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!