Small mind energy

"There's a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It's a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis…" -Rebecca Solnit It's small-minded, hard-hearted, anti-social, misanthropic, misogynistic… and deserving of every public humiliation. Superbly played, @gretathunberg@mastodon.nu

https://c.im/@osopher/109608376078866413

Candy House blindness

 In its very different style and mood, Jennifer Egan's The Candy House continues to explore Marilynne Robinson's theme of the "inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us"... We suffer from mutual, intractable, possibly ineradicable interpersonal opacity.

Or you could just call it a certain blindness.

“The fact that so many thoughts could have gone through my head in 3.36 seconds is testament to the infinitude of an individual consciousness. There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.” ― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

Like kids in a candy house we can't stop sampling the stuff that sustains our separation and, in excess, makes us sick. For Egan it's subcutaneous social media that promises to "externalize" and over-share our experience. For Robinson it's the tendency to think we're in a good position to judge others' acts and motives even when we don't really have a clue what's going on in someone else's mind, or what their experience has meant to them.

These are themes I look forward to us exploring this coming semester in our course Experience, complementary sequel to last summer's on Rationality. 

One odd incidental curiosity, I'd love to know whether it's purely coincidental: central figures in Robinson's and Egan's novels are, respectively, Reverend Boughton and a tech wizard called Bix Bouton.

Is that a knuckler, or what?!

Humility & nobility

Be humble; be noble... https://mastodon.n8vsi.com/@atheistbot/109590624601607563

No annual resolutions

"I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me."
- Anaïs Nin

https://mastodon.online/@ethicsinbricks/109590639337358018

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, narrated by a fictional small-town Iowa minister in his twilight, addressing his young son (or rather, addressing the future adult son who will survive him), has been on my must-read list for too long. Now I've finished it, and can report that it lives up to the praise heaped on it (and its author) by Barack Obama and many others. Some of my highlights, conveniently gathered by Kindle:

…Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world. Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. 27

…the congregation took up collections to put him in college and then to send him to Germany. And he came back an atheist. 29

…I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp. 45

… And there was baseball… 50

…I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches. 62

…I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth. 103

…you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. 108

…I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world! 131

…The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point. It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love. I’ll try to remember to use this. 135

…presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, 141.

—my note: That's the nub of my objection to most religiosity. If our enjoyment doesnt matter, except by divine grace, then we dont truly value OUR lives. But I do. It does.

…his mind came from one set of books as surely as mine has come from another set of books. But that can’t be true… Who knows where any mind comes from. It’s all mystery. 142

…I have decided the two choices open to me are (1) to torment myself or (2) to trust the Lord. There is no earthly solution to the problems that confront me. But I can add to my problems, as I believe I have done, by dwelling on them. So, no more of that. The Yankees are playing the Red Sox today. This is providential, since it should be a decent game and I don’t care at all who wins. So there should be no excess of emotion involved in my watching it. (We have television now, a gift from the congregation with the specific intent of letting me watch baseball, and I will. But it seems quite two-dimensional beside radio.) 143

There are two insidious notions, from the point of view of Christianity in the modern world. (No doubt there are more than two, but the others will have to wait.) One is that religion and religious experience are illusions of some sort (Feuerbach, Freud, etc.), and the other is that religion itself is real, but your belief that you participate in it is an illusion. I think the second of these is the more insidious, because it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer. 165-6
…
…Grant me on earth what seems Thee best, Till death and Heav’n reveal the rest.—Isaac Watts And John Ames adds his amen. 190

—My note:
I find the notion that we're just not supposed to know or inquire into some things superstitious... and the notion that pushing inquiry in every direction is somehow impious or impudent or hubristic doubly so.

…Morris chair 270

…It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health. 272

…There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. 277

Also...

“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”

“That is how life goes--we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water...
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

JCO

James C. Oliver (1928-2008) would be 94 today. My earliest, steadiest moral exemplar. Miss his wisdom and decency…and his free veterinary care.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CmrHixYuPQf/?igshid=NWQ4MGE5ZTk=

Trust

"A social organism of any sort is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs."
— William James

#philosophy #quotes #bot https://mastodon.lol/@Phil_O_Sophizer/109564291074074511

APA wisdom

From the APA:* "Want to boost your mental health? Take a walk..." https://mastodon.social/@deniseaday/109557234664456345

* That's the American Psychological Association, not Philosophical… but some of us in that APA also know the wisdom of the peripatetics.

Solstice! 2022-12-21

More light...

Visions

"I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth."

"Gilead: A Novel" by Marilynne Robinson: https://a.co/434emDf

“You need a human in the loop”

But not just any human.

"…A.I. can be helpful if we're looking for a light assist. A person could ask a chatbot to rewrite a paragraph in an active voice. A nonnative English speaker could ask ChatGPT to remove grammatical errors from an email before sending it. A student could ask the bot for suggestions on how to make an essay more persuasive.

But in any situation like those, don't blindly trust the bot.

'You need a human in the loop to make sure that they're saying what you want them to say and that they're true things instead of false things,' Ms. Mitchell said…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/technology/personaltech/how-to-use-chatgpt-ethically.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
How to Use ChatGPT and Still Be a Good Person

Earth Stove, R.I.P.

The old Earth Stove in my Little House getaway out back may have breathed its last, the cost of repairing/replacing the disintegrating pipe is prohibitive… at least until I win the lottery or become a lot less frugal. All things must pass. Alas.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CmZpzWUptSJ/?igshid=NWQ4MGE5ZTk=

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Bookish wisdom

Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" has been on my reading list ever since Barack Obama went out of his way to meet the author and discuss it with her. I finally started it, and just encountered an uncomfortably humbling insight many of us (I hope) can relate to:

"I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books. This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp."

Gilead: A Novel" by Marilynne Robinson: https://a.co/bicXECY

Winter

"How to Savor Winter: A Century-Old Poetic Recipe for Bliss in the Bleakest Season"

Bleak and barren, winter is the season when nature is silently preparing to burst forth in spring — the grand incubator of life. Rilke saw a human equivalence when he celebrated winter as the time for tending to your inner garden. His contemporary Dallas Lore Sharp (December 13, 1870–November 29, 1929) — a former clergyman, whom the great John Burroughs lauded as America’s greatest nature writer — captured this delicate dialogue between nature and human nature in his 1912 book Winter (public library | public domain) — a lyrical effort “to catch the spirit of the season… the large, free, strong, fierce, wild soul of Winter,” to channel “the bitter boreal might… that is wild and fierce and strong and free and large within us.” 

Maria Popova continues...

And Margaret Renkl today shares a similar message.

This year the winter solstice arrives on Dec. 21 in the shank of the dark afternoon. Officially the first day of astronomical winter, the solstice is better known as the shortest day of the year. I prefer to think of it as the longest night of the year, for I am making friends with darkness.

For most of my life, I looked forward to the solstice because it signals a shift to longer days. I was never a fan of winter, and earlier sunrises and later sunsets always felt to me like a kind of compensation for the cold. But my heart has been thawing these past years, watching as winter becomes ever more fragile, its cold imperiled by the changing climate, its darkness by our own foolishness and fear...

They're both exhibiting George Santayana's resolution to get over an impractical and exclusive infatuation with the lengthening light that follows the winter solstice. "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." That's a wise conclusion other animals presumably cannot (and need not) rationalize, they just adapt to change and don't dread or even consider the prospect of death. 

In the middling zone called middle Tennessee, we don't get many brutally cold winter days. It was 26 at dawn this morning, the dogs and I went out in it for a few minutes and will enjoy a longer walk around mid-day when it's a balmy 40. But the holiday weekend forecast is foreboding. We'll still walk, but my wife will insist that they wear their preposterous sweaters. We're a splashy sight to see on those arctic days, with me in my luminescent yellow "Don't hit us" jacket and them pretty (silly) in pink. 

And what if they call us a trio of pathetic peripatetics? So what if they do, we say. We're too interested in the changing seasons to mind.

Mastodon

Optimism

Arthur C. Clarke is 105 today.


"In 2007, on his 90th birthday, Clarke recorded a video in which he says goodbye to his friends and fans. In it, he said: 'I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we've learnt something from the most barbaric century in history — the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization …' He died of respiratory failure three months later."
https://c.im/@osopher/109525304911799721

Reports of the death of the student essay are greatly exaggerated

Like the legend of Mark Twain's premature obit. (But that, evidently, is not quite what Sam Clemens said.)

Ian Bogost says "ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think-Treat it like a toy, not a tool."

"When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public last week, the first and most common reaction I saw was fear that it would upend education. “You can no longer give take-home exams,” Kevin Bryan, a University of Toronto professor, posted on Twitter. “I think chat.openai.com may actually spell the end of writing assignments,” wrote Samuel Bagg, a University of South Carolina political scientist. That’s the fear...
Imagine worrying about the fate of take-home essay exams, a stupid format that everyone hates but nobody has the courage to kill." --Ian Bogost, Atlantic

I don't hate that format, or think it stupid. A student blogpost is basically a take-home essay. But I've already shifted to more in-class presentations, maybe the advent of essay-writing AI will and should encourage more of that. More oral exams too.

Or maybe I can just continue to trust most of my students to do their own work, and verify that they've done so the old-fashioned way: by talking to them and getting to know them.

Better that, I think, than allow the small fraction of would-be cheaters to dictate the terms of our classroom activity.

==
"I Can’t Stop Talking to My New Chatbot Pal"

ChatGPT makes a lot of mistakes. But it’s fun to talk to, and it knows its limitations. ["Knows" as in "understands"? No.]

...One primary criticism of systems like ChatGPT, which are built using a computational technique called “deep learning,” is that they are little more than souped-up versions of autocorrect — that all they understand is the statistical connections between words, not the concepts underlying words. Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus in psychology at New York University and a skeptic of deep learning, told me that while an A.I. language model like ChatGPT makes for “nifty” demonstrations, it’s “still not reliable, still doesn’t understand the physical world, still doesn’t understand the psychological world and still hallucinates.”
... nyt
==
What Would Plato Say About ChatGPT? 

A.I. can be a learning tool for schools with enough teachers and resources to use it well.

...As Plato was wrong to fear the written word as the enemy, we would be wrong to think we should resist a process that allows us to gather information more easily.

As societies responded to previous technological advances, like mechanization, by eventually enacting a public safety net, a shorter workweek and a minimum wage, we will also need policies that allow more people to live with dignity as a basic right, even if their skills have been superseded. With so much more wealth generated now, we could unleash our imagination even more, expanding free time and better working conditions for more people.

The way forward is not to just lament supplanted skills, as Plato did, but also to recognize that as more complex skills become essential, our society must equitably educate people to develop them. And then it always goes back to the basics. Value people as people, not just as bundles of skills.

And that isn’t something ChatGPT can tell us how to do...  Zeynep Tufekci, nyt

===
Will ChatGPT Make Me Irrelevant?

...Educators are spooked, recognizing a specter on the horizon — no, right in front of us — that makes plagiarism look quaint. Last week, The Atlantic published an article, by Stephen Marche, titled “The College Essay Is Dead.” That was followed just three days later by another article, by Daniel Herman, titled “The End of High School English.” I figure “Curtains for the Seventh Grade” will be out next week and, fast on its heels, “Is Literacy Obsolete?”

And I can tell you that here in the lofty precincts of elite academia, conversations about whether a significant fraction of students would be turning in papers generated by A.I. segued quickly into conjecture about whether professors would respond by grading those papers with A.I.

Let’s take human endeavor out of the equation entirely. It’s such an inefficient, unnecessary thing.

But it’s also, well, everything — not by the dictates of productivity, but by measures much more meaningful. It’s the font and province of originality. It’s the cornerstone of identity. We are what we do, and by that I don’t mean the labels affixed to our professions. I mean the stamps of our idiosyncratic contributions, no matter their nature or context. That’s how we bend the universe — our butterfly effect — and how we register that we were here. If we outsource it to A.I., don’t we erase ourselves?

Maybe not. Maybe this is the cusp of a new utopia, in which machines not only assemble our appliances and perform our surgeries but also plot our novels, draft our legislation and write our op-eds while we pop our soma or chew our lotus leaves and congratulate ourselves on the programming and the prompts behind it all... Frank Bruni

Living in the future's past

Missed this in 2018. It abides. Really ties the climate crisis together. Makes good companion viewing for KSR's 2140. Timothy Morton (Oxford, Rice) delivers some good lines, like "the problem with philosophy is that it isn't just in your head. Philosophy is everywhere." But the problem is that it's not valued and practiced everywhere, that it's ignored or discounted.

  

Trailer... Extended preview 

In his book Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (not to be confused with Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bergman, which I also recommend) Morton says something quite Jamesian:

“Wholes subscend their parts [in other words, a whole is less than the sum of its parts], which means that parts are not just mechanical components of wholes, and that there can be genuine surprise and novelty in the world, that a different future is always possible."

Actuality is a tiny subset of possibility. But we actually have to care about the future, if the better possibilities are to be actualized. It's our "really vital question," again. What is life going to make of itself?

Will we be good ancestors?

Mastodon

In the spirit of peace

The Apollo 17 astronauts were the last humans on the moon, fifty (!) years ago today.

They unveiled a plaque, which read: "

Here man completed his first explorations of the Moon, December 1972. May the spirit of peace in which we came be reflected in the lives of all mankind." WA

50 years ago today, Gene Cernan became the last person to stand on the Moon. Before his return to the #Apollo17 lunar module, he said: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.” 

A planetary perspective. We're not there yet.

 

Why is it that to function in society with strength and efficiency, we need to ignore the incomprehensible miracles that surround us constantly? Why is it that to function in the world, we must take on an oblivious self-confidence by placing ourselves in a tiny world, a small and limited subset of reality? Why is it that we abandon awe and limit ourselves to the prison that is right in front of our noses, guided primarily by our animal instincts while ignoring our full perception of the world? We have the capability to project our conscious thought backward or forward billions of years yet act as if all that matters is the past and/or immediate future. ”
― Ron Garan, Floating in Darkness - A Journey of Evolution

The joy of (real) reading

Sleep hasn't come easy lately, at the back end. "Do you struggle getting out of bed in the morning? Marcus Aurelius can help." Thanks, Mark. But my problem isn't getting out, it's staying in.

The upside of that: the undistracted peace and stillness of pre-dawn is a fine time to read. Not scroll.

Jenny Odell is right, scrolling generally lacks a meaningful experiential context. And she's right to invoke Marie Kondo. Scrolling rarely sparks joy. Real reading often does. Did. Can again.

…In the past few years, in part because of how frayed my mind felt, I started avoiding my Twitter and Instagram feeds altogether. From this remove, I sat down and wrote out on paper what it was that I really wanted from these platforms. The answer ended up being a sense of recognition among peers, connection to people with shared interests and whose work I admire and the ability to encounter new, unexpected ideas. As opposed to algorithms, I wanted these new things to be recommended by individuals who had reasons to like them, like the weekly set on my local college radio station by a D.J. whose wide-ranging taste I'm at pains to describe, but reliably enjoy. Really, I think I just wanted everything to have a little more context...

Back to my holiday stack. Currently on KSR's High Sierra and New York 2140…

A final tweet...

at least until someone sane and sensible deposes the current Chief Executive Twit.

The experience and culture of Mastodon is far superior to this corrupted space, mirroring Dr.Fauci’s humility and magnanimity and dwarfing the top Twit’s rude, sophomoric self-aggrandizement. Come on over. But don’t follow rude & snarky migrant Twits. https://t.co/S18sgQfBlz

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) December 12, 2022

“a spirit of radical optimism”

I've been enjoying this biography of the legendary Bloomsbury philosopher & economist John Maynard Keynes. (Thanks for the recommendation, KSR.)

JMK was at heart a meliorist, entirely compatible with any truly radical form of optimism. The roots of our condition are well summarized in the last two sentences:

"This is a dark time for democracy—a statement that would have been unthinkable to U.S. and European leaders only a few short years ago. It took decades of mismanagement and unlearning to manufacture this global crisis, and it cannot be undone with a few new laws or elections. But all over the world, people are acting as if even this frightening global slide into authoritarianism might be reversed through the mechanisms John Maynard Keynes proposed three-quarters of a century ago. They are organizing, planning, and voting as if they really can improve society for themselves and their children by changing the economic arrangements that currently divert so much of the world's wealth into the hands of so few. In the United States, activists and politicians are promoting a Green New Deal, reviving the legacy of FDR to combat climate change through public investment. Mainstream economists now speak openly of moving "beyond neoliberalism," and there is talk in academic circles of a new Bretton Woods conference that might replace the global order erected in the 1990s with a new harmony of international economic interests. These optimists may succeed, and they may fail. But they are pursuing a vision that sustained Keynes through three world crises and demonstrated beyond any doubt that a better world was possible on the other side. Keynesianism in this purest, simplest form is not so much a school of economic thought as a spirit of radical optimism, unjustified by most of human history and extremely difficult to conjure up precisely when it is most needed: during the depths of a depression or amid the fevers of war. Yet such optimism is a vital and necessary element of everyday life. It is the spirit that propels us to go on living in the face of unavoidable suffering, that compels us to fall in love when our hearts have been broken, and that gives us the courage to bring children into the world, believing that even in times such as these we are surrounded by enough beauty to fill lifetime after lifetime. "Down with those who declare we are dumped and damned," the twenty-one-year-old Keynes cried in 1903. "Away with all schemes of redemption and retaliation!" A better future was not beyond our control if the different peoples of the world worked together, leading one another to prosperity. Twenty-seven years later, Keynes had reconsidered the economic strategies of his youth, but not his bet on tomorrow. We would build for the future not through Victorian self-denial or by waiting for deliverance but by taking action today. "Were the Seven Wonders of the world built by Thrift?" he asked readers of A Treatise on Money. "I deem it doubtful." And so it is today. Despite everything, we find ourselves back with Keynes—not merely because deficits can enable sustained growth, or because the rate of interest is determined by liquidity preference, but because we are here, now, with nowhere to go but the future. In the long run, we are all dead. But in the long run, almost anything is possible."

— The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter-conclusion
https://a.co/0JdW2eh

Wider than the sky

 #Emily Dickinson, the poet who dwelled in possibility and hope, is 192 today. 

Found an old post, and then another, inspired by her poem about the brain being wider than the sky, which I used to ponder every day on my way to class at Vanderbilt. 

Buttrick hall also features, inside, a quote attributed to Wittgenstein. New words, fresh seeds...

"Matter's possibilities"

Alan Lightman "calls himself a spiritual materialist." I've called myself that too, to the consternation of those who prefer to think in boxes. 

On my reading, William James was a spiritual materialist. Likewise Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. That's what I was thinking about yesterday when I started to draw up the syllabus for our upcoming Experience course beginning in January. We'll meet weekly for three hours, giving WJ's Varieties the first segment of each class and Sagan's and Druyan's the last. 

It was Druyan who conceived (perceived?) her late partner's 1985 Gifford lectures as a natural bookend for James's of 1902, and who spotlighted his affinity for WJ's habitual defense of those varieties of experience that enable their possessors to feel "at home in the universe." Her Cosmos: Possible Worlds invites us to make ourselves at home with the idea of a future life on earth no longer vexed by strife and strain. Envisioning that world is surely a crucial condition of its possibility. 

"Dreams are maps... If the series of pilgrimages toward understanding our actual circumstances in the universe, the origin of life, and the laws of nature are not spiritual quests, then I don’t know what could be."

That's why WJ said "the really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights." 

Spiritual materialists are all about "the earth of things," about matter's possibilities. The greatest of those is experience.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/cosmos-space-time-universe/672344/

Happily dissolved

Willa Cather only wrote for two or three hours a day. She said, "If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day."

Her headstone reads, "That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." After her death, poet Wallace Stevens said, "We have nothing better than she is." WA 

And that reminds me of what Annie Dillard said about Wallace Stevens's walking/working routine.

"Wallace Stevens in his forties, living in Hartford, Connecticut, hewed to a productive routine. He rose at six, read for two hours, and walked another hour—three miles—to work. He dictated poems to his secretary. He ate no lunch; at noon he walked for another hour, often to an art gallery. He walked home from work—another hour. After dinner he retired to his study; he went to bed at nine. On Sundays, he walked in the park. I don’t know what he did on Saturdays. Perhaps he exchanged a few words with his wife, who posed for the Liberty dime." The Writing Life, recounted by Maria Popova

A routine like that might make working for an insurance company almost tolerable. Not for me, though, unless I could take the dogs with me. 

Knowledge is power

The bright side

Looking forward to this afternoon's capstone defense, as another student in our Master of Liberal Arts (MALA) program prepares to debrief her faculty advisors and move on. 

This one conveys a powerful personal message, that one's attitude largely shapes the quality of one's experience... even, and maybe especially, in adversity and ill health. MP's quotes from the stoics* and from James are spot-on. She's an inspiration, turning her long bout with cancer into a testament to philosophy's relevance for life. And death. And keeping each in its place. And being happy.

* "Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding... Some things are within your control. And some things are not." Epictetus

"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts." Marcus Aurelius

"A sense of humor is just common sense dancing." WJ 

I'll raise only a couple of quibbles: she asks if anything "really causes cancer"... Cancer clearly has causes, behavioral, genetic, cellular etc. Not all smokers get cancer, but smoking is nonetheless an evident carcinogen. And yet, the fact that some smokers escape unscathed while some non-smokers succumb to other causes is maddening. Plain bad luck is also a factor. But I don't think we should deny the science that medical researchers have worked so hard to establish, and that has saved so many lives and will save many more. But probably you're just making a rhetorical point: life is unfair. It is. And yet, as Christopher Hitchens said: to the rhetorical complaint "Why me?!" the only possible answer is: Why not you?" If we didn't have bad luck, we wouldn't have any luck at all. That's what luck is: random. (But I still like to quote Branch Rickey, "luck is the residue of design." Well it is if you're lucky.)

And the other quibble: she credits her religious beliefs with getting her through the ordeal. I'm glad she's found solace in her faith. But as I know she knows, at least as many people of faith suffer and die unfairly as do those without traditional religious beliefs. It's understandable that the survivors of shipwreck and natural cataclysm are inclined to credit faith with saving them, but what to say to the faithful who went down with the ship and were blown away in the gale? Surely not that they were of little faith.

In any case, her ten good years and counting are a credit to the philosophy that urges us to see the glass half full (cue Monty Python-MP once gifted me a shirt inscribed "Always look on the bright side..."). 

But speaking of that...

I wonder if she's ever seen the late Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (alternately published under the "blunt" title Smile or Die) or if she has a thought about these quotes from it:

“Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”

“I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy. In my own vision of utopia, there is not only more comfort, and security for everyone — better jobs, health care, and so forth — there are also more parties, festivities, and opportunities for dancing in the streets. Once our basic material needs are met — in my utopia, anyway — life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”

Ehrenreich subsequently wrote about her particular form of what she calls her spirituality, by the way, in Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything. There she writes: “if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being.” Ehrenreich would have liked MP's stoic lines. Not sure she liked James as much, though he had a strong stoic streak and was fond of "Mark" Aurelius too.  And she did say positive things about WJ's discussion in Varieties of mysticism and exceptional mental states. And she was a meliorist in the best Jamesian spirit, as her September obit notes:

Ms. Ehrenreich said she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world.

“The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that’s the measure of us,” she told The New Yorker, “but that we will die trying.”

I can't mention James's friend Mark without repeating his (and my) morning meditation:

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love."

"Reader, Come Home"

Maryanne Wolf's recent appearance on the Ezra Klein show resonated with me, I too have found it increasingly difficult to get beyond surface and shallows to the more immersive and transportive forms of deep reading. Like Wolf I still buy and borrow books, kindles and book-books,* but (as she writes in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World) “more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.”

Me too.

And I too must, with great regret, sigh a string of  yesses to Wolf's barrage of diagnostic questions:

• Do you, my reader, read with less attention and perhaps even less memory for what you have read?
• Do you notice when reading on a screen that you are increasingly reading for key words and skimming over the rest? Has this habit or style of screen reading bled over to your reading of hard copy?
• Do you find yourself reading the same passage over and over to understand its meaning?
• Do you suspect when you write that your ability to express the crux of your thoughts is subtly slipping or diminished?

• Have you become so inured to quick précis of information that you no longer feel the need or possess the time for your own analyses of this information?

• Do you find yourself gradually avoiding denser, more complex analyses, even those that are readily available?
• Very important, are you less able to find the same enveloping pleasure you once derived from your former reading self?
• Have you, in fact, begun to suspect that you no longer have the cerebral patience to plow through a long and demanding article or book?
• What if, one day, you pause and wonder if you yourself are truly changing and, worst of all, do not have the time to do a thing about it?

Sigh.

What to do about it? 

For starters, make a holiday leisure-reading list and get to it. Once I finish Wolf's Come Home I'll pick up its prequel, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Then finish Kim Stanley Robinson's The High Sierra: A Love Story and Zach Carter's The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (which KSR said everybody should read). Then, 

• Jennifer Egan's The Candy House 
• Ian McEwan's Lessons 
• Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Song of the Cell 
• Jon Meacham's And There Was Light
• Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead...

Lists are easy, reading lots of books without distraction used to be a lot easier. Got to fix that.

But first, I've got to read a bunch of students' final reports. It's that time of the semester again. This post was self-incurred procrastination. A deliberate distraction. I don't think I can blame digital culture for that.

Teacher, come home. Remember that students, after all, are just aspirant fellow thinkers. CoPhilosophers, even.

==

*Used to buy lotsa books at a place called Bookstar... 

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Time to move

It's the last day of class (unless some of us choose to meet on Zoom next week). Seems like only yesterday, though it's actually a year to the day, since I posted this:

LISTEN. Back from Thanksgiving, it's time to wrap things up and send the classes of Fall 2021 out to meet their uncertain futures. The usual last words apply, there really are no fortunes to be told. There definitely is advice to be given, however. Do stay curious, kids, do keep asking questions. And do keep in touch.

It was nice to hear again from my old grad school friend the Biochemist, who makes a point of sending out holiday missives every Thanksgiving and Valentines Day that keep our old far-flung and socially distant 80s cohort in touch in spite of ourselves.

She confessed some despondency in this Thanksgiving letter, "over the state of the country ... and yet I want to be optimistic. But I am genuinely scared about all of the unraveling I see around me."

Many of us feel that way, on occasion. Several of us agree that the daily news cycle is indeed frightful. We're learning to monitor and regulate our exposure to the worst of it. Better to start the day with a little history and poetry.

And best to heed old Henry's sunny words at the end of Walden. A morning atmosphere, at any time of day, is tonic. Wake up. Get up. Do something. Don't stare too long or hard at the light that would put out your eyes. Dream of dawns to come. Build your castles in the air and start climbing. 

Listen to Mark and Maria: 

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love… Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them." --Marcus Aurelius

“Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles.” --Maria Mitchell

And listen to the Almanac's trademarked wisdom. Be well, do good work. and keep in touch.

Oh, and to my old epistemologist friends who responded to that holiday letter with worries about "the problem of criterion," "infinite regresses of reasons," whether children or anyone else have justified beliefs, and various "meta-issues" in philosophy etc. I say: When you erkenntnistheorists finally settle those meta-issues, I hope you'll tackle the bigger one. We're all already justified in believing the metaverse is going to be big trouble.
==

It's a year ago tomorrow since I posted this:

Happiness meets for the last time in 2021 today, scheduled to return in '23.

I've taught this course biennially for quite a long time now, and I still don't think we can do better for a coda than Charles Schulz. Happiness is a warm puppy. And really, it's "anyone and anything at all/That’s loved by you." 

So our parting takeaway has to be: love profligately, and love well.

And don't be Sally Brown.

 

11.30.21 LISTEN

That's a pretty good parting message: take time to arrive at a philosophy that affirms something, that says Yes!

And as always, classes of Fall '22, I leave you with the words of two really wise guys:

“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!”

That was William James’s farewell in the summer of 1910, an encomium to a certain “pluralistic mystic” whose openness to new experience and constant intellectual reconstruction was unstinting. Aristotle and his peripatetics were early exemplars of that kind of openness in philosophy. Plato’s mind, from a Jamesian perspective, was not so supple.

And,

“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."

That was this guy. Keep moving, and keep asking questions. 

 

One more thing...

The versatile holiday

 I habitually pull Richard Ford's third Frank Bascombe novel from the shelf on Thanksgiving, which "ought to be the versatile, easy-to-like holiday, suitable to the secular and religious, adaptable to weddings, christenings, funerals, first-date anniversaries, early-season ski trips and new romantic interludes. It often doesn't work out that way." 

But today the lay of the land here looks fine. I fetched ("carried") Brother-in-law up the Trace yesterday, Younger Daughter will arrive shortly to help cook the comestibles and join in the general spirit of festive gratitude for all good things.  It'll be a small gathering, no tension or contention in sight.

An old Thanksgiving post notes Frank's gratitude for "The Hawk," who I look forward to finally meeting at the Baseball in Literature and Culture conference in Ottawa (KS) next March:

 

...Here's one of Frank's ruminations on happiness, recalling a "shining moment of glory that was instantly gone" when he caught a foul ball and impressed his kid. I can almost totally relate... but can't agree that "happy is a lot of hooey." (Though of course the way a lot of us talk about it is.)

“The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when "Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap to me, and everyone cheered and practically convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It was one shining moment of glory that was instantly gone. Whereas life, real life, is different and can't even be appraised as simply "happy", but only in terms of "Yes, I'll take it all, thanks" or "No, I believe I won't." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life's about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better. Believe me.”

Ford on Fresh Air...

Matter of gratitude

A holiday devoted to gratitude is gratifying, even if you're not always grateful to be in the company of every member of your extended family. The old Stoic Emperor reminds me every morning to "think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." Or even just to tolerate, for a day or so.

It might sound like an odd thought at first, but shouldn't we be grateful for matter? 

As Teilhard de Chardin said, 

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.” 

And as William James said,

"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities." Pragmatism, Lecture III

And as Loyal Rue says, "it is appropriate that we feel grateful to matter..."

 

 Happy Thanksgiving!