Moving forward

Today in Environmental Ethics, we wonder--or Robin Attfield and I do, anyway--if people who say they don't care about the long-term future of humanity are declaring the shocking opinion that their death effectively obliterates the moral universe.

And what's a "moral universe"? Best statement of it I know is James's, in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in the passage at the end of Part II that begins: "Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could harbor..."

James also said our one really vital question is: what is life going to make of itself? What is this world going to be?

 Life goes on, as Samuel Scheffler's thought experiments in Death and the Afterlife (and in a Stone essay) make clear and not cliche.

Consider a hypothetical scenario. Suppose you knew that although you yourself would live a long life and die peacefully in your sleep, the earth and all its inhabitants would be destroyed 30 days after your death in a collision with a giant asteroid. How would this knowledge affect you?

It affects me with the realization of just how much I rely on the assumption of humanity's endurance and advance, for my own sense of meaning and purpose. So long as we're here, and they're here after I'm gone, the moral universe subsists. I don't have to be here. Neither do you. Good thing. 

But while we're here, let's appreciate the natural universe too. Margaret Renkl's latest column is another gem, meditating on the wildlife just beyond her window and concluding:

...How lucky I am to live in a home with windows. Against all odds — the encroachments of construction companies and lawn services and exterminators — these windows still open onto a world that stubbornly insists on remaining wild. I love the bluebirds, and I also love the fierce hawk who reminds me that the peace of the backyard is only a fiction. I love the lizard who looks so much like a snake, and I also love the snake who would eat her if it could.

And my friend the mole, oh how I love my old friend the mole. In these days that grow ever darker as fears gather and autumn comes on, I remember again and again how much we all share with this soft, solitary creature trundling through invisible tunnels in the dark, hungry and blind but working so hard to move forward all the same. Margaret Renkl, nyt

William Blake, she reminds us, was right about this (I think he was wrong about plenty else, but that's another story): Every living thing is holy. And while every living thing is still destined to live out its  unique and personal existence in the blink of an eye, we still have it in our power to refrain from acts that would end the marvelous parade of living beings whose extinction would be the annihilation of the moral universe. That includes us. But not only us.

A related question: do those who have a harder time caring about their hypothetical great-grandchildren (etc.) than children and grandchildren lack a moral imagination? Or are they merely human, all too human?  

In CoPhi, we turn from Plato to his disillusioned student Aristotle. I'll ask my usual question, as we ponder Raphael's "School of Athens": which side are you on? And I'll endorse Aristotle's view that a virtuous character rests on solid habits. I'll doubtless bring Willy James into it too, with his "enormous fly-wheel of society" statement. And Maria Popova, also a fan.

We'll note Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland appreciation of Sir Francis Bacon's early insight about humans' tendency to embrace superstition and notice only those instances of experience that seem to confirm it, while selectively ignoring other instances that do not. He didn't call that confirmation bias but that's just what it is, and we're all prone to it. 

In Baggini's How the World Thinks we'll go with him to the Indian philosophy conference, where "no questions were taken"... in sharp contrast to what typically goes on at American academic philosophical conferences. That seems very strange, to those of us who've attended more western philosophy conferences than we can count. Is it an error? Or just an alternative approach? Both east and west are smitten with the metaphor of "seeing," but mustn't we also analyze, cogitate, interrogate, and converse about our different perspectives, in order to figure things out?

One thing I do find appealing (but finally not defensible) in the Indian approach to pedagogy: students are supposed ALWAYS to defer to their teachers, even when they're wrong. Wonder what that's like.

The Japanese philosopher Nishida said "It is the artist, not the scholar, who arrives at the true nature of reality." But he was a scholar. What did he know?

My view is that western philosophy is right to distance itself from the idea of philosopher -as-sage or guru. But, a little more artistry in our discourse and our publications would be welcome.

How the World Thinks, and other things

LISTEN. Today in CoPhi we begin with Socrates... but I have some misgivings about that. The past several semesters I've made a point of spending quality time with pre-Socratics, but this time there were other texts I wanted to make room for. But I do want to take a moment to just say: Democritus of Abdera was no dummy. And Protagoras was no screaming relativist, but more like a pragmatist. And Thales was right, water is a universal solvent. The pre-Socratics were trying to puzzle out a naturalist account of our condition. They were headed in the right direction. Read all about them in Anthony Gottlieb's wonderful first volume history of western philosophy, The Dream of Reason.

Sorry for the abrupt ending, entertaining though it is... Part 2 concludes quickly and without incident:

I've been telling everyone in my Zoom classes that our goal in CoPhilosophy is amicable conversation, collaboration, and mutual support. That's probably only possible if we embrace the Socratic definition of successful conversation: nobody "wins," everybody acknowledges the depths of our shared ignorance, and we resolve to continue a conversation constructed upon careful listening and the proffering of reasons for our claims and statements. In times like these, that would be quite the achievement.

Plato said we're like cave-dwellers who are clueless about what's "outside." I agree with the first part, we're substantially in the dark and cut off from the light. But maybe the light's not out there, beyond the sun; maybe it's more a product of our own reasoning and empirical observation, and circumspect critical analysis of the natural facts we can behold right here in the "cave" of the world.

If we are prisoners held captive by a notion that reality is easy to glean on the walls and screens directly before our passive gaze -- kind of like the bar-stool patrons at the Boulevard during Happy Hour? -- then we need to get up and move around, and explore the world. We need to get more peripatetic, as I keep saying. We need to take our minds to the gym, roam our thinking paths like Darwin on his Sand Walk or Bertie Russell on his daily mornings' hour perambulation.

Maybe, then, we'll discover the light of the sun to be nothing transcendent in a metaphysical sense, but merely a metaphor for the mind unshackled by prejudice and lazy complacency. You don't transcend nature when you navigate its byways, you find yourself planted more firmly in her.

What would Plato make of our modern versions of the cave, in particular all those entertaining, flickering screen spectacles we stare at incessantly and seem incapable of tearing ourselves away from? Rebecca Goldstein in Plato at the Googleplex imagines he'd be smitten with the silicon simulacrum's capacity to deliver information, but possibly not so sure of its relation to wisdom.

I would not want to live in Plato's so-called utopian Republic, not if I don't get to make my own vocational choices and rise or fall on my own merits and initiative there. Much as I talk about what I'd decree if I were Philosopher-King, I'll take my chances with what we're still calling democracy. But ask me again in November.

Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland asserts we've become a nation more interested in "truthiness" than truth, in alternative "facts" and fake "realities" than reality itself. Seems unarguable to me, I just hope we've hit peak-fantasyland... but again, ask me in November.

2/3 of Americans believe in angels and demons. Really? I know that many say they do, but surely a percentage of them are like my daughter: they say it just to annoy me. 

Today, for the first time in my classes, we take up Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy as a needed complement to Nigel Warburton's Little History of (Western) Philosophy. I'm sure he must be right, bi- and multi-cultural people do indeed "score higher on creativity," not to mention empathy, insight, and wisdom. They, sadly unlike most people historically and in some places regionally, enjoy encountering new ideas, philosophies, religions, traditions etc., and assimilating what's distinctive in each.

Writing that last line, I realize it sounds a lot like Captain Picard's nemesis the Borg, a monolithic aggressor that robs individuals of their autonomy while muttering the mantra that "resistance is futile." Nothing could actually be further from the cosmopolitan ideal of genuine global citizenship. I like that Baggini mentions Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethicist, in making the point that cultural identity can be a complex thing and we ought to embrace our diversity, not shrink from it.

I also like Baggini's citation of neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty's repudiation of "the philosophers' own scholastic little definitions of 'philosophy'...intended to exclude" other traditions and cultures from the conversation of humankind. The pluralistic form of philosophy requires many voices and visions, multiple perspectives, endless points of view.

Today in Environmental Ethics we commence our look at Robin Attfield's Very Short Intro, which announces early on: "the environment that our grand-children inherit will be vastly different from that of our early ancestors, and even from the environment we were born into ourselves." He's not talking about the pandemic or the political swamp-pit of our present moment, but he could be. 

The world is awash in change, uncertainty, and executively-orchestrated chaos. It would be hard to dispute or dissuade a younger person who'd concluded that the older generations have saddled theirs with an irretrievable climate catastrophe. I've had more than a few conversations with young "anti-natalists" whose present intent is to stop propagating our species altogether, saying they find it unconscionable to contemplate bringing new life into such a world. How sad. 

But I'm still wearing my rally cap, hoping for the right kind of change. That astronauts' image of the Earth hanging beautifully and vulnerably in space is still transformative and inspiring for me, still a powerful reminder that we're one species on a small rock with every incentive to bridge our differences and make a habitable, sustainable world for our children's children (etc., ad infinitum).

The heedless, voracious, unsustainably anthropocentric "Last Man" cannot be our paradigm. Right?

Biospherical egalitarianism, the "equal entitlement of all species to live their own way of life," expresses a lovely "live and let live" sentiment. But I must confess my own bias for human solidarity and survival. Live and let live, but prioritize humans if ever a choice must be made. But show me that a choice must be made, my inclination is to presume that human survival will not require animal and plant-species sacrifice.

One of my discussion prompts today asks if Stoicism is the wrong philosophy for this moment, if indeed it counsels that we should "follow nature" and comply with the status quo? But Stoic Pragmatism might be just right...

Another: If you don't feel "at home" anywhere, do you lack an environment? But shouldn't we feel at home everywhere, given our cosmic identity as creatures of the stars?

Margaret Renkl, again, a Nashville resident who writes a wise weekly column for the national newspaper of record, reminds us of the small comforts that put it all in perspective in her latest essay.

We may be in the middle of a story we don’t know how will end, or even whether it will end, but we are not helpless characters created and directed by an unseen novelist. We have the power, even in this Age of Anxiety, to enfold ourselves in small comforts, in the joy of tiny pleasures. We can walk out into the dark and look up at the sky. We can remind ourselves that the universe is so much bigger than this fretful, feverish world, and it is still expanding. And still filled with stars.

Her essays are consistently good, as is her first book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. I don't know if she'd say so herself, but she's a worthy philosopher.

One more question:

What do you think about "needlessly cutting down a healthy tree"? Here's what I thought about it, earlier this summer:

Opening Day, part 2

LISTEN. Opening Day on Zoom was indeed different, and a bit rushed. I didn't get around to saying everything I'd intended. Congress-people read things into the record all the time, why can't I? So, for the record (and since today is still Opening Day, for the students who'll be Zooming with me at 2 pm)...

I'll explain why I call the Intro to Philosophy course CoPhilosophy: because we're all in it together, and because I agree with William James's collaborative approach: "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of co..."

And, we'll remind ourselves that there should be far more to a university education than just a quick crash-course in vocational credentialing. Higher education is supposed to equip us to become good people leading good lives, not just good consumers earning good salaries. It's supposed to make us successful in the fullest sense, not in the constricted way James ridiculed in a wonderfully acidic epistle to H.G. Wells: “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease."

Our goal, simply put, is success at school as the first step on the road to non-squalid success in life. That's what college is for.

One clear mark of our success in CoPhilosophy will be the enhanced ability to perceive and consider alternative points of view, to sustain amicably constructive conversation in the face of dissent. To that end, and now that "an Authorized Employee may carry a concealed handgun on MTSU property," I'm in the market for one of these:

POV gun

(But, too bad I'm not teaching on MTSU property this semester.)

And... [from January 2016]

What is college for?

Isn't that a good question to ask, on the first day of the Spring semester? And to keep on asking, alongside "What is philosophy for?" It deserves more than the ritual lip-service we tend to give it at term's beginning, before settling into autopilot.

A college course ought to be an adventure, not just another hurdle on the way to a life of rote, routine, and repetition. One of our goals, in my classes - two CoPhilosophy (Intro) classes this semester, Atheism, & Bioethics, all on Tuesday/Thursday - is to arrive at the last day of class with a sense of having only begun an exciting lifelong journey, not wanting it to end. Older Daughter says she had a class like that last semester, and it was exceptional. It ought to be the rule.

One theme I'm going to push in all my classes this time is summed up in a statement of Spinoza's. “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” That's marvelous, and though it didn't prevent his own scorn and excommunication it suggests the wisdom of a John Rawls-ian kind of veil. We should always approach our studies as though we didn't already know what we think we know. We should seek to understand not just the position we've defended in the past, but also the positions we'll end up rejecting in the future.

That's not easy, particularly where passions run deep. Atheism, for instance. I won't ask anyone to suffer total amnesia as to their previous conclusions about the (non-) existence of god(s), but I willl ask them to pursue Spinozistic understanding of others' conclusions in a Rawlsian spirit of fairness.

I'll also ask them to adopt a suitable humility, if not quite Socratic then at least Einsteinian and Saganesque:  “One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

We should always be willing to listen to those who are willing to listen to us. That's the simple condition of collaborative co-philosophizing.

I tend to treat Opening Day of the academic season much as I treat its April counterpart in baseball, as a lighthearted and festive occasion to wax just a bit silly on a subject I care deeply and seriously about. But setting aside Douglas Adams' philosophical whale and Monty Python's Argument Clinic for a moment,  I want to think a bit this morning about that question. It's the title of chapter five of William Deresiewicz's controversial book Excellent Sheep, and it's really the main subject of that book (which generated most of its heat with a critique of elite education, but whose message applies to us public land-grant educators and our students as well). Some of its more trenchant observations:

“College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is "not the real world." But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.”

“Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for. Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse, that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them.” 

“You’re told that you’re supposed to go to college, but you’re also told that you are being self-indulgent if you actually want to get an education. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn’t self-indulgent? Going into finance isn’t self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn’t self-indulgent? It’s not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It’s selfish to pursue your passion, unless it’s also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn’t selfish at all.” 

“What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.” 

“In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we’ve been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fame. No wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job.” 

"The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again.”  

Every teacher and student, not just the ivies, should read Excellent Sheep, and then its sequel "How College Sold Its Soul to the Market":

As college is increasingly understood in terms of jobs and careers, and jobs and careers increasingly mean business, especially entrepreneurship, students have developed a parallel curriculum for themselves, a parallel college, where they can get the skills they think they really need. Those extracurriculars that students are deserting the classroom for are less and less what Pinker derides as “recreational” and more and more oriented toward future employment: entrepreneurial endeavors, nonprofit ventures, volunteerism. The big thing now on campuses — or rather, off them — is internships.

All this explains a new kind of unhappiness I sense among professors. There are a lot of things about being an academic that basically suck: the committee work, the petty politics, the endless slog for tenure and promotion, the relentless status competition. What makes it all worthwhile, for many people, is the vigorous intellectual dialogue you get to have with vibrant young minds. That kind of contact is becoming unusual. Not because students are dumber than they used to be, but because so few of them approach their studies with a sense of intellectual mission. College is a way, learning is a way, of getting somewhere else. Students will come to your office — rushing in from one activity, rushing off to the next — to find out what they need to do to get a better grade. Very few will seek you out to talk about ideas in an open-ended way. Many professors still do care deeply about thinking and learning. But they often find that they’re the only ones.

Too bleak for Opening Day? (And the anniversary of Vesuvius, and the baptismal day of Mr. Keating's favorite poet? WA) Maybe it's not too late for some of us to retain or regain our souls, to gather some rosebuds and make much of our brief time together before the volcano blows. Hope springs eternal, in the beginning.

Opening Day!

LISTEN. Opening Day will be a little different this year. Okay, a lot different.

2020 has been a year like no other, hasn't it? [LISTEN to my Opening Day intro last January, which now seems a small eternity ago.]

But Opening Days are still a big deal. We get to introduce ourselves, and I get to begin introducing the course. Everybody's still in first place, we've all still got high hopes (I hope).

Here's how I'll introduce myself when our first class of the semester gathers in Zoom-space this afternoon...

If you haven't guessed, from my sporting metaphors, I'm a baseball fan. Raised in the St. Louis area, I went to my first live Cardinals game several stadia ago. I've not got to see them in action much yet in 2020, bunch of them came down with the virus.

My wife and I were in Scottsdale, AZ back in March, enjoying Cactus League Spring Training, when the plug was pulled on this baseball season. The rest of Spring Training was canceled (glad we got to see Murfreesboro TN's favorite millionaire athlete David Price pitch for LA earlier in the week), MLB's Opening Day was delayed ('til late July, it turned out, and that turned out to be too soon). Resumption of our Spring semester was also delayed, and we haven't been in the brick-and-mortar classroom since.

But let's look on the Bright Side. Many of us, thanks to these extreme measures, social distancing, masking etc., have managed to dodge COVID-19. We're healthy enough to carry on by other means. We'll be communicating, in my classes, on this platform and on Zoom. And we'll look forward to the day when we can again share physical space on our currently-lonely campus.

Meanwhile, in spite of everything, it's Opening Day again. As Mr. Cub used to say, let's play two! (He got to play on grass under the big sky at Wrigley Field, before they conformed and added lights and night games, we'll play on Zoom-CoPhi first, then Environmental Ethics). But since I'm a peripatetic, I'll again urge us all to find our own piece of turf and sky each day. I guarantee it will improve your and our experience of the course. As Chris Orlet reminds, in Gymnasiums of the Mind: Solvitur Ambulando, "it is solved by walking"--for pretty much any it.

Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind.” 

Read the rest, if you're curious about the peripatetic life. It's a short essay, but if you follow the peri-philosophers' footsteps it may just change your life.

Also by way of introducing myself, I suggest you take a look at Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot [video]- he was an early influence on me and my version of Cosmic Philosophy.

And William James's opening lecture on Pragmatism, wherein he insists that we all have a philosophy whether we know it or not.

And my book...

And Brian Cohen...

For the record, here's how things began the last time we commenced a real (on ground, in person) semester:

Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Opening Day!

Or Opening Deja-vu, all over again. Like last time, and the time before, and the time before that, but also different. [Fall 2019]

Another fresh start, a blank slate, a return to that form of life we call academia and philosophia. Call it what you will, the first day of a new semester is an always-welcome recurrence I'm happy to affirm. I say yes to the challenge of introducing the next generation to this odd but essential practice of mature reflection on behalf of our adolescent species. The break was actually a little long, in some ways, though the break from that congested commute down I-24 to the 'boro was (as always) a time-giving, anxiety-relieving happy respite.

We'll do our usual Opening Day round of introductions: Who are you? Why are you here? I always encourage students to be creatively and playfully thoughtful with their responses to those questions, and there's usually a small handful of creatively playful responses mixed in with the dull literal Joe ("Just the facts, M'am") Fridays. "I'm Bill, I'm in concrete management, I'm here for the GenEd credit..." Thanks, Bill. Anybody given any thought to who you are independent of your academic and career aspirations, why you're living this life, in this place, with these goals and intentions?

Philosophers and physicists wonder why there's something rather than nothing, a universe where there might (we suppose) have been nought at all. Beyond that, as William James said, there's a mystery as to the existence of every particular, "this very thing," in its very particularity. Today begins, again, the worthy task of getting more of my young charges to grasp and grapple with (or at least acknowledge and value) that mystery, and grow from the encounter.

Atheism and Philosophy begins again today too. In addition to the usual questions we'll ask: Do you have firm convictions regarding religion, spirituality, an afterlife, a deity...? Do you think religion and science are (or can be) compatible? What sources of meaning and purpose in life do you recognize?

So, shall we hit the ground running? And not say, like that jaded bowl of petunias, "Oh no, not again!"

Or maybe I'll just talk about my dogs again, and my canine philosophy. (Did someone mention Diogenes?)

"The best life in America"

LISTEN. Feeling nostalgic for ordinary campus life, as we used to know it, I recall the way my first landlord Winterton Curtis concluded his "Damned Yankee" autobiographical notes:

...IT WAS [Mizzou] PRESIDENT LAWS who admitted publicly that he settled the competition between the various Protestant denominations for representation on his faculty, by choosing his appointees in rotation. If he needed a chemist, he chose a chemist who was a Methodist, if it was the Methodists' turn. The Baptists had their chance for a place in the . sun when the next vacancy .occurred. Since the father of George Lefevre was a Presbyterian minister, he was razzed by his friends as being a Presbyterian appointee, even though he came to the University in 1899, and the administration of President Laws was only a memory. No such accusation was ever pinned on me, although my father was a Congregational minister, since Congregationalism was a denomination unfamiliar to most Columbians.

I MIGHT HAVE included here the story of how I built the house at 210 [later re-numbered 504] Westmount Avenue into which Mrs. Curtis and I moved in December 1906, but that account is reserved for another section of my autobiographical notes.

It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield , to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia.

 

And Murfreesboro, once upon a time... and someday again, maybe?

A big thematic resonance for me, in Curtis's writing and in our course, is this idea of making a home for ourselves on this earth. Carl Sagan also said that what drew him to appreciate William James's approach to questions of spirituality was the latter's emphasis on the feeling of being at home in the universe. That was also Sagan's understanding of the spiritual promise of science, that we would--through the steady application of scientific and rationalistic methods and insights--come to feel ourselves, as a species, at home in the universe. We would come to see ourselves as embodying what John Dewey would call "the continuous human community"...

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” John Dewey, A Common Faith

Curtis redux

LISTEN. I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I choose to draw down the curtain on our short summer course with one last nod to my old landlord Winterton Curtis. I've already posted a small excerpt of his Dayton recollections below, but Tompkins' D-Days at Dayton (LSU Press,1965) includes a lengthier essay and his formal affidavit as submitted to the court.

Curtis writes:

In 1901 [as Curtis began his teaching career at my dad's and my alma mater, the University of Missouri], it seemed to me and to the vast majority of zoologists that the public controversy over evolution had ended a decade before the turn of the century. I remembered how, as a college student in the mid-nineties [that's the 1890s], I had almost wished that I had been born twenty years earlier and had participated... when the fighting was really hot. If anyone had told me that within twenty-five years the fight would be on once more and the climax would be legislation against the teaching of a scientific fact so well established as the doctrine of evolution, this would have seemed incredible.

...Because [former] students had come to me with their problems [teaching evolution in high schools and some of the denominational colleges] and because the "Fundamentalist Crusade," under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan, was assuming alarming proportions, I began about 1920 to take an active part in the defense of evolution.

...The Macedonian call from Dayton, Tennessee, that came to me one hot July morning in 1925 was probably due to my activities in defense of evolution as well as to my geographical location, to my recent book Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology, and to whatever standing I then had as a zoologist...

In his book Curtis wrote, among many other passages I find personally compelling:

The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times.

And,

...the gods do not help us to that which we desire; we help ourselves, by understanding nature and by ordering our lives in conformity to her laws. Courage and high resolve are needed thus to face the realities of life. The night of fear is still about us, though we face the new day. At times, we lose all hope that a scientific philosophy of life can ever prevail within the hearts of men. In the faith that it will prevail, we lay hold upon scientific truth as we see it around us, believing that in the end no other state of mind will satisfy as well. 

In D-Days Curtis details a remarkable trial postscript, his later discovery (on visiting Dayton in 1956) that there had been credible threats on Darrow's life after his cross-examination of Bryan which led Judge Raulston to strike those proceedings from the court record and discontinue further cross-examination.

He writes:

On the hopeful side, I found among students a much greater interest in my course on evolution during the decade following 1925 while the "Monkey Trial" was still remembered.

But he goes on to deplore the subsequent retrenchment of anti-evolutionism since the 1950s, with many college students now arriving on campus already inured against any consideration of the evidence so strongly in its favor. "Would that the fundamentalists would learn that facts are stubborn things which will not be denied and that in the long run religious doctrines must square with the facts of science if these doctrines are to survive in the minds of educated and thoughtful men." And women. Religion must evolve, as must attitudes and language

Curtis and Darrow formed a lasting friendship in Dayton, which Curtis credited with helping him persevere in the face of dire illness.

...in the spring of 1924 I had been told that I had perhaps two years to live. A growth diagnosed as Hodgkins disease had been removed from my neck... But I found my agnostic philosophy of life sufficient unto the day... My escape was in work that took my mind off my problem, my philosophy that we all take our chances with the order of nature and that this problem was mine to handle as best I could without hope of Heaven or fear of Hell...

After dinner at "The Mansion" Curtis's first night in Dayton, he and Darrow spent a long time talking out on the veranda.

...When we parted [Darrow] remarked, "There aren't many who think about these things as you and I do..." 

The important thing I got from this first contact with Darrow was an uplift of spirit. It seemed to me I could still keep going... I remember writing him some weeks after the trial, "Because of meeting you, I have renewed courage to face life..."

Strength for living comes from different sources, for different folks. Acknowledging that is what pluralism in philosophy is ultimately about.
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Here's the first page of Dr. C's lengthy annual holiday letter ("report to stockholders") from 1963, addressed to my parents. Note the reference to D-Days at Dayton in the second paragraph.


Dr. C., I think you can tell from just this snippet of personal correspondence (and as further evidenced in his charming autobiographical notes A Damned-Yankee Professor in Little Dixie), was no crass materialist. There was a pronounced spiritual dimension to the man, as he himself averred in the penultimate chapter of his book "The Higher Values of Science":

The material values of science are widely acclaimed. Its higher values are commonly ignored. For the man of the street, science represents only control of his physical environment. As a matter of fact, the changes induced by science within this environment are insignificant, when compared with those wrought within the human mind. To designate these higher values of science, the term spiritual may be used...

The account of creation in the book of Genesis, when compared with the tale outlined by modern science, is like some nursery story, cherished as part of a departed childhood and wonderful in its proper setting, but not to be classed with the great symphony made known by science...

Cue the Symphony of Science again!

Winterton Curtis really does anticipate Carl Sagan, for me. Carl could well also have said, and in his own idiom did, "One of the tragedies of life is the fact that so many minds close at the threshold of what might have become a great adventure... science counts of the side of the open mind."

But it was not the author of The Demon-haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark who first remarked on

a subtle change of ideas and of beliefs, comparable to the changes of intellectual outlook in the past, by which superstitions, like infant damnation, witchcraft, demoniacal possession, and the belief in ghosts were rendered impotent... The history of scientific progress has been marked by spiritual emancipations. Today the process still goes on, for supernaturalism is not yet fully vanquished, but lingers on as a miasma of society.

In this manner, science feeds the spiritual as well as the material man... 

The Cosmos we know today is unbelievably complex...

The biological discovery of man's place in nature did more than change traditional beliefs; it gave a point of departure into a future, unknown but fraught with possibilities... 

The future is bright with a promise that stands at the threshold of realization. Ignoring of science by one generation bars the door of progress and the next generation suffers accordingly. Understanding of science is the greatest legacy we can bequeath to posterity. Winterton C. Curtis, Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology

And that's why Carl Sagan vigorously rejected the opposition of science to religion. Both are spiritual enterprises, concerned with those unknown possibilities and our legacy for future generations. It's why he called science "informed worship." The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
And that's why William James said the deepest religious impulse is for life, "more life, a richer, more fulfilling, more satisfying life." The word religion comes from a root that means to bind or connect, above all to connect to nature and to other humans.

Spirituality comes from a root that means breath. To breathe is to live, and to deliberately honor and gratify the life impulse is to serve the spirit. Science and religion at their best, shorn respectively of narrow materialist defeatism and of anti-scientistic superstition and fear, both do that.

And so the curtain comes down, our course is through. But may we all continue to evolve into a brighter light of mutual understanding and acceptance. Keep your health, be happy, I'll talk to you again soon.

Atheists more religious than Christians?

Interesting item in The Atlantic (thanks, Mitch)...

Atheists are sometimes more religious than Christians
Survey shows how poorly we understand the beliefs of people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. —
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"America is a country so suffused with faith that religious attributes abound even among the secular. Consider the rise of “atheist churches,” which cater to Americans who have lost faith in supernatural deities but still crave community, enjoy singing with others, and want to think deeply about morality. It’s religion, minus all the God stuff."

As Wm James said, the deepest religious impulse is not for god but for life, "more life, a richer life..." etc.

The etymology of the word is telling: "religare" means to bind or connect, to nature and to other humans.

But...

“I hypothesize that being ‘spiritual’ may be a transitional position between being Christian and being non-religious,” said Linda Woodhead, a professor of politics, philosophy, and religion at Lancaster University in the U.K. “Spirituality provides an opportunity for people to maintain what they like about Christianity without the bits they don’t like.”

I don't think spirituality is a merely-transitional phenomenon. Etymology again: "espiritu" means breath. To breathe is to live, and to deliberately honor and gratify the life impulse is to serve the spirit. Check out Carl Sagan's posthumous Varieties of Scientific Experience for a lucid discussion of the spirituality implicit in science, which he calls "informed worship."