Nothing doing

LISTEN. Today in CoPhi we continue, with Susan Neiman, to ask why grow up? 

Why wake up? In the pre-dawn of day, and of life, why not snooze through "the sleep of reason" indefinitely? 

The short answer for Neiman, we've already noted, is Kantian: perpetual immaturity is a benighted state of dependence on the thoughts and instructions of others, an irresolute absence of courage to think for oneself. It's the path of least resistance, of servile subjugation to the will of others, of ignorance and docility and vulnerability to manipulation by unscrupulous authoritarians. It is to make oneself a pawn in service to someone else's ends, to abrogate one's birthright of freedom. 

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things," says The Book. The trick to the art of mature living, though, is to retain childlike wonder and a capacity for spontaneous joy throughout life, but also to own your freedom and independence of mind and will. A properly happy childhood imbues a person with that capacity. 

What does a happy childhood look like? Rousseau said "a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all," while for a child well-taught the days are packed with running and jumping and exploring and dreaming. Those are not nothing. "You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long." 

You know who that reminds me of?

 

I'd like nothing more, right now, than to dive into the Calvin and Hobbes archive and explore their brand of Nothingness. It's a way of Being the grim authors of Being and Nothingness and Being and Time seem to have known nothing of.

But I have something to do. Freely. I don't have to do it, existentially speaking, except from the perspective of a happy childhood. Happy maturity is something else.

Gaia

LISTEN.  It was great Zooming last night with the whole far-flung family, celebrating Older Daughter's 25th birthday. When she was a toddler she once flung coins in the fountain outside the old Davis-Kidd bookstore in Green Hills and wished "we would all be together." And  there we were last night, together again though she's in LA and her sister's in the 'boro. 

Then the 2020 MLB season ended. For the record, I called it: LA in 6. Was hoping for 7, though. One of their stars was pulled after testing positive for COVID, and then joined the celebration. Unmasked, partly.

Will there be a Spring Training? Hard to see past Nov.3, with the larger fate of the human game so uncertain. I'll still be counting the days 'til pitchers and catchers are supposed to report, starting now. 110...

How many days 'til we can report springtime for Gaia? In Environmental Ethics today we wonder: If the earth is a "living organism" is that metaphorical or literal? Does it matter? What part of the organism are humans?

The first time I taught the course in '06 we read The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock's second book exploring his controversial Gaia hypothesis that "Earth functions as a self-regulating system" and "living meta-organism." This view

conceives of the Earth, including the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and upper layers of rock, as a single living super-organism, regulating its internal environment much as an animal regulates its body temperature and chemical balance. But now, says Lovelock, that organism is sick. It is running a fever born of the combination of a sun whose intensity is slowly growing over millions of years, and an atmosphere whose greenhouse gases have recently spiked due to human activity. Earth will adjust to these stresses, but on time scales measured in the hundreds of millennia. It is already too late, Lovelock says, to prevent the global climate from “flipping” into an entirely new equilibrium state that will leave the tropics uninhabitable, and force migration to the poles. The Revenge of Gaia explains the stress the planetary system is under and how humans are contributing to it, what the consequences will be, and what humanity must do to rescue itself. g'r

 Yesterday in CoPhi we were talking about Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, and the ethical/ecological case for veganism. Lovelock: “I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.”

Lovelock turned 101 in July ('The biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives') and celebrated with the paperback release of his new book, The Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. “The experience of watching your garden grow gives you some idea of how future AI systems will feel when observing human life.” Has he been talking to Ray Kurzweil?

He argues that the anthropocene - the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies - is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age - the novacene - has already begun.

New beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think 10,000 times faster than we do and they will regard us as we now regard plants - as desperately slow acting and thinking creatures. But this will not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by sci-fi writers and film-makers. These hyper-intelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project.

It is crucial, Lovelock argues, that the intelligence of Earth survives and prospers. He does not think there are intelligent aliens, so we are the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos. Maybe, he speculates, the novacene could even be the beginning of a process that will finally lead to intelligence suffusing the entire cosmos.

Hmm. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Lovelock is clearly a sort of Humean, reason as slave of the passions etc., but without so many skeptical scruples.

I don't know about the "novacene" and all that, but I do hope I'm still dreaming incredible dreams of the (more-or-less) human/post-human future when I'm in my last 1%. I hope we all are. 

And I hope I'm a cheerful centenarian then, too. 

Sapere aude

LISTEN. Happy birthday, Older Daughter! XXV!

Today (again) in CoPhi we close Warburton's Little History with Rawls's Veil, Searle's Chinese Room, Turing's Test (and Depp's Transcendence), and Singer's Effective Altruism, before opening Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age.

She says you're fooling yourself if you think youth is the happiest time of life. Ask Grandfather Philosophy. Enlightened maturity is best, though her hero Kant was more about deserving than actually achieving happiness. We should go for both. You should not have to "renounce your hopes and dreams" to get what you want and need. That's Stones (not Stone) philosophy.

In "What is Enlightenment?" (1784) Kant answered his own question promptly and succinctly, for once.  "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!"

In a distracted age like ours, and a country like ours (like Brian's) where we're so lockstep-sure that we're all individuals, it takes a resolute and committed will to think for yourself. Even those who think they're thinking may just be re-arranging their prejudices, William James probably wasn't the first to say. Most people would die sooner than think, Bertrand Russell repeated. Real originality is hard. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, Honest Abe. 

But I can vouch for the accuracy of this statement from Susan Neiman: "All the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement... Judgement is important because none of the answers to the questions that really move us can be found by following a rule." Surprising statement from a Kantian, though even he was probably not much moved by the Categorical Imperative. Point is, there's a big gap between the way things are (according to experience) and the way reason tells us they should be. "Growing up requires confronting the gap between the two, without giving up on either one."

If travel is essential for growing up, the pandemic's going to really set us back. Former Harvard President and Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers's disdain for language-learning would too. As we've noted in discussing Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks, and as Wittgenstein's "language games" imply, learning a language is inseparable from thinking new thoughts and expanding your mental world.

Is 18 to 28 the best time of life? Neiman thinks it's the hardest, made harder by the conceit that you should be loving it then and missing it the rest of your life. Better to look forward with the poet to a long and gratifying maturation. "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made."

Today in Fantasyland we notice the precedent in POTUS 40 for 45's dangerous conflation of myth and reality, and wonder if there's any way to control the spread of "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" on the Internet." Only one surefire way, apparently: log off. 

And what do we think of the 80% of Americans who "say they never doubt the existence of God"? I think they need to think about it.

A burning thing

 LISTEN. Went to see the otherworldly Chihuly at Cheekwood exhibition the other night. Highly recommended, especially when it's not raining. 

 

Chihuly.com

Today in Environmental Ethics we turn to Naomi Klein's On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. "Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now,” to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of 'climate barbarism,'" she has Greta's endorsement as "an inspirer of generations.” 

And she endorses Kim Stanley Robinson's rejection of resignation in the face of inevitability. It ain't over 'til it's over. (Go Rays.)

Speaking of Greta and the generations, the stinging chorus of scolding young voices ("You don't learn these things [anthropogenic climate change etc.] in school"..."You sold our future, just for profit!"... "You have failed us all so terribly") should bother all "boomers," whether captains of industry or mere consumers. But of course the Exxons and BPs and Shells have more oil on their hands, and in our oceans. 

"If emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white," Greta says. 

Klein has authored The Leap Manifesto, calling not for a leap of faith but of conscience and commitment. 

We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit, in which the jobs and opportunities of this transition are designed to systematically eliminate racial and gender inequality. Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors. Many more people could have higher wage jobs with fewer work hours, leaving us ample time to enjoy our loved ones and flourish in our communities.

We know that the time for this great transition is short. Climate scientists have told us that this is the decade to take decisive action to prevent catastrophic global warming. That means small steps will no longer get us where we need to go.

Will a Green New Deal take us where we need to go? What's actually in H. Res. 109? 

This resolution calls for the creation of a Green New Deal with the goals of

• achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions;
• establishing millions of high-wage jobs and ensuring economic security for all;
• investing in infrastructure and industry;
• securing clean air and water, climate and community resiliency, healthy food, access to nature, and a sustainable environment for all; and
• promoting justice and equality.

The resolution calls for accomplishment of these goals through a 10-year national mobilization effort. The resolution also enumerates the goals and projects of the mobilization effort, including

• building smart power grids (i.e., power grids that enable customers to reduce their power use during peak demand periods);
• upgrading all existing buildings and constructing new buildings to achieve maximum energy and water efficiency;
• removing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation and agricultural sectors;
• cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites;
• ensuring businesspersons are free from unfair competition; and
• providing higher education, high-quality health care, and affordable, safe, and adequate housing to all.

Some call that socialism, and some are sadly incapable of thinking beyond tired old cliches. "How are we going to pay for it?" We're going to pay a far steeper price if we don't leap. We'll pay with tomorrow. 

But won't it be nice to look back, from the other side, and realize how smart it was to be bold?

Do we have a right to be hopeful? With political and ecological fires raging all around, is it irresponsible to imagine a future world radically better than our own? A world without prisons? Of beautiful, green public housing? Of buried border walls? Of healed ecosystems? A world where governments fear the people instead of the other way around?

“A Message From the Future II: The Years of Repair” is an animated short film that dares to dream of a future in which 2020 is a historic turning point, where the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic and global uprisings against racism drive us to build back a better society in which no one is sacrificed and everyone is essential.

The film is a sequel to the 2019 Emmy-nominated short film “A Message From the Future” with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez... Produced with The Leap, https://theleap.org... Watch Part 1 "A Message from the Future" with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9uTH... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m8YACFJlMg

"Young people are ready for this kind of deep change," I just hope enough of them are ready and willing to vote out the old people who are standing in their way. Early voting here lasts through Thursday, folks.

Today in CoPhi we finish the Little History with Rawls's Veil, Searle's Chinese Room, Turing's Test (and Depp's Transcendence), and Singer's Effective Altruism. 

And then we'll begin Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? She says you're fooling yourself if you think youth is the happiest time of life. Ask Grandfather Philosophy. Enlightened maturity is best, though her hero Kant was more about deserving than actually achieving happiness. We should go for both. You should not have to "renounce your hopes and dreams" to get what you want and need. 

So again: please vote.

Hannah Arendt on loving and renewing the common world

LISTEN. WATCH. The most interesting philosopher in today's CoPhi lineup, for my money, and by far the one with the most timely and relevant message for this moment when the future of democracy feels so precarious, is Hannah Arendt. She warned us to beware the "terribly and terrifyingly normal" average fellow citizens we'd never suspect of harboring a capacity for sadism and violence. She said:

• “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
• “As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.”
• “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
• “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Origins of Totalitarianism

In other words, Fantasyland is ripe for the picking. There may never in history have been such a concentration of banal, unthinking, uninformed, lonely (isolated, disconnected, paranoid/conspiratorial) people as we find here now. 

Paranoid/conspiratorial?

"[T]o a great many Americans, digital communication has already rendered empirical, observable reality beside the point... Many Americans have become so deeply distrustful of one another that whatever happens on Nov. 3, they may refuse to accept the outcome...Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies." Farhod Manjoo

Why "lonely"? 

Loneliness radically cuts people off from human connection. She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings. --Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Aeon [and see her FiveBooks recommendations]

But don't overlook the crucial distinction between loneliness and solitude, the latter being indispensable for the independence of thought that enables us to think for ourselves. Sapere Aude, as Arendt's fellow Konigsbergian implored. "We need the private realm of solitude to be alone with ourselves and think."

Let us hope she was right to think a relative few thinking, informed, connected citizens would or could suffice to neutralize their threat. "Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation."

And, let us hope we can still share and vindicate her confidence in the power of education to resist the anti-democratic tide.

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

Love for the "common world," for John Dewey's "continuous human community in which we are a link," is precisely what we should be teaching and learning. Nothing else will save democracy or preserve a habitable planet for the next generations. That's why voting is such a big deal, even for blue voters in red states (and vice versa): it's our most democratic ritual of renewal. 

Still in the game

LISTEN. WATCH. We finish Falter today in Environmental Ethics. It would be nice to think we're all about to finish faltering, as a democratic nation under siege of pandemic, political chaos, and climate denial/indifference. For a brief while yesterday morning, queuing to vote in the pleasant middle Tennessee sunshine outside the Bellevue branch of the Metro Public Library, I believed. 

The simple act of casting a ballot feels constructive and empowering, the very opposite of faltering. It feels like moving forward. The feeling would linger if only we could lose the electoral college that effectively denies some of us proportionate representation. Ranked-choice voting in the primaries would be good too.

But never mind, for now. Yesterday was all about the invigorating sense of democratic dignity that free people expressing their will in free and fair elections still, for now, get to enjoy in this country. Conjuring Chris Stevens' invocation of Einstein (vs. Randian selfishness) from the memory vault yesterday I've also recalled his paean to democracy in little (fictional) Cicely, Alaska. "You see, the act of voting is in itself the defining moment."

My friends, today when I look out over Cicely, I see not a town, but a nation's history written in miniature...we exterminated untold indigenous cultures and enslaved generations of Africans. We basically stained our star-spangled banner with a host of sins that can never be washed clean. But today, we're here to celebrate the glorious aspects of our past. A tribute to a nation of free people, the country that Whitman exalted. (reading) "The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives and legislators, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people." I've never been so proud to be a Cicelian. I must go out now and fill my lungs with the deep clean air of democracy. Northern Exposure Season 3, Episode 15-"Democracy in America" 

A lung-full of freedom is bracing. Breathe deep. Vote. Resist democracy's destabilizers and dismantlers while you can. The great game of self-governance has never in my lifetime felt so imperiled, or more worth fighting for.

But as Bill McKibben acknowledges in Falter, resistance comes at a cost. "I know so many people who have given over the prime of their lives to this fight." But he also knows "many people who've found their lives in this work, in burgeoning movements that are full of love and friendship." The tired cliche about finding meaning and purpose in causes larger than oneself is not wrong, the vivifying and ennobling benefits of personal and shared commitment are real. Resistance may be frustrating and may finally fail, but it's not futile. Remember Grantland Rice, a game well-played is its own reward. You don't have to fly the "W" to be a winner at life.

Still, though, to lose democracy, humanity, and Gaia to indifference and inattention would be tragic and stupid. Resisting the apathy and amused-to-death distraction that permit the plutocrats to plunder the planet for personal profit, is in that light not radical or subversive. You might even call it conservatism, if that word weren't already so tainted, to want and work for "a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software." Solidarity simply means the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Ask the Scandinavians, who consistently top the World Happiness Report. In 2018 the USA was #18 on that list. If we say we believe in humanity that should embarrass us.

Ray Kurzweil's posthuman vision of spiritual hu-machines with all the time in the world to cultivate "music, literature, beauty and artistic expression" sounds humane, to humans. But, says Todd May, "without mortality our lives would eventually become shapeless. If we lived forever... it would be difficult to sustain our enthusiasm for even many of our most significant engagements." We'd be bored out of our skulls (would we have skulls?) with time slowed to the pace of birds plucking sand grains from the Sahara.

No, we'd best learn to embrace the approaching shore while still pursuing our projects, "orient toward the future while immersing in the present."

What did Camus say? “Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”

And Dewey?

“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.” A Common Faith

And James?

The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,— the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman ‘s pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place. “What Makes a Life Significant”

Or as McKibben says, "our job is to keep the human game going through our time, and to pass it on."

The game just now calls for no "magic technological breakthrough," just our best efforts to continue scaling up renewable energy, "eat lower on the food chain, build public transit networks, densify cities..." That's how we'll "reshape the zeitgeist" and "shift culture" to sustainability. It's helpful to recall that Nixon didn't necessarily want to sign the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, et al, back in '70, he was compelled by dedicated activists out to conserve the Earth. "The mere act of gathering" [them] is an antidote to despair.

Maturity is a good word, when understood to mean growing up as opposed to just growing. J.S. Mill's remarks on the leveling of growth would surprise most libertarians these days, suggesting that the "art of living" only really matures when we stop devoting the bulk of our energies and resources to just "getting on" and accumulating ever-more material wealth.

Why grow up? Because (as we're about to read in CoPhi) that's what it means to live in the light. Maturity is a condition of success, in the climate fight and in any game worth playing.

McKibben seems to think growing up means we ought not to go into space, even to Mars, agreeing with Kim Stanley Robinson that it's "pernicious" to suppose we can just use up this planet and then go find another to despoil. But can't we "boldly go" in the spirit of exploration and maturity, not mere consumption? A mature conversation about that still needs to be had, I think.

Are "most of us, most of the time," really "pretty wonderful"? That's generous.

"Even--especially--in its twilight, the human game is graceful and compelling." McKibben's last words are elegiac, but a mature response to them will keep us in the game at least a while longer. Let's play seven. (Go Rays!)

And then let's go to Spring Training.

I voted!

  

 

Just an hour in line, on a beautiful morning, at the Bellevue Public Library. Only sour note: the belligerent "Recall the Mayor" guy who wanted to fight about re-opening Nashville so musicians like himself could work. Don't most musicians perform and market themselves online these days? Shouldn't they?

Sic transit, wabi-sabi, and the far shore

LISTEN. Our discussion of Falter and the end of the "human game" yesterday in Environmental Ethics turned to questions of meaning and its possible loss in a technologically transformed future. Todd May's Stone conversation with George Yancy does too.

...I believe, with some of the existentialists, that we're not here for any particular cosmic reason or purpose. We just show up, live our lives, and then die. This doesn't mean, of course, that I don't believe in things like morality; rather, I ground morality and values in another way... our death threatens to sap meaning from our lives. Why is this? We live oriented toward our future. Our most important engagements — career, relationships, hobbies, etc. — presuppose future development. Death would cut us off from those developments and thus some of the meaning of our engagements. And it is important to note that because we can die at any time that threat is a constant one. We live under the shadow of death.

...we must engage in forward-looking projects and engagements, because that's inevitable for almost all human beings. A life without ongoing engagements is, for most people, an impoverished one... we must try to live as best we can within the moments of those engagements. Instead of solely looking forward, we should enjoy the present of what we do in the knowledge that at any moment the future could disappear. It's a kind of stereoscopic vision that seeks to orient toward the future while immersing in the present.

I don't think that doing this is easy. For my own part, living more fully in the present is difficult for me. But I have gotten to the stage in my life where I can see its far shore much more clearly than the shore I set out from, and so I am trying to do that with greater urgency... (continues)

He's right, properly focusing a meaningful present with an altered onrushing future while retaining what's valuable from the past is a difficult balancing act. Young people who can't quite see their own far shore so vividly may feel less urgency, but this isn't just a question of personal meaning. It's existential for our species, and our life on Earth. 

On the personal front, though, May's approaching shore reminds me of Northern Exposure's radio deejay philosopher Chris Stevens. "Be open to your dreams, people. Embrace that distant shore. Because our mortal journey is over all too soon." And, you are here right now. Don't just "snuggle up to your fiber optics baby and bliss out." Connect. Chris quoted Einstein to that effect too, in a nice riposte to Ayn Randian hyper-individualist libertarianism.

“Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we’re here for the sake of others, above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends; and also for those countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by bonds of sympathy.”

We'll talk about that today in CoPhi, beginning with Bertrand Russell's youthful discovery of John Stuart Mill's father's answer to the Big Question about God and the First Cause, then consider Freddy Ayer's youthful positivistic impudence and the brush with mortality that his wife said made him so much nicer "after he died," then Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus on freedom, absurdity, and the perpetual reconstruction of what we call our human and personal natures. 

If Sisyphus was really happy, btw, he'd have had friends helping him with that rock. And he'd have taken more moral holidays, when not working from home during the pandemic. [More Sisyphus cartoons]

Among today's Fantasyland fantasies we consider the incipient early-60s counterculture of Students for a Democratic Society, the culture of gun fetishism and our epidemic of gun violence, The Force, The Pill, and our national obsession with perpetual youth. 

That last topic is a good teaser for our next read, Why Grow Up?, which we'll open after we close How the World Thinks. We're about to do that, after today's chapters on Transience and Impartiality and next time's concluding thoughts. 

The acute Japanese sensibility to the fleeting seasons is one angle on transience. Those revered cherry blossoms are magnificent, and no small part of their magnificence is due to their rapid entrances and exits. They are a natural production of performance art. And tea can teach too. "Teaism is the noble secret of laughing at yourself... the smile of philosophy." 

And take a little wabi-sabi with your tea, to enjoy "the bitter-sweet pathos of things" and find "beauty in imperfection and consolation in impermanence."

Now, maybe I'm ready to go stand in line and vote this morning. 

Caring about the game

LISTEN. What a nice story they told yesterday on Sunday Morning, about an old bucket of balls that means so much more. It's a story about connecting across the generations, which to my mind is what the human game is ultimately all about.

The World Series is now set, with the Dodgers' Game 7 win last night following the Rays' the night before, and to my delight and slight surprise I actually care. Same for the Titans' win in OT after a stunning last-seconds score to tie the Texans. It's good to care about things you don't really care about, that's another way of thinking about Moral Holidays. Sundays are good for those. But I already don't really care about who won.

In our penultimate reading of Falter today in Environmental Ethics, Bill McKibben says that's not surprising. It's precisely because we expect the games to continue that any particular outcome, the thrill of any particular victory, the agony of any particular defeat -- exciting or excruciating though it may be in the moment -- quickly recedes into the annals of trivia.

Our games "divert a preposterous amount of our time and energy" but their meaning eludes us. "Once the final game of the season has receded a few days into the past, even the most die-hard fan doesn't really care that her team won," we quickly shift focus from World Series to Spring Training. "What we remember are the stories... 'It's how you play the game' is the truest of cliches."

And the cliche that Baseball (or tennis, or stock car racing, or whatever) is Life means just that, that we have stories to tell about how they or we played those games and somehow made ourselves think they mattered, made ourselves care. They do matter because we care, as Roger Angell so smartly said: “we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved…”

The point is to keep our games going, to keep the stories coming, to keep on caring. If we can still care about the little games, maybe we'll still have stories to tell about the bigger game, the human game. Then we all win, and it'll all seem to mean something. If we don't play well with others, though, we'll be all played out. We won't Live Strong, we won't take charge of our lives, won't conquer the Alps of our imagination or attest the power of the human will. We won't make it into the Hall, at least not without a meaning-sapping asterisk. 

McKibben's a baseball fan, who undertstands how stories keep old games alive from a mere spectators' point of view. But he's also a distance skier who understands that the meaning of finishing 48th depends on summoning powers of will not from a pill but from reserves built of training and resolve. "I'm not here to talk about the past," Mark McGwire stonewalled about his own shortcut to glory before he was quickly upstaged by Barry Bonds (another shortcutter). But the storied past, and the prospect of generating more stories today and tomorrow and tomorrow, is exactly what we're all here for.

Which brings us to Google's Ray Kurzweil, dreaming like his bosses Brin and Page of upgrading "our version-one biological bodies" and backing up our memories and stories in a "synthetic neocortex in the cloud." But would the backup be us, would the stories be ours? Can you suggest a Smart Reply, Ray?

Ray's vision sounds Marxist/utopian: "As we get smarter, we can create more profound intellectual expressions--music, literature. Beauty and artistic expressions of all kinds." McKibben: "Freed from the need to work, we'll paint paintings, play the saxophone, write books all day." If our smart machines let us.

How smart is it to equate the supposedly limitless exponential acceleration of computing power with evolved and evolving human-level intelligence? What can we possibly think it would mean for our machines to be billions of times smarter than us, as Ray predicts by the end of this century?

And in the meantime, will we be talking to our cars and trusting them with our lives? McKibben likes his IPAs, as do I, and is intrigued by the thought that he may one day be able indulge his taste for them at some Boulevard or other without having to worry about the drive home. But the smart car "won't be able to carry on an interesting discussion about whether this is the best course for your life." Well, why can't my car be accessorized with Alan Watts built in? What a smart feature that would be!

But seriously, to be "smart as a human across the board" raises questions. Smart as which humans? Doesn't the "board" include intangible dimensions of intelligence, emotional and self-comprehending, for which no computer has yet demonstrated any capacity?

That's a big yet. Maybe it's forever. The only way we'll know is to keep our game going. Either way, it'll be the greatest story ever told. Will humans tell it? Or post-human hybrids? Aren't we telling it now?

Maybe we'll use CRISPR to create better story-tellers, or to create an insuperable gap between Naturals and Genetically Enhanced Superhumans. Bill Joy, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Jaron Lanier and others have interesting ideas about whether the future will include us, but our present ideas about the future are presumably already shaping it. Those who say we should restrict our gaze to the now, it seems to me, are missing that point.

Or, perhaps mind is entirely epiphenomenal, in which case I suppose we should just relax, tell some stories, and watch the show. But in that case, I don't think I'd care about the result. And I do care. I also think our children will "supplant" us, theirs will them, and so on down the line.

If the game goes on.

Talking cures

LISTEN. At the end of class yesterday a student reported having been physically bullied and threatened, and verbally abused, at a Trump rally in Murfreesboro over the weekend. She and the other anti-Trumpers were badly outnumbered by the ruffians, and unprotected by the police on site. She does not believe the polls that have him losing, or expect he and his Proud Bystanding Bigots to go peaceably if he does. 

My advice: don't go to Trump rallies, you can't reason with those people in that setting. Go to the polls. Early voting starts tomorrow here. Do all you can to encourage every sensible person you know to do likewise. Work the phones too, if that's something you're comfortable doing. 

Then, call on your inner Stoic. Some things are up to us, others are not. It's up to us to resolve that we'll not let the bigots and Know Nothings prevent us from pursuing our happiness, even in such a world.

Let's give ourselves permission to distract ourselves a bit, from Trump and his band of blind mice, from what they've done to subvert sound and responsible environmental action, from the general insanity of these times. Breathe. Peep at leaves. Root for the Rays. Ride your bike, walk your dog. Or do whatever you do,when you need a moral holiday. We all do, about now. Just take it.

Speaking of moral holidays, William James is up today in CoPhi. So is his old pal Peirce, who ungraciously deflected James's praise (accusing him of "kidnapping") and tried to rebrand and insulate his philosophy as "Pragmaticism." Nonetheless, it was James who introduced the term pragmatism to the world in 1898 (in a lecture at Berkeley called "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results"*) and later elaborated on the permission it grants us all to preach and practice the gospel of relaxation.**

James: "The universe is a system of which the individual members may relax their anxieties occasionally, in which the don't-care mood is also right for men, and moral holidays in order..." Holidays aren't forever, but they should be frequent. They're tonic. Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means

And,

* "...Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. What everyone can feel, what everyone can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express..." Sometimes. Other times, they feel the frustration and irrelevance of elusive words. ("I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what... exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization." --Talk talk talk words words words @dawn..."What an awful trade that of professor is...")

And,

** "The advice I should give to most teachers would be... Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further care.

My advice to students... If you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself, "I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the method permanently."

Peirce's best insights, for my money: Do not pretend to doubt in philosophy what you do not doubt in life. Do not block the way of inquiry. Do seek wisdom in collaboration with our fellow inquirers, past present and future. Do your part to move down the road towards truths, the views destined to be arrived at, when all the questions have finally been asked and the experiments run. 

We're also talking Nietzsche, Ayn Rand's favorite philosopher, again today. That's not an endorsement I'd want, any more than the Senate candidate in Tennessee wants Trump's. (We've noticed that your signs have changed, Mr. Hagerty.) I have little use for "poor Nietzsche's antipathies" (as James named them) and misanthropy and misogyny, his anti-democratic and anti-utilitarian contempt for what he called human weakness and I'd just call the human condition of vulnerability and mutual dependence. But I do still enjoy talking Eternal Recurrence.

And Freud also makes an appearance today. It will be interesting to compare his "talking cure" with James's views on the insufficiencies and limits of talk. 

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. Talked out @dawn

The philosopher's conceptual shotgun is a scattershot weapon. James and I would both trade it for a POV phaser. "Give me that thing." And put down that cigar, Sigmund.

A native son's ignoble legacy

LISTEN. How good it was to be visited by my sister Saturday night, stopping on her way home to Missouri from Carolina, and then to speak yesterday by screen with our old friend in Florida who's been felled and bedridden by stroke. As the poet says, "Often a sweetness comes as if on loan, stays just long enough to make sense of what it means to be alive..."

Today in Environmental Ethics we consider the source of the lie that global warming is a hoax. Spoiler alert: Ayn Rand, the Kochs, MTSU's own James Buchanan, and "our" Political Economy Research Institute are involved. It's not a great-hearted or happy story, but it's important to grasp why our social contract has come unraveled if we're ever to restitch it.

Let's begin by visiting campus, as most of us have not done in quite some time. 

On the walk between the Business and Aerospace Building (where a couple of my classes this semester were scheduled) and the McWhorter Learning Center (named for the former Governor) stands this plaque honoring James McGill Buchanan. His name also adorns the Honors College's top fellowship, and an expansive but often-off limits reading room on the top floor of the Library. He attended our institution, known then as Middle Tennessee State Teachers College (or Normal School) in 1940.

Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1986, for his work on "how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making." Put another way, he was "architect of the radical right."

At his death in 2013, Buchanan was hardly known outside the world of economists and libertarians, but his ideology remains much in force. His view of Social Security—a “Ponzi scheme”—is shared by privatizers like Paul Ryan. More broadly, Buchananism informs the conviction on the right that because the democratic majority can’t really be trusted, empowered minorities, like the Freedom Caucus, are the true guardians of our liberty and if necessary will resort to drastic measures: shutting down the government, defaulting on the national debt, and plying the techniques of what Francis Fukuyama calls our modern “vetocracy”—refusing, for example, to bring an immigration bill to a House vote lest it pass (as happened in the Obama years) or, in the Senate, defying tradition by not granting a confirmation hearing to a Supreme Court nominee. --Atlantic review of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean

As Bill McKibben summarizes Buchanan's importance, his work comes to the view that billionaires (and everybody else) are "victimized" by taxation, leading to "overinvestment in the public sector" and the stifling of economic growth. But more insidiously, it amounts to the judgment that democracy must be subverted so that wealthy people won't be forced to "support the lazy" who "mooch" at the public trough. 

Nancy MacLean writes, in Democracy in Chains, that Buchanan 

directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.

How many of our students at MTSU realize that we've so honored a figure so openly hostile to their own aspirations? MTSU's unblushing pride in Buchanan is an embarrassment, its investment in the Koch-funded Political Economy Research Institute a contradiction of its stated commitment to progressive values and liberal education. 

But it didn't start with Buchanan, or the Koch brothers. Before them was Buchanan's spiritual parent Ayn Rand, and their actual parent the Bircher Fred Koch. McKibben tells part of that story in our reading today, in trying to get to the bottom of our culture's endemic "hatred for the poor," "virtue of selfishness," and "winner take all" mentality.

Some questions for today: Do working class and middle class Americans really think they too (or their kids) can become Jeff Bezos or Sam Walton? Is that why they tolerate the "sick" gap between corporate owners and employees? If more egalitarian societies are healthier and happier, shouldn't that message be politically popular? Will it be, in the years ahead? 

Will we adopt anything like Naomi Klein's Leap Manifesto for Canada, calling for us to care "for the Earth and one another"? 

Or will more Buchanans come along to castigate caring as coddling and weakness? 

We have better native sons to choose from, in Murfreesboro. We can play a better game.

For when the One Great Scorer comes To write against your name, 

He marks-not that you won or lost- But how you played the game.

The Fly

LISTEN. Frank Bruni's account reassures me we didn't miss much when my wife flipped off last night's veep debate early on. We did miss the Fly that took up extended unacknowledged residence on the Vice President's pate.

How could he be expected to register or exile an itty-bitty pest when he routinely puts up with a great big one? That fly was some crazy combo of metaphor, visitation and karmic joke...

Pence kept talking over the moderator, Susan Page of USA Today, ignoring her alerts that his two minutes were up so that he could commandeer more time than Harris got. Page was left to sputter endlessly, “Thank you, Vice President Pence. Thank you, Vice President Pence. Thank you, Vice President Pence.” But more than a thanking he needed a spanking...

He would not fess up to humankind’s role in climate change but said, preposterously, “President Drumpf has made it clear that we’re going to continue to listen to the science.” Continue? Science? Is this before or after the bleach injections?

“This is a president who respects and cherishes all of the American people,” Pence said, making me wonder if I’d spaced out and missed an antecedent and he was talking about someone other than Drumpf.

Pence also said: “Senator Harris, you are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts.” This confused me, because Drumpf gets to have his own facts and Pence just beams at him.

Let's just fly away.

Today in CoPhi we lead off with Mill on Bentham, on happiness, pleasure, quality and quantity, and (crucially) liberty. 

Would I rather be a sad human or a happy pig, Socrates dissatisfied or a fool satisfied? We get that question in both the Little History and How the World Thinks today.

Honestly, it depends on when you ask me. I'd prefer to be a happy human on some occasions, a happy pig on others, but never a sad anything.  That of course is not an option, in Mill's dichotomy, but shouldn't it be? Can't I be suitably attentive to the world's multifarious deficiencies, and concerned about them, and in select instances actively engaged in ameliorating them, without sacrificing my own good humor? 

And then, can't I have my moral holidays too? Can't I  indulge my own preferred equivalents of lolling in mud, for a bit? Can't I ride my bike, swim, walk the dogs (again), hit the hammock and read a novel, and so on? Well, I too just take my moral holidays. [Wm James: "I just take my moral holidays; or else as a professional philosopher, I try to justify them by some other principle" than the Absolute Rationalism of philosophers who insist the world is in better hands than ours.] 

J.S. Mill had to overcome his hothouse home-schooled "raisin" and learn that it was okay to spend a fraction of time listening to music and reading poetry, that doing so didn't make him a "pig" but a more sensitive and feeling human being. Wordsworth in particular, Mill's Autobiography reports, had a healing effect. "What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of." 

Worthy quest. Feelings rightly "colour" our subjective qualitative apprehension of pleasure and happiness, and while we should listen to people who've experienced "higher" pleasures we shouldn't allow them to deny us our own.

Thing is, the Mill who wrote On Liberty would never have thought to impose his own notions of "quality" on free individuals. He just wanted to start a conversation. Fair enough. I don't happen to think pushpin's as good as poetry either. We could talk about it. Free speech is really good for that sort of conversation.

Then today, Darwin. Huxley's reply to Wilberforce seems to me a tour de force of rhetorical brilliance. 

 

...Wilberforce ask[ed] Huxley if he considered himself descended from an ape through his grandmother or grandfather... Huxley, then an undergraduate, retorted: “[A] man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a MAN, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point : eat issue by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.” In short, Huxley preferred the disgrace of an ape to the ignorance of his opponent. Dday 

Debates, we've had occasion to notice, are frequently un-enlightening. This one at least had the virtue of being entertaining, and of spotlighting anti-evolutionists' aversion to science. Natural selection is an ingenious idea, one of the best ever in Daniel Dennett's estimation. Darwin didn't think it disproved God, a matter Darwin in any event thought beyond our power to resolve. He did think it proved the unified co-lineage of all humanity, probably far more powerful a belief if we all could accept it.

We read of the Scopes Trial last week in Fantasyland, I'd love to revisit the Dayton judge's disqualification of "my first landlord's" (and the other scientific experts') testimony.  Mizzou zoologist Winterton Curtis might have told them about the humanistic philosophy of life, its spiritual joy in living and confidence in the future, and the role of evolutionary theory in establishing our species' capacity for joy and confidence. What a missed opportunity.

If you heard a voice purporting to be God, telling you to murder your child, what would you do? I'd get myself to an infirmary, or a counseling center. I think I'd do that whether or not I happened to identify as Christian. Nothing should ever be allowed to violate the sacred trust of the parent-child relationship, particularly not disembodied phantom voices.

As for trust: Soren Kierkegaard was a Christian who mistrusted Christendom and thought true faith an irrational "leap." What would Anselm and Aquinas say?  Leaps into the darkness are sometimes required of us, but shouldn't we have a good reason to jump? And shouldn't a good reason be more than a subjective "truth"?

Julian Baggini: Kierkegaard's point is that no matter how rigorous your logical system, there will always be gaps. As these gaps are logical gaps, it is futile to try to bridge them. Instead, they can only be breached by a leap of faith. What characterises a leap of faith is the absolute uncertainty that underlies it. Faith is by definition that which cannot be proven or disproved. That is why a leap of faith is undertaken in "fear and trembling". 

Was Karl Marx an Epicurean communal-ist  rather than a statist/communist? Wasn't his vision of utopia ("from each according to ability, to each according to need" in a world where no one has to work at menial tasks merely to meet the basic necessities of living) unrealistic, in a world like ours and a moment like this? Unrealistic not so much due to an allegedly permanent intractability of human nature, but because we've repeated the charge about our essential greed and egoism so often that too many of us now believe it and can't see past it?

But it's a lovely vision, nonetheless. 

In Fantasyland we've entered the era of pre-Internet/YouTube/Netflix/Social Media/videogame  popular entertainment,  already monopolizing people's leisure hours in the 50s. Now we play and work on screens, as I'm doing right now. Thanks, both sincere and sarcastic, are due to Disney and Jobs among others. And what of Hugh Hefner's Playboy philosophy? [see Carlin Romano's America the Philosophical] 

Should small children be made to recite a pledge, "under god" or not? Should any of us pledge blind allegiance to anything? How about the New Age "create your own reality" mentality? 

How the World Thinks asks if it's more important to form good habits or to follow strong principles, to build our characters and become good people. Isn't that another false either/or? Don't Aristotle and Confucius have a better idea, about virtue and the mean etc.? Truly good people don't really need a Golden Rule, do they? And the people who need rules most are the least apt to follow them. "Nurture makes actual what nature makes possible." That's possibly the most hopeful statement of all. 

Just keep swimming

LISTEN. Today in Environmental Ethics we continue to seek grounds for a less-than-devastating response to Bill McKibben's more-than-rhetorical subtitle query: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? 

One of us opined last time that climate change is not really all that frightening. Well, we know that some humans consider fear a sign of weakness. "Don't fear COVID" apparently reflects such an attitude. Sometimes, though, acknowledging one's wholly rational fears in the face of an unconquered challenge is the first step to mounting a suitable response, to respecting it as a necessary condition of subduing it.

So, true confession: I fear that we are well on the way to contaminating our oceans beyond the point of healthy recovery in the lifetimes of my children and theirs. "By the middle of this century the ocean may contain more plastic than fish by weight... since 1950 we've wiped out perhaps 90% of the big fish..." We've been more than a bit self-indulgent, imprudent, and downright disrespectful towards ocean habitats. We've failed to grasp their continuity with the rest of life on earth. We've taken them for granted, as an exotic but somehow entirely self-contained and self-sustaining world under the sea, beyond the reach of human malfeasance.  

"It was a bustling city, like in Finding Nemo. But now it just seems quiet, like the lights have been turned off," says the reef scientist. What would Dory do? Dory: "When life gets you down do you wanna know what you've gotta do? Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming." 

And, as I was trying to say last time in suggesting that McKibben's just-short-of-despair-but-engaged concern is complemented and not contradicted by Steven Pinker's statement that we should all be happier: "So, we’re cheating death now. That’s what we’re doing, and we’re having fun at the same time." In other words: restoration of damaged reefs and other ocean ecosystems must be a priority, in the human game your generation, class of 2020+, is destined to play. And you must insist on having fun doing it. Just keep swimming, and remember that a relatively few bad apples trying to subvert the EPA and other custodians of our only home don't spoil the whole bunch. There's enough good in the barrel to make restoration and recovery more than a vanishing hope. But 2050 will be here quicker than you can look up Donny Osmond, there's no time to waste. 

Another confession: I've also been guilty, on occasion, of spouting the hollow truism  that "the earth will be fine; its humans who are in trouble." The barely-technical truth of that statement depends on construing "earth" in the narrowest and most barren sense, already devoid of the teeming biodiversity Sir David's Blue Planet celebrates.

  

McKibben can't be "philosophical" about the sun's eventual explosion, he conceded at the end of chapter one. That's good, if being philosophical means being resignedly stoical and not proactively pragmatic. Whether or not we're on collision course with our own asteroid equivalent, we can only play the game well on the premise that it will continue. Hollywood endings are designed to end one show and prime audiences for another, but we're not just the audience. We're players in a more complicated story. Consider the Deccan Traps volcanism, for instance, an interesting complication to the asteroid narrative that might remind us not simply to wait around stoically for the space rock we can do nothing about. 

Will technology end or extend our game? I'm uneasy about Yuval Harari's attitude on this, when he says the potential to "re-engineer human minds" means the end of Homo sapiens and human history. This too, like the un-comforting reassurance that "earth will be fine," seems like a technical point that misses the bigger picture. Learning and adapting is also a re-engineering of minds. If Homo sapiens 2.0  has learned to sustain itself and to respect its place in a bio-diverse nature, won't it be writing the next chapter in our history? They'll not be post-human in our imagination unless we choose to think of them that way. Evolved species are still continuous with their antecedents, they still share an identity. From such simple beginnings, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful...

More questions posed by today's reading: 

If "a suburb is designed to hide the natural world," can the suburb be reconceived and reconstructed? Or is dense urban living the only ecologically sound option, at least until we possess the infrastructure to support sustainable commuting? 

"If the economy doesn't grow larger each year, we now suffer as a result." So are we in an impossible Catch-22, committed to suffer whether we grow or not? How do we stop that merry-go-round? 

"Nobody with a choice ventures outside." Is that a world any human should want to live in? Not me.

"Tomorrow was always a problem for tomorrow..." We must listen to the Greta Generation. There is a tomorrow. 

Kant's walk etc.

LISTEN. “I am struggling for words — this is crazy. It is just utterly irresponsible,” says one medical ethicist about Drumpf's "don't be afraid of COVID" tweet. That's the one norm he's established and never flouts. When crazy becomes normal, how do we stay sane? 

What would Kant say?

Kant's life was pretty dull, his routines rigid. See The Last Days of Immanuel Kant for cinematic documentation of this. "It follows the famously abstemious and abstruse philosopher as he’s anticipating his death, yet it’s a physical comedy filled with neo-slapstick intimacy." It's funny, and broadly affectionate.  The depiction of his vaunted daily walks, at snail's pace, is hard for a peripatetic like me to watch. My pal the Kantian in Carolina was offended by it, but I find it an ingratiating portrait of an eccentric for whom the excitement of life was almost entirely about thinking. I wouldn't want to have lived that life myself, nor do I much like reading its results. But I'm glad someone did. 

Kant really needed a dog, though. Schopenhauer at least had his poodles, one Atman after another. 

His philosophy, though, shook things up and enticed admiring competitors and successors to challenge his biggest caution: don't try to describe reality-in-itself. Don't forget: everything we know comes with a built-in point of view, a perspective rooted in the knowers' categories of mind. 

I shouldn't have gone looking for that film on YouTube just now, the rabbit hole is hard to resist. Did you know that Joacquin Phoenix taught Kant? Like Chidi in the Good Place? "The wave returns to the ocean... Whenever you're ready, just walk through."

Ready or not...

Was Kant's metaphysic of mind-as-projector of categories (quantity, quality, relation, modality... plurality, reality, cause & effect, possibility...) and of space and time the Copernican revolutionary breakthrough he and his acolytes thought? For Hegel and Schopenhauer it didn't break on through to the other side, the noumenal view from nowhere. That was a deficiency, they thought. But was it ever even a possibility? My biggest concern about Kant's metaphysics is that if he's right we might never get to make first contact with ET (whose categories and resulting "conceptual scheme" might be too alien to know)...

We'll also consider Kant's ethics, and Bentham's. Of course we should help people when we feel sorry for them. There's nothing wrong with that, and much right. But Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon?

How about the Experience Machine? We've already got one, haven't we? And when the holo-deck comes along we'll find out how the experiment really turns out.

If wisdom and understanding come only at a "later stage" of history, Hegel, in twilight, is philosophy worth doing now? At dawn? It's the very best time to do it, in my experience, rght before our daily morning dog walk. That's when Geist is most real for me. But my geist is probably not yours, or "ours"... Anyway, the great rational optimist and cynical pessimist are ultimately (like us all) in the same boat. "Shipwreck is a permanent possibility," said William James...

Schopenhauer on Hegel: “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”

Schopenhauer's Will still seems wildly speculative and idiosyncratic, to me, truly a projection of the philosopher's personal temperament. But it shows that pessimists are people too. I don't think it shows the value of asceticism, though, as "the ideal way to cope with existence." But as always, to each their own.

In Fantasyland we're invted to wonder if the film industry narrowed the perceived distance between fantasy and reality and acts like a drug. I'll ask Older Daughter about that. And about online videogaming.

Also, advertising. It's manipulative and misleading, it engenders false desires and a confusion about what will make us happy. Or, you can do what I've been doing for decades, ever since I went to Radio Shack and purchased a little device that screwed into the back of the tee-vee. That was before hand-held remote controls, kids. But muting the noise, I've found, enhances the day-to-day quality of my life like almost nothing else.

And: Wells's War of the Worlds, our infatuation with celebrity, and celebrities. Suburban nostalgia and racism. LA and South Florida as fantasylands. Confucius Institutes. Should there be a Western Philosophy Institute in China? The difference between harmony and conformity, compliance, sameness, and uniformity. Would we have a more eastern attitude about harmony and cosmic order in the west if Heraclitus (and Hegel) had "won out" over Plato? 225 Kant's Enlightenment "maturity"... Parents who try "to maintain their authority over their children after those children have grown up"? 231 People who are "beyond care" and have "given up"? 235  "Yin/yang"/// "picking yin"? 239 (Keep it clean please.)
Is the Confucian principle of quan anti-Kantian? 243 How about the African concept of ubuntu? 246

Time to rise

LISTEN. That's my 5 a.m. mantra, but it's also the message of a powerful poem by Marshall Islands poet and climate activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner. 

She, fellow poet Aka Niviana, some ice scientists, and Bill McKibben traveled to Greenland to research and plead for its melting ice shelf and our warming planet. McKibben shares the message at the end of our first day's reading in Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

...we ask

we demand that the world see beyond

SUV’s, ac’s, their pre-packaged convenience

their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief

that tomorrow will never happen, that this

is merely an inconvenient truth.

Let me bring my home to yours.

Let’s watch as Miami, New York,

Shanghai, Amsterdam, London,

Rio de Janeiro, and Osaka

try to breathe underwater.

You think you have decades

before your homes fall beneath tides?

We have years.

We have months

before you sacrifice us again

before you watch from your tv and computer screens

waiting

to see if we will still be breathing

while you do nothing.

My sister,

From one island to another

I give to you these rocks

as a reminder

that our lives matter more than their power

that life in all forms demands

the same respect we all give to money

that these issues affect each and everyone of us

None of us is immune

And that each and everyone of us has to decide

if we

will

rise

===

Coming on the heels of my recent revival of interest in the mere game of baseball, this so much more self-evidently-existential talk of threats to the continuation of the game of life on Earth is sobering. 

I don't want to be too quick, though, to move on from that old game of my childhood and perpetual grasping at youth. It's been my teacher as much as a diversion and a recreation. My favorite player back in the day was Bob Gibson. He died this weekend, age 84. His autobiography From Ghetto to Glory opened my sheltered eyes at about age 10, and sent me to find Malcolm X's. 

But as existential threats go, empty ballparks don't compare to melting ice caps and land masses, rising seas, climate refugees, droughts and floods and all the rest.

McKibben is a baseball fan, as he'll reveal later. But the point he's making about the bigger game of life is that its complexity and beauty are a marvel of cooperative human endeavor and evidence of human capacity. We are entitled to take some pride, as a species, in life's intricate dance and what we're not wrong to call its progress from humble early innings. 

Darwin said it well, "from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." Each generation is entrusted to keep it going, keep it human, and pass it on to our children at least no more at risk than we received it. And Falter's subtitle clearly signals distressed concern that we're dropping the ball.

McKibben acknowledges the recent trend, in books at least, to send a different message. Steven Pinker's Better Angels and Enlightenment Now argue against gloom and doom, asserting contrarily that "none of us are as happy as we ought to be..." 

By many uncontested measures, things are better than they've ever been. They're way better than they were decades and centuries past. Fear of violent death, for most of us most of the time, is negligible. Access to quality health care, even in the U.S. (where it remains shockingly uneven and unstable, compared to the rest of the "developed" world), is higher than its ever been. Life expectancy far surpasses our forebears' of just a few decades ago. And so on.

But we're on a trajectory for "catastrophic biodiversity loss," global poverty and malnutrition and child labor (!) are up. Climate change is palpable and suddenly urgent, with unsettling implications for the mass displacement on our side of this century of people as heat and ocean rise. We truly are challenged to rise, to reclaim our shrinking habitats or at least slow their rate of disappearance. 

And yet I do think Pinker's specific claim, that we should be happier than we are, is correct. Things could be worse for us, and were, for many of our antecedents. The pressing question, though, is what we're prepared to do to transmit a happy (or at least not miserable) planet to posterity. We can be happy that things aren't worse for us, but when we contemplate how things may be for our children and grandchildren et al, it's hard not to feel a creeping despair. 

McKibben says he lives in "engagement, not despair," and given his personal level of activism over the years he has every right to say so. He's done so much to bring active attention to this issue, and as Hope Jahren told us, doing something is the best antidote to dejection. Now, the ball's in our hands. Will we rise to this unprecedented occasion? Nothing less the the fierce focus of a Gibson will do.