Forward

I'm sure it's coincidence, but striking all the same. 

Alexa woke me today with a heartwrenching BBC story about a sad man who's lived his adult lifetime in the shadow of the horrific disappearance of the little sister he was supposed to be looking after on an Australian beach fifty years ago. 

A few minutes later, checking in with the archival Writer's Almanac, I learn that American author William T. Vollmann suffered just such a nightmare himself. “When I was a young boy, my little sister drowned, and it was essentially my fault. I was 9, and she was 6, and I was supposed to be watching. I’ve always felt guilty. It’s like I have to have sympathy for the little girl who drowned and for the little boy who failed to save her — for all the people who have screwed up.”

I'm not superstitious, but it's still hard not to look for a cautionary message in this tragic uncanny convergence. And a Stoic message: expect the worst, be especially grateful when it doesn't happen to you. And the message of compassion and forgiveness. We've all screwed something up.

Well, even though Senator Manchin apparently is changing his mind about that environmental legislation we so desperately need, our two-party system has for some time been a pretty big screw-up of dysfunction and mutual vituperation. So maybe Andrew Yang's new party is worth a look. 

Two pillars of the new party's platform are to "reinvigorate a fair, flourishing economy" and to "give Americans more choices in elections, more confidence in a government that works, and more say in our future."

The party, which is centrist, has no specific policies yet. It will say at its Thursday launch: "How will we solve the big issues facing America? Not Left. Not Right. Forward."

"Forward" sounds good, but will it really advance progressive values? Will it not siphon strength from the only party currently standing between our present remnant of democracy and fascism?

We've been enjoyng The First Lady, about the lives and times of Eleanor, Betty, and Michelle. The theme asks  if this land really was "made for you and me," the show implicitly asks if it still can be. Can we still "achieve our country"? That was Richard Rorty's question, echoing James Baldwin, and it's why I decided to take on American Studies. We need smart students to become smart citizens who care about the answer.

John Ganz writes smartly about it, and about what Rorty called American sadism and selfishness. Progressives who've led the charge against reactionary conservatism have much to be proud of. They need a better platform than the Democratic Party as currently constituted, with its many Manchins (the West Virginian's not the only one) and their "centrist" stalling and ambivalence. A new centrist party may not be the answer we need.

We definitely do need a politics and a mindset oriented to a better, richer, more intrepid future. I'm with @elonmusk when he tweets 

A new philosophy of the future is needed. I believe it should be curiosity about the Universe – expand humanity to become a multiplanet, then interstellar, species to see what’s out there.

But that's not new, it's at least as old as Carl Sagan. But it's good. Carl probably wouldn't think Twitter was going to be the vehicle to take us there. Elon needs to stay focused on rockets and e-cars

I'm with Norman Lear too. He became a centenarian yesterday, and is not looking back like Archie and Edith. Old guys who look far forward are an inspiration.

“Reaching this birthday with my health and wits mostly intact is a privilege. Approaching it with loving family, friends and creative collaborators to share my days has filled me with a gratitude I can hardly express.

This is our century, dear reader, yours and mine. Let us encourage one another with visions of a shared future. And let us bring all the grit and openheartedness and creative spirit we can muster to gather together and build that future.”

Then, all our heirs in the human family can look back and truly sing "those were the days." 

Promoting American studies

 Now that American Studies at our school is my baby, I've been authorized to spend up to $500 promoting it. Guess that'll mostly take the form of posters scattered around campus. What should they look like? What words and images will capture students' attention long enough to plant a seed of curious interest? Maybe

• America: study it or lose it
• What the hell happened, America?
• America the polarized: why can't we all just get along?
• Make America democratic again
• American culture: what a good idea

Maybe not.

Images may be more promising. There are so many iconic possibilities, as a quick glance at American Studies programs on the internet reveals. 

Fairfield University

I like the way Sam Houston University spotlights "experience"...

Lipscomb's choice to highlight the Supremes seems a bit odd, though there's no denying their impact on our culture.

 

Utah State takes a smartly cosmopolitan and trans-continental approach.

But I think I'd like our poster to spotlight three iconic Americans from the USA. Who should they be? So many to choose from. Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, The Roosevelts, Joe ("where have you gone?") DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, JFK, RFK, Dr. King, ... and, thinking of what I said in class last night about my hero the Humanist of the Year:

He was an awful First Pitcher, but a tireless advocate for medical science and public health in the face of the ugliest unwarranted opposition I've seen in my lifetime. I think his example of perseverance in service of the greater good represents America's best. He'll look great alongside Willy J. and Jackie R.

Self and others

 This evening's penultimate (already!) Rationality class looks first at the persistent trouble humans have discerning meaningful "signals" amidst so much distracting "noise," what's true from what we wish were true, bombers on the radar screen from flocks of seagulls, killer cancer cells on the scan from harmless cysts, pharmacological efficacy from a placebo effect, damning testimony from witness confusion, and so on.  

"All we mortals see are our observations," which is plenty to start with but no guarantee of signal veracity. For that we must place new observational information in context with previously observed hits and misses, correct for our biases, check with other observers, arrive at a suitable response criterion in the light of common sense and "expected utility," and (if we're a certain sort of rational calculator and homo economicus) try to assign numeric values to the projected costs and benefits. It'a a lot to try and think about.

And still we're liable to tragic error, if we misperceive our observations and miss or mis-atribute (say) a cancer diagnosis. Pinker gives us lots of graphs and charts and bell curves to illustrate all this, but the straightforward applied upshot is on the order, for example, of Blackstone's Rule: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." The rational objective is to "make our practices consistent with our values."

And further, if we gaze through that wider Jamesian Sentiment of Rationality lens, it's to make our values consistent with our whole humanity. When we do that, we'll not be casual or complacent about "the grim necessity that some innocents will be punished." Not acceptable, particularly if you or someone you love is the unfortunate innocent caught in the snares of that calculus. In that case, "statistical significance" is a lot less compelling than simple human compassion combined with holistic ratiocination. Again,

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way. The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof by a vulgar fraction by the size of whose denominator and numerator alone it is swayed, is ideally as inept as it is actually impossible.

Then in chapter 8 we'll look at game theory and its implications for the great challenges that face us, climate change among the most urgent of them. "Only if everyone eliminated their emissions would anyone benefit," Pinker overstates, to make the point that from a certain self-interested conception of rationality it's rational "to ruin the planet."

But of course it's not. And it's not rational to do the things we know contribute to ruin and exemplify ruinous behavior that can only spread the contagion of same to our fellow meme-imbibing mimetics. We really shouldn't be playing rock-paper-scissors and Chicken with the fate of the earth. 

"Many of the dramas of political and economic life may be explained as Prisoner's Dilemmas," wherein we imprison ourselves within a blinkered failure to grasp how intimately our personal and communal interests must ultimately converge. That's the Tragedy of the Carbon Commons, when individuals and nations misconceive their interests to lie in consuming more and more fossil fuels and emitting extinction-inducing greenhouse gasses rather than cooperating to conserve and sustain life by switching to non-carbon alternatives like solar and wind, and maybe nuclear energy.

"There ought to be a law" against such tragically self-destructive behavior, in the form of a social contract that teaches us the importance of public goods and shared mutual sacrifice towards common ends and benefits. What kind of social contract? Not Hobbesian, surely, but one that preserves a like liberty for all and that makes it our reflexive first impulse always to ask not what's in it for me but what must we do.  We'll discuss.

Bucking up on climate

This is supposed to be a post about rational responses to the climate crisis, but I have to detour en route...

It was so good to see the Hall of Fame induction broadcast from Cooperstown yesterday, returning to July and a packed crowd. Another "return to life," another recovery of something special the pandemic's made us stop (at least for awhile) taking for granted. Big Papi is in, and so at last are octogenarians Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat. Bud Fowler, Gil Hodges, Minnie Minoso, and Buck O'Neil were admirably represented by Dave Winfield, their spouses, and his niece, respectively.

"Baseball immortality" is pretty special, and all those guys deserve it. Especially Buck, with as great a claim to the "soul of baseball" moniker (and "character, integrity, and dignity") as any. His friends and greatest advocates Bob Kendrick, Joe Posnanski, and Ken Burns deserve to bask in Buck's sunshine too. 

Not many of us deserve immortality, but this guy... @nlbmprez @JPosnanski https://t.co/ZWQr7D0tg1

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) July 24, 2022

The thing so many love most about Buck, who I'm pretty sure I met briefly at the original Negro Leagues Museum in KC back in '92 before Ken Burns made him famous, was his inextinguishable beneficence of spirit and joie de vivre. Just a few years older than his negro leagues peer Jackie Robinson, he was never bitter about missing a shot at the show. He implicitly understood that Deweyan wisdom I like to cite, that we must live our lives in precisely the time we're allotted. Buck took pride in helping pave Jackie's way. "I got here just in time."

And isn't that a good model for how we, at this precarious time, should be thinking about the role we have an opportunity to play in paving the way for the generations just at our heels? We have an opportunity to acknowledge the pivotal hinge of history this moment embodies, to seize the moment, to reject short-sighted self-destructive policies with regard to the environment, politics, social diversity, international comity, and so much more. We have before us the possibility of acting with character, integrity, and dignity before our brief turn on the stage of existence is through. And we have Buck O'Neil's example of how to personify those ideals with grace, hope, charm, and cheer.

And so, the climate crisis...

Not many of us are feeling much hope or cheer about that lately. Yesterday's Times ran an editorial that begins,

The American West has gone bone dry, the Great Salt Lake is vanishing and water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two great life-giving reservoirs on the Colorado River basin, are declining with alarming speed. Wildfires are incinerating crops in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, while parts of Britain suffocated last week in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yet the news from Washington was all about the ability of a single United States senator, Joe Manchin, to destroy the centerpiece of President Biden's plans to confront these very problems... nyt

This informed observer, speaking for many, is ready to toss in the towel:

Where, then, are we left with American climate policy? Not anyplace good. Joe Manchin has squandered his party’s best opportunity to mitigate catastrophe, and Joe Biden has few options for what to do next. I hate to sound defeatist, but I don’t see an alternative. If you aren’t despairing about the climate, you aren’t paying attention. 

So it's a  breath of fresh air, this morning (as on most Monday mornings lately), to turn to Margaret Renkl:

In a democracy as polarized as ours, trying to move the needle on climate is a conundrum: We can’t just bully people into demanding dramatic action, and our elected officials won’t take dramatic action until Americans, including those who vote Republican, demand it. If Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, couldn’t move Senator Joe Manchin to vote for his party’s signature climate legislation, what hope do the rest of us have of convincing our own obstinate Uncle Joes?

But reading Katharine Hayhoe’s new book, “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World,” has made me reconsider my silence. [This reminds me as well, btw, of E.O. Wilson's The Creation: an appeal to save life on Earth...] What if the average Uncle Joe, one who hasn’t made himself a millionaire by way of the coal industry, isn’t as hard to talk to as I imagine? More to the point, what if the skeptics actually aren’t everywhere? What if everybody else is just as terrified to talk as I am?

...You’d never know it from listening to red-state politicians or right-wing “news,” but only 14 percent of Americans are outright climate deniers.

Nevertheless, says Dr. Hayhoe, “a lot of the news outlets are doubling-, tripling-, quadrupling-down on fear-based messages because they think more fear is going to make more people pay attention. What they don’t realize is this: Most people are already worried. And if you’re already worried but you’re not activated, more fear is not going to activate you.”

And here's where I catch an echo of old Buck, whose repudiation of fear and bitterness, whose  positive and hopeful attitude, whose joyful embrace of the opportunity to pave the way for his successors, could "activate" us. "The solution," Renkl writes, "is to offer a vision of a better future. People are willing to make all sorts of changes if they’re convinced it will make a difference."

In fact, people are generally willing to change on the chance of making a difference. No guarantees required. Nothing is more characteristic of human nature, as WJ put it, than that willingness to live for a chance.

This is why it’s so important to learn how to talk about climate change with others. Convincing people on both sides of the aisle that they are not alone in their fears, that there are solutions to the challenges we face, and that their own actions can make a difference is the first step toward holding politicians to account. MR

Buck up, in other words. Let's talk climate. Let's give ourselves and the next generations a chance. 

American Studies

Looks like I'm to be the new college advisor at our school for American Studies (they've called it American Culture), taking over for the history prof who's done it for many years and is now anticipating retirement. 

I was telling Younger Daughter about it on our way to the Loveless Cafe for a special lunch yesterday. Power went out before we got our food but I'm glad we stayed and tolerated the extra warmth, the biscuits and gravy and "chicken-fried chicken" more than compensated. That's some real Americana.

She warns me to look out for "skinheads" and other hyper-nationalists being drawn to the program. That's not really a concern, I think, but something else she said could be.

She said students of her cohort--she graduated in '21--just aren't into America, aren't interested in studying its traditions or holding out much hope for the realization of its highest ideals. Sad if true. 

I harken back to what Richard Rorty said in Achieving Our Country, that (paraphrasing) the success of any serious progressive movement here will depend crucially on reviving a sense of patriotism rededicated to those ideals. Freedom and justice for all is what America's always said it's supposed to be about. It's what they had us reciting by rote in elementary school. Say it, but don't think about it, was the implicit instruction. Surely somebody here still wants to study the conditions under which those ideals might actually be made real. 

And then there's American culture in all its other dimensions. Thinking of our old Lyceum guest Carlin Romano and America the Philosophical, Louis Menand's American Studies, Emerson and Thoreau and Fuller and Transcendentalism, all that great Americana roots music, my Democracy in America and Evolution in America and American Philosophy courses, Jacques Barzun... 

So I can imagine really getting into American Studies myself. We'll see if I have any company.

Pascal's night terrors

“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”...

We discussed Blaise Pascal's distress at the conclusion of class last night. What an odd attitude, it struck some of us, for a scientist to admit to. But most scientists don't spend a lot of time in public rationalizing and cultivating belief in traditional religious dogma, either. 

This study confirms that "scientists are indeed more secular—in terms of beliefs and practices—than those in their respective general populations, although in four of the regional contexts, over half of scientists see themselves as religious. And surprisingly, scientists do not think science is in conflict with religion. Instead, most see religion and science as operating in separate spheres."

They've bought Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisterium (NOMA). Most philosophers I read and talk to reject it. Have sociologists studied the philosophers by geography and specialization? I'll bet more Jamesian pragmatic pluralists are sympathetic to it, or at least to its spirit of "hands off" others' impassioned commitments. They're more likely to endorse Mark Vernon's summation: 

The panoply of Pascal's experiences and convictions were drawing him towards Christianity. But that weight of evidence "ran before" his rational mind, because Christianity demands real not notional assent. Moreover, as "the mere appreciation of syllogistic logic" cannot of itself decide the case, the wager was never meant to stand alone. (It was originally just a note in a private commonplace book.) What the wager represents is Pascal justifying his religious intuitions to his mathematic mind. It's one strand in the cable of his belief.

Understand the wager in this way, James concludes, and "instead of being powerless, [it] seems a regular clincher". It works for Pascal. It might for others. But it's never going to work for everyone. It doesn't work for James. But nonetheless, he respects Pascal's attempt to integrate his whole person into his desire – his will – to believe.

They might even be prepared to call Pascal's bet rational. But also Bertrand Russell's and Richard Dawkins's. They occupy different rooms off of the pragmatic corridor, which we all must share and navigate. The corridor is a far better way (I think) than Gould's of acknowledging the varieties of human experience. 

Against rationalism as a pretension and a method, pragmatism is fully armed and militant. But, at the outset, at least, it stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees Praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown.

But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms.

No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. Pragmatism lecture 2

Speaking for myself and others whose temperaments welcome stellar speculation and cosmic curiosity: bring on more images from those "silent infinite spaces," Webb telescope! Sooner or later they're going to speak eloquently of a universe we can feel at home in. A rational universe. I don't know if James really said this, as Vernon says he did, but I will: "Human intelligence must remain on speaking terms with the universe." 

Just keep talking and listening, I'd have told Pascal, and see if you don't begin to get over those night-sky terrors. 

 

"just the beginning"

Postscript. Speaking of hotel rooms and night terrors...

Some people might find the level of detail in the images less like a Vermeer and more like a Hieronymus Bosch—everywhere you zoom in, you get an image that is frightening, alien, or sublime. There’s something vertiginous and confusing about taking one’s life seriously, until a new sense of scale alters that perspective. I spoke with Rieke while travelling with my daughter, who made an observation about our hotel room that I found relevant to, well, cosmic beauty. “You know what I like about small hotel rooms?” she asked. I didn’t know. “There’s less there to be scared of in the dark.” Of course, such experiences of scale can be comforting at other ages, too. Rivka Galchen

Post-Postscript. Neil Armstrong made his "giant leap" 53 years ago today. “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” TW

Higher goals

LISTEN. "A paradigm case of Bayesian reasoning is medical diagnosis."

I wish my elementary and middle-school teachers had explained that. I always valued verbal literacy over statistical numeracy. Many of us used to sneer, in math class, that we'd never need to know what they were trying to teach us. They didn't seem to try very hard to justify the curriculum themselves. "Someday when you're older," they might have said, "you'll need to decide whether to opt for the drug, the therapy, the surgery... and you'll wish you'd learned a formula or two." 

It's pretty shocking that doctors misestimated a woman's chance of having breast cancer as 90% when in fact a simple formula (below*) revealed it to be 9%, and pretty embarrassing that an 18th-century cleric could have told them so. Our credence should be conditional on the evidence, said Revered Thomas Bayes (1701-1761). 

Bayes' contemporary David Hume famously said "a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence" and "rejects the greater miracle." He and Blaise Pascal, I'll wager, would have had an interesting meeting of minds. Or parting of them.

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish: And even in that case, there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.”

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

Pinker: "Which is more likely--that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?"

It's not uncommon to hear that someone's medical recovery was a miracle, when in fact the laws of the universe are perfectly compatible with the patient's good fortune. The odds are more often in our favor than not, when the diagnosis has been duly proportioned to the evidence and the appropriate "base rate" for the relevant class of comparison, and when adjusted "by the person's particulars." 

The base rate of breast cancer, for instance, is 10 in 1,000. 9 of the 10, and 98 of the 1,000, will test positive. 9 divided by 98 is 9%. That's where the evidence and right reasoning lead. "When the problem is framed in this way, 87% of doctors get it right... as do a majority of ten-year olds."

That's where the evidence and right reasoning lead us, if we're methodical and patient. When we're not, we leap to wrong conclusions. That doesn't make us irrational, just sloppy and impatient.

Nor does it invalidate the sentiment of rationality, it just shows that we must learn to feel more at home, more at ease and peace, in the world of probability and statistics. 

Another crucial point Pinker makes in this chapter, not with respect to medical diagnosis as such but more broadly: we also have to learn when and how to balance the goal of statistical and actuarial accuracy with our other higher goals. "A higher goal is fairness. It's wicked to treat an individual according to that person's race, sex, or ethnicity--to judge them by the color of their skin or the composition of their chromosomes rather than the content of their character." 

If we ever learn to do that consistently, it won't be a miracle. But it will be an improbable overcoming of deep ancestral and institutional malefaction. It will be a triumph of rationality. It will feel right.

The gambler

Thinking not of Kenny Rogers here, but of Blaise Pascal. He said “belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”

We're up to the "Risk and Reward" chapter in Pinker's Rationality. 

"The theory of rational choice goes back to the dawn of probability and the famous argument by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) on why you should believe in God: if you did and he doesn't exist, you would just have wasted some prayers, whereas if you didn't and he does exist, you would incur his eternal wrath."

That's as reductive as a coin-toss. Does it really come down to just that? He exists or He doesn't? 

And how rational is it to bet on such a wrathful and needy god, here imagined as hellbent on the supplicant submission of the tiny unknowing creatures He is hypothesized to have created with such a propensity to irrationality and insecurity in the first place? Would that have been a rational creation? 

These are serious theological questions, for those inclined to wrestle with them. I'm more inclined to a dismissive response, of the sort Monty Python and George Carlin offer. Is it rational to think the creator and sustainer of life, the universe, and everything so desperately needs grovelers and tithers?

Is it rational to spend our precious few years here fretting and worrying in solemn terror about an ultimate reward, in the transcendental version of Let's Make a Deal?

Might it be more rational to get on with living our best lives here and now, ameliorating the conditions of life in the only home we've ever known, working to make the bet on humanity worth taking?William James the meliorist definitely thought so, and James the pragmatic pluralist thought Pascal was perfectly entitled to place his bet as he saw fit. 

James sees the wager for what it is, of course: the logic of "the gaming-table", as he describes it. But he is curious enough to wonder why a brilliant man like Pascal penned such an argument. He concludes that it made sense to the French philosopher and mathematician, in spite of the obvious objections, because Christianity was a living, genuine and momentous option for Pascal.

Seen in that light, the wager works like this. The panoply of Pascal's experiences and convictions were drawing him towards Christianity. But that weight of evidence "ran before" his rational mind, because Christianity demands real not notional assent. Moreover, as "the mere appreciation of syllogistic logic" cannot of itself decide the case, the wager was never meant to stand alone. (It was originally just a note in a private commonplace book.) What the wager represents is Pascal justifying his religious intuitions to his mathematic mind. It's one strand in the cable of his belief.

Understand the wager in this way, James concludes, and "instead of being powerless, [it] seems a regular clincher". It works for Pascal. It might for others. But it's never going to work for everyone. It doesn't work for James. But nonetheless, he respects Pascal's attempt to integrate his whole person into his desire – his will – to believe. Mark Vernon

We should also discuss some of Pascal's other notable pensees.  “The heart has its reasons which reason knows not"... "There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason”... “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"...  “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”...

Wouldn't Blaise be quaking, to see the latest images from the Webb telescope! 

I'm not. I think a more rational response, at least for temperaments like mine, is to greet that eternal silence with a human voice and a human spirit of adventurous curiosity. "Human intelligence must remain on speaking terms with the universe." I'm betting on a bold, benevolent, emergent rational intelligence in the cosmos. I'm betting it might even happen here. 

How to change your mind

 Watched the first two installments of the new Netflix documentary based on Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind last night. Impressive. 

I'd already read the book, four Junes ago already. (I'll always associate it with Montreal, where our attempt to flee the summer swelter of Tennessee was confounded by a record-breaking Canadian heatwave that made us want to change our minds.) I've read all his books. I've been reading Pollan ever since his first, Second Nature. 

I wrote him a fan email back then, he promptly responded, we had a nice correspondence, I dumped a draft of my long Springs of Delight introductory chapter on consciousness on him and he responded constructively and generously. Then he got famous, I haven't pestered him since.  

I'm not ready to drop acid or eat magic mushrooms just yet, I'll wait for a suitable life-crisis or physical trauma or galloping decrepitude (it's still just creeping, so I'll stick with my ordinary everyday consciousness for now) to trigger that decision. But if the time ever comes I'll thank Michael again for boldly going where only other psychonauts (and nuts like Leary) have gone before, and writing beautifully about the experience.

 

Experience is key in this whole discussion, I think. A front-page story in this morning's Times says some psychopharmacologists think it may be possible to take the magic, the hallucinatory subjectivity,  out of magic mushrooms and still reap the mind/brain-changing benefits. They "think that psychedelics’ effects on the brain are what give them their therapeutic properties, not the trip they take people on, and that the subjective experience of the drugs can be removed while their impact on depression remains.”

But my impression from Pollan is that omitting the subjective experience of psychoactivity would be to miss the point... kind of like Robert Louis Stevenson's lantern-bearers without their lamps. I don't just want to be transformed, by a pill or an injection, I want to be transformed by experience. And possibly by joy. "To miss the joy is to miss all." 

I want always to be able to tell a story about who I thought I was before and after, and what it felt like during. There's not much to tell about just ingesting some molecules and then, presto, being changed. What made the change, from the changeling's point of view? If I'm to be "shaken out of my grooves" I want to feel the shaking and then to narrate it. I don't just want to wave a magic wand. But I might still want to feel some magic.

And that's what Pollan has done, as he did before for plants and caffeine and food: felt and conveyed the natural magic of being a sentient, sometimes sapient organism on this planet, striving to connect and to flourish.

But my wife says he's too thin, and looks older than his age (which is also mine). I don't think she'll ever change her mind about that. It's genetic and behavioral, on his part (he eats mostly plants, after all). Hers too, I think. 

John Post

Talking in Rationality the other evening about my earliest explicit classroom experience with logic, having been thrown in without a figurative lifejacket as a first-year grad student and told not to sink as John Post's TA, has me in a reminiscent mood this morning. 

John was the first Vandy professor I spent social time with, literally on my first evening in town. My roommate and fellow Mizzou alum already knew him, having preceded me by a year. We joined the Posts at their West Meade home at around sundown, out on the patio, not far (it turned out) from where my own future family would establish residence a decade and a half later.  

I don't recall a lot of conversational details from that evening long ago, but I do remember John saying I  reminded him of a recent Vandy grad who was then teaching at MTSU. (His name sounded a lot like grey fox, if I recall correctly.) I think it was probably just because we sported similar facial hair at that time, in an era when beards of any sort were still relatively rare. But it was, in retrospect, an interestingly-coincidental foreshadowing. 

Fast-forward a few months to John's Metaphysics seminar, when I said something probably quite banal and John interpreted it so generously that it wound up in a footnote in his Faces of Existence.

A bit later I repaid his generosity poorly, joining a pair of fellow classmates in going to his office one afternoon and complaining that the course was a little too heavily focused on his own work. He listened and responded graciously and reasonably. I'm glad we continued to discuss non-reductive physicalism that semester, and sorry we bothered him about it. 

A bit after that he invited us logic TAs to his home on a Sunday morning to finalize and report grades. Bloody Marys and Mimosas made it a memorably festive experience.

Fast-forward more years than I'd care to admit, and there's John pressing me during my PhD oral defense over my objections to the way Daniel Dennett deployed Richard Dawkins's (pre-Internet) notion of memes. I never did persuade him, but I still got his vote and his congratulations (along with those of John Lachs, Michael Hodges, John Compton, and Paul Dokecki).

A few years later my wife and I were in his living room, part of a surprise party to commemorate a milestone birthday. Or anniversary?

And then, blink of an eye, he was gone. 

John attributed a strong and nurturing family, fulfilling work as a writer and teacher of philosophy, and vigorous engagement with the natural world as a climber and lover of wilderness as fundamental to his growth and wellbeing. "Wise parents gave me the support, freedom, and inspiration to follow my own interests from an early age. A happy marriage to the same woman for [53] years, two fine sons with whom I bonded deeply, and a close, lifelong relationship with my brother and only sibling provided emotional sustenance and personal stability." obit

John's death came during the pandemic, and so his memorial would be later and on Zoom. It was there that I learned from his brother of John's close association at Berkeley with Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement. John housed Mario for a time, in those heady days of student-led activism, offering him sustenance and (apparently) a much-needed shower. He was on the right side of that history.

John said in a mid-90s interview that "we need to be careful that we do not buy too quickly into a strand of Western thought according to which none of the grammatical or logical features of language are there because of 'the way the world is'--the world in which we evolved." I agree. That strand can lead to a devaluing of experience, or an uncoupling of experience from rationality and a reduction of philosophy to something platitudinous and incapable of illuminating not only how the world is but how it ought to be. That would be excessively reductive, and as John said: 

"It is a good thing I am a non-reductivist."

So glad I got to study and work with and know John, all those years ago. I often cycle past his place, and always think fondly of my introduction to logic. 

Running with the stars

 Did someone say Carl Sagan?

Predictably, when Dan chose the Baloney Detection Kit as his report topic in Rationality I seized the moment: yet another occasion to speak gratefully of the formative model Sagan's cosmic perspective  has been for me. I discovered his Cosmic Connection late in High School and, in retrospect, credit the Sagan connection with lighting the candle that would eventually lead me to Philosophy. 

Carl's daughter Sasha insists (pace NASA administrator Nelson at the conclusion of yesterday's big Webb telescope reveal party) he never said “somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” (that was somebody else, quoted in Newsweek) but he surely believed it. “Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.” 

In the transition we've learned to think critically (or try) and use the logical toolkit to detect and call bullshit on at least some of the baloney. Logic is indeed a great tool, in service of rationality conceived as life on the grandest scale of possibility for our species and loyalty to our cosmos. We've been invited to see ourselves as transient riders on a pale blue dot, "a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark." We should by now have come to accept "our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Nobody else in class had ever seen, read, or heard the PBD before, or the Contact opening, which together convey that most rational perspective that transcends personal, tribal, sectarian, merely instrumental parochialism. Rationality in the expansive Jamesian sense involves just such a broadened big-picture perspective that doesn’t diminish us and reduce everything to narrow self-regarding means-ends efficiencies.

I noted that, by contrast to this generation's most renowned astro-popularizer Neil deGrasseTyson (who has recounted receiving the Cosmos baton from Carl directly), Sagan was instinctively a friend of philosophy. He knew what the old Roman emperor meant: "Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. 

We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

Rationality, not so easy as it looks

LISTEN. Tonight in Rationality we focus on logic and critical thinking (Pinker's chapter 3) and probability and randomness (4), with our first report presentation on what Carl Sagan (or his editor) in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark with euphemistic gentility called Baloney. But let's call it a spade. Let's call in Harry Frankfurt.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share... It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction... Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” "On Bullshit"

I didn't much know what I was talking about back in my first year of grad school, when I was pressed into service as a Teaching Assistant in the late John Post's logic and critical thinking course at Vandy. One of my TA colleagues knew quite a lot about biochemistry, she already had a PhD in the subject and would go on to tack one on in philosophy... and then to make a significant research contribution in the urgent quest to develop a COVID vaccine in 2020.

Another of my peers would go on to distinguish himself as a premier contemporary epistemologist, working out of Chicago. I had and have great regard for his logical acuity, notwithstanding my Jamesian disdain for "the gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young Ph.D.'s, boring each other at seminaries, writing those direful reports of literature in the Philosophical Review and elsewhere, fed on 'books of reference,' and never confounding 'Æsthetik' with 'Erkentnisstheorie.' Faugh!" 

Faugh indeed. That would be my absolute favorite imprecation, if only it wouldn't confuse people who thought James and I were referencing Asian cuisine and not hair-splitting logic-chopping self-exalting anal analytics. I'm sure Santayana caught his drift, though, in that 1905 letter.

We taught a text called Reasoning that year, 1980. When I got a chance to teach my own critical thinking course--they're all critical thinking courses, of course--I used the 1st edition of How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age (Schick & Vaughn), inspired by Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. 

A subsequent edition of Shermer included a chapter on why smart people believe weird things. Don't they know better than to accept ghosts and aliens and conspiracies (etc.) without rational evidence? At some level maybe, but we all know how to rationalize our hearts' desires and smart people are good at rationalizing. "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

That's why it's tricky, to walk that Jamesian tightrope whereby the subjective mark of rationality is as much a feeling or sentiment as an evidenced bit of cognition. But life is a tightrope, and it's whole people with all their biases and blindnesses and passions and prejudices who get to try to walk it.* Keeping our rational balance (like catching fly balls, noted Skeeter Barnes after lending me his glove one fine Herschel Greer Stadium pre-game Sunday a few decades back) is thus not so easy as it looks. (I caught one of three fly ball chances. And I fell on my ass doing it.)

Even trained professionals sometimes drop the ball and fall on their asses. Or make asses of themselves, smartly defending the indefensible propositions they've embraced non-smartly. 

Fortunately we have teammates who'll pick us up, if we'll let them. The non-sporting metaphorical equivalent of that is, of course, the collaborative approach to thinking James and I call Co-Philosophy.

* Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs..." SOR

Improve AND enjoy

LISTEN. It's E.B. White's birthday (1899). I'm always quoting him, mock-seriously but in total sympathy: "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

It's a funny way of saying something serious and true. Our time is short, even at the outside.* We don't need to waste it, whether in frivolity or undue solemnity. We should want to ameliorate the world but also to luxuriate in the precious privilege of getting to exist at all. Just consider the immense improbability that any one of us would ever even have been born. We will do just that in class tomorrow, when we take up Steven Pinker's chapter on probability. I'll probably mention Alan Lightman's Probable Impossibilities, Richard Dawkins' meditation on our good luck ("We are going to die...")  and Maria Popova's complementary appreciation of White's humanism.

I've never quoted the line just preceding White's morning conundrum, but it sharpens and deepens the point: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem." But it's both, so we must be hedonists of a sort as well as meliorists.

Hedonists of the sort, I mean, who understand that the experience of pleasure and delight is a universal birthright not to be hoarded but expanded. The good and happy times we want for ourselves we must rationally want for all. That was John Dewey's rationale for insisting on what the "best and wisest parent" wants for all children in the sphere of education. Learning is not preparation for life, he said, but life itself. Let us not squander it. Improve AND enjoy. That's what you do, if you love life. 

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”

White also said:

“After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.”

While we're here we should try to do some good, have some fun, and “always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” 

E.B. White was *Roger Angell's stepdad. Some family.

Reading recommendation: My old friend and '80s co-worker Michael Sims wrote a great book about Mr. White... Other books by Michael...

Clearness, simplicity, and "the whole man"

LISTEN. The resonant and lingering issue for me, after our first Rationality class, is the enduring confusion around David Hume's famous and notorious statement about reason being rightly the slave of the passions. Steven Pinker rightly notes that Hume was decidedly not praising licentious hedonism or inviting the excessive indulgence of un-reason. He was just alerting us to the goal-oriented sources in our experience that give reason something to think about. Fine. 

But does that really entail the hyper-instrumental view that reason and feeling must be segregated, kept in separate chambers, and not mutually engaged except when we're puzzling about the most efficient means to our passionally prescribed ends? I think not. I think reason, understood in an appropriately-broadened conception, is anything but "inert" and non-impulsive. 

"Passions are the engine for all our deeds: without passions we would lack all motivation, all impulse or drive to act, or even to reason (practically or theoretically). This gives at least one sense in which “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions... So, reason has only an instrumental use. But whatever its other virtues, this model does little to explain why reason “ought to be” the slave of the passions. It also seems inappropriate to reduce passions to desires: passions have a great deal more structure than their attractive or aversive directions, important though those may be. What seems central to Hume’s view is the inertness of reason, its inability to generate impulses for the mind."  SEP

I think, with James, that reason and sentiment are inter-penetrative.

A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of these two cravings [for clearness and simplicity]. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or entirely subordinates the one to the other. The fate of Spinosa, with his barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of everything, on the other,—neither philosopher owning any strict and systematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as well as a stimulus,—show us that the only possible philosophy must be a compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity... Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs..." SOR

Is it the case that rationality is only good for devising efficient means to our chosen ends (desires, goals etc.), and cannot help us think about what those ends should be... and thus is entirely neutral with respect to value, virtue, character, goodness, kindness...? James would say that's too narrow a concept of reason and rationality. And if Kurt Vonnegut was right about the indispensability of the "rule" to ("God damn it, babies") be kind, what's the status of the rule? Is it a rational rule? A sentimental rule? Both? Neither?

For my part, I do want my rational deliberations to be informed by a kind of emotional intelligence. I don't want my thinking and feeling segregated in separate boxes. That of course raises the great challenge of getting the balance right between heart and head, intellect and our "passional" natures. Call it Spock's (or the Stoic's) dilemma. He's half-human. We're all human. If Aristotle's right, we're rational animals. We must, therefore, integrate and honor the parts of us that think and the parts that feel. We must overcome the violent and uncivilized passions, or re-channel ("sublimate") them. We can't just suppress or dis-integrate them. Only the purest Vulcans can do that. And remember, they're a fiction.

So let's drop the pretense that we are passionally-neutral calculators whose passions are just a given to be dealt with or dealt out. Let's think about them. That's what reason is really good for. Isn't it? Thinking about what it means to be a whole person?

Looking forward to continuing that conversation in class.

Rational possibilities

LISTEN. The Independence Holiday was simple and right, in my household. Just quality time together appreciating what's good about our lives in this land of possibility, acknowledging what's bad and what must be made better. Nourishing food and nurturing conversation, no rah-rah nationalistic bombast. Like John Fogerty I and mine were not born to wave the flag. It ain't us.

But we  do still salute this country's unfulfilled creed of freedom and justice for all. Baseball, hot dogs, & apple pie too. (The cliche came alive for me, on my bikride yesterday morning, when I happened upon a parade of my neighbors on bikes and in strollers over by the Richland branch library.) And we salute our independence from conformist bluster. 

To all those gifts we quietly re-pledged our allegiance. When the temperature rose to oppressive levels we hit the multiplex to see Baz Luhrmann's take on Elvis. Glad we didn't let the New Yorker review deter us, it's an all-American story of rags to riches to heartbreak to legend. The boy from Tupelo and Memphis flew, before he crashed at just 42 in '77. But in the process, in many positive ways, he made things better. Thank you, thank you very much. I think I have to go to Graceland now. Gotta find that old Paul Simon disc.

So now summer school begins, with my MALA course Rationality (sequel to last summer's Enlightenment, prequel to next spring's Experience). 

We only have a few weeks, really just time to dive in to Steven Pinker's book and BBC podcast. But I want to begin by setting up a contrast between Pinker's emphasis on the rules of rational thinking and William James's in "The Sentiment of Rationality" on feeling. We need to honor both, in order to begin realizing our potential for lives at least intermittently salved by "ease, peace, rest"--James's subjective "marks" of rationality.

And why, ultimately, should we want to be rational? Because the unrealized possibilities we treasure, like those Fourth of July ideals, and a mutual commitment to sustainable non-violent peace, depend on it. Reading this morning an interview with the public radio star Krista Tippett, she says of her new project that it will attempt to ameliorate some of the irrational "disarray, damage, and pain" of our country and world in this time by "stitching together relationships and quiet conversations at a very human, granular level. We’re going to work on quiet conversations that will not be publicized." 

That sounds like a good description of what we might possibly accomplish, on a much smaller scale, in our course. It's possible. There's a chance. And as James said, nothing is more characteristic of human nature than its willingness to take a chance on possibility. Seems rational to me.