Moral Equivalence redux

LISTEN. AT&T is out again, I’m thumb-typing this on the phone. Do I get bonus points?

Another look at "Freedom and Life," chapter 2 in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds...

"Anhedonia," the inability to feel pleasure, is a strange condition indeed. Even the most miserably deprived sufferer must have some derivative notion of what it might be like to experience the cessation of pain. Wouldn't the contrast, even if only imagined, be pleasurable? But young James, on his Amazon voyage with Louis Agassiz in the late 1860s, turned "with disgust" from every imagined good. It appears he'd “just about touched bottom” well before that crisis diary entry in 1870.

(More images of WJ in Brazil)

We've noted the life-saving impact on James of Renouvier's definition of free will, "the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts." He thought to try it, and was thus reborn as the prophet of pragmatic volition. It was a philosophical bootstrapping operation, as Kaag says, that defies common sense. "You can believe in free will by simply exercising your free will?" 

Or is it the other way around, with the exercise preceding whole-hearted belief? Either way, the result is "a decision about how we will live and what we will become." Decisiveness is what James-in-crisis was lacking. Do something, even if it's wrong. Goethe's advice is sound: "What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it." What have you got to lose but your indecision?

"Always look on the bright side..." Practical advice, almost always. Believe that life is worth living, and see if your belief doesn't in fact help create the fact. Is this the power of positive thinking? Or of consistent willing? Or just of stubborn persistence? Again, what have you got to lose?

James's claim that most of his contemporaries would not have preferred to "expunge" the Civil War, even if they could do so without expunging its results, must strike many of us as strange. Or even perverse. But his point is that a hard-won victory is a thing to treasure and to inspire. 

Without examples of heroic nobility we may find ourselves incapable of rising to a challenge of any sort, never mind a war for union and freedom. That may be true. But can we ever learn to exemplify such nobility in non-martial ways? Can we lay down arms and still charge to defeat a more universal common enemy? 

Whenever this question arises in class, as it did yesterday, students are quick to insist that it is of our nature as human beings to be bellicose, belligerent, and violent on behalf of our various causes. We can't help ourselves, they're sure.

Well, maybe so. But I can't help recalling the resolve of one James Tiberius Kirk when he and his crew confronted the denizens of a planet who were similarly sure of their incapacity to behave civilly. We humans are violent, he acknowledged, but we're not going to kill today. Tomorrow we'll reaffirm that pledge. And tomorrow, and tomorrow. As someone said in class yesterday when we talked about how to go about breaking bad habits and substituting better ones, it really is a day-at-a-time proposition. 

Recall Yuval Noah Harari’s crucial insight: the stories we tell determine the sorts of society we can create. Beware stories of resignation and despair, they have a way of preempting more hopeful possibilities.

Believe devoutly with James in a pacific but still-challenging non-Chautauquan future—unless you disagree with him about the “insipid” quality of that form of life—and our belief has at least a chance to help create the fact. But if he’s right, if nothing is more characteristic of our nature than the willingness to take a chance, then we’d better give peace a chance. 

And in addition to an army enlisted "against Nature,” or those bits of nature and human nature that would defeat us, we’d better muster an army in defense of nature and against anthropogenic environmental destruction. Maybe something like what Naomi Klein and AOC have envisaged. The future is now.