This crazy semester and "This Life"

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We're back.

My first-ever Spring Break/Cactus League holiday in Arizona was gloriously good for three days. Then it rained, they pulled the plug on Spring Training (and the NBA and all the other organized spectator sports), and Spring Break was extended to give my colleagues and me time to prepare for Pandemic University online. Oh Brave New World...

So I've posted a little video and encouraged students to take virtual co-responsibility for their education. It can work, if we're all in. We'll see.

In CoPhi there will have to be some trimming, we're only up to Augustine and Boethius  et al. But we'll not trim Camus and the Existentialists, they're never more relevant than in times of crisis. And plague.

Nor will we trim American Philosophy: A Love Story, whose author John Kaag published his new William James book during our extended break. His fundamental message, to my taste better conveyed than by the Existentialists: life may be worth living, it's our choice. 

Also just out during our break: Ann Druyan's companion book to the newest rendition of Cosmos. It puts all this in perspective. “A world [this] tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter—to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness.”

In A&P we finally take up Martin Hagglund's This Life, a robust defense of secular values and an impassioned plea for egalitarian politics. "To be religious is to regard our finitude as a lack,an illusion, or a fallen state of being," he asserts. It might be, if there were any alternative. Infinitude is not on our menu. His audacious rejoinder: "Any life worth living must be finite and requires secular faith." Full commitment to the secular life requires our fidelity, without which its object vanishes. It's entirely on us. 

Hagglund draws a distinction, surprisingly due in part to C.S. Lewis, between eternal life and "living on" in this one (secular faith opts for the latter). Woody Allen, whose autobiography just came out, famously articulated a similar sentiment: “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

Self-absorbed though that may sound, it's also implicitly expressive of the central tenet of secular faith: that life is worth living. or (as Kaag's James would have it) may be. "If I did not have faith that life is worth living, I would never be compelled to fight for the memory of the past or for a better future." I'd be stranded in a meaningless pointless eternal present. I'd have effectively abolished time, not (in Charles Taylor's phrase) simply "gathered" it. Secular faith regards time as irreducibly sacred."The days are gods," as Emerson the secular transcendentalist put it.

It's entirely fortuitous that we're doing Augustine in CoPhi on the same day that in A&P we encounter him  insisting on the inescapabiliy of secular faith -- "the source of our passion for the world and our care for one another." Is there really a greater passion, a deeper care? 

This Life is a revelation in many ways, including its insight into Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård's extensive, micro-attentive ruminations on quotidian banalities. It's telling, to realize that Knausgaard's determined quest for focus translates, in his native tongue, as attachment. Under his unblinking gaze "even dull experiences come alive with the sensory, perceptual, and reflective richness of being in the world." We tend to exaggerate the exceptional and extraordinary, when in fact it's the everyday that typically tethers us to our lives. "Setting the table, cleaning the house," walking the dogs... it's all as rich as we're prepared to notice, when attending with a will to attachment.

Hagglund quotes Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights: "in heaven I should be extremely miserable." Why? Because nothing there is ever really at risk or at stake. We humans require challenge and vulnerability to perceive value, it seems. Also, apparently, Ted Danson will be there.

A sharply drawn allegation, which I found useful to mention when I gave my little talk to the Honors College early last month (it seems so long ago, already), is Hagglund's claim that having religious faith means believing that "what is truly valuable" can survive the destruction of earth and everything finite." I said I looked forward to hearing the Dean's perspective on that, he being a person of unconcealed faith. Guess we won't be hearing that, not this semester in that forum. Seems like we've already lost much, to COVID-19, that would have been of great educational value.

But I do think people of religious faith, not just secularists, can think they take the climate crisis seriously. Can they unreservedly affirm, though, that  the fate of the earth is ultimately in our hands? Can any of us afford not to make that assumption, in these unsettled days?