LISTEN. All our closing texts in CoPhi end on guardedly-hopeful notes.
Kurt Andersen imagines we might have hit "Peak Fantasyland" and are ready to come down the other side, in the direction of greater fealty to truth, facts, and reality-the real varieties, not fakes.
Susan Neiman says "real grown-ups are not long distracted by bread and circuses. No longer confused by baubles or shy with inexperience, we are better able to see what we see, and say it. We? All of us..."
Earlier, making the same point about the pleasures of maturity, Neiman said we "no longer care if that sunset in that moment would seem kitschy if seen through other eyes. You see it with yours, and you're simply grateful..."
John Kaag concludes with sunset and gratitutde too. "I looked out to the Statue of Liberty again, and back down into the water below. The sun was indeed setting, and I tried to let myself watch it, as Whitman and James hoped we would, for what seemed like many minutes. Just long enough to be glad that I still had the chance." Earlier, channeling James, he agreed that "chance makes the difference between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of...hope."
Henry David Thoreau wrote a pretty good conclusion too, reminding us that every sunset is also a sunrise. "Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."
LISTEN. Thoreau, like all stolid New Englanders, was much concerned with the efficient and reliable generation of personal warmth, in the literal (not emotional) sense.
...man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire...
The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us...
How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?Walden
It's a philosophical, environmental, aesthetic, and practical matter that comes up every year about this time, at this latitude. I have a propane space heater out in the barn where I like to hang with the dogs, a wood-burning Earth Stove out in my Little House, and a round and glowing radiant electric space heater I like to position in front of my La-Z-boy. I have a fireplace in the library too, but my wife doesn't like smoke so it tends to lie sadly dormant through the winter, except on rare holiday occasions.
What is the climatically-correct view on the use of any and all of these warming contrivances?
If you get your electricity from renewable sources, an electric patio heater is probably your most environmentally friendly choice...But if your electricity is generated by fossil fuels, a propane heater is likely a better solution...“If you’re concerned about the climate, this isn’t the largest source of impact, even within your control,” he said. “The car you drive is going to make a bigger difference over the car’s lifetime than whether you burn wood or propane in the backyard for one or two nights a week for the winter.”
...using a radiant space heater might allow you to maintain a similar comfort level at a lower setting, thereby reducing your electricity usage...having “perceived control” over the temperature, through, say, a nearby space heater, can increase your “thermal acceptability,” or the range of temperatures in which you feel comfortable. nyt
Keeping my "thermal acceptability" within our range of climate sustainability is the goal here, but retaining vital heat is also a happiness issue. Once again, we should look to our Nordic friends for guiding light. The Danes are happy, and the Fins and Norwegians and Swedes. Danish Hygge Is So Last Year. Say Hello to Swedish Mys-"the essence of mys is the feeling of warmth." Alright then. I'm going to fetch that radiant heater from the shed, and I'm going to be remorselessly thankful for it.
LISTEN. It's that time again, time for end-of-semester parting words. "It got late real early" (as the old Yankee may or may not have said*) this Fall, since we'll not be re-convening in December. Maybe I should scour the Yogi files for other good words to end on. But I don't think I can do better than this:
"Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal,” wrote Nietzsche. But what did he know of happiness? Less, possibly, than Grandfather Philosophy. He sees the connection between happiness, hope, goals, and another Yogi-ism: it ain't over 'til it's over.
Yogi didn't say, but would in his own way have understood:
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.
—"Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64”
And, again:
Let _my_ last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be... "There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.--Farewell!" William James, "A Pluralistic Mystic"
And finally, also from Willy James: "Keep your health, your splendid health. It's worth all the truths in the firmament."
LISTEN. It's time to wrap things up. We'll not be Zooming any more, this Fall semester, after Thanksgiving.
For our last week, in both CoPhi and Environmental Ethics, I'm inviting students to think about our larger legacy. Will we be well regarded by our descendants, after we've thinned out?
"...we're gonna be like him! I mean, he was probably one of the BEAUTIFUL people. He was probably dancing and playing tennis and everything. And now look: this is what happens to us. You know, it's very important to have some kind of personal integrity, you know? I'll be hanging in a classroom one day, and I want to make sure when I thin out, that I'm... well-thought of." Manhattan
Or will they excoriate us, as short-sighted and selfish Oncelers?
Bertrand Russell was asked, late in his life, to articulate a message for future generations. He told them to value facts above wishes (Always ask "what is the truth that the facts bear out?") and love over hate ("love is wise, hatred is foolish").
What would be Immanuel Kant's (or Susan Neiman's) and William James's (or John Kaag's) messages? Presumably, based on our reading in CoPhi of Why Grow Up? and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, something about enlightened maturity and life's possible (but not guaranteed) worthiness to be lived.
My message would certainly be along those lines. I hope people in the future will value thinking for themselves (in the Kantian sense of Sapere aude!) I hope they'll find life worth living. And I hope they'll forgive us.
And what will future generations' message be, to us? I hope they'll say we were "good ancestors," that they're grateful people in the '20s (Americans in particular) recoiled from "Peak Fantasyland" and began at last to really value truth, facts, and reality.
"...seven trillion people will be born over the next 50,000 years.
How will all these future generations look back on us and the legacy we're leaving for them?
...A global movement has started to emerge of people committed to decolonizing the future..."
Will the view from 2050 be anything like the following?
and that we had all the technology to do it, but people were scared. They said it was too big,
too fast, not practical. I think that’s because they just couldn’t picture it yet..."
A message from the future II... the virus changed everything. We finally understood that we couldn’t keep patching up the same broken systems: we had to build something new...The first step was rebuilding the economy around the core of essential work -food and farming, care for young and old, public health. Not to mention the essential labor of the more-than-human world: the winged pollinators. The leafy oxygen makers. The Full Employment Act made the new priorities clear, and there was a wave of new worker co-operatives –in everything from mental health support to public art and tree planting. Many bosses were made redundant. Our information ecology needed tending too: and so we built a digital commons, vaccinated it against surveillance, and built up our herd immunity to disinformation. Fossil fuels were running on fumes by that point. So we harnessed their final profits to clean up their messes. Whatever we could, we did outdoors: school, theatre, celebrating. At first because it was safer, then because we realized it made us happier. Nobody talked about missing shopping... (continues)
"We are all now stuck in a science fiction novel that we are writing together." Kim Stanley Robinson
"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Abe Lincoln
"The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?" William James
More questions, as we close the books on Fall 2020:
SSHM
"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation." 129 Can you (partly) describe an example of that?
"Everything makes sense. Just not to you or me." 133 Does this make sense?
What do you think it means to say "truth is our story about the facts"? 134
Something's being "useful at a particular time for a particular person" does not make it true. 136 Why do you think so many of pragmatism's critics misunderstand this?
What do you think it means to have "conversations with sensations"? 137
Are you a meliorist? 143-4
What do you think of the Gertrude Stein anecdote? 152
Do you like James's "Hands off" message? 158
How do you interpret Protagoras's "Man is the measure" statement? 161 Is it a "radical humanism"? 164 What does that mean to you?
Do you agree about "the greatest use of life"? 169
Do you agree about "the art of being wise"? 172
How does chance make the difference between resignation and hope? 174
Must James's "unseen order" be something supernatural? 177 Or can it just be aspects of nature not yet understood?
Have you ever experienced "the sublime or the religious" in some mundane activity (like Whitman on the ferry)? 182
Kaag concludes his book with a sunset, which Neiman (201) says young people typically have no time for. Do you?
WGU
Which of the synonyms for "serious" Neiman mentions do you associate with being adult? 193
Is Peter Pan a worthy hero for a grown up? 194
In what way is growing up "the work of generations"? 195
How is life like Neurath's boat? 196 Is Otto Neurath a good adult role-model? 197
Neiman wishes she'd "known enough to ask my teachers the right questions before they died." Do you know some of the right questions? 198
Does the U-Bend surprise you? 199 Does it encourage you to think more positively about aging?
Do the older people in your life (grandparents for example) "manage emotions more smoothly" or remember fewer negative things?
Do you think James was wrong about what happens by age 30? 200
Do you look forward to "escaping" the urgencies of "your natural force" (like Sophocles)? 202
Do you yet realize "that no time of one's life is the best one"?
Do you look forward to "giving back"? 204
Are the people you know who possess the soundest judgment and the most common sense also the wisest? 207
Was Kant right that philosophy is (or should be) "natural to all of us"? 208
Did you "grow up in a home filled with good books and articulate people"? Did that "enlarge your mind" and world? 209-10
Can you "tell someone how to think for herself"? 215
Would you choose to live your life again, unconditionally-as Nietzsche's eternal recurrence proposes? 220 Or only on condition that it would be different next time, as Leibniz said? 216
Was Voltaire right about why people would choose life? 217
Do you expect the next 10 years of your life to be better than the last? What will you do to fulfill that expectation? 221
"It's more common to think about death in your twenties than it is in your fifties..." 230 Do you hope that's true?
Do you think fear of growing up is really fear of living, not dying? 230
"Real grown-ups are not long distracted by bread and circuses." 234 Are you?
FL
What will you do to escape, or avoid falling deeper into, Fantasyland?
Responding here to just those last two questions, it's clear that bread and circuses have long distracted too many of us. They've led us deep into Fantasyland. The way up and the way down are not the same, Heraclitus. Prolonged consensual commitment to truth, facts, and reality are our only way out.
LISTEN. Before class this afternoon I'm meeting again, as I've done annually near the close of the past several Fall semesters (but on Zoom this time), with a Sports Management class concerned specifically with the ethics of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) in sports. They submitted some questions yesterday. Here are my first stabs at answering, from my own bioethical point of view.
Based on The Case Against Perfection (by Michael Sandel), why is it that we need to rely solely on our natural abilities? Aren’t we already doing things that stretch our natural abilities? Athletes “stretching” their natural abilities on the basis of training, conditioning, and practice is fundamentally different from extending and enhancing those abilities (or compensating for comparative deficiencies of ability) via PEDs that provide a nontransparent advantage to users and create an “uneven playing field” between competitors. That is of course the point of PEDs: to acquire and exploit a covert, nontransparent advantage.
What is the difference in the performance enhancement things we are already doing as opposed to performance enhancement drugs? What is the bright line drawn between these two? The line may not be terribly bright, but it’s the difference between achieving one’s native potential by working hard to develop and express it, vs. exceeding one’s native potential by shortcut and artifice. Could Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa ever have hit so many HRs without PEDs? Hard to know, but it’s pretty clear that they would not have done so. They took a shortcut, they enhanced their performances, and thus skewed the possibility of realistic comparison and assessment vis-a-vis their peers.
Currently some athletes are being tested for PEDs more frequently than others in the NFL, do you think this is ethically correct? Why or why not? Depends on why. Is there some reason why testing can’t be universal and consistent? Are they past offenders? Is there good reason to suspect they’re more likely than their peers to be abusing PEDs? Or are they being singled out arbitrarily? If the latter, that’s not ethically correct.
Many believed that Dolly the cloned sheep’s birth was morally incorrect because it was agreed by scientists to be unsafe, so if that has any correlation to PEDs, would you consider them to be morally incorrect since they are not all approved? ”Unsafe” need not imply “morally incorrect,” unless we stipulate safety as an overriding moral criterion. PEDs are objectionable in spectator sports, from a fan’s point of view at least, not because of the risk they may pose to a player’s safety but because they subvert our appreciation of an athlete’s natural gifts and achievements.
The Savulescu* article mentions that all kinds of doping could be eliminated, but it would require 24-hour surveillance and other intrusive restrictions on the athletes. While highly unlikely to be executed, what kind of moral and ethical dilemmas do you think this would cause if it were done? (Note: go over the examples given in this article) Athletes are people too. If we value privacy as a human right, constant surveillance (etc.) is an unacceptable violation. (I’m not yet familiar with the examples in question, you’ll need to catch me up.)
Do you think taking performance enhancement drugs can destroy the true spirit of sports? Yes. As Murfreesboro’s own Grantland Rice said, it’s all about “how you play the game.”
6 a. Do you think all performance enhancement drugs should be illegal to take? Including painkillers and anti-inflammatory? No, if painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs are deemed PEDs then (in my opinion) they should be exempted on the grounds that they are (or should be) universally available. What else should be? I would leave that to an ethics board to delineate precisely… but their charge should be to prohibit any PEDs that are not uniformly distributed and that render a nontransparent advantage.
6 b. Should drugs like mental stimulants that function only to increase brain function and decision making be outlawed in sports? Examples include Ritalin, Adderall, etc. Probably… but I’d leave that determination to the ethics board.
To those Qs & As, I've added:
In my Environmental Ethics course we recently discussed Bill McKibben's Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?He writes, after noting the meaningful experience he'd had of besting a previous personal (though unexceptional) marathon best...
So, here's what begins to worry me: with the new technologies we're developing, it's remarkably easy to wash that meaning right out of something even as peripheral as sports. In fact, we're very close to doing it. Erythropoietin, or EPO, is a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells. Happily, we have learned to produce it artificially, so we can give it to people suffering from anemia and to those who must undergo chemotherapy. It is remarkable medicine for the repair of problems in our bodies. Apparently, it was given to the cyclist Lance Armstrong when he was being treated for the testicular cancer that almost took his life... [he] also took EPO (and testosterone and human growth hormone and probably some other stuff) en route to seven Tour de France victories after his recovery from cancer. It enabled him to climb the Alps with a dash and grit never seen before. People thrilled to watch, transfixed by his epic ascents, and when he launched a charity, Livestrong, they joined by the millions, strapping on yellow plastic bracelets to commemorate the power of the human will. And then it emerged that it wasn't a triumph of the human will at all. Sure, he'd worked hard, but he'd done it in concert with those drugs. And for almost all of us, that robbed his victories of any real meaning. He was stripped of his titles, and the charity he'd founded asked him to step aside. “What people connect with is Lance's story,” an official of his foundation said. “Take charge of your life.” But it turned out that that wasn't really his story; instead, it was "find an unscrupulous doctor who will give you an edge. It wasn't dash and grit; it was EPO. Barry Bonds's home runs were towering, awesome—and then it became clear that they were the product only in part of diligence, application, skill, gift. They were also the product of drugs. We test athletes for those drugs now, in an effort to keep sports "real," to prevent the erosion of their meaning--because otherwise, it is all utterly pointless."
McKibben concludes: "...faster isn't really the point. The story is the point." And,
If something as marginal (though wonderful) as sports can see meaning leach away when we mess with people's bodies or remove them from the picture, perhaps we should think long and hard about more important kinds of meaning. The human game, after all, requires us to be human.
We'll discuss.
==
* I've now had a glance at Julian Savulescu's "Doping Manifesto"...
Central to human progress (in life, as in sport) has been our ability to understand the world and ourselves, and modify these for the better. If this is admirable in life, why is doping against the spirit of sport? Doping expresses the spirit of sport. To be human is to be better. Humans are not like racehorses, flogged by the whip of the jockey: they are their own masters. The choice to be better is an expression of that, and so performance enhancement embodies the spirit of humanity.
Yes, but as Bill McKibben says: "better" doesn't just mean faster (or stronger, or able to hit balls further, etc.), in the absence of a "story" of how an athlete achieved greater speed, strength, or power (etc.) by means of commitment, perseverance, and character. Especially character. Without such a story, being better is deprived of the human context that makes sports and games mean something to us. When meaning "leaches away" from an activity, any activity, the game has gotten away from us. Game over.
To Savulescu's point about "mental doping"...
"If mental doping is the use of substances to change our willpower, desires, and perception of pain, then using cocaine counts as mental doping." Sure. But analagesics and anti-inflammatory drugs? If we're talking about dosages great enough to entirely mask serious injury, sure. But I can't agree that they should be entirely prohibited. In moderation, I don't see how their use would leach the meaning from athletic competition.
More broadly, I'm not sure I grasp or accept the mental/physical distinction Savulescu wants to draw. Where is that "bright line"?
Finally, though, I agree in principle: "doping that departs from optimising normal physiology, especially that which pushes us into different realms of existence," changes our games beyond meaningful recognition. "The human game, after all, requires us to be human."
LISTEN. It's supposed to be a grab-bag, crowd-sourced day in Environmental Ethics. My contribution: Stewart Brand.
We've noted Brand's brand of Whole Earth EcoPragmatism (Whole Earth Discipline: An EcoPragmatist Manifesto...alternate subtitle: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary), and the general skepticism we've seen from Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben towards the prospects of "managing" and engineering our way around climate change. Brand thinks "environmentalists are going to have to reverse some longheld opinions and embrace tools that they have traditionally distrusted. Only a radical rethinking of traditional green pieties will allow us to forestall the cataclysmic deterioration of the earth's resources."
“The scale of forces, this time, is planetary; the scope is centuries; the stakes are what we call civilization; and it is all taking place at the headlong speed of self-accelerating human technologies and climatic turbulence. Talk of “saving the planet” is overstated, however. Earth will be fine, no matter what; so will life. It is humans who are in trouble. But since we got ourselves into this fix, we should be able to get ourselves out of it.”
So will life. That's a bit glib, a bit broad. Whose life? Which species? Mass extinction events don't leave "life" intact. (But, "de-extinction"?!) But pragmatists do in fact tend to be speciesists, to the extent at least of prioritizing human trouble. I don't have a problem with that, except insofar as the Whole Earth idea of holistic ecological inter-relatedness (with which younger Stewart Brand is so closely identified) entails that the "fix" we're in isn't just ours. Any engineered solution that works for us must also work for life in general, must anticipate the long-term consequences for other species and eco-subsystems.
Brand knows that. That's why he started the Long Now Foundation, to foster long-term thinking and end our quick-fix mentality. So there's a conversation to be had between Brand the EcoPragmatist and Brand the Clock Maker. “The operative principle for all is what Danny Hillis calls the Golden Rule of Time: Do for the future what you’re grateful the past did for you. (Or what you wish the past had done for you.) That tells you the right thing to do.”
And,
“Climate is so full of surprises, it might even surprise us with a hidden stability. Counting on that, though, would be like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded but one.” Well, exactly.
So it's a given that short-term thinking is untenable. But is really long-term thinking really helpful? Will thinking now about that 10,000 Year Clock translate into responsible Golden Rule behavior, and into the right choices about geoengineering, nuclear power, fossil fuel consumption, renewal energy transition, et al? Brand himself doesn't seem so sure.
“We’re engaging in a set of activities which go way beyond the individual life span, way beyond children, grandchildren, way beyond parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, to the whole frame of at least civilizational life. Once you get comfortable with that, then you start to go further out still, to three and a half billion years of life on Earth, and maybe we’ll do another three and a half billion years. That’s kind of interesting to try to hold in your mind. And once you’ve held it in your mind, what do you do on Monday?"
Good question, for a Wednesday. Sunday night may be too late, for "gods" like us.
"I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.
I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years." Danny Hillis
It was also the sort of marvel of the Internet Age we've already begun to take for granted: the author was in Massachusetts, the organizer in Potsdam Germany, and we participants were scattered around the globe... and yet here we all were in our little Zoom rectangles. James would be astonished and filled with "zest," that life-affirming vivacious quality John spoke of that makes life worth living. I must keep reminding myself, every time I log on for class, that we're doing something our ancestors would have regarded with awe and envy.
Envy, of an appreciative and not resentful sort, is part of what I feel about the books John has written that I wish I had. And gratitude that someone has. These ideas really can help save lives, in the extreme instances, and ameliorate them in many others. How sad and self-indicting that some academics resent and criticize John's successful efforts, so much in the spirit of William James (like a good stroll) to reach a broad audience of non-academics.
Sadder still, that this book didn't arrive in time to help one Steven Rose. He jumped to his death from atop William James Hall in February 2014. He was not the first to do so, the Harvard Crimson reported...
Interim chair of the Sociology Department Mary C. Waters wrote in an email to The Crimson Thursday night that she had not been notified of the incident by the University. Waters, whose office and department is housed within William James Hall, wrote later in the email that students and staff in her department knew that someone had fallen and that “we found it hard to go about our daily routines.”
So did John. "I did not go about my daily routine that day; instead I decided to write a book that James might have written for men and women like Steven Rose... We all spin off this mortal coil soon enough. The task is to find a way to live, truly live, in the interim. William James can help people find their way."
They can, maybe, if they find humane and saving ideas like William James's in time ("maybes are the essence of the situation," he writes in "Is Life Worth Living?").
Thanks to scholars like John, maybe they will. "These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
Jennifer Michael Hecht writes in the spirit of William James, too, when she implores us all to Stay.
“None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience. History and philosophy ask us to remember these mysteries, to look around at friends, family, humanity, at the surprises life brings — the endless possibilities that living offers — and to persevere. There is love and insight to live for, bright moments to cherish, and even the possibility of happiness, and the chance of helping someone else through his or her own troubles. Know that people, through history and today, understand how much courage it takes to stay. Bear witness to the night side of being human and the bravery it entails, and wait for the sun. If we meditate on the record of human wisdom we may find there reason enough to persist and find our way back to happiness. The first step is to consider the arguments and evidence and choose to stay. After that, anything may happen. First, choose to stay.” Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht
"The endless possibilities that living offers..." are what William James's philosophy is all about. His last published words say it all, in a rhetorical question every next breath answers: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?"
That's another really vital question for us all, prompted by one Benjamin Paul Blood--one of the many eccentric autodidacts James always made a point of engaging with. His was truly a democracy of "radically empirical" ideas... which is why I resist John's suggestion that (at least as Harvard Yankee intellectuals go) James was an elite patrician. He thought every voice and every perspective has its place in the CoPhilosophical world. "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'."
LISTEN. "Resilience" launched impressively last night. It's the next step towards the era of commercial space tourism, beginning "perhaps as soon as late 2021" for those who can afford the fare. Low earth orbit will be an exotic place to visit, initially, and eventually an extension of the natural habitat we've taken too much for granted. It'll be our final frontier, though, if we don't change our lives. "If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped," Margaret Renkl observes.
Speaking of launching, and failing to launch...
Today in CoPhi we'll begin John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. But then we'll quickly adjourn, to join the author's Zoom workshop on the book.
We're joining the workshop mid-stream, they've moved on from the opening chapter which begins to delineate the stark contrast between those on the one hand "whose existence is little more than a series of zigzags," whose "spirit wars with their flesh," who "wish for incompatibles," whose "wayward impulses interrupt their most deliberate plans," and on the other the "lucky ones," the 'once-born who came into the world as babes ready to embrace it."
William James was not lucky, not at least in that respect. He zigzagged well into his twenties, wrestling with feelings of indecision and profound doubts as to his capacity to marshal the will and perseverance to launch a life worth living. As we'll see, though, his discovery of now-obscure Charles Renouvier's thoughts about controlling one's attention and "sustaining a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts" was the start of his rebirth as a philosopher and liver of a life worth living. It launched him.
James would have deplored the fact that the 170-foot Hall in Harvard Yard built in 1963 and bearing his name has been a popular launch-point of a different sort, popular with sick-souled jumpers who couldn't find a cure.
But he'd have been pleased that John Kaag has written a book inspired by his discovery. "We will spin off this mortal coil soon enough. The task is to find a way to live, truly live, in the interim. William James can help."
I visited William James Hall and took in the stunning view from the top, with my friends in the WJ Society, back in 2010 when we gathered on the centenary of James's less dramatic exit. Then we went up to Chocorua to the getaway with all the "doors opening out." We mugged on his stone wall, and stood in the very room where he made his last "transition." Life is in the transitions.
In Environmental Ethics we've finished our assigned texts and will now crowd-source the subject matter of our remaining sessions. My suggestion for today is more Wendell Berry, alongside Michael Pollan.
I've just discovered a pair of instructive encounters between Berry and Michael Pollan, whose book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, is dedicated in part to Berry. Pollan writes: "If the environmental crisis is ultimately a crisis of character, as Wendell Berry told us back in the 1970s, then sooner or later it will have to be addressed at that level--at home, as it were. In our yards and kitchens and minds." The two authors conversed on stage in 2013 in Louisville. (I saw Pollan in Nashville discussing Cooked with Ann Patchett a year later at the Blair School, according to the notation in my signed copy.)
And here, just a few minutes into a panel discussion in California, Pollan credits Berry with teaching him that it is possible to pull weeds and cultivate a better harvest without offending the spirits of Emerson and Thoreau or sacrificing either nature or culture to the other.
Sick souls could do worse than cultivate a healthy interest in the culinary arts and their transformative power.
Pollan: “Cooking—of whatever kind, everyday or extreme—situates us in the world in a very special place, facing the natural world on one side and the social world on the other. The cook stands squarely between nature and culture, conducting a process of translation and negotiation. Both nature and culture are transformed by the work. And in the process, I discovered, so is the cook.”
Squarely between nature and culture is just where we must stand, if we're to address our environmental crises with character sufficient to effect the eleventh-hour transformation we so desperately need. Otherwise, we're just cooked.
I'm looking forward to meeting for the second and final time tonight, on Zoom of course, with students in "MALA 6010-Communication"-the co-taught course in which I'm bringing up the rear...
My block, & 12, is "The Conversational Nature of Philosophy"...
Description. The communication of ideas, and the constructive-critical work of discussing and evaluating them, is central to the mission of philosophy, "the search for wisdom." Philosophers in America's pragmatic tradition, in particular, have emphasized the notion of philosophy as an ongoing trans-historical conversation between and among ourselves, our forebears, and future generations. In that sense, philosophy is an intrinsically pluralistic philosophy of communication. We'll read and discuss
William James, who said "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'..." ("The Essence of Humanism," 1905)
Richard Rorty, who called philosophy "the conversation of mankind" and said “The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that."
David Whyte, the philosopher/poet who speaks and writes eloquently of "the conversational nature of reality."
I've spent the morning reading and joining the discussion threads our students have generated so far. Just for the record, shorn of context, here are some of my contributions to the conversation (which I'll be sorry to see come to an end):
We mustn't conflate socialism with communism, at least not in the specific forms of authoritarian communism we know from 20th century history.
Rorty's "socialism" is Norway's. Norway and the other Scandinavian social democracies consistently top the "Happiest Nation" rankings. Those societies are redistributive and egalitarian, but they are not corrupt. Universal health care and education are paid for by high tax rates, which the people do not generally consider to be confiscatory but rather simply the cost of creating a humane and generous society. It's a different model than ours, for sure, and one that I notice my young students increasingly drawn to.
"Philosophy is keeping an open mind about the world. As a socialist you can’t do that"... I have to disagree. Some of my best friends are open-minded socialists. == "if you want to walk fast walk alone, if you want to walk far walk together"... I think Al Gore cited that proverb in "An Inconvenient Truth," to make the point that we CAN effectively address climate change if we "walk together"... == "The idea of overhearing yourself say something is a bit meditative"... What's that old line?--'I don't really know what I think 'til I see what I say.' J.K. Rowling said "Sometimes I know what I believe because of what I’ve written." Conversation (which writing is of course a species of) is thus a catalyst of self-discovery.
I agree, hearing Whyte's literal voice adds a lot to the printed text. Same for Rorty, in a different way. --Also, as to philosophers' accessibility... Analytic philosophers pride themselves on the clarity of their expression, but paradoxically tend to converse only among themselves. Rorty broke with the analytic tradition in calling for a more conversational approach that crosses traditional lines between analysts and "continentals" (and pragmatists). His heroes are Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Of those three, only Dewey is generally thought to be straightforwardly "accessible" to non-specialists (Dewey prided himself in being a "Public Philosopher"). In bringing the three of them together in his own thought and writing, Rorty was attempting to simulate a conversation that would transcend academia and shed light on our larger human history. == "He believes that our identities are shaped in part by the amount of attention we pay to things other than ourselves"... Indeed, perhaps in largest part. Whyte and Rorty, in their different styles, both attest the value of expanding one's sense of self by opening up to the world and others, and other "vocabularies" and "languages" etc.
I find it interesting, maybe poignant, that Rorty's regret at not having been more attuned to poetry in life is in part also a regret at not having forged deeper friendships. Perhaps his particular style of philosophical conversation was, "ironically," a barrier to the human "solidarity" he sought. == "Reality wants you to come out from behind yourself and the wall you have set up for yourself and start a conversation"... And "reality" in both the poet's and the philosopher's sense just IS that point of contact and engagement, isn't it, with the world and other people? Philosophical conversation in Rorty's sense is engagement with others' ideas and metaphors (etc.) combined with a recognition that our own are "contingent"... so an appropriate humility and receptivity and willingness to listen might just teach us something, might (as you say) expand our horizons.
LISTEN. We finish Naomi Klein's latest "impassioned manifesto" today in Environmental Ethics. She really is, as the blurb for On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal says, "at her most prophetic and philosophical" here.
Being philosophical about climate change in this moment means more than just being pensive and reflective about our place in nature. It could (but for Klein does not) mean being an Ecopragmatist like Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. He "sees everything in terms of solvable design problems" and thinks environmentalists "should take up the tools and discipline of engineering" and "learn how to manage the planet's global-scale natural infrastructure." Klein is rightly skeptical of our ability to geo-engineer and "manage" without incurring devastating unforeseen disruptions of natural systems.
But Klein is on Brand's Long Now Foundation wavelength, in her contempt for our culture's blithe disdain for the future in our perpetual now of personal (pardon the pun) branding and consumerism. A broader view might liberate us from the "never-ending present" of social media and shopping.
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years...
Speaking of shopping...
Guess who's bankrolling the Clock?
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis :
"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."
Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.
And that's Klein's message too: if we can really reframe the way people think, we can have a Green New Deal. Happy Days can be here again. Her "seven minute postcard from the future" and its sequel give a glimpse of what a reframed world might look like. In AOC's narration, "we didn't just change the infrastructure. We changed how we did things... we stopped being so scared of the future. We stopped being scared of each other..." What did someone say about having nothing to fear but fear itself?
The first YouTube comment on that sequel echoes Wendell Berry's statement about doing what's right, whatever the odds of success. "I don't fight fascism because I think I can win, I fight fascism because it's fascism." And so we should fight for a sustainable and humane future.
The power of art in the old New Deal to reframe the way people thought about a vigorous public response to the crisis of their time, under the auspices of the WPA, offers inspiration to ours. We too have an opportunity to "go bold rather than give up."
When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free.
Is it any wonder that the acclaimed litterateur Chabon became the first showrunner for Picard?
LISTEN. Is it safe to look away from politics yet, for at least a day?
In CoPhi today our Fantasyland focus is first on the "nonjudgmental Squishie" academics of the '80s and '90s--presumably the period of Peak Squishie, coincident btw with my time in grad school-- who taught that reason was not for everyone, or that "someone's capacity to experience the supernatural" depends on their "willingness to see more than is materially present."
Yesterday was Carl Sagan's birthday (as his daughter Sasha, an accomplished author herself, noted), making it the perfect time to consider his Baloney Detection Kit and its particular application to UFO "abductees" and their sympathizers. He also thought it would be very cool to have a close encounter with E.T., but it's really more than okay not to think with your gut (as Sagan said to his cabbie).
“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
What would Carl have said about the "Q conspiracy" nonsense? "Baloney!" And that's putting it mildly and euphemistically.
And would Thomas Jefferson say such nonsense "neither picks our pockets nor breaks our legs," figuratively speaking? There are worse forms of injury and harm, in a would-be democracy, than overt assault and theological dissent. The body politic takes a devastating blow when citizens can no longer think for themselves or distinguish truth from lies and fantasies.
In Why Grow Up? Susan Neiman thinks we ought to unplug from the internet periodically, and for longer intervals. The National Day of Unplugging comes up again in March. But that's just once a year. How about one day a week? Okay, you first.
LISTEN. Margaret Renkl, as usual, offers an artfully crafted and sobering reality-check.
Yes, Joe Biden won, but the 71 million people who voted for Donald Drumpf aren’t going anywhere.
...People have had four years now to find out just how truly terrible Mr. Drumpf is. How indifferent he is to the norms of civil discourse and to the responsibilities of democracy itself. How transparently racist he is, how divisive, how selfish. We know he’s a chronic liar who, when caught out, simply doubles down on the lie. We know that he is using the levers of government to enrich himself. We know he delights in and urges on the most violent impulses of his most dangerous followers. We know he has let 237,000 Americans die on his watch and still has no plan for saving the rest of us.
She's as grief-stricken by this appalling number as she is joy-struck by the fact that millions more voted for truth, integrity, and normalcy. I'm feeling less grief than consternation, myself.
And I'm feeling like I'll have to really push myself to do my part, as Robert Talisse advises in Overdoing Democracy(which we'll read next semester in our MALA course "Democracy in America"), to restore democratic health by seeking and finding common ground with at least a few of those lesser millions in arenas that have nothing to do with politics.
A thriving democracy needs citizens to reserve space in their social lives for collective activities that are not structured by political allegiances. To ensure the health and the future of democracy, we need to forge civic friendships by working together in social contexts in which political affiliations and party loyalties are not merely suppressed, but utterly beside the point. g'r
I caught the end of Krista Tippett's On Being yesterday on the radio, just in time to hear a seconding of this motion. Karen Murphy, advocate of peaceful coexistence and reconciliation, says we should"get to know each other... across all these divisions and categories that don’t utterly define us," finding common ground via (for instance) music. Van Morrison, maybe?
I used to listen to a lot of Van. I'll dust off the old CDs. Can't hurt. At the very least it will provide a needed distraction from the pervasive poison of polarized politics... if not from excessive alliteration.
Postscript. Maybe not. "Sir Van Morrison has accused the government of "taking our freedom" in three new songs that protest against the coronavirus lockdown..." bbc
America, how can it be this close? You're choosing between a narcissistic fascist hell bent on destroying US democracy and the planet and an uninspiring but basically decent guy who wants to do the right thing. @Raymodraco
Another way to put it: is the American democratic experiment done? Are 49+% of us so distracted, disengaged, misinformed, and misanthropic as to think an inveterately dishonest narcissistic fascist misogynist deserves four more years in the White House? Or maybe the bulk of them are mostly just grossly misinformed, in their mental Fox fortresses? Either way, this is no way to run a country.
But on the bright side, maybe now we've hit "peak fantasy" and it's got to get better. Nowhere to go but up.
Too close to call, so Trump says stop counting ballots and just declare him the winner. Sure, that's the way democracies decide elections.
But of course this is no democracy. Voting blue in a winner-take-all red state (and vice versa) always feels symbolically important, but the hollowness of the exercise is palpable on election day. Being disenfranchised in Tennessee is a familiar experience, but it always stings. Guess I can empathize with Massachusetts and California Republicans.
Inner Stoic, come out. Some things are not up to us. We'll figure out what to do about this sham system in my Spring "Democracy in America" MALA course, as though it were. But things won't change until younger Americans decide in droves that finally rectifying the fundamental unfairness of our electoral process is up to them. Meanwhile, my job is to encourage them to persist, not to be resigned, to be the ultimate Deciders.
And to distract myself from the outrage. Fortunately I've still got dogs to walk, grading to do, and a little tune to whistle.
LISTEN. We had a nice weekend up on Monteagle Mountain, amid the turning and rustling leaves. It would have been nice to suspend time there a little longer, to postpone whatever's about to happen tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow) and get a little more perspective on these strange days. Stop the merry-go-round etc. But time marches on, the sun is up again, there are votes still to cast and count and lessons to learn.
I spent some time on the mountain with Wendell Berry, whose steadiness and sanity are tonic. Why don't people like him run for president? Could have something to do with their steadiness and sanity.
The rare interview he did with Bill Moyers a few years ago, featuring film footage of Berry and friends occupying the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop removal and other environmental atrocities, is a delight and an inspiration. "We don't have a right to ask whether we're going to succeed or not. The only thing we have a right to ask is, what's the right thing to do?"
In his 2016 talk at Johns Hopkins Berry said "the concept of limitlessness is a fantasy, and so is the notion that we can have limitless economic growth. The concepts of enough and plenty have been replaced with 'all you can get' and 'all you can make.'"
His advice to settle in somewhere and really understand what it means to have and love a home-place, to set a worthy example and contribute to the expansion of the meaning of home for those who follow us , is golden.
“Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence-that is to wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.”
“Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.” GBks
The Library of America has also issued two compendious editions of his nonfiction.
And of course there are all those novels and poems and short stories.
There's also a bio called Wendell Berry and the Given Life, with a foreword from Bill McKibben. Berry is religious in a way I am not, but I think his form of spirituality is not restrictive. Pantheists, humanists, and naturalists (among others) can all agree that we're "creatures" whether we affirm a creator or not.
We have room for another text or two in Environmental Ethics, before the Fall semester concludes. If the class is up for it, we could all use a little more steadiness and sanity. Send more Wendell Berry. (Chuck too.)
