do you agree that, contrary to Pascal, most nonreligious people would consider it a huge sacrifice to devote their lives to religion? Why? Is the choice between God and no-god 50/50, like a coin toss? How would you calculate the odds? At what point in the calculation do you think it becomes prudent to bet on God? Or do you reject this entire approach? Why?

Renaissance

We conclude Gottlieb's Dream of Reason today  in CoPhi, with the Renaissance. Scholastic hairsplitting was down, classical antiquity was up, scientific reason was heating up, the Enlightenment was on deck. Rene Descartes waits in the wings with his cogito, ergo sum.

But, why cogito? Why not spiro (I breathe...)? Indeed, as Milan Kundera suggests, why not rideo? (I ache...) "'I think, therefore I am,' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches." Descartes' reply, that his thinking is of the essence because it is indubitable, is dubious. But we'll get to that, let's not put Descartes before the horse.

The Renaissance was not a period of great achievement in philosophy, but it did certain things which were essential preliminaries to the greatness of the seventeenth century. In the first place, it broke down the rigid scholastic system, which had become an intellectual strait jacket. It revived the study of Plato, and thereby demanded at least so much independent thought as was required for choosing between him and Aristotle. In regard to both, it promoted a genuine and first-hand knowledge, free from the glosses of Neoplatonists and Arabic commentators. More important still, it encouraged the habit of regarding intellectual activity as a delightful social adventure, not a cloistered meditation aiming at the preservation of a predetermined orthodoxy... The attitude of Renaissance scholars to the Church is difficult to characterize simply. Some were avowed free-thinkers, though even these usually received extreme unction, making peace with the Church when they felt death approaching. Most of them were impressed by the wickedness of contemporary popes, but were nevertheless glad to be employed by them.  Russell

The new Renaissance humanist movement placed more stock in the quality and clarity of writing, than the logical contortions and convolutions of theological apologetics. It laid new emphasis on the philosophical subdisciplines of ethics and political philosophy, with the likes of Machiavelli and his "manly" prince, and Hobbes' nightmare state of nature, both offering bleak "realistic"/materialistic assessments of human nature. Most modern-day humanists have a much sunnier outlook.

"Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance that affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. Humanism stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethics based on human and other natural values in a spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. Humanism is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.” 

Some are even Brights, espousing a "naturalistic worldview, free of supernatural or mystical elements."

"It was possible—two or three hundred years ago—to believe that human beings were a variety of different tribes and even species ... We know now that’s not true. We know that we have a single origin." Andrew Copson, recommending the best books on humanism. Stephen Law wrote a very nice "short intro"which begins: "The word 'humanism' has had, and continues to have, a variety of meanings. At its broadest, 'humanism' means little more than a system of thought in which human values, interests, and dignity are considered particularly important. Understood in this way, perhaps almost everyone qualifies as a humanist (including those of us who are religious)."

Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, who spoke yesterday with Terry Gross, certainly qualifies. The compelling story of how he lost his religion, though not his professional and personal interest in it, by reflecting on the perennial problem of suffering is recounted in God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question.

The Dutch humanist Erasmus "made scholasticism seem absurd and petty," or maybe he just made it reveal its pettiness and absurdity. (Did you see what Senator Franken said about absurdity, btw?) French comic parodist Rabelais knew absurdity when he saw it, too. 

Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate polymathic Renaissance Man, said scholars should study the world directly and not spin their wheels recycling old untested ideas and musty books. "Go direct to the works of nature." He really thought “the knowledge of all things is possible,” “the noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding,” and "learning never exhausts the mind."  He bought Ockam's razor. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." He was a pre-pragmatist. “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” And, "people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” Maybe that's where Dr. Seuss got "If things start happening, don't worry, don't stew, just go right along and you'll start happening too."

The Florentine explorer Vespucci betrayed more than a bit of old world prejudice when he said the New Worlders were more Epicurean than Stoic, more hedonistic than dutiful.

Francis Bacon, often extolled as a "prophet of modern science," nonetheless wanted to "build on astrology, alchemy, and magic" because (as we're always told he said, but almost never told why) "knowledge is power." Neil Tyson's favorite scientist Newton was also, oddly, an occultist and alchemist. But by his time was that was no longer considered normal science, so he downplayed it. The science-magic continuum would continue to dissipate, even though Sir Arthur C. Clarke famously said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Indistinguishable by scientific illiterates, he meant. Magical thinking is entertaining at Hogwart's, but the sooner we dispel the demon-haunted world of irrational fear and superstition the better.

Still, the continuum was in place long enough for Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler all to be impressed by Platonism and sun-worship. "The sun can signify God himself to you," said Platonist Ficino. We are all star-stuff, and owe our lives to our nearest star. But it's a mark of scientific rationality to be struck and even moved by such relationships (see the Sagan quote from last time, about the intrinsic spirituality of science) without bowing down in worshipful submission.

What a "remarkable development" was Gutenberg's printing press, giving rise to "a deluge of books" and mass literacy. Too bad so many of us these days don't take advantage of it. As Mark Twain said, there's no practical difference between one who can't read and one who won't. Or, one who won't write or read more than 140 characters at a time. Looking at you, Mr. President. "There is not much thinking going on. He hears things that please him and repeats them, like a magpie making a nest."

Montaigne was an underrated Renaissance figure, father of the essay, moderate skeptic ("Que sais-je?"), and anti-Descartes. More on him soon. His cousin Sanchez first named what we call "scientific method" and said it could support only "limited claims about the appearances." Limited, but also correctable and growing.

Martin Luther's protestant reformation partook of just enough Renaissance spirit to refuse to accept papal and ecclesiastic infallibility. He was not without his own dogmatic streak, however. "A good Christian should look to the Scriptures, interpreted in the light of his conscience and his own religious experience, in order to find out what to believe." But shouldn't he also listen to others, and learn from their experience too? If “reason is the devil’s whore,” we're in big trouble. 

The French mathematician Gassendi "revamped Epicurus' picture of the universe" to make it more Bible-friendly, saying atoms swirl in the physical realm but their laws don't apply in the spiritual world. Christian atomism was convenient, at least. But is it tenable? Mustn't a scientific naturalist refrain from such speculation, and stick to his atoms?

Metaphors are important. Descartes proposed to support the new scientific worldview of Galileo with a building construction metaphor, that of firm foundations. Raze the edifice of belief to the ground, build it up again with bricks of indubitable certainty. But can we get enough of those to make the metaphor stand?

In Fantasyland today, we recall the last American president for whom "the world of legend and myth were a real world"-the same who told that preposterous angel anecdote about Thomas Jefferson and the founders. There he goes again. (Bonus base opportunity, kids.)

We also try to recall the vanishing time before the '90s when "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" didn't spread quite so fast and wide as they do now, thanks to the web that was supposed to bring us all closer to knowledge, truth, facts, and reality. "Reality: what a concept"-said what late comic whose tv costar now says he was grabby, flashy, and inappropriate on set?

80% of Americans say they never doubt the existence of God. What would Descartes say? Possibly, what Bacon said: begin with certainties & you'll end in doubts, but begin with doubts and you may end in certainties. In my experience, the best thinkers begin and end in doubts. They do not quest for certainty. Stay tuned for the anti-Descartes, Montaigne.

Augustine's instruction 1,600 years ago is still pretty valid, no doubt: Don't be stupid, don't interpret holy writ literally.

In A&P today, we wrap up Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers. It ends with The Great Agnostic Robert Ingersoll's eulogy for Walt Whitman, one of the heroes of the American Renaissance, whose thought was as candidly free and affirming as anyone's has ever been. “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals... argue not concerning God... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book..."

"He was the poet of the natural," who thought he

"could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d; I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition; They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God; Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things; Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago; Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."

Whitman and Ingersoll were secular humanists, as "robust" a creed as a godless person could want. But Jacoby says the term has acquired a "vaguely bureaucratic ring." She says "it is time to revive the evocative and honorable freethinker, with its insistence that Americans think for themselves" and its commitment tot "the best human hopes for a more just earth." That's a revival we humanists can attend with enthusiasm.

If you're looking for another good book by SJ, there are many. The latest is Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion. There she writes:

"For atheists raised not in fundamentalist environments but in more moderately observant religious families, the diminution of belief tends to occur gradually and is characterized by an incremental rejection of dogma. Atheism rarely manifests itself either as Saul’s sudden knock on the head in the Acts of the Apostles or as Augustine’s tortuous spiritual passage described in his Confessions..."

Today in Bioethics, we commence Eula Biss's On Immunity...

Some questions: Is there a sharp difference between writing well and thinking logically? Why do you think so many scholastic/medieval philosophers were poor writers? How can you become a better writer and clearer thinker? Was Machiavelli right, about how power works in the real world? If European explorers like Vespucci understood that European knowledge was at best incomplete, at worst just wrong, why were so many of them still so confident that the natives they encountered in the New World were sub-human? Why in general are humans still so quick to denigrate those who are different, or who have different customs?
Is there any proper place for astrology and magic in the modern world? It's been estimated that the average social media user could read 200 books in the time they spend online. What would they gain? What would they lose? What's the right balance? Do you trust your own conscience and experience more than that of religious leaders like the Pope? Does knowledge need foundations? Can you agree with Machiavelli about leadership without being a sexist or an autocrat? Are people fundamentally selfish, in your experience? Are you? Can people change?
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Peripatetic news update. 10K steps may not be enough for optimal health. “It takes effort, but we can accumulate 15,000 steps a day by walking briskly for two hours at about a four-mile-per-hour pace... This can be done in bits, perhaps with a 30-minute walk before work, another at lunch, and multiple 10-minute bouts throughout the day. Our metabolism is not well-suited to sitting down all the time.”
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10.25.17. It's the birthday of the artist Pablo Picasso, born in Malaga, Spain (1881), who was living in a bohemian community in Barcelona painting portraits of his friends and acquaintances when one of his paintings was selected for inclusion in the upcoming world's fair in Paris. He was just 18... By the middle of the 20th century, he was generally considered the greatest living artist in the world. Pablo Picasso, who said, "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

It's the birthday of comedienne Minnie Pearl (books by this author), born Sarah Ophelia Colley (1912) in Centerville, Tennessee, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do lumberjack. She majored in theater, taught dance lessons, and joined a theatrical troupe which went all over the south. While on tour she met a woman from the Alabama mountains whose manner of talking amused her. The young comedienne Sarah Colley imitated the mannerisms and mode of speech of the Alabama mountain woman in an act where she called herself "Cousin Minnie Pearl", which first appeared in 1939. Nashville radio executives saw the act and were impressed and in 1940 offered her the chance to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. It was a huge hit, and she'd continue with the Opry for more than 50 years. WA==
Orig.publ. 3.23.17. It was on this day in 2010 that President Barack Obama (books by this author) signed into law the Affordable Care Act, the most sweeping piece of federal legislation since Medicare was passed in 1965. Universal health care had long been a dream of the Democratic Party. The passage of the bill extended health care to almost 32 million Americans.

And today marks the first day in 1942 when the U.S. government began moving Japanese-Americans from their West Coast homes to internment camps. Between 110,000 and 120,000 people were forcibly relocated. Some Japanese-American men were drafted into the War even as their families remained incarcerated. The camps remained open until 1945. WA

5:30/6:47, 40/71, 6:59

Saints and secularists

In CoPhi today, another quick pass at the heroes of late antiquity/middle ages. Augustine was a Manichean before his dilatory conversion to Christianity and its omnipotent Deity and supernaturally-rooted disdain for human reason.

Boethius's consolation came mainly from stoic philosophy, not Christianity, but he lets God off the hook (in anticipation of Aquinas) by flattening time and letting Him "see everything in one go in a timeless sort of way."

Anselm's Greatest Conceivable God possesses Being irrefragably and necessarily, if you believe in the power of words to compel reality.

Peter Abelard may have been "the first serious moral philosopher of medieval times" but his lust for Heloise came at a painful and irreparable cost. Perplexing. What would he have liked to synthesize?

Ockham's "razor" was a simple tool. Too simple, for a complex world? Giordano Bruno could have used it, though.

In Fantasyland today we're reminded - wouldn't you rather forget? - that the occupant of the formerly-most-respected office in the world once slapped and body-slammed the head of the WWF on stage. He's been slapping the rest of us since.

Burning Man is another fantasy stage for adults of all ages, who go to the desert and dress up as unicorns, birds, mermaids, geishas etc., and "step through the looking glass - that is, through the LED screen - to inhabit Azeroth or Tatooine" or wherever. Kids 'R' Us for sure, innocently and harmlessly enough for most perhaps, but Michael Jackson was another story.

In A&P today we note the ascent of Catholicism in America in the '30s, impacting pop culture via calls for censorship in the film industry and a pledge not to "throw ridicule on any religious faith." Life Magazine's Birth of a Baby also offended the vigilant censors, despite the Supreme Court's ruling against prior restraint of free expression.

A pair of priests, Coughlin and Sheen, blazed the trail for Billy Graham and other Protestant evangelicals - not to mention Rush Limbaugh and other hate-preachers. And Bishop Sheen also paved the way for those who wanted to treat "liberal" as a dirty word. Imagine wanting a government to "do good in society" - how vile!

The Jehovah's Witnesses had no use for secular govenment, earning a reputation even lower than atheists' by the mid-'30s - mostly by proselytizing passionately and refraining from patriotic public pledges.

The last well-known secularist crusader in the tradition of Paine and Ingersoll was Clarence Darrow, who died in 1938. "The Atheist Mother" Vashti McCollum was no crusader, just a humanist whose wish to raise her children free of doctrinal duress was "somehow" perceived as hostile and threatening by the conformist majority.

Lady Chatterley dealt a decisive blow to the Comstock law in 1959, inflaming the enemies of secularism and leading Billy Graham to write in 1954 that communists worship the Devil. That was a bit abrasive. Would it have been worse, if he were a woman?

Big questions

Stephen Hawking has died. "The only subject he found exciting was cosmology because, he said, it dealt with 'the big question: Where did the universe come from?'”

In late antiquity and the middle ages the big questions tended to be more about life's rumored sequel and how to achieve it. Hawking's view was that there would be no sequel, nor was there any need to appeal to anything outside the universe, like God, to explain how it began. "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Augustine first thought you had to make alliance with the forces of good, in their death struggle with the forces of darkness. He was on the right track, I tend to think, before his big conversion. He was right to suppose that our side needs all good hands on deck, to resist and overcome evil. He put that conversion off as long as he could, praying for purity but only in due course. For the record, though: I don't think he was right to think of our carnal condition as an entombment. Incorporeal souls sow no wild oats, ascetics enjoy few existential delights.

So, buoyed by Platonism, he "put all forms of materialism firmly behind him" and "turned back the clock of intellectual history." The old Greek commitment to reason was not finally comforting enough to him. "He returned to a version of the comforting supernatural stories which most of the first philosophers sought to dispense with, or at least to rationalize."

Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy dialogue found its own form of comfort, not in Augustine's Christianity but in Lady Philosophy's timeless stoicism. God (or Good?) sees all in a single atemporal sweep, "at a go," and thus somehow leaves the hapless victim of tortured persecution and execution as free as it found him. He can still choose to be "philosophical" about every misfortune, even to his dying breath on the rack. His freedom's a lot like Kris Kristofferson's and Janis Joplin's, "just another word for nothing left to lose."

Anselm's God, "than which nothing greater can be conceived," and his famous "proof" thereof, is another of those notorious sleights of hand made to do heavy philosophical lifting with nothing more muscular than verbiage. It's still shocking to me, how many bright people (including young Russell, briefly) it's seduced.

Speaking of great misfortune, poor Abelard's is painful to ponder. Gottlieb blames "his scholarly prowess and his passionate involvement with logic" for emboldening him to undertake his own fateful seduction. How ironic, that he would go on to make his mark as "the first serious moral philosopher of medieval times" and "to apply rational analysis to the nature of moral goodness." Too little, too late.

Moses Maimonides did not address Abelard's peculiar form of perplexity but did try to bring philosophy, science, and religion together. “Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.” But try telling that to the world. He was right, though. “You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” But, “Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.”

He was onto confirmation bias early. “We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”

Was he really the first to say this?: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Did he anticipate James's Will to Believe notion that "our errors are not such awfully solemn things"? “The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”

He was sort of a bioethicist before his time: “The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it.” And, “No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.” Actually that might have helped Abelard, with a little timely saltpeter in his diet.

William of Ockham's famous "razor" said we should keep our theories simple, our ontology thin. "It is pointless to do with more what can be done with less." Remember Goober's beard?

Remember Buridan's Ass? Apparently "no such animal appears in his writings." Too bad, he's been such a workhorse for logicians.

Giordano Bruno was a mystic friar, but he also had a vivd scifi imagination. He said there must be other worlds and "countless suns" out there in the Void, "innumerable globes like this on which we live and grow." We've only confirmed that in the past twenty years or so. It (and other heresies) got him torched in 1600. Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson tell his story.

Finally today in CoPhi, Aquinas. His First Cause Argument, echoing Aristotle, said a never-ending series of causes and effects would lead to an unacceptable regress. The first term in any explanatory sequence, he thought, has to be self-evident. But is that itself self-evident? Russell says, of "the supposed impossibility of a series having no first term: Every mathematician knows that there is no such impossibility; the series of negative integers ending with minus one is an instance to the contrary. But here again no Catholic is likely to abandon belief in God even if he becomes convinced that Saint Thomas's arguments are bad; he will invent other arguments, or take refuge in revelation." It's not just Catholics. Remember confirmation bias?

More questions: Can the definition of a word prove anything about the world? Is theoretical simplicity always better, even if the universe is complex? Does the possibility of other worlds somehow diminish humanity? Which is more plausible, that God exists but is not more powerful than Satan, or that neither God nor Satan exists? Why? Are supernatural stories of faith, redemption, and salvation comforting to you than the power of reason and evidence? And what do you say to Carl Sagan?:

“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” [More good questions here... ]

Today in Fantasyland, we note the Big Bang that erupted after the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) adopted its founding document in 1962 - the explosion of magical thinking when "dystopian and utopian fantasies seemed plausible" and the Weather Underground went to work making real explosions, kidnapping heiresses, robbing banks and creating general mayhem in the name of revolution.

And then came the Sexual Revolution, with the Pill "available everywhere by 1965. "When sex became far less consequential, it could become less 'real' and more like exciting fiction." See Erica Jong and Philip Roth...

This is real: Did you see all the kids who walked out for 17 minutes yesterday, in honor of the 17 latest school-shooting victims? This caps (for now) a history beginning with the first gun rights absolutists who surfaced on both the left and the right in the '60s. By the late '70s "hysterics [had] managed to take over the NRA, replacing its motto 'Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation' with the second half of the Second Amendment."

Kurt Andersen realized fantasy would now rule pop culture, he says, when he saw Star Wars. "I remember walking out of the theater thinking the Force was the first faith with which I felt simpatico."

Today in A&P, we note that "nearly all freethinkers strongly supported both the expansion of women's rights and freedom of artistic expression" in the embryonic culture wars of the late 19th century, led by freethinkers like Twain (who said "go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company") and Whitman. Whitman said “Resist much, obey little.” And, “Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.” And,

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

He said not to argue about God, but I read this on a t-shirt: “God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.”

Speaking of Augustine, Elizabeth Cady Stanton deplored his idea that motherhood is a curse. How would he know?  In her Bible she also deplored the prayer by which some Jewish men thank the almighty for so engendering them, and suggested an alternative: "I thank thee, O Lord, that I was not born a jackass." But that one might fail the presupposition test.

Robert Ingersoll also offered recommendations for Bible study, advising censors applying the Comstock laws to take a close look at the "hundreds of grossly obscene passages not fit to be read by any decent man." Bet they did.

Freethinkers and leftists came together over separation of church and state and freedom of speech, a coalition still in evidence in organizations like the ACLU. Freethinkers consistently uphold the constitutional prohibition against any religious test for high office. Of course, that never stops voters from dismissing and reviling honorable candidates like Gayle Jordan, or from imagining that America can cut itself off from the world, turn away from progressive politics and earth-centered solutions to our problems, and still be "great" enough to achieve a heavenly reward.

Jacoby offers a fine account of the Scopes Trial, and of how William Jennings Bryan's witness stand concession that even he did not read the Bible literally made him appear pathetic.  He was on the stand because the Tennessee judge thought scientific expertise irrelevant to the evolutionary case. Have I mentioned lately that I have a personal connection to one of the disallowed scientific witnesses, Winterton Curtis (my first landlord, who used to pull $$ from my ears)?

Today in Bioethics, it's case studies in medical paternalism...

And if last time's discussion of lab-grown meat left anyone salivating, my research reveals three places in Nashville where you can find that "Impossible Burger" I found in Indy. Bon appetit.

Sk(c)eptics (and a Humanist)

Back from Spring Break and the American Philosophy conference in Indy, in a new car (a Corolla, same as the old car but without all the miles and dents and irrevocable damage). It's good to be behind the wheel, any wheel. But there's so much anonymous hostility and naked aggression out there.

Aggression was the theme of the panel I chaired and commented on, with presentations on microaggressions, aggression in football, and aggression in war. Personal highlight: getting on my stump with George Carlin to proclaim baseball, not football, the best alternative and "moral equivalent" to war.

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying...

And so it goes.

George was a comedic skeptic. He said “Don’t just teach your children to read…Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything. If someone says 'Do not think,' say 'I'll think about it.' If they tell you 'Do not question,' immediately ask 'Why?'"

Before departing the Circle City I fulfilled a longstanding ambition to visit the Kurt Vonnegut Library and Museum, in tribute to a great literary skeptic. I recommend it highly.

I don't recommend Mr. Vonnegut's workspace, so low to the ground, though it obviously worked for him. I do recommend his good words, including that wonderful welcome to earth in Mr. Rosewater, and his last speech (at Clowes Hall) just two weeks before he thanked us for out attention and was out of here.

Today in CoPhi it's skeptics. Or sceptics, if you prefer the British spelling. Or you can follow their lead and refuse to commit. "Don't commit, and you won't be disappointed."

I haven't generally found that to be a reliable guidepost in life, instead taking my cue from the lesson James's "first act of free will" (previously noted) seems to me to teach: don't just sit there, stand and select a destination. And get going. As my old pal the Carolina prof says, do something-even if it's wrong. And as James also said, "our errors surely are not such awfully solemn things." Lighten up.  Pick a path. Move. (My friend's colleague David Henderson gave a first-rate presentation at the conference, btw, on not reducing wilderness and the national park system to an American thing but seeing wilderness as a call to cosmopolitanism.)

But that's my therapy, it may not be yours. Some of us really do prefer sitting on a fence, avoiding firm opinions, keeping all accounts open. And there's no doubt, a healthy dose of skepticism is good for you. But how much is too much? 

My answer is implied by the bumper sticker message on my bulletin board: "even fatalists look both ways before crossing the street." If you stop looking, you're either too skeptical or not skeptical enough. Probably a lunatic, too. Or the ruler of the universe. "I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More I cannot say."

Point is, we need beliefs to motivate action lest we sit and starve like Buridan's ass, or cross paths with a cart and get flattened. Prudence demands commitment. Commitment is no guarantee against error and disappointment, but indifference and non-commitment typically leave us stuck in the middle of the road or drop us off the cliff.

That wasn't Pyrrho's perspective, jay- and cliff-walker though he was. Fortunately for him, he seems always to have had friends steering him from the edge. His prescription - but is a skeptic allowed to prescribe? - was to free yourself from desires, don't care how things will turn out, persuade yourself that nothing ultimately matters, and you'll eventually shuck all worry. Or not. If we all were Pyrrho "there wouldn't be anyone left to protect the Pyrrhonic Sceptics from themselves." Prudence wins again.

Prudence and moderation. "The point of moderate philosophical scepticism is to get closer to the truth," or further at least from falsehood and bullshit. Easier said than done, in these alt-fact days of doublespeak. "All the great philosophers have been [moderate] sceptics," have sought truth and spurned lies, have deployed their baloney detectors and upheld the bar of objective evidence. Sincerity alone won't cut it.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These anti-realist doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry... Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial-notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

So, be a skeptic. But to paraphrase David Hume and Jon Batiste, stay human. ("Be a philosopher, but amidst your philosophy be still a man.")

Read Skeptic magazine, which in a recent issue doubts the possibility of eternal youth and features the parodic perspective of Mr. Deity. Skeptic's editor Michael Shermer says “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” And, “I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know.”

Pyrrho must not have been that crazy, to have lived to nearly ninety. "He did not act carelessly in the details of everyday life," said a defender, he just suspended judgment as to their ultimate import in the larger truths of things. Or maybe he just wanted to protect his batting average, so to speak. If you never swing, you'll never miss. But you'll still strike out if you take too many.

David Hume, again. He was a skeptic but he didn't let that interfere with living. He ventured opinions but couched them in philosophic humility. He knew we couldn't all be Pyrrho, for "all action would immediately cease" and "the necessities of nature" would "put an end to [our] miserable existence." Miserable? He must have been having a bad day. Generally he was of great cheer and humane disposition.

So let's not throw in the sponge on humanity just yet. What a strange expression, "throwing in the sponge"-it comes from the Roman Skeptic Sextus Empiricus, who told a story about a painter who stopped trying so hard to paint the perfect representation of a horse's mouth and discovered that sometimes it's best to just let fly. Fling your sponge, let it land where it may. Okay, if you're just painting. If you're living a life, though, maybe just a bit less skepticism is prudent.

Is it possible to go through life questioning and doubting everything, committing always to nothing, and holding no firm opinions? Is it desirable or useful to try doing so? And do you know anyone who doesn't look both ways before crossing the street?
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In Fantasyland today, Kurt Andersen's brush is a bit broad when he paints with it a picture of '60s academics who turned away from reason and rationalism as enthralled with the view that they were all raging relativists who saw no significant difference between truth and falsehood. Some were on the relativist spectrum, for sure, but - and this is a point to be made (for all the good it will do) to Pyrrhonists and other radical skeptics. If all is up for grabs, truth-wise, what's left to recommend your point of view?

Maybe an out-of-body perspective, UCLA psychologist Charles Tart might have responded. He got tenure after reporting that a young woman in his lab went for regular o-o-b nightflights to retrieve remote numbers. Can't believe that flew.

Tom (Electric Kool-aid) Wolfe said the Jesus People of the '60s were "young acid heads who had sworn off drugs... but still wanted the ecstatic spiritualism" and found in "Fundamentalist evangelical holy-rolling Christianity."

It was hardly "nonfiction," but Hal Lindsey's Late, Great Planet Earth was wildly successful with its even wilder Satanic/apocalyptic conspiracy-mongering. No wonder Billy Graham seemed relatively moderate compared to such stuff, and to his not-so-different compadres Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. If you want to earn a reuptation for reasonableness in America, just stake out a position slightly less hysterical in tone to that of your peers.

In A&P today we note Darwin's friend and seductee, Harvard botanist Asa Gray. He was the first important American scientist to advocate "a Christianized Darwinism" propelled by a divine first cause. He thought it "possible to teach evolutionary theory in entirely naturalistic terms without addressing the nonscientific issue," in this anticipating Stephen Jay Gould's late-20th century talk of "nonoverlapping magisteria."

Gould was often called to testify in court cases challenging the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools, a phenomenon that would have been unimaginable to the 19th century heirs of the Enlightenment-especially after the Scopes fiasco. The sense that Darwin had taken us down several pegs was not restricted to evangelicals and fundamentalists, however. "How insignificant we are, with our pigmy little world!" declaimed Mark Twain. But we're significant enough to note our own insignificance. Isn't that significant?

And isn't it significant that we're heirs to an Enlightenment tradition that's confident of our ability that, if we keep plugging, we'll eventually figure some things out about the ultimate origin of life, the universe, and everything?

Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable" was a catchall big enough to lure those Americans who wanted to "have their God and evolution too." Will we ever know enough to know if there is such a thing?

Civilization, for Darwin, is a game-changer that subordinates natural selection to environmental factors including, most prominently, civilized humans themselves. Darwin was no Social Darwinist.

My alma mater Vanderbilt fired a geologist named Winchell in 1878 for disputing literal readings of the Bible, with respect to the age of life on earth. The Methodists who founded Vandy have since modulated and modernized, but there's been no shortage of other southern zealots to grab the anti-evolutionary baton.

And you've always got to be on guard against university administrators anyway, whatever their denominational persuasion. Our new governing board at MTSU merits watching, they keep scheduling their meetings inconveniently out of town. Get tenure so you can show the Dean any finger you like, my earthly-elegant mentor Lachs said. But Deans haven't been our problem.

The Great Agnostic Robert Ingersoll's "larger and nobler faith" was in "all that is, and is to be." That's very large indeed, and to my mind is far more appealing than the Dawkins-esque en masse repudiation of all "faith-heads" etc.

Why aren't people called "Philo" anymore? I'm Phil O., but that's not as cool as Philo T(V) Farnsworth or Philo D. Beckwith, with whom I share a few heroes: Ingersoll, Paine, Voltaire, Whitman...

Freethought lecturers packed auditoriums back in the day, without the carrot of ultimate salvation or the stick of hell. Ingersoll was one of them, in an age seemingly more tolerant than ours of unconventional thinking. Their appeal was like Mr. Vonnegut's, to a better "vision of how to think and live on this earth." Hi-ho. So it goes.

The intellectual turning point in Robert Ingersoll's life was his youthful encounter with The Bard of Avon. That was a guy with a vision, an attitude towards "our little life/rounded with a sleep," and indeed a philosophy-as Colin McGinn has written (before becoming an untouchable, before #MeToo, before resurfacing with his latest and, in light of the events that ended his teaching career, his most preposterously-themed book).

In Bioethics today, Oryx and Crake and lab-grown meat...
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10.11.17. It's the birthday of the longest-serving First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt (books by this author), born in New York City (1884) who said, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water." She began a secret courtship with her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt... She once said, "We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk."
And, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."

It's the birthday of Mason Locke Weems (books by this author), born in Anne Arundel County, Maryland (1759). He was an Episcopalian clergyman and a traveling bookseller. He wrote extremely popular fictional tales about history and presented them as if they were fact... It was Weems who invented the famous story about George Washington cutting down his father's cherry tree with a hatchet, and then admitting that it was made-up.... Pope John XXIII convened the first session of the Second Vatican Council on this date in 1962. It was the first time Roman Catholic religious leaders had met to settle doctrinal issues in nearly a century. In 1870, the pope had been declared infallible, so people didn't see the point of arguing about church doctrine: whatever the pope said was what the church would do and believe. But Pope John XXIII — who had assumed his duties only three months prior to calling for the council — believed that the church had become too insular for modern times. He often said it was time to "open the windows [of the church] and let in some fresh air." 

...One of the most revolutionary aspects of Vatican II — as the Second Vatican Council came to be known — was the change in the church's attitude toward other religions, and other Christian denominations. Previously, Catholics were forbidden from visiting any other houses of worship, and encouraged to look down on other religions. Now they could attend the weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals of their non-Catholic friends and neighbors. WA

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3.2.17. Happy birthday Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), who said “If things start happening, don't worry, don't stew, just go right along and you'll start happening too.” And “It's opener, out there, in the wide, open air.” And “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.” And “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”

Happy birthday too to Tom Wolfe, who admired the Stoics and asked "What is it you're looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there'll be nothing more to worry about, and instead you become a bigger and bigger slave to how you think others are judging you.” And “One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false. Nothing you can give me is worth surrendering that freedom for."

Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation? Fact Check: Drumpf’sFirst Address to Congress
5:30/6:17, 38/54/31, 5:41