Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, & Marx

Back from Ottawa (KS) and KC (MO), and the best Baseball in Literature and Culture Conference yet.

The estimable Gerald Early, of Ken Burns' fame (Baseball, Jackie Robinson, Jazz...) gave a great morning keyn0te.

The impressive Doug Glanville spoke at noon on the power of teamwork to overcome bias and hostility. He told a gripping tale of being profiled in his own snowbound Connecticut driveway, and then calmly persevering to change the culture that enables such effrontery. And check out his paean to Cubs Opening Day.

They both joined Sabermetrician Bill James and a local television personality to ponder "the state of the game."

And I had a great time presenting my thoughts on the power of perseverance, to conquer "the yips" and overcome self-imposed obstacles. Can't wait 'til next year.

But first, there are busy days just ahead here and now. Once we've caught up on Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Fantasyland (37-39) in CoPhi it's on to Mill, Darwin, Kierkegaard, & Marx.*

Next in Fantasyland, Kurt Andersen wonders what really derailed the GOP. Paul Ryan's favorite fiction writer Ayn Rand is part of the answer, and science denial is another. But there's some good news on this front, "only 17% of Americans who don't call themselves Republican believe global warming is a myth." [40-41]

Today in A&P, Matthew Stewart says  the overwhelming majority of Enlightenment philosophers and practically all of the American founders took God's existence for granted, while disputing his (it's) nature. Most concluded that God's nature was to just be nature, our eponymous Nature's God, "presiding deity of the American Revolution."

Carl Becker's influential and "essentially correct" claim that "Jefferson copied Locke," especially with respect to our defining "purfuits," doesn't grasp Locke's own originality and subterfuge in concealing it to avoid overt association with Spinoza.

John Toland, "Spinoza's avatar" and "Locke's evil twin," "raised Giordano Bruno from the ashes..." His "game" was to reveal the Locke-Spinoza connection that detected God in the very absence of miracle. God does not play dice.

"Bruno once again anticipates it all," that guy is just on fire (Sorry, too soon): "God is everywhere in all things..."

"The mass of men believe they are free" because they know effects but not all the causes. A good thing too, if you ask me. Free action makes sense only in the context of possibilities, which vanish in the face of causal necessity.

Epicurus's clinamen or Swerve doctrine is perhaps his "most problematic" proposal, but it's intriguing. Don't we all swerve all the time, to our own as well as others' consternation? “Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion.” And here's a suggestion: "abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.”

Alexander Pope "tracked" Spinoza when he said discord is "harmony not understood" and evil is really good. Those are tracks I try not to follow. Might as well say black is white.

But if we don't want to say that, should we also resist saying that the universe is the thinking and the extended body of God? I do.

Ethan Allen's vision of the hereafter was a Field of Dreams, a "brighter, shinier version of the here and now." But was it in an Iowa cornfield?

Thursday night, it's the first of my two classes in the second rendition of the MALA course on "Cheating"... my contribution: "Cheating Truth"... 

 Last time this quartet of philosophers came up I was doing my bit for the Spring MALA course on Human Migration, worth a look back. My block contribution then was "The Human Journey to Cosmopolitanism," first retracing the genetic trail of Y-chromosome crumbs that prove we have indeed walked far, then wondering if we'll ever complete the mission summarized by that ambitious (if premature) plaque on the moon.

"Premature," I say, as evidenced by that other marker we left in the lunar dust.

Also premature perhaps in its implication that humans at this stage of their evolutionary development have in fact become a peaceable, or even reliably civil, species. I ventured out to the airport last night and was met with several instances of gratuitous incivility. Lots of us seem like powder kegs waiting to blow, these days. Oh well. At least I didn't get beat up or kicked off a plane. I'd rather walk than fly any day.

We might check in tonight with Frederic Gros's Philosophy of Walking, and Christopher Orlet's Gymnasiums of the Mind, and "Walking to the stars": Some of us fervently believe, with Nietzsche, Rousseau, and so many others, that the best ideas first come while walking. Some of us also believe we should expand our range to include more distant turf, over the Terran horizon. I'm a believer.

*As to those 19th century stars...

Mill, we've noted, disagree with Bentham about pleasure. He had nothing against "pushpin," just impatience with humans who wouldn't bother to explore more. His great passion was of course for liberty, so his insistence on qualitative pleasure-standards sets up a taut challenge: how to prescribe but not impose those standards, and still respect the rights of all to seek their own good in their own ways without (as John Lachs puts it) meddling. Open discussion in a free society, especially about our differences, forces invaluable self-critique. "If you don't have your views challenged by people with opposing views, then you will probably end up holding them as 'dead dogmas'..." But of course we rarely call out our own dogmas, it's other people's prejudices we detest. So we need to hear out other people.

The great Huxley-Wilberforce debate has probably grown in legend beyond its moment, but what wouldn't I give to have been there! I think Dan Dennett is probably right, evolution by natural selection is probably the single best idea anyone ever had. Huxley was probably right too, when he upbraided himself for not having thought of it first. The best ideas are often right under our noses, out of sight.

Since Darwin's day genetics, tonight's topic, "has given a detailed explanation of how inheritance works." It's not just a theory, it's a hypothesis with "a very substantial weight of evidence in support."

The Danish Socrates said evidence/schmevidence, what's that to me if my "subjective truth" says I should take a flying leap into the darkness. Some of us think Kierkegaard committed intellectual suicide, but we're glad somebody stepped up to defend the irrationalist position. It gives us more to talk about. And it's clear enough why some Existentialists (though not the atheists like Sartre) look back to the Melancholy Dane as their early prototype. Kierkegaard was all about "choosing how to live and the difficulty of knowing that your decision is the right one." My view is that you only make that more difficult, when you renounce reason. And, you do contradict yourself in the broadest sense of reason when you write tracts attempting to vindicate your irrationalism. Nigel's unvarnished judgment: "Faith involves risk. But it is also irrational: not based on reason."

But, give Kierkegaard credit for defending "the subjective point of view" against the pure objectifiers in philosophy who leave themselves no place to stand, pretending to occupy Professor Nagel's "view from nowhere." That really is a Nowhere Land, Nowhere Man.

Karl Marx always looks angry. The "grim conditions" of industrial capitalism and its assault on the poor and powerless dispossessed sent him to the British Library and into collaboration with Engels to crank out their Manifesto. The political struggle of class demanded and predicted revolution, they said. They took Hegel's history and said it's all coming to a head much sooner than his intellectualistic analysis allowed, given its manifest material contradictions. Theye didn't predict the Soviet Union, though.

"From each according to ability, to each according to need": a beautiful vision, which American students seem conditioned to reject as impossible. Seems to work pretty well in places like Denmark and Switzerland, though.

Finally, Marx famously called religion "the opium of the people." He didn't think that was an insult, but a sympathetic explanation. "In the new world after the revolution human beings would achieve their humanity." Sounds so naive, from the perspective of 2017. But humanity isan achievement, not just a genetic fact. We've got to reclaim it constantly.

Lotsa questions: Name two or three of your favorite pleasures. Are any of them higher or better than the others? In what way? Are any of yours higher or better than those of a friend whose list includes none of yours? Why or why not? Is state paternalism ever warranted? Why don't we ever talk about state maternalism? What are the appropriate legal limits on speech and expression in a free society, if any? How would you reply to Wilberforce's debate question? What do you think was the best idea ever? Do you want a map of your own genome? Why or why not? Do you agree with Darwin that the subject of God is "too profound for human intellect"? Does it mean we should all be agnostic? What would you have done, in Abraham's position? Would you have doubted the "message" or challenged the messenger? Does it damage the parent-child relationship if Mom or Dad make it clear to the child that they'll always defer to the perceived instructions of a "heavenly father," even including murderous instructions? Does anything "trump the duty to be a good [parent]"? Would you ever do something you considered morally wrong, in the name of faith? Does taking a "leap of faith" make you irrational? How do you balance your subjective point of view with objectivity, and with the subjectivity of others? What role should inter-subjectivity play, in forming that balance? If you ever own a business will you pay your workers as little as possible and extract as much "surplus value" from them as you can? Is anything in history "inevitable"? Does religion ...make people more reconciled to oppression and exploitation, and less likely to revolt?

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11.15.17. On this day in 1835 Charles Darwin reaches Tahiti on board HMS Beagle...
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On this date in 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee staged one of the biggest anti-war protests in American history. It followed a month after a massive demonstration and teach-in dubbed the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. As many as half a million people gathered for this day’s event, the Moratorium March on Washington. Protesters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Washington Monument, where they listened to speeches by anti-war politicians and sang John Lennon’s new anthem “Give Peace a Chance,” led by Pete Seeger (lyrics). Arlo Guthrie; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and the cast of the musical Hair also performed. The Moratorium March followed immediately after the three-day March Against Death, in which 40,000 silent protestors walked in single file down Pennsylvania Avenue, each carrying a sign bearing the name of a dead soldier.

“The predominant event of the day was that of a great and peaceful army of dissent moving through the city,” the New York Times reported. The Times also described the crowd as “predominantly youthful” and a “mass gathering of the moderate and radical Left … old-style liberals; Communists and pacifists and a sprinkling of the violent New Left.”

Other protests were held around the world in support of the Washington moratorium. A quarter of a million people gathered in San Francisco. Future U.S. president Bill Clinton organized an anti-war event in Oxford, England, where he was a Rhodes scholar.

President Nixon had promised during his 1968 presidential campaign to withdraw from Vietnam, but —10 months into his term — had so far failed to deliver. He was not swayed by the protests, and said, “As far as this kind of activity is concerned, we expect it; however under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it.” He watched sports on TV in the White House while the demonstration was taking place. WA