Growing up

What a fine summery weekend, with possibly the last short-sleeved dogwalks and bikerides for a while. The World Series begins Tuesday. The leaves are coming down more insistently, as the chill wind blows in. 

This is that time of year when I must repeatedly chant George Santayana's seasonal wisdom: "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." So true, as is the ensuing moral: it's a want of discipline and education that allow us to "insist petulantly on [our] random tastes instead of cultivating those which might find some satisfaction in the world." In other words, it's a lack of maturity. It's a failure to grow up and achieve enlightenment.  And that will bring us to Susan Neiman.  

She has become one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, with her gift for pith and pointed observation. To wit:

“As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.”

“One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.”

“If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks.”

God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.”
― Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

“Tribalism will always make your world smaller; universalism is the only way to expand it.”

“The line from Southern hatred of Reconstruction to Southern opposition to government programs is a straight one, though it’s rarely explicitly drawn. So Mississippi prefers potholes that can ruin your wheels in its capital, and schools that leave their graduates illiterate in its countryside, to imposing taxes that might fix them.”

“The rise of the Tea Party following Obama’s first election was the first hint of backlash revealing the extent of white supremacy. Its roots in America’s psyche are too deep to be pulled up by the victory of one extraordinary black man. Those who hailed that victory as the dawn of a post-racial era were those who’d never fully faced American darkness.”
― Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil g'r

Growing up means facing the darkness, fixing the roads, educating the children, working out our ethics on our own, not settling for deficient actuality when better possibilities loom. It also means living through growing pains, as Bruce and friends sing.

That was a nice piece about Bruce and his friend Barry on Sunday Morning. Their friendship is anchored in a shared dream of a more enlightened, inclusive, and reconciled America. It's possible. "While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.” (Matt Haig, Midnight Library)

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LISTEN (recorded 10.20).

Today in CoPhi, if we make sufficient headway on report presentations, we'll open 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 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.

10.27,20