The Honors Lecture went well, I thought. I enjoyed talking about Aristotle and Wendell, and friendship and happiness.
The Instagram photo my colleague posted was not flattering, I thought. My wife said I need new pants.
But then I thought about what Thoreau said. "I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes."
Right. And somebody else--not, evidently, Mrs. Roosevelt or David Foster Wallace--said something smart too, about the vanity of fretting over superficial appearances and judgments. "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."
So what I hope my audience took away was the central message about the importance of investing in our closest relationships, nurturing and sustaining them, not waiting for governments and institutions or philosopher-gurus to swoop down with solutions to what's not working in our social life. We must build and model trust, mutuality, and reciprocity for ourselves, at home and in our neighborhoods and communities. Wendell's "Think Little" quote sums it up: "We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities."
We need, in other words, to take responsibility and put first things first.
I hope they also got the point of those slides at the end, and that line from Aristotle about men sharing salt (“men cannot know each other till they have ‘eaten salt together’...”) and something to wash it down with. You've gotta have friends.
I choose that word deliberately. Wendell's wisdom is a gift, a receipt to treasure. The astute hypothetical aliens who might ask for more Chuck would do well to ask for another Berry too.
In CoPhi it's time for Aristotle. That serendipitously coincides with the lead-off slot I've been graciously asked to fill in the Honors Fall Lecture Series.
My CoPhi Section #12 will thus crash their party on the other side of campus at 2:40 this afternoon, where we'll consider Aristotle on friendship and happiness. I'm likely to bring Wendell into that conversation as well. I've already noticed some affinity between he and Socrates, now I think I also detect an Aristotelian strain in the farmer-poet from Port Royal. That does leave Plato the odd man out.
In particular, I notice the echo in Wendell of Aristotle's insistence on creating strong communal lives wherein individuals have learned to trust and thus mutually support one another. That's the collective form of friendship, or at least its cousin. Good friends, good neighbors, and good citizens share a great deal of common ground. "We need better government, no doubt about it," writes Wendell in his 1970 essay Think Little. "But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities."
Aristotle's great theme, in the broadly-ethical sphere that asks what it means to live a good human life and thus to flourish and attain happiness, is ευδαιμονια[eudaimonia]. Nigel Warburton's mnemonic is worth remembering, even if a native Greek speaker might say it mangles the proper pronunciation: a flourishingly happy human is one who has succeeded in replacing youdie with a virtuous life of αρετη [aretê], and thus has begun really to live. That's excellent.
Wendell's great theme, bound up with love of one's homeplace and a willingness to work joyously to sustain it, live from it, try to improve it, and ultimately pass it along to its next generation of caretakers, is also (I submit) something like Aristotle's version of happiness. Both aim at the great Graceful Life prize, αταραξια [ataraxia], serenity, tranquility, peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear. And happiness. "Be joyful, though you've considered all the facts."
But Wendell disagrees with Aristotle and Solon (“Count no man happy until he is dead"), we must take our happiness where and when we find it.
I've made a few slides, probably too many and still in poor order. But they'll get us talking. That too is something Wendell shares with the sage of Stagira, an uncommon ability to provoke constructive conversation. And so the Socratic gadfly from Kentucky is also an Aristotelian provocateur.
Busy week ahead. Aside from the usual crowded docket on class days I'm delivering an Honors Lecture tomorrow afternoon--first of the season--on Aristotle, friendship, and happiness. Then a special trip in to campus Wednesday to honor the unexpectedly-departing longtime voice of MTSU News, Gina Logue. Then on Thursday, a fifth class at 6 pm: I go first in the MALA team-taught class on Experience. We'll talk Varieties of Religious Experience this week, followed next by Varieties of Scientific Experience. I like it that two of my favorite thinkers gave Gifford Lectures 80+ years apart.
Looking forward to it all. As Younger Daughter used to say, "I like too much."
I like that Older Daughter called over the weekend with news that she had a League of Their Own signed ball for me, and that she thanked me for introducing her to the game in the back yard all those years ago.
When I asked Alexa (I address her as "Computer," Star Trek style) to turn on BBC 4 yesterday I was delighted to hear a program with a live studio audience exuberantly applauding the enthusiastic host's commentary on Lucretius and Epicurus. That was too much enthusiasm, some would say, for a pair of long-dead old philosophers. I liked it.
I liked the way the Cards won their series with the Braves last night, and the way they wired Adam Wainwright to talk through his warm-up routine.
I like Margaret Renkl's column this morning on the persistence of desire in humans, long past the time when it is pro-creatively useful. (I love that she quoted Roger Angell on that.) I just observe that human desire is often sublimated in small, ordinary things like radio programs and ballgames. I like that we can do that.
The point, I think, is that liking what we like is life-giving. Like the Stones said, it's only rock-&-roll but I like it.
LISTEN. Are Socrates and Plato really Wendell Berry's spiritual ancestors?
That may be a little glib. But Socrates the gadfly definitely modeled an aggressive and alienating version of Wendell's more reserved and honeyed way of persisting in the face of scorn and opposition to uphold what's right, and to insist on honesty in our mutual relations with people and places. He modeled strong loyalty to one's native grounds (see Plato's account of Socrates' rationale for accepting the state's ultimate injustice in Crito). Port Royal KY is Wendell's Athens. Fortunately no one will make the Mad Farmer drink hemlock.
Likening Wendell to Plato the metaphysical Idealist may be a harder case to make. If you believe your world is shadowy, cut off from light and eternity, second-rate compared to an abstraction like the Form of the Good, you're not a Wendell Berryan. "Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. You can't act locally by thinking globally." A Berryan thinks a concrete commitment to locality is prerequisite to the formation of an effective and informed global consciousness.
The opposite of an abstraction is someplace, some quite specifically distinctive place, to plant your feet and hang your hat. It's home. Home, in the first instance, is something we're born to. But then it's up to us to continue making a home for ourselves and keeping it, sustaining it, sharing it, bequeathing it. Home is Wendell's great theme, and in fact I think it is the great unnamed theme of many and possibly most philosophers. Socrates and Plato for sure... Epicurus and other "graceful life philosophers" who say our happiness depends on making ourselves at home here in the "forest" of earth rather than feeling lost in it ("Hang a sign on a tree that says Home and be done with it") .... Carl Sagan and other cosmic philosophers who say we are born to be cosmopolitans, citizens of the entire cosmos... And on we could go. So we will, in the coming weeks of our semester.
Our challenge is to expand the boundaries of home to include the planet and its intricately interconnected living systems. We must begin where we are. It's not helpful, Wendell would tell Plato, to begin with the assumption that where we are is a benighted subterranean Nowhere, a cave. Get out in the field, in the sunshine. Walk in the woods.
Funny thing is, Socrates would probably tell Plato the same thing. Probably did.
Here's a great introduction by Bill Moyers to Wendell and the place he calls home, nicely complementing a more recent conversation in which WB tells Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation) it is more than possible to be happy and hopeful in troubled times. It is indispensable.
"What does this earth require of us
if we want to continue to live on it?" -WB
Today in Environmental Ethics we begin The World-Ending Fire with "A Native Hill": "Take today for what it is, I counsel myself. Let it be enough... there is peace, too...the times when the creature rests, communes with himself or with his kind, takes pleasure in being alive."
And then he talks about those ducks that inspired his poem about peace, and about a moment when they were truly one with their element. "The moment was whole in itself, satisfying to them and to me."
And then he says "there is not only peacefulness, there is joy... a free nonhuman joy in the world... something heavenly in the earth."
And finally, of his own final and eternal rest "as I sink under the leaves... It is acceptable to me, and I am at peace."
Wendell's own source of hope and peace is not quite mine, though I think I understand what he means by taking no thought for the morrow which "doesn't exist" and of which we thus can know nothing. But, whatever works in getting us to get on with doing the right thing, patiently and steadfastly for the long haul, the Long Now.
An old post considers just how "down to earth," like Wendell, the real Socrates must have been.
In CoPhi today [2.18.20], we'll search for the real Socrates.
Those who know Socrates mainly through the writings of Plato – Xenophon’s near-exact contemporary – will find Xenophon’s Socrates something of a surprise. Plato’s Socrates claims to know nothing, and flamboyantly refutes the knowledge claims of others. In the pages of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, however, Socrates actually answers philosophical questions, dispenses practical life advice, provides arguments proving the existence of benevolent gods, converses as if peer-to-peer with a courtesan, and even proposes a domestic economy scheme whereby indigent female relatives can become productive through the establishment of a textile business at home... this Socrates takes his conversation partner through logical steps that are not designed to refute him or humiliate him, but to awaken him to a different way of looking at the natural world... It’s not brow-beating, but gentle leading, which leaves his intellectual self-respect intact. This is a hallmark of Xenophon’s Socrates.
Another recent re-take of "the real Socrates" suggests a less buttoned-down version, "more worldly and amorous than we knew." More importantly, it cites Aristotle's insistence that Socrates was more sympathetic to his own philosophy than to Plato's. "For him, Socrates was also a more down-to-earth thinker than Plato sought to depict... the picture of Socrates bequeathed by Plato should not be accepted uncritically."
On the heels of Valentine's Day, note: Socrates "is famous for saying: ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ But the one thing he claims, in Plato’s Symposium, that he does know about, is love, which he learned about from a clever woman." Diotima? Or "an instructor of eloquence and relationship counsellor" called Aspasia?
Either way, the iconic version of Socrates is of one who values extended and even interminable conversations that disabuse all interlocutors of any dogmatic assurance they may have erroneously assumed. The wise know that they know not. And so it's very hard to believe that the real Socrates would have endorsed Plato's rigidly top-down authoritarian Republic.
After all, Socrates is one of the deepest roots of our "reflex to disbelieve official explanations." Fantasyland also reminds us today that the suspicion and paranoia endemic to public life in our day is rooted in a bad old habit of inventing conspiracies where none exist. The Freemasons, for instance, are and always were simply a fraternal organization for guys who like to socialize and "perform goofy secret rituals," not a pernicious cabal out to rule the world.
It was a good Opening Day. Not many wanted to introduce themselves in class, it always becomes clear who the extroverts are. But their posted intros speak well (or at least interestingly) of them. A sample...
I think in order to get a feel on why I'm here, I should list out my top 3 priorities. In order of importance: 1) My best friends. They're my support system, and I'll drop everything to help them if anything happens to them. 2) My cat. She's my child, and I'll do anyhthing for her. 3) School. It is my goal to make a better life for myself and my loved ones, and school is the next step towards that goal...
There are so many things that are beyond human comprehension that the closest we can get to truly understanding the unknown is to pass information on to others and debate our findings. I have little to no knowledge in this field. Thus, I have no expectations for this class...
The word "philosophy" brings to my mind pictures of people with big brains, saying things about the world that no one had thought of in the most complicated way possible. A philosophy that I want to embody would be Colossians 3:12-17, which basically describes aspects of Jesus when it says to be kind, compassionate, humble, kind, loving, thankful, etc
I know a few philosophers from a web series I watch where the creator helps both himself and the viewers solve relatable problems with both logic and compassion..
We can be so alike yet so different in our thought processes. The third reason I am in this class is because I need perspective. As an individual, I have reflected upon myself and learned that I need to see a different perspective than just my own. I chose to come to college because I know that I am capable of achieving great things, contrary to some peoples beliefs or perception of me. College for me had little to do with my parents and more to do with me. I want to prove to myself and to everyone that doubted me..
I understand philosophy as mankind's attempt to understand purpose. Whether an individual's personal philosophy stems from religion, relationships, activism, or anything else that makes them feel a wholeness of self or a sense of community, it's ultimately about fulfilling the need for purpose.
I look forward to the discussions and debates this class may hold because, as Andrew Forsthoefel said at our Convocation, sometimes the best way to learn who you are is to listen. And maybe that can be the answer to a lot of other existential questions.
When I think of philosophy, I honestly thing about grey haired men with beards in togas discussing world views and ideas...
My understanding of philosophy is that it’s the questions of life, death, and everything in between...
My whole YouTube feed is full of philosophy related topics...
I don’t know much about philosophy besides that the army is always quoting philosophers...
Really? Sun-tzu's Art of War? What else?
Anyway, we are here to fulfill a mission. With all due respect to the generals, I think philosophy is a more constructive discipline when it comes to pursuing your and our human potential. Aristotle will tell us so on Tuesday.
LISTEN. A new dawn is breaking on us CoPhilosophers, and I've finally arranged a Fall schedule stacked entirely on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
"Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation." Pragmatism 1 (Students who've looked at the syllabus know that this is one of our recommended texts, today and forever.)
Three CoPhi classes beginning early, interrupted by a Farmer's Market lunchtime break (and Office Hours) at noon, capped late in the afternoon with Environmental Ethics. An intense teaching schedule is worth half as many I-24 commutes, for reasons ecological as well as emotional. Happiness studies do consistently report a strong correlation between life satisfaction and (less) time behind the wheel. Plus, I can defer that gas money to fluids more gratifying and less guilt-inducing than fossil fuels.
On Day 1, per usual, we'll tell each other who we are and why we're here, which philosophers we like, what new philosophies we've tried to live by (I still like Sally Brown's "No!" for pith, if not for attitude), and what wisdom might have to do with truth, facts, and reality.
We'll note Mark Edmundson's thoughts about why we're all here and how, if we do it right, we'll lay greater hold on reality in these difficult days of shamefully-gaslit public discourse. I'll endorse our convocation speaker's implied advice about using these precious college days to best effect, to figure out who we really are and how we can leverage our brief time to acquire some genuine wisdom.
In Environmental Ethics our opening questions also include: What do you consider to be your environment? How does that relate to nature, the climate, and society? Do you think most college-age students are concerned about the present and future condition of the environment? Are you optimistic about the future? Then I'll send everyone off to read Wendell Berry.
To that last I still say what Michael Chabon said long ago, from a parental perspective:
If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. The Omega Glory
So I'm still pro-natalist. But not pro-compulsory natalist.
I'll cast my usual aspersions on the cliche notion of guru philosophers and sedentary Thinkers.
Then I'll send my new CoPhi collaborators off to think about what Socrates and Plato (Wendell's spiritual ancestors) might have to say to us about all that, and prepare to talk about it Thursday.
And of course, I'll make sure no one leaves without understanding what it means to be Peripatetic... Or hearing the hallowed name of William James.
I hear my colleagues have been going maskless, "playing it by ear"... If we're too crowded and it's not too hot, we'll go check out the grounds of the MTSU Lyceum. Comfortable shoes, everyone. See you in class.
"By coming up with fresh and arresting words to describe the world accurately, the writer expands the boundaries of her world, and possibly her readers’ world, too. Real writing can do what R. P. Blackmur said it could: add to the stock of available reality."
And by natural extension, teachers attempt to expand their students' stock of reality.
At convocation yesterday, Andrew Forsthoefel told our new students that he'd expanded his own stock of reality when he set out on his trans-American walk and listened to the stories of scores of Americans. In the process he learned a great deal about who he was. He grew up.
A university education can be a virtual walk across the best that has been thought, said, and written. It can help students learn who they are. It can help them grow up, in Andrew's sense of discovering what most matters to them and how they can make the most of this improbable, wondrous opportunity called living. It can help them grow up in Immanuel Kant's sense of throwing off self-imposed immaturity and dependence on the ideas and decisions of others. It can help them learn to think for themselves and take responsibility for their lives.
It can't do that, however, Edmundson says, if teachers aren't willing to challenge students and students aren't willing to be challenged. It can't do it if schools adopt the consumer model of education and think of students as customers to be kept satisfied. Real learning is a process of shucking a lot of false self-satisfaction and complacency. It should be an adventure, it will often be exhilarating, but if it works it will bring both the satisfactions and the pains of growth."For a student to be educated, she has to face brilliant antagonists: She has to encounter thinkers who see the world in different terms than she does." Indeed. I'll be happy to introduce her to some.
I'll tell all my new students that. Maybe not on Opening Day, though.
LISTEN. David Brooks used to irritate me, now he more often entices me to discover authors and ideas I'd not previously reckoned with. I think it's mostly him who's changed, but maybe it's me too. Either way, his column on Frederick Buechner (dead this week at 96) adds another name to my list.
One of Buechner’s often cited observations is that you find your vocation at the spot where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. Perhaps like many others, I struggle to experience my inner life in the quiet, patient, deep and old-fashioned way that Buechner experienced his. So much of the world covers over all that — constant media consumption, shallow communication, speed and productivity. Sometimes I think the national obsession with politics has become a way to evade ourselves.
I think that's probably right, but we're stuck with politics right now unless we're willing to cede it to the extremist wackos who lack all capacity for cultivating a sensitive inner life and all interest in ameliorating the world's deepest needs. Politics as encountered in social media, though, does indeed make people shallow, evasive, and mean. It's a problem.
Buechner’s vocation was to show a way to experience the fullness of life. Of death, he wrote, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”
Right. I'm reminded of old Horace Mann's stern admonition: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
But experiencing the fullness of life isn't just about serving exterior humanity, it's also about inhabiting and delighting in one's own. I think I'll be pleased to make Buechner's acquaintance.
LISTEN. Kierkegaard's disjunctive title, and his existential pessimism, have new life in Elif Batuman's novel of academia from the perspective of a Harvard co-ed for whom every new experience and encounter is an occasion for extended ruminative puzzlement.
I like to read something just before a new semester to displace my usual ways of thinking about Higher Education. Batuman's narrator/protagonist Selin, a first-generation student of Turkish heritage, definitely sees school and life from an unfamiliar perspective.
I especially delight in her digs at my profession, beginning with the opening epigraph from Kierkegaard himself: “And is it not a pity and a shame that books are written which confuse people about life, make them bored with it before they begin, instead of teaching them how to live?”
And
“That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professor's characteristic delight at not imparting information.”
And
"It was a relief that the person they sent to teach you ethics wasn't some kind of asshole."
And so, with Selin's observations fresh in mind, I head into the new semester with renewed awareness of my responsibilities: to impart information, encourage critical reflection, and not be some kind of asshole. It's not as easy as it sounds.
I'll also try to convey, in a non-assholish way, Selin's spirit of gratitude for the season. It's felt oddly autumnal here the last couple of days, in mid-August in middle Tennessee. Today President McPhee will deliver his annual Fall Faculty Address in Tucker Auditorium. I'll be watching. Or listening. From a comfortable distance.
“It was the golden time of year. Every day the leaves grew brighter, the air sharper, the grass more brilliant. The sunsets seemed to expand and melt and stretch for hours, and the brick façades glowed pink, and everything got bluer. How many perfect autumns did a person get?”
Not many. Fewer all the time. And bluer. Back to school we go.
“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry
Thomas Berry--no relation to Wendell, nor to *Chuck, except in spirit--"sought a broader perspective on humanity’s relationship to the earth in order to respond to the ecological and social challenges of our times." He too had a particular notion of what this perspective entails for education.
“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process.” (Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth, 89).
“The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” (Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth, 98).
“We come into being in and through the Earth. Simply put, we are Earthlings. The Earth is our origin, our nourishment, our educator, our healer, our fulfillment. At its core, even our spirituality is Earth derived. The human and the Earth are totally implicated, each in the other. If there is no spirituality in the Earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves.” (Thomas Berry, “The Spirituality of the Earth,” in The Sacred Universe, 69).
Unlike Wendell, I do not live near a wood drake. My dogs stand in for them. And the peace of the distillery tour is not to be discounted. Whatever works.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
LISTEN: Daily Bread (W/Michael Toms, 1985)... Natural Gifts (W/Michael Toms, 1992)... Farmer, ecologist, and writer Berry provides some rich and fertile ground for recreating life and culture. He speaks of enduring values, the wholeness of life and the interdependence of all creatures, especially humankind. Berry's self-discipline, ethical sense and human compassion come through as he leads us from the microcosm of his Kentucky hill farm to the macrocosm of a sane and reasoned planetary vision based on personal integrity, faithfulness, and love...Using words like “affection” and “satisfaction,” “care” and “joy,” Berry calls for a re-evaluation of the basic values and practices of our lives. He illustrates his ideas with glimpses of his own life and those of his Kentucky farm neighbors, and describes a future where we can learn to find love, wisdom and meaning in the people, the places and the work of our own daily lives. “Abstractions don't work-abstractions are abstractions,” he says. “You have to realize that finally you must do something.”
What a fine time my friends and I had in Kentucky this past weekend, renewing auld acquaintance and mostly blocking out the troubled and demoralizing world. Mostly. Until we checked in with the internet as we rocked on the porch and awaited the start of our Four Roses tour on Saturday afternoon.
What would WJ say about what happened in Chautauqua on Saturday, in light of what he said of the place and the institution back in 1900, that "in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear..."? I guess he'd say he was speaking figuratively. Is there anywhere, any time in our world when danger and death might not possibly appear? That's not something to brag about.
So my friends and I had a brief but gratifying moral holiday, enjoying the Bluegrass State's finest autumn-like weather in August and sampling its noblest liquid distillations.
I asked our young Four Roses guide if he knew that William Faulkner was a fan of its product back in the day. He did not. I don't believe he'd heard of the 1950 Nobelist, in fact. "For Mr. Faulkner, the first sip of straight bourbon signaled the first day of fall in Oxford (MS)...Bourbon to him was also a means of aiding reflection. He liked to have a drink, smoke his pipe and think about his writing or about people or about life. And he also used it to assuage grief." Bourbon does help, in that department. That might begin to explain its late resurgence.
Anyway, the Four Roses tour (like our earlier morning tour at the Woodford distillery) was captivating and distracting. Both delivered a lovely denouement at the end.
I come away from our little holiday reaffirmed in the conviction that Walker Percy got it right:
"The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C(2)H(5)OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime--aesthetic considerations to which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary."
In that explosive instant, grief is the last thing on your mind. Unmediated delight is first.
Also delightful, on our moral holiday, was our rented place of lodging: an old cabin dating to 1818. Its period furnishings included an old collection of the works of Dickens, conveyed as an inscribed gift over a century ago and also claimed by one C.H Boone of Bardstown. My dad would have been proud to assert a family connection to the great frontiersman. I assert, again, simple and unadorned delight. Holidays displace present affliction and gird us for the ameliorative struggle to come. In the right company they solidify our strongest connections. Most of all, they're fun. No further rationale required.
It’s after midnight in central Kentucky, 70 degrees on the screened back porch of a cabin built in 1818. Perfect time and place to ponder the wisdom of Wendell Berry. And sip bourbon. pic.twitter.com/XuJuU5CIkD
I took a deep breath yesterday afternoon and dove into the bewildering morass also known as the Curriculog New Course Proposal online form. I have a feeling this is (in parts) too colorful for the gray-scale world of digitized data processing and paper pushing, but at least I'm swimming. Not drowning yet. Stand back and stand by, Kafka.
PHIL 3360: "Americana": Streams of Experience in American Culture
CATALOG. Exploring the American cultural experience and experiment, in light of classic American philosophy's traditional promotion of individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
COURSE DESCRIPTION. Our proposed course "Americana": Streams of Experience in American Culture is inspired, in name and aspiration, by the late philosopher John McDermott's book Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture. Both aim to identify and clarify "philosophical ideas at work in the task of understanding the fabric of American culture."
The course is intended to support MTSU's Minor in American Studies (the program heretofore known as American Culture).
Americana is the name of a big-tent musical genre. It's what they play on WMOT, our campus radio station. "Roots radio," they call it. It includes everything from Asleep at the Wheel to Miles Davis to Duke Ellington to the Gershwins to Tom T. Hall to the Jake Leg Stompers to B.B. King to Lyle Lovett to Bill Monroe to the Neville Brothers to Cole Porter to John Prine to Webb Wilder to Dwight Yoakum to Warren Zevon (merely to begin sketching a broad and expanding spectrum). Listening to the Americana musical format can be a pleasurably novel experience. You never know what may come up next, that's the delight of the genre. It's a pluralistic playlist, much in the way Americans traditionally have wanted to conceive the USA as a pluralistic nation and culture. Just as musical Americana enthusiasts "believe that Americana music is inclusive of all people," enthusiasts of Americana as a cultural marker believe in a country dedicated to ideals of diversity and inclusion.
Americana is also Carlin Romano's implicit template in America the Philosophicalfor the claim, surprising to those who say America lacks the philosophical sophistication and depth of older nations and cultures with (for instance) their Platos (Greece) and Descartes (France) and Kants (Germany), that America has in fact been richly fertile soil for the growth and dissemination of a New World-inflected search for wisdom.
(The books by McDermott, Anderson, and Romano mentioned above are examples of the sorts of texts the course might employ.)
"Americana" the course, exploring the American pursuit of happiness ever since Jefferson, will complement our standing course on American Philosophy, touching not just on the classic textbook names and notions (Pragmatism, Naturalism, Idealism, Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, Santayana) but venturing as well into all the realms of "the American Experience." One might consider documentarian Ken Burns' work on the Civil War, Baseball, Mark Twain, the Second World War, Country Music, Muhammad Ali, and on and on, to begin to get a sense of the vast breadth of that experience. (Next up: Thoreau.)
In any given iteration, of course, a more precisely focused subset of those topics is likely to be targeted. But all are eligible for inclusion under the pluralistic BIg Tent known as Americana. At a historical moment when so many are so concerned about the fate of the American Experiment, it seems like a course whose time has come.
Most of the philosophers I know are more or less "normal," by conventional American mainstream standards... or so it seems to me. (But how would I know, right?)
Most of the philosophers who become prominent enough to crash the pages of The New Yorker, though, come across as exceptionally eccentric. To wit, "The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism." William MacAskill became a Peter Singer disciple when as a Cambridge undergrad he read “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and "was shunted onto a track of rigorous and uncompromising moralism."
The author of this profile observes MacAskill "doing his best to retain a grasp on spontaneity" but still coming off as rigidly self-programmed and doctrinaire. I've known philosophers like that, but they are indeed the exceptions. Unfortunately these high-profile pieces probably reassure most non-philosophers that philosophy's just not for them.
To his credit, MacAskill still aspires to the Socratic ideal: to be an "independent pair of eyes on the world” and not the face and voice of a Movement that's yoked itself to a distortive ideology. Philosophy and celebrity don't usually mix. Isn't that why earnest Buddhists are supposed to kill the Buddha?
Got a late-night text just before drifting off last night from my old friend in Huntsville, a reading recommendation: The Last Days of Roger Federer and other endingsby Geoff Dyer. "Trust me, it's right up your alley."
I'm not much into tennis, but I do usually trust him and his biblio-advice. He's the guy who told me, when we were undergrads, that I should read Walker Percy and John Updike. I think I give as good as I get in that department, I told him about the Richards (Ford and Powers).
I do wonder, though, how in his mind I've come to represent an affinity for endings. That might be ominous, in the year we've both turned 65 (on consecutive days in February). But when someone who's held your acquaintance for so long--we celebrated our 21st birthdays together on consecutive nights in February 1978--says something like that, you should probably listen and ponder.
That's what the review headline says Dyer does in this book, "ponders the twilight."
Too bad my friend won't be pondering the twilight with me and two other old pals in Kentucky later this week, we're renewing our now-annual tradition of meeting up at a mutually-accessible venue in August for minor-league baseball. This year it's Lexington (last year Huntsville, the year before Asheville, the year before Chattanooga, the year before Nashville), where the Legends share Wild Health Field with the Genomes. Really.
And then we're hitting a portion of the Bourbon Trail. So we could use a designated driver or two. Unfortunately another of us (the one who would have shared the drive up with me) also had to bail, due to an urgent health concern. Like it or not we're at that age. But that's why I like these trips so much, with these guys I now so seldom see: it's a bit like peeling back the years and feeling like a know-it-all, semi-mortal grad student again.
But, back to Geoff Dyer and my alley. The reviewer generally likes the book, though she says Dyer might be too much in touch with his inner 14-year old. Not even grad school age. The lines I particularly notice (or illustrate):
“I was conscious, even as I bought a ticket and made plans to go, of a tendency to do things one time too many.” As Younger Daughter used to say: "But I like 'too much'."
“A benefit of writing is that it makes one less susceptible to the numerous irritations and calamities of the world beyond the desk,” Dyer writes. “It insulates from bad weather; it’s a shield against Covid and Trump (against thinking about them all the time).” Exactly. Writing things down is like shucking a load. And in the age of digitized everything, if you publish the things you've shucked you can retrieve them if you want to. Or not. You can just move on and think about something else. Maybe that's the "alley" my friend has in mind, the grab-bag alley of daily dawn musings, reflections caught and released.
* He quotes Nietzsche saying, “The profoundest mind must also be the most frivolous one.
Well alright then. I just ordered up Roger Federer from the Nashville Public Library. We'll see.
(Oh by the way, AC, I had an unpleasant dream last night I'm pretty sure your text triggered: I was at an epistemology conference before a hostile audience, entirely unprepared to comment on an abstruse technical paper about the Problem of the Criterion or such. Thanks for that. And sincere thanks for the reading recommendation, and for reminding me of WJ's withering comment on erkentnisstheorie and the "belligerent young enthusiasm" and "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... Faugh!")
No classes to prep for the first time in a while, the Fall '22 semester begins in two weeks. Need to nail down those syllabi. But first, a bit of frivolity:
Please vote for Nell in the Adoption Ale Photo Contest, it’s her dream to adorn a Tailgate 🍺 https://t.co/h6crk9yasp
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Thanks, Rationality class of summer '22. I've enjoyed our brief time together.
Older Spock learned to love humanity, and to honor his own (half-) humanity. You might say he developed a "sentiment of rationality" to complement his logical acuity. Maybe (like Picard) he even read some William James. I'd like to think so. But as an old bumper sticker admonishes:
*
Do feel free to continue commenting on this site, which will host my Spring MALA course Experience.
As WJ said, there's a new dawn breaking on philosophy. And as HDT said, the sun is but a morning star.
Live long and prosper!
jpo
==
*Interesting example of this, in this morning's Times: AI researchers who think machines can think like humans.
"The problem is that the people closest to the technology — the people explaining it to the public — live with one foot in the future. They sometimes see what they believe will happen as much as they see what is happening now."
“There are lots of dudes in our industry who struggle to tell the difference between science fiction and real life...”
We went out last night for Vince Gill's show at the Ryman. I'm grateful to my brother-in-law for surrendering the ticket my wife intended for him. While (as a fellow Nashvillian) I appreciate Vince I probably wouldn't have gone out of my way to see his show. And that would have been my mistake. He performed the first 3+ hour concert I've attended since, probably, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band at Opryland back in the '80s.
Highlights for me included a new song about the fabled local dive Brown's Diner, where I took my groomsmen the night before our nuptials back in '93. It's under new ownership, but they promise not to change a thing. That appeals to the slim part of me I call conservative. That's Americana.
And the pre-concert live music across the street at the giant food court wasn't bad either. (Likewise my chickpea masala & Kingfisher.)
It's good to get out amongst the crowd. We've done that a few times over the past couple of years, but previously with masks and trepidation. Saw one mask all night, and it wasn't mine. After my fourth jab last Saturday we're throwing excessive caution to the winds. Hope we can continue to do that when the Fall semester starts in a little over two weeks, and the next time we visit Brown's.
Vince Gill last night at the Ryman. Said he couldn’t wait to sing his new song about our old Nashville haunt Brown’s Diner, IN Nashville. May have to head over there now. That’s some real #Americana 🍔 🍻 pic.twitter.com/n0xiMg5dF6
While I'm fired up about the American Studies (Culture) minor and the iron's hot, I should strike. I should get busy devising new courses, for our department's catalog, to anchor the reconfigured program.
We already have an American Philosophy course in the catalog, the one my colleague (now chair) told me on the day of my hire I should never expect to get my mits on. Okay I said. Grudgingly.
But we don't have an Americana course. That's what we need.
Americana is the name of a big-tent musical genre. It's what they play on the campus radio station. Roots radio, they call it. Everything from Asleep at the Wheel to Miles Davis to Duke Ellington to the Gershwins to Tom T. Hall to the Jake-Leg Stompers to B.B. King to Lyle Lovett to Bill Monroe to the Neville Brothers to Cole Porter to John Prine to Webb Wilder to Dwight Yoakum to Warren Zevon. You never know what you're gonna get. It's a pluralistic playlist, just like America's supposed to be. "We believe that Americana music is inclusive of all people."
Americana is also Carlin Romano's implicit template in America the Philosophicalfor the startling claim that America has in fact been richly fertile soil for the growth and dissemination of New World-flavored Sophia.
Shouldn't we have a course about that? A course exploring the American pursuit of happiness ever since Jefferson, touching not just on the classic textbook names and notions (Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, Santayana, ...) but venturing as well into the realms of art, literature, music, poetry, politics, pop culture, whatever? A course that cares about Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Melville, Hawthorne, baseball, bourbon, The Simpsons, Star Trek, and whatever other popular personal enthusiasms--mine and others--we can squeeze in? A course that will get on the bus and come, like Simon and Garfunkel, to look for America?
I think I can reassure our Tsarista esteemed chairperson that it will not at all conflict or compete with her American Philosophy course, with its wider-focus lens on the relation between philosophy and everything else American. If it needs a more disambiguating name we could call it something like Americana: ideas and ideals in the American Experience…OR, following John McDermott, just Streams of American Experience.
Well that was fun, now I just need to do the paper- and committee-work. And find some students.
He was the consummate baseball voice. But, the Times obitnotes,
he also drew on the world beyond the diamond. On June 6, 2015, the 71st anniversary of D-Day, he offered vignettes from the invasion of Normandy and told how J.D. Salinger came ashore at Utah Beach with several chapters of his uncompleted novel “The Catcher in the Rye” amid his gear.
Mr. Scully savored his connection with successive generations of baseball fans.
“One of the nicest residual effects of this job is to have people say to me, ‘You know, when I hear your voice I think of summer nights with my dad in the backyard and a barbecue,’ or ‘I can remember fishing with Dad,’ or ‘I remember Mom and Dad taking me somewhere and I heard the game,’” he told The Daily News of Los Angeles in 2007. “It’s a nice feeling. I really do love that.”
I've been to exactly one game at Dodger Stadium in my life. It was on June 6, 2015, and I very distinctly remember eating a Dodger Dog before the game with Older Daughter behind that big logo in the upper deck and listening to Vin spin those vignettes in his inimitably compelling style. He had the Ken Burns touch, elevating the game and connecting with it in ways that also elevated his listeners.
And recalling that day, that dog, that wonderful memory of being with Older Daughter as she began her life in LA... Well, I really do love that too.
LISTEN. Rationality meets once more this evening. It's Closing Day again. In addition to my standard exit lines (keep asking questions, nothing has concluded) I'll encourage us all (not least myself) to continue reflecting on the full meaning of rationality. Rational people try to achieve their ends economically and efficiently, they constantly interrogate themselves about the wisdom and humanity of their chosen ends, they never close the door on other possibilities, they intend and expect to feel at home in the world and to coexist with other rational agents whose various personal projects and faiths (hopes, dreams, delights) make the world a richer and more celebrative plurality.
I've started a little reading list, to support that encouragement.
Over the past 50 years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Those merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.
Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and each other. And he traces the feedback loops between our polarized political identities and our polarized political institutions that are driving our political system towards crisis. g'r
“...toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease. They do so not by demanding we betray our values but by enlisting our values such that we betray each other. What is rational and even moral for us to do individually becomes destructive when done collectively. How American politics became a toxic system, why we participate in it, and what it means for our future is the subject of this book.”― Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..."
"The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
And finally, another prescient Saganism stands as a cautionary coda for our course and our historical moment. I've shared it with Garrison Keillor's correspondents, one of whom solicited GK's wishes for the guy he calls The Orange Man. The semi-morose Minnesotan wrote "I don’t have an opinion on [Trump's] legal situation but I am hopeful that Republicans will give up on the lie of the stolen election. It’s a hole they’ve dug for their candidates and it doesn’t work to their benefit, as lies never do. The vast majority of Republicans know that it’s a lie. It’s dangerous to support a narcissist in politics."
To which I say:
Unfortunately the vast majority of Republicans won't say it in public. In fact about 70% of them say they believe the Big Lie. Carl Sagan's sad observation of a quarter century ago rings true: “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
And that's why Pinker says in his final podcast episode Being right that getting it right might mean admitting you're wrong, and asks What if we were to replace intellectual combat with genuine discussion and treat beliefs as hypotheses to be tested rather than treasures to be defended? We'd be less prone to bamboozlement, that's what. Less susceptible to the seductions of charlatans. Less confused and conflicted. More rational. More likely to flourish and be happy.
