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?
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?
No comments:
Post a Comment