Don

Don has left us, credential in hand. The Dean who first headed our Master of Liberal Arts program made sure of it, made sure Don got his diploma. Sometimes, in some ways, there is justice in this world. There'd be a lot more, if there were more people like Don. 

He was kind, caring, civically engaged (constantly writing letters to the editor and encouraging others to do likewise, working tirelessly on behalf of causes he believed in like expunging Nathan Bedford Forrest's disgraced name from our ROTC building), and the very epitome of a Lifelong Learner. He knew instinctively and implicitly what John Dewey meant when he said education is not preparation for life, but life itself.

He was a decade ahead of me. My goal now is to possess and express a fraction of his curiosity and enthusiasm in 2030. Just being here then won't suffice.

Just a decade, but I find myself experiencing almost-filial feelings of loss that remind me of my old dad's departure over a decade ago.

Shortly before my father's passing in 2008, I sat down with him and talked about things I'd long postponed. Then I read to him from an 1882 letter William James sent from abroad to his father on learning of the latter's illness:

"Darling old Father,
...We have been so long accustomed to the hypothesis of your being taken away from us, especially during the past ten months, that the thought that this may be your last illness conveys no very sudden shock. You are old enough, you've given your message to the world in many ways and will not be forgotten; you are here left alone, and on the other side, let us hope and pray, dear, dear old Mother is waiting for you to join her. If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing. Only, if you are still in possession of your normal consciousness, I should like to see you once again before we part... though we have often seemed at odds in the expression thereof, I'm sure there's a harmony somewhere, and that our strivings will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of estimating,—so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the influence... —As for the other side, and Mother, and our all possibly meeting, I can't say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that were true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strangely over me in bidding you good-bye how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don't see you again—Farewell! a blessed farewell! Your WILLIAM."

Don got his message out, I think. And the best case for dreaming of "the other side" I can think of is the prospect of talking to him again. But like my own dad, Don's going to be with me for the rest of my life.

Our last communication:

Donald Enss
Sun, Feb 14, 1:12 PM (10 days ago)
to me

Dear Dr. Oliver,

Happy Birthday!

Don

Phil Oliver
Sun, Feb 14, 2:11 PM (10 days ago)
to Donald

Thank you, Don. You've inspired me to make the most of the years ahead.

And I'm not the only one.  

Hopeful for a good man

 The big thaw is happening here now, puddles of melt-water and piles of slush, dotted by shrinking patches of white, are all around. The dogs finally got a decent walk yesterday. And I got to Zoom with Older Daughter in LA and Younger Sister in MO. That's the good news.

The sad news is that my student Don, who retired and returned to school when we began the Master of Liberal Arts program at MTSU several years ago, who has taken just about every class I offer, who rode with me to Dayton TN for the Scopes re-enactment a few summers ago, who is an expert on the history and significance of the women's suffrage movement, and who is just a capstone project away from finishing his degree, is very ill. 

I don't pray, but I do hope. I hope he knows what an inspiration he has been, to me and to so many others, persevering through a prolonged health crisis with grace and courage and good cheer. I've seen his kindness and wisdom positively impact his peers and countless younger students. He doesn't need a formal credential to attest to all that, but I hope he gets it. 

And my hopes are more than wishes. 

Skeptics, fake and for real

We're still in the deep freeze here, with classes canceled for a third consecutive day. But we're more fortunate than many, in places like Austin, we still have power and heat and light. So why not think about some old dead French philosophers? Weather is a passing thing (though climate is more persistent), doubt and uncertainty are forever.

LISTEN (recorded Sep. 2020). Tomorrow in CoPhi we'll turn to three French philosophers, Descartes the pretend-skeptic, Montaigne the real one, and Pascal the gambler who wanted desperately to suppress his doubts in deference to the promises of faith.

Rene Descartes "meditated" himself into a conjured and contrived form of doubt, but never really doubted for an instant that the world revealed by the senses--beginning with the senses themselves, and our perception of ourselves as sensate creatures capable of encountering a world--is real enough. What he doubted was not his and our existence as embodied knowers, but the status of that knowledge. For him, if we're not indubitably certain then we know nothing.

C.S. Peirce the fallibilist, as noted in How the World Thinks, said it's an error to pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in real life. That's one of Descartes's errors. His mind-body "ghost in the machine" dualism is another. The worry that life is but a dream is fun to discuss and make movies about (Matrix, Inception etc.) but whether we're dreams or dreamers may, as the Chinese sage said, be a distinction without a practical difference.

Blaise Pascal is best known for his famous Wager and its "What have you got to lose?" premise, but I'm more struck by his statement that the immensity and silence of the night sky terrified him. Fear in general seems to have motivated his approach to theology, specifically fear of eternal damnation. As we said in one of our Zoom sessions yesterday, fear-based thinking and living is ill-advised in politics. Probably in religion too.

Michel du Montaigne's rhetorical/skeptical question was Que sais-je? What do I know? The answer depends on what we want from knowledge. If not Cartesian certainty, but practical guidance tempered by humility and a willingness to revise our beliefs and practices in the light of what we learn, then I think he knew quite a lot. He learned to get back on the horse that throws you, and knew that life should not be lived in fear of dying or anything else.

In Fantasyland Kurt Andersen says Christian religiosity is "the grandest and greatest conspiracy of all" (89), and that Enlightenment skepticism received a religious make-over in America that predisposed the national mind to become an incubator of conspiracy-mindedness. The QAnon nonsense is just the latest incarnation of an old tendency, going back to the Freemasons whose big secret mission, said Ben Franklin, was that they had none.

Wouldn't it be nice if nations and traditions just stopped insisting on exclusive divine sanction for their beliefs?

In How the World Thinks we wonder about Islamic notions of "perfect divine transcendental unity" and their dis-unifying consequences.

Is ordinary experience, day to day, "nothing more than a powerful illusion"? 149 Does anyone ever really act as if they believed that? Is it possible to function effectively and happily with such an attitude? Or in predestination and one's pre-"recorded destiny"? 154 Or in natural disasters that kill innocent people according to "God's will" for which the victims are nonetheless "culpable"? 155

More too on Harry Frankfurt's "bullshit" (162) and Jeremy Bentham's "felicific calculus" and Stephen Hawking's greatly exaggerated reports of the demise of philosophy (167). And a question about reductionism that reminds me of a mantra we met in the Atheism course several years ago: "physics fixes the facts." But not all of them, Baggini says, not if fixing means reducing. There are no car batteries in fundamental physics...

Democracy in chains

We're having a rare middle Tennessee ice-and-snow day, they've closed campus and encouraged everyone to hunker down and stay off the roads. 

I'm happy to stay in today and enjoy the ample remains of all the wonderful food my family feted me with on my birthday, including my favorite Indian spread from Sitar and the luscious German Chocolate cake Younger Daughter baked. And Krispy Kremes. 

And I'll scribble my reflections on her generosity of spirit in the blank book she made from recycled paper and the husk of a bad old book called Problems of the Spirit-filled Life. 

Older Daughter's spirit is nourishing and heartwarming too, she zoomed in from LA to promise the gift, when the accursed pandemic is finally behind us, of a father-daughter roadtrip up and down the Pacific Coast Highway en route to all the MLB parks in California. That after phoning in a Friday night pizza-and-IPA growler order for us from Tailgate. 

It all took the sting out of turning the age of Paul McCartney's nightmare vision (at age 22) of a lonely senescence in an unimaginably distant future. Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine? 

I'm pretty blessed, as people around here sometimes say. 

❤ 💘 💙

We're scheduled to discuss Thomas ("nasty brutish and short") Hobbes and Niccolo ("ends justify means") Machiavelli in CoPhi tomorrow. 

In Democracy in America tomorrow night we're scheduled to discuss Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Steralth Plan for America.

Hobbes and Machiavelli were not friends of democracy.

Neither was the MTSU alum who is celebrated on our campus with a commemorative plaque, a reading room in the library, and an honors fellowship in his name: James M. Buchanan, born in 1919 "along the Dixie Highway" in the village of Gum, Tennessee, just 8 miles from our school.

His story, and the threat to American democracy it represents, is dramatically told in Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains, the kindle version of which is currently on sale for $1.99. Everyone connected with MTSU needs to know the story, and the origins of the Political Economy Research Institute on our campus.

 

"James M. Buchanan, economist and author, received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Grandson of a former governor, he attended Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Chicago. Buchanan's emphasis on applying market principles to political choice led to the founding of the subdiscipline of Public Choice, recognized throughout the world. Since 1983, Buchanan has been associated with George Mason University." Marker

bust

In my classes at least, Professor Buchanan, you are busted.

Free

LISTEN (recorded Sep.'20). Today in CoPhi we begin with Augustine and his famous pre-pious "ask" of God, for chastity later. Even Saints must sow their oats. His Manichaean "solution" to the problem of suffering, a less than omnipotent god who needs all the help He can get, still impresses me as more plausible than any standard Christian alternative. An all-hands account of how we can best counter the world's ills makes more sense and greater appeal than the claim that all's already right with the world. Clearly it's not.

The problem of suffering is the toughest nut for any conscientious person of faith to try and crack. Even if "moral evil" and the suffering it produces were entirely a product of human free will, and free will were a divine gift with no strings attached, there's still the sticky matter of natural geo-cataclysms. "Acts of God," in  the insurers' responsibility-ducking argot, are not on us. Victim-blaming is no solution.

Then, Boethius in his prison cell yakking with Lady Philosophy. But where was Lady Theology? And why didn't he write The Consolation of Christianity?

If "God grasps everything in an instant" and "sees past, present and future as one," how does that make us free? How does timeless presence exculpate the all-seeing Omniscient One? People have tried to explain this to me for years, but I think He's still on the hook if He's anywhere or anywhen at all.

Do humans really have a transparently self-validating idea in mind of perfection, an idea so compelling that we have no choice but to acquiesce in its logical necessity? And what would that do to free will, Anselm?

Aquinas's (and Aristotle's) First Cause argument leaves inquiring minds wondering about its unasked and unanswered question, obvious even to a child... or to children like J.S. Mill and Bertrand Russell, at least: what caused the First Cause? Nothing? If the First Cause domino provides its own impulsion , then so can a universe. And anyway, the impulsive force need not be conceived as possessing personal or moral properties. It could just be The Force, neutral with respect to our notions of good and evil.

In Fantasyland  it's time again to marvel at Ronald Reagan's duplicity or credulity (or both) in telling the legend of Thomas Jefferson's Constitutional Convention angel. When Trump tells a tale we all know he's bullshitting. Was Reagan?  Or was he an even scarier sort of Confabulator in Chief, one who actually believed his own phantasms?

Cane Ridge, Kentucky, the 19th century Woodstock? A come-to-Jesus fest is not the Garden either Epicurus or CSNY had in mind, I think. It was suggested in class the other day, though, that some people attend Bonnaroo and Burning Man seeking refuge from the commercial and militarized mania of our workaday world. Not my idea of paradise, but to each her own.

I'll never understand why so many Americans believe(d) Joseph Smith, either. Kant and Emerson would have something to say about that, about thinking for oneself and having an "original relation to the universe." To that point, I found my missing questions for last time, on How the World Thinks. One of them is: Should later thinkers consider themselves "mere commentators"? And: Should enlightened thinkers still venerate tradition?

If we can get past those, we'll take up time (one of Augustine's timeless topics) and karma. Both flirt with fatalism, as I see it...

Today in Environmental Ethics, we're on to Hope Jahren's chapter on food and climate change. I suggest we take a look at Michael Pollan's latest publication on the subject. "The Sickness in Our Food Supply" concludes:

"...post-pandemic politics [will] need to confront the glaring deficiencies of a food system that has grown so concentrated that it is exquisitely vulnerable to the risks and disruptions now facing us. In addition to protecting the men and women we depend on to feed us, it would also seek to reorganize our agricultural policies to promote health rather than mere production, by paying attention to the quality as well as the quantity of the calories it produces. For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform."

Cheap and abundant calories are not the only things killing us, but at least they're something we can choose personally to do something about... if, that is, we have the right sort of free will. 

Originally published 9.16.20

"I too am an Epicurean"

LISTEN (recorded November 2019, this was originally posted for our Philosophy of Happiness class's discussion of Epicureanism). It's our penultimate lesson in how to be an Epicurean, today in Happiness, with the chapters on "Science and Scepticism" and "Social Justice." (And, sneak peaks of reports on Stoicism and Watts redux, and a surprise.)

"Our life has no need now of unreason and false opinion," but now more than ever that's what we have in spades. See yesterday's dawn mention of Kurt Andersen's "plunge" into the Fox abyss, and Moscow Marsha, and really just about everything in the headlines over the last several years. Will we ever get out of Fantasyland? Maybe, when Fred Rogers's children take the lead.

Or we could just accept the atomic premise that most of what happens depends on the swerving "little particles" over whose movements we exercise minimal control. But we can save that discussion for the last chapter - "Should I be a Stoic instead?"

Meanwhile, convenient as it would be for those of us in the most egregiously emitting nations to do so, we can't afford the luxury of accepting things like climate change as entirely beyond the scope of our involvement. We have a moral responsibility to seek solutions. Being an epicurean does not mean retiring to our respective gardens and awaiting the apocalypse. What would Thomas Jefferson do?


What he said was:

I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece & Rome have left us. Epictetus indeed has given us what was good of the Stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace. their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines: in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. the merit of his philosophy is in the beauties of his style. diffuse rapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. his prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been defied by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention...I do love the Monticello Sage's Plato-bashing here, notwithstanding the latter's truly admirable and visionary gender utopianism. But one of chapter 12's epigraphs does make things uncomfortable for a Jeffersonian: "A free life cannot acquire great wealth, because the task is not easy without slavery..." He kept his slaves but squandered much of his wealth on books and wine. We hold these truths to be self-evident... Noble words, ignoble deeds.

Was Marx an Epicurean at heart? His youthful ideal "society of the future would be recreational and allow for individual whims and preferences," like Bertrand Russell's. He too was an epicurean, of sorts. But his critics will remind us, he also said "better red than dead."
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every
person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational potboilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity.
[…]
Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least 1 per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle... "In Praise of Idleness" [b'p]... Russell on the value of philosophy for life

Some questions: Is Epicurean scepticism peculiarly well-suited to this moment in history?Will we ever, or should we even desire to, explain everything in terms of micro-phenomena?
Should an Epicurean concerned about climate change become an activist? Should calculations of personal happiness and the enjoyment of one's own life be decisive for him/her in addressing that question? Is it self-destructive to affirm "the view that the fate of all plants, animals and humans resides with a loving and intelligent deity?

Faith in democracy

LISTEN. The morning after the Super Bowl is always when I begin my countdown to the true arrival of Spring (Training): pitchers and catchers report, at several camps at least, in 8 days. 

Attempts by the host cities in Arizona to postpone Cactus League 2021 have been withdrawn. Fans of course will still be discouraged from flocking to the desert and to Florida's Grapefruit League, and should be. But just imagining the anticipated sound of balls popping mitts and cracking bats has already returned the bounce my step has been missing since March. That's my "faith in the promise of spring," or (as Margaret Renkl says) of bluebirds. It's Cardinals for me. But as for the Boss's plea for a re-united USA, I'd like to agree that "there's hope on the road up ahead." I don't think a jeep in Kansas is going to get us there.

This week John Dewey is up, in Democracy. (When I say Democracy, these days, or DemMALA, I mean my Master of Liberal Arts course Democracy in America.) 

Dewey appreciated our national pastime. "The sources of art in human experience will be learned by him who sees how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the onlooking crowd," he wrote in Art as Experience. Maria Popova, like E.J. Dionne discussing American democracy: 21 historic answers to 5 urgent questions, is  also Dewey-eyed. The rest of that book's subtitle is Dewey's own phrase, "the task before us." 

Democracy, wrote Dewey in Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us (1939), is "a belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience shall grow in ordered richness." But ability should not be confused with probability. This attitude is indeed an  aspirational article of faith,  no less than it was on the eve of America's entry into the war against fascism abroad.  Today the challenge is closer to home. The late Dewey devotee Richard Rorty was blunt: "Dewey's dreams of participatory democracy will never come true." Oh he of little faith. I still want to believe, and to affirm the possibility at least, that there are enough Amanda Gormans and Greta Thunbergs out there to wake their generation to the dream. 

So we'll talk about it in class. Are public schools still (were they ever, can they still be) an "assimilative force" for unity in American life, bringing people of different races, religions, and customs together? Is the charter school movement scattering that force?

When our girls were small I was, for a time, a public school activist. I started an online discussion group called Nashville PTO Talk, that got a bit of play in local media reporting. The tagline on all my posts was Dewey's statement in  The School and Society (1899): "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy." 

I believe that wholeheartedly. I wish more of our elected representatives did too. "As charters became more acceptable, so did school choice, which in turn allowed conservative politicians to advocate for home schooling, private school tax credits and charter expansion. And here we are today. What was once unthinkable — the dismantling of our nation's public schools — is now a real possibility." Thanks, Betsy DeVos and friends. So many deep private pockets, so many captive and corruptible/corrupted legislators.

Every school, Dewey thought, must become "an embryonic community life...we shall (then) have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious." Is this utopian? Can we foresee a time when our legislators view public education in this light, and fund it accordingly? Not here, not now. But I'm counting on the Amandas and Gretas to turn that around.

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” So we're in process, on the road to better days. We have to believe that, in the pragmatic sense of belief as a roadmap and action-plan, if we're to move in the right direction. Right?

And that's what Dewey is all about: moving forward, generation after generation, transmitting an improved legacy "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.” Keep the faith, Dewey-eyed democrats. Spring is coming. 

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” John Dewey, A Common Faith (1934) 

 

Aristotle

Today in CoPhi it's our first pass at Aristotle. "One swallow doesn't make a summer" (or a spring-were the Greeks really so vague about the seasons as these alternative translations suggest?) was his most poetic observation by far.

If then the work of Man is a working of the soul in accordance with reason, or at least not independently of reason... and we assume the work of Man to be life of a certain kind, that is to say a working of the soul, and actions with reason, and of a good man to do these things well and nobly, and in fact everything is finished off well in the way of the excellence which peculiarly belongs to it: if all this is so, then the Good of Man comes to be "a working of the Soul in the way of Excellence," or, if Excellence admits of degrees, in the way of the best and most perfect Excellence.

And we must add, in a complete life; for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.

Happiness is far more than the sum of its parts, it's a quality of soul steeped in a lifetime of habitual virtue. Or so we say, when interchanging "happiness" with "eudaimonia." Flourishing or well-being are better substitutes. By whatever name, though, Aristotle's saying the good life takes time, possibly more time than a lifetime affords. If your child suffers a tragic and premature end, even after you've gone, your life has suffered diminution. In some non-trivial sense your well-being has taken a hit, your flourishing has foundered.

Russell: From 335 B.C. to 323 B.C. (in which latter year Alexander died), Aristotle lived at Athens. It was during these twelve years that he founded his school and wrote most of his books. At the death of Alexander, the Athenians rebelled, and turned on his friends, including Aristotle, who was indicted for impiety, but, unlike Socrates, fled to avoid punishment. In the next year ( 322) he died. Aristotle, as a philosopher, is in many ways very different from all his predecessors. He is the first to write like a professor: his treatises are systematic, his discussions are divided into heads, he is a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet. His work is critical, careful, pedestrian, without any trace of Bacchic enthusiasm. Russell didn't much like Aristotle's perennial quest for the "mean" between extremes, particularly when applied to truth and other intellectual virtues. But splitting the difference between excess and deficiency is often the right strategy in life.

...with respect to acting in the face of danger, courage {Gk. ανδρεια [andreia]} is a mean between the excess of rashness and the deficiency of cowardice; with respect to the enjoyment of pleasures, temperance {Gk. σωφρσυνη [sophrosúnê]} is a mean between the excess of intemperance and the deficiency of insensibility; with respect to spending money, generosity is a mean between the excess of wastefulness and the deficiency of stinginess; with respect to relations with strangers, being friendly is a mean between the excess of being ingratiating and the deficiency of being surly; and with respect to self-esteem, magnanimity {Gk. μεγαλοψυχι&alpha [megalopsychia]} is a mean between the excess of vanity and the deficiency of pusillanimity.So many of the circumstances of life are beyond our control, on either side of the grave. Can we increase our chance of eudaimonia, or must we just learn to accept our fate and let happiness happen or not? Aristotle says we can take steps to develop our character, form strong habits, and live the good life. This is only partly subject to our control, since much depends on the quality of our early nurture. Some overcome adverse beginnings, others are derailed. Life and luck are unfair.

And that's why Aristotle was so concerned to create a just society, a polis capable of nurturing and supporting all its citizens (except slaves and women-in this regard Plato scores over his pupil). "We live together, and need to find our happiness by interacting well with those around us in a well-ordered state." If you choose to go it alone, you may or may not be pleased with your life but you definitely won't flourish in Aristotle's terms.

The middle ages enshrined Aristotle as The Philosopher, the great authority not to be challenged. He would have hated that, inimical as it is to the spirit of free and open debate governed by reason alone.

Only hedonists conflate pleasure and happiness, but that doesn't mean the relation between them is easy to pin down. Wouldn't Aristotle admit that it might be possible to indulge the right pleasures at the right time for the right reasons etc., thus acknowledging that the time and place for pleasure is always a matter of judicious discretion? Bertrand Russell seemed to think he would not, and for that reason found the Nichomachean Ethics less than wholly appealing. "The book appeals to the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seveteenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling it cannot but be repulsive." Repulsive!

I would have said tepid, not repulsive, but Russell has a bit of a point. I'll still line up on Aristotle's side of the School of Athens, though. Which side are you on? (2.20.18)

Other old Aristotle posts..older still

Give me a break

LISTEN. It's already February, and just the second week of the Spring 2021 academic year. We're not ready for a break, yet, but I predict we will be in about six weeks. Will Phil see his shadow tomorrow? 

"I feel I need to take a break from academia."

This time last year, I was about to deliver my Honors College talk on the environment and looking forward to my trip later in the month to Chicago (where I sat in an over-crowded and poorly-ventilated space, across from Daniel Dennett, to hear Martha Nussbaum), followed by our Arizona spring training holiday in early March (it was glorious for a couple of days, a vivid picture-memory of the Dodgers-Rockies game with David Price on the mound and Nolan Arenado in spitting distance on the on-deck circle stands out). At the time there were eight - 8! - confirmed cases of COVID in the U.S. 

And now here we are. 60 Minutes last night offered a sobering reminder of how lucky some of us are, unlike so many who've been devastated by this scourge.

We turn next in CoPhi to Aristotle, and in Democracy in America to Democracy in America.

Aristotle was no democrat, though he harbored more grudging sympathy for its potential in some circumstances and societies than did his teacher Plato. 

Although Aristotle classifies democracy as a deviant constitution (albeit the best of a bad lot), he argues that a case might be made for popular rule in Politics III.11, a discussion which has attracted the attention of modern democratic theorists. The central claim is that the many may turn out to be better than the virtuous few when they come together, even though the many may be inferior when considered individually. For if each individual has a portion of virtue and practical wisdom, they may pool these assets and turn out to be better rulers than even a very wise individual... (SEP)

Tocqueville is a little harder to pin. He famously warned of the tyranny of the majority, but also (says John Keane in Why Read Democracy in America)

was sure that the fundamental problem of modern democracy was not the frantic and feverish mob, as critics of democracy from the time of Plato had previously supposed. Modern despotism posed an entirely new and unfamiliar challenge. Feeding upon the fetish of private material consumption and the public apathy of citizens no longer much interested in politics, despotism is a new type of popular domination: a form of impersonal centralised power that masters the arts of voluntary servitude, a new type of state that is at once benevolent, mild and all-embracing, a disciplinary power that treats its citizens as subjects, wins their support and robs them of their wish to participate in government, or to pay attention to the common good.

 That sounds about right. We've met the enemy, Pogo, and he is us. 

He's also the generic idiot in fur and horns, with whom I do not claim a shared identity but whose ilk will be the final ruin of this experiment in self-government if the rest of us don't pay a whole lot more attention to the common good.