A bigger picture

When the big picture keeps getting darker, writes Margaret Renkl (as paraphrased by a Times headline-maker) it helps to zoom. Chance the Gardener was right, there will be new growth in spring. That's the bigger picture.  But zoom in, for a closer peek into dark corners, or out, for a more expansive view? In reveals life in fine-grained detail, the not-quite-micro world we normally miss. 

Bigger still is the cosmic perspective that only comes into focus when we zoom out, so effectively refracted in Sean Carroll's The Big Picture. "The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it.” Well, we bring our capacity to notice and appreciate the beauty, and to talk about it. There are always better things to talk about than most of what preoccupies us day to day. We must put the news in its place.

In CoPhi today we turn to the ancient Skeptics, whose unwillingness to commit and thus risk error and possible conflict shrinks and diminishes the picture dramatically. The better skeptic commits to the search for knowledge and truth, even while doubting its completion. We also note Dayton Tennessee's outsize claim to evolutionary-historical importance. Ask me about my first landlord.

In A&P we again wonder if justice can be retributive or retribution just, and entertain a view called neuronaturalism -- the thesis that, in imagining options, evaluating them, and making a decision, "each of those mental processes just is (or is realized in) a complex set of neural processes which causally interact in accord with the laws of nature." 

Part of my neural processes are already on their way to Chicago, where I'm scheduled to participate in a panel for the William James Society. One of our panelists has had to withdraw because her flight from China has been cancelled, hope the forecast of a big snowfall doesn't cancel mine from Nashville.

I'll be continuing my reflections on James and his pal Josiah Royce, and whether I've long tilted too far to the former's corner without giving the idealist his due. In other words, have I missed a bigger picture in which pragmatist and idealist stride together in affirmation of naturalism, meliorism, and "the beloved community"? Probably.

“Unless you can find some sort of loyalty," said Royce, "you cannot find unity and peace in your active living.” My advocacy of James is some sort of loyalty, but it doesn't (I now think) require or gain from a repudiation of his friend's mostly-complementary non-competing views. 

“If this life is not a real fight," said James, "in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

There's still room in Royce's world for nobility in the fight for liberty and justice for all. I didn't see that before, now I do. I'm finally seeing a bigger picture.

Aristotle, peripatetics, "free won't"

They dialed up the heat at last night's Nevada debate, but didn't cast a lot more light. I have to agree with the baseball philosopher Bill (not William) James, a show of angry mutual incivility is really not constructive at this stage. Save it for Drumpf. But the good news is that last night should have punctured Bloomberg's trial balloon, particularly due to all those NDAs. This being America, though, where $$ talks loudest, it probably didn't.

In CoPhi today we're talking Aristotle and the Peripatetics (both those student-scholars who literally followed him around his Lyceum campus, and those who followed in his spirit historically to create the  tradition of philosophy in motion. (See Rebecca Solnit's peripatetic chapter in Wanderlust, and recall "Gymnasiums of the Mind".)

Aristotle was much concerned with the causes of motion, from the Prime Mover on. Here's an interesting poll stale-mate: what if you were omniscient, omnipotent etc., but were not the originating source of motion in the universe? What would that make you?

If you said "One swallow doesn't make a summer" and were the philosopher known as The Philosopher, that would make you uncharacteristically poetic. We don't know if an easy eloquence came to the Stagirite, since most of what's come down to us from him is in the form of lecture notes and not polished prose. But he meant we shouldn't judge of the success or flourishing of our lives ("happiness" is not the best translation of eudaimonia, but it's the most common) on the basis of too small a slice of time and experience, or in strictly self-referential terms. Raphael's School of Athens, rightly depicts him reaching for the natural world, in contrast to his teacher's ostentatious upward ostension.  He'd have been appalled to learn that subsequent generations ossified his legacy by treating him as the conversation-stopping final authority, The Philosopher. Not his fault, but it's an ironic illustration of what he meant when he said our total eudaimonia depends on factors beyond our control and even beyond our lifespans.

In Fantasyland today we consider the American pastoral ideal, the transparent eyeball of Concord, the fake discovery of lunar life long ago, the carnival-barking all-American huckster Barnum, and Chicago's shiny faux-fest event that still symbolizes much that is phony in our public life.

In A&P today, more on free will, determinism, neuroscience , responsibility etc. Daniel Dennett's free will determinism and Michael Gazzaniga's storytelling separation of free will from responsibility come under the spotlight. Despite their differences I think they agree: we experience our freedom, when we do, as a narration in progress and not a closed book.  

Some of my questions: if you think free will skepticism does not threaten your prospects of finding meaning in life, but have constructed your life on the premise that without free will we're just automata, aren't you going to have a difficult story to tell? Can you stage a meaningful 2d act, after being persuaded to accept fws? Wouldn't you have to experience the decision to do so as a free choice?

Does the question "Why did you decide to do that?" not beg the question, for the fw skeptic?

"Dennett, drawing on evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics and philosophy, demonstrates that free will exists in a deterministic world for humans only, and that this gives us morality, meaning, and moral culpability. Weaving a richly detailed narrative..."

So, as we were saying in class last time, we are "special"-and it's not arrogant to say so, it's just naturally human.

In his first Gifford Lecture, Gazzaniga says to understand anything from a biologic perspective requires an evolutionary context to make sense of emergent complexity and cultural expectations like volitional self-control. Again, in Dennett's phrase, freedom evolves. So, free will? Maybe the internalization of civility and a socially-sanctioned willingness to apply the brakes to otherwise-determined behaviors, which we might better call free won't, is freedom enough for us. We're free at least, apparently, to tell that story.

The real Socrates, and Hitch on meaning

LISTEN

What a gorgeous day we had in middle Tennessee yesterday, perfect weather for biking at Edwin Warner and hiking at the Burch Reserve Trail. Spring was in the air. I'm ready.

It's Wallace Stegner's birthday. We had a little scroll from his Spectator Bird for the guests at our wedding.

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But it is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle.

In CoPhi today, we'll search for the real Socrates.

Those who know Socrates mainly through the writings of Plato – Xenophon’s near-exact contemporary – will find Xenophon’s Socrates something of a surprise. Plato’s Socrates claims to know nothing, and flamboyantly refutes the knowledge claims of others. In the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, however, Socrates actually answers philosophical questions, dispenses practical life advice, provides arguments proving the existence of benevolent gods, converses as if peer-to-peer with a courtesan, and even proposes a domestic economy scheme whereby indigent female relatives can become productive through the establishment of a textile business at home... this Socrates takes his conversation partner through logical steps that are not designed to refute him or humiliate him, but to awaken him to a different way of looking at the natural world... It’s not brow-beating, but gentle leading, which leaves his intellectual self-respect intact. This is a hallmark of Xenophon’s Socrates. 

Another recent re-take of "the real Socrates" suggests a less buttoned-down version, "more worldly and amorous than we knew." More importantly, it cites Aristotle's insistence that Socrates was more sympathetic to his own philosophy than to Plato's. "For him, Socrates was also a more down-to-earth thinker than Plato sought to depict... the picture of Socrates bequeathed by Plato should not be accepted uncritically."

On the heels of Valentine's Day, note: Socrates "is famous for saying: ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ But the one thing he claims, in Plato’s Symposium, that he does know about, is love, which he learned about from a clever woman." Diotima? Or "an instructor of eloquence and relationship counsellor" called Aspasia?

Either way, the iconic version of Socrates is of one who values extended and even interminable conversations that disabuse all interlocutors of any dogmatic assurance they may have erroneously assumed. The wise know that they know not. And so it's very hard to believe that the real Socrates would have endorsed Plato's rigidly top-down authoritarian Republic.

After all, Socrates is one of the deepest roots of our "reflex to disbelieve official explanations." Fantasyland  also reminds us  today that the suspicion and paranoia endemic to public life in our day is rooted in a bad old habit of inventing conspiracies where none exist. The Freemasons, for instance, are and always were simply a fraternal organization for guys who like to socialize and "perform goofy secret rituals," not a pernicious cabal out to rule the world.

In A&P today we'll hear from Heather of Christopher Hitchens, mortality, and meaning. I'm fond of quoting Hitch's answer to the nihilist (or Extreme Existentialist) who proclaims meaninglessness as our natural condition. "A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so." That's pragmatism to the rescue again.

I like Walter Glannon's statement: "We do not 'find' meaning in the brain, any more than an existentialist 'finds' meaning in the world. Rather, we construct it from the actions we perform on the basis of our brain-enabled mental capacities... There is more to persons than can be dreamed of in our neuroscience."

Socrates would like that too. Plato, I'm not so sure. Aristotle? Definitely.

High hopes

LISTEN. Happy Almost Valentines Day and Happy Day After Darwin Day. My favorite Darwin quote: "the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." And if they're lucky they'll make it to 63. ("Keep your health, your splendid health," James told his friend Schiller. Mine was briefly in doubt last night, but I'm feeling resilient today-just in time for the party.)

Darwin's most constructive (for us) regret: "If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness..." But once a week is not enough. We need a daily dose of music and poetry (among other things) to flourish.

Also on my mind since yesterday: the new New Yorker piece on Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens (which means wise people). If his large message really is that "our political struggles barely matter" and that it's okay not to care, then that's not okay. The Lorax again speaks for me and the trees. "If someone like you doesn't care a whole awful lot, nothing's gonna get better. It's not." If we're going to live up to our name ("sapiens," wise guys) we'll listen to him. We can't afford the luxury of complacent optimism but we'd better be hopeful. Don't panic, but also don't stop thinking about (and working for) tomorrow. Nice to see an accurate write-up on that message in our student paper.

Today in CoPhi we note Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation that advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, for a scientific neophyte. We have lots of those, for whom magical thinking is the norm. Where's the harm in that? one might ask. Isn't it like homeopathy, benign and mostly harmless? But of course it IS harmful to your health to deny yourself effective medication in deference to snake oil. Surely it does harm our society that so many would impede the progressive promise of scientific rationalism. And it harms the children of magical thinkers to deny the reality of pain, suffering, and disease.

Mr. Twain again: history rhymes. Trouble is, so many of us have a tin ear for poetry.

The great California Gold Rush, says Kurt Andersen, was an inflection point in our history when many Americans began to entertain the fantasy of heaven on earth and the entrepreneurial spirit was born. Our national mythos obscures "the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops" whose fantasies fell flat. But we celebrate those hard-luck ants and grasshoppers, those nose to the grindstone puritans with "a weakness for stories too good to be true," who pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start all over again. They have high apple pie in the sky hopes. Or maybe just holes in the head.

Today in A&P we wonder with Neil Levy about choices without choosers and "a neuropsychologically plausible existentialism" according to which unity can be imposed on what we may choose to call ourselves (but not our selves?). Levy does not agree with Dan Dennett, though, in characterizing the self as a "user illusion." There's more to us than that, in the form of "a system with causal powers and the capacity to act on the world." Such a system presumably can be authentic or not, in more-or-less familiar Existentialist terms.

For the trio of authors of "Relational Authenticity" it all comes down to 4Ms and 4Es: mind, meaning, morals, and modality are situated in a way that is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended...

Heideggerian authenticity can sound a lot like parochial nationalism, with his emphasis on the establishment of identity through shared practices of a specific environment - especially if that environment is identified with a homeland and a "hero"-for heroes are rarely without their villains, whether truly villainous or scapegoated and persecuted. That may have been the furthest implication from his intent, but it's hard to give a defender of the Reich an unprejudicial hearing.

Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus all come in for consideration and scrutiny here. A question for J-P (too bad we've come too late to hop the channel with Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion to ask him...and too bad that Python video has been blocked):

Is your famously disingenuous waiter really so inauthentic? Or is it mutually and rightly understood by waiter and customer alike that role-playing is an inescapable element of normal human life? Is it so different from playing professor-and-student? That's a frequently-fun game - finite or infinite? "(Infinite games are more mysterious -- and ultimately more rewarding. They are unscripted and unpredictable; they are the source of true freedom.") -  I've always felt was authentic enough to continue indefinitely. My hopes are high for the play to go on and on.

Keep on pushing

LISTEN

We're experiencing a mysterious semi-power outage in our home this morning, so I'm even more in the dark than usual. All the more cause to appreciate Mr. Edison...

Happy birthday to the man who said “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

And

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

And

“Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”

Which echoes Bertrand Russell ("Most people would rather die than think, and in fact most do") and William James ("A great many people think they are thinking when they are really just rearranging their prejudices").

Edison was a freethinker and a fan of Tom Paine, approvingly citing Paine's declaration that 'The world is my country; to do good my religion.' (More Paine below*)

“Happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” A.Dumbledore

 In CoPhi today we commence report presentations and continue following the great American retreat from reason and Enlightenment, from Cane Ridge to Joseph Smith.  Mark Twain summed up his century's standard cerebral strategy: we feel, and call it thinking. We habitually mistrust our minds and turn to our guts for guidance. Visceral "thinking" is precisely what's landed us in Fantasyland.

“Yes, but what's your gut feeling?” But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

And yet, 19th century America was on track to "realize" Enlightenment before the forces of reaction gut-punched us back into our prolonged adolescent infatuation with superstition and supernaturalism. "Education became free and compulsory... we got telegraphy, high-speed printing presses, railroads, steamships, vaccination, anaesthesia, more."

But we also got tellers of legendary tall tales. Ronald Reagan liked regaling us with stories of a mysterious angel in a dark robe whose sudden appearance (and equally sudden disappearance) at the Constitutional Convention knocked sense into the quarreling delegates. ("God has given America to be free!") His source was supposed to be Thomas Jefferson.

Europeans traditionally have had a binary choice between state-sanctioned religion or none at all. America has always been about a wild sectarian smorgasbord of religious pluralism. We do like to choose. When we don't like what's on the current menu, we cook up a new religion. Christian Science, Scientology, Science of Mind,  et al. It's been estimated that there are over 300 Christian denominations in the U.S. alone. That almost seems low.

Funny thing, though: in Jefferson's day it was (he told European correspondents) the north that was known as a hotbed of "superstitious and hypocritical" piety, while southerners were "without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart."

The 19th century "Woodstock for American Christianity" came in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, whose high-on-heaven communicants have been described as "drunk as sexually aroused... walking to the altar to be saved and experience an all-consuming feeling of a personal relationship with Jesus."

The next generation of evangelical enthusiasts included one Charles Finney, who was sure he'd met Jesus face to face. Literally. Even Billy Graham never claimed that, did he? Can't speak for Franklin, whose claims I think we've learned to discount anyway. Finney was not doctrinaire, he just wanted us to meet and greet our savior too.  Of course the doctrine of eternal damnation always lurks behind the promise of eternal life, for those who doubt and question.

Alexis de Tocqueville, observing all this, said no country in the world was as fanatically Christian as America. Understandably. "Religious insanity is very common in the United States."

And then came William Miller, who said Christ would be back in the Spring of 1843... Oops, April 1844. No wait, October. Well, stay tuned.

Joseph Smith takes top prize for sheer audacity of faith, if we can trust that he really believed his own story about the angel Moroni and the golden plates etc. "I don't blame anyone for not believing my history, if I had not experienced what I have, I should not have believed it myself." And yet, more than 15,000,000 present-day Latter Day Saints presumably have not experienced it but say they believe anyway.  That is truly a great mystery.

*Citizen Tom Paine would defend their right to believe, but would also point out that no one is obliged to accept someone else's experience as coercive of one's own faith. "My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches... appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit... I do not choose to rest my belief upon such [hearsay] evidence." Age of Reason

Today in A&P we also begin by pondering the power of emotion to run roughshod over reason. Its important function is to give us our goals and an impetus to meet them, but it can sometimes also impede our ability to critique and modify them in the light of new ideas and evidence. But some would say that ability is already compromised by the imperative of our "selfish genes" whose reproductive success is what ultimately accounts for our goals. 

Richard Dawkins: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do...We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.” If we don't rebel, then there may well be a sense in which a person just is a vehicle driven by genes, in order to produce more of themselves. Can we occupy the driver's seat? Can we "defer immediate gene-specified rewards and make longer-term plans" that do serve our goals?

And is this another way of asking, again, about free will?

This is also the context in which Dawkins introduced memes, the mind's own replicating agents. He echoes Tom Paine “The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.” 

Even with rational inquiry, we must guard against the "sedimentation" (says Jesse Prinz) of social forces supplanting our individual critical choices and goal-seeking.

Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity acknowledges the inevitability of social forces defining us, by race or gender or whatever, until we accept the responsibility of pushing back. We're not pure subjects, though. The fashioning of personal and social identity is always a matter of push-pull. Values do get sedimented in the brain, and it's only the courageous persons whose brains ever get cleansed from too much accreted and unexamined layering. 

Sartre's bogey was bad faith, Marx's was alienation, and the forest is full of other bogeys we must always be ready to face if we're to flourish. For instance, the tedium and ennui and sheer sense of maddening pointless repetition were Camus's Sisyphean bogeys. His solution, to keep pushing that stone, seems to me mis-characterized in our chapter as a case of acquiescence to absurdity. 

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." A full heart born of struggle is not resigned or acquiescent. but it probably is ironic and amused. So should we all be, in these strange unsettling days of Drumpf and virulence. Keep on pushing.

Stand!

Mitt Romney, profile in courage: who'd ever have predicted that!  "Lamar!" though, profile in cowardice, is sadly no longer a shock. He's no Howard Baker, nor even a  Bob Corker.

Local headline: Two Republican lawmakers want to allow students at Tennessee's public universities and colleges to carry concealed handguns. "The effort comes several years after lawmakers approved a measure that lets full-time faculty, staff and other employees to carry guns on campus." My response then, and still, is that the only weapon I want in my classroom is the Point of View gun.

Happier morning thoughts are called to mind by the birthday of Michael Pollan, a writer I admired and corresponded with before he became famous. I'd read his A Place of My Own and presumptuously sent him a long chapter of my book in progress, which he graciously read and offered constructive comments on. Happy birthday, Michael.

Today in CoPhi, the true "greatest generation" (but of course they had their limitations, many owned other humans; greatness is relative). The American Founders were rationalists and pragmatists, true republicans who'd have recoiled from the Tennessee state legislature and probably would have withdrawn that ambiguous language about the right to bear arms if they'd known what kind of arms would be bearing and borne in 2020.

The Last Puritan was a novel by George Santayana (who warned us not to ignore history), but it was also the moniker of "Great Awakening" instigator Jonathan ("Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") Edwards. He thought ecstatic shows of holy delirium ("moaning, weeping,screaming, jerking, fainting") somehow proved the divine source of all things. He was a respected scholar and preacher but he was also, as Andy said of Barney, a nut.

So was John Wesley if you ask me. He thought dreams were a landline to heaven, and inspired his early co-religionists to invest everyday life with intimations of the supernatural. Methodists have a reputation nowadays for moderation, but again these things are relative.

And George Whitefield, who popularized the "born again" phenomenon that captivated my early years and gave me night terrors ("If I should die before I wake" etc.) and later made me think I was missing an  "intense supernatural feeling" without which I'd be left behind. (My parents didn't spout that nonsense, but some of my peers did. Wish I'd met a philosopher back then.)

Thomas Jefferson instructed his teenage nephew to "question with boldness even the existence of a god," and boldly cut up the Good Book to get the supernatural bits out. The result, he said, was sublime: the Jefferson Bible, shorter and sweeter. He was a self-avowed Epicurean and materialist, and probably a Deist. He and his pals did not want to create a theocratic Christian nation.

The Framers didn't really forget God, they remembered to affirm a big beautiful wall between church and state. That Alexander Hamilton, what a card.

Have the courage to think for yourself, and grow up. That was Kant's message, and is Susan Neiman's. But the market for reason is not as bullish as they'd have wished.

Neiman: “Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.” And, “A defense of the Enlightenment is a defense of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.” Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

That's meliorism, not optimism. Take a sad world and make it better.

Mark Twain said there's nothing more sad than a young pessimist, except an old optimist. Right, Dean Fischer?

Did you see the most-shared story in the Times yesterday? "Four ways to help your college student grow up." One of the ways: help them figure out how to script a conversation with their "intimidating" professors. Ha! Ask my daughters how intimidating I am. Or don't. But do come talk to me, kids. And share this article with you “helicopter,” “bulldozer,” “snowplow” and “lawn mower” parents please.

Are existential/"meaning of life" questions really so burdensome and beyond the pale of rational human thought? Kant thought so, thus proposing to limit reason and try to make room for faith. But we're testing that proposition this semester in A&P with Neuroexistentialism. Lately our discussions have been all  about free will, and the analogy of dominoes I like to share.

"Knowing that I'm a domino and knowing, in so far as is possible, what forces are acting upon me, and making choices in light of this makes it possible--in my estimation--for me to feel free enough." Well said, Jamil.

Knowing oneself to be a "domino" of this sort would indeed enhance one's feeling of freedom in Spinoza's sense, i.e., leading one closer to acceptance of fate and necessity and personal impotence. But what then happens to the feeling of freedom as agency to influence events and outcomes in the world, to function as a meliorist (neither a cloudy pessimist or rosy optimist, just one who believes that things could be better and is prepared to work for that result)? If we're dominoes and know it, we'll better understand the tragic dimension of life. That's worth knowing.

But we Jamesians still want to experiment with the proposal that free will might mean the sustaining (and acting upon) a thought,when I might have and might be distracted by other thoughts... and that free will in that sense might make a difference in our lives and in those of others. When we attend, we gain information that may inform better choices. (But better and efficacious? That's the question.) We could be wrong. But, what would it be better for us to believe? And here I go all pluralist again and say: I've decided it's probably better for ME to believe in free will, as here explicated. But it might not be better for you, or for one or another of our friends.

Maybe Sly and the Family Stone had the best last word on this: you're free... well at least in your mind, if you wanna be...

One more thing, C.S. Lewis:

“Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.” ― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

Wrong again, Clive.

Trees, witches, and voles

Pitchers and catchers report in 8 days and counting...

Yesterday I told the Spring Honors Lecture Series audience that, as Greta Thunberg has said, "there is a tomorrow." (See preceding post)

The fact that so many young people are demanding their tomorrows is heartening. Al Gore was right, great moral movements grow when young people join them. So I'm looking forward to the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in April, and I hope they are too. Unlike the Dean in the audience whose pessimism on behalf of my generation was a wet blanket tossed late onto the conversation, I'm still with Michael Chabon and Long Now, optimistic - or at least hopeful - for their (our) future. I'm betting on them (us) to finally heed the guy who speaks for the trees: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

When I said "Don't Panic," I wasn't denying that we earthlings face a long-festering and self-imposed existential crisis we could have reversed by now if we'd grown the spirit of that first Earth Day over the just-past half century and reigned in the fossil fuel Oncelers. I'm just saying it almost never helps to panic in a crisis, and anyway it's not an Alien Invasion that's got us in this predicament. We've met the enemy and he is us (though it's especially those of us who've enabled and submitted to the fossil Oncelers.)  We just need now to act, with calm heads and resolute hearts. Al again: "We know what we have to do. What's wrong with doing the right thing?"

But if this happens during my commute, I will panic.

Meanwhile, the endless Iowa campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination that was supposed to end yesterday is dishearteningly suspended and unresolved. Maybe that's good, maybe this glitch will finally break Iowa's grip on an absurdly grueling and unrepresentative process. Maybe we'll begin to think seriously about reforming and streamlining our electoral machinery. "There are 41 delegates up for grabs" in the Hawkeye state, "a tiny fraction of the 1,991 delegates needed to win the Democratic presidential nomination." So let's move on. New Hampshire shouldn't get to decide for the nation either. How about a national primary on a single (holi)day in June? Or later?

On the other hand, I do recall the one time I participated in a presidential caucus. It was 1976, I was a sophomore at Mizzou, one of maybe 75 people who showed up on caucus night at the designated middle school precinct location. When the time came I went and sat with a handful of others who were supporting Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (I was a misguided foreign policy hawk back then, having dodged the draft which ended just the month before my eligibility). There weren't enough of us, so we were dispersed and had to go with choice #2. Pretty sure I floated over to Jimmy Carter's table. (Or was it Mo Udall's?) It all felt like a charming and authentic bit of democracy in action. It'd be kinda sad to loose it. But it's a broken system.

Today in CoPhi we're talking witches, wiccans, puritans, and that "so American" confident certitude exhibited by Anne Hutchinson and others ever since that we get to believe whatever we damn well please because, well dammit, we're Americans. "Spectral evidence" (dreams & visions) was enough to convict those poor women in Salem of witchcraft, and most Americans believed it. Believe it.

I get to mention my little encyclopedia entry on Roger Williams, and to note that as Europe was embracing Enlightenment and sweet reason our forebears were running desperately in the other direction.

During our founding 1600s, as giants walked in Europe and the Age of Reason dawned- Shakespeare, Galileo, Bacon, Isaac Newton, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza- America was a primitive outlier...[promoting]the freedom to believe whatever supernaturalism you wished.

But in fairness, this didn't happen in America:

 

This did:

In A&P we'll turn to Greg Caruso's and Owen Flanagan's Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience. "Third wave existentialism," they call it, "defined here as a zeitgeist that involves a central preoccupation with human purpose and meaning accompanied by the anxiety that there is none." Plus a swig of Darwin's dangerous idea that we're "100% animal" and subject to all the selective pressures that contribute to species extinction and in our time (as noted at the Honors College yesterday) threaten our own. We have met the enemy and he is us, right Pogo?

But we're 100% the animal that has devised human culture, and we'd better hope it can still be our salvation. There's still no sign of help coming to save us from ourselves. "There is not JUSTICE, there is just us." So we need to use those oxytocin receptors Pat Churchland says we share with the prairie voles, to reward ourselves for doing the right things in this particular moment of cultural, species, and planetary duress. Go Voles!